Huge thank you to Andrewleepotts and lezzles1956 for their reviews (sorry if anyone else did and I missed you out; even bigger thank you to you!) And also thank you to everyone who faved this story! I love you all!
So sorry about the wait, I understand fully if anyone thought I'd died or something. But no. Please enjoy chapter three!

Chapter Three

"I was thinking," Connor piped up. West groaned inwardly. She had already learnt that whenever he said that, he was about to say something really silly. "Won't the owners of this place notice that we've just kinda gone and destroyed their front door?"

"I doubt it," Matt said. West barked a laugh at Connor's expression of confusion.

"Whoever owns this fine house either ran off screaming when they saw the enormous creatures outside, or they are on holiday in Greece somewhere, it being the middle of July and all."

"Right. So we're not going to get sued for vandalism or anything?"

"Connor," Abby said with a hint of impatience. "Shut up."

"What? It's a valid…" he caught the looks the rest of the team were giving him and theatrically snapped his mouth shut. Grinning, Becker carefully lowered the front door onto the royal purple carpet-one that clashed horribly with the flowered wallpaper-and stood, EMD raised, with his back against the wall. West mirrored his action on the other side of the door frame. Becker looked around the whole team, gauging their readiness, and began to count down on his fingers. Three…two…one. Becker tan out first. West followed him instantly and ran along the road at a crouch, keeping low and close to the wall. The first juvenile Gigantoraptor came into view immediately. Not wasting any time, West fired. Her shot hit the side of its head and it let out a high-pitched keening sound, similar to that of the adults. A second, third, fourth, fifth shot landed on the same juvenile, and with a sickening thud, it hit the floor, unconscious except for the occasional twitch.

"One down, three to go." West declared with far too much enthusiasm.

"That was the small one," Matt announced. "The others are likely to be more cautious."

"On your left!" Abby screeched, opening fire on the second juvenile. In the time it took West to turn, Abby and Becker had grounded the dinosaur. It had taken twice as many shots as the first, and it wasn't even the biggest one.

"We left the trucks this way," Becker lead the way down the rubble-strewn road, taking care to avoid the streams of water sprouting from the ground where the fountains had once been. Miraculously, the statue still stood in the centre, fully intact except for a few chips in the stone. The air was filled with an eerie silence that made West's skin crawl; there were two more dinosaurs somewhere around. They should be making a lot more noise.

"Maybe they've gone home," Connor whispered.

"How?" West was incredulous. "Their anomaly closed. No, they're around here somewhere."

"Are your Spidey Senses telling you that, West, or are you psychic?"

"Neither actually Connor, I'm sensible."

"Or paranoid."

"Whatever."

"Will you two be quiet?" Matt snapped. "We're supposed to be the ones with the element of surprise here." West was tempted to tell him to be quiet too but she bit that remark back. She was getting edgy with tension. That was all.

The team stopped in front of the South African High Commission building and Becker, face devoid of any emotion whatsoever, pointed.

"That's where the trucks are." The rest of the team followed his finger. Sure enough, the two black ARC pickup trucks were sitting, right where they had left them, in the middle of the street, about fifty metres away from the team. Between them, however, stood the other two Gigantoraptors.

"Options." Matt requested.

"We could go around," Abby supplied.

"It would take too long and they might see us and run off, or worse, try and eat us."

"We could just shoot them," Becker mused. Matt's expression clearly told the team what he thought of THAT plan.

"A distraction. Then shoot them," West said.

"Bearing in mind what happened last time we went through with one of your plans, go on," Matt said cautiously.

"To be honest I hadn't thought any further ahead than that yet," West admitted. "But really, there's only one option. Someone's going to have to be the bait." Matt sighed, thinking this through.

"Anyone else have an idea?" he asked, already knowing the answer. No one responded. "Okay. Fine. I'll distract them. West, Becker, you're our best shots, try and take them out before they start eating things again. Abby and Connor, make a break for the trucks." Everyone nodded. Connor looked a little paler than usual and Becker muttered something vague about the two Gigantoraptors' parentage, but the whole team agreed. No signals were needed; Matt sprinted in the general direction of the monument, firing shots at the raptors and yelling at the top of his lungs. West and Becker raised their EMD's in unison and began firing too, and Abby and Connor ran straight for the pickups.

