Helen's Hi-jinks Part II
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Intermission II
In recent days, since Leek had released a future predator into the building and it had destroyed the security personnel before going after Lester, the ARC was undergoing renovations, which is a polite way of saying that it was going a period of being re-built. Therefore, this meant that building materials were lying underfoot, the illumination tended to flicker off and on in unexpected places, and various electricity-conducting materials were sticking from walls in various places. Overall, it made the ARC a more dangerous place to storm at, but at a cost of being more dangerous to its own workers as well.
"Ah! Nick Cutter and the crew!" Once again, Lester beamed with a smile that had very little warmth in it. "I am so glad that you could make it on time!"
"Lester – cut with the joviality crap. We need to talk," next to Lester's falsely cheerful face, Nick's own darkened one was like a cloud next a full moon.
"We most certainly do. Tell me, do any of you know how a car could surface in the – wait for it – Ludlow!"
"Ludlow?"
"Ludlow. That's in Wales."
"I am sorry, James, but unless it was your car – or even it was your car – I don't see how the ARC is involved-" Jenny began, but Lester interrupted her with a howl:
"That is how!" He slammed a newspaper onto a table whose headline read: "A fossilized car found amongst the Silurian fossils! An involutionist guru claims this as proof of his theory!"
"Lester," Nick said in a weary tone, "you... you are absolutely right, you know it? You are absolutely right, you are never wrong, and now you are going to shut up and listen to what we have to say."
"I think that you need to get a better understanding of the whole honesty concept, Cutter," Lester said with a frown. "You are on the right, track, but the approach is completely wrong."
"Yesterday, a time anomaly to the Silurian period has opened dragging Abby's jalopy into it. Abby and Jenny managed to escape, but not before a giant scorpion had ravaged the car. The anomaly closed before they were able to retrieve the wreck. Connor's ex-girlfriend, Caroline, gave them a lift to my place, and in the process told them about her discussion with you. Lester, why didn't you tell us that you had new information about Leek, his operation and his cohorts?"
"Because Leek is dead and gone and so's his operation!" Lester snapped. "Yes, some of his underlings managed to escape, but that's it. Caroline's spring of information was really shallow and pointless-"
"So why didn't you tell us that, Lester? I admit this information would've been much more useful in the past, but this was no reason to withhold on us."
"I think your problem, and the problem of your little friends, Cutter, is that you're complaining about my methods, while pretending to complain about the reasons. Cutter, you kept me in the dark about all of your monster-hunting issues, so why should I share any issues that clearly are not related to monsters?"
"Because Leek was a monster, albeit a human one, and had involved all of us, not just you, in his operation," Cutter spat out. "Do not evaluate everything and everyone by your own scale!"
Lester just shook his head. "We can argue about our different methods all day long and not come to any conclusion," he paused. "Wait a moment – just why did you trust Caroline? She did work with Leek."
"And confessed to you first. However, this is not my point, whether or not we can trust Caroline is not that important. We want to know, how we can trust you."
"Oh, I don't know. I do not remember you trusting me at all. Stephen, in particular, gave me an eye on his last days, you know?"
"You leave Stephen out of this!" Nick turned first white, then red.
Lester, upon seeing his last remark strike a nerve, opened to say something else that would have increased the level of testosterone in this discussion to a sufficiently high point for a brawl to begin. Fortunately, at that moment Claudia decided to join the discussion, or rather – interrupt it.
"Excuse me," she said, timidly, as Lester and Nick stared at each other with menacing stares of men fighting for dominance over each other and the others just staring nervously at them, "but I was told to tell you that the anomaly detector has been fixing, all bugs and viruses purged out of its software, and it is ready to be tested."
"It is? Great! I'll go and check it out!" Connor said quickly, naturally eager to either lighten-up the atmosphere or get away from there.
"Connor, wait. I think that we're ought to all go, especially since we're done bothering Mr. Lester here," Nick spoke up, abruptly changing the discussion.
"We are?" Connor re-asked.
"You are," Lester answered instead. "We already wasted almost half an hour talking about nothing."
Nick's face twitched, as if he wanted to say something to Lester's face, but instead he followed Connor and the others out of Lester's office. Claudia, clearly confused by her lack of current information and the conflicting signals that Nick and others had expressed regarding the discussion with Lester. However, since she had nothing to go on, she complied, leaving Lester with his thoughts.
In addition, the current head of the ARC was rather angry.
As Nick and the others walked from Lester's office to the anomaly monitoring room, the silence abated somewhat, but was still going on strongly. However, as Claudia was about to ask her cousin what was going on before she walked in, Jenny spoke up to Connor instead.
