“Come on,” I breathed. “Let’s see if we can get up to the next level. That white door over there looks promising.”
“Okay,” Becka whispered as she wiped sweat from her forehead.
There were a few smaller nests on the ground floor, and it was tempting to kick them as we raced by toward the back doorway. It was hard to tell what used to be in this space, but other than two crushed office chairs, there didn’t seem to be much of anything left.
Only dino nests and dino eggs.
We raced over to the white door and pushed it open to see a set of metal stairs. The staircase seemed to be dino-free, although there was a suspicious dark stain along the steps.
Then an ominous creak echoed above us, and we froze to see if the door at the top of the stairs would swing open.
“There is something up there,” Hae-won said quietly, and I nodded without taking my eyes off the stairwell.
None of us moved or spoke, but as a roar broke out behind us, I could tell several of the dinosaurs had started to make their way back up from the lake.
“We’ve got to go,” I muttered. “Come on.”
I led the girls up the stairs and tried to place my feet down as gently as possible. The only reassuring thought I had was that there probably wasn’t anything big on the second floor. If the only way up was the staircase, it had to be able to fit through the slim passage.
We could take on a few small dinos in order to save the world.
It was the big fuckers outside we had to worry about.
As we reached the top of the stairs, I grabbed the door handle and gently pushed it open. I stayed still for a second, but there didn’t seem to be any signs of movement coming from the other side.
Then I opened the door fully, and I found that we were in a long corridor that actually had a flickering fluorescent light still on. There were multiple black doors along the wall, and they were each numbered.
The one we were opposite read 226.
I looked at the one on its right and read 227, and that meant room 204 would be on the same floor. We were going to make it.
“Fuck yeah,” I hissed as we piled out into the hall. “Come on, the room must be just down here.”
“It’s right there,” Becka gasped and pointed ahead. “Look, that’s the one.”
“Good eyesight.” I grinned, and we skidded to a halt just outside one of the black doors.
We kept our weapons close, but the grin faded when I reached for the door handle to find it had been torn clean out of the door.
“Shit, come on,” I whispered.
Then I pushed open the door, and my jaw dropped.
The entire room was covered in nests.
“Fuuuck,” Kat breathed behind me.
Purple-hued eggs were in every spare inch of the room, and the place stank of shit.
Fresh shit.
I didn’t have time to process any of this as a thunderous sound of talons striking against linoleum suddenly rang out through the hall. We spun around to the right, and a whole herd of large raptors came pelting toward us.
I guess it wasn’t our lucky day after all.
Chapter 10
The raptors cried out as they ran, and their long claws scraped along the floor with every step. They were about seven feet long and five feet tall, with dark yellow skin and beady, orange eyes, and as they tore down the hallway, it was impossible to see exactly how many of them there were.
But judging by the number of nests, there were a hell of a lot.
“Aim for the heads!” I yelled as we swung our guns around to face the dinos.
There wasn’t any time for strategy or well thought-out plans. The dinosaurs were fast and closing in, and I aimed at the one in the middle of the pack that seemed to be leading the way. Then I put my finger on the cool metal of the trigger and pulled.
The sharp bullet whistled through the air and tore through the skull of the raptor. The dinosaur’s face burst open, and the two eyeballs went flying in different directions from the impact.
As the body hit the floor with a squelch, the girls began to shoot at the pack, and raptors started to fall left and right.
We shuffled backward slightly as blood began to ooze out from the dinos’ bodies toward our feet. Then I shot at one of the raptors as it leapt over its packmates, and I managed to get it right in the snout.
The dino’s jaw shattered apart, and sharp teeth flew everywhere as its eyes rolled back into its head. It toppled onto the other bodies with a crunch, and it added to the little barricade of corpses between us and the rest of the pack.
But the raptors didn’t seem to care about the hurdle. The remaining members began leaping over the bodies.
“There’s only a few left!” Kat shouted as she shot at the closest dino.
It looked like we had three more raptors to kill, and I took aim at the biggest of the bunch as it hurtled over the bloody barrier.
I shot right into the beast’s left, orange eye as it whipped its head around, and the bullet traveled straight through the small skull into the opposite eyeball. The top of the creature’s head exploded off, and a small eruption of gore poured out of the top.
As the dinosaur fell, I watched Hae-won and Adhara shoot at the final raptor. They hit it right in the middle of the skull, and there was a sickening crunch as the last pack member toppled onto its front.
The hallway was silent again, and the lake of blood trickled to our feet as I checked either side for any lurking dinos.
“That’s dealt with, then,” Becka sighed as she wiped some blood-splatter from her cheek. “You think that was all the parents?”
“Maybe,” I said as I looked down at the pile of bodies. “But they made a shit-load of noise. Something else must have heard all that chaos.”
“We should be fast.” Adhara nodded. “Other ommati will smell blood.”
With a final glance at the pile of raptor corpses, I pushed the storage room open again and gagged at the stench.
“This smells terrible,” Hae-won choked as we stepped inside. “How are we meant to find the missing piece?”
