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fredbassettTitle : When in a Hole, Stop Digging, Part 2 of 2
Author : fredbassett
Fandom : Primeval
Rating : 15
Characters : Lester/Lyle, Ralph Lyle, Julia Denton, Henry Rossington
Disclaimer : Not mine (well, actually, everyone other than Lester is mine), no money made, don’t sue.
Spoilers : None
Summary : There are times when Lester considers a) taking up a new hobby b) finding a new boyfriend and, finally, c) changing jobs. This is one of those times.
A/N : 1) Written for the every lovely![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lukadreaming for the ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
primeval_denial Secret Santa for this pairing and the prompt Up is the only way to go when you’re down, which, with sufficiently powerful binoculars, you might even be able to spot. 2) Set in my Stephen/Ryan verse.
After half an hour and several changes of hot water, Lester finally hauled himself out of the bath and accepted the warm towel Lyle handed him. His lover gave his bruises an appraising glance but pronounced that he’d seen worse, which was probably true. Lester still remembered the ones imprinted on his flesh by the Devil’s Crowll. By comparison, even LVS paled into insignificance.
Lester pulled on a pair of old cords, a warm shirt topped off with a cashmere sweater, and the cashmere socks Lyle had bought him for his birthday. He’d had more than enough of being cold for one day. A glance out of the window showed that the snow was still falling and had probably rendered most of the roads in the area undriveable by anything other than a 4 x 4. Maybe Lyle’s insistence on stocking up with enough food to feed the 5,000, as well as all their friends and relatives, hadn’t been misplaced after all. But it was a good job that they had two spare fridges in the garage, as neither Ralph nor their guests had come empty-handed.
The woodburning stove was pumping out heat, and Ralph was in the process of taking a tray out of the Aga.
“Pigs in blankets!” his brother declared, handing around plates while Henry popped the cork from a bottle and expertly filled five glasses without spilling so much as a drop.
Lester took an appreciative sip, recognising an exceedingly good sparkling wine from Camel Valley in Cornwall. Ralph had been lecturing at the Camborne School of Mines and had come to Mendip via Bodmin.
“There’s six cases in the garage,” Lyle commented. “Your brother is a gentleman and a scholar, wombat, and I won’t hear a word said against him. He does a good line in pig products, too.”
Lyle was right, the small pork sausages wrapped in pancetta were excellent, and eating them on Christmas Eve had been a Lester family tradition for years. Ralph lived a somewhat nomadic lifestyle most of the year, as his services as a consultant mine engineer were in demand throughout the world, but when he was home, he was quite happy pottering around in the kitchen. The enormous turkey had already been prepared and put into the Aga’s slow-oven to cook overnight, and in a little while they were going to indulge in a non-traditional evening meal of smoked salmon and home-made chips, courtesy of the deep fat fryer that Lyle had insisted on buying, but by way of compromise, had agreed to install it in the garage, underneath an open window.
Lyle and Ralph quickly started to produce a steady stream of golden chips, crisp on the outside and fluffy inside, accompanied by smoke salmon and cream cheese rolls. Julia claimed that a sprinkle of lemon juice and some freshly ground black pepper turned the whole thing into a healthy meal, and Lester certainly wasn’t going to argue, not when the result tasted that good.
While he’d been in the bathroom, Ralph had even festooned the main room in several strings of battery-powered fairy lights, some silver, some multi-coloured, and a small Christmas tree had found its way into the corner of the room and was looking distinctly over-dressed with various bright baubles, more lights and some strands of tinsel. It probably wouldn’t win any prizes for tasteful decoration, but it looked cheerful.
Lester sat at one end of a battered leather sofa, his feet drawn up next to him, as he finished his chips and wondered if he could find room for two more pigs in blankets.
“There’ll be none to have cold for breakfast if you keep pigging out now,” Lyle said reprovingly.
“Yes, there will. Ralph always cooks a spare tray for exactly that reason.”
“A gentleman and a scholar,” Lyle repeated. “And he has exceedingly good taste in fizzy wine. But you know perfectly well you snore when you’ve eaten too much. Especially when you lie on your back.”
“Keep your bedroom secrets to yourselves, boys,” Julia said, rolling her eyes theatrically.
“You’ll find out soon enough, mother dearest. You’re in the room next to ours.”
“I’m hoping my presence will cock-block the pair of you.”
“Mother! Will you stop talking about cocks! I can’t take you anywhere.” Lyle threw himself down on the sofa next to Lester and said plaintively, “She did this at my passing out parade at Sandhurst.”
“Talked about cocks?”
“Did her best to fucking embarrass me. And then she copped off with my RSM.”
“In my defence, I was between husbands at the time,” Julia said, a wicked grin tugging at the corner of her mouth. “And if we’re talking about cocks, his was….”
Lyle put his hands over his ears and looked aggrieved when both Lester and Ralph burst out laughing. “Don’t encourage her,” he moaned. “Henry, when you divorce her, I hope you’ll remember what a nice stepson I’ve been and not write me out of your will.”
Before Henry could answer, Julia said, “Jon, you’re scratching your thumbs.”
Lyle looked down, almost as if the statement had caught him by surprise. “It’s only a slight itch,” he said defensively. “I was hoping it might go away.”
“So much for a quiet few days off,” Lester commented, reaching for his mobile phone. He keyed in the number for the ARC, but all that he got was a continuous tone that didn’t bode well for communication. Without speaking, Ralph tossed him the handset for the landline. The ARC was on speed dial, but he didn’t even get that far. He couldn’t raise so much as a dialling tone.
“Whatever it is can’t be very far away if it’s affecting mobile reception,” Lester said, his mind already racing. “But what about the landline?”
