Title : Clusterfuck, Part 3 of 6
Author : fredbassett
Fandom : Primeval
Rating : 15
Characters : Stephen/Ryan, Lester, Claudia, Cutter, Abby, Connor
Disclaimer : Not mine (except OCs), no money made, don’t sue.
Spoilers : None
Word Count : 15,000 split into six parts.
Summary : Trouble doesn’t just come in one simple package for the ARC team when an anomaly opens in the small Somerset village of Wookey Hole.
A/N : 1) Written for the
primeval_denial art challenge for
primeval_denial art challenge for this wonderful picture by
goldarrow! 2) Set in my Stephen/Ryan series, but no prior knowledge of the series needed.

Wookey Hole, Somerset. 11.27am.
Calling the gorilla a big sod was probably the understatement of the year. To put it mildly, it was fucking huge.
Fortunately, it was also plastic.
Stephen looked around the valley in amazement. There were dinosaurs everywhere. A stegosaurus was calmly cropping the grass on the side of the valley. Opposite that, a group of phorusrachus were frozen in the act of feeding, whilst further away, a life-sized tyrannosaurus rex loomed above everything, fortunately unmoving. Stephen quickly raked his eyes over the scene, scanning automatically for threats, trying to distinguish reality from cleverly constructed fiction. Apart from the massively over-sized gorilla, a lot of the exhibits were surprisingly realistic from a distance.
A sudden flurry of movement caught Stephen’s eye, but before he could bring his EMP to bear, Barrett had calmly dropped to one knee and fired his own weapon. The powerful electrical charge hit an adult phorusrachus, halting it in its tracks. Its eyes rolled back and it fell to the ground, stubby, flightless wings flapping for a moment as it struggled against what had clearly been a knock-out charge. Barratt had smoothly dialled back from maximum charge before taking the shot, but even so, he’d still hit it with a hefty whack. Moments later, the bird lay still.
Keegan ran forward without needing to be told and started to strap its legs together. Even when the bird came around, it wouldn’t be going anywhere in a hurry.
“Nice shooting,” Burns said. “Christ, those fucking models are lifelike. They had me fooled.”
“Just be glad King Kong’s plastic,” Stephen said, slapping his hand on the massive model.
“Yeah, small mercies,” Burns agreed.
“Anomaly’s over there, Stephen,” Fizz called, pointing with the barrel of his weapon to a glittering ball of light further up the valley, almost hidden in a small copse of trees.
Stephen nodded. He was going to need to check the area for tracks. If one terror bird had come through, there was a good chance there’d be others. They were known for hunting in flocks. And with multiple anomalies winking into and out of existence, he had no idea what else they might end up facing. He just hoped nothing measured up to the gorilla or the T. rex in size.
A sudden cry stopped Stephen in his tracks. He wheeled around, looking for the source of the noise. A small boy peeped out from behind the leg of a beak-nosed plastic triceratops. There was a smear of blood on his face and he looked terrified.
“My mum won’t wake up!” the child said plaintively.
Confident that the soldiers were covering his back, Stephen ran over to the life-sized model of what was probably one of the most easily recognised dinosaurs in the world. Fizz matched him step for step. In Ditzy’s absence, the young soldier was their best field medic.
A woman who looked to be in her late 20s was lying on the ground behind the plastic triceratops. Fizz quickly started to feel for a pulse. After a moment, he nodded, and started to make a more thorough examination. Stephen could see blood in her hair, but there were no obvious injuries elsewhere that he could see.
“What happened?” Stephen asked gently, one arm around the frightened little boy.
“The phorusrachus jumped at us,” the boy said, not even stumbling over the name. “We ran away then Mum fell and hit her head.”
“And then it left you alone?” Stephen said. Terror birds weren’t known for passing up easy prey.
“No. An allosaurus chased it.”
Stephen exchanged glances with Fizz. This really wasn’t turning out to be their day. They needed to evacuate the unconscious woman and the boy, but to do that they’d be almost halving the operational capacity of their team.
He spoke quickly into his radio mike. “Connor, get me one of those ambulances to the road between the car park and the track up to the caves. We need as casevac now. Unconscious woman, plus unharmed kid. Tell the crew to get them on board and get the hell out of here and not stop. Over.”
