Z. Raptor (14 page)

Chen grabbed his shotgun and pressed a pistol into Stone's hand. Stone passed it to David, who accepted it grimly.

Adam looked at Harm. She was holding her breath, and he realized he was doing the same. David was holding the gun so tight his knuckles looked set to pop through the skin. A stealthy, rustling noise crept into his ringing ears.

Stone was right. Something was drawing nearer.

N
ot again,
Adam thought, coldness and exhaustion filling his bones.
Can't go through it again.

“So much for your spray,” David sneered at Chen.

“We've been making enough noise to wake the dead,” Stone whispered tersely, “let alone a pack of lizards born to hunt.”

Chen aimed his shotgun.

The rustling of vegetation stopped, and labored breathing sounded in its place. “Do not shoot,” came a soft, mournful voice from the darkness.

“Loner?” Lisa breathed.

Harm turned to Adam, incredulous. “He's alive.”

“If
he's
alive,” said Chen, “what about the others?”

“I am alone.”

Adam got up as Loner stalked closer, but his smile of relief soon faded. The raptor was barely recognizable. His hide was burned black. Along one side, his stubby shield of shoulder quills was a mass of shattered stumps. One arm hung uselessly by his side, caked in mud. His breathing came in hard, stubborn wheezes, and his eyes smoldered dull yellow.

“Thank God you're all right,” Lisa said, struggling to get up. “After all you've done for us . . .” It looked for a moment like she was going to hug him, but instead she hovered awkwardly. “You are all right, aren't you?”

Loner bobbed his head. “Others bore the worst of the blast. I will heal. In time, so will they. We are very hard to kill.” He looked balefully at Chen. “Very hard.”

“If the Z. raptors are anything like the Z. rex, their cells repair really quickly,” Adam said. “I think that's how they're made—regenerating the original fossils, or something.”

“Loner,” David said, “we—we're so sorry this happened.”

Adam nodded and turned to Chen. “Aren't we?”

Chen didn't look at Loner, but he nodded. “Sure. I didn't come here to kill off the good guys.”

Loner did not comment on the halfhearted apology. “We must leave this place,” he said. “Vels are coming. The explosion—”

“Of course,” said David. “This part of the jungle will be swarming with raptors.”

“They can't smell us now,” Adam said.

“They won't need to,” Harm responded. “They'll most likely trip over us.”

“Where do we go?” asked Lisa.

“We just keep moving,” said Chen. “Find some higher ground with cover, so we can see the raptors coming without them seeing us back.”

“I know a place,” said Loner, straightening his shoulders with some difficulty. “Sheltered. Overlooking the Vel camp.”

“That's not just the Vel camp,” David said, looking at Chen. “The Geneflow headquarters were built beneath it.”

“Yeah?” Chen nodded. “I'd like to check that out.”

“Then let's get there,” Stone said. “If the Vels are out searching the jungle, there'll be fewer minding their store.”

“They've got guards, a barricade and all kinds of stuff,” Adam informed him. “I saw through these.” He pulled out Chen's binoculars. “The Brutes must've found them washed up on the beach, and Loner found them near their camp at the north cliffs.”

“They were spying on the Vels too, huh?” Chen took the binoculars with a smile and looked around at the others. “Well, I think maybe we should take a closer look. Who's coming?”

Harm answered with a shrug, David and Lisa with weary nods. Adam looked at Stone, who gave a weak smile of encouragement.

Loner was first to move, turning and limping into the jungle. “This way,” he said.

The hike seemed to last forever. By its end, Adam was hot, tired and so exhausted he wanted to go to sleep and never wake up again.

Which could happen so easily,
he thought as night settled over the huddle of survivors and their new camp in the high ground.

The night sky was peppered with a billion tiny bright lights. Too wired to sleep, Adam stared up at the stars from a makeshift hammock of fleshy leaves and jungle vines strung high between two sturdy palms, wishing he were far away from here.

So much for day one on Raptor Island,
he thought.

Loner had led them to a vantage point overlooking the Vel camp. Not only did the camp have thick concrete walls for protection, it was surrounded on three sides by cliffs and the sea—most likely the reason the U.S. military had chosen the site during World War II in the first place, in case of Japanese attack. David reckoned it probably wasn't much more than a half mile around the coast from the Brutes' home turf, while Harm suspected the distance was closer to a million when you had to divert through the jungle as they had just done.

As for Adam, he'd felt happier when the Vel camp had been a hazy image through binoculars. Looking down from here, the striped raptors seemed close enough to touch.

Loner had gone away, sniffing for scent trails, making doubly sure that this place and its approaches were not in regular use. Reunited with his binoculars, Chen had spent an age scrutinizing the area while the other survivors had gotten busy securing their makeshift camp as best they could, rigging up early warning systems using bundles of sticks and jungle-vine trip wires. But creepily, the Vels' own security was more high-tech. To Adam's astonishment, floodlights kicked on as dusk settled, illuminating the camp in a harsh yellow glare. The scaly monsters cast thick, misshapen shadows behind their barricades of scrap metal, some of them even wearing plates of metal as improvised armor.

“It's like they're expecting an attack,” David observed. “Maybe they know the Brutes have been spying on them.”

“There were no floodlights when we scouted this area before,” Lisa agreed. “Something's got them rattled.”

If only Zed were here,
Adam thought.
He'd save me
. He wished for the huge reptile to come swooping down from out of the sky on his impossible wings, bearing Dad on his back, and ached with loneliness.

