Distanced by the harpactognathuses somewhere in the middle of the Central Fields, Dearing and Grady had continued to drive to Burroughs despite this. They first had turned east, leaving the Reserve not far from the Cartago's aviary before taking the road that went down the cliffs south of it, then a bridge over the Rio Iris further south and finally the network of underground roads under the Zoo.
They came out of said network at a small parking lot north of the night show's bleachers. They left their vehicle there and took the path that led the pond while screams came from Burroughs.
They hadn't even reached the end of the path when a mantellisaur passed in front of them. The animal, still wearing its harness, didn't pay attention to them and disappeared immediately in the dense vegetation, running away from the city.
Reaching the base of the bleachers, Dearing and Grady started to trot towards the crossroads and the visitors' infirmary, passing by some visitors and employees that were also fleeing the city.
As they had passed two-thirds of the bleachers, a group of visitors ran out of the multiplex and like if it was chasing them from the building, a pachyrhinosaur came out in its turn by the great breach it had made by ramming the large bay window of the entrance hall.
The group headed for the base of the bleachers and running after them, the ceratopsian ended up charging towards Dearing and Grady.
"The bleachers! Quickly!" The latter said to his companion.
The herbivore crossed the hundred and fifty meters that separated them from it in less than ten seconds, forcing some of the people on the way to jump in the pond.
Thus, Dearing and Grady had barely reached the third row of seats that the pachyrhinosaur charged the first two rows in full force, projecting seats all around.
In its attack, it tried to reach the two companions but the stands considerably impeding its advance, it gave up.
The pachyrhinosaur preventing them from reaching the infirmary by the quay, they decided to make a detour by the Grand Nublarian's hanging gardens.
After progressing among those for a while, hiding in the bushes or dense groves each time that pterosaurs flew nearby, they reached a small gazebo that overlooked west.
From there, they had a view on the Promenade, Richard Owen Avenue and the Obelisk Plaza, as well as on the chaos that had struck the city.
The entire valley echoed with screams. Where people once laughed, they were now crying; where children once played, adults were fighting for their lives; where they once ate, they were eaten…
In the sky, a few of the quetzalcoatluses were circling over Burroughs, looking for some easy prey and sometimes avoided the bolts fired by the marauder. One of those had already taken one of them, hit in the chest, and its body has crashed down into one of the houses in the eastern residential district.
At one moment, Dearing and Grady saw one of the Hell Storks flew vertically, holding a guard in its beak, and once it was high enough, the pterosaur let its prey fall to their surprise. The guard fell for long seconds before another Quetzalcoatlus arrived to impale him on the tip of its beak.
The pterosaur then went to the congener which had let the guard fall, described an arc over it and made its victim slid along its beak, letting him fall. The guard was once again caught mid-air, being the object of a macabre game between the two giant pterosaurs for long moments. The more he watched the scene, the more Grady thought that it looked like some form of courtship.
After a while, the two animals abandoned their victim, leaving his shredded body fall straight towards the tiles of one of the apartment block of the western residential district.
In the north, the Sibo was still rumbling and one could sometimes felt the earthquake's aftershocks.
Beyond the summit of the Southern Plateau, they could manage to distinguish the declining daylight. Since the cloud emitted by the Sibo was mostly pushed to the south and the east, the western part of the island hadn't passed under its shadow and the sun was still illuminating it while darkness had fallen upon Burroughs.
Dearing's gaze turned to the visitors' infirmary, which was on fire.
"The infirmary," she pointed in a stressed voice, hoping that those inside had been evacuated.
"Claire!"
Grady showed her a small formation of harpactognathuses that was flying straight in their direction from the south. They had been spotted.
"The Chicxulub!" She exclaimed, naming their nearest way-out.
The roof terrace of the night club was a dozen of meters from the gazebo, below a stone wall covered with creepers.
They then rushed in that direction, jumping off the wall before heading for the staircase leading to the night club's main room and ran down its steps as the pterosaurs landed.
When they arrived at the stairs' base, they slammed the door in the snouts of the harpactognathuses that had leapt to catch them. They heard them crash against the door and not waiting for them to find a way to open the door, Dearing went to get a small table that could be put against it while Grady had his back against it, preventing it from moving.
Once the table was positioned to block the door's opening, the two turned to the heart of the large room, that had the particularity of having a screen on the ceiling that showed small asteroids continuously falling in the middle of a starry night sky, preceding a bigger one that was approaching inexorably while a Cretaceous forest had been painted on the walls, giving the impression to the patrons of partying on the eve of the apocalypse that had killed the non-avian dinosaurs more than sixty-five million years ago.
