fredbassett | Fic, Falls the Shadow, Part 10, Stephen/Ryan Series, 15

Title : Falls the Shadow, Part 10
Author : fredbassett
Fandom : Primeval
Characters : Stephen, Blade & Others
Rating : 18
Disclaimer : Not mine (Except Blade & the others), no money made, don’t sue
Spoilers : None.
Summary : Surprises just keep on coming.
A/N : The remainder of this series can be found here

Stephen knew the kids claimed that the creatures wouldn’t follow them through the anomaly, but he wasn’t convinced, preferring to keep the maximum distance possible between himself and a pack of rampaging meat-eaters. In his experience, hungry predators could be surprisingly tenacious, especially when they’d already tasted the blood of their quarry.

He dropped quickly to the ground next to the injured soldier. The torn flesh on Blade’s lower leg looked nasty, but the guy was as hard as nails and Stephen didn’t waste his breath asking whether he could walk on it. The answer would be yes, no matter how badly the leg had been mauled.

And it was bad, there was no disguising that.

His stomach turned slightly at the sight of flesh ripped down to the bone, hanging off in strips.

They weren’t equipped to deal with an injury of this magnitude. The best Blade could hope for was a couple of painkillers and a makeshift bandage. Predator bites were notorious for becoming infected, but it would be nice to have sufficient life expectancy to worry about complications like septicaemia.

Stephen glanced up into a pair of pale blue eyes. “How many of these things have you been through, Vicky?”

“Declan’s kept notes,” Victoria Thornton replied, nodding at the boy next to her, and miming writing with her hand. The boy nodded and pulled a battered notebook out of his pocket. “You can see them later. We need to get back to the others now. Becky’ll patch your friend up. Her mum’s a doctor.”

She looked down at the injured soldier, seeing the pain twisting his face as he tried to struggle to his feet and just for a second, the hard mask of competence slipped, revealing a frightened ten year old.

Blade reached up and brushed a strand of greasy blonde hair back from a dirty, scratched forehead. Christ, both kids looked like they’d been sleeping rough for a month, not just a night.

“Thanks, miss, that sounds good.” With Stephen’s help, Blade managed to get upright, one arm looped round the other man’s shoulders. “So which way?” the soldier asked.

Vicky nodded to her companion and the boy set off towards an anomaly about ten metres away, gesturing to the others to follow him.

“Have you got any double AA batteries in there?” the girl asked, as Stephen swung Blade’s pack up onto his other shoulder.

The soldier looked surprised, but nodded. “Got some in a torch. Why?”

“We need them for Declan’s hearing aid. That’s what we were using to keep the creatures off you. They don’t like the whine, but the batteries are nearly dead, and there’s only one set left back at the camp.”

Camp? Blade glanced at his companion, eyebrows raised. Stephen shrugged. Neither of the men had the faintest idea how to deal with a pair of kids who seemed to know way more about what was going on around here than they did, but somehow the idea of playing Twenty Questions when there was still a pack of meat-eating somethings just on the other side of an anomaly still only a scant few metres away didn’t seem like that good an idea.

As they made their way as quickly as they could after the two children, Stephen noticed that Vicky Thornton had a large machete hanging from the belt of her very dirty, very torn jeans.

In fact, on closer examination, both kids bore an all too marked resemblance to actors in a scene from The Lord of The Flies.

“Vicky?” The girl turned round and raised her eyebrows. Stephen’s heart did a quick back-flip. Christ, the kid had a look of Ryan about her. “How long have you been here?”

The girl frowned. Another gesture straight out of his lover’s manual of non-verbal communication. “Ten days, give or take a couple, maybe.” She shot both men a sharp look. “You didn’t say whether my Dad sent you or not.”

Stephen nodded absently, his brain still floundering in reaction her previous statement.

Ten days?

“Well, you took your bloody time,” she snapped and with a toss of her filthy hair, the girl marched on towards the chosen anomaly, but not before Stephen had seen a tell-tale tremor in her lower lip and a flash of moisture in two defiant blue eyes.

