Z. Rex (23 page)

The sound of a massive explosion came crashing from the far end of the tunnel. The lights flickered alarmingly, and several went out.

Mr. Adlar whirled around as smoke ghosted into sight. “Must be the electrics—all that steam. . . .”

A familiar bloodlusting howl sounded, crawling down the corridor in successive echoes.

“Y. rex,” Adam breathed.

“It’s not over, you know.” Hayden spoke with unnerving calmness as the lights buzzed on and off overhead. “Geneflow has so many projects in preparation, right around the globe, no single setback can stop us. Survival of the fittest, that’s the name of the game—and
we
will decide who’s fit to survive.” He raised the gun to cover Mr. Adlar and smiled. “Now, come on, Bill. We can still turn all this around.”

Adam glanced behind, feeling a familiar prickle of gooseflesh as a dark, bestial shadow padded into view.

“For God’s sake, Jeff!” Adlar shouted. “Let us pass!”

“Swear you’ll work with me willingly,” Hayden said, pointing the gun at Adam. “Swear that you’ll see the project through till the end.”

The dinosaur came forward into the flickering light, its body battered and bloody, its head sooty and scored with scratches. And Adam’s heart capsized in his chest at the sight of the beast’s bared ivory-dagger teeth, which were all very much in place. Which meant that this was definitely the Y. rex.

And that Zed was dead.

“All right!” Adlar wrung his hands together. “I swear I’ll see it through. Now please . . . he’ll kill all of us.”

The hulking, scaly monster narrowed its eyes and quickened its step. It was horribly close now, a wrathful growl building in its throat through tight-clenched jaws.

“It’s all right, Bill.” Hayden waved his gun. “I made that thing. It can’t touch me.” As the Y. rex strode ever closer, Hayden barged angrily past father and son to yell at it. “You hear? There’s not a thing you can do to me, because I learn from my mistakes. I adapt!” He nodded. “Your predecessor turned against me, but you can’t. Because I had Josephs place one overriding priority command into your brain: You—Can’t—Hurt—Jeff—Hayden. Not ever.”

The creature’s huge jaws swung open. Then it froze dead in its tracks.

“Yeah, you’re feeling that conflict in your brain right now, aren’t you?” Hayden turned to face his two prisoners and smiled. “I plan for every contingency. See?”

I see something,
thought Adam, staring past him at those terrible jaws. His pulse quickened. On the upper right-hand side, five or six of those dagger-pointed teeth were
sliding out
from the swollen gums.

“You want to know why I’m a natural leader?” Hayden went on arrogantly, gesturing at the frozen monster. “
That’s
why.”

The loose teeth fell to the floor with a bloody clatter as the dinosaur shook its head.

“
Not
Y,” it hissed.

Before Hayden could even scream, the monster’s mouth was around him, snapping and tearing at his body, crushing bones and swallowing flesh and clothing until there was nothing left.

Mr. Adlar put his hand over his mouth, white-faced. “Project’s through, Jeff.”

“Zed?” Adam whispered, reeling with emotions he hardly knew how to name. “Is that really you?”

The dinosaur wiped his grisly mouth and sank to his knees. “All . . . done . . . ,” he growled, as gore went on pooling from his wounds. Then Adam and his dad had to hurl themselves clear as Zed pitched forward and struck the concrete floor.

With a final flicker, the overhead lights went out.

T
wenty-four hours later, Adam was sitting in a deserted common room, glad he would soon be gone from the shelter. Partly, that was for safety’s sake; the place was designed to withstand a nuclear attack, not a clash of killer dinosaurs and massive explosions in the heart of the complex. Several walls and ceilings were already showing the strain, crisscrossed with cracks or spilling plaster and rock dust.

Ironic that Y. rex’s attack on Edinburgh Castle had, in the end, given Zed the means to save himself, thought Adam. The bomb that Y had not deployed had gone back into the pouch in its cheek. From his poking around in the gory evidence, Mr. Adlar realized the bomb had gone off and taken Y’s head with it. Zed must have primed it while his clone was struggling to bite him, then kicked the creature clear.

The injured reptile had even thought to take Y’s shattered teeth and use them to disguise himself as his identical twin. Adam shook his head in grossed-out wonder.
Another fine Zed strategy,
he thought grimly.
Brutal, cunning—and successful.

You said it yourself, Hayden
.
Survival of the fittest.

Still not quite sure how he had survived this ordeal himself, Adam longed to escape the whole Frankenstein setup and get back to familiar surroundings again. The weird machines, the hum and buzz of their workings . . . they were freaking him out.

Adam supposed it was lucky for Zed’s sake that the shelter was so well equipped. Weakened close to death, the dinosaur had been helped into one of Hayden’s bioregenerators to recover. For such a high-tech miracle it didn’t look like much—basically a large vat identical to the one Zed had hurled at his attackers back in Fort Ponil.

If we’d only known then where the journey would take us.
. . .

His dad said it wasn’t safe for anyone else to stay in the room with Zed while treatment was in progress. So Adam tagged along while his dad checked the rest of the shelter for anyone who might be injured.

Or for anyone who might know where Josephs had gone.

“She’s not likely to come back here, is she?” Adam asked nervously as they sat in the common room. “And if she ever does . . . well, with Hayden and Bateman both gone, she can’t cause much damage.”

“Sam Josephs believed in Hayden and his ideals absolutely,” his dad said. “She’ll most probably be making for one of the Geneflow facilities. Lending her expertise to another of their little projects . . . or helping them to abduct another specialist.”

