Disclaimer: Jurassic Park is copyright Steven Speilberg, Michael Crichton, and others. No infringement or disrespect of the intellectual property rights held by the owners of existing copyrights in Jurassic Park or its derivative works is intended by this non-profit, noncommercial amateur fan fiction.
Summary: Living dangerously is far preferable to dying safely.
Yuletide 2013 story written for voksen.
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Living Dangerously
by silverr
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It's a combination of things that bring him back to consciousness: the pain, and not being able to open his eyes, and finally the silence.
He's dealt with pain before, of course; there were incidents in Kenya with animals and poachers. This doesn't feel nearly as bad as that. Unpleasant, but not fatal, primarily arms and legs. Doesn't feel as though he's bleeding out. It takes him a while to work out that he can't open his eyes because they're glued shut. Most likely with his own blood, which is curious — not the presence of blood, but that he's alive at all. The Big One had played him up well ... as well she should have, because he'd been thunderingly careless. He doesn't know why she hasn't killed him yet, but then it's possible she's left him to suffer, and perhaps to eat later ... no, that's not her modus operandi. She's efficient, the type to kill and move on. He tries moving his fingers; the right ones work, but moving the left stabs his arm with wrist pain. Likely only a simple fracture or sprain. He listens: has anything noticed his movements? Doesn't seem so. He lifts his right hand to see if he can bend the arm at the elbow, gritting his teeth at an agony in his upper arm. Appears as though someone's taken a good chunk out of his bicep. Funny, he thinks. He'd have gone for the thigh. A lot more meat there, and easier to tear off the bone.
He is finally able — with frequent pauses — to lift his arm enough to bring his hand to his face. He explores the rough bumps and ridges of slashed flesh on his chin, cheeks, nose, and forehead, then pushes and rubs his eyelids until he he can open them a bit. The overcast grey sky he sees through the blurry slit of vision is blinding at first, but once he adjusts he gingerly moves his left arm out out of the way and slowly rolls onto his left side — discovering a fractured rib or two along the way. He tastes blood; it seems he's bitten his lip. Charming. What the raptors hadn't done to him he's going to do to himself, it seems.
He spies his rifle, but in his condition it's going to take a bit of time to get to it. As he inches slowly and painfully over to it he spends the time wondering again why The Big One and her minions didn't kill him straight off in the ambush, or why they haven't come back to finish him off. He supposes he won't ever know the answer to the first, but it occurs to him that the reason for the second might be that they are dead.
That will be a severe disappointment if true. He'd wanted to take out The Big One himself.
Touching the rifle's barrel at last feels like a huge accomplishment, although it's a while before he is able to maneuver onto his knees and then use the rifle as a crutch to stand. His head swims, and he can't suppress a groan as the scabbed skin on his ravaged right bicep tears open and begins to bleed anew.
"Stop being such a baby, Muldoon," he mutters through clenched teeth.
He's lost his watch, so between that and the overcast sky and the incipient shock he has no idea how long it takes him to hobble up the service road to the visitor's center. Every time he wants to quit, he keeps himself going by thinking about the water and painkillers he'll find there.
Then too, dying is boring. He'd much rather face the dangers of living than the peace of the grave.
He considers swinging by Hammond's bungalow, but decides against it. It might have been worth if if he'd been going to the Visitors' Center's back entrance, but as it is he's going to have to go around to the front. Unfortunate, that, as the employee entrance, though much closer to the infirmary and control center, is still under construction. He doesn't fancy dragging himself through scaffolding and construction debris.
He hauls himself up the wheelchair ramp to the front entrance. Opening the front door takes everything he's got, but at last he's inside.
The lobby looks like the scene of an explosion. The suspended bones have fallen, the towering plate glass window has shattered, the festive banners have been shredded, and half the displays of cheerful merchandise have been overturned.
Muldoon supposes this means he's out of a job.
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He makes his way to the infirmary and injects a painkiller. As he waits for it to kick in he patches himself up — splinting his left wrist and bandaging his legs one-handed is easy, but taking care of the right bicep involves some ingenuity. He finally gets it done, of course, and as he takes a long drink from the clinic's faucet he considers his situation. As he's neither seen nor heard any park personnel or guests, he's assuming Hammond's evacuated the island. Old codger must have gone kicking and screaming ... if he survived. Well, for now he'll assume that if any other humans remain on the island they'll be intelligent enough to head for the visitors' center, and so the sensible thing to do is to gather what he can reasonably carry and set up in the control room.
