Archive of Our Own

This morning it was Cutter who woke up first. It was full light, so once he was up from his bed of bracken, he grabbed his spear and left the overhanging rock shelter for the nearby toilet area. Strictly speaking no one was supposed to leave the shelter on their own, but in the two months they'd been there no one had met any problems whilst going to the toilet. Besides, there were some times that a man needed privacy.

He sat on the narrow branch that hung over the midden drop and attended to business, keeping an eye out for anything that might want to make a meal of him. Once done, he made sure to pour water over his hands. Fadwa was fanatical about hygiene and she'd ask to make sure he had. Cutter could only agree with her. In a world millions of years before any form of plumbing and sewerage system, it would be too easy for them to contract dysentery or worse.

Back at the shelter, Cutter knelt beside the smouldering fire and started to bring it back to life. Once it was putting out enough heat, he scooped water from their wooden pail into one of their cooking bowls. There were river pebbles in the fire getting hot and he picked them out with tongs and put them in the water to bring it to a boil. It was a slow business, but unfortunately, while he and Elvis Harte had come through the anomaly equipped with very basic survival supplies neither of them had a pan to cook with. Luckily Elvis knew of this Native American technique of putting hot rocks in liquid to make it boil. It worked, but it was tedious. Cutter longed for an electric kettle and instant coffee.

The water was beginning to steam so Cutter sprinkled in some pine needles to make tea. This was his contribution. He was paranoid about scurvy and he knew pine needles had some vitamin C content. He insisted that everyone drink at least one cup in the morning. So far, despite a diet low on plant food, no one seemed to be succumbing to that deficiency. Beri-beri was something he was trying not to worry about.

As the tea steamed and steeped beside him, he stared out over the lush river valley that was their home. It was pretty, even if it was a bit of an oasis among the volcanic landscape that surrounded them less than a day's walk away.

'How long before the brew's ready?' Elvis whispered as he crouched beside Cutter.

'Five minutes or so.'

Elvis grunted, rubbed the sleep from his eyes, stood up and then stretched. 'I'll er...' He gestured in the direction of the toilet.

Cutter watched him go. Elvis was grubbier and shaggier than the man Cutter had met in the Black Diamond pub. He was bearded too now, but he still radiated that alert power Cutter had noticed then. And it was his survival skills that were keeping them alive.

There were signs of life behind him in the shallow cave, but Cutter scooped a bowl of tea and ignored them. He sipped the hot liquid and looked out at the landscape. For a few moments he pretended that he was alone, that he wasn't responsible for keeping everyone alive. He wasn't in charge of getting them back through the anomaly to their own time. Time enough before he had to put on his confident, competent mask and pretend that everything was going to be fine. They had this. They could survive for four more months in a world they didn't belong to. Time for that when he'd finished his tea.

++++

The tapejarid pair by the pool were dancing again. They had finished their synchronised flight around the pool and were now standing on the rocks by the little waterfall, with their wings swept back bowing and nodding to each other. Their stylised movements were enhanced by the red crests on the top of their heads. Cutter pulled out his notebook and, with his spear held in the crook of his arm, started to quickly sketch them. He hadn't expected to become an expert in this antique flying reptile when he'd come through the anomaly, but as he was there he might as well make the best of it.

He had the time to indulge in the Cretaceous version of bird watching because Fadwa was fishing and needed guarding. It was a rule that no one went any distance from the rock shelter they were calling home on their own. Everyone except Elvis, of course, but as the SAS captain carried enough fire power to see off most of the cast of Jurassic Park that was an acceptable risk. Cutter was entrusted with Elvis' Glock 19 for extreme emergencies but, with a strictly limited supply of bullets, his spear was the first defence weapon.

Fadwa, a shipping clerk from Tripoli in Libya, turned out to have a wholly unexpected talent for fishing. Elvis and Cutter both had a basic survival kit between them which included fish hooks and twine. Both of them could sit all day by a pool full of fish and get barely a bite. Fadwa only had to show up on the bank and the fish were fighting each other for the privilege of getting caught.

But fishing took concentration and Fadwa needed someone to be on guard duty in case something nasty went for her while she was busy. That duty fell to Cutter this time. Fadwa's daughter, Naziah, was left behind in the cave in the care of the fifth member of their troop, Omar.

This concerned Cutter. He suspected that Omar, a taxi driver from Baghdad, had mental health problems before he was kidnapped by the Hendersons back in the present day. But he had spent at least three weeks sedated by non medical personnel and had no memory of that time. As far as Omar was concerned, he went to a meeting with a social worker in Sunderland one afternoon and woke up in the late Cretaceous. It was enough to test the most resilient of minds and Cutter thought that Omar had spent most of his resilience just getting to Britain. There were some days when it took Omar a long time to remember where he was and how he had got there. There were some times where Cutter had seen a haunted look in Omar's eyes and then the young Syrian would carefully put down any knife he was holding and walk away from it.

So, when Fadwa caught her third fish of the afternoon, Cutter was all for going back to the cave. Fadwa shook her head and cast her hook, baited with a small insect, back into the pool.

'The sun is still high,' she said.

'Yes, but Naziah will be missing you.'

Fadwa turned her head towards him and gave him a searching look. Cutter had learned that she was good at hearing unsaid thoughts as well as fishing.

'Naziah is safe, Mr Nick,' she said. 'Omar will not hurt her.'

'Yes, but...' Nick trailed off, his fears were too unformed to be spoken out loud.

Fadwa turned round fully to face him. 'I have seen men who would hurt children on my way here. Omar is not one of them.'

'But if he's ... unwell?'

'Omar has a good heart. It is not in him to hurt a child no matter how sick he is.'

Cutter tried to put his fears into some kind of coherent sentence and was still trying when Fadwa spoke again.

'You worry much, Mr Nick. Naziah is my daughter. I think she is as safe with Omar as she would be with your or Mr Elvis.'

Fadwa clearly thought that was an end to the discussion because she turned back to the pool and her fishing line.

Cutter gave up and went back to guard duty. Fadwa was right, he did worry much. But then, he thought, there was much to worry about.

++++
Their path back to the shelter was blocked by the ankylosaurus pair they shared the valley with.

They were performing some kind of dance with much synchronised tail swishing. As these tails ended in a large, hard club, Cutter and Fadwa stood well back and let them get on with it. The pair didn't appear to have noticed them and it wasn't worth getting fatally swatted just to get the fish back quicker.

Cutter was wondering if this was some kind of pair bond ritual when, with a lot of trumpeting, the pair got down to mating; vigorous, prolonged mating with much stamping and thrusting.

It wasn't a spectacle Cutter had expected to see and certainly not in the company of a Muslim woman. He shifted uncomfortably.

Fadwa, however, was watching both the ankylosaurs and himself with a look of knowing amusement. She made no comment, however. Cutter was grateful. Light conversation at this time was beyond him.

++++
The sun was dipping towards the horizon by the time Cutter and Fadwa made it back to the rock shelter. The cliff face was completely in shadow making the steep and winding path up to the ledge and shallow cave difficult to find.

A small white face peered down at them as they made their way up. Cutter waved at it when he spotted her. It was Naziah, Fadwa's daughter; eight years old and undisputed ruler of all she surveyed.

'Mr Nick, you're late,' she said as they climbed up the small ladder to the ledge.

'You're right. We're sorry,' Cutter said, holding out his hand to help Fadwa up. 'It was the dinnersaurs, they were in our way.'

'What were they doing?'

'They were ... er ... playing,' Cutter said, suddenly channelling his grandmother.

'Really? What were they playing?'

Cutter's mouth opened, but nothing came out.

'Football,' Elvis supplied, coming round the corner and the other, more dangerous, route to the cave.

Naziah giggled. 'Uncle Elvis,' she chided.

'Fetch the cutting board, Naziah,' Fadwa said. 'We have fish to prepare.'

The woman and girl went to the back of the cave.

'Any luck with the traps?' Cutter asked.