“On to it,” Connor confirmed.
“Can she be carried over someone’s shoulder?” Stephen demanded.
Fuzz shrugged. “Not exactly ideal with a head injury, but we need to get her out of here and it’ll be faster than getting the paramedics in here.”
Stephen nodded and called out to Tony Keegan. The mercenary was thick-set, with arms like tree trunks. Stephen had no doubt that he could carry the injured woman and still run.
Fizz hoisted the boy up onto his back. “Hang on, mate, we’re going for a ride,” he said cheerfully.
Keegan lifted the woman into his arms and settled her head against his shoulder. Stephen was impressed. It took a lot of strength to carry an inert body like that, but it would be kinder to her than the fireman’s lift method.
“Get back in here as quickly as you can,” Stephen said.
Fizz nodded. “You can count on us, boss.”
Stephen nodded. He just hoped they would manage to get the child and his mother to safety.
Wookey Hole, Somerset, Paper Mill Complex. 11.40am.
“It’s somewhere in there,” Suzie said.
She was pointing at the exit from the mirror maze.
Ryan could see reflected light bouncing off the surface of the glass and he could feel the slight tug of magnetism on the EMP weapon in his hands. The anomaly was in the mirror maze and they had no idea if anything had come through, so staying on the outside wasn’t an option. He didn’t have enough men left to cordon this one off, so they were going to have to do this the hard way and make a sweep.
He looked at Suzie. “There’s another way around this?”
She nodded.
“Good. Take Abby and Cutter that way and I’ll meet you on the other side. Fiver, cover them.”
“Boss?”
“That’s bloody stupid, man!” Cutter broke in, looking anything but happy at Ryan’s order. “You’ve got no idea what’s in there.”
“I know. But two of us dressed in black going in there is equally fucking stupid. I won’t know if I’m looking at my own reflection or not. Too risky if I need to shoot.”
“Never been mistaken for a white bloke before,” Fiver said with a grin.
“I’m not taking the risk. Stay out unless I yell for you.” Ryan swung the EMP off his shoulder and handed it to Abby. “I’ve got no idea how that’ll work in a confined space surrounded by glass and I don’t want to find out the hard way.”
Without waiting for any more comment, he flicked his M4 onto single shot and stepped into the maze.
All around him, black-clad figures moved as one, some looking like him, others grotesquely distorted: some tall and thin, others massively fat. Ryan moved as quickly as he could, but there were dead ends everywhere, and the light from the anomaly flickering brightly off multiple surfaces didn’t help his sense of orientation.
He followed the twists and turns of the maze, soon losing any sense of direction, but he could tell from the increasing magnetic pull on the weapon in his hands that he was getting closer to the source of at least one of their problems.
When he finally caught sight of the anomaly itself, it was hard not to screw his eyes up against the light. It was like being in the middle of a massive diamond. Light twisting and turning everywhere, surrounding and enveloping him, wrapping him in endless, coruscating shards of time, stretching into infinity in the mirrors, threatening to overload his brain’s ability to process what he was seeing and experiencing.
A sudden shriek echoed all around him.
Ryan whirled to face what he thought was the source of the noise.
A strong beak struck at him…
Ryan flung himself sideways and fired a single shot. Glass shattered around him. A heavy head drew back and then darted at him again, beak open, a red tongue waving at him. Ryan rolled, feeling glass crunch underneath him. Distorted by the mirrors, the creature seemed to have a neck like a giraffe on top of an unnaturally short-legged body. He had no fucking idea what it was, but whatever it was, it wasn’t friendly.
He fired again. More glass shattered.
Something struck him hard on the back, knocking him forward into one of the glass walls. Ryan caught sight of sluggish trickle of blood on his cheek and realised he must have been hit by a flying shard of glass. He resisted the impulse to wipe the blood away just in case there was some glass lodged in the wound.
The sound of raucous shrieking echoed all around him as the light of the anomaly glittered on a million shards of glass.
As he pushed himself off the wall, Ryan saw creatures coming at him from all sides, beaks open wide, ready to strike.