He spreads a lab coat on the counter and piles it with painkiller hypos, antibiotics, bandages, and disinfectant wipes. He grabs a few pairs of surgical gloves for good measure, then ties the coat into a sling.
Next, he goes down the hall to the weapons locker. He switches out his crutch for a rifle whose barrel isn't jammed with dirt, slings a second rifle across his back, and stuffs his pockets with shells.
Finally, the kitchen. Signs of a struggle here, but no bodies or blood. He doesn't need to take water — there's a head upstairs — but he raids the food storage room for non-perishables to add to his supply-sling.
Enough of the painkiller has circulated that the climb to the control center on the second floor is almost tolerable. The first thing he tries is the radio, but although powered it doesn't appear to be working. Another of Nedry's parting gifts: now that's one slimy bastard he can't wait to get into his sights. Still ... even without the radio this is probably the best place to hole up aside from the emergency bunker: it's where any damage assessment or resource teams would head first, for the embryos. And speaking of embryos ...
He heads to the egg room, gathers up the lot — raptor eggs all, of course — and tosses them in the freezer. Most burst open on impact: those that didn't will freeze. He hadn't ever determined if InGen's choice to breed velociraptors was greedy, stupid, or a sign that they were clandestinely in the pocket of some shady military organization, but he supposes that it doesn't matter now.
In the control room he notes that the surveillance cameras are still working ... not that this is at all useful. He sees that only the local park network is running: the internet connection is gone. "No e-mail for Bobby," he mutters. He browses through three of the workstations, looking for useful files, but finds nothing, and so shuts all but one of the computers down. Worst case is that he'll be here until he dies: there's no point in running down the batteries or straining the generator.
"Not the spot I'd've picked for my retirement," he says, looking around. He'll have to find some way to reinforce the air ducts, of course: he's pretty sure The Big One understands the purpose of the ventilation system, and he's no doubt she could get in from the outside if she wanted. The office chairs are too padded for this purpose, will cut off too much of the air flow, so he'll have to haul up some of the Danish modern from the dining room.
It's when he goes out into the lobby dining area that he sees the two dead raptors.
He'd barely noticed them among the rubble of ersatz dinoskeleton pieces, but the painkiller seems to have made his hearing extra-acute and the buzzing flies — Hammond had wanted so badly to keep the island free of all contemporary pests — lead him to them. The first carcass is in the dead center — an ironic phrase — of the room. Its midsection is crushed, and he suspects it wasn't from falling plastic dino skeleton pieces.
"Rexy got a good bite out of you, didn't she?" He wonders if it's a trick of the light, but the raptor looks different for some reason. Stripes, something about stripes ... He has to battle through through the fuzz in his head before he remembers that stripes indicate males. But this couldn't be a male, could it? He uses the tip of his rifle to push what's left of the tail aside; at first he thinks, no, of course not, it's a female just like all the others, but then he recalls that raptors, male and female both, have a, damn it all, he knows the bloody word, what is it? —a cloaca.
Right. A cloaca. Latin for sewer. Master Newberry would be so proud. Too bad there's no sewer handy to drop the bag of rotting raptor meat into.
He takes one of the chairs from the dining area and uses it to push the mass toward the door. He's not really sure that putting it outside the front entrance — as if he expects the waste services binmen to cart it away — is a good idea, but then he'd rather anything looking for something to eat not bother to come inside.
It's then that he sees her. She's draped across a piece of the display skull like a scaly toupee. He can tell at once that she's not dead — the baleful eye staring at him blinks once — but as he's gone past her at least three times without her making any move to attack he assumes that she's dying.
He limps across the floor to get a closer look at her last moments.
One leg and both forelimbs are bent at an unnatural angle. Her midsection and tail seem uninjured, for the most part, which means that it's unlikely that Rexy chomped her ... or at least didn't chomp her very hard.
"Well, so here we are," he says. "Just you and me."
She blinks again.
"I just shoveled your mate outside," he says. "Or what was left of him. Smart of you to let him go first."
