Fic, Scrapheap Challenge, Danny, Lyle, 18
Aug. 19th, 2017 02:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fredbassettTitle : Scrapheap Challenge, Part 2 of 2
Author : fredbassett
Fandom : Primeval
Rating : 18
Characters : Danny, Lyle, Ryan, Claudia
Disclaimer : Not mine (except Lyle), no money made, don’t sue.
Word Count : 3,300
Spoilers : None
Summary : A copper’s life suddenly becomes more complicated.
A/N : Set in my Stephen/Ryan series. No prior knowledge needed.
Lyle hefted the scaffold bar in his hands, feeling the tug of the anomaly, despite the mound of cars that covered it. He still wasn’t quite sure how he’d ended up this deep in trouble when all he’d intended had been a quiet night in the local boozer with a mate who’d lost a leg to an IED in Helmand. But his thumbs had started itching as soon as he’d got off the bus, and things had taken a rapid nose dive when he’d seen the dark shape scaling the wall in the alley.
He’d gone up against this particularly brand of nasty once before so he knew what to expect. They were fast, unpredictable and deadly. Set against that, he was unarmed, in difficult terrain, with no way of calling for back-up. He didn’t even have his stepfather’s golf clubs to get him out of a tight spot. He was going to have to rely on his wits and an unarmed copper who had utterly no idea what kind of shit they’d both just landed in.
A scratch of claws on metal behind him made Lyle pivot around, the bar already swinging in a wide arc. The predator came at him out of the darkness, unhindered by the lack of light, equipped instead with an advanced echolocation system, possibly evolved from bats, according to the scientists who’d been busy taking apart the corpse left behind after the incursion on the Mendips. Connor had sat in on the post-mortems and had come back with a ton of grisly photos and boundless enthusiasm for the wonders of evolution. Enthusiasm that Lyle certainly didn’t share, not when the fucking things were trying to rip his head off.
The scaffold bar connected with one of the creature’s spindly limbs and Lyle heard the crack of a bone. A grin quirked the grim set of his lips. Breaking something was always a good start. Despite its injury, the predator jumped sideways, using a pile of heap of metal as a springboard. Lyle dropped to one knee, ducked and used the bar to fend off the attack as the creature flew overhead, raking out with one upper limb, long and skeletal. It looked like a bigger and butcher version of Gollum on crack cocaine.
Lyle’s danger-sense alerted him to another line of attack, this time from the rear. He barely had time to throw his back against the burnt-out shell of car and jab the scaffold bar hard at the next monstrosity to have a go at him. It twisted sideways, slashing again with three talons. One caught him on the shoulder, ripping through the material of his jacket and teeshirt, cutting into his flesh. He was really starting to fucking dislike this game, but the things had the advantage when it came to attack and he was just going to have to live with it – or die by it.
One of the fuckers was crouched on top of a pile of cars, silhouetted against the night sky by pale moonlight and the diffuse glow of London’s ever-present light pollution. Lyle could see saliva dripping from its bony jaws. It wasn’t a good look. It was going to jump him and Lyle knew he was cornered with nowhere to go. Another of them was about five metres away in the shadow of the mangled wreckage of an old Beamer, poised to spring. If they came at him at once he was going to be fucked.
Lyle hefted the bar in his hands, weighing his chances of moving fast enough to take out the one on the ground and then avoiding the other when it came after him. If he was lucky, the cavalry would appear. If he wasn’t….
He powered forward, lashing out with the metal pole. The predator moved, but wasn’t quite fast enough. The scaffold pole caught its jaw, knocking the vicious teeth together in a way that would have made a decent amount of money for a dentist. The creature leaped at him, but Lyle was already moving again, this time towards the thing perched up on top of a pile of Dinsdale Piranha’s finest stock.
Lyle’s right foot hit the tarmac of the scrap yard floor and promptly slid out from underneath him, skidding in a pool of black oil. He twisted as he fell, trying to make sure that the iron bar stayed in play, but he was fucked and he knew it. That moment off balance was all the opportunity the creature needed and it took it with its bony talons, jumping at him like a large and aggressive spider, drool dripping from its open jaws.
