Z-Volution (8 page)

He barked into his radio for his head of security to stop the show. The crowd’s reaction grew louder around him, and even with the earpiece in he had trouble hearing the radio reply.

“I said cut power to the stage,
now
!”

The response was hard to make out but he caught most of it: “…say they can’t cut power with the cage dancers suspended…down first…do? Over.”

Suddenly, Jaime was besieged by fans who saw him speaking into a headset microphone and pegged him for some kind of official. A woman clad only in a bikini ran up to him and clutched his arm, pointing frantically at the marauding lizard.

“What the fuck is that thing? Is that for the circus?”

The radio crackled again in his ear.”…say again, boss…need to know…do?”

Into the mic, Jaime returned, “Shut it all down now—just do what you have to do,
over
!” He had no idea it would be the last coherent order he would give an employee in his life, that it really was all over.

“Hey mister, what’s with all those homeless people who just came out of the ship?” The worried woman was tugging at him again.

He eyed the shambling mass of slovenly humans but something about them didn’t look right at
all
, even worse than the dinosaur. He leveled a stare at the eyes of one of them and saw nothing there whatsoever. Not even a feral, animal kind of intensity. Only a deadness. He’d seen plenty of homeless and drug addicted people—some in this very crowd here today—but this sorry assemblage of humanity that had descended upon his venue was one hell of a motley fucking crew, that was for certain.
Ridiculous
, Jaime thought. He was making a mental note to call the mayor later to see if this was some kind of new social program where some other city had been allowed to dump their homeless here or some crap like that when the commotion of the
T. rex
preempted it.

The Mesozoic reptile rampaged through the crowd, crushing people as it loped onward without care as to who or what was in its path. Near the front of the stage where the crowd was thickest, a mosh pit had formed with a young man crowd surfing, being handed from person to person on his back. The
T. rex
bent down its mighty head, a head with a set of jaws and accompanying musculature designed by millions of years of evolution to rip and tear through the thickest of hide and bone, and snatched the shirtless man in its jaws. It reared its head back, crushed the person in half with its five-inch long teeth and flung his legless torso to the front of the stage, where the most fervent spectators hadn’t yet noticed the commotion. The band was still playing, the bright spotlights blinding them to the mayhem unfolding, but now security guards were flagging down the singer, running out on stage while waving their arms for her to stop.

The crowd caught the bloody half-man, passing him over their heads for a few seconds before realizing he was nothing but a mutilated corpse that looked as though it had come through an aborted meat-grinding process. The concert-goers parted in a rush, letting what remained of the dead man splash on the grass.

Looking around, Jaime felt increasingly lightheaded. His venue had crumbled to complete bedlam in the space of mere minutes. Absolute pandemonium reigned in blood. Fans fought fiercely with each other as they battled to flee the property. On the JumboTron behind the stage, a close-up of a gore-drenched
T.rex
mouth with a hand protruding from its teeth filled the screens. Further back in the middle of the lawn, a circle of undead fell on a passed out partier, opening the woman’s abdomen and flinging entrails everywhere, crimson-splashed faces looking up from her opened innards, like contestants in a pie eating contest checking on their competitors’ progress.

Jaime took a last desperate look out at the harbor and saw one of the Coast Guard cutters engulfed in flame and black smoke while the other fired machine guns at the tanker. Overrun, Jaime was fell upon and savaged by a tall zombie, its gray skin sloughing off in messy sheets as it scrabbled with him after having taken a mouth-stuffing bite. Then Jaime Perez faded, succumbing to loss of blood.

The last sight the promoter would take in was a squadron of no fewer than six winged reptiles launching themselves out of the ship’s cargo hold and into the crisp, Maryland air. He heard one of them shriek as it turned, heading south toward D.C.

#

Charlotte, North Carolina

Already a large trucking freight hub for the Eastern Seaboard, it was a little known fact that the small city of Charlotte was also the nation’s second largest financial center after New York City. Bank of America was headquartered here, as was NASCAR and a host of other well-known companies.

Igor Starinskovy backed his eighteen wheeler up to the distribution center’s unloading bay. An employee emerged with a handheld computer and consulted it while asking him what he was carrying in the truck.

“Consumer electronics, machine parts and domestic goods.” Starinskovy stifled a yawn. He’d been driving since the previous night from the port of New York where he’d picked up the truck.

The worker checked his electronic manifest and nodded. “Go ahead and open it up.”

Starinskovy nodded and moved to the rear of the trailer, where he keyed open the padlock and raised the retaining bolt. Then he swung the double doors wide open.

“Most of this stuff is bound for—“

He never finished his sentence, for at that moment a veritable herd of cryolophosaurs rushed toward the open exit. Large therapods, similar to a
T. rex
but smaller in stature, the cryolophosaurs featured a prominent, red fleshy fan on top of their heads, sort of like a rooster. Unlike roosters, they were formidable predators, although no one knew enough about their behavior to determine whether they hunted alone or worked together in packs. The twenty of them seemed to cooperate well enough to move rapidly out of the truck, however, interrupting Starinskovy’s thoughts as to how and when these horrendous aberrations of nature had been substituted for his normal, everyday cargo.

Illogically, despite the absolute horror and mind-numbing impossibility of what he was seeing, the only thought rising in his mind now was: this couldn’t be his fault. But the only thing that really mattered now was the herd of free-ranging dinosaurs that had somehow materialized out of his truck.

One of the animals’ tails whipped Starinskovy as it leapt from the trailer bed. The driver was thrown into the loading bay’s concrete wall where he felt his elbow crack with the impact. He screamed in agony, the searing nerve impulses overriding his thinking to the point that he did not even hear the loading bay worker calling, “What the fuck? Jesus… what the
fuck
?”

