Pteranodon Mall (17 page)

Jefferson and Janine joined David and Sandy directly outside the store. Like the rest of the mall they had passed through, the store looked deserted. He stayed where he was and frowned at the sight before him. Somebody had been in here after he and Janine had fled. The bed which he’d taken refuge under now blocked the exit. Chairs, drawers, and even a large wardrobe were piled on top of the mattress.

“That is unexpected,” said David.

Jefferson and Sandy ventured inside, followed by Janine and David. Somebody had tried to make damn sure that nobody was going to run out of here. It would take them ages to shift all that stuff. Jefferson stopped beside a display stand advertising cheap sofas. He could hear something. It sounded like a high-pitched hum. The noise was coming from that wardrobe. Jefferson turned to Sandy. “Can you hear that?”

The girl’s gaze hadn’t shifted from the blocked entrance. They now practically bulged in their sockets. “You have got to be shitting me!” she exclaimed.

He spun around to find they were no longer alone. That creepy janitor was now sitting on the wardrobe with his legs dangling over the edge. “What the hell is going on?”

“Apparently, it’s called a field displacement procedure.” Desmond chuckled. “Bet you all just shit your pants didn’t you!” He turned his attention to Sandy. “Hi there, honeypot. I can’t tell you how happy I am to see you’re still kicking about.”

“Get out of our way, you freaky weirdo,” she spat. “Haven’t you got some bogs to clean or something?”

Desmond looked straight at Jefferson. “God, I love it when she talks mucky. It so turns me on.”

Jefferson didn’t like this one bit. His guts were rolling over again. This time with good reason. That janitor did not pull the magic trick without some help. He slowly took a single step back, silently wishing Sandy would do the same. “What do you want, Desmond?”

“Oh, that’s easy.” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a small glass vial containing a bright blue liquid. Desmond gave it a little shake. “Your feisty friend isn’t going to last much longer. Pretty soon all those pretty bits of hers will soon either drop off or turn into stinking mush, and there is absolutely nothing any of you can do about it.” He gave the vial one more shake. “I can save your life, honeypot. All you have to do is be my princess. I’ll even let all the others leave the mall. Now, you can’t say fairer than that.”

Sandy turned around. She looked straight at David, and then after a moment, she looked at the rest of them. “Guys, I’m really sorry about this, I truly am. Please forgive me?” The girl then spun around, aimed her gun at Desmond’s grinning face, and fired. A stream of energy smashed into an invisible sphere encircling the man, who was now incandescent with rage. The wardrobe liquefied, throwing the janitor off the piled-up furniture. The man crashed onto the floor.

“You ungrateful little shit!” he screamed. “You’re all going to get it. I’m so going to fix all your wagons now!” He jumped to his feet and glared at Sandy. “Watch this then, you smirking bitch. I’ll show you some fucking field displacement thingy that you’ll never forget.” He made a point of dropping the glass vial before he pulled out a small black cube. “See you all in hell,” he snarled, jabbing one of the cube sides.

That humming noise filled the room. One by one, the forms of several very large dinosaurs popped into existence directly in front of them.

“Run!” shouted Jefferson. He pulled back Sandy, threw her towards David, and then raced out of the furniture store with the sounds of two roaring Tyrannosaurs drowning out the noise of Desmond’s manic laughter. He shot past Kevin who hadn’t moved an inch. “Head for the main doors!” he yelled at the others. Jefferson turned around, fully aware that three of the predators were now heading straight for them. “Come on, man, for God’s sake. You can’t stop these things.”

The large man took his eyes off the approaching Tyrannosaur for a second to push Jefferson away. “Go on, get away. Don’t waste my fight!”

He saw a smaller creature, a raptor running past him and Kevin, keeping close to the shop fronts. It was going to jump straight onto Janine’s head! “Thank you for this, man!” he shouted. Jefferson screamed at Janine to get out of the way while he pumped his legs, desperately trying to reach them before that raptor caught his Janine. He heard a scream of rage which quickly turned into a shriek of agony just as the raptor jumped onto the first eatery table. It used them like stepping stones, each pace taking it closer and closer to the woman he loved. Jefferson screamed again, but the roars of the huge killers behind him made it impossible for them to hear his warning.

