Author's note: Thanks for the feedback and the words of encouragement, guys!
So, y'all ready for more?
Present day
The second time he came to, the sun was high up in the sky and the pounding in his skull receded to a dull, throbbing ache that didn't bother him so much as annoy him. He was thirsty, that much he knew for sure. It was hot again – shocker! – and even in his hazy state, he was fully aware of being slowly burned alive.
Owen pried his eyes open and blinked in the bright sunlight, waiting for his sight to adjust, and then sucked in a sharp breath when his eyes landed on a chewing snout of a dinosaur not even ten feet away from him, only letting it out slowly when he realized it was only a Stegosaurus, and another one behind the first. If Owen's presence bothered them in any particular way, they didn't show it, choosing to focus on their lunch.
Ahead of him and slightly to the left, he could see a black metal carcass of what was most likely his chopper lying behind the trees, its blades sticking out at awkward angles, standing out like a sore thumb in the greenery of the jungle.
His gun must still be in there somewhere, as well as some other armory. And a first aid kit. And if he was lucky, a working radio. Although, if it was damaged, he just had to keep moving south until he reached the resort – the size of the island made it virtually impossible not to find his way back to the park eventually. Now, the danger of being eaten was something else entirely, but he decided to deal with one problem at a time.
Slowly, using the tree he was siting against for support, Owen pushed himself up, instantly feeling lightheaded and unstable on his feet, but he'd had it worse. The pain in his left shoulder shot sharply through his arm and into the shoulder blade and down his back, making his grimace and clench his teeth.
It was slightly disconcerting that no one came looking for him yet, but there was a chance he'd meet the search party halfway back to the compound.
Fixing his dislocated shoulder without any help, or decent painkillers, was a treat, and his involuntary cry spooked the dinosaurs and a flock of birds that took off into the sky, and left him crouching behind the crumpled chopper for a while, listening, waiting for the approach of something big and ravenous, his heart racing in his chest, until the quiet settled around him again. Although, even then, he could still feel the ground tremble beneath him under the heavy footsteps of the I-Rex, his memory helpfully suppling him with vivid images of her razor-sharp teeth.
This goddamn island…
As it turned out, there was a big difference between knowing that she was dead and actually knowing it.
The chopper was a mess, the entire front half of it wrapped around a boulder, and Owen shivered at the idea of what would've happened to him had he not been thrown out of it on impact. The dashboard was a history that buried his hopes of radioing his location to someone else in the park under a pile of broken metal and plastic, and his handgun was nowhere to be found. His Remington, on the other hand, was crammed under the seat in the back, and he had never been happier than when he managed to uncover a dented box with the first aid supplies. He popped a few Aspirins into his mouth and pocketed the bottle in case it wasn't enough.
Owen straightened up then, ignoring the pulsing ache in his ribs, and started southward, hoping to get back to the resort before sunset on the off chance he'd be less lucky to make it through his second night in the jungle alive.
xoox
5 weeks ago
"It's a joke, right?" Owen frowned from where he was sitting on the bed, his back resting against the headboard.
"I broke the protocols." Claire noted and kicked off her heels with exasperation, exhausted out of her mind and so scared she could feel it in her bones, and now also annoyed that there was nothing else she could take out her frustration on other than her shoes.
His jaw tightened. "That's bullshit, Claire! What were you supposed to do? Let your nephews die?"
She asked the exact same question not two hours ago, and never got a coherent answer, receiving the same response that started to sound like a broken record soon enough for her to tune it out entirely. "…contacted the security blah, blah, blah… never left her post blah, blah, blah…" If the Masrani lawyers and execs were waiting for her to start apologizing for her actions as far as her family was concerned, well, they might as well fucking bite her.
"I was supposed to follow the procedures." Her response was mechanical – something she ran through her head dozens of times, the words making less and less sense the longer it went.
Claire paused by the vanity table to take off her earrings, avoiding to so much as glance at her own reflection, unnerved by how unfamiliar her own face appeared to her, the person in front of her looking like a stranger that climbed out of her skin and took her place.
"It sounds absurd." Owen shook his head.
She sighed and rubbed her temples as if physically trying to push away the headache building up behind her eyes. "That's not how the Board sees it."
He was on his feet and standing behind her, his forehead creased in disbelief.
