Like crows on a battlefield, they landed among the bodies and began to eat the dead or the dying, or worse, as they had become frenzied, to attack those spared by the pachyrhinosaurs' charge and the previous attack.
One of the Harpactognathus however, entered in the Winston's to raid the kitchen where meat was still grilling.
The guards, barely recovering from the charge who had neutralised a fifth of their force, regrouped and drove the harpactognathus out of the plaza.
But they were only confronted to a dozen of individuals since when it arrived in Burroughs, the swarm had scattered in formations all across the northern part of the city. Brunet then decided to disperse his men in order to protect the civilians from the rampaging animals, help the keepers neutralise the latter and the J-SEC in leading the visitors to the shelters.
"Darbinian, take some shooters with you and go on the roofs. Temba, take half of the remaining men and hold the plaza," he said to one of the riders, a South African. "The other half with me and Leif, we have to save those we can. Durant, Velasquez, go defend the door!"
The two recruits nodded and took positions in front of the Discovery Center's bronze door, helping there the J-SEC officers to bring the civilians inside.
While Darbinian and four other shooters were already climbing the walls in order to reach the roofs and the towers, and Temba and those in charge of defending the plaza setting up a security perimeter, the remaining guards in fighting condition, a little less than fifteen, split into two groups: One, led by Brunet and Cole headed to the Avenue, and the other, led by Drekanson and Maathai, hastened to join the quays bordering the night show's pond.
On the way, the two groups saw that the pachyrhinosaurs had stopped running but that lost and frightened by the pterosaurs, their panic had turned into a destructive madness and they were attacking everything that was moving around them, humans, flying reptiles but also the horses and the mantellisaurs.
Seeing Darbinian and those with her within earshot, running on the roofs towards shooting positions, Brunet shouted at them:
"The pachys! Kill the pachys!"
Killing an adult pachyrhinosaur in such circumstances was not an easy task and most would have even agreed that without the cannons and the big steel bolts, it would have been almost impossible.
Arrows and many types of bullets were inefficient against their hard hide and the only kind of ammunition that could cause any significant damage were those of a calibre identical or higher than that of an elephant gun while the horses were so frightened by them that even the most skilled riders couldn't have approached enough to deliver fatal blows or shots.
Without a heavy weapon, the only way to kill a pachyrhinosaur was to shoot in the eye in order to hit the brain, which meant that the shooter had to stand in front of it while the animal was charging him or her.
Seeing some of her group's members waste their ammunition on the ceratopsians, Darbinian instead ordered them to aim at the pterosaurs and Brunet asked in his microphone to the remaining marauder to come to the Avenue and take care of the pachyrhinosaurs.
X
Meanwhile, Velasquez and Durant were helping the civilians and the wounded to reach the safety of the Center.
Despite the desperate situation and the shock of the Indominus' ambush, Durant kept going and remained focused. Her sense of duty was stronger and demanded her to show courage in front of those defenceless people.
She had to be strong for them.
Among the arriving people, they glimpsed a familiar limping figure.
Like all other unauthorized employees, Lambert Ross had been asked to evacuate his workplace and to head for one of the shelters alongside the visitors but the quetzalcoatluses' first attack followed by the pachyrhinosaur's charge had reduced to nothing the efforts made to organize a proper evacuation and among the fugitives, there were even some of the security officers tasked with supervising said evacuation.
As they had crossed half the distance between the obelisk and the steps, some within the group of visitors that was ahead of him suddenly stopped to point something way above the door of the Center.
"Up there! Watch out!" One of them shouted.
Durant and Velasquez raised their heads and among the line of pterosaur statues crowning the entrance's facade, they saw three Harpactognathus, watching with great interest the fleeing people converging towards the building.
Since their likeness to the statues and the declining light because of the cloud passing over the city, so thick that it blocked sunlight, no one had seen them earlier and quickly they laid their eyes upon the slowest and, apparently, the weakest of their potential prey: Ross.
They leapt in the air and swooped on the innkeeper. The latter, having seen the threat, took a knocked down stroller near his feet and brandished it with both hands, ready to face his attackers.
Using it to strike them, he defended himself valiantly for a moment before a bite on his arm almost made him yield. It was then that Durant drew her sabre and rushed to his rescue.
She struck a fatal blow to the Harpactognathus which turned away from Ross first to attack her instead, sliced off another's wing and finally, defeated the third by thrusting her blade in its throat.
