Z. Rex

by Steve Cole

“The petrified remains of ancient animals. I thought—if I could only restore those ancient relics for proper study, think what we could learn. . . .” Hayden shook his head gravely. “But these people’s ambitions ran far higher. And it seems they had access to actual soft tissue preserved at the heart of a T. rex femur recovered from hydrated sandstone in Wyoming some sixty-six million years old.” He started to pace about the room. “Somehow they managed to make my molecule machines fuse with the dinosaur DNA. Instead of simply regenerating the original dinosaur design, they accelerated its potential evolution through millions and millions of years.” He shook his head, marveling. “Brilliant. Extraordinarily brilliant.”

  Crazy, more like, thought Adam, uneasily. “But I thought dinosaurs evolved into birds,” he said. “How come they didn’t end up turning a T. rex into . . . I dunno, a chicken or something?”

  “Evolution is the way in which a life form develops and adapts in response to changes in its environment,” Hayden answered. “Something that happens naturally over millions of years. But there was nothing natural about what they did to those cells.” He drew in a breath and let it out slowly. “I shudder to think what mutations they must have created in their first experiments. They were able to take control of the evolution process. Played a game of prehistoric ‘What if?’ by the sound of things. . . . What if the T. rex had grown wings that would carry him to fresh hunting grounds? What if he developed a kind of advanced chameleon skin, allowing him to blend in with his environment to creep up on prey?”

  Adam joined in. “What if he could be made as smart as a human being?”

  “Or smarter,” Hayden shot back. “And he had four fingers and a thumb on each hand as we do, the better to shape his habitat?”

  “You’d get the ultimate dinosaur,” Adam murmured.

  “The ultimate predator,” Hayden corrected him. “A highly evolved, highly intelligent killing machine. Do you see now, Adam, why those papers you left with me are so vitally important? They contain information about how the bioregenerators can be applied in the different fields of biology.” He leaned in urgently. “You’re sure you don’t have any more of these notes anywhere?”

  Adam shook his head. “It’s like I said—all the ones we took from New Mexico, I gave to you.”

  “And the others?”

  “Buried in New Mexico. The lab there was blown up.”

  Hayden nodded, turned and paced toward the door, his wispy hair standing on end. “So, there’s not a shred of evidence left, you say?”

  Adam shook his head, frowning. Something felt wrong. “Um . . . no.”

  “Nothing that could incriminate these people or shed light on the process?”

  “Nothing.” Adam went suddenly very, very cold. “Mr. Hayden?” He swallowed hard. “You say you got hit on the head. Where, exactly? There’s no mark.”

  Hayden turned slowly to face Adam. He smiled reassuringly. “It was the back of my neck they struck.”

  “And you said I felt bad ’cause the anesthetic they gave me was wearing off.” Adam’s heart was sinking and dragging every other organ with it. “If you were clobbered by these people, why would you think I was given an anesthetic?”

  “Josephs told me, before you . . .” Hayden tailed off, and then sighed. “No, I shan’t insult your intelligence. You’re more astute than you appear, aren’t you, Adam? A little of your father’s analytical ability creeping into that young head, huh?”

  Each soft-spoken word was like a nail thumped into Adam’s chest. He found he could hardly speak. “What . . . what’s going on?”

  Hayden shrugged. “I guessed you were far more likely to speak honestly about the Z. rex’s operational status and the existence of any further files if you trusted me. And I was right.” He banged on the door of the cell; it swung open at once to reveal Frankie Bateman, standing impassively with a pistol aimed at Adam’s chest.

  Adam froze, his eyes hardening as he glared at Hayden. “You were never a prisoner here.”

  “That’s right, Adam. I’m actually head jailer.” Hayden gave him a regretful smile. “And if your dad causes me any further problems—you’re dead.”

  20

  SECRETS

  For several seconds, Adam remained stunned by the sudden shift of events. Hayden had been tricking him right from the start. How could he ever have trusted this man? Because Dad told me to, he realized, and because I needed to believe someone was on my side. “You’re in charge of Geneflow Solutions?” he asked finally.

  “Let’s just say I’m an influential figure,” Hayden told him.

