Jurassic Dead 2: Z-Volution

by Rick Chesler

  “Something’s coming out of the mouth, Dad!” Sandi observed the behemoth even while backing away. It bothered Peter to take his eyes off the overall scene and instead focus on such details as what was in the mouth of the thing based on what one of his kids said, but he did in fact see movement in there and…holy crap!

  He watched in rapt disbelief as a couple of objects fell from the creature’s oral cavity and spilled out onto the kayak. But as he continued to watch, mouth agape, he could see that they were no mere objects that had been disgorged from the animal’s mouth—no! They were…people? He didn’t know how it could be possible, wondered for a fleeting moment if the water supply in the hotel had been spiked with some experimental drug by the government using its guests as lab rats, but after rubbing his eyes and taking a deep breath, he was all but certain. Human figures were dropping from the mouth of the…dinosaur—is that what that is? Impossible…

  The kayak capsized as two of the humans toppled onto it and began grappling with the paddler, who began shouting for help. Cell-phones were produced by passerbys who dialed 911—or took videos. The Jeffersons began backpedaling for higher ground, unable to rip their gazes from the ungodly manifestation playing out before them. The beast kept coming toward shore after plowing over the hapless paddler. As it neared the seawall, it picked up speed, rising higher in the water. They could see its broad back now, topped with a membranous sail supported by rigid spines. It looked large enough to propel a good-sized sailboat were it to be placed on a mast.

  Although, as Mr. Jefferson dared himself to look more closely at it, there was evidence of what he supposed might be damage: irregular holes in the sail; some were just thinning spots while others were completely missing the skin or membrane or whatever the heck it was. Greenish, sort of moldy-looking splotches covered most of it, but he supposed that might be from living in the water? Then he realized with a start that it was drawing very near to his family now and they had better move.

  “Kids, Pamela—run!”

  #

  A massive, webbed foot emerged from the water and landed firmly on the concrete walkway with an audible slap. As it emerged onto dry land, a few more of the bipedal forms slipped off of it and began to stagger pell-mell around the boardwalk. One more dropped from the gaping maw of the prehistoric-looking beast before it, too, stumbled off as if in search of something.

  People all over screamed in panic as the monstrous thing with its disgorged army of rotting humanoids took over the boardwalk. One young man stopped moving in order to take a cell-phone selfie with the beast in the background, and he was promptly knocked yards away with a vicious tail-slap from the dinosaur, which executed that movement surprisingly fast.

  Over by a cotton candy stand, two of the zombies had surrounded a young girl and snarled and gnashed the rotten stumps of what remained of their teeth. She was alone, her parents inside a T-shirt shop just behind the candy stand.

  At that moment, the first squad of National Guard soldiers who had already been dispatched from nearby on standby burst out onto the waterfront walkway.

  “Freeze or we shoot!” One of the soldiers yelled at the two humanoids near the girl, but this of course had no effect. The rest of the soldiers, meanwhile, were awestruck by the dinosaur. One of them yelled the word “Spinosaurus,” sure that he’d read that in the briefing. Something about a dinosaur larger even than the T. rex, but none of them cared what the hell it was. It was a monster and it needed to be stopped, and that was all they needed to know.

  At least they thought it was. In reality, this particular Spinosaurus was no ordinary therapod, even aside from the fact that it lived eons after its proper era had succumbed to the ravages of time. It had been…zombified…for lack of a better term. Ripped full of festering wounds and reeking to high heaven of the foulest imaginable rot, it lunged toward the nearest contingent of machine-gun toting soldiers. Its lopsided, wobbly gait propelled it forward faster than anyone would have guessed, and even as the first slugs of lead pounded into it, the dinosaur was upon the soldiers, lashing out, screeching, spitting, flinging its tail.

  The war had begun.

  #

  Pier Six Pavilion, Baltimore, Maryland

  At first, no one heard the sound of the cargo ship’s horn blasting over the strains of the pop music act careening on stage in front of thousands of adoring fans. They were an interesting act, the concert promoter noted—a Japanese export who played an infectious pop-metal blend that people could both dance and rock out to.

