Notes
Soundtrack suggestions:
The couple in the stable:
- Vanessa's dream - Abel Korzeniowski, Penny Dreadful: Season 2.
Claire talks about her impossible dream:
- A nation of thieves - Bear McCreary, Black Sails.
- Sacred Guardian Of the Mountain - James Horner, Mighty Joe Young (Starting from 02:15).
- The Campfire in her Soul - Michael Giacchino, Jurassic World: Dominion (Starting from 01:33).
- The Glade Part II - Trevor Jones, The Last of the Mohicans.
The couple falls asleep:
- Sleep - Stephan Schütze, Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis.
-o-
"Now where are we going?" he asked once it was done. "I was supposed to spend the night in the guest room but I'm not comfortable with leaving you hanging around alone until morning. And you can't go back to town. The gates are guarded and under video surveillance."
"If I'm seen tomorrow morning inside the hacienda with you, it will be highly suspicious. Let's find a quiet corner. You can always come back to the hacienda later."
Going around the terrace and then the hacienda itself, they hugged the walls, in order to avoid being seen by the occupants of the rooms, and once they had passed the house, they turned right, as if to go to the Predators Camp. This part of the estate having more trees and bushes, they could hide more easily if they ever encountered guards patrolling the paths and alleys. However, these being content to patrol the outskirts of the estate and guard its gates, they saw none that night and the only being which reacted to their passage was a Mantellisaurus, which mooed to attract their attention, probably to ask for food or even caresses. The animal was standing close to the fence of its paddock, following them with its eyes. Fearing that the animal would wake up the neighbourhood, Owen turned to him and said:
"Hush... Go back to sleep!"
The animal became silent and Owen and Claire continued down the path, passing between the Asian Plain and several small enclosures to their left. The clouds parted, letting the moon light illuminate the estate a little and arriving in sight of the Predators' Camp, the couple turned right, passing between the Plain and the Marsh in order to avoid the camp and the ACU troopers on duty there, posted in two of its watchtowers and keeping an eye on the predators. They passed the Marsh' night building as well as that of the Triceratops and the latter's paddock but Claire led her boyfriend a little further, towards the large night building between the Titanosaurs' paddock and the Jurassic Plain.
Unlike the elephant and giraffe barns that may be seen in temperate countries' zoological establishments and just like the other barns of Site D, most of this building had no walls, just a large roof and strong pillars supporting it, letting them see an array of stalls and boxes where the animals spent the night. Of course, since the keepers locked the building's front door when they left, making the service rooms inaccessible, Owen guessed that the destination Claire was heading to had to be one of the unoccupied stalls, which they could access by taking a certain detour.
They left the path, Claire pulled out a flashlight from her bag and they walked around the Titanosaurs' paddock by the west. Once they reached two isolation corrals at the back of the building, they entered the one adjoining the Jurassic Plain, as there was enough space between its posts to allow a grown human sneak between them while neither bars nor fence prevented them from doing so. The couple sped through the corral and sneaked through the heavy steel bars of a gate large enough let a truck pass. Thus entering the barn, they ended up in a wide corridor and were greeted by the half-muffled bellow of the Stegosaurus standing behind the high and solid steel barrier of the stall ahead them. The animal was enormous, as long as a bus and with dorsal plates raising above the top of the barrier, which was a little over four meters high by Claire's estimate. Although the herbivore's spiky tail wasn't moving, she and Owen avoided getting too close to the fence and they turned left, passing two other stalls which also containing stegosaurs, but smaller individuals than the first.
As the fourth stall in this series was empty and the last before a dead end, Claire slipped through its bars, followed by Owen, and after checking that there was no droppings among the layer of straw that covered the floor, she sat down against the fence on the opposite side of the stall, by the service corridor used by the keepers during the day.
While she pulled out her phone and her map, Owen looked toward the nearest security camera, mounted near the ceiling on top of one of the pillars. The light was too dim for him to see it, but having been there earlier during the stay, he knew its approximate location and had noticed the layer of dust covering it and its lens. They had known then that they wouldn't have to worry about the cameras and that they would just have to leave the place before the keepers' arrival in the morning. To their right was another stall, much larger than theirs and that of the stegosaurs and with sort of baskets filled with leafy branches, suspended about five meters above the ground. Between those baskets, he saw a small group of apatosaurs, motionless and rumbling softly as they slept while standing. The group consisted of two adult females, two Parasaurolophus-sized juveniles and a third big as a horse. Owen knew there were also three sheep-sized babies born at the Farm earlier in the month, but he didn't see them and thought they had to be either in another part of the stall or hidden behind the older individuals. The adult male was locked in a separate stall.
Claire called him:
"Owen…"
He came to sit next to her and she pointed with her flashlight the area she had just circled on the map, the same one where she had seen the mysterious building on the copy she had photographed in the office.
"On Jocelyn's map, there was a building in that area. And it was not indicated on recent maps. It must be an abandoned old farm."
Owen took out his phone and went to Google Maps to zoom in on this area. He described what he saw to his girlfriend:
"This building seems to be in a small clearing. It doesn't seem to be a farm but more some kind of a house."
Being on the satellite pictures layer, he switched to the Map layer.
"And there is a forest path that connects it to the road…," he added, "…without crossing the estate…"
"Wu and co. could have come and gone unseen by most people here, with only Jocelyn and Austin aware of his presence and activities. We've got that damn lab!"