She opens her jaws slightly and makes low, click-clacking noises. At first he thinks it's her death rattle; then he wonders if she's cursing him.
Not that it matters either way.
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"Over the years, you see," he says, "anyone with half a brain realizes that there are two types of animal. The big dumb brutes, and the clever ones with skill."
At the word 'clever' she blinks twice and moves her jaw a little.
He's still not sure why he's talking to her — it's not as if she can understand what he's saying — yet he feels a certain obligation, as if he's paying a debt. Not just because she's been one of the most challenging enemies he's ever faced, but because he knows damn well he's only alive because she willed it. "Tigers ... they're pretty clever," Muldoon continues. "And apes. Long memories, they have. And they can be vicious. Though it does take a lot to get them riled." He's brought over a chair from the dining room; seated, he is eye-to-eye with her. "Most would say, though, that man is the most dangerous animal. Happily, most are big dumb brutes." He chuckles a little, shifts in the chair. "Women, on the other hand ..."
Before he can finish the sentence he feels it, all at once: the shift in the air, a sudden increase in the bird noises from outside as dozens take to the air, the vibration that hums against his arse through the wooden seat of the chair.
"Tyrannosaur," he says, and stands.
He intends to just hurry up the stairs to the safety of the control room, but she's looking at him steadily as the claws on her injured forelimbs contract convulsively. It's as if she pleading, trying to snatch at him to take her with him.
"I must be daft," he says. He grabs her by the tail — she squeaks weakly — and pulls her off the skull, dragging her across the foyer and out of sight under a wide, low shelf in the dining area. "'Don't move," he tells her brusquely, "and you might not get eaten."
As he turns to go, the light from the broken windows is eclipsed, and he realizes he's out of time to go upstairs. Grunting in pain, he crouches down in the shadowed corner next to her tail and waits.
Rexy crashes through the window, massive head swiveling to and fro. Muldoon can imagine that the tyrannosaur, having once seen prey here, assumes there will always be prey here. It will take her tiny brain a while to process that that's not true.
She snaps at some chairs, breaks a few teeth attempting to eat the stairs to the second floor, and then stomps out.
"Ridiculous," Muldoon mutters. "Plenty of perfectly edible brachiosaurs in the east paddock, if you'd bother to look."
The Big One makes a soft gurgling noise.
Muldoon could swear it sounds as if she's snickering.
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After that, well, there was nothing for it but to fetch bandages, splints, and disinfectant from the infirmary. He grabs a few rolls of duct tape from the workmen's cabinet, and then sets the items down on the floor where she can see them.
"Just so we're clear," he says before he begins, "If you so much as move a millimeter, I'll smash your skull. Got it?"
She blinks twice.
She shudders when he takes hold of her leg, but he's not buying it. As he wraps the belly-slicer claw on the foot of her working leg in twenty or so layers of tape he tells her, "Don't think you're going to lull me into trusting you, my girl. I'm at least as clever as you are."
She studies him for a moment — it's her usual, 'Just you wait, I'm working things out' look — and then makes the low gurgling noise again.
"Well," he says with a chuckle, "so you have a sense of humor after all."
He splints her broken leg somewhat, more to immobilize it than anything else, and then considers her forelegs. They are reminiscent of emu: deceptively frail looking, but with tendons and ligaments that can move blindingly fast. Lethal as a cluster bomb. He's a bit surprised that she's made no attempt so far to slice him, but then he has taken care to stay out of her range. He tears off a half-dozen strips of duct tape, hanging them from the edge of the shelf above her, then disinfects and bandages her wounds. When that's done he wraps the gauze and splints with several layers of the shiny grey tape. As a last step he considers taping over her front claws as well, the way he'd taped over the belly-ripping claws on her feet, but decides against it.
There is a point at which caution oversteps its bounds and takes all the joy out of life.
"Well, I suppose I ought to feed you," he says at last. "No point in doing all that work otherwise." He waits for her to blink twice — he's come to think this means 'yes,' even though he knows that's absurd — and then goes off to the kitchen.
There's several hundred pounds of ground meat in the freezers, but frozen solid in cow-sized blocks it's as good as useless. Fortunately, there are plastic trays of thawed patties in the refrigerator. As he doesn't intend to get his hands anywhere near her mouth he rummages through the drawers until he finds several long-handled spoons and a pair of tongs.