Adam chewed his lip. “They won’t come after you again, will they?”

“I’m sure they’ll have other priorities right now,” Mr. Adlar said carefully. “What worries me more is the bigger picture. These people are organized. Well financed. Ruthless.”

“And building more dinosaurs,” Adam murmured.

“Experiments in evolution,” his dad agreed. “But what are their real aims? What are they working toward?”

“Nothing good.” Adam sighed wearily. “Jeez, wouldn’t it be good to feel properly safe again?”

“Which reminds me . . .” His dad looked at him. “Josephs told me you were New Mexico’s most wanted before you skipped continents.”

“Oh, no, I almost forgot!” Adam jumped up from his chair. “The police won’t be after me, will they?”

“Well . . .” Mr. Adlar paused dramatically, and then smiled. “Nah. Bateman’s phony evidence didn’t stand up more than a couple of days. The police called off their manhunt already.”

“Dad!” Adam whacked him on the arm. “That isn’t funny!”

“Just figured you’d like to know.” Mr. Adlar’s eyes met his. “We might never be ‘properly safe’ in this world, whatever’s out there. But if we’re together, things are better . . . right?”

“I guess so.” Adam couldn’t find it within himself to smile back so warmly. “But you know . . . things can’t be like they were, Dad. I can’t just tag along behind, while you go off living your life. ’Cause it’s my life too.”

“I know.” His dad nodded. “I’ve learned that. From now on, we do what’s right for us both.” He held up his fist. “Deal?”

“Sounds like the right kind of evolution to me.” Adam knocked knuckles with him. “Deal.”

Zed’s treatments went on for hours. While his dad sifted through Hayden’s files and records in the War Room, Adam dozed fitfully on a couch in the corner. It felt strange, sleeping on something soft after so many long nights roughing it.

“Can we go back to the flat soon?” Adam asked when he finally woke up.

“I want to,” Mr. Adlar told him. “I just don’t know what I’m going to do about all these research materials, all this equipment. . . .”

Adam pulled a face. “I wish we could blitz the whole lot.”

“But if it was used differently, a lot of this stuff could benefit humankind,” his dad argued. “Do I have the right to destroy it?”

A brute voice grumbled from the doorway. “Zed does.”

“Zed!” Adam turned to find the dinosaur glowering in the doorway. He was looking in much better shape, his scales a lustrous deep sea green, still scuffed and scraped, but with neat, puckered scars where open wounds had gaped the day before. “Are you feeling all right?”

“Go.” Zed’s dark eyes shone. “Time to go.” His voice was just as deep and gruff but it sounded clearer somehow, less slurred. He braced his back against the entrance to the War Room and strained with all his strength. Thick black cracks ran like rising veins in the wall above him.

“Wait!” Mr. Adlar cried. “I know you must be angry, but you can’t just—”

The ceiling split open with a sound like giants’ bones breaking. “C’mon, he means it.” Adam grabbed hold of his dad and dragged him outside. They ducked under Zed’s legs and hid in the relative safety of the tunnel outside as a rumbling noise built and the walls began to crumble.

Seconds later, Hayden’s mission control was pulverized, buried under tons of rock, more ancient still than even the earliest dinosaurs.

As the echoes of the rockfall slowly died, Zed carried Adam and Mr. Adlar to the blood-soaked ruins of the Ring. He opened his jaws, and Adam saw new shoots of ivory already pushing through to replace his lost teeth. The dinosaur flew up and sheared through the remaining cables, severing the arteries of power that fed the whole shelter.

Emergency systems kicked in, bathing the place in thin, eerie white light.

“The backup power will probably last for a few days,” Mr. Adlar muttered. “After that, the shelter will stay dark forever.”

Good,
thought Adam.

He and his dad followed Zed silently out through the tunnels to the loading bay, where the massive elevator platform waited to take them to the surface.

They came out in the lean-to behind the sham gas station, in the shadow of Arthur’s Seat. The night was surprisingly warm, and a crescent moon hung like a jaunty grin in the dark, clear sky.

Mr. Adlar took huge lungfuls of fresh air, beaming madly with each breath. “It’s so good to be outside!”

Adam couldn’t be sure, but Zed appeared to be nodding in agreement. He, too, breathed deep. Then he gripped the controls that opened the hidden entrance in one claw, and crushed them into scrap.

Mr. Adlar didn’t look back, striding onto the dark forecourt. “I’ve been kept a prisoner for so long.” He stared out over the cityscape. “To be free again . . .”

“But just look at that.” Adam pointed to the floodlit ruins where the castle had been. It was as if the whole thing had been carelessly scrubbed from the skyline. Helicopters hovered like fireflies around the ruins that teemed still with the emergency services; the winking lights that crowned their vehicles were like tiny blue flashbulbs going off in the dark.

Adam shook his head. “How can something so real vanish so quickly?”

“The castle can be rebuilt,” Mr. Adlar murmured. “The importance of old buildings isn’t just in the stones. It’s in their story.”

“What about Geneflow Solutions—
their
story? Planning and plotting in their secret bases all over the world. Hayden said so.” Adam turned hopefully to Zed. “Will you help us find them?”

The huge dinosaur shook his head. “Your world. Not Zed’s.”

“But if there
are
other dinosaurs, or even other clones of you,” Adam said, “you wouldn’t have to be alone.”

Zed stared down at him, impassive.