Fic: Frequently Asked Questions (6/6)
Nov. 25th, 2022 05:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thelibraniniquity posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
tli_productionsHeader information and notes contained in Part 1.
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
6
It’s easy to lose track of time travelling through the anomalies. Danny’s muscles have settled into a low continuous ache, and the scavenged roots and water droplets have kept the hunger from twisting into anything worse.
It’s his gut, honed from years of paperwork and interview time restrictions and more than a few rugby matches at the pub, that suggests to Danny that it’s been maybe two days. Two days travelling with his brother wearing a stranger’s face, or perhaps it’s the other way around. However long it has been, Danny hasn’t tried to do anything, either against Patrick or to get away from him. It’s easy to blame his inaction on the guilt he’d had over thirty years to stockpile. Like he owes it to his brother to let whatever this is play out, despite the risk to Danny’s life – his actual life, as well as the one he’d slowly built for himself.
The difference between what he wants to do and what he should do has changed over the years, twisted and separated and merged depending on how much he’d had to drink, how far away from the Torrence Estate he’d dared to move. By how difficult it had been to try to let go, just as a new lead came into the frame.
It would almost be funny, if it was happening to someone else. Over the years, Danny had lost count of the ways he’d imagined the reunion with Patrick could have gone, until a department-referred counsellor had gently suggested he find a way to compartmentalise those feelings.
The small spark of hope that Patrick could actually, somehow still be alive had grown and waned over the years.
The anomalies had given him belief.
And now here they were.
“Here we are.”
Wait. What.
Danny stops walking. Looks up, takes proper stock of everything beyond a few feet away.
He and Patrick are on the crest of a small hill. Down the slope in front of them, a pale and sandy shoreline stretches over a mile to what must be a shallow tide shimmering in the distance. There are a few chittering sounds in the distance and above them the sun beams in a cloudless sky.
He takes a chance. “It’s nice,” he says quietly.
“I thought this was Heaven, when I first came here,” Patrick snorts. His expression hardens. “I thought I was dead, and this was Paradise. No eight-year-old’s supposed to think that.”
Danny’s stomach twists. Patrick had been six when he’d disappeared.
“I’d be lying, Danny, if I said I hadn’t thought about this.” Patrick’s voice is low now. Smooth. Rehearsed. “I’ve kept coming back here over the years. This place, this beach, this false paradise. It seems only fair I finally get to bring you back too.”
Danny swallows down a surge of emotion.
“All that time, waiting for you to come and save me until I finally realised you weren’t coming,” Patrick says coldly. He flings his arms out and takes half a step back. “Well, now’s your chance.”
He drops one arm, leaves the other one outright, then points to the sea.
Danny shields his face against the sun. It isn’t just the tide that’s shimmering; from here it almost blends into the sand until the light catches the shards and then the anomaly is impossible to miss.
“Go on.”
Danny glances over at Patrick. He catches Danny’s gaze, then slowly drops his hand to the stolen revolver still attached to his hip.
“Okay,” Danny lies. “Okay.”
He eases himself down the slope and onto the beach. The sand is soft beneath his feet, moving and shifting with his weight. Guilt, fear, whatever’s stopping him from turning around also keeps Danny’s gaze firmly on the anomaly.
He stops a few feet in front of it. He’s shivering, but not from being cold.
Danny takes a deep breath, all too aware of the weight of his brother’s gaze on his back and the sensation of missing Jen. He clenches a tremble in his hand and walks through the anomaly.
o o o o o
The plan itself is very simple. So is Stephen’s rationale.
Becker knows he shouldn’t have expected any differently. He’s known on some subconscious level for some time it was coming. He just hopes that the growing feeling of dread isn’t too obvious. It’s all he can do not to start shaking or shivering.
The worst part is that it’s nothing he hasn’t already done, give or take a few details. Use the racetrack anomaly to reach the future ARC and reconstruct the anomaly database to map the Spaghetti Junction site. Use that information to find and then retrieve Danny Quinn and return to the present.
It’s a solid plan because somehow, without having ever set foot into the future, Nick Cutter had begun making connections between anomalies that wouldn’t be quantified and archived for decades, if not centuries.
