Chapter 6: 6: Victoria Pryce

The creature smacked me onto the cold pavement, one of its meaty paws catching me on my shoulder. I felt like it had hit me with a slab of frozen beef. I twisted round as I fell, pushing my arms up to block my attacker. It pounced on me, spitting and snarling, its full weight of around two-fifty kilograms pressing down on me. A razor-sharp claw raked across my chest, scratching three deep cuts.

I screamed as blood flowed from the wounds, slapping at the thing as it pressed its advantage.

“Help!” I shouted, desperately trying to fend it off. It had me pinned down and kept batting my arms away as I tried to land a blow. I struggled as it snarled on top of me. It was all I could do to stop it cutting me again. As strong as I felt, this thing was monstrous, and fast. I couldn’t land a solid punch to get it off me.

The soldiers pointed their oversized guns at the pair of us, unsure what to do. The thing opened its mouth, intending to take a solid bite out of my face. I felt its hot breath on my cheeks. Its sharp teeth glistened. I scrabbled around and realised I was still clutching the door handle from the classroom I’d locked Jess, Dee and Forrest in. I’d held onto it in the meantime without realising it.

As makeshift weapons went, it wasn’t much - but it was enough.

The beast bore down on me with its jaws wide open and I rammed the handle into its mouth. My hand scraped past its teeth and past its slimy wet tongue. I pushed the handle in as hard as I could, then pulled my hand out, ignoring the burning scratches its teeth caused.

The thing let out a startled, strangled yelp as the elongated U- shaped piece of metal lodged between the ridged roof and soft floor of its mouth. It reared up, pawing at its chin ineffectually.

I saw my chance, got my legs beneath its chest, and kicked as hard as I could.

The thing sailed through the air and smashed into a wall fifteen metres away.

It scrambled to its feet, dazed and limping. It pawed at its mouth and shook its head, still trying to dislodge the handle. A whimpering, mewling sound came from its throat.

The woman was suddenly next to me. She pulled me to one side as the soldiers surrounded the beast. Three of them fired from their oversized guns, and I realised why the weapons looked so odd. They didn’t fire regular bullets, although the soldiers were equipped with plenty of the normal variety of guns. The guns they were using right now, however, fired steel nets with weights around the edges, designed to capture and detain.

Within seconds, they’d trapped the creature under three nets. It tried to twist its way out, but just became more tangled. Two soldiers pulled trank guns from side holsters.

“Stop!” the blonde woman said. “No tranquillisers! We don’t know how its biology will react to the chemicals. You might kill it.”

The soldiers lowered their weapons without question. I looked at the woman in surprise.

“And killing that thing is a problem why, exactly?”

The woman smiled at my quick aside. Her smile was like a burst of sunlight on a cloudy day. She continued to address her special operations team.

“Restrain the creature, avoid injuring it as best you can,” she instructed her men.

Then to me, “It’s far more interesting alive, don’t you think? Besideds, I don’t have a license for killing strange creatures of unknown origin that appear out of nowhere. Could get into all sorts of legal problems.”

For a second I thought she was being serious, then I saw the faint curl of her lip that told me she was joking.

The soldiers set about tying the thing up, watching out for its lashing claws. Within a couple of minutes they had it trussed up like a Christmas Turkey. It managed to spit out the door handle, but the men looped rope around its jaws, preventing it from biting anyone.

The woman nodded, satisfied.

“You’re hurt,” she said, turning her attention to me.

It was true. My costume was in shreds and blood was dripping from the three deep cuts across my chest. The scratches on my arm weren’t so bad, but my whole body felt bruised and battered. My wounds were already closing up, however. My healing powers were already starting to stem the bleeding and stitch the cuts on my chest back together.

My cuts and bruises aside, I suddenly felt cold, hungry and exhausted. I discovered my powers had a downside that night. Once the fire died down, I was left shaken and drained.

“They’re just scratches,” I replied, trying to cover the chest wounds with my arm.

I didn’t want anyone to get a close look. Especially not a strange woman who’d shown up out of nowhere with a bunch of soldiers in tow, equipped to deal with monsters.

“They looked more serious than that. Medic!” the woman called out, “Over here, I want this young man taken care of. Lieutenant,” she spoke to her second in command, “get that thing loaded onto the helicopter. Someone get me an ETA on the goon squad. I want to be long gone before they show up.”

Ignoring my protests, the medic did a quick job of cleaning my injuries and applied bandages around my chest.