During the night club's opening hours, conducts all around the room released a fog that gave the place a disturbing atmosphere, just like the fake dinosaur bones here and there. Thick ferns completed the scenery.
To reach the front door, Dearing and Grady first had to go down a few steps to the dance floor, cross it and then climb a few steps to the platform opposite of them and by which one could enter in the club by the quay.
While the only sounds that had been heard so far were those of their footsteps on the dance floor, they heard some chairs' feet scrape on the floor of one of the platforms that overlooked them.
Something had make them move but the prevailing dim light prevented them from seeing what. They weren't alone in the Chicxulub.
No matter what it was, they had no reason to linger there and Grady told Dearing to hurry.
Letting her distance him a few steps, he had a last glance at the platform where the chairs had moved.
He didn't see anything.
But when he looked back at Dearing, his ears perceived a low but distinct sound, the one of claws scraping the floor.
Realizing that the animal to which they belonged was moving quickly, he pivoted, just in time to see a Harpactognathus gliding towards him but before he could react, the pterosaur knocked him down and landed on top of him.
Caught off-guard, Grady had dropped his rifle during the attack and he couldn't reach his knife either since the reptile was snapping at his face, forcing the keeper to maintain its head at a certain distance with both hands.
"Back off, you faggot!" Grady roared while strangling the reptile.
But it was then that Dearing grabbed the rifle and struck the pterosaur's head with the butt, almost knocking it unconscious, and while it was recovering from the blow and yelping, the director hurried to take aim. Just as the reptile was about to respond, she shot it in the chest three times. Although the first shot was fatal, she had feared that it wasn't the case and had mechanically pull the trigger again.
When the pterosaur let out its last breath, Dearing relaxed and had the sudden urge to let out a nervous laugh in the heat of the action. Despite all the years that had flew since the last of her rifle shooting competitions, she still knew how to handle a rifle.
"Groovy…" Grady couldn't help but to let out.
Dearing's gaze crossed his and she noticed that he was looking at her with a certain barely-masked admiration.
She reached out and helped him up.
"Thank you," he said.
They exchanged an intense look and if the situation wasn't so urgent, he was sure that he would have kissed her on the spot.
The shouts and screams outside reminded them that they were racing against the clock and they left the nightclub.
Under the Casino's porch, they found one of the guards, protecting the group of civilians who had massed behind him. He waved them to come and they joined him.
"Where are the infirmary's patients?" Dearing hastened to ask.
"The J-SEC had evacuated them after the earthquake. They had to be among the crowd on the Avenue when the Hell Storks began their attack. Then, it was nothing but chaos… Your nephews can be anywhere now. I hope for them and for you that they didn't stay at the Avenue. It's Stalingrad there!"
"I'm afraid they're still there," Grady said. "Thank you. Hold on!"
Before the guard could dissuade them to go there, Dearing and Grady rushed to the quay on the southern side of the pond and ran past the shops situated there while above them, a pachyrhinosaur was rampaging through the gardens and the patios. Meanwhile, the flames were spreading northward.
X
Refuged with other visitors in a shop whose entrance was twenty meters from the northern end of the Avenue, Zach and Gray watched the chaos outside.
In front of the shop, a guard armed with a sabre and wearing a shield was facing two Harpactognathus and their fight prevented the survivors from leaving the building. As its outcome seemed uncertain, some began to cough because of a nearby fire's smoke which was starting to arrive abundantly.
"The fire is getting closer," one of the survivors pointed out between two coughing fits. "We're going to suffocate or burn alive if we don't get the hell out of here…"
As oxygen was getting scarcer in the shop, the group watched the opponents continue their fight.
Once the guard triumphed over the pterosaurs, someone shouted and they came out of the shop, bowed by their coughing, passed behind the guard and turned to their right, running at full speed in the arcade.
Looking back, one of the survivors noticed that the guards were losing ground but at the obelisk's plaza, the situation wasn't much better.
A pachyrhinosaur had smashed the defensive perimeter and was now fighting a group of infantrymen.
While spearmen were keeping it at bay, the shooters struggled to find a favourable firing angle.
Nearby, a rider was grappling with a Quetzalcoatlus, spearing the pterosaur's beak or neck each time it tried to impale him or his horse.
But the door of the Discovery Center, through which people continuously rushed, was in sight and as long as they were defended, they had to try their luck and cross the plaza.