“Could have been brought down by the snow,” Ralph said, staring out of the window. “It’s still coming down out there.”
“Jon, what kit have you got here?” Lester asked.
Lyle was already on his feet and moving towards the gun case bolted to the wall under the stairs. “Two EMPs, a Glock, an M4 and a Mossberg 590. I’ll get them.”
“Were you expecting trouble?” Henry’s arm had tightened protectively around Julia’s shoulders. His wife’s experiences with anomalies hadn’t been good ones.
“We had an anomaly cluster near here in the summer. It can take a while to get a team down here from the ARC so we prefer to be prepared.”
“What do you want us to do?” Julia demanded.
“Stay here and stay out of trouble,” Lyle said. He was already removing weaponry from the safe.
Lester grabbed a thick jacket and a pair of boots from the porch and pulled on a fleece hat. As Ralph had said, the snow was falling fast. Lyle handed him the M4 and four spare magazines of ammunition. The soldier strapped the EMP pistol to his thigh and slung the combat shotgun over his shoulder. The EMP rifle he handed to Ralph and gave him a rapid series of instructions on how to use it. Ralph, used to working in many of the world’s trouble spots was confident with both rifles and handguns. Lyle gave the Glock to his mother. Julia, had reported from several war zones in her career and knew one end of a weapon from another, whereas Henry, on his own admission, knew nothing about guns.
“I have a set of golf clubs in the car, Jon,” he said.
Lyle grinned. He approved of improvised weapons. Two minutes later, Henry was equipped with his clubs and had been given instructions to keep all doors and windows closed and stay on guard. Julia had earned herself an approving look from her offspring by dropping the magazine out of the Glock, checking it before clicking it back into place then racking the slide to deliver a round to the breech.
“Double action trigger, no safety, mother,” Lyle said.
She executed an eye-roll that put Lester’s own efforts to shame. “Don’t worry, brat, I won’t stick it down the waistband of my trousers.”
The last piece of equipment Lyle took from the weapons’ cabinet was one of Connor’s handheld anomaly detection devices. He powered it up and passed it to Lester. “I’ll cover you once we’re outside. If we find one, at least with the snow we’ll know if anything’s come through.”
“Unless it’s flying.”
“We’ll worry about that later.”
All three of them pulled on headtorches over fleece hats and Lester and Lyle turned on the torches mounted on their weapons. Outside the cottage, the snow swirled on a freezing wind, dancing in the torchlight and making it difficult to judge distance. Lester looked down at the handheld detector. It had already started to emit a high-pitched bleep, a bit like the parking sensor in his Merc.
“There’s one close by,” he said, staring down at the screen. “No more than 250 metres away.” He pointed across the piece of land that belonged to Drove Cottage. “That way, towards the swallet.”
The cottage was blocking their view, but from the screen in his hand, he knew exactly where the anomaly was. The cottage came complete with its own swallet, an ancient sinkhole in the pockmarked landscape of the Mendip Hills. The sunken feature was surrounded by trees but no stream had run there for thousands of years. Athough it looked no more than a grassy depression, with no obvious place to dig, he and Ralph had often talked about starting to prospect for cave there, and Lyle was enthusiastic, but as yet they’d never managed to find the time.
Lester hung the detector around his neck to leave both hands free to handle the M4 carbine and cautiously, they advanced through the narrow gap in the drystone wall surrounding the garden and made their way into the field.
“It’s in the fucking swallet,” Lyle said quietly. “On the count of three, turn your lights off so we can check.”
They were a long way from any street lighting and as soon as they turned their own torches off, they were plunged into darkness. Lester blinked, adjusting to the sudden change, then through the snow, he started to see an eerie white glow behind the whirling flakes coming from the direction of the swallet.
At Lyle’s signal, they turned their torches back on and advanced carefully, sweeping the ground in front of them in search of tracks. In all directions, the snow was unbroken apart from their own tracks. But Lester knew better than to count his chickens too soon where anomalies were concerned. With the sound of his own breathing loud in his ears, he did his best to stay focussed on the task in hand.
They advanced in line, keeping some distance between them, and making sure they each had line of sight ahead without being in anyone’s field of fire is something came at them from in front.
Over the noise of the wind, Lester heard a sudden bellowing cry, sounding like a cow in distress.
They quickened their steps to the edge of the swallet. The edge nearest to them was bare of trees, and in the ghost-light cast by the anomaly, they could see the almost perfectly circular depression, about sixty feet across, and thirty feet deep. On the far side, where the trees clustered densely on the ground above, the slope was almost vertical.
At the bottom, a creature the size of a large bull was threshing around in the snow trying to dislodge something clinging to its back. The beam of their torches picked out a shaggy shape, stamping large hairy feet and crying out in distress. A long trunk thrashed from side to side and Lester realised he was staring down at a young mammoth.
“What the fuck is that on its back?” Lyle demanded.
Lester didn’t know. It looked like the creature was being attacked by some sort of large, hairless ape that had its fingers – claws? – fisted in the mammoth’s thick hair.
“Oh shit…”
As they looked down, a figure ran out from beside the anomaly and jabbed at the ape-like creature with a spear. Lester realised to his horror that they were looking down on what could well be one of their own ancestors. The anomaly teams had been briefed countless times on the need to avoid contact with hominins of all types. Contact was sometimes inevitable, but it was certainly to be avoided, if at all possible.
The young mammoth threw its head back, bellowing in distress.
The fur-clad figure thrust its spear at the creature clinging to the mammoth’s back. The spear pint came close, but the ape-like creature swept a long, bony arm to one side and ripped the spear out of its assailant’s grasp.
In the light from the anomaly, Lester caught a glimpse of the figure’s face and realised he was looking down on a boy, in his early teens, if the beardless face was anything to go by.