Blood squirted on her face and when it collapsed against her, Durant pushed the body away and stood there for a moment, looking dazed, gasping while her limbs were shaking and adrenaline still rushing through her body. Ross have her a grateful look.
Durant regained her concentration and looked back to the door of the Center.
"Quick, upstairs!" She said to the innkeeper.
She wiped the blood on her mouth with the back of her hand and, following him backwards, returned to the steps.
X
Zach and Gray had narrowly avoided being part of the charge's victims.
At the last moment, they had sheltered with others behind the same tram on which one of the quetzalcoatlus had leapt before attacking the Guard contingent and whose team of two mantellisaurs had managed to escape just before the charge, derailing slightly the vehicle in the process.
The first of the pachyrhinosaurs to take the Avenue, knocking down the people on his way like a bowling ball striking pins, had headed towards the west sidewalk and hit the tram head-on out of inattention, making it turn towards the middle of the street, but the second animal, whose sight had been obstructed by the moving crowd in front of him, had also hit the vehicle hard, making it turn even more. It had ended up perpendicular to the street with its front part resting on the sidewalk, forcing all along Zach, Gray and those with them to follow the tram's movements in order to avoid being crushed.
Thus, the other pachyrhinosaurus, unable to pass through the space left between the tram and the west arcade, were forced to pass either in the middle of the latter or on the east side of the Avenue.
The tram also lost its stability because of the first two hits and when it was hit a third time, it had tumbled and the Mitchells had ended with the roof in their backs.
When they had wanted to leave their shelter, after that the pachyrhinosaurs had turned left at the end of the Avenue, the quetzalcoatluses had returned, along with their former aviarymates. Their arrival had forced the small group to seek refuge in the nearest building, a restaurant where they had hidden behind the walls or under the tables.
A minute or two elapsed during which they stayed that way, until some harpactognathuses entered in the restaurant through a broken window and, attracted by the food left on the plates, started to walk in the aisles, jumping on the tables from time to time to feed on a sausage or a piece of steak. Sometimes they knocked over the places settings, making the humans hidden a few meters away start.
Worked up, some began to sob, attracting the black-faced pterosaurs which found them.
In the commotion that followed, tables were knocked down, the furniture ravaged, and plates of food and knives flew in the direction of the harpactognathuses. Zach and Gray were separated from the others during it and when they left the restaurant by the entrance and crossed the arcade, they ended up between two pachyrhinosaurs.
They had become enraged and the one on their right didn't stopped bellowing as he tried to charge between the columns of the arcade in order to reach some visitors huddled against a wall.
At one point, he gave up and disappeared behind the Emporium.
For his part, the other was facing a group of guards.
As they passed fast behind the ceratopsian, Gray saw what was behind the soldiers.
"Zach!" He suddenly yelled.
Before the latter could see what was threatened him, his brother pulled him by the arm to the side and at the same time, the pachyrhinosaur moved to the right, revealing the marauder which was standing at the upper end of the Avenue, its cannon pointed straight in their direction.
He heard an object pass by him and so fast that it whistled in his ear
Suddenly, Zach felt a sharp, burning sensation on his left cheek that made him groan in pain.
Reflexively, he put a hand on it and felt blood flowing along a cut half a dozen of centimetres long.
His brother had saved him from a giant bolt, whose barbed tip had just scraped the young man's cheek. The projectile meanwhile, had continued its trajectory to thrust itself in the barrier reef between the mosasaur's lagoon and Hell Aquarium.
As they stood in the middle of the street still realizing that Zach had almost been killed by the guards, one of the flying quetzalcoatluses spotted them amidst the surrounding confusion and decided to hunt them.
Seeing behind the smoke a great shadow descending towards them from the north of the Avenue, Zach and Gray once again scurried towards the Promenade. The flying reptile rapidly emerged from the smoke, and began to fly low, catching up with them at a tremendous speed without caring at all for all those under its path, forcing them to crouch down.
It gave the brothers an idea.
When the pterosaur opened its beak to catch Gray, he and his brother jumped to the side.
The flying reptile, hampered by its own size and not having the same maneuvering abilities in the air as a bird, had no choice but to continue straight and regain altitude before turning to start a new attempt.
But just as it was about to dive again, two arrows pierced its chest, one of them right in the heart.