Elvis held up a couple of small, skinned carcasses. 'Rodent kebab time!'

'A feast!'

Cutter wasn't entirely being sarcastic. Between Elvis' survival skills, Fadwa's talent for fishing and Cutter's knowledge of late Cretaceous flora and fauna they were getting by in terms of calories, but only just. Going to bed hungry was as common as going to bed full. Enough food for four adults and a child was rare enough to be celebrated. Even if the seasoning for food was decidedly lacking.

++++

The next morning Cutter decided it was time to add some gathering to the hunting that had been going on. He went to the shelves at the back of the rock shelter and picked up one of the baskets.

The shelves were still a source of amazement to him. If you had asked him before what this little jaunt into the distant past would contain, Cutter would have named danger, hunger and worry as main components. He would not have thought that shelves would be part of the scenery. But there they were. It turned out that Omar could not only drive a taxi, but had fairly extensive carpentry skills.

Once Omar was out of the remnants of his sedated fog, he had noted the lack of sophistication in how Elvis and Cutter were putting together their shelters and taken over anything to do with wood. Once they had found the cliff face and the rock shelter, Omar had moved on from tent making to home furnishings. The shelves were his, using Elvis' serrated field knife, and so were the plates and cups that sat on them.

Cutter had woven the basket he was holding from tree bark shreds. It looked decidedly amateurish compared to Omar's work, but it was light and did the trick. He picked it up and turned towards Omar who was already holding the spear.

'Let's go.'

Cutter led the way down the valley away from the fishing pool towards a stand of conifers. That accounted for nearly all the types of trees in the valley. They were millions of years before the first proper flowering plants and deciduous trees, so conifers and ferns were the main source of vegetation. That really cut down on the variety of plant foods they could safely eat.

'Mr Nick, look!'

Omar was pointing to a clump of Swiss cheese plants that lived in the shade of a boulder. They were in fruit and Cutter found a couple of the long, knobbly fruit that were big enough to pick. They would need to ripen and soften back at the cave, but they were surprisingly tasty and a good source of vitamin C. Cutter worried about scurvy setting in with so little plant sources they could eat safely.

'Nice,' Cutter told Omar and then looked towards the clump of conifers. They looked a little trampled on. 'Looks like the ankylosaurs have been past here this morning.'

'The Dinnersaurs?'

'Dinnersaurs,' Cutter agreed and Omar nodded in recognition. Everyone in the party could pronounce dinosaurs, but Naziah had said 'Dinnersaurs' on first seeing the ankylosaur pair and that was the name that had stuck. Just as Naziah called Omar and Elvis, 'Uncle Omar' and 'Uncle Elvis', but he was 'Mr Nick' and that had stuck. Cutter just hoped he could drop it once they got back to the twenty-first century. He had a suspicion that Elvis was going to spread it around the SAS once he was back.

The copse of conifers was indeed showing signs of coming into contact with an ankylosaur's tail. Two had been felled and one was leaning at an extreme angle.

Omar looked at the felled trees. 'It is good. We can get a lot of bark for food!'

Cutter smiled. Omar was right. The inner bark of the trees was edible, if not exactly gourmet. The problem with harvesting it was that you could normally only take a little from each tree at a time in case you killed the tree. As these trees were already dead, or as good as, they didn't have to worry about it. Cutter pulled out his knife to start work and then stopped.

'Can we store this much bark?'

Omar thought and then nodded. 'Yes. We can dry it. It will last a long time.'

That was good enough for Cutter, he bent down and started stripping the outer bark away, exposing the white inner bark.

It took a couple of hours, but finally Cutter had a basket full of the edible bark. Then it was his turn to stand guard while Omar checked over the trees for usable bits of timber. Omar picked a couple of smaller branches and used the wire saw from Cutter's survival kit to cut them to the right size. He made special care to pick up a thin branch.

'I will make a ... ' he stopped not knowing the word. He held the branch up to his mouth and made a tooting noise.

'A whistle?' Cutter guessed.

'A whistle. For Naziah. So she can call for help if a bad dinnersaur is close.'

'Good idea!' Cutter picked up the basket of bark and juggled it awkwardly for a few seconds while he found a way to hold it and the spear at the same time.

'We must come back here,' Omar said. 'There is much we can use here. We must all come back.'

'I think you're right.'

The two men set off back to the cave. Cutter felt better now that part of the food problem was solved at least for a while.

++++

'Look, Naziah, the Bagaceratops are back!' Cutter pointed to the half dozen small herbivores that were grazing at a wary distance from the ankylosaurs.

They all stopped to look at the little grazers, about the size of Shetland ponies.

'Babies!' Omar pointed as two, even smaller versions of the dinosaurs appeared from behind the largest one.

'I wonder if they went away to have the young?' Cutter quickly pulled out his notebook and make a quick note to that effect.

'When you're ready, Doctor Dolittle?' Elvis was impatient to get on with the job. Omar had suggested trying to pull one of the fallen conifers closer to the cave and that job was going to take a while and take all the combined strength of the men to achieve.

When they got to the fallen conifers it quickly became apparent that there was a clear division of labour involved. Omar and Elvis were taking care of the mechanics of moving a conifer about the size of the ARC's christmas tree, and Fadwa, Naziah and Cutter were taking care of the food gathering side. Cutter had to admit that his experience of tree transportation was strictly limited, but he suspected he would be involved in providing some of the manpower before the day was out.

He bent down and started stripping more bark from the the other tree. Fadwa and Naziah were busy collecting sprouting fern heads from a bed of them a few metres away.

Naziah's giggling made him look up. She was holding out a fern leaf and one of the baby Bagaceratops was tentatively nibbling at it. Cutter took in the scene and smiled. Fadwa was standing a couple of metres behind Naziah and an adult Bagaceratops was standing a similar distance behind the juvenile. Clearly both mothers were supervising this piece of cross-species fraternisation.

Fadwa looked over her shoulder at Cutter, a question in her eyes. He nodded reassuringly. This was safe enough as long as both sides kept an eye on it.

The little dinosaur came to the end of the fern and Naziah turned to get another frond. Suddenly a blur of bright feathers leapt out of the ferns and jumped on the adult Bagaceratops. It was joined by another from the other side. The herbivore let out an almost human screaming as the predators ripped and tore at it with claws and teeth.

Cutter was only aware that he had grabbed Naziah and was running back to the cave when Elvis shouted at him.

Cutter only had one word to spare. 'Raptors!'

++++

In the end Cutter only stopped shivering when Fadwa took Naziah back over to him and let him hug her until he was sure she was safe. It took longer than he would have liked, but eventually he was able to convince himself that none of them were lying wounded on the valley floor and he relaxed his hold on her.

'I'm OK, Mr Nick.'

'I know you are, darling. It's just ... ' Cutter couldn't find the words.

'I know,' Naziah said with all the seriousness of an eight-year-old. 'Bad things happened.'

'Bad things happened,' Cutter agreed. 'And sometimes I remember them too much.'

Naziah nodded as though she understood and moved away to sit with her mother beside the fire.

Elvis came over and handed Cutter a cup of conifer needle tea. 'I wish it was something stronger,' he said as he sat beside him on the bed.

'Same here,' Cutter took a sip of it. 'A month ago a couple of raptors came through an anomaly,' he said to forestall the question. 'They killed a couple of ten-year-old girls before we could stop them.'

'Oh, so that's what happened then.' Elvis smiled at Cutter's questioning look. 'Yes, everything's secret, nobody talks, but everybody knows when there's been a bad shout.'

'That would be it. I haven't been handling it well. I was at Lumley Hill Tower for a break to get away from it.'

Elvis gave a gasp of laughter. 'You're kidding! The universe hates you, mate. I thought it was after me because I wanted to see what it was like on a Creature Feature op. But that's nothing on yours!'

Cutter raised a wry smile.

Elvis went serious again. 'Question is, what do we do about this?'

