Becks nodded. ‘Affirmative.’ She straightened up. ‘The hominid pack hunters may have returned. We should rejoin the others immediately.’
Liam grabbed his spear. ‘Come on.’
They splashed across the shallow stream, kicking up fans of water, and then along the bank on the far side. No more than two hundred yards closer to the beach, that’s where Whitmore and the others had been left to place their tablets. That seemed to be where the scream had come from. Liam couldn’t tell if that one long cry had been a male or female voice, but it had rattled with horror and ended in a way that hadn’t sounded good.
They splashed back across the water again to avoid another thicket of reeds as the stream weaved around a smooth boulder the size of an automobile. A minute later, up ahead, he could make out the others gathered in a group, standing closely together and studying something on the ground.
‘What happened?’ he called out.
None of them replied. They looked up at him with faces as pale as bed linen. Kelly and his group had heard the cry too and had come up from the beach. They must have arrived there only a minute or so earlier.
‘What happened?’ he called out again as he and Becks splashed across the stream one last time and finally joined them on the silty bank.
Then he saw it for himself.
Blood.
Blood everywhere, and a few tattered shreds of clothing that he recognized as belonging to Franklyn. But no sign of the boy himself. ‘Oh no,’ he uttered, blessing himself absent-mindedly. ‘That isn’t really…?’
Whitmore nodded. ‘Franklyn’s. He… was… we were just down there,’ he uttered, pointing downstream. ‘Just there… just b-beyond those reeds.’
‘Didn’t hear anything,’ said Howard. ‘Or see anything. Just heard him scream. We came up here and… he was gone. Just gone.’
It was Kelly who decided to say first what they were all thinking. ‘Those things… it’s those things, isn’t it? They’ve damn well come after us.’
‘We don’t know that for sure,’ said Liam. ‘There are other predators.’
‘Oh, we know,’ said Laura. She passed Liam a mobile phone, dappled with droplets of congealing blood. On the small screen, a shaky low-resolution image looped over and over: nothing but the bright pale blue sky, and then the jerky image of something stepping over just the once. But that was all he needed to recognize it: lean, almost skeletal, and that long tapering skull. The image was pale sky again, occasionally shuddering as the camera was knocked, and through the small speaker the sound of growling, snapping teeth and the frenzied noise of something being torn to pieces.
Liam swallowed, his mouth and throat suddenly dry. He felt his face drain of blood and blanch, just like theirs now, pale as a ghost. ‘We’re leaving,’ he said quietly. ‘Leaving right now.’
‘Uh… I left my bag at the beach,’ said Juan.
‘Forget the bloody bag!’ snapped Liam. He glanced at Becks, ready to bark at her to be quiet should she decide to caution him about potential contamination. But she seemed to understand. Instead she pointed out which way they needed to go. Up the steep slope, thick jungle. ‘I will lead the way,’ she said. ‘Recommendation: you should all remain close.’
‘Oh, don’t you worry about that,’ uttered Liam under his breath. He pulled one of their homemade hatchets out of his bag and hefted his spear in his other hand. ‘Everyone ready?’
The others nodded, all of them with a weapon of one sort or another in their hands. None of them keen to step back into the thick canopy of leaves and vines and dense clusters of fern leaves that could quite easily conceal death, but even less keen to remain here a moment longer.
‘So, what about Franklyn?’ asked Chan in a small voice. No one seemed to want to answer that question. The boy looked up at Howard. ‘We’re not looking for him, Leonard?’
Howard answered. ‘He’s gone, Edward. He’s gone.’
Becks nodded. ‘Correct. Information: approximate calculation — at least five pints of blood on the ground. Franklyn cannot be alive.’
‘Come on,’ said Liam, resting a hand on Edward’s shoulder. He looked up at the sloping jungle ahead of them. ‘We should go.’
CHAPTER 52
Clay tablets, five of them, buried deep in mud and sand, silently count the passing of years. Above, as they slumber in their own dark tombs, tides rise and fall, and individual layers of mud dotted with the decaying bones of generations of creatures accumulate like the rings of a growing tree.
Two hundred and seventy-six thousand, nine hundred and two years after a group of Homo sapiens placed them in the ground, the planet Earth shudders under the impact of a rock the size of Manhattan travelling at forty thousand miles an hour. A wave of incinerating energy spirals hundreds of miles out and tidal waves engulf millions of miles of lowlands across the world. The sky turns dark for the best part of a decade. A ten-year night in which almost all of life on land vanishes, except hardy small rodents from which those very same Homo sapiens will one day descend.
The giants of the plains die off quickly, first the plant-eaters, then the predators. A holocaust followed by a nuclear winter. Massive extinction on an unimaginable scale.
Yet through this five tablets lie still, and dark and oblivious.
In the aftermath of the asteroid impact, the Palaeogene period begins: a vast stretch of time, forty million years in which mountain ranges are born, live and die. A period in which a vast inland sea riding up a backbone of hills that will one day be called the Rockies recedes, surrendering ground that has only ever known the darkness of a seabed, ground that will one day have names like Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico.
The dinosaurs are long gone, now nothing more than fossils waiting silently, like the tablets, for the constant attrition of erosion, the movements of ground, to finally push them near the surface and sunlight, again.
Above, in the world of daylight, a brand-new ecosystem exists, a world utterly rewritten. It is a cooler one than the tropical world of the dinosaurs, and the small hardy rodents have grown, evolved, diversified and cover the land with a million different mammal species, many of which a traveller from the present might even begin to recognize.
Near the end of this era, one of the five tablets, now no more than an impression on the surface of a stratum of sandstone, is lost forever when a minor earthquake fractures and grinds the strata to loose gravel. The subtle etchings of words and numbers imprinted from the long-gone clay tablet, erased.
Four companions, however, live on, still separated after so many millions of years by the same distance that existed between them the day they were buried, mere hundreds of yards apart.
Around twenty million years pass and the Palaeogene period becomes the Neogene. The world grows cooler, and for the first time, for a long time, ice-caps begin to form at the polar north and south. Species of grass colonize the land in a way that prehistoric ferns could only dream of, and small four-legged mammals that will one day look very different and be known as ‘buffaloes’ graze blissfully upon it.
Around seven million years ago, the hard-rimmed hoof of one of these small grazing creatures catches the tip of a broken slab of sandstone, and pulls it out of the ground. It lies there in the darkness of night, moonlight picking out strange and subtle patterns of raised markings on one side. But the roaring of a night predator spooks the herd. As one, they surge away from the sound, and the night is filled with the rumble of thousands of hooves on hard- baked soil.
By dawn the curious slab of sedimentary rock is no more than dust and fragments, destroyed by thousands of trampling beasts.
Three silent witnesses remain as endless aeons pass in darkness, like the soft ticking of an impatient clock. Above ground, one species of rodent that took to the trees during the early Palaeogene, has finally ventured down to the ground once more to forage for food as the Neogene era begins. It is larger, with a more muscular frame and a head larger in proportion to its tree-climbing ancestors. It’s a species that will one day, in another more million years, be known as ‘ape’.