He rolled away, still clutching the scaffold bar like a comfort blanket.
Talons raked his back. Lyle rolled again, trying to get underneath one of the cars, but he felt the predator take hold of his leg. Lyle kicked out. One boot connected with his attacker’s body. That was a good start. He kicked again and the hold on his leg was abruptly released. Lyle took the opportunity to scramble to his feet but his relief was shortly lived. The predator watching from the top of the pile of cars chose that moment to get involved.
The thin, almost skeletal body launched itself into the air just as the other chose that moment to rush him.
Lyle slammed the bar into the head of the predator closest to him, but there was nothing he could do to protect himself from the airborne attack.
The sudden noise of an engine spluttering into life cut through the air and a thick, heavy chain with a massive lump of metal on the end came swinging through the air to thump into the creature just before it reached Lyle. The creature was smashed into the side of what looked like a vey old, very dead transit van, leaving behind a trail of blood as it slid to the ground.
The predator he’d hit was crawling towards him, down, but certainly not out. They were determined fuckers. Lyle readied himself for another swing.
The scrape of metal on metal echoed through the dark yard. Lyle looked around to see an ancient, battered crane swinging a long jib towards him, a length of chain dangling from it with what looked like a block of crushed metal held in steel claws. The crane jerked the block into position and then released its hold, letting the heavy cube drop to the ground, crushing the predator like a brick dropping onto a spider.
Keeping a firm hold on his favourite metal teddy bear, Lyle looked up, grinning.
Danny Quinn was clearly very good at using his imagination.
*****
Danny pulled one lever back while pushing the other forward. He was starting to get the hang of this.
With two creatures dead and no sign of a third, Lyle had re-ordered their priorities, no longer wanting to expose whatever was under the pile of scrap metal. Instead, he wanted to add to the pile, to bury what was underneath as deep as possible. The soldier wasn’t keen on offering any explanations, but he clearly had a pretty good idea what was under there, even if he was working on a strict need to know basis and, despite the fact that Danny had just ridden to the rescue on a very old, rusty charger, Lyle wasn’t volunteering any more information.
But Danny wasn’t blind, and he certainly wasn’t stupid. In the dark yard, he’d seen a bluish-white light shining from the middle of the pile of junk. The whole thing wouldn’t have looked out of place in the sodding Tate Modern. And the two creatures he’d squashed could very easily have been part of the cast of a Ripley Scott movie.
Lyle had managed to get a mobile phone signal by climbing the wall on the far side of the yard and had called in back-up, but it was going to take them at least another fifteen minutes to arrive and Lyle was taking no chances in the meantime.
“Another one over there!” Lyle yelled, waving his hand in the direction of a small chink in the rusting defences where some faint light could still be seen.
“Yes, boss,” Danny muttered.
He looked around to see what he could grab next. The whole thing was a bit like those games you found in fairgrounds and motorway services where you had to try to grab a fluffy toy and manoeuvre it into a net, winning you whatever piece of tat you managed to hold onto. Half a crumpled Audi looked like a reasonable bet. It looked badly-mangled and had been reduced to a barely-recognisable wreck, with peeling blue paint that looked blanked by fire. He didn’t want to dwell on what might have happened to the occupants. The whole place looked like the Top Gear team had been let loose and told to make as much mess as possible.
The Audi proved harder to pick up than he’d expected. The dangling grab-hand at the end of the chain was jerky and kept sliding off. He summoned his rapidly-dwindling reserves of patience and tried again. And again. No fucking wonder he’d never been able to win a teddy bear at Southend-on-Mud. His brother had had the right idea…. Just break in at night and help yourself. Danny ruthlessly shoved old memories aside and tried to concentrate on the job at hand.
