Notes
Soundtrack suggestions:
Claire's exile:
- Lívstræðrir - John Lunn and Eivør Pálsdóttir, The Last Kingdom.
- Holding On (feat Eivør) - Bear McCreary, God of War: Ragnarök.
- Queen Gorgo - Junkie XL, 300: Rise of an Empire.
- Breaker of Chains - Ramin Djawadi, Game of Thrones: Season 4.
- One day soon - Abel Korzeniowski, Penny Dreadful: Season 3.
The couple:
- Love Theme - Basil Poledouris, Conan the barbarian.
Owen look at the videos from the IBRIS program:
- The call of the riled - Michael Giacchino, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (Up to 00:56).
-o-
Claire Dearing and Owen Grady had taken up residence in a remote cabin somewhere on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada, several miles from Hope, the nearest town.
The cabin, built by one of Owen's ancestors, stood in the middle of a meadow by a lake, frozen at this time of year. It was a chalet built on two levels, neither too big nor too small, simple but comfortable, a place which inspired solitude but also tranquillity, with an open fire which provided the necessary warmth in winter.
As the former head of the IBRIS (1) program had found work in a local wildlife park, his girlfriend and Sigurd, their five-month-old son, conceived during the Fall, were alone at the cabin that afternoon.
Claire was sitting on the living room sofa, looking focused and determined, staring at the TV screen in front of her while clutching a PlayStation controller.
Dressed in old jeans and a black hoodie with red and white stripes and a N7 (2) logo, her long hair hastily gathered in a ponytail, she seemed to have nothing to do with the elegant white-clad woman who once appeared in the media as the director of Jurassic World. And that was without mentioning the long gash on the left half of her face, which started near the hairline and went down to the chin, bisecting her left eyebrow in its path and only interrupted at eye-level. Claire, who avoided mirrors since the Fall, thought that this gash made her look like a James Bond villain.
She was playing the latest God of War and had reached the part where Kratos and his son Atreus, the game's two protagonists, were taking some sort of large lift inside a mountain and repelling waves of enemies who were jumping on the lift. Claire's fingers twitched nervously on the controller's joysticks and buttons and her mouth muttered swear words, catching the attention of Sigurd, who was sitting on the other end of the sofa and staring at the screen with curious eyes.
"Sorry Sigurd, I shouldn't swear in front of you," she corrected herself. "But die, you son of a bitch!" She uttered against a particularly tough enemy.
She managed to defeat the last enemies and then a dialogue scene ensued where the father and the son discussed their quest's objective and what will happen next. But suddenly a burst of lightning, spat out by a monster hidden until then in a nearby tunnel, passed over them. The monster emerged from the darkness, revealing a large scaly body with two vestigial wings, clawed hands, a horned skull, red eyes, and jaws lined with sharp teeth. A shiver ran down Claire's spine.
A dragon… It had to be a fucking dragon.
The dragon dug its claws into the lift, holding it in place with one hand while it tried to reach Kratos and Atreus with the other and its fangs. Claire, whose heart was beginning to race, knew that the objective was to strike the beast's fingers, those digging in the lift. But as she was about to move Kratos forward, the dragon let out an ear-splitting scream before striking and in Claire's head, this scream turned into that of another creature, one that had existed in real life, one which had brought her downfall and mauled her.
The fallen park director ended up paralyzed and dropped the controller on the floor while her heart rate quickened and she began to hyperventilate. With a few attacks, the dragon killed Kratos and a failure notification appeared on the screen.
With a shaking hand, Claire took off her glasses to put them on the coffee table and pressed the palm of her prosthetic hand against her panicked face. She let out a long sigh and Sigurd, as if he sensed his mother's distress, fidgeted. Noticing this, she sniffed and took him in her arms to reassure him.
"Hey, it's nothing. Mom just got scared. Hush, don't worry about that."
She rocked him for a while and then, looking at the time on the microwave in the kitchen, she remembered that it was time to breastfeed him.
"It's time, huh?"
She turned off the PlayStation, took her son upstairs to the bedroom and there she breastfed him while watching the snowflakes fall outside. Once they were done some time later, she put Sigurd in his crib and waited for him to fall asleep before heading downstairs.
Eager to get some fresh air and clear her mind after her earlier moment of panic, she put on a pair of boots and an anorak, then pulled a rifle from a cabinet in the entrance hallway. She went outside and the cold winter air ruffled her face.
While moving out of the cover provided by the veranda's roof along the entrance facade, she scanned the surroundings and especially the nearby coniferous forest and its undergrowth.
Neither she nor Owen hunted, and the latter had inherited the rifle along with the cabin. Black bears and cougars lived in the area but they never had any problems with them. No, Claire preferred to go out with the rifle to defend herself from another eventual danger, although she had never been bothered since her arrival in the Sierra Nevada, not even during the few times she went into town.
Since she had not yet mastered her bionic prosthesis, she was still unfit to drive, so it was Owen or his mother, Cait, who took her there, usually for her visits to the psychologist. The simple fact of imagining herself back in his office, with her sweatshirt's hood pulled down over her head and her eyes looking at the floor, tapping her foot while listening to him or telling her misfortunes, was enough to fill her with self-loathing.
