Z. Rex

by Steve Cole

  “Put me down!” Adam hollered, struggling in the scaly crook of Zed’s elbow. He saw the helicopters buzzing around the scene of destruction like wasps around jam. The traffic in the streets below was grid-locked. Honking horns fought for attention over the row of sirens.

  Zed hurtled north over the darkened estates. He swooped down over an enormous large white truck parked outside the neighboring gasworks and landed near the warehouse with a thud, his claws churning up the old concrete. The distant bedlam of shouts, horns and air traffic carried even here to the dark, deserted wasteland, as Zed opened the roll-up doors and stalked inside.

  Adam wriggled free of Zed’s grip and dropped to the ground, shaking in the murky gloom. “You’re crazy!” he yelled, staring up at Zed. “If you’re gonna kill me, just get on with it!”

  The creature seemed agitated, his claws clicking together, padding around in a circle and scenting the air, his massive muscles tensed. Then he reached into his giant jaws and pulled something out.

  It took Adam a few seconds to realize he was staring at a White Sox sweatshirt, crumpled and damp.

  “That’s Dad’s,” Adam said. He was frozen inside. “I got it for him in New Mexico. He packed it when he went to Fort Ponil.”

  “Dad . . . scent. Dad.” He looked distressed, heaving great breaths. “Tried. Get Dad.”

  “Tried?” Adam breathed.

  Zed nodded. “Get. Zed must. Must get.”

  “No!” Adam shook his head. “Smash all the castles you want, but for the last time, it’s not him you should be after. You don’t want to kill him!”

  “KILL?” As he shouted the word, Zed thrust his huge face up close to Adam’s. Adam gasped and lay very still, petrified as those huge, dripping teeth hovered just millimeters away from his neck. “GET. Get Dad.” He stamped his foot. “Get. Dad. Out.”

  “Get him . . . out?” Adam felt a huge crash of confusion.

  Zed’s brows beetled together. “Pain. Dark. Get Dad out.”

  Adam stared at him. “That’s why you came to our apartment in New Mexico?” Sadness, fear and relief surged through his brain in a dizzying rush. “You weren’t trying to kill him? But you trashed the place!”

  “Men. Guns,” the dinosaur sneered. “Zed mad.”

  He’s like an overgrown kid, Adam realized, still trembling. Lashing out. Not thinking stuff through. “Zed, why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “Am . . . Ad . . . am.” Zed stared down at him, just as he had back in Fort Ponil. “Zed. Ad. Knows.”

  “No.” Adam shook his head. “No, you don’t understand. You’ve got bits of my thoughts in your head, but I haven’t got any of yours! I’ve never known what you were thinking about me, or my dad, or—”

  “Dad,” Zed growled. “Mine. Dad mine.”

  “Your dad?” Adam closed his eyes and thought. If Zed’s head had been so scrambled he’d come to see Bill Adlar as a kind of surrogate father, and Adam as close to a brother, then no wonder he’d come so far to bring them back together. But what if Zed’s mind was starting to heal, and the links binding him to Adam and Dad were breaking down? He remembered the way Zed had clutched his head in the horse field, thought of the woman being taken to the hospital, the castle collapsing. . . .

  Zed’s savage side had to be gaining control.

  “What about Dad’s shirt?” Adam said quietly. “Where’d you find it?”

  “Long way. Sky.”

  Frowning, Adam spotted a string hanging down from the White Sox top with shreds of foil tied to the end. “Helium balloons,” he whispered. “Someone tied his shirt to balloons and let them fly out over the sea?” He got up from the floor, thinking hard as more sirens went shrieking into the night beyond the warehouse grounds and the persistent helicopters whirled on overhead. “It was a trick, Zed. A trick to get you out of the way. Whoever did it knew you’d pick up the scent and try to follow. But why?” He looked imploringly at Zed. “The woman you attacked last night, did she have anything to do with Geneflow?”

  Zed ignored him, sniffing the air. “Feel wrong. Bad.”

  “And what about the castle?” Adam demanded. “Zed, I know you’re confused. You’ve been put through so much, but now you’ve—”

  The dinosaur turned without warning and pounded over to the loading doors. He slammed his fist against the red button, almost tore it from the wall. The chains clanked as the metal barrier lifted.

