Escape From Dinosauria (Dinopocalypse Book 1) (19 page)

“Yeah, you keep saying that, and I keep telling you how fucking stupid you are. Staying here is a death trap, man.”

Kenshin stopped walking and faced Doctor Israel. “Staying here is my duty. Now silence yourself, Doctor.”

But Doctor Israel was no longer listening. His eyes had widened and refocused to something behind Kenshin. Kenshin now heard the unmistakable sound of heavy breathing. Gripping the katana, he slowly turned around, careful not to prematurely trigger whatever was waiting behind him with any sudden movements.

If not for its chest slightly heaving, the
Tyrannosaurus
at the end of the street could have easily been mistaken for a statue.

But then it growled.

And charged.

4

Jamie saw the
T. rex
but didn’t know what to do. If she yelled out a warning, the dinosaur would surely notice her. If she didn’t warn them, then it’d spot Kenshin and Izzy walking straight toward its location. The building she was standing on wasn’t exactly a skyscraper. If the
T. rex
desired, it could easily snatch her from her position. Even with new dinosaur powers, the sight of this behemoth froze her in terror. Her strength and speed had improved, yeah, but she hadn’t been turned into a god. This thing would destroy her if she gave it half a chance.

She waited too long. The
T. rex
growled and charged down the street. Its target was clear: a ninja wielding a katana and his cowardly scientist sidekick. Maybe Kenshin had killed his share of dinosaurs with that katana, but she figured for a beast this size it would do less damage than being stabbed with a plastic butter knife. If they had any shot of surviving, they would need her help. She couldn’t just stand on the roof and witness it happening.

Jamie tightened her grip on the raptor rib and leapt off the roof. Just inches away from landing on the
T. rex’s
back, something sharp dug into her shoulders and lifted her. When she continued flying upward, she raised her head and saw the underside of a pterodactyl in mid-flight.

The motherfucker had caught her like a Frisbee. The Russian machine gun dropped from her hands.

She thrust the raptor rib into the bird’s belly and it screamed and desperately flapped its wings. It dug its claws out of her shoulders and she dropped toward the ground, still holding on to the now bloody rib.

She landed hard on the road. Her skull bounced against cement and the universe went dark for a moment. Somewhere, Izzy was screaming. Despite every cell in her body begging for sleep, she forced herself to stand up.

The
T. rex
had half of its mouth shoved into the shattered picture window of a souvenir shop. Kenshin and Izzy were undoubtedly somewhere inside, if it hadn’t already found and devoured them.

The massive carnivore took one step back and crunched the rifle beneath its feet. She hadn’t used the damn thing one time. What the fuck.

Jamie stepped forward, mentally preparing herself for the fight of a lifetime, when the stabbed pterodactyl speared her against an abandoned tour bus.

5

Doctor Israel’s screams were louder than the
Tyrannosaurus’s
growls.

Kenshin and the doctor pressed themselves against the back wall of the souvenir shop. They’d fled inside when it became clear it would be impossible to outrun the beast, and now they were trapped. The doctor ripped the bandages off his face, complaining that he couldn’t see. There was no backdoor to the shop, and the front of the building was currently occupied by the
Tyrannosaurus’s
impressive teeth snapping at them. The doctor fell and his shirt tore in half. If the dragon pushed just a little deeper into the shop, the distance between them would be nonexistent. Kenshin refused to allow it to get too comfortable and continuously sliced at the dragon’s face with his katana. It wouldn’t stop it from eventually getting through and eating the both of them, but it was his best option given the circumstances.

“Good boy!” Doctor Israel screamed, tears overflowing down his face. “It’s okay, it’s okay, you’re a good boy, it’s okay, oh God, please stop. Good boy, good boy.”

Kenshin sliced a flap of flesh from the top of the dragon’s lip. The doctor had his methods of self-defense, and Kenshin had his own. Unfortunately, he did not believe either would prove to be very effective.

“Please go away,” Doctor Israel said. “Good boy, who’s a good boy? You are. You are. Now...please don’t eat us. Please.”

The
Tyrannosaurus
snapped down his jaws and came within a foot of decapitating Kenshin. He repositioned his grip on the katana and leapt forward, driving the blade under the dragon’s mouth and jabbing it upward. It pierced through its chin and the beast immediately screeched. It jerked its head to the side and threw Kenshin across the shop. Miraculously, he managed not to lose his katana this time. The dragon retreated from the shop, an infuriated growl emitting from its now punctured throat.

Doctor Israel rushed over to Kenshin and helped him to his feet. The kid was smiling through his bandages. “Kenny, you fucking pimp!”

6

The pterodactyl had Jamie pinned against the bus. The thing was too injured to fly away, but it was determined to make Jamie pay even if it cost it its last dying breath. Jamie happily obliged and snapped the poor fella’s neck in half.

Up ahead, the
T. rex
had removed its head from the souvenir shop and was now spinning in circles. A flow of blood streamed down its throat and dripped onto the road. She couldn’t decide if the blood was coming out of the dinosaur or if it had just been a sloppy eater. The latter answer drove her forward in a fit of fury.

Jamie ran up the wild dinosaur’s tail and across its spine. Just as it jerked to the side in an attempt to fling her off, she leapt forward and landed on top of its head. She raised the raptor rib and drove it down. The tip pierced through its skin, but stopped at its skull. She raised the rib again and swung down harder and smiled in a lunatic’s glee as the rib broke through its skull and slid into the
T. rex’s
brain. The dinosaur paused for a moment, stunned, then collapsed. Jamie held on and fell with it, rolling against the hot pavement once they landed. Her raptor rib was long lost inside the
T. rex
.

Kenshin and Izzy tried to help her stand but she brushed them away. “Holy shit,” she said, once she was finally back on her feet, “this place fucking sucks.”