Zach looked towards the top of one of the nearby rooftops and saw one of the guards there, a slender woman with black hairs, pointing her bow toward the pterosaur.
The Quetzalcoatlus moved back and once it was high above the Avenue, it began to gradually lose control of its motor functions.
When it could no longer fly, the pterosaur let out a desperate scream that was silenced in a gasp.
Then, its body fell and crashed into the thatched roof of a tower on the eastern side of the Avenue.
X
Darbinian watched the pterosaur slide and fall on the street before being surprised by the sound of rotating blades and an engine's roar.
Looking at the sky, she saw the last touring helicopter of tourism quickly losing altitude while spinning.
The pterosaurs had also make this aircraft crash and it was plummeting towards the surface of one of the closest lagoons.
As soon as the helicopter hit the surface and began to sink slowly, Darbinian's attention was drawn to a series of human screams, coming from the Promenade.
Wanting to know what was causing these people to scream, she climbed up to the top of the roof and from there, she saw, amidst the smoke, that a pachryhinosaur was about to push one of the trams into the Hell's Aquarium lagoon next to which it had been stopped.
Its team had been freed earlier by some keepers but the tram itself was filled with visitors that had taken refuge there but who had been then cornered by the mad ceratopsian and terrorised, they didn't dared to leave the vehicle.
Darbinian would have rushed to their help and scream to her comrades to shoot the pachyrhinosaur but she realised it was too late and the vehicle tumbled a moment later.
Looking away from this tragic scene among so many others, she decided instead to go save those she could.
X
As the tram was sinking rapidly because of its weight, those inside hurried to swim out of it but as soon as they raised their heads out of the water, a Harpactognathus formation came to harass them, biting arms and heads or clawing scalps, and several of the pterosaurs tried to grab together, not without trouble, a visitor or two to take them out of the lagoon.
While the tumult that it provoked attracted the attention of the lagoon's dwellers, those whom the harpactognathuses weren't attacking began to look for a way out.
Seeing no ladder from their position, they were struck by despair and some shouted for help.
Slender shadows, those of the small mosasaurids and the predatory fishes that lived there, passed a few meters beneath them, and some even felt something graze their feet or a calf.
Nearby, the top of dorsal or caudal fins began to breach the surface.
Suddenly, one of the visitors opened his mouth wide like if he wanted to scream but before he could do that, he disappeared under the water.
As he wasn't in the field of vision of anyone, the others noticed its disappearance too late and it was only when a small mosasaur, as long as a full grow Nile crocodile and with a black-striped pale grey skin - a Platecarpus - surfaced to grab one of the tram's passengers by the throat that they realized how much of a deadly trap the lagoon was.
Excited by the scent of blood, the predators rushed on the visitors with great ferocity and instead of sharing them, each took a prey and dragged it under water.
Only one young woman managed to reach the reef barrier.
She tried to grab onto the false corals in order to climb but in vain, as the structure was too slippery.
One of the Harpactognathus saw her despair and flew to her, but just after he began to bite her right arm, a subadult Platecarpus closed its jaws on her leg.
Pulling on it, the mosasaur dragged the young woman underwater as she had her grazed right arm raised, with her hand wide open while she was screaming and swallowing water at the same time.
From the safety of the tunnel within the reef barrier that separated Hell's Aquarium from the Mosasaur's lagoon, other visitors that were fleeing towards Mount Thetis could not help but to watch horrified this carnage happening in the middle of a cloud of blood that grew and grew until it concealed the scene.
X
On the other side of the same barrier reef, the touring helicopter continued to sink to the depths.
Water had infiltrated inside and had already half submerged the cabin, threatening to drown the passengers and the pilot if they didn't leave the aircraft.
At first, they managed to agree not without trouble, as some feared what was in the lagoon even though they didn't knew exactly where they had crashed, on the decision to open the door and swim to the surface but at the very moment they went to slide the door, the man who had his handle froze out of terror.
Through the window, he saw the mosasaur emerge from the depths and slowly swim towards them.
Underwater, no one could heard them scream.
The mosasaur first swam around the helicopter, describing increasingly smaller circles, and then, as she had noticed that this entity wasn't aggressive, she approached her head to investigate the aircraft with great curiosity.
When her huge, round and dark pupil met the eyes of each of the passengers, horror struck them.
