Z. Raptor (24 page)

Ford's body exploded in a storm of fire and noise that did its best to level everything in the room. Monitors shattered, desks and chairs splintered and burned, concrete was blasted from the walls and ceiling. Adam curled tightly in a ball. His back felt skinned raw; he smelled burning hair and choked on smoke and rock dust. Something fell on him.

Harm.

They lay still for a moment as debris settled. It was Harm who spoke first.

“You okay?” she said, her eyes wide and terrified. “Am—am
I
okay, Adam?”

They got up together, leaning on each other for support. Adam looked her over briefly. “You look okay. Does anything hurt?” he asked.

“No,” she said back. “You?”

“I'm good.”

Squinting over her shoulder through the flames and smoke, Adam saw a seven-foot silhouette stagger from the shattered room, screeching and spluttering with rage.

“He was going to betray the Brutes,” Adam murmured, “but they betrayed him first.”

“He must be hurt,” Harm murmured, pulling away. “We have to help him.”

“No, we don't,” Adam told her.

“But he got Josephs, he saved the others—”

Adam grabbed her hand. “Trust me on this, Harm, Loner's been playing us all for fools. He's a born-again killer, only looking after us so we'd speak up for him when rescue finally came.”

“I don't believe it,” Harm began as the scream of the female Brute, short and rattling, drilled through the smoke. “He's always been—”

“There's no time to explain now.” Adam saw a thick crack in the wall beside them and cursed under his breath. “We have to get out of here.” He dragged her toward the door that led to the caves. “I don't know if we can make it through the caves before the whole thing falls apart, but—”

“What are you talking about?” Harm demanded.

“I used Think-Send to control the sea monsters,” Adam told her, ushering her through the doorway. “Loner wanted me to shut them down. Instead I directed them here to destroy the tidal power plant—and the foundations of the base with it.”

She stared at him, disbelieving. “You did what?”

“I didn't know what else I could do!” he shouted. “Loner was going to kill me as soon as I was through. I couldn't let him leave the island on Chen's ship and do the same to everyone on board, could I?”

A massive tremor thundered through the building, almost knocking both of them to the rubble that once had been a floor.

“The whole place will flood!” Harm realized. “Everything could come crashing down on top of us.”

Adam nodded, trembling, as a long, choking bellow that sounded like One Eye cut suddenly off. “We can't get past Loner to reach the elevator or the stairs. When he's finished with the Brutes, he'll outrun us, easy. Our only chance is to get to the beach through the cave network to the old Brute camp.”

“You saw the map; those passages stretch on forever—”

“A kilometer, maybe.”

“And God knows how many of them are below sea level.” Harm closed her eyes. “Please, tell me I never woke up. Tell me this is all a nightmare.”

The building shook again. “It's a nightmare, all right.” Adam grabbed her wrist and pulled her away with him toward the caves. “Now,
come on
!”

The two of them ran through the passage and found that plaster soon gave way to natural rock, the walls gradually widening into the gaping mouth of a cavern. Pale electric lanterns hung at regular intervals; they cast some light but left the encroaching shadows darker. Five electric scooters stood in a line—presumably for guards to travel to and from the Brute camp to study their subjects. The ground shook again, knocking over two of the scooters. Adam picked up one, and Harm grabbed another.

“How do they work?” Adam asked.

Harm shook her head. “How should I know? Let's see.” She turned a black plastic key beside the handlebars and then stabbed at a button. Her bike hummed eerily into life. Adam did the same and twisted the throttle. The whine of the engine bled into a desolate howl from somewhere behind them.

“I'll tear you apart, kid!” he heard Loner scream. “Her first, then you!”

Harm put a hand to her mouth as though she might be sick. “He's killed the Brutes.” She accelerated jerkily away as another earsplitting crack set the ground belly-dancing. The lanterns in the walls flickered, and Adam was glad for the steady blue shine of his bike's headlight as he headed after her.

“We've got a chance,” he told himself. “Please, let us have a chance.”

The tunnel was winding, the ground cracked and uneven, and the scooters gave a bone-jarring ride. Each time the ground shook, the vibrations struck a little harder and went on for longer. Adam almost lost his balance a dozen times, veering about clumsily, straining to see the turn of the tunnel in the blur of blue from the headlight. The run was reckless, but it had to be. He had no idea how fast a Z. raptor could sprint, but he could imagine how fast the seawater all around would flood the cave system he and Harm were speeding through. The thundering shudders were lasting longer, doing more and more damage.

It was Harm whose luck ran out first. The whole passage jumped as though kicked by a giant, and a large chunk of the roof fell and nearly crushed her. Swerving to avoid it, she lost control of the scooter, rode into the wall and fell heavily against the bare rock. Adam ditched his own scooter and ran to help her; in the blue blur of the headlight, he saw that her legs were raked with nasty gashes and her cheek was scraped raw. Her scooter had fared even worse; the front wheel was twisted.

Adam cast a frantic look back down the tunnel. How far had they come? How close behind was Loner? “You can ride with me,” he said. But as she tried to follow him over, she gasped and winced each time she put weight on her right leg. “Is it broken?”

“It's my ankle. I think I sprained it,” she muttered.

A new noise carried to them as Adam lifted his scooter. Heavy footfalls on the rock, pounding like a steady heartbeat behind them.

Harm looked at Adam fearfully. “Loner's coming.”

