Jurassic Dead (14 page)

28.

Adranos Facility

Marcus Ramirez wandered up to the dead zombie slain by the soldier. He crouched eagerly, animal-like, pulling the corpse so that it remained upright in a sitting position. He felt waves of revulsion as he sniffed the corpse.

Revulsion that was quickly overcome with another feeling. A
need.

Hunger…

So intense. His jaws opened and snapped. His tongue came out and licked the edges of the new teeth. He wanted to lap the blood pooled in this corpse’s open neck, like a drunk guy at a wedding sipping directly from a champagne fountain. Wanted to sink his face into the dead one’s right bicep, but instead, his belly aching and rumbling, he stood and sniffed the air in the direction of the facility.

He sniffed the air again. Something else, something… better… was around.

He set off in that direction, the vacant mind filling with vague purpose like a pinball bouncing from one target and seeking the next. Marcus’s remaining hand scratched reflexively at the now open stump while he stumbled along, the bandages long since having fallen away. A cloud of flies buzzed about the raw amputation, the zombie’s personal air force.

The light of the tunnel stood out from the rest of the storm-battered island and the Marcus-zombie gravitated toward it. In the distance, he heard a large animal vocalizing, causing him to turn his head but not to stop walking. A high-pitched squealing sound, and it was almost—but not quite—alluring enough to call him toward it, but for some reason, he fought that call. For some reason, he turned right instead of going inside, walking around the outside of the complex. On this side of the building, the ground sloped away sharply, causing him to adjust his shambling gait with one leg higher up than the other.

When he came upon an open doorway set into an alcove in the side of the enormous structure, he paused, the sounds of a human struggle piquing his dulled senses. He turned and walked inside the open concrete bay, some kind of receiving station meant for vehicles to back into. Two still-functioning Jeeps were parked inside.

He shuffled past them into a narrow entrance vestibule, a sign overhead he could no longer comprehend reading, MEDICAL UNIT. This area emerged from that into a small hospital-like room, which led in turn out into the same large hallway he had walked through earlier, although he had no recollection of that. Wheeled cots, defibrillators, various medical machines, supplies, and equipment filled the space.

He paused, drooling, and stared ahead.

Feeling the hunger surge, his stomach rumbled and he licked his lips in anticipation.

#

In this room, two of DeKirk’s doctors—genuine research physicians—both wearing white lab coats, struggled to keep two of the zombified ship’s crew at bay, keeping a wheeled table between themselves and the reaching attackers.

“I thought you said they were dead!” One of the men said to the other, his mind struggling to accept the impossible.

“They were! They were dead on arrival. I’m sure of it! I took their pulses myself. They were flat lined, I swear it! That guy is the one who had his leg crushed by the crane on the ship. The other one drowned, his body washed up on the beach.”

“Steve…”

“We need to get some help.” This doc, a pudgy, bald man in his fifties, let go of the table and rushed to a handheld radio docking station on a counter, but froze when he sighted The Zombie Formerly Known As Marcus standing there at the back of the room. Marcus was dripping a cornucopia of bodily fluids and rainwater onto the tile floor, sounding like a mini-percussion ensemble as the steady drips intermingled with the occasional
plop
of an abscess releasing its cargo of smelly pus.

“Good Lord,” the other doctor said, ducking away from the reach of one zombie. “Get back here and help—”  Then he saw the Marcus-zombie.

The one who’d been going for the radio considered their situation. Three zombies, although he didn’t yet think of them as that, occupied what until now had been their comfortable little work area where they’d treated the occasional workman’s injury during the construction of the facility. He turned to the newcomer. Maybe it was the unreality of the situation, or it was just his mind’s way of breaking away from the terror of imminent violent death, but he spoke, as professionally as possible.

“Hey…uh, you require some urgent attention?”

No response came from the zombie. From any of them.

Meanwhile, the doctor in the corner faced off against two slow-moving but relentless zombies. The nameplate pinned to that doc’s coat read, Felix Alvarez, M.D. Alvarez was clearly not a fighter, awkwardly attempting to fend the zombies off with timid arm gestures. One more shove of the table against his hip caused him to notice behind him the enclosure on the wall containing a fire extinguisher next to a red-handled axe. He stood there looking at it for a moment too long, before the nearest of the zombies suddenly launched itself over the table.

“Get off me! Get! Off!”

The attacker only sunk its teeth into Alvarez’s upper back, eliciting a blood-curdling scream from the man.

