by Rick Chesler
Alex saw a blur behind him, a flash of blonde hair and a whistling sound as Veronica swung hard and down with the metal piping Alex had dropped. It connected hard across the captain’s skull, spinning his head around.
It didn’t stop him. Veronica backed up, pipe raised in a two-handed sword grip. The captain shook his head, drooled another thick line of syrupy blood, and then advanced. Veronica swung and clocked him again, dodging out of the way as she caved in his nose. He turned and just growled and shook his head, and opened his jaws wider, revealing even more jagged incisors.
“What the hell are you?” was all she could yell, as fear and incredulity lowered her guard. The captain saw his chance and leapt at her—
He never made it. One shot. Alex had it all lined up, and this time he didn’t miss, blasting a perfect hole into and through the captain’s right temple. The big man dropped, lights out, as if he had been a robot and someone had just killed his power supply.
The body twitched once on the floor, face down in front of Veronica, and then lay still. In a moment, gathering her wits, she stood up, glancing around nervously. “Any more of those fuckers?”
Alex waved the gun around, looking at the three other bodies. One with brains exploded, two others with so many bite marks and rabid devouring it looked as if the first zombie had nearly eaten every last bit of exposed flesh—including cracking open the skull and eating the prize inside.
“I think we’re good,” he said, “for now.”
She stared at him, lowering the metal rod. “Zombies?”
Alex nodded. “Goddamn prehistoric zombies.”
“How?” she whispered.
Then they both stopped and turned, looking toward the slumbering T. rex. Alex thought about telling her about the lake, the microbes, and the floating dinosaur submerged in the muck with all those primitive microorganisms for millions of years, but figured he’d leave the speculation to brighter minds, like his dad’s.
“I think,” Veronica said, pointing at the gun, “you’d better shoot that thing in the head now. Just to be sure. No idea how long those tranq’s are going to last, and I don’t know about you, but I have no wish to be up against an undead one of…whatever those are.”
Alex nodded and moved closer, taking aim at the T. rex’s head. He paused, and considered telling her there were two more big reptiles—the Cryolophosaurs, somewhere around here in a shipping container. Probably in the next hold. “Wish my father was here. I have no idea where the brain is in this thing’s head.”
“Heard it’s small, like a walnut,” Veronica said. “At least, that’s what I remember from high school.”
“Great.” Alex shrugged, eyeing a head that was the size of a compact car. “What if I miss and it just wakes up pissed off?”
Veronica took a few steps back, toward the stairs, just as a wave pitched at the ship. The metal joints creaked and the T. rex slid hard, platform and all, into the side wall. It stirred, groaned, and turned its snout.
“Now,” Veronica called. “Do it…”
Alex regained his balance as a flood washed in over his feet, spilling in from the stairwell and the splitting joints. Water suddenly burst from a seam behind the creature, and then another spout erupted from his left, blinding him.
“Shoot!”
He squeezed the trigger, and a section of the thing’s snout blew out. “Damn.” He aimed again, a little higher. “You know it would help if you could cut my wrists free.” He took a breath and tried to steady his aim. “I also just had a bad thought. With the captain dead, who’s piloting this thing…?”
He turned back in the silence, and saw why she hadn’t answered.
Veronica’s back was to him, her hands raised in the air. “Uh, Alex…”
Xander was on the stairs. Holding an M5 submachine gun on them. “Drop the gun, kid. If you take one more shot at my prize, you and her are dead meat.”
Alex swore and was about to drop the gun when the boat pitched again. He saw Veronica lurch backward while Xander held on for dear life. The T. rex groaned and Alex heard something that sounded like breaking chains just before the tortured grating noise of the hull splitting open. He was thrust across the room into a wall that suddenly broke apart as he struck it—letting in thousands of gallons of ocean, swirling, pulling, and tugging him under and out.
Everything spun into the black maelstrom and his thoughts drowned with his screams.
21.
