Escape From Dinosauria (Dinopocalypse Book 1) (29 page)

Izzy swerved over just enough to clip a running dye-non. He couldn’t see what happened, but the first one lost its grip and was sucked into oblivion beneath the truck. The dino’s buddy had likely dragged him down beneath the truck when they collided.

An ear-piercing screech in the cab caused Izzy to jerk the wheel awkwardly to his left. He could feel control slipping as the wheels resisted him and wanted to turn the entire truck in another direction. He released pressure from the gas pedal and remembered it was a bad idea to hit the brake, although he really wanted to.

Peering into the cab, its nails digging into the backside of the dino that had bashed its own head in to break the glass, a dye-non opened its mouth and displayed a long red tongue wet with saliva.

7

Gravity disappeared. Pain, blood, air. These things were Jamie Rock’s reality.

The truck lurched awkwardly to the side. She tried to reach behind her for the feathery dye-non and hopefully rip it off, but her feet left the ground and tree branches circled over her head.

Defying gravity was one thing. Defying gravity with a dinosaur on your back was another.

In that split-second frame of movement, Jamie instinctively leaned forward and dropped to her chest, using her hip and hand to dampen the impact. Dirt from the road flew into her eyes and flooded her lungs.

The creature released its grip and rolled alongside the truck, left behind in the dust, dinged by a low-hanging branch.

Jamie sat up and spat dirt and blood out of her mouth. She dug around with her finger to make sure all of her teeth were present. She hurt in a million places, and there was no time to assess the damage. More screeching beasts raced alongside the truck. One of them hung limply against the passenger door.

With a sigh, she picked up Kenshin’s bloody sword. The machine gun was gone.  The grenade launcher was still intact, but there was only one grenade left in the bandolier.

The sun was high, its warmth creating a mask of light upon her face.

She flicked blood off the sword.

A dye-non leapt upon the truck bed.

On her toes, blood in her eyes, she led the dance. The sword clanged through claws and sliced cleanly through a thigh. She turned to the dino behind her and swept the blade through its jugular, creating an arterial blood spray that painted the bed. She leapt over the top of a dino and landed behind it, dragging the sword all the way down its back and ripping through flesh and bone.

They came for her.

They didn’t need their limbs anymore.

Or their organs.

Jamie Rock no longer existed. In her place was a killing machine, sliding and slipping over a massacre. Sunlight could no longer penetrate the veneer of blood that had sheathed the katana. It was a dark blade, dripping with the gore of dying beasts.

The dino-killing machine stood atop a corpse and stared into a savage face. She roared back at the creature and sliced with a horizon of death across its jaw, and the crown of the skull and upper jaw slipped off.

Once again, the truck lurched awkwardly. She kept her footing, but she no longer used her speed or athleticism to battle the ravenous dinosaurs. Stepping into solid footing, her feathered arm was wrenched back and a claw pressed against her chest.

Yeah, right.

With her free hand, Jamie grabbed its throat and lifted it in the air for a moment, letting it become nothing more than a dark shape against the backdrop of sun and sky, and then she slammed it hard, using all of her newfound strength to snap its back.

Another dino had the misfortune of jumping into her field of vision. With the same left hand, she uppercutted the little fucker and drove the teeth in its bottom jaw into the top of its mouth. Blood leaked out of its clenched mouth like a boat that had been shot in the hull several times. The dye-non dropped.

A shock of pain in her right arm caused her to drop the sword. Her biceps and triceps cramped up at once, and her arm curled inward.

It was happening again.

A foot above her head, standing atop a dead dinosaur, a dye-non slobbered onto her face. Jamie clenched her left fist and dropped it down in an arc, hammering the top of its head. The dino dropped, its stiff tail jutting into the air as it pawed at the air like a dog that was being attending to lovingly by a master who scratched its belly. Jamie stomped into its midsection and yanked hard on the tail.

The tail separated from the creature, and the bastard screamed.

Jamie smashed the tail into the dino’s face. When the creature had nearly had enough and its limbs began to slow their frantic pawing, she shoved the point of the tail into its open mouth, down its throat.

The headache again, voices filling up the space inside her mind.

(“Eat.”)

(“Kill her. Kill.”)

(“Hungry. Eat. Hungry.”)

Inane chatter. Desperate words. How much more of this could she take? She wanted to close her eyes and sleep. She wanted to be knocked unconscious, cut off from all the noise of violence and chaos. Her mouth tasted like blood and dirt.

Rational thought began to creep back through her brain. She looked at the horror in front of her. Slabs of meat, all of it rotting in the sun. A waste of life. Those things had tried to kill her, but they all used to be people until they were injected with the mutagenic serum.

And there wasn’t one person she could blame. There wasn’t one person she could destroy to avenge this atrocity.

Her battle rage subsided. Everything seemed futile and useless. She had never been a defeatist, but the idea that this struggle was all for nothing popped into her brain suddenly, an idea she had never truly grappled with. Life was always worth fighting for. She had believed that. What was her problem? She had experienced this sort of helplessness during an adrenaline crash several times after some of her fights, but this was different. She was still in danger. The fight wasn’t over. She hadn’t won anything.

Bleeding, tired, sweating. A few scattered dinos still raced alongside the truck, but there were fewer now and they dropped off in the distance, as if they were giving up. Jamie Rock wasn’t easy prey. She was at the top of the food chain.

“I really, really need a cold beer,” she said to nobody. It felt good to say something that made sense. At least Kresevich had the good sense to provide her with a last meal before sending her into the octagon. He wasn’t such an asshole, after all. That PBR had tasted so damn good.