“That was quite something,” the woman said as she observed me. “What you did there. The way you kicked it off you.”

She raised an eyebrow, a question in the air. How had I done that?

“I’ve got powerful leg muscles. I, uh, play a lot of rugby,” I mumbled, trying to evade her questions. Apart from not wanting to give anything away, I had a lot of questions of my own. My mind was reeling at the sudden series of events that had just taken place and I needed answers.

“Look, what is that thing? Who are you? Why are you here?”

The woman nodded, a bemused smile on her face. She considered for a moment, then seemed to decide it was worth taking me into her confidence.

“In answer to your first question, frankly I haven’t got a clue. I’ve seen nothing like it before. In answer to your second question, my name is Victoria Pryce. And you are?”

“Ethan. Ethan Hall.”

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“Well, I’m very pleased to meet you, Ethan Hall. Do you know why our mystery creature was chasing you?”

“I don’t. It just showed up and started chasing my friends and me, so I sort of locked them in a classroom and drew it away. To keep my friends safe, you know?”

“My my, how heroic,” Victoria replied with a raised eyebrow. There was a slight tease in her voice.

I looked at her more closely, trying to work her out. Her clothes were as sharp as her short cropped blonde hair, her manner calm and collected. Her commanding voice was often laced with an edge of humour and irony. But the main thing I picked up from her was the sense of how in control she was. Everything was happening as she expected it to, and any surprises - like me appearing out of the blue - were quickly folded into whatever her plan had been all along.

In all the time I spent with her, though, nothing quite stuck in my mind about Victoria Pryce so much as those very first few seconds as I’d charged towards her and she, despite the obvious danger, hadn’t budged.

She’d refused to move out of the way, not because she couldn’t, but because she didn’t want to.

And that pretty much summed Victoria up.

I realised I couldn’t guess her age. Victoria’s face had an elfin, ageless quality to it. She could have been anything from late thirties to early fifties. I later found out she was forty-nine, not that you’d have guessed.

“Dumb, really,” I said, downplaying my earlier heroics. “If you hadn’t shown up, it would have killed me.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Victoria replied. “You seemed to hold your own.”

“Well, I wouldn’t like a rematch. Look, seriously, who are you? How did you get here? Were you tracking that thing?”

“Yes, we were tracking it, as you surmised. It started popping up on social media feeds two hours ago, as people filmed it on their phones as it roamed around. It had been wandering around for a while and then zeroed in on the school - and you, apparently, Mr Hall.”

There was something in her tone that suggested she wasn’t buying the ‘I don’t know why it was chasing me’ line. I mean, I didn’t know why it had been after me, in fact. All I had was a strong suspicion that it was somehow connected to my powers.

“As for where it came from,” Victoria continued, “Well, isn’t that the question? My guess would be it escaped from someone’s private collection. That’s just a guess, though. Hopefully, we’ll be able to find out more when we study it. There should be some clues, but I admit this has me more puzzled than usual. Still, who doesn’t love a good mystery to solve?.”

“Maybe it has a dog collar?” I quipped.

Victoria smiled again. Although I was cold, trembling and had just been attacked by who-knew-what, I smiled back.

“And you do this often?” I pressed on, “Track down weird...things?”

“More often than you’d think,” Victoria replied with a bemused smile, “It’s not quite a job, but it’s more than a hobby.”

The lieutenant interrupted us. None of the soldiers seemed fazed by the fact that they’d captured something straight out of a fantasy horror film. They were all behaving as if everything was business as usual.

“Ma’am, we’ve had visual confirmation. Section 13 is en route, ETA twelve minutes.”

Victoria clicked her tongue.

“And I was having such a lovely evening,” she muttered.

“Section 13?” I asked.

“The goon squad,” Victoria scowled, “Government. Big on the Official Secrets Act and shooting first, asking questions never.”

I gave her another quizzical glance.

Everything she said just made me want to ask more. I couldn’t decide if evasiveness was a deliberate strategy or if she was just in too much of a hurry to outline things properly.

She sighed. “There’s no time to explain, I’m afraid. We must be on our way. Ethan Hall, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

She gave me a curious look.

“There’s something about you, Ethan Hall. I will be in touch. Oh, and give my regards to the moustache.”

“The moustache?”

“You’ll see,” she grimaced.

“Wait…” I said, but it was too late. Victoria Pryce and her men boarded the helicopters and took off into the night sky. Within a minute they were out of sight and earshot, leaving me alone in the playground, cool air whipping around me and only one thought on my mind:

What the hell just happened?

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