Z. Rex

by Steve Cole

  But the pain couldn’t keep deeper concerns from filling Adam’s head. All my stuff, buried and gone. . . . The rental car completely trashed. . . . What was that monster? Was it coincidence that Bateman and his friends had come to get him at the same time it had decided to run amok?

  And how did his dad figure in all this?

  “You know, I never pick up hitchhikers, kid,” the trucker growled, surlier now they were safely away. “Where am I dropping you?”

  “I guess we need to tell the police what happened,” said Adam.

  “We nothing,” the trucker said flatly. “I’ve got a haul to make on schedule. Can’t afford to waste half the day jawing with a bunch of cops.” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, got to be a normal explanation for all that—probably a movie crew. Special effects. Or one of those hidden camera shows where they film you and make you look like a jerk. . . . Well, I may’ve been pulling a week of all-nighters, but they won’t get me that easy!”

  Listening to the trucker do his best to dismiss all he had seen, Adam wished he could kid himself so easily. Then suddenly he remembered Dad’s text on his phone. He pulled it from his pocket and keyed in the passcode. Then he swore as he noticed the battery was in the red; if the phone died before he could read the message . . .

  Sucking at his cut fingers, Adam called it up:

  Managed 2 steal back phone. Not me txting before. Them. Project wrong. Here now against will. Am being moved out. Get flight 2 Edinburgh. Give this web address to Jeff Hayden, Symtek Biotronics, BioQuarter—adlar65headspace.co.uk. Evidence there. Password ZREX. Get evidence seen by right people who can take action. NO POLICE. Too risky. Promise I’ll be OK. Josephs mad but needs me. Dad X.

  Adam stared at the text, uncomprehending. Jeff Hayden was one of Dad’s friends from way back at university, and the BioQuarter was the new science development in Edinburgh. But what did “Project wrong” mean—that it had gone wrong, or that it was wrong?

  With his throat tightening, he wiped crossly at the tears in his eyes. I’ve been strung along here for days by fake messages. Josephs must be Frankie Bateman’s boss. He must have sent Bateman and his buddies to get me. But why?

  “Josephs mad,” Adam muttered, scanning the message again. Did “mad” mean angry or insane? And what was that monster thing all about? Oh, Dad. . . . He swallowed hard. What’re you mixed up in? What’s happened to you?

  “You even listening to me, kid?” the trucker rumbled. “C’mon, I said d’you want me to drop you at the nearest sheriff’s office?

  Adam hesitated. NO POLICE, the text was yelling at him. He sighed and shook his head. “I need to get to the nearest airport.”

  “The airport?” The trucker scowled and slowed his rig, pulling in to the side of the road. “There’s one at Los Alamos, but I’m no free taxi service.” He pointed at a road leading off from the highway. “Gray Rock’s a mile or so that way. Maybe you can pick up a bus from there.”

  “Okay.” Adam pocketed his phone and stiffly opened the door. “Thanks for the ride.”

  “Happy hiking. And next time watch where you’re going, hidden camera or no hidden camera!” the man yelled after him. “You could wind up the same way as your trashed bike!”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” Adam muttered. “See ya.” He slammed the door behind him and heard the truck growl away. The road ahead of him ran straight and seemingly forever, a gray scar through the scrubland. The mountains in the distance looked like dark creases in the otherwise faultless blue sky. Everything appeared so wide open, and he felt so tiny out here, mocked by the rugged calm of the new day.

  In a single violent half hour he had lost everything. He’d been shot at, almost abducted, nearly killed. His bike had been mashed, his whole body hurt, and he was feeling scared to death. It was so tempting to give up, to drop in despair where he stood.

  But if I do that, he thought, I’ll never get back up again. And I’ll never find Dad.

  Step after painful step, Adam kept going.

  It took less than an hour to reach the clean, quiet streets of Gray Rock. It was a small town laid out thinly over the wilderness. The buildings were low-rise, a messed-up mix of old-style Spanish and modern ugliness. Red clay walls clashed with neon signs. Spotless churches stood serenely beside boarded-up shops and battered motels. Not wanting to drain his phone any faster, Adam kept his eyes peeled for anywhere that might offer free internet connection. He had access to his dad’s PayPal account from buying retro games off eBay; he had no idea if you could buy plane tickets that way, but he had to give it a try.

