The Extincts Read online

  SEVEN

  I HADN’T BEEN back to Wormestall all week. When Mum heard about my detention, she grounded me. Miss Thripps must have said something to her about broken homes.

  “I’m not having you running wild,” she told me, knotting one of her legs around the other one, “just because your father’s not here.”

  “I’ve got a job,” I pointed out. “That’s not the same thing as running wild. They’ll be expecting me.” I couldn’t even call, because of Wormestall having no phone. “I can’t just not turn up for a whole week. It’s … it’s unprofessional.”

  “Getting detention’s unprofessional!” snapped Mum, hanging on to the fridge to stop herself falling over. “You should have thought of that earlier!”

  I could only hope that Mrs. Lind hadn’t gotten tired of waiting for me and given my job away to anyone else. Anyone like Prudence.

  * * *

  As I turned up the track to Wormestall, a van shot past me. It had been dawdling behind my bike since I came off the main road, although I’d given it plenty of room to overtake. An ordinary black van—except I was sure I had seen it before, parked on our road. It had been there when I’d left home, a few doors down from my house. The two men inside had both been holding up newspapers, so I hadn’t seen their faces. I didn’t see them now, either, but I wasn’t really looking. I had other things on my mind.

  Halfway up the track, I leaned my bike against the fence and looked for the horse.

  He was over in the far corner of the field: a black mountain of a shire horse, with hooves the size of dinner plates, shaggy socks, and a tangled tail. He must have sensed me staring because, after a minute or two, he took his nose out of the hedge, turned around, and blew a loud raspberry at me.

  I should have known. This was Wormestall, after all.

  All the pictures I’ve ever seen of unicorns have been of prancing, dancing things, with floaty manes and pearly horns. This was different but much more real. I wasn’t imagining it: grass-stained and muddy, covered in bits of bramble leaf and about as long as my arm. Definitely a horn.

  He came right up to the fence and whickered at me. I patted his neck. The skin twitched beneath my hand, but he didn’t seem to mind. I stroked the white blaze running down his nose while he lipped at my T-shirt. It wasn’t until I reached out to touch his horn that he tossed his head and cantered away from me. I tried whistling, but he ignored me, so I got back on my bike and pedaled up to the house.

  The door was open but there wasn’t a note on it this time, so, to be polite, I clanged the bell.

  “Must you make that racket?” said a voice. “Can’t you see the door’s open?”

  It was Lo. As I stepped into the hall, he was coming down the stairs, his arms full of sheets and towels.

  “I’m sorry I’m late. It’s not my fault,” I said, in a rush. “I had detention and Mum grounded me and I’ve seen Mortifer; he came to my school, and … What’s that?”

  I’d stepped in something. Something wet and sticky. There was a trail of it leading to the kitchen door. It looked a lot like—

  “Blood,” said Lo.

  In the kitchen, Dido was sitting on her egg collection. She glared at us and clicked her beak, but in a halfhearted sort of way.

  There were puddles of blood everywhere. In the middle of it all, at the kitchen table, sat Mrs. Lind, pressing a red-stained towel against her arm.

  “Hello, George. I knew you’d come!” Her voice was cheerful, but her face was ghostly pale.

  I stared. “What happened?”

  In answer, she lifted the cloth away from her skin. More blood splashed onto the floor. She covered the wound again, but not before I had seen the jagged tear in her flesh, and the gleam of bone.

  And the teeth marks.

  “What did that?”

  “There’s something new in the duck pond.” Lo was ripping up a sheet.

  “It wasn’t there yesterday,” said Mrs. Lind. “I went to feed the fish, but there weren’t any left.… It must have been very hungry, poor thing. There was a drowning bee. I put my hand in the water to rescue it and … snap!”

  “You—Saint George—put the kettle on,” Lo ordered me. “We want hot water. And this.” Pulling the first aid box down from the dresser, he took out a little bottle full of what looked like sugar crystals.

  I squinted at the spidery writing on the label: Alicorn—Use with care.

  “She needs stitches.” Even I could see that. “She needs to go to the hospital.” I didn’t know how we were going to get her there. With no phone, we couldn’t even call for an ambulance.

