Z. Rex

by Steve Cole

  I have to run for it, he thought.

  Then he pictured again what had happened to Sedona, and imagined how far he’d get.

  In the end, Zed settled the matter. He grabbed Adam in both claws and thrust him upward onto his back. Terrified, Adam clung to a knobbly ridge on the dinosaur’s back and managed to swing one leg over like a jockey, perching just above Zed’s wings. Then Zed reached back, grabbed the flopping arms of the hazard-suit and used nimble claws to tie them tightly around his broad, scaly throat. That had the effect of securing Adam in a kind of makeshift harness, his body pressed up against the back of Zed’s long neck as he clung on for dear life.

  “I’m so gonna die,” Adam moaned to himself.

  The two rucksacks scraped and bounced over the rocky ground as Zed strode back toward the cave mouth.

  “Don’t you understand?” Adam shouted. “You can’t do this! You’re gonna kill us both!” The bomb still lay close to the entrance—and it seemed Adam would be proved right sooner than he’d thought as Zed stooped, picked up the explosives and studied them carefully.

  “Zed . . . please put that down,” Adam begged him, hearing the scratch of claws against wires. “Please, please put it down before you—”

  The bomb made an ominous, electronic belch, and the blue numbers glowed back into being. There were now thirty seconds clicking down on the display.

  “Get rid of it!” Adam almost sobbed. “C’mon, you can’t know what you’re doing. . . .”

  Zed calmly placed the bundle down beside the entrance and strode out into the cold night darkness. His wings unfurled like broad sails, lifted to the rising wind. Then Adam gasped and gripped on as, with a sickening lurch, his unlikely mount launched skyward. Hold on, he willed himself. Hold on as hard as you can. The world tumbled and spun about him as they climbed up into the starry blackness. The wind teased tears from his eyes as they went higher, higher over the crumpled shadows of the wilderness park.

  The bomb detonated with a roiling bloom of fire. The deafening boom of the blast left Adam’s ears screaming and his heart in his mouth, as the explosion consumed rock, soil and air with the same greed and vigor. Adam saw the entrance to the abandoned lab collapse, entombed beneath tons of rubble.

  Then he did know what he was doing, Adam realized.

  Just what are you, Zed?

  The skull-like moon watched balefully as Adam was swept away from the heat and the light on the dinosaur’s back, deeper and deeper into the cold, star-scattered darkness.

  10

  FLIGHT

  I’m getting used to feeling scared. It’s not so bad.

  So Adam had been telling himself, over and over. But hurtling through the skies, clinging to the back of an impossible flesh-eating monster, he knew the lie for the total garbage it was. Each flight was terrifying, from the first lurching takeoff to the final jarring touchdown.

  It turned out that Zed could fly incredibly fast over extraordinary distances. But such progress came at a cost. Within minutes of being airborne, Adam would lose all feeling in his face and fingers as the night wind whipped against his skin. His perch on the monster’s back felt precarious at best, but with the high altitudes robbing him of breath, his head kept spinning, and waves of nausea rolled through him. It was like being trapped on the world’s most evil roller coaster for hours at a time with only a big elastic band holding you on board.

  Even so, he didn’t dare complain too loudly. There was no one to listen except Zed, who was doing all the real work, flapping those incredible wings of his hour after hour. It seemed the plan was to rest by day and fly by night so as not to be seen; clearly, not even a Z. rex could stay invisible for hours at a time while flying at ridiculous speeds.

  Adam soon discovered that even intense fear couldn’t hold off boredom indefinitely. With no one to talk to, he felt as if he were going quietly crazy. He worried about his dad, thought about his friends, about the way their numbers and texts were stored inside his dead phone. A little electronic tomb that held the remnants of his old, predictable life, meaningless in this new one.

  After the second night’s flying, they camped out beside an enormous lake as the dawn rose.

  Adam rested on the deserted beach, sore, sour and shivering, watching Zed as he built a rocky shelter next to a hillside. The dinosaur worked quickly, shifting boulders with his brawny arms and adjusting their position with his jaws. It was clearly no casual arrangement. Zed layered the stones with mud and brushwood and kept crawling in and out, as though he were testing his shelter not just for cover but for camouflage too.