  But . . . leave you behind, Dad? Wherever it is you are?

  Fear for his father kept the sweat icy cold as he tramped through the rising heat.

  A waitress in Lotaburger directed him to a library that she thought might have computers. Adam waited in the shade outside for its doors to open, wiping dirt and dried blood from his cuts and grazes with spit and fingers. When he heard the door-lock turn, he nearly knocked over the hard-faced Latina librarian in his haste to push inside.

  “Hey, what happened to you?” she called after him.

  “I, er, had a cycling accident,” Adam said. “Do you have the internet?”

  The librarian looked at him dubiously. “You’re scuffed up pretty bad. Maybe you should see a doctor?”

  “I’m okay,” he snapped. Then he took a deep breath, forced himself to chill out a little. The woman was only trying to help, and upsetting her would get him nowhere. “It looks worse than it is,” he added. “Honestly.”

  “Not local, are you?” Her dark eyes were curious. “Where’re you from?”

  “Scotland.” Adam thickened his accent a little. “Aye, just arrived in town from Edinburgh with my dad. Couldn’t sleep, still jet-lagged, thought I’d check my emails. Only we ride on the left back home—I forgot and I had to swerve fast to avoid a truck. . . .”

  The librarian must have bought his story; her face warmed with sympathy as she pointed to a door behind her. “Look, the bathroom’s through there. Why don’t you clean yourself up a bit? I’ll go start the computer for you.”

  “Brilliant, thanks,” said Adam. He went and washed his sore hands, then dabbed gingerly at his wounds with wet paper towels for a minute or so before re-emerging.

  “Now you’re less likely to bleed over the keyboard,” the librarian said wryly, nodding to a PC on a desk in a corner. “Help yourself.”

  Adam smiled his thanks. Within moments he was sitting down and had called up a list of local airports. If he could fly from Los Alamos to the bigger airport at Albuquerque. . . .

  Then, suddenly, with a sick rush, he realized he had no passport. It was buried now under tons of rubble. I’ll have to go back, he thought dismally. It could take days to find it. And the police will be there, and they’ll start asking questions, and—

  He reined in his racing thoughts, tried to stay calm and think things through. “If Dad’s got evidence on whatever’s going down,” he murmured, “perhaps there’s something there that will help me find him.”

  Checking that the librarian was busy sorting through books at her desk and not about to poke her nose in, Adam took out his phone, used some of the now precious power left and checked the web address in his dad’s SMS, which he typed into the PC.

  The computer’s processors creaked and whirred for a few moments. Then the screen went completely black save for a white box in which sat a flashing cursor.

  “Enter weirdo password now,” Adam surmised, an uneasy fizz of nerves creeping through his stomach. “Z . . . R . . . E . . . and X, the unknown.”

  He typed in the last letter and hit return.

  After a second’s hesitation, the page turned bloodred except for some small black letters, bunched together in the center of the screen like a clot. A shiver snaked along Adam’s aching backbone as he made sense of the message:

  NICE TRY, ADLAR.

  “What . . . ?” Adam tried to click back onto the password page,
but the screen had frozen. Frightened, angry and impatient, he kept clicking on the back arrow.

  Until suddenly the computer whirred. For a second the screen showed a monstrous, reptilian head, with massive jagged teeth. It looked like a dragon, or . . .

  A dinosaur?

  The picture was so real that Adam recoiled, as if the hideous creature could somehow smash through the monitor and get him.

  Then the application abruptly quit and the screen went dark, like an eye closing. Adam sat very still, heart racing, as the memory of the thing he’d glimpsed in the dust and rubble of the apartment block burned back into his mind. Whatever that thing is, Dad must know about it, he thought numbly. But why isn’t the web address working? A realization struck him with a shiver. Maybe this Josephs guy found out he’d texted me and did something—trashed the evidence Dad wanted Jeff Hayden to see. . . .

