Escape From Dinosauria (Dinopocalypse Book 1) (26 page)

She wasn’t about to wait for him.

Luckily, her mutating body was interested in working with her mind. The soldiers positioned outside of the octagon aimed their weapons on her, but they quickly turned their heads when another savage roar filled the gymnasium.

And there it was, larger than life, a moving fortress of flesh and muscle that had not walked the Earth in millennia. A terrible, long mouth full of teeth and tongue poked through the smoking wreckage of the hole it had presumably made by flinging vehicles at the building. An oversized lizard with a monstrous face that would settle for nothing less than chaos for the sake of its own survival, the
Spinosaurus
quivered with rage, drool pouring over its bottom jaw. With just its head poking in through the hole, the
Spinosaurus’s
hungry graze swept over the crowd until settling on Jamie.

(“I am…leaving this world…to be…a dragon…”)
Kenshin said.

Doctor Israel had codes. There was a way to fix this. She did not have to become a monster like Kenshin.

Jamie lowered her shoulder and charged through the octagon’s door. She performed a swan-dive atop the shoulders of two men and dragged them to the floor. Her misshapen left arm felt stiff and difficult to move, but she still managed to get both her hands around one man’s head. The entire head popped off his shoulders, the mouth still shaping the oval of a powerful scream as it snapped free like a grape from its vine.

With the dripping, severed head in her right hand, she slammed it into the remaining soldier’s face. He staggered back, and she hit him with the severed head again and again, until he dropped, until the head in her hand cracked open and spilled broken teeth all over the other man’s face. Her skull-weapon softened, and its contents oozed over the other man’s face like egg yolk spilling over the rim of a bowl. She tried to bring the skull up for another slam, but her fingers sunk into the skull and grabbed something wet and meaty instead. Jamie pulled out glistening gray brain matter.

Her stomach growled.

The other man wasn’t moving anymore, his features distorted by mashed blood and bone. An eyeball hung from a socket on wiry threads, and there was no telling which dead man had once used it to see with only seconds ago.

A heavy stomp reminded Jamie that she did not have time to sit around beating the brains out of people. Her consciousness barely functioned now. Violence was too easy, and she felt nothing for the people she destroyed. Just like the bloodbath on the bridge, she felt disconnected from her actions, as if she could have watched a replay of the entire event and not recognize herself or anything she did.

The massive dinosaur stomped into the gymnasium, its foot bending part of the wayward jeep’s frame, a shrill whistle popping through one of the tires as it deflated and completely disappeared beneath the monstrous foot. The Kenshin-saurus dipped its body through the hole, the fin like a spindly Mohawk along its back, the tail entering last. It
snatched up a frightened member of the audience in its jaws as they stopped to look over their shoulder at the beast.

Jamie dropped the brain and headed for the exit. She pushed runners out of her way, bowling some of them over; their faces were streaked with fresh blood, their eyes wide with fear, some of them running as if their legs were made of rubber. Human shit and piss stank up the escape route.

Humans weren’t alone in the hallways surrounding the gymnasium where Jamie had made a raptor tap out.

A fresh coat of red paint had been tossed against the walls. Or blood. A fresh coat of blood from all the dead people who were being chopped to pieces by Kresevich’s mutant soldiers. Tails swinging, mouths rending, claws tearing, half-devoured bits of flesh splashing the floor or decorating the fresh, twitching corpses of each victim.

“This has been the longest day ever,” Jamie said. It felt good to speak, to remind herself that she could utter a rational sentence.

Bouncing on her heels, she tried to fire up her heartbeat to the rhythm of violence, envisioning herself executing a series of moves that would take her right down the corridor and through every motherfucking mutant freak in sight.

Jamie took a deep breath and began to move. She had leapt between rooftops before, so this had to be easy.

And it was.

Twisting her hips, she ran up the side of a wall over a mutant who had skewered a dude, the victim holding tightly to the tail, an awkward smile on his lips because he was surprised that he could be killed by a creature that should not exist in the first place. Jamie landed behind the mutant then grabbed his shoulder and punched her fist through his stomach. Dammit, she was strong,
too
fuckin’ strong. Shit and blood blossomed. The mutant’s ropy intestines trailed down her arm. She withdrew her arm. The mutant was dead before he hit the ground. Although it dawned on her for a split second that she had saved a life, she was more impressed with how brutally she had massacred the soldier; she was also interested in the Kalashnikov rifle that had been slung over his back. He may or may not have been Russian, but he was using a Russian machine gun, and it was a gun she had never fired before.

