Jurassic Park: The Broken Lives Saga by Dinohunter55
Chapter 3: A Spark of Hope
The air simmered with the afternoon heat as Silver Claw stirred from the troubled sleep that he had slipped into from unconsciousness. Faces of the dead faded from his mind's eye as his crimson eyes opened. He was under a large rock. A stream gurgled nearby. His head pounded. Moisture clung to him.
Slowly, Silver Claw crawled out from under the rock. His chest throbbed where he hit the ground and it hurt to move his arms quickly. His mind was foggy unlike the afternoon air. He absently plucked the fat leeches from his body that he could reach while trying to put together everything that happened.
Sophia!
Silver Claw looked around. He was alone. He made his way up the embankment to where he fell and picked up her trail. Please be alive. The wound on her leg left an easy trail to follow but so did the footprints of the spinosaurus. Not far from where he fell, the trail ended at a pit where the stream descended beneath the earth.
"Sophia," Silver Claw called. When he got no answer, he looked over the edge. The floor of the pit was not far down but only a small pool of blood marked where something had been. "Sophia! Please answer me."
Silence.
"Sophia," the words left Silver Claw as a hoarse whisper. Trembling rocked his body. He dropped to the earth and was still for a long while.
The events of the morning played again and again in his mind. The chase, the rush home, the destruction at the nest, the chase, the rush home, the destruction at the nest, the chase, the rush home, the destruction at the nest, and then the faces of the dead came to him. Some of his pack was missing from the dead. That realization gave Silver Claw a small hope.
"Sophia," Silver Claw cried out as he rose to his feet. She did not answer him. Silver Claw turned from the pit, head low, and traveled north.
There was a place where multiple waterfalls converged into a single pond. His pack told him about it recently but never got to show him where it was though he had found it during one of his secret ventures away from the nests when no one was paying attention. He did not tell them that he had found it. They were going to show him where it was soon anyway and they said that if something should happen to the nests and it was not safe to return that he should go to it and wait for the others. Traveling with them to the waterfalls was an excuse to leave his normally limited territory and he would not pass it up by saying he had already found it.
Silver Claw reached the road and followed it east until it forked and then traveled north again. It followed an inlet from the ocean for a while. The gentle swells broke upon the shore and the spray filled the air with the salty ocean scent. He passed a shed before the jungle surrounded him once more. Before long the road linked up with a stream. Where the road and stream finally parted, Silver Claw followed the stream.
A pounding behind Silver Claw's eyes made him want to sleep again to rid himself of the discomfort. But he endured it. He was nearly there.
The jungle opened up to a large pond in the center of which lay a small island. Beyond, the multiple waterfalls poured out of a small cliff. A mountain ridge loomed over the place and a radio tower sat at the peak, barely seen above the canopy.
Silver Claw circled the pond until he reached the narrowest place between the island and the shore. He plunged into the cool water and swam for the island. He saw the shimmer of darting fish fleeing his presence but paid them little notice. There were no crocodiles in this pond as far as he knew. He clawed his way up the gravely embankment of the island and quickly hid himself within its foliage.
Eventually, Silver Claw found a safe area to hide while still being able to watch over most of the pond. The day turned to evening and between brief troubled sleeps Silver Claw saw several creatures come and go from the pond to drink. A small herd of five triceratopses drank deep for the longest time before disappearing into the jungle but it was the ceratosaurus that got Silver Claw's heart racing a little. It seemed to sense him but moved on with little investigation.
As night fell, it began to rain. Silver Claw nestled in under a broadleaved plant and slept through the night. His dreams were troubled and he startled awake more than once. A pack of smaller carnivores harried a group of gallimimus in the wee hours of the morning just before sunrise. They failed to get a kill and were very noisy about it.
With dawn, Silver Claw repositioned himself to watch the pond. He reflected on the previous day. By midday the rain stopped and his heart sank. His pack was not coming. He was truly alone for the first time in his life. It felt like a great weight was in his gut.
As evening approached, Silver Claw waded back to shore and slipped into the jungle. He knew of a safer place where he could hide until he decided what to do next. Perhaps he would travel east to the center of the island and try to find the other pack. If they were gone, he knew of one other pack in the southeastern region of the island that might take him in though they were a different breed.
