When he regained consciousness, Sherman realized that he was knelt in the basin, with his back facing the Kapok tree mound.
He noticed that he had been stripped of his weapons and his armour pieces.
He saw that the guards had begun to do the same with the fallen Slayers and mercenaries, taking with them whatever they thought was useful, before gathering the bodies together in a heap at the edge of the basin.
While they were doing this, Drekanson strode across the battlefield, murmuring the verses of an ancient poem in Old Norse:
skeggöld, skálmöld,
skildir ro klofnir,
vindöld, vargöld,
áðr veröld steypisk ;
mun engi maðr
öðrum þyrma
They were from the Völuspá, a cosmogonic and eschatological poem of the Poetic Edda that consisted in a long monologue where a völva (a seeress) told the god Odin the history of the world, from its origin to Ragnarök, its coming end. The verses could be translated as such:
axe-age, sword-age,
shields cloven,
wind-age, wolf-age,
ere the world falls;
no men will
each other spare.
At the opposite end of the basin, near the tail of the stegosaur, Sherman saw Faraci, also alive and held, and a noose had been passed around his neck, like if he was an animal.
A few guards were gathered around him.
"Get your hands off me!" He protested. "I know nothing else."
As they continued to taunt and humiliate him and as he insulted them in return, one of the guards, of whom Sherman could only see the legs and the lower part of the torso, approached the leader of the Slayers at a quick and determined pace.
Sherman was suddenly hit in the face.
"Dog!"
Sherman looked up and saw Yu's face, stern but struggling to not deform under hatred.
He asked for the sword of their prisoner.
Once it was given to him, he grabbed Sherman's collar and placed one of the edges against his throat, so close that the blade's serrations scraped the surface of his skin and made a cut.
"I should kill you swiftly for the murder of my niece but first you will talk!"
Keeping Fendiserpentes in hand, Yu stepped back and turned to Brunet, who was returning to the basin, riding between the skeleton and the Kapok tree mound.
Rössler, who were among those busy with Faraci, came to him:
"We didn't learn anything new from that schwein," she told him.
"That's why I asked you to bring Sherman alive to me," Brunet said while looking at the kneeling leader of the Slayers.
He turned his eyes to Faraci.
"Get rid of him," Brunet ordered. "Give him a taste of his own medicine."
"With pleasure," she darkly said.
He then dismounted and approached Sherman.
"Well, Gregor. Before you leave for Hell, let's have a talk."
"Damn you!"
Brunet hit him.
"I have a few questions and I greatly would like that you answer them! Who tasked you to test the Indominus on my platoon?"
"How knowing it will help you? It won't bring back your men. You are aware of this and you're responsible for the deaths of those who had fallen here."
Brunet struck his prisoner again, more violently than before, breaking his nose and some teeth. Sherman turned his head sideways and spat blood.
"I repeat my question. Who sent you?"
He just supported his interrogator's gaze without a word, challenging him to strike him again.
But Brunet was given a knife whose blade had been heated to white, and those who held the ex-chaplain violently tore off his T-shirt, unveiling the scars he had acquired in certain parts during the Saurian Wars and other missions.
Brunet began by gently applying the point of the knife on the bare skin of the torso, before slowly lowering the blade so that one of its sides was put against the skin which began to redden.
Sherman gritted his teeth and moaned but when the tip sank several millimetres into the flesh, he wasn't able to hold back a scream.
Meanwhile, the guards grouped around Faraci had moved away from the latter, forming a circle. One of them returned to him, holding Faraci's own mace in his hand, weighing it. The guard inhaled deeply.
"For Patience!"
He brandished the mace and struck Faraci's thighbone with a ferocious grunt, raising him a howl of pain that was heard at the promontory where the Pack was waiting and beyond.
The guard then passed the mace to one of his comrades and each hit Faraci with his own mace, giving him brutal but non-lethal blows, intending to make him suffer before his death.
Brunet pulled the tip of the knife back from Sherman's flesh, letting the latter gasp.
Observing that he would not yield under any form of physical torture, Brunet decided to change his approach:
"Bring him!" He commanded with authority.
Darbinian and another guard arrived, dragging another of their prisoners, one of the Slayers, by the arms.
Sherman recognized with horror that it was Parker, soaked and stunned but alive.
As he slowly regained consciousness, they turned to Faraci.
Lying on his back, he was still breathing, painfully because of his fractured ribs, but the bones of his arms and legs having been broken, he could neither sit up nor rest on his hands.