++++

Cutter wandered through the ARC, looking for the way out, but the corridors twisted and turned in on themselves and he couldn't find the way. He felt panicky and trapped. It was vital that he left the ARC, but he just couldn't. He ran down empty corridors that went nowhere.

He stumbled upon the atrium. This wasn't empty, but it was filled with dead people. The whole team, everyone he worked with, stood there with torn clothing and dreadful wounds. Ryan, Lester, Becker, Abby, Connor, the special forces team, the technicians, all of them.

'Welcome back, Nick,' Lester told him. 'Glad you could make it.'

Lester held out his hand to shake Nick's, but when Nick held out his own he realised that he had wounds too.

'We're all here now.' It was Omar's voice.

Nick turned to see Omar, Fadwa and Naziah standing among the dead. They were torn and mutilated too.

Cutter woke up, breathing heavily with his pulse racing. He sat up, trying to distance himself from sleep. He supposed it was inevitable that he had a nightmare this night. They had diminished as the months passed since they came through into the Cretaceous, but he could expect one at least once a week.

To his right he could hear Omar breathing quickly. Maybe he wasn't on his own having a nightmare about today. He made no move to wake his friend. Perhaps if he didn't wake he wouldn't remember his dream. It was a small mercy, but the best he could do.

Cutter lay back down. Eventually Omar's breathing evened out and Cutter fell asleep.

++++

The next morning at first light Cutter and Elvis went out to see if they could find the raptors. The ankylosaurs were grazing near the fishing pool and Cutter thought that they were too big to be targets for the raptors and would be scaring away more likely prey. The two men went upstream instead towards the trees where the raptors had interrupted their lumberjack expedition.

They went slowly and carefully, with as much time spent checking what was behind them as what was in front. There were no sign of the raptors or the Bagaceratops, not even anything of the one they killed.

They were nearly at the little cairn Cutter had built to mark the anomaly site before there was any sign of the raptors. Then there was a flash of coloured feathers and Elvis took them to behind the shelter of a clump of Swiss cheese plants. Elvis watched through his rifle sights and Cutter used the binoculars that were in his backpack, once again thanking the Hendersons for throwing it through the anomaly before him.

The raptors were by the trunk of a ginkgo tree. One of them, with brighter colours than the other, was carrying a dead Bagaceratops. It dropped it where the other was sitting. The sitting one raised up slightly to eat it and Cutter saw the flash of pale ovals underneath it. Not it, her.

'It's a nest,' Cutter whispered to Elvis. 'They're breeding.'

'So the brightly coloured one's the male?'

'Display feathers. Like in birds.' Despite the danger, Cutter was fascinated. 'No one has ever seen this before. There's been theories from the fossil record, but this is proof!'

'How many eggs?'

'I can only see a couple, but we've found fossil examples of six or more.'

Elvis grunted. 'Can you see any others?'

Cutter scanned the surrounding area. 'Can't see sign of any. This is a breeding pair, they're probably going to be maintaining a territory.'

'So this is all of them?'

'I think so, yes.'

'Good.'

Two shots rang out and the male raptor slumped to the ground. Shocked, Cutter made an instinctive grab at the rifle, but Elvis was expecting it and batted his hands away. He shot twice more and the female raptor lay motionless beside her mate.

'What they hell do you think you're doing?' Cutter yelled.

Elvis got to his feet and shouldered the rifle. 'Keeping us safe. It's my job.'

Cutter jumped to his feet. 'That's not your call to make!'

'Yes it is. I told you I read the procedures for anomaly ops. Safety of ARC personnel and civilians is the military's responsibility.'

Elvis walked towards the nest site and the dead raptors. Cutter followed sputtering in offended palaeontologist. Elvis kicked the two prone raptors to make sure they were dead and then looked Cutter in the eye.

'Look, Professor, I get that you don't want me shooting the wildlife with no reason. But we both know with them in our valley I would be doing this sooner or later. This way I'm doing it before they've had a chance to hurt one of us.'

'But...'

'Or would you prefer Fadwa or Naziah to be hurt, or worse, before I got rid of these bastards?'

Cutter subsided. 'No, of course not. It's just, you should have asked.'

'Sorry, Nick. Not your decision.' Elvis looked down at the carcasses and shrugged. 'It's one of the SAS principles. Wherever possible get your retaliation in first.'

Elvis bent down and rummaged under the female's body. He came up with an egg in his hand. 'Do you think these are edible?'

Cutter struggled for a moment to catch up with the SAS officer. 'Er, yes, probably.'

Elvis handed the egg to Cutter and bent down to pick up more. 'Waste not want not, then.' He smiled up at Cutter. Cutter shook his head and held out his hands to take the eggs as they were handed to him. There was something engaging in the unapologetic way the younger man did his job. He wished he had Elvis' lack of remorse about the necessities of their life here. But then, Cutter had seen the damage messing about in the past could do to the future.

++++

It was, as far as Cutter could judge, the late Cretaceous period. This era was due to end with the Chicxulub impact event, when a very large asteroid or comet slammed into the earth at the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico wiping out seventy five percent of life on earth. It could happen in a thousand years' time. It could happen tomorrow. Cutter had no way of knowing, so he made sure to scan the night skies every couple of days looking for increased meteor activity that might herald an express delivery sky rock the size of the Isle of Wight. There wasn't anything he could do about it, of course, but he found that he wanted to know if he was destined to end up in a very thin layer of iridium at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary.

He worried much. He knew that. But if this worry was pointless, at least it was something he was in charge of, like rubbing an aching joint or a mouth ulcer.

It was only when the ground moved under their feet that he realised he had been worrying in entirely the wrong direction.

The first sign of trouble was a thin thread of smoke rising from one of the two volcanoes visible from their valley. They took turns looking at it through the binoculars.

'Trouble?' Elvis asked as he passed the binoculars to Omar.

Cutter shrugged. 'I don't know. Any eruption is a bad sign. Both of our mountains have different coloured layers of rock at their summits which probably means they're both active. But I'm guessing. I'm not even a geologist let alone a vulcanologist.'

'You're the nearest thing to an expert we've got.'

'Don't bet on it. To be honest, I never used to pay that much attention to the geology lectures. I was much more interested in the fossils themselves. How they got there was a side issue for me.'

'Professor Cutter, you shock me!'

Cutter grinned. 'I didn't start out my student career as a professor. And there's one thing about academia - you specialise. It's entirely possible you watched an episode of Horizon and know more about this than I do.'

'Now you're just saying that to reassure me!'

In the end they went back to hunting, gathering and fishing. They did the things they needed to do to survive until the next day. The smoke rising out of the distant crater remained there most days now, but just a thread. If Cutter smelled the faint odour of rotten eggs in the wind, he hoped it was just his paranoia.

Three days later the ground shook just before dawn. It wasn't a long quake or a severe one. A couple of bowls fell off the shelves and that was it. Cutter felt it through his whole body as he jolted awake. He heard someone moving in the cave. When he found his torch and switched it on, Omar was missing.

'Shit!' Cutter got up and got to the mouth of the cave in time to see Omar disappear down the ladder. 'Omar!'

Omar didn't respond, so Cutter followed him down the steps. Luckily, Omar stopped before going down the steep path in the dim pre-dawn light. He crouched instead against the cliff wall.

'Are you all right?'

Omar looked up, squinting against the torchlight. 'Sorry, Mr Nick. I was asleep. Then the earth moved. I thought I was back there.'

'Back in Syria?'

Omar nodded.

'You've been in an earthquake before?'

'No. Not earth quake. Bombs.'

'God. I'm sorry.'

There wasn't anything Cutter could do or say that would really help Omar. He sat beside him against the rock face and waited with him while Omar dealt with his memories. As the sky got lighter Cutter could see cloud rising from the volcano. It wasn't just a thin thread, but a definite cloud. The volcano was clearly waking up.

++++

Toot! Toot!

