Notes
Soundtrack suggestions:
The keepers tries to capture the velociraptors in the kitchen:
- Chasing a Silurian Millipede - Dominik Scherrer, Primeval.
- Playful Dinobird - Daniel Pemberton, Prehistoric Park.
- Caracaras – Enrica Sciandrone et Nathan Stornetta, Cetrería de Reyes (From 00:40 to 01:30).
- The Basket Game - John Williams, Raiders of the Lost Ark (Up to 01:18).
-o-
Juan turned to the group and seeing that only the DPG IT technician showed signs of fear, an idea germinated in his mind and he exchanged a knowing look with the couple as well as Zia and Alexander, as the four were much calmer.
"Okay, this is an unusual situation," he declared in a rather serious tone, "but I ask you to keep your calm and do whatever I say. OK?"
They nodded, Franklin included, but he did with more nervousness than the others.
"Alright," Juan said, "follow me."
Under the young man's stunned gaze, his four companions agreed to follow the head keeper towards the building. Reluctantly, he followed on their heels.
"Shouldn't we head for a bunker or something?" he asked him.
"The thing is, we don't have a bunker here. We could go to the hacienda but the raptors are smart. They would find a way to get inside... We have to make sure they don't leave the building."
They entered the Ark, where a few keepers were gathered near the entrance of a hall to the left of the newcomers, the old canteen mentioned by Juan earlier. There was Allison and Pasqual, but also Marisol, a portly fifty-something Costa Rican with short brown hair.
From a nearby hallway, one of the ACU men, a dark-haired man in his thirties with a stubble, came out, radio in hand. He hailed the keepers:
"Should I call the guys for reinforcements or not?" he asked.
"Just tell them to watch every entry and exit, just in case," Allison replied. "We can handle them alone. They're only velociraptors after all. They're too delicate for brutes like you."
"Hey! You wouldn't be showing off that much had it been bigger creatures!"
The ACU trooper returned to the hallway he had come from and Juan joined his colleagues. He whispered something to them, and then invited the group to come closer. Allison turned to him.
"We locked them in the kitchen, but I need someone brave to help me capture them and bring them back to the kennel."
"I'm in," Owen offered.
Juan nodded approvingly and said:
"Who better than the former head of the IBRIS program to help you catch velociraptors, Allison? I'll go with you. While two will wrangle one of them, the third will distract the other."
Franklin leaned into Zia's ear and whispered:
"But they're crazy! They should let the ACU guys do this."
But she only answered with a nod and trembling, he took a look into the old canteen. Franklin saw several cupboards and lockers there, which most likely contained the keepers' usual equipment, a few tables against the walls, a desk in a corner as well as, in the centre of the room, a circle of about fifteen chairs. On the other end, Alfredo stood against the kitchen door, looking impassively through the porthole while his body showed no noticeable signs of stress. Not even a shiver… Franklin wondered how he was doing, because from the little knowledge of velociraptors he had, he knew they were powerful and fast animals which could kill a grown man in the blink of an eye and even open doors with their hands or their jaws. Thinking that his companions and the keepers had a strange behaviour, the IT technician came to wonder if there wasn't something fishy.
The ACU trooper then returned to the keepers.
"Hodgson just called me. She wants those raptors back in their cages before the councilors' arrival. Or shit's going to hit the fan!"
"And when do the councillors arrive?" Vinny asked him.
"In ten minutes."
"Shit," Juan swore. "Well, we have to use the hard way. Oscar, I need two of your ear pieces."
Oscar nodded and ran to the ACU headquarters, located at the other end of the building, and Horatio and Vinny followed him. The others opened the cupboards in the old canteen to take out pairs of leather gloves, visors and a sheet. Pasqual even took the lid of a large bin to put it with the rest of the gear they had taken out.
Oscar and the two British keepers returned soon after with not only the requested earpieces but also stabproof vests and protections for limbs.
"Put that on though," Oscar urged them, speaking about the protective equipment. "If you ever get hurt, Austin and Mrs. Hodgson are going to bawl me out, so be careful."
"They'll need eyes to help them spot the raptors," Juan said. "Marisol, take the group and go to the windows by the delivery area."
He gave her one of the earpieces and the keeper asked Claire, Alexander, Zia and Franklin to follow her out of the building.
"Which ones escaped?" Owen asked Allison as they and Juan put on the protective gear, including the leather gloves and the visors.
"Randy and Kim."
"I remember them. Escape masters and natural thieves."
"We put them in the kennel after a fight with the other three, but that lousy Pedro didn't closed their cages correctly," she grumbled. "Oscar must had one hell of a face when he saw them coming here."
"Let's hope they didn't trash the kitchen too much," the head keeper said.