"Concentrate on the small one," Becker told West and she switched her target. The young raptor, under fire from all three active EMDs at once, only managed a few steps before falling to the ground. As the bulk of its form made contact, hundreds of shards of detritus flew into the air, hurtling outwards at a fantastic rate. West covered her face with her sleeve and felt bits of stone rebound off her arm. She heard Becker suck in a breath and turned to see him drop a piece of glass the size of her hand to the floor. Half of it was dyed a brilliant red, and the right sleeve of his jacket was already darkening. Before she could ask him about it, the second Raptor charged at them. Sensing that it was earning itself more pain from one direction than the other, it swung its head at Becker and West, missing only by a few centimetres. Its beak crashed into the stone pillars behind them, getting stuck in the intricately carved masonry. As it thrashed its head around trying to escape, the tell-tale crumbling of cracking stone echoed through the air and sent warning bells ringing in West's head. Beside her, Becker began firing at the Raptor, using its momentary distraction as an invitation to bring it down. His efforts only made the Gigantoraptor thrash harder.

"Don't!" West yelled. "It's going to bring the whole building down!" He stopped, but it was already too late. With one final jerk, the Raptor broke free, and sent a cascade of car-sized pieces of stone and plasterboard raining onto the two of them.

It had been three hours. Three whole ours of boring, monotonous waiting, and Jess was about to go completely crazy. Not only had Lester been gone a whole hour longer than he had said he would be, but she hadn't had anything back from the team either. That did nothing but add to her restlessness. She wasn't used to knowing nothing.

As if on cue, a single set of footsteps began thundering down the corridor, and at first Jess thought the Dracorex had escaped again. Then Connor slid to a stop beside her, panting hard.

"Matt told me to... get back here... see what's going on..." Jess waited until he had regained more control over his breathing before asking him to continue. "The whole Com system went down and none of our phones are working. Matt told me to get back here and see what the problem is."

"I have no idea. One minute I was halfway through re-routing the traffic system, then nothing. The ADD won't connect to anything other than the ARC's internal network, and none of the other computers in the building will even get internet access. Lester went to Whitehall three hours ago. What about the rest of the team?" Jess looked expectantly up at Connor. He was her only link to the team. Her only link to Becker. His hesitant silence wasn't at all encouraging.

"One of the Gigantoraptors knocked down the South African High Commissions Building. As far as we know, Becker and West were standing right next to it when it fell. With the Coms down, we haven't heard anything from them." His voice was completely devoid of emotion, as if he hadn't quite worked out how to handle it yet either. Jess felt like she was about to cry. "But that doesn't mean they're not perfectly fine and waiting for us to come and get them, right?" he was clearly trying to cheer her up. "Now let's have a look at this." With huge effort, Jess shifted her worry to the back of her mind and showed him the message that was still, infuriatingly, flashing on the screen. Cannot connect; no signal. Connor frowned and leaned over Jess' shoulder, tapping codes into the keypad at a lightning rate. After a minute he stopped and straightened up.

"Someone's blocking the signal from the ARC satellite," he said simply.

"That's what I thought, but who could do that?"

"Well anyone really. The question," He leaned over Jess again. "Is how to get it un-blocked. Whoever is doing this is good; they've isolated all our phones and the Com system as well as the independent network connection, so they obviously know who we are and have a specific reason for doing it. But do they know about..." Connor paused again as his task required more concentration than he could spare for talking. "...This?" He hit the enter key with a flourish, and a second later, every single light in the ARC went out.

"Umm... Connor..." Jess began, but he held up a finger.

"Wait for it," he muttered, staring at the screen of the ADD. Ten more seconds passed, and power returned to the system. Jess suppressed the urge to shout with glee; she didn't know what that had just accomplished. Connor, on the other hand, had no such reservations. He yelled, triumphant, and punched the air with one fist. The ADD sprang into life, sending reams of text scrolling down the screen, and then a status bar popped up.