One more leap and the raptor would be in amongst his friends. Jefferson bent down and scooped up a chewed-up bone lying in the middle of the concourse. With all his might, he threw it at the smaller dinosaur, shouting out in triumph when his missile smacked it right on the muzzle. The impact threw it off balance, and it skidded off the table and landed directly in the path of one of the tyrannosaurs. It lowered its head, grabbed the squawking creature, and bit it into three pieces without even slowing its pace.

“What are you going to do?” cried David. “The shutters are still down.”

Jefferson shook his head and ran straight for the metal barriers. “Trust me,” he shouted. “They never were down.” He closed his eyes, hoping to God he was right about this, and quickened his pace while screaming hoarsely.

Bright sunlight stung his closed eyes. He opened one of them and screamed in terror at the sight of another Tyrannosaur running towards him from the other side of the deserted square. The dinosaur’s foot slammed down onto the head of an old man; it didn’t seem all that bothered about the abundance of human bodies lying everywhere.

“Get over here, you stupid kid!” yelled a voice coming from behind a parked-up military truck. “Come on, move your arse!”

Jefferson knew just how close that thing was to him, yet he couldn’t go, not without the others. He spun around and managed to catch Janine in his open arms just as the noise of automatic gunfire reached his already battered ears. Her bulging eyes told Jefferson that that weren’t out of danger just yet. He pulled her away from the pretend shutters just as Margaret ran out into the square and straight into the path of the wounded dinosaur.

“Get over here!” Jefferson shouted.

The woman either didn’t hear him over the sounds of the rounds still tearing into the creature’s thick hide or the very sight of the dinosaur froze her solid. The animal lowered its head and bit Margaret in two, cutting off her voice in mid-scream.

The remaining two survivors burst through, and they both slipped and fell into the lake of thick blood, gushing across the paving. It was only David’s lightning reactions that saved them from being the Tyrannosaur’s next victims.

Jefferson’s friend wrapped his arm around Sandy’s body and flipped her across his front before rolling away from what remained of the older woman’s corpse. Both Jefferson ignored the shouts from the unknown newcomers and ran over to their friends and pulled them to safety just as the mortally wounded dinosaur finally died.

The officer, who Jefferson had seen earlier, leading the parade stormed over to the group, his face red with fury.

“You almost got yourself killed, you idiots. What on earth were you doing hiding beside those shutters? The warnings went off hours ago. This place is supposed to be clear of civilians now.”

Jefferson just shook his head. He didn’t have time for any of this bullshit. He tried to move away, only for another soldier to pull him back.

“The captain asked you a question, young lad. You’d better answer him.”

“Get the fuck off me, you dickhead! We’ve just come out of the mall and there are…”

The soldier then slapped his face. “You’d just better watch your mouth.”

Jefferson shook his head. “Fuck you.” He spat warm blood into the soldier’s face, just as he saw the familiar huge heads of their saurian pursuers pushing through the shutter illusion. The resulting shouts of the other soldiers made the one holding Jefferson turn around.

The soldier tried to raise his rifle but it was too late. Three raptors leapt at the man, their sickle-shaped hind claws shredding his body into ribbons of bleeding flesh. Jefferson grabbed the arm of the astonished captain and pulled him away from the raging dinosaurs.

One of the Tyrannosaurs had taken exception to the raptor stealing food out from under its snout and had tried to bite the little dinosaur which resulted in the other raptors jumping onto both larger dinosaurs.

Jefferson slammed his back against the other side of the truck while watching the rest of the squad take up position by the front of the vehicle. They all opened fire at the fighting animals. The bullets tore into their hides. The smaller animals were torn apart under the hail of weapons fire. One of the Tyrannosaurs had obviously had enough and retreated, limping away from the massacre. The remaining animal wasn’t quite so easily scared.

