Primeval Series 4

Episode 1: MIA

Chapter 1

He'd fallen asleep on the sofa again. Abby would be furious if he'd left the telly on, or worse: the playstation. The sofa was harder than he remembered. Maybe he'd spent too long at Lester's luxury "pied à terre", or whatever else posh people with big houses in the country or the suburbs call their spare flat in town.

He shifted uncomfortably. The sofa was definitely harder than he remembered, and lumpier. Maybe he should talk to Abby about getting a new one. It would mean spending money he wasn't too sure he had, but faced with the prospect of getting rid of him, perhaps Lester would consent to a pay rise. Maybe even a moving out bonus!

The sound of munching reached his ears. Rex was awake then. Well, if Rex was awake, and eating, that meant Abby was awake too. He groaned. If Abby was awake, that meant she knew he'd slept on the sofa. That meant she'd be calmly feeding all the intelligent creatures in the house (namely herself and the lizards) and waiting on him waking up so that she could tell him how much damage he was doing to his spine. As if they were that likely to live long enough to worry about a bad back in their line of work!

The munching sound grew louder. It was now accompanied by rustling and tearing noises. Oh please, don't let her have fed Rex cabbage again! Last time they spent all week clearing up after him! And there is nowhere - nowhere! - that a flying prehistoric reptile can't go apparently!

A warm breeze blew violently across the top of his head. So Rex had finished his meal and gone off to deposit the remains of it somewhere then. Something cold and damp landed on the side of his face and slid downward.

"Urgh! Rex!" Connor shouted, sitting up sharply and banging his head on something solid and leathery.

"Wha..." Abby muttered, rubbing her eyes. She looked at Connor, closed her eyes, counted to five and opened them again. "Er, Conn?"

"Ow," was the mumbled reply as Connor rubbed his bruised head with one hand and damp cheek with his other sleeve.

"I'm not dreaming, by any chance, am I?" Abby continued, pushing herself up into a sitting position with her back to a branch.

"Not any more, anyway," was the grumbled reply. "Welcome to the Cretaceous, all over again! Complete with massive trees, active volcanoes and your all time favourite pack of hungry raptors!"

"And Dino's big brother."

"And Dino's big brother, yes... What?"

Abby looked at Connor, her eyes narrowed. He shrugged and waved his hands in mute confusion. She raised an eyebrow and looked up. He followed her gaze. The sound that followed this manoeuvre sounded remarkably like a cross between an old fashioned kettle boiling and sock being stuck in a trumpet. She decided it was a strangled scream. Connor's eyes were still locked onto the massive jawbone he had hit sitting up. Above his head the dinosaur chewed peacefully.

"I think he's having breakfast," Abby mused. "The sun doesn't seem that high yet."

"Uh-huh," Connor's voice was higher than usual. "Although with a body that size, some experts believed Sauroposeidon to be a continual grazer only slightly less active at night due to a marginal drop in body temperature with the sheer bulk of the body providing its own insulation for the internal organs, thereby keeping the blood warm and the animal active even in cold temperatures..."

"Connor: breathe."

"Sorry."

Abby waited until Connor's shoulders had relaxed down from the level of his ears before continuing the conversation.

"I thought we were too high for anything to reach us here?"

"Too high for any carnivores," he corrected. "Most of the herbivores too. This one just happens to be..."

"The only one that could reach us?"

"Pretty much," Connor nodded. "Tallest dinosaur of the Cretaceous. Almost as tall as the largest dinosaur ever found. Only about a third of the size though. They lost the fossil for that somehow, though, so that technically makes this the tallest dinosaur ever found. The orientation of the hips..."

"Babbling again."

"Shutting up."

"So it's a herbivore?"

"Yes."

"So it doesn't want to eat us?"

"Yes. I mean, no. I mean..."

"I understand, Connor," Abby cut him off and decided to change tack. "Will it hurt us if it sees us as a threat?"

"What?" Connor's brow wrinkled. "I don't know," he shrugged. "I don't think it knows what a threat is. Even a G-rex would have a hard time taking a Sauroposeidon on."

"So, it's kind of like a dinosaur version of a human shield?"

"Well, I guess, but you would have to be..." Connor's face paled visibly. "No, no, no, no! Abby you cannot be thinking of..."

"You want to climb down and take a stroll with the raptors?"

"Come on, Abs! It's fifty feet tall! You can't be serious!"

"It's a walking taxi!"

"It doesn't know that!"

"It won't even notice we're there!"

