Author's Note: Surprise, it's me! So, of course, it's been forever, and I won't bother telling you why I've been away for so long (those of you who have dared to even stick close to this piece and click on it) and I won't pretend like I'm not a jerk. I have been uber busy though, but we won't get into that. I've just been really bothered that this hasn't been finished up yet, especially with the new movie slated for June, so I decided to dive back in and try my hand at this again. Hopefully more updates are to follow, and please, enjoy! As always, reviews and comments are so appreciated, friends!
Chapter Forty-one
It hadn't taken but five minutes for Claire Dearing to abandon her Mercedez Benz outside the employee entrance to the Innovation Center and rush up to the control room, her heart hammering like a wedge within her chest. Her hair was frizzing, her shirt was soaked with sweat, and the heel on the back of her left shoe was loose.
All things that were very much unlike the collected Claire Dearing of Jurassic World.
The first order of business she received after bursting into the control room was Lowry's quiet report of, "She's approaching the park." Handing off a tablet, and slowing seating himself back at his station, the entire room had looked at her as if they were awaiting God himself.
She swallowed a thick breath, looked down at the blinking tracer of the hybrid on the screen, and looked up to the room's main monitor, where the steadily displayed number of populants blared a scarlet so deep it caught Claire's breath. With an odd twenty thousand people in the park, it would be nearly impossible to evacuate them all in time – and, if they evacuated, that would be the end of the park, Henry's research, Hammond's legacy, and her.
There was only one thing do, and while panic wasn't one of them, Claire was slowly beginning to feel like she was losing control of the entire situation. Don't panic. Whatever you do, don't panic. You have this completely under control, Claire. Remember your training excercises. Breathe. The words rang like hollow bells in her head, however, echoing off the cold stone trap that had become her brain.
She didn't even hear herself clear her throat and begin giving orders. "Please ring up Mr. Masrani," she said quietly, passing the tablet back to Lowry as she approached the main monitor. Horrifying screams were still running in the back of her mind like a broken record as she gently touched her fingertips to her lips, remembering the cold words she'd exchanged with Owen in the paddock before this whole mess had transpired. She suddenly regretted so much – and she didn't even know if he was alive.
Lowry was already on it, when another tech asked from across the room with a reverance so dead it might as well have been buried. "What do we do, Miss Dearing?"
Swallowing back a breath, she looked at the digital schematic of the park, filled with buzzing occupants, and then glanced over at the technician. With a slow and uneasy sigh, she turned on her heel, extended her arms to address the audience she'd mustered, and offered them her best smile of reassurancel. Given the pale chill of the room, it did little to reassure anyone.
"We are going to get everyone inside where it is safe, and ACU will deal with this problem. Someone please activate the main unit, and send the announcement for all bodies inside," after a few brief moments of no one moving, she clapped her hands twice, then snapped her fingers and waved her hand as if to get the pulse back in the room, only partially aware that the movement was a subconscious effort to mask her own lack of faith.
She dipped her head, and brushed aside her now imperfect hair. "Chop, chop, people," she mustered a nervous laugh that wedged in her throat like a stuck piece of half-eaten truth, "Everything is under control. Let's get a move on, shall we?"
When Claire turned to intercept a headset, she noticed that, for the first time, her hands were trembling.
"Zach! Would you come on? It's our turn to board!"
Of all the things to be doing on a bright Wednesday afternoon, riding the Gyrosphere with your dorky kid brother was probably at the bottom of Zach's list. Well, cleaning up dinosaur filth might've slightly topped that, but this was the closest thing to misery that he could think of.
It wasn't just that there were two really smokin' hot girls totally checking him out across the queue, but also his hair was also pretty on point, and for once, his brother had seemed too downtrodden to be his usual, dinosaur-obsessed self. It had seemed like favor had smiled upon him, so he'd opted to smile at the girls and attempt to strike up a distant game of "smile at me, and I'll smile at you" looks.
Since Claire had snapped at the both of them two weeks ago, they hadn't seen much of their aunt, which had led them to other endeavors around the park. She'd been frantic with the "busiest season of the park", having welcomed over three thousand new arrivals in the passed two weeks, as school was released in the mainlands and summer was now well underway. She hadn't seen hide nor hair of the pair of them for three days, though she had taken them out for smoothies Saturday night. And, ever since she'd gotten rid of the Marianne woman, she had been hardly tolerable.
Not that it wasn't bad, no seeing Claire. She was a stick in the mud anyway; just another adult caught up in her job and obsessing about a man she could never have. Genderbend it around, and it was practically his father in a nutshell – this wasn't unusual for Gray or himself. They'd grown up with this type of drama with their own parents, and it didn't surprise him in the least that his mother's sister was the exact same way. It must've been in the genetics.
