Z. Rex (8 page)

With a wet crunching sound, Zed’s sail-like wings unfolded again from his back. He looked at Adam, an unspoken challenge in his black crocodile eyes.

“What?” Adam shook his head. “You can’t fly there.”

“You,” rasped the dinosaur. “Zed. Go.”

“No.” Adam felt his stomach twist. “No, you can’t take me with you. Not all that way.”

Zed kicked the empty fridge into the wall and stabbed a claw down at the jumble of food. “Hungry,” he grunted. “Need. GO.”

Thirty minutes later, Adam’s stomach was full, but he felt sicker than ever. While he’d been eating, Zed had quietly, methodically gathered supplies in a couple of rucksacks: tins of food, matches, coats and blankets—and a selection of the mysterious files. Then the monster had fastened both bags to his tail.

His brain’s been fried,
Adam realized, still half dressed in the oversized hazard-suit.
He’s been inside Ultra-Reality, and now he thinks life is like a video game, thinks he’s a superhero. He reckons he can fly halfway across the world with me on his back.

I have to run for it,
he thought.

Then he pictured again what had happened to Sedona, and imagined how far he’d get.

In the end, Zed settled the matter. He grabbed Adam in both claws and thrust him upward onto his back. Terrified, Adam clung to a knobbly ridge on the dinosaur’s back and managed to swing one leg over like a jockey, perching just above Zed’s wings. Then Zed reached back, grabbed the flopping arms of the hazard-suit and used nimble claws to tie them tightly around his broad, scaly throat. That had the effect of securing Adam in a kind of makeshift harness, his body pressed up against the back of Zed’s long neck as he clung on for dear life.

“I’m so gonna die,” Adam moaned to himself.

The two rucksacks scraped and bounced over the rocky ground as Zed strode back toward the cave mouth.

“Don’t you understand?” Adam shouted. “You can’t do this! You’re gonna kill us both!” The bomb still lay close to the entrance—and it seemed Adam would be proved right sooner than he’d thought as Zed stooped, picked up the explosives and studied them carefully.

“Zed . . . please put that down,” Adam begged him, hearing the scratch of claws against wires. “Please,
please
put it down before you—”

The bomb made an ominous, electronic belch, and the blue numbers glowed back into being. There were now thirty seconds clicking down on the display.

“Get rid of it!” Adam almost sobbed. “C’mon, you can’t know what you’re doing. . . .”

Zed calmly placed the bundle down beside the entrance and strode out into the cold night darkness. His wings unfurled like broad sails, lifted to the rising wind. Then Adam gasped and gripped on as, with a sickening lurch, his unlikely mount launched skyward.
Hold on,
he willed himself.
Hold on as hard as you can
. The world tumbled and spun about him as they climbed up into the starry blackness. The wind teased tears from his eyes as they went higher, higher over the crumpled shadows of the wilderness park.

The bomb detonated with a roiling bloom of fire. The deafening boom of the blast left Adam’s ears screaming and his heart in his mouth, as the explosion consumed rock, soil and air with the same greed and vigor. Adam saw the entrance to the abandoned lab collapse, entombed beneath tons of rubble.

Then he
did
know what he was doing,
Adam realized.

The skull-like moon watched balefully as Adam was swept away from the heat and the light on the dinosaur’s back, deeper and deeper into the cold, star-scattered darkness.

So Adam had been telling himself, over and over. But hurtling through the skies, clinging to the back of an impossible flesh-eating monster, he knew the lie for the total garbage it was. Each flight was terrifying, from the first lurching takeoff to the final jarring touchdown.

It turned out that Zed could fly incredibly fast over extraordinary distances. But such progress came at a cost. Within minutes of being airborne, Adam would lose all feeling in his face and fingers as the night wind whipped against his skin. His perch on the monster’s back felt precarious at best, but with the high altitudes robbing him of breath, his head kept spinning, and waves of nausea rolled through him. It was like being trapped on the world’s most evil roller coaster for hours at a time with only a big elastic band holding you on board.

Even so, he didn’t dare complain too loudly. There was no one to listen except Zed, who was doing all the real work, flapping those incredible wings of his hour after hour. It seemed the plan was to rest by day and fly by night so as not to be seen; clearly, not even a Z. rex could stay invisible for hours at a time while flying at ridiculous speeds.

