Z. Apocalypse (11 page)

‘Stop it,’ Zoe urged him. ‘You’ll only use up the air faster.’

‘Well, you try! You’re the one who’s meant to be so close to her . . .’ He trailed off, his anger blowing out as quickly as
it had ignited. ‘I’m sorry, Zoe.’

‘Like it matters.’ She found his fingers and squeezed them. ‘I’m sorry too. I really felt that Keera wouldn’t hurt us. Guess I was wrong.’

‘She’s an animal. Why should it occur to her that we need air?’ Adam shrugged helplessly in the blackness. ‘Anyway. I guess she’s got to come up sometime to breathe again.’

‘But if she doesn’t anytime soon . . .’

Zoe left
the thought hanging.
Saving her breath
, Adam supposed. Already he was feeling kind of woozy – imagination, or the first fingers of suffocation at his throat? If Keera didn’t surface then it would all be over for them just as surely as if one of the Z. rexes had caught them. The pointlessness of it all crashed down on Adam, and his mood became black as the prison of flesh all around. He felt strangely
tired; he wasn’t sure if it was the shifting movement of Keera’s body beneath him, but there was a spinning sensation building inside his head, he was starting to lose all sensation in his body.

He searched out Zoe’s fingers, tried to focus on
the feeling. But it was no use. Adam slumped back, his last thoughts melting away as consciousness fled and left him to the darkness.

Chapter 12: Number Not Available

ADAM AWOKE WITH
an aching stomach.

He blinked. His mouth was dry and he felt starving hungry. His body was warm, but the air was icy on his face.

Memories flooded back.

He realized that he was staring not at Keera’s bloodstained mouth, but instead at a high corrugated metal ceiling. The sun’s feeble rays shone through a cracked skylight.
I’m alive!

Sitting
bolt upright, Adam found he’d been half-buried beneath sleeping bags still in their torn plastic packaging. Zoe was curled up next to him, asleep and similarly swamped with sleeping bags. A shedload of groceries – from tins and packets to fresh and frozen meat – lay littered around them in the middle of a huge, derelict warehouse.

It’s like a nest
, thought Adam. He grabbed a dented tin of peaches
and yanked hard on the ring pull; his bandaged hand felt much better.

As he slurped down the juice and slithery
segments inside, he looked about him more closely. The writing on the cartons and packets was in a funny language he didn’t recognize. Behind him were two enormous wooden doors, one of which was hanging off its hinges. It looked as if Keera had made a dramatic entrance.

Where is she?

A movement in the corner of his eye made Adam turn to the other end of the cavernous warehouse. Crouched in one corner, half-hidden in shadow, was Keera. The wounds around her head and jaws seemed almost healed, and she was feeding on the remains of an animal, ravenously ripping the creature’s flesh from its bones.
You didn’t pick
that
thing up at the local store
, thought Adam; he glimpsed ragged
patches of white fur spattered with blood, and a grisly pile of discarded skin and bones.

Adam swallowed hard. Judging by the size of her victim, it looked like Keera was devouring a polar bear. Had she raided a zoo as well as the local Seven-Eleven? Where
were
they? He fumbled for another tin, apricot halves this time, and quickly downed them, almost choking in his haste. He wiped his sticky
mouth, mind racing. If he ran now could he escape to fetch help – or would the Z. dactyl come after him . . .?

He was distracted by a whimper. Zoe was stirring in her sleep, her only leg lashing out at some invisible
attacker.
She’s having nightmares
. Uncertainly, Adam leaned over and shook her. Zoe’s eyes suddenly snapped open, her features twisting in fear as she gasped for breath.

‘Zoe, it’s
OK, we’re safe.’ He pushed aside some bottles of cooking oil to get at a carton of drink, and passed it to her. ‘I don’t know how, but we made it . . .’

While Zoe tore the cardboard open and drank deeply, Adam found some more peaches and opened them up. Zoe dropped the carton and snatched the tin from his hands, scooping the fruit into her mouth. ‘Where are we?’ she mumbled through a sticky mouthful.
‘Why’s it so cold?’

‘Ask the polar bear.’ Adam nodded to Keera’s bloodthirsty feast in the shadows. ‘I guess Keera must’ve surfaced for air after all. I blacked out, I don’t know how long for . . .’ He frowned, started patting his pockets. ‘But if I can find my phone, that’ll tell us, right?’

Zoe finished the peaches, wiped her hands on a sleeping bag and pulled her own phone from her jeans
pocket. ‘Mine’s out of battery. Weird, I thought I had plenty of charge.’

