Caught Red-Handed
Ellie, Malcolm, and Grant ran helter-skelter out of the burning theme park. Rides were exploding all around them, and they heard the sound of approaching vehicles. Running towards a small road that looked like it was used for maintenance purposes, they stopped and took a look at the incoming vehicles. The vehicles were large, yellow-colored trucks with large compressed-gas tanks marked with the words 'HALON GAS' mounted on them. As soon as the trucks stopped, many men jumped off and started pulling long fireman's hoses towards the inferno that had once been a roller coaster. Their long hoses sprayed out a dense white gas, which seemed to have no effect on the flames. But they knew that the Halon gas would eventually put out the fire, and resumed running down the maintenance road.
As they ran, they didn't see three Jeeps painted in the army-camouflage style follow them into the maze of maintenance roads.
xxx
The three of them ran along mud-covered tarred roads that wound through dense forest. The road was even occasionally blocked by small logs or bushy plants. Crickets sang in the twilight, chirping like an orchestra. Grant was the one who spotted the squat, concrete building at the side of a maintenance road. The building had a small sign in front of it which declared it to be 'Geothermal Power Plant 02'. They broke the door's large locks, and entered the dark building. Upon entry, they found the room to be in total darkness. Malcolm pulled a switch labeled as 'LIGHTS', and a long row of dim tungsten bulbs lit up, flickering now-and-then.
"Let's find the controls," said Ellie, shouldering her saboteur tool bag.
"What are you planning to do?" asked Malcolm, squinting down from the metal platform they were standing on. He saw a deep, dark, seemingly bottomless pit of machinery and piping. Steam and pungent sulfur fumes billowed upwards out of the darkness, making it look like the bowels of Hell, but without the flames and brimstone.
"Find the controls and turn off the power to the fences," replied Ellie, walking down the creaking, narrow staircase that connected the platform they were on to the dark, smoking pit below.
They walked in near darkness, one level below the entrance, in the largest corridor on that level, with only the occasional tungsten bulb as a form of lighting. They saw nothing that looked like controls, but merely several locked grille-gates that barred entry to darkened corridors. Ellie squinted at a grille-mounted panel which had the words 'Office' etched into it. She looked at the gate the panel was mounted on, and saw that the grilles were locked up with three separate heavy-duty locks. She took out three sledgehammers, and handed one to Grant, one to Malcolm, and held one herself. They swung the hammers towards the locks.
CLAAAANNNGGG! CLAAANNNGGG! The sound of the blows that they inflicted upon the locks echoed loudly in the dark corridor. Before they could swing down on the locks an umpteenth time, Grant held up a hand.
"You hear that?" he asked them, and they strained their ears to pick up the slightest noise. They heard what Grant had heard: footsteps coming down the metal staircase they had descended.
Without saying anything, Ellie turned and smashed one of the locks. Malcolm and Grant followed suit, and soon the locks lay smashed on the floor. Ellie took out a chain and a lock, and locked the grille behind them. Soon, they were running down the darkened corridor, heading for the doors at the end of the corridor.
xxx
Several Capture Crewmen followed head engineer Agis down the narrow metal stairs that headed towards the dark geothermal power plant machines. They heard the strange clanging sounds coming from ahead, but dismissed it as the power plant's machinery at work. Agis walked briskly towards the geothermal plant's control room, and took out his keys. His jaw dropped open when he saw the locks lying broken on the floor, with the grille gate now locked by a chain and a combination lock.
"Poondek!" he cursed in his native Tamil. Turning to the crewmen, who were armed to the teeth with everything, from tasers to chainsaws, "One of you pomblaks cut this lock open."
Grant, Malcolm, and Ellie heard the sound of a chainsaw cutting through metal, and hastened their work. They had found the power plant's controls after searching every room in the corridor, and were perplexed over what meaning the schematics had.
"These shapes look like a fractal geometry diagram if not anything," said Malcolm, frowning at the numerous decagonal shapes on the schematic plan.
"If only we knew what these numbers and symbols mean," sighed Ellie, looking at a wall-mounted schematic drawing, with several switches sticking out of it.
"I know how to solve this problem," announced Grant, walking up to the schematic's switches and flipping every single switch. The room was plunged into the darkness, and they heard the chainsaw get turned off as their chained lock clanged to the floor. Loud footsteps approached rapidly.
"Quick, let's ciao!" hissed Malcolm, throwing a knockout-gas grenade he had found in Ellie's bag out of the office, into the corridor. It went off, and the approaching goons started hacking, coughing and cursing, allowing them to run through the fog with held breaths, guided by flashlights. Before they left the room, Ellie used her sledgehammer to smash the switch panel, spilling sparks and smoke into the doorway.
Once they had ran out of the power plant, Grant asked Ellie, "Why didn't we use these lights when we were entering that hellhouse?"
"Batteries would go flat, Alan," was her abrupt reply, as she eyed the unattended Capture Crew jeep parked on the maintenance road outside the power plant's entrance. With its keys in the ignition.
"I wonder what did we turn off?" asked Malcolm, as they drove off the jeep.
"Let's find the boathouse and get out of here," said Grant, "I think those 'fractal' shapes on the schematic plan were dinosaur enclosures."
All over the park, the strobe lights that normally blinked on top of the electric fences, went dead simultaneously. The lights blinked when there was voltage flowing through the fences. They died when the fences were deactivated. And they were now dead.
xxx
In the computer center, Felix, Tembo, Lee, and Ludlow were brooding over the theme park's destruction. Tembo was not brooding about the theme park however. He worried about the broken spinosaurus enclosure fence. If the 2 spinosaurs got out…
He turned to Ludlow, "Why haven't you repaired the spino fences?"
"The repair crews are almost there, Roland," said Ludlow, in a bored tone, "It's only a matter of time…"
All of them jumped out of their chairs when the emergency sirens started to scream, throughout the whole park. Felix's computer screen flashed the words 'DINOSAUR FENCES DEACTIVATED. MULTIPLE FENCE BREAKS'.
"What the Hell?" shouted Ludlow, turning red, "Is this some kind of joke, Felix?"
Felix, who was frantically punching keys, turned around and said, "It's for real! Just because I pulled that incident with the shoes and chocolate biscuits you think I…"
"Shut the Hell up and turn those fences back on!" bellowed Tembo, drawing his elephant gun, "Lee, we're going on safari!"
"Oh no, you're not!" snapped Ludlow, "Those are expensive animals!"
"They're also very murderous animals," was Lee's reply as he and Tembo walked out of the control center.
"What fences have been breached?" asked Ludlow.
"Err… Herrerasaurus, velociraptor, spinosaurus, tyrannosaurus, suchomimus, dilophosaurus, deinonychus, and gojirasaurus," replied Felix, who was furiously punching in commands for the computers.
"Damn!" cursed Felix, throwing his hands in the air, "The fences have been turned off at the power plant. They'll need to be turned back on manually, at the power plant."
"And you're gonna do it," said Ludlow, dragging Felix out of the control room.
"What about the computers?" cried Felix, as he was dumped into the driver's seat of a Jeep.
"I'll get Kenny to take care of them. Now get your skinny ass moving!"
The jeep roared to life, and started off towards the power plant.