Cutter smiled at the sound of Naziah blowing into her whistle with enthusiasm. Omar had made it for her so she could signal for help if needed. Naziah took this responsibility very seriously and had been careful to practise it as much as possible. Elvis, in an inspired move, Cutter felt, had told her that the best time to practise was when they were out on a gathering expedition. As he explained to Cutter and Fadwa, if it annoyed the predators as much as it annoyed the adults, they'd be certain to keep away.

Toot-too-Toot!

They were heading back up the valley to where they had met the raptors, but this time they were in search of ginkgo fruit. Elvis had spotted a tree laden with it a couple of days earlier and that was too good a food source to pass up, even if it was going to be an extremely smelly job to get the seeds out of their casings.

Toot! Toot! Toot!

Cutter was taking point, with the spear in his right hand and a basket in his left. Fadwa and Omar were also carrying baskets and Naziah, of course, was acting as predator repellent. Cutter spotted the bright yellow leaves of the ginkgo tree half way up the side of a small hollow close to the river. As they got closer he could see the ground was littered with leaves and the round peach coloured nuts.

'Let's do this quickly,' Cutter told the others. 'The smell isn't going to improve by lingering around here.'

Toot! Toot! Toot! Toot!

They walked into the hollow with baskets at the ready. Cutter stood on one of the nuts and screwed up his face as the smell of vomit reached his nostrils. This was going to be grim.

'Mr Nick!' Omar was pointing towards a small shape on the ground by the trunk of the tree. It was one of the small scurriers Elvis trapped for them, but this one was unmoving. It was dead. Cutter pushed at the body with the end of his spear. He couldn't see any wound on it. Perhaps it had died of old age.

To-o-o-ot.

Naziah's whistle was faint and weak. He turned round to see her slumped on the ground. Fadwa bent towards her daughter and staggered and went down to her knees. Cutter stood for a second while his brain raced and then he realised what was going on.

'Gas! Omar pick up Naziah and hold her as high as you can!' He mimed holding his hands above his head as he raced towards them.

He reached Fadwa, grabbed her by the arm and pulled her to her feet. She looked dazed and her face was flushed. Beside him, not understanding, but obeying, Omar picked up Naziah's limp body and held her up.

'High ground! We need to get out of this hollow!'

The quickest way was the way they'd come. They retraced their steps as fast as they could manage. By the time they were back on the higher ground Fadwa was operating under her own steam and Naziah was stirring. Omar made to set her down on the ground, but Cutter stopped him.

'Wait! Let me test!'

Cutter pulled out his matchbox and quickly struck one of the precious matches. He held it down at ground level and watched the match burn until it reached his fingers and he dropped it.

'It's OK. It's safe here.'

Fadwa bent over her daughter who was starting to breathe easier. Naziah's face was flushed.

'What was that?' Fadwa said.

'I think it was carbon monoxide,' Cutter said. 'It's heavier than air, so it pools in hollows and low ground. You can't see it or smell it. But it'll kill you. Naziah walked into it over her head, but we were breathing fine until you bent down to help her.'

'But we've been here before and it's been safe.'

Cutter looked round at the smoking mountain. 'The volcano wasn't active before.'

++++

It was a sombre party back at the rock shelter when Elvis returned with the fruits of his trapping expedition.

'What happened?' he asked.

'We found a carbon monoxide sink,' Cutter said. 'Naziah nearly didn't make it.'

'Shit!' Elvis looked carefully at where Naziah was huddled against her mother's side, still clearly shaken. 'Is she OK?'

Fadwa nodded. 'I think so, but if Mr Nick hadn't seen what had happened...' She left the conclusion hanging and pulled her daughter closer only relaxing a little when Naziah squeaked a protest.

'Nice one, Nick.' Elvis looked around again. 'OK, so that's one we walked away from, why the long faces?'

'We don't know if we should stay here or not,' Omar said. 'It used to be safe, but now...'

'If the volcano is becoming active...' Fadwa said.

'We have to balance staying here or moving out,' Cutter said. 'Which could be equally dangerous.'

'And moving away from the anomaly site. Our only sure way home,' Elvis added.

'That's what's weighing on my mind the most,' Cutter said. 'If we can hold out here, we know we can get home in a matter of months.'

'How long to the next solstice?'

'Ninety-eight days,' Cutter said without even having to look at the scratches on the cave wall.

'That's a long time sitting beside a grumbling volcano.'

'We could be a longer time finding another anomaly home.'

'You have the portable anomaly finder, though?'

'Yes, but there's no way of knowing where the anomalies lead. You can end up in a worse time than this or even in the future.'

'You want to stay?' It wasn't really a question.

'If we can, yes,' Cutter said.

'What about everyone else?' Elvis looked round.

'How can we stay here,' Fadwa said, 'if there's invisible gas that can kill us before we know what's happening?'

'Where do we go?' Omar asked. 'We have learned to stay safe here. We can learn to keep away from the gas. We have to watch the little one, but we can do that. I have lived with bombs and rockets, we can live with this.'

'That's easy for you,' Fadwa said. 'You're tall!'

'Cool it!' Elvis said, trying to keep the peace. 'None of us know what the right answer is. Sometimes you just have to pick the best one out of the bad options.'

'Then we have to go!' Fadwa stood up. 'Let's eat.' She picked up the carcasses of the scurriers Elvis had been carrying and moved towards the fire.

Elvis shrugged. 'A bit of food won't do us any harm.' He rubbed his forehead. 'And maybe a night's sleep.'

++++

In the end nobody got a good night's sleep that night except Naziah. The ground didn't move, but there were odd rumbles like distant thunder throughout the night. But this wasn't thunder, these sounds were coming from the ground itself.

At first light a slow stream of animals walked through the valley. The Bagaceratops family were there as well as the ankylosaurs. Cutter saw winged dinosaurs in the sky.

'Look!' he told Elvis.

'What's happening?' Elvis asked. 'A seasonal migration?'

'So many different species? All at the same time?'

The soldier and the scientist looked at each other. They both knew what the answer was.

'Do they know something we don't?'

'This is their world. They've adapted to living with volcanos.'

'So maybe this isn't a good time to be an estate agent around here?'

Cutter snorted. 'Yesterday I was in two minds about what to do for the best. But now?' He gestured to the animals walking away from the volcano. 'I don't think we have a choice.'

'OK,' Elvis said. 'We move on. We try and find a new valley to live in and we try and come back here in three month's time to get our trip home. If it's not under a couple metres of lava by then.'

'Agreed.'

Cutter was resigned more than happy with the decision. He knew it was the right one. Waiting for the volcano to actually erupt was as much a death sentence as not moving at all. They needed to get a long way from it to be safe. He just hoped they weren't cutting themselves off from the only way home.

++++

Cutter still had time for a look back at their little cave shelter as they left the way the animals had gone. He stood for a few moments his mind racing over various possibilities of disaster now that they were leaving it. Behind it the volcano puffed out another jet of smoke and steam and he turned back to the others.

Elvis gave him a quizzical look as he caught up with them.

'I still can't shake the feeling that we're making a mistake.'

Elvis shrugged. 'Maybe we are, but you just have use the information you have available to make the best decision you can and then commit to it.'

'Is that what they teach you at Hereford?'

Another shrug from Elvis. 'Pretty much. I certainly never met a senior sergeant who was fond of dithering, that's for sure.' He glanced back at the volcano. 'Let's get some distance between us and Vesuvius over there.'

Cutter nodded and looked towards the path ahead.

++++

Elvis pushed them hard for the first handful of days, saying that if they needed to get further away from the volcano then that's what they should concentrate on. The last two days were over harsh terrain as they left the comfort and green vegetation of the river valley to climb over a hill of barren ash field and old lava that their feet sank into like sand dunes. They toiled through this landscape for hours with the men taking turns to carry Naziah. Cutter was sure they'd made a terrible mistake until he saw the green fronds of tree ferns appearing over the top of the next hill.

An hour or so later they were descending into another river valley. If Elvis felt relief he didn't show it any more than he had shown concern for the difficult terrain they had been travelling through. He put Naziah down beside the river and filled his water bottle and passed it round.

'This looks better,' Cutter said.