"But they know what you did next. Don't they?"
"Yeah… I intentionally let a dangerous animal out of her paddock, thus endangering thousands of people that were still on the island. They might want to come back to that later."
"That's ridiculous." He snorted, his fists balling, and she could feel his desire to put one of them through the wall just for the hell of it. "How much trouble are you in?"
"Not much. Yet. I don't know." She caught his gaze in the mirror. Held it. Tried to keep her voice steady. "They can't pin it all on me because I know too much. About Wu's lab and the hybrids. And because they'd lose their face if it turned out they hired a complete moron to run the park packed with bloodthirsty dinosaurs. I'm not sure that, in the light of everything else, they can afford to pull something like this."
Owen lips quirked. "Don't be so hard on yourself. There's nothing completely moronic about you."
"Don't push it."
"Hey, it's gonna be okay, okay?" He leaned in and buried his nose in her hair, his arms wrapping around her shoulders from behind, and she wanted to desperately to believe him. Didn't even notice how badly she was shaking until she could feel his steady form against her back. "Do you want me to set something loose on 'em?"
No, definitely not, was her initial reaction – her professional and calculated response. But she had just sat through a torturous meeting with basically everyone in this world who could turn her life into hell at a snap of their fingers, her heart still leaping uncomfortably at the mere memory of it, at how they spoke about the tragedy as if it was nothing but a business fallback. If they tried hard enough, they could actually send her to jail. Her throat closed up at the thought, and so God help her…
"Like what?" Claire turned around.
"Well, we still have that T-Rex somewhere…"
"Oh, no!" She stopped him right here, hands up in the air. "I think I've had enough of the T-Rex for the rest of my life."
Owen moved closer, his fingers threading through her hair.
"Then how 'bout we focus on something else tonight?"
Claire felt the tension abate slowly, her lips tugging up at the corners on the will of their own. Safe, safe, safe, her heart thumped. "I'm listening."
xoox
Present day
Memory was a funny thing, Claire mused as she watched Isla Nublar step out of the mist hanging low along the shore and grow bigger before her eyes as her stomach kept flopping up and down.
She'd hardly left it in over 7 years, allowing it to consume every spare moment of her time, becoming somehow bigger than everything else, but now she could barely recognize it. It looked vaguely familiar, and yet as alien as a distant memory you almost forgot you had until it was pulled out of the farthest corner of your mind. She wondered if a little absently if it was because the park was never truly hers, or because it tried to take her life, disregarding her devotion to it.
Two months ago, Claire thought that the things couldn't possibly get any worse. Two months ago, she boarded the ferry heading back to the mainland, knowing exactly what was waiting for her there – a whole new level of the corporate nightmare she had trouble even imagining but couldn't help dreading all the same, liberally peppered with such consuming guilt it was almost breaking her in half.
Back then, she didn't think about the liability – her liability – yet. Back then, all she could see were black plastic bags neatly stacked in the far corner of the hangar where the survivors waited for the ferry to take them home, strategically placed there to keep them out of the sun. The lucky ones, she overheard someone say – a callous and yet accurate statement. At least they were found, unlike Simon Masrani who would only be discovered a week later, almost by incident. Her doing, whether she liked it or not.
Two months ago, she thought… No, she knew she would never be coming back, dinosaurs be damned. But look how the tables had turned…
She griped the railing tighter and willed herself not to jump over it and start swimming back towards San Jose. Wouldn't that be fun, in retrospect?
There was a car waiting for her and Lowery at the dock and a glum-looking man dressed in InGen's black uniform. He nodded curtly at the two of them, and then they were driving down the road Claire knew like the back of her hand and deeper into the island, and everything inside of her screamed in terror, pushing her back to safety. To where everything made sense. Instead, she clutched the door handle so tight her knuckles turned white and watched the jungle close around them.
"You okay?" Lowery asked from his spot on the other end of the backseat.
Claire nodded without looking at him, her eyes scanning the forest outside her window, struggling to catch a glimpse of something moving between the trees, hoping she wouldn't.
Okay was a very evasive concept these days. Okay meant she'd made it through the night, that she managed to get out of her bed in the morning, that she didn't end up hyperventilating in a company of three people of more, that the ground shaking under the passing truck didn't make her start running for the cover, thinking it was a T-Rex chasing her.
