Shadow Creatures (31 page)

Rhino looked around, cradling his injured hand. One or two people from the market were looking over in their direction, but mostly they were being ignored.

He walked across to where Roxton was writhing on the ground, holding his burnt eyes. He would collect the bits of giant centipede later, see if he could retrieve a chunk of unburned flesh, and
then put the rest of it in the sack and burn it all, but first he had something to do.

‘You never go anywhere unprepared,’ he said to Roxton. ‘Where’s the first-aid kit?’

‘My eyes!’ Roxton moaned. ‘I need help!’

‘First-aid kit?’ Rhino prompted.

‘The man who got spat at by that damned creature,’ Roxton said, seemingly forcing the words out, ‘he has the first-aid kit. It’s a pack on his belt.’

‘Thanks,’ Rhino said. He crossed to the other man, who was lying on the ground and twitching. He did, indeed, have a first-aid kit attached to his belt. Rhino unclipped it and walked
away, opening it up as he went. There had to be a burn ointment in there somewhere.

‘What are you doing?’ Roxton screamed, hearing the footsteps moving away. ‘I’m injured!’

‘Yes,’ Rhino said quietly, ‘but I’ve hurt my hand, and that’s
much
more important. I’ll see you around, Craig.’ He smiled as he walked.
‘Although I’m not entirely sure you’ll be seeing me.’

Despite the long time he’d spent in bed at the Robledo Mountains Technology establishment in Las Cruces, Calum slept for a good few hours aboard Gillian
Livingstone’s jet. The stress of the past few days had pushed him right to the edge, and he needed to recharge his physical and mental batteries. The last thought he had before he slid into
welcome unconsciousness was to wonder whether the aircraft actually
belonged
to Gillian, or whether she’d hired it or borrowed it from some corporation that owed her a favour. However
she’d got it, it was nice: small, with a main cabin that had eight comfortable chairs in it, and a full bathroom in the back.

Getting out of Nemor Incorporated’s clutches was A Good Thing, but An Even Better Thing happened as they were leaving. Dr Kircher came up to Gillian’s limousine, outside the Robledo
Mountains Technology building, with a plastic crate just like the one that Gillian had brought to Calum’s apartment days ago.

‘Oh, more bionic legs,’ Calum said without any noticeable enthusiasm. ‘Just what I want.’

‘These ones aren’t controlled by your brain impulses,’ Kircher said, obviously embarrassed and guilty, ‘but they are the next best thing. There’s a small hand-held
controller that straps round your wrist and sits in the palm of your hand. You can use it to operate the legs – forward and back, up stairs and down, fast or slow.’ He shrugged.
‘There’s obviously a design flaw in the brain-impulse software we tried to use. It’s too vulnerable to interference from other equipment in the vicinity.’ He frowned.
‘Although we never tied down exactly what happened with the ARLENE robot to make it react like that. Anyway – take these as a form of apology. Things went too far – much further
than I should have let them.’

‘Thanks,’ said Calum, genuinely touched. He knew that Kircher had just been a tool, and that Dave Pournell had been the man wielding the tool, but Pournell had already left after
taking a long phone call from, presumably, his bosses during which he had said very little and listened a lot, mostly with a dark expression on his face. Based on the expression on
Gillian
’s face, the phone call had had something to do with her. Calum was surprised, and disturbed, at how far her influence extended.

But at least he managed to walk on to Gillian’s aircraft, rather than being carried, using the new legs. That was a small victory of his own.

When he woke up from his deep, dreamless sleep, Gillian was sitting opposite him, staring at him. She looked . . . tired. Unhappy.

‘How are you feeling?’ she asked.

‘Physically – a bit shaky,’ he said. ‘Mentally – what do you think?’

She nodded softly. ‘You’re wondering how deeply I’m involved with Nemor, or how deeply they’re involved with me.’

He said nothing, just staring at her until she looked away.

‘I’ve done some work for them before,’ she said. ‘I’ve done work for a lot of companies. Nemor have fingers in a great many pies, and they’ve got a lot of
influence in high places. It doesn’t do to cross them.’

‘But you did,’ he pointed out.

