Led by Campbell, Zach et Gray were walking along the quay east of the pond.
They had returned to Burroughs by the northeast, using the tunnels that passed under the Zoo and allowed the staff to come and go between the East Docks, the Administration and Burroughs easier.
Having left it when it was waking up, the Mitchells saw the city in a state in which she had never been.
With the two-tone alarm's sound echoing across the valley, Campbell's colleagues running here and there to extinguish the fires or rescue people trapped under rubble or furniture, and the visitors being gathered to be led to underground shelters, it was like being in the middle of the Blitz.
The following message was broadcasted via the speakers in several languages:
"Your attention dear visitors! For safety reasons, all park attractions are closed until further notice and must be evacuated. All visitors and unauthorized staff members mustcalmly head to the nearest shelter and stay there until our staff fix the situation. Thank you."
When they arrived at the crossroads east of the Promenade, they saw that the visitors' infirmary was being evacuated.
"The earthquake has compromised a part of the infirmary and we have a fire at level -3 under the Grand Nublarian. Other fires broke out in the rest of the city. The guys are on their way to control them but they must act quickly if we don't want to stand in the middle of ruins at dawn." One of the J-SEC officers on the scene stated when Campbell asked him about the reasons behind the evacuation.
Campbell turned to the Mitchells.
"Please join other visitors," he told them.
"And Miss Young? She's supposed to meet us here," Zach reminded him.
"She too must head to a shelter. Don't worry about her. Go! I have much to do." The officer said coldly, almost chasing them away.
The Mitchells didn't insist and joined the flow of visitors that was progressing towards the entrance of Richard Owen Avenue.
Among the last to join the slowly advancing crowd, they ended up with two mounted grey guards behind them.
Unlike Rocinante and the other horses seen in the Reserve, those of these riders wore protections on the legs and the neck, a sheet, and a visor, like those of the police during violent protests or riots.
In the area that encompassed Richard Owen Avenue and the Promenade, there were three entrances leading to the Depths and the shelters found there.
Similar in appearance to entrances of metro stations, there was one at each end of the Promenade whereas the third was at the Obelisk plaza.
As for the one closest to the crossroads, it had been blocked by rubble and so the visitors had to go further.
At the fountain with the four Parasaurolophus busts, two J-SEC officers had been tasked with separating the coming flow in two parts, one going towards the entrance at the plaza and the other to the western end of the Promenade.
As the Mitchells had just entered the Avenue, an Emporium saleswoman hurried out of the shop to head to the nearest security officer.
"First everyone outside, now everyone underground. What the hell is going on?" She asked, confused and worked up.
"The Hell Storks," he answered laconically after making sure that no one was paying attention to their discussion. "They must be above us as we speak… Watch the skies…" he added grimly while looking at the clouds.
Not far away, one of the park keepers, a giant of a man with a thick black beard, looked at the speakers with irritation.
"We must turn off those damn sirens! Loud noises makes them go berserk!" He bellowed amidst the cacophony.
A few meters away, a group of visitors had stopped to observe the sky. One of them had his forefinger pointed at it, showing a vague dark shape moving fast between the clouds.
"What is this? Is it a plane?" A man wondered.
"A bird?" Suggested another.
"One thing is certain is that it's not Superman..." Added a woman.
Suddenly, the horses of the mounted guards began to stomp and one of them let out a nervous neigh while the mantellisaurs of a tram immobilised on the street and stilled hitched sought to remove their harnesses, pushing the crowd to move aside while the coachman vainly tried to calm them.
Looking up at the clouds, the visitors saw that the shape had descended lower and they could now see two large grey wings and a long pinkish neck.
The moment they realized the nature of the shape, there was a strident call behind them.
"Quetzal!" The black-bearded keeper yelled.
The pterosaur let out another sound, more booming, which strike the visitors with dread.
"Take cover!" A J-SEC officer shouted.
The horses kicked and when it reared up, one of them unseated its rider before fleeing, galloping between the visitors, knocking several down and even trampling another, leaving him badly injured.
The mantellisaurs' panic increased and they pulled with all their strength on their harnesses.