A mighty bellow increased their stress.
The pachyrhinosaur was now standing on its hind legs and, after letting out a growl, it made a few steps forward and its fore legs slammed the shields of the spearmen, flattening them on the ground.
Before the rest of its opponents could move back, the ceratopsian violently knocked them over with a sweeping move of its frill and moved towards one of the shooters, its beak wide open.
It close it on the shooter's arm and as the guard was screaming in pain while trying to stab the pachyrhinosaur in the eyes, the latter shook him in all directions, twisting and dislocating the arm during the process before breaking it in two but suddenly, it released its victim, yelped and backed off abruptly: Before falling unconscious, the guard had managed to stab its right eye.
While the pain paralyzed the pachyrhinosaur on the spot, the survivors took the opportunity to rush to the gates but as they run, they saw late the Quetzalcoatlus fought by the rider being chased by the latter towards the Avenue. The pterosaur passed in the middle of the group on the way in addition to take in its beak the man who was in front of Gray. For his part, the rider had to pull firmly on his horse's reins in order to not hit the group with his mount and the horse reared a little before turning to go around them.
They looked back at the door and saw their way of salvation was blocked by the one-eyed pachyrhinosaur.
Its wound had aggravated its berserk state and in the meantime, it had made its way through the fleeing people by taking one of the ramps that led to the top of the platform.
The two guards who defended the door had been caught off-guard and while one, an American young woman, had taken refuge in the vestibule, the other, a Costa Rican man about the same age as his colleague, had ended up trapped outside between the pachyrhinosaur and the fleeing people.
Zach and Gray's group glanced at the rest of the building's facade.
They couldn't either pass by the glass doors leading to the IMAX dome's queue and the center's shop since while a pile of rubble obstructed the second, the opening system of the first had been damaged and the door could only open for a few centimetres before blocking itself. Although their attempts hadn't yet showed any encouraging result, some visitors and employees were trying to break the windows with stones.
At the top of the steps, the pachyrhinosaur bellowed and reared up, as if to prepare to trample the helpless guard that stood in front of him, but it was suddenly silenced when a great steel bolt pierced its chest, thrusting itself right into the vital organs.
While the marauder's cannon was reloaded near the plaza's rim, the guard told the civilians to move aside but the ceratopsian, still alive, put its forelegs back on the ground and with a wheezing breathing, advanced a few feet towards the stairs and let out another bellow, more plaintive than threatening, before receiving another bolt between the ribs.
The animal staggered, collapsed on its right side and hurtled down the steps. There, a guard rushed to it immediately to put an end to its sufferings. He pointed his rifle to the eye and shoot.
Just before he pulled the trigger, adults made the children in the vicinity look away or covered their eyes but the mere sounds of the pachyrhinosaur letting out its last breath and the weapon's firing were enough to terrify them.
Despite what the pachyrhinosaur had done, few were those who weren't saddened by its death because the scene summed up the tragedy of the events that struck Jurassic World.
Now, its body stood in the way and blocked a large part of the steps and those who intended to reach the door by them had to climb over this new obstacle, that another body on which one stumbled in his or her escape.
The way being finally secured, the group rushed toward the door while the guards tasked with the defence of the plaza reorganized not without difficulty and the rider who had chased the Quetzalcoatlus sent one of them, a slender and muscled Frenchman in his mid-thirties, in the Avenue to inform their comrades about the evolution of the situation at this level.
After a quick climb over the pachyrhinosaur's body, the Mitchells and their group passed between the two guards that were firmly holding their position on the platform and finally crossed the threshold of the door, following the other civilians to the rotunda.
There, a security officer was pointing the direction to follow and shouting:
"To the lower levels! Go to the lower levels!"
As they headed for the stairs, they saw a ranked J-SEC officer castigating two subordinates who had abandoned their posts. Both shown punch marks.
"Go back to your posts you scumbags! If I ever find you hiding again, I swear that it will be with two bullets in the back that you will leave this island, you damned rats!"
Something broke through a window at the same time.
"Pterosaurs are in the building!" Shouted the officer in the Rotunda.
The harpactognathuses' croaky calls echoed in the corridors and halls.
X
Running in the middle of the western arcade to avoid advancing in the open, Corporal Vincent Chapuy was heading towards the southern end of the Avenue.
Sent by Temba after the death of the pachyrhinosaur, he was looking for Lieutenant Brunet.
During his progression, he looked inside each of the buildings he passed by. Some, those which generally offered not a lot of hiding places, were empty and in others, conversely very furnished, there were still many terrorised civilians who didn't dare to go out despite the threat of the nearby fires.