“Get it, Steve—” Felix, lying on the floor, pointed with a spasming hand. “—the axe!”

Steve, meanwhile, continued to stare at the motionless, newly arrived zombie. He noted the missing hand and the hopelessly gangrenous, abscessed wound there.
That entire arm will have to be amputated
, he couldn’t help but think, before mentally chastising himself.
Stay focused!
He’d heard the whispered rumors of some of DeKirk’s “experimental” endeavors and wondered if this could somehow be one of them.
There were those blind tissue assays Melvin asked us to do last week...

Felix managed to get to his feet, one zombie still feasting on his back, the other shoving the barricade away and lurching toward him. He reached the fire implements on the wall, the zombie riding him, now trying to take additional bites from the smorgasbord of his back. The semi-tough lab coat material was the only thing making it difficult, but it wouldn’t be long before the monster took a real bite.

Marcus suddenly jumped, and came toward Steve fast.

Steve tried to summon the Judo skills from the classes he’d taken decades ago as a teenager and never followed through on. He kicked out awkwardly with his right leg and connected with Marcus’s gut, knocking him back a few steps but also winding up on his back on the floor in the process. He shot to his feet.
No more of that crap
, he told himself. The zombie he’d kicked was just recovering. He’d bought a few seconds. He moved toward Felix, now cornered by two zombies, one still clinging to his back, repeatedly jabbing his mouth onto him, while the other still sought access to the potential meal.

He had to help Felix out. Steve ran up to the lagging zombie and gripped it by the shoulders. He jerked it backwards, sending it flying to the floor. Looking back, he saw the zombie with the missing hand start to walk toward them, his left foot dragging across the floor. Steve turned around to face this threat.

At the same time, Felix got a hand on the axe and ripped it from the wall, knocking himself in the lip with the butt of the blade in the process. He caught a glimpse of his face in the reflection of the fire extinguisher case and saw the blood running from his split lip. The zombie on his back became even more excited, crawling higher in order to feverishly lick and sniff his at his face like some kind of hyperactive, rabid dog.

Hunched over with his attacker sprawled over him as he was, Steve had no way to brandish the axe. The only direction in which he could strike with it was directly in front of him. He had to keep shaking his head from side to side to avoid a facial bite from the zombie, but he was able to thrust the axe into the fire extinguisher case. Shattered glass dropped from the housing. He let the axe fall to the floor and reached out for the extinguisher as the zombie took little nips from his skin, now frustrated at not being able to sink its teeth more deeply, like a toddler unable to bite into a whole apple.

Steve circled around the Marcus zombie. As a doctor, he’d dedicated his life to relieving human suffering, and even though he was a threat, the details of this person’s condition had a sobering impact on him. His skin had congealed to form a scale-like dermis. The edges of the scales were rimmed with blood. He was covered in festering abscesses, terrible infections that would require lengthy intensive treatment, if it wasn’t too late for this poor soul already.

He found that the zombie wasn’t able to track him so well when he circled in this way. Its head turned much too slowly, although when it decided to adjust its position it moved very quickly. As Steve circled he got a look over against the wall at how Felix was doing. It wasn’t a pretty picture. The zombie that Steve had thrown to the floor was now back on its feet and lumbering over to Felix’s left side. The other zombie still straddled the physician high on his back, assaulting his face with a barrage of quick, vicious little bites.

“Get him off you, Felix!” Steve yelled his encouragement, but there was little more he could do. He wasn’t about to turn his back on this one-armed monster, which now became more aggressive, lashing out alternately with its stump and its whole arm when he thought Steve might be in range.

That’s when the Cryolophosaurus hopped into the room.

A small dinosaur by ancient reptile standards, it was no
T. rex
, but still, when a reptile twenty feet long and a dozen high hops into a room, people—and zombies—pay attention.

A reddish, feathered crest sat atop its slim head, which it lowered order to fit into the space. Its two clawed feet clacked on the floor as it pushed further inside, aware that the ceiling was far too low for its usual loping gait. Its beady black eyes gave away nothing as its nostrils flared while it jerked its head up and down.

Steve couldn’t tell what the creature was looking at. To say his mind was blown simply did not do justice to the utter detachment from reality he felt at that moment.
Dinosaurs? Zombies?
Did DeKirk leak psychoactive drugs into our water supply?

As Mr. One Arm took advantage of his lack of attention and threw itself at him, Steve knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the situation he now found himself in was all too real. So real, in fact, that it wasn’t just another part of his life, it represented an entirely new existence for him.

