Z. Raptor

by Steve Cole

  “You are mine.” Hunchback nodded. “Sweet. Perfect. You—”

  “Stop it!” Harm shouted as Lisa took hold of her hand. “Stop it!”

  Broken Teeth shoved the hunchbacked raptor back into the bushes, one clawed hand raised in warning. Then he turned back to Loner expectantly.

  “These soft-skins you were chasing have no scent,” Loner went on, jerking his head toward Chen and Stone. “I know why.”

  Stone glanced at Chen. “How can it know?” he breathed.

  “Spare us, and I will share that secret with your group,” Loner went on. “Then the Vels will not scent you. You can kill with no warning.”

  “Warning,” echoed Chen, quietly looking around at each of his group, opening his hand behind his back. Adam saw with a jolt that the man held a grenade in his palm. A metal pin fell silently to the grass at his feet.

  Adam felt panic rising, saw it mirrored in Harm’s eyes; she’d seen the pin too. What was Chen doing?

  As Loner took another cautious step toward Broken Teeth, lowering his head, the hunchback grew agitated. “Kneel,” it rasped, pointing its claws at Loner. “Kneel low.”

  Loner reacted as though struck in his black-burned face.

  “Kneel low!”

  “Quiet,” Broken Teeth snarled.

  “Back!” bellowed Chen. The world seemed to slow as he lobbed his grenade at Broken Teeth’s legs.

  Then the grenade went off low with a blast of roiling flame and a boom so deep it punched Adam’s guts and flung his hearing into a ringing void. The shock wave threw him to the ground. The raptors, engulfed in smoke and flame, vanished from sight.

  Loner included.

  Lost in shock, Adam felt someone grab his arm. Lisa. Even with her burned legs, she had the strength and the sense to guide him. His ears ached and his balance was shot as she hauled him along, limping with pain.

  The whole ragged bunch of them scrambled into the cover of the forest, breaking through the thick foliage, leaving the bone pit far behind. But Adam knew he could never outrun the image of the grenade going off so close to Loner, engulfing him in the fireball.

  Slowly, Adam’s hearing returned, sound rattling loosely as though distorting through speakers. He could hear Harm, who was sprawled on the ground, weeping. “You killed Loner! He looked out for us, he helped us.”

  “We’d all be dead without him,” David stormed.

  “You’d all be dead back there with him if I hadn’t done something,” Chen shot back. “You saw what those things did to Pete.”

  “Maybe—maybe Loner’s all right?” Lisa said.

  “He was beat up pretty bad before.” Adam leaned hard against a tree, pushing back wet hair from his forehead. “But then, Geneflow breed their wildlife tough as tanks. He could’ve made it.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Chen said impatiently. “I was forgetting you’re the dinosaur whisperer.”

  Adam glared at him. “That’s why you kidnapped me, wasn’t it? Because of what I know?”

  “Well, I know we all need to rest up and shut up for a bit,” said Stone, examining Lisa’s blistered legs. He pulled a little bottle from the battered medicine bag on the ground. “I have some iodine here. I’m afraid it’ll sting real bad. . . .”

  Lisa threw back her head and gasped through gritted teeth as the antiseptic made good on his promise.

  Adam noticed some cuts on Harm’s face.

  “Harm needs some too,” he said.

  She shook her head and winced. “I’m fine,” she insisted.

  “You’re not,” said Stone. “Those monsters will smell the bleeding a mile away.”

  Stone passed Harm the bottle. “Better get the spray, John. If any of those creatures survived the blast, we all need to be invisible.”

  “Invisible—if only,” said Lisa. “I honestly thought we were dead this time.”

  “Me too.” Harm winced as she dabbed the iodine on her wound. “And now . . . with no Loner watching out for us—”

  “Look. And listen.” Chen pulled a canister from a Ziploc bag. “But don’t bother sniffing. This is the antistink spray Geneflow uses to keep its staff off the dino-radar. Deadens your scent to the wildlife’s smell receptors or something.”

  Lisa stared. “You mean we really can hide from the raptors?”

  “Those Brutes back there seemed to have your scent in their nostrils well enough,” David observed.