"Get out! Get out while there is still time!" He yelled at them.
While some complied, others decided to stay.
But Chapuy had to find Brunet as soon as possible and reluctantly not insisting, he continued.
After descending two-thirds of the Avenue, he finally found Brunet.
The latter was standing on the doorstep of one of the restaurants, ready to order a part of his team to escort a group of about fifty civilians they had gathered in the main dining room.
The establishment was one of the buildings in this part of the Avenue that resisted the fires best.
Thus, while the flames were just beginning to lap the furniture on the upper floor, the nearby buildings were burning.
Chapuy hailed his senior officer in French:
"Lieutenant!"
"Oui caporal Chapuy?"
"La place est compromise. Le pachy a neutralisé une trop grande partie de notre équipe. Ce qui reste ne pourra plus tenir encore très longtemps."
"Bon sang! Drekanson et Maathai sont occupés à défendre ceux dans le Casino et nous menaçons d'être à court de munitions de notre côté."
Brunet turned towards the street and while some were keeping the animals at bay, he scanned the trail of lifeless bodies and his gaze stopped on the fallen guards, J-SEC officers and keepers.
Screams attracted his attention: The harpactognathuses had gathered in sufficient numbers and threatened to overwhelm the guards supposed to cover them while they evacuated the group of civilians.
"We are losing the streets..." he added in English.
Other screams echoed from further down the avenue, screams of terror, uttered by visitors trapped in a building ablaze, located just opposite of the Emporium. A few meters from it, two Quetzalcoatlus waited with a puzzling tranquillity, like if the smoke didn't bothered them and that they intended to let the humans burn alive and feast on their roasted flesh later, once the building would have collapsed and that the fires' intensity would have considerably decreased.
"Prepare to sound the retreat," Brunet ordered to Chapuy.
Chapuy gave him a brief uncertain look and then grabbed the horn he was carrying over the shoulder.
But as he was about to blow in it, a huge hand grabbed his wrist, stopping him from doing so. Chapuy saw Maleko Cole's face, unprotected since the loss of his helmet during the chaos, giving him an insistent look.
"And about these people?" The Hawaiian asked, turning towards Brunet and speaking of the screams coming from the ablaze building.
"The men are wavering. If we do not fall back, they will rout and it will be in vain that we would have fought because there will no one left to defend the City or what will remain of it after that!" Brunet replied coldly.
He grabbed Cole's arm, making him release Chapuy and he looked him straight in the eyes.
"We can't save everyone," he said in a stern voice that couldn't hide however traces of remorse.
Still holding Cole by the arm, Brunet nodded to Chapuy and as the latter repeatedly blew the horn, he came back inside the restaurant:
"Fall back!" He shouted to his men.
While some escorted the group of civilians as originally planned, the others covered this retreat, firing at the harpactognathuses that were chasing them.
Along the way, they were joined by Darbinian and the shooters who had climbed on the rooftops.
Two of them had perished, one pushed from a roof during a pterosaur attack, and the other was the victim with whom the two Quetzalcoatlus seen by Dearing and Grady had played.
Thus, Brunet's team and the shooters led by Darbinian managed to join Temba's remaining men by the obelisk.
There, Brunet saw that there were only fourteen men still in fighting condition on their side, himself included, and he was aware that were others left on Drekanson's team side. However, since they had heard the horn sounding the retreat, they must had preferred to entrench themselves in the Great Nublarian and wait for reinforcements. Hearing a heavy and continuous rumble coming from the Avenue, Brunet knew that they had taken the most judicious decision since a huge crowd had formed and was converging towards the center's door.
Seeing the guards falling back and fearing to be left outside, the survivors still massed in the buildings had left those to rush to the door before its closing.
In no time, hundreds of them were covering the avenue and running towards the steps, charging like a stampeding herd. Some stumbled on the bodies lying across their path while pterosaurs were harassing the slower ones.
The crowd was so panicked that the guards no longer had any hope of getting it under control without resorting to force, and they soon observed that many of the fleeing had abandoned all notions of public-spiritedness, caring only for their own skin and leaving others to their own fate.
Those who had the misfortune to fall were trampled by those who were just behind them in the utmost indifference and desiring to hide at all costs, a group stormed the marauder.
The gunner shouted at them to back off but their relentlessness didn't diminish in the least and when he decided to unsheathe his pistol to threaten them as he was overwhelmed, arms grabbed him and he was dragged down to the crowd.
