Escape From Dinosauria (Dinopocalypse Book 1) (25 page)

(“I can’t control it. I don’t want to hurt you. Please.”)

Jamie crawled, the pain burning through her side making it impossible to stand. She scrambled forward and nearly made it to the chain links when her breath was knocked from her and her back arched awkwardly against a slimy surface; her face slammed against the cage and all she could think to do was grab it with her fingers.

She needed to move. Now.

If she could climb up and drop onto its back, she might have a chance.

(“Kill me. Please.”)

Wayne had asked her to sign a picture on the plane. She had talked with him in the lobby at the hotel when Jordan was falling in love with baby dinosaurs. Now he was pleading for her to end his life. This motherfucking island.

She was roughly yanked from the cage, her trunks in the raptor’s teeth as she was flung to the canvas. She used her hands to make sure her face didn’t break her fall.

Jamie rolled as a foot came down, and she had to roll a second time to avoid another stomp.

The damn thing was fast.

(“Oh God please Jamie, please.”)

She pushed off from the canvas and bounced back onto her hands, both legs over the canvas, and quickly swung her legs up for a kick to bottom of the raptor’s jaw in a move that somersaulted her backward and onto her feet.

Jamie attempted to gather her balance and establish her body position in the one second that she had before the beast recovered. Sweat in her eyes, blood in her mouth. Life or death.

On her feet now, poised, bouncing. Time to dance.

Capoeira style.

The raptor charged again. There was only a few inches of space between her and the beast before it moved.

Capoeira allowed her opportunities to improvise and do crazy shit. She could never pull this off in a fight against a normal human being.

Jamie performed a handstand and swung her legs down to scissor the raptor’s head just as it came down to bowl her over. Using her momentum, she managed to swing herself over the raptor’s head, but the beast moved too fast and didn’t stop its own momentum; it crashed into the chain link fence and Jamie slipped off.

The cage held because the creature had tried to stop before it crashed, so not all of its weight landed. Jamie was on her feet again, retreating backward, each foot stepping behind the other, her tiptoes flexing along the canvas and her hips moving with her sweeping legs. She could not stop. She had to dance. Capoeira relied on constant motion.

As the raptor turned his gaze on her, blood from its shredded tongue pooled upon the canvas in dark puddles.

One more time.

(“I’m sorry.”)

Jamie waved him over.

A primal roar surged through its throat and blood was spit from its gore-filled mouth. Instead of charging, the raptor observed her, its head tilting as if inspecting a new chew toy. Rancid, metallic blood breath wafted into her face, mingling with her own rich body odor.

The raptor reared up on its hind legs, rising to its full height.

And brought its head down, jaw snapping.

Jamie flattened to her backside and kicked her legs up, wrapping them around its snake-neck. The head was cradled in her crotch. She squeezed her thighs, but it was no good. Its malicious eyes stared into her own, determined to gnaw on her face. Blood splashed over her stomach from its mangled tongue, and it tried to open its mouth, but she was scissoring tightly enough to render the full expansion of its mouth impossible. The attempt gave her enough time to position herself better, tightening her thighs around the underside of its lower jaw and top of its skull. She leaned forward and hugged its face, doing her best to squeeze down and asphyxiate the fucker.

The raptor smashed her against the cage. It swung her back and forth quickly and she held on for dear life.

(“I can’t help myself. I want to kill you. I want to swallow every part of you.”)

Wayne swung her against the chain links again. Jamie closed her eyes. She just had to hold on. The raptor pressed her into the wire and she could feel it cutting into her back.

(“I can’t help myself. I can’t stop…”)

She held on as it pulled her away and slammed her against the cage yet again. She squeezed tighter, its yellow eyes bulging out of its skull. Wayne smeared her against the wire, pressing hard. She could hear its tail lashing about wildly. Tearing skin from her back, she repositioned one of her hands around its face and allowed it a moment to breathe; using the cage for support, she slid up and around just as Wayne snapped at her. She lost her grip on its scaly head. Her legs saved her, as she arched her back with her ankles entwined beneath its jaw. She rocketed herself back up as Wayne tried to stand upright. Jamie positioned her hands underneath his jaw and reared back with her legs wrapped around its neck.

There was no way in hell it could breathe now.

Wayne rotated in a wild circle, swinging its tail and shaking its head while its tiny arms clawed at its throat. Suddenly, the raptor sagged and dropped with her on top.

One tiny hand slammed on the canvas. Once, twice, three times. Over and over again.

Wayne was tapping out.

Jamie made a raptor tap out.

And she squeezed.

(“Don’t stop.”)

“I won’t,” Jamie said through her gritted teeth.

The dino went limp in her hands.

She let its head drop like a plastic bag full of wet towels. Sitting between its shoulder blades, Jamie panted heavily.

Silence.

This was new.

No cheering. No booing. Nothing.

They stared at her.

Slowly, a chant began to rise through their ranks.

“Rocky, Rocky, Rocky, Rocky…”

Louder, louder.

Jamie stood, the dinosaur at her feet. She spat out her mouth guard and appraised the audience. She was supposed to be dead. She wasn’t supposed to survive this fight.

Their chant echoed through the darkness. Outside the octagon, Kresevich’s soldiers conferred with one another, trying to figure out what they were supposed to do next. The assembled crowd had to be a mix of soldiers and cultists who had fallen in love with the mutant reptiles, and they were trading their loyalty for the victor.

An underdog can always win the hearts of those who do not believe.

“Rocky, Rocky, Rocky, Rocky…”

The guitar riff. The music. The chant.

Fresh electricity coursed through her veins. She had won. And let them come at her with guns blazing. She was unstoppable.

