Pteranodon Mall (5 page)

“I don’t care what they are. I think they’re gorgeous.” She picked up another apple. “Aren’t you a hungry little thing? I love their colours.”

“They look like giant bees.” The woman chuckled. “Janine, I don’t want to sound rude here, but we’re supposed to be looking for the others.”

“I know. Just one more apple first.” She picked up a golden delicious and twisted off the stem. “You do know that we’re perfectly safe here in here, David.” She placed the apple in her hand. “Safe from that monster, I mean.”

Jefferson nodded. He waited for her new friend to take the apple before he gently pulled the woman out of the store, seriously wondering if she was aware of the danger they were both still in. He tried to keep his temper in check and not to tell the woman that this wasn’t a fucking petting zoo. All the other shoppers and staff were still missing. If any of them had run into the monster from the furniture shop, then they’d be in bits. It was that simple.

“Come on, we’d best get a move on while that other thing is still behind us.” He turned around to make sure that none of those stripy dinosaurs had decided to follow them. Hell, if that thing did come down this way, those poor buggers wouldn’t stand a chance. Still, while it was busy eating them, it meant it wouldn’t be chasing him and the woman.

Jefferson pulled her across the concourse until he reached the mall corner. He flattened his back against the glass storefront, breathing in the fumes of fresh-brewed coffee drifting out of the open door. There was another more unpleasant smell mixed in with the roasting coffee beans. A taint which had already assaulted his nose when that large predator slaughtered the smaller one.

He squeezed her hand tightly, shut his eyes, and pressed the back of his head against the glass trying to calm himself down. He told himself that it was just another dinosaur corpse lying between those tables and not some headless teenage barista or a waitress with her steaming guts spread across the tiled floor.

“Are you okay, honey?”

He wanted to tell her that he was far from all right, that all he wanted to do was to find his friends and get the hell out of here. He also wanted to tell Janine that his name was Jefferson and not
honey
. “Yeah, I’m fine. Just a bit tired, that’s all.” Jefferson pulled the woman a little closer to his side and breathed in her perfume, hoping it would mask that sour stench of death.

“I can’t hear anything apart from the mall music.” He gazed into her eyes. “Please, stay close to me and watch my back. I’m Jefferson, by the way.”

She smiled back at him. “I already know your name.” She leaned in and gently kissed him. “Don’t worry, I’ll watch your back.”

Jefferson peered around the corner.

“What can you see?”

“Oh no!” he gasped.

Chapter Five

His sodden shoes splashed through the shallow pools of black water as Franco raced down the narrow passageway. The man’s legs cramped as the burning muscles screamed at him to stop. Every gasping breath that his blow-torched lungs took in felt like his last, and yet he refused to give up.

Thick blood streamed down both his upper arms where the occasional jutting-out nails ripped through his sweat-soaked skin as Franco ran past, but he hardly felt the pain. Nothing was going to get him to stop. Not until he was sure he was safe. Not until Franco had reached the old door which led into the sewer.

“They thought they’d caught me. Well, I showed them. Sure I did. Fuck Killmore. Fuck those stupid shoppers, and most of all, fuck whatever those things were.” Franco slowed, just enough for him to get enough air inside his body and to glance back the way he came. None of those things were following him. Of course they weren’t. They were as thick as frozen shit, the lot of them.

He broke into a relieved grin when the old door came into view. He’d done it, nobody or nothing could outwit old Franco on his patch. No matter what the creepy janitor thought, this was his patch.

It was a little odd how he’d not seen that dirty old man on the upper levels when they were all being herded together. Then again, knowing that cowardly piece of frozen shit, as soon as the fucking lizard birdmen showed, Desmond would have disappeared faster than the food the janitor stuffed down the front of his pants.

He saw Killmore though, swanning through that crowd of bubble-headed morons giving out all these annoying reassuring platitudes. Thing is, Franco knew she was just going through the motions, that her words weren’t having any effect on the assembled shoppers and staff. They weren’t working because those lizard birdmen had already done something to them first. They didn’t catch him, though. No way was he going to march to any pied piper.

Franco’s bones had been itching like a bastard all night. He always got like this before one of his deals were close to finalising. He sighed heavily, deciding that they weren’t chasing him after all. He sat down on an overturned metal box and wiped his brow. Franco had been that close to saying
fuck it
and staying in bed. It’s not like he really needed to open the pet shop. No bugger came in there anyway, not to buy stuff. He’d only be spending the day getting stressed out at the sight of the bubble heads coming in all the time and disturbing his rabbits and guinea pigs by ignoring his signs and tapping on the glass.

