Part One: " Queen's Gambit Declined "
"What burns me," Hammond said, "is that we have made this wonderful park, this fantastic park, and our very first visitors are going through it like accountants, just looking for problems. They aren't experiencing the wonder of it all."
"That's their problem," Arnold said. "We can't make them experience wonder."
--Jurassic Park.
Prologue
It had started in the late afternoon, the trouble, with Andro Diaz complaining of a stomach problem and stretching out to sleep it off. Then Enrique Flores, in a true act of chivalry, had become seasick all over the boat captain's wife, Penelope Guzman; he hadn't ever become seasick before. That left three fishers left with good stomaches—Ramos, Moreno and Soto. And in Almira Guzman's view, the three of them couldn't have fished a salmon out of a bucket.
"This is what I get," he muttered, "for being such a lousy husband. Nothing but trouble, and my wife is down below not speaking to anyone."
He hadn't wanted to bring her aboard the Serpiente, which was his most prized possession even with the heavy rust, because she hated the ocean, but she was pregnant and Guzman didn't trust the men of his neighborhood. Not at all.
"Look on the bright side," one of his fishermen remarked, "at least she's not talking."
"Shut up, Moreno," he snapped. "Fish, damnit."
"We're trying," Ramos said, dry. "Maybe the fish are frightened off by the rusty bottom of your boat, senor."
"I don't—"
"I've got one!" Soto, a dark and normally withdrawn man, cried. He tugged excitedly at his fishing pole; such was the fishing that this was exhilerating for all of them, and Guzman dropped down to the deck from the wheelhouse, grinning.
"It's about time," he said. "Pull it up, Soto."
Soto tugged, reeled, and tugged. He frowned. "It's a fighter, senor! Perhaps it is a—"
Without further warning, the fishing pole was suddenly tugged out of his hands, and it was sucked into the water as if pulled by a vaccuum. Soto cringed as Guzman turned around to glower at him, the other two fishers looking away awkwardly.
"How are we supposed to fish now?" he demanded. "Now we only have two poles, and you fish so poorly that we will never be able to buy another!"
"Senor…" Soto, abruptly, paused. "…did you feel that?"
Guzman blinked at him. "Feel what?"
"I felt something too," Ramos said, looking anxiously down at the green-brown water. "The fish is angry, I think."
Guzman grumbled something obscene, going back up to the wheelhouse; on the stairs, he looked back to glower a little more at his worthless fishermen, and then he noticed something—
The water behind the boat had become very, very dark, and shaped not like a cloud, but like a moving and organic mass underneath the surface. He had fleeting thoughts of sea monsters, of Godzilla, when Moreno screamed something and threw himself past Guzman on the stairs. He'd been looking into the water closely. Guzman looked at him confusedly as he cowered by the wheel.
"Eyes," was all the fisherman said, in Spanish broken by terror. "Eyes."
By now Diaz and Flores had awoken, looking thoroughly confused.
The hairs on Guzman's neck raised automatically, but the situation was not helped by the sudden reappearance of the heavily-pregnant Penelope, her soft brown eyes as wide as portals. Which she had probably been looking through, he reasoned.
"What is it?" she cried. "What is the thing beneath the water? It is like a great crocodile, Almira, please, we must go!"
He took only two more seconds to decide to start the engine. With a rusty roar, and a whimper from Moreno, the boat began to vibrate. But they were still anchored, Guzman realized, and pulling up the anchor required being especially close to the monster in the water.
Diaz realized that almost simultaneously and, bravely, he lurched towards what chain they had left before plunging his hands into the water to pull the rest up. Guzman mused that he probably hadn't got a solid look at the thing yet, like most of them, and sure enough, a moment later there was a soft noise of terror—
And then, quite suddenly, he was sucked into the water as well.
Yelling nonsensically, Flores went to the rail as well, and then his screams mingled with that of Penelope's. Guzman, his brain freezing up from a lack of experience with this sort of thing, threw himself down the stairs after yelling for Moreno to take over the wheel; the fisherman was only too glad to follow these orders.
The minute his hands plunged into the water, Guzman realized the water was stained red around the boat, and that the shape was moving far faster than a thing of its size should have been able to. He pulled more chain in the boat, his movements feverish. This was of the utmost importance, and he wished Flores would aid him, but Flores was near the bow, trembling at whatever sight he'd seen.
"Almira!" Penelope suddenly cried. "Look!"
Knowing he shouldn't, he did.
There was a great grey-green head on top of the water, not ten feet from where Guzman's hands were working as fast as they could. It was crocodillian and had two very large, expressive eyes that weren't as protruding as a crocodile's. And its gaze was fixed on him, eerily—he could almost sense what the creature was thinking, and yet he couldn't at all. It was an alien and unreadable stare. The head alone was at least eight feet long.
Guzman had no words for it. No curses, no exclamations. He worked and it watched him. Strangely, the boat behind him was silent as well, Penelope having stopped screaming with her cry. Not even Moreno was whimpering.
He could see the anchor when the head began to move—forward, back under the water, towards Guzman and the boat. Lunging like a snake's strike towards where the anchor was coming up out of the depths. He had no time to react when the great maw fastened around it and then kept going.
With a jolt like a car crash, Guzman was suddenly in the water, dragged by the chain in his numb fingers.
Under the water he was in a completely alien enviornment, out of his element entirely; there came an instinctive rush of fear at this. Coupled with the terror that he was in the water with the monster, he was almost completely paralyzed.
Now he could see all of it. It was monstrous, at least fourty feet long, with a strange fin that curled up its back like something Guzman had once seen illustrated in a story book, and the way it was built he knew it was primarily a land creature. In fact, he was prepared to swear that this thing was something prehistoric, something that had existed millions of years ago, and that came as a tremendous shock.
Land creature or no, it moved very well under the water, dragging the boat by its anchor for a few feet and then stopping again, whirling around to bite at the feebly turning motor. Blood spewed from its jaws at the movement, the blades having cut into its flesh; the roar it sent off caused Guzman to lose all of the remaining warmth in his body.
He had one last coherent thought: Penelope.
She was waving at him, crying freely, while the fisherman bustled about doing nothing and everything at once; panic reigned on board his boat. Guzman began to swim, slowly and awkwardly, then gaining confidence. He made his way towards the boat, though it was drifting, and stopped as a displeasured purr rent the air—and then stopped.
The motor had been destroyed.
On the other side of the Serpiente, the thing was moving again, slamming its head against the side of the boat. He could hear his craft groaning and whimpering under the strain of it until there was a violent kbang sound, and Guzman felt his heart sink. That was surely the side becoming breached.
"Penelope!" he yelled. "Penelope!"
To what end he was calling to her, he didn't know. But communication at this dire time was suddenly very important, somehow, and Guzman continued to call. It was only a few minutes and most of the boat was under the water, the fishermen yelling and screaming, Penelope crying as she swam towards him—
"Almira!"
Behind her, he could see Moreno disappear under the waves, and then Flores, and then Ramos. That left Soto, characteristically silent during the whole debacle, who swam alongside his wife loyally, despite barely knowing her. Guzman felt a surge of gratitude as he struggled to join their position in the water. But there wasn't a lot of enthusiasm to his movements, because the monster under the waves was moving again, towards them.
He felt his arms clasp around the struggling figure of his wife, pregnant with their first and only child, and heard the fanatic breathing of Soto, and that was the last thing he was conscious of, right before the entire world became red.