Jurassic Park is my all time favorite movie. I've seen it more than any other movie and it still both thrills and frightens me.

Birds of Prey – A GW adaptation of Jurassic Park (1993)

Demon.

Strength of the Devil.

Our punishment.

Black, leathery scales.

The Lord has unleashed His wrath.

Yellow eyes. Like a snake?

Rotten breath.

Teeth. Too many teeth.

Duo's own notes still made him shiver. He remembered the translator whispering snippets of the woman's frightened rambling in his ear. When he closed his eyes, he still saw the petite woman writhing in her hospital bed. Trapped in a condition of absolute agony, even as the staff kept her medicated on the very edge of consciousness. He had underlined words to get a sense of the physicality of whatever she claimed had attacked her. At his request, the translator had tried to get her to be more descriptive, but then all she did was wail:

"Pain! Pain!"

The daughter had ushered the two men out of the room then and told them not to come back. Her black eyes, too, conveyed a hurt beyond words. Through the narrow window of the door, Duo stole a glance at the daughter blanketing her distressed mother with her own body; holding her down while trying to comfort her.

A story on an apparent abduction of a woman from his home city of San Diego, had led him to Puerto Carillo, a small town on the Western shore of Costa Rica, where she was born and raised. Speaking to the locals about the woman's past had unearthed a history of drug abuse and debt to the cartels and he knew he would be writing a sad ending. It was also how he heard of the gringos that kept coming into town – people wondered if he was one of 'them', suspicious of all the questions he was asking. He smelled a new story.

When he interrupted a group of young boys playing soccer in the hot sand of the beach, to ask them about the 'gringos' and why they had come to their small town, one of them said: "The gringos have come to hunt the chupacabra".

The 'gringos', he learned, were – by the looks of them – a group of mercenaries, who had come into town by boat, as if out of nowhere.

The chupacabra in question was a creature that had been responsible for several casualties in multiple towns dotting the coast, going South as far as Playa Santa Teresa. All small towns trapped between the ocean and a vast expanse of jungle. He would have dismissed it as another myth if not for the verified death certificates and the most recent attack on an elderly woman who had survived. His meeting with her at the hospital was chilling.

He had wanted to stay and get to the bottom of the mystery but his editor at the Union-Tribune reached him at his hotel and ordered him to fly home and type-up his missing person's story before the Sunday paper went to press.

Most of the story he wrote on the plane ride home and he handed it in before the deadline.

He couldn't release the survivor from his thoughts, she was trapped in his mind. That was how his drive for story-telling always worked: a person's story would get locked in his brain and he would not find peace until he could set it free with words on paper.

On Monday he pitched the idea to his editor in an attempt to get him to sign off on another investigation that would take him South. The man had laughed at first, then became angry when Duo insisted.

"I'm not footing the bill for another plane ticket and hotel stay for you to chase the Goddamn Chupacabra of all things! If you wanted to tell jokes, you should have become a cartoonist, not a journalist."

This was the kind of investigation that could drag on for weeks. The costs of traveling, hotels, and 'incentives' for the locals to be forthcoming was not something the Union-Tribune had a budget for and neither did Duo. But that didn't stop him.

He had eleven vacation days saved up and he took them, hoping that by the end of his vacation he had enough to convince his boss to at least not fire him. He did as much digging as he could and knew the phone bill at the end of the month would cause him trouble, but after seven days he was adamant that he had to pursue this. This was the story he needed to get his career back on track.

He used what little money he had in his account for a one-way trip to New York City. If he made the plea in person, he was certain he could succeed. He knew someone equally as committed to telling the truth as he was and he was banking on the notion that this person still trusted his instincts.

After a red-eye with a delayed lay-over and no sleep for twenty-seven hours, he arrived at the offices of the New York Times, right at the start of the workday. He waited by the entry with a cup of coffee that he got from the vendor around the corner, taking a single sip as a taste test.

Precisely on schedule, Heero Yuy arrived, coming from the direction of the nearest subway station. He wore jeans, a white shirt, an open button-up and a pair of sunglasses. He was already sipping on a to-go cup of coffee.

Duo didn't call out his name, waved, or even moved to draw his attention, but without missing a step Heero made a beeline for him.

"What are you doing here?"

Before saying anything, Duo held the coffee he had bought.

Heero showed him the cup he was already holding.

"If I know you as well as I think I do, you took the very last sip of that coffee right before you spotted me – right before you were supposed to step inside. And the first thing you were planning on doing, was get coffee from the machine in the lounge, on your way to your desk. This coffee, however, is much better than that sewage from the lounge."

