A/N: Yeah, I know that according to Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, they didn't bother returning to Nublar after what happened in Jurassic World, but there was no way that I was going to know about that when I first began writing down this story. That aside, though I hope you'll still keep reading this fanfic and drop a review if you liked it or even if you didn't. I don't mind either way. Oh, and this picks up where Chapter 5 left off so if things seem a bit confusing, read back a little bit to get back up to speed. Cheers. - GR
There was a lot of dirt and debris on the floor, but what appeared to be a clear path carved out by what was most likely a small group of people, maybe three or four, stretched out in front of Owen and Claire as they took in the interior of this mysterious warehouse. "Well, someone's been here recently," Claire said out loud.
"I'd say it has to be survivors from the crash," Owen continued as he knelt down to examine the trail. "And there must be more than just one or two of them; probably three or four."
They went further down the hallway, a bland gray concrete affair that ended on a flight of metal stairs that went up. They had originally been painted green but was now showing signs of the rusting metal underneath the flaking paint. Their steps echoed with a hollow ring as they went up the stairs before finally arriving at a metal platform overlooking the rest of the interior space of the warehouse, which was mostly occupied by three massive cisterns. "What on earth are those things?" Owen asked.
"I don't know," Claire replied, "but they look very like the holding tanks for the fish that we feed to the mosasaurus."
They continued up to the second floor, which was basically a network of catwalks that gave them a better view of what was actually inside the big cisterns. Claire gasped when she saw what was inside the cisterns. "They're sawfish," she exclaimed. "Very, very big sawfish. They must be intended for some kind of niche market, most probably in Asia."
"Yeah, I think you can add the European market to that," Owen said. "I can see some French, German, Spanish, and Russian warnings on the tanks alongside Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. And I think someone else is already taking advantage of all the free food." He pointed at a large pile of both clean and half-rotten bones near one of the cisterns, which also had a pair of mysterious indentations at the top. "Best not think about what made those marks," he said.
"But why in the world are we keeping these massive sawfish in these tanks in the first place?" Claire asked as she and Owen went back down to the first floor. "They're not going to be put on display in Jurassic World. And, the last time I looked, these sawfish aren't the ones we feed to the mosasaur, although if the park does go back into service, we really should think about getting these fish for the mosasaur. They would be probably way cheaper than the great white sharks for the feeding shows, and that might finally get the WWF off of our backs…"
Some sort of eerie greenish-golden glow emanated from the bottom of the cisterns, casting the shadows of the massive sawfish into murky relief on the warehouse's metallic roof. These shadows followed Claire and Owen all the way back to the first floor, which contained a row of offices and rooms which all appeared to do with the running and maintenance of this warehouse. Looking into one of the rooms, Owen found something that confirmed his initial suspicions about this place. "Will you look at this," he said as he also let out a whistle of appreciation while examining the computer that he found inside one of the offices. "Flat-screen monitor; top of the line CPU for office applications; nice, nice, nice," he muttered. "This particular model came out in 2013, so this warehouse, or facility, or whatever this place is, must have been constructed up to at least that time."
"How do you even know the years that computer models come out on?" Claire asked, genuinely curious despite herself or their current situation.
"Let's just say that back in my SEAL days, there were times when we needed to know what kind of computers the bad guys used to store their data and plans and plots so that we could break into them quickly or, if we really had to, rip them right out of their sockets without damaging them," Owen replied.
They went out of the first office and checked on some of the other rooms, which were more offices and basically copies of the first office they had entered. This was to make sure that they didn't have any unwanted neighbors with them, neighbors of the dinosaur kind. There were some droppings inside some of the offices but they appeared dry, brittle, and crumbling into dust, meaning that they had been there for quite some time already before Claire and Owen's arrival. However, it was at the very first room in the first floor of the warehouse that both of them found concrete evidence that someone had been here before them recently. This room was apparently the warehouse's communications center, if the big radio right in the middle of one of the walls wasn't proof enough. But that wasn't all that attracted their attention. There were at least four gaps in the fallen foliage scattered throughout the room, gaps shaped like a rectangle and could just fit a person inside. There was also other man-made trash such as energy bar wrappings, two empty plastic water bottles, a bundle of torn, dirty, and bloodied clothes, and some loose strips of medical gauze. "Looks like this was where the survivors patched themselves up after the crash," Owen said out loud.