  “But . . . I don’t understand.” Adam glanced at Bateman, saw the gun barrel, looked quickly away. “Your head of security over there tried to get me when I broke into my home, but blew it. How come you didn’t just grab me when I came to your office?”

  Hayden smiled. “That would hardly have suited our purpose. We had tried to contain and collect you in America, of course, but assumed you’d perished with the Z. rex when the bomb went off in New Mexico. A pity, we thought, since having your life in our hands gives us good leverage over your father.” His green eyes were gleaming. “When Bateman sighted you outside your apartment, I was glad his attempt to capture you didn’t work out.”

  “Sure you were,” Adam muttered.

  “No, really. When I found you in my offices, I guessed that the Z. rex must have brought you to Scotland,” Hayden went on. “If we’d simply captured you at once, the creature would surely have come looking for you, as it did before—causing carnage and unwelcome attention. So we bided our time, employed a little trickery to put you off guard and followed you to learn where the Z. rex was hiding . . .” He grinned. “We picked up the two of you and the files you stole with little struggle and no loss of life. Works for me!”

  Adam felt crushed inside, but he was determined not to show it to these maniacs. He squared his shoulders. “Where’s my dad? I want to see him.”

  Even as he said the words, Samantha Josephs appeared beside Bateman in the doorway, silent as a shadow. “I’ve brought him,” she announced.

  “Adam?” It was his dad’s voice, outside in the corridor. “Adam, is that—?”

  “Dad!” Adam craned to see past Josephs and Bateman, his heart bunching up in his throat. “Dad, I’m here, I’m—”

  The next moment, Bill Adlar pushed past them and flew to Adam, grabbing him in a bear hug. “Oh, Adam, they told me you were dead. . . .”

  “I thought you were too,” Adam whispered, his voice thick with the tears he was trying to keep down. “Thought I’d never see you again.” For a moment the rest of the world faded away as he felt the solidity of his dad. “Have they hurt you?”

  Mr. Adlar pulled away, and Adam was shocked to see how gaunt, how gray he looked. His glasses had been broken—they were held together with tape—and the rest of him looked to be in similar repair. “I’m fine,” he said, convincing no one, a haunted look in his blue eyes. “But are you all right? Did Zed hurt you?”

  Adam quickly shook his head.

  “Josephs made us evacuate Fort Ponil when she found Zed was alive, thought he was out for revenge. To know I was leaving you . . .” Mr. Adlar wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, and took tight hold of Adam’s arm. “When they said that you were alive, that you were here in Edinburgh, I didn’t believe them at first, I thought it was another trick, a way to get me to—”

  “It’s okay, Dad.” Adam felt a strange numbness settling over him. He’d waited so long to see his dad again, as though that would take the fear away and make everything seem better. Now he realized that wasn’t going to happen; his dad was just as vulnerable as he was. They were trapped in this situation, both together.

  “I’m sorry for all this, Adam,” his dad murmured helplessly.

  Hayden took a step forward. “Adam will be a lot sorrier, Bill, if you don’t get on with the work with a little more enthusiasm.”

  “Should I demonstrate?” Bateman smiled at Adam, sc
ratching idly at the healing scar across his cheek.

  Mr. Adlar clutched Adam’s wrist. “I can’t perfect the Think-Send tech in the timescale you’re working to, Jeff.” His raw voice matched the look in his eyes. “However much you threaten Adam. Or me.”

  “Bill, I’ve been checking your progress,” said Josephs. “The notes that we found in your apartment prove you’ve been duplicating much of your groundwork.”

  “Testing it properly,” Mr. Adlar insisted.

  Hayden shook his head. “Samantha has already performed the most thorough checks. I was paying her to do so even before you kicked her off your team.”

  Adam turned to his father in surprise. Mr. Adlar nodded. “Hayden’s been building up to this for a long, long time, Adam. He and the rest of his would-be world changers in Geneflow Solutions.”

  “Dad, that night you came back after the meeting at Fort Ponil”—Adam looked him in the eye—“did you know what they wanted you to do?”

  “Not for sure.” His dad looked away. “But . . . I had an inkling.”

  “Then how could you get involved?” Adam demanded in confusion. “You must have known Josephs had stolen your research.”