He'd been refraining from thinking on the inevitable the entire trip – he'd seen the divorce papers on his dad's computer one night after borrowing a USB drive from the office, and he'd seen his father had already signed them, and that his mother's copies were alphabetically archived in an email to her work account. Of course it had devastated him, though he hadn't so much as batted an eye about the intrusion into their lives – he couldn't, for Gray's sake.
But now it was obvious. His mother had been recovering from sobbing fits each time she'd called to talk, and that spoke volumes for the home-life situation. Zach half expected his father to be moved out and gone by the time they arrived back, since he hadn't even spoken to his father since they'd left home.
He hadn't thought to talk to Gray about the situation, until his brother fell into the Gyropshere seat next to him, and buckled himself in. "Mom and Dad are getting divorced, aren't they?"
It threw him for a literal loop – his head snapped around to face his brother so quickly from his own seat, that he slipped the buckle into his thigh from his attempt to snap it closed. Instantly, like he'd been dumped with a bucket of water, sweat began to soak through his shirt, and his palms were beginning to moisten. He found it infinitely difficult to breathe.
He struggled to find words, before raking a nervous hand through his hair. "What – what are you talking about? Mom and Dad are not getting a divorce."
Gray gave him a very serious, I-know-you're-totally-lying look, before Zach willed himself to focus on the attraction, and took the yoke of the hamster-ball he was now, effectively, trapped in. Now it would be impossible to turn away and ignore the statement.
"Yes they are," Gray's demeanor instantly drooped, and his head fell against the glass of the gyro. He looked lazily out into the expanse of landscape as they pulled away from the platform, his features tugged downward like a sad dog. Dark circles framed his eyes, and his eyes were puffy as if he'd been crying, not getting any sleep, and suffering from an allergic reaction all at once. He began to trace the zipper on his waist-pack absentmindedly, like he always did when he was in thought.
"How do you know that?"
Gray looked back at him, before he propped an elbow on the plexiglass of the sphere, and plopped his chin into his palm. "I saw divorce papers, from both their lawyers."
Zach had the fleeting thought that his brother was a lot more observant than he first imagined, and that he was also clever – and finally, that he'd have to tread a bit more carefully if he wanted to keep any secrets of his own. Sighing, he fell back into the seat, and navigated the gyro out into the landscape away from the platform, not noticing the sudden fluster of activity in the crowd.
Then, without thinking, he blurted, "I saw them too," in a sprout of mumbled words.
Gray's head snapped to attention as if someone had just flung his spine into alignment. "You did?" After a slackjaw look, his face bunched into a wrinkled frown and he crossed his arms liked an irritated parent. "You saw and didn't tell me?"
Now he was at an impasse. He could lie to his brother, or admit to the fact that he didn't actually find him annoying and decided to spare his feelings. Either way was not how he would've chosen to handle the situation. But, when he glanced over at his young sibling, he saw that his eyes were brimming with rising tears at even the thought of their parents splitting up, not necessarily the fact that his big brother had kept it from him.
He blubbered for words, the sight of his brother's tears nearly unravveling him to the point of embarrasment. A hot flash of color exploded on his cheeks, and suddenly sweat was dribbling into his eyes as if he'd showered in a stream of his own perspiration. His heart was pounding like a brass weight in his chest, and his lungs hurt from trying to stabilize his breathing process. Why was this so hard? It was his brother - his pesky, far-too-intelligent, know-it-all brother.
"I...I didn't know how to tell you, Gray," he looked away quietly, guiding the gyro slowly, with no particular direction in mind. "I didn't know how to tell anyone."
It didn't do anything to curb Gray's impudent look. If anything, his brother's stare was colder than before, and it picked away at Zach's resolve as if it had, for the first time, mattered to him like it never had before. Suddenly, he felt very alone while being within a breath of his only sibling, and his gut was cold and steely. He felt sick, like he was almost ready to vomit - had he, all this time, been missing something from his life that could only be manifested as that of his younger brother?
With a hurt look in his eyes, Gray simply uttered a quiet, "I'm your brother - you're suppose to tell me everything," before shifting entirely to face the world outside his half of the sphere, partially curled into a sulking ball of sadness. His shoulders slumped, he hung his head, and Zach tried to ignore the soft whimpering and sniffles he heard coming across the gyro.