'Not bad,' Elvis said as he bent to refill the water bottle and take a long drink. 'Omar, you stand guard duty here, Nick and I will check it out to see who the sitting tenants are.'

Cutter was hungry and tired, but he straightened himself up, took a firmer hold on his spear and nodded his agreement. He didn't pretend that he could match the SF guys for fitness, but he had learned from them how to push himself beyond what he thought was possible. And besides, if they could prove that this was safe enough then there was the possibility of rest at the end of it.

++++

Luckily it was a fairly short reconnaissance trip. Elvis took the opportunity to set a few traps in likely places, but there didn't seem to be anything more threatening than the flash of bright feathers of primitive birds in the tree ferns. When they came back to where they had left their companions, they discovered that Fadwa was working her magic on the local fish and there were two good sized specimens already on the river bank.

Omar looked up from where he was starting a fire. 'Is good?'

'Good enough,' Elvis said. 'We'll rest up here today and then go further up the valley tomorrow.'

Cutter looked back the way they had come. The volcano itself was no longer visible, but the plume of smoke could still be seen reaching up into the sky. He just hoped that the ridge of the valley would keep them safe from any lava or pyroclastic flows.

++++

They couldn't stay in the valley in the end. The river plain was wide and flat and there were no convenient cliffs with ledges and overhangs to replace the rock shelter they had left behind. This wouldn't have been a problem for them as Elvis had found a raised beach protected on three sides by a wide meander in the river. This was as good a defensible position as they could get under the circumstances. At least if the circumstances hadn't included a herd of a dozen or more hadrosaurs. These herbivores were the dominant group in the valley, grazing up and down the river and taking no nonsense from any predators that might be stupid enough to annoy them.

Cutter didn't know if they were naturally nervous in the way of all grazing animals or if the rumbles and occasional booming sounds coming from the waking volcano were agitating them more than usual. It didn't matter, in the end. The hadrosaurs were given to charging en masse up and down the valley at the slightest provocation.

'Skittish things, aren't they?' Elvis said as they hid in a copse of tree ferns, their belongings grabbed up as they ran before yet another stampede that wiped out any shelter they had constructed by the river.

Cutter grunted, watching the herd disappear in a cloud of dust, stamping and confusion. The tree ferns granted them only psychological protection. The hadrosaurs were big enough that nothing stood in their way when they were at full speed. Trees didn't stop them, water didn't stop them, fire didn't stop them, you just had to get out of their way and hope they missed you.

'We can't stay here,' Fadwa said.

Everyone nodded.

'We stock up with food and water as much as we can and move out tomorrow,' Elvis said. He looked out over the valley to what had been their camp. 'Nice place. Shame about the neighbours.'

++++

It was part of Cutter's daily routine to check the portable anomaly detector every morning and evening to see if any anomalies had opened up near them. Nothing had ever shown up on the screen and it was more a ritual to calm his worries rather than any determined attempt to find another way home. It was typical then that they found another anomaly not by any high-tech means, but by a dinosaur wandering past them.

They were on the ash fields again. Gritty sand and ash crunched under their feet and a wind was blowing enough to fling ash and gravel at them. Omar spotted the shape first.

'Dinnersaur!'

They squinted through the dust to where a low shape was trotting towards them. The creature was about a metre long with a squat face and two fangs protruding down from its upper jaw. It got close enough to see them and moved away giving them a mournful hooting sound as though it blamed them for the bad situation.

'There's an anomaly nearby,' Cutter said, trying to find the anomaly detector in his pack while keeping the dust out of it.

'How do you know?' asked Elvis

'That's a rhynchosaur. We're in the Cretaceous and they belong to the Triassic. That thing is the best part of 200 million years out of time.' Cutter pressed a few buttons on the detector and the screen sprang to life. He pointed in a direction slightly away from where the rhynchosaur had come from. 'It's over there. Maybe a kilometre away.'

'Let's check it out,' Elvis said.

They trudged along until the sparkling shards of the anomaly appeared in the distance. The wind was blowing harder now and blasting gritty dust in their faces. It had been like that for a couple of days with no sign of a friendly river valley to take shelter in.

'Watch out for your rifle,' Cutter said as they got close. 'The magnetic field will pull on it.'

'Shit! You're right! Why didn't I notice that back on the beach?'

'Much weaker anomaly, I think. This one has been going for hours if the rhynchosaur got as far as it did when we met it.'

Elvis nodded and then stepped through the anomaly. Cutter didn't know why he was surprised. Elvis was prone to taking decisive action with minimal consultation. In this case, Cutter only had time to exchange a worried glance with Omar and Fadwa when Elvis was back again.

'It's sunny and green through there. I could hear running water. Nothing tried to eat me. I vote we go through.'

'Is that wise? How will we get home?' Omar spoke all their worries.

Cutter looked round at them. They were nearly out of water. Beneath whatever cloth they had wrapped around their faces was dry skin and chapped lips. They would not survive long as they were. But still, stepping through this anomaly was cutting their last tie to a guaranteed way home. Yet, Helen had made it. She had learned to traverse time. It was possible.

'We can find anomalies,' Cutter held up the detector. 'We can find other places and times. But if we stay here we'll die.'

'I don't think we have a choice,' Fadwa said.

Omar nodded. 'Nauzubillah. Allah protect us!'

Elvis led the way. Cutter watched them disappear through the glittering oval. He spared one look back and then followed them through. He just hoped it was the right decision.

++++

The troop walked over a low hillock to find a wide, shallow river stretching out in front of them.

'Well, that's one problem solved,' Elvis said. 'We have water and with a bit of luck the fish here will like Fadwa as much as the Cretaceous ones did!'

Fadwa smiled. 'Not many trees. Where will we stay?'

'One problem at a time. Best fill the water bottles.'

Fadwa and Elvis walked down to a shingle beach. Cutter looked around trying to find some species that could narrow down what era they were in.

'Cutter!' Something in Elvis' voice put Cutter on alert.

'What's up?'

'Look here.'

Cutter hurried down to the river to see what Elvis and Fadwa were looking at. He gasped when he saw it.

The print of a boot.

'There's been someone here.'

'Not long ago, either,' Elvis said.

Cutter looked around as though expecting the owner of the print to be suddenly standing in front of them.

'Arcteryx,' Elvis said.

Cutter was puzzled. 'No, it's human.'

Elvis snorted in amusement and pointed to a faint logo visible in the sole. 'Arcteryx, the outdoor clothing company. They're not cheap. Someone's come well prepared.'

'Maybe they'll have spares.'

++++

Omar came up to them and looked down at the footprint.

'Who is that?'

Elvis shrugged. 'We don't know.'

'Where is he?'

Elvis looked around. 'It might be possible to track him. I'm not sure.'

'What if he's hurt?'

Cutter caught Elvis' eye. 'That's the million dollar question isn't it? What do we do now we've found signs of other humans?'

'If they are hurt, we must help.' Omar was as definite as Cutter had heard him.

'Or maybe they can help us,' Fadwa suggested.

Cutter weighed the options. 'If they're here we should try and find them.'

Elvis studied the ground. 'OK. Maybe I can track them. But we go carefully. Let's have a look at them before we do anything stupid.'

He put his pack down at the edge of the river bank. 'Cutter and I will try and find our visitor. Omar, you stand guard while Fadwa can see if the fish here will bite. Naziah,' she looked up at his words, 'can whistle if anything goes wrong.'

He picked up his rifle. 'C'mon then.'

++++

Cutter had been around special forces enough to know how not to get in the way when they were tracking anything. He walked behind Elvis and made no attempt at conversation and tried to make as little sound as possible. As he walked as stealthily as he could he wondered if this was overkill in terms of tracking someone who was possibly more lost than they were. That was, he decided, an argument he was going to lose before it even started. The SAS had fixed ideas about caution with strangers and much preferred initial conversations to start with the stranger prone on the floor with their hands tied behind their backs.