After a few false starts he managed to get the corpse of the Audi up in the air and started to swing it over to where Lyle was pointing. The metal creaked and groaned, reminding Danny what his knees used to feel like after a night pounding the beat. He manipulated the levers as best he could, watching Lyle duck out of the way as the remains of the car swung over his head. His prize was swinging rather alarmingly like an out of control pendulum, but he managed to slow it down enough to start to manoeuvre it into place, blocking the gap Lyle had pointed out to him. He settled the squashed metal into place and released the grab hooks. So far so good.
The remains of the once-blue Audi suddenly shifted to one side and toppled over. It came to rest against the side of something too battered to be identifiable. Danny cursed aloud and pushed against the array of levers to get the grab back into place. As it moved, the mound of cars shifted as well…
Danny watched as first one car then another started to shift. So much for his wreck-stacking abilities. He wouldn’t be giving up the day job on the strength of this.
Lyle turned to him, pale moonlight showing the exasperation on his face. Danny shrugged and spread his hands in mute apology. Trying to catch a moving piece of wreckage wouldn’t get him very far, but Danny’s stubborn streak kicked in and he found himself doing his best to get the metal grab in place to pick something off the tottering heaped of rusted instability and stack it in a way that might be more stable. He was close to getting hold of one of the twisted hulks when he realised that a bony arm had just come snaking out of the pile. A bony, three-clawed arm, to be quite precise.
He leaned out of the cab and yelled loudly to Lyle, “They’re fucking coming through!”
Lyle swore loudly and looked around for the iron bar he’d dropped.
Danny concentrated on trying to grab something he could swing at the creature. To his amazement, he managed to get hold of a block of metal that looked like it had already been through the crusher. Swinging it like a pendulum, he knocked it against the pile of junk, aiming for the spot where he’d seen the creature starting to clamber through, hoping that would be enough to force a change of mind.
It wasn’t.
Without warning, the pile of scrapped cars seemed to be swarming with the things; arms and skull-like heads appearing all over as they tried to worm their way through the cars. Lyle, armed now with a long, heavy crowbar, whacked one hard on the head and it withdrew. Danny swung the block at another, forcing a second retreat. He couldn’t exactly engineer precision strikes, but the noise of the clanging metal seemed to be off-putting to the creatures, so he carried on, pushing one lever, pulling another and rotating the cab as much as he could to get the best angle of attack. It wasn’t exactly how Danny had envisaged spending the evening, but it was definitely giving him one hell of an adrenaline rush.
Lyle was almost preternaturally fast, seeming to anticipate where one of the buggers would try to get through next, and when one did succeed in dragging itself out through the windscreen of a mangled Merc, he was on it in a flash, swinging the crowbar hard. But the next one was equally fast. It sprang away from Danny’s modern art masterpiece of rusting metal, bouncing directly at Lyle, drool dripping from its jaws. There was no way Danny could help with this one, not without risking taking out Lyle with the swinging block.
The creature bounced around like a rubber ball, avoiding every swipe Lyle took at it. Danny had a horrible feeling it was deliberately acting as a decoy to enable others to make their way through the mangled vehicles and out into the yard, although what the hell was drawing them into this wasteland of twisted metal, he really didn’t know.
Frustrated at his inability to help Lyle, Danny rotated the cab again and took a swing at the pile of cars, hoping that by shifting them around he might do some damage to the nasty fuckers crawling around in there. He didn’t know what the creatures were, but he’d seen the mess one of them had made of the old man’s neck, and he wasn’t inclined to give the sods the benefit of the doubt. Anything that came at you, jaws bared and slavering, wasn’t playing like a nice puppy.
The improvised wrecking ball hit the pile of cars with a searing screech of metal. Even Danny winced, and he’d been responsible for the racket. The creature intent on attacking Lyle hesitated for a moment, swinging its head from side to side as if trying to clear the noise from its ears – if it even had ears. That momentary advantage was all Lyle needed. He closed on the creature, hammering hard at its head.
A scraping noise from behind him made Danny twist in his seat, turning away from the battle going on below him with the unpleasant realisation that he had troubles of his own.
