Escape From Dinosauria (Dinopocalypse Book 1) (13 page)

And right now, pizza and beer sounded really fucking good.

But this ache that stabbed through her body was on a whole different continent of pain than what she typically experienced after a cage match. She felt like she went a few rounds with a Mack truck. Though half her body was numb, the pain was still plenty present. She rubbed her hands down her torso, wincing as they came in contact with each spot of tenderness. Her skin felt strange, almost alien. Harder and rougher than normal skin. And...slimier?

Between her legs, she discovered a tube inserted inside her. A catheter? Christ, how long had she been out? Well, even if she had to pee to the point of death, she wasn’t pissing in any damn catheter. She wasn’t helpless. She was a goddamn CFI champion. Slowly, she pulled the tube, groaning as it slid out of her like a garden snake. Warm liquid trickled from the end of the tube and splattered on her thighs, which she could now feel, surprisingly enough. If her health was truly down, her thighs would still be numb. But for the feeling to
already
be returning?

Jamie smiled. Whatever had happened, it wasn’t anything she couldn’t deal with. There were few things she couldn’t deal with in this world. She’d learned at a young age that life wasn’t going to give her handouts. When she was six years old and Rudy Michaels tried to make her eat sand, nobody came to her rescue. There weren’t any adults present and the other kids at the playground didn’t give a shit about some girl being bullied. So she did something about it on her own. She wrestled that little fucker and pushed his face so deep in the sandbox that he had to get his stomach pumped. And when she was sixteen, and that prick Andy Oxford took photos of her in the locker room and taped them all over the walls of their school, nothing was done about it until Jamie personally delivered punishment. The principal had shrugged it, gave the kid a warning. Even the cop she reported the incident to didn’t care, just recited the classic anthem of a million rapists: “boys will be boys.” So she followed him home one day and knocked out three of his teeth with a baseball bat, then pulled down his pants and took photos of his own shriveled little penis and distributed them not only at their school but also in the mailboxes of every house in town. Sure, after that she was kicked out of school, but nobody ever fucked with her again. At least, not for a long time.

She dropped the catheter to the floor and tossed the blanket to the side, leaving her nudity exposed to the humidity swallowing her.

Jamie sat up in bed too fast and the room immediately began spinning. Whatever medicine they were injecting into her veins was some powerful shit. She was only half present, the other half in the clouds. Her mind kept wanting to drift away from her skull, like a breeze tugging a bouquet of balloons from a pole. Looking down at her legs, she noticed two things: one, her catheter had shot out a lot more urine than she guessed, and two, despite tilting her head down, her hair had not spilled over her face. This did not happen, she learned, because she no longer had any hair on her head. She was bald.

“Those motherfuckers,” she said, and stood up.

Her bare feet sunk into a dirt floor and she had to wobble a moment and lean against the bed to prevent from losing her balance. She half-expected both legs to collapse as soon as she stood. Maybe for a weaker woman. Maybe for someone who hadn’t knocked out Tonya Beaux with one kick. Some of Jamie’s fans liked to call her the Bitch of Steel. Jamie wasn’t totally against this nickname. Definitely better than Rocky. Fucking anything was better than Rocky.

It hit her how awful the cabin smelled. She could detect the various disgusting odors of the wilderness. Obviously she was no longer in the city. She was pretty sure this was still Dinosauria. Maybe somewhere off the mainland, where civilization wasn’t allowed. Somewhere nearby, she could smell another human being. A man. She could feel his warmth even from her prison. If he tried to stop her from leaving, she would not hesitate to snap his neck. She had never snapped someone’s neck before, but today she felt like it wouldn’t be an issue. She could snap a thousand necks without tiring.

Jamie scanned the area, searching for clothes. All she found was the dress she’d been wearing during her dinner with Jordan and Tanaka. The dress was now ripped and unwearable, unless she planned on modeling for
Playboy
, maybe.

Jordan
.

