Old Friends

Ray Arnold was awoken from his sleep by the shrill sound of his doorbell ringing. Irritated, he grunted and rolled over, hoping that the visitor or visitors would bugger off and leave him in peace and let him finish his afternoon nap. He was on his day off from work, and he needed to catch up on his sleep. His latest work projects had kept him awake for at least eighteen hours a day for the past two months. He got up, fluffed up his pillow, and lay back down, with a sigh.

'Peace at last,' he thought.

The doorbell rang again.

Mightily pissed off and sleepy now, he got up and walked downstairs in a drowsy manner. Yanking open the door, he was about to use some rather colorful language until he saw Alan Grant, Ellie Sattler, and Ian Malcolm standing outside his house, Ellie with her hand on the doorbell.

"Hi, Ray. This is urgent," Ellie said.

Letting them in, he cursed whatever Gods there were up there that had seen it fit to interrupt his nap.

xxx

"And that's why we're here," said Ellie, as she finished telling a (by now) horrified Arnold about Peter Ludlow's plans, "We need to know as much as we can about Isla Sorna."

Arnold stretched and yawned, "Site B was a place which we kept secure through the secrecy of its workings. Not many knew about it, and most of them were evacuated before Hurricane Clarissa. They're probably all re-hired by other scientific-product firms already."

"What could you tell us? Ways to sneak in? Species there?" asked Malcolm, raising an eyebrow.

"Well, there was a small boathouse in a series of caves near the island's northern end," said Arnold, lighting a cigarette, "I don't know what species survived, but the last message that I remember from Site B was one that had a manifest of 41 species."

"41!" exclaimed Grant, shocked, "Didn't you only clone 15 species for the park?"

"Alan, we claimed to have cloned 15 species. But we didn't necessarily have to be telling you the gospel truth," said Arnold, tapping some ash from his smoldering cigarette into a blue porcelain ashtray on the table, "Henry's labs were working overtime on Site B. They had cloned 41 species, 15 of which were fully functional and perfected. The others were still new, probably between Version 2.5 to 3.8."

"Henry? Who's that?" asked Ellie.

"Dr. Wu. Remember him?"

"Oh, the Chinese guy who was head geneticist?"

"That's him."

Malcolm spoke, shaking his head, "You never learnt back then, did you?"

"What are you talking about?" asked Arnold, puzzled.

"You already had tons of difficulty managing 15 species on Isla Nublar and yet you still persisted in cloning the other species you had on hand. Hammond was a fool, allowing that to happen."

"He would have said that it was his dream, his vision, to resurrect the dinosaurs."

"But that was the problem. He would have let a thousand people die if it meant that his dream would become into a reality."

"Hey, stop this!" snapped Ellie, the maniacal look back on her face, "Ray, what about Muldoon?"

"Robert? What about him?"

"Where is he? We need his help!"

Ray paused, thinking. He took his cigarette out of his mouth with the two-fingered grip of an expert cigarette-smoker, and pressed it out on the ashtray. He stared at Grant, Ellie, and Malcolm. The sad look in his eyes was scary, to say the least. He merely looked at them, not saying a word. He sighed, and got up from the sofa. Walking over to the adjacent wall, with the mantelpiece, he lifted up a large, leather-bound book from the top of the mantelpiece. Returning to his seat, he opened the large volume, and a small cloud of dust dispersed as the old, cracked leather opened up with a creak. The three of them had no idea what Arnold was doing, but they saw many black-and-white pictures inside, taped down with ancient-looking, yellow-colored from age cellophane tape. They saw various newspaper clippings, with some dinosaur pictures.

Arnold looked at them, sadly, "This was where all my memories of Jurassic Park were stored. Here, have a look."

He handed them the scrapbook, and they flipped through, seeing various kinds of items inside. A newspaper clipping about Jurassic Park's opening day, when they had finally unveiled the dinosaurs to the public. A yellowed brochure for Jurassic Park's Jungle River Ride. A photo of John Hammond, Ray Arnold, Robert Muldoon, Gerry Harding, and Henry Wu standing in front of a sign that read, 'JURASSIC PARK: WHEN DINOSAURS WALKED THE EARTH'. Below that same photograph were the words, 'Meet the loonies', scrawled in spidery handwriting, in black ink that had started to fade. Several small newspaper obituary cuttings, labeled as, 'The men who died so that Jurassic Park might live'. The names were Costa Rican, and Grant recognized one of the names, Jophery, as the worker who had been killed by one of the raptors. They came to a page with a withered wildflower taped to it, and stopped, in shock.

The page had a newspaper cutting, with Robert Muldoon's picture on it. The headlines read, 'World-renowned White Hunter of Nairobi Passes Away From Lung Damage'. The article was yellowed, and there were some numbers scrawled in a corner of the cutting, '12/24/91'. They were brought back to the earth by Ray Arnold's soft, sad voice.

"He died from the slash wounds he got from the therizinosaurus. The one that he and Grant killed. They damaged his ribs beyond repair, even though he underwent intense surgery. The intercostal muscles were mangled, scarred. His lungs were punctured. His ribs couldn't move properly to allow him to breathe. And he died, on Christmas Eve, 1991, and no one mourned him here."

Grant remembered the disastrous mission that he and Muldoon had undergone, hunting down Hammond's secretly-cloned therizinosaurus. They had killed it, but not before it managed to severely wound Muldoon, with its terrible scythe-like, two-foot long claws.

The article stated that Muldoon had hung up his khakis not long after the Park closed, never returning to the bush of Africa. He had retired, and no one had kept in touch with him. He had died alone, on the night before Christmas. His body had only been discovered on New Year's Day, when his neighbor wondered about a strange smell coming from his house. The police had kicked the door down and found him dead in his bed, his body already rotting. The coroner's report had reported the cause of his death to be hypoxia, due to his damaged respiratory system.

Grant looked around the room, at the three others gathered there.

"We'll do this for Robert," he said softly.