Apart from Cait, who lived in Hope, and the psychologist bound by medical confidentiality, no one knew her true identity and when people asked what she did before coming to the Sierra Nevada and how she met Caitriona Grady's son, they replied that she was a veteran of the war in Afghanistan who was introduced to Owen through one of his former Navy comrades, and she was known locally only as The Zookeeper's wife.
She reached the tool shed on the cabin's eastern side and opened it to pull out an axe, which she took to a chopping block a few meters away and which stood near the log rack that adjoined the shed. Claire put the rifle against the log rack, grabbed one of the logs to put it upright on the block, and split it with one axe blow.
Before moving to the cabin, she had never cut wood but after being instructed on this matter by her boyfriend, she had taken a liking to it because striking with the axe helped her unwind and clear her mind, usually at least.
She didn't know if it was because of the moment of panic she had earlier while playing on the PlayStation or because of the development in InGen's situation but she couldn't relax. As she split one log after the other and put the cut pieces in the rack, she couldn't help but think back to the future resumption of Operation Fallen Kingdom. InGen might just make it out of this while she would be doomed to live as an outcast or, worse, as an inmate if she ended up summoned to court and found guilty of causing Jurassic World's collapse. All these sufferings she endured during it...to end up suffering even more afterwards. She was never going to forget what she went through, nor forgive what InGen did to her...
Her mind was swarmed with negative thoughts and her axe blows became more and more violent, until it threatened to slip out of her hands.
Claire stopped, digging the axe blade into the block, wiped the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand, and sighed. She had to be careful, especially since her prosthesis was stronger than the forearm it replaced, and she was even sure she could beat Owen at arm wrestling with it.
The snap of a branch somewhere in the wood startled her and she immediately grabbed the rifle, aiming its barrel towards the trees. She listened carefully, on the alert for any new suspicious noises, and watched the pine needles rustling in the wind.
At that part of the edge, the fir trees' lowest branches were so dense that they almost formed a wall between the cabin's meadow and the wood's undergrowth. Here and there at the level of the middle and upper branches, gaps opened on the wood's penumbra. It was such that Claire could easily imagine seeing the shadow of a predatory dinosaur among the fir trees, watching her from the undergrowth.
Claire shook her head slightly. There were only bears and cougars in those woods and not a single dinosaur. A cawing caught her attention and she saw two Common ravens perched on a nearby branch, watching her.
Not a single dinosaur aside from the local birds, she corrected herself.
She lowered her rifle and sighed.
"Who sent you? The All-Father?" she asked them. "Or your distant cousins from Costa Rica?"
One of the crows cawed.
"Never mind…" she muttered.
Then she laughed disdainfully at herself. Her social interactions were so limited that she started talking to animals in order to ease her loneliness.
Talking to crows... I really look like a madwoman.
She turned away from them and went to put the axe back in its place in the tool shed. As this woodcutting session had not relaxed her, she considered another activity and returned inside the cabin.
She took off her boots and her anorak, put the rifle down where she had taken it and went back to the bedroom, to check that her son was sleeping well and to change.
She went down again, this time in jogging and tank top, heading towards the room which served as their gym as well as a storage space for the move boxes which they hadn't yet unboxed. The sport equipment were neither numerous nor bulky and part of the room was still occupied by boxes. There were dumbbells, a stepper, a dart board, and a punching bag. Near the dart board, A2 pictures of Henry Wu, Susan Lynton, the journalist Cassandra Landis and other people Claire hated with all her being piled up on top of a cardboard box and showed many holes. Claire put her phone atop another of the boxes and started a music playlist.
It was to the rhythm of drums and guttural choirs of Heilung, an experimental folk group from Northern Europe, that she warmed up and began to strike the punching bag. Carried away by the music and the exercise's effort, her mind cleared and she finally relaxed a little. She kept striking, until she was too tired to continue.
When that was the case, she looked out the window and noticed that daylight was fading. Claire then went to the kitchen, to drink a large glass of water but also to start preparing dinner. Although she was not bad at cooking, she wasn't as passionate in this activity as Owen, who was the cook within the couple. However, cooking dinner was the least she could do in the week, on the days he worked and didn't return home until around six o'clock.
Such was Claire's daily routine since several months. Video games, sports, cooking, and, when she had the motivation, check InGen-related news and prepare her defence strategy for a possible trial...
While setting the table, she heard Owen arrive and after taking off his shoes and his anorak, he came to see her in the living room. He was still wearing his Sierra Wildlife Park keeper uniform and snowflakes were melting in his hairs and in his beard.
"Good evening, honey."
"Hi."
They kissed and seeing that dinner was almost ready, he went to the sink to wash his hands.
"Yeah, wash your hands. You smell like wet dog and raw meat…," she remarked half-jokingly.
"It's because I fed the wolves. How was your day?"
"Oh you know, same as usual… I chopped some logs this afternoon and exercised," she replied. "It will be ready in two minutes," she added, talking about the dinner.