She tensed, remembering her last coherent moments before the darkness swallowed her. The look in his eyes that begged for her help. Help she’d failed to give. It only now dawned on her that she was the only patient in this fake hospital room because she’d been the only one to survive the dinosaur attack. Jordan was dead. So was the piece of shit responsible for all of this: Tanaka. Served him right. This was what you got for fucking with mother nature. Cloning creatures that were supposed to be dead. But Jordan? Jordan didn’t deserve this. Jordan had just been looking for a story. Jordan was an innocent. And what about all the other guests of Dinosauria? Were they also corpses? If there were other survivors, then where were they? Why was she here and not at a legitimate hospital? Surely she would have been airlifted back to California for medical treatment. It made no sense that she would be kept here, to be treated by some kid who barely looked old enough to shave. Surely one dinosaur hadn’t slaughtered the entire island, so did that mean
all
the dinosaurs had turned violent? Where did the weird Russian guy play into all of this? Was he responsible for the attacks somehow?

Down the tunnel, a man began singing. Not Kenshin, but the other one, the kid. She recognized the lyrics from Lana Del Rey’s “Brooklyn Baby” off of her
Ultraviolence
album. She smirked. The kid probably thought he was all alone, figured Jamie was as good as dead. She wondered how embarrassed he’d get if she suddenly barged in on him, so that’s exactly what she did.

The kid was sitting at a desk, typing on a laptop. She cleared her throat and he screamed and jumped back, knocking over a bottle of water.

“Shit!” he said.

“Lana Del Rey?” Jamie said, legs feeling weak and alien like a newborn’s. “Really?”

“Hey, Lana Del Rey is a musical goddess.” He shook his head at her, perhaps disregarding her opinion as trash, and bent down to retrieve his water bottle. Then he shot back up and stared, finally realizing who he was talking to. “Holy shit, you’re awake.”

“It seems that way.”

He stood up and walked toward her, examining her body from head-to-toe. Jamie stayed in the doorway, leaning against the wall in fear of falling over. She was naked, but she didn’t even give a shit. It didn’t seem like he gave a shit, either. Guy had probably already seen her naked more times than she wanted to know. Who else had inserted the catheter?

“How are you even standing up right now?” he asked. “You’ve been in a coma way too long to have such strong motor functions already.”

“Exactly how long have I been out?”

“Like three weeks.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“I’m serious.”

She rubbed her forehead, massaging her temple. Confusion brought on a piercing pain in her skull. None of this made any sense. One minute she was eating dinner with her boyfriend and the Japanese asshole, then the next minute she was waking up without any clothes on in a pseudo hospital room three weeks later. She couldn’t comprehend the idea that so much time had passed without her experiencing it. This wasn’t like getting an elbow to the eye and momentarily forgetting your surroundings. This wasn’t a couple seconds.

Three weeks.

“What
happened
?” she asked, although the answer felt fairly obvious.

“Quite a bit,” the kid said. “We’ll catch you up here in a few, once you’ve had a chance to rest.”

“No.” Jamie grabbed the kid by his collar, pulling him forward. One wrong word and she’d break him. “I’ve had enough rest, I think. Tell me what the fuck is going on. Why did you shave my head? Why aren’t we at a hospital? Where’s Kenshin?”

The kid tried to talk but instead started coughing. His eyes looked wide and terrified, like they were on the verge of popping out of his skull. Jamie loosened her grip. He freed himself and backed away until he walked into a chair and collapsed into it, stuttering and stammering. “Kenshin’s out. He lost his sword.”

“What?”

He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, then exhaled. “Okay, maybe you need to sit down.”

She sat down on the sofa and pulled a nearby blanket over her. “I’m sitting. Talk.”

“Okay, so there’s this Russian asshole—”

“Yeah, Kresevich, I’ve already met him.”

“Well, he’s not exactly who—”

“I know, he’s a traitor. He betrayed Tanaka.”

The kid threw his hands up. “Well shit, you already know the story, what more is there?”