Automatic fire would result in him being cut to ribbons by flying glass.
He had a split-second to decide what was real and what was a reflection.
As his finger squeezed the trigger, Ryan just hoped he’d chosen the correct target.
Wookey Hole, Somerset, Dinosaur Park. 11.45am.
With his EMP rifle held to his shoulder, Stephen advanced cautiously through the dinosaur park with Jamie Barrett covering his back.
They’d taken down a second terror bird and left it trussed up like the first one.
The anomaly they’d had eyes on a few minutes ago had just winked out of existence, but that hadn’t been much consolation, as Connor had immediately reported that another had appeared in the valley.
“Over there!” he said, pointing with his rifle at a sudden flash of white in the bushes.
They’d never come across as cluster as unstable as this before. The anomalies were winking in and out of existence like a set of flashing Christmas tree lights. At this rate, they were going to have a fuck of a lot of creatures in transit to Farnley Hall at the end of the day. But it was better than sending a heap of corpses to the dissection labs.
The anomaly promptly started to shimmer the way they did when something was about to come through.
“Veggie or meat-o-saurus?” Barrett said, just as a beaked nose topped with three distinctive horns started to appear.
“Veggie,” Stephen said. “Leave this one to me.”
A moment later, a juvenile triceratops found itself nose to nose with a much bigger replica of itself. The small creature stared up at something that was probably about the same size as the adults in its herd. It tilted its head on one side, quizzically, making Stephen wish he had time to take a photo. Connor would have loved this.
The baby butted its nose against that of the model and let out a surprisingly high-pitched mewling sound. It took a step backwards, raising Stephen’s hopes that it was about to turn around and go straight home again. That hope was dashed almost immediately when it mewled again and butted the model harder like an overgrown kitten trying to get its mother’s attention.
Stephen swung his EMP over his shoulder and unholstered the much smaller pistol strapped to his left thigh. Dialling the weapon down to its lowest setting, he stopped forward and fired.
He hoped the electrical charge would be no worse than a dose of pins and needles to the thick-skinned dinosaur. He didn’t want to panic it, just nudge it back in the direction of its own time.
The triceratops threw its head up and mewled again.
Stephen handed the pistol to Barrett and spread his arms as widely as he could, taking a step forwards in an attempt to herd the baby backwards. “Give him another dose,” he instructed.
Barrett aimed and fired.
The strange sensation coupled with the even stranger sight of an unfamiliar creature advancing on it had the desired effect. The baby triceratops turned and fled, fortunately before its mother had come looking for it.
Barrett pulled something out of a pocket of his tac vest and stepped forward.
For a brief moment, Stephen thought the soldier was about to lob a grenade through the anomaly and opened his mouth to protest when he realised that Barrett was actually holding a smoke bomb.
“Chuck it,” Stephen said. “The rate these are opening and closing, we can’t risk going through.
Barrett nodded and pulled the pin, lobbing the grenade neatly through the middle of the anomaly. It would produce a wall of smoke in three seconds, more than enough to keep even the most curious of creatures from succumbing to the siren attraction of the rip in time.
One down. Several more to go.
Author : fredbassett
Fandom : Primeval
Rating : 15
Characters : Stephen/Ryan, Lester, Claudia, Cutter, Abby, Connor
Disclaimer : Not mine (except OCs), no money made, don’t sue.
Spoilers : None
Word Count : 15,000 split into six parts.
Summary : Trouble doesn’t just come in one simple package for the ARC team when an anomaly opens in the small Somerset village of Wookey Hole.
A/N : 1) Written for the

Wookey Hole, Somerset. 11.27am.
Calling the gorilla a big sod was probably the understatement of the year. To put it mildly, it was fucking huge.
Fortunately, it was also plastic.
Stephen looked around the valley in amazement. There were dinosaurs everywhere. A stegosaurus was calmly cropping the grass on the side of the valley. Opposite that, a group of phorusrachus were frozen in the act of feeding, whilst further away, a life-sized tyrannosaurus rex loomed above everything, fortunately unmoving. Stephen quickly raked his eyes over the scene, scanning automatically for threats, trying to distinguish reality from cleverly constructed fiction. Apart from the massively over-sized gorilla, a lot of the exhibits were surprisingly realistic from a distance.
