Notes

Hypothetical casting:

Julian Barratt as Horatio Bingham.

Noel Fielding as Vinny Maxwell.

-o-

Occupying an area of half a dozen hectares, the Predators' Camp was bounded by a six-meter-high chain-link fence topped with a coil of barbed wire and it was built right on part of the estate's western border, with the fence on the west side simply being part of the estate's large perimeter fence of the estate. In each of the corners of the camp, a watchtower stood and one entered inside that part of the facility through a gate.

Upon arriving, Juan took a bunch of keys from his shorts pocket and inserted the camp's key into the gate's lock. He partially opened it, just enough to let him and the couple, and closed it behind them once they were inside.

Owen and Claire looked around the camp. Between its fence and those of the paddocks there was a path which followed the inner perimeter, wide enough for a tractor and its trailer, and stretching straight ahead of them was another while on their right, there were small enclosures which, according to Juan, housed a Masiakasaurus and a couple of Lycaenops, but the vegetation inside was too dense to see the occupants right away.

The trio followed the path ahead of them for about fifty yards, skirting one of the sides of a large rectangular paddock before turning right to follow another path in the middle of a wide grassy strip, perpendicular to the one they just came from and which led to a dead end two hundred meters ahead. On either side of the grass strip, other rectangular paddocks were lined up and Owen looked at their fences, identical to those for large carnivorous mammals in zoos, with electrified wires for some in order to provide additional security.

Juan pointed to the dead-end.

"Blue's paddock is there."

Along the way, the head keeper approached one of the paddocks on their right, in order to check what its occupants were doing. While Owen continued straight, Claire also looked inside the paddock and saw three animals sunbathing in the middle of a sandy area. Nearly four meters long, they resembled crocodiles but their snouts were laterally flattened, giving the skull an appearance closer to that of carnivorous theropod dinosaurs instead of modern crocodilians. Their backs were dark bronze, with faded blackish blotches and stripes of varying width along the spine, while their bellies were dull yellow, and the sides, which had a greenish-yellow colour, had dark blotches arranged in oblique stripes.

"Baurusuchus," Juan said. "A cousin of crocodiles with the head of a dinosaur and a behaviour halfway between that of a Komodo Dragon and a hyena's. We have to keep an eye on them, they like to dig..."

Claire, who remembered having seeing these animals at Nublar in the Mesa near the Discovery Center where they lived in a pit that mimicked an arid environment, indeed saw several holes here and there in the paddock. One of the predators got up to walk a little and she noticed that its legs were not semi-bent like those of modern crocodiles but straight.

Claire and the head keeper left, catching up with Owen who had almost reached Blue's paddock.

It was the largest in the camp, the size of a soccer field, and the fence around it was identical to the one around the camp. The couple heard a faint electric hum along the fence and between it and them was another fence, low and made of wood. They had seen other of these low fences around the paddocks with the tallest fences, which usually housed the most dangerous animals and had electrified wires. The couple knew that they acted as railings and encouraged employees to keep their distance with those paddocks, although one could easily cross these railings by hopping over them or by stooping to pass between their posts.

Behind the wire mesh, they saw clusters of ferns tall as an adult man. Owen heard some sort of nasal growl, then footsteps. A long silence ensued.

"I can't see anything," Claire finally whispered.

They waited. A few seconds passed. Flies buzzed around them. Claire still saw nothing. Owen patted her shoulder and pointed her something.

Amidst the ferns, Claire saw an elongated and relatively narrow bare snout and then realized that the raptor had grown. In her memories, Blue's head just reached her chest while it was now at the same height as Owen's eyes. If Claire and the Achillobator were facing each other, then the predator would look down on her. Blue was motionless, mostly hidden by the fronds, and her large black eyes were fixed on the trio.

"There you are," Owen said softly."

He moved forward slowly, stopping only at the railing.

"Hey gorgeous, did you miss me?" he asked her.

But there was no form of response from the Achillobator. She continued to stare them straight in the eyes without making a sound, in a manner very reminiscent of birds of prey. She ended up looking away from the humans and her snout disappeared among the ferns.

"Come on, you know me Blue," her former keeper, worried by this behaviour, "look at me."

She stood like that for a moment, hidden from their sight. Finally, she snorted and walked away from the fence and the trio. Her long tail covered with grey-blue feathers emerged from the ferns for a moment but soon disappeared and the sound of her delicate footsteps gradually faded away.

Owen sighed and bowed his head. Juan put a hand on his shoulder.

"Sorry Owen. I hoped that it would turn out differently with you. With her it's simple, either she sulk, either she attacks us..."

"It's alright. She needs time."

"Maybe she'll show up at the feeding this afternoon," the head keeper hoped.

The former head of IBRIS program nodded and slowly turned away from the paddock, following Juan towards the exit with Claire walking to his right. Seeing her boyfriend's eyes riveted on the grass, she put her hand on his back and rubbed him gently, trying to distract him from the reunion's disappointment.

They returned to the canteen, where the DPG trio was waiting for them, and resumed their tour shortly after one o'clock. This time, the head keeper took them to the southern part of the estate and they visited the farm itself and the neighbouring greenhouses and wire-meshed growing tunnels. In several of them, InGen still cultivated horsetails, grasses, mosses, pawpaw and cycads, which many herbivores were fond of, but Juan told the members of the DPG that in addition to these species and the bamboos that they had seen at the start of the tour, more plant taxa had been cultivated at the Farm: Various ferns, including Serenna veriformans, a de-extinct species; ornamental plants such as the West Indian lilac; many flowers, including several Heliconia species… Beyond the greenhouses and growing tunnels, they saw other fields as well as plantations of tropical and subtropical conifers, ginkgoes and palm trees.

Once they had toured the cultures production area, they headed for the Ark. The group was surprised to see a big domestic cat running across the alley in front of them and while Juan explained to them that it was the farm's cat, they saw two keepers running towards the Ark's eastern entrance. They were about the same age, around fifty, and whereas one of them was a tall, mustachioed man with curly brown hair, the other was a shorter man with androgynous features and mid-length black hair. Owen recognized them: Horatio and Vinny, a pair of British expats. Juan asked them what was going on.

"We've got two velociraptors on the loose. They're still in the building," they replied.

Hearing that, Franklin froze and his face had a shocked expression.