CHAPTER 139
Shelly had been thrown onto her back. The hole in her leg hurt so bad her body was stiff to the point of feeling paralyzed. She had felt the curved killer claw scratch along her femur as the utahraptor retracted it, and it was like nothing she'd ever felt before. Painful chills were still shooting up her spine from the awful sensation.
Now she was staring the enormous vulture-like creature in the face as it curled its lips and drooled over her. Its lumpy wrinkled face and neck showed all their detail now as it leaned in close. The short hairs that mingled with its gnarly scales prickled up and then relaxed as the dinosaur licked its chops. Pinning her shoulders with its long clawed fingers the utahraptor raised a killer claw over her gut and moved in to split her from the sternum down.
Shelly's head rolled to the side. Her eyes were so full of tears her surroundings became blurred, and she did not see the speeding approach of a vehicle. At the moment where she expected to feel her guts spilling out of her belly a bullet ricocheted off the top of the SUV near her face. Shelly was so much in shock that she didn't even notice. The utahraptor on the other hand withdrew its killer claw and roared in the direction the gunshot had come from.
The pickup truck containing Hector and the two doctors came skidding up to the Ford Explorer so fast it almost slammed into it. As Dr. Conners and Hector opened fire on the utahraptor it leapt from the vehicle and rushed towards the jungle.
Bryce sprang from the truck and climbed on top of the SUV. "Shelly?"
Her eyes were clenched. She wouldn't look at him, nor was she speaking.
He saw her injured leg and the gushing blood. "God." Drawing his belt from his waist he looped it around her upper thigh and tightened it as much as he could.
On the ground Dr. Johnson was getting out of the truck when the passenger door of the Explorer flew open and Kyra came running out. She flew right past the pickup as though she had not even seen it or Dr. Johnson.
Kyra was running back toward the gas pumps and the emergency bunker with a complete lack of awareness to her surroundings. In her head she had already made up her mind that she was just going to run and keep on running. She would look straight ahead and not anywhere else. If she made it to the bunker than she would consider herself lucky. If she got caught she considered it better than sitting and waiting to die.
The life or death nature of her situation had occupied all of her thought, and she hadn't known the truck had arrived. Now she was sprinting away from the protection of people who had weapons, and she did not expect she would survive.