  He doesn’t want to be spotted while he sleeps, Adam realized. Vaguely he wondered how far he might run before the dinosaur woke up and came looking for him—and what punishments he might receive. He felt completely helpless. Even if he found other people nearby who might help him escape, what good would it do? Zed could kill them all, just as he’d killed Bateman’s “friends.”

  Adam curled up on the grass and drifted into an exhausted sleep.

  Around midday, Adam woke with a start to find Zed emerging from his hideaway, scenting the air. Stealthily, the dinosaur padded toward the beach, shimmering into invisibility as he went.

  Adam watched in uneasy wonder. If he squinted he could make out the faint edges of Zed’s form ghosting in the sunlight, but only because he knew what he was looking for. And he saw that the dinosaur was stalking toward a group of large, dark cormorants. “Like a stealth fighter closing on its target,” Adam muttered. The birds shifted about uncertainly, as if sensing some kind of danger, but not its direction.

  Then suddenly Zed snapped back into view, jaws lunging, tail swiping, huge claws raking the air with deadly precision. A few of the large birds clattered away, escaping over water. Most were not so lucky. Shaken, Adam could see about a dozen dead or injured on the shore. One by one they vanished into Zed’s jaws, swallowed whole.

  The dinosaur smoothed out the bloody, churned-up sand with one massive foot, then turned and retreated to his shelter without a glance at his unwilling companion.

  Aching too much to sleep any longer, Adam passed the afternoon gathering sticks and tinder in the hope of starting a fire. Then he started searching for matches in one of the rucksacks. He found instead the mysterious files Zed had collected and packed carefully at the bottom.

  Why had Zed wanted Sedona to explain those files to Adam? If only Bateman hadn’t turned up when he did, Adam guessed he’d know a lot more about whatever mad, mutant experiment had been going on at Ponil—and how his dad figured in things. Instead . . .

  He shook his head to clear the horrible memories. “Where are the stupid matches?”

  As if at the sound of Adam’s voice, Zed crawled out from his shelter. Adam backed away as the dinosaur approached his pile of dry grass and sticks, watched as the giant creature struck his massive claws against a rock and set great sparks jumping. As the tinder started to smoke, Zed carefully pursed his lips and blew gently enough not to scatter the kindling. The fire was blazing in moments.

  A regular Boy Scout, Adam thought wryly. He shuffled closer to the flames, but they couldn’t seem to touch the coldness inside him. How does Zed know stuff like this? Dinosaurs never made fire. . . . He caught himself. Of course, dinosaurs had never performed kickboxing routines they picked up from a video game either. Or talked. And since when had they defused bombs?

  Adam bit his lip. The truth of that night had been flickering at the back of his mind. It wasn’t Bateman who had loused up at all. Zed had defused the bomb and then set it off after they left so Bateman would think it had worked after all . . . that he and Zed were dead and buried inside.

  He stared in awe at the dinosaur beside him. “You’re a devious wee monster, aren’t you?”

  Zed made no response, staring at the fire as if transfixed by his creation.

  Yeah, devious. Clever. A killer.

  And edging closer to civilization.

  Wearily, Adam reached into one of t
he rucksack’s side pockets and unfolded the map of the world that Zed had torn down from the wall. “Wonder where we are now?”

  Abruptly, Zed leaned forward and stretched out an arm toward him. Adam flinched as the point of the dinosaur’s index claw tapped down on the map with precision.

  “Ontario?” Adam read, as Zed retreated to his original position. “How would you know that? I mean . . . are you navigating by the stars? You can’t come with built-in sat-nav. . . .” He shook his head. “Where did you come from?”

  The dinosaur seemed not to hear. His dark eyes were fixed on the fire once more, reflecting the flames’ pattern and dance.

  That night, Adam decided to wear the gas mask he’d packed, to ward off the chill and keep the sting of the wind from his eyes. But it did little to improve his comfort, and the rubbery smell didn’t help his nausea any.