“Cutter predicted the anomaly at the house where Danny’s brother went missing,” Stephen explains. “The same way Connor found one at a theme park that hadn’t opened in years. It works.”
The justification is written all over Stephen’s face. He’d survived months in that half-destroyed hellscape, proving it’s not impossible.
Becker’s rebuttal is just as firm. The last time he’d tried anything resembling a rescue mission, Sarah had been killed and Danny and Jenny had discharged themselves from A&E before discharging themselves from the shambolic remains of the anomaly project.
Stephen’s hand touches his upper arm, and Becker flinches backwards before he can tell himself it’s not an attack.
“This is a terrible idea,” Becker says in a voice that doesn’t sound like his own. He tries again, aims for flippant “Probably the worst idea you’ve ever had.”
Stephen's flat expression suggests he misjudged that one which, okay, fair.
Becker fights the urge to wrap his arms around himself, and Stephen’s expression shifts slightly.
“I can do this on my -”
Becker pulls his arm away from Stephen, raises his other hand. “The hell you will. If you think I’m going to let you back out there alone, you’ve got another -”
Stephen kisses him.
Becker’s thought process stops completely.
“Okay,” Stephen says softly. There’s a faint smile on his face. “We’ll do this your way.”
It takes Becker a moment to catch up with himself. “I...”
A loud beep makes them both jump. It’s the lab door. It’s opening.
Becker and Stephen both take half a step backwards as Burton steps inside. As the door closes behind him he takes a long, appreciative look at the sprawling anomaly model, and smiles.
“This is very impressive, Dr Hart.”
Stephen’s shoulder twitches. “It’s not all my work.”
“So James likes to impress upon me.” Burton steps up to a wall and makes a point of examining several of the post-its and copy sheets tacked to it. He shoots Stephen a sidelong glance. “You really shouldn’t downplay your contribution. I daresay you’ve brought anomaly modelling research forward by decades, at least.”
Becker has only had a few direct encounters with Burton before, enough to consign him as Lester’s annoyance rather than a more direct help or hindrance. It’s been all of thirty seconds this time but despite being completely overlooked, not for the first time, Becker really doesn’t like where this is going.
“And it’s in that spirit,” Burton continues, completely unfazed by Stephen’s apparent indifference, “that I’d like to offer my own contribution to the cause.”
He steps back over to the door and holds a key-card to the sensor. It opens again and a young woman steps through. She takes in the anomaly model in one long sweep before glancing dismissively at Becker then turning to Stephen for a longer look, and she smiles.
Becker recognises her face but can’t immediately place her. She has long blonde hair scooped back into a neat bun and thick rimmed glasses. Her clothes and shoes are sensible and sturdy.
Burton reaches out a hand to her, and smiles again at Stephen. “Dr Hart, I’d like you to meet April Leonard. She’s going to assist you in rebuilding the anomaly model.”
o o o o o
Claudia comes to on a barren, stony hill. It’s cold and windy and when she raises a hand to her face it comes away sticky with drying blood. She’s slow from the pain, fuzzy around the edges. Rolls onto her back to see clouds rolling across the sky, an anomaly flashing overhead and a familiar rumble that shakes through the ground.
Seconds later rain pelts down. The shock wakes her up. She climbs to her feet and scrambles for the glass device. She aims it upwards and jabs her thumbs until the anomaly disappears. Then she runs. The rain assaults her all the way to a shallow cave network where she collapses onto the ground, dry heaves until she feels hollow and passes out again.
When she wakes up this time, her cave is lit by hundreds of tiny moving lights on the ceiling. She thinks she’s hallucinating until she manages to stand up and realises they’re creatures. Great big oversized fireflies, cocooned and swaying and pulsing in a beautiful rhythm.
Hopefully they don’t mind squatters.
Claudia finds a corner to huddle in and examines the glass device again. There are no possible anomalies nearby, but she thinks the numbers have changed. A string of code that might be co-ordinates, longitude and latitude and whatever else she’s forgotten from orienteering with Guides and later the anomaly project, and then a set of numbers that looks unmistakeable.