  “Of course he did. But how could he resist?” Josephs looked at Adam, a faint smile on her face. “I told him my organization would fund the completion of Ultra-Reality—provided he joined the Z. rex project first.”

  “With yet another contract about to end, I guess I was clutching at straws. But I had no idea where the work was headed.” Mr. Adlar turned to Hayden, his eyes hardening. “And until I was dragged into this crumbling hellhole, I had no idea you were behind any of it—‘old friend.’”

  “If you had, you would hardly have told Adam to go to me with the evidence you’d so clumsily compiled.” Hayden flashed him a tight smile. “All right, Bill, now you’ve seen that we’ve got Adam and that he’s unharmed. Why don’t we all get back to work?”

  Mr. Adlar went on glaring at him. “I want Adam to come with me.”

  “Oh, the boy’s coming, don’t you worry,” said Hayden, in a tone of voice that suggested he should.

  Adam gasped as Bateman yanked him roughly from his dad’s grip and steered him out of the cell into a featureless white corridor. From the clomping of footsteps behind him, he knew his dad, Hayden and Josephs were following close behind.

  “What are you going to do with Zed?” Adam demanded.

  “You should have destroyed that beast as I told you to, Bill,” said Josephs curtly. “It would have been kinder.”

  “It would have been murder,” Mr. Adlar shot back. “He’s not an animal. He’s intelligent, articulate. Self-aware. At least by lowering the voltage he had a shot at survival.”

  A jolt slammed through Adam’s heart. “Then you didn’t flick the switch to kill Zed, Dad. You did it to save him!”

  “I had to try, Adam. I’m only sorry for all that my decision has put you through.”

  “And what about the good men I’ve lost to that thing, Adlar?” Bateman snarled. “Are you sorry for them?”

  “Your good men simply weren’t good enough, Mr. Bateman,” said Hayden coolly, walking just ahead of Adam now. “They went rushing off to track the Z., and the Z. rex used its superior strength and skills to thwart them, ensuring its own survival.” He smiled to himself. “That’s the business of life, Mr. Bateman, and always has been.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Bateman quietly. He yanked down hard on Adam’s arm to stop him walking, as Hayden marched up to a formidable set of sliding steel doors and pressed some buttons on a keypad. The heavy doors ground open with a whir of gears, and harsh white light spilled out from the huge room they guarded. From the looks of things, this was the underground control center of the aging nuclear shelter.

  It was a strange mix of old and new. Whereas Fort Ponil boasted modern workstations, here the slimline PCs perched on old, ink-stained desks. As Bateman marched him inside and pushed him into a threadbare office chair, Adam noticed a large arc of metal studded with circuits leaning against the nearest desk—like a Think-Send headset only far bigger. At the back of the room, state-of-the-art computer servers hummed beside battered gray generators. Above them, four huge flat-screen TVs were pressed into the rock wall like dark windows, their chrome tops nudging rusted grilles. Each grille was festooned with fluttering ribbons to show that fresh air was circulating. With a chill, Adam saw the image of Zed’s scaly bulk on one of the monitors. He was curled up in a rocky cell with sensor pads placed against his forehead, motionless and wreathed in white gas.

  The holding pen, Adam thought.

  Josephs crossed the room to sit at a workstation at the far side of the echoing chamber, close to another pair of enormous metal doors. The sheets of steel were pitted and scratched and stained with grease. Adam wondered warily what they were designed to contain—or keep out.

  “The place is a bit of a ragbag, I know,” said Hayden, Bateman hovering by his side. “But research of this type costs a good deal, and sadly our resources aren’t unlimited.”

  Adam pointed up at the screen. “So why try to kill Zed?”

  “Because they screwed up.” Adam’s dad slumped into his chair and placed one hand on the oversized headset. “Sam put terabytes of knowledge into Zed’s head using a variation of the Think-Send system. But she’d taken an early work in progress, full of glitches. The more information Zed absorbed, the more his mental state started to deteriorate.”

  Adam nodded grimly. “I guessed they must have brought you in to try and put things right.”