  But right now their music was not his concern. Situated on a finger of artificial land that jutted into the busy Inner Harbor, most of the people faced toward the stage. Not the promoter, Jaime Perez, however, who stood just backstage with a commanding view of the act, his line of security guards in front of them to keep away the occasional overzealous fan, as well as the entire audience. Beyond that didn’t usually require his attention, but right now he saw something that troubled him.

  Jaime brought a walkie-talkie to his lips and held down the push-to-talk button. “Attention Harbormaster, attention Harbormaster, this is Jaime Perez, promoter for the act in progress at Pier Six.”

  He waited for a reply while he watched the industrial ship steam ever closer to the end of the finger of land on which the concert venue sat. He’d put on dozens of shows here and had never once seen so large a ship get so close to the venue. What’s more, it appeared to be actually gaining speed as it neared land. No one except for Jaime seemed to notice, though, as on stage, the scantily-clad female pop star was engaged in a simulated sex act with one of her male dancers, the crowd reacting wildly with raucous shouting.

  Jaime tapped his headset earpiece more snugly into his ear. “I say again, Harbormaster, this is—“

  “Copy that, Jaime, we are attempting communications with the ship, thank you, over.”

  “Copy that,” Jaime said, but thought, Attempting communications? He didn’t see how they could have much more time to attempt anything. He could see a substantial bow wave pushing ahead of the ship as it continued nearer to the end of the concert venue.

  Then, just as he was about to alert staff to get all people away from the area nearest the water, Jaime watched as a pair of U.S. Coast Guard cutters, painted in the distinctive orange-and-white motif, sped in front of the tanker. Still, the seagoing behemoth did not slow down. Jaime picked up his radio again and this time yelled for his staff to evacuate the waterfront. He couldn’t believe how quickly the tanker had gained on the shore. Did no one see what was happening?

  Jaime grabbed an assistant and told her to take charge of the stage. He left the backstage area and ran toward the far end of the venue, past the cheap seats all the way to the water.

  He heard the screeching, wrenching, and tearing of metal before he got there. The rumbling of concrete being knocked into smaller pieces. The first shouts of confusion and fright, which would shortly turn to terror.

  Jaime skidded to a stop once he saw that the ship was riding up onto the land, having impacted the seawall at an unsafe speed. From this distance, he could hear the Coast Guard cutters blaring warning messages through PA systems, to no avail.

  And then the unthinkable.

  A cargo door opened in the bow of the ship and…no, it can’t be…Jaime had to consider for a moment if his water bottle had been drugged by some kid who would think that kind of thing was funny, or possibly even by a temp worker who wanted to get even with him for assigning him a crappy shift or some other perceived slight. This was a rock concert, after all. But no, he told himself after shaking his head. This was as real as it gets.

  A dinosaur stood at the entrance to the ship’s cargo hold. A Tyrannosaurus rex, Jaime was pretty sure. Impossible, though. Regardless, it was a fantastically large lizard, just standing there, stock still but for its nearly car-sized head which moved in small but quick, hyper jerks. Jaime wondered for a split second if it could somehow be a high-tech stage prop that hadn’t been cleared with him
. He didn’t see that dinosaurs had squat to do with that little tart’s act up there, though.

  Then the prehistoric reptile set into motion. In one terrifyingly athletic leap, it left the ship and landed on the manicured lawn at the edge of the harbor’s music venue. It raised its head up and down in rapid succession a few times, sniffing air redolent with the sweat and hormones of thousands of warm mammals.

  Those fans in the back rows were pointing and shouting, many of them actually smiling, under the dangerously false impression that this creature was some sort of showpiece. That would be their mentality, Jaime thought fleetingly. And he couldn’t blame them. They were here to be entertained, after all, not slaughtered by some weird animal. What in the hell was going on here? Because as he watched it, it dawned on him. This thing was real. It wasn’t some animatronics model or holographic illusion as he had first suspected. It was alive!