"So, Connor, what is going with the anomaly monitor?"
"That's what we're going to find out," Connor said in a different voice from his usual easy-going one. "Lester said that it's going to be just a routine check for any remaining bugs of Leek..."
"Uh, excuse me, who's Leek?" Claudia gathered her courage to ask this question.
"Leek was a former underling of Lester, who had planned a coup. It didn't work out, and now we all are in the finishing stage of clearing up this mess," Nick replied.
"Oh," from the look on Claudia's face it was obvious that she was somewhat disappointed. "Mr. Lester explained this to me already. I guess what I am meaning to ask-"
"Not now, please!" Jenny interrupted her cousin. "I promise that we will talk about this later, and I'll explain everything. Right now, everybody is a bit sore. Lester can be rather bureaucratic, and Nick doesn't like that, and everybody tends to take sides when the two of them confront each other over this, all right?"
"You will, will you?" Claudia eagerly asked her cousin. "I'd much obliged."
"Yes, well..." Jenny shook her head, obviously still uncomfortable in her physical twin's presence, but unwilling to confront her at this moment, not directly at any rate.
In front of the line (due to the renovations the corridor was fit to really travel only in single file) Nick felt his headache returning. Not that it had left to begin with, the story of Abby and Connor's about Caroline and Lester's discussion.
As for Caroline, Nick did not really know the younger woman, nor did he care to, right now. From what Abby and Connor told him, this woman sounded like a potentially nasty piece of work, not unlike Helen, only with an inferior education, but then again, he never really met her in person to break or confirm this opinion; besides, what he spoken to Lester was truth: he wasn't angry at Caroline, but at him.
Lester... Nick had never shared Stephen's belief that Lester was at fault, and time and fate proved the correctness of this belief, when Leek and Helen proved their own guilt. Still, this recent development reminded Nick that James Lester was a formidable bureaucrat himself and probably, if Helen made the right kind of offer to him, he would have accepted it instead.
Helen... was she behind this recent anomaly? Helen could be vindictive, Nick was sure of that now, and he belatedly began to realize that an open confrontation with her without a full control of the situation could backfire on the attacker badly, especially if the attacker was he, Nick Cutter.
"Are you okay?" Connor's quietly asked question shook Nick out of the contemplative reverie. "'Cause you're looking kind of funny, and well, we're here."
"Well, that was long," Nick replied, trying to go for a light-hearted joke, but failing, as Connor took him to be completely serious.
"Yes, well, with all the clutter in the corridor, it was a very slow walk," the younger man replied.
"Aha," Nick nodded thoughtfully. "Right then – Connor. This is your show. Show us if the monitor works."
"Don't mind if I do," Connor nodded, still business-like, but at his most cheerful since yesterday's Silurian scorpion situation. "Let us see first, how it runs with Lester's background checks and antivirus installations, shall we?" He flipped the switch.
Time froze.
Time froze and burst to pieces – to little, chromatically white, semi-transparent pieces, creating a hole between the ARC and a wide, open plain, dominated by various scrubs and oddly looking trees below, and a big blue sky above.
And from the sky, like a trail of black, came a chattering flock of creatures that Nick remembered with a great pain in heart and an equally great fear in his gut. "Anurognathus!" he cried out shrilly. "Connor, turn it-"
The anomaly exploded in a flash of blindingly white light and a clap of thunder.
Caroline ("Caro" to her stepmother and some acquaintances only) Steele was a woman confused. Her confusion stemmed from the fact that she had no idea of why she was driving to the ARC in the first place.
Well, officially it was to deliver a couple of dogs, trained to track, to either James Lester or Jenny Lewis, whoever of them was in charge of that department.
However, Caroline never considered herself to be self-deluded and she knew that it was really in her best interests to stay away from the ARC as far as possible. Back in the cemetery, Lester may have been making threatening noises, but Caroline knew her reality, and knew that as far as this one goes, James Lester was left from Leek's coup overwhelmed and understaffed, especially in the armed enforcement department. Consequently, if Caroline was to just stay quiet and away from the ARC in particular, Lester was sure to forget her and about her, and she would get on with her life, free from diminutive madmen with a Napoleon complex and giant sabre-toothed cats.
Back then, yesterday Connor Temple inadvertently brought her back in, using a giant scorpion of all things. Caroline assumed that she knew her character, and it was from heroic, but, well, she could not just walk away from that situation. Therefore, she got involved, and now Connor Temple and his cohorts were dragging her back to the ARC and the irate James Lester.
