“Ma’am, let me carry him. You’d best get inside.” Embrey’s voice again. This time, Cecil struggled onto his knees, coughing his guts up. “Easy-I’ve got you, old boy.” The young man’s frown made him look a decade older in the firelight. As he crouched, Cecil spied the two pistols steaming in Embrey’s hip holsters. “Up you go.” The lad heaved him onto his shoulder and made for the gentlemen’s club. Another roar sounded much closer this time. Half way up the steps to the front door, Embrey spun northwards, yelled, “Christ Almighty!”
The tip of a long, crooked shadow jerked up the street after them. The ground shook in its wake, and a rampant, thumping rhythm made him fear the building itself would collapse. Embrey halted in the vestibule, lowered Cecil against a glass display cabinet that held bound books, trophies and assorted political guff.
“Here, take this.” His young friend offered him one of the steam-pistols. “If anyone makes a try for you, put his seat up for re-election on the spot. Don’t hesitate.” He spun to the doorway and murmured, “Jesus! I’ll be a son of a…”
“W-what is that thing?”
“Beats me, Professor. Something gigantic.” Embrey puffed, then touched the flat of the brass barrel to his temple. He moved his lips as though miming a prayer.
Cecil started forward, then crabbed back in horror as a huge lizard-like tail swung over the road outside, knocking the chairs and fire stack over. Sparks and cinders spilled onto the junction. A blood-curdling roar shattered the stained glass window in the reception area to their right. The beast reacted. Thump, thump. A monstrous snout poked against the gap, its nostrils as big as rugby balls. Cecil squeezed the moist pistol grip until his fingertips squeaked on the rubber. He daren’t move or make another sound. The creature’s breaths sounded like the rasps of a slow-moving steam train.
A distant clatter drew it back across the street. The monster reacted to the thunder of falling rubble with another roar. Manmade noise-had that intrigued it? Embrey’s pistol shots? What exactly was this thing? For the sake of his experiment, he must know.
Embrey tried to hold him back from the doorway but Cecil gained a clear, unforgettable view of the first dinosaur any human had ever seen alive.
“My God, it’s colossal.”
“And bent on feeding by the looks of it. Down, Professor. Keep down.”
Cecil whispered excited mental notes between coughs, while the beast attacked a buckled lamppost in front of a terraced building in which quite a few people-too many people-had gathered. “Four-legged, walks on its rear two, forelimbs longer and more powerful than usual for a dinosaur. ” He sputtered and couldn’t quite believe he’d used that word in a bona fide naturalist endeavour. “Long, low, crocodilian snout, narrow jaws filled with serrated teeth, large, hooked claw on the thumb of each hand, over a foot long. You getting any of this, Embrey?”
“In the seat of my britches, maybe.”
“Skull set at an acute angle, not at ninety degrees like most dinosaur skeletons I’ve seen. I’d say it’s close to forty feet from snout to tail. Would you agree?”
“Forty or four hundred, it’s got a taste for Londoners. Look, it’s got someone.”
A sickening crunch curtailed the poor bastard’s scream as the monster plucked him in its jaw from the second floor of the terraced house opposite.
“And there’s nothing we can do,” Embrey spat, baring his teeth.
“No, not with steam-pistols.”
“We daren’t fire a shot. That thing’d bring the roof down on us. Think, damn it, think! Some kind of diversion- lure the bugger away.”
He had to hand it to the youngster-Embrey was a natural born leader, graceful under pressure. But there was also that halt-worthy whiff of defiance in his muttering, the noble and self-sacrificing kind beloved of Englishmen over the centuries, feared by their enemies. Personally, Cecil had never experienced it outside of his protection for Lisa and Edmond. For the life of him, he’d never been able to fathom why a man would risk his neck for complete strangers. Nonetheless, he was glad to have such a man at his side.
They watched and waited for the best part of half an hour while the dinosaur stalked up and down Parliament Street probing open windows and doors and exposed sections where the brickwork had collapsed.
“This is no good. It’s not giving up. We need the men from the Empress. ” Embrey tugged Cecil’s sleeve. “Come, the back of this place is wide open. Let’s not dally another minute.”
