Chapters (45)
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- Prologue
- 2046
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Thirty-Three
- Thirty-Four
- Thirty-Five
- Thirty-Six
- Thirty-Seven
- Thirty-Eight
- Thirty-Nine
- About the Author
They follow Harry picking a route towards the trees and spot beetles climbing up plant stems and more shoving their faces into the sticky pollen. Small flying insects are everywhere too. Wasp-type things with yellow and black bodies but bigger and much tougher-looking. For a second Ben thinks they must be what bees come from until he actually sees bees and mutters in shock. They’re bloody huge things. Much bigger than any bee he has ever seen, with legs like saddlebags weighed down with pollen and broad wings that vibrate as they hover to lift or sink towards the flowers. On sight of the creatures Safa draws her pistol, holding it down at her side. Her thumb resting on the safety switch as she tracks and follows the huge bees buzzing through the air. Harry just watches. He served in jungles across the world and although seeing new creatures is amazing, it does not hold the same shock for him as it does for the other two. Mind you, they didn’t have dinosaurs in Africa. Big bugs, but no dinosaurs.
Things scuttle between rocks and plants and are gone from sight before they can turn and lock their eyes on them. They see a column of ants marching along that sends a shiver down Ben’s spine. Each one must be over two inches in length, some look bigger and thicker with bulging back ends. They look nasty too, like they would cause damage if they bit you, and there’s hundreds of them just in that snapshot of a glance.
A splash of water makes them all look round in time to see a small thing flying up and away towards the treeline and it’s at that point that they gain a sense of the scale of the trees standing sentinel on that line.
Ben recognised the cypress trees, but the ones forming the forest are much bigger and must be standing at over fifty metres in height easily. Some look like sycamores or the London plane trees he and Safa are so used to seeing in parks and open spaces. Thick, dense trunks sweeping up to the enormous branches, which stretch out in decreasing size from the bottom to the top with dense green foliage. Conifer-type things too, but again they get that jarring sensation of expecting to see one thing but actually looking at something different.
The closer they get, the more the scale of the trees increases. They have huge gaps between them, forming lanes and avenues threading round the trunks. The noise gets louder too. The clearing is like the quiet section and the forest is the main attraction, where everything that can make noise lives.
Screeches and squawks from everywhere. Branches rustling with scampering noises of things chasing and things being chased. A burst of activity and the sound of twigs snapping bring them to a halt as they listen to the death screams of some creature being chomped.