Last Survivor

Prologue

Prologue ​London, EnglandHe was doomed. The last of his species to have lived in the wild, his extinction was guaranteed. The question was not if his kind would disappear from the face of the earth, but when.

With no females left alive in their natural habitat or in captivity there was no chance of natural reproduction.

The luckier of his ancestors had been stolen from Africa and shipped to foreign lands. In years gone by this had been done by supposedly well-meaning colonialists, who had displayed their captured specimens for generations of enchanted aficionados to gawk at.

Today it was illegal to take them from the wild, but that didn’t stop the wealthy from breaking the law. Impoverished poachers were paid by middlemen to risk imprisonment, perhaps even death at the hand of an armed ranger, to satisfy the desire of proud rich people to flaunt their wealth and status by showing off something rare.

But he was now beyond rare; he was critically endangered, extinct in the wild.

His less fortunate forebears had been butchered for use in traditional medicine, hacked to pieces, ground into potions whose efficacy was spurious, at best. But worse, he was a victim of his rarity; he had been taken to serve the basest of emotions.

Pride.

Greed.

Vanity.

Envy.

These were the sins that had spelled a death sentence for a species that predated the dinosaurs and had once been seen across much of the earth’s surface. Of course, scientists were looking for ways to artificially continue his existence, but it would never be the same.

He had come from a forested hill in Zululand, and while it had sometimes been misty and cool it had never been as cold as it was here, in England. His enclosure protected him from the worst of the elements and that was just as well, for if he had been left to face the harsh northern winter in the outdoors he would surely have died long ago.

So he sat, all alone, under a cold grey sky. Fertile – he had shown his captors he could produce, like some slave from bygone times being exposed and inspected by those who would use him as breeding stock – but he was nonetheless condemned.

The crime of it, Joanne Flack thought as she stared lovingly at him, was that so few people in the world even knew about him, let alone cared.

Joanne looked around, making sure no one was watching, and then reached out and ever so gently stroked one of the plant’s spiky green leaves.

‘Hello, Woody, my old friend. I might have some good news for you.’