Chapter Six:
Tremors
a/n: Thanks for the reviews you guys, I am one of those people who has a deep need to please people and reviews definitely inspire me. This one will probably start with a bunch of dialogue (mostly between Grant and Ian) before we get into the crazy-ass stuff. By the way, it incorporates more novel/screenplay elements (as well as original stuff) than movie stuff. I just- - I'm super excited for it, but I'm also terrified I'll screw it up. Well, read with caution. SHOUT OUT TO LORD OF THE BAGELS FOR SO KINDLY SEARCHING FOR "DESPERATE CHOICES" AND GETTING ME A LONG-ASS CLIP OF MY PRECIOUS CHILD DOING PRECIOUS THINGS. GO CHECK OUT THIS WONDERFUL PERSON.
"Care for a drink?"
Alan Grant shook himself out of his reverie and begrudgingly acknowledged his new traveling companion. The bespectacled man was presenting the silver flask like some coveted object, too precious to be sullied by a tarrying human gaze. Grant couldn't say he was surprised; Ian had been remarkably inspired ever since taking his first swig in the helicopter. What truly surprised him was Ian's generosity with the booze. After all, they were doomed to this place for an entire weekend. "No thanks."
"More for me…"
Grant busied himself with keeping a clinical eye on the enclosures that rambled past. It was a futile endeavor though: the rainfall had begun shortly after they left and effectively driven every living creature into hiding. The most he could perceive was the occasional twitch of a leaf or flash of scales amongst the vegetation. Probably just Compies, though. He supposed Hammond had exploited their scavenging behavior to his advantage and had them working in place of a custodial unit. Truly a business move.
"She's asleep, isn't she?" Ian asked, suddenly paranoid. Grant consulted the rearview mirror: Misty had not moved an inch since insisting she was impervious and didn't need rest.
"Yeah. She's asleep."
"Good." He resumed his graceful nursing of the bottle and paused only after his sips became equal parts whiskey and air. "She's, uh… she's been on my back about the drinking. Been trying to get me to quit, um, actually. I'd probably get a damn lecture if she caught me." Ian laughed uproariously at himself; Grant wondered if he could duck out of the Jeep and hoof it to the resort without getting himself killed.
Then again, his curiosity had been piqued… "Ya got any other kids?"
Ian snorted and peered down into the depths of his sacred flask. "Me? Oh, oh, hell yeah—three. Misty's the oldest, but she, uh, she's more like the parent. And we gotta girl, Kelly, she's a little spitfire. She'd talk your ear off. And Roger, he's the little one. You should see him—takes after his mom. Gorgeous kid. Kids… I mean, anything at all that can does happen. Same with wives, for that matter…"
Wives? Grant pitied the poor woman (or was it women?) who had gotten herself knocked up by Ian Malcolm. "You married?"
"Occasionally." The paleontologist didn't bother masking his surprise nor the contempt it dissolved into. "Yeah, I-I'm always on the look for another ex-Missus Malcolm."
Grant eyed Malcolm and knew in that moment he would never like him. He had always been reserved with his stronger emotions, but after spending the day in relatively close quarters with the chaotician, Grant couldn't imagine ever wanting to spend time with him or, hell, speak to him again. Ian Malcolm was just not a likeable man. And, if he played his cards right, Grant could go about the rest of his weekend without ending up in this awkward position again.
They drove on, lulled back into silence by the ethereal thrum of rainfall.
.
.
Donald Gennaro was appropriately pissed off.
His company had invested in InGen after the construction of the mega-aquarium. It had raked in a pretty penny and his company—Exil—was eager to take a percentage of that pretty penny into its own pocket. Once the Kenyan wildlife preserves were opened, Exil and InGen forged a mutual agreement; Gennaro, as Exil's representative, oversaw the accord's signing and finally met the elusive John Hammond. He had expected an imperious, bitter tyrant with a silk tie and a cigar. The man who hobbled in was a grandfather, cheerful and garrulous; when asked if he cared for a drink, he requested a spot of chamomile tea and a dish of water for his companion, a miniature elephant in a little cage.