Zombie...zombie...zombie...
He flashed on a vacation to Haiti he’d taken many years ago, during a pocket of political stability there to indulge his adventurous first ex-wife’s penchant for exotic travel. They’d stayed in some fluffy beachside resort but took a day trip into a genuine village to see a real life witch doctor. She was an old, superstitious woman who, in a Creole accent told him about spirits and voodoo and zombies while he drank something of the Earth...He was a man of science, a physician, but the essence of her message had never left him.
There is more to this world than you can see...
He pictured her leathery, lined face now, heard her rhythmic chanting...

In the distraction served by the dinosaur, the Marcus zombie leaped across the space between them and closed its jaws around Steve’s throat, clenched in a spray of blood.
My blood,
Steve thought indistinctly. Struggling to breathe, struggling against an onslaught of such pain he could never imagine. He felt drained, the strength sapped out of him along with the image of the witch doctor.

Next he knew, he was on the floor and staring up. He felt his larynx pull free into the monster’s mouth with a sickening snapping sound and a burst of blood. With a bizarre form of objectivity, he mentally pictured the anatomical parts of his throat that had been removed, exactly where the tendons, nerves and blood vessels had been severed, picturing the full color plates from Gray’s Anatomy that he’d pored over for countless hours all those decades ago.

Then he watched the Cryo rush at him. Sadly, he welcomed it. He wanted the monster to step on him, to bite his entire head off, to end his life quickly… far better than to asphyxiate on the floor while this subhuman brute ate the rest of his throat and face.

As the dinosaur pushed further into the room, the high point of its back wedged into the ceiling, halting its forward motion. Stretching its neck out, its head reached a couple of feet shy of the zombie dining on Steve’s throat. It squealed in frustration, but the zombie bent over Steve only gave it a passing glance before returning for another feeding session.

Steve’s vision faded to black.

The last thing he heard was the strident hiss of a fire extinguisher.

29.

Adranos Facility

Alex Ramirez shifted the Jeep into four wheel drive and flipped on the fog lights. The weather intensified, the wind and now the rain increasing in force. Finally, he could see lights a hundred yards or so through the jungle. After standing in place in the driver’s seat, looking around for signs of dinosaurs or zombies, he rolled the Jeep down a steep, muddy incline toward the facility.

Xander would be here, along with Veronica. He had to admit that he wouldn’t mind seeing her right now, and his Dad. Alex had no idea about his health or his condition, and he feared the worst.

The Jeep’s right front tire bounced off a volcanic rock and he corrected for it, coaxing the vehicle back on course. The land flattened out at the bottom of the incline and he followed the muddy track out of the jungle into a clearing, at the opposite end of which lay the lighted facility.

He looked around again, half expecting the
T. rex
to come barreling out of the forest, racing to devour him, but there was only open space between him and the building. He pressed his foot down on the pedal and ate up the distance, rolling by the corpse of the soldier Veronica had taken the knife from without noticing it. He parked the Jeep in front of the tunnel entrance and got out.

He could hear shouting now, and sporadic gunfire. Definitely not coming from inside the tunnel, but somewhere close. In the tunnel, however, he could hear an alarm of some type, not unlike the fire alarms he’d heard during school drills. He took off at a jog inside the structure, glad to be out of the rain. He tried the first couple of doors he passed but they were locked. He was about to call out when he heard it.

A prehistoric roar.

Not the
T. rex
. More shrill, and chilling in its simplicity.
One of the Cryos?

He continued down the hallway, the braying alarm growing louder until he reached an open door on his right. A current of cool air passed from it into the hall. His eyes narrowed as his gaze caught on a blood splatter pattern extending into the hallway floor. He darted to the wall on the same side as the open door and flattened himself against it, listening.

A shuffling and clopping sound, like a large four-legged animal walking, emanated from far into the open room. As he listened that sound grew fainter, as if moving away. Alex slid along the wall until he couldn’t be any closer to the doorway without being in it. The shuffling continued away from him, so he poked his head around the doorway.

He’d never seen a floor with so much blood on it. That was the first thought to strike him. The second was that the room had a strong metallic odor to it, like copper. His gaze was riveted to that shimmering, red floor. It was like a lake of blood, there was so much, although it did thin out toward the opposite end of the room, where the shadows were thicker.

