Z. Raptor

by Steve Cole

  “There’s no time to explain now.” Adam saw a thick crack in the wall beside them and cursed under his breath. “We have to get out of here.” He dragged her toward the door that led to the caves. “I don’t know if we can make it through the caves before the whole thing falls apart, but—”

  “What are you talking about?” Harm demanded.

  “I used Think-Send to control the sea monsters,” Adam told her, ushering her through the doorway. “Loner wanted me to shut them down. Instead I directed them here to destroy the tidal power plant—and the foundations of the base with it.”

  She stared at him, disbelieving. “You did what?”

  “I didn’t know what else I could do!” he shouted. “Loner was going to kill me as soon as I was through. I couldn’t let him leave the island on Chen’s ship and do the same to everyone on board, could I?”

  A massive tremor thundered through the building, almost knocking both of them to the rubble that once had been a floor.

  “The whole place will flood!” Harm realized. “Everything could come crashing down on top of us.”

  Adam nodded, trembling, as a long, choking bellow that sounded like One Eye cut suddenly off. “We can’t get past Loner to reach the elevator or the stairs. When he’s finished with the Brutes, he’ll outrun us, easy. Our only chance is to get to the beach through the cave network to the old Brute camp.”

  “You saw the map; those passages stretch on forever—”

  “A kilometer, maybe.”

  “And God knows how many of them are below sea level.” Harm closed her eyes. “Please, tell me I never woke up. Tell me this is all a nightmare.”

  The building shook again. “It’s a nightmare, all right.” Adam grabbed her wrist and pulled her away with him toward the caves. “Now, come on!”

  The two of them ran through the passage and found that plaster soon gave way to natural rock, the walls gradually widening into the gaping mouth of a cavern. Pale electric lanterns hung at regular intervals; they cast some light but left the encroaching shadows darker. Five electric scooters stood in a line—presumably for guards to travel to and from the Brute camp to study their subjects. The ground shook again, knocking over two of the scooters. Adam picked up one, and Harm grabbed another.

  “How do they work?” Adam asked.

  Harm shook her head. “How should I know? Let’s see.” She turned a black plastic key beside the handlebars and then stabbed at a button. Her bike hummed eerily into life. Adam did the same and twisted the throttle. The whine of the engine bled into a desolate howl from somewhere behind them.

  “I’ll tear you apart, kid!” he heard Loner scream. “Her first, then you!”

  Harm put a hand to her mouth as though she might be sick. “He’s killed the Brutes.” She accelerated jerkily away as another earsplitting crack set the ground belly-dancing. The lanterns in the walls flickered, and Adam was glad for the steady blue shine of his bike’s headlight as he headed after her.

  “We’ve got a chance,” he told himself. “Please, let us have a chance.”

  The tunnel was winding, the ground cracked and uneven, and the scooters gave a bone-jarring ride. Each time the ground shook, the vibrations struck a little harder and went on for longer. Adam almost lost his balance a dozen times, veering about clumsily, straining to see the turn of the tunnel in the blur of blue from the headlight. The run was reckless, but it had to be. He had no idea how fast a Z. raptor could sprint, but he could imagine how fast the seawater all around would flood the cave system he and Harm were speeding through. The thundering shudders were lasting longer, doing more and more damage.

  It was Harm whose luck ran out first. The whole passage jumped as though kicked by a giant, and a large chunk of the roof fell and nearly crushed her. Swerving to avoid it, she lost control of the scooter, rode into the wall and fell heavily against the bare rock. Adam ditched his own scooter and ran to help her; in the blue blur of the headlight, he saw that her legs were raked with nasty gashes and her cheek was scraped raw. Her scooter had fared even worse; the front wheel was twisted.

  Adam cast a frantic look back down the tunnel. How far had they come? How close behind was Loner? “You can ride with me,” he said. But as she tried to follow him over, she gasped and winced each time she put weight on her right leg. “Is it broken?”

  “It’s my ankle. I think I sprained it,” she muttered.

  A new noise carried to them as Adam lifted his scooter. Heavy footfalls on the rock, pounding like a steady heartbeat behind them.