  Stone shook his head. “They didn’t smell us, they saw us,” he explained.

  “That canister,” Adam said. “How’d you get hold of it?”

  “Three cans were recovered from the Geneflow base at Fort Ponil you know so well,” Chen told him. “Forensics even salvaged some intel on its development.” He shrugged. “I tried it out with some of the guys, hunting deer in the Rockies. The stuff works.” He sprayed Adam, who coughed as the aerosol engulfed him. “I don’t know how much is enough or how much we’ve got left. Had another canister, but it got lost in the water.” He shook his head bitterly. “I felt so sure this stuff would give us the drop on the wildlife.”

  “You never change, John,” Stone said, not unkindly. “When did your hunches ever work out? You always did spend a second thinking and a week feeling sorry.”

  Adam watched as Chen sprayed Harmony from top to toe. “What brought you here?”

  “The tide and a strong front crawl,” Chen replied. “Lucky for the doc here, he clung on to a life vest in the water. It helped him wash up onshore along with his bag.”

  Stone snorted. “I’ve been washed up for years.”

  “This isn’t a joke. You know exactly what I mean.” Adam could hear his voice getting high and squeaky, fought to bring it down lower. “You’ve kidnapped me and my dad, you’ve got your own friends killed, and I just need to know—”

  “Why I came here.” Chen moved on to spray Lisa, who screwed up her eyes and tried not to choke. “Well, it’s simple. I need to talk to Josephs.”

  “Why?” Adam demanded.

  Chen shook his head. “Remember I told you that there was someone in the FBI I knew who had taken bribes from Josephs?” He sighed. “Well, that someone . . . was me.”

  Adam’s stomach turned a cartwheel. He stared at Chen in uncomprehending disappointment. “You . . . you’re working for her?”

  David leaned forward angrily and gripped Chen’s wrist. “What is this?”

  Chen shook him off and looked at Adam, and his eyes seemed haunted. “Look, I made a mistake a while back, all right? That’s what this is all about.” He pushed the spray can into David’s hands and sat on the grass, hugging his knees. “Almost three years ago, I was investigating an industrial espionage case. High-tech secrets going missing. Josephs’s name was in the frame, and my team was that close to nailing her. She found out. . . .” He shrugged. “And so she bought me off.”

  “You took her money? Let her get away with it?” Adam realized that he and Harm, David and Lisa were fixing Chen with the same look of disgust.

  “It was so much cash.” Chen was gently rocking, resting his head on his knees. “And I thought Josephs was stealing the info just to sell it, you know?”

  “Oh, that’s okay, then,” said David sarcastically.

  “Yes, because every one of you chose the right thing to do your whole life long, didn’t you?” Chen shook his head, quieter now. “You know what I’m saying—it’s all fat-cat companies and their bottom lines, right? No one gets hurt, no one dies. That’s what I thought, anyway.” He looked down at his feet. “Then I saw what had gone down at Fort Ponil. The carnage there. The corpses. That crazy stuff we dug up about . . . about dinosaurs. And when I found Josephs’s name attached . . .” He looked up at Adam, and finally it was as if there were someone alive and feeling behind those dark eyes. “I needed to know exactly what it was I had helped her make possible. Find out how big this is. How responsible I am.”

  “And to see if you could cover up your involvement,” Adam said, his loathing for Chen growing by th
e moment. “That’s why you didn’t go to your bosses. Why you dragged my dad out here in secret as your science adviser, why you brought no proper backup.”

  Harm was giving Chen looks hard enough to bludgeon. “You helped this whole nightmare to happen!”

  “No. But I did nothing to stop it,” Chen conceded calmly. “And I know now that I should’ve. I didn’t want anyone to die. Believe me, if I could do the whole thing over again—”

  “I do believe him,” Lisa said. She looked at David and Harm. “I bet he came here for the same reason the people we loved came here from death row. For a shot at redemption. To start over.”

  I’m sure you’d like to believe that, thought Adam. But if those prisoners were on death row to start with, they could’ve come here just because they had nothing to lose.

  “Death row?” Chen looked at Lisa. “Like your husband?”