The room was pretty big, and the walls were lined with shelves that had large plastic boxes stacked in every square inch. Luckily, it looked like the boxes were labeled, and it didn’t seem like many of them had been damaged by the dinos. The only issue was getting to the boxes without stepping on eggs or piles of dino shit.
“I guess they spent a lot of time in here,” I muttered as I tried not to look too closely at the ground.
“What is the name of the thing again?” Kat asked as she covered her nose.
“A superconducting link,” Hae-won answered.
“Hae-won, Becka,” I said. “You guys keep a lookout. I feel like pregnant women shouldn’t be stepping in dino shit.”
“I won’t argue with that,” Becka gagged as she turned to stand guard at the doorway.
“I think pregnant women can do anything,” Hae-won said. “Although in this case, I think I will accept my post.”
“I knew there was a reason people had babies,” Kat scowled as she took a huge step over a rancid puddle.
“Yeah,” I chuckled and started to make my way over the nests. “Getting out of tasks like this is definitely the reason.”
Kat smirked and rolled her eyes at me, and Adhara glared at the eggs as she lifted her long legs over them. The beautiful alien and the soldier both made small choking noises as Adhara’s foot narrowly missed a pile of dino crap, and Kat sent her a grimace of support.
We carefully navigated to the back shelves and managed to get there without any unpleasant incidents, and as I scanned the box labels, I found that half of them contained things I could barely pronounce. We were silent as we studied the shelves, and my stomach did a flip when I spotted a faded label on the top shelf which read “superconducting links.”
The trouble was, there were four different labels with the same words, but each had a different part number specified as well,
and I was able to locate the one that matched the part number on my slip of paper.
“There it is,” I hissed and pointed up to the high shelf.
“Can you reach?” Kat asked as she squinted up at the box.
I stood on my toes, but the box was just a few inches too high. I put a foot on the lowest shelf and gripped the metal poles of the unit as I hauled myself up higher.
“Careful,” Kat muttered. “If those boxes fall over, then something will definitely hear us.”
The shelving unit was bolted into the wall, so I put my full weight onto it as I swung my arm up and grabbed the edge of the box. I shimmied it off the shelf and then grabbed it as I stepped back down onto the floor. It was heavy, and I placed it down on one of the lower shelves before I tore off the plastic lid, and there were long tubes of black material that had something solid inside.
“This must be it,” I said as I grabbed one and looked in the open end of the tube.
Inside, there was something silver and circular, with intricate bronze wiring in the center. I didn’t have a clue what it was for, but it matched the description Mateo gave me.
“Fuck yeah.” I grinned. “We found them.”
I pulled one of the material-covered items from the box and hesitated before I took a second. It had a strap attached to the casing that was just wide enough for me to sling over my shoulder with the blaster, and it wasn’t as heavy as I had expected.
“You’re taking two?” Kat asked.
“Yeah.” I nodded. “Just in case something happens to one of them. I don’t want to have to do this all over again.”
“Good plan,” Adhara said. “I will take one of these.”
I held out one of the cylinders, and the gorgeous alien carefully placed it on her shoulder with her weapons.
“Fuck it,” Kat said. “Give me one, too. Might as well be thorough.”
“You just don’t want everyone else carrying more weight than you.” I grinned as I grabbed another tube from the box.
“Can’t let you two do all the hard work.” The soldier smirked and slid the strap over her back.
“Are you guys nearly done?” Becka hissed. “I think I heard something.”
“Me, too.” Hae-won nodded. “It was coming from beyond the raptors.”
I left the box on the shelf and turned to make my way back across the gross sea of shit and nests.
I kept checking I had the superconducting link safely on my back while I went, and as we got to the hallway, I thought I could hear a rumbling sound, but I couldn’t pinpoint which direction it was coming from.
“I can hear it, too,” I said as I peered down the corridor.
The flicker of the fluorescent light made the building look like something from a horror movie, and the blood-soaked floor didn’t exactly help.
“I think it’s getting closer,” Hae-won said as she kept her sharp gun aimed past the raptors.
“Let’s go,” I said. “We need to get back to the ship before whatever it is finds this pile of dead dinos and catches our scent.”
“There is a window at the end of the hall,” Hae-won said. “Maybe we should go and check that it is not something right outside?”
I glanced down past the raptors and saw smashed glass on the floor at the far end of the hall.
“I’ll go check.” I nodded. “Stay here.”
I walked over to the wall of dead raptors and jumped over their corpses onto the other side.
“Fuck,” I hissed as I slid on the bloody linoleum, but I managed to steady myself without toppling over into the pile of bodies. There were bits of brain and bone strewn everywhere, and I carefully navigated past the mess toward the end of the hall.
The rumbling sound had started to grow louder, and I was almost certain that it was the rhythmic thump of heavy footsteps. I jogged down the hall and tried not to step on the shards of broken glass as I reached the smashed window.
The view looked out the back of the building and onto the mountains, and for a second, I was just blown away by the Swiss landscape. The green woodlands stretched out over the hills, and the blue sky gave the snowy peaks a beautiful background, but my awe for the view was quickly broken when I looked down at the ground right behind the building.