Jamie gave him a dumb look, then slowly glanced around the cavern. “I think there’s probably a lot more to discuss. Like what I’m doing here, instead of sitting in an actual hospital.”

“What, you expect the military to come swooping in to save us all?” The kid started laughing.

She didn’t understand the joke. “Yeah, that’s kinda what I was thinking. Or at the very least, there has to be a boat we could have used.”

He shook his head, still amused over a joke without an apparent punch line. “Listen, Rocky—can I call you Rocky?”

“Fuck no.”

“Okay. Jamie?”

She nodded.

“All right, Jamie, you gotta understand something. This island, you gotta picture it as one big toilet. Now imagine someone came along and took the worst shit of their life in it. And when they tried to flush it, guess what happened?” He waited a beat for her to answer, and when she didn’t, he continued on. “It clogged. Now all that shit, it’s seeping out of the bowl like a motherfuckin’ volcano.”

“What are you talking about?”

“This island is overflowing with dinosaurs.”

“Well, it is called Dinosauria for a reason.”

The kid grinned. “Right, and what does Dinosauria guarantee?”

She shrugged. “Swampass?”

His laughter was loud and annoying. “I think I like you, Jamie. Which is good, because I’ve spent a fuck-load of time taking care of you lately.” He cleared his throat, leaned forward. “Dinosauria guarantees a habitat of prehistoric creatures that are one hundred percent non-violent. No breakouts, no accidental decapitations, no maulings. Dinosaurs that are free to walk around the park without any restraints, with the promise that they won’t suddenly lean down and snack on one of the guests.”

The scar across her torso seemed to dig deeper in her body at the mention of the word “maulings.” A dinosaur attack was no joke, it didn’t matter who you were, even CFI champions didn’t fuck around with monsters. She wondered how she was even alive. Surely she should have met the same fate as Jordan and Tanaka. But here she was, three weeks later, still breathing, still aching.

The kid kept going. “But do you know what makes the dinosaurs a bunch of pussy pacifists?”

She hadn’t exactly researched the amusement park before the trip. “I don’t know. Something in their diet?”

“Uh. Well, no.” He waited for a second guess, which he didn’t receive. “The first thing you gotta understand is this: these dinosaurs are born from science. They’ve been cloned from several million layers of various DNA. They are scientifically engineered. So much of their innards are artificial you could practically consider them androids. Except they can still breed, eat, and shit as if they were pure. But being so controlled, this means we can change a bit of their coding to fit our needs. That’s where I came in, back when I used to work for Tanaka, before I started living in this shitty-ass cave with Kenshin. I helped design a set of coding that deactivated their truly violent animalistic urges. You know how some cats are wild and insane no matter what you do, but you take it to the vet and get the little fucker fixed, then it’s suddenly chill? Just hangs out on the couch all day like it’s high on Xanax? This isn’t too different. We’ve basically zonked them out, put them on cloud nine.”

“Then what changed?”

He sat back, hesitant to answer. “Kresevich sabotaged my lab. He managed to reverse the coding in a shit-ton of the dinosaurs and turn them into what they’ve always been meant to be: vicious animals.”

“How?”

“I was stupid enough to trust him, show him around the lab, let him mess around with things. I guess he swiped a few of my notes, used them to crack some of my passwords. Using a database I’ve invented, you can actually log-in to the dinosaurs’ systems and tamper with their hardware. Make them violent, make them calm, tell them to go to sleep, you get the gist. Of course, being the stereotypical super villain asshole that he is, he hacked into the database and made the dinosaurs hungry for blood. But he didn’t get all of my passwords, just a few dozen. Enough to inflict chaos throughout the island and ruin the park’s future.”

“But…why?” The urge to urinate had never been stronger, but she needed answers. “What the fuck does this have to do with me?”

“Nothing, really. Just shit timing on your part. If I had to guess, the Russian thought he’d have a better chance of kidnapping me if the island was in the process of being slaughtered.”

“What does he want with you?”