A sudden flurry of movement caught Stephen’s eye, but before he could bring his EMP to bear, Barrett had calmly dropped to one knee and fired his own weapon. The powerful electrical charge hit an adult phorusrachus, halting it in its tracks. Its eyes rolled back and it fell to the ground, stubby, flightless wings flapping for a moment as it struggled against what had clearly been a knock-out charge. Barratt had smoothly dialled back from maximum charge before taking the shot, but even so, he’d still hit it with a hefty whack. Moments later, the bird lay still.
Keegan ran forward without needing to be told and started to strap its legs together. Even when the bird came around, it wouldn’t be going anywhere in a hurry.
“Nice shooting,” Burns said. “Christ, those fucking models are lifelike. They had me fooled.”
“Just be glad King Kong’s plastic,” Stephen said, slapping his hand on the massive model.
“Yeah, small mercies,” Burns agreed.
“Anomaly’s over there, Stephen,” Fizz called, pointing with the barrel of his weapon to a glittering ball of light further up the valley, almost hidden in a small copse of trees.
Stephen nodded. He was going to need to check the area for tracks. If one terror bird had come through, there was a good chance there’d be others. They were known for hunting in flocks. And with multiple anomalies winking into and out of existence, he had no idea what else they might end up facing. He just hoped nothing measured up to the gorilla or the T. rex in size.
A sudden cry stopped Stephen in his tracks. He wheeled around, looking for the source of the noise. A small boy peeped out from behind the leg of a beak-nosed plastic triceratops. There was a smear of blood on his face and he looked terrified.
“My mum won’t wake up!” the child said plaintively.
Confident that the soldiers were covering his back, Stephen ran over to the life-sized model of what was probably one of the most easily recognised dinosaurs in the world. Fizz matched him step for step. In Ditzy’s absence, the young soldier was their best field medic.
A woman who looked to be in her late 20s was lying on the ground behind the plastic triceratops. Fizz quickly started to feel for a pulse. After a moment, he nodded, and started to make a more thorough examination. Stephen could see blood in her hair, but there were no obvious injuries elsewhere that he could see.
“What happened?” Stephen asked gently, one arm around the frightened little boy.
“The phorusrachus jumped at us,” the boy said, not even stumbling over the name. “We ran away then Mum fell and hit her head.”
“And then it left you alone?” Stephen said. Terror birds weren’t known for passing up easy prey.
“No. An allosaurus chased it.”
Stephen exchanged glances with Fizz. This really wasn’t turning out to be their day. They needed to evacuate the unconscious woman and the boy, but to do that they’d be almost halving the operational capacity of their team.
He spoke quickly into his radio mike. “Connor, get me one of those ambulances to the road between the car park and the track up to the caves. We need as casevac now. Unconscious woman, plus unharmed kid. Tell the crew to get them on board and get the hell out of here and not stop. Over.”
“On to it,” Connor confirmed.
“Can she be carried over someone’s shoulder?” Stephen demanded.
Fuzz shrugged. “Not exactly ideal with a head injury, but we need to get her out of here and it’ll be faster than getting the paramedics in here.”
Stephen nodded and called out to Tony Keegan. The mercenary was thick-set, with arms like tree trunks. Stephen had no doubt that he could carry the injured woman and still run.
Fizz hoisted the boy up onto his back. “Hang on, mate, we’re going for a ride,” he said cheerfully.
Keegan lifted the woman into his arms and settled her head against his shoulder. Stephen was impressed. It took a lot of strength to carry an inert body like that, but it would be kinder to her than the fireman’s lift method.
“Get back in here as quickly as you can,” Stephen said.
Fizz nodded. “You can count on us, boss.”
Stephen nodded. He just hoped they would manage to get the child and his mother to safety.
Wookey Hole, Somerset, Paper Mill Complex. 11.40am.
“It’s somewhere in there,” Suzie said.
She was pointing at the exit from the mirror maze.