Adranos Island—Dawn
Marcus woke on a rocky shore that reminded him of his honeymoon in St. Lucia. A black sand beach and a sky full of angry clouds punctuated with flecks of weak sunlight from dawn’s cautious appearance.
He blinked, coughed, and felt a hundred bruises and pains, and a surge of something else, vitality maybe, coursing through his veins. He shouldn’t, couldn’t feel this good, not after his trauma, a shipwreck and all the drugs that fake doc had given him, but still… something must have been transferred in that bite…
He groaned and sat up. His head spun and hurt like apocalyptic hell. Everything was blurry and he should have been freezing, but instead felt an agonizing fever, and there, splashing out of the pounding surf… that doctor, the fake.
Dripping wet, shivering, but pretty, resolute and angry.
She carried a gun.
#
Veronica splashed over to Marcus, but slowed as she came closer.
“You’ve got it,” she said over the surf, as the rumbling thunder chased the clouds away to the south. She leveled the M5 at his head. Not sure it would still fire, waterlogged as it was, still she felt better for holding it.
“Got what?” Marcus said with a gasping, raspy voice.
Glancing away from his jaundiced skin, already tightening and scaling, away from those haunted, changing eyes, she looked up and down the shore. The Hammond was crashed upon a rocky incline fifty yards distant, its midsection split open, cracked like an egg, its contents expelled into the sea. Boxes, crates, and debris littered the shore.
“Hello?” Marcus coughed again. “Can you see…Alex?”
“No,” Veronica said, sweeping her gaze around, now farther out to sea. “Not yet. I’m sure we’ll find him.”
“No you’re not.” Marcus coughed again, then rolled over, trying to get up. “How could you be?”
“You’re right, but I’ll look for him. I promise.”
“Thanks,” he said, grimacing as he stood up, holding his stump, “but I can manage.”
“I doubt that,” Veronica said, aiming the gun at him again. “Although you do seem healthier. More energy.” She took a step back.
He eyed her. “You seem far too cautious of me.” He cracked his neck, flexed the fingers on his remaining hand, and then looked at his nails intently.
“There’s something you should know.”
Marcus opened his mouth to reply, then groaned and doubled over, suddenly spitting out blood—and bits of white teeth. “Oh God…”
“Yeah,” Veronica said, “you might be…changing. We’ve got to—”
Suddenly, the water erupted in a human-sized splash of arms and legs and coughing, a crashing wave that brought Xander rolling onto the shore. He gasped and shook his head and jumped to his feet, only to meet the barrel of the M5 aimed between his eyes.
“I’m not second guessing fate,” Veronica said. “Especially when it’s delivered you right to me.”
Xander blinked away the water from his eyes. “Knew there was something about you. CIA spook, right?” He spread out his arms. “Congratulations, you got me. Although you don’t really have me.”
Veronica tensed her finger on the trigger. “Sure looks like I do.”
“No evidence of anything.” He thumbed over his shoulder, toward the wreck. “Are you just going to shoot me and deliver up a body to your bosses? Never knowing what I was really up to, never being able to unravel all the sticky threads of my supposedly criminal web?” He grinned. “You have no idea.”
“
I don’t need the details,” she said defiantly. “This isn’t part of my assignment. They send me after the big fish. You…you are only a blessed coincidence. A chance for perfect revenge.” She had him at last. All those years of anguish came down to this. One pull on the trigger could erase all the pain.
Xander narrowed his eyes. “Ohhh. Wait, now I know. Edgars, wasn’t it? Your…partner maybe? Or was he something more?”
She paled, tensed. Aimed lower. “You’re going to suffer, just like he did.”
Then Xander turned his head slightly, listening. He smiled. “Oh, I don’t think this dish of yours is yet served cold enough.”
He lowered his arms, and then waved with a motion like a conductor calling for a new instrument to join the chorus. Seven Jeeps bounded over the ridge and tore onto the beach, bearing with them several dozen soldiers in green woodland camouflage.
“DeKirk’s men, I imagine,” Xander said, stepping forward, hand out for the M5. “Come to save the day.”