A shadow passed rapidly over the crowd and looking up, it saw that a Quetzalcoatlus was flying over it, almost brushing the rooftops, going from the northern end of the Avenue to the southern one before turning east, passing at a stone's throw from the Great Nublarian's balconies and describing an arc as it went back toward the Discovery Center, near which it was joined by two of its congeners, also coming from the north.
The three flying reptiles passed over the building and then dived towards the plaza and the avenue, swooping on the crowd, and like a herd surprised by predators, it was stricken with panic.
While some sought to rush to the entrance of the Depths, jostling or moving over each other during the process, the others turned around to flee the Avenue.
Among those, Zach took Gray by the hand and told him to run towards the arcades on their left but once there, the other fleeing visitors forced them to go down the Avenue.
Looking towards the lagoons between the columns of the arcades, the Mitchells saw three other Quetzalcoatlus, flying over the water in their direction, helping their congeners to make a pincer attack on the visitors.
The pterosaurs were on them in no time and four of them landed on the street in the middle of the crowd itself, brutally pushing people down during the process before starting to peck all around them, rapidly inflicting a number of lethal wounds.
Their foul stench struck everyone in their vicinity, even the Mitchells who were watching them from the arcade, horrified they were by the pterosaurs' repulsive look with the dried blood on their pycnofibers, their sickly-looking whitish eyes and their wrinkled and warty gular pouch; the fact that they were agile, fast and large at the same time, making them creatures from which it was almost impossible to escape if one was in the open; and their brutality, not hesitating to disembowel, impale or flaying their prey alive, in addition to rough them up in every way possible, catching them in their beak before repeatedly strike them against the ground or any other hard surface.
Moving as far away as possible from the carnage, Zach and Gray returned to the Promenade but chasing down other visitors, one of the Quetzalcoatlus also headed there and blocked their path towards the western part of the Promenade and the shelter's entrance.
They heard two helicopters approaching Burroughs but soon after, the sounds produced by one of the aircrafts became irregular and Zach even thought that it was losing altitude, like if it was going to crash.
The resounding of an explosion a few seconds later, coming from the plaza, confirmed his supposition.
Another pterosaur landed shortly after in the middle of the eastern part of the Promenade.
While looking for a place to hide, a security officer hailed them.
"Don't stand here!" She shouted amid the screams.
But as soon as she finished her sentence, a large shadow passed over them and a beak closed around her torso and once she realized it, she was already some fifteen meters above the ground.
Having seen that the stream of people fleeing along the arcades had considerably diminished, Zach and Gray had rushed into a building and went to its first floor.
Hidden behind a window's frame, they watched helplessly the officer being disputed between two Quetzalcoatlus.
Right in the middle of their quarrel, she fell straight down into one of the lagoons, the one of the mosasaur.
The boys didn't know if she was already dead or not. All they saw was one of the pterosaurs begin its descent to recover the body.
But just when its beak caught the latter, the gigantic and gaping jaws of the mosasaur breached the surface and closed around the beak, crushing it.
The Quetzalcoatlus, under the shock of pain, shrieked and then began to drift in mid-air, quickly losing height before hitting the bay window of a shop and crashing inside it.
From their hiding place, the boys heard the sound of boots, those of a contingent of the Grey Guard, approaching from the west.
X
Preceding the two marauders of Brunet's platoon, about thirty foot soldiers were running. A part of the contingent was armed with firearms, the other with spears, not electrified but with an iron tip, like medieval or Antiquity's ones. Those guards were also carrying shields and all had sabres as a secondary or melee weapon.
Arrived at the fountain, the guards turned and at the entrance of the Avenue, they got in formation, deploying themselves on three packed lines where they were shoulders against shoulders. The marauders stopped, their cannons pointed at the opposite end of the Avenue.
Standing at the very centre of the first line, Brunet commanded the contingent.
"Shield wall!" He ordered before lowering the spear he was holding in his right hand and placing his shield in front of his torso.
Those of the same line made the same move in unison, locking their shields together, and those of the second line held their shields horizontally over their heads and projected their spears out over the first line.
Once the shield wall ready, Brunet exhorted the formation to advance.
"Forward!"
