Shadow Creatures (21 page)

Rhino jumped backwards one way, Gecko another. Gecko was agile enough to make sure that his jump took him to the nearby column. He grabbed it, lifted his feet up, swung round the column and
jumped lightly to the ground.

Rhino wasn’t as agile, or as lucky. He jumped badly. One of the claws caught the heel of his boot, and he toppled sideways, hip banging against the top edge of the crate. His momentum
carried him over, into one of the aisles between the crates and cages, and he started to fall towards the ground, head first.

Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion. He could see grit on the floor and footprints in the dust, as well as the seams on the cage where the bars had been welded together. He hoped
desperately, in that long eternity of falling, that whoever had soldered those bars had done a good job.

Without thinking, he reached out and grabbed hold of the bars as he fell. His fingers bent backwards and he thought for a terrible moment that they were going to break, but he twisted his body,
clenched them against the metal and pulled himself closer, allowing himself to pivot so that his legs came past his head and he was falling the right way up.

Something massive and dark hurtled towards him from inside the cage. He released the bars just as a mouth big enough to crush his head, lined with dagger-like teeth and wet with saliva, crashed
into them. A wet fetid wave of hot air crashed against his face. Inches away from his face a huge yellow eye glared at him, full of hatred.

His legs connected with the ground, absorbing the impact of the fall. He sprang backwards just before a paw the size of his head raked its claws downward, slicing the air inches away from
him.

He ended up sitting on the ground and staring at the cage. He still didn’t know what was inside; he just knew it was incredibly dangerous. Even with the night-vision goggles – which,
thank heavens, still worked despite the fall – all he could see was a black shape that was curling itself up again, somehow knowing that its prey was out of reach.

Gecko appeared round a corner. He looked like some kind of strange insect-human hybrid with the goggles over his eyes. He reached out a hand and pulled Rhino to his feet.

‘What was
that
?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know and I don’t
want
to know,’ Rhino replied. ‘But I can’t imagine who would want it as a pet!’

‘It might be a tiger,’ Gecko said, gazing at the cage in awe. ‘In Chinese medicine, powdered tiger bones are highly prized for their supposed medicinal properties. Chinese
healers make something called “tiger wine” out of them.’

‘Great,’ Rhino said breathlessly. ‘I’d hate to have to be the guy who does the powdering.’

Gecko’s mouth was set into an unpleasant line. ‘I’m sure there are plenty of ways to kill a tiger in a cage,’ he said bleakly. ‘Anything from a rifle to a long
stick with a knife on the end. They are magnificent creatures. They deserve better than that.’

Rhino clapped him on the shoulder. ‘It’s an unfortunate situation,’ he said, ‘but we can’t let it distract us. We have a job to do.’

‘It’s a good thing Natalie isn’t here,’ Gecko murmured. ‘She’s taking this whole thing surprisingly hard.’ He led the way back to the corner where the
aisles crossed. Rhino glanced around, trying to orientate himself, based on what he remembered from earlier on. If the main door was over
there
, and the skylight they had entered through was
up
there
, then the place where Gecko had discovered the moulted centipede skin was over . . .

‘There,’ said Gecko, pointing. ‘That’s where the coypu was.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I am sure. Now all we have to do is find the crate with the centipede in, get a sample of its DNA and get out unobserved. How hard can it be?’

A sudden loud crash echoed through the warehouse. It was followed by two more crashes from different directions.

‘You had to ask, didn’t you?’

‘What was
that
?’

‘That was the sound of doors being smashed in,’ Rhino answered grimly. He’d heard that noise before. He’d caused it more than a few times.

Lights flared as the overhead illumination suddenly came on. Rhino and Gecko pulled the night-vision goggles from their eyes before they were blinded. A heavily amplified voice announced
something harsh in Mandarin. Rhino translated it roughly as ‘This is the police! Stay where you are! Do not move or run!’

The noise level in the warehouse suddenly rose as the various creatures protested in whatever way they could at the sudden intrusion. Growls, barks, snarls and screeches filled the air. There
was also panicked shouting in Mandarin from Xi Lang’s various employees who had been taken by surprise.

‘It’s a raid!’ Rhino told Gecko grimly. ‘What are the chances that the police would choose to raid this place just as we get here?’

