Notes
Hypothetical casting:
Adrian Bouchet as Theo Lomas.
-o-
The next morning, the dinner organized by Jocelyn was on everyone's lips within the estate. During breakfast, many crowded around Juan and Valentine to ask them to tell the dinner's juiciest parts, and more particularly Alexander's moments of ridicule as well as the quite tense confrontation between Claire and Jocelyn. They did, and many InGen employees as well as several of Wheatley's mercenaries admitted they would have liked to be there to witness those scenes.
While some were still having breakfast in the large canteen tent, the minibus transporting the group and the employees accommodated outside arrived at the same time as usual and dropped off its passengers in the parking lot by the Ark. But instead of heading directly to the keepers' office, Franklin took his tripod and camera, walked through the old farm and went to stand with his back to the sun in the meadow at some distance from the camp, in order to have its tents, the hacienda and part of the oaks driveway in the frame, especially since it was a beautiful morning.
Then standing on the camp's periphery, Pasqual, Marisol, Horatio, and Vinny noticed him and waved at the camera. Alongside the keepers were also two ACU soldiers: Oscar and Meyers, a thirtyish brunette with a ponytail.
"He's filming again?" Pasqual noticed.
"Yeah. He almost reminds me of that other pink-haired stuck-up bitch," Marisol said, "although he has the merit of filming with serious equipment and not a stupid cellphone."
"Who?" Horatio asked.
"You know, the influencer they sent to Camp Cretaceous. What was her name again? Sydney? Paris? Kimberly?"
"Brooklyn," Oscar said.
"Yeah, anyway. A reality TV contestant's name," Marisol grumbled. "With the behaviour that went with it."
"My daughter was a fan…," Meyers sighed. "This Brooklynn couldn't stop bragging… Blah blah I picked a door lock in a Kathmandu hotel… Blah blah I climbed Everest… Blah blah this… Blah blah that… A bunch of crap! I would've gladly bought her a plane ticket to Syria! She would have bragged a lot less..."
"Don't talk about that. Every time she opened her mouth, you wanted to tell her "Shut up!"", Vinny added while a few of Wheatley's mercenaries passed by on their way back to the bungalows after having breakfast. "Like Balthasar from the Grey Guard said: Someone needs to be struck with a shield!"
But as he and his five colleagues laughed, one of the mercenaries froze and turned his head in their direction, glaring at them. Middle-aged, he was a bruiser with an unshaven face and rather short dark hair. Of all of Kenneth Wheatley's men, he was one of the most intimidating due to his build and height of over one meter and ninety centimetres. The keepers ignored his name but knew he was very probably from east London because Horatio and Vinny had recognized his accent the night before at dinner. Looking at him with a wary gaze, Oscar noticed that amid the mercenary's stern expression, there seemed to be another feeling, a painful one. What was it actually? Sadness? Guilt? Shame?
"What does this one want? What is he staring at?" Marisol wondered, speaking a little loudly for her colleagues' taste.
"Stop, the Londoner doesn't seems to be easy-going," Horatio pointed out. "Personally, I don't want to receive a blow..."
Suddenly, the mercenary was hailed by one of his comrades:
"Hey, Theo!"
He finally looked away and joined his comrade.
"We can no longer laugh like we used to these days...," Marisol complained.
It was then that Valentine Taylor and Benito arrived, returning from the large canteen tent. The keepers and the two ACU soldiers greeted the two security guards:
"Yo guys!"
"Hi," Valentine replied. "Is everything alright?" He inquired, glancing warily towards the English mercenary further away.
"Just a joke that didn't seem to have been to his liking," Oscar replied.
"Anyway," Vinny said as the pair of guards joined them, "I also remember the time she was prowling at night with two of her comrades near the achillo paddock. She wanted exclusive footage for her vlog you see…"
"It almost ended with a fistfight between Owen and Dave, who was defending the three kids," Oscar said. "Luckily, Owen is rather nice because he would have boned Dave like a chicken if he pissed him off too much."
"Well, some in the group weren't the sharpest knives in the drawer," Pasqual added.
"And the poor Roxie who had to manage this fine team of Einsteins, in which I include Dave," Marisol said.
Pasqual looked up and stroked his moustache dreamily.
"Ah Roxie, one of the island's most beautiful asses…"
"Before or after Claire's?" Vinny asked him. "Because that one... It looks like it was carved by the gods themselves."
"Going back to that Brooklynn, may she rest in peace, wasn't Owen the one who found some pink hair in droppings?" Marisol asked them.
