Notes
Soundtrack suggestions:
The couple is heading to the house:
- Castithan Bath - Bear McCreary, Defiance.
The house:
- The Bakra - Bear McCreary, Outlander: Season 3.
- The cutwife of Ballentree Moor - Abel Korzeniowski, Penny Dreadful: Season 2.
The garage:
- Bury the Hatchling - Michael Giacchino, Jurassic World.
- The Island of Dr. Hoskins - Michael Giacchino, Jurassic World.
-o-
"But thinking about it, we left Jocelyn on her deckchair," Claire recalled while they descended into a small valley. "I hope a jaguar didn't eat her..."
In front of her, Owen struck his machete's blade on a branch which blocked their way.
"No chance," he replied. "Jaguars only attack humans if cornered or injured. Unlike Old World cats, they didn't evolve alongside apes and thus don't see us as natural prey. If that hadn't been the case, you can imagine that I would have raised this issue. We would have been in deep shit if she had been killed by a predator during the night."
It was past six o'clock and the forest's diurnal inhabitants were already awake. Monkeys chattered, birds sang and frogs croaked. Following the map's directions on Claire's phone, the proximity of batrachians told the couple that they were heading in the right way and shortly after reaching the bottom of the dell, they soon stumbled upon a stream. Beyond, at the edge of their field of vision, they glimpsed a wooden house, nestled in the middle of the forest.
"Here it is!" She exclaimed.
They jumped over the stream and headed for the abandoned house. Surrounded by tall trees, including an old mahogany, it was a teak dwelling built on two levels, with a large balcony upstairs and a patio below, and it seemed large enough to have housed an entire family.
Between the couple and the house was a fallow plot, once a well-kept garden. On either side of their path, they saw banana trees, other fruit trees as well as orchids but also and above all a large number of bushes and creepers, which assailed the house like kraken's tentacles on a ship, slowly smothering it in an endless embrace. Here and there large webs, sometimes a yard wide, had been woven, and their filaments appeared like golden threads in the sunlight.
Golden orb-weavers' webs…, Owen observed, shivering a little.
"What is this set straight from an eighties horror movie?" He said aloud as he was making their way through with the machete.
"It gives goosebumps... We should have borrowed one of the guns from the armory. Just in case. All I have is a steak knife I pinched from the restaurant."
Owen glanced over his shoulder and saw that his girlfriend had pulled out said knife and was pointing its blade now to the left and then to the right.
"Be careful with that knife, Brutus, you could hurt someone," he joked. "Since the bearing of arms is restrictive in this country, I'm not sure that walking around like that with a gun is a good idea. What if we ran into cops..."
"Except we're still on InGen property," she pointed out. "I only remembered this morning that they bought some land two years ago, to expand Site D. This plot was probably part of it. So I'm not sure the cops are allowed to walk around here without a warrant."
"True."
"I would still feel safer with a gun. How do you think a single pretty young woman could have avoided being bothered by the first bastard who came along back in New York and Florida?"
As they got closer, they noticed that the house had an annex on its northern side. Not built of wood but of cement, it had a rectangular shape and a flat roof. The couple surmised that it had to be a garage, large enough to shelter several vehicles and added to the house only later, rather crudely for Claire's taste. Amidst the dead leaves, she could make out the outline of a driveway connecting the garage's door to a gate further ahead. Consisting of two large wooden doors, the latter was closed and barricaded from the inside.
Taking the steps at its entrance, the couple climbed onto the patio, advancing towards the front door. On either side of it, large bay windows showed dusty curtains. Owen stuffed the machete into Claire's bag and kicked the door open. Eventually the door gave way and they entered, letting daylight flood into the house and illuminate the living room and kitchen as well as the dusty furniture. The impression given by the house gave is that the owner had suddenly disappeared but that no one had come to take the furniture away. On their left, a spiral staircase led upstairs; to their right, the kitchen had been built in a corner and featured furniture made of precious wood.
"Okay… let's search this place," Claire said, looking at the furniture as well as the doors and recesses visible in the back, leading to other rooms. "They may have forgotten some stuff."
"Do you think that documents could have slipped from their folders and slid under the sofa?" Owen asked her.
"Unlikely, but worth considering. The slightest packaging or receipt could have some use for the Ocelot."