  “Hospital? What for?” Lo had pulled down a second box. This one was marked sewing. Inside were all the things you would expect—a rainbow of cotton spools, a pincushion, scissors, thimbles … and needles.

  I stared at him. Was he planning to sew her up like an old pair of pants?

  “You can’t! That’s not how they do it! They have special needles and special thread and … and stuff.”

  And doctors and nurses and people who know what they’re doing.

  “No hospital. No doctors,” said Lo. “They ask too many questions. Now get a move on, before she runs out of blood.”

  I looked at Mrs. Lind. She was the color of skim milk. I gave in and picked up the kettle.

  Lo was choosing a needle.

  “You should sterilize that,” I said. I knew this, from the time Harry decided to pierce her own ear. The germs got in, and she went around dribbling pus for days.

  “Don’t need to,” said Lo. He took the top off the alicorn bottle, sprinkling it over the wound as if he were salting French fries. “No germs stand a chance against this stuff.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Powdered unicorn horn,” said Lo, licking the crystals off his fingers.

  “Oh,” I said. “And you get it from…?”

  “Big Nigel.” Lo nodded. “Although it’s a bit of a struggle. He’s not that keen on having his horn grated.”

  * * *

  I was all right until Lo picked up the needle. It flashed silver between his fingers, then swooped. The room began to swim and blur, pinpricks of light dancing before my eyes. A wave of sickness washed through me.

  “I think…,” I heard myself say. “I think I might have to sit down.…”

  I’m fine with blood. I’m not so good with needles.

  I heard an impatient sound from Lo, then a voice saying urgently, “He’s going to fall. Get a chair.…”

  There was the scrape of wood across flagstones and somebody gave me a shove. My knees folded, and I crumpled backward into the open arms of the rocking chair.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled. “It’s just … needles. I’ll be okay in a minute. Carry on without me.”

  I did feel better after a few minutes of sitting with my eyes closed, breathing in the smell of disinfectant. Better, and embarrassed. I stood up.

  “Er—sorry. I’m fine now. Can I help?”

  Lo was a fast worker. The wound was nearly closed, with a row of impressively neat stitches.

  “You can try not doing that again, for a start. I told you before—this is no place to be squeamish.”

  “Don’t be unkind, Lo.” Mrs. Lind smiled at me. “George isn’t used to us yet—and the way we do things.”

  “He had better get used to it,” said Lo. “And quickly. There’s no point hanging around—you’ll just be in the way,” he told me. “If you want to make yourself useful, you can go and feed the ducks.”

  I was relieved. I used to feed the ducks on the river with my gran when I was a little kid. You just chuck bread at them. Easy.

  “They’ll be hungry. They’ll come running,” said Mrs. Lind. “Just give them a call—Donald and Jemima—then throw the food down for them. They won’t bother you.”

  “Food’s in a bucket by the back door,” said Lo, head bent over his stitching.

  “No problem,” I said cheerfully. “And where are the ducks?”
<
br />   “Where d’you think? Try the duck pond. Through the vegetable patch into the orchard, then turn right, down the hill. You can’t miss it.”

  “The pond? Isn’t that where…?” I looked at Mrs. Lind’s arm. She’d been lucky not to get her whole hand bitten off. What lived in a duck pond and did that to people?

  “It’s all right,” she promised me. “It had flippers and a fin—some sort of ichthyosaur, I think. It won’t leave the water. It’s muddy down there. You can borrow a pair of boots.”

  “Just remember,” said Lo, tweaking a stitch tight. “If you go for a paddle, I’m not sewing your feet back on.”

  * * *

  There were two buckets waiting outside the door. One contained slabs of glistening raw meat, buzzing with flies and reminding me unpleasantly of the inside of Mrs. Lind’s arm. The other was full of crumbled bread crusts. Not rocket science to work out which was meant for the ducks.

  I walked through the vegetable garden and on past the orchard, full of fruit trees and bees and wildflowers in the long grass, then turned right. The borrowed boots were too big. My feet slid around inside them, which made walking uncomfortable, but it didn’t matter because there, ahead of me, was the duck pond.

  “Donald! Jemima!” I called, swinging my bucket.