Being separated from their colleague by the latter, the guards had to watch this scene helplessly. They now regarded the crowd as a threat and Brunet rapidly lined men in front of the obelisk to stop the civilians and force them to separate at their level.
Some of the guards had a hand close to their belts, ready to throw smoke grenades on Brunet's order.
The latter was seriously considering to order his men to shoot in the air in order to deter them. In a corner of his mind, he even thought about shooting on the crowd itself but this was only a solution he intended to consider as a last resort.
Behind the panicked and moving bodies, Cole saw a small figure standing in the shadow of the western arcade, hidden behind a column, far behind the crowd.
Squinting, he realized that it was a little girl. He also saw the harpactognathuses running on the rooftops and climbing on the nearby facades.
They're going to find her.
Without warning, he threw himself into the crowd and ran through it towards the avenue.
"Cole, come back! That's an order!"
But it was in vain that Brunet yelled, not only because the ambient cacophony muffled the sound of his loud voice but also because the crowd was so dense that they couldn't catch Cole anymore.
He was alone now.
Cole managed to pass through the crowd and when he emerged, it was at the same spot where the formation had stood when the pachyrhinosaurs charged.
The harpactognathuses which had harassed the back of the crowd were gone and the little girl hadn't moved from her column.
Cole rushed to her but he barely had crossed half the distance that a pack of harpactognathuses came out of the smoke-filled buildings.
Before they surrounded him, he grabbed his shotgun and shot down two of the pterosaurs until he ran out of ammo.
As he unsheathed his dagger, a Harpactognathus swooped on his arm and bit.
While Cole was trying to get rid of it, the others threw themselves on him and the sight of the upper part of his body was concealed by the wings flapping around him.
X
After their comrades' retreat, Velasquez had held his position on the platform and Durant had left it.
She was now a dozen of meters in front of the pachyrhinosaur, trying to channel the running crowd.
But it ignored her instructions and rapidly, ignored her as well, jostling her more and more until she was knocked over.
Durant immediately tried to get up but the arriving civilians did not see her and she was trampled.
The sight of her colleague disappearing under the human tide struck Velasquez with anguish.
"Tamara!" He screamed.
He then left his post, quickly went down the stairs, climbed the pachyrhinosaur' body before, once he was on its back, jumping forward and head to the spot where she had fallen.
X
Despite the amount of injuries that the pterosaurs inflicted him, Cole was fighting with all the strength he could muster and he had already delivered lethal blows to several of his opponents, forcing the others to let him go.
At one point, he blocked with one hand the jaw of the Harpactognathus in front of him and squeezed the other around its neck before diving his head forward and bite the reptile's jugular in retaliation of a bite from the latter which had ripped off a piece of his left cheek.
The pack having lost too many of its members in the attack of the colossus, it gave up, leaving him alone in the middle of the street.
X
Pushing aside those in front of him, Velasquez covered the few meters separating him from Durant.
Once he was in sight of her body and saw her being trampled by the tourists, he became so angry that the next few moments happened like in a dream.
Losing momentarily control of himself, he acted more brutally, charging like a bull and grabbing those on his way by the shoulder to push them back violently.
When he came back to his senses, he was holding in his fist a shirt collar, the one of the surprised and frightened tourist in front of him.
His other fist had stopped in extremis in the air, halfway from the man's nose.
Before grabbing the latter, Velasquez had seen him walk on Durant's head. She was lying on her back just behind, inert.
Letting out a grunt, he released the tourist and crouched by Durant.
Her face was now purple, like if she had taken a severe beating, her breathing was wheezing and she had lost consciousness in the meantime.
"Help!" He cried in a voice full of despair.
Another guard arrived shortly after and came to help him take her away, with each passing one of her arms over their necks.
Maybe they aggravated her injuries by doing so but they had no other choice. They couldn't leave here there amidst all this chaos.
As they went back to the platform in front of the center's door, they saw the fleeing people climb en masse over the pachyrhinosaur and then climb the stairs half crawling before jostling each other at the threshold like a frightened herd entering into a canyon.
The two guards decided to take the west ramp.
They went up, reached the inside of the Center but as they were about to enter in the rotunda, Velasquez and his colleague saw that J-SEC officers were trying to repel an harpactognathuses' incursion.
The rotunda being no longer safe, Velasquez's colleague looked towards a hallway on their left.
"This way!"
X
Cole headed to the child who, although she knew he was coming to save her, was a little frightened by his blood-drenched giant's look.