Okay went a long way.
Okay meant she was alive.
Besides, saying she was okay was so much easier than trying to explain why she wasn't.
"Wouldn't it be fun to see the T-Rex now?" Lowery muttered more to himself than to her.
"Don't even joke about it," Claire shook her head.
Barry was waiting for them outside of the Operations building when they pulled up to it 10 minutes later, looking more like a soldier than an animal handler, his eyes scanning the trees covering the sloping hill before him. He shielded his eyes from the sun when Claire climbed out and his lips twisted a little – a faint ghost of a smile, a recognition between the two people that went through the same ordeal.
Her lips tugged upwards at the sight of him ever so slightly as well, the knot in her stomach feeling less tight by the second. She hadn't seen him ever since her falling out with Owen, although she knew he was a part of the team coming back to the park, but just like with Lowery, it was hard to hold it against him when the rest of the world was against her and it was a damn relief to see a familiar face.
"Anything?" She asked after a quick exchange of greetings and Good to see you's as they all stepped inside and headed up to the Control Room.
It was an unnecessary question – she could see it in his eyes, in the crease between his eyebrows, in the stiff line of his shoulders. There was a dark gloomy air about him, and a part of her didn't want to know the answer.
Barry shook his head without turning to her as he led the way – not that she didn't know where to go, but she wasn't in charge anymore. It felt… odd.
"Nothing," he said. "No contact in nearly 40 hours."
Claire swallowed uneasily and pushed through the door after him with Lowery following at her heels and the man that took them here right behind him.
"But it doesn't mean…" she started. "He might still be alive."
"We hope he just doesn't have any means of communication, is all."
The Control Room looked exactly the way she remembered it – and different at the same time. Too empty for Claire taste. Some of the monitors weren't turned on, the remaining showing live feed from the surveillance cameras all around the island. She scanned the images quickly with a trained eye but found nothing but the forest, the trees swaying in the breeze. There was a cluster of men standing by one of the desks, bent over what looked like digital maps.
No one acknowledged their arrival.
"The problem is, we haven't located the helicopter either," Barry added, catching her gaze.
"And it's a bad thing why?"
"He could've fallen into the water," Lowery explained before Barry could respond, his eyes glued to the screens just like hers were a few moments ago.
Barry nodded, lips pursed tight, and Claire wished she had something to lean on to, feeling suddenly nauseated. He headed towards one of workstations that displayed a digital map of the island and the surrounding area, and she followed him on cotton legs.
"The last message we got came from here," he pointed at a spot to the east from the island, about 30 miles away from the coast by Claire's rough estimation. "He was expected to land 15 minutes later."
She followed the approximate route Owen must have taken, chewing thoughtfully on her lip. Then looked Barry square in the face. "You've got boats."
"If he fell into the water, it falls under the jurisdiction of the Costa Rican Coast Guard."
A tall man in his early forties pushed himself away from the group Claire spotted earlier and stepped towards them. Square chin, greying hair on his temples, straight back, heavy gaze. She'd never seen him before, but she could all but feel Barry bristle and flare his nostrils at the sound of his voice.
She stared him down. "So what's the problem?"
The man's lips twitched into a humorless smirk. "They're terrified to come anywhere near those islands."
"That's ridiculous!" Claire huffed. "Are you telling me you're going to just sit back and do nothing?"
He arched an eyebrow, unimpressed by the tone of her voice. "There's not much we can do."
Her eyes narrowed, head tilted slightly to her shoulder.
"Excuse me, who are you?"
"Dave Harris, InGen. And you are…?"
"Claire Dearing—"
"Of course." He gave her an apprehensive once-over, nearly snickering, and she had to clench her teeth to hold back a comment rolling on the tip of her tongue. "I should've guessed."
"I beg your pardon?"
"There're no more animals left on this island for you to set loose, Ms. Dearing. So why don't you go back to your air-conditioned office and let us do our work?"
"And what work would that be, exactly, Mr. Harris? Allowing a bunch of superstitious people to call the shots?"
A flash of anger flickered in his eyes. "No one told me you'd be arriving." For a brief moment, his gaze darted toward Barry, but the latter didn't flinch, and Harris decided to keep on trying to incinerate Claire with his glare.
"Surprise." She said flatly.
"You're not authorized to be here."