  They’ll be hungry. They’ll come running.

  Why hadn’t I paid attention to the warning? Probably because—call me stupid—I had been expecting something duck-sized. Something that waddled and quacked.

  “Donald,” I called again. “JemimaAAAAAGH!”

  The “ducks” had burst out from behind a clump of trees. Taller than grown men, they looked like a cross between an ostrich and a velociraptor, with glossy feathers and gigantic, curved beaks specially designed to rip me to pieces and crunch up my bones. They didn’t quack—they honked. And they didn’t waddle—they galumphed on bright yellow feet the size of pizzas.

  Pulling myself together, I hurled the contents of the bucket as far away from me as possible. Honking greedily, Donald and Jemima braked, flapping wings that didn’t look big enough for their massive bodies, and lowered their heads to inspect their breakfast.

  They poked the bread with their beaks, turning it upside down, as if there might be something hiding underneath. Then they flung it about a bit. After that they lost interest in it. Raising their heads, stretching out their long necks, they focused on me.

  My stomach lurched. I had brought the wrong bucket. These birds didn’t eat bread. Not with those beaks. No, Donald and Jemima liked raw meat.

  And the only raw meat on the horizon was me.

  * * *

  I could hear the mutterings at school, in assemblies, in the corridors, in the locker rooms: “Heard about George Drake? Yeah, eaten by a duck…”

  Donald and Jemima had separated, stalking toward me from different directions. They’re hunting you. My heart was thudding. They’re working as a team: you haven’t got a chance.…

  I wasn’t ready to be a duck’s dinner. I looked around me. What choices did I have? The birds were cutting off my line of escape to the farmhouse. I didn’t think I could outrun them, anyway—they had legs like football players. In front of me lay the still waters of the pond, which was actually more of a small lake. I thought of what had happened to Mrs. Lind’s arm and shuddered. Not the pond. I looked at the clump of trees growing by the water’s edge. I was pretty sure Donald and Jemima couldn’t fly: those stumpy wings would never get them off the ground. I, on the other hand, am not bad at climbing.

  The only way was up.

  I made a dash for the nearest tree, grabbed hold of a branch, and swung myself clear off the ground. Just in time. Lighter and faster than Donald, Jemima had put on a burst of speed. As I swung out of reach, she made a lunge and caught my leg in her crushing machine of a beak. Desperately, I tried yanking my foot free. To my surprise, it came. Jemima was left with a green boot sticking out of her beak. I didn’t like to think what would have happened if it had been a tighter fit.

  While Jemima was busy ripping the boot into little shreds of green rubber, Donald arrived at the foot of the tree, stamping his flat pizza feet and doing his best to reach me by snaking out his neck and snapping his big red beak.

  The snaps were barely missing my dangling toes. I needed to climb higher, but it was the wrong sort of tree. The upper branches were too narrow and twiggy; they wouldn’t take my weight. Instead, all I could do was scramble to the far end of one of the lower branches, overhanging the water.

  I was out of Donald’s reach, but I wasn’t feeling at all happy. I remembered Dolphin Park. The dolphins had exploded out of the water, to loop-de-loop and leap through hoops. They were very good at it, even the mighty killer whale. They had jumped easily as high as my branch. I could only hope that ichthyosaurs weren’t that acrobatic. I sat gripping my branch, staring into the depths below me and wondering if that was a dark shape I could see, stirring in the pondweed, or just a shadow.

  Donald got bored of snapping at thin air, and had another idea. He seized one of the lower branches in his beak and began shaking his head from side to side. The whole tree rocked, nearly tipping me into the water. It was then that I heard the first crack.

  No. Please. No.

  Another vigorous head shake from Donald. Another crack.

  No—please no—please no—pleasepleaseplease …

  Suddenly, the smooth surface of the water broke beneath me, and something sleek and silvery rose up out of it, like in the stories of King Arthur’s sword. Except that this looked more like a chain saw than a sword. I had never seen so many teeth in one mouth before. Even the ducks backed off, honking in alarm. Heart slamming against my ribs, I wrapped my legs around my dying branch. Any minute now, there would be a final crack and I would be in the pond with the ichthyosaur.