Lyle, realising the same thing and swore under his breath. “Can’t get a clear shot at whatever it is. I’m going to try to get closer. Keep an eye out for anything else coming out of there and cover me. Check for tracks. We need to know if anything has come out of the depression.”
At Lester’s side, Ralph stared down at the battle taking place below them with the expression of a man who thought he was dreaming. With a visible effort, his brother said, “What the fuck do I do, Jim?”
“Cover my back!” Lester told him. “And don’t let anything get past you.”
Below him, unfazed by the loss of his weapon, the boy flung himself at the creature and tried to drag it from the young mammoth’s back. The creature turned and raked at the boy with long claws.
Lyle drew in a sharp intake of breath. “Ryan’s report from Roque St Christophe! It’s one of those fucking predator things!”
Lester stared in horror at the scene unfolding below him. He knew the report Lyle meant. The one from Ryan and Stephen’s interrupted holiday in the French countryside. By agreement with their colleagues in France, they’d received one of the corpses for dissection and study. Cutter and Connor had been all over it like a rash. The creature was a highly-developed predator that hunted its prey by echo-location. Bizarre as it sounded, Connor thought the things might be descended from bats. He had no idea what one of them was doing at an anomaly site that had also disgorged a young mammoth, but they couldn’t discount the possibility of another anomaly on the far side of the one they were looking at or even a portal to something the spaghetti junction of anomalies accessed via the permanently open anomaly at Farnleigh Hall.
Lyle slithered down the slope into the depression, his combat shotgun held firmly in his hands.
The young mammoth was trampling the snow beneath its hooves as it turned in circles, trying to dislodge its unwelcome passenger. The boy had jumped up and grabbed hold of the predator’s bony leg and was trying hard to haul it off its prey. Why he was quite so concerned to protect the mammoth, Lester didn’t know. They might have been both competing for the same prey, for all he knew, although he had to admit it didn’t seem likely from the attempts the boy was making to drag the creature off.
The predator turned and swiped at the boy with long claws. A cry of pain told Lester that the predator had obtained the upper hand in that exchange.
Without warning, the mammoth dropped to the floor of the depression and Lester wondered if it had taken a mortal injury, but a moment later he realised it was simply an attempt to dislodge the creature from its back by rolling and hoping to crush its opponent. The predator jumped free and Lyle seized the moment to fire.
The sound of the Mossberg 590 was deafeningly loud. Dark blood blossomed on the trampled snow, but whether it came from the predator, the boy or the mammoth, Lester couldn’t tell.
As Lyle moved closer to the melee, Lester realised the anomaly was shimmering in the manner he knew indicated that something was about to come through. He raised his rifle to his shoulder and tied to stop his hands from shaking with the cold. A dark shape burst through. He hesitated, then, as the creature barrelled forwards, he knew he was looking at another of the predators. Nothing human moved with that kind of bounding lope. He snapped off a three-round burst, but had no idea if any of his shots had reached their goal. The creature came towards him with a terrifying turn of speed. He fired again and heard the crackle of an electric charge in the air as Ralph tried to bring it down with the EMP rifle.
Neither weapon had any effect.
The predator bounded away, clearing the drystone wall in one springing leap.
“Try to stop anything else getting past,” Lester said quickly. “Do what you can but don’t risk hitting Jon with a charge from that thing. It’ll lay him out.”
“Jim…”
“I’ll be all right,” he lied, knowing Ralph didn’t believe him, but they couldn’t take the risk of the creature getting in to the cottage or, even worse, getting away from the immediate area of the anomaly. He’d read the reports and knew exactly how dangerous the fucking things were, and even with the aid of an M4 carbine, he didn’t feel confident. This was Lyle’s sort of work, not his…
The rapidly-deepening slow hindered his movements, but Lester pressed on, doing his best to ignore another shotgun report from the depression. Lyle could look after himself. He had to believe that.
The beam of the torch mounted under his rifle barrel picked out picked out the movement of a dark shape ahead of him. Lester knew he had no chance of bringing the predator down from that distance so he simply kept moving as quickly as he could. As far as he could see, it was heading straight for the cottage. The sickening thought struck him that it was being drawn in by the light from the windows…
Lester caught sight of movement towards the front of the cottage then, to his horror, he saw a sudden shaft of light fall across the snow-covered garden as the door opened. The creature bounced off the front wall, leapt onto the roof of the porch and then jumped down. Another shape moved out of the shadow of the porch and Lester heard the sharp, unmistakeable crack of breaking bone. His stomach gave a sickening lurch. A heartbeat later, the sound of a pistol shot came from beside the cottage and cut through the noises coming from the depression, but a heartbeat later, the boom of Lyle’s combat shotgun split the air again and then there was silence.
****
Lester stared down at the bloodied mess in his front garden.
Henry had a golf club in his hands and Julia was pointing the Glock 17 at the dead body of the creature. The look on both their faces was that of people who were just glad to be alive.
One of the predator’s claws opened and closed.
Julia shot it again at point blank range. “I hope you’re not going to tell me it was harmless, James,” she said, not quite managing to disguise the tremor in her voice.
“I have it on good authority they’re fucking lethal,” he said, wondering if he should stick a three-round burst into it, just to be sure, but as it didn’t have much of a head left, he decided that wouldn’t be needed. “Henry, did you just hit it with that golf-club?”
Henry nodded. “Lucky shot right between the eyes.”
“I think I might have changed my mind about taking up golf.”
Henry smiled in satisfaction. “Shall we see if Jon needs any help?”