She opened the bag to take out the machete, then ventured to the back of the house to search the rooms there while he dealt with the living room. He first slid the couch to the side, trying to see if the house's most recent occupants had left anything under it, but he saw nothing but dust. He then took looked at the rest of the living room's furniture, opening them when possible to look inside. But as he moved a chest of drawers near a low piece of furniture on which a television must have rested, he suddenly cringed.
"Fucking hell!" he hissed.
He had just disturbed a tarantula, which quickly scampered off, crawling on the tiled floor only a few feet from his shoes. He froze, with his eyes nervously following the huge hairy spider as it headed for the front door.
"I just searched the laundry room and the toilet," Claire informed him. "I found nothing."
She then noticed his frightened expression.
"You're alright?" She inquired.
"There was a tarantula," he replied.
"Compared to other spiders, a tarantula isn't that dangerous, is it?"
"Indeed, but it's still a big disgusting spider."
"So when you have big boas lying around on the terrace of your bungalow, no worries. Acting like Kevin Richardson (*) with raptors, no worries either. On the other hand, a spider which happens to be a bit bigger than the others, hello anxiety!" She scoffed. "The next time you see one, just think it's an eight-legged vagina."
"Stop saying bullshit like this, I'm going to have nightmares..."
Claire then went to the kitchen to search it, opening the drawers and cupboards one by one.
"The bushwhacker is more afraid of spiders than the suburbanite. How ironic!" he grumbled.
"Indiana Jones is afraid of snakes," she reminded him.
"You'll excuse me but unlike spiders, snakes have the merit of being beautiful."
"I'm not a fan. I think they're cold and sinister."
"And yet your ring had snakes if I'm not mistaken."
"My ex from Florida claimed that the snake was the animal that symbolizes me the most. Back then, I thought it was some esoteric bullshit but I didn't care since the ring was a nice gift."
"Your ex, the smith and ring maker... Rama, right?"
"Yes."
Remembering that she had never told him the name of the boyfriend she had before she was hired by InGen, Claire froze for a moment before resuming her search.
"Wait, how do you know his name? I never told you."
"I saw the letter he sent you while you were recovering. He has nice handwriting. Rama Ian Nantor, that's not a very common name. I went to his shop's website."
Claire stopped and her eyes widened in excitement.
"You went on this website? Oh you rascal, I think you're hiding something from me… Don't act like you're innocent."
"Sorry if I disappoint you, but I didn't buy anything. I just did some virtual window shopping."
"Oh!"
"Then I heard he got into trouble over a story of chipped rings he allegedly sold to some of his wealthiest and most powerful clients. I also read that he had a penchant for the occult and I put the idea aside. In any case, all the boyfriends you've had are far from boring. Between him, who would be the type to live in a big Gothic castle, the metalhead fan of Norse mythology and role-playing games whom you dated in high school, the fencer and medievalist when you were a student… and me, a mountain man who trained raptors..."
Then about to close the cupboard under the sink, Claire saw out of the corner of her eye an abandoned box at the bottom of it. First she took a photo of it with her cell phone and then held out her prosthesis and not her hand in order to not be bitten or stung by some hidden venomous critter. She grabbed the box and pulled it out, showing it to Owen.
"Jasmine tea…," he observed.
"We're getting warmer ... Henry loves jasmine tea."
She put the box on the counter and took a second photograph of it.
"If I was him and had to work in secret here, where would I set up a clandestine laboratory?" Owen wondered, scanning his surroundings. "Upstairs? No… The wooden floor wouldn't have hold under the weight of some lab equipment, not to mention transportation issues… The laundry room? I'm afraid it's too small..."
"The 'garage,'" Claire suggested, looking toward the door opposite the kitchen, near the spiral staircase. "I don't think it was here in the beginning and if I was the owner of this house, I wouldn't have commissioned something so ugly. InGen had to add it in a hurry. Let's take a look."
They went to that door and Owen kicked it. Lighting their way with Claire's phone and the flashlight, they moved a little forward, stopped at the small wooden staircase behind the door's threshold and swept the garage with their lights.
"There's nothing…" Claire noted, disappointed.