Veronica kept her grip on the gun, even as Xander walked right into it, smiling, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the men and the weapons trained on her, the soldiers leaping out, surrounding them.
“Welcome, boys.” Xander grinned. “Glad you brought reinforcements. We’ll need to sweep the shore and locate our prized cargo, but in the meantime, Marcus here has to be secured and brought to the lab for further analysis, and this one…”
“Drop it,” one of them said, approaching Veronica, but she didn’t need to reply, as Xander, in one quick motion, disarmed her and used the butt of the gun to bash her on the side of the head.
22.
Alex woke as a crashing wave kicked black sand and rugged shells into his face. He tried to get up. Wrists still bound, he gathered himself and stood, looking down: clothes tattered, flesh scraped and bruised but overall, no deep cuts or (God help him) bites. He looked around the windswept volcanic sand beach. Far to his left, he could just make out the ship crashed up on the shore. It didn’t look much damaged from this vantage point, but it surely wasn’t a gentle landing.
He wondered about the cargo hold. About his father’s fate. About Veronica, and…
Just then, around the bow of the ship came roaring three Jeeps, launching into the air and crashing down. Bearing toward him. Four men in each vehicle, each in camo outfits carrying machine guns.
Damn it, Alex fumed, standing wearily. Out of the furnace…
He tried to raise his hands, but they were still bound with that damn plastic. He winced against the sun and another crashing wave that almost knocked him forward, but as the Jeeps roared to a stop in a semi circle in front of him, he noticed something unusual. The men weren’t pointing their guns at him, but at something over his head. Something huge, something rising and dripping.
Something that roared and expelled a putrid gust of breath, like millions of years of delayed decomposition.
A shadow fell over him just as the bullets flew.
Alex didn’t need to look up or back. He knew from the screams of the men and the intensity of the slamming footfalls behind him, on either side of him that he just needed to run.
#
Forward, then ducking left and banking right, Alex burst out of the ocean, scrambled onto the beach and took off for dear life at an angle away from the soldiers and…
He risked a backward glance and had to freeze in his tracks. There could never be a more surreal and absolutely incongruous site: a beached cargo ship as the backdrop for a battle between armed mercenaries and a prehistoric marauding zombie T. rex. Men were out of their Jeeps firing, running and shooting, screaming at each other and the beast as it moved incredibly fast (were T. rexes supposed to be that fast, Alex wondered, or were they plodding hulking things that you just wanted to avoid at all costs?) He wished he could ask his Dad.
He watched, lingering on the beach as the dinosaur tore through the first wave of men. It lurched its giant head and snapped one man clean in half, shook, and flung the lower section back into the sea before leaping and crushing another soldier beneath its huge foot. Bullets sprayed its neck, its jaw, into its chest cavity, but it just kept roaring, lunging, and swiping its jaws. Onto the beach now, it bit down onto a Jeep with a driver still inside. Lifted the Jeep, crushing it like it was a metal toy and crunching into the man inside. Shaking its head again, the vehicle parts fell out and just the dangling legs of the soldier remained, kicking as the T. rex chewed again, crushing the bones and gulping down the rest.
More bullets sprayed into the monster’s back and up its head, and Alex had a moment’s hope—but if anything the skull seemed thicker, or the scales around there tougher, and nothing got through to the brain case.
The T. rex howled, its bloody snout raised skyward, then it raked its talons into a man who crawled on the beach, leaving a crimson trail. Punctured his back, then withdrew, and the T. rex launched itself to the side where it chased down two soldiers who were firing from the cover of another Jeep. It used its snout to flip the small truck end over end, over their heads, and then chomped down, eating one man whole and gouging the other straight through the ribs and nearly taking off his leg.
Alex backed up now, ascending a ridge, still watching the carnage. Just two soldiers were left firing, emptying clip after clip into the creature’s hide until they ran out and just seemed to stand still, accepting their gruesome fates, which the T. rex mercilessly delivered.