He smelled the smoke before he saw it. Elvis froze and brought his fist up to his shoulder. Cutter didn't know many of the army's hand signals but he knew that one meant 'stop'. He stopped.

There was a small copse of conifers ahead on a little rise of ground. A thin column of smoke was rising from the middle of it.

Elvis beckoned Cutter towards him. 'Got the pistol?' he murmured in Cutter's ear.

Cutter nodded.

Elvis pointed to his right. 'You circle round and come in from the right. I'll go in the front door.'

Cutter grinned at the idea of a copse of trees having a door of any kind and nodded his understanding. He set off, trying to imitate the best stalking walk that he had seen the special forces guys and Stephen employ so many times. It came as a bit of surprise to him, then, that once he was at about the right position, Elvis just marched straight up to the copse with no apparent attempt at concealment.

'Hello in the camp,' Elvis called out.

Cutter crept closer.

'Who's there?' a stranger called out.

Of all the things Cutter had been expecting, a reply in a broad Birmingham accent had not been one of them.

++++

The man standing beside the fire was a lanky individual, with coarse brown hair pulled back in a ponytail and a long, but patchy, beard. He was dressed in camouflage gear from head to foot. His small tent was also in a camouflage pattern. A tan, canvas rucksack stood at the door to the tent. A series of camping cooking equipment lay ready next to the fire. Cutter briefly wondered if he had planned this in advance or an anomaly had opened up in an army surplus shop and he'd just grabbed stuff on the way through.

The shotgun he held wasn't army surplus, though. And he looked, to Cutter's semi-trained eye, to be holding it in a professional enough manner.

'Hello. I'm Elvis Harte.'

'Ben Kesterton,' the strange man said in reply. 'Where have you come from?'

'The Cretaceous,' Cutter said moving forward into the camp.

'Funny,' Ben said without smiling. 'Before that.'

'A beach near Sunderland. Bit of a long story.'

'I'm from Cotteridge in Birmingham.'

'You look well-prepared,' Elvis said, looking round at the camouflaged equipment.

Ben nodded. 'Oh yeah. I planned a lot before coming through the portal.' He kept on nodding. 'Yeah. I planned this. Totally.' His face turned suspicious. 'How'd you find me?'

'We found a foot print down by the river,' Elvis said with a nonchalant tone to his voice. 'It was pointed this way, so we walked up see if we could find its owner. In case they needed help.'

'I've got to say, it doesn't look like you do.' Cutter decided to err on the side of flattery.

It worked. Ben's face softened and his stance relaxed. 'Thought you might be after me.'

Elvis shook his head. 'Nah, we're just trying to get home, mate. Finding you was a surprise.'

Ben looked a little superior. 'I see. I'm here because I want to be. Free. Lone wolf, me. Free.' He stared out over the Triassic landscape as though he owned it.

Elvis and Cutter exchanged a glance.

'Well, we're further down the valley for the night if you want some company,' Cutter said.

Ben sniffed. 'Thanks. I might come. I don't know. I like my own company.'

'Offer's there if you want it,' Elvis said.

He and Cutter turned and left.

++++

It was on the tip of Cutter's tongue to ask Elvis if he thought the 'Lone Wolf' was going to come to dinner when there was a call of 'Y'oroight?' and Ben stood outside the little circle they had made around the fire.

Elvis beckoned him closer and made the introductions. Omar made room on the log he was sitting on and Ben sat down.

'You're a bit of an odd group,' he said, 'If you don't mind me saying.'

'Bad men pushed us through the anomaly,' Omar told him. 'Elvis and Mr Nick came through to rescue us.'

'How did you come through?' Fadwa asked from the fire where she was watching the fish cook.

'These portals,' Ben stressed his correct term slightly, 'have been showing up under the railway bridge near me for years. All the kids knew about them. We used to dare each other to go through and come back.'

Elvis looked at Cutter with a silent question in his face. Cutter shrugged. He didn't know why the ARC hadn't picked them up. It was another thing he'd need to sort out when he got back. If he got back.

'So you went through for long time?' Omar asked.

Ben shrugged and looked a little shifty. 'Well, I wanted to. I needed a change.'

'Big change.'

Fadwa declared the fish ready to eat, which stopped any explanation Ben was going to give. Later on, as the light faded, he told his tale. He had been in the French Foreign Legion. He was one of their top soldiers. He implied undercover operations and dark secrets. Powerful people were after him and he'd decided to lay low for a while.

'Then I remembered the portal,' he said. 'It was the obvious place. No one would know to look for me there.'

They all nodded, but Cutter caught an appalled look on Omar's face that anyone would choose to put themselves in this situation. Elvis' face was unreadable and he didn't join in Ben's adventurous stories with ones of his own. Cutter thought he knew why and it wasn't because of the official secrets act.

Eventually the talking stopped and they lay down to sleep. Ben stayed with them rather than risk walking back to his camp in the dark. Cutter noticed that Elvis casually placed himself between Ben and Fadwa and Naziah as they lay down. It would, he thought, be a night of light sleep and many wakings. He hoped it would turn out to be just paranoia on his part.

++++

Cutter chased after Naziah. She was running ahead of him. An anomaly appeared in her path and she ran through it like she didn't even seen it. He tried to call out to her, but he couldn't form the words. He ran through the anomaly after her. The landscape barely changed. Naziah was still there running. Another anomaly appeared and she ran for it again. He tried to stop her, but he couldn't catch up with her and he couldn't shout.

This went on for three or four anomalies, until suddenly Nick found himself on a green hillside surrounded by anomalies. There were shining ovals all around. Naziah was nowhere to be seen.

Then one of the anomalies flickered and a future predator came through with Naziah in its mouth. He shook the child like a terrier shaking a rat and dropped the wounded girl at Nick's feet.

'You're too late, Nick,' the predator told him in Helen's voice. 'Always too late.'

Cutter woke with his mouth dry and his throat sore. He felt he had been shouting, but no one else was stirring so he must not have been in reality. He wished Helen would stop turning up in his dreams, but if there was anyone who would enjoy twisting the knife it would be her. There was the hint of light in the east. At least with the night nearly over he probably wouldn't dream again. Cutter lay back to wait for dawn.

++++

The next morning Cutter did his usual sweep of the area with the anomaly device without thinking about who else was in the camp.

'What's that?' Ben asked and came up close to have a look.

'It checks to see if there's an anomaly around.'

'That's what you call the portals isn't it?'

Cutter nodded.

'So it controls them?' Ben's face betrayed his interest although his voice was casual.

'No such luck,' Cutter said dismissively. 'It'll tell you if there's an open one nearby, but nothing else. It doesn't open them or even tell you what time period they lead to.'

'Still, useful bit of kit.'

'Only if you want to go home,' Cutter said pointedly and put the device away at the very bottom of his pack.

Ben gave a huff of amusement. 'True enough. Good luck with that.'

He went to pick up his guns and then walked to where Elvis was managing the fire.

'I'm off,' he said. 'Thanks for the hospitality, but I've got to get back to my camp.'

'You don't want to stay with us?' Elvis voice was neutral.

'Nah. Lone wolf, me. Been nice meeting you and all, but I'm here to be on my own.'

'Good luck, then.'

Elvis stuck out his hand and Ben shook it. Then the man waved a farewell to the rest of the group and walked off up the valley.

'Different,' Elvis said as he watched him leave.

Fadwa scowled after him. 'That one. He is not a good man. I saw him looking. Always looking. Trying to find a way to get something.'

'Well, he's gone now.'

'Maybe. Maybe not.'

Cutter came over. 'Do you think he was really with the French Foreign Legion?'

Elvis shrugged. 'I doubt it. If you show up to one of the recruitment centres and you pass the physical they'll give you a go, but I doubt he spent more than five weeks with them.'

'What do you mean?'

'Five weeks is the selection period. After that they boot out the rejects.'

'And he was a reject?'

'Yeah. Thinking about it, his camp was way too messy for him to have been a squaddy let alone a Legionnaire.'

'He's not wanted for his work in black ops, then?'