"I am brilliant," Connor declared, an enormous grin spreading across his face.

"What did you just do?"

"Ever since Phillip had control of Lockdown back when the Beetle Incident happened, I encoded a backup override into the system. Basically it shuts everything down and re-loads it to the specifications I programmed into it at the time, so if you've made some important upgrades to this thing since then you'll have to do them again. This won't stop whoever was blocking us from doing it again, but it should give us Coms back. And if they do cut us off again, we can just repeat the whole process." Jess didn't wait any longer than the word Coms. She hit the speaker button and started talking the second Connor closed his mouth.

"Becker? Jess to Becker, do you read?" She left him a few seconds to reply, but nothing came. She started to panic again. "Becker, please respond."

"Jess? Gracias a Dios. Jess, it's West. We need a medic down here now. It's Becker, he's..." The Com signal went to static for a few seconds. "Jess, do you copy?"

"I copy, West. Medics are on the way." At her words, three people ran out of the Hub. Jess took a moment to calm herself down. Becker was hurt. The urgency in West's voice suggested it was serious. Connor had said the team couldn't reach them. Becker might die. She shut her eyes to prevent the tears that had been welling up since the system went down from spilling over. She was tempted to ask West to repeat what she had said when the signal failed, but she was interrupted.

"Jess, can you get CCTV back up around here?" Matt's voice was as unemotional as usual, but there was a certain underlying tension in it that told her even he was having difficulty coping with the situation.

"I can try. Hold on." Jess had to go through fifteen different cameras to find one that actually gave her a feed, but even then it was temperamental and had a habit of going blank for seconds at a time. The carnage the Raptors had created was enormous. Jess' eyes immediately went to where she knew the SAHC should have been, and sure enough it had been replaced with a pile of rubble.

"We need some heavy digging equipment down here, immediately." Matt didn't elaborate; he didn't need to. Jess wasted no time in getting on the phone to the local building contractors.

"Are you alright?" Becker helped West sit up while she coughed the dust out of her lungs. Once she'd finished, she delved into her bag; which had somehow managed to stay on her back the whole time; and downed half a bottle of water before offering the rest to Becker. He declined; there was no telling how long they were going to be down here. They should preserve their resources.

"I'm fine," West replied. "How about you? That looked pretty nasty."

"It was just a scratch, its fine," Becker insisted. West raised an eyebrow but said nothing more on the matter, even though he knew she wasn't buying it. He didn't know what she'd seen and he was determined to make sure that was as little as possible. Besides, it didn't hurt much. Yet. The two of them sat in silence for a few minutes, broken only by West rummaging around in her bag again.

"Mind your eyes," she told him. He did as instructed, and seconds later the tiny cave they were sitting in was filled with light. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust properly but when they did, he saw that West was now sporting a strap-on head torch.

"I hope you brought spare batteries for that," he commented, shifting his weight onto a more comfortable piece of plaster board. She chuckled, although Becker had no idea how that was even remotely funny.

"It runs off my body heat," she explained. "So long as I'm not dead, we won't need batteries for it."

"That's... clever," Becker eventually decided. He hadn't thought that kind of technology existed outside of Connor's sci-fi movies, but what would he know? The finer points of modern technology often escaped him.

"Here, eat this," West handed him what looked like a granola bar but the wrapper was covered in Spanish writing so he couldn't tell.

"Shouldn't we be conserving our resources until we actually need them?" Becker asked.

"Well, probably, but if we don't eat until we have to, we will never be at one hundred per cent, so why not? And besides, I don't think we're going to run out."

"What did you pack for, an Arctic expedition?" this was another thing she seemed to find extremely amusing.

"I prepare for every eventuality," she said matter-of-factly. "And in this line of work, that includes getting marooned on the other side of an anomaly, so yes, I suppose I did. Now eat; you're injured, you need to keep your nutrient levels up."

"I told you, it's not that bad."

"Eat it anyway. It's not going to kill you." Becker shrugged and bit into the bar. Her logic was undeniable; he had to hand it to her. Another few minutes of silence passed, during which the only sounds that filled the cave were those of West's constant rummaging and Becker's own chewing. It wasn't that bad, actually, the granola.

