Z. Rex Read Online Free

the first man, pulling out a hand-gun. “Him and the Easter Bunny.”
    Adam stared in horror. What in the world was going on?
    And then a thick black shadow swooped overhead. In a heartbeat, Adam saw the men’s hard faces twist in terror as they stared up at something above him. They hurled themselves to the ground—
    A blink later, a cream-colored convertible dropped from the sky. It landed upside down with a deafening smack on the rear of the black car, crushing it. The windows of both vehicles exploded as the impact sent the Cadillac careening across the road, almost crushing the bald, burly man as he rolled aside to get away.
    With a sick feeling, Adam recognized the convertible at once. It was his dad’s rental car, an extravagant indulgence, left parked in the underground garage. So how could it have come flying over the top of the building like a tossed stone . . . ?
    A grating, bone-shaking rumble started up. Adam spun back around to find the entire apartment complex starting to collapse. “No way,” he breathed, too shaken to feel much other than a horrified fascination. Then he caught movement, realized that the first man was scrambling back up with his gun—
    Jerking to life, Adam stood up on the pedals and powered away.
    “Get back here, kid!” the man screamed.
    Adam ignored him, clicking upward through ten gears in half as many seconds. Half deafened by the cacophony of falling concrete, he pushed himself faster, shooting out from behind the crumbling corner of the block. He glimpsed Bateman and a friend running for the hills, while the other suited man lay sprawled over the remains of the Caddy. Adam didn’t stop. Broken bricks chased him across the road as his home, his whole world, came crashing down around him. But fear had numbed him and all he could think about was to keep on pedaling. Approaching the entrance to the industrial park, he swerved neatly and tightly through the gap in the battered gates, and only then did he risk a backward glance.
    A split second later, Adam gripped the brakes, jamming the wheels, almost hurling himself over the handlebars.
    What. Is. THAT—?
    A cloud of thick white dust shrouded the space where the apartment building once stood. But the powder seemed to be settling impossibly in midair to reveal the hideous outline of a monster standing astride the debris, as big as a bus. Adam glimpsed what could have been a thick, snaking tail, a ridged back, a huge reptilian head. Then the dust was shaken away with a bestial roar that nearly burst his eardrums and all suggestion of a monster seemed to vanish.
    In blind panic, Adam pedaled away with a strength he never knew he possessed, his tires singing over the tarmac. He remembered that so-called news story: Giant monster spotted in southern Utah. Suddenly it didn’t seem so crazy anymore.
    He hung a reckless left turn at the first junction he came to, and then turned right, desperate to put cover and distance between him and the thing he had seen. Adam’s calf muscles knotted as he pushed the pedals faster. His breath scraped in his throat. But over the noise of his flight he could hear the heavy pounding of footsteps behind him.
    It’s following.
    Adam took another corner, leaning hard into the turn, chanced another look behind him. Nothing. But if the thing was invisible it could—
    A blare of horns made Adam face front—to find a huge truck had pulled out from a junction just ahead of him. Adam knew he was going too fast to swerve aside or to stop in time. Instead, he threw himself from his saddle and dived underneath the trailer, between the two pairs of wheels. The jarring clang of his bike as it struck the undercarriage was an explosion in his ears. He landed heavily, crying out as he skidded across the asphalt.
    For a second he lay dead still in shock. His body ached, burning in places like it was on fire, but he forced himself to scramble from beneath the truck and to his feet. The driver had thrown open the