‘That depends on how they knew about it,’ Gecko answered, thinking of Natalie. There was a strange tone in his voice.

Rhino sprinted down the aisle to the place that Gecko had indicated earlier. He saw the coypu straight away: it was pressed against the far side of its cage, shivering. Looking at it now, head
on, Rhino could see that it was very different from a rat – its legs were longer, and its head was squarer.

‘You check that way,’ he said to Gecko, pointing right, ‘and I’ll look this way.’

Separately the two of them went from crate to crate, cage to cage, trying to work out what shadowy creature was in each one. The animals were on edge and wary now, bothered by the sudden
activity, and most of them were easy to see. Within the space of thirty seconds Rhino spotted hyenas, crocodiles, a brown bear and a tangle of pythons as thick as his arm.

He passed a crate where the wooden slats were closer together, and moved in for a better look. A big, black eye was looking back at him, at the same level as his own eyes. The creature inside
screeched at him; the eye blurring as the creature whipped its head forward, and something hard hit the wood by Rhino’s face. A beak, maybe? Was it an ostrich? He wasn’t sure, but he
knew that it wasn’t a centipede, so he moved on.

The air was suddenly filled with noise as another harshly amplified announcement came over the tannoy – in English this time, and spoken by a different voice – American. ‘This
raid is being carried out by the Hong Kong Police on behalf of the United Nations Office on Exotic Animal Trafficking,’ the voice said. ‘My name is Evan Chan. Please stay exactly where
you are. If your paperwork is in order and you are
not
dealing in the illegal sale of protected species, then you have nothing to fear.’ The announcement was repeated in Mandarin by
the same voice that had spoken earlier.

There was a pause, filled only by the sounds of the various animals in the warehouse protesting, and then Rhino heard gunfire. Semi-automatic weapons, he thought. Probably Israeli Uzis or Ingram
MAC-10s, judging by the sound. He’d been on both ends of those weapons before in Special Forces. Nasty little things.

Single shots responded to the gunfire – probably Heckler & Koch pistols. That would be the police.

Xi Lang’s people were fighting back. Presumably the announcement had not reassured them.

‘Over here!’ Gecko called, not bothering to be quiet now that the warehouse was filled with noise. His voice sounded strange. If Rhino hadn’t known better, he would have said
that Gecko was frightened, but he’d never known anything to scare the plucky Brazilian boy before.

Rhino moved to join him, passing the coypu again. Gecko was crouching beside a crate and shining a small flashlight inside. He turned his head towards Rhino, and his eyes were wide. ‘I
think,’ he said, ‘I may have found them.’

‘
Them?
’ Rhino echoed. Over to one side, another speckle of gunfire punctuated the warehouse air, along with more shouting in Chinese.

‘Oh yes,’ Gecko said softly. ‘I mean, who would want just
one
of these things?’

Rhino knelt beside the boy and glanced through the wooden slats of the crate.

And saw something straight out of hell.

At first sight it was a tangle of vivid red cable, wet and glistening. It was about as thick as a loaf of bread and as long as a car. It was writhing, apparently unknotting itself from the
tangle that it had got into. As the smell hit him – something unpleasantly vinegary – he realized three things: firstly, that the thing he’d thought was a cable was actually
flattened rather than rounded, and made of numerous segments that were wider in the middle than at the places where they were joined; secondly, that a row of bright red legs ran along each
‘edge’, one leg to each segment and each leg terminating in a claw that looked as if it could cut through metal; and thirdly, that there were two of the things, wound around each other.
They separated as he watched. One of them reared up towards the top of the crate, exploring it with long twitching feelers that emerged from its head. Now that he had a better look at it, Rhino saw
that there were blue rings marring the vivid crimson of the creature’s hard exoskeleton. The other one, also ringed with blue, wove its way across the crate’s floor, moving like a
snake, from side to side, right towards where Rhino and Gecko were crouched. Its head was blunt, with two feelers emerging from the top that twitched as if with a life of their own, and a pair of
pincer-like jaws on the bottom. In between was a symmetrical scattering of hard black spots that Rhino assumed were primitive eyes. They glittered in the light, and there was something about that
glitter that almost suggested a malign intelligence.