"Pass me that rock by your foot, will you?" she asked, her voice half muffled by the rucksack. Becker, absent-mindedly munching on the granola, reached down and picked up the rock in question with his right hand.

As soon as his grip tightened around it, a numbing pain lanced through his arm and he hissed involuntarily, dropping the rock as he did so. The light from West's torch was on him instantly.

"You did that deliberately," he said with a defeated sigh.

"Yes I did. Now let me look at that." she climbed over his legs without even waiting for a reply and knelt down next to him, a civilian first-aid kit in one hand. Becker knew there was no point in trying to stop her and was finally starting to admit that maybe he shouldn't have tried to hide it after all. She slowly rolled up the sleeve of his jacket; it was already soaked in blood. Her eyebrows furrowed as she revealed the dirty, bloody mess that was now his right arm.

"Mierda," she muttered. Becker grabbed a mental hold on the sound and replayed it over and over in his mind, trying to find something to think about that would distract him, even just a little, from his pain.

"Do I even want to know what that means?" he asked. Even to him his voice sounded strained.

"No." she didn't look at him but the tone with which she had said that one word gave him the impression she was not particularly pleased with him at that moment. "You are an idiot, do you know that? A first class, Royal Idiot of the highest order." Yep. Definitely not pleased. "Ten minutes ago, I would have been able to bandage this up and it would have been fine, but now..." Her sentence trailed off and Becker risked a glance down at his arm. And then wished he hadn't.

"It's bigger than I remember," he joked, trying not to force himself to consider the details. Truthfully, it was actually a lot bigger than the last time he had looked at it, but that had been at least half an hour ago and a building had fallen on him since then. Now, the skin around it was a bright shade of red and considerably warmer than the rest of him. Dirt and bits of fluff from his jacket had gotten into the cut itself. He was only just realising the implications of this; that cut was deep, he could easily get blood poisoning from it, and if he didn't get it cleaned up quickly enough, he could die. The thought struck him like a sledgehammer and he was inclined to agree with West: he was a complete and utter idiot.

She began cleaning his arm with what looked and felt like a piece of kitchen paper, running it up and down his arm in an attempt to clean off the worst of it. Becker wondered if there wasn't a better, less painful way of doing it. He also wished she would start talking again. Now that the adrenaline from their earlier fight with the Gigantoraptors was wearing off, he was feeling everything, amplified.

"So how come you're so very Spanish, yet you have a surname like West?" He had moved past the fact that her personal life was none of his business and was focusing all his attention on the conversation.

"My father was British," she said simply. "I did originally have my mother's name but... Let's just say she and I don't get along anymore."

"What was it?" he inquired. She chuckled.

"I was born Teresa Catalina Ortega. That's about at generically Spanish as you can really get."

"Why did you change it?" He thought about telling her he thought her name was beautiful but he had a feeling that would just make it awkward.

"I moved in with my brother, and we were far less susceptible to Granny Gossip if we had the same name. So I changed mine to our father's." She didn't look up from her work and her voice contained no emotion whatsoever. Becker sensed he was on dangerous ground asking so much about her, but he was beyond that. If she didn't want to tell him she didn't have to; that didn't stop him from asking.

"Why were your names different?" He studied her face as she thought up how she was going to answer. It changed from studied indifference to the look someone might get when they are thinking about something that happened a long time ago. She sighed impatiently before providing him with an answer.

"We were both born in Spain, but my mother divorced my father a few days after I was born and he took Jack back to England with him. I grew up in San Sebastian, up in the North. My mother's way of child upbringing was... Less than particularly warm. I got to seventeen and figured I would go try and find my brother; we'd never met before then and he didn't even know I existed. When I arrived in London I found Jack easily enough, but our father had disappeared a few weeks before. We never found him." She finished, staring at the wall next to Becker's elbow, lost in her own world. Becker didn't know what to say to that. Her story, however vague it might have been, put the complaints he had about his life to shame. "What about you?" she asked before he could think about it for too long. "What's your story?" Becker found himself smiling humourlessly as he thought about it; his family stories that once would have been too uncomfortable for him to talk about now just made him laugh at how childish it all had been.

