Notes
Hypothetical casting:
Jean-Christophe Hembert as Brice Le Goff.
Soundtrack suggestions:
The beginning of the day:
- Entering the park - Daniel Pemberton, Prehistoric Park.
- Dawn - Jeremiah Pena, Jurassic World: Evolution.
The keepers talk about the illegal traffics on Nublar and the Depths:
- Jackseye's Tale - Daniel Pemberton, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword.
The Deinocheirus:
- Thanator chase part2 - James Horner, Avatar (complete score) (Up to 01:15).
- Gorgeous beasts - Ramin Djawadi, Game of Thrones: Season 7 (Up to 01:07).
-o-
The next day, the minibus picked up the couple and the three DPG members at a quarter to eight, as planned. It was driven by one of Site D workers and the group saw the other passengers from the previous day. There were other workers, a few security guards and administrative employees, including the young woman who had greeted the group when they arrived at the hacienda, as well as Pasqual, Alfredo, Marisol and a fourth keeper, Costa Rican too. Fairly old, on the verge of retirement, not very tall, bony, he had long curly hairs that fell over his shoulders and they, like his beard, had a shaggy appearance. It was that Pedro Allison had mentioned in less than complimentary terms and the group had only seen him briefly late the day before. Owen did not recognize this man and that was normal, as he had never worked on Isla Nublar and had recently been hired by InGen to compensate for the resignations of several keepers.
The group and the four keepers arrived at their office a few minutes later, joining those who had arrived before them in the circle of chairs. Among those were Judd, Allison, Horatio, Vinny, Mark, but also Nala, a slender Kenyan taller than most of her colleagues; Suraj, an Indian man; Dana, a second-generation Costa Rican who had the distinction of being blonde, a rare hair colour in the country; and Alex, an American close in age to Mark, chubby and with a pleasant face.
In one corner, a radio was on and broadcasting national news.
"…Now the minor news items. After a long chase, San José police arrested three people last night for drug trafficking. The culprits were indeed selling Unicorn Candy to the customers of a nightclub located near Obrero cemetery. As a reminder, the Unicorn Candy is a psychotropic drug appreciated for its soporific and calming effects and today widespread throughout the metropolitan area of San José. It first appeared in the Barrio Mexico district almost a year ago and the drug is so popular and is spreading so fast that authorities fear it will soon be sold in other cities across the country, and this while its traffic and accidents related to its consumption have already caused five deaths. For now, the secrets of its production as well as the identity of the people behind the traffic remain a mystery, although the police suspect one of the city's gangs."
"That affair reminds me of the mushroom and Lioplo traffics on Nublar," Pasqual said, "although we didn't have any fatalities."
"Quite a few people smoked ganja in that clearing near the lake," Alfredo added, "the den of all of the island's hippies. There was that French guy who kept drumming and singing flat about society or whatever... We heard him at the village and probably even on the other side of the lake. If the dinosaurs bellowed, it was to tell him to shut up."
"I remember that some dealt Lioplo in the Chicxulub's toilets," Vinny recalled. "Some were completely stoned on the sofas."
"You can tell that, you used to buy some, Vinny," Alfredo pointed out.
The Briton shrugged.
"Maybe."
"It's true, you bought some," Horatio added. "You even said that you had the impression of being in a Ralph Bakshi film."
"I said Ken Russell, not Ralph Bakshi," Vinny corrected, "though some of the hallucinations seemed to be straight out of his adaptation of The Lord of the Rings."
"Who was your dealer?" Judd questioned him. "Wasn't it Getafix or some other weird alias?"
"No, it was Panoramix."
"How did they manage to get their bearings with all those code names?" Marisol wondered. "The organization of this traffic must have been a hell of a mess!"
"We never got to the end of this story," Claire said. "They never found the manufacturing lab or knew who was behind the traffic."
"There are rumors saying that corrupted J-SEC officers were running the whole thing," Alfredo told her.
"No wonder the investigation went nowhere then...," the former park director concluded.
Meanwhile, Franklin and Zia listened to the conversation in amazement.
"Burroughs wasn't Chicago, but almost," Alex told them. "And we didn't even talked about the orgies that some executives organized in their residences. We had the impression of being back to Roman times... We may be criticizing the park where we worked, but if you want my opinion, there must be some similar interesting stories at DisneyWorld too."
"If it hasn't been found since, the stock must be rotting somewhere in the Depths," Vinny said, "probably near one of the squats one could find there."
"Didn't one of them became a Herrerasaurus lair?" Judd raised. "Apparently, they shit on the mattresses. They might have eaten all the stock and been on a trip for days. That would explain the state in which they were found..."