Her lips curved into a small dangerous smile, and beside her, Lowery mumbled, "Don't go there, man," in a futile attempt to warn Harris against getting his head bitten off.
"This place shouldn't be authorized to exist."
"I'm going to bring it up with your superiors," he promised.
Without hesitation, Claire pulled her phone out of her pocket and handed it to him. "If you get Caldwell, tell him I said hi. I'm finally where he wanted me to be all along."
Beside her, Barry snorted and covered with a cough. If Harris hear it, he chose to ignore it. "You are to leave this island at the earliest convenience."
"Good luck with that."
Behind her, Lowery and Barry bumped fists.
xoox
It finally started to dawn on Owen that something was off when he walked for about 2 hours without coming across any road.
Isla Nublar was cut in bits and pieces by roads and trails and tourist tracks.
He might not have known the park all too well, his job never allowing enough free time for him to explore every corner of it, but he sure as hell knew his way around it, and by this point, he should have at least reached the Gyrospehere valley. Unless, of course, he was circling in on himself, which he didn't discard as impossible, but something was definitely wrong, although he couldn't quite put his finger on what it was, exactly.
His phone was off – either a dead battery, or it didn't take his diving into mud and rain water too well – thus eliminating the possibility of using a GPS. How fucking lucky! He tried to figure out where he was based on the landscape, but without any defining landmarks, it was a lost cause.
The worst thing, however, was that he was getting hungry and weak, and that pounding headache started to make him wonder if he had a mild concussion, which would be nothing but a cherry of top of his terrific day, Owen thought with dismay.
And where the hell was everybody?
xoox
"No, you listen to me! I don't care what your problem is, but if you don't send someone here this very moment, I'm going to-" Claire took in a breath, and then frowned. "Hello? Hello!"
Lips pursed together, she turned around to find Barry, Lowery, and a couple of other people watch her with growing interest.
"They hung up on me," she looked at her phone with exasperation, debating throwing it against the all for good measure. "The Coast Guard hung up on me."
"When you mentioned The Muertes Archipelago?" Lowery huffed. "Figures…"
"And what did you expect?" Harris snorted behind her. "That you would bat your eyelashes and everyone would come running in?"
Claire bristled at the implication, a wave of irritation nearly sweeping her off her feet. "At least I'm doing something."
Which wasn't a fair thing to say, and she knew it – in the hours since she'd arrives, she watched the search groups move through the jungle turning every stone on their way, heard them report their progress, saw them come back to the park while the others went out, as she hoped that maybe this time, they'd say something she wanted to hear. They were doing their best, she couldn't deny that.
But there was something about rubbing it in Harris's face…
"How's that working out?"
"What is your problem, Mr. Harris?"
"My problem, Ms. Dearing, is that I don't give a crap about what kind of petting zoo you were running here before. This is not your playground anymore, and I don't like the civilians barging in on my operations."
"Well, you're not being efficient now, are you?"
He opened his mouth to say something, but then Barry's walkie-talkie cracked with static until someone voice broke through it, their words unintelligible, and Claire forgot about Harris immediately, her ears perking up at the sound. But when she met Barry's eyes, he shook his head. Nothing.
"We broke the island into sectors and are searching them one by one, moving north," he explained when she joined him again, pointing at the dotted lines that made the entire place look like a grid. "Most of the carnivores migrated to the north-east part of the island. Here and here." Claire followed his finger. "Once we get there, they'll slow us down. But so far, we've covered almost half of the territory."
"It's not good, is it?" She asked in a voice that threatened to break any moment. "If he was coming from the east, he wouldn't make it this far north."
Without responding, Barry shifted his eyes to the screen. She didn't need to have it spelled out though.
On the left from them, Lowery cleared his throat.
"Have you guys thought that maybe you're looking in the wrong place altogether?"
Everyone in the room turned to him, all eight pairs of eyes boring into his face.
He cleared his throat again and pushed his glasses higher up his nose. "Okay, so Owen was coming from the mainland, heading west." His fingers danced over the keyboard until his map was projected on the main screen. "Say, something happened… the storm or whatever…" More typing. "And he missed the island. So we add the wind… and he'd be heading straight for—"
"Isla Sorna?" Claire frowned.
"Let's face it, Claire. You can't get lost on this island. Eaten – yeah, in 2 minutes flat. But lost? Not likely. Not for someone like Grady."