Scanning the screen, Adam saw his own battery was almost flat – then did a double take as he saw the date on the scuffed screen. ‘No way. That’s got to be wrong, it’s . . .’ He showed Zoe the screen. ‘It’s
two days since we were in the hangar.’

‘Two
days
?’

‘Seven o’clock in the morning, that’s almost forty-eight hours.’
He sniffed himself and grimaced. ‘Guess that explains one or two things.’ He tugged at the bandages on his hand, and saw that the cut was now healing well.

Zoe looked at him wildly. ‘Mum will be freaking. She hates to let me out of her sight. Has your dad called?’

‘My phone’s been in flight mode since we went into the hangar – you can’t make or take calls.’ He disabled the setting and waited,
praying he would get a signal.

‘How were we out for all that time?’ Zoe was opening a tin of corned beef now with the little metal key. ‘Last I remember we were running out of air. I got so dizzy . . .’

‘And sleepy,’ Adam agreed thoughtfully. ‘How could we sleep for two days unless—’ He remembered the chemical stink on Keera’s tongue. ‘Unless we were helped. Maybe there was something in her
saliva that
made
us sleep.’

‘Like an anaesthetic, you mean?’ Zoe finished opening the tin and bit a big chunk from the pressed meat inside. ‘Why would there be?’

‘Dr Marrs told me and Dad how a load of scientific genius types had been kidnapped by Geneflow,
with creatures heard overhead around the same time.’ Adam took his own mouthful of the salty, freezing meat, thinking hard. ‘And Keera opened
her jaws for us to get inside like it was the most natural thing in the world.’

Zoe’s eyes widened. ‘You think Z. dactyls did the kidnapping?’

‘Well, they’re well designed for it. Just tuck the victim under your tongue, out of the way, stop them struggling with some drugged spit, then slip into stealth mode – or vanish into water. Gone without a trace.’ Adam ate some more and kept staring at
the phone, willing a signal to appear in the top left corner. ‘When Keera took me the first time she only grabbed me round the ribs, she didn’t put me in her mouth, so I didn’t get sleepy . . .’

‘She wasn’t trying to kidnap you.’ Zoe swigged some more from the carton. ‘In the hangar when she was talking about her creator, I’m pretty sure she didn’t mean anyone at Geneflow. She was talking about
you
.’

Adam finally looked up from his phone. ‘Me?’

‘That part of her that doesn’t want anyone telling her what to do, that wants to be free – she associates it with you. Or whatever bit of you got left behind in those Think-Send brainwaves.’ Zoe ripped open a half-crushed box of biscuits. ‘I think a part of you’s been haunting her head from the day she was born.
Maybe she sensed you were near,
back in DC, and just
had
to find you.’

‘Maybe.’ Adam felt seriously weirded out, but had to admit it was the likeliest explanation. In the past, traces of his personality had bled through Zed’s programming, with the creature tearing apart New Mexico to find him. And even Loner, the raptor with a human mind, had felt linked to Adam thanks to Think-Send. He glanced over at Keera, remembering the
pain in her eyes on the rooftop, the way she’d looked at him as if desperate for help.

And I was too busy being scared to death to think of giving it
.

‘She may think she knows me, but you’re the one who seems to know her.’ Adam went back to staring at his phone. ‘You said you’d touched her mind – and even when you were unhooked from the cables you were shouting about wanting the sky, and the
hunters and stuff . . .’

‘Keera’s thoughts.’ Zoe nodded, speaking through a mouthful of biscuit crumbs. ‘So freaky. It was like she was broadcasting her feelings and I was a radio picking them up . . .’

Adam looked at her warily.
How could that happen?
But it wasn’t as if the rest of the world made a bunch of sense right now. ‘Can you tune in and find out what happens next? Why Keera’s brought
us here – wherever here is?’ He broke off as a weak signal
crept into his phone beside the word
Telenor
. ‘Finally. I’ll call Dad. He must be going crazy.’ He dialled the number, but it wouldn’t connect; he got an automated voice saying something in a foreign language. He tried again, with the same result.

‘What’s up?’ asked Zoe.

Adam put the recorded voice on speakerphone. ‘I can’t get through.
My phone doesn’t allow international calls, and we were rushed out to the States so quickly I didn’t even think about asking Dad to change it . . .’ He put down the tin of corned beef, feeling sick. ‘Zoe, we’re not in America any more.’ He switched back to the main screen and selected the satellite map. ‘Let’s see if this tells us anything.’