And the guards moved. In their advance, they regularly let out together a single cry, short, guttural and powerful, almost bestial; a scare tactic that was efficient against many opponents, including large predatory animals.
The quetzalcoatluses busy harassing the visitors then turned to the source of these cries and looking at the formation and the two marauders, they were confronted with one single entity: a wide and gigantic armoured monster, with many long and protruding teeth, a flattened snout, and two large rectangular eyes kept wide open.
Seeing it advancing toward them little by little, crawling on its countless legs and growling, they became confused and apprehensive. Instinctively, the pterosaurs moved back and the formation inexorably gained ground without encountering any resistance.
Taking advantage of this, the visitors still on the Avenue fled the street and passed through the arcades to run past by the guards or take shelter in the buildings that seemed still safe at the time.
When Brunet thought they had advanced far enough, he turned his head to the third row where Darbinian was. When her eyes met his, he nodded and she knew that it was up to her row to act.
"Shooters, mark your targets!" She ordered.
As the formation continued to advance slowly, Brunet waited a few seconds before starting to give the order to fire.
"Ready!..."
All the shields were lowered and the first two rows crouched down as the shooters on the third were ready to take aim.
"... Aim! ..."
The shooters pointed their weapons on the nearest quetzalcoatluses and prepared to press the trigger.
"…Fire!"
The bullets whistled across the Avenue and on the three pterosaurs targeted, one dropped dead immediately but the other two were only wounded since they had showed a greater reactivity than their dead congener, and they withdraw promptly out of reach or sight of the guards.
Having now reached the middle of the Avenue, the latter became emboldened because of the relative success of the first salvo.
If they continued like this up to the plaza, fear would win the remaining quetzalcoatluses, making them flee.
Seven left… Durant thought while she was having a quick and nervous glance over her shield.
Within the shield wall, heat was increasing, threatening to become stifling, and the air was getting scarcer.
As less than thirty meters separated the formation from the edge of the plaza, one of the quetzalcoatluses wounded by the first salvo, having fled further before coming back to land on the roofs of the buildings on the western side of the Avenue, watched the contingent advance while being mostly concealed by the smoke.
When the formation had to go around and pass a stopped tram and its team, the pterosaur could distinguish each of the men that made it.
It then realized the trickery to which its eyes had been subjected and it laid its gaze upon of the most exposed guards, the one that operated the cannon of the nearest marauder.
He and the other guards looking straight ahead of them, they did not see it sliding down from the roof and leaping on the top of the tram, making the team's mantellisaurs letting out a loud call, before rushing in a flash to its prey, the beak wide open.
The guard screamed when he was grabbed but fortunately for him, his comrade inside the marauder, whose role was to reload the cannon between each shot, unsheathed his pistol and fired in the wings of the pterosaur.
Its reflex action was to let him go and some of the spearmen turned to face and shout at him.
Angry, the queztalcoatlus rushed forward to impale one of the men with its beak but at the last moment, he raised his shield over him and the beak struck it instead of his neck.
Behind the spearmen, another guard, armed with a shotgun, shot it in the chest a couple of times and fatally injured, the flying reptile collapsed on the ground and was speared.
Seeing their congeners falling one after the other, the quetzalcoatluses finally got scared and fled the guards, galloping towards the street that led to the pond. There, they took advantage of the slope to take off, running first on four limbs, then on two before leaping and beating their wings.
As they flew away, the guards, triumphant despite the defeat of their visual ploy, broke ranks and looked at the fleeing Hell Storks while roaring out of victory and brandishing their weapons.
Behind them, a large crowd had gathered and watched too the pterosaurs flying away with relief and hope. Some civilians were taunting the quetzalcoatluses while others cheered the guards for their bravery.
"Stay alert! The harpactognathus are still heading towards us. They will be here soon. Brace yourselves!" Brunet said to his subordinates.
His gaze was drawn by the burning helicopter in the eastern part of the plaza, the one the Hell Storks had made crash during the attack.
It was releasing a thick smoke which, pushed by the wind, acted like a screen between the contingent and the tunnel that led to the zoo.
The employees told the visitors to head in a calm and orderly way either to the nearest Depths entrance, located just next to one of the stopped marauders, or to the Discovery Center in order to reach the lower rooms and halls.
