Escape From Dinosauria (Dinopocalypse Book 1) (21 page)

“I guess I am.”

“Then I will ask you to hand over Doctor Israel. Pretty please.”

“Not going to happen.”

“I will give you one more chance.”

“Why give me a chance at all? The answer’s still no.”

“You want off the island? We can get you off. Kresevich has plenty of resources. He’ll make it work out for you. Or we can work together. I have ideas. I could use you. You can add star power to my program.”

“You
used
a word that I am not fond of right now.”

Izanami clapped her hands together again, and the robed attendants stood. “That’s too bad. I know a lot of people have been wondering about you. You’re undefeated, aren’t you?”

Several attendants produced cell phones and pointed them at her. She could only wonder what the hell they were doing.

“You want star power?” Jamie said. “Come and get it.”

They came for her. Draped in white, their faces were just as white. Was this another incarnation of the KKK? Dinosaur-supremacists. The bullshit never ended.

To kill or not to kill? That was the question.

Or maybe not.

She flipped into the air with her legs cinched tightly like a dolphin leaping out of the water. She landed behind a dino-lover and planted her hands on the bridge to arch her back upward. She snagged someone’s neck with her ankles and pulled them backward. She used her momentum to spin on her hands, twirling her victim into another member of the worship team. On her hands, legs tucked beneath her but not touching the ground, she pushed off and swung her legs upward to catch someone in the chin.

Damn, this felt great.

Jamie Rock danced her capoeira moves right through them, knocking white robes down like they were bowling pins. She spun and kicked, her body and hair flowing madly through beneath the sunset-doomed sky. Cell phones dropped and bones snapped. Men groaned and begged for mercy, while still others tried to grab her. She remained elusive, spinning and twirling among them, shoving noses into brains and closing synapses forever. Cutting off windpipes and dropping heads into concussions and comas.

One of her hands grabbed a wad of flesh, and she reared back to tear it away. She felt like she was a racecar that drove way too fast and was smoking its tires and heading for the wall. She frantically clawed at someone’s face and blood rained into her eyes.

And now there were hands on her.

Spinning wildly, Jamie clawed and kicked at everything and anyone. Focus and discipline were ripped out of her, replaced by savage lust. The metallic taste of blood was on her lips, and she wanted more.

She shoved her hand up the back of a man’s white robe and inserted her fingers into the man’s ass. The man yelped, and she held his throat with her other hand while she shoved her hand straight up the man’s asshole. Impaled upon her fist, the man screamed and writhed as shit and blood ran down Jamie’s arm. She gripped wet, ropy intestine and pulled it out of him.

Jamie roared as she spun the intestines around her like nunchuks. She landed strikes upon wide-eyed, fearful faces, a meaty
smack
accompanying each hit. Jamie wrapped the intestines around the man’s neck and pulled them tight, causing the eyes to bulge from his head. She reached around his face with one hand and plucked an eyeball out. She dropped the dying man over the bridge and tossed the eye into her mouth.

Human consciousness was absent from her mind. She did not know how many men came for her, and she did not care. They slipped on blood and tried to seize her, their devotion to Izanami keeping them from fleeing into the jungle. They had no chance against Jamie Rock, and they knew it.

Blood dripped from her body as if she had just emerged from a gore shower. It dripped into her eyes, her hands were slick and red. No man stood in front of her.

Hands on her shoulders.

She pivoted and delivered a punch to a robed man’s stomach. Her fist went straight through him, and she lifted him into the air like an umbrella. He reached for her throat, but she slammed her free arm down onto his and shattered his forearm. Lifting him high above her head, she opened her mouth and drank in the blood that dripped from his wound. She shoved her other hand into his stomach and peeled the flesh away. Sloppy organs flopped out and splattered at her feet. Jamie withdrew her arm from the man’s limp body and it fell over the bridge and splashed into the river. She knelt and scooped a wet chunk of humanity and shoved it into her mouth, her hunger so powerful that she barely chewed and nearly choked on her meal.

A terrible, gurgled laugh came from one end of the bridge. Jamie, still on her knees and snacking, turned to see the mutant dinosaur clapping its tiny arms.

The cage fighter stared at the bloody piece that had been ripped out of a human being. She dropped it, and her mouth hung open.

Holy shit. She was eating people and loving it.

She shoved a hand down her throat and tried to expunge everything she could over the side of the bridge.

What the hell happened?

She tried to replay the whole thing in her head. She was covered in blood. Her stomach still rumbled, but the pain was gone. She had turned a man into a Happy Meal and wanted another one to go. Everything was fucked up.

Cell phones littered the bridge in pools of blood. A couple of people were still alive, groaning and clutching themselves.

The whole thing had been streamed. Was it live?

Jamie Rock: Cannibal Champion of the World. Bald mutant dino-warrior with a killer bod and a dead boyfriend.

She was going to be stripped of her title. She was a murderer. She was a freak now, a sideshow who belonged in a cage she could never escape from.

Whenever she finished a fight, she tried to prepare herself for the onslaught of questions the media would sling at her.

“How does it feel to be Cannibal Champion of the World?”

“Can you tell us how you prepared differently for this fight?”

“Who do you think your next opponent will be?”

“When do you think the fight really turned in your favor?”

“Did you suffer any injuries during the fight?”

“What will your father think?”

No. That last question.

What would her father think?

Jesus Christ. She had ripped intestines out of a man’s asshole somehow. Her strength was freakish, and Jamie did not know her limits anymore. There was no telling what she was capable of. If only Kenshin were still alive, she would kill him. Again and again, she would pummel the shit out of him for what had been done to her.