“Don’t ask me, chum,” muttered Blade, with a helpless shrug, as he limped after the two children, “but she’s her father’s daughter, that’s for sure.”

* * * * *

Annie Lowe handed over a tin mug full of dark, steaming liquid that smelled mouth wateringly like coffee.

Stephen took it from her, still watching in fascination as a twelve year old girl tied a very professional looking bandage around Blade’s lower leg. She’d also cleaned the nasty wound left behind by the predators serrated teeth without so much as flinching.

The girl sat back on her heels and tossed a long, untidy ponytail back over one shoulder. “You’re getting the last of the sugar,” she told Blade. “Don’t know whether it’s true or not, but my mum always says it’s good for shock.”

“You’re Becky and your mum’s a doctor, right?”

The girl nodded.

Her teacher watched with the ghost of a smile, and a bucket load of pride. “Becky’s our medic.” Annie Lowe’s smile broadened at the incredulous look on Stephen’s face. “Don’t underestimate children, Mr. Hart.” She pointed at her left wrist, which was firmly bandaged, splinted and held up in a sling. “This got broken in our first encounter with a dinosaur. Some sort of ceratopsian, according to Declan. It seemed friendly, I tried to pet it, it head-butted me and broke my wrist. Lesson learnt the hard way, but it happened to me, not to one of the children. Becky got the bone back into place. Josh worked out what drugs to give me. He was the only one who knew the names on the packets in the medical store.”

She gestured with her head to a series of large plastic boxes on a rough shelf at the back of the rock overhang that served as a shelter.

Stephen returned her smile. “Don’t tell me, his Dad’s a chemist? And Vicky’s dad’s a soldier, so she was out on recon.”

Annie Lowe grinned. “You’re getting the hang of it. So, if you’ve come to rescue us, when can we expect to get out of here?”

“They don’t know,” said Vicky, from her position at the edge of a four metre drop. “They didn’t come in through the original Star Gate. They came from the Big Critter Zone.” She glanced across at Blade and grinned. “You two really picked a bad place to arrive. It’s packed with those buggers. We thought it was nice, too, when we first looked through. Lots of grazers and a lovely big open plain. Next time we looked it was night-time and the place was stiff with hunters. That was when Declan discovered they didn’t like the noise he can get his amplifier to make.”

Stephen stared at the girl all too conscious of the fact that he seemed to have contributed very little to any of these exchanges. For would-be rescuers, they hadn’t exactly covered themselves in glory so far. He wondered if they’d survive long enough to live down the fact that they’d been rescued by a couple of kids, who, with six companions their own age or thereabouts and one teacher, had spent the last ten days or more holed up in a rock shelter, reached by a long wooden ladder stamped with Pattersons of Kendal on one side.

The way things were panning out, if a small girl had run through the clearing below them chasing a white rabbit, Stephen would have found it hard to muster much in the way of surprise.

The two men had been offered an energy bar each on arrival, from a store of hard rations in one of the large plastic containers stacked at the back of the shelter. One of the children was now preparing an evening meal of something that looked suspiciously like dinosaur in sauce, accompanied by rice and in spite of everything, Stephen felt his stomach grumble in anticipation of a hot meal.

According to Annie Lowe, there were enough basic food supplies in the camp to last at least another month, and, with the help of a semi-automatic shotgun and the large batch of cartridges that had been stowed in one of the boxed, they’d supplemented their supplies pretty well. Ten year old Jamie’s dad ran the local clay-pigeon shoot, and he’d won the Northern Counties Junior Championship only a month ago.

Stephen had a nasty suspicion that if they ever did get back to their own time, then this lot could probably make a pretty successful bid for world domination if they put their minds to it.

“So why go back to where you found us?” he asked, sipping the coffee and wondering at what point he was going to start discovering what the hell was going on.

“The Star Gates don’t always seem to lead to the same place every time,” said Annie Lowe. Seeing the look on Stephen’s face, she added. “It’s as good a name as any. Why, what do you call them?”