Henry and Julia has just taken down a highly-evolved predator with the aid of a golf club and a handgun. Telling them to go back into the dubious safety of the cottage would seem like too much of an insult in the circumstances, so Lester just nodded and turned back towards the depression.
“Jon’s all right,” Ralph said quickly as they approached.
“Good, I’d hate to lose him now he’s almost house-trained,” Lester said as lightly as he could manage.
Keeping a wary eye on the anomaly, they made their way down the slope. They arrived in time to see the young boy leaning against the shoulder of the young mammoth, running his hands down its thick, russet coloured coat. The mammoth snorted quietly and snuffled at the boy with its trunk. The boy looked at them warily, but had clearly established some sort of rapport with Lyle.
Lyle looked over at them and raised his eyebrows. “What part of stay inside and stay out of trouble wasn’t clear, mother?”
“The part where you omitted to mention something even uglier than you staring in the window with blood dripping off its fangs.”
Lyle winced.
Julia smiled wolfishly. “It’s all right, brat. Henry caved its skull in with his golf bat…”
“Club,” Henry corrected.
“Don’t interrupt, darling. And then I blew its brains out. Twice. But apart from a nasty mess in the front garden, we didn’t break anything, which is probably fortunate. Even Henry isn’t rich enough to pay the call out fee for an emergency glazier on Christmas Eve.”
The boy looked puzzled and the mammoth loudly blew snot out of its nostrils.
“That’s nice, mother,” Lyle said weakly.
The boy stepped away from the mammoth’s side, a short-bladed flint knife in his hand. He gestured to dead predator and said something that Lester couldn’t understand.
Lyle stepped back and gestured at the body in what he clearly hoped was a universal gesture for ‘be my guest.’
Their visitor dropped to one knee in the snow then quickly and efficiently severed the head from the body. With an underarm action that would have stood him in good stead in a bowls match, the boy lobbed the head through the anomaly. He stood up, calmly rubbing the blood from his fingers with a handful of snow. He gestured to the body, then to Lyle, clearly indicating that Lyle was welcome to keep the rest.
Lyle grinned. “Thanks, mate.” He looked around. “We need to give him something in return. But I think Cutter might whinge if I give him a steel knife.”
Julia shrugged off her large, white fake fur coat and held it out to the boy. He was wearing what looked to be a fur parka, but when he ran his hand down the synthetic fur, a look of incredulous delight crossed his face and he held the coat to him.
“I imagine the Eccentric Academic won’t be too pleased about that, either,” Lester said dryly. “But I imagine we can gloss over that in the report.”
The mammoth reached out to lightly touch the white fur with the sensitive end of its trunk. The boy grinned and lightly swatted away the questing trunk.
Behind them, the anomaly flickered and the boy cast a quick look, thoughtful look at it. He patted the young mammoth on the shoulder and pointed at the anomaly. The creature stepped forward into the light. The boy looked at them all, a wide grin on his face. Lyle held out his hand, palm up. The boy touched his hand to Lyle’s and then turned to follow the mammoth back through the anomaly.
Henry draped his jacket around Julia’s shoulders and together the four of them stood in the depression and waited for the anomaly to fade from sight, their weapons held in readiness, just in case of any more unwelcome visitors.
When the light finally faded then winked out altogether, Ralph let out a shaky breath and said, “At the risk of sounding like a teenager, that was fucking awesome.”
“Even the bit where we all nearly died horribly?” Lester said, knowing exactly how his brother was feeling.
“Yes, even that bit.”
Lyle shook his head in disbelief. “I get paid to deal with this shit. The rest of you are just fucking bonkers. Now someone go get a tarpaulin from the garage to deal with what’s left of this ugly sod while I check the area for tracks.”
Two hours later, the bodies of the two predators had been wrapped in tarpaulins and secured with rope before being stowed in a lean-to shed at the back of the cottage. To prevent them starting to smell, they were packed around with snow. It was heavy work and they were all sweating by the time they’d finished, despite the rapidly-dropping temperature. By the time they’d finished, Lyle had declared the area free of any other visitors and they retired inside Drove Cottage, leaving boots, coats and hats to drip in the porch.
Lester looked at his watch. It was nearly midnight. He slipped an arm around Lyle’s waist and pulled him close for a cold-nosed kiss. “Happy Christmas”
Lyle returned the kiss. “Happy Christmas.” He looked thoughtful for a moment. “How about cold climate animals for the rest of December and January?”
“Sounds good, my little snow panda…”
Lyle stared at him suspiciously, not knowing whether he had made that one up or not.
Lester smiled his best inscrutable dealing-with-idiot-ministers smile.
“Hot toddies coming up!” Julia called from the kitchen.
“And more pigs in blankets!” Ralph added.
Lester rested his head against Lyle’s shoulder and let the smile morph into a grin. “Maybe our families aren’t that bad after all.” He glanced at Henry, who had cleaned his golf club and was just sliding it back into its bag in the porch. “Is that offer to teach me golf still open? I’m always in favour of transferable skills.”
Author : fredbassett
Fandom : Primeval
Rating : 15
Characters : Lester/Lyle, Ralph Lyle, Julia Denton, Henry Rossington
Disclaimer : Not mine (well, actually, everyone other than Lester is mine), no money made, don’t sue.
Spoilers : None
Summary : There are times when Lester considers a) taking up a new hobby b) finding a new boyfriend and, finally, c) changing jobs. This is one of those times.
A/N : 1) Written for the every lovely
lukadreaming for the primeval_denial Secret Santa for this pairing and the prompt Up is the only way to go when you’re down, which, with sufficiently powerful binoculars, you might even be able to spot. 2) Set in my Stephen/Ryan verse.After half an hour and several changes of hot water, Lester finally hauled himself out of the bath and accepted the warm towel Lyle handed him. His lover gave his bruises an appraising glance but pronounced that he’d seen worse, which was probably true. Lester still remembered the ones imprinted on his flesh by the Devil’s Crowll. By comparison, even LVS paled into insignificance.