  Hayden looked across at Josephs, who shifted under his stare. “Talented and committed though Samantha is, for work so specialized I required the genius who first designed the system.”

  Mr. Adlar ignored the compliment. “They needed me to update the software and restore the balance in Zed’s brain. I placed him in a simple Ultra-Reality scenario to focus his mind while I did so—but there were side effects.” He paused. “I had to adapt the latest Think-Send system. As you know, it’s patterned on your own brain waves—”

  “I know, all right,” Adam broke in. “Boy, do I know. And some of them got into Zed’s brain, right?”

  “Yes. He was in Ultra-Reality long enough to absorb traces of your own personality. When he came out, he was more headstrong, willful, even secretive at times.” His dad smiled sadly. “Prone to sudden bad moods.”

  “Can’t think why,” Adam muttered.

  “The traits of a teenager.” Hayden pronounced the word like it was dirty. “Is it any wonder I ordered the creature destroyed? He was useless for my purposes.”

  “And if it really wanted to survive,” said Bateman, “it should never have come after us.”

  “Zed didn’t come after you for revenge,” Adam said, “you just got in his way.” He turned back to his father.

  “He came here to get you, Dad. Maybe ’cause he did pick up some of my personality, and I’d have come for you too. I guess Zed took me along ’cause in his head, me and him are linked.”

  “That partly explains the beast’s motivation,” Sam Josephs agreed, looking up from her monitor. “In the wake of the severe brain trauma we inflicted, the Z. rex could well have imagined a connection between the two of you. But it’s not the whole story.”

  “Aha!” Hayden turned to her, expectantly. “You have the results from our brain scans of the Z. rex?”

  “The tissue damage has healed even faster than you predicted,” she said, and while her voice remained steady, her eyes were bright with excitement. “As you know, my first theory was that the Z. rex brought the boy here in order to kill him in front of Bill, and pay him back for his apparent betrayal.”

  Adam shook his head. “He wouldn’t do that.”

  “Apparently not.” Josephs gestured to Zed’s image on the TV screen. “Those sensors have been feeding test images and information directly into the beast’s brain. Pictures of itself and of other animals, along with footage we recorded at the war
ehouse tonight—”

  Mr. Adlar broke in. “So, tell us your results.”

  “The Z. rex’s physical-chemical reactions to you, Bill, are mixed. I’ll need more time to go over them.” Josephs looked at Adam. “But when it sees or hears the boy, levels of certain hormones increase . . . blood pressure rises . . .”

  Adam scowled. “What’s all that meant to mean?”

  Josephs looked at him, a sardonic smile playing about her lips. “I believe that the poor, deluded creature has formed an affinity with you. Isn’t that sweet? With all the time you’ve spent together, it has actually come to care about you. Like a brother.”

  Adam swallowed hard, groped about for words. None came.

  “The one part of the equation that your science couldn’t control, Hayden,” Mr. Adlar said quietly. “Emotions. Spirit.”

  “You two are out of your minds.” Bateman snorted. “Finer feelings in a dinosaur?”

  “But this is fascinating!” Hayden cried, beaming. “What science can’t control, it can still exploit, Bill. This is going to make for a most interesting experiment.”

  “Listen to yourself.” Adam stared hatefully at Hayden. “Experiments! You don’t give a toss about Zed and what you’ve done to him. Tricking him into flying away. Confusing him, exhausting him when he was already sick and hurting. It’s all your fault that he went bad and out of control—”

  “Bad?” With a sly look at Josephs, Hayden crossed to a bank of controls near the huge, grimy double doors. “Why, Adam, whatever can you mean?”

  “You know he tore down the castle. He even attacked people!”

  “How about that?” Bateman was shaking his head in some amusement. “The kid really fell for it, didn’t he?”

  Adam felt a prickle of unease. “What’re you talking about?”

  “Your precious Zed didn’t hurt anyone here,” said Hayden, a smile still playing about his mouth. “And I certainly won’t allow him to take credit for the destruction of Edinburgh Castle.” He turned to his controls and stabbed one with his finger. With an ominous clank and judder, the huge metal doors began to slide slowly open onto pitch-darkness. Adam saw that the color had drained from his dad’s face, and he found himself holding his breath.