  But there was no time to ruminate on it, for at that very moment, a horde of costumed freaks, that Jaime at first thought were grunge rock fans who somehow ended up at the wrong show, but the shredded flesh and potent stench told him that this was something else altogether—ambled from the cargo hold, some spilling into the water and sinking from sight, but most dropping onto the lawn where they proceeded to spread out toward the crowd.

  The people at the back of the open air venue didn’t know at first what to make of it. A few turned and saw the newcomers, then promptly turned back around to the show, ignoring them. But most were curious, some actually approaching the horde, while others started to run. Alarm bells sang out in Jaime’s brain, the potential for a panic situation that could lead to a human stampede at the forefront of his mind. He’d been in such a situation once before, many years ago, but it was something that as a concert promoter he was always afraid of. It was his responsibility to keep these people safe.

  He barked into his radio for his head of security to stop the show. The crowd’s reaction grew louder around him, and even with the earpiece in he had trouble hearing the radio reply.

  “I said cut power to the stage, now!”

  The response was hard to make out but he caught most of it: “…say they can’t cut power with the cage dancers suspended…down first…do? Over.”

  Suddenly, Jaime was besieged by fans who saw him speaking into a headset microphone and pegged him for some kind of official. A woman clad only in a bikini ran up to him and clutched his arm, pointing frantically at the marauding lizard.

  “What the fuck is that thing? Is that for the circus?”

  The radio crackled again in his ear.”…say again, boss…need to know…do?”

  Into the mic, Jaime returned, “Shut it all down now—just do what you have to do, over!” He had no idea it would be the last coherent order he would give an employee in his life, that it really was all over.

  “Hey mister, what’s with all those homeless people who just came out of the ship?” The worried woman was tugging at him again.

  He eyed the shambling mass of slovenly humans but something about them didn’t look right at all, even worse than the dinosaur. He leveled a stare at the eyes of one of them and saw nothing there whatsoever. Not even a feral, animal kind of intensity. Only a deadness. He’d seen plenty of homeless and drug addicted people—some in this very crowd here today—but this sorry assemblage of humanity that had descended upon his venue was one hell of a motley fucking crew, that was for certain. Ridiculous, Jaime thought. He was making a mental note to call the mayor later to see if this was some kind of new social program where some other city had been allowed to dump their homeless here or some crap like that when the commotion of the T. rex preempted it.

  The Mesozoic reptile rampaged through the crowd, crushing people as it loped onward without care as to who or what was in its path. Near the front of the stage where the crowd was thickest, a mosh pit had formed with a young man crowd surfing, being handed from person to person on his back. The T. rex bent down its mighty head, a head with a set of jaws and accompanying musculature designed by millions of years of evolution to rip and tear through the thickest of hide and bone, and snatched the shirtless man in its jaws. It reared its head back, crushed the person in half with its five-inch long teeth and flung his legless torso to the front of the stage, where the most fervent spectators hadn’t yet noticed the commotion. The band was still playing, the bright spotlights blinding them to the mayhem unfolding, but now security guards were flagging down the singer, running out on stage while waving their arms for her to stop.

  The crowd caught the bloody half-man, passing him over their heads for a few seconds before realizing he was nothing but a mutilated corpse that looked as though it had come through an aborted meat-grinding process. The concert-goers parted in a rush, letting what remained of the dead man splash on the grass.

  Looking around, Jaime felt increasingly lightheaded. His venue had crumbled to complete bedlam in the space of mere minutes. Absolute pandemonium reigned in blood. Fans fought fiercely with each other as they battled to flee the property. On the JumboTron behind the stage, a close-up of a gore-drenched T.rex mouth with a hand protruding from its teeth filled the screens. Further back in the middle of the lawn, a circle of undead fell on a passed out partier, opening the woman’s abdomen and flinging entrails everywhere, crimson-splashed faces looking up from her opened innards, like contestants in a pie eating contest checking on their competitors’ progress.