  I’d never really thought about dying, not properly. Mum was going to be upset. She’d have to do a lot of yoga before she cheered up again. And she’d have to email Dad. Would he come home for my funeral? Would there be enough of me left to have a funeral? Harry would burst into tears. Harry’s always bursting into tears, but it never lasts very long. Frank cried for a day and a half when her hamster died, but that was a hamster. I was just her brother. Would she wish she had been nicer to me? Or would she just want her redundancy money back…?

  CRACK!

  I was in the water.

  * * *

  When Mum told Dad she hoped he would get eaten by a shark, I did some research. He wasn’t going to be winning Dad of the Year Award anytime soon; that didn’t mean he deserved to be fish food. I sent him an email with instructions on How Not to Get Eaten. He emailed me back: “Thanks, buddy. I think you’ve been watching too many Jaws movies! Love, Dad xox.” Which wasn’t very grateful of him, seeing how long I’d spent on the Internet when I was supposed to be doing my math homework.

  It’s much more difficult remembering the Top Tips on How Not to Get Eaten when you’re about to get eaten.

  Don’t panic. When you’ve just fallen into a pond inhabited by a hungry prehistoric monster, this is very helpful advice. Not.

  Don’t splash. This will attract the predator. A bit late for that. I had already made a massive splash, dive-bombing out of the tree.

  Don’t bleed. Predators can smell your blood from miles away. Failed again. I had grazed my hand on a rough branch.

  Punch the predator in the eyes. This thing’s jaw was longer than my arm. I’d never get anywhere near its eyes.

  Shout loudly, to distract the predator and gain the attention of rescuers. My mouth was full of pond water, and my throat seemed to have closed up. I tried shouting. It came out as a sort of bubbly gurgle.

  Get out of the water. Well, DUH! I could have thought of that one for myself, thank you.

  I was out of my depth, tangled in weeds, and my one remaining boot, now full of water, was weighing me down. Gasping with cold, I swam as fast—and unsplashily—as I could to the edge of the pond. The bank
was steep here, and very crumbly. I scrabbled at it, trying to get a grip, but it was like trying to climb a wall of damp sand.

  Treading water, I looked over my shoulder. The surface of the water was as smooth as glass. Where was the ichthyosaur?

  Then something bumped against my leg.

  My mouth and throat dry with fear, I stared down into the depths.

  Where? Where?

  There—beneath me, a sleek, gray shape, weaving through the weeds.

  Ignoring the no-splashing rule, I kicked out savagely. If I was really lucky, I might get it in the eye after all.

  The kick took my boot off. I felt it go. There was a sudden thrashing and boiling of water, and that chain saw jaw broke the surface. Speared between those terrible teeth was my boot.

  My very own Top Tip on How Not to Get Eaten: wear rain boots. They can buy you time.

  Ripples fanned out behind the ichthyosaur as it headed back into the center of the pond with its trophy. I didn’t have very long. It would soon lose interest in a rubber boot.

  I dug my fingers into the earth. Above my head, just out of reach, a tree root poked out. If I could get hold of that, I’d be able to heave myself up.… I stretched up for it, straining until my shoulder ached. Please, please, please … I’ll be good for the rest of my life, really I will. I’ll do my homework.… My fingertips were a hairsbreadth away from the root, but it was no use. I was doomed.

  I glanced back over my shoulder, just in time to see an angry tail slap the water. The water rippled, and this time the arrow was pointing straight at me. It was swimming fast, coming in for the kill. I shut my eyes and started to count. The last time I’d ever play the Million Game—and I’d be lucky if I even got to ten.…

  Then two things happened at once. Something fell into the water with a splash, and somebody said my name.

  “George. Give me your hand. Now.”

  I opened my eyes. Lo was kneeling on the bank, holding out his hand. I raised my arm; he gripped my wrist and pulled. He was stronger than he looked. I slithered up that bank and flopped on the grass like a landed trout.

  I lay on my back, full of relief and pond water, listening to the drumming of my heart. Lo reached into the plastic bucket beside him and chucked a second lump of meat into the pond. I turned my head in time to see the chain saw rise up and snatch it before it hit the water.