7

The hotel’s electricity was out, which meant the automatic entrance refused to open, so she had to kick in the glass. It also meant the elevators weren’t functioning, forcing them to continue their long hike up an asshole amount of steps to reach her room. Every couple floors, Izzy would groan and talk about how easy life would be if only he had just let her die. In a cruel way, his misery gave her energy.

Without electricity, the door to her room refused to open. Even if the building did still have electricity, she’d lost the keycard weeks ago. But weeks ago she didn’t have dinosaur strength, so getting inside the room was as simple as punching the locking mechanism until it shattered off the frame. Just like her knockout with Adrean Hotch, all it took was one punch.

The smell of rotten food and garbage hit them right away.

“Jesus Christ,” Izzy said. “Did you take a shit three weeks ago and forget to flush?”

Kenshin nodded. “My nostrils do not agree with the abomination hiding in here.”

Jamie couldn’t recall anything in particular she could have left in the room before going with Jordan for the restaurant. Maybe all the rooms shared a similar scent and it was just the result of a broken water pipe that’d spread mold throughout the hotel. She rushed to her bag and sorted through it. She considered telling Kenshin and Izzy to leave the room so she could change, but figured they’d seen her naked enough at this point that she meant nothing to them. She threw her filthy and bloody clothes off and changed into something more casual—and, more importantly, something she actually owned before flying over to this goddamn island.

“Please don’t tell me we came all the way out here so you could have a set of clean clothes,” Izzy said. He sat on the bed and leaned against the backboard.

“You literally just changed clothes downstairs,” Jamie said.

“Don’t make this about me.” He closed his eyes.

She wondered how weird it would be to suggest they all get in bed and take a group nap. All of them were beat at this point, even Jamie, new powers and all. Still, though. It’d be pretty awkward. Maybe. Maybe she could fuck both of them right now and relieve a mountain’s worth of stress. Jamie laughed, then fell silent when she realized the idea didn’t sound that ridiculous. Hell. Were these her thoughts, or Dino Jamie’s thoughts? She had never exactly been a nun in the bedroom—well, okay, she
did
have a nun costume, but still, the point being that if she did happen to fuck two guys right now, it wouldn’t be her first rodeo. Although, come to think about it, when she was seventeen she had gotten drunk with a dude in the public restroom of a Dallas rodeo.

But she wasn’t particularly attracted to either of them. Izzy was basically ten years old, and Kenshin gave her the impression that he was hiding too many secrets that would probably piss her off if they ever became public. In movies, whenever a woman is rescued by a man, it’s legally required that she falls in love with him. The old damsel in distress bit. And that’s exactly what it was: a bit. A stereotype. A fairy tale.

Fairy tales didn’t end with the damsel being injected with drugs from a mad scientist and mutating into some kind of half-woman, half-dinosaur freak of nature. Well, not most of them, anyway.

She gave her previous set of blood-soaked clothing one last look and kicked them under the bed. The city may have been extinct of humanity, but some small part of her was still paranoid that a housekeeper might come in and judge Jamie for leaving such a gruesome scene out in the open for anyone to discover. Of course, the room’s odor would probably be a more pressing issue for any new arrivals, especially those employed in the area of cleanliness. Jamie desperately wished never to find out the source of this odor. Instead, she dug deeper into her bag and found the real reason she’d returned to the hotel.

“A medal?” Izzy said, leaning forward and squinting.

Kenshin nodded at the object in her hands. “What does it symbolize?”

Lacking appropriate storage, Jamie hung the medal around her neck. “This was my first award for mixed-martial arts. I was fifteen, but lied and said I was eighteen. This little girl going up against grown-ass adults and standing her ground. I came in third place. It was the best day of my life.”

“And you brought it to an island full of dinosaurs, why…?” Izzy asked.

Jamie tucked the medal under her shirt and immediately calmed as it settled between her breasts. “I don’t go anywhere without it.”

Kenshin left them at the bed and explored the rest of her suite. Perhaps he was disgusted at the idea of her risking both of their lives to scavenge a third place medal. Well if that was the case, then he could go fuck himself. He drooled over his little katana way more than she did her medal. Hell, it was the first time she even mentioned the medal’s existence aloud to them, whereas Kenshin seemed to be able to find a way to fit his katana into every conversation, regardless of topic. Despite what he liked to believe, he was no different than any other guy. Some men replaced their dicks with pick-up truck engines, and some men replaced them with katanas. So if Jamie’s dick was a third-place medal she’d won when she was fifteen, then so be it.

Kenshin hurried back to the bed. Izzy had started to fall asleep. Jamie was going through her bag, seeing what else she couldn’t bear to leave behind.

The old ninja man cleared his throat. It was the first time she had ever seen him express distress. “I have located the source of the foul odor.”

Izzy snapped awake. “I knew it. Jamie farted.”

“A corpse is sitting in the lounge.”

Izzy rubbed his chin. “Close enough.”

Jamie pushed past Kenshin, already knowing in her heart what awaited her in the lounge.

Jordan sat on the recliner, caught in the midst of decomposition. Half his face was ripped off, but at least his eyes were closed. She couldn’t remember what color his clothes used to be. Now they were stained from head-to-toe with dried blood. In his lap he held a sheet of paper. At his feet, there was a pen—perhaps something he’d dropped in his moment of death.

On the sheet of paper, Jordan had written the following:

J

IM SOR

And that was it. The handwriting was sloppy and frantic. He’d spent his last few breaths attempting to apologize to her.

Kenshin could have saved him. Instead, he chose her.

This wasn’t Jordan’s fault. He was doing his job. He was doing the one thing that he was good at, and he wanted to bring Jamie along with him. Jordan Vance came to Dinosauria to write the story that was supposed to save lives.