Z. Apocalypse

by Steve Cole

  ‘Think . . . so . . .’ Adam’s heart slapped mushily against his ribs while his dad tore the electrodes from his clammy skin.

  ‘What happened?’ Colonel Oldman sounded cross. ‘Was that the end of the simulation?’

  ‘I made it end,’ said Adam’s dad tersely. ‘You saw how distressed Adam was. I should never have let him do it. That sim was meant for animal minds, not human.’

  The lights glared on again; Adam flinched, screwed up his eyes.

  ‘It’s clearly a training program for Z. beasts,’ Mr Adlar went on, ‘honing their instincts, teaching them how best to hunt and kill people.’

  When Oldman spoke again it was more quietly. ‘On the screen . . . Were we seeing . . . some kind of pterodactyl?’

  ‘Yes . . .’ Adam barely recognized the tortured croak in his throat as his own. ‘Dad, I was that thing . . . Flying. I was flying . . .’

  ‘I’m here, Adam, it’s OK.’

  ‘I wanted to kill . . . I was hunting people . . . had to kill everyone . . . everyone left.’

  Oldman peered down at him. ‘Everyone left after what?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Adam whispered. ‘Something bad. Something terrible . . .’

  ‘Easy,’ Mr Adlar whispered, trying to settle Adam back down on the couch. He sighed and looked up at Oldman. ‘I should never have agreed to this.’

  ‘You had no choice,’ Oldman said softly, the assurance sounding somehow sinister. ‘Now, while I take this video footage to the Pentagon, I’d like you to meet with some of my colleagues on the National Security Council. They want to speak to you about Geneflow.’

  ‘Right now?’ Mr Adlar was growing exasperated. ‘We haven’t even checked into our hotel yet.’

  ‘Bear with me, Mr Adlar.’ Oldman gave him a tight smile. ‘Recent evidence has raised fresh questions. I just hope to God we can answer them.’ He turned and opened the door. ‘I’ll have someone escort you to a car in just a few minutes. They’ll drive you to DC, and back again afterwards.’

  ‘Back here?’ Mr Adlar said sharply. But he was talking to shadows; Oldman had gone.

  Adam puffed out a breath. ‘Did he mean DC as in Washington DC?’

  ‘And National Security Council as in the men and women who advise the president of the United States of America on what to do in a national crisis.’ Mr Adlar sat down on the couch beside him, looking dazed. ‘Nice to feel wanted, isn’t it?’

  Adam closed his eyes and sighed. ‘It’s the biggest thrill of my life.’

  An hour later, Adam sat in the back of the black SUV, watching through tinted windows the interstate clog with cars. From the overhead signs they had to be nearing Washington DC.

  About time, Adam thought. He had been playing his 3DS for much of the journey, but the constant stopping and starting of the car through the thickening traffic was beginning to make him feel sick. Besides, he reflected, once you’d played Ultra-Reality, even the most sophisticated hand-held or console felt uninspiring by comparison. It had been getting harder and harder to lose himself in gameplay, to shut out his problems in the real world.

  And now he was on his way to confront them head on.

  They turned from 13th Street onto I Street Northwest – the city was a gridwork of letters and numbers and Adam counted three stately parks within six blocks. It felt a very tidy and grown-up city; a serious place for serious people.

  ‘Whereabouts is the meeting?’ Adam asked his father beside him.

  ‘The Eisenhower Executive Office Building, just west of the White House. Saw the outside on a school trip once.’ Mr Adlar looked at him. ‘How’re you doing now?’

  ‘I’m OK. Just wondering what this new evidence is all about.’

  His dad considered him. ‘We know that Geneflow have been creating living terror weapons, and uploading human minds into the bodies of beasts. Perhaps now we’ll find out why.’

  Adam nodded solemnly. ‘Can’t believe they’re using pterodactyls.’

  His dad shrugged. ‘They’ve re-engineered T. rexes and raptors – perhaps they’ve experimented with flying reptiles too?’ He placed a hand on Adam’s and squeezed. ‘Try not to worry.’

  Uh-huh. Right. Adam tried to accept the intended reassurance, but all he could feel was the clamminess in his dad’s grip. Time to change the subject. ‘This traffic’s a nightmare. Are we going to be late?’

  Mr Adlar checked his watch. ‘No, we’re good. The meeting doesn’t start until seven, we still have a good forty minutes . . .’