Gennaro knew it was a carefully constructed façade. He still kissed ass throughout the duration of the meeting.
When he received the phone call concerning the lawsuits, Gennaro knew Exil would go to great lengths to absolve InGen's allegations and shove them back into the spotlight. Rumor was circulating that Hammond had something enormous planned (the covert laboratory operations hadn't gone unnoticed) and Exil, having invested a substantial amount into InGen's past efforts, was prepared break necks and write checks until InGen's good name was restored.
This was Gennaro's job. He was quite good at it.
He had the briefcase and the polished wingtips and the framed diplomas glinting like wide, unblinking eyes on his office's wall. When he boarded the helicopter, quietly reverent of Hammond and boldly intolerant of the damn mathematician, Gennaro expected a basic tour of a kiddie park, some papers to sign, and a well-deserved reprieve from his wife and daughter.
Then there were dinosaurs. Living dinosaurs.
Gennaro was justifiably surprised.
His dreams of investing every cent of Exil's assets into this spectacular, demented park of Hammond's were compromised by those damn doctors. First the doctors, then the insufferable mathematician (he wasn't a chaotician, there was no such thing), then those goddamn kids. God, did that piss him off. Hammond was well aware this was strictly a professional affair and he had still shipped his irritating grandchildren over. Like it was a goddamn vacation! And that butch little girl who snuck on the helicopter! God! That pissed him off.
He was getting that investment. No matter who interfered.
"Timmy! Stop!"
Gennaro closed his eyes and coerced himself not to raise his voice to Hammond's grandchildren. He wasn't accustomed to doling out discipline; his wife had been relegated to that role the second Amanda drew her first breath. The only consequence filed away in his mental library was a firm spanking. After all, what better way to reprimand a child than to smack a little sense into them?
"Lex, I'm just kidding!"
Of course, Hammond probably wouldn't appreciate his brand of punishment.
He cut his eyes to the young boy in the passenger seat, who seemed to harbor a vendetta against his older sister. The girl was punching the starchy newness out of her violet baseball cap, gaze sporadically flicking from the accessory to her brother and complexion steadily darkening with an embarrassed blush. "I do not have a crush on Doctor Grant," she insisted. There was a near operatic note of insistence in her voice that did little to help her case.
"Sure. That's why you kept making this face at him." He bulged his eyes at an imaginary paleontologist and bit his lower lip in mock fascination.
Lex's cheeks, if possible, flushed even more; her modestly tanned visage took on a florid glow. "I didn't make that face!" she exclaimed, swatting his shoulder with her cap.
"Hey!" Gennaro swiveled in his seat and extended a scolding finger. "Cut it out. Both of you."
Lex fell back in her seat, mildly surprised and then upset. Tim enjoyed poking fun at her—it was practically his job—but he hated when other people antagonized her. She was emotionally fragile, a personality trait he respected whenever he began to torment her: the last thing she needed was another guy in a suit yelling at her.
Tim quickly glimpsed at Gennaro to affirm he wouldn't be seen, then peered over his seat's headrest and smiled at Lex. She returned the affection, but he still noticed the tears glistening in her cerulean eyes like tiny diamond pinpricks.
.
.
It wasn't the bone-rattling thunderclap or the jolt of the Jeep lurching to a sudden halt that awoke Misty: it was her own coughing.
She found herself catapulted back into consciousness by the sensation of her lungs seizing painfully, then of her entire body tensing with spasms. One trembling hand found its way to her mouth and she hacked forcefully until she was finally capable of breathing independently, however wheezy her shallow inhalations were.
Within seconds of registering the awful sound of his daughter suffocating, Ian had unbuckled his seatbelt and dove into the backseat before Alan could even turn his head. The man brought Misty into an upright position, dug her inhaler out of her pocket, and essentially shoved it into her gaping mouth. "C'mon, honey… give me a good breath, a good, strong breath."
She latched desperately onto the nozzle and sucked in the medication. While she labored with the inhaler, Ian stroked the arch of her back, moving his broad hand in soothing circles to assist her in relieving her distressed airways. Finally, Misty summoned the strength to part ways with the little mechanism and draw in the vehicle's humid air.