  Adam closed his eyes, trying not to panic. His whole world had turned crazy. So, tell me, Dad, he thought, fists clenched, his nails digging into his palms. What am I supposed to do now?

  5

  FUGITIVE

  Feeling sick, sore and helpless, Adam tried to reboot the computer. But it wouldn’t start up again, as though something on that web page had crippled the hard drive.

  The librarian must have noticed the blank screen. Her voice was sharp: “Hey, what did you do?”

  “I dunno.” Adam turned shiftily to face her. “It, uh, just crashed on me.”

  “Seems to be your day for crashes.” She eyed his scrapes and grimaced. “Those cuts really do look bad. You should get them cleaned up properly. Is your dad at home now?”

  Adam resisted the urge to laugh in her face. “No, he . . . he had to start work already. Outside of Los Alamos.” He hesitated. “Have you heard of a place called Fort Ponil?”

  “Fort Ponil? Don’t think so.” The librarian considered. “D’you mean Ponil Canyon over in Colfax County—where they found the fossil dinosaur tracks?”

  “What?” Adam frowned, the image of the reptile head on the screen still bright in his memory. Never mind how impossible it is. There could be a link. He jumped up and crossed to the librarian. “Do you have any info on this canyon?”

  “It’s probably mentioned in one of our dinosaur books.” She directed him toward nonfiction. “Check out the ones with 560 on the spine. And then get yourself checked out at the local walk-in clinic—deal?”

  Thirty minutes later Adam left the library feeling worse than ever. The librarian had given him directions to the clinic, but they hadn’t really sunk in. The giant dinosaur roaming his thoughts had already torn them to shreds.

  Who’d have thought that old words on gum-gray pages could spark so many vivid images?

  It turned out that the tracks in Ponil Canyon had been made by a T. rex, some sixty-five million years ago. Several near-complete fossils of the creature had been dug up in New Mexico. Maybe Dad meant to type T.REX in the text, not ZREX, mused Adam. But even if he had, what evidence had the password been supposed to keep secure?

  Tyrannosaurus rex was one of the largest carnivores to ever walk the Earth, a massive, meat-eating destroyer that evolved during the late Cretaceous period. One of the last dinosaurs to exist before whatever wiped them all out, it weighed around six tons, had powerful two-clawed hands and huge hind legs as thick as red-woods. Its teeth were close to a foot long.

  You wouldn’t want to meet it in a dark alley.

  Or even in an industrial park.

  I’m cracking up. Adam felt cold despite the blazing sun. What am I thinking? That dinosaurs still exist?

  Tyrannosaurus rex meant “tyrant lizard king.” It had the strongest bite of any carnivore, with jaws uniquely designed to help it rip maximum bone and tissue with a single snap. And while some experts figured the T. rex was a scavenger that fed on the dead, most declared it a hunter—one equipped to tackle the largest prey around. . . .

  Adam grimaced and tried harder to recall the route to the clinic.

  The sight of a phone booth distracted him for a moment. Maybe he could find the number for Jeff Hayden at this Symtek place. He had no cash, but if the operator could reverse the charges. . . .

  He went inside the booth and dialed double-zero for the international operator. Then he saw the phone cable had been cut.

  Swearing under his breath, he decided to gamble the last bar of battery on his old Nokia. He searched for Symtek Biotronics online, but the browser was taking forever to load anything—and when it came to coping with the company’s Flash animated home page, it seemed to give up altogether. “Come on,” he muttered, shaking the phone uselessly. It bleeped a low-power message at him morosely, as if making excuses.

  Crossly, Adam clicked back to his SMS folder and resolved to try again at the walk-in clinic. There was bound to be a phone.

  A signpost and an old lady helped him on his way there. But as he threaded his way through the sunlit streets, he noticed people clocking his face, eyes lingering just a little too long. It made him feel weird.

  Finally Adam reached the clinic. It was newly built at the edge of town and looked like something out of Toyland—single-story, blocky and white with a gray pointed roof. He pushed through the door into the welcome shade of a waiting room. A woman sat behind a counter, the scowl on her face seemingly as ingrained as the smell of lavender and disinfectant. Adam wondered how a kid with no passport, money or health insurance would be received. Then he shrugged. After all that had happened today, how scary could she be?