  But as the SUV turned onto 17th Street, there was a thunderous explosion from somewhere ahead. Their driver swore as the car jerked to a halt, almost crashing into the vehicle in front. The traffic ahead was gridlocked, and horns were blaring.

  Then Adam realized people were getting out of their cars, pointing up at the skies or running for cover. He felt a sick feeling rise in his stomach. ‘Dad, what’s going on?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Mr Adlar looked grave. ‘Driver, do you see anything?’

  The driver’s reply was lost beneath another boom that rocked the entire street like an earthquake. Crowds of pedestrians swarmed past in the opposite direction, the air filling with their footfalls and terrified babble.

  Adam craned his neck to look upwards, following their line of sight. He saw a massive shadow streak overhead, something impossibly huge in the sky – and his heart stabbed with sudden recognition.

  ‘Zed?’ Adam gripped his seat. ‘Dad, I think it’s Zed! Did you see?’

  His dad stared up at the clouds. ‘Zed? Are you sure—?’

  ‘Like he was in stealth mode . . .!’

  Memories and emotions churned inside Adam. He had spent a good ten days trapped in the company of Zed, the first of Geneflow’s prehistoric recreations – a true-life T. rex who had been force-evolved all the way to a Z. rex, the Z standing for Zenithsaurus, or lizard at its highest point in plain language.

  ‘Geneflow cloned Zed, remember?’ Mr Adlar was staring out of his own window. ‘Whatever’s up there, I think there’s more than one . . .’

  Adam squinted against the evening sunlight. Geneflow had given Zed the gift of adaptive camouflage – a chemical sweat secreted by the skin that deflected light and left the massive beasts practically invisible. A blur of brickwork as they sped past buildings, or ripples in the blue as they swooped down from the sky – these were the covert clues that a creature was coming.

  And with horror, Adam saw that a cluster of hazy shadows was now descending on DC. So many . . . like an army . . .

  ‘Dad—!’ he began, but the sudden shattering sound of breaking glass drowned him out as a flying pickup truck crashed through the window of the McDonald’s opposite. Screams, panic and chaos built all around as one car mounted the pavement and reversed wildly, trying to get away, ploughing a path through the hapless pedestrians. Adam hid his eyes and heard a strained, authoritative voice above the din of the crowd as the driver switched on the car radio and sent the volume screaming with a sudden twist on the dial.

  ‘ . . . asked to avoid the area of Pennsylvania Avenue where reports are coming in of a series of explosions in the vicinity of the White House . . .’

  There was a supersonic rush of air and another blast went off, in the sky this time – a defensive missile, a strike back, swiftly followed by more. For a second, an enormous black silhouette, almost like an aircraft, was revealed in the blazing flare of light and heat. Half blinded, Adam struggled to make sense of the image before a haze of black smoke covered the area. A keening cry tore through the thick smoke before more explosions went off, and the throaty judder of helicopters added to the cacophony.

  Everything was happening so fast. Adam realized his dad was reaching forward, shaking the driver’s shoulder, shouting over the clamour that he release the safety locks so they could open the doors.

  We’re going outside into that? Adam’s instinct was to huddle down in his seat, to cover his head and hide—

  The windscreen expl
oded inwards as something chrome and gleaming smashed into the front of the SUV at high speed. A motorbike . . . The driver took the deadly impact, speared by the handlebars, his whole seat shoved backwards, trapping Adam’s legs. Adam screamed, more in terror than pain. The dead rattle of gunfire reverberated down the street and met with a deep, animal roar of defiance. Shaking with fear Adam felt a pressure under his armpits, saw his dad, white faced and desperate, straining to pull him clear.

  ‘What do we do?’ Adam clung to his father, not looking at the front of the car as he wriggled his bruised legs free and curled up helplessly on the back seat. ‘Dad, what?’

  ‘I don’t know what’s happening. But we can’t stay here.’ His dad wrestled the passenger door open. More and more people were swarming out of the buildings now, evacuating in blind panic. As Mr Adlar started hauling Adam out of the SUV he was barged aside by the scrum of people. Adam tumbled to the ground with a gasp. Someone stepped on his hand and another trod his face against the asphalt. He cried out, rolling under the SUV for protection. Panting for breath, he stared out at the narrow strip of crowded ground, watching for his dad’s scruffy loafers to appear. ‘Dad! Where are you?’ He’ll never find me under here . . .