A hairless skull, skin stretched tight over the pronounced bones, grinned at him in a way that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Grimm brothers fairytale. Danny glanced around the cab, but found nothing to use as a weapon, but yelling loudly was always the best first defence, and Danny had always had a good pair of lungs…
As a secondary defence, he grabbed hold of one of the levers and started to spin the cab around, hoping to dislodge his unwelcome passenger. The chunk of crushed car thumped into the now tottering pile, dislodging one vehicle from the top, forcing Lyle to leap to one side. Danny didn’t have time to see what had happened to Lyle’s skinny opponent; he needed to stop the sod who’d hitched a ride on the cab getting close enough to bring its teeth and claws into play.
Bringing the cab to a juddering halt failed to dislodge the creature, so Danny promptly tried to rotate the other way. It lunged for him and all Danny could do was drop to the floor of the cab.
A moment later, the deafening sound of a shotgun blast told him that the cavalry might just have arrived. Either that or one of Harry Taylor’s goons had turned up and was taking a dim view of nocturnal joyriding.
Danny swung out of the other side of the cab as it ground to a halt now that he was no longer working the pedals. The creature followed him.
“Get down!” a voice ordered in a tone of command.
Danny didn’t need telling twice. He dropped to the ground and pressed himself against the vehicle’s tracked sides.
A muzzle-flash temporarily blinded him and a rifle shot rang in his ears. With the amount of metal around, a ricochet was a very real prospect, so Danny made himself was small as possible, which wasn’t easy with his lanky six-foot two inch frame.
“Eyes on before you fire!” The commanding voice was back. “No EMPs! Too much fucking metal around! Choose your targets!”
The acknowledgments of ‘yes, boss’ that Danny could hear from around him in the yard told him all he needed to know. These guys were definitely military. He heard gunshots ringing around the yard and caught sight of muzzle-flashes from various directions.
“Stay where you are, Danny boy,” Lyle said, appearing at his side, a semi-automatic rifle held to his shoulder in readiness.
“I’m weapons certified,” Danny said. “Won prizes.”
“Knew you weren’t just a pretty face.” Lyle pulled what looked to be a Glock 17 from his pocket. “I don’t normally get to second base on a first date, but you’ve twisted my arm.” He handed it to Danny butt first. “There’s one up the spout. Don’t shoot your own balls off or anyone else’s or I'll never live it down. Stick with me and I’ll show you a good time.”
“You already have. This is the most fucking fun I've had with my clothes on for years.”
“Mad bastard.” There was no mistaking the note of approval in Lyle’s voice.
They operated as a team, making their way through the scrapyard, hunting the hunters. Danny hadn’t enjoyed being stalked and was very happy to return the compliment. Together they took down another two of the predators, corning one before it had chance to clamber away over the piles of cars and blowing the second one apart as it jumped at them from around a corner. Danny put four bullets into its centre mass while Lyle blew its head apart like an over-ripe watermelon.
Standing over its still-twitching corpse, Danny felt nothing more than grim satisfaction. Whatever the things were, they were killers, and he felt no compunction in putting them down.
From the shouts of ‘Clear!’ that started to echo around the scrapyard, it sounded like they were winning the impromptu war.
A tall bloke in black combats nodded to Lyle. “Too much to hope that you’d stay out of trouble on a night out, Jon.”
Lyle grinned with an air of injured innocence. “Does boy wonder want any more to play with?”
“Yep. You know what he’s like with new toys.” The man turned his attention to Danny. “We’ll need your signature on the Official Secrets Act, mate.”
“He’s a copper,” Lyle supplied.
“That’ll make life easier,” the soldier said. “Go and see Claudia. She’ll take care of it all.”
****
Two hours later, Danny penned the final signature on a sheaf of paperwork that had been thrust in front of his nose by a politely scary woman who had introduced herself as ‘Claudia Brown, Home Office’ and had proceed to read him the riot act about the consequences for his career if he breathed so much as a word to anyone about the night’s events. In response to Danny’s query about how they intended to cover up the death of the man in the alley, she had simply informed him that he didn’t need to concern himself with that. He’d opened his mouth to argue, but an elbow in the ribs from Lyle had put paid to further discussion.