“Anomalies,” Stephen offered, with a hint of embarrassment.

“The local people call them Gateways,” the teacher said. “But I guess it all amounts to the same thing. The children christened them Star Gates and it stuck. We’ve been trying to check as many as we can, but they change. Or at least we think they do, but if it’s night on the other side then it’s difficult to tell where you’ve ended up. This is the only place where we’ve found any evidence of other human beings so we stayed here in case the person who left this lot shows up. We’ve also been hoping that the one we came through will re-open. But as far, it hasn’t. Not yet, at least.” She waved her good hand to catch Declan’s attention, then said, “Show Stephen your notes, Declan.”

The boy handed over a notebook, opened at a page with a sketch of the area he thought of as Spaghetti Junction. Each one was marked with a cross and an annotation. SG1, 2, 3 etc. A separate page had brief notes on each. Dark. Forest. Raining. Heard something big. Another said, Looked like an allosaur pack. Didn’t hang around. SG5 read : Day 3. Pitch black. Rock walls on two sides. Knee deep water. Smelt funny. Day 5. Still dark, but maybe light some way off. Still smelt weird. Rotting wood?

“The gate that we came through was about a quarter of a mile away,” Annie Lowe waved her hand to one side. “Over there,” she gestured out over the clearing, “you’ll find the one that leads to the field with all the Gates. When we tried that, we found something like a dozen of them, but the one that led here was marked with a rock. That’s how we’ve kept track of it. A lot of them seem to come and go.” She looked at the two men and smiled. “The pair of you look knackered. Try and get some rest, and don’t worry, we won’t let you miss tea.”

“Don’t tell me,” said Blade, settling back against the rock wall and trying to ignore the pain from his mangled leg, “whatever it is it tastes like chicken.”

Vicky Thornton shot him a quick grin and shook her head. “Jamie says it tastes like cotton wool stewed in verruca cream.”

The soldier’s eyes opened sharply. “What do you think it tastes like?”

“I don’t know, but it smells like the stuff I put on my pony’s legs.”

“Haven’t you got anyone who’s parents are into cooking?” asked Stephen, hopefully.

The girl giggled and shimmied down the ladder, yelling something to her friends about the look-out rota.

“Sounds like that’s a no, sir,” muttered the soldier, with a sigh.

* * * * *

Much to Stephen’s surprise, the pair of them had to be woken up for the promised meal. He was even more surprised when the food turned out to be surprisingly palatable, but he suspected that had more to do with the fact that he’d eaten what amounted to practically bugger all in the last twelve hours. Energy bars might stave off the worst of the hunger pangs, but they were still no substitute for a hot meal.

They finished eating, and the camp started to settle down for the night, with the majority of the children retreating up into the rock shelter and pulling the ladder up behind them.

“There are more predators around at dusk,” explained twelve year old Josh. “We keep a twenty four hour watch for the Star Gate we came in through, but we do that from the platform in the big tree. We take it in turns. Vicky’s in charge of the rota.”

“Did you build the platform?” asked Stephen.

The boy shook his head. “Found it, same as we found the rest of the stuff. There’s a knotted rope leads up to it. Do you know who left this lot here?”

Stephen met the boys sharp brown eyes and nodded. “A woman called Helen, I think.”

“Will she help us?”

“I wish I knew,” Stephen Hart said, quietly. “I’d like to think she would, but I really don’t know any more.”

And before Josh could ask any more questions, Stephen closed his eyes, but this time, he couldn’t sleep.

Less than an hour later, a piercing whistle split the silence of the Cretaceous twilight.

Annie Lowe jumped to her feet, along with the rest of the children. The atmosphere was suddenly electric with activity.

“Grab your guns, you two, we’re leaving!” said the teacher.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

lukadreaming.livejournal.com

Fabulous! I love the sprogs -- they could definitely do world domination *g*. And young Miss Ryan is a star!

From:

Fic, Falls the Shadow, Part 10, Stephen/Ryan Series, 15

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