Z. Raptor

by Steve Cole

  So even the one he took away was bad, Adam realized.

  “Now our hopes lie with the Brutes’ eggs.” Josephs turned to a big TV screen. “Or perhaps with this Velociraptor you’ve adopted.”

  “Loner?” Adam said automatically. “What are you doing to him?”

  Josephs grinned. “Is that what you call him? Loner?”

  “It’s what he calls himself. He knows he’s different from the other raptors.” He couldn’t resist the chance to goad her. “It’s Loner who’s really messed up your experiment—maybe with a little help from my brain waves in the Think-Send you’ve been using. Your own creation turned against you.”

  He wanted to see Josephs dismayed or angry, but she simply looked at Haskins. “I honestly thought this Vel was another failure, at first. But if he really remembers his past . . .”

  “It could mean a breakthrough far ahead of schedule,” Haskins agreed.

  “Remembers what past?” Adam asked.

  “Never mind Loner.” Chen nodded to the unconscious Harm. “I want to know why you’ve abducted this kid, and Lisa Brannigan and all the others. Why you took death row cons from across the United States—and what you did to them.” He strained forward angrily. “I want to know what I did by letting you go, what I helped you put together here.”

  “So you can pull it back down again, single-handed?” Josephs seemed amused. “I’ve brought you here to give me answers. You must tell me more about Loner, as you call him. I want to know exactly how he has helped you. I want you to describe his behavior and his abilities.”

  “What about your spy cams in the raptors?” Adam asked. “Haven’t you seen for yourselves?”

  She waved to the large screen. “We’ve been monitoring the different packs through camera implants in the alpha males and females. Loner here fell sick and was shunned by his pack, so he has escaped scrutiny.”

  “Lucky him,” Chen muttered. “We’re not helping you, Sammy.”

  “Not even if I agree to help you?” Josephs asked. “I’m a scientist, not a murderer. Cooperate and I’ll turn you loose once the experiment is over. Leave you on this island.”

  Chen sneered. “And that’s not a death sentence?”

  “A real death sentence is handed out with good reason,” said Josephs. “That certainly was true in the case of Neil Richard Lowe.”

  Adam was lost. “Who?”

  “He’s a killer who preyed on those weaker than himself,” Josephs replied. “All our convicts had a strong predator’s instinct, of course. That was the whole point. But some took to the raptor simulations better than others. And some, like Mr. Lowe, were clearly in a league of their own.”

  “I played that simulation,” said Adam. “Why make people pretend to be raptors?”

  Josephs looked at him. “For the day when they would become raptors.”

  Adam’s blood froze. “Neil Richard Lowe . . .” He pictured the high-score table he’d seen in the simulator, one of the names shining in his memory: LOWE, N.

  Without even thinking, his mind pushed the word and letters together into a pattern.

  Lowe, N. And an R for Richard.

  Loner.

  “Oh, no.” Adam fought against the tears of helplessness he could feel bunching in his throat. “No, no, no . . .”

  “Get out of here,” Chen said hoarsely. “I’m not buying that. We saw the bone pit. We saw the remains of those cons.”

  “You saw the remains of their bodies,” Josephs reminded him. “Their minds had already been uploaded to our computer model, adapted for our purposes, and then downloaded into the original raptor embryos.”

  “That . . . that’s why you stole the brain-map research from Mindcorp?” Adam felt sick. He remembered the deformed, hunchbacked Brute shouting at Loner in the jungle—it hadn’t been ordering him to kneel low. It was shouting “Neil Lowe.” Somehow it had made the connection. And when it had picked on Harm—sweet Harmony, perfect Harmony—and said “you’re mine . . .”

  It really did know her, he realized. That thing was all that was left of Harm’s father. And it died trying to protect her.

  Adam was glad Harm was asleep right now.

  Chen looked sickened. “You tricked all those convicts into coming here, did that to them—and then fed them to the things they’d become?”

  “If we’d left them on death row, they would have been killed uselessly,” Josephs reminded him. “At least this way their deaths helped science.”

  “Bull! This isn’t science. It’s plain sick.”