"Good girl. That's my good girl." Ian brushed a stray curl from her eyes and lovingly cupped her upturned face in one hand. "Should we sue Hammond for everything he's got?"
Misty managed a raspy cough that bore a shaky resemblance to a chuckle. "Everything and more."
"You could be driving one of these fantastic Jeeps to school."
"Promise?"
"I swear, honey, we're gonna rob that bastard blind. Well, blinder. Now go back to sleep before you give your poor father another thirty heart attacks, m'kay?"
She would have ardently campaigned against yet another nap had she not been nodding off during Ian's instruction. Her head sank down to the door's paneling and within seconds, she was lightly snoring.
Alan oppressed himself not to project his curiosity onto his face. "She going to be okay?" he asked with forced nonchalance.
"Misty? She could probably run to the resort and back. She's strong." Ian extracted his flask again and, if the visible heave of his gorge was any indication, polished off its contents in a single desperate swallow. When the deed was done, he pocketed the thing and glanced at Alan with a queerly candid expression. "But she was sick. Sick for a long time. They found stuff in her lungs you wouldn't believe. They were pumping it out of her for months. And now she's got asthma and breathes like a guy on his death bed."
This was certainly news to Alan, who had pegged Misty as the sort of person whose immune system was impregnable and had lived a charmed life free of colds and flues. He cleared his throat awkwardly, wishing Ian wasn't so keen on eye contact. "I had no idea. She looked so strong, I just assumed…"
"Oh, yeah. The kid went crazy for physical therapy after they got all that shit out of her system. First it was just walking across a room without losing her breath, then they had her lift these little weights and walk on treadmills. And then she just decided to make herself strong again. She worked out all the time. Always tried to sucker me into doing it, of course, but I'm a mathematician, not an Olympian." Ian grinned at his own wit, but there was a shadow of pale anguish behind it. "The kid works so goddamn hard at everything. She's so stubborn. She said, 'I'm not gonna quit until I'm strong'. And she didn't. Now all she needs are her steroids, inhaler, and a hospital visit every few months."
Alan maintained his reticence, although this time out of quiet awe rather than contempt. Perhaps Ian was a good father. He might have been a terrible husband (his five wives would most likely attest to that), but it had been years since he had heard anyone wax poetic about their own children.
"Hey. We stopped."
Ian had already changed the subject. Alan glanced down at the dashboard and realized he was right. Both Jeeps were stalled on the tracks.
Rain pattered down incessantly, deluging the roadways and turning the soil to muck.
.
.
In the humid, hazy Control Room, Arnold stared at his computer monitor, aghast. His screen was crawling with flickering lines of codes.
Muldoon's attention was diverted from the bit of crocheting he'd taken up by Arnold's frantic muttering of "what the hell, what the hell, what the hell". "What now?"
"Fences are failing all over the park! A few minor systems, that's all he said!" He sank his teeth a little too deep into his cigarette; a dash of nicotine streaked across his tongue.
"I'll find Nedry," Muldoon said calmly, setting aside his work. No soul dared to accuse him of girlish behavior, not after they beheld his performance on the gun range. Robert Muldoon was a master of both rifle and crochet hook.
"Check the vending machines!"
Muldoon replied with what might have been "will do"; Arnold was in too much of a frenzy to pay it much attention. He sat down his swivel chair and propelled himself across the room to Nedry's workspace. It was a veritable landfill of drained bottles and wrappers speckled with scuds of synthetic cheese and whipped frosting. Arnold couldn't even focus with the mess surrounding Nedry's terminal.
"What a fucking slob," he muttered ruefully as he swiped the desktop clean with his arm. Arnold had a thought then, looking at the monitor: what if Nedry, in his idiotic haste, killed the voltage on the raptor fence? The mere notion sickened and encouraged him to check the system mainframe.
Raptor Pen: ON
The sigh of relief Arnold was about to heave promptly halted in his chest as yet another thought struck him. Why the hell would he turn the other ones off?
Muldoon returned without Nedry. "The whole place is abandoned, Ray. Not even the night people are working. The lobby smells like cologne, who was wearing cologne today?"