"Alright then," he says, carrying the trays and the spoons back to the alcove. He molds a fist-sized ball of meat onto a wooden spoon, says, "Open wide," and holds the spoon up near the end of her snout.
She sniffs, then opens her jaws.
He slides the spoon into her mouth, turns it over to deposit the meat onto her tongue, then pulls the spoon out.
Nothing. She doesn't swallow, just waits with her jaws half-open, watching him.
"I'm doing you a favor, you ungrateful cow."
He uses the spoon to poke the wad of meat from the center of her tongue toward the back of her throat, but before he can take the spoon out her jaws snap shut, crunching the wooden spoon to splinters.
She makes the soft gurgling noise again.
"Very funny." Muldoon holds up a heavy stainless steel spoon and a pair of metal tongs. "Try that with these and you'll lose teeth."
She blinks twice.
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After Muldoon finishes feeding her the rest of the beef he gets a liter of bottled water from the kitchen. Not that she'll be able to taste the difference, but he thinks the bottle's long neck will allow him to direct the water into the back of her maw without losing fingers.
Giving Big One a drink is less decidedly successful than feeding her had been: as she sputters and chokes he resists an urge to thump her on the back. "No Perrier for you, eh?" he asks, then finishes off the bottle himself. "I don't suppose you lot drink water anyhow, do you? Blood's your preferred beverage." He mops up the spilled water with a handful of Hammond's fancy linen napkins — "No expense spared on these," he tells her — then stabs himself with another painkiller hypo.
He looks around. In the increasingly dusky light the ruined Center looks less and less like a man-made structure full of debris and broken toys and more like a craggy alien landscape.
Of course, that could just be the painkiller.
"A good go, John," he says, "but not clever enough by half." Seems like the oily mathematician had the last laugh after all.
He staggers a little then, suddenly feeling weak with exhaustion and accumulated shock, and notices The Big One jerk away from him as if she's flinching.
"I'm not going to fall on you, you goose," he says, and then sits, in a bit less controlled of a manner than he intends, in the corner next to her tail. He puts one rifle on the floor parallel to his right leg, the other across his lap, and then falls asleep.
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He's not sure if it's the tree branch slapping his shin that wakes him, or the hissing.
His first thought, upon seeing how dark it is in the Visitors Center, is that the motion sensors have stopped working: it only when the branch slaps him again that he realizes that it's The Big One's tail, and that the reason it's so dark is because the moonlight coming through the windows is being eclipsed by forms looming close to him.
He stays very still, listening. The hissing comes again, a slithering sound that ends with a crackle, like a tarp being lifted and then snapped by the wind. In the next instant, as he thinks Dilophosaur, frilling before it spits, The Big One lets out an astoundingly loud screech.
He swings up the rifle on his lap, points into the darkness before him, and fires.
There's a wet thud as the Dil hits the floor ten or fifteen meters away. The others — there are at least two, hard to be precise with his ears still ringing a bit from the rifle-blast — skitter back. Keeping his eyes on the movements of the slightly darker darknesses sliding through the shadows of the Visitor Center, he sets down the first rifle and picks up the second, waiting to fire until the Dils group up and start moving toward him again.
The shrieks die out, but there's still the faint staccato of multiple sets of claws scratching over marble. He scans the shadows while reloading both rifles one-handed with the cartridges in his right pocket. The Visitor's Center itself seems to hold its breath as he and Big One wait for each attack. He picks off two more, reloads, then one, and thinks he's done until she slaps him hard with her tail and somehow he knows to aim the rifle straight up and blast the sneaky one who'd thought to ambush them from above.
They're showered in slimy bits of Dilophosaur entrails. He laughs and pats The Big One's haunch. "Clever girl! Good job."
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The two of them settle into a routine over the next week. He spends the morning hours salvaging. Clever works well as an early warning system, but as she's three meters long and weighs twenty stone, she's hardly a Yorkie he can tote around in a pocket. He manages to improvise a wheeled walker for her by cutting out the bottom and handle side of a wheelbarrow, fitting in a few metal bars to support her weight, and bolting on a raised wooden beam for her to rest her forelimbs on. He's rather pleased with how it comes out in the end, and Clever seems to be as well, as once her bad leg has healed enough to support some weight she spends hours walking back and forth, giving a hilariously childish-sounding "peep" whenever she needs him to turn the barrow around so that she can walk the other way.