"This makes no sense," Harris huffed, but his resolve was faltering, that much was obvious.
She turned to Barry. "Is it possible?"
He studied the trajectory line drawn by Lowery, brows furrowed in concentration, before answering reluctantly. "It's not impossible. If he had a full tank." A pause. "I can check that, and then—"
"Hold on, hold on," Harris stepped into her line of vision, addressing mostly Barry and giving Lowery a stink-eye. "Isla Sorna is a restricted zone."
"That belongs to InGen," Claire reminded him instantly. "You don't need anyone's permission to search it."
"No one is searching anything."
"Are you kidding me?" She snapped. "He could be there, he could be hurt! We need to go right away." Her hands balled into fists by her sides, her voice trembling with barely controlled anger.
"It's almost nightfall," Harris told her, his tone uncompromising. "Nobody goes anywhere after dark."
"You've gotta be out of your goddamn…"
"He's right, Claire," Barry interrupted her. "It's too dangerous."
Lowery pointedly looked away.
Claire clenched her jaw. "You understand what we're talking about, right?"
He rubbed the bridge of his nose, and "Look, it's not like—"
"Fine," she hissed through her teeth. "We'll go first thing in the morning."
"Now, wait a minute." Harris drawled. "You," his fingers jabbed at Claire, "are not going anywhere. You don't have a clearance to go anywhere near Isla Sorna."
She squared her shoulders, her chin tipped up, her eyes brazing with rage. "Stop me."
xoox
He should've known it was too good to be true, Owen thought, sprinting through the trees and hoping against hope he wouldn't trip and end up flying face first to the ground in the next ten seconds as three Ceratosauruses kept closing in on him, their teeth snapping mere inches form his back.
Since when did they even have those?!
Panting, his muscles burning, Owen took a sharp turn to the left, hoping to throw them off, but the beasts simply regrouped. The maneuver only bought him a few seconds – not that he was going to complain about that.
He couldn't take them down. Not on his own. Not without having to reload his shotgun. Not without giving them enough time to rip him to pieces. Even if he fired and hit one of them, the smell of blood would probably drive the other two insane. And by the looks of it, he didn't stand a chance at tiring them down either.
Shit, shit, shit!
That was just fucking perfect…
He flew out into a clearing, cursing himself for not staying under the trees where he'd be a much less easier target than in the open. And then he all but skidded to a halt at the sight of a low structure covered with ivy and half-buried into a sloping hill. InGen's logo was barely legible on the rust-covered steed doors. The doors that looked freaking massive.
Heavy panting got louder behind his back, something let out a loud angry scream, and Owen sped up for the building – a hangar? a storage? – feeling like his lungs were going to burst in his chest.
The old hinges resisted the pull, squealing in protest when he yanked the door open, his body screaming in pain against it, but he managed to make a crack big enough for him to squeeze through. And then he slammed it close with a deafening bang and dropped the bolt into its slot seconds before two, and then three bodies smacked into it, screeching.
Gulping the air hungrily, Owen leaved heavily against the doors that kept shuddering under the assault of the dinosaurs on the other side, their claws scratching it furiously. It would hold them off though, that much he was certain of. Soon they'd lose their interest and wander off in search of a better prey. Close. Too close.
He sank heavily to the floor, waiting for his heartbeat to get back to normal so that he could assess the damage caused by this marathon, as he waited for his eyes to adjust to near complete darkness of what he now thought was a bunker of sorts.
"Shit," he muttered quietly.
Where the hell was he?
xoox
In her mind, Main Street would always look chipper and festive, crowded with excited people, boiling with dozens of languages and laughter. Claire watched it being constructed, walked it a thousand times in the years she'd run the park. It had always been bright and colorful, always buzzing with excitement.
Her memory of her last night in the park was hazy and unfocused, as far as the destruction of the shops and the restaurants was concerned. She'd never looked back to see what it turned into when Owen ushered her and Zach and Gray to the docks where the camp was already set for the survivor. She was too tired. Didn't have it in her to think about anything but not falling apart now that their lives weren't in imminent danger and it was the only thing she actually wanted to do. She wanted to collapse onto the concrete pathway, curl into a ball and cry until there were no tears left.