"It won't even notice when we fall off and break our necks!"

"We can climb down its neck!"

"Then you'll break its neck!"

"It's a dinosaur! Don't be ridiculous!"

"I'm not! Have you any idea what size those neck muscles would have to be to lift that head all the way up here if those bones were solid? They're hollow, like bird bones!"

"We're hardly going to add that much weight to it!"

"We're not using a sauropod as a handy staircase bannister!"

"No, that might be painful, we'll climb down carefully."

"Abby!"

"Just down to the ribs, then we'll see where it takes us."

"Abby!"

Connor groaned as he watched Abby stand up and reach up to the massive head munching placidly above them. One gigantic eye rolled lazily round to view the strange little twig that was now rubbing the sauropod's nose.

"It sees me," murmured Abby in awe.

"Well, at least it hasn't eaten you yet," muttered Connor in heartfelt resignation.

"Come on!"

Before Connor could protest, Abby had scrambled further up the tree with the agility of a monkey and was shinning out on a branch that overhung the dinosaur's domed head. Connor sighed. He'd regret this. He knew he'd regret this. Watching the huge eye follow the movement of the funny little twig that was now perched on the sauropod's head, Connor rolled his eyes and followed Abby up.

XXXX

Doctor Sarah Page, student of archaeology and mythology, was busy with the archaeologists' time honoured favourite task. She was trying to piece together a construction of the past with only limited information to aid her. She was trying to put together Cutter's model from the CCTV recordings. It would have been a lot easier if she had a nice full recording of Cutter putting the thing together in the first place, but apparently that data had been in the server bank destroyed in the fire. Only the data from the day of the fire had been on the mainframe at the time and had, therefore, survived in the incomprehensible machinations of the super info ether that seemed impervious to anything except time itself.

"Even if you do get it back in place, and I mean exactly in place," Becker stated coolly from the doorway. "Even then, there's no way of knowing which of the intersecting timelines we need to look at. Cutter only made one prediction, to a different time zone I might add. Apart from Connor, I'm fairly sure Jenny was the only person here when Cutter made that prediction. The recordings have been wiped and all of Cutter's paperwork has gone up in smoke. You have no way of calibrating the model. Without knowing where we are in it, how can we possibly figure out where they are!"

"Actually, you're forgetting something," Sarah replied without looking up.

"Am I? I must eat more oily fish."

"And you've been spending too much time around Lester," Sarah rolled her eyes. "But more to the point, there was someone else here when Cutter made that prediction: me. And I helped him work out all the dates. All the mythological sightings, all the anomalies we'd already encountered, everything."

"But Cutter did the actual work of putting the model into place. He actually built it."

"Cutter figured it out," Sarah shrugged. "There's no reason why I can't do the same."

"Cutter was a genius," Becker quipped raising an eyebrow. Sarah glared at him.

XXXX

Danny scratched irritably at the stubble covering the lower portions of his face. He hated having a beard. Always had. At least it stopped his chin getting sunburnt though. He took another swig from his water bottle. It was nearly empty, but he had another two from Helen's pack, and at least he'd be back at the anomaly site soon.

Up ahead he spotted the rocky ledge that had saved the entire human race. That and an out of time raptor looking for a meal and maybe some form of ironic karma. He wouldn't be able to refill his water bottles at the spring there. Not yet anyway. Even if the water wasn't still polluted with Helen's poison, the dead bodies would have started rotting by now, especially in this heat. He decided to take the high road and head up the ledge and around the impromptu graveyard.

The climb took maybe five minutes more than going round the pool at ground level, but the view alone was worth it. Danny could see his destination clearly. The anomaly hadn't reopened, but there was a straighter path than the one he'd planned on that might save him some time and, not far beyond that, over another rise, some greenery that suggested another stream. He hadn't seen it before, but it would be closer to the anomaly site if he needed to go and refill his water bottles before it opened again. He moved closer to the edge of the ledge, climbing up on a boulder to get a better look. Yes, there was almost definitely water there. That was good. He'd check it out once he got back to the anomaly site. He closed his eyes, memorising the landscape in front of him. It took him another five minutes and another swig of water, but then he was sure he had it. He knelt down to climb off the boulder and froze.

As he had knelt down, Danny's eyes has swung down to the boulder and the land below it. It wasn't so much what he saw there that made him pause: dead bodies in various states of disrepair were not uncommon to him. What made the blood in Danny's sunburnt veins run cold was the patch of dirt that Helen and the raptor had landed on. It was empty.