And then Adam thought about Loner. Like Zed, Loner was a beast at odds with the world around him; humans and dinosaurs were never meant to coexist. And yet . . . weirdly, it felt to Adam as if there was already some kind of bond between him and Loner. The raptor had carried him and fought for him and almost died for him without thought or hesitation. Was it only because the Think-Send technology used to train him had touched him somehow with Adam's humanity?

Or by some fluke of nature or science, had this beast evolved beyond the others to develop a conscience?

Adam shuddered.
I need to evolve the ability to switch off my brain
.

As the youngest members of the party, he and Harm had been allowed to sleep first before taking their turn on watch. But the slightest noise seemed to travel like a bullet in the night air. Even now, Adam could hear Dr. Stone's voice from the clearing, low and fragile: “Those things are just reptiles. ... How can they be doing this? How can they be so advanced?”

“Geneflow made them that way,” David said.

“Adam?” Harm's voice came out of the silvery darkness. “You awake?”

“Wide awake.” He looked across and dimly saw a figure lying in a hammock fashioned from an old blanket between two neighboring palms. “I don't know how you've slept at all on this island.”

“Yeah, well, total exhaustion's quite good for that.” She gave a low whistle. “You know what? It's Christmas Eve.”

Adam frowned. “It is?”

“Maybe we should go down and crash the grown-ups' party.” Harm sighed. “Sure is comforting, having all these adults around to look after us, huh?”

Adam imagined his unwrapped present to his dad lying back at his New York hotel room. A pair of gloves, to ward off the Manhattan cold. Tears suddenly prickled at the back of his eyes, and he dashed them away, glad of the darkness. Would the staff at the hotel realize the room had been empty for days? Would they have told the police? Maybe Jeremy Marrs had tried to get hold of Mr. Adlar or even Chen and realized they were missing.

Soon the
Pahalu
will be headed back to Hawaii. Dad will tell Dr. Marrs where the island is. They can get help....

The notion seemed as ridiculous as a happy Christmas.

“It's really selfish,” Adam muttered, “but I wish my dad was here.”

Harm stretched in her hammock. “Guess he's always been around for you, right?”

“Well . . . most of the time. His work's always been really important to him, and sometimes it sort of takes over. . . .” Adam felt a pang of guilt. “But he's great. He's there for me, and I'm there for him.”

“What about your mom?”

Adam stared up at the stars. “She died way back.”

Harm said nothing, one hand idly playing with her ragged braids. “It's good you have your dad around. Mine went to jail when I was just five.”

“What did he do?” asked Adam.

“Killed two cops. He was robbing someplace, they surprised him.” Harm was silent for a time. “You know, I grew up hating him so much. And it was weird—the more I hated him, the more I missed him, and that fed into the way I hated him, and . . .” The words dried up into slow, steady breathing. Adam was wondering how best to fill the silence when Harm spoke again, quieter, huskier. “My mom never let me see him. Wanted a clean start.”

“You never visited him?”

“No one to take me. I wrote him, sometimes. He always wrote back. I sent him pictures of me, sort of goofing around or dressing up. He said he hoped I'd be able to visit someday by myself when I was old enough, and he would get to see me all grown up.” Harm snorted. “I kidded myself he really cared.”

“Of course he cared,” said Adam. “You're his daughter.”

“You know . . .” Harm took a deep breath as if steeling herself. “He always called me his . . . his . . .”

Adam waited. “His what?”

“Never mind.” Her voice sounded thicker, as though tears were close. “That Brute . . . the way he looked at me. Spoke to me.”

“Sweet and perfect.” Adam shivered. “Like you were his ideal meal or something.”

“Don't.”

“That whole pack of Brutes had stuff wrong with them, did you notice?” Adam saw Harm's head nod in the moonlight. “Hunchbacks or one eye or half lame or just crazy or whatever.”

“So they formed a club. I'm happy for them.”

“But why would their queen send the weakest in the pack to get us?” Adam persisted. “If we're, like, a big part of her plan for getting the Vels—”

“Even the weakest of those things are a thousand times tougher than we are.” Harm shifted in her hammock. “Do you buy Agent Chen's story of why he brought you here?” she asked suddenly. “That he'd risk so many lives and his own too, and splash out on two boats just to find out how much of a bad boy he's been? I mean, I can give you the names of twenty social workers who'll tell you I got trust issues, but, man . . .”

Adam felt uneasy. “Chen's seen what was left of another Geneflow base after a Z. rex tore it apart. No one could let stuff like that happen again if they felt responsible, could they?”

“He and his buddy out there drugged you, Adam. Is that what the good guys do?” The edge to Harm's voice was hard as the starlight. “What if Agent Chen knows Josephs a little better than he makes out? Maybe he thinks no one can stop what Geneflow's doing and wants to save his own ass by getting in with them?”

“No, he couldn't want that . . . could he?” Adam sighed. “I don't know. I don't know anything.”

Suddenly the crash of trampled brushwood ghosted through the night.
Oh, God, they've found us
. Adam turned awkwardly in the thick palm leaves as the small jungle clearing below rustled with strained whispers and hissing voices. But then Chen's muted call sounded over them. “Looks like our tame dinosaur just got home.”

Adam saw movement in the darkness; a mound of dark scales patterned with scars, hunched over.

“Loner?” Lisa sounded like a worried mother. “Did something happen? Your face—”

“It is only mud,” came the quiet hiss. “It soothes my wounds.”

“You were hurt again?” Lisa persisted.