04-12-2015
She waits until sunlight filters into her hiding place, then follows it to find the exit. The landscape is barren, dirt and rocks as far as she can see, and it’s quiet.
Her surroundings are also exposed, but she’s left with little choice but to venture forth. She chooses uphill and climbs as quietly as she can. Eventually she reaches a rocky plateau with a full three-sixty view of the landscape.
It’s as barren as the cave exterior had been. There are hills, and more rocky structures, but no sign of human life.
She tries telling herself she’s in the middle of some isolated mountain range, but there’s only one way to find out for sure.
She hikes for two weeks across unforgiving terrain. The largest creatures she encounters are recognisably cockroaches and beetles. She needs all the extra protein she can get right now.
Each night the glass device updates until it reads 21-12-2015 and tells her another anomaly is nearby.
She finds herself in a thick, abrasive fog with too-loud hissing in the shadows and quickly turns back.
Claudia searches out every anomaly the device tells her about. She nearly drowns in crystal clear freshwater, gets jumped by a velociraptor who makes off with her rucksack instead of her head. She walks along desert lakes, falls down a few more cliff faces and forest slopes, hides from future predators and fights off some oversized slugs who take a liking to the lights on the anomaly device.
She quickly loses track of how long she’s been travelling.
The device throws out all manner of numbers and co-ordinates, but the recognisable ones tell her she’s been to 3488BC, 1087AD, every decade of the 17th century and then through years too large to comprehend.
Not once does she meet another person.
Not once does she find any evidence of human settlement – or human existence.
This had been Helen’s plan, she thinks, while running through a prehistoric jungle. The hominids in her valley had been humanity’s precursors. Helen had killed them all before they could play their part in human history.
Claudia barely has the energy to want to be wrong. The why stopped mattering a long time ago.
She’s not sure whether the absence of humans makes her more or less safe, and the almost comfortable routine of life in the valley feels more and more like a fading dream.
The anomaly device finally stops responding somewhere around 17-06-(-)401020753. She leaves it at the base of a tree and wraps her bad arm inside her jacket as rain starts to fall. Weather like this deters most future predators brave enough to hunt outside whenever they had originated from, so Claudia keeps walking in the direction the device had pointed before the lights had finally dimmed.
The weather quickly deteriorates. Wind whips through the undergrowth and heavy rainfall lets Claudia believe she’s alone, though she knows better. She can barely hear her own breathing over the storm, but she knows something is watching her.
She can’t afford to slow down any more.
Her uninjured arm catches in a tangle of vines. She swears, loudly enough she can hear herself for the first time in months, and attempts to pull herself free. She finally manages it, using Helen Cutter’s knife. She looks around, trying to find a place to shelter until the storm passes.
Instead she finds an anomaly. Her device’s final destination.
Claudia stumbles towards it, one painful, uneven step at a time.
The next thing she’s aware of, it’s daylight, she’s on hard, dry ground and there’s a predator in her face. Claudia whips her knife out and goes for the creature’s throat.
Dimly she realises the creature is making a noise.
“Claudia.”
Slowly a man’s face comes into focus.
“Claudia,” Stephen Hart says again.
And just like that, she’s not alone any more.
o o o o o
Lester taps his phone against his knee. “Isn’t there any way you could hurry this up?” he asks his driver.
The man shrugs at him in the rear-view mirror, and Lester sighs. “Sorry,” he mutters, then leans back in his seat.
Outside the car several men in hi-vis jackets run around, shouting and carrying things. Whatever they’re doing, the sat-nav hadn’t been aware of it when Lester had been picked up from the flat this morning. He still feels a little guilty at leaving a sleeping Jenny behind, but she’d clearly needed the rest – and besides, she was a grown woman eminently capable of looking after herself, with or without the resources Lester had left for her.
He chances a glance behind him, and sure enough the queue of traffic behind them is just as long as the queue ahead. They won’t be going anywhere in a hurry.
Lester looks at his phone again. He’d been expecting a call from Professor Erskine this morning regarding the human remains that had been found in Professor Cutter’s university office, but she’d clearly been waylaid. Lester could only hope it was due to answers, and not more questions. He tucks the phone into his pocket.