  “He wasn’t killed in jail like you thought,” Adam cut in. “Him and a whole lot of others like him got taken here by Geneflow—”

  “And they were fed to the raptors,” said Harm. “End of story.”

  Stone looked at David, his face haunted. “Why, for pity’s sake?”

  No one had an answer.

  Chen rubbed his temples. “Well, you can all hate me as much as you want. But at least I’m bringing the cavalry.”

  Adam frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, the Pahalu will be sailing back to Hawaii by tomorrow morning.”

  “What?” Adam felt shaken. “But Dad wouldn’t leave me.”

  “And my guys out there wouldn’t leave me and Doc Stone behind if they had a choice. But what can they do with those things in the water guarding the way?” Chen shook his head. “They’re under strict instructions that if there’s no word from me within thirty-six hours, they’re to turn tail and get in touch with our old friend Marrs at the United Nations.” He shrugged. “I lost my radio in the big washout, so there you go. Cavalry.”

  “How long will that cavalry take to get here?” Harm asked slowly.

  “Days? Weeks, even.” David sprayed himself with the antistink. “And the experiment might finish anytime. When it does, Josephs and Geneflow will bail. Whoever comes here will find nothing.”

  “Except us.” Lisa’s voice sounded so fragile the breeze could’ve bruised it.

  Or rather our chewed-up bones, thought Adam. He wanted to cry at the thought of his dad sailing farther and farther away without him. At least you’ll be okay, Dad.

  “Wait,” said Stone. “I think something’s coming.”

  Chen grabbed his shotgun and pressed a pistol into Stone’s hand. Stone passed it to David, who accepted it grimly.

  Adam looked at Harm. She was holding her breath, and he realized he was doing the same. David was holding the gun so tight his knuckles looked set to pop through the skin. A stealthy, rustling noise crept into his ringing ears.

  Stone was right. Something was drawing nearer.

  14

  SLEEP LESS NIGHT

  Not again, Adam thought, coldness and exhaustion filling his bones. Can’t go through it again.

  “So much for your spray,” David sneered at Chen.

  “We’ve been making enough noise to wake the dead,” Stone whispered tersely, “let alone a pack of lizards born to hunt.”

  Chen aimed his shotgun.

  The rustling of vegetation stopped, and labored breathing sounded in its place. “Do not shoot,” came a soft, mournful voice from the darkness.

  “Loner?” Lisa breathed.

  Harm turned to Adam, incredulous. “He’s alive.”

  “If he’s alive,” said Chen, “what about the others?”

  “I am alone.”

  Adam got up as Loner stalked closer, but his smile of relief soon faded. The raptor was barely recognizable. His hide was burned black. Along one side, his stubby shield of shoulder quills was a mass of shattered stumps. One arm hung uselessly by his side, caked in mud. His breathing came in hard, stubborn wheezes, and his eyes smoldered dull yellow.

  “Thank God you’re all right,” Lisa said, struggling to get up. “After all you’ve done for us . . .” It looked for a moment like she was going to hug him, but instead she hovered awkwardly. “You are all right, aren’t you?”

  Loner bobbed his head. “Others bore the worst of the blast. I will heal. In time, so will they. We are very hard to kill.” He looked balefully at Chen. “Very hard.”

  “If the Z. raptors are anything like the Z. rex, their cells repair really quickly,” Adam said. “I think that’s how they’re made—regenerating the original fossils, or something.”

  “Loner,” David said, “we—we’re so sorry this happened.”

  Adam nodded and turned to Chen. “Aren’t we?”

  Chen didn’t look at Loner, but he nodded. “Sure. I didn’t come here to kill off the good guys.”

  Loner did not comment on the halfhearted apology. “We must leave this place,” he said. “Vels are coming. The explosion—”

  “Of course,” said David. “This part of the jungle will be swarming with raptors.”

  “They can’t smell us now,” Adam said.

  “They won’t need to,” Harm responded. “They’ll most likely trip over us.”

  “Where do we go?” asked Lisa.

  “We just keep moving,” said Chen. “Find some higher ground with cover, so we can see the raptors coming without them seeing us back.”

  “I know a place,” said Loner, straightening his shoulders with some difficulty. “Sheltered. Overlooking the Vel camp.”