Blow marks dotted his body and blood was flowing from several wounds, including one on the crotch, from a blow inflicted by Rössler.
As another was about to hit him in his turn, Drekanson, repulsed by the savagery that had gripped his comrades, briskly pushed aside those on his way, unsheathed his handgun and fired, finishing Faraci with a bullet in the forehead.
The shot woke Parker and distracted Brunet's attention. Drekanson then gave a disapproving look to the nearby guards, shaking his head, and turned around and walked away without saying a word while Brunet was giving him a look that was initially cold and then more circumspect, like if doubt was seizing him but that he didn't wanted to show it.
Once Drekanson had left the basin and Parker was kneeled, Brunet turned to Sherman and resumed the interrogation while Faraci's body was taken to the heap.
"Spare his life, please!" Sherman begged. "It was me who involved him in this mission."
"Surely," Brunet said, "but when he learned its nature, he could have opposed it or even surrender, like we suggested to him earlier. He didn't. His loyalty to you seems to be above his scruples. He is guilty and shall pay the price. I repeat my earlier question: Who, within InGen, has entrusted you with this mission?"
Darbinian positioned herself behind Parker, grabbed his frizzy hair, and placed her long knife's curved blade under his throat. The young slayer exchanged a look with his superior but when he was about to open his mouth to speak, he stopped him:
"Don't talk! Our loved ones will pay instead of us if we reveal anything."
Parker nodded weakly and Darbinian looked at Brunet.
He nodded and from one of her pockets, she pulled out what looked like a needle to Sherman's eyes, with which she jabbed Parker on the neck, raising him a little cry.
"Why did you accept this mission?" She asked.
He remained silent and impatient, Darbinian told her comrade to hold him and she came to stand in front of the captive, prompting him to speak by starting to slowly slash his cheek with the tip of her long curved knife, making him grimace under pain.
"Answer!"
Suppressing his sobs, he finally spoke:
"The bonus that was promised if we carried out the mission... It's a pretty big sum, enough for..."
He paused, clearing his throat. His voice tightened.
"I... It's my mother. She became badly ill several months ago but our family being modest, it doesn't have a good healthcare. Thus all our savings went in her treatment..."
"If we want her to be healed," Sherman added, "we had to find a lot of money. As we were about to return home yesterday morning, we received a call."
"Who gave you that call and what did he or she told you?" Brunet questioned him.
"To go to Nublar discreetly with the gear and follow you. He insisted that we had to carry out the mission disguised. Our objective had only been revealed once we were on the field."
"I had no choice. I had to accept. For her," Parker whined. "I have almost no one else. I love her."
Darbinian stepped back, looking falsely shocked for a moment.
"Your story is touching, believe me, but if you think that it will make us change our mind about you, you're wrong. Life is not a fucking Disney, boy! So your pathetic speeches worthy of a bad drama broadcasted on weekdays' afternoon, keep them for yourself! Do you have any idea of the number of children you took a parent from? The parents to whom you took a child? The brothers and sisters you killed? Wives and husbands whose spouses you have forever took?"
"We were just supposed to take some footage, not kill anyone. It was the role of the beast. I didn't killed anyone..."
"But your companions did. Sherman slit Gareth Turner's and Mei Tian's throats like if they were animals and Faraci broke the bones of Sergeant Bellamy with a club! And you did nothing to stop or denounce them!"
She hit his face with the back of her hand but as he was recovering from the hit, he started to feel numbness in the extremities of his limbs and around the mouth, along with a feeling of nausea.
His breathing was getting faster and faster.
Darbinian noticed this.
"You've got trouble breathing, huh?"
She showed him the needle with which she had jabbed him.
"Do you know what's at the end of this needle? A neurotoxin derived from Blue-ringed Octopus' venom," she said. "It's in your blood."
Parker's panic only got worse and Sherman looked at him with a horrified expression.
Darbinian turned to the latter and said:
"You seem to care about him. Good. Now you can watch him die."
The leader of the Slayers grunted angrily and tried to get up to rush on Darbinian but he was held back.
He saw Brunet address his subordinate a certain look in reaction to the words she had uttered, almost a disapproving one.
"The venom will not kill him immediately," he said to Sherman, "but he will be sure to suffer a lot in the meantime. If you decide to answer, I will spare him."
Parker suddenly retched and he vomited right in front of his knees.