"Makes sense," Claire agreed. "I mean, they've got a radio right here with them. And if they needed to get away quickly, the stairs are just right out the door. But now that begs the question: if they were here before and actually stayed for some time here then where are they now?"
"I don't know," Owen replied honestly. "Maybe the big predator that feeds on the sawfish in here scared them away."
"And I suppose you've got a plan in mind for when the same thing happens to us, right?" Claire asked.
"Sure," Owen shrugged. "Although we shouldn't attract too much attention given that the predator only probably makes a pit stop here for some quick fish food. Then again, I really hope it doesn't pick up on my eau de diesel or your dino crap perfume."
"Well, I don't know about you, but I already took the time to wash off as much of the shit away as I could when we were back in the mainland," Claire replied. She then realized what Owen was implying and she turned around to him and asked, "Are you telling me that you haven't taken so much as a single shower the whole time that we've been in Costa Rica before we got dragged over here by these Pardew PMC guys?"
"In my defense, I was busy being debriefed by the State Department and the Costa Rican police."
"Ugh. You men can be so disgusting sometimes!" But Claire merely shook her head and folded her arms in front of her and didn't push the subject further so Owen chose to ignore it. He knelt down in front of the radio and began examining it for signs of damage or missing parts. "Looks like it hasn't been roughed up too much," he said. "There's no vital parts missing apart from the transmitters themselves, which whoever built this place either took with them when they bugged out or stashed somewhere around here."
"Can you fix it?"
"If I can find the transmitters, sure," Owen replied. "It's just a matter of hooking them back up to the radio. But I'm not going to do that in this kind of lighting. I might hook up the transmitters to the wrong thing like the battery or the power source and then, boom! No more transmitter. No more power source. No more radio."
"Just like that?" Claire asked disbelievingly. "'Click, boom!'?"
"Basically, yeah, just like that, click, boom!" Owen said after a moment's thought. He then happened to look at his watch, and he muttered, "Oh, crap."
"Why? What is it?" Claire asked him.
"It's already seven in the evening," he replied. "If memory serves me right, this is the time when some of the smaller nocturnal predatory dinosaurs like raptors and other dromaeosaurs like to go hunting. At least we found a good place to spend the night and get some rest. Why don't you go sleep first, Claire? I'll keep watch over the both of us."
"And where exactly am I supposed to sleep here?" she challenged.
"Um, over there, I think? I'm sure you'll figure something out. You are a clever girl, after all." Claire shook her head in resignation and began looking around the room for a spot to lie down. She found a sleeping bag balled up and seemingly abandoned in a hurry in the far corner of the room. As it was highly improbable that the original builders of this warehouse would have any need for a sleeping bag in their radio room, Claire was sure that the sleeping bag had come from one of the survivors of the plane crash that had brought her and Owen here to Sorna in the first place. There was some blood on the sleeping bag but it was drying up and turning brown so she didn't mind it as much as she would have had it been fresh. She slid herself into the sleeping bag and closed her eyes.
It seemed to Claire as if she had just fallen asleep when she found herself opening her eyes once again. The moon was bright and full and casting its light down on the jungle of Isla Sorna and into the radio room where she and Owen were spending the night, hopefully away from the predatory dinosaurs living on the island. And speaking of Owen, Claire saw that he was gone from his place near the door, and for a moment she thought that the bastard had left her behind, and then she saw that Owen was actually sound asleep beside the door, on his haunches, with his rifle on his lap and his mouth slightly open. But as there was nothing that she could see that could have possibly woke her up, Claire shook her head and settled back down into the sleeping bag.
And then something shook her awake once again, and this time she was sure that she was being literally shaken. It wasn't just Claire, either; the whole place was shaking. Claire's first thoughts was that this was an earthquake—Islas Nublar and Sorna were volcanic islands formed from a hotspot just like the Hawaiian Islands, after all—but the shaking wasn't happening all at once. In fact, it appeared as if the tremors were getting stronger the more time passed. Then Claire realized what exactly it was that was causing the ground to shake more and more, and she sat bolt upright on the sleeping bag upon making the realization, and then she rushed for the radio room's sliding steel door.