  “That’s not just the Vel camp,” David said, looking at Chen. “The Geneflow headquarters were built beneath it.”

  “Yeah?” Chen nodded. “I’d like to check that out.”

  “Then let’s get there,” Stone said. “If the Vels are out searching the jungle, there’ll be fewer minding their store.”

  “They’ve got guards, a barricade and all kinds of stuff,” Adam informed him. “I saw through these.” He pulled out Chen’s binoculars. “The Brutes must’ve found them washed up on the beach, and Loner found them near their camp at the north cliffs.”

  “They were spying on the Vels too, huh?” Chen took the binoculars with a smile and looked around at the others. “Well, I think maybe we should take a closer look. Who’s coming?”

  Harm answered with a shrug, David and Lisa with weary nods. Adam looked at Stone, who gave a weak smile of encouragement.

  Loner was first to move, turning and limping into the jungle. “This way,” he said.

  The hike seemed to last forever. By its end, Adam was hot, tired and so exhausted he wanted to go to sleep and never wake up again.

  Which could happen so easily, he thought as night settled over the huddle of survivors and their new camp in the high ground.

  The night sky was peppered with a billion tiny bright lights. Too wired to sleep, Adam stared up at the stars from a makeshift hammock of fleshy leaves and jungle vines strung high between two sturdy palms, wishing he were far away from here.

  So much for day one on Raptor Island, he thought.

  Loner had led them to a vantage point overlooking the Vel camp. Not only did the camp have thick concrete walls for protection, it was surrounded on three sides by cliffs and the sea—most likely the reason the U.S. military had chosen the site during World War II in the first place, in case of Japanese attack. David reckoned it probably wasn’t much more than a half mile around the coast from the Brutes’ home turf, while Harm suspected the distance was closer to a million when you had to divert through the jungle as they had just done.

  As for Adam, he’d felt happier when the Vel camp had been a hazy image through binoculars. Looking down from here, the striped raptors seemed close enough to touch.

  Loner had gone away, sniffing for scent trails, making doubly sure that this place and its approaches were not in regular use. Reunited with his binoculars, Chen had spent an age scrutinizing the area while the othe
r survivors had gotten busy securing their makeshift camp as best they could, rigging up early warning systems using bundles of sticks and jungle-vine trip wires. But creepily, the Vels’ own security was more high-tech. To Adam’s astonishment, floodlights kicked on as dusk settled, illuminating the camp in a harsh yellow glare. The scaly monsters cast thick, misshapen shadows behind their barricades of scrap metal, some of them even wearing plates of metal as improvised armor.

  “It’s like they’re expecting an attack,” David observed. “Maybe they know the Brutes have been spying on them.”

  “There were no floodlights when we scouted this area before,” Lisa agreed. “Something’s got them rattled.”

  If only Zed were here, Adam thought. He’d save me. He wished for the huge reptile to come swooping down from out of the sky on his impossible wings, bearing Dad on his back, and ached with loneliness.

  And then Adam thought about Loner. Like Zed, Loner was a beast at odds with the world around him; humans and dinosaurs were never meant to coexist. And yet . . . weirdly, it felt to Adam as if there was already some kind of bond between him and Loner. The raptor had carried him and fought for him and almost died for him without thought or hesitation. Was it only because the Think-Send technology used to train him had touched him somehow with Adam’s humanity?

  Or by some fluke of nature or science, had this beast evolved beyond the others to develop a conscience?

  Adam shuddered. I need to evolve the ability to switch off my brain.

  As the youngest members of the party, he and Harm had been allowed to sleep first before taking their turn on watch. But the slightest noise seemed to travel like a bullet in the night air. Even now, Adam could hear Dr. Stone’s voice from the clearing, low and fragile: “Those things are just reptiles. ... How can they be doing this? How can they be so advanced?”

  “Geneflow made them that way,” David said.

  “Adam?” Harm’s voice came out of the silvery darkness. “You awake?”

  “Wide awake.” He looked across and dimly saw a figure lying in a hammock fashioned from an old blanket between two neighboring palms. “I don’t know how you’ve slept at all on this island.”