Loot.

The other mutants were preoccupied with killing everyone who came into their path. Nobody saw her pick up the gun and drop to one knee with an eye sighted down the barrel.

“Get behind me or get shot!”

She wasn’t going to discriminate. She was going to deliver death to whoever was in the path of a bullet.

Trigger squeeze. Bullets. Screams. Blood. Bodies.

Dry click. Empty clip.

A mutant had closed the distance between them, but she was on her feet and able to swing the rifle like a baseball bat and connect with the ugly bastard’s lizard-face. Why weren’t they using their guns? She ripped a machine gun that was strapped to the idiot’s back and shoved the barrel into his stomach, then held down the trigger.

She pivoted and swept the gun over the hallway without firing. Survivors shouldered past her and slipped on gore.

Bloodlust. Battle rage. The mutants relished it just as she had relished it.

But she wasn’t too far gone to realize she had an opportunity. Picking her way among the fallen, she found a man who was hunched over, clutching himself; his long neck and beaked face made him appear to be more of a bird than a reptile, but then she remembered what the
Triceratops
had looked like. How long did any of them have before they became absolute beasts?

“Look up,” she said.

Beak-face looked up. Blood oozed from his left shoulder where he had been shot.

“Sorry about the bullet. Don’t take it personally. You happen to know where Doctor Israel is being kept?”

The mutant coughed up a round of awkward laughter.

“Ah, fuck. Really? We have to do this? Can’t anything come easy today?”

Jamie found out the hard way that he could barely speak coherent English, much less any human language at all. She made it even harder on him by ripping his right arm out of its socket, because his left arm was already pretty fucked up to begin with, and she had to balance things out a bit by taking away the good one. Eventually, he was able to tell her something that almost made sense, and she did him a favor by snapping his neck. This time, the head did not come off in her hands.

CHAPTER FIVE:

THE GETAWAY

1

When the lights went out, Izzy tossed his Xbox controller onto the floor. So close to getting his last achievement in
Call of Duty
, and he didn’t have a chance to upload his save game to the Cloud. His luck had turned to shit the last month.

Money, girls, respect. All gone. Shit, why not his progress in
Call of Duty,
too?

King-size bed with silk sheets. Temperature-sensitive mattress and pillows that allowed him to sleep cool, with cashmere ticking and more coils than Donald Trump had perfectly-maintained hairpieces resting on mannequins inside of an underground vault. Maybe Trump didn’t have that many hairpieces, but still; his mattress was pretty damn nice, as was the 3D projection screen on which he played Xbox and watched Netflix.

This was his domain. His castle. When he wasn’t working on genetic codes or watching
Sinraptors
on the race track, he was hanging out in here. Nobody had anything interesting to say on this stupid fuckin’ island, anyway. He was the youngest person on the compound, and the only time anyone talked to him was when they wanted to check on his progress or give him more directives. Despite being a genius, he was just another employee. But this place was a hell of a lot better than the bunker Kenshin had waiting for him.

He sat on his bed with his hands behind his head, waiting, listening. He could hear the explosions and the gunfire. He could hear the dinosaurs roaring.

There had been a time, right after Kenshin rescued him from the race track, where he had found it good taste to beat himself up over everything that happened. The massacre, the coup, Tanaka’s death, and even his capture were all his fault. When Kenshin had asked him to pump dino drugs into Jamie Rock, he couldn’t have cared less what the end result was going to be. Like everyone else, she was going to mutate and turn into a dinosaur. The only question was: how long?

He had never questioned what he was doing; he loved his work and he was good at it, plus he was treated like royalty. Why would he care what these people were doing with his work? Morality didn’t figure into it. Money did.

Kresevich had what he wanted, and the only reason why they had stayed on the island in the first place was because they were collecting combat data. Izzy’s work was complete, and the Sean Connery clone did not explain why they had wanted to recapture him in the first place. Izzy thought Kresevich was going to put a bullet into his head and call it a day. Lucky for him, Kresevich had wanted to capture him, instead.

And then left him here in his room, alone.

They obviously had more plans for him, but whatever they were couldn’t be too important, because as guns were going off and the dinos stormed the compound, nobody came for him.

Until there was a knock on his door.

“Pizza delivery,” a familiar voice said.