  Harm looked at Adam fearfully. “Loner’s coming.”

  “Get on,” he told her, restarting the engine. As they pulled away, Adam barely managed to keep his balance because the ground grumbled again. Harm was holding on to his waist behind him, and he could feel the tremor in her skinny arms like a second engine. He could picture the dark shapes of the sea monsters massing in the deep on the other side of the rumbling walls, tearing into the base’s foundations with the same remorseless power they had turned on the Hula Queen.

  Then he heard a deep, creaking noise that seemed to thunder all around—the sound of solid stone straining under heavy duress. Adam glimpsed boulders blocking the passage ahead and braked sharply.

  “Oh, God,” Harm whispered.

  Adam glanced behind—and through the thick gloom glimpsed a dark, tailed figure in the far distance racing toward them. Panic rising, he wheeled the bike forward a little way—far enough to see that the passage was impassable. “Cave-in,” he said helplessly. “We’ll have to climb over.”

  He started up the pile, helping Harm manage with her bad ankle. The scraping beat of Loner’s footsteps behind was quickening. And then the background creaking gave way to a wrenching, shattering boom, as if a longthreatened storm had finally broken.

  “It’s hopeless,” Harm snapped, clinging to the rock pile. “We can’t outrun Loner!”

  “And nothing can outrun that,” breathed Adam, staring over his shoulder as a wall of seething seawater came crashing into view, ready to dash them to pieces.

  23

  SLIPPING AWAY

  As the foaming wedge of water swept toward them, Loner was snatched from sight. Adam turned desperately to Harm. “We’ve got to get to the other side of this pile or we’ll be crushed against it. We can do this!”

  Harm looked into his eyes and nodded. He saw the tears there. And the resolve.

  They scrambled like crabs over the rocks, braced themselves at the top and held their breaths—as the water struck them both like a freezing, frothing fist. In a moment, it had thrown them fifty meters into the flickering darkness. Adam kicked wildly in a freezing soup of furniture and equipment—and found that it was kicking him back. Eyes stinging with salt, he looked around wildly for Harm in the boom and hiss of the rushing tide. As he did so, he nearly grazed his head on the rocky ceiling. The water level was rising with horrific speed. If the rushing torrent didn’t drown him, it would leave him crushed and grated raw. Surely if these tunnels led to the Brutes’ beach, they would rise above sea level soon and the water level would drop. Surely . . .

  “Harm!” he yelled, swept along helplessly by the underground tsunami. “Harm, where are you?” Files and chairs and a white-coated body plunged past. Then something dark and reptilian bobbed toward him. He glimpsed a single bestial eye and jaws open wide.

  With a scream of horror, Adam put up his hands in what he knew was a futile attempt to wrestle the thing away. But the jaws stayed slack. The eye was dark and dead.

  The Brute’s head had been severed from its neck; Adam found he was holding it like a float. Moaning with horror, he pushed it away. ...

  . . . Just as Loner rose up in front of him with a hissing scream, jaws snapping, claws scything through the water to fillet him.

  Adam lunged to his left, windmilling his arms in a crawl, trying to escape—but debris slammed into his back and he went under, lost in icy subterranean blackness. Something closed on his leg. Loner’
s jaws, he thought with terror. But no, it was more wreckage of some kind, a chair maybe, dragging him down deeper. He kicked it free, but already his lungs were straining, his head was starting to spin. He glimpsed red stripes in the blackness, and the orange burn of an eye up close to his. He tried to push the raptor away, felt claws slice into his arm, cried out into the water, lost what little breath he had left. Black spots speckled his vision as that hideous reptile face pressed up close.

  And then something big and heavy smashed Loner away from him. The dark, rocky roof spun crazily above Adam as he broke through. In the still-sputtering lantern light, he saw Loner clawing at a huge chunk of concrete that had him pinned against the wall. The raptor howled with pain, his barks and yowls hurling mad echoes around the tunnel as though some bigger, louder raptor was shrieking back at him.

  Adam felt a moment’s giddy triumph—but then the tip of Loner’s tail twisted like a whip around his ankle and held him tight.