Lester pulled on a pair of old cords, a warm shirt topped off with a cashmere sweater, and the cashmere socks Lyle had bought him for his birthday. He’d had more than enough of being cold for one day. A glance out of the window showed that the snow was still falling and had probably rendered most of the roads in the area undriveable by anything other than a 4 x 4. Maybe Lyle’s insistence on stocking up with enough food to feed the 5,000, as well as all their friends and relatives, hadn’t been misplaced after all. But it was a good job that they had two spare fridges in the garage, as neither Ralph nor their guests had come empty-handed.
The woodburning stove was pumping out heat, and Ralph was in the process of taking a tray out of the Aga.
“Pigs in blankets!” his brother declared, handing around plates while Henry popped the cork from a bottle and expertly filled five glasses without spilling so much as a drop.
Lester took an appreciative sip, recognising an exceedingly good sparkling wine from Camel Valley in Cornwall. Ralph had been lecturing at the Camborne School of Mines and had come to Mendip via Bodmin.
“There’s six cases in the garage,” Lyle commented. “Your brother is a gentleman and a scholar, wombat, and I won’t hear a word said against him. He does a good line in pig products, too.”
Lyle was right, the small pork sausages wrapped in pancetta were excellent, and eating them on Christmas Eve had been a Lester family tradition for years. Ralph lived a somewhat nomadic lifestyle most of the year, as his services as a consultant mine engineer were in demand throughout the world, but when he was home, he was quite happy pottering around in the kitchen. The enormous turkey had already been prepared and put into the Aga’s slow-oven to cook overnight, and in a little while they were going to indulge in a non-traditional evening meal of smoked salmon and home-made chips, courtesy of the deep fat fryer that Lyle had insisted on buying, but by way of compromise, had agreed to install it in the garage, underneath an open window.
Lyle and Ralph quickly started to produce a steady stream of golden chips, crisp on the outside and fluffy inside, accompanied by smoke salmon and cream cheese rolls. Julia claimed that a sprinkle of lemon juice and some freshly ground black pepper turned the whole thing into a healthy meal, and Lester certainly wasn’t going to argue, not when the result tasted that good.
While he’d been in the bathroom, Ralph had even festooned the main room in several strings of battery-powered fairy lights, some silver, some multi-coloured, and a small Christmas tree had found its way into the corner of the room and was looking distinctly over-dressed with various bright baubles, more lights and some strands of tinsel. It probably wouldn’t win any prizes for tasteful decoration, but it looked cheerful.
Lester sat at one end of a battered leather sofa, his feet drawn up next to him, as he finished his chips and wondered if he could find room for two more pigs in blankets.
“There’ll be none to have cold for breakfast if you keep pigging out now,” Lyle said reprovingly.
“Yes, there will. Ralph always cooks a spare tray for exactly that reason.”
“A gentleman and a scholar,” Lyle repeated. “And he has exceedingly good taste in fizzy wine. But you know perfectly well you snore when you’ve eaten too much. Especially when you lie on your back.”
“Keep your bedroom secrets to yourselves, boys,” Julia said, rolling her eyes theatrically.
“You’ll find out soon enough, mother dearest. You’re in the room next to ours.”
“I’m hoping my presence will cock-block the pair of you.”
“Mother! Will you stop talking about cocks! I can’t take you anywhere.” Lyle threw himself down on the sofa next to Lester and said plaintively, “She did this at my passing out parade at Sandhurst.”
“Talked about cocks?”
“Did her best to fucking embarrass me. And then she copped off with my RSM.”
“In my defence, I was between husbands at the time,” Julia said, a wicked grin tugging at the corner of her mouth. “And if we’re talking about cocks, his was….”
Lyle put his hands over his ears and looked aggrieved when both Lester and Ralph burst out laughing. “Don’t encourage her,” he moaned. “Henry, when you divorce her, I hope you’ll remember what a nice stepson I’ve been and not write me out of your will.”
Before Henry could answer, Julia said, “Jon, you’re scratching your thumbs.”
Lyle looked down, almost as if the statement had caught him by surprise. “It’s only a slight itch,” he said defensively. “I was hoping it might go away.”
“So much for a quiet few days off,” Lester commented, reaching for his mobile phone. He keyed in the number for the ARC, but all that he got was a continuous tone that didn’t bode well for communication. Without speaking, Ralph tossed him the handset for the landline. The ARC was on speed dial, but he didn’t even get that far. He couldn’t raise so much as a dialling tone.
“Whatever it is can’t be very far away if it’s affecting mobile reception,” Lester said, his mind already racing. “But what about the landline?”
“Could have been brought down by the snow,” Ralph said, staring out of the window. “It’s still coming down out there.”
“Jon, what kit have you got here?” Lester asked.
Lyle was already on his feet and moving towards the gun case bolted to the wall under the stairs. “Two EMPs, a Glock, an M4 and a Mossberg 590. I’ll get them.”
“Were you expecting trouble?” Henry’s arm had tightened protectively around Julia’s shoulders. His wife’s experiences with anomalies hadn’t been good ones.
“We had an anomaly cluster near here in the summer. It can take a while to get a team down here from the ARC so we prefer to be prepared.”
“What do you want us to do?” Julia demanded.
“Stay here and stay out of trouble,” Lyle said. He was already removing weaponry from the safe.