"The raptor fences are still on," Arnold said. "See if I can't try to access the main program grid and get this working again." A daring pearl of sweat traversed the slope of his nose and then the chasm above his upper lip. He was too preoccupied to wipe it away.
The warden crossed the room and was just peering over Arnold's shoulder when something particularly appalling appeared onscreen. A photograph of Nedry's head had been crudely pasted onto a little cartoon body, which was waving its little finger disapprovingly at the two men. "You didn't say the magic word!" it scolded.
"Please, goddammit!" Arnold snapped, thumping the top of the monitor with a closed fist. "God! I hate this hacker crap!"
As Arnold continued to buffet the computer, surreptitiously pretending the machine was Nedry himself, Muldoon pushed the office phone over to him. "Call Nedry's people in Cambridge. They'll know what to do."
Seething, Arnold whisked his chair over and picked up the receiver. When he punched for an outside line though, he heard nothing but a faint, mechanical hiss. His rage dissolved into anxiety and a distant, creeping fear. Fences could be shut down inadvertently with a few sloppy keystrokes, but shutting down the communication service was a deliberate act. "Phones are out too."
Muldoon felt the shift in Arnold's mood and looked to the blank video monitors across the room, his composed façade ruffled slightly. "Do you know where the vehicles stopped?"
.
.
Misty was roused from sleep again, this time by the thunk of a car door shutting. A cautious breath swelled in her lungs, then escaped with no wheeze or hitch—the attack had passed like a thunderhead on a summer afternoon. As she struggled to shake off the lethargy, she saw Alan readjusting himself in his seat and rain drops plinking off the brim of his faux-Indiana Jones hat. His words eluded her for a moment before crystallizing with coherence: "Their radio's out too. Gennaro said to stay put."
She almost spoke up, but her father was quicker. "Kids okay?"
"I didn't ask, why wouldn't they be?"
"Kids get scared." A fond smile inched its away across Misty's face: her dad was no candidate for Father of the Year, but his parental affection was unfaltering.
"What's there to be scared of? It's just a little hiccup in the power."
"I didn't say I was scared."
"I didn't… say you were scared."
"I know."
Misty decided to put this particular exchange to rest by sitting up and leaning between the two seats. "You say the radio's out?"
"Yep. Apparently, Hammond spared no expense on everything but the electricity." Ian tapped the dim dashboard, but Misty had already turned her attention to something else. She pawed around in the console a moment, upturning brochures and buttons and then, finally, a small device with a protruding antennae. "What's that, honey?"
"Walkie-talkie. The other car had one and I thought maybe this one would too." Misty switched it on, found it was battery-operated, and scrolled through the various channels, testing each one as she went. When she arrived at the sixth, there was a flicker of movement in the Jeep ahead of them. The little gadget grumbled with static.
Finally, a voice: "Grant?"
Misty twisted to the doctor with the walkie-talkie extended to him and found his watery blue eyes already on her. There was something vaguely off about his gaze. Gone was the disinterest, the uncomfortable shifting: it struck her then that he had been present for her brief attack, which colored her cheeks with embarrassment. She fiddled with her glasses, avoiding eye contact and oppressing herself not to bite on her knuckles.
"Grant? Do you think we can radio someone for a Jeep?"
"It's late. Everyone's probably back at the resort or on a boat out of here."
There came another garbled staccato of static, then a thin echo of a voice asking: "Is that Doctor Grant?" Misty had no doubts that it was the girl, who had taken quite a liking to the much older doctor. It was cute, really.
Lex had taken a liking to Doctor Grant, but was asking out of boredom rather than curiosity. The Jeeps had been stalled for almost forty minutes now and the heat, as well as the tedious yhush of rainfall against the plastic overhead windshield, was starting to take its toll. She had already beaten the starchiness out of her baseball cap, which she was now utilizing as a fan.
"Alright. We'll wait it out a little longer." Gennaro returned the walkie-talkie to the console and stared pensively out the window. Within seconds, he was complaining to no one in particular about Ian. "Why the hell did we invite Ian Malcolm? He'll write a bunch of papers, go on Larry King Live, say we're irresponsible…"
Lex knew better than to roll her eyes. She hadn't thought Doctor Malcolm was anything but harmlessly funny. Maybe lawyers just lacked senses of humor.