Danny didn’t know who these people were, but he was certainly going to make it his business to find out.
Author : fredbassett
Fandom : Primeval
Rating : 18
Characters : Danny, Lyle, Ryan, Claudia
Disclaimer : Not mine (except Lyle), no money made, don’t sue.
Word Count : 3,300
Spoilers : None
Summary : A copper’s life suddenly becomes more complicated.
A/N : Set in my Stephen/Ryan series. No prior knowledge needed.
Lyle hefted the scaffold bar in his hands, feeling the tug of the anomaly, despite the mound of cars that covered it. He still wasn’t quite sure how he’d ended up this deep in trouble when all he’d intended had been a quiet night in the local boozer with a mate who’d lost a leg to an IED in Helmand. But his thumbs had started itching as soon as he’d got off the bus, and things had taken a rapid nose dive when he’d seen the dark shape scaling the wall in the alley.
He’d gone up against this particularly brand of nasty once before so he knew what to expect. They were fast, unpredictable and deadly. Set against that, he was unarmed, in difficult terrain, with no way of calling for back-up. He didn’t even have his stepfather’s golf clubs to get him out of a tight spot. He was going to have to rely on his wits and an unarmed copper who had utterly no idea what kind of shit they’d both just landed in.
A scratch of claws on metal behind him made Lyle pivot around, the bar already swinging in a wide arc. The predator came at him out of the darkness, unhindered by the lack of light, equipped instead with an advanced echolocation system, possibly evolved from bats, according to the scientists who’d been busy taking apart the corpse left behind after the incursion on the Mendips. Connor had sat in on the post-mortems and had come back with a ton of grisly photos and boundless enthusiasm for the wonders of evolution. Enthusiasm that Lyle certainly didn’t share, not when the fucking things were trying to rip his head off.
The scaffold bar connected with one of the creature’s spindly limbs and Lyle heard the crack of a bone. A grin quirked the grim set of his lips. Breaking something was always a good start. Despite its injury, the predator jumped sideways, using a pile of heap of metal as a springboard. Lyle dropped to one knee, ducked and used the bar to fend off the attack as the creature flew overhead, raking out with one upper limb, long and skeletal. It looked like a bigger and butcher version of Gollum on crack cocaine.
Lyle’s danger-sense alerted him to another line of attack, this time from the rear. He barely had time to throw his back against the burnt-out shell of car and jab the scaffold bar hard at the next monstrosity to have a go at him. It twisted sideways, slashing again with three talons. One caught him on the shoulder, ripping through the material of his jacket and teeshirt, cutting into his flesh. He was really starting to fucking dislike this game, but the things had the advantage when it came to attack and he was just going to have to live with it – or die by it.
One of the fuckers was crouched on top of a pile of cars, silhouetted against the night sky by pale moonlight and the diffuse glow of London’s ever-present light pollution. Lyle could see saliva dripping from its bony jaws. It wasn’t a good look. It was going to jump him and Lyle knew he was cornered with nowhere to go. Another of them was about five metres away in the shadow of the mangled wreckage of an old Beamer, poised to spring. If they came at him at once he was going to be fucked.
Lyle hefted the bar in his hands, weighing his chances of moving fast enough to take out the one on the ground and then avoiding the other when it came after him. If he was lucky, the cavalry would appear. If he wasn’t….
He powered forward, lashing out with the metal pole. The predator moved, but wasn’t quite fast enough. The scaffold pole caught its jaw, knocking the vicious teeth together in a way that would have made a decent amount of money for a dentist. The creature leaped at him, but Lyle was already moving again, this time towards the thing perched up on top of a pile of Dinsdale Piranha’s finest stock.
Lyle’s right foot hit the tarmac of the scrap yard floor and promptly slid out from underneath him, skidding in a pool of black oil. He twisted as he fell, trying to make sure that the iron bar stayed in play, but he was fucked and he knew it. That moment off balance was all the opportunity the creature needed and it took it with its bony talons, jumping at him like a large and aggressive spider, drool dripping from its open jaws.