Zoe wriggled over beside him. They both stared at the
screen like they meant to burn holes in it, until finally a blue circle appeared on the grid. Adam swept his fingers across the touchscreen to zoom out and the map began to load a moth-eaten coastline in pixelated pieces.

‘This is crazy,’ Zoe whispered. ‘Looks to me like . . . Scandinavia.’

Adam looked at her. ‘Telenor.
Nor
as in Norway? That’s got to be thousands of kilometres from Maryland.’

‘And Keera made it in just two days?’

The blue circle on the screen went on pulsing serenely. ‘Perhaps that’s another reason why
Geneflow bred pterosaurs alongside Z. rexes,’ Adam supposed. ‘Not only can they swim, for whatever reason, they’re faster in the air.’

Zoe jumped as Keera deposited another huge bone on the pile. ‘Maybe Keera’s stopped here to fuel up and rest.’

‘But where’s our destination?’
Adam surveyed the sleeping bags and the edible litter all around. ‘She’s stocked up for us. I guess she sensed we’d need food and drink after two days.’

A chime from the phone made them both jump. A text message had come through:
Voicemail: Caller unknown
.

‘At least I can still receive calls.’ Adam stabbed at the soft buttons on the phone. ‘But can I pick up messages . . .?’

As if in answer,
the calm tones of his voicemail sounded over the speaker: ‘Thursday,’ it said sunnily. ‘Three fifty-four a.m.’

‘That’s yesterday,’ Zoe realized.

Then a familiar voice whispered urgently out from the phone: ‘Adam? It’s me, Dad.’

‘Dad!’ Adam held the phone closer, straining to catch every hoarse word.

‘I pray you’re all right, that Keera saved you and Zoe, that you get this. Ad, they’ve taken
me – Geneflow. The raid on the hangar, those monsters took me and Eve . . .’

Zoe gripped Adam’s arm. ‘What—?’

‘Shhh!’ Adam hissed, straining to hear.

‘We were set up, Ad. Colonel Oldman and Dr Marrs – they’ve been working for Geneflow all along. Whatever happens – don’t tell Oldman
or
Marrs where you are.’

No
. Adam shook his head, throat burning with the threat of tears.
No, they can’t have been
 . . .

‘I know you’ve been tricked in the past by messages you thought were from me, but this is for real. Remember your birthday meal at Browns when Stevie got that candle stuck up his nose? Remember those beige pants you got me Christmas before last, three sizes too big? It’s me, Ad. Eve and I, we’ve been taken to Geneflow’s headquarters – where Keera was reared. We think it’s some way
inland from the port of Murmansk in Russia. We’re all right for now; Geneflow need us to work for them. But . . .’ There was a long pause, then his voice dropped lower. ‘I have to go. Please – try to find someone you can trust. Oldman and Marrs will be out to get Keera – and you and Zoe too. Don’t believe anything they say. Be brave, Ad.’

The phone went silent.

‘To delete the message, press
two,’ came the automated voice. ‘To play the message again, press three . . .’

Adam pressed three and listened again, tears
squeezing through his eyelids, Zoe still clutching hold of his arm. ‘This can’t be happening,’ he muttered, shivering now in the warehouse chill. ‘Losing Dad . . . tricked by people we thought were friends . . . it can’t be happening again . . .’

The message ended just
the same: ‘Be brave, Ad.’

‘Brave. Right.’ Adam put down the phone and looked at Zoe. ‘So . . . what the hell do we do now?’

‘Lose it completely?’ Zoe looked crushed. ‘I mean, you’re positive that was your dad, right?’

‘I know his voice. And all that stuff he said . . .’ Adam sighed, remembering that carefree night at Browns last year. It felt like another life. ‘Only he’d know that.’

‘Then
if Dr Marrs is a part of this, and Oldman too, what
can
we do?’ Zoe was working herself up into a state. ‘Oh, Mum . . . if anything happens to her, what am I—?’

‘Don’t think that way,’ Adam urged her. ‘Maybe Keera can find them. She was reared there, she must know where the place is.’

‘That’s it . . .!’ Zoe grabbed the phone from him, started pressing buttons. ‘The map, look. Norway’s well on
the way to Russia. Adam, I think Keera’s been taking us to this Geneflow base all along!’

‘I don’t see—’

‘What was the last thing you asked us – asked
Keera
in the hangar? For anything that might lead to the ones who did this to her, remember?’

Adam blinked and wiped his nose. ‘I
did
ask that, yeah. And you were muttering on, something about being free, and—’