  “No!” Adam yelled, trying to grasp hold of the rock wall and prevent his being pulled back underwater. “Let go of me!”

  The raptor said nothing, but his teeth were bared in a leering grin. Adam kicked and twisted with the last of his failing strength but couldn’t break Loner’s grip. Water pushed down his throat. The darkness and the cold were slowing his movements, sapping his strength. Then Adam glimpsed something huge and dark sweeping through the water. For a split second, he thought it was one of the guardian creatures, breaking through into the tunnel. Then he saw the hard lines, the glinting edges.

  It was the operating table from Josephs’s lab. The scientist’s slab where Neil Lowe had died and the thing he’d become had been born.

  Glancing back over his shoulder, Adam realized that he was blocking Loner’s view of the approaching danger. He flailed still more wildly, praying that his struggles would keep the raptor distracted.

  “Kill you!” raged Loner, biting at the air close to Adam’s neck, clawing at his concrete confinement. “Kill you!”

  “No!” Adam screamed back, transfixed by the operating table as it scythed through the seething seawater toward them. “Kill you!”

  At the last possible moment, Adam stopped struggling and plunged down beneath the surface. One corner of the metal slab plowed over his shoulder, missing him by millimeters. A fraction of a second later, it slammed into Loner’s head with the force of a juggernaut, pulping the raptor’s skull against the tunnel wall before resuming its headlong tumble through the water.

  Stunned, Adam had barely a second to witness the gruesome aftermath before more rocketing debris caught the small of his back and tugged him free of Loner’s tail. Adam was smashed underwater, scraping his arms and legs against the walls. He could barely process how many times he struck something hard or swallowed cold salt mouthfuls. The cave system was almost completely submerged. The last specks of consciousness began to drain from his mind as he seemed to spiral icily down, down....

  Adam might have been out for seconds or maybe for minutes, but suddenly strong arms were lifting him, turning him onto his side. His ribs felt in pieces as he coughed up water, choking and retching for air, shivering cold on wet sand, his back and his head throbbing like crazy. As his eyes flickered open, he found himself on a beach. A thick, wide stream of seawater was spewing from a cave in the cliffs, cutting through the shore and feeding back into the ocean.

  “Easy, Adam.” Starting at the sound of David’s voice, he turned feebly and saw the man’s familiar weathered face lined with concern. “You’re okay. You washed out of there in one piece. Nothing broken.”

  “Doesn’t feel that way.” Adam tried to smile. “I thought you were locked up.”

  “We got out. Got all the other survivors out too.” David gave him a strained smile. “Turns out our friendly neighborhood guard, JJ, had keys for all the rooms aboveground as well as below—including the raptors’ larder.”

  “Though it took me to think of actually looking,” came a familiar voice from close by. Adam rolled over weakly to find Agent Chen kneeling beside him. “That a-hole Ford put me in with the other castaways—then ran into a pair of Brutes.”

  “I know,” Adam muttered.

  “So I checked out JJ, stole his keys, found the right one out of about a hundred and we all ran like hell—well, except for those who had to be carried.” Chen frowned at Adam. “What’s your story? What happened in there? That flood—”

  “It was the sea monsters. They won’t attack the Pahalu now. And Loner’s dead. He tried to kill us—” Adam broke off in a coughing fit.

  “Slow down,” Chen urged him.

  “Loner never cared about anyone,” Adam muttered. “He was just using us to get rescued.”

  “He what?” David stared. “You mean, after all these months—”

  “Wait! Harm!” Adam shook his head, tried to lift himself up on his elbows. “Where’s Harm?”

  “Uh . . . Lisa’s waiting with the other survivors in the jungle,” David said, as if he hadn’t heard.

  Chen shared a look with him and nodded. “See, Adam, when the earthquakes started, we hightailed it down here to try and get you out through the beach tunnels. But I guess you beat us to it—”

  “Where is she?” Adam realized David was blocking his way deliberately and struggled up. “Harm!”

  He saw her.

  She was lying on her back, her bloody legs bent at right angles to her body. Dr. Stone was crouched over her, pinching her nose and breathing into her mouth.