Tim, unlike his sister, was indefatigable and was making the most of the experience. He had related to Lex the gory details of the midnight movie he watched at Chuck Walter's house last weekend—the highlights included radiation-induced aneurisms and blood spilling out of people's eyes—then created a game in which he threw his legs over the seat's headrest and had Lex push them up and down. The game lost much of its intrigue once she started rambling about Doctor Grant again, detailing the intelligence in his eyes and dreamy hair.
His exploration of the front seat led him to his most interesting development: a box of equipment. There was a pair of high-power binoculars on a strap, some pamphlets, a few reference guides, and a strange pair of goggles. They were much larger than the binoculars and as bulky and high-tech as something from Robo-Cop. Enthralled, Tim slipped them over his head and, in a moment of maniacal brilliance, leapt out of his seat with a shout of "boo!"
Lex gasped and jerked back before realizing it was nothing more than her brother. As he laughed triumphantly, Gennaro turned to him with a sour expression. "Hey! Where'd you find those?"
Anticipating a scolding, Tim pushed the goggles onto the ledge of his forehead. "They were in a box under my seat."
"Are they heavy?"
He took them off and shook them to judge their weight. "Yeah."
"Then they're expensive, put 'em back." Goddamn kid. Just as careless as Hammond. He rested his head against the window glass and continued to fret over Malcolm.
Tim decided to disobey, if only to spite the man who had made his sister cry, by replacing the goggles. He then climbed nimbly over his seat, crawled past Lex—who rebuked him by slapping her hat against his shoulder and hissing "don't scare me!"—and hopped into the backseat. Upon adjusting the knobs on either sides of the lenses, Tim realized they were night-vision goggles. High-quality night vision goggles, if the sharp, though green, view he had on the world was any indication.
He watched Doctor Grant and Doctor Malcolm speak for a moment. Then, the paleontologist opened his car door and raised what looked like a canteen skyward. It was a funny thing to witness, especially with his electric-emerald perspective of it.
The thrill of the goggles dissipated as something in the atmosphere changed. It arrived as swiftly as a fork of lightning across a cloudy night sky, but left an enduring aura of dread in its wake. Tim paused, listening intently for what might have caused such a disturbance, then felt it again. They weren't just shifts, but vibrations.
The ground was trembling right beneath them.
Feeling as though he had just witnessed something too horrible for the human gaze, Tim turned around and placed a hand on Lex's cap as it sliced lazily through the air. "Do you feel that?"
They both listened and, just as Tim had before, sensed the tremor. Lex, however, didn't share in her brother's presentiment. "What is it, Timmy?"
He didn't answer. Instead, Tim moved back towards the dashboard and focused attentively on the complimentary glass of water in the console. His mouth had gone flannel-dry and his stomach twisted unpleasantly for no discernible reason other than he felt the earth shaking and the vague fear that the world itself was about to end.
Ripples appeared in the surface of the water, tiny concentric circles spiraling outward with each pulse. The tremors were now accompanied by distant thuds and becoming more rhythmic, almost regular.
Gennaro lifted his head from the glass and listened. "Maybe it's the power coming back on."
Tim didn't think any generator would produce such an unsettling sound, but he was in no state to voice his opinion. Instead, he returned to the rear windshield, replaced his goggles, and adjusted the knobs. This time, he went about observing the Rex paddock, which had been as still as a watercolor mural since the Jeeps first stalled. He scanned the treetops, then the lower vegetation until he encountered a truly disconcerting sight. The little platform the goat had first stood upon was empty; its chain swung pendulously in the fierce wind.
In the midst of his fear, Tim found his mind returning to a movie his father loved and would watch constantly whenever his mother wasn't around. It had something to do with war and while the soldiers were walking along, one of them said: "I got a bad feeling on this one."
Tim also had a bad feeling on this one.
It took Lex a moment longer to locate the platform in the rainy darkness. She titled her head to him quizzically. "What happened to the goat?"