"Not sure it was her," Horatio replied. "There had to be several Pink-haired numbskulls on the island. Natural selection must have done its work during the Fall."
"If you ask me, she probably ended up in a ditch, eaten by maggots, or croaked in a swamp or a pond, or devoured by the guanlongs or something else…" Pasqual supposed.
"Yeah, Pectinodons for example," Vinny suggested.
"Pectinodons, or troodons as they used to be called...," Horatio said thoughtfully. "An urban legend if you ask me, probably invented by Wu to demonize a former rival or whatever."
"Yeah, a bit like the legend who says that Mark Hamill was a worker during the park's construction, working under a false identity," Valentine compared.
"I've never heard of that story," Vinny said.
"Some people claim to have seen him on the construction sites. He would have played the gallery by throwing over his shoulder a dirty-looking old can of Barbasol shaving foam into a garbage container," the guard said.
Vinny cleared his throat.
"In Warhammer, Skavens were an urban legend too," he reminded Horatio, "until they decided to invade the surface…"
"And where are those pectinodons if they're not a legend?" Oscar asked. "Last I heard, we don't have any here and none of you have seen one with your own eyes."
"And what killed Wheatley's guys?" Vinny retorted. "From what I heard, the injuries and symptoms were neither those of a dilo bite nor those of a moscho."
"Adrian saw them," Benito suddenly said.
Valentine turned to him and looked at him gravely.
"Adrian? Filip and Kilian died because of that man-child. If he hadn't gotten drunk, he could have been more vigilant and warned them of the presence of the Acrocanthosaurus which ate them."
"That's Torres' version. That man is mixed up in shady business and is the board's dog!" Benito retorted. "Adrian saw everything. There was no Acrocanthosaurus. He said they were attacked by smaller and faster animals and that they started to hallucinate after being bitten. Those hallucinations drove them mad, up to the point where Kilian gunned down Filip before starting to shoot at Adrian who fled. When he returned to the scene, the two had disappeared, taken to God knows where, probably by the same creatures that had attacked them."
"When he spoke to you, he was delirious because of his encephalitis! And Adrian's word has always been worth nothing, and he isn't more believable than Sylvester when he's drugged on mushrooms," Valentine reminded him. "It's all a bunch of bullcrap."
"Then why did they send him straight back to the mainland and then unceremoniously fired him?"
"Because he was a burden, that's why!" Valentine said angrily as his thoughts turned to their two late colleagues. "He must be getting drunk in some small bar in the middle of nowhere, if he isn't still sleeping with the pigs."
"Do you really believe Torres' version, Val?" his colleague asked.
"As there is no alternative, yes."
"Okay everyone! Gather up!" The Temp coordinator shouted.
Horatio looked at his watch.
"Wow, it's eight o'clock. We must start working..."
"Yeah… See you later," Valentine told his colleagues, including Benito.
Whereas the keepers and the two ACU soldiers headed for the Ark and Benito for the western gate, Valentine went to join another of his colleagues to patrol along the estate's borders.
Being then also at the camp, Wheatley had heard too the coordinator announce the gathering. He knew that the temp keepers and veterinarians were about to begin their tour of the estate, whose purpose was to show them briefly the different sectors where they were going to be spread out and to give them a first glimpse of the animals in the flesh. The mercenary leader then thought that this tour might prove useful for the latest recruit of his organization, who had only recently joined them and therefore had not been on the island with them.
He walked away from the camp and his gaze stopped on a woman sitting in the grass against the trunk of one of the oaks. In her thirties, she was not very tall, had fine, straight blond hairs cut at shoulder-level, an angular face and blue eyes. Idle, she stared absently at the sky and daydreamed while biting the end of a stalk she must have picked nearby. Her tank top, fatigues pants, and combat boots indicated that she was one of his mercenaries.
"Oven," he called her.
"Yes Boss?" She replied in her raspy voice.
"Get McLagen and join the group there for the tour. He must get to know the animals... You will take the opportunity to brief him and tell him about what happened on the island."
"Everything?" she asked hesitantly.
"Everything. It will be for the best."
"And if he chickens out?"
"He is free to return home by his own means and without pay."
The mercenary nodded.
"Aye aye, sir," she said while struggling to get up.
