Skull Full of Kisses Read online

  He threw his door open and ran around the Liberty, staring across the barrel of his rifle at the cavernous garage. Ryan climbed into the driver’s seat as Bill backed up to the passenger’s side window.

  “I got to go into the station for a bit,” he said. “Ryan, anything comes up, I want you to drive off like a bat outta Hell. Got me?”

  The boy held onto the steering wheel with pale knuckles. “I can’t just leave you here.”

  Hobbs spoke up, “Then let me drive!”

  The man from Taggart Labs stank of fear. It wafted through the open window in waves. Ryan was athletic, but if Hobbs panicked...Bill could see him overpowering the boy, driving away with the girls along for the ride. He couldn’t let that happen.

  Bill opened the passenger door. “Get out.”

  “What?” Hobbs sat up straight in his seat.

  “You heard me.”

  “Not me.” He grabbed the Liberty’s drink holder as if it were a life preserver. “I’m staying right here.”

  “I said out!” Bill spun the rifle around toward Hobbs’ sweaty face.

  The man turned ashen. He held up his hands as if he were being robbed, slid from his seat, and stepped away.

  Bill slammed the door, then motioned with his rifle. “After you.”

  Hobbs walked slowly toward the open garage. “Why don’t you just pump the damn gas?”

  “Because there’s no power. No power means no pumps.”

  “Then why are we even here?”

  “You’re gonna help me siphon gas from the underground tanks.”

  “I don’t know how to...” The protest died in Hobbs’ throat.

  Bill lowered his eyes to see what had drawn the man’s attention. A wide trail of blood ran from the garage floor onto the asphalt. It looked as if someone had been dragged off.

  “Jesus...” Hobbs’ tone made it sound as if the name had truly been offered in prayer.

  “Come on.” Bill gave him a little push between the shoulder blades to get him moving again.

  They stepped cautiously into the darkened garage, finding a white Ford Taurus up on a lift. What was left of the car’s mechanic lay on the floor below, his glassy eyes taking in the undercarriage with sleepy fascination. Everything below the man’s gnawed ribcage was gone, carried away, leaving the bloody path they’d found at the door. According to the patch on his torn coveralls, his name had been Jake.

  “Where...” Hobbs put a hand across his mouth and swallowed, his forehead crinkling as he spoke. “Where’d they take his legs?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Bill told him. “Let’s just get what we need and go before they come back for the rest.”

  They continued deeper into the garage.

  Bill started opening drawers. He rifled through the contents until he found what he was looking for: a length of rubber tubing. A long, black prybar hung on the back wall. He grabbed it and turned to Hobbs.

  The man was still looking at poor Jake’s remains, his pale face almost glowing in the dimness.

  “Don’t just stand there.” Bill threw him the prybar. “See if you can find a big gas can.”

  Hobbs looked around as if he were lost, then walked to some shelving units.

  Bill moved to the opposite end of the bay and found a row of lockers. Most were bolted with combination locks, but there was one he could access. Inside, he found a blue mechanic’s coverall with Jake’s name embroidered on the breast. He smiled. After a quick survey of his surroundings, Bill leaned the rifle against the lockers, stripped off his prisoner’s garb, and slid into the new clothing.

  “Found a gas can in the—” Hobbs looked suddenly shocked. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Changing. We run into cops, I can’t very well show up wearing prison orange and expect them to just let me go my merry way.”

  “How can you think about that now?”

  Bill zipped up, chuckling humorlessly. “You’re the last man on earth to lecture somebody about priorities. Who was pissin’ their pants in a corner while Ryan and I were bug wrestling?”

  Hobbs said nothing.

  “And when your little space engine blew a gasket, how many white coats did you trample tryin’ to be the first one out Taggart Labs’ front door?”

  The man grabbed hold of his tie and wiped it across his damp forehead, but remained silent.

  Bill wondered if he would turn on his television a month or so from now to find Ken Hobbs sweating again, only this time he would be behind a microphone with a lawyer at his side. This disaster would spark a media frenzy of finger pointing, political grandstanding, and investigations. Those directly responsible might be dead, but Bill had no doubt someone would be made to pay. The victims’ families would demand it.