There’s more commotion outside, but Lester’s barely able to drown it out before the sound of an explosion echoes down the street. He’s out of the car before he realises what he’s doing. Ahead of him, several construction workers shout and yell and then they run. Two of them push past Lester, and he manages to grab one of them by the arm.
“What was that?” he asks in his most officious tone.
The man stares at him. He’s clearly in shock.
“It had teeth!” the man hisses. He wrenches himself out of Lester’s grip and runs away.
Crowds are beginning to gather, pedestrians and other drivers already jostling for position. Lester fumbles for his phone and calls Jess.
She answers on the third dial. “I’m not getting you out of -”
“Jess,” Lester says quietly, “I need you to check the database and then assemble the team. We may have a... situation, here.”
o o o o o
Danny takes in his surroundings. He’s in a large, oddly shaped rocky valley, maybe a dried out river or lake bed. The sky is cloudy, the air is fairly balmy and he can hear creature noises in the distance.
The only way out that doesn’t involve backtracking through the anomaly is up the sides of the valley – this is still Patrick’s show and Danny’s fear has given way to a very clear sense of obligation. Patrick had brought him here, Danny had let himself be brought here, and whatever this place is Danny knows he has to see it through.
He walks towards the nearest cliff. It towers higher and higher the closer he gets until it’s all he can see. The creature noises get louder as well. Danny tries to scope out the ground around him but there’s nothing even remotely resembling a weapon.
Movement on the cliff wall roots Danny to the spot, and he waits and watches. Whatever they are, they blend almost perfectly into the walls and it’s only when first one, then dozens of pairs of eyes turn to watch him that Danny realises what they are.
The small goblin screeches and flings itself at the Maitland girl. Danny takes out his handgun and fires, again and again and again until the goblin stumbles backwards into the refracting light show.
Danny’s blood runs cold.
Then, in the distance, a child screams.
6
It’s easy to lose track of time travelling through the anomalies. Danny’s muscles have settled into a low continuous ache, and the scavenged roots and water droplets have kept the hunger from twisting into anything worse.
It’s his gut, honed from years of paperwork and interview time restrictions and more than a few rugby matches at the pub, that suggests to Danny that it’s been maybe two days. Two days travelling with his brother wearing a stranger’s face, or perhaps it’s the other way around. However long it has been, Danny hasn’t tried to do anything, either against Patrick or to get away from him. It’s easy to blame his inaction on the guilt he’d had over thirty years to stockpile. Like he owes it to his brother to let whatever this is play out, despite the risk to Danny’s life – his actual life, as well as the one he’d slowly built for himself.
The difference between what he wants to do and what he should do has changed over the years, twisted and separated and merged depending on how much he’d had to drink, how far away from the Torrence Estate he’d dared to move. By how difficult it had been to try to let go, just as a new lead came into the frame.
It would almost be funny, if it was happening to someone else. Over the years, Danny had lost count of the ways he’d imagined the reunion with Patrick could have gone, until a department-referred counsellor had gently suggested he find a way to compartmentalise those feelings.
The small spark of hope that Patrick could actually, somehow still be alive had grown and waned over the years.
The anomalies had given him belief.
And now here they were.
“Here we are.”
Wait. What.
Danny stops walking. Looks up, takes proper stock of everything beyond a few feet away.
He and Patrick are on the crest of a small hill. Down the slope in front of them, a pale and sandy shoreline stretches over a mile to what must be a shallow tide shimmering in the distance. There are a few chittering sounds in the distance and above them the sun beams in a cloudless sky.
He takes a chance. “It’s nice,” he says quietly.
“I thought this was Heaven, when I first came here,” Patrick snorts. His expression hardens. “I thought I was dead, and this was Paradise. No eight-year-old’s supposed to think that.”
Danny’s stomach twists. Patrick had been six when he’d disappeared.
“I’d be lying, Danny, if I said I hadn’t thought about this.” Patrick’s voice is low now. Smooth. Rehearsed. “I’ve kept coming back here over the years. This place, this beach, this false paradise. It seems only fair I finally get to bring you back too.”