"If not, I'm willing to cut one of my balls off."
She pulled out a blanket from her bag, and put the map and her phone back in. She got up and began to harmonize the thickness of the straw a little further ahead in preparation for laying down there.
"Well done," she congratulated him.
"You can say. I did the worst while you played Lady Macbeth in the shadows. I almost prostituted myself for you," he reproached her in a joking tone. "If we were in a movie and our sexes were inverted, it would get ripped apart on social media."
She laughed.
"My plan still worked. It was so cunning that you could have pinned a tail on it and called it a fox."
As they finished preparing their layer of straw, the couple sat down, took off their shoes and spread the blanket over their bodies. Claire turned off her flashlight and sighing at ease, they cuddled together.
"I don't think I'll ever be able to thank you for your devotion," she told him.
"What can I say? I am loyal," he answered. "You are my wife. My captain. My queen…"
She smiled.
"You're paraphrasing Boromir now? Well, it's better than just repeating "You're my Queen" all the time."
"I can't help it if Jon Snow's lines in the last season of Game of Thrones were quite limited. Because of them, as soon as I say you're my queen, you're laughing at me."
"That's not true."
"You're my queen," he said, mimicking Kit Harington's accent and acting, making her smirk. "You're my queen. You're my queen," he repeated in the same tone.
She couldn't help laughing at him and he threw some straw at her face in retaliation.
"You see?"
She grabbed a handful of straw and answered by stuffing it under his polo shirt.
"Hey!" He protested in an amused tone as the strands scratched his stomach and lower torso.
And they bickered like children, trying to put as many straws as possible under each other's clothes to inconvenience them. When they were done, they rolled onto their backs, looking at the ceiling while they started to be lulled by the soft rumble of the apatosaurs in the stall to their right.
"Reminds me of the time Isaac caught us having sex in the hay," Owen said with a sigh, "in one of the barns back on Nublar."
Claire, then removing strands of straw from her hair and her hood, asked for clarification:
"Isaac? Isaac Clement from marketing?"
"No, Isaac, one of the interns. Remember…"
"Ah him ... I knew it couldn't have been Clement, that vicious tongue. We would have had problems soon enough otherwise…"
Then remembering this episode, the intern's appearance came back to her mind.
"Wasn't this Isaac skinny and dark-haired, barely adult, always climbing everywhere like Tarzan and snooping where he shouldn't be, probably still a virgin at the time?"
"Yup."
"I remember how you caught him and grabbed him by the collar. You even threatened to smash his face if he said anything about what he saw. I thought for a second that you were going to defenestrate him."
"And you threatened to fire him from his internship."
"True."
"It's a pity we didn't allow him to brag to the other interns that he saw you naked. This is the kind of bawdy anecdotes we love at his age. Well, this incident at least gave him an unforgettable memory."
"Stop, I must have haunted several of his naughty dreams… Poor boy… When he left the barn, I bet that some noticed the fucking stiffy he had. The shame he must have felt..."
"You can't blame him for standing to attention in front of the deputy park director."
Claire's attention was suddenly drawn to a whine coming from the stall to their left. She turned to look at it and saw a young Stegosaurus behind the bars. It kicked them, which woke up its mother, lying a few meters behind. She growled and called it back with a sort of yelp. The juvenile Stegosaurus stopped kicking. It went back to lay down next to its mother, which gave it a little nudge before nestling it up against her with her tail to keep it warm.
"Do you remember the first time you saw a dinosaur?" Claire asked. "The first time you see one is like a miracle. You read about them in books, see the bones in museums. But you don't really believe it, like they're some kind of myth. And then you see one… in the flesh."
"We'll give them a new home," Owen assured her.
"I owe them that… They are all what remains of a kingdom I was supposed to protect. Like them, I'm not sure I have a place in this world... Blamed for all these deaths, treated like a monster but victim of Men's greed and power games. It's like I became one of them and I risk having the same fate, by being locked up for many years... And I was also, despite myself, the mother of one of them. We say that the Tyrannosaurus is the king of the dinosaurs but even Roberta did not survive… They have no king or queen, no homeland…"
He passed an arm around her waist.
"They have you..."
"Some indeed call me the Fallen Queen of Isla Nublar, but that is only out of mockery. Anyway, I no longer have any power, and even with the responsibilities Lockwood gave me, I can't do much for them. Had InGen's intentions been more sinister for them, I fear I would have been unable to protect them. What is a king or a queen unable to protect their people? If only I was filthy rich... I would have bought them all and created a sanctuary for them. Not one like Alexander would like, some kind of discount Sorna whose result would be nothing more than a Battle Royale… No, think of something more like that sanctuary for elephants in Tennessee or the one where they filmed that movie we once watched at your place on Nublar, with the guy who had all those lions in his house… Tippi Hedren is the president of that sanctuary…(*)"
"Shambala Preserve?"
"Yeah, that's it. Shambala Preserve. Basically, something like that but adapted to dinosaurs, without tourists if possible... I would build it in some remote place, where they and I could live in peace for the rest of our days... Another idea that will be nothing other than a sweet dream, a utopia, like many things..."
They chatted a little longer, then closed their eyes and drifted off to sleep.
-o-
Notes
(*) The film Claire is talking about is Noel Marshall's Roar.