Rhino shook himself. This thing was a monster, but there was no need to get carried away. It was just a centipede – big, yes, but not housing some bizarre intelligence.

‘I tell you what,’ Gecko muttered. ‘You hold it and I’ll take the DNA sample.’

‘Can we toss a coin?’ Rhino whispered back.

The creature’s feelers waved at them – first at Rhino and then at Gecko. It could see them, and it knew that they were interesting. Perhaps even edible. A sudden explosion from the
direction of the front of the warehouse didn’t faze it at all. Maybe centipedes were deaf.

Which reminded him . . .

‘You did say that centipedes are carnivorous, didn’t you?’ Rhino asked.

‘And poisonous,’ Gecko reminded him.

‘Great.’ He reached into a pocket of his lightweight anorak and pulled out the DNA sampler – a metal probe with a handle at one end and a rounded section at the other. Pulling
a trigger on the handle opened up the rounded part to reveal a small, sharp-edged circle. The idea was to push that into the skin of whatever creature you wanted to sample, cut out a very small
plug of flesh, and then close the end to protect the sample.

That was fine if you were dealing with an animal that had soft skin – like a giant rat. It wasn’t so useful if the creature had a hard exoskeleton, like a centipede.

‘It’s possible that we didn’t think this through properly,’ Gecko pointed out.

‘You think?’ Rhino rejoined.

A sudden burst of semi-automatic fire sounded close by. Several single shots from an automatic pistol followed it.

‘That’s too close,’ Gecko hissed.

Rhino glanced from the centipede to where the gunfire had come from, and back again. They didn’t have enough time to work out what to do.

‘I’m going to try to pull off one of those legs,’ he announced. ‘It’s not like it’ll miss one. Let me know if you hear anyone coming.’

The centipede’s head was still weaving hypnotically back and forth in front of him, its feelers caressing the wooden slats. He glanced down to where a couple of the legs were waving
through the gaps in the wood. The claws on the ends of the legs snapped open and shut with little
snick, snick, snick
noises. He should, he thought, just be able to grab one and twist it
off. It probably couldn’t even feel pain. Did any insect feel pain?

Somewhere off in the distance Rhino could hear a crackling, like flames. He glanced in that direction. A red glow was reflecting from the roof. Something was on fire.

Not much time. He turned back to the centipede and braced himself, feeling vaguely sick.

Before he could close his fingers on one of the legs, Gecko grabbed his shoulder.

‘People coming!’ he hissed.

Rhino retreated to the other side of the aisle, pulling Gecko with him. Most of the cages and crates were separated by narrow alleys, and the two of them sheltered in one that was just wide
enough to take them. The cage on one side held a trio of red pandas – small, furry creatures with black circles round their eyes who cowered in a corner, hugging each other. On the other
side, the cage was lined with glass and was half filled with an object that looked like a small mountain and which Rhino thought might be an anthill, although he couldn’t see any ants.

Moments after they got out of the aisle, two men raced down from the direction of the front of the warehouse. Behind them was Tsai Chen. The men were holding guns, while the Chinese woman
grasped a removable computer hard drive to her chest. It took Rhino less than a second to work out what was going on – the explosion he had heard a few moments before was probably Tsai Chen
trashing Xi Lang’s computer files and written records – probably with a thermite grenade chucked into the office – and now she was running off with the only back-up copies.
Without records, all the police and the UN would have was a warehouse full of animals. No names, nobody to track down. Xi Lang, Tsai Chen and everyone else who didn’t get caught would just
relocate somewhere else and start again.

A voice shouted ‘Stop!’ in Mandarin, then again in English. Tsai Chen didn’t even blink. She just kept running, but the two men with her stopped and turned round. They raised
their guns.

A shot rang out from the direction the voice had come from. One of the men fell back, blood blossoming from his shoulder like an exotic flower. His fingers tightened on the trigger of his own
gun, which fired a stream of bullets uselessly into the air. Some of them hit the crates near Tsai Chen. She dropped the hard drive, glanced at it for a moment, glanced back to where the police
were running down the aisle, then ran off, leaving it behind. Stray bullets caught the top corner of the centipedes’ crate, smashing it to wooden splinters.