Instead, she entered a half-catatonic state that only cracked and crumbled around her once her sister had arrived, the tightness in her chest growing unbearable as the tears began to flow. It would get worse later, much worse, but standing in the hangar then, she was just relieved to have Karen there and know that at least some part of this nightmare was over.
That being said, Claire knew, of course, that Main Street would look bad. She just didn't know it would resemble a setting of a post-apocalyptic film with broken glass and construction debris and torn down signs everywhere. Her breath hitched in her throat as she gaped at all this, trying to piece it together with the image in her head and failing so badly she thought she was going to lose it again.
What a perfect metaphor for her broken life.
"You shouldn't be here alone, Claire."
She started and turned around to find Barry heading her way, his eyes scanning the skeletons of the buildings around them.
"Pteranodons," he added as if in apology for telling her what to do and where to go in her own park.
Claire swallowed uneasily, her eyes picking bright letters 'RITAL' out of the broken bricks and bent metal pieces of something or the other – a part of what used to be a 'MARGARITALAND' sign.
"You think Owen's there? On Isla Sorna?"
Barry didn't reply at once. "I guess there's only one way to find one."
"But…?" She looked at him out of the corner of her eye.
"We don't even know what lives there," he said grimly, his gaze hard. "They closed it for a reason."
She shuddered involuntarily. The thought crossed her mind, and how could it not? But it didn't seem half as bad until he actually said it out loud.
"I knew it was a bad idea to come back here," she told him in a hollow voice.
"And yet, here we are," his smile was small and humorless. "Don't mind Harris. He's an ass."
Claire's lips twitched sourly. "What is it with this job? First Hoskins, now this."
"They only pick the best ones." They both glanced at the Mosasuarus's pool at the end of Main Street, its surface still and smooth like a glass, the air humid and windless around them, the sun about to sink below the horizon. "I should take you to the hotel before it got dark," Barry suggested after a while.
"No," she shook her head. "I think I'll—"
"Sleep in the Control Room?" He slung his rifle over his shoulder. "Bad idea. Trust me." And then, "There are two teams still out there. I won't call them back for another hour or so. We're doing everything we can."
Claire ran her hand through her hair, heaving a shaky sigh. "I know Harris doesn't want me to go with you tomorrow, but could you…" She trailed off.
He nodded without hesitation. "They're taking a motor boat. But you could fly with me."
xoox
"We're going to have to land!" A voice shouted into Claire's ears, breaking through the howling of the wind and the noise of the chopper blades cutting through the air. Not Barry, the pilot, she thought, although it was hard to tell when she could barely hear anything at all.
They circled the north-east part of Isla Sorna – a part where, according to Lowery's estimation, Owen would've landed if he made it here – a couple of times peering out their respective windows at the lush greenery below, her heart hammering as she waited, hoped….
In front of her, Barry nodded. "Can't see anything from here anyway."
"There's a clearing straight ahead." The man said. "Or we can try to find the old base. They had a landing platform."
"No, it's too far inland."
"A valley it is, then."
Claire gripped the armrests as they began to descent, her stomach doing uncomfortable flops as the wind currents tossed the chopper from side to side. Either that, or because of the fact that they'd been flying around for a while without any result.
It wasn't that she expected Owen to oh so conveniently wait for them on the beach, pissed at how long it took them to figure out where he was, but now that she saw the vast expanse of the forest and rolling hills stretching to the horizon, she started to realize that it would be akin looking for a needle in a haystack. Sorna was nearly four times bigger than Nublar, and about ten times more dangerous. All things considered, it didn't bode well for… well, anyone.
Inhale. Exhale. Repeat.
She was not going to freak out, she was not—
The helicopter touched the ground with a thud and a shudder, the blades slowing down once the engine was off.
She tossed the earphones aside and climbed out on unsteady legs, her knees just about to give in from adrenaline rushing through her system, half expecting for something to charge at them from the trees, half relieved to not be stuck in a tin can hanging up in the sky anymore.
Back at the park, Barry gave her a handgun, and now it felt odd and heavy in her hand. Out of place. Like it didn't belong. She didn't want to use it. Couldn't imagine using it. The very thought was making her queasy, but, as Barry said to her before they departed, Sorna was a wild territory. She had to do whatever she had to do to survive.
She nodded, swallowing the comment about being sick as hell of trying to survive.