The kids were the worst. If he had his way, Franco would have every one of the little fuckers euthanized. It was the only way to deal with them in his book. Granted, he knew his temper had gotten worse over the past couple of days. It wouldn’t get any better until the deal had gone down.

Not all of his animals came through the proper channels. Some of his more expensive clients preferred an animal either endangered or illegal, and he knew enough contacts who could supply him with either.

The ultimate irony of his little side-line is that he would have made a bastard fortune if he’d been able to get to some of those nasty little critters that he had noticed running between the legs of the lizard birdmen.

Franco licked his fingers and gently wiped off some of the dried blood on his arm while trying to make some sense in what had been a thoroughly strange and fucked-up morning. His first thought at the sight of those man-shaped creatures, covered from head to foot in a soft yellow down striding along the upper balcony, was that the mall had put on some kind of stupid festival again. His opinion soon changed when a security guard ran at one of them, only for his intended target to pull out a short pipe. Within seconds, the uniformed fool stopped dead in his tracks. Even from his position behind his till, Franco could see this man develop a huge grin over his face before turning around, walking up to the thick glass barrier, and throwing himself over the edge. Right at that moment, when the bone-smashing noise reached his ears, he realised that it didn’t matter about the reason for their sudden appearance. All that mattered was for Franco not to end up as a concourse pizza. His own survival took precedence over everything else, and that included the two young girls who’d been sighing over his two floppy-eared grey rabbits.

He remembered ducking behind the counter and waiting for the two brats to hear the fun and games outside. Franco’s mum did not raise any fools. He knew just how important it was for those kids to believe that he had
fucked out
of the shop as well. Kids were gobby. They seemed to get off on grassing over people.

Just like the stupid rabbits they had been cooing over, the two girls quickly forgot their object of fascination as soon as they heard the excitable noises coming from outside. Franco watched them from behind his hiding place, silently urging them to hurry up and get the fuck out of his shop before those yellow-feathered bastards reached his shopfront. They’d only have to look through to glass to see his fat arse cowering under his cash register.

Franco allowed a slight smile of relief to ghost over his face when they finally buggered off. He ran around to the other side and hurried straight for the rabbit cages. He glanced around just once, before he ran his fingers along the side of the wooden cage until reaching a groove in the grain. Digging in his fingernails, he pulled out a block of wood the same size as a postage stamp, revealing a metal keyhole. Franco pulled out his wallet, took out a small silver key, and pushed it in before turning it. He heard a quiet click before a door-shaped panel swung open.

After replacing the block back into the slot, Franco disappeared behind the panel. As the false door closed behind him, the sounds of those two girls shrieking reached him. Franco guessed that their mothers did raise fools. If he had been in their shoes, Franco wouldn’t have gone out there, no chance. He’d have thrown himself under the shelving and pulling down some dog food bags. As far as he was concerned, it served them right for being so bloody nosy.

Franco finished cleaning his left shoulder and got to work on his other one. It had only been about an hour since he’d escaped from the carnage on the upper floor, and yet it felt like a full day had passed. He closed his eyes, wincing as the pain from the shoulder wounds finally caught up with him.

He had waited for a few minutes before leaving his beloved pet shop. His professional curiosity piqued to the maximum at the thought of some new life-form in his proximity. Now that he felt safe, Franco could at least indulge his inquisitive nature, even if it was for just a minute or two.

His heart rate went into fucking overdrive when two of them ambled into his shop. Oh Jesus, Mary, Joseph and all the stable animals! They weren’t birdmen at all. The two of them reminded Franco of upright bearded dragons without any tails, but only in a superficial way. He knew without a doubt that these creatures were intelligent, and deadly. The claws on their hands and feet proved that. They both moved like a cross between a stalking cat and an excitable fat kid in a cake shop, especially when they spotted his caged animals.

He jumped back, almost crashing into the cages which he stored his illegal animals, when they ran up to the two rabbits. God, they were fast! Thankfully, this area was completely soundproofed. So even if he had made any noise, they wouldn’t have heard him, he hoped.

These new creatures were hunters though, so who knows what other senses they used to find their prey. Franco decided, while one of them was trying to figure out how to open the rabbit cage, that enough was enough. He left them to it and left the hidden room by way of a hatch, set into the wall behind him.

