Alex Scarrow - Day of the Predator

‘Negative. The damage is significant,’ she replied, looking down at the point of the spear, still protruding from her waist. One of her legs wobbled beneath her and she dropped to her knees.

‘BECKS! Hang in there!’ yelled Liam.

Then they all felt it, the solid push of displaced air. Liam looked behind him and saw a shimmering sphere: the faint, dancing pattern of a reassuringly familiar place — the archway. ‘LOOK! That’s it! THAT’S THE WINDOW!’

Right now, in this instant, there were no creatures between them and their way home. ‘GO!’ Liam yelled.

For a moment the two remaining girls and Edward stared at him, unsure what he meant by that.

‘NOW!’ he screamed, his voice breaking. ‘THERE!.. RUN FOR IT! GO, GO, GO!’

Laura nodded, more than happy to obey. She turned on her heels and sprinted for the window. Jasmine followed suit. Edward lingered. ‘What about — ?’

‘NOW!’ screamed Liam.

Edward turned and sprinted after the girls. Liam turned to Becks. ‘Come on!’

She struggled to her feet unsteadily. ‘Information: I have lost significant levels of blood — ’

‘Just shuddup!’ he snapped, sliding his hands under her armpits and hefting her up. She staggered to her feet. ‘Leave, Liam!’ she ordered him. ‘Protect Edward Chan!’

Liam shot a glance over his shoulder. He could see Laura hovering just outside the spherical boundary of the window, hesitating to step in. Between her and them, Edward and Jasmine sprinting.

‘GODDAMMIT GO THROUGH!’ he shouted. ‘GO THR-… AGHHhhhh!’

He suddenly felt a searing pain through his leg and saw that one of the smaller creatures had grasped his shin; the razor-sharp edge of its claws sliced through his shorts, through his skin and now grated against his shin bone.

Becks swiped with the hatchet still in her left hand, and cut through the creature’s thin wrist. Its claws and its hand were still attached to Liam’s lower leg like the jaws of some tenacious decapitated soldier ant. Despite the grating agony in his leg, he dragged Becks with him, she barely able to drunkenly stagger, and yet still swinging her blade in powerfully vicious yet groggy ill-aimed arcs that thwacked and cracked against the hungrily grasping reach of those creatures determined enough to reach out for them.

Around him, Liam could hear a mixture of frustrated snarls and startled whimpers… and a sudden high-pitched scream that sounded unmistakably human. His mind solely on dragging Becks, heavy despite her slight frame, he could only fleetingly hope that it wasn’t Edward Chan’s voice he’d just heard.

‘Mission priority — ’ Becks began to chastise him.

‘JUST KEEP HITTING THE BLOODY THINGS!’ he bellowed back at her. She shut up and obliged, swinging a booted foot out at a long bony jaw getting ready to snap down on her blood-caked thigh. Her boot made heavy contact, and the skull spun on its turtle neck like a skittle, a handful of toothpick-sized teeth whizzing out into the dark.

Ten seconds later — ten seconds that to Liam could easily have been a minute or an hour, ten seconds of dragging, hacking, swinging, kicking and screaming — and all of a sudden he felt the hair on his head lift in response to the warm soup of energy and excited particles around him. Over his shoulder, he could see Sal, actually see her shape, dancing and undulating as if seen through a thin veil of oil, and other shapes, Edward, Laura standing beside her. He could see the flickering blue fizzing archway light that normally irritated him so much as he read on his bunk.

‘WE DID IT!’ he found himself yelling as his foot seemed to lose touch with solid ground and he felt that all too familiar nauseating sensation of falling.

2001, New York

He felt his face smack against a hard concrete floor, the dead weight of Becks landing heavily on the top of his back, knocking the air out of his lungs.

‘Good God!’ he heard from somewhere nearby — a male voice he didn’t recognize.

While his eyes were still seeing stars, he could feel Becks struggling to lift herself off his back. He heard the pounding rasp of laboured breath nearby, presumably, hopefully, Edward and the other two. He could hear the faint muted chug of the generator in the back room. And through the still-open portal hovering a couple of feet above the tangled pile of himself and Becks, the far-off sounds of a jungle night stirring to life… and the click-clacking and mewling of those things getting louder, closer.

‘Ummpph… closhhhh the ’ortal!’ he mumbled into the floor, his bloodied lips still mushed against the hard concrete as Becks struggled to lift her dead weight off him.

‘Liam? Is that you under there?’ Maddy’s voice.

‘Umpph. U’mm… yeshhh,’ he mumbled. ‘Closhhh the ’leedin’ ’ortal!’

Then all of a sudden he felt another heavy load land on his back, and the excruciating pain of three sharp blades digging deep into his left shoulder-blade.

‘What on earth is THAT?’ Another unfamiliar voice, another man’s voice.

The weight was gone as quickly as it had arrived and he heard the skittering of claws across the concrete floor and the startled bark of one or two of those creatures echoing off the arched brick ceiling.

‘My God, Forby! Shoot it! SHOOT IT!’

The piercing scream of a girl, he couldn’t be sure who. Then, with a rattling sigh, Becks finally flopped off the side of his back, her pale face spattered with dark dots of drying blood, thudding to the floor beside his. Her grey eyes stared lifelessly back at him, as if looking at something far, far away. He managed to lift himself up on to his elbows, grimacing at the sharp pain in his shoulder and his head still spinning from the impact of the heavy landing. He attempted to get his first glance at what was going on around him.

Two of the creatures had managed to follow them through and were now darting in confusion and panic one way and then the other across the archway floor. He spotted two men he didn’t recognize: one old, in a rumpled suit with a loosened tie dangling round his throat like a hangman’s noose. The other man was younger with buzz-cut sandy hair and an army-fit physique beneath what looked like a baggy light-green boiler suit. He raised a gun.

‘Where did they go?’ snapped Maddy.

They heard something fall off a shelf in a dark corner of the archway and roll noisily across the floor.

‘Over there!’

With trained, quick precision, Forby squinted down the weapon’s barrel and flipped the night-sight of his scope on. A soft green glow poured across his face as he slowly panned the weapon around the archway, then up towards the curved brick ceiling.

‘Ahh… I see one.’

Liam followed the direction of his gaze and thought he could just about make out some dark shape moving among a criss-cross of old rusting pipes and loops of electrical flex. Age-old dust and the grit from crumbling bricks and mortar trickled down past the softly fizzing glow of the ceiling light, giving the hapless creature’s position away.

The man fired two aimed shots in quick succession. The creature screamed, then plummeted to the floor, bringing down a small flurry of dust and grit with it. It squirmed and screamed and drummed arms and legs against the floor, until the young man put a third shot into its long skull.

As the echo of the last shot rattled around the brick walls, Liam looked around him. He could see Edward and Laura huddled together by the displacement machine’s perspex tube, and Sal and Maddy beside the computer desk. All of them looking from one dark recess to another, listening intently for the sounds of movement.

‘Where’s the other one?’ whispered Sal.