It spun around and charged the truck. Sandy ran up and took position behind the soldiers who were still pumping round after round into the charging dinosaur with seemingly little effect. She then fired her strange weapon and the Tyrannosaur’s mid-section just melted.

“I remember you winking at me,” said Jefferson. “You probably don’t remember that.” The officer wasn’t even looking at him anymore. His eyes were on Sandy, specifically on the alien gun. “We really were inside the shopping centre, you know.”

The captain nodded, still not taking his eyes off Sandy. “Yeah, so I gathered. I’m supposed to take all civilians to the resource centre they’ve set up in the city library.” He turned and looked into Jefferson’s eyes. “I don’t believe that any of you fall into that category anymore. Are you willing to help us contain this clusterfuck?”

Janine walked over to the captain. She stood beside Jefferson and took his hand. “Captain. You have absolutely no idea how bad this situation really is. If you can give us a few hours to get cleaned up, have something to eat and to grieve over the people we have lost, I promise we’ll tell you everything we know.”

Chapter Nineteen

From his vantage point on the roof of the shopping centre, Desmond watched the survivors and those soldiers fight off the dinosaurs. He waved at them and felt most annoyed when none of the buggers turned to wave back. With a bit of luck, a stray dinosaur might pick up their scent, sneak up on them and eat the ungrateful little shits. That’d show them.

Desmond saw a few other people in the city centre. Some were hiding as the expelled dinosaurs lumbered past them. There were certainly more dinosaurs than humans down there now. He walked close to the edge, trying to see if any of the females were pretty.

“What happened to the other one?” He looked at Zinik-Tow, who stood a few metres away, stroking Susan’s head. It appeared that neither of them were too keen on heights.

“He and the rest of our species returned to the quantum capsule and displaced to another location on this planet. That is something I did not anticipate. He also took a lone female as well. I can only assume that he took her to experiment upon, to find a contagion more effective that the one he had already used on the native population.”

“Wait, are you telling me that we all might still die?”

“That is the logical scenario.”

Desmond sat on the edge of the roof, watching his lost love take the hand of the geek and walk away from the shopping centre. “Why isn’t Sandy dead?”

“I do not know. It is possible that she will not die of the contagion. If that is the case, then the contagion has altered her at a genetic level. It means that if that woman breeds, the offspring are likely to be mutants, even giving rise to another species.”

Desmond turned from the roof and walked over to Zinik-Tow and Susan. He grinned to himself. “Well, isn’t that the ultimate irony!”

E
pilogue

Gloria Chadburn sipped her iced tea while watching Jane’s little darlings tear into the nest of rats they’d found in the barn behind the big house. They’d brought their bodies back and dropped them into a pile in front of their mother first. Of course, Jane took the largest corpse for herself before allowing her offspring to feed on the remaining bodies. Gloria found it rather sweet to watch such motherly love. Of course, she wasn’t that happy watching Jane’s knitted blue sweater getting covered in dirty rat blood. She sighed to herself. It wasn’t that much of a disaster, though. Gloria could always knit the raptor another sweater.

The boys were talking about the war as per usual; it’s all they ever seemed to talk about nowadays. Honestly, after two years of fighting, she thought the three factions would have made up and become friends by now. It all seemed rather silly.

Dailess-Zaid, his creepy little second-in-command, Quediss-Tel, plus one of the soldiers from the warrior caste were sat around the other garden table. Dailess-Zaid was not happy that somehow Sons of Maulis-Bow had managed to contaminate their clone vats. Consequently, the next batch of ten thousand warriors had to be terminated. He was under the impression that the human faction had rendered the terrorists practically extinct with the last salvo of nuclear missiles they had used against them.

Gloria leaned down and pulled one of Jane’s babies back when he got a little too close to the soldier. She caught the eye of Dailess-Zaid and smiled at him, feeling a little flutter in her stomach when the Saurion gave her a nod in return. He told her last night that he had a surprise announcement to make today, involving her. She couldn’t wait to find out what it was.

The End?

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