Danny swallows down a surge of emotion.
“All that time, waiting for you to come and save me until I finally realised you weren’t coming,” Patrick says coldly. He flings his arms out and takes half a step back. “Well, now’s your chance.”
He drops one arm, leaves the other one outright, then points to the sea.
Danny shields his face against the sun. It isn’t just the tide that’s shimmering; from here it almost blends into the sand until the light catches the shards and then the anomaly is impossible to miss.
“Go on.”
Danny glances over at Patrick. He catches Danny’s gaze, then slowly drops his hand to the stolen revolver still attached to his hip.
“Okay,” Danny lies. “Okay.”
He eases himself down the slope and onto the beach. The sand is soft beneath his feet, moving and shifting with his weight. Guilt, fear, whatever’s stopping him from turning around also keeps Danny’s gaze firmly on the anomaly.
He stops a few feet in front of it. He’s shivering, but not from being cold.
Danny takes a deep breath, all too aware of the weight of his brother’s gaze on his back and the sensation of missing Jen. He clenches a tremble in his hand and walks through the anomaly.
The plan itself is very simple. So is Stephen’s rationale.
Becker knows he shouldn’t have expected any differently. He’s known on some subconscious level for some time it was coming. He just hopes that the growing feeling of dread isn’t too obvious. It’s all he can do not to start shaking or shivering.
The worst part is that it’s nothing he hasn’t already done, give or take a few details. Use the racetrack anomaly to reach the future ARC and reconstruct the anomaly database to map the Spaghetti Junction site. Use that information to find and then retrieve Danny Quinn and return to the present.
It’s a solid plan because somehow, without having ever set foot into the future, Nick Cutter had begun making connections between anomalies that wouldn’t be quantified and archived for decades, if not centuries.
“Cutter predicted the anomaly at the house where Danny’s brother went missing,” Stephen explains. “The same way Connor found one at a theme park that hadn’t opened in years. It works.”
The justification is written all over Stephen’s face. He’d survived months in that half-destroyed hellscape, proving it’s not impossible.
Becker’s rebuttal is just as firm. The last time he’d tried anything resembling a rescue mission, Sarah had been killed and Danny and Jenny had discharged themselves from A&E before discharging themselves from the shambolic remains of the anomaly project.
Stephen’s hand touches his upper arm, and Becker flinches backwards before he can tell himself it’s not an attack.
“This is a terrible idea,” Becker says in a voice that doesn’t sound like his own. He tries again, aims for flippant “Probably the worst idea you’ve ever had.”
Stephen's flat expression suggests he misjudged that one which, okay, fair.
Becker fights the urge to wrap his arms around himself, and Stephen’s expression shifts slightly.
“I can do this on my -”
Becker pulls his arm away from Stephen, raises his other hand. “The hell you will. If you think I’m going to let you back out there alone, you’ve got another -”
Stephen kisses him.
Becker’s thought process stops completely.
“Okay,” Stephen says softly. There’s a faint smile on his face. “We’ll do this your way.”
It takes Becker a moment to catch up with himself. “I...”
A loud beep makes them both jump. It’s the lab door. It’s opening.
Becker and Stephen both take half a step backwards as Burton steps inside. As the door closes behind him he takes a long, appreciative look at the sprawling anomaly model, and smiles.
“This is very impressive, Dr Hart.”
Stephen’s shoulder twitches. “It’s not all my work.”
“So James likes to impress upon me.” Burton steps up to a wall and makes a point of examining several of the post-its and copy sheets tacked to it. He shoots Stephen a sidelong glance. “You really shouldn’t downplay your contribution. I daresay you’ve brought anomaly modelling research forward by decades, at least.”
Becker has only had a few direct encounters with Burton before, enough to consign him as Lester’s annoyance rather than a more direct help or hindrance. It’s been all of thirty seconds this time but despite being completely overlooked, not for the first time, Becker really doesn’t like where this is going.
“And it’s in that spirit,” Burton continues, completely unfazed by Stephen’s apparent indifference, “that I’d like to offer my own contribution to the cause.”