A half dozen members of Parliament cowered in a corner of the smoking room. They watched, speechless, as Embrey and Cecil dashed out over the rubble and across the railway track. What these inebriated swine had done to him a moment ago was so unconscionable, so far outside the realm of possibility, he didn’t know whether to pinch himself awake or open fire on the Whigs. For now, he would follow Embrey’s resolute lead.
A brigade of African men-at-arms was already piling onto the embankment from the ship. Seeing their rifles made Cecil feel a little safer. Embrey called out, “Where’s Tangeni?”
One of the aeronauts pointed back along the embankment. Before he could explain, a terrible roar from the factories forced three of the men to swerve into the mud. A second monster burst onto the quayside. It swiped its fore claw at the band of fleeing Africans, felling them like paper dolls. A few stood their ground, opened fire. Embrey’s steam-powered shots were gallant but ineffectual at that range. He quickly realised it and desisted, instead helped the men escape toward Cecil’s factory, the nearest cover.
“Where’s Billy?” Cecil called out.
“With Djimon in-in the fo’c’sle,” someone replied, barely hiding his terror.
Embrey held his pistol aloft. “Follow me!” The remaining aeronauts swarmed after him and Cecil as they scampered over the collapsed wire-mesh fence. The dinosaur hadn’t finished chewing its latest victim when it lunged into a full sprint. Head low, it stalked them with a bloodlust that reeked of vengeance. It lifted its claws into a taut pianist position under its massive jaws and caught the group within several strides.
At this rate, none of them were going to reach the roofed section in time-too much rubble lay in their path, and the monster had its pick of victims.
“Split up,” Cecil shouted. “Some of us might make it.”
Teeth clenched, Embrey nodded and veered northward, taking eight or nine aeronauts with him while the others quickly overtook Cecil onto the pile of bricks and twisted girders. He glanced behind him and thanked God the beast had stopped to savour its latest meal at the start of the rubble.
A massive claw swung ahead of him and ripped the head off a screaming aeronaut. Cecil ducked, rolled away as the first dinosaur joined the hunt from the south. The combined roars of two leviathans assaulted his eardrums, blanked his mind to anything but imminent, horrific death. In the corner of his eye he glimpsed the silent cogwheels waiting like gloomy cobwebs either side of his miraculous brass machine. It had worked. He’d achieved that much, if nothing more. Edmond would forgive him, Lisa would be proud. Dying screams drowned the clacks of tumbling bricks. He closed his eyes and tucked the pistol muzzle up against his jowl. Better he take his own life than being eaten alive. No regrets to speak of…except one…
“ Reardon, no!”
A boy’s voice boomed through the night, wrenching Cecil back to life as though it was Edmond calling for him to stay his finger on the trigger. Again the voice climbed high, too high. “Reardon, wait.” The echo told him it had to be young Billy using a megaphone on the ship’s deck. He scanned the site of carnage around him and couldn’t believe what was happening.
One of the dinosaurs scrabbled on its side against the hill of bricks, a harpoon cable wrapped around its rear leg. Insanely, someone was driving the tri-wheel car along the embankment. The cable was attached to it-it had dragged the monster off its feet. Cecil lowered the pistol in his trembling hand and gasped for air. The cable released. As the lizard struggled upright, the car skidded round for another run, revealing its door-less passenger side. Steam spat and columned from its boiler, shrouding the driver. But as the vehicle gathered speed, Cecil’s jaw dropped.
The woman from the Empress, the redhead, cradled a harpoon launcher between her legs on the passenger seat. The dinosaur lunged. She fired the iron projectile at its torso, struck a glancing blow-enough for the beast to wheel sideways in agony. She lit a series of flares and tossed them at its feet, then at its monstrous partner’s. Slowly but surely, frightened by the flames, the leviathans retreated up the embankment. A last volley of gunfire from the Empress’s deck proved decisive. The beasts lumbered away toward the northern tree line, their steps shaking London less and less until only a slight quiver remained.
He slumped with his head in his hands and felt, truly for the first time, the gravity of his blunder.