His breath became wheezing.
Darbinian looked down on him with contempt.
"You're just a dirty little shit, kid! Your mother will let herself die out of shame once she will learn that you have been an accomplice to a slaughter! You will be the one who killed her!"
Brunet turned quickly towards her.
"Enough, Darbinian!" He reprimanded her. "Leave us!" He harshly ordered her.
She looked at him with surprise for a moment and then obeyed, heading towards the edge of the basin.
"Was Hoskins the one who tasked you with this mission?"
Sherman, watching Parker's eyes roll in his sockets and the young man suffocate, resolved to begin giving answers to their torturers.
"No. Even though he knew we were going to this island to collect data, he did not know that it was up to us to trigger the attack and to get rid of any potential witnesses."
"Who gave you those orders?"
Sherman hesitated a moment to answer but the sight of Parker's torment was hard to face and it made him yield.
"Lynton. Susan Lynton," he confessed.
"About the Indominus. Who would like to buy one?"
"I don't know. Lynton only shared the information that we needed to know for the mission and nothing else. The precise identity of the clients interested by the project weren't among those."
Brunet looked at Sherman for a moment, and having judged that he was telling the truth, nodded slightly and knelt beside Parker, who was convulsing.
"It's over young man…" He said softly, before jabbing him in the neck with a needle similar to the one used by Darbinian.
Parker's face stiffened and almost instantly, his convulsions stopped and his body collapsed sideways, lifeless, under Sherman's dismayed gaze.
"You promised that you would spare him! Liar!"
"I kept my word," Brunet retorted. "I spared him of a more horrible death. The Conus Purparescens' venom that coat this needle instantly put an end to his suffering. You should thank me for that."
As Parker's body was taken to the heap, Sherman began to cry.
A few seconds later, as he was suppressing his sobs, he declared to all the guards within earshot:
"I don't cry for him but for all the men you slaughtered you butchers! And for what? Avenge your comrades? What a noble cause..."
He then gave them a defiant look.
"This will not be left unpunished. If InGen manages to put the US army on its side, it will be the end of your insurgency and adversity spoils you already. You stand here triumphantly but you have forgotten the threat to every human being on this island. You didn't see what I saw inside the mountain. She will take the city before dawn and kill you all, to the last man if she can. This creature is not some mere animal, a spirit inhabits her."
Having the information he wanted, Brunet turned to Yu and, with a tacit look, allowed him to dispose of Sherman.
He came closer, holding Fendiserpentes firmly in his hand.
"If the time of my death has come, so be it. However, I won't leave you the pleasure of killing me. May you and your order be cursed until the end of time!"
Before he could be held back, Sherman suddenly straightened up and rushed towards Yu.
Reflexively, the latter pointed the sword forward but the breath of the slayer, who was then within a meter from him, was cut off and he froze.
Yu lowered his eyes and saw that Sherman had thrown himself on his own sword.
He grabbed Yu's wrist and pulled it towards him, making the sword ran further in his body and the tip emerge from his back. In a weak half-stifled voice, he asked him:
"Will this bring her back?"
Yu promptly pulled Fendiserpentes from Sherman's body and the latter fell on his knees, let out his last breath and collapsed.
Yu dropped the sword on the ground and considering that he had seen enough, headed for the vehicles.
While Sherman's body was put with the others, Brunet ordered:
"Contact Chapuy. Tell him to ask the technicians to send a message to InGen's board of directors. I must speak with them imperatively. Make also an inventory of our arsenal."
He leaned over to pick up Fendiserpentes, put it in its scabbard and taking it with him, he went to find Darbinian at the other end of the basin.
She was standing before the jungle, stomping in the dead leaves and breathing noisily.
She was nervous, remorseful, and to calm down, she had felt earlier a strong urge to smoke, but had restrained herself because of the ashes in the air.
"Forget that boy," Brunet said to her. "He made his choice by deciding to stand with them."
"It's not his death that troubles me the most but he didn't had to die knowing that his mother would curse him if she ever learn the truth about what happened on this island. By reminding him of this fact, I showed monstrosity while it was not even necessary. What was I thinking?"
Seeing that she doubted herself, he reassured her as best he could:
"I have seen your record. You still blame yourself for that infiltrated secret service agent, the one you shot down while you were taking your revenge on the terrorists who had murdered your friend. I know that you went into exile at the Guard after being court-martialled but it was just an accident, which could have been avoided but still an accident. You only have been the victim of a cruel turn of fate. He's the only innocent you killed. I would like to have a record as exemplary as yours."