'Shoplifting more like!'

'So what do we do about him?'

'Nothing.'

'Seriously?'

'What do you want me to do? You can't go around shooting people for pretending to be in elite regiments. You'd empty half the pubs in Hereford if you did that!'

Cutter kept his eye out for Ben for the rest of the day, but he saw no signs of him. He noticed that Fadwa kept Naziah closer to her than normal. It was something else to worry about.

++++

Life had settled back into a routine similar to the first few months when they had come through the first anomaly. Fadwa caught fish, Elvis hunted and set traps, Omar carved things, Cutter gathered edible plants and watched the dinosaurs, and Naziah kept them amused. The Triassic was better than the Cretaceous in that there weren't any volcanoes erupting nearby and there was no threat of an express delivery comet, but Cutter refused to let himself get comfortable. They didn't have a guaranteed path back home here and he had to stop himself using the anomaly detector every hour or so to check if a new one had appeared.

The lack of a end point nagged at Cutter. They were surviving, but only just and he didn't know how long that would go on for.

They saw Ben occasionally over the weeks since they met him. He would stop and chat if they met on the trail, but he never sought them out or tried to prolong any conversation. He stuck to his camp and his 'Lone Wolf' persona. Cutter found that he didn't like him now any more than he had when they first met, so that minimal contact suited him fine.

Splashing in the river broke into his musings. Fadwa had caught another fish. Cutter ran down to the bank to help her land it. This was a big one about two feet long with a shiny coat of scales that resembled a mackerel. It was becoming a staple of their diet and Cutter had no idea what it was called. It was possible that it was unknown to science. It was also possible that Cutter couldn't remember it, but then Triassic freshwater fish had not been one of his main areas of expertise. It tasted good when grilled and that was worth all the Latin genus names he knew.

The fish was still flapping around as they were trying to wrangle it into the basket when they heard Naziah's whistle.

Toot! Toot! Toot!

Then again.

Toot! Toot! Toot!

Elvis had tried to teach her the morse code for SOS, but in the end had settled for patterns of three whistles.

Cutter met Fadwa's eyes and then they were both running for the camp. Cutter gripped his spear firmly, adrenaline racing through his body.

'Not again,' he whispered. 'Please not again. Please not again.'

They reached the camp at the same time as Elvis did. He held his rifle up and ready.

Naziah was crouching beside Omar who lay prone on the ground. Cutter raced to check him over. Fadwa scooped Naziah into her arms. Elvis surveyed the scene with his gun still at the ready.

Naziah was speaking in rapid Libyan to her mother as Cutter knelt beside Omar. The man was beginning to stir. There was a wound towards the back of his head.

'Stay still,' Cutter told him. 'I'll get a dressing.'

He ran to his pack and his first aid kit to find the contents strewn about the ground. He grabbed the green bag and rushed back to Omar. He pulled out a dressing pack and started to apply it to the wound.

'What happened?'

'It was that man,' Fadwa said.

'Ben?'

'He came here pointing his gun. He hit Omar with the back of the gun and made Naziah pull out the anomaly device from Mr Nick's pack. He took it and left. That's when Naziah started blowing her whistle.'

Elvis knelt down beside Omar and checked Nick's dressing skills.

'I'm sorry,' Omar said. 'I should have stopped him. I thought he was a friend.'

Elvis put a comforting hand on his shoulder. 'Not your fault.'

'What will we do without the device?'

Elvis met Cutter's eyes and there was anger and determination in them.

'That's easy. We get it back.'

++++

Cutter and Elvis left Omar in the care of Fadwa and Naziah. Elvis was tracking Ben's footprints and Cutter fell in behind as he had done when they had first tracked him. This time when they were out of site of the others Elvis stopped and turned to Cutter.

'You'll need this,' he said and handed Cutter his pistol.

'We aren't going to kill him?'

'Why not?'

'He didn't kill Omar and he didn't hurt Naziah.'

'It was only luck that Omar isn't dead, Ben didn't know what he was doing. And he left Naziah unprotected and at the mercy of any predator that fancied a snack!'

Elvis was very, very calm, but Cutter could see the anger inside him.

'We're not judge, jury and executioners here. Let me try and get the detector back. I don't think he's got much resolve. He'll give it back.'

'And if he doesn't?'

'Then we'll do it your way. But I've seen too much death to add to it if we have another choice.'

Elvis didn't look that convinced, but he nodded.

'All right. But he gets no second chances from me.'

Cutter took the pistol. 'Agreed,' he said.

++++

Cutter stared at the shotgun Ben was pointing at him and scowled. 'Don't be stupid.'

'Stupid? I'm not the one with the shotgun pointed at him!'

'No, you're the one with the rifle pointed at your head.'

Ben kept the gun up, but looked around quickly.

'You won't see him,' Cutter told him. 'You may or may not have been in the Foreign Legion, but Elvis is in the SAS.'

'Easy to say.'

A shot rang out and a rock a metre away from Ben's feet shattered. Ben jumped, but defiantly held his gun up.

'That was your only warning,' Cutter said. 'And I had to do some fast talking to get him to give you that. Frankly, if it was down to Elvis you'd be dead meat now and you wouldn't even have heard it coming. Put the gun down.'

Ben hesitated.

'I'm trying to save your life, you idiot! Put. The. Gun. Down.'

Ben did so. Cutter walked over and took it.

'Where's the anomaly device?'

'It's in my pack.'

Cutter spotted the rucksack and went over to it. The anomaly device was in it under a few evil smelling pieces of underwear. He picked it up and put it in his jacket pocket. He threw the shotgun as far away as he could into the bushes.

'Stay away from us,' he told Ben. 'You've had your last warning.'

He walked away without looking back.

++++

Elvis joined him half-way back to their camp.

'You should have kept his gun.'

'That's as much a death sentence as shooting him direct,' Cutter said.

Elvis' expression told him that this was the point as far as he was concerned.

++++

'I got it back,' Cutter held up the anomaly device as they came into their camp.

Omar and Fadwa came up to see it.

'Did you... ?' Omar let his question trail off.

'He's still alive,' Cutter said and Omar nodded.

'I hope something eats him,' Naziah said.

They all turned round to look at her.

Naziah folded her arms and looked as judgemental as only an eight year old can. 'He's a bad man.'

'Can't argue with that,' Elvis said. 'Now, let's get packed up and on our way. I want some distance between him and us.'

'What if he follows us?' Fadwa asked.

'I'll be waiting for him,' Elvis told her. His tone of voice left Cutter in no doubt that there would be only one outcome if that happened.

++++

The Triassic was a better time to move camp than the Cretaceous, Cutter decided. Instead of finding oases of river valleys among deserts of volcanic ash and rock, they were in lush vegetation with large stands of primitive conifers and tree ferns. Water was still a necessity so they followed the river for a couple of days until they came to large lake. There was a low hill with a few conifers on the top about a hundred metres from the shoreline. Elvis, who had been keeping an eye on how tired Fadwa and Naziah were, declared it a good place to camp for a few days.

They settled in to what was a well practised routine of making camp with the comforting knowledge that they wouldn't have to break it all up again in the morning.

Cutter went down the lake to fetch water and looked back at the campsite from the shore. It was actually quite high up with a good view not only of the lake, but the shoreline as well. It looked defensible. Cutter knew that Elvis had not forgotten the threat that Ben had been to them. Was he still a threat? Cutter didn't know. He worried about whether he had made the right choice in letting him live. Then he gave himself a shake. There was no way he could condemn a man to die like that. Not in cold blood. There was nothing else he could have done. Still, he wished he could find a way to stop it nagging at his mind.

++++

The next morning Omar was on water duty and he came back to the camp with a tale about a monster in the water. That brought them all down to the shore to look. At first there was nothing to see, but then about 40 metres out a long, thin, grey shape showed coming up to the surface.

'It's Nessie!' Cutter shouted, delighted at the sight.

Omar, Fadwa and Naziah looked puzzled, but Elvis slapped Cutter on the back, equally happy.