Against his better judgment, he stepped into the room—obviously a medical facility of some kind. He crossed the lake of blood over to the right side of the space, where it was even deeper. His shoes splashed in the stuff with each step. He saw a busted BREAK GLASS IN CASE OF EMERGENCY fire alarm on the wall. On the floor, he saw a raised outline of an axe. He almost missed it because the axe was red—a fire axe—while the floor was red with blood. A burst of adrenaline bloomed in his abdomen and spread to his fingertips and toes in half a second. Something god-awful horrible had transpired in here, and not very long ago.

A fire extinguisher also lay on the floor, its black funnel spray nozzle hung up on the handle of a cabinet door. Looking up, he followed a trail of white chemical spray that went from the wall near the fire case on up to the ceiling—random zig-zaggy swathes of discharge that suggested whomever had used it had been under great duress and not aiming steadily. Which one might expect in a fire situation.

Looking around, Alex didn’t see any signs of a fire. No charred areas, no smoke damage, no lingering smell, and of course, most fires didn’t leave behind a lot of liquid blood.

He splashed further into the room, glad for the fact that he wore “old school” leather sneakers, not the new ones with that fabric mesh crap. Full-on shit-kicking boots would have been even better, but he had what he had. Alex reached the vestibule area near the back and ventured through it.

Two Jeeps in good shape were parked here, a bloody handprint on the hood of one of them. Lesser amounts of blood compared to the medical room streaked the concrete floor. He passed through this area to the outside, where an unpaved access road led away from the building and curved off to the right. He traced its path with his eyes but saw no activity there. Then he looked off to the left, out toward the tree line that marked the edge of the jungle, and he spotted it.

A
Cryolophosaurus
stalked the perimeter, shaking its head back and forth. Its snout was bloody. It had fire extinguisher residue plastered to its right flank, giving it a most unnatural white stripe down its side. Although Alex wasn’t sure how much, if anything, about this monstrosity could be called natural.

He shifted his weight and a thin branch snapped under his foot. The Cryo stopped moving, and then it whipped its head around in Alex’s direction. The creature’s nostrils flared, and then it jumped—not ran, but leapt in a single bound—three-quarters of the distance to Alex, who whirled back around into the vehicle area. He bolted between the two Jeeps, through the vestibule and back into the medical room, home of Blood Lake. He heard the dinosaur’s feet pounding the floor through the Jeep area. Alex was making his way across the slick floor when he sighted something in the corner he hadn’t noticed on his first trip through.

A human leg, severed at mid-thigh. Ragged chunks missing from much of it. He stared a little too long and slipped on the blood, the side of his face pancaking into the liquid floor. He heard the Cryo bashing its way through the vestibule.

Panicking, Alex pushed off the floor but the heel of his right hand slid out and down he went again, bruising his chin and soaking the front of his shirt. The beast behind him snorted as it entered the medical room. Alex craned his neck from the prone position and saw it coming for him. Maybe two or three of its gigantic strides away, and that’s without jumping.

I’m dead.

He tried to push up again, anyway.
Ain’t going out like that
, but he was going out like that, with a twenty-foot-long dinosaur about to trample him or eat him, or trample him and then eat him. Either way, he was done. It was at that point, as he was just beginning to rise to a standing position from his hands and knees that he heard something happening to the ceiling. Like it was being ripped apart, the fiberboard tiles shredding. A precipitation of plaster dust rained down on the room, settling on the blood like snowflakes on iron-rich soil.

Alex turned around to face his fate, but the Cryo’s back was wedged into the ceiling, impeding its forward progress. It could advance no further into the room.

Alex locked eyes with the hideous dinosaur. Black, lifeless eyes streaked with red, and the body—he hadn’t noticed it outside—but it was ravaged with wounds. Whitish bulbs of what appeared to be entrails protruded from several slits in its underside, a couple of them dripping copious brown slime. Open flesh pockets festered from neck to tail. Alex almost felt caught in that soulless gaze and felt a fleeting sympathetic bond with it: remorseless and icy-cold, as if the countless centuries in the frozen lake had destroyed any sense of warmth or emotion. Then it passed, terror and self-preservation took over and he rolled, got to his feet and ran for his life.

A large section of ceiling tile came down as the monster thrashed, and Alex took a couple of steps and slid, coasting through the blood to the door.

The reptile gave ear-splitting bird-like screeches as Alex ran from the room.

In the hall, he saw no one to the left, the way he had come, so he continued to the right. It was empty but there were sporadic smears of blood here and there. He kicked something small that made a metallic ringing. His eyes followed it, seeing a shell casing to a small caliber weapon. Swallowing hard, he turned suddenly, terrified he’d see the Cryo bearing down on him, but there was nothing behind him.