Her question was immediately answered by a deafening thunk! as the hind leg of the creature in question slammed against the sunroof. Meaty tributaries of blood striped the glass.
Lex fell back in horror, her mouth a quivering "o". Tim could only push the goggles back onto his brow and watch as the Tyrannosaurus Rex tossed back her van-sized head. The goat disappeared in the jagged trap of her jaws, never to see its leg or the light of day again.
"Oh, Jesus," Gennaro moaned, "oh, Jesus, no."
The beast was uncomprehendingly big. Tim had seen skyscrapers much taller than her, but this was a living thing, a thing with teeth and eyes and blood dribbling down its chin, it was real and big and right outside his window.
Gennaro glanced down at his hands; they were shaking violently. He had abandoned rationality, uprooted it even, and planted in its place an overwhelming desire to survive. This was not his department. He, with the wingtip shoes and briefcases and framed diplomas, was not equipped to face something like this. Gennaro was equipped to survive.
Panting, he clawed for the handle and frantically shouldered the door open; errant raindrops dotted the leatherette paneling. He stumbled out, sliding precariously across the pavement, and sprinted away from the Jeep. And God if he didn't think for a moment about his wife and Amanda and the guys at the office this wasn't him he wasn't going to sit there and wait to be fucking devoured he wanted to live no loopholes no signatures
"He left us…"
Alan's curious eye followed the figure as it dashed through the stormy void and slammed into a small roadside hut. "Where's he think he's going?"
Lex's voice climbed to a dizzyingly frenetic pitch. "He left us!"
Ian shrugged, unconcerned. "When you gotta go, you gotta go."
The sky thrashed with a rolling peal of thunder, just as the seemingly impregnable paddock fence began to bow.
"Dad?"
Thwap! Thwap! Thwap! Thwap!
The closest segment of fence wires snapped loudly and violently. Misty anticipated a catastrophic burst of electricity, then remembered the power had failed. No power, no Jeeps. No power, no fences. No power…
"Daddy?"
The Rex scarcely hesitated before bounding out of her paddock and stepping onto the center of the road. She lifted her massive head to the moon, nostrils flaring dramatically and tiny forearms wiggling with almost comical futility. Liberated and ravenous, the Rex arched her back and roared menacingly into the night.
"Timmy?!"
The second Land Cruiser's passengers watched, appropriately terrified, as the Rex continued to advance forward. Miles of muscle rippled beneath her scales; her cruel eyes were as wide and blank as twin television monitors. And though Misty was scared—shaky-scared—the sight of her reminded her distinctly of those childhood nights she spent gazing out her bedroom window and pretending dinosaurs were striding across her subdivision. She was afraid—and enthralled.
Her absorption dissipated just as quickly as it came. The Rex was stomping towards the kids.
"Don't move…" Alan whispered gravely, pressing himself into the seat. "She can't see us if we don't move."
"Dad, she's going to kill them. He left them." She swallowed and felt a peculiar swell of unease: the Rex was perfectly capable of slaughtering those children. Those children, so much like her irritating half-siblings… "Dad."
Lex pawed through the trunk space, body quaking with half-sobs and barely formed breaths. Gennaro was gone gone gone and he wasn't coming back. And however childish and capricious, she imagined Doctor Grant arriving—sans shining armor—to rescue them from the impossibly malicious T-Rex. She just needed to capture his attention.
She swiped aside some pamphlets and found a case flashlight. Lex switched it on and directed its lurid beam into the rear Jeep.
"Oh, God. Turn the light off, turn the light off…"
The Rex detected the light's movement on her periphery. Prey. Rumbling in intrigue, she lumbered toward the car to investigate. To kill, if the time was right.
For her, the time was always right.
Misty's stomach gave an artful flip at the grisly notion of the creature actually picking off two kids like they were mere rats in a trap. She looked to Doctor Grant, whose dumbstruck expression was darkening with horror, and had a thought. Her hand shot towards the dashboard and yanked the walkie-talkie out of its slot. The device static-crackled obnoxiously as Misty scrambled to find the channel.
"Kids?"