His little brother's words, mixed with his expression, hit Zach straight in the chest, where they dropped sourly into his gut like a Mento and Coke rocket gone wrong. He swallowed the growing lump in his throat, before exploring the landscape before them, unsure of where to go in the silence of the space that wasn't so small between them, anymore. And briefly, he had the thought that he must've been the worst older brother ever.
Marianne was certain of two things on the drive back from Paddock 11. Firstly, that she was certain Owen was fully capable of exploding at any moment to whomever would dare get in his way, and secondly, that Alan was going to kill her for dragging him into this. At first, as she'd plopped into the Camaro's front seat, Sophie on her her lap trembling like a scared rabbit, it hadn't at all seemed real. She'd thought this was all some elaborate nightmare, and that any moment, she'd wake up in the trailer parked on the desert flats of the Montana plains, Alan right outside her door lecturing her about sleeping the day away.
It became very real, however, when Sophie started to whimper into her shoulder and Owen reached across the console to rub his niece's back reassuringly. Marianne had almost broke down into a ragged sob herself at the realization that she may have gotten herself, and Owen's niece, killed by being reckless. She'd flown into Paddock 11 in a jealous fit over Owen being alone with Claire, and it had not only cost her the peace of mind and joyful oblivion, but it had also sobered her to Alan's cold and dark reality of nightmares.
As they approached the park, Sophie's whimpering became muted, and her trembling began to wear off when she buried her face in Marianne's chest. She'd slowly taken to stroking the little girl's back and drawing small circles against her shoulder in an attempt to quell her fear, and it had seemed to work, because now she just stared blankly out the window. Marianne wouldn't deny that the girl was probably going into shock, because she was still suffering the aftereffects herself.
It was when Owen reached across to brush a curl over her shoulder and offered his hand for her to hold that tears pulled at the corner of her eyes, again. His soft look of patience and sympathy, paired with a concerned look tossed with fear, was enough to knock her steeled belly into a toppling tailspin. As Sophie rested against her, she slowly slipped her hand into Owen's, and then reached with her other hand to wipe at her eyes.
He said nothing, just interlaced their fingers, and gave her hand a tight squeeze of reassurance. She did the same, before resting her other elbow on the ledge of the window, and propping her head up with aching and bloody fingers. Thankfully the wound to her hand had stopped bleeding, and the gash above her eye throbbed painfully, but had also stopped bleeding for the most part. Now, mostly, her body was just aching with trauma as the horrific roars of the animal cascaded up and down her spine in every other thought.
When she closed her eyes, she could see the monster's dripping maw and the black expanse of throat, and her stomach collapsed in an inferno of fear and horror. Her eyes popped open fully, to find that she'd dozed off slightly, and that the Camaro was just parked beneath the hotel's overhead canopy, and Owen was transferring a sleeping Sophie to Nick van Owen, while exchanging words with Alan. When he looked towards the Camaro, her breath caught, and she was almost on the brink of tears.
In hardly any time at all, Alan's face went white as a sheet, and he turned away from Owen so quickly that he might as well have transported over to the side of the Camaro. He was at the passenger's door in less than a dozen strides from the door of the hotel, and practically ripped open the vehicle's door with the force of an animal. He dropped to his knees, flung his arms around her, and she fell into him so quickly that it felt suddenly natural. As thick arms wrapped around her, she buried her face in his shoulder and released a wrenching sob, all her emotions fluttering to a head like a boiling pot.
Alan's tone was grave, but calm, as he rubbed her back gently. "It's okay," he said quietly into the disheveled mop of hair above her ear, "It's okay, Marianne. I'm right here - you're safe. It's okay." He shushed her in baritone whispers, as if trying to console an infant, but this only made her sob harder, and grip the back of his shirt as if she were a child clinging to a father.
She gulped for air, pulled back, and shook her head while wiping at her eyes. "The car...at the paddock...I tried to get Sophie out, but, I couldn't-" then she paused to watch Nick carry the unconscious little girl back into the hotel, a while calling for medical assitance. Two hotel employees quickly rushed him, and one of them lifted a radio to make a call for assistance inside the glass doors of the hotel's lobby. Owen turned from the doors after a moment, and hurried over to the car.
Alan grabbed her face in his hands, and shook her once, firmly but with care. "Listen to me, this isn't your fault, honey. You kept her alive, and that's what matters right now. Are you alright? No broken bones? Do you need to see a doctor?" Alan was looking over her with such care that she couldn't even register his questions fully, until he noticed the cut on her hand and above her eye. "These are going to need stitches,"
All she could mumble, while staring into the aged and weathered features of her longest friend, was, "You were right, Alan. All along...and I didn't listen -"
While the corner of his mouth twitched with a humorous tug, he withheld any trace of satisfication that he might have had from hearing her save the words. Instead, he just took her in another hug, and patted her back strongly, shaking his head. "It doesn't matter. I never wanted to be right, Marianne - I'm just glad you are safe." And that made her cry all over again, fat tears that rolled onto his shirt and stained the navy cotton in dark pools.