There were six of the biggest nests I had ever seen.
A chill ran down my whole body as I stared down at the piles of sticks and filth, and the dark blue eggs inside them looked like they were bigger than me.
Then one of the eggs started to shake, and for a second, I thought it was about to hatch. As I stared down at the nests, the sound of approaching footsteps became more clear, and I realized all the eggs were shaking, but they weren’t hatching.
Whatever the fuck was coming was vibrating the ground with every step.
Something huge was coming back to its breeding grounds, and it sounded like it could crush this whole building with one foot.
“Go,” I hissed as I spun around and raced back toward the girls. “There are huge nests out the back. Something big is coming home.”
My second leap over the pile of raptors wasn’t quite as graceful, and I had to grab onto Adhara’s shoulder to steady myself as I skidded on the blood.
“The eggs are massive,” I said as I wiped blood from the bottom of my shoe onto a scaly corpse. “We do not want to meet whatever the fuck laid them.”
“Shit,” Becka hissed, and we ran for the door of the stairwell.
As we raced down the metal steps, the distant footsteps grew louder and louder. My heart rate soared as I took the stairs three at a time, and I pushed open the door to the ground floor the second I reached it. Then I scanned the space while I waited for the girls to catch up with me, and I heard Leo’s blasters start to fire off again.
He must have realized that we would be coming back soon and started up another frenzy to lure any stray dinos back down to the water.
The booming footsteps were drowned out slightly by the sound of the ship, and the roars of the other creatures down at the lake made the rumbling harder to track.
“Is it out there?” Kat asked as she came to a halt beside me.
“Not yet,” I said and peered out at the demolished ground floor.
When the rest of the girls caught up, we sprinted out into the nest-covered area, and in the right half of the building, we were still shielded from view. Unfortunately, as soon as we stepped past the ruined wall, we would be exposed, and then the real challenge would begin.
“It is close,” Adhara whispered as we tore across the rubble-covered floor. “It is coming from the mountains.”
The alien’s good hearing turned out to be correct, and a few seconds later, I could definitely hear the thumps were coming from our right side.
We slowed down as we reached the edge of the torn-apart wall.
The next step we took would lead us out into the open, and we would be back in the maze full of nests.
“Okay,” I said as sweat trickled down my neck. “We do the same thing as before, we get through the eggs, and--”
I was cut off by a roar that made every hair on my body stand on end. I had never heard a noise like that before, and my entire body went as cold as ice while the sound echoed around the walls.
“Oh, my god,” Becka whimpered. “Jason, we need to go.”
I nodded as my heart pounded in my throat, and I stuck my head out to check that the breeding ground was clear enough to get to the ship.
Leo still had the big blasters on and was firing like mad into the lake. It was working well as a distraction, and the nests were unsupervised by any adult dinos.
“Run,” I said, and I let the girls go in front of me as we leapt out into the open.
The footsteps had gotten so loud now that I struggled to hear anything else, even with the ruckus of the other dinos around, and I kept my focus on putting one foot in front of the other as quickly as possible. The girls tore across the maze of nests just ahead of me, and the spaceship came into view as we
navigated over the breeding grounds.
I could see the hazy shimmer of the forcefield still on, and I hoped Leo would see us in time to take it down. In the lake just beyond the craft, there was a whole herd of mixed dinos thrashing around through the water, and getting caught by them would probably be just as brutal as the incoming giant finding us out here.
The ship continued to fire into the lake and nearby trees, and it was driving the dinosaurs fucking crazy. They seemed to know they couldn’t attack the ship, but were determined to find something to destroy as they whipped their heads around and howled into the sky, and they tore at the landscape and crashed into one another as they rampaged out of control.
Leo had aimed his shots diagonally again, though, so the left side of the ship was dino-free to sneak around toward the back, and we were almost there.
I just had to get my girls back into the craft, and Leo could put the forcefield back on in a flash. As long as they were safe, that was the only thing in the world that mattered right now.
The bone-chilling roar echoed out over the landscape again, and I knew in that moment that the dinosaur was right behind us.
Close enough to see us.
“Go!” I shouted at the girls, and I spun around to see a dinosaur bigger than a t-rex looming over the destroyed storage facility.
It stood about forty feet tall on massively thick hind legs, and it must have been about forty-five feet long. The scales on its body were matte black, but there were bloodstains all down its front, and the dinosaur’s claws were curled and thick enough that they could probably slice me open with a single tap.
Then the beast took a single, thunderous step, and as the ground shuddered, I was knocked right off my feet.
My body froze out of sheer shock and terror as I looked into the giant’s glowing, red eyes, and the dinosaur’s nostrils flared.
I recognized the creature’s downward curved snout from when I was a kid and was fascinated by anything around the size of a t-rex. It was a fucking mapusaurus, and I knew without a doubt that I was staring at one of the most dangerous dinosaurs I had ever met.
The girls had stumbled and stopped in their tracks to catch their balance, and there was a second when we all seemed glued to the ground as we stared up at the massive dinosaur.
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