  “We’re working to build a new society, Agent Chen,” Josephs argued, “free from murder, free from crime.”

  “Only because you’re choosing what they think,” Chen shot back, “as well as how they look.”

  “The sick raptors . . .” Adam stared at Josephs. “Are they the ones who remembered something of who they used to be?”

  “Yes.” She crossed to check the connections between Loner and the machines. “In most cases, it drove them mad. Although Mr. Lowe here was a psychopath even before his conversion. A master manipulator. One of the most dangerous men we had.”

  “But . . .” Chen looked way out of his depth. “Why would anyone want to take a human mind and put it in the body of a raptor?”

  “Because,” Josephs said, “ultimately it’s easier to change ourselves than to change our world.”

  Chen swore. “You want to change people into dinosaurs?”

  “Don’t be an imbecile,” said Josephs. “This is simply the first step on a long journey of evolution.” She crossed to the still-sleeping Harm and nudged her with the toe of her boot, exposing the gash on the back of the girl’s head. “See how fragile people are? You must know better than anyone, John; you’ve seen so much death in your time. ... So many people killed every day. So many people who still had so much to give.” She crossed back to the slab on which Loner lay. “Imagine if we could heal ourselves fully after trauma, the way a reptile or amphibian can. A lizard can regrow its tail; a salamander can regenerate whole limbs or even parts of its spine.” She smiled. “Like the Z. rex, our Z. raptors contain molecule machines that can rebuild damaged cells—but we have made the healing process more powerful still by incorporating amphibian DNA into their genetic makeup.”

  Chen sneered. “Taken from those things in the sea that wrecked my ship?”

  “The guardians are the result of some of our less successful experiments in DNA sampling,” Josephs conceded. “But put to excellent use here as attack animals.” She looked between Adam and Chen. “You still don’t grasp it, do you? Did it ever occur to you to look up what ‘gene flow’ even means? It’s the transfer of genetic material from one population to another; amphibians into reptiles—”

  “And humans into dinosaurs,” Adam whispered.

  “The dinosaurs thrived on Earth for hundreds of millions of years,” said Josephs. “We Homo sapiens face extinction after a few hundred thousand. Pollution, climate change, weapons of mass destruction—sooner or later, we must destroy either the planet or ourselves.”

  One of the female doctors, an Asian woman with pulled-back hair, joined in. “Global agreement to cut back on carbon emissions or reduce the stockpile of nuclear weapons can only delay the inevitable,” she insisted, like she was quoting some mad scientist handbook. “Humanity needs to adapt.” She looked at Josephs. “It needs strength and boldness of vision.”

  Josephs smiled approvingly. “Now that science has shown us that our bodies are simply vehicles for our genes, as a race we must take control of them and achieve our true potential—or suffer the consequences of our inaction.”

  Adam shook his head. “How does making two kinds of dinosaur fight each other to the death achieve anything?”

  “You’re missing the point entirely.” Josephs switched on a monitor set into a console beside Loner, and it began to fill with data. “Our original aim with the Z. rex project was to create a highly trained, obedient slave animal. When that beast dev
eloped free thought, however primitive, it suggested more exciting possibilities.”

  “Oh, I bet you just peed yourselves with excitement,” drawled Chen.

  “Our ultimate aim is to combine the human and dinosaur forms into a hybrid creature,” said Josephs, ignoring him. “The raptors are among the most intelligent dinosaurs, but it’s still not possible to upload a human personality into the brain of an animal and expect it to remain stable. We will have to manipulate many generations of raptor to achieve the proper balance. Evolution is a multilayered story.”

  Haskins nodded with enthusiasm. “Starting with the marriage of human ambition and bestial instinct.”

  Adam felt he was starting to understand. “You took the minds from human predators ’cause they were closest to animal predators.”

  “It was my job to assess the prisoners,” Haskins revealed. “They were split according to their IQ score and how they performed on the Ultra-Reality simulation.”

  “The smartest ones were made into Vels,” said Adam, “and the others became Brutes?”

