Sitting in the news studio, Fiona Pilkington paused again. She ought, she supposed, to have become used to incredible things by now. But what she was hearing shocked her more than anything else she’d been required to announce so far.
‘I’m sorry. All over the West End, men and women seem to be vanishing into thin air. Now, to explain these astonishing reports as best we can, we go live once more to Nelson Akubwe, who is there at the scene as we speak. Nelson . . .?’
She spun in her chair to face the studio wall screen, unable to mask the small sag of relief in her back as she slumped a little once the camera was off her.
‘Well, Fiona,’ said Mr Akubwe breathlessly, ‘I apologize right now for the jerkiness of the footage, but as you can see, the scene here is one of total panic and confusion, and I and my team, like everyone else, have been forced . . . to run . . . for our lives!’
The shrieks of the stampeding crowd were clearly audible in the background of Mr Akubwe’s voice-over. The orange streetlights wove crazy trails across the screen whenever the cameraman turned in a new direction. But everywhere were people, running and jostling, screaming and crying. And whenever the soft grey tendrils of Mallahide reached down and found their marks in the crowd, people froze – opened their mouths – and vanished.
‘We’re under attack!’ shouted the young journalist over the din. ‘London is under attack! The cloud seems to be reaching down into the streets and . . . destroying us!’
On-screen, the view from the cameraman’s shoulder rounded a corner, then juddered to a halt. Throughout the next part of the transmission the view slowly bobbed up and down as Mr Akubwe and his crew gasped for breath.
‘I’m sorry . . .’ he said. ‘We’re . . . we’ve just taken shelter in an alleyway off Leicester Square. From here, we’ll . . . continue to broadcast our report as best we can.’ He straightened up and squared his shoulders as he faced the camera.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he began, ‘when Professor Mallahide first appeared, there were those who dismissed him as a hoax – some kind of publicity stunt that went out of control.’ He shook his head. ‘Tonight we’ve seen the truth. The attack began without warning: as we speak, innocent civilians are being targeted and . . . dissolved! And, ladies and gentlemen, I’m afraid this is only the beginning: I—’
He paused and went pale. ‘Oh God,’ he murmured. ‘It’s coming.’
The orange streetlamps that were lighting the scene seemed to go dim, as if an enormous shadow was falling across them.
‘Get off the streets!’ shouted Mr Akubwe as quickly as he could. ‘Stay in your homes and shut all your windows and doors! What else can we do? Who can save us now?’
Then he froze. Silhouetted in a kind of orange-grey haze for a moment, the hapless journalist opened his mouth to scream. His face and body held their shape for another second – then burst apart into nothingness and TV static. The screen went blank.
‘Nelson?’ asked Fiona Pilkington. ‘Nelson?’
There was no answer.
SMACKDOWN
IN THE CRISIS Room, Colin Wythenshawe took a deep breath. He hadn’t been working as a military liaison for long: this was his first posting to the underground nerve centre. Also, he was nervous about speaking to the prime minister. But it was too late to be worried about that last point: Mr Sinclair had already noticed the way that he’d been hovering by the side of his chair.
‘Yes?’ Sinclair snapped up at him.
‘Sir,’ said Wythenshawe unhappily, ‘we, ah, have a problem.’
The prime minister gave him a look that could have withered an Amazon rain forest. ‘Really.’ He smiled mirthlessly. ‘Young man, if you’re referring to the fact that the West End is currently under attack by a cloud of super-intelligent nanomachines that appears to be gobbling up every civilian unlucky enough to be caught out on the street, I have to tell you that particular “problem”’ – he made air quotes with his hands – ‘is one I’m already exquisitely aware of.’
‘I – I’m sorry, sir,’ Wythenshawe stammered, ‘but – but I’m not talking about that problem. It’s . . .’ He gulped. ‘It’s something else.’
The prime minister looked at him grimly. ‘Very well.’ He sighed. ‘Let’s hear it.’
‘Well, it’s . . . it’s like this,’ said Wythenshawe, and took another deep breath. ‘For the last half-hour I’ve been receiving reports from various points all along the Thames, from the coast right up to London’s outskirts. I’m afraid there’s no longer any room for doubt.’