  Adam lined up behind an elderly couple and watched the TV mounted on the wall, showing the local news to waiting patients.

  “A freak tornado caused a trail of damage throughout the Brakspear Industrial Zone outside of Santa Fe early this morning,” said the anchorwoman, and Adam felt a jolt go through him. The camera lingered lovingly on the crushed remains of his apartment block and his dad’s trashed rental car. Adam swallowed hard as he relived the morning’s mayhem. For those few seconds he was staring at the carcass of an old life, trampled suddenly to dust.

  The cameras cut to the meatpacking plant next, its corrugated roof hanging off like a picked scab.

  And then a photograph of Adam sprang onto the screen.

  “What the . . . ?” Adam saw it was the picture Dad had taken last Christmas, the one he’d said he always kept on his desk. The world seemed to tilt sideways as the anchorwoman resumed her voice-over with new gravity.

  “Police are pursuing a thirteen-year-old runaway, Adam Adlar, in connection with a spate of lootings in the wake of the tornado. Adlar is slightly built, around five foot five, speaks with a Scottish accent and may be armed. Anyone sighting him should alert police on this number . . .”

  “No. . . .” Adam’s voice was a choke in his throat as anger, disbelief and fear fought to hold sway in his head. Those people in the street outside, staring at him . . . just as the woman at the counter was staring now, her frown starting to deepen.

  Adam turned and ran out of the health center, crashing through the doors and back out into lurid daylight. His mind was racing as fast as his heart, but he forced himself not to run and draw any more attention. He walked through the parking lot and then hunkered down between a couple of four-by-fours, trying to gather his thoughts.

  Bateman and those men were after me before that monster thing came, but I got away—so now they’re trying to put the whole of New Mexico on my back, including the police. But why do they still want me if they’ve already trashed the evidence Dad’s meant to have? He chewed his lip. Maybe the cops were in on his dad’s kidnapping too. Maybe they knew about the invisible creature, knew it was no tornado but were trying to cover it up, reeling in any witnesses who might speak out.

  He shivered as he thought back to his dad’s text. Suddenly he was seeing “No police . . . too risky” in a different light.

  Voices carried from the other side of the lot. Doors clunked open and shut. Adam expected to hear sirens at any moment. He couldn’t risk giv
ing himself up. It was time to split.

  The parking lot edged onto an alien landscape of red prairie, interrupted only by coarse scrub bushes and a line of trees in the middle distance. With a deep breath and a muttered prayer to anyone who might be listening, Adam set off at a run for the wildness beyond Gray Rock.

  6

  MONSTER

  Dusk was starting to fall as calmly as the dawn had risen some twelve hours earlier. But it felt to Adam as if he’d lived a lifetime between the two. Slumped against a tree, he watched the sun’s belly nudge the mountains on the horizon as the vibrant colors of soil and scrubland began to fade. There was maybe an hour of daylight left, and he knew nights around here fell cold and heavy.

  Adam got up, brushed down his sweat-drenched summer clothes. I need shelter, and fast.

  He was hiding out in one of the area’s State Parks, surrounded now by miles and miles of plains and rock. He didn’t know where he was. Hopefully, no one coming after him would know either.

  The few people Adam had chanced upon were care-free hikers smiling as they passed. One guy even swallowed Adam’s story about falling down a gully, and treated his scrapes properly with cotton wool and antiseptic. Better still, Adam had chanced upon a picnic site in the afternoon. He’d braved a trash bin full of wasps to feast on stale sandwich crusts and coffee dregs from paper cups.

  “Dad always said I ate garbage,” Adam murmured. “If he only knew. . . .”

  Welcome to life on the run, he thought. Oh, Dad, where are you?

  A line of cottonwood trees, their branches bristling with green arrowheads, dominated the valley below. Adam scrambled over the scrub toward them. He seemed to recall that these trees grew near water—and where you found water, you often found campsites. A stinky outhouse or a damp shower block was hardly a dream accommodation, but any cover was better than none. And maybe the bins there would offer a little late-night supper.