  “Both raptor breeds were programmed with the instinct to feed human to their young at the first hatching.” Josephs gestured to Harm. “By keeping people like her prisoner—people we brought to the island—they would have the opportunity to study human behavior over a period of months, awakening unconscious connections within their minds . . . reminding them of their own human inheritance.”

  Chen shook his head in disgust. “All these men and women fighting so hard to stay alive . . . dragged here just to help along your sick experiment.”

  Haskins ignored him. “The Brutes had more of their humanity repressed than the Vels,” he said. “You’ve seen the difference, I’m sure. The Brutes would occasionally kill humans despite their conditioning. They’ve behaved like typical animals in the wild. But the Vels cooperated as a tribe, learned to use human tools and weapons . . . even went so far as to move their camp from the wilds outside into the base itself, make themselves fully at home in a human dwelling place.”

  Josephs glanced at the screen, which still showed a blurred view of Brute eggs. “Unfortunately, with their human traits closer to the surface, the Vels have proved more prone to mental breakdown.”

  Chen nodded. “Lucky for your ‘studies’ that your hidden door backed onto their sickroom, huh? If they’d been playing all-night card games in there, you might’ve found the coming and going harder.”

  “We had hoped the Vels’ offspring would prove more stable,” said Haskins. “But now we’ll never know.”

  “We can look to enhance and strengthen the human genes in the Brute hatchlings,” Josephs said to him. “What we learn from dissecting the brain of Loner could offer several shortcuts through the process.” She held up a sinister-looking surgical tool. “He’s survived the mental imbalance and seems to have come through with plenty of human traits intact—”

  “Just say you crack this crazy process of yours,” Chen said. “Do you really think anyone’s going to thank you for sticking their mind into one of these dinosaurs?”

  “When this technique is perfected, the finest scientific minds need never die,” Josephs proclaimed. “The bodies that house them will be close to indestructible—and should the worst happen can easily be uploaded again to a new form.”

  “This is all wrong!” Adam shouted.

  “It is simply radical and different, so you fear it instinctively. I suppose you feel that no one should have such power.” Her sympathetic smile hardened to a sneer. “Well, they do, now. And they will use it.”

  “But you don’t have to cut Loner open,” Adam protested. “Just talk to him.”

  “His cells will talk to me, clearly and honestly.” Josephs looked at Loner’s body on the slab. “Lowe lay here while we took his mind . . . now here he is again as we take his life.” She turned to the guard. “Ford, we’ve wasted enough time enlightening our guests. Take the children to my office.” She turned to the Asian woman. “Dr. Lee, once you’ve finished setting up here, start recording their impressions of Loner’s behavior. If they give you any trouble . . .”

  Dr. Lee looked unhappily down at the floor, but nodded.

  “As for Agent Chen . . .” Josephs shook her head. “Too dangerous. I think we’d best take you through the hidden door upstairs and let the Brutes find you. Give them one more for their feast.”

  “You just can’t let those monsters kill so many innocent people!” Chen shouted. The guard—Ford, Josephs had called him—hauled Chen roughly to his feet, but as he did so, Chen butted him in the stomach, shoving him back against Loner on the slab. Haskins ran forward to help restrain Chen, but the agent planted a boot in his stomach and sent him tumbling into a tray of instruments that clattered all over the tiled floor. The guard, staggering back from the slab, blasted Chen with the shock gun. With a high-pitched yell, Chen collapsed to the floor.

  Josephs stared at him, flustered and seething with anger. “Deal with him first, Ford. Do it.”

  Ford nodded, and Adam stared helplessly as the guard hauled Chen’s body out of the room and the door swung shut behind them.

  “Now.” Josephs glared down at Adam. “I trust you and the girl will prove a little more cooperative?”

  “Sam, wait.” Dr. Lee sounded concerned as she pointed to the screen. “What’s this?”

  Through the camera implanted in the alpha male Brute minding the makeshift hatchery, Adam recognized One Eye and the rangy female, the two Brutes who’d attacked Loner back by the bone pit. They bobbed their heads low, turned down their claws, acting passive. Then, without warning, they started trampling the eggs, cracking them open, stooping to devour the fleshy innards. The alpha Brute rushed to the attack, spitting acid at One Eye and slashing the smaller one with his claws.