Franco stood and examined the holes and grazes on his shoulders before he made his way towards the next door. He so wished he had grabbed his phone before running. Like the fool that he was, he had left the bloody thing beside the cash register. It would have been nice to have snapped a few pictures before leaving the mall.

Then again, maybe not. Any hesitation on his part might have meant that poor Franco here could have ended up back in there, along with all those other bubble heads, all waiting like stupid cattle at the gates to an abattoir, waiting for their imminent slaughter.

The feathered iguanas had pulled out ten people from the assembled crowd. Franco did note that each person selected was either from a different ethnic background or a different age. The last one was a little girl that one of them pulled out of a green pushchair. Just like that security guard, none of those shoppers had shown any distress at being herded into the middle of the concourse between a craft shop and a music store. From his hiding place behind a supporting pillar in the jewellers next to his pet shop, Franco witnessed a sight which even eclipsed the appearance of these terrible invaders. Franco had given their arrival some thought whilst squeezing his body between the outer wall and the false partitions. He came to the conclusion that the Earth had been invaded by aliens. It was either that or some kids had cooked them up with those chemistry sets that had been on sale in that shop opposite him over Christmas.

He saw dinosaurs, honest to God
dinosaurs
. They weren’t the size of that T-rex, or the one with three horns, but they were dinosaurs all the same. He counted eight animals, about the length of a pony, with their heads coming up to his shoulder. These looked just like the other dinosaurs from that kiddie movie set in a park. Velociraptor, that’s what they were called. Only in the movie, those nasty bastards weren’t covered in fucking canary feathers.

Like a bomb going off in his head, Franco then understood exactly what he was seeing here. He watched those iguana men guiding the raptors in a single file through the crowds. Like the humans, those animals were acting just like sheep. Franco would have loved to know how they were able to control both the humans and the dinosaurs right now, though. He pushed that question to the back of his head, just happy that he’d worked out exactly what they were.

The similarity between the raptors and these upright feathered lizards were plain for all to see. They were evolutionary relatives; it was like comparing him to a monkey. Ha! So much for his alien theory.

The raptors and the small assembled humans were now rubbing shoulders in the middle of the concourse, separate from all the other shoppers. One lizard man walked around the perimeter and placed cylindrical objects around the two species before returning to join its companions.

The air around the group shimmered before what appeared to be a glass dome formed around the group, then whatever spell the iguana men had over the group vanished. The slaughter that followed burned into Franco’s retinas as those hooked claws sliced through human skin and muscle.

This energy field might have stopped all that deluge of blood from escaping, but it didn’t stop those bird-like screeching and the short-lived screams from reaching his ears. Franco looked away when the interior of the dome turned completely red.

The squawks stopped a few seconds later, so he guessed that the feathered men had used those pipes on the raptors again. When he looked back, he found to his horror that the energy field was no longer on. The raptors were busy guzzling down the remaining pieces of meat. What made Franco’s heart miss a bit was the feather men were all looking directly at where he was hiding. Two of them raised their pipes.

Franco reached the door which led into the town’s sewer network. He needed to work out what to do once he reached home. He hadn’t given his future much thought until now. It’s obvious that he couldn’t contact the police. Those bastards could all suck on a plate full of frozen shit. No way he could allow the authorities to get in on this one.

He had a couple of shotguns hidden under his floorboards, and with the help of a couple of trusted buddies who lived close by, Franco reckoned he’d be able to bag a couple of those raptors and get them out without anyone realising. Hell, he might even be able to grab a birdman as well. He nodded to himself, yeah
why the fuck not
? After the stress they had put him through, he deserved some kind of recompense. It was only fair. Also, he so wanted to lay his hands on one of those pipes. The fun he could have with a device like that just boggled the mind.

He wasn’t exactly sure how to explain his adventure to Danny and his older brother, but Franco should be able to come up with something plausible enough for the lads to follow him back into the sewers.

Franco placed his hand upon the door handle. His thoughts of coming back just fizzled away. He smiled and let out a quiet giggle. Franco loved his job. He had some great friends, and he knew he shouldn’t be down here, not when the mall was about to get busy.

The pet shop owner slowly turned out and walked back the way he came still grinning, and why shouldn’t he grin. After all, he loved his job. He had such terrific friends. In fact, he could see two of them right now skittering towards him, both of them holding a length of metal pipe.