As Claire ran for the door, she happened to bump into Owen, who grunted in his sleep before he opened his eyes as well. He saw that Claire was trying to close the sliding door, thought about letting Claire do all the work, and then he noticed that the ground was shaking in a short and rhythmic way with each tremor increasing in magnitude, then he stood up to help Claire close the door. The two of them struggled with the door as it was made of armored or reinforced steel and the rails on which it moved was rusty and hadn't been oiled for some time, but they both eventually managed to force the door closed. As Owen moved the bolt to lock and secure the door, Claire reached up for the eye-level viewing panel to slide it shut, but then she caught sight of what had been causing the tremors, and she gasped. Owen looked up through the same panel to see what had surprised Claire so much, and when he saw what it was, he couldn't help but softly blurt out, "Oh, my God."
The dinosaur inside the warehouse was unlike any other animal both of them had ever seen. It had a long and slender snout not unlike that of a crocodile or a gharial; two big, muscular forearms; a massive red sail on its back with green spots and splashes; and a pair of huge and powerful hind legs. One of the creature's eyes was visible from their vantage point, and they were grateful for it deep down as that single eye manifested pure evil and malevolence. The eye was a bright green, something between neon green and acid green. The iris in the middle was thin and slit like a cat's, which only added to the creature's fear and creepy factor.
It was Spinosaurus aegypticus.
The spinosaur looked around the warehouse, and it stopped when it noticed that one of the doors on the first floor was now closed. Claire and Owen immediately ducked down from the eyehole and flattened themselves against the door. They could hear the dinosaur's slow, deep, and rhythmic breathing, and clouds of mist from its snout flew into the room through the eyehole. At that moment, Owen knew that what he had told Claire was wrong; he was sure that the spinosaur could smell both of them inside the room even though it couldn't see them at the moment.
A low, deep growl rumbled out of the spinosaur's throat and Claire could only imagine that evil green eye looking around, trying to see the prey that it could smell was inside this now-closed room. Then, after what felt like an eternity but was probably only just one minute or two at the most, the two humans felt the spinosaur move away from the door. None of them dared move from their hiding place though as they feared that the dinosaur might be lulling them into a false sense of security in the hopes of revealing themselves. Owen finally made the first move, standing up behind the door and keeping his face flat against the rusting steel. He then angled his face so that only a thin sliver of it could be seen from outside the door, a trick that he had learned during his SEAL days so that his head wouldn't get shot off by a nervous insurgent. This time, though, Owen wasn't afraid of getting his head shot off; rather, he was more worried about his head or any other part of his body really, getting bitten off. Oh, and he also hoped that he wouldn't see a green cat-like eye on the other side when he peeked out of the door.
Luckily for Owen, there was no green eye waiting for him at the other side. The spinosaur had finally moved away from the door to the radio room and was now fishing around in one of the sawfish cisterns inside the warehouse. When Claire saw that Owen hadn't jerked back his head almost immediately after looking through the eyehole, she also got up and chanced a look through the hole.
The spinosaur was fishing at the cistern with the two strange depressions on its top. Its head was hovering above the water, its snout submerged. Suddenly, the head jerked forward, and then it raised its head to reveal one of the huge sawfish caught in its teeth. The sawfish thrashed around and tried to strike at the spinosaur with its jagged rostrum but the spinosaur tossed the sawfish onto the ground and swiped at its back with its huge forelimbs, leaving huge gaping gashes in the flesh. The sawfish, which had been flopping around when it was dropped to the ground, grew very still, allowing the spinosaur to finally tear into its latest kill. The spinosaur dug into the sawfish's flesh, stripping off big chunks and tossing its head back to swallow the meat.
The spinosaur suddenly stopped eating and looked around the place as it sensed that it was being observed. It laid its eyes on the closed room where it could smell prey, but once it saw nothing of interest, or at least nothing that it would consider prey worth wasting effort and energy on, it turned back to the sawfish it had caught and began stripping off more chunks of flesh from it. Meanwhile, unseen by the spinosaur, two pairs of human eyes watched silently as the dinosaur ate its kill.
