Chapter 6

Time passed, ticking slowly as it always did, but regularly. Perhaps, in the two hours, two minutes and two seconds it had taken for the world to end, time had been the only constant for the survivers locked up in the ARC.

Perhaps time would get rid of this menace for them? Good old time had a habit of catching up with everything in the end, however powerful they had been before. It had taken out the human race well enough.

Now the survivors sat in the lobby of the ARC at something of a dead end. An ex-student of Professer Cutter and long-time nerd sat drinking his third can of Fanta hopefully, as if he would find the answer to their dilemma at the bottom, or at least some clue to whatever it was they were searching for. A zoologist had her knees crushed into her chest as if to comfort herself in the fact that she would probably be dead in a few hours time, but glad of the company she kept in her last hours, glad she was not alone. An Egyptologist kept up with the experiments she knew next to nothing about; she was not that kind of scientist by any extension of the word. Perhaps her constant strivings for a ray of hope were all that kept the team from crumbling apart around them. A soldier paced up and down, ever vigilant and ever ready; ready to give his life for any one of them at a second's notice, even the ones he had never truly understood and never truly would. A police officer recounted what he had seen from the ventilation shaft with some animation before falling silent once more and staying that way, opening a can of Fanta for himself and sinking to the floor to drink it.

"So..." Connor said in a feeble attempt to make some kind of conversation, and the others looked around in shock at the sound, startled by the sudden life it brought to the otherwise silent bunch of survivors. "What do we do now?"

"Find Lester." The reply was simple and delivered with some force by the man who felt the need to check their perimeter was secure every five minutes and now shook his handheld detector irritably in an attempt to check their life signatures were still functioning.

Danny got to his feet quickly, discarding the now empty can on the floor and smiling. "I reckon I could find a way to Lester's office through those vents..."

"No way, Quinn. It's my job to protect you all from harm, and I can't do that unless you all stay in this one room where I can see you."

"Yes," the policeman replied, raising an eyebrow cynically. "But you also said it's your job to protect Lester, and you can't see him right now, can you?" The logic was undeniable, and when nobody replied Danny saw fit to continue: "You don't need to worry about me, Becker. I've got firearms experience and police training..."

"... And a knack for getting yourself into trouble." Then Becker stopped and sighed, looking at the three scientists and then back at Danny. "If you're not back in an hour we're coming to find you, understand?"

Quinn just smiled. "Perfectly," he stated, climbing through the dislodged grate in a matter of seconds and disappearing from sight.

Becker checked his watch and then looked back at the others before resolving to check their perimeter for the umpteenth time while the scientists turned back to continue their fruitless work. They wouldn't even know if what they had found worked until they died or survived, the fatal flaw in the already highly flawed plan.

And all around them time ticked by as if nothing had ever happened, marking their movements with an awkwardly eerie mantra: And then there were four.

Author Note: Hmm... Why am I here, writing this? It's been a year, more than a year, and a lot has changed since last time. Not to mention the cast of Primeval. Reminder: I started writing this in the middle of series 3, so Helen's alive and Cutter's just died... Connor, Abby and Danny have never ended up trapped in the past... Sarah's alive... And Matt and Jess have never been employed in the ARC. Didn't like them anyway.

Short chapter. Depending on the number of reviews I get it might be followed by more, since Primeval is back and didn't get cancelled (because, I believe, the last time I wrote this, it still was).

Perhaps y'all missed me, but then again perhaps not... Lemme know

~ARTY~