  “No!” Adam shouted, pushing past David to get to her. “Harm, wake up!”

  Stone didn’t look up. He was too busy putting his hands over her heart and starting compressions. “Stay back, Adam. I know this is difficult for you, but—”

  “You can’t die, Harm,” Adam insisted, staring at her swollen face, her blue lips. “I . . . I haven’t even told you about your dad yet. He knew it was you—perfect Harmony, sweet Harmony.” He took her freezing cold hand in his own and held it tight. “With all that Geneflow did to him, he still remembered. He still cared.” Tears were balling in his throat. “He didn’t die in Josephs’s lab, all alone. He died protecting you.”

  “John,” Stone called, “the boy shouldn’t have to see this.”

  “We didn’t tell him to wake up, Doc—”

  “Harm, you can’t die now,” Adam pleaded, shrugging off Chen’s uncertain hands on his shoulders. “We’ve made it, don’t you see? We’ve—”

  Suddenly Harm’s back arched. She choked and puked water over herself. Adam shouted, and then laughed and pointed. “You see that? She’s back!”

  “I hurt all over,” Harm said hoarsely.

  “That just proves you’re all right!” He whooped. “She will be all right, won’t she, Dr. Stone?”

  “Aside from the headache you’re giving her? I hope so.” Stone checked her eyes and her pulse. “She needs rest. But I think she should pull through.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t get your friends killed, kid.” Chen was smiling, his hand held out to shake. Adam took it, and David put his own hand on theirs.

  Stone rolled Harm onto her front, placed her head on one side. “She needs fresh water and rest.”

  “I’ll find some coconut milk,” David offered.

  “No way,” Harm gasped, her eyes still closed. “David, there’s, like, a ton of bottled water in the Geneflow storeroom.”

  David looked at Chen. “There is?”

  “Through the sickroom door, down the steps, double doors on your left,” Chen confirmed. “Start fattening up the survivors. Don’t go crazy. Proper food’s gonna be a shock to their systems—and I don’t know how much toilet paper Josephs was hoarding. . . .”

  With a look hovering between amusement and disapproval, David turned and walked away.

  Adam crouched beside Harm. “It’s going to be all right,” he whispered to her. “It really is. The Pahalu can come in safely, get us out of here.”

  “A good feeling, isn’t it?�
� Stone smiled. “Having hope again.”

  Adam looked at him. “Hope that we’ll get back home?”

  “Hope in being human,” Stone said quietly. “For all their cleverness, Geneflow could only breed beasts that hate and kill and destroy. But for all our faults, people like us . . . we can mend. Mend and care and make better.” He shrugged. “That’s something I’ve forgotten these last washed-up years. I’m glad I’ve been given the chance to remember.”

  Chen nodded. “A new start, huh, Doc?”

  “Why not?” Stone looked up at him. “How much of our lives do we spend wishing we’d done things differently instead of making a difference now?”

  “A federal agent doing time inside is sure going to be different,” said Chen.

  Adam looked at him. “You really think you’ll go to jail?”

  “I deserve to,” Chen accepted. “And I will. But I need to swing a deal first. I’ll serve out whatever sentence the judge decides—later. First, I’ve got to make somebody see we have to stop the rest of these Geneflow lunatics. With all I’ve seen here—with all I know now—I can’t cool my heels in jail and trust some other jackass to take care of this. I’m seeing it through all the way.”

  “There you go again, John.” Stone shook his head. “A snap decision you’ll be regretting for the rest of your life.”

  “Next time I’ll be going it alone, Doc,” Chen promised him. “You’ve done enough for me, and I’ll never be able to repay Pete and Brad and Doug and . . .” He shook his head. “But, Doc, something tells me that the rest of my life isn’t going to be so long if I don’t even try.” He shrugged, staring out to sea. “Time’ll tell . . . and just look at what’s coming in over the horizon. Beats the hell out of Santa and his sleigh.”

  “What?” Adam looked, and his head spun to see a tall-masted ship approaching over the horizon. “The Pahalu,” he breathed. “Dad.” He looked at Stone and Chen, grinning uncontrollably. “My dad’s coming!”