Lester grabbed a thick jacket and a pair of boots from the porch and pulled on a fleece hat. As Ralph had said, the snow was falling fast. Lyle handed him the M4 and four spare magazines of ammunition. The soldier strapped the EMP pistol to his thigh and slung the combat shotgun over his shoulder. The EMP rifle he handed to Ralph and gave him a rapid series of instructions on how to use it. Ralph, used to working in many of the world’s trouble spots was confident with both rifles and handguns. Lyle gave the Glock to his mother. Julia, had reported from several war zones in her career and knew one end of a weapon from another, whereas Henry, on his own admission, knew nothing about guns.
“I have a set of golf clubs in the car, Jon,” he said.
Lyle grinned. He approved of improvised weapons. Two minutes later, Henry was equipped with his clubs and had been given instructions to keep all doors and windows closed and stay on guard. Julia had earned herself an approving look from her offspring by dropping the magazine out of the Glock, checking it before clicking it back into place then racking the slide to deliver a round to the breech.
“Double action trigger, no safety, mother,” Lyle said.
She executed an eye-roll that put Lester’s own efforts to shame. “Don’t worry, brat, I won’t stick it down the waistband of my trousers.”
The last piece of equipment Lyle took from the weapons’ cabinet was one of Connor’s handheld anomaly detection devices. He powered it up and passed it to Lester. “I’ll cover you once we’re outside. If we find one, at least with the snow we’ll know if anything’s come through.”
“Unless it’s flying.”
“We’ll worry about that later.”
All three of them pulled on headtorches over fleece hats and Lester and Lyle turned on the torches mounted on their weapons. Outside the cottage, the snow swirled on a freezing wind, dancing in the torchlight and making it difficult to judge distance. Lester looked down at the handheld detector. It had already started to emit a high-pitched bleep, a bit like the parking sensor in his Merc.
“There’s one close by,” he said, staring down at the screen. “No more than 250 metres away.” He pointed across the piece of land that belonged to Drove Cottage. “That way, towards the swallet.”
The cottage was blocking their view, but from the screen in his hand, he knew exactly where the anomaly was. The cottage came complete with its own swallet, an ancient sinkhole in the pockmarked landscape of the Mendip Hills. The sunken feature was surrounded by trees but no stream had run there for thousands of years. Athough it looked no more than a grassy depression, with no obvious place to dig, he and Ralph had often talked about starting to prospect for cave there, and Lyle was enthusiastic, but as yet they’d never managed to find the time.
Lester hung the detector around his neck to leave both hands free to handle the M4 carbine and cautiously, they advanced through the narrow gap in the drystone wall surrounding the garden and made their way into the field.
“It’s in the fucking swallet,” Lyle said quietly. “On the count of three, turn your lights off so we can check.”
They were a long way from any street lighting and as soon as they turned their own torches off, they were plunged into darkness. Lester blinked, adjusting to the sudden change, then through the snow, he started to see an eerie white glow behind the whirling flakes coming from the direction of the swallet.
At Lyle’s signal, they turned their torches back on and advanced carefully, sweeping the ground in front of them in search of tracks. In all directions, the snow was unbroken apart from their own tracks. But Lester knew better than to count his chickens too soon where anomalies were concerned. With the sound of his own breathing loud in his ears, he did his best to stay focussed on the task in hand.
They advanced in line, keeping some distance between them, and making sure they each had line of sight ahead without being in anyone’s field of fire is something came at them from in front.
Over the noise of the wind, Lester heard a sudden bellowing cry, sounding like a cow in distress.
They quickened their steps to the edge of the swallet. The edge nearest to them was bare of trees, and in the ghost-light cast by the anomaly, they could see the almost perfectly circular depression, about sixty feet across, and thirty feet deep. On the far side, where the trees clustered densely on the ground above, the slope was almost vertical.
At the bottom, a creature the size of a large bull was threshing around in the snow trying to dislodge something clinging to its back. The beam of their torches picked out a shaggy shape, stamping large hairy feet and crying out in distress. A long trunk thrashed from side to side and Lester realised he was staring down at a young mammoth.
“What the fuck is that on its back?” Lyle demanded.
Lester didn’t know. It looked like the creature was being attacked by some sort of large, hairless ape that had its fingers – claws? – fisted in the mammoth’s thick hair.
“Oh shit…”
As they looked down, a figure ran out from beside the anomaly and jabbed at the ape-like creature with a spear. Lester realised to his horror that they were looking down on what could well be one of their own ancestors. The anomaly teams had been briefed countless times on the need to avoid contact with hominins of all types. Contact was sometimes inevitable, but it was certainly to be avoided, if at all possible.
The young mammoth threw its head back, bellowing in distress.
The fur-clad figure thrust its spear at the creature clinging to the mammoth’s back. The spear pint came close, but the ape-like creature swept a long, bony arm to one side and ripped the spear out of its assailant’s grasp.
In the light from the anomaly, Lester caught a glimpse of the figure’s face and realised he was looking down on a boy, in his early teens, if the beardless face was anything to go by.
Lyle, realising the same thing and swore under his breath. “Can’t get a clear shot at whatever it is. I’m going to try to get closer. Keep an eye out for anything else coming out of there and cover me. Check for tracks. We need to know if anything has come out of the depression.”
At Lester’s side, Ralph stared down at the battle taking place below them with the expression of a man who thought he was dreaming. With a visible effort, his brother said, “What the fuck do I do, Jim?”
“Cover my back!” Lester told him. “And don’t let anything get past you.”
Below him, unfazed by the loss of his weapon, the boy flung himself at the creature and tried to drag it from the young mammoth’s back. The creature turned and raked at the boy with long claws.
Lyle drew in a sharp intake of breath. “Ryan’s report from Roque St Christophe! It’s one of those fucking predator things!”