“THUNDER.”

Jamie shouted back to the crowd. “My name. Is not.
ROCKY
. It’s Jamie fucking Kennedy. Jamie Kennedy!”

But they could not hear the sound of her voice over their own manic chants.

Her spine stiffened. Her knees buckled. Fire shot through her left arm and it twisted up awkwardly against her control. Her bicep tightened, her shoulder numbed. Stars danced in front of her eyes; circulation was cut off, and all the noise around her was reduced to a dull echo. Her arm felt as if it had been crunched against a brick wall fist-first, every bone and tendon splitting with pressure from her shoulder to her fingertips.

Tears welled up in her eyes. She could not cry. Her father would be pissed if she saw her cry from physical pain. No tears.

Jamie screamed.

Her thumb was rigid, her other four fingers parting down the middle and curling inward like a talon. Flesh rippled as new coloration slowly filled the pores along her arm, which began to take on a pale green hue. The new color crept along her arm, staining her well-tanned flesh.

Wayne lay dead, and she was about to turn into the same monster that he had become.

Struggling with the fiery pain burning her left arm, Jamie stood, boiling with pure rage against the world with screams that would have frozen the flames in Satan’s personal oven. She screamed loud enough for God to hear. She screamed loud enough for the whole damn world to shake with fear.

To ease her pain, she bent one knee and used her fingers to dig into Wayne’s back. She wanted to kill something. She wanted to hurt something. She was alone in the cage with the corpse of a man who had become a victim of science, just like she was now. Her fingers found what they were looking for—she gripped the spinal cord and pulled.

“THUNDER!”

Jamie ripped the spinal cord out of the raptor’s body.

A collective gasp followed the abrupt end to her music. Her left arm looked like a branch on a dead tree in autumn. Seething with pain and anger, Jamie stood with the long, bloody vertebrate that had belonged to the mutated Wayne. It was still attached to several body parts, so she yanked harder. It wasn’t enough. Not for what she wanted. As more of the spine came free, she tried to use her mutated hand for support, and found it did not lack strength, though she could barely feel anything.

Dinosaur mutants. Telepathic communication. A cage fight with a raptor. She had suspended her belief and allowed bloodlust to consume her now, to shut down every rational thought that could possibly tell her this was all just a bullshit nightmare.

Because she had just pulled an entire raptor skeleton out of its dead body.

Not enough.

Might as well revel in her new condition. Might as well enjoy it.

(“I am coming.”)

A voice in her head again. A voice that provoked feelings of hatred and anger. Once again, she screamed.

“Kenshin!”

(“We can hear you. We are coming.”)

Just what she needed. Let him come. She would fuck him up, too.

5

Jamie could feel herself slipping away. She was barely present during her own breakdown, but rather watched herself stand over the bloody disaster that had once been a dinosaur. Loose, meaty organs and the bloody entrails of an impossible beast lay exposed, and excrement that had been expunged from its death stung her nose. But it didn’t matter.

This didn’t sicken her at all. When she was a little girl, her dad had shown her how to skin and dress a deer. Blood didn’t bother her. A dead dinosaur meant nothing, no matter how much of a mess it was.

The fact that she no longer had control of herself was troubling.

There was more pain, more noise. Her bones made cracking noises and her teeth rattled in her mouth as her face seemed to open wider than it should.

(“You have to finish”)
Kenshin’s voice said inside of her head.

How many people were in the audience? How many witnessed her gruesome ordeal? They would have something to tell their kids when they got home. Not only did they see dinosaurs, but they watched Jamie Rock go nuts, make a raptor tap out, then become a goddamn mutant herself.

All in a day’s work.

She wondered what kind of insane hashtag Twitter would ejaculate into the world.

Usually the adrenaline crash after a fight took a long time to set in. Raw energy pumped through her veins now, and the air she breathed cooled her lungs as if she were breathing in fresh air carried in by ocean waves. Her nerves were calm, but the hatred and anger that burned through her could not be defined by words. Too much had happened. Too much had happened to
her.
She could only imagine what this must have been like for Wayne, or anyone else who had been subjected to Izzy’s mutagenic hormones.

What did Kenshin want her to finish?

Chest rising and falling from each rapid exchange of air, Jamie looked at her disfigured arm. Her legs were also starting to change color. Why couldn’t she have a badass combination of colors, like Wayne’s red and black mix? A lot of good it did him.

The inside of the octagon looked like a bowl of tomato soup with salami chunks and noodles tossed in for good measure. Blood, meat, viscera, and shit. And then there was Jamie, of course, her flesh slowly turning green.

A sudden explosion of sound made her turn around. She thought her music was starting back up. Dust flakes rained from the ceiling.

A hole was punched through a nearby wall; brick, stone, concrete—whatever the hell made up the wall exploded in a white cloud of smoke and dust. Flame billowed through the cloud as steel groaned. A mess of machinery that had once been a helicopter occupied the space in the wall now. Screams of fear and agony rippled through the audience as they scrambled over each other and head for the exits.

When the rest of the helicopter dropped into the makeshift arena, another vehicle followed it in, presumably pushing the helicopter inside; a military jeep with its wheels still spinning, engine running. The jeep crashed onto its side and rolled once, crushing members of the captive audience beneath.

A bestial roar outside accompanied a round of gunfire.

Deep down, Jamie knew what was out there. In a part of her life that seemed like a nearly-forgotten dream, she would have thought it silly that she could feel something so innately, so definitive.

Kenshin was out there, and he was coming for her. There was a good chance that he was pissed off she had kicked him through a window, which was understandable.