"Nothing too exciting. I grew up in Hampshire with my dad and two brothers, raced through Sandhurst, did some Spec Ops work for a few years and then got drafted to the ARC. There's nothing more to it really."

"Are you the oldest?" West's question took him by surprise, even though he was kind of expecting her to ask.

"No. I was the middle kid," he was about to go into more detail but she interrupted him.

"Do you still talk to them?" she was sitting with her arms wrapped around her knees, the light from her head torch casting strange shadows across her face. At his lack of response, she looked up at him, her eyes begging for an answer.

"Not really," he said, choosing his words carefully in order to accurately describe the teetering relationship the three of them shared. "Tom, my older brother, was born nine years before I was so we were never really that close. Sam, though, came a year and a half after me. He never... Our mother died giving birth to him. I don't think he ever got over it."

"Did you?" West's sudden ability to pick up on even the smallest hesitations was getting a little irritating.

"I can't remember her; I wasn't even two years old. He never said, but I think Tom blamed Sam for it. I know our dad did."

"What happened to them?"

"I have no idea where Tom is now, something to do with Army Intelligence, I think. And last I heard from Sam he was trying the whole 'Travel the world' thing." Becker allowed himself a laugh.

"How's that funny?"

"It just is. Sammy is a very antisocial person; when he told me about it I thought he was joking." the two of them fell into silence once again, and the lack of conversation brought his thoughts back to the stabbing pain in his arm. He looked down at it, curious. His blood had stained most of the bandage West had put on it not twenty minutes beforehand, and every slight movement of his fingers sent fresh waves of pain coursing through him. He was also starting to get a headache.

"You still got that water?" he asked. Silently and absently, as if she was somewhere else entirely, West passed him the half empty bottle of water. He downed its contents in three swift gulps. It didn't get rid of his headache but it made him feel a little better. "What about you? You said you have a brother."

"Had." she said after a moment's pause. "I had a brother. He died a few months back."

"What happened?"

"I don't know. Well, I know that he was doing something undercover in Libya but they won't tell me what he died for. All I know is that he died serving his country, although I find that hard to believe." Her voice trailed off and Becker remembered that letter he had sent to Sargent Grey's family three days ago. He realised that West had just repeated the exact thing he had written to them, and he imagined that this was how they would be feeling right now.

"I'm sorry," it was paltry comfort but it was all he could think of to say.

"Why? You didn't even know him." she didn't lift her gaze but her voice had a steel edge on it. "I'm sorry," she said eventually. "I'm just not used to people showing genuine sympathy."

"Fair enough," Becker shrugged; a gesture that was more painful than it was worth, and yawned widely. He was suddenly exhausted. He knew, somewhere in the back of his mind, that his weariness was down to the slice that glass shard had taken out of him; that he was losing too much blood for his body to compensate for and that he really should not go to sleep at any cost otherwise he wouldn't wake up again. But it was dark, cold, and sleep was just so inviting. And besides, he hadn't actually fostered any hope of the ARC finding them. He didn't even know how much rubble was on top of them, or why they hadn't been crushed when the building fell in the first place. It wouldn't matter then, he reasoned, if he just had a short nap for a while. West would wake him up when the team did eventually show, so he had nothing to worry about.

He hadn't realised he had blacked out until West was shaking him, forcing him awake again. He supressed a childish grumble; he didn't want to be awake, he was just too tired. She was saying something to him now, a look in her eyes of urgency and fear. Fear. One thing he had never thought she would ever show.

"Teresa," he knew he had cut her off, even though he couldn't focus properly on what she was saying. "Make sure the ARC doesn't..." His energy reserves dropped below what was required for speech and his eyelids drooped again. It didn't really matter anyway. She would understand what he meant.

This time he knew he had blacked out; he heard Jess' voice in his ear, calling his name.

Thanks for staying with me so far. I know I am terrible with speedy updates, but please do leave a review. I do love my reviews. I'm not going to lie and say that the more reviews I get, the faster I'll write because that is a load of bull and we all know it. I will write chapter four as fast as I can, I promise!