“It better be Jet’s,” Izzy said.

Jamie Rock opened the door and let herself in. The emergency lights from the hallway outside his room showed a woman covered head-to-toe in gore with a huge machine gun in her hands and a bandolier of bullets slung over her shoulder. Something was wrong with her. Her left arm was curled inward, and her skin was a lot darker than it used to be.

Izzy was amazed at himself for not being afraid of her, though the first thought that popped into his head was that she was auditioning for a new
Terminator
movie and she was about to blow him away.

“I bet you were hot when you had hair,” Izzy said.

“Were you a class clown in school? Usually little boys who don’t get attention from their mommies resort to shitty jokes to impress their friends.”

“First of all, I didn’t have friends. Secondly, get on with it.”

“Get on with what?”

“I get it: you’re pissed. Instead of just bitching at me again, get it over with.”

“You still have codes, right?”

“Codes? For what?”

“To get out of here.”

“Oh. Ha. Yeah. Codes. Sure. I’ve got codes. Kresevich does too. In fact, since he’s probably evacuating his people now, they’re on their way out of here, and anyone else who tries to use the codes will likely be nonessential personnel.”

Jamie stepped into the room and shut the door behind her. He watched her slowly walk over to the bed and drop onto its edge, just a couple feet away from him. Her shoulders sagged.

“You’re not going to kill me,” Izzy said.

“Nah. Don’t feel like it today. I’m wiped out.”

“I thought you had a lot of stamina. I mean, more than normal. I watched you tear those dudes up on the bridge.”

“I don’t know if I’m tired. I feel like I need to get hold of myself.”

They sat there quietly for an awkward moment, then she said, “I talked to Kresevich.”

“Did he say what he needed me for?”

“He told me what the dinosaurs used to be. All of the dinosaurs.”

“And you’re still not going to kill me?”

“Do I look like I have social justice on my mind right now?”

“I have no clue what’s on your mind, or what you want. I don’t know what anyone wants. I just work here.”

“With a clean conscience, apparently.”

Izzy sighed. “Just do us both a favor and kill me now.”

“Forget it. We don’t have to go through all that again. How the hell did you get millipedes? Surely they aren’t also humans.”

“Turkeys. They were turkeys.”

Jamie laughed. It was a genuine laugh, and it sounded nice. Deep down inside that hard-ass demeanor, there was a girl who had a lot of shit happen to her in a short amount of time.

“What’s so funny?” Izzy pretended to be offended. “I was proud of those millipedes. They were one of the first to complete the process. Speaking of which, what’s up? How’re you feeling?”

“My left arm’s messed up. Can’t move it much. I still have headaches. I enjoy eating people. I want to kill everything. I’m turning into a cucumber, I think. Skin’s harder. No hair’s growing on my legs.”

He didn’t know if he was supposed to apologize or keep listening. As wealthy as he had become from all of his work, he had never improved anything about himself other than his ability to get whatever he wanted. He had never been alone with a beautiful celebrity in his room before, especially a beautiful celebrity who was covered in blood and brought a machine gun with her. He was clueless.

“Psychic powers,” Jamie said. “You gave the dinosaurs psychic powers?”

“Huh?”

“Izanami and Kenshin. They were able to talk to me. I mean, in their heads.”

“Now you’re making shit up to make me feel worse.”

“Wish I was. And you have no idea how much time I have left? No idea what happens to me next?”

Izzy shrugged. “Sorry about the psychic powers-thing. You saw Kenny? How is my favorite person in the world doing these days?”

“You might get a chance to talk to him yourself. He’s roaming around here somewhere. He showed up after my fight.”

She told him about the fight with the raptor, and it was his turn to laugh. “You made a raptor tap out! You can’t make that shit up.”

“I feel like he was still trying to help, in his own way.”

Izzy thought for a moment. “He’ll never give up. He took every single damn syringe we had and loaded up. You did try to kill him, though. But I can promise you he isn’t the kind of person to hold a grudge.”

“Well that’s good news. Finally.”

“Kresevich still wanted me, and I can’t figure out why. That’s bothering me. He brought me here and now he’s leaving without me. I’m sure he also took Izanami with him.”

“So there’s no way we can just ask him?”

“Well, I mean, Tanaka kept an armored truck in the garage. It was his personal vehicle. We could take a trip to the airport and try to raise hell. Kresevich might have been ordered to bring me in and might be able to say I just got eaten by Kenny or something. If we call for help, maybe it might raise eyebrows.”