He rolled away, still clutching the scaffold bar like a comfort blanket.
Talons raked his back. Lyle rolled again, trying to get underneath one of the cars, but he felt the predator take hold of his leg. Lyle kicked out. One boot connected with his attacker’s body. That was a good start. He kicked again and the hold on his leg was abruptly released. Lyle took the opportunity to scramble to his feet but his relief was shortly lived. The predator watching from the top of the pile of cars chose that moment to get involved.
The thin, almost skeletal body launched itself into the air just as the other chose that moment to rush him.
Lyle slammed the bar into the head of the predator closest to him, but there was nothing he could do to protect himself from the airborne attack.
The sudden noise of an engine spluttering into life cut through the air and a thick, heavy chain with a massive lump of metal on the end came swinging through the air to thump into the creature just before it reached Lyle. The creature was smashed into the side of what looked like a vey old, very dead transit van, leaving behind a trail of blood as it slid to the ground.
The predator he’d hit was crawling towards him, down, but certainly not out. They were determined fuckers. Lyle readied himself for another swing.
The scrape of metal on metal echoed through the dark yard. Lyle looked around to see an ancient, battered crane swinging a long jib towards him, a length of chain dangling from it with what looked like a block of crushed metal held in steel claws. The crane jerked the block into position and then released its hold, letting the heavy cube drop to the ground, crushing the predator like a brick dropping onto a spider.
Keeping a firm hold on his favourite metal teddy bear, Lyle looked up, grinning.
Danny Quinn was clearly very good at using his imagination.
*****
Danny pulled one lever back while pushing the other forward. He was starting to get the hang of this.
With two creatures dead and no sign of a third, Lyle had re-ordered their priorities, no longer wanting to expose whatever was under the pile of scrap metal. Instead, he wanted to add to the pile, to bury what was underneath as deep as possible. The soldier wasn’t keen on offering any explanations, but he clearly had a pretty good idea what was under there, even if he was working on a strict need to know basis and, despite the fact that Danny had just ridden to the rescue on a very old, rusty charger, Lyle wasn’t volunteering any more information.
But Danny wasn’t blind, and he certainly wasn’t stupid. In the dark yard, he’d seen a bluish-white light shining from the middle of the pile of junk. The whole thing wouldn’t have looked out of place in the sodding Tate Modern. And the two creatures he’d squashed could very easily have been part of the cast of a Ripley Scott movie.
Lyle had managed to get a mobile phone signal by climbing the wall on the far side of the yard and had called in back-up, but it was going to take them at least another fifteen minutes to arrive and Lyle was taking no chances in the meantime.
“Another one over there!” Lyle yelled, waving his hand in the direction of a small chink in the rusting defences where some faint light could still be seen.
“Yes, boss,” Danny muttered.
He looked around to see what he could grab next. The whole thing was a bit like those games you found in fairgrounds and motorway services where you had to try to grab a fluffy toy and manoeuvre it into a net, winning you whatever piece of tat you managed to hold onto. Half a crumpled Audi looked like a reasonable bet. It looked badly-mangled and had been reduced to a barely-recognisable wreck, with peeling blue paint that looked blanked by fire. He didn’t want to dwell on what might have happened to the occupants. The whole place looked like the Top Gear team had been let loose and told to make as much mess as possible.
The Audi proved harder to pick up than he’d expected. The dangling grab-hand at the end of the chain was jerky and kept sliding off. He summoned his rapidly-dwindling reserves of patience and tried again. And again. No fucking wonder he’d never been able to win a teddy bear at Southend-on-Mud. His brother had had the right idea…. Just break in at night and help yourself. Danny ruthlessly shoved old memories aside and tried to concentrate on the job at hand.
After a few false starts he managed to get the corpse of the Audi up in the air and started to swing it over to where Lyle was pointing. The metal creaked and groaned, reminding Danny what his knees used to feel like after a night pounding the beat. He manipulated the levers as best he could, watching Lyle duck out of the way as the remains of the car swung over his head. His prize was swinging rather alarmingly like an out of control pendulum, but he managed to slow it down enough to start to manoeuvre it into place, blocking the gap Lyle had pointed out to him. He settled the squashed metal into place and released the grab hooks. So far so good.