He steps back over to the door and holds a key-card to the sensor. It opens again and a young woman steps through. She takes in the anomaly model in one long sweep before glancing dismissively at Becker then turning to Stephen for a longer look, and she smiles.
Becker recognises her face but can’t immediately place her. She has long blonde hair scooped back into a neat bun and thick rimmed glasses. Her clothes and shoes are sensible and sturdy.
Burton reaches out a hand to her, and smiles again at Stephen. “Dr Hart, I’d like you to meet April Leonard. She’s going to assist you in rebuilding the anomaly model.”
Claudia comes to on a barren, stony hill. It’s cold and windy and when she raises a hand to her face it comes away sticky with drying blood. She’s slow from the pain, fuzzy around the edges. Rolls onto her back to see clouds rolling across the sky, an anomaly flashing overhead and a familiar rumble that shakes through the ground.
Seconds later rain pelts down. The shock wakes her up. She climbs to her feet and scrambles for the glass device. She aims it upwards and jabs her thumbs until the anomaly disappears. Then she runs. The rain assaults her all the way to a shallow cave network where she collapses onto the ground, dry heaves until she feels hollow and passes out again.
When she wakes up this time, her cave is lit by hundreds of tiny moving lights on the ceiling. She thinks she’s hallucinating until she manages to stand up and realises they’re creatures. Great big oversized fireflies, cocooned and swaying and pulsing in a beautiful rhythm.
Hopefully they don’t mind squatters.
Claudia finds a corner to huddle in and examines the glass device again. There are no possible anomalies nearby, but she thinks the numbers have changed. A string of code that might be co-ordinates, longitude and latitude and whatever else she’s forgotten from orienteering with Guides and later the anomaly project, and then a set of numbers that looks unmistakeable.
04-12-2015
She waits until sunlight filters into her hiding place, then follows it to find the exit. The landscape is barren, dirt and rocks as far as she can see, and it’s quiet.
Her surroundings are also exposed, but she’s left with little choice but to venture forth. She chooses uphill and climbs as quietly as she can. Eventually she reaches a rocky plateau with a full three-sixty view of the landscape.
It’s as barren as the cave exterior had been. There are hills, and more rocky structures, but no sign of human life.
She tries telling herself she’s in the middle of some isolated mountain range, but there’s only one way to find out for sure.
She hikes for two weeks across unforgiving terrain. The largest creatures she encounters are recognisably cockroaches and beetles. She needs all the extra protein she can get right now.
Each night the glass device updates until it reads 21-12-2015 and tells her another anomaly is nearby.
She finds herself in a thick, abrasive fog with too-loud hissing in the shadows and quickly turns back.
Claudia searches out every anomaly the device tells her about. She nearly drowns in crystal clear freshwater, gets jumped by a velociraptor who makes off with her rucksack instead of her head. She walks along desert lakes, falls down a few more cliff faces and forest slopes, hides from future predators and fights off some oversized slugs who take a liking to the lights on the anomaly device.
She quickly loses track of how long she’s been travelling.
The device throws out all manner of numbers and co-ordinates, but the recognisable ones tell her she’s been to 3488BC, 1087AD, every decade of the 17th century and then through years too large to comprehend.
Not once does she meet another person.
Not once does she find any evidence of human settlement – or human existence.
This had been Helen’s plan, she thinks, while running through a prehistoric jungle. The hominids in her valley had been humanity’s precursors. Helen had killed them all before they could play their part in human history.
Claudia barely has the energy to want to be wrong. The why stopped mattering a long time ago.
She’s not sure whether the absence of humans makes her more or less safe, and the almost comfortable routine of life in the valley feels more and more like a fading dream.
The anomaly device finally stops responding somewhere around 17-06-(-)401020753. She leaves it at the base of a tree and wraps her bad arm inside her jacket as rain starts to fall. Weather like this deters most future predators brave enough to hunt outside whenever they had originated from, so Claudia keeps walking in the direction the device had pointed before the lights had finally dimmed.
The weather quickly deteriorates. Wind whips through the undergrowth and heavy rainfall lets Claudia believe she’s alone, though she knows better. She can barely hear her own breathing over the storm, but she knows something is watching her.
