For Grady and Sembène, the escape through the Path of the Dead had looked like a very strange dream, halfway between a hallucination and a nightmare.
Still wearing their night vision goggles in front of their eyes, they saw their surroundings in green and the Slayers in front and behind them looked like wraiths.
With the ear defenders and the box's whistling as a background noise, they couldn't even hear the mere sound of their stride and had almost felt like they had become deaf, or like if they were in an old horror video game.
Above all, they did not dare to turn around, out of fear of seeing the large multi-species pack that was after them but that the box was keeping at a distance.
They had managed to cross the tombs of the upper classes without any trouble and were now running down the ledge path that winded down to the warriors' necropolis.
But as they were halfway from it, a seismic aftershock shook the depths of the island and was particularly felt within the mountain.
Running near the ledge's edge, Leng staggered and lost his balance, threatening to fall forward in the gigantic chasm, and his precious box, hanging at his belt thanks to a snap hook, hung over the void.
Decker caught up her colleague in extremis, wrapping her arms around his chest, keeping him from falling, but as she pulled him back, the ones behind them who had stopped in their run saw with horror the snap hook, which hadn't been closed correctly before due to the rush of the flight, slip from the belt and unhook, letting the box crash against a rocky project a few tens of centimeters below and then fall straight to the abyss.
The box still producing the loud whistle, it was in vain that the others had yelled to warn Leng and he only heard their voices to his surprise when the sound began to fade, dragged by the box in its descent towards the mountain's foundations.
The two keepers removed their ear defenders and heard nothing but the same heavy silence that was there when they came.
The silence was far more frightening than a cacophony of growls and calls since by taking care to chase their prey as discreetly as possible, quite the opposite of a constantly barking pack of hounds, the neoraptors and the proceratosaurs prevented the group from having an idea of the distance between them.
As they were light-footed in addition, they could very well emerge from the darkness at any moment.
Sherman turned to Arana and whispered him an order. The Costa Rican then ran immediately, sprinting towards the warriors' necropolis and the leader of the Slayers then urged the rest of the group to resume their run.
The keepers easily guessed that Arana, the fastest member of the group, had been sent to fetch the mercenaries at the gorge, but even if he ran, it took several minutes to reach only the entrance of the Path of the Dead and this amount of time would have to be doubled or more before seeing him came back and there was no doubt about the fact that the dinosaurs would caught up with them in the meantime.
As they had to stick together in order to have a better protection against any attack, and therefore adopt the pace of the slowest (especially Ford because of his flamethrower), they were quickly left behind by Arana and the lights of the latter, like a distress flare in a starless night sky, gradually narrowed until it disappeared in the middle of the darkness.
Parker turned and lit the path behind them with the light of his rifle, searching for the predators.
"Where are they?"
"Close. The will caught us even before we reach the peasants' necropolis," Sherman replied. "At the warriors' necropolis, we will hold them there!" He shouted to the whole group.
Sherman planned to use the narrowness of the corridors to their advantage and to hold a siege in one of the chambers until the arrival of reinforcements.
Once the neoraptors and the proceratosaurs would be eliminated with their help, they would return to the temple to finish once and for all with the Indominus.
"We're heading right into another trap!" Sembène said to Grady. "If they ever overwhelm us there, we're screwed!"
As the end of the beam of Sherman's light hit the arch through which they had left the warriors' necropolis, a Neoraptor appeared suddenly in the middle of the group and pinned Parker to the ground. They barely had the time to move away from the landing zone of a second individual which, just like the first, had leapt from a ledge that overhung the one taken by the humans.
While the first animal, a female tigris, tried to claw and bite through Parker's protections, the second, of the same subspecies and gender, attempted to prevent the other Slayers from rescuing their comrade but she was immediately shot.
The other then let Parker go and ran out of the group, making zigzags to avoid the shots.
A few helped Parker up but at the same time, the group was attacked from the rear.
Some proceratosaurs, that had taken a narrow ledge under theirs, climbed over it and the leading individual directly swooped on Méndez, the closest to the edge, and dig its claws on his back.
Panicked, he began to move anarchically and his feet hit the rocks bordering the edge.
He stumbled with a cry of surprise and his helmet slid forward, falling into the void.
As he slip, Méndez grabbed a crack in the rock with his fingers and clutched it in extremis, preventing himself from falling.
He tried to climb back but the proceratosaur on his back was a weight that pulled him back.
While avoiding the animal's snaps, he screamed for help but Decker, who was the closest to him, was also busy with a proceratosaur hanging on her back and she was unable to come to his aid.
Another proceratosaur was attracted by this call and it closed its jaws around Méndez's skull, making him scream in pain.
The animal did not even care that its prey threatened to fall, and his congener with him. Méndez, nearly out of strength, grabbed in a final effort the arm of the proceratosaur with his free hand and when he let go, he fell thus with it and the other.
Decker finally managed to get rid of her assailant thanks to a brisk turning movement but a second one came at once, jumping towards her throat with a wide-opened maw.
In extremis, she raised her glaive above her and the dinosaur closed its jaws on the shaft.