  Terrified, Adam pulled himself out roadside and scrambled to his feet. Smoke had veiled the street, choking him as he tried to shout over the rattle of artillery. Eyes streaming, he climbed over the crumpled bonnet of the SUV and jumped up onto the roof, waving his arms wildly, praying his dad would see him.

  Something else did.

  A shrieking cry behind him made Adam spin round. Something slammed into him, flung him across the street. Time seemed to slow, a brick wall came rushing towards him—

  Then Adam was jerked sharply upwards, his ribs nearly breaking, his dangling feet skimming the stonework. Fear almost stopped his heart. I’m not falling, he realized, I’m being carried.

  For a second, Adam was back in the Geneflow simulation, soaring through a ruined landscape. Oh my God, this thing’s got to be a pterosaur.

  And I’m clamped in its jaws.

  Adam tried to shout out, helpless as the creature carried him like an owl might carry a mouse. This thing’s going to eat me, it’s going to drop me, it’s . . .

  But then he caught sight of the true scale of the carnage below, and his panic turned to shock. The White House was in ruins. The roof was caved in. The colonnades were shattered. The immaculate lawns were churned up like World War I trenches. Adam couldn’t take it in. This can’t be happening. It all seemed unreal, like an elaborate movie effect.

  Smoke or gas wreathed the ruins. The iconic fountain’s waters were littered with debris and bodies. Adam picked out the hazy traces of four or five colossal beasts in stealth mode rampaging through the grounds, each as big as a bungalow. I can sort-of see them ’cause I know what I’m looking for, but those people down there . . . Secret Service men, Marines, police, Adam couldn’t tell them apart from this height. But he could see they were all being killed.

  A burning helicopter spiralled down from nowhere and exploded in a tornado of flame. Adam flailed in the fierce heat, screamed as the blast revealed a hunched, enormous beast, black and reptilian. Then it blurred and turned invisible again, smashing the wreckage of the ’copter towards the soldiers at its feet.

  Adam was almost grateful when the creature that held him darted swiftly away. But the horrifying scene played on in his memory, even as the panic-ridden streets passed dizzily far below. ‘What do you want?’ he bellowed, clinging to his invisible captor’s hard, scaly flesh. ‘Where are we going?’

  Suddenly a wide, flat rooftop came into view below him. As it rushed closer, Adam was released, tossed aside like a rag. He fell onto white concrete, palms stinging, moaning with fear. His heart rocked his whole body with its wild pulse. The explosions had stopped; there were only sirens now, and the deafening roar of aircraft engines as a fighter jet shot past. So shaken he could hardly move, Adam crawled on all fours towards the low parapet that ringed in the roof. But there was no fire escape, no way down.

  Nowhere else to go.

  Only then did Adam turn to face the thing that had caught him, feeling as he did in nightmares when the final crisis was near, the game-over moment that would rip him awake.

  And then his captor became visible.

  It was a giant, birdlike monster with a body as big as an elephant and a face that was little more than a vast beak – easily big enough to swallow him whole with room to spare. The beast’s upper jaw ended in a kind of circular crest, crusted in blood. Its eyes shone black, each the size of a dinner plate. But it was the thing’s wings that held him transfixed – colossal sails of scaly flesh rippling over an intricate framework of bone. Stretched out as it was, its wingspan was easily greater than a light aircraft.

  Not just a pterosaur. A Z. pterosaur.

  Adam let out a long shaky breath, transfixed by the meat-hook talons on its feet, the way its chest rose and fell and the great jaws twitched. Abruptly the creature folded its wings against its scaly flanks with machine-like precision and – K-KLAKK! – closed its jaws. Splayed teeth protruded top and bottom like huge spikes about the mouth. The bulk of the beast’s body tapered into a thick sinewy tail – a diamond-shaped flap of skin at the end lending it the look of a rudder.

  The beast was real. Impossible but real.

  And, oh my God, it could kill me in a second.

  Instead the creature stared, slowly tilting its head to one side, eyes unblinking. Fixed on him.

  ‘Can . . .’ Adam’s voice died. He licked his lips, tried again. ‘Can you understand me?’

  A ghostly chittering built somewhere in the belly of the beast. Its jaws began to open.