She can’t afford to slow down any more.
Her uninjured arm catches in a tangle of vines. She swears, loudly enough she can hear herself for the first time in months, and attempts to pull herself free. She finally manages it, using Helen Cutter’s knife. She looks around, trying to find a place to shelter until the storm passes.
Instead she finds an anomaly. Her device’s final destination.
Claudia stumbles towards it, one painful, uneven step at a time.
The next thing she’s aware of, it’s daylight, she’s on hard, dry ground and there’s a predator in her face. Claudia whips her knife out and goes for the creature’s throat.
Dimly she realises the creature is making a noise.
“Claudia.”
Slowly a man’s face comes into focus.
“Claudia,” Stephen Hart says again.
And just like that, she’s not alone any more.
Lester taps his phone against his knee. “Isn’t there any way you could hurry this up?” he asks his driver.
The man shrugs at him in the rear-view mirror, and Lester sighs. “Sorry,” he mutters, then leans back in his seat.
Outside the car several men in hi-vis jackets run around, shouting and carrying things. Whatever they’re doing, the sat-nav hadn’t been aware of it when Lester had been picked up from the flat this morning. He still feels a little guilty at leaving a sleeping Jenny behind, but she’d clearly needed the rest – and besides, she was a grown woman eminently capable of looking after herself, with or without the resources Lester had left for her.
He chances a glance behind him, and sure enough the queue of traffic behind them is just as long as the queue ahead. They won’t be going anywhere in a hurry.
Lester looks at his phone again. He’d been expecting a call from Professor Erskine this morning regarding the human remains that had been found in Professor Cutter’s university office, but she’d clearly been waylaid. Lester could only hope it was due to answers, and not more questions. He tucks the phone into his pocket.
There’s more commotion outside, but Lester’s barely able to drown it out before the sound of an explosion echoes down the street. He’s out of the car before he realises what he’s doing. Ahead of him, several construction workers shout and yell and then they run. Two of them push past Lester, and he manages to grab one of them by the arm.
“What was that?” he asks in his most officious tone.
The man stares at him. He’s clearly in shock.
“It had teeth!” the man hisses. He wrenches himself out of Lester’s grip and runs away.
Crowds are beginning to gather, pedestrians and other drivers already jostling for position. Lester fumbles for his phone and calls Jess.
She answers on the third dial. “I’m not getting you out of -”
“Jess,” Lester says quietly, “I need you to check the database and then assemble the team. We may have a... situation, here.”
Danny takes in his surroundings. He’s in a large, oddly shaped rocky valley, maybe a dried out river or lake bed. The sky is cloudy, the air is fairly balmy and he can hear creature noises in the distance.
The only way out that doesn’t involve backtracking through the anomaly is up the sides of the valley – this is still Patrick’s show and Danny’s fear has given way to a very clear sense of obligation. Patrick had brought him here, Danny had let himself be brought here, and whatever this place is Danny knows he has to see it through.
He walks towards the nearest cliff. It towers higher and higher the closer he gets until it’s all he can see. The creature noises get louder as well. Danny tries to scope out the ground around him but there’s nothing even remotely resembling a weapon.
Movement on the cliff wall roots Danny to the spot, and he waits and watches. Whatever they are, they blend almost perfectly into the walls and it’s only when first one, then dozens of pairs of eyes turn to watch him that Danny realises what they are.
The small goblin screeches and flings itself at the Maitland girl. Danny takes out his handgun and fires, again and again and again until the goblin stumbles backwards into the refracting light show.
Danny’s blood runs cold.
Then, in the distance, a child screams.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2022-11-28 03:44 pm (UTC)The segment with Claudia was great — I could really feel her isolation...
Looking forward to the continuation! :)
no subject
Date: 2022-12-01 10:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-01 05:37 pm (UTC)Crikey!
That's one hell of a cliff-hanger!
Beautifully timey-wimey.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-01 10:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-02 01:56 pm (UTC)Oh crumbs!!! I guess we need to find out what happens next!!
I hope Claudia really will be ok!
Good read :D
no subject
Date: 2023-01-16 11:23 am (UTC)