‘I had to. I honestly didn’t know that they would go so far as to kidnap you and threaten you. I’d been asked by them to talk to you, see if you could be persuaded to release
the Almasti DNA, but I didn’t know they were going to take their own action.’ She sighed. ‘I’m sorry, Calum. I should have told you. I should have been honest.’

‘Yes,’ he said, but he was remembering how Gillian’s daughter, Natalie, had been put into physical danger in Georgia, and how neither he nor Natalie had told Gillian the full
story. Maybe there was fault on both sides.

‘How did you find out I’d been kidnapped?’ he asked. ‘I sent you emails, but I didn’t get any answer from you. Did you
get
my emails?’

Gillian looked away, out of one of the aircraft windows. ‘I did,’ she said slowly, ‘and I was trying to get hold of someone high up in Nemor Inc., to find out what was going
on. I only decided to take more direct action when Rhino phoned me from Hong Kong and told me exactly what had happened and where you were. He was . . . very persuasive.’ She closed her eyes
for a long moment. ‘He had seen me having a coffee with . . . someone from Nemor Incorporated, and he threatened to tell you, and Natalie. I decided that my relationship with the two of you
is much more important than my business relationships.’

‘Gillian, what’s the story with Nemor Incorporated?’ Calum asked. ‘What do they
really
want?’

‘That,’ she said, ‘is a simple question with a very complicated answer, and I don’t think I can give you that answer right now. They’ve been around for a hundred
years or more. They used to be known as the Paradol Corporation, and before that they were something else with “Paradol” in the title. They have a lot of influence, but nobody really
knows what they want.’

‘How long
have
you been working for them?’

‘
With
them,’ she pointed out. ‘There is a difference.’

‘OK –
with
them.’

She still wouldn’t meet his gaze. ‘Since before your parents died,’ she said softly. ‘Let’s leave it at that.’

Calum closed his eyes. Gillian wasn’t going to tell him anything else – not now, anyway. He would work on her, subtly, over time, and he would get more details. And, after that, he
and Nemor Incorporated would be meeting again – but on
his
terms.

C
alum, Tara, Gecko, Natalie and Rhino were all in Calum’s apartment. Most of them were sitting on his sofa or easy chairs, but Natalie
was over at his nine-screen computer system. She had headphones on. Instead of listening to music she was talking in a low voice into the attached microphone.

‘Were the DNA samples viable?’ Rhino asked, pulling Calum’s attention away from Natalie. Rhino’s hand was bandaged, and he kept rubbing it on the arm of his chair.
‘Could you actually get anything usable?’

‘Well,’ Calum said carefully, ‘yours was pretty crispy, and the one Gecko and Natalie brought back was hammered fairly flat, but between the two of them I think we can put
together a good sample. I still haven’t decided where to send them though. Same with the Almasti DNA. I’ve got to make the right choice, and I’ve got to be very careful that Nemor
Incorporated don’t somehow own or control whatever laboratory I decide on.’ He hunched his shoulders, feeling a chill. ‘I’d assumed they would leave us alone after the
Almasti adventure, but that’s not the case. They’re watching us carefully, and we need to take precautions.’

He glanced sideways to where Natalie was sitting at his computer system. He hadn’t mentioned the involvement of her mother yet. He wasn’t sure he ever would.

‘What
is
she doing?’ Tara asked, following his gaze.

Gecko frowned. ‘I believe she is talking with this United Nations biologist that she first spoke to in Hong Kong – the one who joined in the raid on Xi Lang’s warehouse. His
name is Evan Chan. Apparently he is very impressed with her dedication to endangered wildlife, and she is very impressed with his clean-cut good looks and his ponytail.’

Calum felt a little knot of jealousy coil in his stomach, and tried to quash it. Natalie could talk to whomever she wanted. Obviously she could.

‘Typical,’ Tara sniffed, which pretty much summed up Calum’s real thoughts.

‘You can talk,’ Rhino pointed out reasonably. ‘How many texts have you and this Tom Karavla exchanged today?’

‘I don’t know,’ Tara said primly, but she was blushing. ‘I haven’t been counting.’

Gecko was shifting in his seat, and the expression on his face made him look as if he was feeling the same way that Calum was. Before he could say anything Rhino asked, ‘So what happens to
the giant centipedes now? Not that I wish them well or anything, but I know you have strong feelings about not letting things like these be exposed to the world or abused by anyone like Nemor
Incorporated.’