"Harris is docking in the east," Barry said to her and the pilot who also geared up, looking threatening and serious. "We're going to head there, meet them in the middle," his eyes flicked quickly toward Claire, "and if we don't find anything on the way, we'll… discuss what to do next once we're all together."
She didn't respond. Didn't have it in her to ask what would they do if they don't find anything, period. Tried not to think about it altogether. It was a long shot and they all knew it, but talking about it was somehow making it even more foolish and stupid, and there wasn't that much hope left already – she didn't want the last grains of it taken away from her.
"Stay close," he said. "If we get separated, head east."
The pilot nodded curtly. Claire refused to think of how they could possibly get separated.
And then they were walking.
"Are you in trouble for bringing me along?" She asked Barry after a little while when they reached the trees running along the perimeter of the valley, more for the sake of breaking the silence than anything else.
He flashed a quick grin at her – the first real one since she arrived.
"Nothing I can't handle," he assured her. "If he's here, we'll get him."
Claire didn't say anything to that, choosing to focus on stifling humidity and swarm of insects buzzing around them – it was easier than to actually think of a thousand worst-case scenarios that kept running through her head on a loop.
They'd been walking for half an hour when she caught a shadow moving behind the trees. She thought it was just the wind at first, the branches and twigs swaying back and for the, but it sounded wrong. Then it happened again, and she felt her hair stand up on the back of her neck.
"Barry…"
"We've got company," he said softly without breaking a stride, but his posture went stiff and he got a better grip on his rifle. The pilot walking slightly ahead of them did the same.
"The good kind?"
"The worst one." He slowed down, alarmed. "The raptors." The words felt like a punch in the gut. "Two, as far as I can tell. Maybe more." Move movement around them, not so subtle anymore. He exchanged a quick look with the pilot, both of them nodding in unspoken agreement. "Claire? When I tell you to run, run."
"Okay."
Where? she wanted to ask. How far? What about you? There was so much wrong with this plan, and she didn't want to go along with it, she didn't want to move, she wanted to—
"RUN!"
And then her heels were digging into the soft soil, her hands pushing three-foot tall ferns out of her way as she charged forward, her lungs burning more with fear than exertion, her breathing uneven and panicked. Claire didn't dare stop and look back, see if the others were following. If the dinosaurs were getting closer. Through the pounding of her own footsteps and the blood rush in her ears, it was impossible to tell the sounds apart.
The ground beneath her feet began to slant, making it harder to maintain her balance as she kept on slipping and nearly falling on a thick carpet of foliage and broken twigs, her hands grabbing instinctively for the low branches, burning the skin of her palms but, by some miracle, keeping her upright, her breathing coming out in soft whimpers.
A gun. God, she had a gun. But how was she supposed to stop and aim and—
A single gunshot exploded in the distance, sending flocks of birds into the sky, echoing in the trees and scattering down the hill.
She stopped and whipped around, her eyes searching for… something, anything, swiping the trees before her, but there was no movement, no other sounds but the shrieks of spooked parrots.
For a moment, her mind zeroed in on this spot, her heart hammering so fast she was seeing black dots before her eyes, her whole body vibrating with the ground trembling underneath the Indominus Rex… No, that wasn't right, this wasn't how-
And then suddenly there was a loud crack right beneath her, and the ground disappeared. Claire's arms flailed in the air on instinct, trying to reach for something to break the fall. For a second, she was suspended in the air, more confused than scared at this point because What the actual hell?! before she plummeted down and smacked into something.
Someone.
Someone who emitted a surprised yelp and string of curses as they both tumbled down to the ground, their arms closing around her in a dead grasp, a steady hand cupping the back of her head.
And then everything went silent again, save for the dust and dry leaved and wood splinters raining on the through the opening above them, as she buried her face in the stranger's shoulder, trying to be very still.
And then—
"Claire?"
Still panting, she pried her eyes open and pulled back to find herself face to face with an equally confused Owen Grady, of all people.
"You could've just knocked," he noted, cracking a half-grin. "Instead of knocking me down."
To be continued...
A/N: And now we're finally going to have some fun! (At least I will :)) This story is supposed to have a pretty dark tone, and soon we'll get there.
Thanks for reading, guys, and for being totally awesome! Comments are always welcome :D