Jamie examined her sore, feathered arms, resisting the urge to simultaneously laugh and cry at how fucking ridiculous she looked. Then the sun’s light grew cold, as if the canopy of trees had reached over the road and shut out the brightness. Her first thought when she looked up and saw what was chasing them was that Izzy had lied: she hadn’t killed the island’s only
T-rex.

8

For Izzy to grab the bag, he would have to reach toward the other side of the cab and attempt to grab it before the dye-non ripped his arm off. The dino’s head was fully inserted into the cab, and its dog breath made Izzy’s eyes water. Damn thing obviously did not a give a shit for its safety; it had climbed up the back of another reckless little fucker that had used its own head as a battering ram against the passenger window and ended up killing itself in the process, its nails stuck into the steel door.

The bag was just out of reach.

Man up. Grab the stupid bag. Find the pistol. Shoot the dinosaur in the face. All in that order. Oh, and keep driving the huge armored military truck over a dirt road that looked shittier than Charles Bukowski’s face after a day in the sun.

There was nothing poetic about this moment. He needed the gun. He needed to shoot.

Biting his bottom lip, he reached for the gun. A bloody claw darted into the window and scratched at his arm, tearing shirt fabric away as burning pain seared his flesh.

“You were a mistake!” Izzy shouted. “Get off the truck, you idiot! I made you!”

The blood on his arm didn’t seem real at all. Even after everything he had been through, the wound ignited a round of heavy breathing and accelerated thoughts. He was going to die. He was going to die. Oh shit, titties pizza ice cream titties baseball think about baseball oh SHIT.

Dinosaurs. He had turned people into dinosaurs. And now they wanted to kill him.

Izzy let go of the steering wheel and lunged for the bag. He wasn’t thinking at all now. Maybe the dinosaur was going to rip his face off. It was practically invisible, its presence nullified by pure fear.

Cold metal in his hand. He pulled out the gun and returned one hand to the steering wheel.

“Open wide, asshole!”

Pop. Pop. Pop pop pop.

The dinosaur faced dropped from the window, and Izzy dropped the gun. His ears hurt worse than his arm. Nobody ever told him that firing a gun in quarters hurt like hell. He needed to somehow wrap his arm to keep it from bleeding. Dizziness already threatened to drag him down into its welcoming darkness. Sleep. Yes, sleep. Sleep would be awesome.

The truck slowed as he steadied the wheel with his elbows. He unbuttoned his shirt and kept reminding himself to breathe, to stay focused, to keep his eyes open. After he managed to shrug out of the shirt, he tried to hold onto the wheel with his bleeding arm. Everything he touched was wet and sticky. His eyelids were heavy.

Stay awake, dammit. Stay awake.

The road ahead blurred. Shades of green and brown melted into the sunlight. He worked to keep wrapping his shirt tightly over his forearm. His sweaty body stuck to the seat. Hell couldn’t be much hotter than this.

A huge shadow loomed in the rearview, and he tried to lift his head up for a better look, but it was no use. His skull weighed a thousand pounds. The dino must have cut a vein in his arm. There was no way to tell. He was going down. Down.

Darkness lingered a millisecond longer with each blink. He didn’t have strength enough to keep wrapping his shirt around the wound. He was a scientist. He had to figure this out. It wasn’t just the blood loss. Not this quickly. He was weak. Maybe the heat. The fear. Maybe everything.

Focus. Focus on the road.

A huge vehicle parked up ahead. Waiting.

“Why would they park a tank…?” Izzy said, then drifted. He tasted the salt from his sweat on his lips and drove with his wounded right arm on the steering wheel, his left pressuring the shirt into the wound.

Half the tank resided on the road, the other half stuck in the jungle as if it had suffered a malfunction and needed help.

“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” Izzy said, because he realized he was about to play chicken with a
Triceratops.
He saw the armored, tri-horned head turn to him and look at the truck with a blank expression.

9

The thing chasing them wasn’t as big as a
T. Rex,
but it was just as ugly. The huge, muscular body was a combination of green and tan coloration, and with the blood in her eyes, Jamie could barely make out the triangular horns spiking over each eye, slanted as if the beast wanted to aerodynamically plunge its hungry face into the belly of its prey and slide its mouth right into the juiciest parts.

“Come on, big boy.” Jamie found the grenade launcher and loaded the last grenade. One shot. It had to count.

The beast leaped forward and managed to grab onto the back of the truck with its small arms. The truck slowed and the transmission hiccupped, but the huge dino held on, its feet dragging through the road behind it.

She wasn’t prepared for its head to sweep like a pendulum across the back of the truck. The head bowled her over and she landed on her side, the grenade launcher dropping into the hands of a not-quite-dead dye-non.

The dye-non’s agony-filled eyes gazed at her, its chest a mess of blood from its slashed throat; the blood was a scarlet bib, and the little guy was seconds from death. She grabbed its arm and bent it back sharply. “Sorry about that,” she said, feeling bad for not killing it outright when she had the chance.

She pried the grenade launcher from its death-grip as the big fucker snapped its jaw over her head. She rolled onto her back and sat up against the back of the cab.

(“Mouth. Eat.”)

“Here’s the buffet,” she said.

Yellow eyes glared at her, appraised her. And all she could think of was that Kenshin hadn’t been joking: the fucker looked just like a dragon.

Then, its mouth opened wide.

“I’m out of one-liners,” Jamie said, and fired a grenade into its mouth.

The bad dragon imitation reared its head back to choke down the invasive object, the sound of a balloon
popping
jilted its skulls sideways; its eyes were jettisoned from its head like champagne bottle corks, blood sprayed out of its nose like a Super Soaker 7,000 on full blast, and solid chunks of skull burst out of the sides of its head. The truck bed was lifted into the air by its tiny arms, and Jamie held on tightly as the dino’s head drooped and blood poured out of its mouth, a huge chunk of something wet sliding out and plopping onto the truck.