  “What is it?” Adam ran after him, afraid of what Zed might do next.

  As he reached the exit, massive floodlights slammed on, the white light blinding. Zed flinched, ducked his head, while Adam threw his own hands up over his eyes. The growl of helicopters overhead grew louder.

  “Hey, kid!” It was Bateman’s voice, ringing out from the wall of light. “We’re from the local pound, heard reports of a dangerous animal.”

  Before Adam could even react, Zed charged forward and stomp-kicked the nearest floodlights, buckling metal and shattering glass. He was about to follow up with the jab cross when a huge copter dropped from out of the darkness to drive him back. The rotor wash whipped at Adam’s hair and clothes, forcing him to the ground. He saw there were men jammed in the doorway. Men with guns.

  Zed roared out in defiance, flicked open his wings and turned himself invisible. But four jagged shafts of blue light spat from the men’s weapons, and Adam was driven back by the fierce, crackling power. Zed’s form reappeared as an outline of sparking, blinding energy, and his shrieks rose above the roar of the rotors.

  Adam stared in horror, shaking his head. Wasn’t this what he’d wanted—Zed under control, incapable of hurting anyone ever again? He looked away, unable to watch—and gasped as his arm was twisted up behind his back.

  “There now, Ad—isn’t this better?” Bateman had snuck around and grabbed him, hissing in his ear. “Thanks for leading us to him. Cycling away from Lawnmarket in such a hurry this morning. . . . You should’ve looked behind you instead of overhead.”

  Adam struggled wildly, gasping with pain, as the men kept blasting away. Zed was down on the ground, unable to withstand the assault, his head jerking from side to side. They sent him on a wild-goose chase ’cause they wanted him tired, Adam realized. Wanted him easier to take. “Mr. Bateman,” he gasped, “his mind’s all messed up, he doesn’t know what he’s done. Please, make them stop!”

  “Stop? You know how hard it is to get private security for a gig like this?” Bateman laughed as the coils of blue energy thickened around the twitching dinosaur. “These guys are mercenaries. They want to be fighting wars.” He twisted Adam’s arm farther behind his back. “So, here’s their war.”

  Zed tried to beat his wings, took a couple of stumbling steps, but then fell against the corner of the warehouse with a deafening crash. Masonry tumbled to the ground with him. He struggled feebly to rise.

  “Wave two,” Bateman shouted into a handheld radio. “Move in!”

  The surviving floodlights dimmed as their operators, four more men in black, faces smeared with camouflage paint, ran forward with strange-looking pistols. They opened fire on Zed—no light show, just the eerie whistle and thud of silenced weapons, again and again. Behind them, the large white truck parked out in the road—the same one Adam had nearly crashed into earlier—was rumbling slowly toward the warehouse. The back doors were wide open, and men bearing heavy chains spilled out. While we were away, these guys moved in, he realized. The dinosaur lay motionless now in the blue spit of sparks.

  “Get the ramps in place, and the forklifts,” Bateman yelled to the men in the truck. “It’s time we loaded up this scaly sack of—”

  Adam brought his foot down hard on Bateman’s ankle and elbowed the man in the stomach with all his strength. At the same time he wrenched himself free and sprinted, terrified, for the warehouse.

  “Wave two, hold your fire!” Bateman bellowed. “Get the boy!”

  The firing stopped as Adam disappeared into the loading bay. He ran for the fire exit, ho
ping to fool them into thinking he was still somewhere inside. But before he’d covered half the ground, the fire doors burst open. Two men carrying the weird pistols blocked his way. Adam skidded to a stop and in desperation ran for the humming power cables. Maybe he could ward them off with an electric shock, see how they liked their own medicine. . . .

  He grabbed hold of the thick, snaking cable, straightened to face his attackers—and felt a thud in his chest. He looked down and saw some sort of dart protruding from his jacket, but couldn’t feel a thing. Whimpering, he hefted the cable. A cold jolt went through his body like a physical blow. Adam fell over backward, the cable slipping from his grip. We blew it, Zed, he realized numbly. Never got Dad out. They got us.

  The men rushed in, surrounding him like the darkness that was closing over his head.