While the civilians advanced in a long column, the guards reformed.
Because of the cacophony made by the crowd, Brunet did not heard immediately his radio's sputterings.
Once far enough away from the crowd, he could hear someone trying to contact them and recognized Harriman's voice.
"Get out of the plaza, dammit! They're coming!" The technician shouted in a distressed voice.
"What is..."
A loud crash coming from the tunnel that led to the Zoo caught the guards' attention.
Because of the black smoke released by the helicopter, they couldn't see what had just broken the gate, closed urgently in order to try to stop what was about to burst out of the tunnel.
The following moments happened like in slow-motion in the guards' minds.
Reaching them like distant echoes, there was first the screams of the visitors that were heading to the door of the Discovery Center, then the guards saw their column splitting, with one part rushing up the steps and another, bigger, fleeing in terror back to the Avenue.
Behind them, the contingent saw a line of large frills appear amidst the smoke and the dread that stroke the guards at this very moment was the same felt by the Roman legionaries the first time they faced elephants on a battlefield, those of the army of Pyrrhus I, king of the Molossians, at Heraclea in 280 BC.
"Break ranks! Move aside!" Brunet yelled.
They barely had the time to hear him than five pachyrhinosaurs breached the smoke, bellowing in their advance and galloping straight towards Richard Owen Avenue.
During the earthquake, a tree had fallen across the fence of the pachyrhinosaurs' enclosure and disrupted the electric current's flow on an entire section but this, the ceratopsians only realized later, when the fear stirred up by two Quetzalcoatlus flying over the enclosures was such that they agglutinated against the fence, pushing one of the individuals to touch the previously electrified wires and notice the absence of current, something that had surprised it since when they were younger, more than once they had touched them and received a slight electric shock, strong enough to prevent them from doing it again for a while.
Thus, panic-stricken, the pachyrhinosaur had moved backwards in order to charge one of the fence's posts and after several attempts, managed to knock it down, creating a breach in which it and its congeners rushed. Not knowing where to go, they had ran through the Zoo, carving their way through thick vegetation or the chaos-ridden paths where a few other escaped animals were running between the last employees that were still there. They had left the Zoo by the path that joined the Obelisk Plaza, passing under the south-eastern ridge of the Discovery Center.
For them, the guards and their vehicles were nothing but another obstacle on their way and to better pass through it, they lowered their heads and accelerated.
The guards then broke ranks and wanted to move away but for some in the centre of the formation, it was too late and the charge swept them like wisps of straw. Some were hurled in the air, one gored, others trampled and one of the marauders was even knocked down across the entrance of the Depths, blocking it.
Drekanson, who was then in the middle of the formation, was one of those knocked down but by some miracle, the big legs of the pachyrhinosaurs only passed a few centimetres from his face and he remained still until they pass.
When he got up, he had the impression of having been struck by a train and as the ceratopsians reached the fountain at the other end of the Avenue, he turned towards it and was confronted to a horror vision.
Richard Owen Avenue was now nothing but knocked down stalls, decorations smashed into pieces that littered the street itself and the sidewalks, palm trees that had been uprooted or that leaned against the buildings and whose leaves had been set alight by the embers of the braziers projected here and there, and, amidst all this, lying and dislocated bodies by dozens.
It quickly rang out with the wounded' moans.
The less serious injured among them sought to return under the arcades, limping or stumbling on the way, many holding a bloody arm or having a hand posed on their skull, others dragging a broken leg. The most serious were agonising on the ground.
On each side, black smoke rose from the buildings and a crackling was perceptible: the minor fires, which, without the attack of the quetzalcoatluses, would have been controlled, had gained in extend and now threatened to consume the whole area.
As he joined his colleagues, they suddenly turned, having heard cawing sounds in the skies.
The ash cloud had just passed over the Rio Iris and was still being pushed southwards.
In any second, darkness was going to fall upon the city. But it wasn't the worst thing since preceding it, there were the remaining six Quetzalcoatlus along with the Harpactognathus' swarm.
When the pterosaurs arrived near the Discovery Center, they dived towards the burning city.