In moments, the beach was a bloody patch of gore and crimson sand. The dinosaur, it seemed, was still hungry. Probably after not eating for sixty-five million years, the thing worked up an appetite.
Of the five or six corpses lying on the rocks or in incomplete pieces in the surf, the dinosaur merely sniffed at them. Then lowered its head, grumbled, and made a strange sound. Sniffed again, and then lifted its head and—appearing to look right at Alex—it roared in frustration.
Alex shivered, unable to look away during that bone-chilling sound, and he was glad he didn’t, or he never would have believed it.
As if woken from a slumber, the dead men stirred.
They slowly moved, raising their heads, lifting themselves up. They stood, wobbling, and approached the T. rex. It lowered its head, now making a low purring sound.
The zombie soldiers grabbed on, one by one, and climbed. They ascended the head, down to the neck and attached themselves to its body where… they began slowly to chew.
Feeding…
Hungrily like pups to their mother.
Alex almost retched, but held it in as he backed away farther, over the ridge where he finally turned and looked out over the descending terrain. He took in the jungle foliage that gradually gave way to rocky outcroppings, flat dry lands and a long stretch leading to a facility set in a valley, surrounded by steep cliff walls and rising hills that eventually after several miles, converged into a larger peak. A smoking peak.
A volcano lording over some sort of military installation, and a lone road that now Alex could make out weaving out of the jungle area. Two Jeeps way in the distance, roared toward safety along that road.
Dad’s on one of those Jeeps, Alex felt with certainty.
He focused on the facility, knowing he had to get there, and fast, if he had any chance of saving his father. Then he glanced to his left, toward the chilling thumping that reverberated through the earth.
He wasn’t the only one with his sights set on the installation.
The T. rex, its snout high in the air, sniffing like a bloodhound after the departing prey, carrying its six zombie riders like over-enthusiastic children, roared and raced ahead, tearing in to the jungle.
Reluctantly, Alex started to follow, and then looked back to the beach.
One Jeep left, not crushed or eaten.
Engine still running.
Smiling, he broke into a run, leapt inside and first, dug around in the glove compartment and found what he needed: a utility knife.
Finally free of the wrist bands, he flexed his arms a
nd cracked his knuckles, then settled his hands on the wheel.
Time to chase after the monsters, he thought, and save his father.
23.
Veronica woke in the back seat of a Jeep with guns trained on her. She sat dangerously close to Marcus, also in the back. Far too close, she thought, watching his eyes, which came in and out of focus. He seemed to marvel momentarily at the foliage, the landscape, the jutting cliffs and vistas peeking out from the dense wood, and then the jarring drive would seem to have the opposite effect and lull him to sleep. Veronica, meanwhile, tried to keep away from his stump and from the drool and the fear of any sudden movements.
“It’s spreading,” she said to Xander, who was in the passenger seat.
He donned mirrored sunglasses as the sun peeked out from behind a ridge. “That’s why you’re in the back with him.”
“You know what he’s turning into, don’t you?”
Xander sighed as they drove again into the woods, careening through a shaded area littered with protruding roots and jutting volcanic rocks. “I got a glimpse of the dear captain while he was topside, attacking your friend here’s son. So I can guess.”
“Then we have to do something.” She glanced back at Marcus, lolling in the seat and moaning. A golden patch of spider web veins had moved up his bad arm and encircled his neck, throbbing in places. “And fast. This thing can spread, and quickly.”
“Oh, and is that your medical opinion, doctor?”
She gave him a glare. “Fine, then you ride back here with him.”
“And give you another chance at me? No dice, Miss… Winters, isn’t it?”
She gave a start, and then composed herself. “I guess you did your homework.”
He leveled his gaze at her, and she could imagine his eyes roaming over her body behind the mirrored lenses. “So you came all this way, all that effort with the aliases and sneaking on board, and you got this close…and it all came to nothing. Just that short of revenge for your little friend Edgars, who if I recall, held up quite well before the end.”