It was Owen's warm hand on her shoulder that jarred her back to glance over her shoulder at him. "We've gotta go," he said with a quietness that was melodic and deep, "that thing is coming this way and we've gotta tell Claire. This place needs evacuated right now before it gets here - who knows how fast it moves."
Alan nodded firmly, then stood to look around the area. "You two go - I'll meet up with you as soon as I find Ellie. She's meeting me here, shortly." Shielding his hands over his eyes, he zeroed on the commotion of stirring crowds across the courtyard from the hotel to the main avenue, where people were moving in confused waves in every direction. Marianne rose out of the car, and followed his stare, when he pointed and looked at her for direction.
She noticed that uniformed park officials were guiding people in, some holding walkies to their mouths, while other were frantically consulting what appeared to be flowcharts and clipboards. Official vehicles were driving everyone in-between guests, horns blaying loudly in an attempt to move the crowds to carry on their tasks. Two teenage girls where hustling towards the hotel, one of them gripping a walkie, the other clipping a headset to her shirt, both of them looking nervous and sunburned.
Owen, concerned, got out of the Camaro and whistled at them with his fingers between his lips, and they paused as he jogged over. After exchanging concerned and hesitant glances with one another, Owen flashed them his badge, and they looked suddenly more relieved - that is, before they handed over the headset and a clipboard to Owen's hand, which was gesturing for them to do so with an open palm and wagging fingers. Once he'd obtained the objects, he sent them off with a wave of his hand, and they departed with curious looks on their faces.
He dropped the clipboard on the Camaro's hood, plucked a Sharpie from his back pocket and pulled off the lid with his teeth. He began studying the map as Alan and Marianne took place standing at either side, bent over the hood of her car as he began to measure distance with the headset's cord, after having determined a distance of three miles from the map's legend.
"The thing is making good time," he stated, "Claire has it pegged in the Control Center," he informed no one inparticular. "It's about two miles east, not far at all."
"Those girls knew that?" Alan challenged. Marianne shivered at the weight of his words, then glanced around them to the treeline which faded into jungle from their civilized cut out. The dinosaur could be anywhere, watching them, and the thought almost made her sick to her stomach. Sensing her unease, Owen handed her the Sharpie, and pointed a solid finger to a large black circle he'd made of the main avenue and it layout.
"Training tells us to put everyone inside if there's ever a situation like this," he then slid his finger across the main avenue on the map, and tapped the Innovation Center with a surprisingly tough jab. "We've never really compensated for anything this big, but I'd put money on it that Claire is going to keep everyone in the central areas, where officials can work with everyone."
Marianne's mind was spinning for a long moment as she considered the words now hanging on the air like a thick blanket of perspiration and trouble. The very thought of all the park's occupants, in one place - thousands of them - send her head spinning, with a wad of breath catching in her throat. She wasn't entirely sure if the roar she heard was outside her head or not, but she was certain that she could still hear the animal's heartbeat, even from here, and that thought terrified her even more.
She finally swallowed a breath. "But...but that's putting everyone in one place," she murmured quietly. Looking up from the map, she found both Owen and Alan starting at her, as if they were waiting for it to fall together in her head before saying. However, she didn't need it to fall together any more than it was already, as their looks confirmed every fearful thought her head had been formulating since Owen had spoken the words moments ago.
"We'll be fish in a barrel," she finally finished, looking out to the swath of people being corralled and directed by park officials like oxen. By the dozens she saw them enter buildings, with attendants closing the doors behind them, talking on radios and looking just as unnerved and unconvinced as everyone else. By facial expression alone you wouldn't have been able to separate the employees from the terrified and confused guests, though Marianne doubted anyone knew what they were currently right in the middle of.
Owen huffed. "You're right about one thing," he said coldly, and folded the map furiously before he stuffed the map in the front of his vest, then grabbed Marianne's hand and pulled her across the hotel's courtyard, which was not but four blocks from the Innovation Center. Alan was right behind them as they approach the mass of scrambling and uncertain people, Marianne gripping tightly to Owen's arm as he melded into the crowd effortlessly. He set his jaw, and drew his arm in closer, her following in an attempt to stay as close to the raptor trainer as physically possible.
And as they pressed forward, Marianne fought the urge to cry.