"And now I'm a bloody physical therapist," he grouses.
Clever gurgles.
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One afternoon about two weeks after the island was abandoned he and Clever are having lunch. She's watching him intently, and he knows why.
"Snack?" he asks.
Clever click-clacks, then blinks twice. Her tail stirs up a puff of dust each time it slaps the ground.
Muldoon sighs, then takes the first aid tin out of his rucksack. He sets out the supplies: fresh gauze, disinfectant wipes for the knife, antibiotic, a hydrocolloid patch, cotton. He holds the penknife in his teeth to undo the bandaging on his bicep and lift the dressing. The vigorous debridement he's been doing seems to be working, and so he sterilizes the knife, then scrapes carefully at the gangrenous patch.
Clever stirs up more dust.
"Don't rush me," he mutters around the knife.
As always, it takes nearly ten minutes to sterilize, apply the hydrocolloid dressing, and re-bandage the wound, during which time he asks himself, as he has every time, why it is exactly that he's going to be feeding scraps of himself to the raptor.
And the answer is, as it has been every time, because she seems to like it.
Clever opens her jaws, and he carefully swipes the blade of the penknife over her tongue — flat side leading, of course, so as not to cut her. When he's done he sits back and says, dryly, "Enjoy."
And then, as far as he can tell, Clever closes her maw, lifts her tongue, and rubs the bits of his dead arm muscle into the roof of her mouth.
His theory is that Clever had enjoyed the taste of him she'd gotten when she and her pack had attacked him weeks ago. As he appreciates that she is willing to get her fix from dead flesh rather than living, he's willing to indulge her.
"Lunchtime's over," he says, re-packing the first aid box.
She's suddenly alert, craning her neck to look at the treeline of a nearby ridge.
"What is it?" he asks as he reaches for his rifle. He sincerely hopes they aren't going to be bitten in the ass for being careless: they haven't seen Rexy since the day after the evacuation — he keeps hoping to come across her carcass — but if she does sneak up on them they're royally screwed. Rexy might be a big dumb brute, but without a jeep, they can't outrun her.
An instant later a 'copter roars up over the treeline.
Muldoon jumps to his feet, waving his hat. The copter flies almost out of sight before it turns around and comes back to him.
The door opens, and a youngster dressed in camos and a blue beret calls down to him. "We thought everyone on the island was dead."
"You thought wrong." Muldoon shades his eyes with his left hand; he's not quite ready to put his rifle down.
"Who are you?" Beret calls down.
"Robert Muldoon!" he shouts up. "Hammond's game warden!"
Beret looks through a sheaf of papers handed to him by a helmeted guard. "We didn't expect to find survivors!"
"Do you want us to take it out, sir?" the helmeted soldier calls down to him. He hefts a sniper rifle.
Behind him, Clever starts to click-clack.
"Take what out?" Muldoon shouts up at then, for a moment genuinely not understanding: when he does he steps in front of Clever, holding his arms wide. "No," he shouts. "Absolutely not." He realizes that he's gone from protecting people from dinosaurs to protecting dinosaurs from people, but the realization makes him oddly calm, as if he's finally taken up the final piece of a puzzle he's been assembling his entire life.
"Mister Muldoon," Beret says, "we're authorized to evacuate human survivors. The island is ... " The rest of this sentence is lost to the wind.
"You can shove your authorizations up your arse," Muldoon tells him, "and bugger off until you come back with transport for both of us."
Behind him, Clever puts in her two cents, and then the two of them laugh and laugh until the 'copter is out of sight.
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~ The End ~
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Many thanks to my beta Measured_Words, and to Naraht and Makioka of #yuletide for emergency Britpicking.
I used the map of Isla Nublar from the Minecraft forum and the Visitor's Center map from the Jurassic park wiki (which also provided information on various other topics).
Finally: Special thanks to a certain person — they know who they are — without whom this story wouldn't have been written.
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(04) 31 December 2013; rev 29 Dec 2014