TimeRiders: Day of the Predator (book 2). Read an extract!
Half an hour later those of the group that had survived the blast and arrived in one piece had made a rough assessment of their predicament. Of the thirty-five people who’d been in the chamber when the explosion – or, more accurately, implosion – had occurred, only sixteen of them appeared to have made it through alive.
Now, gathered together in the middle of the clearing, well away from the forbidding edge of thick jungle, it was Whitmore who first seemed to be stirring from a state of stunned shock. He wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his sleeve and narrowed his eyes as he studied Becks.
‘You!’ he said. ‘Yes, you! I remember now . . . you said it was going to explode. Just . . . just before it actually did.’
Becks’s face remained impassive. ‘That is correct.’
‘Hang on!’ he said again, his eyes suddenly narrowing with dawning realization. ‘You . . . you’re not one of m-my kids. You’re not –’
Liam could see where this was going. It was pointless continuing to pretend to be high-school students a moment longer.
‘What just happened, whatever’s just happened,’ blustered Whitmore, ‘you knew it was going to happen.’ His voice rose in pitch. ‘Who are you? Is this some sort of terrorist thing?’
Becks shook her head slowly, her face impassive. ‘Negative. We are not terrorists.’
Whitmore fell silent. His lips quivered with more questions he wanted to ask, but he was struggling to know what exactly to ask. Where to begin.
‘Excuse me?’
Their heads all turned towards a boy with kinky ginger hair, neatly side-parted into a succession of waves, and thick bottle-top glasses that made his eyes seem to bulge like a startled frog. He pointed to his name tag. ‘My name’s Franklyn . . .’ He smiled at them uncertainly. ‘Uhh . . . I just wanted to say that . . . this is going to sound really weird, but I guess I’ll just come out and say it.’
‘What?’ snapped Whitmore.
‘Well –’ he pointed up at the sky – ‘you see them?’
All eyes drifted towards the top of some trees twenty yards away where a pair of dragonflies danced and zig-zagged with a buzz of wings they could hear from where they stood.
‘Those are huge,’ uttered Kelly. ‘Good grief! . . . Two-foot, three-foot wingspan at a guess?’
‘Uh-huh,’ said Franklyn. ‘They’re really big and I’m pretty sure I know what species that is.’
The others looked at him.
‘It’s a petalurid, I think . . . yeah, I’m sure that’s the right name.’
‘Great,’ said Laura, ‘so now we know.’
‘No, that’s not the important bit,’ said Franklyn. He looked at her. ‘They should be extinct.’
‘Well, obviously they’re not,’ she replied.
‘Oh yes they are. We’ve only ever had fossils of insects that size.’
Whitmore stood up. ‘He’s right!’ He watched the two dragonflies emerge from the overhanging branch and dart out into the open, their wings buzzing noisily. ‘Insects haven’t been that size since . . .’ He swallowed, looked at the others. ‘Well . . . I mean, millions and millions of years.’
‘Petalurids,’ uttered Franklyn again. ‘Late Cretaceous. I’m pretty sure of that.’
Kelly got to his feet and stood beside Franklyn. ‘What are you saying?’
The boy wiped a fog of moisture from his glasses. ‘What I’m saying, Mr Kelly, is those things haven’t existed, alive . . . in, like, well, I guess something like sixty-five million years.’
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