  Haskins, still on his knees, was watching in horror. “What’re they doing?”

  “Those are the last of the eggs!” Josephs had bunched her fists. “If they’re destroyed, we’ll have no hatchlings for study at all!” She yanked a two-way radio from her lab coat. “Ford, come in. Come back.” She shook it crossly. “Damned batteries . . . Ford, this is Josephs; forget Chen, you’ve got to—” As the carnage on screen continued, she gave up on the radio and ran to the door, hurling it open and pursuing the guard down the corridor. “Ford! Ford, get back here!”

  But Adam saw that One Eye had something clamped in his clawed hand. Something small and metal. One Eye rammed it into the alpha Brute’s jaws. The point of view blurred as the beast staggered backward—and then the screen flared red before sputtering into static.

  Haskins seemed shell-shocked. “Was that a grenade?”

  Dr. Lee nodded. “Must’ve been taken from the armory. Explosion took out the cameras. . . .”

  “My cue to take out you.”

  Adam started at the sound, the now-familiar unearthly whisper. Again, as Loner jerked upright on the slab, his terrible injuries seemed all but healed. He looked stronger, more fearsome than ever.

  Haskins flinched. “What the—?”

  He’d barely said a word before the raptor swung his arm in a lethal arc, slicing open the man’s chest. Haskins fell soundlessly, eyes wide, a huge red patch spreading through his shirt.

  “You can’t be awake!” Dr. Lee backed away. “I gave you enough sedative to keep down an animal twice your size.”

  She grabbed one of the surgical tools. But as she lunged forward to use it, Loner kicked her into the blank screen on the wall so hard that glass and skull split open together. She slid down the wall, leaving a bloody trail on the whitewashed bricks.

  Just then Josephs re-entered. There was no sign of Ford.

  Loner loomed over Josephs.

  “Don’t kill her, Loner!” Adam shouted. “We need to know what else Geneflow is planning, where their other bases are.” He shut his eyes and covered his ears as Loner attacked.

  It was over quickly.

  Adam looked at the scarlet pool spreading beneath Josephs and fe
lt his stomach twist with nausea. Worse, Josephs’s eyes were open . . . and they were focused directly on Adam.

  “It’s all right,” she said in a ragged whisper. “I’m still alive. I won’t be killed quite so easily. . . .”

  She’s in shock, thought Adam, fear and revulsion clouding numbly inside him. She’s lost it.

  “I won’t be killed,” she whispered again. Then she grinned as a trickle of blood leaked from her mouth and her breathing stopped.

  Josephs was dead.

  21

  ME, KILLER

  Adam trembled as Loner reached behind him and cut his ropes with a flick of one claw. He rubbed his aching wrists, his mind reeling from all that had just happened, all he had learned. Since he’d washed up on the island, he’d been thinking of the raptor as another Zed, a misunderstood monster acting basically for good. But now he knew Loner’s true heritage.

  And alone with him, Adam was terrified.

  “It’s over now.” Loner lifted him gently onto the slab. “What is wrong?”

  “Nothing,” Adam whispered. Just what crimes did you commit to land you on death row?

  “Where is Chen?” Loner asked.

  “A guard took him up above to be given to the Brutes for the feast.”

  “With the eggs destroyed, there will be no feast. The prisoners are safe.” Loner glanced around. “The guard didn’t come back?”

  “Not yet.”

  “And Harm is still asleep?”

  “She hasn’t woken since the fire.” He looked into Loner’s lantern eyes. “Look—Lisa, David, Dr. Stone and the others . . . surely we need to—”

  “I told you, they’re not in danger anymore.” Loner kept his gaze fixed on Adam. “My followers have smashed the eggs and killed the other Brutes. They won’t harm the captive humans.”

  “Followers? You mean the one-eyed Brute and his girlfriend . . . they serve you?” Adam frowned. “But they attacked you yesterday. Half killed you.”

  “And I beat them,” Loner bragged. “That proved my power to them, made them willing to follow me. Especially once I’d killed their queen.”