From where he was, he saw that she was holding firmly in her arms a stuffed grey-brown Giraffatitan, bellowing while standing on its hind legs.
Cole's wounds were hindering his movements and exhaustion was winning over his remaining strength little by little, decreasing his senses and sometimes making him half-stumble over the bodies on his path.
Suddenly, the little girl opened her eyes wide out of terror and let out a scream.
Cole froze in his advance, while a strange sensation was engulfing his abdomen.
He lowered his gaze and saw a large bloody white tip emerge from his belly: A quetzal had pierced him.
He grunted and stepped forward, feeling the beak leaving his back.
The pain made him stagger and he almost fell on his knees a few steps further.
He had a spear in sight but before he could grab and use it in a desperate attempt to defeat the Quetzalcoatlus before succumbing first, the predator moved its head back and struck powerfully Cole's back, skewering him on its beak.
X
Brunet and Darbinian, who had watched the whole scene, saw Cole stand for a few seconds before falling on his knees, making his body slide along the pterosaur's long beak.
This loss was added to the guards' share of sorrow.
So many had fallen during the battle and among the wounded, Brunet and Darbinian knew that some weren't going to survive the night.
Brunet looked behind him.
Civilians continued to flow through the door, but there were still a sheer number on the platform, the stairs, the ramps and on the sidewalk behind them but people had stopped to came from the Avenue or the pond's sector. Another minute or two and they would all be inside.
He didn't noticed it right away but Dearing and Grady had joined the crowd in the meantime.
Seeing them a few steps behind him, he couldn't help but to be surprised by the fact they were still alive as he had given up hope they would be.
The park director's gaze was suddenly drawn towards the Avenue.
As the buildings along the latter burned and the last screams coming from there faded, the girl that Cole wanted to save stepped on the ravaged and almost-deserted street, still holding her stuffed Giraffatitan firmly against her chest.
While the Quetzalcoatlus which had killed Cole was busy feasting on his corpse, tearing off long shreds of flesh, she looked all around her, searching for an escape amidst the hell that surrounded her.
Grady, who was standing next to Dearing, heard her let out a barely audible cry when she saw a great shadow in the thick smoke behind the child.
As she looked to the plaza, the little girl saw a threatening shadow looming over her and turning, saw a tall sinister shape moving slowly towards her.
The huge head and the long neck of a Quetzalcoatlus emerged from the smoke and the pterosaur's eyes met those of the girl, paralyzed by terror, not daring to move or scream, and like if she was under hypnosis, she let her stuffed Giraffatitan fall on the ground.
The pterosaur walked further toward her, making the front part of its body move out of the smoke, placed its claws on the palm trunk between it and her, lowered its head a little and inclined the latter sideways as if to better observe its prey while the sounds it was making by rapidly knocking together its two mandibles echoed throughout the avenue.
Finally, as the smoke was pushed in their direction, engulfing them gradually, it took her in its beak while embers landed on the stuffed Giraffatitan, setting it on fire.
Tears streamed down Dearing's horrified face and when the other Quetzalcoatlus rushed to its congener and tried to take the girl's body from its beak, she looked away.
Grady then led her to the Center's door.
They were now a little more than three hundred outside and the two had just to climb over the dead pachyrhinosaur, went up the stairs and walk the remaining few meters to the doorstep.
But as they began to lean on the herbivore's legs, a shadow flew over them while those in front of them moved back briskly, passing over the pachyrhinosaur's body, forcing Dearing and Grady to step back in order to avoid having someone jumping on them in their flight.
As they went backwards, towards the guards, they saw that a Quetzalcoatlus was now standing at the top of the platform, blocking their retreat and towering over them. In its back, half a dozen of harpactognathuses galloped from the center's rotunda and stopped next to the larger predator.
People then attempted to run to the paths leading to the Zoo, the Tyrannosaur Kingdom and the western residential district in the greatest disorder, but other pterosaurs landed on their way.
"Stay together!" Brunet shouted to all at full lungs.
The civilians massed just in front of the pachyrhinosaur, behind the guards.
The latter, only nine now, fired their last bullets and shot down some harpactognathuses but running out of ammunition, they grabbed spears or drawn their sabres before spreading around the civilians, ready to face the four Quetzalcoatlus, including the two of the Avenue, and the two dozen of harpactognathuses that surrounded them.
Long seconds elapsed during which the pterosaurs came closer to the group and scanned it with attention, looking for flaws in the defence organized by the guards.
