Kingdom of Monsters by John Schneider (microsoft ebook reader .TXT) 📗

good paw.  Shanna clung to his fur, her head spinning with vertigo from the sheer dizzying height.

It had been less than thirty minutes since the rex had first walked out of the East River, and already it was the worst disaster in the city's history.  From her vantage, Shanna could see the path of the destruction leading straight through midtown.

There had not even been a military response yet.  The choppers that circled the air-space were all either police or local news.

Another tremendous impact shook the tower.

Shanna remembered 9/11 – the way the buildings had suddenly seemed to simply dissolve and crumble apart.

The circling helicopters seemed to remember as well.  They held a respectful distance.

Except for one – a news-chopper that abruptly separated, rapidly zeroing in on the tower's steeple.

The buzzing bird drew close, and even as she felt the building below her begin to totter, Shanna realized who was on-board.

Chapter 37

Cameron was quite surprised to learn Maverick had never once flown a chopper before.  Turned out it was completely different to flying a plane – a balancing act with wind-gusts, always in a constant state of near-crashing.

Maverick had offered up this little tidbit as he was starting the bird up.

When they had first skidded their purloined Jeep up to the Brooklyn Bridge, they found it jammed with emergency barricades blocking the route back into the city.  Police were escorting people from their cars, ushering them out on foot.

Reporters milled at the east end of the bridge, peppering the directing officers with questions, including a local reporter, whose traffic-chopper had been flagged away from the bridge, and landed on the nearby docks.

Surveying the blocked-off bridge-access, Maverick parked the Jeep, hopped out and started jogging over to where the pilot waited in the chopper for his team.

“Hey!” he shouted, waving.

The pilot looked over just as Maverick pulled open the cabin door, stepped up and pumped a fist precisely on the helmet-strap of his unsuspecting chin.  The pilot emitted a brief grunt before Maverick tossed him semi-conscious out onto the dock.

Cameron stepped discreetly past the dazed, blinking pilot, and climbed into the co-pilot's seat.  Maverick fired the rotors and jerked them into the air before Cameron even got his door shut.

“Sorry,” Maverick said, mulling over the controls.  “Let's see.  Lift versus rotation.  Can't be that hard.”

Neither was it hard to determine their destination.

Congo stood atop the highest tower in the land.

Two-thousand feet below, bellowing like a hound who had treed a cougar, the rex smashed into its base again and again.

Cameron had seen this before.  He had been in Midtown when the original towers had gone down.

Already the steeple Congo clung to seemed to tilt.

“That's where we're going,” Cameron said.  “Right there.”

Maverick nodded.  “Of course it is.”

With an abrupt, skating-rink, mid-air spin, Maverick turned them towards the tower.

Congo hung from the steeple by a single hand.  Even from the distance, they could see the grievous wound that had nearly severed his arm at the collar.

And as the rex pounded away, it was also obvious the building would not last much longer.

It wasn't until they circled in close, however, that they saw Shanna, looking no bigger than a pocket-pen, tucked in the crook of Congo's injured arm.

As they drew near, the big gorilla snarled, but they could see Shanna patting him down.

His glowing green eyes blinked, with shifting awareness.

“Take us down,” Cameron said.

Maverick eyed the giant ape dubiously, but dropped their altitude, riding the wind-drafts in steps.  Cameron pushed open the hatch.  With one hand latched grimly on his seat, he stepped down onto the landing gear.

The whirling rotor blades buzzed dangerously close as Maverick hovered just above the giant ape's head.

“I get any closer,” he said, “I'm gonna clip his ears.”

Congo, struggling with one good arm, latched onto his perch with his feet, and plucked Shanna from the crook of his shoulder, holding her cupped gently in his palm as he held her up to the chopper hovering above.

Maverick dropped them lower as Shanna reached up for Cameron's hand.

Two-hundred stories below, the rex crashed into the base of the tower one final time.

Almost from the moment the original twin towers had collapsed, there had been talk of a monument – but with such constant, and ever-more politicized legal wrangling, it had taken so long, it seemed as if it would never be built,

Now the monument was coming down too – just as its predecessors had, the fates simply denying the towers' right-to-be.

Cameron would daresay it would stay down this time.

As the building started to crumble, Congo began to fall.

For a breath of a moment, Shanna fell with him – and Congo reached his hand up, even as Maverick dropped the chopper abruptly.

The rotors chopped one of Congo's extended fingers, prompting a snarling yelp, and an involuntary jerk.

Even as the chopper spun from the impact, Shanna leaped for Cameron's outstretched hand.  He caught her grip in mid-air, hauling her up next to him onto the landing gear.

Below them, the building collapsed on itself, crumbling into rubble.

Congo disappeared into a billowing cloud, as hundreds of thousands of tons of steel and concrete went crashing to the streets.

By happenstance, right on top of the hapless rex itself.

The mighty beast's own roar was drowned out as the collapsing tower tumbled down, burying him in an avalanche of rubble.

Circling above, the chopper spun crazily, its rear-rotor knocked askew.

Cameron pulled Shanna into the seat beside him, yanking the door shut, as Maverick struggled to level them out.

He took them up over the rooftops, arrowing out of the city.

They were out over the river when the main-rotor started to chop.

“Awww, shit,” Maverick muttered.  He glanced sideways to Cameron and Shanna.

“Hang on,” he said.

Maverick cranked the throttle, prompting backfires from the motor, but a surge of speed as he launched them towards the west docks, opposite the East River.

They just made the beach, when the chopper engine quit and they crashed, right where the ocean met the sand.

Chapter 38

As the tower collapsed, Congo felt himself falling.  Then