  He rested his cheek against Zed’s neck. Even through the rubber, Adam could feel the dinosaur’s knots of muscle bunch and relax with every sweep of those powerful wings. He closed his eyes, wished he could sleep and wake to find the journey was over. Or better, that this whole nightmare had been exactly that—a bad dream. Maybe he’d had a fever or something, and would wake to find his dad smiling down at him. “Quite a temperature you had there, Ad, but now it’s—”

  Falling.

  Adam jerked awake to find himself in free fall, tumbling through the night, arms and legs windmilling helplessly. For a dizzying moment he couldn’t tell up from down or ground from sky. The sleeves of the hazard-suit flapped uselessly around him in the fierce gale of his descent; the knots Zed had tied in them must have come loose.

  He screamed through his mask, a raw shriek of horror.

  Buffeted by the wind, turning in midair, Adam saw a dark shadow rushing up to meet him and braced himself for the impact. But the next moment, hard pressure clamped down on his rib cage. His body jerked—and suddenly he was lifted upward in the rough grip of two massive claws. The sprawling shadow was above him, all but swamping the stars as its huge wings beat violently through the night.

  Adam felt sick with shock and relief. The killer dinosaur had just saved his life.

  Sure he saved you, a mocking voice said. He’s not taking you on this little trip for nothing.

  He’s got plans, and he needs you in one piece. For now.

  By the time dawn had begun to bleed away the blackness of night, Adam could spare no thoughts for the beauty or the wonder of the sunrise over the Adirondack mountains, only a searing sense of gratitude that the ordeal would soon be over for a few more hours.

  Zed touched down beside a fast-flowing creek that trailed through a rocky valley like so much black ribbon. He and Adam crashed out in the shelter of the sheer mountainside.

  Adam refilled the empty water bottles from the stream. He had never felt more exhausted. His ribs were bruised mud-black. Every movement hurt him and his muscles felt ready to peel away from his bones. And his thoughts kept jerking back to his free-fall flight. The way Zed had swooped down and snatched him from certain death.

  He glanced across at the dinosaur, who lay curled up on his side, his wings tightly folded under his bony back. “I thought I was dead last night,” Adam told him. “That was quite a move you pulled off.”

  Zed didn’t react, his breathing shallow, black eyes dull.

  “Guess I should say thanks, huh?” Adam screwed the cap onto one of the refilled bottles and snorted softly. “Yeah. Thanks to my dad. Thanks for dragging me into this whole stupid situation.” He shook his head miserably, flapped the stretched, grimy sleeves of the hazard-suit. “Oh, Dad—”

  “Dad,” Zed rasped suddenly. “W . . . X . . . Y . . . Z.”

  Adam looked at him warily. “What’s the alphabet got to do with anything?”

  The creature tried again. “Y . . . zed.”

  “Yeah. Dad changed the way he said it, thought I might get confused. Must’ve thought I was stupid.”

  Zed went on muttering in his hoarse sandpaper voice. “Y . . . Z.”

  Adam looked at his disheveled reflection in the water of the creek. “Why me?” he whispered.

  To Adam, the flight from the Adirondacks to Newfoundland felt like the longest yet, through driving rain and gusting wind. The heavens decided to put on a light show, with toothy forks of lightning zigzagging past over the forests of Maine. Thunder ripped all around. The clouds were like giant, black timbers stacked in front of the stars.

  Adam had hurtled on through it all, hunched up on Zed’s back as those wings doggedly knifed at the rain-lashed night.

  Now here he was with dusk tugging down the shutters on the fourth day, perched on a desolate crag that stuck out from the churning Atlantic like a bad tooth, staring out to sea. The sun was finally shining, but Adam still felt cold, damp and rotten.

  Zed had hardly stirred all day, except to go shark fishing around noon. He had an unusual technique. First, he scraped a daggered claw along his muscular forearm. Then he plunged the bleeding flesh into the sea, and stood waiting, motionless and alert, for as long as it took.

  Adam shuddered to remember the sight of Zed snatching his arm from the sea with an enormous shark hanging from the end of it. It had flapped about in a frenzy, refusing to relinquish its scaly catch even as it vanished down inside Zed’s bulging throat like an olive sucked from a cocktail stick. A minute or so later, Zed spat out some bloody lumps back into the water—and so attracted more sharks.