While Wheatley walked towards the hacienda, Fanny Oven crossed the driveway and then the meadow, heading towards the bungalows. In front of one of them, she saw several of her comrades, also idle and waiting for the morning exercises. Within the group, Fanny saw a twenty-something young man with thick but short brown hair: McLagen, the youngest of the troop. He might be part of an organization full of seasoned mercenaries, but he looked so young and innocent with his sweet face and blue eyes. He had not witnessed the horrors of this hellish island that was Nublar. Just thinking about it sent shivers down her spine.
"Hey, rookie!" She hailed him. "Come with me!"
"I'm coming," the young mercenary replied.
He joined Fanny in the middle of the meadow.
"The boss wants us to join the group," she told him. "We're going to see the big lizards."
"OK."
They then walked to the group of temp keepers and vets gathered on the other meadow and listening to the coordinator from Palo Alto, Juan and Brice.
"Tell me, what's your name again?" She asked him, curious.
"Danny."
"Okay, Danny. I hope you like living dangerously."
"I wouldn't have made this career choice if it wasn't for me."
"Oh, I was joking... Half-joking."
The InGen employees having finished their speech, they invited the group to follow them in the direction of the hacienda first and the two mercenaries accelerated a little to catch up with them.
"You avoided the worst part of this operation, believe me," Fanny added. "I'll tell you about it at the end. What's left is just a big FedEx quest."
"A FedEx quest? Because we help transport the dinosaurs from point A to point B and we get a reward at the end."
"Basically, yes. We'll just have to serve as extra pairs of arms and keep the InGen guys safe by fending off nuisances. You're a gamer?"
"Yeah."
"What kind of games do you play?"
While getting to know each other better, they followed the group and passed in front of the different enclosures to observe the animals. Whereas Danny gazed at them in wonder, Fanny looked at them with indifference at best.
Unlike Claire, Owen and the DPG members on the day of their arrival, the group headed towards the large carnivores paddocks after passing by the Sauropods and the Triceratops and did not walked immediately towards the Marsh and the Asian Plain.
"Those are weird," Danny commented a few moments later. "I wonder what they eat..."
"I'll let you guess," his comrade told him.
The two animals they observed were bipedal dinosaurs with a pale olive-green body and an elongated, narrow skull with a small lacrimal horn and a laterally enlarged spoon-like anterior extremity. They had a length of more than nine meters as well as powerful arms equipped with a very large claw on the first finger. Baryonyx. One of the individuals, which was standing motionless under a tree, had particularly pronounced orange markings on the back of the skull, the tip of the tail and the snout. Those of the other, which was bathing in the small waterhole that had been dug in the paddock, were much more discreet, but both had on their heads and necks many grey, black and brown spots circled with cyan.
Closer to the two mercenaries and the rest of the group, there was a third individual, a young one, no bigger than an American black bear and with eyes proportionally larger than those of the two adults, a feature which aroused a number of tender looks among the group of temps.
"Look at the teeth and you'll have your answer," a male voice suggested to the mercenary in an annoyed tone, speaking with a French accent.
The two mercenaries turned their heads to the right and saw that the veterinarian was also standing near the fence, observing the animals with a watchful eye, checking that they were okay.
Danny listened to him and took a closer look at the animals' snouts. From its end, hung two pairs of barbels similar to those of catfish or Chinese dragons, with one pair long and thin and the other shorter and thicker. Whereas the first, the closer to the snout's tip, was of similar length in both adults, the other was remarkably longer in the individual with the distinct orange markings, the male. As for the young, its barbels were still just small protrusions and it had no orange markings either. When it opened its jaws, the mercenary noticed the presence of a large number of conical shaped teeth which reminded him of those of alligators and crocodiles.
"They're pointed," he observed.
"Nice observation Sherlock," Brice told him with undisguised sarcasm. "You can imagine we don't give them cheese pies."
"I was just wondering…," Danny replied to the vet's rudeness.
The two mercenaries resumed their turn and passed behind Brice, following the rest of the group towards the acrocanthosaurs' paddock.
A few seconds later, they heard him grumble in his native language:
"Putain mais qui nous a refourgués des débiles pareils? Aucune jugeotte ces gens-là…"
"Hello my sweethearts!" Mark said in a cheerful tone.
Their internal clocks knowing feeding times, Zaza and Blume waited impatiently for their keeper behind the fence of their enclosures and hooted in excitement at the sound of his voice. But when they saw he was being followed by the same two individuals who had prowled near their enclosure the previous day, their eyes locked on them, they unfolded their multi-coloured frills, and showed their long, backward-curving teeth.
"It's all right," the keeper said to the two dilophosaurs. "They are friends. Friends. Freunde."