"Once, some people found a box containing a whole bunch of accessories, including an imitation of a certain uniform designated by Hugo Boss if you know what I mean. A woman's uniform. It didn't have the logo, thank God, and when we searched the box, we also discovered an old beret for men as well as script pages, those of the romantic-masochistic adventures of Isla the SS she-wolf and Gaston, member of the Resistance. We've always wondered about the identity of the two idiots who played them…"
Two young and pretty Costa Rican women, Aura and Inès, entered the room and shortly after, Juan arrived, accompanied by a third woman and a fortyish man with a round face and a balding head. They were Brice Le Goff, Site D veterinarian and Breton expatriate, and Maribel, his assistant.
They greeted those they hadn't seen yet, and with the keepers' team complete, the head keeper gave the group their assignments for the morning:
"…Owen, you'll be with Mark and me; Alexander with Aura and Inès; Zia with Judd and Nala; Claire with Horatio and Vinny; and Franklin with Alex and Pedro. And this afternoon, we'll send you scythe in front of the carnotaurs."
As Juan had told them about the sectors where each had a good chance of being affected, none of the five was surprised and when the clock showed eight o'clock, they followed their respective duos of keepers. Claire joined the two British keepers, whose sector included the Asian Plain (name given to the paddock which contained the shantungosaurs, the gallimimus and the sinoceratops) and the Marsh, an enclosure located next to the Asian Plain and which housed species which formerly lived in the Jungle Cruise attraction on Nublar. She followed them out of the building and to a room where buckets and large bins were stored. They took several buckets and one of the bins, which they put in the back of a van. Before climbing in the vehicle, Horatio looked up at the sky. It was grey, cloudy, and the air was humid.
"Do you have a raincoat?" he asked Claire. "Because I think it's going to rain..."
She nodded and climbed into the front of the vehicle with the two men, taking the middle seat.
"Where are we going?" she asked.
"We're going to collect stones in the streams," Vinny answered, seated on the right.
"Gastroliths for herbivores?" She guessed.
"That's right," Horatio replied from the driver's seat. "We were supplied back on Nublar but since they cut the gastroliths budget, we have to go and collect them out there ourselves. Without them, some animals have digestive issues."
They left the estate by the western gate and went to a first stream, located a few kilometres away, in the middle of the jungle. When Horatio parked the van next to the path, it had already been raining for a few minutes, so they put on their rain jackets before getting out of the vehicle. As they took out the buckets and the large bin, Vinny said to the fallen park director:
"You know Claire, you can take off your mask. You'll be more comfortable without it."
She froze, wondering if they were mocking her.
"We promise to not scream," the androgynous keeper added.
"It's better if I keep it," she said. "What's under isn't a pretty sight."
"One of my friends had an accident with an iron when he was little and Horatio knows a guy who got mauled by a leopard. You can take it off, we're not wimps. And I think the pals can tolerate its sight."
She hesitated for a moment, then sighed.
"You can't tell me that I didn't warn you..."
She took off her mask, revealing her gash, barely hidden by the hood of her raincoat. Their eyes widened slightly, but their faces showed no sign of horror or disgust. Claire exhaled softly in relief.
"You see? No problem," Vinny said with a shrug. "Sure, it might surprise when you see it for the first time but I think we'll get used to it. If it can reassure you, you look more like Blofeld from the James Bond saga than Two-Face from Batman."
"I guess I'll take that as a compliment…Owen says it reminds him of the one Commander Shepard might have. The Renegade version though."
"Shepard from Mass Effect? Mine was Paragon but it's true that there's resemblance," he admitted.
Before they went down to the creek, Horatio also took a pistol, which he hid under his jacket. Although there are jaguars and pumas in that part of Costa Rica, Claire knew that Horatio carried a weapon rather to protect themselves against potential human attackers, whether they were locals who hated InGen so much that they were ready to attack simple employees like them or agents of the corporation's rivals.
"Without wishing to pry, Claire, what did this to you?" He asked her as they descended a small slope.
"A Baryonyx," she lied, thinking of the first predator other than the Indominus that could have scarred her like this.
"A Baryonyx? It was very surgical," Horatio said sceptically. "They are usually rougher."
"I don't remember what attacked me. I was in one of Burroughs streets, got suddenly attacked and then I woke up in a hospital bed in Nicoya with this gash and one arm missing. It must be some kind of amnesia."
"If we believe what the control room folks said, you were by the Tyrannosaur Kingdom. But Roberta couldn't have done that. Unless it was the Indominus, which was at the Avenue at the same time? I think that my brain would have also erased any memory of a confrontation with that thing."
"Maybe it was her."