Once they were ready, they headed for Alfredo and the kitchen door with all the gear. Owen had the sheet, Juan carried the muzzles and two hoods in a small bag, and Allison led the way because she was the one who had the bin's lid, holding it by the handle in front of her body like a shield, and she was ready to use it to fend off the predators if they tried to get out while she and the two men entered.
Behind, Pasqual, Horatio and Vinny were ready to receive the animals, waiting with transport cages, and with a nod, Juan indicated to Alfredo that they were ready and he opened the door, letting the trio enter quickly. He closed behind them and they looked around the kitchen before moving forward in search of the velociraptors. Looking to their left, above a row of shelves, Owen saw the faces of Claire, the DPG members, and Marisol glued to the small and rectangular windows.
Since those were on the upper part of the wall, the five stood in the back of a pick-up that Marisol had parked alongside the wall. They were peering out the best they could at the aisles as well as the three rows of low cabinets and work surfaces in the centre of the room.
While Owen and Allison each walked down a different aisle, he in the one between the wall and the first row and she between the latter and the second row, Franklin frantically searched for the raptors, fearing to see them suddenly appear and pounce on the unarmed keepers to tear them to pieces. But apart from them, the kitchen seemed quite deserted and from what they saw, it didn't appear to be trashed and the only unprotected foods they saw were fruits and vegetables, uninteresting for the velociraptors, and the meat was stored in closed large refrigerators.
"We have the whole kitchen on sight, but I don't see any raptors," Franklin observed. "They're young?"
"No, they're adults," Marisol answered.
But as Juan made his way down the second aisle, the same one his colleague had entered, Franklin saw, out of the corner of his eye, an animal moving stealthily, finishing up the aisle in the opposite direction to that of the chief keeper and turn to disappear immediately behind the corner of a cabinet at the end of the third row. Invisible until then since it had advanced very close to the furniture of the second row, out of their field of vision, the animal had been too fast for the IT technician for him to see it clearly but he had noticed a bipedal silhouette, a small size of about two meters in length and fifty to sixty centimetres in height, and a body covered with feathers.
"Did you see something?" The keeper asked.
"There was… some kind of bird…" Franklin replied hesitantly.
"Describe this bird."
"It had a long tail, a narrow head and a dark brown back."
"It's Randy."
"Randy?"
"The male."
The male?
Turning his head sideways, Franklin noticed that his companions were looking at him with a somewhat amused air and he then realized that he had been bamboozled.
"Wait, it wasn't a Velociraptor. That thing was barely bigger than a turkey. You're kidding, aren't you? All this mess for clawed turkeys..."
Meanwhile, Marisol had just informed Juan about Randy's location, using her headset's microphone.
"Have some respect, young man!" Marisol told the IT technician. "They can send you to the hospital if you don't handle them properly."
Claire then turned to him and said:
"Tell me, wouldn't you be one of those still stuck at the end of the last century or the early 2000s, when the neoraptors were called velociraptors?"
"Uh ..."
He grew ashamed of his confusion and saw Alexander smirking while Zia was giggling.
"You could have warned me," he whispered reproachfully. "I look like a huge dimwit now. Thanks guys!"
In a more audible voice, he added:
"It's also the fault of the people at HQ! When talking about man-eating raptors, they used the word Velociraptor, not Neoraptor."
"We're lucky that Wu classified them as a new taxon before the opening of Jurassic World," Zia said, "because the previous reports as well as Spielberg's films had already caused quite a bit of confusion ..."
The three DPG members looked back into the kitchen, where Allison retraced her steps, heading for the cabinet behind which Randy had disappeared.
Juan passed her on the way and joined Owen at the other end of the kitchen. They made their way to the third row as well, but when they reached the aisle between it and the second row, Juan pointed to it and Owen moved there with the sheet. The head keeper gently put his small bag on top of a worktop and took out a muzzle and a hood, similar to those used in falconry. He grabbed the muzzle, looked at Owen, who nodded, then at Allison, who had stopped just before the corner of the opposite end of the third row, ready to turn. She nodded as well and only with his hand, Juan counted down, starting at five. When the countdown reached zero, Allison finally skirted the cabinet and did come across a male Velociraptor.
Those could be distinguished from females by their dark brown and black-streaked plumage, their red head crown, and the presence of a black stripe through the eyes, reminiscent to Zorro's mask for some people.
Randy had turned around, and while looking at her with his head tilted sideways, he was purring very softly.
"Okay Randy. Recess is over. It's time to get back to your cage," the keeper told him calmly.
She walked slowly towards him but he spread his arms, stuck out his chest, stretched his neck and directed his long, narrow bluish snout towards Allison's throat. His jaws half-opened, letting out an irritated hiss.
"Randy!" She scolded, positioning the bin's lid towards the animal, ready to push him back if he ever decided to pounce on her.
