Content warnings: violence, gore, blood, injury, near-death, animal death,
Media: Primeval Series 4 Prequel Webisode 1*
Word count: 2,118
Sarah screamed for Becker as the hideous creature shattered the windscreen and swiped at her with clawed forelegs, snarling and clicking and chittering. She knew in the back of her mind that her voice and the noise of the shaking car were attracting more creatures, but it hardly mattered.
She wished she hadn't let her own fear get the better of her and trap her in this rusty old car.
She wished she hadn't come along on this mission.
She wished she hadn't let Danny talk her into staying behind.
She managed to climb over the backseats into the boot- her jacket still tied around her waist by the sleeves- but it would only protect her for so long. Desperately, she pawed at the bottom edges of the boot door, hoping to find a release mechanism she could activate. The side doors had worked well enough despite the years of disuse; surely anything back here would also be workable.
A cloven paw (foot?) attached to a bony limb came over the backseats, its swipe only just missing her hip. The hideous pear-shaped head appeared next, its mouth with a handful of too-long teeth gaping wide and entirely too close to her. She shuffled closer to the boot door, as close as she could cram herself, one hand still furiously probing for an escape.
The heel of it bumped against something loose on the floor, and her fingers wrapped around a thin but flat length of cold steel; unwelcoming to most, but a veritable lifeline to Sarah. She lifted it off the floor of the boot, finding it to be a crowbar. Hope soared in her chest and she swung out behind her with the crowbar, which solidly connected with the creature's head.
Knowing she only had gained mere seconds from that hit, she shoved herself up onto her knees and struck the glass of the boot door with the crowbar. A jagged spiderweb of branching cracks exploded out from the point of impact, but did not entirely break the grime-browned glass. Two terrible claws raked down her back, leaving fiery lines of blood in their wake, and Sarah batted wildly at the beast behind her. She hit the glass again, close to where she had hit before.
This time, shards fell out of the frame, leaving the window partially broken. That was enough for Sarah; she shoved the crowbar through one of the holes and swiped left and right, successfully dislodging more chunks of grimy glass. With her free hand, she reached through, crawling through the jagged-framed space away from the monster.
She nearly ate the dirt as she hit the ground, but her hands mercifully took the brunt of the impact. Fresh pain bloomed in her palms, however, having landed on the shards of glass she'd just knocked out of her way. It didn't matter; the moment her legs had hit the ground she was scrambling away. All she had to do was get back to the anomaly; they had been there for about an hour, which meant that the guard on the other side would unlock the anomaly for ten minutes before resealing it.
Managing to get to her feet, Sarah sprinted toward the anomaly, running down the long line of broken-down vehicles toward the glimmering orb that led to her sanctuary.
But it seemed that luck was not with her.
The predator leapt from the car and landed just behind her, its forelimbs connecting with her back and taking her down onto the ground. The breath went out of her, and her palms stung with the introduction of more dirt into the fresh cuts.
Sarah kicked, her heels bumping against its gaunt underbelly and bony limbs even while its talons tore through her clothes like paper and rent into her flesh. Her fingers clawed at the ground and she ducked her head as she dragged herself under the nearest car, hoping it would not easily be able to pursue her below the underbelly of the car. Its claws hung tightly into the meat of the back of her legs as she dragged them underneath, but Sarah persisted.
Unfortunately, being entirely under the car did not fully protect her from the monster. It pressed itself to the ground and to the side of the car as its unnerving foreleg swiped and scratched at her, scoring every inch of flesh within its reach. Sarah shuffled herself as far away as she dared and wiped the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand. Her vision was limited now, but she had a general sense of where she was going. So with a deep breath and the determination to not die under that car, she crawled out from under it, and ran on bleeding and limping legs down the line again.
About ten meters away, Sarah caught sight of the anomaly, and premature relief quickened her stride – the anomaly was unlocked! Like the pinnacular lamp of a lighthouse, its glow seemed a beckoning, inviting call, a beacon of hope amidst the darkness she had been plunged into when the future predator plunged into her hiding place. Her legs burned, but she struggled onward, gaining with every stride. Just a few more meters and she'd be safe. Seven meters away. Six. Five. Four.
Three meters away, and the anomaly imploded into a closed sphere again.
Sarah skidded to a halt, only just managing to silence the scream of aggravation that wanted to burst from her throat. She spun on the spot, frantically looking for somewhere to wait out however long it took for Becker and his men to reach her or the anomaly to be unsealed, whichever came first. The nearest buildings were either too far away to get to in time or did not have any visible entrances, which left her with only the cars. She could try to hide inside or under the nearest one, she supposed, if she did it quietly enough and wasn't seen by the creatures.
But a flicker in her peripheral drew her attention, and Sarah was mystified to discover another anomaly, hovering beside the cliff's edge just ten meters away.
It could lead anywhere, to any time or place, where any unfriendly animal or person might mean her doom.
It was better than getting in another car.
So Sarah ran again, stumbling as she went, hurtling desperately toward that glimmering lifeline and praying that it was real and not a cruel mirage. She flung herself into its glimmering crystalline heart, and tumbled into darkness.