The remains of the once-blue Audi suddenly shifted to one side and toppled over. It came to rest against the side of something too battered to be identifiable. Danny cursed aloud and pushed against the array of levers to get the grab back into place. As it moved, the mound of cars shifted as well…
Danny watched as first one car then another started to shift. So much for his wreck-stacking abilities. He wouldn’t be giving up the day job on the strength of this.
Lyle turned to him, pale moonlight showing the exasperation on his face. Danny shrugged and spread his hands in mute apology. Trying to catch a moving piece of wreckage wouldn’t get him very far, but Danny’s stubborn streak kicked in and he found himself doing his best to get the metal grab in place to pick something off the tottering heaped of rusted instability and stack it in a way that might be more stable. He was close to getting hold of one of the twisted hulks when he realised that a bony arm had just come snaking out of the pile. A bony, three-clawed arm, to be quite precise.
He leaned out of the cab and yelled loudly to Lyle, “They’re fucking coming through!”
Lyle swore loudly and looked around for the iron bar he’d dropped.
Danny concentrated on trying to grab something he could swing at the creature. To his amazement, he managed to get hold of a block of metal that looked like it had already been through the crusher. Swinging it like a pendulum, he knocked it against the pile of junk, aiming for the spot where he’d seen the creature starting to clamber through, hoping that would be enough to force a change of mind.
It wasn’t.
Without warning, the pile of scrapped cars seemed to be swarming with the things; arms and skull-like heads appearing all over as they tried to worm their way through the cars. Lyle, armed now with a long, heavy crowbar, whacked one hard on the head and it withdrew. Danny swung the block at another, forcing a second retreat. He couldn’t exactly engineer precision strikes, but the noise of the clanging metal seemed to be off-putting to the creatures, so he carried on, pushing one lever, pulling another and rotating the cab as much as he could to get the best angle of attack. It wasn’t exactly how Danny had envisaged spending the evening, but it was definitely giving him one hell of an adrenaline rush.
Lyle was almost preternaturally fast, seeming to anticipate where one of the buggers would try to get through next, and when one did succeed in dragging itself out through the windscreen of a mangled Merc, he was on it in a flash, swinging the crowbar hard. But the next one was equally fast. It sprang away from Danny’s modern art masterpiece of rusting metal, bouncing directly at Lyle, drool dripping from its jaws. There was no way Danny could help with this one, not without risking taking out Lyle with the swinging block.
The creature bounced around like a rubber ball, avoiding every swipe Lyle took at it. Danny had a horrible feeling it was deliberately acting as a decoy to enable others to make their way through the mangled vehicles and out into the yard, although what the hell was drawing them into this wasteland of twisted metal, he really didn’t know.
Frustrated at his inability to help Lyle, Danny rotated the cab again and took a swing at the pile of cars, hoping that by shifting them around he might do some damage to the nasty fuckers crawling around in there. He didn’t know what the creatures were, but he’d seen the mess one of them had made of the old man’s neck, and he wasn’t inclined to give the sods the benefit of the doubt. Anything that came at you, jaws bared and slavering, wasn’t playing like a nice puppy.
The improvised wrecking ball hit the pile of cars with a searing screech of metal. Even Danny winced, and he’d been responsible for the racket. The creature intent on attacking Lyle hesitated for a moment, swinging its head from side to side as if trying to clear the noise from its ears – if it even had ears. That momentary advantage was all Lyle needed. He closed on the creature, hammering hard at its head.
A scraping noise from behind him made Danny twist in his seat, turning away from the battle going on below him with the unpleasant realisation that he had troubles of his own.