  Jaime took a last desperate look out at the harbor and saw one of the Coast Guard cutters engulfed in flame and black smoke while the other fired machine guns at the tanker. Overrun, Jaime was fell upon and savaged by a tall zombie, its gray skin sloughing off in messy sheets as it scrabbled with him after having taken a mouth-stuffing bite. Then Jaime Perez faded, succumbing to loss of blood.

  The last sight the promoter would take in was a squadron of no fewer than six winged reptiles launching themselves out of the ship’s cargo hold and into the crisp, Maryland air. He heard one of them shriek as it turned, heading south toward D.C.

  #

  Charlotte, North Carolina

  Already a large trucking freight hub for the Eastern Seaboard, it was a little known fact that the small city of Charlotte was also the nation’s second largest financial center after New York City. Bank of America was headquartered here, as was NASCAR and a host of other well-known companies.

  Igor Starinskovy backed his eighteen wheeler up to the distribution center’s unloading bay. An employee emerged with a handheld computer and consulted it while asking him what he was carrying in the truck.

  “Consumer electronics, machine parts and domestic goods.” Starinskovy stifled a yawn. He’d been driving since the previous night from the port of New York where he’d picked up the truck.

  The worker checked his electronic manifest and nodded. “Go ahead and open it up.”

  Starinskovy nodded and moved to the rear of the trailer, where he keyed open the padlock and raised the retaining bolt. Then he swung the double doors wide open.

  “Most of this stuff is bound for—“

  He never finished his sentence, for at that moment a veritable herd of cryolophosaurs rushed toward the open exit. Large therapods, similar to a T. rex but smaller in stature, the cryolophosaurs featured a prominent, red fleshy fan on top of their heads, sort of like a rooster. Unlike roosters, they were formidable predators, although no one knew enough about their behavior to determine whether they hunted alone or worked together in packs. The twenty of them seemed to cooperate well enough to move rapidly out of the truck, however, interrupting Starinskovy’s thoughts as to how and when these horrendous aberrations of nature had been substituted for his normal, everyday cargo.

  Illogically, despite the absolute horror and mind-numbing impossibility of what he was seeing, the only thought rising in his mind now was: this couldn’t be his fault. But the only thing that really mattered now was the herd of free-ranging dinosaurs that had somehow materialized out of his truck.

  On
e of the animals’ tails whipped Starinskovy as it leapt from the trailer bed. The driver was thrown into the loading bay’s concrete wall where he felt his elbow crack with the impact. He screamed in agony, the searing nerve impulses overriding his thinking to the point that he did not even hear the loading bay worker calling, “What the fuck? Jesus… what the fuck?”

  Another crylopholosaur jumped from the truck toward him. It leaned over in one fluid motion and positioned its jaws around the stunned man’s head. Then, with an effortless movement of its powerful neck muscles, it lifted up, severing the worker’s head so swiftly that his headless body remained standing for a few seconds, hands still holding onto the inventory computer until he fell forward onto the pavement in what would have been a face plant had his face not been sliding down the creature’s gullet at that very moment.

  Starinskovy saw what happened and chose to remain very still against the wall where he’d been thrown, suddenly forgetting all about the pain of his shattered elbow. Fuck your stupid elbow. At least you still have a head. You still have a head, damn it! Use it if you want to stay alive!

  He started to reach for the 9mm pistol he had proudly received a concealed carry permit for a few weeks ago. But he arrested his own motion before even touching the holster. What good would a pistol do against these untold tons of ravenous dinosaurs? He didn’t so much as breathe while the parade of reanimated Jurassic beasts poured out of the trailer. He knew that should even one of these horrible, ragged-looking creatures notice him and decide to approach, he was done for.

  He wet himself, the warm stain on his jeans dripping onto the concrete.

  One of the trailing dinosaurs stopped and jerked its head up and down. It turned around, its leathery footpads making a rasping sound as they slid across the pavement. Starinskovy started to cry as the lizard began to run right at him, like a ridiculously oversized bull toward a broken matador. Behind it, two more of the reptiles began to approach Starinskovy.