“This whole time, we were sitting here while there’s a Hummer we can steal?”

“Um, yeah.”

Jamie stood. “You know how to drive?”

“Fuck no. I’ve been too busy sciencing my balls off to get a license.”

“Perfect. You’ll learn.”

2

The first time Jamie used the machine gun, Izzy had to plug his ears. He forgot how loud those fuckin’ things were. She mowed down an entire corridor full of his favorite chicken-sized dinosaurs.

“I don’t know if that was necessary,” Izzy said.

“They were in the way.”

Only a few stray dinos and mutants remained, most of them too busy eating to care about Jamie or Izzy. They were about to leave everything behind. A wealth of experimentation and military gear. Most likely, this whole goddamn island would be nuked as soon as Kresevich cleared off, and Izzy would be cooked along with it if they could not get to the truck in time.

If Kresevich could blow the place to hell, then it was likely he had collected every piece of data necessary—or possible. Had the project been a failure? Was it all for nothing? Would he be blamed for what happened here? It suddenly occurred to him that freedom might not be waiting for him in the US.

Izzy surveyed the wreckage as he led Jamie to the garage. His life’s work had been accomplished here, and he always told himself that it didn’t matter what or who he was working for. He was nineteen and had more money than Jay-Z. A new generation of genetic engineering that would include anti-aging hormones, advanced reproduction conditions for animals, and improved human immunities to a significant number of diseases were just the tip of the iceberg. Oh, sure, there was the fact that everyone who volunteered to try out the first batch of the new enhancements was doomed to mutate a bit here and there, but he had never expected to see his work corrupted to the extent that it was. The first dinosaurs on the island were people who had volunteered, willingly, to give their lives to science. People who wouldn’t live much longer, anyway. Izzy had been assured that their families had been taken care of, etc., etc., and after a while, he stopped asking questions. He had work to do. The dinosaurs were peaceful, incapable of harming others, until Kresevich tampered with the nanomachine codes. All the genetic safeguards that would stop people from completely transforming into dinosaurs were thrown out the window, or maybe they had never fully worked in the first place. Beautiful socialites who were led to believe they could become younger without surgery did not sign waivers that freed Tanaka from liability if they mutated into man-eating dinosaurs, or did they? Izzy could not ask questions. Izzy could not care. He had work to do.

Here was the fruit of all his labors. Dead bodies. Flames. Soldiers who would never be able to play the next
Call of Duty
. Clearly, the world had gone to shit. And it was Izzy’s fault.

Jamie, a world champion cage fighter, was turning green. The fingers on her left hand were about to fuse together and her entire arm made her look like she could easily become the victim of culturally-insensitive special needs jokes. Yet, there was a part of him that believed she wanted to save his life, that she wanted to do something about all the bullshit that had rained down on her. Even though she enjoyed eating people now, she was a fighter, and wanted to go down swinging. Her boyfriend had been killed, she lost all her hair, and she was becoming a dinosaur. She had not asked for any of this.

Had he accomplished his dreams in this place? He didn’t even know what those dreams were. He had been paid to stop thinking about dreams and ideals. There was something to be said for having the peace of mind that he was not expendable and he would always be wealthy, unless he became a coke head and married a gold digger who would eventually divorce him for an even wealthier man. He had always considered himself too smart to fall into those common traps; more likely, he was going to end up buying a shitty baseball team like the Chicago Cubs or create his own line of racially-marketed clothing like FUBU. At least then someone would be able to recruit him to show up on television and offer bad financial advice to people who needed to find Jesus or some shit.

“Quit staring at my ass,” Jamie said.

“I’m not.”

“You’ve been quiet.”

“Did you say that you talked to Izanami?”

“Yeah. Only in my head, though.”

Izzy stared at her.

“The psychic powers.”

“… Right.”

“She couldn’t talk anymore. She’s pretty much a lizard with a humungous rack. She looks like she could breastfeed a third-world country.”

“Developing country. Third-world is offensive.”

“Why’re you asking?”

“It’s going to take them a few minutes to load up Izanami. I assume they’re going to take her with them. They wouldn’t have brought her here, only to ditch her during the escape. Kresevich had to know the shit was going to hit the fan. They were getting ready for it, I think.”

“What’s your point?”

“My point? We have time. They’re going to load her onto a big ass plane at the airport.”