Hanging above the ground, he clawed Decker's plastron with its hind legs' claws, but before they could dig into the flesh under the armour, Leng shot the animal, thus paying his debt to her.
Following their losses, the proceratosaurs retreated but the Slayers couldn't catch their breath because the Neoraptor that had fled them caught their attention by letting out her species' characteristic hoarse call.
A part of the group turned towards her and lit her with their lamps but behind her, they saw the rest of the pack arriving at all speed.
The humans ran and rushed into the passage.
Once again, Ford kept the animals at bay with his flamethrower while he and the others retreated in the warriors' tombs.
They crossed several chambers and remembering the path they had taken, Sherman estimated that there were only two left.
The attack came from the sides.
By seeking to bypass the obstacle that was Ford's flamethrower, the neoraptors had followed the old path and had found the hole left by the collapse of a part of it and that had pushed the humans to pass by the chambers.
Jumping from platforms to platforms, the raptors had been able to cross it and thus flank the humans, attacking from two of the adjoining chambers.
The confusion that had ensued prevented those directly attacked to respond adequately. On one hand, the lack of light hindered greatly their aiming and on the other hand, they feared to fire on a comrade instead on one of the attackers.
The raptors struggled however to inflict deep wounds, as the body of the Slayers was almost completely covered with protective gear, and if they wanted to overcome them, they had to fight them for a long time in order to tear off the pieces of armours over the vital areas.
Thus, despite the surprise of the attack, the Slayers were able to resist, by mainly punching snouts with their fists, but the neoraptors adapted to their adversaries.
Changing tactics, they decided to isolate one of their enemies and it was Pizarro that they choose first.
With its tail, one of them make her fall on the floor and another immediately grabbed her by the ankle. Cortès, who just had repelled a third raptor by gashing its snout with a dagger, was struck by distress.
"Esmeralda!" He screamed.
He rushed to his friend as she was pulled out of the room.
She managed to clang on one of the arch's frame and Cortès passed his arms under her armpits, pulling her towards him.
Their eyes met and he saw that her eyes were crying, begging him to save her.
But another Neoraptor came to help the one that had grabbed her and being together stronger than Cortès, they took Pizarro out of the arms of her former mentor, dragging her on the stomach while she tried to dig her fingers in the stone.
The scream of terror behind her visor continued in the darkness and it only stopped when they ripped off her throat in some chamber's corner.
Seeing that the Tun-Si couldn't move following the loss of Pizarro, Sherman rushed to him, raised him quickly and pulled him away in order to save his life.
He pushed him in front of him, making him join the others who had been able to regroup. They were throwing bones in the direction of the dinosaurs and one of the proceratosaurs was even knocked out when a skull landed on his head.
One of the crested theropods and a hybrid male Neoraptor laid dead in the chamber, the latter with its innards emerging from a large gaping wound, the result of a blow inflicted by Olsen's great axe.
Shooting from time to time to make them back off, they returned to the first chamber they had crossed earlier and went up the stairs.
Sherman scanned the group and only noticed then that the two keepers had disappeared.
X
Standing with the back against the rocky wall on the ledge that overhung the abyssal chasm, the same that the proceratosaurs had taken in order to attack them by surprise and so narrow that a man a little too corpulent would have tipped in the void, Grady and Sembène listened attentively, for any sound that might come from the other ledge over them or from the entrances of the chambers where the warriors laid.
They went to hide there as soon as they had seen the bulk of the pack arrive, thinking that following the Slayers in the warriors' necropolis would be suicide.
Neither the dinosaurs, focused on the soldiers, nor the latter, busy fleeing, had seen them ran out on them and in order to not be spotted, they had even turned off their lights.
Once they made sure the best they could that there was no longer any dinosaurs above them and that they had all gone to the chambers, they slowly pivoted and climbed back to the ledge path.
Once on it, they began to run up the path, intending to return as quickly as possible to the nobles' tombs.
Their plan was to join the lava tube beyond it and then turn west to get out of the mountain by the path the Indominus had taken to enter in it.
Maybe they would avoid thus the neoraptors and proceratosaurs, too busy fighting the Slayers, but the keepers took the risk of throwing themselves into the Indominus' mouth.
They strongly hoped that the possibility of some humans daring to return near the temple doesn't cross her mind. They momentarily doubted about their decision, but as if to told them that it was the right choice, they heard Pizarro's scream when they reached the spot where Leng had lost the box, and the other sounds they hard implied that they would have been torn to shreds if they had followed the Slayers.
X
"The bridge is near, hurry!" Sherman shouted to his men as they reached the aisle lined with standing mummies.
Pursued by one part of the pack, the other being quarrelling over Pizarro's body, all they had to do was to reach the end of the aisle, go down the stairs, cross the guard room and jump over the gap left in the middle of the bridge before reaching the entrance of the necropolis' peasants, a position that could be easily defended against a coming horde of enemies, especially if they had to cross an obstacle while they were within firing range.
However, by estimating the speed of the dinosaurs and theirs, Sherman quickly realized that they would catch them before they could all reach the other side of the bridge.