‘Doubt about what?’
‘It’s the monster,’ said Wythenshawe. ‘The first one,’ he corrected. ‘He’s . . . well . . . He’s back.’
‘Oh no . . .’
‘I’m afraid so, sir. If you look up on the main monitor, you’ll see the satellite imagery now.’
Instantly everyone in the room stopped what they were doing and looked at the main screen. Anna and Chris, who’d been allowed to take refuge in the Crisis Room after their experience, looked up with them.
Thanks to the satellite’s thermal-imaging camera, Tim was visible as a gigantic green-and-red T.rex-shaped blob; Mallahide, by contrast, appeared as a kind of a cool icy blue colour, drifting and slithering across the screen like some unspeakably magnified amoeba.
‘But . . . what’s it doing?’ the prime minister spluttered. ‘I thought the bloody thing had escaped into the sea and that was the last of it! What’s it doing coming back to London?’
Chris knew. He’d known it when the extraordinary bracelet on his wrist had begun to heat up again. He’d known it in his heart too, as soon as he’d heard about Tim’s return.
‘They’re going to fight,’ he whispered. ‘He’s come to save us.’
Burning with righteous rage, Tim strode up the river. The water surged around his legs. His massive tail thrashed the air behind him.
He was ready to take on his first job as the Defender of the Earth. His claws were sharp, his jaws were ready to bite and he was spoiling for the first proper fight of his life. In fact, he could hardly wait. His muscles tingled as he flexed them. A surge of joy ran from his jet-engine-size heart to the tips of his claws.
The surrounding city seemed to have changed a bit since he’d last been there. Not thinking of much else except the upcoming combat, it took Tim’s gently simmering brain quite a while to work out what the exact difference actually was, but he got it in the end: there were no tiny people. No tiny people! None anywhere! Or none that Tim could see. All there was, instead, was this enormous cloud, poised over the city, piled up like a thunderhead and growing, growing all the time just like it had in the vision. At the edge of where the Mallahide swarm now reached, just a little upriver from St Paul’s Cathedral, Tim halted. Eyeing the cloud with ineffable contempt, he opened his mouth –
– and roared.
Windows blew out in the buildings to either side. The gigantic bells in the belfry of St Paul’s shuddered where they hung. Londoners cowering underground to escape Mallahide’s attentions suddenly found themselves on the floor on their knees, covering their ears, terrified even further by the incredible noise as it continued on and on.
It wasn’t the same kind of roar that they’d heard before, that night Tim had made his escape. That night, Tim had been scared, scared of the size of the world he’d suddenly found himself in, the world outside his enclosure. But everyone who heard it now recognized the roar – and noticed the difference.
Tim wasn’t scared now. This roar was a challenge.
Abruptly the roar came to an end. Tim stood there proudly. For a long echoing moment, silence hung in the air over London.
Intriguing, thought Mallahide. Tim’s none-too-subtle message had reached him in a quicksilver flash of clarity almost the moment the tyrannosaur had opened his mouth. The only reason Mallahide was hesitating was because he was working out how best to respond.
Well, why not? he thought. And he began to reconfigure himself.
Bulging downwards, the swarm began to take Mallahide’s favourite shape.
An object like an unspeakable multi-fingered hand reached down from the heavens, instantaneously splitting apart into two rows of gigantic arched legs that straddled the Thames. At the same moment, uncountable trillions of freshly created nanomachines poured themselves forth, forming a kind of chimney of tapering darkness. The chimney grew bigger, rearing and swelling into a shape not dissimilar to that of a human torso – albeit one of colossal size. With a soft crackling sound, the place where the ribs would be seemed to bud, swell, then finally shoot forth no less than six long and limber arms this time, three on each side, each one tipped with a serious-looking set of opposing lobster-style pincers. Now encased in an appropriately monstrous-looking form, Mallahide eyed his opponent.
Half human, half cockroach, Mallahide squatted on the London skyline. The entire transformation had taken about eighteen seconds – the professor had slowed it down for added dramatic effect. Big as he was, Tim was barely level with his chest.
