Chapter Twenty-Four

The Facility

"What the hell is going on?" shouted Skinner.

David Ketterman, one of Helen Cutter's hired hands, had just lumbered through the facility portal, from the Oligocene, carrying an unconscious woman over his back. He laid her down on Skinner's anomaly-side desk, tossing notes to the floor in the process.

"Watch those!" Skinner said. He bent down to clear them up.

Ketterman sat down on Skinner's chair. "I found this girl on the other side of the anomaly. I don't know what she was doing there, but I couldn't just leave her."

Skinner placed the piled notes back on the table. He then grabbed a new pair of plastic gloves from a wall-mounted dispenser, and examined the unconscious woman. "Is she injured?"

"Not that I could see. Although, she has been asleep the whole time I've been with her. That doesn't seem quite normal."

"I can't see any skin injuries, but I'll have to take a closer look. And I'm going to have to quarantine her. God knows how long she was out there." He walked over to the console and locked the anomaly. He then turned back to Ketterman. "Why were you out there?"

"Sightseeing," he said with a wry smile. "Nah, I was in London and needed a quick way back here. Seems there was another anomaly to the same location in the British capital. The anomaly research centre there has it under control."

"So, I'm assuming you're the reason Helen wanted me to open the anomaly?" Skinner asked.

"Guilty as charged."

"Well, seeing as you didn't get disinfected and treated before going through, you're going to have to be quarantined like her."

"I was only in there for an hour, at the most. Just give me the pill, and I'll be fine."

Skinner sighed. "The pill isn't foolproof. God knows, we don't want another DX. If we were to take some modern bacterium or virus to a prehistoric era, the creatures there wouldn't be at all prepared for it. It could cause a mass extinction, and change the past, even wipe out our own ancestors."

"I washed my hands!"

"Fine." He opened one of the desk drawers and searched through it, eventually finding a packet of pink pills. These pills could wipe out any unfamiliar bacteria in the system, if given soon enough after exposure to the prehistoric or future environment, and the person didn't spend very long there. Of course, these weren't fully effective, and that was why trips to the past were infrequent. He took out two pills and threw them to Ketterman, and he swallowed them.

"Thanks," he said, before getting up and walking out.

"Where are you going?" Skinner called after him.

"To get a drink! You may want to call Helen about this." With that, he left the facility.

Skinner sighed again. "Harper!" He called one of his fellow scientists. Kenneth Harper came rushing down the corridor. "Sir?"

"Ketterman has found someone…"

XXXX

"Sir, there's something up with the detector."

Becker walked over to join Sergeant Rogers as she gazed at the detector. The arrow was unstable. It was sliding back and forth between two points. One of these points was pointing back to where they had just come, and was obviously that anomaly. But the other direction the arrow was sliding to was somewhere ahead of them. Becker took a look at where it pointed. It was down a steep canyon-side. Becker had never known this technology to give false results, so there must have been a second anomaly to this era.

"DANNY QUINN!" he shouted. His voice echoed throughout their mountainous surroundings. Creatures barked and howled in reply, but there was no Quinn.

"Right then!" His squad all stood to attention. "Quinn would probably have made his way down to the canyon floor. Flowing water can be heard down there, and where there's water, there's food. There also appears to be an active anomaly down there, so he may well have headed for that. That's our best chance of finding him. Move out!"

Becker led the way down. Quinn probably made this journey in daylight, but in the darkness of night that now surrounded them, Becker's squad would have a much tougher job.

Once they reached the bottom, Becker noticed something in the dirt. Tyre tracks. This must have been Quinn's motorcycle.

"QUINN!" he shouted again. No reply again. He gestured for the soldiers to come over to see the tracks. "He must have gone this way," Becker said. The squad followed them, eventually leading to a cave, and a locked anomaly.

"It's locked!" said Hawkins. "There must have been people here! The ARC?"

Becker looked down at his detector. This was the anomaly.

"Quinn went through," Briggs said.

"Then we wait until it unlocks," Becker said.

XXXX

"She doesn't have any foreign antigens in her body," Doctor Thorpe said. "She's clean. Just a final disinfection should so it, and then we ask her where she came from." Doctor April Thorpe had just returned from the facility operating theatre, complete with blue scrubs and white mask. "In the meantime, I need to return to the pens. I think I've nearly cracked it."

"Really? How?"

"I'll tell you if it works." She took off her mask and returned to the changing rooms.

Skinner went down to the pens. The Hyaenodons were getting restless. They should soon be transported to the final enclosure at the park. He then made his way to the second area of pens, cut off from the first by a set of barriers, which he opened using his ID card. He took a look at one of the dromaeosaurs. It was behaving very strangely, almost rabidly.

"Dammit…" he whispered. "Harper!" he called. The other scientist soon emerged from the labs. "This raptor in infected," Skinner said.

The henchmen loaded the raptor onto a container, where it could be treated separately from the other animals.

Rossiter had lied. DX had never been cured. They were still experimenting on the Isla Sorna animals. While they were making breakthroughs, DX was still appearing in the animals.

Skinner decided to return to the anomaly. His area was paleontology, not biomedical. He typed into the console, and keyed in the appropriate code. Helen had ordered him to switch the anomaly for an unknown reason.

Something was wrong. This facility was the power source for the entire park, as the magnetism produced awesome levels of power. But the console showed that there was an overload of electricity. It wasn't being used in the park. The power must have been turned off. This couldn't be good…