Just then, as he was about to take his first relaxing breath in a long time, the lights in the tunnel began to flicker, casting it into intermittent darkness.

Holy shit.
He had no flashlight on him, or gear of any kind other than the blood-soaked shoes and clothes on his back. Deciding there was nothing he could do about any of that at the moment, he pressed on, running through the flashing lights.

Before long, he heard a dramatic struggle playing out in a room up ahead on the left. Objects smashing or being thrown. Guttural hissing noises, and a woman’s voice. Screaming.

Veronica.

Alex set off at a full-out sprint until he arrived at an open door. He paused, then dashed inside and stopped short as he saw Veronica Winters in the grasp of those
things
—this one had on the green-camo paramilitary uniform of DeKirk’s soldiers, but it was clearly no longer a man. She slashed at it with a huge Rambo knife as she tried to keep its jaws from snapping anywhere near her.

Another of the zombies was coming for her. This one wore a white medical coat and had huge chunks of flesh torn out of its throat, and ragged bloody teeth marks on its back.

“Veronica!”

The closer zombie heard Alex and turned its head and Veronica, cooler than Alex would have ever expected, took advantage of that. She jammed the blade of the Ka-Bar right through what was supposedly the softest bone in the body—the one on the side of the skull—and then twisted it savagely, churning the thing’s brains into disorganized mush that oozed out around the blade.

She gripped the hilt of the Ka-Bar as the zombie attacker fell to the floor, dead, brandishing the brain-covered weapon as she turned to face the approaching white-clad zombie.

Risking a glance over her shoulder, she gave him a once over. Literally soaked in blood from head to toe, he realized with an unsettling start that she easily could have thought he was one of
them
, and if she had a gun instead of a knife she might have simply shot him in the head on sight. Others might, too—the soldiers. He would have to clean himself up. He thought about the rain outside.

“Alex? You good? Any…bites?”

“Uh, no. Fine, I slipped in a mess back there, and—look out!”

“I got him,” she assured Alex, sweeping the knife back and forth in front of her to keep the fresher medic zombie at bay.

Alex noted the physician’s outfit and guessed he was part of the fun at Blood Lake back there, and wondered how anyone could possibly have escaped from that little piece of Hell. As he appraised his condition, though, he realized that he most certainly hadn’t escaped. He barely had time to process the irony of it, that Veronica, the bogus doctor was now being assailed by a real one who was no longer among the living.

Dr. Zombie growled at her and lunged. Veronica slashed its throat, opening a wide gash and slicing into the cheek, but still it came at her.

Alex looked around the room for anything he could use to help. It was some sort of computer lab, but not the kind he’d seen in school. Stacks of Cray supercomputers, servers and appliances lined the walls, humming and whirring and blinking to do God only knew what. He saw a high-backed swivel chair on wheels and ran to it.

He waved and yelled for Veronica to step aside. She rolled smartly to her left, leaving Dr. Z hunched over in mid-strike. Alex took a running start with the chair and rammed it into the zombie’s backside. It flopped right into the seat and Alex gave it a full-strength shove, sending it past Veronica and toward the wall of Crays.

A flash of sparks and a hiss burst out of the terminal. On the screen, rolling lines of code started scrolling and scrolling, along with diagrams and molecular schematics. The back of the zombie’s head slammed into a control panel before its body crumpled out of the chair in an uncoordinated heap. It was very slow to get up but still moving. Alex and Veronica closed in on it, Veronica apparently more concerned about whatever was still outside. She glanced back at the door even though it was shut.

“What do you think is out there?” she wondered.

Alex tried to listen and identify the sounds, responding: “One of two possibilities. Zombies, or it’s that nasty little zombie dinosaur that’s been trying to get in here in the worst way. Almost had me back there.”

“Let’s hope for the human variety.” Veronica turned and rather calmly closed in and ended Dr. Zombie’s illustrious career with a knife implanted firmly to the brain stem. “Much easier to deal with. At least when they’re alone.”

Suddenly, the door behind them bulged in its frame as something kicked on it. Then several more thumps simultaneously crashed onto the other side.

Veronica withdrew her knife from the corpse and wiped it on her pant leg. She looked at Alex, who had been drawing nearer to the keypad, trying to look at the lines of code and hoping to piece together anything about what DeKirk was doing here.

“Forget that,” Veronica said, “we’ve got company—a lot of company.”