A hairless skull, skin stretched tight over the pronounced bones, grinned at him in a way that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Grimm brothers fairytale. Danny glanced around the cab, but found nothing to use as a weapon, but yelling loudly was always the best first defence, and Danny had always had a good pair of lungs…
As a secondary defence, he grabbed hold of one of the levers and started to spin the cab around, hoping to dislodge his unwelcome passenger. The chunk of crushed car thumped into the now tottering pile, dislodging one vehicle from the top, forcing Lyle to leap to one side. Danny didn’t have time to see what had happened to Lyle’s skinny opponent; he needed to stop the sod who’d hitched a ride on the cab getting close enough to bring its teeth and claws into play.
Bringing the cab to a juddering halt failed to dislodge the creature, so Danny promptly tried to rotate the other way. It lunged for him and all Danny could do was drop to the floor of the cab.
A moment later, the deafening sound of a shotgun blast told him that the cavalry might just have arrived. Either that or one of Harry Taylor’s goons had turned up and was taking a dim view of nocturnal joyriding.
Danny swung out of the other side of the cab as it ground to a halt now that he was no longer working the pedals. The creature followed him.
“Get down!” a voice ordered in a tone of command.
Danny didn’t need telling twice. He dropped to the ground and pressed himself against the vehicle’s tracked sides.
A muzzle-flash temporarily blinded him and a rifle shot rang in his ears. With the amount of metal around, a ricochet was a very real prospect, so Danny made himself was small as possible, which wasn’t easy with his lanky six-foot two inch frame.
“Eyes on before you fire!” The commanding voice was back. “No EMPs! Too much fucking metal around! Choose your targets!”
The acknowledgments of ‘yes, boss’ that Danny could hear from around him in the yard told him all he needed to know. These guys were definitely military. He heard gunshots ringing around the yard and caught sight of muzzle-flashes from various directions.
“Stay where you are, Danny boy,” Lyle said, appearing at his side, a semi-automatic rifle held to his shoulder in readiness.
“I’m weapons certified,” Danny said. “Won prizes.”
“Knew you weren’t just a pretty face.” Lyle pulled what looked to be a Glock 17 from his pocket. “I don’t normally get to second base on a first date, but you’ve twisted my arm.” He handed it to Danny butt first. “There’s one up the spout. Don’t shoot your own balls off or anyone else’s or I'll never live it down. Stick with me and I’ll show you a good time.”
“You already have. This is the most fucking fun I've had with my clothes on for years.”
“Mad bastard.” There was no mistaking the note of approval in Lyle’s voice.
They operated as a team, making their way through the scrapyard, hunting the hunters. Danny hadn’t enjoyed being stalked and was very happy to return the compliment. Together they took down another two of the predators, corning one before it had chance to clamber away over the piles of cars and blowing the second one apart as it jumped at them from around a corner. Danny put four bullets into its centre mass while Lyle blew its head apart like an over-ripe watermelon.
Standing over its still-twitching corpse, Danny felt nothing more than grim satisfaction. Whatever the things were, they were killers, and he felt no compunction in putting them down.
From the shouts of ‘Clear!’ that started to echo around the scrapyard, it sounded like they were winning the impromptu war.
A tall bloke in black combats nodded to Lyle. “Too much to hope that you’d stay out of trouble on a night out, Jon.”
Lyle grinned with an air of injured innocence. “Does boy wonder want any more to play with?”
“Yep. You know what he’s like with new toys.” The man turned his attention to Danny. “We’ll need your signature on the Official Secrets Act, mate.”
“He’s a copper,” Lyle supplied.
“That’ll make life easier,” the soldier said. “Go and see Claudia. She’ll take care of it all.”
****
Two hours later, Danny penned the final signature on a sheaf of paperwork that had been thrust in front of his nose by a politely scary woman who had introduced herself as ‘Claudia Brown, Home Office’ and had proceed to read him the riot act about the consequences for his career if he breathed so much as a word to anyone about the night’s events. In response to Danny’s query about how they intended to cover up the death of the man in the alley, she had simply informed him that he didn’t need to concern himself with that. He’d opened his mouth to argue, but an elbow in the ribs from Lyle had put paid to further discussion.
Danny didn’t know who these people were, but he was certainly going to make it his business to find out.