The garage was empty. There was no furniture or equipment, just bare walls, a few electrical outlets, a large sliding door closed, cobwebs in the corners and on the ceiling, and a layer of dust on the floor. While the flashlight beam zigzagged across it, Owen noticed marks on the floor. They were a little faded but if one looked carefully, they could see them.
"Wait. Look at the marks on the ground," he said to Claire while passing the light over the marks.
"Traces… Large enough to have been those of furniture, laboratory equipment… Light them up while I take pictures."
They went down the small staircase and started taking pictures of the marks they saw. Most were located near the sockets and had rectangular shapes, except for one in a corner, which was rather circular.
A development vat, Claire thought after her phone's flash lit up that part of the garage. Like in the lab annex back on Nublar, where the Indominus was born.
When they had taken pictures of all the marks they saw, Claire scanned the garage for more clues. Looking back towards the door they had taken, she saw a thin, white item under the stairs' steps.
A sheet! It must have slipped out of a folder or a binder when they left.
As for Owen, he too had just found a potential clue, in the form of a mortar stain at eye level on one of the walls. Passing the lamp's beam below and above this stain, he noted the presence of other mortar stain, evenly spaced all the way up the wall. Approaching the stain by eye level, he saw that a small metal object protruded from it. Stepping forward again, until he was almost pressed against the wall, Owen noticed that the edges of the object were sharp and he crouched down to look closely at the mortar stains below. They too had these same kinds of metal objects protruding from them. Realizing the likely nature of the mortar stains and pieces of metal, Owen backed away from the wall and illuminated the one about two meters to his right. When the lamp's beam met a vertical series of mortar stains, he stopped and passed his lamp first along an imaginary straight line on the ground between that wall and him, then along another which started from his feet to join the wall ahead of him, following the probable contours of an enclosed space that had occupied that corner of the garage.
"Owen?" Claire asked.
He looked to the left and saw that she was holding a sheet of paper in her hands.
"You see the mortar smears in front of me? Come closer and tell me what you see."
She carefully folded the sheet and put it in her trouser pocket.
"What was that sheet?"
"No idea, I didn't have time to read it. I found it under the stairs. We'll read it later."
She moved closer to the wall.
"There are bits of metal sticking out of the mortar," she noticed. "They look like they were sawed off or at least cut... Those who did that proceeded like slobs."
"Exactly. Railings were attached to these two walls. Bars... And who says bars, says cage, says animal..."
"What else this place could be? Wu's sex dungeon? If they built a cage, that would mean..."
"These marks remind you of anything?" He asked her suddenly.
She turned around and saw that he was crouched down and directing the flashlight on a part of the floor within the rectangle the cage once described. She positioned herself at his side and saw on the concrete three irregular streaks stretching across two dozen centimetres. Claw marks. Terrible memories came back and she couldn't help but put her hand on her gash.
"Yes, the ones on the wall of the Indominus enclosure," she replied. "Fuck…" she added in a low voice with a hint of dread.
"So InGen probably has another Indominus or a similar creature somewhere," he concluded.
"I don't think they sent it to Palo Alto," Claire said, pulling the sheet out of her pocket. "There are too many people and no room for a monster like the one born here."
"Maybe Site H. InGen wanted to move the IBRIS program there before the death of Blue's sisters."
"The one in the desert? Good luck infiltrating the place if the Ocelot asks us. The employees working there are carefully selected."
"And Torres must have turned the place into a fortress if they sent that thing there…"
"Indoraptor. That's how they called their new horror..."
Claire had just read the name on the sheet and when Owen leaned over it, he noticed that it was a photocopy of a health record. As the sheet had been left in moisture, it was stained and most of the information had become illegible, but the name Indoraptor was clearly visible in the Species box.
"Losing that photocopy wasn't very smart…" she added.
"Given the name, it must be a cross between an Indominus and a raptor. The second stage of their diabolical project. A miniaturized version of the first… I don't dare to imagine the appearance and the abilities of this creature."
"I think we have enough evidence. Let's search the rooms upstairs and leave. You have to go back to the hacienda afterwards."
They turned away from the claw marks and returned into the house proper, unaware that a micro-camera concealed at the top of the garage's large sliding door had watched them the whole time.
-o-
Notes
(*) Kevin Richardson: South African Environmentalist and wildlife sanctuary owner. Is known as The Lion Whisperer.