Caroline paused, feeling a smirk worthy of her stepmother appearing on her face. James Lester was mostly bark and little bite. She was going to enjoy-
At that moment, the traffic signal flickered and died completely. So did the others up and down the street, and from the increasing signalling and other noises symbolizing traffic getting out of control, Caroline understood that traffic signals had gone out on other streets as well. And she was close to the ARC too.
Caroline quickly parked her at an appropriate area, unloaded the dogs that she promised Jenny Lewis to deliver today and began to walk to the ARC on foot. Hopefully though, there would not be any giant scorpions this time.
"I am blind – I am blind – I can't see!" Connor shouted.
"Connor, relax – it's just a blackout, no one can see around this place.
There was a pause, and Connor said in a slightly more reasonable tone of voice: "And how is this making it all better?"
"Everybody, try not to move around too much," Nick felt that he needed to take charge at this moment while there was still a possibility of avoiding a complete disaster. "First, is everyone more or less all right? Arms, legs, face – there are no wounds or anything?"
There was a lull of silence in the dark as everyone followed Nick's advice. After a while, Jenny spoke up from her position. "I am guessing that no one is hurt."
"No, mate," Connor spoke up as well. "But the monitor had given up the ghost. Just what had Lester installed into it?"
"Connor," Nick could not help but give-in to a comment, "the monitor had actually created a time anomaly rather than noted an appearance of one." He paused, letting the information sink in, then continued: "I believe that the anomaly opened to the Late Jurassic period."
"And-?" Abby pressed on, sensing that Nick was withholding something.
"And there was a flock of pterosaurs, the anurognathus, which was coming in our direction. Connor, you were the closest, so are you sure that they didn't come through our anomaly?"
There was a pause. "I- I don't remember," Connor said, sounding rather miserable. "Are they, ah, dangerous?"
Nick paused. He and other had faced-off with the anurognathus back when Claudia- no, back when there was not any Leek. "I have reason to believe that they are," he said, not willing to get into the greater discussion of how the diminutive flying menaces had killed at least two people when they came to this time and possibly space, and how the only way to stop was to blow-up a building, even if it was abandoned.
"Anyways, as long as nobody is bleeding or disabled we should be fine," he continued in a more brisk tone of voice, aware that this time they were possibly trapped with bloodthirsty pterosaurs in a dark, or almost dark, building. "Still, we must concentrate on getting out of here."
"Ah, how will everyone get to the door?" Claudia's voice, softer and less secure than Jenny's sounded from Nick's left. "Should the first one there wait for the others or not?"
There was a pause in the darkness, and Abby, at least, became aware of something else, something... organic.
"Connor?" she spoke-up, "professor Cutter? Anyone else? I think one of these pterosaurs is on my head."
"I think I am the closest to you – let me try to chase it off," Connor said somewhat eagerly. "Hey – is this a light switch."
In a fit of dramatic irony, the auxiliary power chose this moment to turn on the light – just in time for Nick and others to see Connor pressing down a fire alarm; in fact, the odds were that Connor himself saw what he was doing, but it was too late: he smashed the glass and pressed on the levers.
The sprinklers came to life. Normally, that would be just an embarrassment and an annoyance, albeit a big one; but the sprinklers came on all over the ARC building, and currently the building was fully of exposed electrical systems, several of which were active, including the ones worked by the auxiliary power. And as it always happens when water and electric currents get in touch with each other, there were massive discharges. The ARC building shook.
The lights began to die once again, but by that time, everyone was aware of where the door was, and raced towards it, eager to get away. They raced into the corridor, only to have the lights die... but, on the other hand, so did the sprinklers, and there was a literal light at the end of the tunnel – a door that opened either to outsider or to a room with some sort of illumination, artificial and natural. As another advantage, there were not any flying pterosaurs, big or small, bloodthirsty or safe, in that vicinity either - not that was particularly easy without the pterosaurs: the corridor and the ceiling shook in the funny ways, and there was an acrid smell of smoke in the building as well.
As Nick and his crew emerged from the outside, another unpleasant sight assaulted their senses: Caroline Steele, in a company of two smallish dogs (not the big one from yesterday) and several men in the standard uniform of the ARC workers. All (except for the dogs) were looking kind of black and smudged. Not unlike the last time, Caroline spoke first:
"What happened? The good folks over here turned on the auxiliary power and things began to fall apart almost immediately after!"
Nick, aware that he and others would be probably blamed for this whole fault and that they looked pathetic as well, opened his mouth to speak, but amazingly, it was Claudia who spoke first.
"Excuse me," she said, trying to sound official, but managing to do only a moderately good job of it, "but can you send me in the direction of a tallish gentleman with curly black hair and a long nose?"