Lester stared in horror at the scene unfolding below him. He knew the report Lyle meant. The one from Ryan and Stephen’s interrupted holiday in the French countryside. By agreement with their colleagues in France, they’d received one of the corpses for dissection and study. Cutter and Connor had been all over it like a rash. The creature was a highly-developed predator that hunted its prey by echo-location. Bizarre as it sounded, Connor thought the things might be descended from bats. He had no idea what one of them was doing at an anomaly site that had also disgorged a young mammoth, but they couldn’t discount the possibility of another anomaly on the far side of the one they were looking at or even a portal to something the spaghetti junction of anomalies accessed via the permanently open anomaly at Farnleigh Hall.
Lyle slithered down the slope into the depression, his combat shotgun held firmly in his hands.
The young mammoth was trampling the snow beneath its hooves as it turned in circles, trying to dislodge its unwelcome passenger. The boy had jumped up and grabbed hold of the predator’s bony leg and was trying hard to haul it off its prey. Why he was quite so concerned to protect the mammoth, Lester didn’t know. They might have been both competing for the same prey, for all he knew, although he had to admit it didn’t seem likely from the attempts the boy was making to drag the creature off.
The predator turned and swiped at the boy with long claws. A cry of pain told Lester that the predator had obtained the upper hand in that exchange.
Without warning, the mammoth dropped to the floor of the depression and Lester wondered if it had taken a mortal injury, but a moment later he realised it was simply an attempt to dislodge the creature from its back by rolling and hoping to crush its opponent. The predator jumped free and Lyle seized the moment to fire.
The sound of the Mossberg 590 was deafeningly loud. Dark blood blossomed on the trampled snow, but whether it came from the predator, the boy or the mammoth, Lester couldn’t tell.
As Lyle moved closer to the melee, Lester realised the anomaly was shimmering in the manner he knew indicated that something was about to come through. He raised his rifle to his shoulder and tied to stop his hands from shaking with the cold. A dark shape burst through. He hesitated, then, as the creature barrelled forwards, he knew he was looking at another of the predators. Nothing human moved with that kind of bounding lope. He snapped off a three-round burst, but had no idea if any of his shots had reached their goal. The creature came towards him with a terrifying turn of speed. He fired again and heard the crackle of an electric charge in the air as Ralph tried to bring it down with the EMP rifle.
Neither weapon had any effect.
The predator bounded away, clearing the drystone wall in one springing leap.
“Try to stop anything else getting past,” Lester said quickly. “Do what you can but don’t risk hitting Jon with a charge from that thing. It’ll lay him out.”
“Jim…”
“I’ll be all right,” he lied, knowing Ralph didn’t believe him, but they couldn’t take the risk of the creature getting in to the cottage or, even worse, getting away from the immediate area of the anomaly. He’d read the reports and knew exactly how dangerous the fucking things were, and even with the aid of an M4 carbine, he didn’t feel confident. This was Lyle’s sort of work, not his…
The rapidly-deepening slow hindered his movements, but Lester pressed on, doing his best to ignore another shotgun report from the depression. Lyle could look after himself. He had to believe that.
The beam of the torch mounted under his rifle barrel picked out picked out the movement of a dark shape ahead of him. Lester knew he had no chance of bringing the predator down from that distance so he simply kept moving as quickly as he could. As far as he could see, it was heading straight for the cottage. The sickening thought struck him that it was being drawn in by the light from the windows…
Lester caught sight of movement towards the front of the cottage then, to his horror, he saw a sudden shaft of light fall across the snow-covered garden as the door opened. The creature bounced off the front wall, leapt onto the roof of the porch and then jumped down. Another shape moved out of the shadow of the porch and Lester heard the sharp, unmistakeable crack of breaking bone. His stomach gave a sickening lurch. A heartbeat later, the sound of a pistol shot came from beside the cottage and cut through the noises coming from the depression, but a heartbeat later, the boom of Lyle’s combat shotgun split the air again and then there was silence.
****
Lester stared down at the bloodied mess in his front garden.
Henry had a golf club in his hands and Julia was pointing the Glock 17 at the dead body of the creature. The look on both their faces was that of people who were just glad to be alive.
One of the predator’s claws opened and closed.
Julia shot it again at point blank range. “I hope you’re not going to tell me it was harmless, James,” she said, not quite managing to disguise the tremor in her voice.
“I have it on good authority they’re fucking lethal,” he said, wondering if he should stick a three-round burst into it, just to be sure, but as it didn’t have much of a head left, he decided that wouldn’t be needed. “Henry, did you just hit it with that golf-club?”
Henry nodded. “Lucky shot right between the eyes.”
“I think I might have changed my mind about taking up golf.”
Henry smiled in satisfaction. “Shall we see if Jon needs any help?”
Henry and Julia has just taken down a highly-evolved predator with the aid of a golf club and a handgun. Telling them to go back into the dubious safety of the cottage would seem like too much of an insult in the circumstances, so Lester just nodded and turned back towards the depression.
“Jon’s all right,” Ralph said quickly as they approached.
“Good, I’d hate to lose him now he’s almost house-trained,” Lester said as lightly as he could manage.
Keeping a wary eye on the anomaly, they made their way down the slope. They arrived in time to see the young boy leaning against the shoulder of the young mammoth, running his hands down its thick, russet coloured coat. The mammoth snorted quietly and snuffled at the boy with its trunk. The boy looked at them warily, but had clearly established some sort of rapport with Lyle.
Lyle looked over at them and raised his eyebrows. “What part of stay inside and stay out of trouble wasn’t clear, mother?”
“The part where you omitted to mention something even uglier than you staring in the window with blood dripping off its fangs.”
Lyle winced.