  He thought of little Hannah sitting in the Liberty, her father’s savaged body back at the bookstore, and picked up his rifle. “Let’s go.”

  The metal plate covering the tanks lay next to a payphone at the edge of the lot. Hobbs walked over to the phone, put the receiver to his ear, then dropped it, letting it hang from its cord in the breeze.

  “Line dead?” Bill asked, knowing it would be. Just like the phones at the county lock-up and the bookstore.

  “Yes,” Hobbs replied, clearly frustrated. “The quake must’ve cut the fiber optics.”

  Bill slid his prybar under the lip of the plate, smelling gasoline. “Give me a hand with this.”

  Hobbs put his weight on the end of the bar. Bill set his rifle on the ground and used his hands to push the plate up and over; it hit the asphalt with a loud clang, releasing strong fumes from the tanks below. Bill knelt down, fed tubing through the opening, and siphoned fuel spilled into the can with a sound like rain on a tin roof.

  “Here.” Bill handed the full container up to Hobbs. “Put this in the Jeep and get your ass back here.”

  “For what?”

  “There’s no more than two gallons there. The way SUV’s suck up gas, we’ll be lucky to get anywhere with that.”

  Hobbs sighed and looked around nervously, gas sloshing in the can as he rushed across the vacant lot. After a moment beside the Liberty, he hurried back to Bill for a refill.

  An ear-piercing whistle blared.

  They looked up and saw a creature—Deinonychus?—staring back at them from the convenience store roof. The wind blew through its multihued feathers, creating waves in a sea of paint, and its clawed toes hooked over the edge as if it were ready to pounce.

  Bill felt his heart sprint within his chest. His eyes went to the rifle, but he knew he couldn’t fire it without sparking gasoline vapors.

  “Don’t move,” Hobbs whispered over the patter of the filling can. “I’ve seen Jurassic Park a dozen times. Dinosaurs can’t see you if you don’t move.”

  The creature’s head twitched as it eyed them from its perch.

  “Then why is it looking right at us?” Bill asked through clenched teeth.

  Before Hobbs could offer an explanation, the animal leapt fifteen feet from the roof down to the blacktop. It leaned forward, chirping, its head tilting curiously from one side to the other. The feathers on its neck lifted slightly, then fell back into place. It continued watching them, nostrils flaring, tail swinging, sickle claw twitching, but it did not charge.

  “It’s the gas,” Bill theorized. “I think the smell’s got it confused.”

  Behind them, the Liberty’s engine started up.

  The creature’s head snapped toward this new sound; the feathers around its neck fanned, and its growl rose and fell like a carnival ride.

  “Hobbs, when I count to three, run like hell.” Bill grabbed the rifle and got to his feet. “One...two...”

  Deinonychus sprang forward on its powerful legs, landing on Hobbs, knocking him down. He screamed and threw his arms up to shield his face. The animal bit cleanly through them.

  Bill turned and ran, Hobbs’ dying screams following him all the way to the Jeep. He scrambled into the passenger’s seat, and Ryan hi
t the gas before his door was even closed.

  Another deinonychus was coming right at them. Bill had never seen an animal charge a speeding vehicle head on, but that’s exactly what it did. It leapt onto the hood, a rainbow plume with claws and teeth. Shocked by the impact, Ryan instinctively stood on the brake and the anti-locks grabbed hold, bringing the Liberty to a jerky stop. The dinosaur lost its footing, tumbled over the roof, then fell off the back end.

  Whistling filled the air as more of the creatures rushed them, pouncing on the Jeep as if it were living prey. They scratched at the metal, a sound worse than nails on chalkboard. Bill heard a series of pops as those long claws punctured the body. The cab rocked on its axels, and for a horrible moment, he thought they would tip over.

  One of the animal’s down-covered faces pressed against Bill’s window, sliming it with drool.

  “Feathered fuck!” He put the barrel of his rifle to its eye and shot through the glass, watching as the creature fell away in a crimson cloud.

  Ryan floored the gas pedal and the Liberty lurched forward. Unable to hang on, the creatures rolled across the asphalt, growing smaller in the rearview mirror, their high-pitched whistles fading.