  Then suddenly the creature went into spasm. It flung its wings wide open, rearing up as if angry or afraid. One wing smashed into a brick chimney, flattening it in a storm of rubble, and a weird, keening cry erupted from its jaws.

  Adam’s fate seemed measured in moments as, eyes narrowed and claws raised, the pterosaur-beast launched itself straight at him.

  Chapter 3: In the Aftermath

  ADAM THREW HIS hands up in front of his face – as if that could save him. But the Z. pterosaur twisted away from him and crashed instead into the rooftop parapet, smashing it to bits. A trickle of watery blood ran from one of its eyes as it lay twitching in the rubble, gasping wildly.

  It’s sick, Adam thought. Despite his fear, a little sympathy stirred somewhere inside him. Maybe it’s crazy. That’s why it didn’t kill me.

  Whatever, I’m not sticking around.

  Adam’s legs felt so unsteady he could barely stand, but he skirted round the creature until he reached the door to the roof-access stairwell. It was locked. He pulled out his mobile, but there was no signal; everyone in the whole of DC must be calling or being called. He heard a helicopter somewhere overhead, wondered if it might see him. The pterosaur was still twitching, one wing splayed out awkwardly, like a colossal broken umbrella. If it wakes up and sees me . . .

  Suddenly the door in front of him burst open. Adam yelled out in shock, jumped away—

  And was snatched up by his father and crushed into a hug. ‘Ad! Oh my God, Adam . . .’

  ‘Dad!’ Adam winced and pulled away, his ribs still bruised. ‘How’d you find me?’

  ‘When we were separated I went to get help. The police tried to evacuate me, then I saw you being carried through the air . . .’ He trailed off, slack-jawed as he took in the giant bird-creature sprawled against the canopy. ‘Jeez, Adam, that thing had you—?’

  ‘Don’t move!’ An armed police officer, panting for breath, appeared in the doorway, covering Adam and his dad with a handgun.

  Still dazed, Mr Adlar looked set to protest when another officer pushed past the first and grabbed him, bundling him onto the ground. ‘Hands behind your head!’

  ‘Get off him!’ Adam pointed to the pterosaur. ‘It’s that thing you want to point your guns at!’

 
The first officer was already gawking at the sprawled monstrosity. ‘What in the name of sweet heaven . . .?’

  ‘I don’t believe it.’ The second cop backed away, horrified. ‘This is crazy. This can’t be happening.’

  ‘It just did. Deal with it.’ Mr Adlar got up shakily. ‘What happened to that thing, Ad?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Adam murmured. ‘It picked me up, flew over the White House, brought me here and just . . . threw a fit.’ He swallowed hard. ‘D’you think it’s going to die?’

  Mr Adlar shook his head. ‘I have no idea.’

  The second officer couldn’t stop staring at the creature. ‘What . . . what are we supposed to do?’

  His question hung in the air. Adam wondered if anyone in the world had the answer.

  Numb hours brushed past, and Adam felt like the whole of DC – a shell-shocked mess. Unsurprisingly, their reason for being in town – the meeting at the Eisenhower Executive building – was a write-off, since the whole area had been evacuated in the wake of what the media had dubbed the ‘White House Incident’.

  As the time inched towards eleven, Adam and his father were waiting in a temporary shelter set up in one of the city’s many Metro stations. Colonel Oldman had at least alerted the authorities that the Adlars were not to be processed like regular witnesses and evacuees, they were to be detained ‘comfortably’ until someone in charge got around to them. That meant Adam got to sit in a creaky chair in the back of a small office. Hundreds of people were crammed onto the platforms in the cavernous station, bewildered and hungry, waiting to get home.

  Home. Adam kept trying to imagine his safe, warm bedroom, but his thoughts wouldn’t shift from the thing that had taken him. The darkness in its eyes . . . The horrific ruins of the White House . . .

  Speculation had quickly mounted that the President of the United States had not been evacuated in time, that he’d been killed – assassinated. And so he’d swiftly appeared on television in a brief press conference, condemning the ‘cowardly’ terror attack, promising harsh retribution once the perpetrators were unmasked, lamenting the hundreds of lives lost, but refusing to comment on the nature of the attack. So far, the word ‘dinosaur’ or ‘pterosaur’ hadn’t featured in a single news bulletin; the Z. beasts’ camouflage powers had cloaked them well, and Adam supposed the two cops had been sworn to secrecy.