So, Mallahide thought, regarding Tim with interest. You’re what came before human beings. I’m what comes after. So come on. Let’s see what you’ve got.
In the underground control centre, Chris felt the bracelet grow suddenly hot.
Bellowing his defiance, Tim lowered his head –
– and charged.
Water surged and boiled around his gigantic hind legs as he took a step and another step, building up speed. Watching Tim coming, Mallahide spread his arms as behind him and to either side his multiple insect legs tensed for the impact. And –
WHAM!
With a noise that seemed to shake the whole city to its foundations, the titanic struggle began.
Tim wasn’t a scientific kind of fighter: being mostly dinosaur, he tended to favour a direct approach. His opening move therefore was simply to charge into Mallahide bodily, hoping to knock him off balance. Tim’s forearms were unusually thick and strong, considering how much of him was T. rex: at the moment of impact he wrapped them around his opponent’s middle – and squeezed.
Mallahide, for his part, had underestimated Tim. Not having fought anything remotely like Tim before, the professor suddenly found himself being pushed backwards. His multiple insect hind legs skittered for purchase on the pavement on either side of the Thames until, with a thin screech of rupturing concrete, the armoured points at their tips penetrated the paving into the topsoil below. Now Mallahide tensed his newly created muscles – and fought back. All six of his arms wrapped around the struggling body of the furious giant reptile.
Before the arms could close all the way, Tim responded by reaching up, craning his neck, then taking one of Mallahide’s arms in his jaws, up near where it joined the rest of Mallahide’s shiny black armoured body. Tim bit down hard, harder than he’d ever bitten anything in his life before . . . and for a long moment the two titans just stood there, locked together like that.
Tim bit down harder still. Drawing on every last bit of strength in his muscular jaws, he concentrated on forcing his long, razor-sharp fangs through his opponent’s outer layer of armour and beyond, into whatever tender meat lay beneath. Biting was what Tim was good at. Biting was coded into every protein of his DNA, every cell of his being, running right back to his dinosaur ancestors. If this fight was going to be decided by biting, then Tim wasn’t going to lose. He could bite harder than anything else on the planet. Tim bit down on his opponent’s arm until gigantic fiery pinwheels seemed to dance before his eyes. And suddenly –
With an echoing SNAP –
– the arm that Tim had been biting came off!
Tim’s jaws clashed shut as the other arms released him.
Letting go of Mallahide, he staggered back . . .
And he stared.
The arm Tim had bitten off was simply hanging there in the air. Each one of Mallahide’s arms was about twelve metres long: for another two seconds, the severed arm stayed like that, suspended a short distance from the stump that had attached it to Mallahide’s body. Then, before Tim’s startled eyes, the arm seemed suddenly to melt into a strange kind of haze before vanishing to rejoin the swarm that remained in the cloud above.
Tim blinked, astonished –
– and before Tim could react, Mallahide’s other five arms with their pincers for hands were diving down towards him. They snipped shut: two grabbed Tim’s own arms, two grabbed his hind legs and hoisted him bodily upright, while the fifth – the topmost one, the one that didn’t currently have a partner – seized him by the throat.
With an effort – but not by any means an impossible effort, not for him – Mallahide lifted Tim up out of the water. Tim’s tail whipped frantically from side to side behind him, but he couldn’t do a thing to stop it.
Now, Mallahide wasn’t sure how much Tim was capable of understanding him. Not much, presumably – he was a dinosaur, after all. But what he needed to show Tim wasn’t especially hard to comprehend, so Mallahide decided to take a chance.
Holding Tim easily in his five remaining pincer-tipped arms, Mallahide concentrated.
Tim struggled furiously – then stopped. His attention was caught: at the place where he’d bitten his enemy, something was happening. The stump that was all that was left of Mallahide’s sixth arm began to change.
The bare patch of black nothingness where Tim’s fangs had shorn through seemed to liquefy – seething, bubbling, and then expanding. The stump bulged outwards, and then it started to grow. It happened quite quickly. One minute, it seemed to Tim, the stump was still just a stump – and then, as if it had been there all the time somewhere behind Mallahide’s torso, the new arm, complete with its pincer tip, abruptly shoved itself out through the gap, extending to exactly the full length that it had been before.