She was a monster now. Her family would want nothing to do with her. Who would believe that she hadn’t pumped the drugs into her body on her own? She was no different than any cheating athlete out there, now.

“You had a lot of fun, Ms. Rock!”

The big-breasted dino-bitch stomped over the bridge toward her; a couple of skulls were squished along the way as if they were nothing more than grapes left out to dry in the sun.

“It’s like your career has matured. Did you think you were going to be a boxer forever?”

“I’m not a boxer.”

“Who cares? It’s all the same thing. You beat people up on camera for money. You’re only special because you’re a
woman
, Ms. Rock. Otherwise, you would be just as popular as any other generic boxer.”

“I swear, I’m going to rip your tits off and shove them down your throat.”

“That’s the spirit! So I assume you don’t want to give up our favorite boy-wonder?”

Jamie spit out a glob of someone else’s blood. “Let’s do this already.”

Jamie was not prepared for Izanami’s speed; the huge dino-mutant rushed forward and whipped its tail around. Jamie was fast, but was a second too slow, and her leap over the tail didn’t quite clear. She fell flat on her face and tasted fresh blood. Her nose was broken.

She pushed herself up quickly, but her rhythm was off after getting caught by the tail and she was bowled over by Izanami’s forward head-butt. The force and momentum caused Jamie to roll along the bridge until she felt air beneath her.

The Women’s CFI Champion had a fleeting thought she never expected to encounter in her lifetime: this is what it felt like to be knocked out—falling, falling, falling…

But she wasn’t knocked out. The river below her seemed to be turning black as daylight faded faster by the second, and the grass seemed a shade of dark blue or gray. When she landed on a huge fallen tree that stretched over the darkening river, her back arched over it and a violent shudder wracked her body. Her arms and legs tingled.

One second passed. One breath.

She could not move, or feel.

Her neck felt naked. Her medal. It’d fallen off. Fallen into the river. Lost forever.

Where were the dino powers now?

She was fucked.

Izanami leaped from the bridge and crashed into the brambles nearby. At least the mutant bitch wasn’t going to waste time with some villainous speeches. Jamie would never have to live with a loss on her record. One loss was all it took to end some fighters’ careers, and one was all she needed to be done.

This one loss was it.

“Izanami!”

A familiar voice, and then a figure. A shadow staggered forward in Jamie’s peripheral vision. A man with long, black hair hanging raggedly from his head, several needles sticking into his arms.

He stopped and tried to steady himself against a nearby tree. Whipping his head around to face Jamie was Kenshin, his skin bubbling, grunt of pain burping from his throat. In one hand, he held a fistful of needles and jabbed them all into his neck. He arched his back and his arms dropped to his sides. His limbs seemed to be growing, bones and sinews cracking and splitting, flesh expanding.

“Nothing to see here,” Izzy said. He was trying to pick her up off the rock and heft her over his shoulders.

Why did he come back for her? Her tongue felt swollen in her mouth. The last time she had felt so helpless was at a party in which she had gone toe-to-toe with a member of the Wu-Tang Clan in a drinking contest. She had won that one by knockout, mostly because she was able to last until she left the party and hit the back of her limo, where she found it impossible to form a coherent thought or word.

“Damn it,” Izzy said, dropping her.

“Run,” she managed to say.

“I need you. And…ah, shit…”

Still unable to move, Jamie could only look into Izzy’s eyes. He stood over her, transfixed by whatever was happening to Kenshin.

“He took all of it,” Izzy said, unable to look away. He stood, his entire face going slack as if he had discovered that the entire universe had been conspiring against him. “Man, I can’t believe it. Nobody has taken that much.”

The kid was a scientist and had to be proud of whatever was happening to Kenshin. He was witnessing the full power of his mutagenic serums. It was no wonder that he was standing there while two powerful roars shook the sky.

Izzy shook himself from his trance. “Hey, I don’t think I can move you. You might be…uh…well, I think you might heal.”

She closed her eyes. Everything was wrong. It was impossible to move and she wasn’t sure she wanted to. What was the point of getting up again? Covered in blood and stranded on an island full of dinosaurs and secrets, she had participated in her own doom by killing people on camera. And she had
loved
it. Only moments ago, in the glory of a bloodbath, she had stood triumphant and hungry.

Now she was broken and bleeding. Her entire body tingled with an unfamiliar energy. She felt the blood rush to the tops of her toes and fingers. It was time to get up, join the chorus of savage roars that filled the air. Her head buzzed again, but this time there was no pain. Time to get up. Time to be near Kenshin.

Why did she want to be near him? Something was happening to that poor bastard, something terrible that was going to shove him right over the edge of humanity and into the bestial embrace of some prehistoric curse. Kenshin had used her, had used Doctor Israel, and now he was making the ultimate sacrifice to protect the idea of a cancer-free world.

“I never thought I would live to see this,” Doctor Israel said, his voice filled with awe. “He took every damn syringe I had. Wow.”

“Move,” she said.

“No. I have to see this. You don’t understand. When I began messing around with biochemistry and genetic code, I pictured this happening. This moment.
This.
”

Izzy propped her against a tree and charged back down into the ravine, the sunset finally surrendering to a blanket of evening sky. The fresh, clean air allowed for an entire heaven full of stars to be visible, but that fresh air wasn’t so fresh at all; the smell of blood was in the air.

Probably because she was covered in it.

The ground vibrated and it felt like a toymaker had picked her up and was shaking her to clear off dust. What the hell could cause an earthquake? She could barely see anything through the trees, but Kenshin’s primal roar had been joined with hundreds of others. She could only imagine what was causing the quake.