Ryan could see reflected light bouncing off the surface of the glass and he could feel the slight tug of magnetism on the EMP weapon in his hands. The anomaly was in the mirror maze and they had no idea if anything had come through, so staying on the outside wasn’t an option. He didn’t have enough men left to cordon this one off, so they were going to have to do this the hard way and make a sweep.
He looked at Suzie. “There’s another way around this?”
She nodded.
“Good. Take Abby and Cutter that way and I’ll meet you on the other side. Fiver, cover them.”
“Boss?”
“That’s bloody stupid, man!” Cutter broke in, looking anything but happy at Ryan’s order. “You’ve got no idea what’s in there.”
“I know. But two of us dressed in black going in there is equally fucking stupid. I won’t know if I’m looking at my own reflection or not. Too risky if I need to shoot.”
“Never been mistaken for a white bloke before,” Fiver said with a grin.
“I’m not taking the risk. Stay out unless I yell for you.” Ryan swung the EMP off his shoulder and handed it to Abby. “I’ve got no idea how that’ll work in a confined space surrounded by glass and I don’t want to find out the hard way.”
Without waiting for any more comment, he flicked his M4 onto single shot and stepped into the maze.
All around him, black-clad figures moved as one, some looking like him, others grotesquely distorted: some tall and thin, others massively fat. Ryan moved as quickly as he could, but there were dead ends everywhere, and the light from the anomaly flickering brightly off multiple surfaces didn’t help his sense of orientation.
He followed the twists and turns of the maze, soon losing any sense of direction, but he could tell from the increasing magnetic pull on the weapon in his hands that he was getting closer to the source of at least one of their problems.
When he finally caught sight of the anomaly itself, it was hard not to screw his eyes up against the light. It was like being in the middle of a massive diamond. Light twisting and turning everywhere, surrounding and enveloping him, wrapping him in endless, coruscating shards of time, stretching into infinity in the mirrors, threatening to overload his brain’s ability to process what he was seeing and experiencing.
A sudden shriek echoed all around him.
Ryan whirled to face what he thought was the source of the noise.
A strong beak struck at him…
Ryan flung himself sideways and fired a single shot. Glass shattered around him. A heavy head drew back and then darted at him again, beak open, a red tongue waving at him. Ryan rolled, feeling glass crunch underneath him. Distorted by the mirrors, the creature seemed to have a neck like a giraffe on top of an unnaturally short-legged body. He had no fucking idea what it was, but whatever it was, it wasn’t friendly.
He fired again. More glass shattered.
Something struck him hard on the back, knocking him forward into one of the glass walls. Ryan caught sight of sluggish trickle of blood on his cheek and realised he must have been hit by a flying shard of glass. He resisted the impulse to wipe the blood away just in case there was some glass lodged in the wound.
The sound of raucous shrieking echoed all around him as the light of the anomaly glittered on a million shards of glass.
As he pushed himself off the wall, Ryan saw creatures coming at him from all sides, beaks open wide, ready to strike.
Automatic fire would result in him being cut to ribbons by flying glass.
He had a split-second to decide what was real and what was a reflection.
As his finger squeezed the trigger, Ryan just hoped he’d chosen the correct target.
Wookey Hole, Somerset, Dinosaur Park. 11.45am.
With his EMP rifle held to his shoulder, Stephen advanced cautiously through the dinosaur park with Jamie Barrett covering his back.
They’d taken down a second terror bird and left it trussed up like the first one.
The anomaly they’d had eyes on a few minutes ago had just winked out of existence, but that hadn’t been much consolation, as Connor had immediately reported that another had appeared in the valley.
“Over there!” he said, pointing with his rifle at a sudden flash of white in the bushes.
They’d never come across as cluster as unstable as this before. The anomalies were winking in and out of existence like a set of flashing Christmas tree lights. At this rate, they were going to have a fuck of a lot of creatures in transit to Farnley Hall at the end of the day. But it was better than sending a heap of corpses to the dissection labs.
The anomaly promptly started to shimmer the way they did when something was about to come through.
“Veggie or meat-o-saurus?” Barrett said, just as a beaked nose topped with three distinctive horns started to appear.
“Veggie,” Stephen said. “Leave this one to me.”