Another crylopholosaur jumped from the truck toward him. It leaned over in one fluid motion and positioned its jaws around the stunned man’s head. Then, with an effortless movement of its powerful neck muscles, it lifted up, severing the worker’s head so swiftly that his headless body remained standing for a few seconds, hands still holding onto the inventory computer until he fell forward onto the pavement in what would have been a face plant had his face not been sliding down the creature’s gullet at that very moment.

Starinskovy saw what happened and chose to remain very still against the wall where he’d been thrown, suddenly forgetting all about the pain of his shattered elbow.
Fuck your stupid elbow. At least you still have a head. You still have a head, damn it! Use it if you want to stay alive!

He started to reach for the 9mm pistol he had proudly received a concealed carry permit for a few weeks ago. But he arrested his own motion before even touching the holster. What good would a pistol do against these untold tons of ravenous dinosaurs? He didn’t so much as breathe while the parade of reanimated Jurassic beasts poured out of the trailer. He knew that should even one of these horrible, ragged-looking creatures notice him and decide to approach, he was done for.

He wet himself, the warm stain on his jeans dripping onto the concrete.

One of the trailing dinosaurs stopped and jerked its head up and down. It turned around, its leathery footpads making a rasping sound as they slid across the pavement. Starinskovy started to cry as the lizard began to run right at him, like a ridiculously oversized bull toward a broken matador. Behind it, two more of the reptiles began to approach Starinskovy.

He reached down the rest of the way and unlatched his holster, removing the 9mm. With a last glance at the loading bay employee’s decapitated body lying nearby, oozing a small river of chunky fluid, Starinskovy stuck the barrel of his pistol into his own mouth.

Three crylos ran for him now, accelerating as they drew near. He wondered fleetingly if it would be more painless to be crushed by them, like being struck by one of his own tractor trailers, but then glanced at the headless victim again and decided he didn’t want that no matter what.
They say you can still see for a few seconds after your head’s chopped off while there’s still blood in the brain.
That dinosaur probably swallowed his head whole…what if the guy could still see
and think
as he rolled down that thing’s throat?

Starinskovy clenched his teeth so hard around the gun barrel that one of his incisors cracked in half and the barrel cut open the inside of his lip. Then he pulled the trigger and his cranial contents were power-ejected across the concrete wall behind him.

The first of the dinosaurs reached its prey and scooped the dead but still warm body into its mouth. The second beast came and tried to steal it but the first one clenched down. The newcomer separated one of the legs at the hip and absconded with its long, stringy treat. The third arrived too late for any real meat and contented itself with licking the brain matter and blood from the wall while the rest of the pack loped off toward the city’s center.

#

Port of Savannah, GA

An oil tanker steaming into the harbor at Savannah was not an unusual sight. Dozens of the industrial behemoths plied their trade in the harbor and surrounding waters dotted with oil rigs each day. This tanker, however, had been extensively retrofitted to facilitate a specific and unusual purpose.

It carried zombies. Lots of them. Hundreds.

The onboard oil reservoir had been drained of oil and, although it still reeked of petroleum, safety or comfort were not concerns for the tanker’s passengers. Inside the oil tanker’s hold, a crowd of undead milled back and forth in darkness with nowhere to go.

In the ship’s bridge, Captain Ned Whittaker looked not ahead at the crowded waters of the inner harbor, but instead gazed upward, scanning the sky. He frowned, seeing no signs of what he was looking for. His radio exploded with urgent questions from the Harbormaster, and he could no longer put them off.

“Captain of tanker ship,
Gulf Oil II
, please respond. The harbor pilot has not been able to establish communications.”

Normally, the captain would have ceded control of the ship by now to the harbor pilot. This time, however, that was not going to happen. Whittaker again shot a worried glance to the sky.
Where was it?
He couldn’t ignore the Harbormaster or put him off too much longer before the Coast Guard would be dispatched to board him by force.

He squeezed the transmit button on his radio, his sweaty finger slipping off of it once before gaining a solid grip, and spoke into the microphone. “Port of Savannah Harbormaster, this is
Gulf Oil II
acknowledging. Had a technical problem with the starboard prop that we wanted to check out, it seems to be good now, over.” He craned his neck up once again to the sky.

Then a different radio crackled—this one a walkie-talkie on his belt. One of his crew asking if it was time to open the oil bay doors. He swiped up the handheld unit and barked into it.

“Not yet, Malcolm. Standby for command.”

“Roger that, standing by.”

Then the ship’s marine radio: “Harbormaster to
Gulf Oil II.
Copy that. Sending harbor pilot boat to your port side now for boarding, over.”

The captain clenched his teeth and yet again looked to the air. What more could he do? This wasn’t going according to plan. He would have to call DeKirk, although it definitely wasn’t like him to screw up on plans. Just as he lifted his cell-phone, he heard the faint
whumping
in the distance, but growing louder by the second. A grin crossed his face.
Finally
.
This has to be it.
Still, the port was an extremely busy area for air as well as vessel traffic and he forced himself to wait just a little longer to get a visual confirmation before giving his crew the final orders.

Looking through the windshield of his pilot house, he watched the harbor pilot’s small boat approach his tanker. He had maybe three minutes until that boat would be alongside, but if this aircraft was in fact the one, as it should be, then that should be enough time. The engine noise from above reached a crescendo, and this time, when the captain looked to the airspace he saw it: a blue A-star touring helicopter, exactly the kind DeKirk said would be coming for him.