Some harpactognathuses suddenly rushed forward, galloping a few meters before leaping in the air right towards the humans but the guards responded in time and the black-faced pterosaurs hit hard the shields raised across their trajectory before being pushed back.
The guards firmly holding their positions in order to avoid the risk of creating a breach in their defence, didn't moved forward to kill the harpactognathuses and those hissed at them before joining their original positions.
There was a similar assault on the right flank and it was thwarted in the same manner but as soon they were pushed back, the harpactognathuses charged again, all along the line of defence this time. Taking advantage of the fact that the guards were busy with them, the quetzalcoatluses all advanced at the same time, including the one at the top of the platform, and struck their beaks amidst the crowd, repeatedly, making many victims.
Some of the Hell Storks even took their victims out of the melee and the harpactognathus that had stayed out of the latter started to harass them for a piece of their pittance, leaping in the air to bite an arm or a leg sticking out of their giant distant cousins' beaks. The quetzalcoatluses did not care at all and secured their preys by swallowing them in one go thanks to their long and extensible neck.
Said harpactognathuses resigned and joined the others in the attack of the group.
In the middle of the fray, Corporal Chapuy suddenly had the idea that allowed to repel this assault.
He knew that pterosaurs hated loud sounds, and he was in possession of a horn.
He waited for a brief moment of respite to grab the instrument and blew it.
A single blast, short but powerful, echoed against the walls of the Discovery Center and all the pterosaurs, surprised, moved back instinctively, letting the guards reorganize themselves.
But the respite was short because as soon as the echoes of the horn' blow were lost in the distance, the flying reptiles got a grip on themselves and all together, they launched a new assault.
An attempt was made to keep the quetzalcoatluses at bay with spears, but while one was held back, the others had free rein, and the simultaneous assault of all the pterosaurs greatly tested the guards' resistance.
Seeing this, the crowd panicked even more and many were those who started to climb over the pachyrhinosaur in order to reach the interior of the center despite the presence of a quetzalcoatlus perched on the body, thinking that the latter was too busy with the guard that was facing it with his spear.
While some even passed under its wings, it lost interest in the guard and pecked here and there near its feet, finally catching one of the fleeing civilians by the abdomen before throwing his disembowelled body in the direction of the guard.
Excited by the screams behind it, the Hell Stork turned to chase them, moving out of the top of the ceratopsian's corpse.
Losing ground, the mass of humans was forced to move back up to the pachyrhinosaur and the latter gradually disappeared as the crowd climbed over it.
While harpactognathuses were diving on the visitors, even making those standing on the pachyrhinosaur fall, Brunet and Darbinian were separated from the rest of the group.
Between them and it, three of the spotted pterosaurs had turned towards them, ready to leap, and on the other side, a Quetzalcoatlus was advancing.
The two guards, standing back to back, closed their grip on the handle of their sabres, exchanged a brief look before turning towards their foes.
Not taking her eyes off the harpactognathuses trio, Darbinian also drew with her free hand the long curved knife sheathed in her back.
Having used it earlier, it was still stained with blood. She showed it to the pterosaurs and grinned, daring them to come closer.
While he was thinking about how to defeat the Quetzalcoatlus in front of him, Brunet saw a black-clad figure emerge from the smoke in the avenue.
Others saw it too and they quickly noticed that it wasn't a grey guard, which raised questions, and as he was running towards them, the individual drew, to the surprise of many, a sword from his back and rushed to the Quetzalcoatlus that was about to attack Brunet and Darbinian.
As the animal was about to strike Brunet with its beak, the black-clad individual cut off one of its legs with his sword.
Surprised, the pterosaur started to move away, dragging itself on the slabs, and wanted to fly away but the mysterious soldier jumped on its back, pinning it against the ground.
The flying reptile turned its head in order to peck at its attacker but before it could fight back, the soldier struck two powerful sword blows on its neck, beheading it.
As the body of the Quetzalcoatlus collapsed under him, the soldier appeared clearly in the eyes of the group and the other pterosaurs, alerted by the Quetzalcoatlus' cries of pain and looking at him with surprise.
At first glance, one might have thought that he was a member of some special force because of the Kevlar protective gear he was wearing and in a way, the man was, but just like in the case of the grey guards, some elements of his equipment evoked the Middle Ages or a fantasy version of it rather than the beginning of the twenty-first century.
As they had seen, his main weapon was a long one-handed sword, with a handle long enough for the weapon to be held firmly in both hands if needed, a cruciform guard with sharp ends, and a straight blade, whose one of the edges was crenelated.