Julia smiled wolfishly. “It’s all right, brat. Henry caved its skull in with his golf bat…”
“Club,” Henry corrected.
“Don’t interrupt, darling. And then I blew its brains out. Twice. But apart from a nasty mess in the front garden, we didn’t break anything, which is probably fortunate. Even Henry isn’t rich enough to pay the call out fee for an emergency glazier on Christmas Eve.”
The boy looked puzzled and the mammoth loudly blew snot out of its nostrils.
“That’s nice, mother,” Lyle said weakly.
The boy stepped away from the mammoth’s side, a short-bladed flint knife in his hand. He gestured to dead predator and said something that Lester couldn’t understand.
Lyle stepped back and gestured at the body in what he clearly hoped was a universal gesture for ‘be my guest.’
Their visitor dropped to one knee in the snow then quickly and efficiently severed the head from the body. With an underarm action that would have stood him in good stead in a bowls match, the boy lobbed the head through the anomaly. He stood up, calmly rubbing the blood from his fingers with a handful of snow. He gestured to the body, then to Lyle, clearly indicating that Lyle was welcome to keep the rest.
Lyle grinned. “Thanks, mate.” He looked around. “We need to give him something in return. But I think Cutter might whinge if I give him a steel knife.”
Julia shrugged off her large, white fake fur coat and held it out to the boy. He was wearing what looked to be a fur parka, but when he ran his hand down the synthetic fur, a look of incredulous delight crossed his face and he held the coat to him.
“I imagine the Eccentric Academic won’t be too pleased about that, either,” Lester said dryly. “But I imagine we can gloss over that in the report.”
The mammoth reached out to lightly touch the white fur with the sensitive end of its trunk. The boy grinned and lightly swatted away the questing trunk.
Behind them, the anomaly flickered and the boy cast a quick look, thoughtful look at it. He patted the young mammoth on the shoulder and pointed at the anomaly. The creature stepped forward into the light. The boy looked at them all, a wide grin on his face. Lyle held out his hand, palm up. The boy touched his hand to Lyle’s and then turned to follow the mammoth back through the anomaly.
Henry draped his jacket around Julia’s shoulders and together the four of them stood in the depression and waited for the anomaly to fade from sight, their weapons held in readiness, just in case of any more unwelcome visitors.
When the light finally faded then winked out altogether, Ralph let out a shaky breath and said, “At the risk of sounding like a teenager, that was fucking awesome.”
“Even the bit where we all nearly died horribly?” Lester said, knowing exactly how his brother was feeling.
“Yes, even that bit.”
Lyle shook his head in disbelief. “I get paid to deal with this shit. The rest of you are just fucking bonkers. Now someone go get a tarpaulin from the garage to deal with what’s left of this ugly sod while I check the area for tracks.”
Two hours later, the bodies of the two predators had been wrapped in tarpaulins and secured with rope before being stowed in a lean-to shed at the back of the cottage. To prevent them starting to smell, they were packed around with snow. It was heavy work and they were all sweating by the time they’d finished, despite the rapidly-dropping temperature. By the time they’d finished, Lyle had declared the area free of any other visitors and they retired inside Drove Cottage, leaving boots, coats and hats to drip in the porch.
Lester looked at his watch. It was nearly midnight. He slipped an arm around Lyle’s waist and pulled him close for a cold-nosed kiss. “Happy Christmas”
Lyle returned the kiss. “Happy Christmas.” He looked thoughtful for a moment. “How about cold climate animals for the rest of December and January?”
“Sounds good, my little snow panda…”
Lyle stared at him suspiciously, not knowing whether he had made that one up or not.
Lester smiled his best inscrutable dealing-with-idiot-ministers smile.
“Hot toddies coming up!” Julia called from the kitchen.
“And more pigs in blankets!” Ralph added.
Lester rested his head against Lyle’s shoulder and let the smile morph into a grin. “Maybe our families aren’t that bad after all.” He glanced at Henry, who had cleaned his golf club and was just sliding it back into its bag in the porch. “Is that offer to teach me golf still open? I’m always in favour of transferable skills.”
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Date: 2016-12-29 02:15 pm (UTC)I adore this pairing, particularly the cracking dialogue and pet names. And the back-chat between Julia and Lyle is priceless. That was some stellar action as well - and I liked the boy beetling off with Julia's coat. I shall wait happily for Lester to take up golf!
*Sighs very happily*
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Date: 2016-12-29 04:58 pm (UTC)Julia is always fun to write, and I'm very fond of Henry, too.
*hugs* Glad you liked it!
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Date: 2016-12-29 04:10 pm (UTC)That had me on the edge of my seat. O_O
Terrific action sequence, and, as always, your repartee is unsurpassed.
Nice that Ralph has now joined the 'anomaly club', and that Henry is also now a direct member!
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Date: 2016-12-29 04:59 pm (UTC)Thank you!
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Date: 2016-12-29 10:37 pm (UTC)Also, go Henry and his golf clubs! Definitely a good match for Julia ^_^
Loved the fic, great action and terribly funny bits with this peculiar but lovely family.
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Date: 2016-12-30 12:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-12-29 11:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-12-30 12:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-12-30 01:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-12-30 07:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-12-30 02:15 pm (UTC)Great fic.
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Date: 2016-12-30 07:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-01-01 03:04 pm (UTC)Great fic!!
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Date: 2017-01-01 04:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-01-01 04:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-01-01 04:10 pm (UTC)They certainly deserve more hot toddies and pigs in blankets. Not a bad family after all. :D
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Date: 2017-01-01 04:24 pm (UTC)Thank you!
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Date: 2017-01-01 05:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-01-01 07:52 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2017-01-27 08:46 pm (UTC)