“Get on,” he told her, restarting the engine. As they pulled away, Adam barely managed to keep his balance because the ground grumbled again. Harm was holding on to his waist behind him, and he could feel the tremor in her skinny arms like a second engine. He could picture the dark shapes of the sea monsters massing in the deep on the other side of the rumbling walls, tearing into the base's foundations with the same remorseless power they had turned on the
Hula Queen
.

Then he heard a deep, creaking noise that seemed to thunder all around—the sound of solid stone straining under heavy duress. Adam glimpsed boulders blocking the passage ahead and braked sharply.

“Oh, God,” Harm whispered.

Adam glanced behind—and through the thick gloom glimpsed a dark, tailed figure in the far distance racing toward them. Panic rising, he wheeled the bike forward a little way—far enough to see that the passage was impassable. “Cave-in,” he said helplessly. “We'll have to climb over.”

He started up the pile, helping Harm manage with her bad ankle. The scraping beat of Loner's footsteps behind was quickening. And then the background creaking gave way to a wrenching, shattering boom, as if a longthreatened storm had finally broken.

“It's hopeless,” Harm snapped, clinging to the rock pile. “We can't outrun Loner!”

“And nothing can outrun
that,
” breathed Adam, staring over his shoulder as a wall of seething seawater came crashing into view, ready to dash them to pieces.

A
s the foaming wedge of water swept toward them, Loner was snatched from sight. Adam turned desperately to Harm. “We've got to get to the other side of this pile or we'll be crushed against it. We can do this!”

Harm looked into his eyes and nodded. He saw the tears there. And the resolve.

They scrambled like crabs over the rocks, braced themselves at the top and held their breaths—as the water struck them both like a freezing, frothing fist. In a moment, it had thrown them fifty meters into the flickering darkness. Adam kicked wildly in a freezing soup of furniture and equipment—and found that it was kicking him back. Eyes stinging with salt, he looked around wildly for Harm in the boom and hiss of the rushing tide. As he did so, he nearly grazed his head on the rocky ceiling. The water level was rising with horrific speed. If the rushing torrent didn't drown him, it would leave him crushed and grated raw. Surely if these tunnels led to the Brutes' beach, they would rise above sea level soon and the water level would drop.
Surely
. . .

“Harm!” he yelled, swept along helplessly by the underground tsunami. “Harm, where are you?” Files and chairs and a white-coated body plunged past. Then something dark and reptilian bobbed toward him. He glimpsed a single bestial eye and jaws open wide.

With a scream of horror, Adam put up his hands in what he knew was a futile attempt to wrestle the thing away. But the jaws stayed slack. The eye was dark and dead.

The Brute's head had been severed from its neck; Adam found he was holding it like a float. Moaning with horror, he pushed it away. ...

. . . Just as Loner rose up in front of him with a hissing scream, jaws snapping, claws scything through the water to fillet him.

Adam lunged to his left, windmilling his arms in a crawl, trying to escape—but debris slammed into his back and he went under, lost in icy subterranean blackness. Something closed on his leg.
Loner's jaws,
he thought with terror. But no, it was more wreckage of some kind, a chair maybe, dragging him down deeper. He kicked it free, but already his lungs were straining, his head was starting to spin. He glimpsed red stripes in the blackness, and the orange burn of an eye up close to his. He tried to push the raptor away, felt claws slice into his arm, cried out into the water, lost what little breath he had left. Black spots speckled his vision as that hideous reptile face pressed up close.

And then something big and heavy smashed Loner away from him. The dark, rocky roof spun crazily above Adam as he broke through. In the still-sputtering lantern light, he saw Loner clawing at a huge chunk of concrete that had him pinned against the wall. The raptor howled with pain, his barks and yowls hurling mad echoes around the tunnel as though some bigger, louder raptor was shrieking back at him.

Adam felt a moment's giddy triumph
—
but then the tip of Loner's tail twisted like a whip around his ankle and held him tight.

“No!” Adam yelled, trying to grasp hold of the rock wall and prevent his being pulled back underwater. “Let go of me!”

The raptor said nothing, but his teeth were bared in a leering grin. Adam kicked and twisted with the last of his failing strength but couldn't break Loner's grip. Water pushed down his throat. The darkness and the cold were slowing his movements, sapping his strength. Then Adam glimpsed something huge and dark sweeping through the water. For a split second, he thought it was one of the guardian creatures, breaking through into the tunnel. Then he saw the hard lines, the glinting edges.

It was the operating table from Josephs's lab. The scientist's slab where Neil Lowe had died and the thing he'd become had been born.

Glancing back over his shoulder, Adam realized that he was blocking Loner's view of the approaching danger. He flailed still more wildly, praying that his struggles would keep the raptor distracted.

“Kill you!” raged Loner, biting at the air close to Adam's neck, clawing at his concrete confinement. “Kill you!”

“No!” Adam screamed back, transfixed by the operating table as it scythed through the seething seawater toward them. “Kill
you
!”

At the last possible moment, Adam stopped struggling and plunged down beneath the surface. One corner of the metal slab plowed over his shoulder, missing him by millimeters. A fraction of a second later, it slammed into Loner's head with the force of a juggernaut, pulping the raptor's skull against the tunnel wall before resuming its headlong tumble through the water.

Stunned, Adam had barely a second to witness the gruesome aftermath before more rocketing debris caught the small of his back and tugged him free of Loner's tail. Adam was smashed underwater, scraping his arms and legs against the walls. He could barely process how many times he struck something hard or swallowed cold salt mouthfuls. The cave system was almost completely submerged. The last specks of consciousness began to drain from his mind as he seemed to spiral icily down,
down.
...