He also wore not gloves but gauntlets, whose fingers had scale-like structures on their surface, giving the hands a talons-like appearance.
But the most noticeable feature of his gear was his helmet's movable mask-like visor. Of a metallic and sinister aspect, it had only two holes for the eyes as well as a series of slits at mouth level, designed in such way to look like a row of sharp teeth, dehumanizing its bearer and giving him or her a disturbing and threatening aura that inspired dread in the hearts of men and beasts alike. It was like if it had been designed to make the soldier look like a predator.
The masked soldier's piercing blue eyes scanned the group, looking at their half-relieved, half-intimidated expressions while the pterosaurs were putting a grip on themselves after the arrival of this unexpected saviour.
But before they pounced on him, a few soldiers equipped like him emerged in their turn from the smoke, all around the plaza, running to their companion's help. The latter, still holding his sword in hand, unsheathed a pistol with the other and shot the nearest Harpactognathus, raising yelps from its congeners which then moved away from the group.
In the midst of the chaos that ensued on the plaza, one could saw that a significant portion of the soldiers had each a unique main weapon, and so a unique way to deal with the pterosaurs.
From the path that led to the pond, came a tall and slender individual who charged the harpactognathuses from behind, and like her companion, she carried a weapon of medieval inspiration, some kind of double-bladed glaive she used to cut off heads and slash the bodies and wings within her range while being constantly moving and dodging the attacks with agility in some sort of deadly dance.
The use of bladed weapons in fights against prehistoric animals was indeed surprising for some but both the grey guards and the masked soldiers had realized that they were more feared by animals than firearms, probably because the first had to evoke them the horns, spikes or even certain types of teeth frequently seen within the Animal Kingdom, thus inspiring them a natural fear while firearms looked like nothing known to them and individuals had to be confronted to them at least once to learn to fear them too.
As a mercenary hired by InGen had stated during the Saurian Wars: "Sometimes I wonder if fighting them with spears and swords wouldn't be better? I mean, it's true. Those bastards are on you before you can scream Chimichangas and as a result, they're shredding your face or ripping through your intestines while you desperately try to reach your gun's trigger. On the other hand, a sword thrust into its belly and that's it! Your saurian have been take care of."
Thus, to face a primitive opponent devoid of technological means but nevertheless formidable since Nature had gifted them with natural weapons and always fighting in close combat, the grey guards and a fraction of InGen Security's forces had adapted and been inspired by combat tactics and technologies from before the mass use of firearms, explaining the strange mix between the technological modernity of the 21st century on one side and, on the other, something reminiscent of Antiquity and Middle Ages' soldiers and warriors, a mix that was based on the combination of the different eras' best.
A good part of the masked soldiers was equipped with quite contemporary weapons such as pistols or light machine guns although again, few were armed in a similar manner.
Near the obelisk, a man even burned the harpactognathuses in front of him with a flamethrower, leaving only their charred corpses in his wake.
As Brunet and some other guards were preparing to, after a moment of hesitation, go help the soldiers drive the pterosaurs out, one of the latter shouted at them with a voice distorted by his mask-like visor:
"Cover your ears!"
One of his companions pushed a button on the box that was hanging at his belt and a high-pitched and piercing sound, increasingly louder and louder, similar to a cry from beyond the grave, filled the air.
It was so scary and disagreeable that all around, both animals and humans were greatly bothered. The pterosaurs shook their heads and started to scream in pain as they moved back.
Even with their ears covered, the civilians and grey guards still heard the sound and for a visitor that didn't covered his ears in time, its listening was so painful that he fell on his knees and screamed.
Immobilised, the guards were no longer able to help the masked soldiers who, on the contrary, weren't bothered at all by the sound since their ears were protected and before the eyes of the group still massed in front of the pachyrhinosaur, they slaughtered the pterosaurs that hadn't yet flee, spilling their blood on the victims' bodies. The civilians saw that the look the guards gave to their saviours was full of everything but benevolence.
Defeated, the last pterosaurs rushed to take off but hardly had they left the soldiers' range that a black helicopter appeared.
A machine gun fired and in their flight, a non-negligible part of the fleeing animals were shot down and the few that managed to escape the city flew to the Misty Mounts or the Western Cordillera.
When the helicopter returned a few moments later to fly over the streets, the group saw that it sported not only InGen's logo but also an emblem, representing Saint George of Lydda slaying the Dragon.
A/N:
Hypothetical Casting:
Alban Lenoir as Vincent Chapuy
