Z. Rex (12 page)

“Why did you have to do that?” Adam whispered.

“Get. Dad,” Zed growled slowly, as if tasting the words and liking them.

“Yeah, well, you
can’t
get my dad, can you?” Adam muttered. “You can’t find him, or any of the others, not when they’re wearing that spray stuff.” He raised his voice recklessly, too angry and frightened to much care about the outcome. “Right now, for all your tricks and growls, you’re useless, aren’t you?”

The creature raised himself to his full, horrifying height and bellowed in anger. He stamped a great scaly foot and the floor jumped and cracked beneath Adam.

“Shout about it all you like!” Adam yelled back. “But think for a second—Bateman saw me today. That means he’ll be looking for me. He might try and catch me again, not realizing you’re here too—you could follow my trail back to their hideout and surprise them or something. . . .”

Zed glared down at him, panting hard, his claws flexing.

Cautiously, feeling sick and light-headed, Adam crawled over to his scattered things and picked up his phone. There’d be hardly any juice in it, of course, after five minutes’ charging, and if someone
was
able to track his mobile here. . . .

Right now, he had to take that chance.

The screen glowed into life. Adam called up Dad’s last text and held it up to Zed. “Can you read? Do you understand?” he said shakily. “It’s like I said, whatever he did to you, they
made
him do it.”

Zed stared down at the phone.

“Let me take those notes you have to this friend of Dad’s,” Adam urged him. “He can explain them to me, like you wanted Sedona to do.”

“No . . . ,” Zed growled. “
Notes
. Y . . . Z. . . .”

Adam frowned. He thought Zed had been listing the last letters of the alphabet because of his name. But what if he was talking about some kind of alphabetical order? “Um . . . I’m sorry, the papers got mixed up,” he said. “All the more reason we show them to someone who really understands them, right? Jeff Hayden is a scientist, and Dad must have chosen him for a reason. He might even know how to find Josephs. We both want that, right?”

“NO!” Zed stamped his foot again, cracking the moldering concrete. “
Zed
find.”

“How?” Adam demanded. “What’ll you do, fly around the city till you get lucky?”

Zed pushed his face toward Adam’s and bared his deadly teeth. “Stay,” he hissed.

Adam nodded dumbly, cowed into submission.
To him,
I’m
the animal,
he realized.

Then Zed turned, his wings unfolding from the crevice in his back. He whacked a red button in the wall with his tail and the roll-up door started clanking open.

“If you’re seen, you’ll start a panic!” Adam warned him. “There’ll be police, army, riot squads coming after you. You won’t be able to stop them all. You’ll die, and this time you won’t come back!”

But the huge animal ignored Adam, launching himself into the air.

Adam ran over to the doorway, watched Zed fade from view to become little more than a blur against the sky’s pale blue. “And I hope you
do
die,” he yelled after him, “you scaly son of a . . .”

Adam turned away and kicked the wall in frustration. “Ow!” he shouted, crossly. He slammed his palm against the red button on the wall and the door clanked down to shut out the sky.

His phone chimed suddenly.

Adam stared down, his heart flipping. Three messages, left queuing all this time, had finally found their way through. Nothing from Dad. Just the usual stuff from his mates—a forwarded joke, and some good-natured abuse for not bothering to keep in touch. He touched the little words on the screen with his fingers.

Josephs could be tracking me through this,
he thought.
Right now.

As Adam turned off the phone, he had never felt lonelier. Here he was, in a crumbling, damp ruin, with men out to get him, monsters ready to kill him, Dad out of reach—and him an escaped fugitive with not a clue what to do about any of it.

He sat down on a square of old carpet and put his head in his hands.

Adam woke with a start. The door was clanking open. He got unsteadily to his feet and hid behind one of the giant rolls of carpet, checking his watch. It was past seven in the evening. He’d slept the whole day away.

It was Zed who came thumping inside, alone, and Adam didn’t know whether to feel relieved or afraid. The giant’s eyes looked darker and meaner than ever as he hit the door button and the metal segments clanked back down behind him. He stood quivering for a few moments. Then, with a deafening roar he smashed his tail against the wall. As the impact boomed out and damp concrete jumped from the wall in showers, Zed stamped over to the rolls of carpet and hurled himself down on top of them, his breath coming quickly in short rasps. Adam backed away, transfixed as Zed turned first one side of his face to the rotten fabric, then the other.

That’s what I do,
he realized. He could picture himself after a typical row with Dad, chucking himself on the bed and pressing his hot face against the cool pillow, trying to calm down. . . .

“It’s one thing to take my moves from Ultra-Reality,” Adam whispered. “But this is me you’re ripping off. The real me.”

The creature did not respond. Adam raised his voice. “You didn’t find Josephs or Dad or anyone out there . . . did you?”

Zed looked over at Adam as if noticing him for the first time. Then, slowly, he shook his head. Adam saw that there was wetness in the animal’s sharp, black eyes.