  ***

  There was a low rumble, like rolling thunder, and the ground trembled beneath the tires. Ryan did his best to maintain control of the wheel. “Another earthquake.”

  “Mommy,” Hannah called out, pointing, “what are those?”

  Bill followed her finger to the rear window and saw creatures the size of Greyhound buses charging up the road. Small heads rode atop serpentine necks, and long tails swung behind them like wrecking balls, smashing the brick and stucco walls that lined the street on either side. Their wrinkled skin was tiger-striped, and what appeared to be elongated porcupine quills lined their backs. One of the few dinosaur names Bill knew was brontosaurus. If he had to call them anything, that would have been it.

  Ryan had another name for them. “Amargasaurus,” he said, staring wide-eyed into his mirrors. He sounded excited. “I don’t believe it.”

  That made them pretty even. Bill stopped believing anything the moment he was tossed from his bunk.

  As these new giants stampeded around the Jeep, Ryan tried to steer between them. It was amazing how fast they could run. Bill would have thought their sheer bulk would make them slow and lumbering, but they ran like the startled giraffe he’d seen in Discovery Channel videos.

  Before Bill could even ponder what these beasts were running from, one of them crossed into the Liberty’s path, causing Ryan to slam on his brakes again. The animals behind them knew nothing of brake lights. They plowed into the Jeep at full gait.

  Ryan had not fastened his seatbelt when he moved to the driver’s seat. He was thrown forward, smashing head first through the windshield. One of the giants whacked the side of the Liberty with its whip-like tail, and the vehicle rolled right over him.

  Bill watched the world spin. He felt the sting of broken glass on his cheeks and forehead, felt pain in his shoulder and abdomen as his seatbelt grabbed him, threw him back against the seat, then felt the sudden embrace of a billowing airbag. When he opened his eyes again, he was dizzy, as if he had just stepped off the teacups at Disneyland, but even with this continued sense of rolling, he knew the Liberty had come to a stop.

  Once he was oriented, Bill realized the Jeep was resting on its side. He heard Kim, Hannah, and Sarah crying, and turned to find them hanging from their belts in the back seat. Bill got himself unfastened, felt around until he found his rifle, then helped the women from their restraints.

  They staggered from the wreckage together, but Kim quickly fell behind. She stopped in the middle of the road, screaming out for Ryan. A shadow came over her, and before Bill could shout a word of warning, the bolting amargasaurus stepped down, one hundred tons smashing her frail frame. She remained stuck to the sole of its foot as it took another stride, her body lifted into the air, limp arms flailing, then plunged back down to the asphalt. On its third step, she stayed on the pavement and the behemoth dashed on without her.

  Bill pushed Sarah and Hannah toward the brick facade of an apartment building, holding them there. When the stampede finally passed them by, he heard a sound like barking in the distance and looked up in time to see the last amargasaurus disappear from view.

  It looked as if it were falling.

  After a few minutes, he took Hannah in his arms and yanked Sarah to her feet. “Come on,” he told her.

  She protested at first, but was soon walking quietly at his side. She wanted to leave this place just as badly as he did, even if it meant on foot.

  Bill noticed the buildings on either side of the street were incomplete. At first, he thought the quake had toppled them, but he saw no rubble. The edges were clean, the structures chopped neatly in half. Even the street was broken here, as if whatever had scissored through the buildings had cut away the rest of the world. He handed Hannah back to her mother and stepped up to the edge of this drop.

  It was impossible.

  Where the street ended, a steep rock face descended beneath a green canopy of palm trees. Bill could see sawed off sewer pipes and conduits of cable, all made level with the face of the sheer wall. He saw the herd of amargasaurus down there. They were all dead. Unable to halt their charge, they had run right off the cliff and were crushed under their own massive weight. They lay on a bed of cars and semi trucks that had preceded them over the edge. Some of the vehicles were still burning.

  Bill’s eyes rose to the horizon. Beyond the smoke from the wreckage below, he could see nothing but jungle and distant mountains, as if some giant had scooped the entire city out of the ground and dropped it in the middle of the Amazon.