She didn't let herself be intimidated and stepped forward. The velociraptor continued to hiss, before suddenly turning around and scampering towards the wide open door at the other end of the aisle, that of an adjoining room which served as a storage area and where the healers suspected Kim to be, hidden in the dark. It was then that Juan appeared in his path and slammed the door. Randy swivelled swiftly, snapping his jaws at him and heading for the wall with the windows, but he let out a cry of surprise when a sheet landed on him, stopping him dead in his tracks and covering his entire body but the tip of the tail. In the heat of the moment, the sheet bothered him a lot, but strangely, the darkness it provided calmed him down.
Owen and Juan rushed on the animal. While Owen held him on the spot, placing his hands on his legs to prevent him from kicking, the head keeper lifted the sheet a little to clear the velociraptor's head. In a split second, Randy projected his snout towards the keeper's face but the latter grabbed his neck, stopping the snout a few centimetres from his visor, and he moved it away from his head.
As Juan muzzled the predator, being careful not to cover his nostrils, and also put his hood on, the keepers heard something scratching against the storage room's door and the head keeper looked up in its direction, knowing that Kim was probably trying to jump on the door handle and lean on it long enough to open it. He noticed that instead of watching it, Allison was looking at them.
"The door!" He shouted.
But before she could block it, the handle lowered and the door swung open from the inside, letting a velociraptor with a beige plumage and a pale grey head crown emerge from the dark all claws out. Like the male, her plumage was streaked with black, her throat white, and her chest and underside pale whitish pink.
Kim jumped up on the nearest counter and hissed at the keepers, like if she was telling them to release Randy, and her eyes fixed Allison's, then nearly at the same level and only a few steps away from her.
Seeing that Kim seemed to be about to pounce on her, Owen turned to Juan:
"Help her distract her! I can handle him."
Blinded by the hood, Randy had calmed down enough for Owen to put a hand under the sheet and grab his legs with it. Juan pulled back the sheet, revealing the male Velociraptor, and Owen picked him up, keeping the animal's body against his chest by pressing his arms against him with his other hand, while maintaining Randy's legs tucked under his body.
He carried him like this to the kitchen's entrance and while Juan and Allison were distracting Kim, Alfredo opened the door and Randy was carefully taken from Owen's arms and put in a transport cage, placed on a cart.
Owen returned inside the kitchen to help the other two keepers and they chased Kim through the kitchen as she leapt from one row to another, knocking over various utensils and bags of food on her way, and even climbed the shelves while uttering small high-pitched mocking-like calls.
"Get down right now, you feathered monkey!" Juan grumbled in Spanish at one point while Kim watched him from the top of a shelf.
After much effort, they managed to capture her too, repeating the operation done with Randy, and Marisol brought Claire and the DPG members back inside.
While the keepers pushed the carts with the cages in the austere hallways of the Ark, heading for an elevator near the ACU headquarters, Oscar, who had gone out to inform his comrades that the situation was under control, ran to them.
"Hodgson and the councillors are heading for the building!" He warned them.
Pasqual shrugged.
"Why so much panic, Oscar?"
"What if they see you?"
"Meh, we'll say we took them for a walk and we're bringing them back to the kennel," Alfredo said.
"Take them for a walk? But we have no leashes! Our story doesn't hold up," Vinny pointed out jokingly.
"But Hodgson said..." the ACU soldier resumed.
"That she wanted those raptors in their cages before the mayor's arrival? We know, and that's easier said than done!" Marisol cut him off. "It took the time it needed."
Realizing that it was highly likely that they would meet the mayor and the councillors if they stayed in the Ark, Claire then informed Juan about what Jocelyn had told her back in the hacienda's hallway.
"Ah, indeed," the head keeper said after listening to her. "No worries, we'll come out the other side and return here later."
"Reminds me of that time when they found an Avimimus in the hacienda's courtyard," Pasqual remembered as they entered the elevator. "Isn't it Alfredo?"
"Yeah...," his colleague muttered in an annoyed tone, as he had some responsibility in the animal's escape.
"It was being chased by the cat," the white-haired keeper continued. "Unless it was the other way around? Anyway, they were running in circles around the fountain. It was really funny! To say that some at the hacienda wanted to catch it and cook it."
"What, the cat?" Alexander asked as the elevator doors closed.
"No, the Avimimus!"
"We're lucky to have the tracking implants and the satellite," Juan said. "We wouldn't have found some of them otherwise..."
After it descended one level as requested, the elevator opened its doors and let the group and the keepers exit with the carts. They separated just outside, with the latter taking a double door, that of the kennel.
Juan and the group heard Pasqual continue their conversation.
"Avimimus cooked in broth, I wonder what it tastes like..."