  19

  CELLS

  Adam stirred, his face cold and numb. There was a dull throb in the muscles of his left arm. He wished that could be numb too. Slowly he became aware of movement.

  He realized his face was pressed up against glass. A car window? No, he was higher up in his seat than that. A truck, then. Big and heavy, by the growl of the engine.

  Adam held very still. He didn’t want anyone knowing he was awake.

  It was dark outside.

  Where am I?

  The vehicle turned and Arthur’s Seat swung obligingly into sight, massive in his window view.

  He was still in Edinburgh. How long had he been out? The ugly scene at the warehouse stuttered through his head as a series of horrific images: Zed collapsing . . . Breaking free from Bateman’s grip . . . Looking down to see the tranquilizer dart lodged in his chest . . .

  Strange that the dart hadn’t hurt. Adam looked down at his ghostly reflection in the glass and saw the end of it still sticking out from his jacket, like a syringe with a fluffy tail. And yet, it wasn’t a sharp silver point he felt digging into his chest now.

  He held his breath. Dad’s phone. The dart must have hit that instead of his chest. So how come he had blacked out? He remembered the jolt that slammed through him as he’d tried to bring that unplugged cable to bear. . . .

  That was it, Adam realized. He’d been shocked, not drugged, and no one had noticed the difference. And now he was awake, presumably earlier than intended, as his transport was still rumbling through the dark roads around Holyrood Park.

  The truck grumbled into a gas station. No lights were on, but they turned left into a big shelter at the back, a car wash, maybe, or a service garage. Maybe this is my chance to leg it, he thought. If I could only get outside somehow.

  Then the realization hit him: Where would he go? Where could he go to, all alone now? He was as much a prisoner of circumstance here as he’d been in New Mexico.

  Maybe if Dad’s here they’ll let me see him.

  The situation was taken out of his hands in any case. A few moments later, the ground lurched. They were going down into the darkness.

  Adam kept faking sleep, but it wasn’t so easy when you were descending into some creepy underground lair, eerily aglow with orange hazard lights. He wondered vaguely if he was still knocked out, if this was a dream.

  The truck came to a halt in a large, rocky hangar. He heard a clamor of echoes—men’s shouts, running footsteps, gruff bursts of two-way radio static, the piercing bleep of the truck’s reversing sensors.

  “Place the Z. rex in the holding pen.” The female voice was English and cultivated—Josephs’s voice. “I need to apply the brain sensors, so be quick. The tranquilizers won’t keep it quiet forever.”

  Adam risked opening his eyes a crack to see the woman up close through the truck window. She was in her thirties maybe, barely taller than he was, slim and striking with smooth, dark skin. Her gaze held an unsettling intensity.

  “We filmed everything that went down at the warehouse, Miss Josephs,” one of the men said. “D’you want the tapes—”

  “Drop them at my workstation,” she snapped. “As for the boy . . . the tranquilizer should keep him out a while yet, but you’d better cuff him. Then leave him in the cell with Hayden.”

  So they did get Hayden, Adam thought. He looked down at the dart piercing his jacket, its tip embedded in the plastic shell of the phone. Perhaps there was some of the tranquilizer left inside—enough to use as a weapon?

  Quickly, he pulled out the dart and slipped it into his jacket pocket. Then he shut his eyes as the truck door he was slumped against abruptly opened and he fell into the arms of some sweat-ape thug. The man wrestled him none too gently into some handcuffs and then carried him away.

  Adam heard heavy doors grinding open somewhere behind him, more deep voices:

  “I’m not going near that thing.”

  “The auto-loader will dump it for us. Get ready to pump in the tranquilizer gas.”

  At least Zed’s alive, thought Adam. Then the sounds were swallowed up, as he was carried deeper into the cold, volcanic tunnels.

  He wasn’t sure how long the journey lasted, and though he tried to memorize the turns they were taking, he soon lost track. A heavy door squealed on its hinges, and he was laid down roughly inside. He gasped, unable to keep up the pretense of sleep any longer.

  “Adam?”