Seeing that he was calm with them and still sensing a softness in his voice, Zaza and Blume stopped hissing, closed their narrow mouths and folded their backs against their necks.
"They're a little shy, as you can see," he told Owen and Claire, who, like him, wore long sleeves, gloves, and visors, as per the rule associated with this paddock. "It's better if you stay there," he suggested.
Still eyeing the couple warily, the dilophosaurs looked down at the bucket Mark was carrying. He approached the fence.
"Who are the mickeys for? Who are they for? They're for you, huh?" He asked them in a childish tone, talking to these two-meter-tall and six-meter-long predators the same way one would to a friendly dog.
They hooted in response, and he pulled a rat out of the bucket and handed it through one of the fence's meshes. But as Blume, the leaner and calmer of the two dinosaurs, was about to grab it gently between her teeth, Zaza suddenly launched her head forward and stole the rat right under the snout of the other dilophosaur.
"But! Zaza! You vile cheeky beggar! Wait for your turn."
While Zaza swallowed the rat, Mark pulled another one out of the bucket and showed it to Blume.
"This one for you, Blume. Do you hear Zaza? For Blume! Not you!"
He held out this second rat through the mesh closest to Blume's jaws, but the fatter dilophosaur protested by unfolding her frill, without opening her mouth or hissing, however.
"Hey…," Mark said, turning his head to look at her.
Zaza folded her frill back, but as soon as he looked back at Blume, she began to unfold it again...
"Hey…" he stopped her.
Zaza folded her frill against her neck and waited for Mark to hand her a second rat.
While he alternately fed them, the couple admired the slender, dark green bodies of the dilophosaurs and their red, yellow, and white mottling. They were both magnificent and dangerous dinosaurs.
Claire looked at the time on her phone and noted that it was a quarter to ten. They had a meeting scheduled for ten o'clock at the hacienda and while waiting for it, they had assisted Mark with some tasks.
"Mark. It's nearly ten o'clock," she informed the keeper. "We have to attend the meeting."
"Okay," he answered without turning around, looking closely at the dilophosaurs. "See you later."
"See ya," Owen told him.
They walked away from the paddock and removed their visors once they passed the warning sign at the entrance of the path leading to it.
"He's really close to them…," Claire pointed out as they left the large carnivores sector behind them and returned to the heart of the estate.
"More than me and the girls. All this almost reminds me of those fanfictions shared by some on the forum…"
"The ones that had you and Blue as the main characters?"
"Yeah… As much as I had nothing against those where we lived fictitious adventures, I even remember one that was pretty good, that an intern had written and where we formed a duo similar to Jack Tenrec and Hermès the Allosaurus from Xenozoic Tales. It even had some nice fanart… But there were other fics that were downright sick…"
"Let me guess, there were sex scenes with you two and you were often turned into a raptor by some genetic manipulation or "Shut up, it's magic!" event to make the pill pass."
"You said it all. No but gods! You know that Blue is like a daughter to me. You have to be quite a degenerate to write scenes that are not only zoophilic but almost incestuous and think it's romantic! There's one in Palo Alto HQ who better stop consulting Project IBRIS stuff and seek psychological help..."
They left their long sleeves, visors and gloves at the keepers' office and went to the hacienda's conference room, joining the DPG trio, Juan, Brice, Austin, the temps coordinator, the leader of the InGen soldiers squad as well as Wheatley and his main officers. Jocelyn arrived last and the meeting began. She, the head keeper, the veterinarian and the ACU commander explained or reminded the other people present in the room of the precise course of the afternoon and the next day, the measures taken by the local authorities to facilitate their operation, the roles of each, potential risks and the rules and instructions which had to be followed.
Meanwhile, outside, Site D's keepers and Maribel the assistant veterinarian formed eight teams of eight people with the temporary keepers and veterinarians, one for each of Site D's animal sectors and made up of a pair of supervising keepers, five temporary keepers and a veterinarian. Those sectors were: The old farm; the Ark; the Aviary; the Asian Plain and the Marsh; the Predators' Camp; the Large Carnivores; the Jurassic Plain and the titanosaurs; the Cretaceous Plain and the Triceratops. Once the teams were formed, each went to their sector where the pair of supervising keepers presented the animals to the temps and explained to them the operation's unfolding within their sector.
At eleven o'clock the meeting ended and while some, mainly the Costa Rican employees, went into town to attend Sunday mass, the others were already making some preparations and doing exercises before the lunch break.