"Okay. I'll get Sigurd…"
He went upstairs and returned soon after, holding their son in his arms. He settled him in his chair and took his place around the table, inhaling the steams which rose from the dishes.
"It's very good," he complimented her a few minutes later as they ate, occasionally spoon-feeding their son. "At this rate, you'll soon be rivalling me."
"Thanks."
As they continued to eat the main course, she sighed.
"I had another moment of panic earlier…while playing on the PlayStation," she said weakly.
"You reached the level with the dragon?" He guessed.
She nodded and sighed again. He gently placed his hand on her wrist.
"It's just ridiculous," she said. "I keep seeing her in any dragon. How it's gonna be when we'll watch the eight season of Game of Thrones? Am I going to have Vietnam War-like flashbacks in front of the scenes with the dragons? Especially since certain scenes are likely to evoke the Fall according to the showrunners. And it will be the same with the next Godzilla... Dammit, I come to wonder how I could have been the Ghost of Nublar…"
"Perhaps you should avoid anything dragon-related. You need to think about something else."
"Yeah, I think you're right," she said, before changing the subject. "Did you get news from Blue?"
"Juan answered me. He wrote that she's fine, at least physically speaking."
His voice tightened.
"She's all alone," he continued. "Her sisters are dead, Barry returned to France and InGen won't let me see her. If they don't sell her but want to resume the IBRIS program, I'm afraid she won't be cooperative and that they'll euthanize her..."
Seeing him moved, Claire took his hand and gripped it tenderly.
Later that evening, he was sitting in the office, dressed in a T-shirt and boxers, drinking a beer while being busy on his laptop. The office had been set up in the room opposite the bedroom and on a cork board fixed to one of the walls, Claire had hung with drawing pins a whole bunch of articles related to InGen and Masrani Global, which were mainly about their controversies. Certain parts had been highlighted and others had comments written in red by the fallen park director, comments which often ended with exclamation marks. On a corner of the desk, rested a binder filled with documents and on which she had written "Defence" in marker. Owen gently rolled the desk chair sideways, so he could see what Claire was doing in the bedroom.
She was sitting on the edge of the bed, holding Sigurd in her arms. She was showing him a dinosaur figurine while talking to him, probably telling him some little story.
This scene warmed his heart and he admired Claire, the strength and the courage she showed in the face of many problems. He knew that her decision to keep their child had been influenced by her tragic experience with the Indominus. During the Fall, Claire had discovered with horror that Masrani's Bane had human DNA, hers, making the monster her daughter biologically-speaking, a sordid relationship reinforced by the fact that, like many other dinosaurs, the Indominus had imprinted on the first being she had seen at birth, which had been none other than Claire. However, unaware of the bond that had been created between her and the creature, Claire had abandoned her to the care of the geneticists and then to the keepers of Jurassic World, who treated her like any other high-risk predator in the park, and a social predator abandoned at birth by her mother figure and kept in isolation could only become a ticking time bomb. For Claire, Sigurd had been the chance to become a decent mother and Owen thought that she was doing great, better than he had imagined. He even thought she was a better parent than him.
He felt a little ashamed. There he was, sitting in the desk chair in front of the laptop, sullenly drinking a beer alone instead of being with his girlfriend and their son, with whom he spent very little time after all. He hated the thought but he almost felt like being his own father, who left when he was an infant, forcing his mother to raise him alone and the family name he adopted was hers and not his father's.
"I'm going to bed," Claire told him, taking him out of his thoughts as she stood against the office's doorway. "You're coming?"
"Soon, honey."
She turned on her heels and the bedroom's light went out soon after, but as he was about to turn off his laptop, he felt the urge to dive back into old memories.
Opening a subfolder named "IBRIS", he put on headphones and viewed a series of videos from mid to late 2014. They consisted of video logs where he reported on the growth and behaviour of his four Achillobators (3), who were then all very young, as they were born in May of that year. In the videos from the summer, they looked like ostriches or vulture chicks with the short down that covered their bodies and they were seen following him wherever he went, walking in a single line, like young geese. He himself seemed much younger and more cheerful, although he had had a serious accident the previous year. His hairs were shorter, only going down to the nape of his neck, and his face only sported a moustache. As they grew, the achillobators became more confident in their movements and their behaviour became more aggressive. Owen smiled and laughed softly as he watched those videos, which showed them bickering during a feeding in their holding cage or chewing on his boots. Another showed Blue ordering her sisters to calm down after Owen had asked her, something that surprised him at the time.
Letting a long, bitter sigh, Owen turned off the laptop, took his empty beer bottle down to the kitchen, brushed his teeth and went to bed, entering the darkened bedroom to slip silently into bed and lay down next to his already sleeping girlfriend. As sleep gradually took over him, he felt Claire stir and knew that she had one of her nightmares again.
-o-
Notes
(1) IBRIS: Integrated Behaviour Raptor Intelligence Study.
(2) N7: Fictional organization from the Mass Effect video game series.
(3) Achillobator: A genus of large dromaeosaurid. Means "Achille's Warrior", bator being the Mongol word for warrior or hero.