He had already lost Butu, Méndez and Pizarro. He refused to let another die here.
If he could win the others a few more seconds ...
As the first Slayers went down the stairs, their pursuers appeared at the turn of the aisle.
Trotting in front of the others, there was a big male iroquoii, the dominant individual of the study group to which he belonged.
Sherman stopped near the top of the stairs and let his men pass before him.
The raptor then saw that the swordsman was blocking his way and he growled at him.
Having caught the raptor's attention, Sherman oriented his light's beam towards his snout and his eyes, irritating the predator.
His congeners wanted to rush towards the human but he dissuaded them with a snap of his jaws.
"Pride is a terrible sin, creature," Sherman taunted the iroquoii.
The raptor snarled, arched his neck back, and darted forward with a scream before spreading his arms.
Sherman tightened his grip around his sword and firmly stood his ground.
The iroquoii covered the distance between them at a frightful speed, almost within the blink of an eye, jumping over the fallen mummies on his way, and once he thought he was close enough, he leapt all claws out.
As the raptor was about to pin him on the ground at the end of his leap, Sherman stepped aside at the last moment and taking advantage of the short moment taken by his opponent to win back his balance, he struck him with his sword at the base of the neck, almost slicing it, and finished the predator by thrusting him in the chest.
"Your sins are forgiven," Sherman declared before running away.
Momentarily dissuaded from moving further by the death of their congener, the other neoraptors refused to advance for a few moments.
The proceratosaurs there rushed on the iroquoii's body and started to devour him.
This triggered the fury of the other who immediately chased them away from the body, forcing them to fall back on Sherman, who had reached the guardroom.
He crossed the arch and arrived near the bridge.
All the others had already jumped and some were even rushing into the tunnel that led to the peasants' necropolis.
But behind him, Sherman heard a lot of growls and hisses: the rest of the pack was coming.
"Gregor!" Decker suddenly shouted.
She was standing at the other end of the bridge, ready to catch him. She kept sweeping with her light's beam the threshold of the arch and the guard room beyond. Sherman perceived the sound of an animal that was running in great strides and quickly catching up with him.
A Neoraptor, much faster than the proceratosaurs, was on his heels and he had not even passed by the hoist.
He thought for a moment about turning around and face his pursuer but if the latter was not alone, he knew he risked to be overwhelmed and slain.
However, if he continued to run, the raptor would pin him on the ground by leaping on him and it would definitely have the advantage.
While he accepted the idea that his death might come soon enough, Sherman heard a sound of compressed air being released and saw a tapered object cross the cavern. The next second, he felt in his back the blast of an explosion that almost made him fall.
Despite this unexpected event that silenced the dinosaurs at his heels, Sherman did not stop and managed to set foot on the bridge.
He jumped over the gap and landed on his knees on the other side.
Decker helped him up and when he turned around, he saw that the Neoraptor who had been on the verge of catching him up had literally burst into pieces.
He let out a sigh of relief.
Beyond the arch, the other dinosaurs had stopped and were silent, looking with distrust at the entrance of peasants' necropolis tunnel.
Arana, Custer and a few other mercenaries, with one of them equipped with a still-smoking rocket launcher, stood in front of it and were motioning to Decker and Sherman to hurry.
The two slayers joined them and rushed in the tunnel, followed by Arana and most of the mercenaries.
Two of them stayed a few more seconds, the time to put explosive charges at the entrance of the tunnel and start the detonators' countdown before running away.
Seeing the humans escaping, the dinosaurs decided to cross the arch and came closer to the bridge.
The proceratosaurs jumped to the other side and moved briskly towards the tunnel but hearing the beep made by the detonators, the neoraptors, very cautious, hesitated greatly to advance and they didn't crossed the bridge.
The increasingly closer time span between the beeps discouraged them even more from approaching and some, which had seen the men pose these strange objects, feared an ill turn.
Some of the proceratosaurs started to become wary and turned around, returning to the bridge.
Suddenly, the time span between the beeps narrowed so much that they formed an almost continuous sound.
A few seconds later, the countdown came to zero and there was a powerful explosion whose shock wave knocked down all the animals.
Most of them, far enough, were left unscathed except for a temporary deafness but three of the proceratosaurs, which were near the tunnel's entrance during the explosion, had been caught in the fire blast and their remains now rested under a pile of rocks weighing several dozen of tons that blocked the passage.
The chase having been cut short, the dinosaurs returned to the warriors' necropolis, intending to return to the Indominus.
X
Despite the distance, the explosion was heard by Grady and Sembène, still on the way to the tombs of the nobles.
Knowing that InGen's troops had just blocked a passage in order to stop the dinosaurs, they realized that they now had no choice but to continue.
Moments later, they heard the Indominus letting out a call, probably from the lava tube, and soon after, the neoraptors answered and their calls echoed against the walls.
Listening attentively, the keepers noticed that they were getting closer and closer.
They had to hurry.
The entrance of the nobility's tombs being in sight, they quickened their pace and rushed in there, searching for a hiding place while the neoraptors and the proceratosaurs went up the path fast.