It was cold and damp where the anomaly deposited her, like any English autumn night. Her sight forsook her at the sudden loss of light, and her palms stung wickedly as they slapped against broken and dirty ground. The near-silence of the dismal future was replaced with an earsplitting racket of screeching car hooters and their engines. Though disoriented, she shoved herself to her feet, stumbling forward as she pressed herself into a run again, toward the sound of the street. She could flag down help. She could lose the creature, if it followed her, in the excessive sound— surely it wouldn't be able to track her thudding pulse and labored breathing among the deafening noise of modern traffic.
But before she could blindly fling herself into traffic, a harsh impact with her back sent her down, sprawled out on her front once more. Sarah's vision blurred with double vision even as it adjusted to the lower light, and she forcefully blocked out the sharp pain of the monster's talons in her back and its guttural snarling as she scanned what she now realized to be an alleyway for a weapon. A discarded glass bottle- Guinness, according to the label- lay a few feet ahead of her beside a pair of metal rubbish bins. She threw out her arm to grab it, but her fingertips were a few inches shy of it.
The creature's claws hooked into her flesh. She pushed herself harder, extending her arm farther even as skin and muscle split and tore around its claws. Its clammy, rancid breath spread across her cheek, ear, and the back of her neck. She cried out in equal parts frustration and pain, stretching and reaching desperately for the bottle. Her fingertips grazed the smooth, cool surface, but it rolled away. But only for a few centimeters; the body of the bottle bumped against a pair of discarded shoes and rolled away again –
– and straight into Sarah's open hand.
With a yell of effort, she swung her arm backward as if reaching for something on her back, and the base of the bottle shattered against the pear-shaped skull of the future predator. Chunky shards rained down on her, but she barely felt them as the creature reared up, its front feet leaving her back. She twisted around for a better angle and slashed at the ears on the front of its face with the jagged edge of the bottle's remnants, eliciting a horrid shriek from the beast. It tumbled to the side, getting off her fully, and she scrambled up onto her feet and ran again.
Murphy's Law says that anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and Sarah was certain that that was the law that governed her life at that moment. The creature burst into her peripheral, flinging itself onto the fire escape of one of the buildings that made up the alley. She slammed the brakes as it dropped down in front of her, backtracking frantically despite knowing it was futile. It leapt forward, and the back of her head impacted the asphalt floor of the alleyway painfully.
And then the monster was torn off her- a gloved hand around its neck- and thrown away, cast aside to collide with the wall of a nearby building and crumple onto the ground beside the aluminum rubbish bins.
Her salvation made an imposing figure. He was tall and broad, every inch of him covered in grey fabric which wrapped around him in a way that brought memories of ancient Egyptian mummies flickering through her mind. On his chest was a vaguely heart-shaped golden breastplate, most of which was covered by strips of cloth, yet tethered to its center a crescent moon of the same metal. A long cloak hung from his pauldron-clad shoulders, and hung over his head with a peaked front emblazoned with a crescent. The most frightening thing about him was not that his entire head and face was masked by grey wrappings, as if he were a living mummy, but the bright white glow emanating from his eyes. The pearlescent glow of the full moon, obscured by his head, shone around him- a halo denoting his righteousness.
Perhaps Shai was with her after all.
The hideous croaking clicks of the future predator reached her ears, banishing the relief from Sarah's being and flooding her once again with fear. But in a moment, the mysterious man who towered over her tore the crescent easily from his chest and flung it aside, where it was embedded deeply in the creature's skull.
He came forward and knelt beside her, leaning over her. "Got you good, didn't it?" The man remarked- bizarrely, with an American accent. "That's a lot of blood. You need a doctor."
"I need to go home." She replied, and was alarmed at how weak and slurred her own voice was.
"Hospital first." The man said, reaching for her shoulder. He drew her into his arms and stood up, holding her against his chest as if she weighed nothing.
"But I need to go home. The anomaly." She twisted in his grasp, craning her neck to see where she'd come through. But there was no anomaly left to be seen, not a single glowing shard remaining in the entire alleyway. Nothing to indicate she could find her way back to that desolate place and time- to Becker, to the anomaly that led to 2009 and her flat and her office at the ARC, to waiting for Danny and Connor and Abby to come home and planning missions to find them.
"You're going into shock." The man told her, oblivious to her turmoil and despair as he began to climb the fire escape stairs of one of the buildings. "I need to get you to a hospital before you lose too much blood. You should shut your eyes."
That sounded great, actually. Her eyelids felt like they weighed a tonne, and she was so very tired as the adrenaline faded. Her head dropped to his shoulder, her cheek pressed against the edge of one pauldron.
Sarah slipped into darkness, and dreamed of Danny Quinn.
*The webisode contains a brief flashback from Becker, where Sarah saying his name is put with stock footage of a future predator breaking through the windshield of the truck in S1E6. It was explained that Sarah was killed by a predator in a car on the last of the four missions. This may be stating the obvious but I felt the need to clarify.
Shai is the Egyptian god of luck.
FYI Marc's not a total idiot, he asked her to shut her eyes because he's either going to fly or run at superhuman speeds and he doesn't want her to see that so a) she doesn't see too much and b) she doesn't panic.