  As the door was closed and locked, he opened his eyes and found Mr. Hayden hovering over him, wild wisps of combed-over hair dancing about his pate. His suit and shirt were a bit crumpled, but otherwise he seemed well. The two of them were in a bare, rectangular room with rough stone walls, a table, a toilet and a single hard bunk. It felt like a prison cell.

  Adam felt a rush of relief that he wasn’t on his own. “Mr. Hayden! Have you seen my dad? Is he okay?”

  “Josephs says he’s just fine,” Hayden assured him. “As fine as he can be, anyway. Sounds like he’s cooperating.”

  “He is?” Adam tried to shrug off a stab of disappointment. “Cooperating on what?”

  “So far as I can tell, Geneflow Solutions is developing a whole range of projects in facilities all over the world. But don’t think badly of your dad. I’m sure he’s only doing what he has to.”

  Adam nodded glumly and forced his thoughts away from that. “How did they get you?”

  “I had a visit in the night. Took me by surprise, knocked me out cold.” Hayden mimed being hit on the back of the head. “But, Adam, listen. This thing is massive. You know, we’re inside a secret nuclear shelter, hidden under Arthur’s Seat.” He helped Adam rise. “It was bought from the government by property developers in the 1990s hoping to turn it into a tourist attraction. But when that fell through . . . they stepped in.”

  “Geneflow Solutions?” Adam rubbed the back of his aching neck. “Who are they?”

  “Geniuses, if the Z. rex project is anything to go by. I still don’t believe they could pull off something like that.” He looked hard at Adam. “But you do, don’t you?”

  Adam sighed. What was the point in holding out now? “I guess Josephs told you that Zed’s been keeping me a prisoner, of a sort.”

  “Zed? That’s your name for it?” Hayden raised his eyebrows. “So, you’ve spent time with the actual dinosaur?”

  “Around twelve days,” said Adam, with a strange feeling of pride. “Just him and me, pretty much.”

  “What patterns of behavior did you notice?” asked Hayden eagerly.

  “Huh?”

  “Sorry. I mean, did it display intelligence, or aggression, or . . . ?”

  “Uh . . . he showed both, I guess.” Adam took a deep breath. “When I first ran into him, he was really mad. Josephs had tried to burn his brains out. He killed some people—”

  Hayden looked at him worriedly. “You had to witness that?”

  “It wasn’t his fault,” blurted Adam, surprising himself. Since when did I start sticking up for him? “Zed was hurt, people were trying to kill him, and he fought back.” Adam shuddered. “Fought back hard. But he was clever too. He actually defused a bomb—and set it again. Over here, he dug
his way down to the electricity supply and ran power through to the old warehouse we stayed in.”

  “So it displayed real initiative!” Hayden seemed staggered. “That’s incredible!”

  “That’s nothing,” Adam went on. “He actually flew us across the ocean from America, all the way here. It took days and days, and after what he went through, I think it was all too much. He got sick—”

  “Physical exhaustion can lead to lowered immune system functioning. But Zed could still communicate? Verbally?”

  Adam wondered for a moment at Hayden’s interest. Dad would be the same, he reminded himself, if he heard something like this. “Zed can speak a bit, read and write even. But like I said, his brain was hurt in New Mexico. He kind of lost his memory, and . . .” He trailed off, his head starting to spin. “Actually, my brain’s not feeling too good.”

  “Must be the effects of the anesthetic wearing off.” Hayden perched on the edge of the bunk. “Sorry. I guess you expected an interrogation from the bad guys, not me!”

  Adam forced a smile as the dizziness passed. “It’s okay. I just wish I knew why they ever made a dinosaur. And so does Zed.”

  “Well, I can’t tell you why,” said Hayden. “But I think I can tell you how. Since it was my technology that kicked off the whole deal.”

  “Of course,” Adam recalled. “When Josephs stole the blueprints of your bio-things. . . .”

  Hayden nodded, looking pained. “Our bioregenerators release microscopic molecule machines into the patient’s bloodstream. They work with the body to undo damage and replace it with healthy tissue. But in tests, we found our bioregenerators weren’t only restoring damaged cells, they were enhancing them. Making them better than before! I found that, if stimulated correctly, the regenerators can even work on certain fossil remains.”

  Adam tried to look as though he had conversations like this every day. “Old bones and stuff?”