Tim gulped. But Mallahide had not yet finished his demonstration.
With a titanic heave, Tim found himself jerked into the air. As the new arm reached back, the other five let go of him. For a moment Tim was airborne, weightless, but then, before he could fall back into the river below, and with a movement so fast that Tim almost didn’t catch it, Mallahide’s replacement arm swung forward and struck him in the chest.
All the air came out of Tim’s lungs in a short, hard gasp. The shock made Tim see stars. But almost instantaneously came a second shattering impact, this time from behind him. Concrete buckled and split. Glass exploded, walls tumbled, staircases and rooms and concert halls and restaurants were smashed flat as he crashed through a building and, eventually, came to rest.
For a moment Tim just lay there, trying to work out what had happened to him.
With his newly regrown arm, Mallahide had punched Tim so hard that he’d been knocked clear across the Thames. A long, grey concrete structure on the river’s southern bank, the South Bank Centre, had taken the brunt of the impact of Tim’s landing. Tim was lying flat on his back in the building’s remains.
Tim sat up and shook his head groggily. The fight was most definitely not going the way he had expected. Dazedly, shaking clouds of dust and bits of building from his hide, Tim got to his feet. His chest was very sore. His ribs ached when he breathed. What had just happened then? Tim didn’t understand it. He was the Defender of the Earth! He was big and strong and important! Obviously, he reckoned, there had just been some kind of mistake.
While Mallahide waited to see what Tim would try next, Tim looked around. His eyes were caught by the orange-lit structure just next to where Mallahide was standing. At one end of it stood a tall thing that looked, to Tim, like it might be usefully pointy . . .
Tim had an idea.
Tim didn’t get ideas very often, so he was particularly pleased with himself for this one, and he was very keen to put it into effect. He roared at Mallahide, hoping that was going to be enough to stop him from trying anything funny until Tim was good and ready. Then he walked over towards the Houses of Parliament.
The large clock tower at the eastern end of the Houses of Parli
ament is one of the most famous buildings in the world. It’s best known by the name of the enormous bell that sounds its hours: Big Ben.
Keeping an eye on Mallahide at all times, Tim climbed easily out of the Thames and onto the bank. Shattering paving and flattening cars without even noticing, he strode quickly to the tower, which (at just shy of one hundred metres tall) was almost as tall as he was. Then Tim bent down, wrapped his arms around the clock tower’s base . . . and heaved.
‘Good God,’ Chris heard the prime minister murmur. ‘He’s not going to . . .’ Words failed him. ‘Is he?’
The heat of the magical bracelet seemed to suffuse Chris in a warm glow.
‘Yes,’ he said delightedly. ‘Oh yes. Yes, I do believe he is.’
All through Tim – across his massive spiked back, down his legs and arms – muscles like trucks and sinews like freight trains bulged and rippled and quivered with effort. Then, with a thunderclap of imploding brickwork, the whole of the historic structure parted company with its foundations and lifted into the air, the illuminated faces of the clock winking out as it did so.
Big Ben had first rung its famous note on the 31st of May 1859. Now, as the thirteen-ton bell rocked and shivered helplessly in its belfry, its death knell sounded like panic. Bellowing with triumph and fury and effort, Tim straightened up, turned –
– and flung the tower, tossing it straight at his waiting opponent, caber-style.
Mallahide watched, astonished, as the most famous building in London inscribed a short arc in the air. He was still watching when its cast-iron spire caught him in the chest, followed by approximately 8,667 tons of falling building.
KER-RASHHH!!! The clock’s four faces simply exploded apart as the upper part of the tower concertina’d against the resisting surface of Mallahide’s armour. But the momentum of Tim’s makeshift missile was unstoppable. Though the tower was already shattering in a cataract of bricks and iron and ruined stone cladding, its sheer weight hit Mallahide full on – and he fell back. The gigantic arch of his unspeakable insect hind legs collapsed inwards, punched clean through by the impact, disappearing from sight in a whirlwind of debris as pieces of the tower (the clock’s arms, Big Ben itself) continued to splash into the Thames, kicking up fountains of spray for several seconds afterwards.