At the stream, they took a number of stones from the bottom, filling the buckets which were emptied into the bin. Once it was full, Claire and Vinny took it to the van to empty its content at the back, before taking the empty bin back to the stream, where Horatio continued the gathering. They filled the bin again with buckets of stones, emptied it into the back of the vehicle and then drove off towards another stream, with Horatio explaining to Claire that they were doing this in order to avoid over modify the streams' hydromorphology too much by taking too many stones from a single place.
Overall, their collection of gastroliths lasted a good hour and a half, if not more, and when they returned to the Farm, they dumped the stones accumulated at the back on a concrete surface under a tin roof and hosed them to clean them.
While Horatio filled a wheelbarrow with gastroliths, Vinny took Claire to the kitchens where they prepared the Marsh animals' food. They filled two buckets with fish which they brought to the van and the trio then drove to the enclosure, parking the vehicle along the path that connected the hacienda to the Predators' Camp.
A group of seven bipedal dinosaurs with grey blue feathers, about two meters and a half long and one meter twenty tall, were massed behind the inner gate. They had a long, narrow skull with a small crest of keratin at its back, an orange gular sac reminiscent of that of pelicans, and a large white stripe which extended from the beak's end to the top of the skull before running down the neck where it separated into two smaller stripes. Pelecanimimus, an early Cretaceous ornithomimosaurian whose fossils were found in the Cuenca province in Spain.
The keepers and Claire went through the gate with a wheelbarrow containing gastroliths and then entered the paddock, with Horatio clapping his hands to make the dinosaurs move back.
"I'm going to see what the ouranos and the niger are doing," he informed his two companions before disappearing behind a curtain of small trees shortly after.
"Okay, I'll feed those little lads in the meantime," Vinny replied, holding the buckets of fish.
Before he started giving the fish to the pelican imitators, Claire, who was pushing the wheelbarrow, asked him where to dump its content. He then pointed to an area a few meters from them, at the edge of a pond.
She went there, forming several piles with the stones like Vinny had told her. Behind her, he fed the Pelecanimimus the same way zookeepers fed pelicans elsewhere, handing each one or more fish which they grabbed and then swallowed greedily.
Hearing the stones sliding on the wheelbarrow's metal, an animal that had been hidden behind the thick foliage of a large tree at the opposite end of the pond showed up, striking Claire in amazement due to its large size and its unique appearance.
As long as an Acrocanthosaurus and bipedal like them, it was humpbacked and massive, with broad flattened feet, relatively short hind legs, huge clawed arms over two meters long, and a head featuring a grey duckbill.
The body was covered with a sort of pale yellow, shaggy-looking down, reminiscent of sloth hairs, while the bare skin of the face and legs was bright red. A male Deinocheirus.
Claire had of course already seen Deinocheirus in Nublar on a few occasions but there had always been a fence between her and them and here she was in the paddock with one of those strange giants. She knew their diet was mainly herbivorous but that didn't mean anything and she remained on her guard. Many of Jurassic World's herbivores could prove dangerous for an adult person, and the animal in front of her was heavy, weighing around six tons. He could trample her easily while a single blow from his claws could kill her instantly.
As he trod heavily on the pond, moving towards her, Claire stepped back, but Horatio, then returning to them, said to her:
"You can stay. He's not aggressive, he's quite gentle actually. He's not Yuriko, the Therizinosaurus. You just have to stay calm."
Walking calmly, he came to join Claire near the gastroliths and the giant ornithomimosaur reached their side of the pond. Towering over the two humans, he gazed at them placidly while rumbling softly. He didn't have a pleasant smell, which recalled both duck and sludge, but Claire didn't care. She stood still and didn't want to alarm the animal.
He lowered his neck and took several gastroliths with his beak. He tilted his head back to swallow them then started the operation again, collecting this time gastroliths in the pile closest to Claire. He swallowed those too and then lowered his head again but stopped it at the same height of that of the fallen park director and, since his eyes were on the sides of the head (as in waterfowl and most herbivores), turned it to inspect with one eye the stranger who accompanied his two keepers. He rumbled more audibly.
"Claire…," Horatio whispered. "Give him that fish..."
She grabbed the trout he gave her in her left hand and slowly handed it to the Deinocheirus, hoping he wouldn't rip her hand off with it. The dinosaur saw the fish and opened its beak to grab it. Claire was relieved to see it close just before her fingers and the trout disappeared shortly after into the animal's mouth. He rumbled again, contentedly. Claire looked into his eye and any apprehension she had about the animal disappeared. Amazed by this encounter, she even smiled.
The Deinocheirus eventually moved away a bit, staying in the pond, and once Vinny was done with the Pelecanimimus, the three returned to the van and spent the rest of the morning in the service building adjoining the paddock, cleaning the premises and preparing fodder or branches for the Ouranosaurus and Nigersaurus which also occupied the enclosure.