Some were aware that the mosasaur was probably thinking that they were some kind of new form of enrichment and that she was expected to, not unlike an otter which had to find a solution to reach a piece of food contained in a small block of ice, find a way to open the helicopter in order to access to the "reward" they were.
Thus, she started to touch the aircraft with the tip of her snout before biting it, tearing pieces of metal.
Noting that this would soon become laborious, the mosasaur stopped doing this and changed her strategy.
She swam away to the other end of the lagoon before returning at full speed and hit sideways the helicopter. Seeing that the only effect of this action was to accelerate the speed at which the aircraft was sinking, the marine squamate opted for another technique.
Pushing the helicopter with her snout, she carried it to the barrier reef and smashed it against the latter.
The barrier being actually made of concrete, the impact tore the sheets of metal and broke many pieces, allowing water to enter en masse inside the helicopter and finish submerging the cabin.
In her attempt to open the aircraft, the mosasaur scraped it down to the nearest bay window.
Although the latter had been designed to retain a large volume of water, it was put to the test by the repetitive attacks of the reptile on the helicopter that affected it indirectly and at one moment, cracks, small ones at the beginning, started to appear, letting a few drops fall in the tunnel.
But the more the mosasaur attacked the helicopter, moving her snout inside the cabin, the more the cracks extended under the terrified gaze of the people in the tunnel. Water infiltrated by thin trickles, then by small waterfalls and finally by full spurts. Then came the moment when the window broke and a roaring flood of saltwater entered in the tunnel.
In a matter of seconds, its entirety was submerged and many of those who were there were violently carried away to the nearby galleries, threatened with submersion in their turn.
If the flood wasn't stopped, a large part of the Depths, including the rooms and halls of Mount Thetis, would be submerged and hundreds of people doomed to drown.
Although the park's designers had thought that this kind of situation was unlikely to happen, Jurassic World engineers had nevertheless considered its eventuality and integrated a security protocol into the park's systems that aimed to isolate a compromised room or tunnel with heavy doors that closed automatically when a high-risk flood was detected.
Despite their foresight on this matter, they had underestimated one of the parameters that was the evacuation speed.
Thus, when the doors were activated after the amount of time written in the program, they closed as visitors continued to flock out of the tunnel, now illuminated by an oppressive reddish subdued light and no longer by the soothing bluish dim light of the seabed.
Trapped, they began to pound on the doors, looking desperately through their porthole, trying to be seen by the CCTV cameras of the neighbouring rooms.
X
"People are drowning in the TN tunnel," One of the technicians stated in an alarmed tone. "I'm going to try override the system in order to unlock the doors," He added while frantically tapping his fingers on the keyboard, starting to enter passwords and write queries.
"Do it and water will spread through the nearby rooms and tunnels. The situation of the breaches in the walls of Mount Thetis will get worse." One of his colleagues dissuaded him. "There are now more than five hundred people there and nearly two thousand in the rest of the Depths!"
The two began to argue virulently, the former appealing to compassion and the latter to pragmatism, showing the other multiple reports of pressurization anomalies and diagrams showing some rooms in the Depths blinking red.
Looking helplessly at the footage from the streets of Burroughs or from the lagoons and showing the park's creatures spreading death and desolation, Masrani was utterly aghast and hiding under his hand the tears that were running down his face.
A few steps away from him, Cruthers was suddenly drawn to one of the CCTV footage on his workstation's screen, showing the atrium of the administration building and some winged creatures moving there, leaping towards the nearest employees.
"Harpactognathuses are in the Atrium!" He warned everyone.
Hoskins immediately turned to him.
"Send some officers there!"
The director of the security division then leaped behind Cruther's workstation.
"How did they enter?" He asked.
The chief technician told him that the pterosaurs had entered in the Administration through the gaping breach left by the earthquake in the rooms closest to the end of the promontory.
"All officers are busy elsewhere," Harriman told him. "Well, all except Oraka and Kelly," he added, glancing at the two officers guarding the entrance of the room.
Hoskins thought for a moment, then a resolute look appeared on his serious face.
"Mr Cruthers and Mr Harriman. I leave you in command while I take care of this."
Before leaving, he leaned over Cruthers and Krill.
"Keep an eye on him," he whispered, speaking of Masrani.
He left the control room.
"With me!" He said to the two officers.
One of them passed a handgun to Hoskins and they ran down the hallways, heading for the Atrium from where screams reached them.