'What's it really?' Elvis asked.

Cutter squinted at the creature as it appeared and disappeared from view beneath the lake surface.

'It's difficult to say. Looks a bit thin for a plesiosaur. Nothosaurus, maybe.' Cutter shrugged. 'Or something we don't have a fossil for.' He peered at the creature again. 'I wish I had a camera.'

Naziah was standing on tip toe trying to get a better look at the dinnersaur. Omar bent down and put her on his shoulders.

'See, it's diving again,' Cutter told her. 'It's fishing.'

The creature disappeared from view, this time for a while. The adults kept staring out into the lake, but Naziah looked around.

'Look!' she shouted, suddenly. 'Look! Look!' She was bouncing on Omar's shoulders in her excitement, pointing along the shore.

Cutter looked and couldn't see anything.

'What? What do you see?'

'Nomaly!'

Cutter stared again. Was it? There was a faint glitter, far off along the shore. He squinted, trying to see.

'Bloody hell!' Elvis had his rifle up to his shoulder and was using the sight to see into the distance. He brought it down. 'It's an anomaly all right! Well done to Naziah for spotting it!' He reached up and brought her down off Omar's shoulders. 'It's a way off though - about two miles.'

'We have to go for it,' Cutter said. 'Even if it's no use to us, we have to try.'

Elvis nodded. 'Agreed. I'll go ahead. You pack the camp and come after me.'

'Good idea,' Cutter said. 'Let's go!'

++++

They walked along the shoreline as quickly as they could manage. Cutter and Fadwa carried the packs, Omar carried Naziah as a piggy-back. Apart from watching his feet, Cutter was entirely focussed on the glittering oval ahead of them as it grew slowly larger and clearer.

'Please be the way home. Please stay open,' he thought over and over. It was getting to be suspiciously like a prayer.

Omar was praying. Cutter didn't understand Syrian, but he recognised the pleading tone behind the words.

Fadwa was silent. Cutter suspected she was saving her breath for keeping up with the fast pace they were setting.

'Please be the way home. Please stay open.'

They were getting close. Close enough that Cutter could see the anomaly was over the water rather than the shore of the lake.

A few hundred metres ahead of them, Elvis was up to his knees in the water as he waded toward the anomaly and then disappeared through it.

'Please be the way home. Please stay open.'

Another hundred metres and Elvis reappeared. He was beckoning them urgently and yelling something.

'It's home!' Cutter heard. 'It's home!'

That was the first prayer answered. Now for the second. Cutter scanned the anomaly, searching for signs that it was fading.

'Please stay open.'

They were in the water now. Elvis waded back to help Omar carry Naziah and they went through the glittering shards. Fadwa was up to her thighs in the water and struggling. Cutter grabbed hold of her and pulled her along. When they got to the anomaly she hesitated and he pushed her through in his anxiety to get them to safety before the anomaly closed. She dropped the backpack she was carrying and Cutter reflexively turned to pick it up.

Suddenly pain sprang in his right back and he felt rather than heard the gunshot. He fell forward into the water, but struggled half up again in determination to reach the anomaly. A hand pushed him down and held his head under the water while something pulled his pack off his shoulders.

'Bastard!' a voice said in a Birmingham accent.

Ben. Of course.

He was let go, but Cutter was gasping for air and couldn't immediately get to his feet. Then more hands were on him, but these were lifting him up and pulling him forward. As he came through the anomaly he heard a rifle being fired twice in close succession.

The hands holding him up let him collapse to the floor. It was grass, Cutter noted. His mind tried to remember when grass appeared in the fossil record. It might be the Paleocene, but he'd need to check.

'Medic!' a voice yelled.

Cutter recognised it. He looked up and tried to focus.

'Ryan?'

'Welcome back, Nick.'

Cutter looked up. There was Ryan crouching beside him, solid and in charge. Cutter could have kissed him. Elvis was standing beside him, grim-faced, but triumphant. He held Cutter's rucksack in his hand.

'We did it, Nick. We did it!'

Ditzy ran up and started looking at his wound.

'Oh, Cutter,' he said. 'Worst place to get shot, mate. Right in the arse. You're never going to live this down.'

Cutter raised himself up enough to check that Omar, Fadwa and Naziah were being cared for. Then he put his head down on his arms in front of him and let it all be someone else's problem.

++++

Epilogue

Dr William's clinic was not on Harley Street itself, but just off it on Queen Anne Street. The taxi pulled up outside the black door set in a red brick building which sported large window boxes filled with brightly coloured flowers. Cutter eased himself out of the taxi and paid the driver. To the right of the door was a brass sign which said 'Queen Anne Clinic'. It was all very discreet, which was what you would expect from Harley Street. And then the clinic Dr Williams ran provided mental health treatment for the senior civil service and, Cutter understood, the secret services, which added a whole level of discretion on top of that provided by expensive private health care.

Cutter pressed the intercom button and gave his name when prompted by a strangled voice asking something unintelligible. There was a buzz and a click as the door unlocked. He pushed it open and walked into a wide, dark panelled hall. A desk was at the far end near the stairs. He walked up to it and gave his name to the young man sitting behind it.

'Dr Williams will be with you shortly, Professor. Please take a seat.'

The seats looked comfortable enough, but Cutter's right buttock was aching after his taxi journey so he stood beside them rather than sat. The receptionist glanced at him once, but said nothing. Cutter got the impression that things were being noted in his file for future reference, or maybe that was just his paranoia.

His phone buzzed and he took it out. It was a message from Fadwa. Naziah had been painting 'dinnersaurs' in school again. The picture was of a blue and green raptor with a broad smile on its face. Cutter smiled at it. If all Naziah remembered of those months in the Cretaceous were happy raptors then that was a good thing.

He didn't know who had arranged the lives of Fadwa and Omar, but there had been a touch more humanity in them than the normal bureaucracy. Fadwa and Naziah had been settled in a small Libyan community in North London. It was a wrench from Naziah's school friends but it was safer than her explaining what she had done on her holidays.

Omar had been given a job with a high-end cabinet maker near Woking. According to Lester, his new boss had taken one look at the carpentry work he was producing and doubled his salary. Omar had sounded happy on the phone and was enjoying the Surrey countryside.

He had only seen Elvis once, when he had visited Cutter when he was in hospital. Elvis was back to the smart, handsome youth he had first seen in the pub in Seaham Harbour. Now he was off doing something dangerous. It would be nice to work with him on a proper anomaly operation, but it wasn't up to Cutter if it would happen. The SAS was not noticeably sentimental about these things.

A small, white, dark haired woman appeared from down the hall. She walked up to him and held out her hand.

'Professor. I'm Jane Williams. How nice to meet you. Why don't you come through.' Dr Williams had a strong Welsh accent, which Cutter was not expecting.

William's consulting room was set up more like a comfortable living room in a country house than an office in the middle of London.

'Take a seat, please,' she gestured to the three, chintz sofas fighting for space around a dark wood coffee table.

Cutter took one of the cushions and put it under his right buttock as he sat down carefully. While he was performing this manoeuvre Williams retrieved a thin folder from the small desk in the corner of the room.

'How is the wound doing?' she asked as she sat down opposite him.

'Coming along. My doctor says it's healing nicely, but it's still sore especially when I sit for long periods. It's just typical, I suppose, I make it through two dinosaur infested time periods without a scratch and I end up shot in the arse by fake French Foreign Legionnaire!'

Dr William's brown eyes twinkled. 'I think sometimes that the universe has a sense of irony.' She let a little silence develop and then smiled. 'I have to say I was a little surprised that you requested an appointment, Professor. What can I do for you?'

Cutter had been rehearsing this reply all the way in the taxi. 'I've not been handling the stress at work very well. A friend of mine told me I should think about quitting, but I can't do that. I might be inflating how much the ARC needs me, but I need to stay. And to do that, I'm going to need help. So I'm here. Asking for help.'

William's smiled broadened. 'Very sensible. And you've come to the right place.'

The End

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