‘We know the location in Hainan Island,’ Calum pointed out, ‘because it was on Xi Lang’s removable hard drive. Assuming that he’s now either in custody or on the
run, we’re the only people who know the spot, and I want to keep it that way. Hainan Island is covered in tropical rainforest. It’s unlikely that anyone will just stumble across the
centipedes, so they should be OK, living their lives, eating monkeys or whatever it is that they do.’

There was silence for a few moments. Tara broke it by saying, ‘So what next? Are we working our way through a list, or what?’

Calum thought. It was a good question. The website hadn’t come up with anything recently, but there were always the standard legends to investigate – the Loch Ness Monster, the
Sasquatch, the Chupacabra. It was unlikely there was any basis in fact there, but it wouldn’t hurt to take a look.

Although . . .

‘Have any of you ever heard of the mokèlémbembe . . . ?’ he asked.

P
lanning this, the second book in the Lost Worlds series, I knew I wanted it to be quite different to the first book while still following
the same general plan – which sounds like a contradiction in terms, and probably is.

There had to be a ‘cryptid’, of course – a creature that biologists have either not discovered and catalogued yet or think became extinct a long time ago. I’d used a
tribe of Neanderthal-like primitive humans in the first book, so I knew I wanted something as
in
human as possible here. Giant centipedes did the trick for me. I
was
going to use giant
millipedes (I had a large millipede crawl over my hand, once, and it’s a curiously pleasant tickling sensation), but I found out pretty quickly that millipedes are vegetarian while centipedes
are carnivorous. Writing a book about kids trying to find a vegetarian that tickles you when it walks across you struck me as being essentially self-defeating. Where’s the drama? So I went
for centipedes. They wriggle from side to side when they run, which makes them creepier than millipedes, who travel in a straight line. And they can be poisonous.

Millipedes don’t have a thousand legs, by the way, despite their name. They have between 36 and 750 legs. Centipedes, you will not be surprised to learn, don’t have a hundred legs
– they have between 20 and 300, more or less. Yes, that’s right, there are some centipedes that have more legs than some millipedes. Taxonomy (the naming of living creatures) is a funny
thing.

And before anyone decides to write to me pointing out an obvious mistake – yes, I know that arthropods can’t grow as large as the ones in this book. This is because they don’t
have lungs and depend instead on oxygen transfusing through their bodies from holes along their sides, and there is a limit to how fast the oxygen can transfuse that limits their size. They
can’t
evolve
lungs because they have hard exoskeletons, and there’s no way they could inflate and deflate them to get air in and out. I’m imagining, for the sake of art,
that a giant centipede might have evolved a mechanism where the side-to-side wriggling as it runs could act as a crude set of bellows, pumping air in and then pumping it out again. Hey, it’s
my book; I can do what I like.

Why Hong Kong as a background? Well, again, in the first book I had the primitive humans living in a very crude, no-tech cave village in the wilds of Eastern Europe. For contrast, I wanted this
book to feature a much more high-tech, crowded environment. I’ve spent a couple of weeks in Hong Kong in the past, and the place fascinates me. The Star Ferries journey from Kowloon to Hong
Kong Island is possibly my favourite journey in the entire world. I’ve taken certain liberties with geography and names – Tungking Mansions is actually a dirtied-down version of a real
building – Chungking Mansions – and I’ve relocated the Jade Market from a dingy covered square to actually being inside the Mansions.

Why Las Cruces as another background? I’ve spent quite a lot of time in America, over the past thirty years, and New Mexico also fascinates me – partly because of the geography and
partly because of the Mexican influences on the architecture and the food. Especially the food. I do like food. I once flew in to El Paso Airport and drove to Las Cruces, on my way to the White
Sands Missile Range, past desert and mountain ranges and miles and miles of cattle in pens, and had a really good time there. I wanted to recapture the environment in prose. Not that Calum gets to
see much of Las Cruces, but at least
I
know what’s outside his window.

Out of interest, I was intending to set the last few chapters on Hainan Island, where Rhino, Natalie and Gecko would have had to confront a whole
nest
of giant centipedes, but that seemed
like overkill. I could do everything I needed to in Hong Kong – and, ultimately, the book is about the people in it, not the creatures. That’s my theory, anyway.