A moment later, a juvenile triceratops found itself nose to nose with a much bigger replica of itself. The small creature stared up at something that was probably about the same size as the adults in its herd. It tilted its head on one side, quizzically, making Stephen wish he had time to take a photo. Connor would have loved this.
The baby butted its nose against that of the model and let out a surprisingly high-pitched mewling sound. It took a step backwards, raising Stephen’s hopes that it was about to turn around and go straight home again. That hope was dashed almost immediately when it mewled again and butted the model harder like an overgrown kitten trying to get its mother’s attention.
Stephen swung his EMP over his shoulder and unholstered the much smaller pistol strapped to his left thigh. Dialling the weapon down to its lowest setting, he stopped forward and fired.
He hoped the electrical charge would be no worse than a dose of pins and needles to the thick-skinned dinosaur. He didn’t want to panic it, just nudge it back in the direction of its own time.
The triceratops threw its head up and mewled again.
Stephen handed the pistol to Barrett and spread his arms as widely as he could, taking a step forwards in an attempt to herd the baby backwards. “Give him another dose,” he instructed.
Barrett aimed and fired.
The strange sensation coupled with the even stranger sight of an unfamiliar creature advancing on it had the desired effect. The baby triceratops turned and fled, fortunately before its mother had come looking for it.
Barrett pulled something out of a pocket of his tac vest and stepped forward.
For a brief moment, Stephen thought the soldier was about to lob a grenade through the anomaly and opened his mouth to protest when he realised that Barrett was actually holding a smoke bomb.
“Chuck it,” Stephen said. “The rate these are opening and closing, we can’t risk going through.
Barrett nodded and pulled the pin, lobbing the grenade neatly through the middle of the anomaly. It would produce a wall of smoke in three seconds, more than enough to keep even the most curious of creatures from succumbing to the siren attraction of the rip in time.
One down. Several more to go.
no subject
Date: 2015-07-02 02:29 pm (UTC)Aww at the triceratops.
no subject
Date: 2015-07-02 03:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-07-02 04:36 pm (UTC)*g* I wondered if the gorilla was plastic. Glad it is.
Yay for Stephen's team, and awww for the kid knowing what all the creatures are.
“Never been mistaken for a white bloke before,” Fiver said with a grin.
*snorfle*
That section with Ryan in the hall of mirrors was terrifying. The description and action pulled me along so quickly I was panting, and didn't realise it until I got to the next section and actually took a full breath again!
Baby triceratops! Baby wanting mum! *melts*
Well done boys for chivvying him back through.
This is fantastic.
no subject
Date: 2015-07-02 05:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-07-02 05:26 pm (UTC)Sometimes with action scenes, even with pro writers, I'll have to stop and go back to reread a section because I got confused. I don't think I've ever had to do that with yours.
*g* Probably because of how hard it is and much thought you put into it as a result.
no subject
Date: 2015-07-02 05:52 pm (UTC)Great chapter! So exciting! I loved the baby triceratops - I'd have loved to have seen that on the screen!
no subject
Date: 2015-07-02 05:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-07-02 07:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-07-02 08:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-07-02 08:22 pm (UTC)Love the kid knowing the names, although eek for “No. An allosaurus chased it.”
And another cliffie with Ryan.
*purrs*
no subject
Date: 2015-07-02 08:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-07-03 08:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-07-03 09:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-07-04 10:09 am (UTC)Love it xxx
no subject
Date: 2015-07-04 10:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-07-05 09:25 pm (UTC)But aaaawwww for the baby triceratops, that was nice in the middle of so much chaos.
no subject
Date: 2015-07-06 12:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-07-07 08:25 pm (UTC)Love the little boy and his matter of fact identification of dinosaurs, and glad his mum looks to be OK.
And Ryan and the mirrors!!! Great set up!
no subject
Date: 2015-07-07 08:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-07-19 10:30 am (UTC)I loved the tense mirror maze scene - you didn't leave Ryan many options there, you meanie ;) (Suzie was right, they weren't gonna like it...)
Whew for the fake gorilla and ooh re them trying to work out what is real. Hee re the flashes of humour and for the baby!
no subject
Date: 2015-07-19 07:54 pm (UTC)