Tim heard the thin, reedy echo of a voice in the car: Misty's voice. He startled before remembering the walkie-talkie, which he fumbled for as the massive shadow of the Rex fell over the Jeep. Lex whispered something unintelligible; it might have been "Mom".
"Misty?"
She heaved a sight of relief. "Yeah, yeah, it's me. Listen: tell your sister to turn the light off. Get down and don't move."
"Misty, they're not—"
The channel roared with feedback; the echoes of piercing screams filled the second Jeep. She dropped the little device and grabbed her father's arm. "They're…"
The Rex shoved her head against the Jeep, which lifted precariously onto one side and slammed back down with an audible clunk. No sooner were they righted did Tim clamber into the backseat in order to carry out Misty's instructions. Lex tangled with the flashlight, struggling with the switch. "Turn it off!"
"I'm trying!"
"Dad, they're not answering, what am I supposed to say?"
"If we could just distract the damn thing for five seconds…"
Kff…
Lex and Tim glanced up in unison, and screamed as the Rex's head rushed towards them in an arc of pebbled orange and beige, eclipsing the sky like some horrible planet on course to strike and destroy the world as they knew it.
The Jeep's sunroof crashed down over them like the sky caving in.
The walkie-talkie screeched with feedback and the distant reverberations of the Rex's snarls overwhelming its victims' shrieks. Misty was fairly certain she had never heard a more horrible sound.
I never should have gotten on that fucking helicopter.
When the overhead attack proved ineffective, the Rex nosed the Jeep back onto its left tires, then shoved forcefully with the wide platform of her brow. The Land Cruiser jolted before tilting completely to one side and crashing against the concrete. It rolled towards the paddock's precipice, crunching and shattering all the way, and finally skidded to a messy halt.
Hssssssss…
Firework-orange sparks illuminated the dim car space. Misty tore her gaze away from the horrific display and found Doctor Grant, armed with a safety flare and jumping out of the Jeep. She had a distinct impression of the dinosaur and the dinosaur expert battling it out in the rain, a man taking on the very thing he had once nurtured in its organic form.
"Sonovabitch…"
Ian had popped the cap off of his own flare, which spewed voltaic embers across the dashboard. He glanced sidelong at Misty, at her trembling lip and knitted brow, and said: "I told you you'd be disappointed."
Her eyes widened behind the foggy lenses of her eyeglasses. "No."
He latched one hand behind her head and brought her forehead towards him for a quick kiss. "I love you, Misty."
"Dad—" She clawed for his hand, their palms dewy with sweat. "Dad, you can't!"
His smarmy smirk crossed his face, cast in the tangerine light of his flare. "Time to be more than a bastard dad, baby."
And then he was gone, a streak of shadow pin wheeling into the night, visible only by the gently pulsing light held high in his hand.
"NO!" Misty spilt out of the Land Cruiser and promptly froze as the Rex crossed her and broke into a stilted run after her father. Her father, holding the flare like his own demented vision of Lady Liberty, like this was the ultimate test of paternal capabilities and that death by T-Rex was the key to success.
She spun around, blinded by the haze, and squinted desperately. Doctor Grant's flare had either gone out or he had… met his maker (she remembered the steer the poor little steer hand-delivered served up hot with chips).
The little hut by the side of the road was blown apart. He screamed, screamed like the poor little steer, then fell swiftly and irreversibly silent. All she could hear was the ethereal patter of rainfall against the road and the waterfall roar of blood rushing behind her eardrums. Darkness encroached her like the tar that had buried so many precious skeletons and buried her entirely.
Her father was gone. Doctor Grant was gone. The very threads maintaining the universe's fabric were gone. Misty was alone in the dark.
She fell suddenly to her knees and cried.
a/n: holyyy shit you guys. I'm so sorry this took twelve decades but I lost my will to continue this story, then I watched the movie with my boyfriend yesterday and wrote the whole second half in a whirlwind of shitty ideas. hope you enjoyed the frenetic style of the rex scene I kind of wanted to model it after the movie. I know this kind of sucked but but but I want you guys to know that there's a pretty good chance of this story coming off of hiatus now. any support would be wonderful god bless have excellent days.