Heero paused. His eyes were invisible behind his black shades. With a tight mouth he accepted the coffee that was offered and handed Duo his empty cup.

Duo smiled. The unchanging nature of certain things was a comfort. Not one to beat around the bush, he said: "I have a story, but I need your help."

"Hn. You need my money, you mean."

"I mean: I need your boyfriend's money."

Heero pursed his lips. The coffee was good but that remark had clearly given him a bad taste in his mouth. Fortunately, he couldn't be easily deterred when there was a possibility of a good story. "What's the story?"

"I talked to this old lady in Costa Rica who said she had been attacked by some kind of creature-…" He pushed off the wall he was leaning against when Heero walked away. He caught his arm to stop him. "Please hear me out."

Heero checked his watch and tilted his coffee left to right to get a sense of how much of the brew was left. "You have two minutes."

"There was a team of hired guns in town as well. Since I've been back, I've done a little digging. Trying to find out what's significant about Puerto Carillo. I found a newspaper article from three years ago about an island over 100 miles off the coast from that town, bought by InGen; Isla Nublar."

Heero steadily sipped his coffee.

"Why would InGen buy an island from a government known to have put a price tag on moral integrity? So I made some calls to my contacts in Puerto Carillo. Workers from that town, as well as Sámara, Nosara and many more places, have been building on that island under an impenetrable cloak of secrecy. And InGen's genetic research facility in my own damn city has upped and left. Every single employee that had been working there, now has the same address listed as their place of residence: Playa Santa Teresa. A hop and a skip South from Puerto Carillo. I called the number for that address, pretending to be a cousin of one of the researchers and I was told I could leave a message. Why? Because the scientists 'only come to shore during the weekend'. They must be working on the island. There is no reason to move operations away from San Diego to some damn island where there is no government supervision, unless they are working something that violates USA laws and regulations."

The other man demonstratively finished his coffee and, again, shoved the empty cup into Duo's hand. "I'll admit, that's interesting. But how does the damn chupacabra that you opened with figure into all of this?" He challenged, familiar enough with the folklore to give it a name.

"I have witnesses that stated those hired guns were there to hunt the creature."

"And if I know you as well as I think I do," Heero said, mimicking Duo's sentiment from before. "Those witnesses aren't the most reliable."

"They're kids," he admitted and even though he could not see Heero's eyes, it was evident in the way he moved his head that Duo had just been on the receiving end of an incredulous eye-roll. "But want to know what else I found? Those hired guns? Guess who hired them."

Heero's eyebrows disappeared behind the frame of his sunglasses. "Do you have proof of that?"

He chewed on the inside of his cheek. Lying wasn't going to help him. "…No. But-"

"Duo! Come on."

"They were American mercenaries who arrived in Puerto Carillo by speedboat. Where the fuck do you think they came from? They came from Isla Nublar."

Heero shook his head. "What is your hypothesis? That InGen is recreating movie monsters?"

"Frankly, I don't think there's a monster. Right now my hypothesis is that those deaths that have been occurring, are those mercenaries cleaning up loose ends. Maybe they were workers running their mouth, who needed to be silenced."

"Didn't you say you talked to some little old lady? Not a worker."

"She could have been someone grandma who knew too much."

"Well, if they wanted her dead because she knew too much, why was she alive to tell you anything at all?"

Duo threw his gaze up to the sky. Heero wouldn't have been recruited by the New York Times if he didn't know to keep asking questions like that. Valid as they were, however, they did not dissuade Duo. "I have a gut feeling about this, Heero." His voice quieted. He reached out and Heero stiffened but the man let him lift his sunglasses off his nose so Duo could look into his blue eyes. "Have you ever known me to be wrong?"

"Not where a story is concerned," he admitted begrudgingly.

"Please trust me on this…"

"Well…" He sighed and made a helpless gesture. "What do you propose? That I just drop what I'm working on? I'm guessing you already pitched this to your boss and he said no. What makes you think mine will let me chase after this?"

"Because you're Heero – fucking – Yuy. And because you can fund this on your own dime."

"My boyfriend's dime, you mean," he bit.

"Heero… when we were together, you set out to be youngest Pullitzer prize winner ever. You didn't do that -"

The other narrowed his eyes.

"But you can still be the youngest journalist ever to have two Pullitzer prizes." Duo watched his remark land. He watched Heero put his hands on his hips and pensively look off to the side as if the morning traffic suddenly sparked his interest.

Heero glared at him. "That was below the belt."

"It worked though."

"...Yes. It did."