Chapter 7

5 0 0
                                    


Grenadier Ben Shaw's day had not improved either. It had taken his company a while to find the source of the SOS. It was a man, a policeman from what remained of his uniform, lying in the tunnel as if he'd been leaning against the wall and slid down. As the soldiers approached the man he stopped moaning, and something in his face made Shaw hold out an arm. The injured man extended his index finger slowly, and pointed into the shadows to the left.

A soldier threw a flare.

"Fire." Ben screamed.

And they did, all of them, until the air was made of metal, and bits of masonry fell like rain.

The men all shone their torches into the darkness. Water was dripping from somewhere. They could see no bodies, no bodies at all for all their ammunition. Then, out of the dark, with a dink dink dink, there rolled a bullet casing. It was soon followed by a second.

"Let each man find a service ladder if he can." Said Ben. "The best of luck, gentlemen." They ran.

The woman sitting outside Café Rouge, eating a plate of frites, started a little as the manhole cover a few feet away from her started to shift. A pair of dusty hands pushed it up and onto the road, and then a helmet began to emerge. Grenadier Ben Shaw took in the scene as he elbowed his way out into the sunlight. The woman watched in amazement as he emptied his gun into the manhole, and then threw the weapon in as well.

"Leave your chips love," he said as he walked past her, removing his helmet. 'Leave your chips and take a drive out of town.'

He was gone before she could ask him what he meant. When she looked back, there was an entirely different sort of face looking at her. A shock of bristling hair, and large impassive eyes. A mouth full of razors. The woman fled, which ultimately did not do her much good, but hers is a different, and much shorter story. The Dino tried a couple of frites, but found itself indifferent towards them, so it went inside and started on the customers. So the first day of horror in London began.

Aggy was bumbling around her flat after Geezer's lunchtime raid on the park. The little dog had gone back to bed, as was his way, leaving her to thumb through a crime novel over a cup of tea and a thin cigarette. There seemed to be a lot of sirens happening outside, so she flicked on the T.V. The talk was all about Dinos. There was a frantic knocking on the front door. It was Dean. She hadn't seen him since the night in Evergreen's lab - they were both signed off for the foreseeable future, until they plucked up their courage to walk back in the door, or handed in their notices. No one would have blamed them. They had been referred for therapy, but neither of them went. How could one begin to talk about it? When Aggy tried to voice it aloud, even to her dog, it sounded made up. A mad scientist mixed human and dinosaur DNA, then he cloned them, then, when they were all grown up, he tried to feed me to them. In the dark, one of them asked me where I was going. Gang weh? She had shot a man, but she didn't mind that – Evergreen would have watched them die, so she wasn't too worried about him either. Dean, on the other hand, was suffering. He'd already lost a great deal of weight, and rarely slept. When he did sleep his dreams were full of long claws, glistening eyes, and that high pitched hooting. Woop woop.

"They're all over Richmond," he said, sounding almost excited, like a bird watcher clutching his binoculars. She knew where it came from – tragic though it may be that people had lost their lives, now she and Dean were vindicated, not mad, survivors of a real danger. They could watch it on the box, and somehow feel better, for the new victims had taken the horror away from them. They no longer carried the fear alone.

"They can't shoot them," he said, shoving Geezer off the couch and sitting down. The dog was so surprised that he didn't bother to retaliate, but sat on the mat, growling whenever a Dino appeared on the screen. If she didn't already know better, Aggy would have thought the Dinos looked made up – in the light of day, confined to a tv screen, there was something ridiculous about them. Their legs were too long, the tail was set too high, the jaws looked as though they might fall off. The talons, granted, could not be laughed at, neither could the teeth. The sprouting hair looked like something out of a bad werewolf film.

But Aggy remembered the cold light in those large, bright eyes – that dark intelligence that caught you and held on. On the tv screen you couldn't smell them; the smell was of menace, of visceral strength combined with the bizarre scent of the old world – methane, mixed with a reptilian tang – something acidic, accompanied by a quality of the unknowable. That which should have remained lost.

"They won't have much luck shooting them from a distance," said Aggy. "You have to get up close."

Dean went to put the kettle on, and they sat together in survivors silence for some hours, watching the progress, until Geezer began to let Aggy know that he was overdue for his Big Walk. He sat in front of them, mixing expressions of indignation with doe-eyed self-pity.

"Shit, Geezer." Aggy muttered. Dean looked out of the window.

"There are some people in the park," he murmured. "You should be ok."

"Me? Us. Come on."

"Seriously?"

"Yep. Actually, you can grab some poo bags from the kitchen, they're in the first cupboard."

Geezer went out of the foyer doors like a Viking off a longboat. Aggy and Dean emerged more like field mice. Aggy pulled nervously on a cigarette, and Dean, despite his principles, asked for one.

"Shall I roll it?" She said, knowing a rookie when she saw one.

"Please."

She passed him the cigarette and he smoked nervously, as if it might turn around and burn him.

"They'll catch them." She said, and he snorted. They were in the middle of the park now. Geezer skipped around merrily, liberally watering all the benches. He was in serious real estate.

"That's what they said before," said Dean, once he'd stopped coughing. Smoking and derision had not combined well for him.

"Do you remember how they wouldn't believe you, wouldn't help us until you told them you'd shot that mad bastard? Then those things killed those people, and the full might of London's finest took all night to kill two out of four. Didn't even have the nous to shoot both the boys."

"Well how could they tell?"

"What?"

"You know," she gestured vaguely. "If they were boys. I thought they all looked the same."

"Anyway," Dean continued, dismissing the point. "Then they let two escape, and lied. Why lie?"

"Complacency. Probably never occurred to anyone that they wouldn't catch them."

An army truck pulled up, and two dozen soldiers positioned themselves around the park. One man came and addressed himself to them.

"Madam, Sir," he nodded, in a manner that said he did not believe either to be true.

"I am Sergeant Walsh, and I am responsible for the protection of this area until the present threat is eliminated. Now, I don't know how far you were planning to walk your little dog, but just for this afternoon I'd ask you to stay behind our line." Geezer was shouting at a couple of soldiers, probably in response to being referred to as little.

"So you aim to have it in hand by tonight do you?" Asked Dean, drawing a look of approval from Aggy.

"Yes sir, we are confident that we will have solved the problem by then."

"Thank you, Sergeant," said Aggy, putting a hand on Dean's arm. They went and sat on a bench, feeling a little better for having a line of guns between them and Wild London. Geezer was enjoying himself, and was in the process of buying up the wheels of the army vehicles.

"Are you going to try and get home, or do you want the spare room?" she said, rolling them both another fag.

"Unless those boys are going to drive me to my door, and escort me inside, I'm staying here."

The dawn was average, but the world that welcomed it was unique. One woman, walking her dog along the leafy haven of Cedar Avenue, home of I.Q.unltd, was about to come into contact with the fate of Britain. She squinted at a large dark shape on the pavement, recalling an article she'd read about avoiding suspicious parcels and rucksacks. Her dog began to growl, and she realised that the shape was in fact a man with no legs. He was dragging himself along the pavement, leaving behind a trail of blood that looked too big to lose. As she approached him, he looked up at her and tried to speak. She crouched down and was in the process of calling 999 when the electricity that accompanies a large predator danced up her neck. As she looked over her shoulder she realised he was telling her to run.

Aggy and the DinosWhere stories live. Discover now