Adam soon discovered that even intense fear couldn’t hold off boredom indefinitely. With no one to talk to, he felt as if he were going quietly crazy. He worried about his dad, thought about his friends, about the way their numbers and texts were stored inside his dead phone. A little electronic tomb that held the remnants of his old, predictable life, meaningless in this new one.

After the second night’s flying, they camped out beside an enormous lake as the dawn rose.

Adam rested on the deserted beach, sore, sour and shivering, watching Zed as he built a rocky shelter next to a hillside. The dinosaur worked quickly, shifting boulders with his brawny arms and adjusting their position with his jaws. It was clearly no casual arrangement. Zed layered the stones with mud and brushwood and kept crawling in and out, as though he were testing his shelter not just for cover but for camouflage too.

He doesn’t want to be spotted while he sleeps,
Adam realized. Vaguely he wondered how far he might run before the dinosaur woke up and came looking for him—and what punishments he might receive. He felt completely helpless. Even if he found other people nearby who might help him escape, what good would it do? Zed could kill them all, just as he’d killed Bateman’s “friends.”

Adam curled up on the grass and drifted into an exhausted sleep.

Around midday, Adam woke with a start to find Zed emerging from his hideaway, scenting the air. Stealthily, the dinosaur padded toward the beach, shimmering into invisibility as he went.

Adam watched in uneasy wonder. If he squinted he could make out the faint edges of Zed’s form ghosting in the sunlight, but only because he knew what he was looking for. And he saw that the dinosaur was stalking toward a group of large, dark cormorants. “Like a stealth fighter closing on its target,” Adam muttered. The birds shifted about uncertainly, as if sensing some kind of danger, but not its direction.

Then suddenly Zed snapped back into view, jaws lunging, tail swiping, huge claws raking the air with deadly precision. A few of the large birds clattered away, escaping over water. Most were not so lucky. Shaken, Adam could see about a dozen dead or injured on the shore. One by one they vanished into Zed’s jaws, swallowed whole.

The dinosaur smoothed out the bloody, churned-up sand with one massive foot, then turned and retreated to his shelter without a glance at his unwilling companion.

Aching too much to sleep any longer, Adam passed the afternoon gathering sticks and tinder in the hope of starting a fire. Then he started searching for matches in one of the rucksacks. He found instead the mysterious files Zed had collected and packed carefully at the bottom.

Why had Zed wanted Sedona to explain those files to Adam? If only Bateman hadn’t turned up when he did, Adam guessed he’d know a lot more about whatever mad, mutant experiment had been going on at Ponil—and how his dad figured in things. Instead . . .

He shook his head to clear the horrible memories. “Where
are
the stupid matches?”

As if at the sound of Adam’s voice, Zed crawled out from his shelter. Adam backed away as the dinosaur approached his pile of dry grass and sticks, watched as the giant creature struck his massive claws against a rock and set great sparks jumping. As the tinder started to smoke, Zed carefully pursed his lips and blew gently enough not to scatter the kindling. The fire was blazing in moments.

A regular Boy Scout,
Adam thought wryly. He shuffled closer to the flames, but they couldn’t seem to touch the coldness inside him.
How does Zed know stuff like this? Dinosaurs never made fire. . . .
He caught himself. Of course, dinosaurs had never performed kickboxing routines they picked up from a video game either. Or talked. And since when had they defused bombs?

Adam bit his lip. The truth of that night had been flickering at the back of his mind. It wasn’t Bateman who had loused up at all. Zed had defused the bomb and then set it off after they left so Bateman would think it had worked after all . . . that he and Zed were dead and buried inside.

He stared in awe at the dinosaur beside him. “You’re a devious wee monster, aren’t you?”

Zed made no response, staring at the fire as if transfixed by his creation.

And edging closer to civilization.

Wearily, Adam reached into one of the rucksack’s side pockets and unfolded the map of the world that Zed had torn down from the wall. “Wonder where we are now?”

Abruptly, Zed leaned forward and stretched out an arm toward him. Adam flinched as the point of the dinosaur’s index claw tapped down on the map with precision.

“Ontario?” Adam read, as Zed retreated to his original position. “How would you know that? I mean . . . are you navigating by the stars? You can’t come with built-in sat-nav. . . .” He shook his head. “Where did you
come
from?”

The dinosaur seemed not to hear. His dark eyes were fixed on the fire once more, reflecting the flames’ pattern and dance.