  It was typical of the dinosaur’s strategies, Adam decided—intelligent, brutal and entirely successful.

  “My stomach’s grown a lot stronger since I met you,” Adam reflected, watching the resting goliath. He supposed that the fact he was able to make jokes about stuff must prove he was getting used to Zed’s existence. Then again, it was tricky to go on disbelieving when you were hog-tied to the evidence, night after night.

  But it was one thing to accept the existence of talking, flying dinosaurs, another to have to sit so close to those giant jaws, to have those black, unblinking eyes fixed on you hungrily.

  They stood on their tiny pinnacle of rock together, prisoner and jailer.

  “How’re you feeling, Zed?” Adam said suddenly. “Those burns on your face look like they’re getting better.”

  The creature didn’t react. Adam persisted, craving some kind of acknowledgment. “I ache everywhere. But I’m sort of getting used to it.” He noticed a thick trickle of crimson running freely from the shark bites on Zed’s arm. “Hey, you’re still bleeding from earlier. Doesn’t it hurt?”

  Zed regarded him, suspicion in his eyes.

  Adam wondered if here was a possible way to get the animal on his side. “We should maybe try to bandage that cut. It could get infected.” He rummaged in one of the rucksacks for the small navy sweater he’d been using for a towel and pillow. “I could use this to stop the bleeding.”

  As he held up the sweater, the dinosaur growled in warning. Adam was about to back down, but knew an opportunity like this might not come again. If he could only win the creature’s trust, prove that he had some usefulness over and above whatever Zed had planned for him . . . if he could make this thing start to think of him as a friend. . . .

  “You saved me before,” Adam said quietly. “Let me help you now.”

  The dinosaur shifted uncertainly, bared his teeth. Adam’s legs started to tremble. Come on, he told himself, you’ve been crushed up against him for the last who-knows-how-long. He hasn’t eaten you yet.

  Yeah, but you weren’t walking right into his jaws like this before.

  Holding his breath, fumbling like an idiot, he placed the sweater around the beast’s gory arm as gently as he could. Again, Zed made that low warning rattle in the back of his throat. Trying not to whimper, Adam tied the sleeves of the sweater in a crude knot and backed hurriedly away.

  Zed stared down blankly at the dark woolen accessory he had just acquired. Adam bit his lip as an unexpected smile twitched at his cheeks. It looked as though
the dinosaur was wearing a big blue bow.

  “There we go,” Adam murmured, turning to hide his amusement. “Much better.” He reached into one of the rucksacks and pulled out the crumpled map. “Wonder where we are now?”

  Zed reached over with his bandaged arm and gestured to somewhere around Newfoundland.

  “Really? So, only about twenty-five hundred miles of Atlantic Ocean between us and dry land, then.” Adam closed his eyes, lacking the will even to summon a hysterical laugh. “We’ll hit Ireland first. Little hop from there, and we’re home. Easy.” He blew out a long sigh. “Still, I guess we can fly by day as well, now—there’ll be no one below to see us. If you’re up to it, I mean. And if we can survive on a gallon of fresh water between us . . .”

  Adam trailed off as Zed turned from him, batting one loose arm of the sweater bandage like an overgrown kitten playing with wool.

  “If we do get to Scotland,” Adam began again, “you’ll be going after the people who hurt you, right? To go so far, you’ve got to be.” He took a deep breath. “Just remember, my dad was only at Fort Ponil for eight days. He was forced to work there.” Just like you’re forcing me to stay with you, he thought. “He would never have wanted to hurt you, Zed. They made him do it.”

  Zed lay down and stared out over the water. “No,” he growled.

  “Yes!” Adam insisted. “And so I want to get back at them too, Zed. Geneflow Solutions has messed up everything in my life. I don’t know what you want from me, but if I can help you get back at them, I will.”

  This time, the huge reptile made no reply.

  “You must be so tired,” Adam went on nervously. “I mean, to put yourself through this kind of strain, night after night . . . how do you do it?” He hesitated, as curiosity got the better of fear. “It’s almost as if you were made for this kind of life. What were you made for?”