“Maybe”—Adam swallowed hard—“maybe we could try it my way, then. Tomorrow?”

The dinosaur turned away, hunched over on his side.

Adam nodded and walked slowly, quietly away, giving the beast his space. He understood. He’d lost enough arguments himself in the past. In time, Zed would come around.

“How about that.” He looked over at the dinosaur’s vast, alien bulk and shivered. “I know just how you feel.”

I
t was past three in the morning, and Adam couldn’t sleep. The lights were out now in case anyone came looking, but the power cables were still humming loudly, a sound like giant flies circling in the darkness. The noise, anxious thoughts about his dad and fears that a burgundy Daimler might be pulling up just outside were all keeping Adam horribly alert.

Zed’s snoring wasn’t helping matters. The creature had said and done little more after his giant sulk, falling into a deep slumber, his head crushing the collapsing rolls of carpet. Somehow, Zed’s heavy silence was almost as unnerving as his full-on rage.

Hoping for distraction, Adam turned on his dad’s phone. There was a little power left in the battery, even after all these weeks, and the glow of the screen was like a tiny night-light in the cold, dark warehouse. As the wind blew haunting notes through the broken panes, he started browsing the files.

There were loads of really boring work emails that went way over his head. He skimmed over most of them. One was from Jeff Hayden, sent a few months back, asking how Dad was doing and mentioning he’d won this amazing amount of funding for his company. Addresses for both work and home were stored in his profile, much to Adam’s relief.

Then he saw an email sent from Sam Josephs.

Adam sat bolt upright, staring at the phone. “So you already knew him,” he murmured, opening the file. It was dated over a year ago.

Josephs was ranting at Dad for firing him from the Ultra-Reality gaming project. He’d wanted to take the research in other “more valuable” directions.

“Repetitive, manual labor could be taken over by animals instead of robots for a fraction of the cost,” Adam read aloud under his breath. “Stray dogs could be turned into perfect helpmates for the disabled overnight. Primates could be instructed to perform complex tasks in high-risk environments in minutes. . . .”

He looked across at Zed.
Or dinosaurs could be trained to hack into power supplies and defuse bombs.

“But how do you get your hands on a living dinosaur?” he whispered into the darkness. “And why would you want to?”

The grunts and growls of Zed in his troubled sleep were Adam’s only answer.

Zed was sullen later that morning. He didn’t respond to Adam’s nervous attempts at conversation, apparently absorbed by the MP3 player he’d found in the sports bag. It looked tiny in his huge hand, but using the tips of his claws he had got it working. A Kings of Leon track was ringing tinnily from the in-ear headphones. The dinosaur sniffed the little device suspiciously.

“It’s just a music player,” Adam said. “Dad used to plug it into the car stereo on journeys. A lot of the songs on there are his old rubbish, but he let me stick on a few albums. . . .”

Zed growled as if telling him to be quiet. The beat went on spilling from the headphones.

“I was going to take it with me on the bus,” Adam said boldly. “I’m going to the BioQuarter.”

“Adam, back,” he grumbled. “Two hours.”

“That’s not long enough,” Adam protested. “People like Mr. Hayden, they have appointments and stuff. I don’t know when he’ll be able to see me.”

Zed snorted and jabbed a claw at a button. The song changed to one of Dad’s—“Ruby Tuesday” by the Rolling Stones.

“That one’s almost as old as you are,” muttered Adam. He took a deep breath. “Look, Zed, I need more time. I was thinking at least—”

“Four,” the dinosaur rasped.

“Yeah, four hours. Two o’clock,” Adam agreed, slightly taken aback. “I’ll know if he can see me by then. If not, maybe I can try tomorrow.”
Any excuse to get away from you,
he thought. “I’ve got enough cash for the bus fare. And after yesterday, Josephs will be looking for a boy on a bike, won’t he?”

“Jo . . . sephs,” Zed snarled, grinding his enormous teeth.

At least it’s not Dad’s name he’s chewing up,
thought Adam, remembering the picture frame that vanished into Zed’s jaws yesterday. “Josephs used to work with my dad, but he got fired. That’s why he must be out to get him.” Adam paused. “You believe me about Dad now, right?”

Zed let out a long, hissing breath. Was it just the weird light through the mucky windows, or did he look paler than before?

“I’ll see you soon,” Adam said awkwardly.

The brooding beast made no reply. Mick Jagger’s voice leaked from the headphones, singing about losing your dreams and losing your mind.

The BioQuarter in Little France was a new development on the outskirts of the city, bringing together loads of different “life science” companies and education sites. In addition to Edinburgh’s main hospital, there were outposts of the university, the Queen’s Medical Research Institute and a giant hundred-acre biomedical research park filled with hundreds of high-tech businesses, all at the cutting edge of genetic exploration.