"Ma'am, but there isn't such a person working here," spoke one of the working hands, looking a bit shaken by Claudia's grasp of initiative.
Claudia blinked, but Caroline, who got very still when she heard Claudia speak up, filled in the gap nicely. "The man was rather tall, on the wiry side, had curly black hair, long nose, and – possibly – a small beard and a moustache?"
"Everything except for the beard and the moustache," Claudia nodded.
"His hands were kind of big, even for his height?"
"In part; in fact, it was really amazing, considering that he was kind of big himself."
"No, he's long-limbed – got long-arms and legs, not really big," Caroline shook her head, much more pale than usual. "Altogether, her man of mystery sounds too much like Eugene Flint, and if Eugene Flint is involved, then I am certainly won't."
"I don't understand-" Claudia began, but the younger woman cut her off.
"Phil's a more or less typical mercenary; he was in with Leek only for the money. Eugene, conversely, is into killing people, as Connor here is into dinosaurs and the such. I have no intention of locking horns with Flint, especially if Phil is involved as well."
"Ah-"
"Professor," Caroline turned to Nick now. "Leek might be dead and gone, but his legacy is lively enough to attempt to blow the ARC to kingdom come." She paused. "For myself, I will have no part of this-" She paused again. "Oh right, I forgot. Ms. Lewis, I believe I owe you these two dogs. I'll send you the instructions about their grooming and taking care of them later this evening."
"Um, can you belay that till next day instead?" Jenny said slowly. "I won't be home this evening. Me and my cousin here will have a lot of things to talk about, I'm afraid."
"You can deliver them to our place!" Abby said brightly. "Besides, the three of us probably need some closure regarding the past."
Caroline's eyes narrowed in suspicion. "Won't your flying lizard object?"
"Let's worry about this when the dogs get there, shall we?" Abby said in a still bright tone of voice.
"Fine," Caroline nodded curtly at the other woman. "I'll see you later."
"And I'll see you later too," Jenny turned to Nick, startling the man. "Me and Claudia-" Jenny sighed "-have to have a long talk about my latest job."
"Yeah, and speaking of jobs, I think I am going to have another talk with Lester after all," Nick nodded in reply.
"Ah, speaking of him – what is he doing? What's that with him?" Claudia interrupted the other two.
Nick, Jenny and the others slowly turned around. Like a parody of some old-fashioned Bollywood movie, James Lester was busy riding the Columbian mammoth that been abandoned in this day and age shortly before Leek began his coup against Lester. Fluttering next to the mammoth were the anurognathus pterosaurs, which, instead of turning onto the huge beast were calmly flying around, snapping up bugs that were scared away by the mammoth's passing by; others were feeding on the horse flies and similar insects that had been bothering the mammoth lately whenever the animal was grazing outside. In short, it was the most idyllic picture, completely opposite to the one created by the anurognathus in the world that never had an Oliver Leek.
Lester, the mammoth and the pterosaurs approached the small gathering and stopped, leaving everyone with open mouths. The dogs of Caroline's – a German pinscher and an Airedale terrier, were not too intimidated by the much-bigger animal. Instead, they trotted over to it and began to sniff at its trunk as if they had met Columbian mammoths every day. The mammoth, for its part, was not too intimidated by the dogs either; instead, it began to sniff back at them via its trunk. The pterosaurs, upon seeing that nothing threatened their meal ticket slash ride, started once again to hunt the insects around the mammoth and the dogs. Overall, it was a very idyllic picture...save for James Lester who was giving a basilisk's glare at Nick and others.
"Cutter," he growled, "what had happened?"
"A blast from the past – on so many different levels, apparently," Nick sighed. "Look, I have a free evening – why won't we have a good talk about this then?"
"How about now instead?"
"Oh, why the Hell not?" Caroline's voice was the last that Nick expected to hear. "I know of a quiet sort of a restaurant – why not go there and talk this over?"
There was a pause and everybody looked at her. "What? Obviously, my name will come there once or twice. Might as well be there in person and defend myself against any misconceptions," Caroline shrugged. "Besides, seeing how Connor is in his past-relieving scheme now, it'd be only a matter of time till this place came onto your radar anyways. Shall we go?"
In the silence, you could hear the pterosaurs snap-up the crickets from the grass.
"Is it a nice restaurant?" Claudia said instinctively.
"Unless you're a strict vegetarian," Caroline nodded. "That's not a problem, is it?"
"No," Lester said curtly. "Ms. Steele, lead our way."
Caroline nodded in agreement.
To be continued...