He paused, inhaled and expired lengthily.
"If I thus reprimanded you earlier, it's because you reminded me of myself when I was about your age. But the way you behaved with this boy was nothing compared to the one I was adopting or encouraging. You are not a monster, Darbinian. I can tell you that for sure because I am one," he said. "Sherman was right earlier during the parley."
Darbinian turned around and began to consider him with great circumspection.
Not without difficulty, speaking in a low and hesitant voice, Brunet explained himself:
"I killed and tortured people who deserved it, others who did not ..." he confessed. "I have the blood of innocents on my hands, civilians, families ... The man I was, you would have shot him at once without remorse. And you would have been right ... I did horrible things, turned ordinary men into bloodthirsty monsters ... and all of that just for easy money, from individuals as despicable as Susan Lynton or worse. When she learned what her son, her only child, became, my poor mother couldn't cope with it…"
He turned towards the heap of InGen's soldiers bodies.
"I'm not better than those people... He was right, you found yourself in hot water by following me."
Darbinian, deeply troubled by those confessions, then avoided his gaze.
She did not want to believe these words but Brunet was not the type to joke, especially not in a situation like this. She had to accept the idea that he was telling the truth.
He read on her face that she felt like betrayed.
She dwelled on all this for a long moment, finally understanding why Brunet had not returned to France in years and had not seen his father since his mother's death.
To say that it was the conflictual relationship that Brunet had with his father who had attracted Darbinian to him, as she was on bad terms with hers, a high-ranked officer in the Russian army, since the incident with the infiltrated service secret agent.
She spoke again:
"Who you were once doesn't matter. What matters is who you are now and who you will be at dawn. I don't know how you could have joined the Guard and how you were able to gain Hamada's and the other's trust and friendship but if they trusted you enough for you to end up here, I should be able to do the same, and this even if I have now an idea of the kind of individual you were. Fate made you our captain and you shall guide us through this ordeal. It's your duty."
Brunet nodded weakly, relieved by the restraint she was showing as she faced this revelation and by the fact she didn't seemed to be willing to spread it.
She warned him though, with the tone of her voice hinting that her trust in him had considerably diminished.
"However, if you betray us or deliberately harm us in any way, I must warn you that I won't miss you."
"And it will be in your interest to do so, Nataliya…" He said without being offended by this threat, even considering that it was justified and that death was better than dishonour. "Let's move, we have a city to defend."
Darbinian let him pass in front of her and they came back to the last guards in the basin.
They had poured fuel on the bodies and thrown a match among them.
The flames, starting at the base of the heap, rose upward.
"What have we done?" One of them let out in a low voice, horrified.
Brunet heard him but said nothing, and just walked, looking deeply pensive.
No one said a word until their return to Burroughs.
X
A few minutes later, once the guards were far enough, the Pack finally went down to the basin.
When they arrived, some of its members saw the body of a horse, the one mortally wounded by Decker and that the guards had to kill in order to put an end to its sufferings.
As they threw themselves on it to devour it with appetite, the Indominus approached the burning heap.
She watched the flames lick, wither and blacken the skins and clothes, roast the flesh...
She then noticed that the men's skin, softer and more fragile than those of dinosaurs, was particularly vulnerable to the flames.
If she could turn fire against them...
Although she ignored how to create it, she could try to determine how it spread.
As the guards had raised the heap of corpses far from any bush, the flames couldn't reach the vegetation.
An idea crossed her mind.
She headed to the nearest tree, bit a big branch within reach of her jaws, choosing one with a thick foliage, broke it and took it with her in order to pass it over the flames.
The leaves were set alight and the flames spreading along the twigs, nearly the entire branch turned fast enough into a burning brand.
As the heat struck a part of her face, the Indominus took the branch to the thickets near the Kapok tree and threw it into it.
The thickets caught fire in their turn and she watched the flames spread to the Kapok tree, climb along the creepers...
She heard worried little cries behind her.
Surprised by this fire that had suddenly appeared, the neoraptors and the proceratosaurs watched with a certain dread the flames enveloping the Kapok tree's trunk.
The Indominus turned and reassured them with a gentle growl, encouraging them to stay a moment to watch her work.
When she thought they had lingered there long enough, she led them away, right towards the land of the gods.