  The terrible truth struck Bill’s brain like an arrow. Dinosaurs hadn’t been caught in Einstein’s Slingshot...they had. Kim told them her cell phone read “No Service.” Bill now had to chuckle at that. There wouldn’t be service for another 144 million years.

  He sat on the end of the road, letting his legs drape over the edge of the broken asphalt. A dragonfly the size of an eagle hovered in front of him for a moment, then resumed its flight. He watched it spiral down onto a dead animal below.

  Sarah looked out on the vista and fell to her knees. She hugged her daughter a little tighter, tears returning to her eyes, following tracks laid by the countless others that had preceded them.

  “Don’t cry, Mommy,” Hannah told her. She wiped at her mother’s cheeks, then pointed to the flying things that circled overhead. “Look, see the baby dragons.”

  Ryan might have known what the winged creatures really were, but Bill didn’t have a clue. A few of them landed and picked poor Kim’s body apart, fighting each other for the tastiest morsels, their snouts made rosy and slick with her blood. One of the animals took flight with her arm clutched between its teeth. Bill saw her wristwatch glinting in the dying sunlight as it flew off.

  Looks like she had more meat on her bones than I thought.

  He turned away, looking at Sarah. “Tomorrow morning, we’ll climb down into the forest,” he told her, trying to be comforting, to get her to stop sobbing before something out there came to investigate. “There’s gotta be others who made it. There’s gotta be.”

  Bill thought of future paleontologists like Ryan, imagined them finding his fossilized remains next to cave paintings of dinosaurs climbing telephone poles and attacking Jeeps. He wondered what they would think of that, then smiled hopelessly.

  Teakettle whistles blared. They were loud, close. In his mind’s eye, Bill saw the pack circling them, their sickle claws calling out for more blood.

  He rolled the rifle’s remaining shells between his fingers and palm, counting them over and over. One... two...three.

  Just enough.

  God Like Me

  “We are experiencing isolated network problems. More details in fifteen minutes.”

  Dylan Mercer jumped at the distorted announcement that blared from a speaker in the
ceiling above his head. Despite fifteen years of servitude to the company, he had yet to meet the owner of this voice of doom, but the tone was unmistakably female and it carried with it boredom and frustration in equal measure. He knew what she felt all too well. Just getting up in the morning, day after endless day, knowing the drudgery of this cubical awaited him, was sometimes more than he could bear.

  The phone on his desk rang and Dylan answered, the scripted words flowing instinctively from his mouth. “Thank you for calling Serra Industries, Dylan Mercer speaking, how may I assist you today?”

  “Why the hell can’t you manage to empty the fucking dishwasher in the morning?”

  It was his wife. The line was “recorded for quality control” (meaning Big Brother was always listening, waiting for him to screw up), but Miranda didn’t give a shit who heard her daily rants.

  Dylan forced his voice to sound pleasant. “I’m sorry, sweetie. Hey, can I call you back in a few minutes on my lunch break?”

  She went on as if he’d said nothing, “You expect me to do everything around here!”

  The truth of the matter was that he would do cartwheels if she would lift a finger to do anything around the house. Her only job was to rest her bulk and keep the couch from flying away. There she would gorge on Little Debbie cakes and watch her daily dose of Montel, Oprah, and Springer sprinkled with soap operas. Occasionally, she would gain the strength to rise and go shopping with his money—money that never seemed to be enough to pay off the credit cards she filled.

  The coffee in Dylan’s Serra Industries mug began to boil. It sat in the middle of his desk on a napkin, but it steamed and bubbled just the same. Dylan didn’t notice. He was too busy staring at the ceiling, wondering why he had married her, wondering why he was stuck in a life that was on the bullet train to oblivion. How much of it was of his own making?—the result of his own meek nature?

  “I’m really busy, hon,” he told her, trying to maintain his level tone. “Can I call you back about this?”

  “You’re worthless,” she yelled and was gone.

  Dylan slapped the phone onto the receiver and the dark liquid in his mug grew still again. He returned his focus to the spreadsheet that filled his computer screen. Absently, he reached for his pen and it rolled across the counter to meet his fingers like a puppy summoned by its master.