The island was home to three different breeds of velociraptor as far as Silver Claw knew. One consisted of the blue males and white females of his own. They were the first born of the velociraptors on the island. The oldest of his pack were raised by humans from eggs and kept in cages before a storm changed everything a few years before.
The second consisted of green males of red females where it was the female that boasted unique patterns while the males were plain. They were the next generation to hatch under human watch and always few in number. They never got along with the first born and were kept far apart by the humans. A long feud existed between them. After the last war between the major packs that claimed his mother and siblings, the second were likely extinct or as close to it as could be on this island.
The third lived in the southeastern area of the island and consisted of orange males and brown females with distinct striped patterns on both sexes though on the males it contrasted much more deeply. They preferred to hunt in the long grasses during the night and rarely ventured far from their territory. They were temperamental however and quick to fight each other as often as a rival pack. When the humans still lived on the island, they took several of the females and shipped them away in crates. Where they sent them and the ultimate fate of the females was not known but it set a deep hatred in the pack for all humans.
Silver Claw cut across the road instead of following it. He continued up into a wide pass between two ridge lines and down into another long valley. He heard gallimimus and pachycephalosaurus towards the northwest where the valley opened to the sea. A touch of hunger toyed with his mind. It would be difficult to hunt alone, harder still to take down any one of the large creature that called the island home. His best shot would be to catch fish in the shallows streams or compsognathus though only those he found in small groups as they had a venomous bite and often traveled in groups of dozens.
Two shallow streams broke up the monotony of jungle travel. At the second, he drank quickly. Carnivores hunted along the streams frequently and waited until their prey bent to drink before they launched an attack. Carnotaurus did this frequently. They were large, horned carnivores with short snouts and short arms. With their ability to camouflage nearly completely however, at least the kind he knew of but his pack said that many could not, they would wait in ambush for hours if not days until something wandered too close. Then it died.
The valley climbed and leveled out comparably to the other side. Silver Claw turned south and continued until he met a road. He followed it around a long gully filled with eroded overhangs, caves, and a rushing stream. The embankment was steep. The stream was normally small and weak but raged briefly with every rain storm. It ended in a waterfall that cascaded over the western cliffs that separated the dense jungles from a narrow band of swampy lowland where the island met the sea.
After a few minutes on the curving road, Silver Claw saw his target. A wall of thick wiring made up the fence that surrounded one of the few human buildings on this side of the island. It was safe most of the time. Few creatures approached the human structures since the storm that freed them and fewer still could enter.
A gate made up of two smaller doors linked by a short tunnel permitted entry to the space within. The doors were both opened. That was unusual. The last time he and Sophia had explored the structure they had closed the gates behind them. The fence was intact so it just provided a little more confirmation that nothing large was hiding inside the space. Something small must have pushed its way through.
Silver Claw considered leaving. The narrow hallways and small rooms of the building provided little space to maneuver if he was attacked. Something might still be inside. It might not. The gap in the doors was narrow however. Definitely not a carnotaurus or metriacanthosaurus then, it had to be closer to his size. It might be a herrerasaurus though they rarely entered velociraptor territory since a pack would easily kill it once discovered.
It could be another velociraptor.
Hope crept into Silver Claw's heart. It could be Sophia or another one of the missing pack members. But it might not, he considered the morning before when Sophia was sure she smelled a strange velociraptor. If it was alone, Silver Claw might stand a fighting chance should it come to it.
Silver Claw entered the enclosed space and stopped. Three human building lay within. To his immediate right, at the gate, the first building sat. It was a small single room with a large unbroken window and door that opened near the gates. It was empty of anything noteworthy to him. To his left and at the opposite corner from the first sat a much larger building. It was spacious inside with few places to hide and smelled of oil and rust. A stairwell led down into a dark room and tunnels. Silver Claw never went down to explore that space before and would not start now.
The largest building ran nearly the length of the fenced in area and almost half of its width. It was painted a jungle green where there was no glass unlike the grey stone of the other two buildings and part of it met the cliff on the far side. A paved road passed a small murky fountain and led up to the entrance atop which a sign read ISLAND OBSERVATION ADMINISTRATION. Silver Claw felt a twinge of recollection at the strange markings above the door but could not read it. The humans used markings like it to denote directions and meaning according to his pack. Silver Claw felt it meant a place of watching but did not know where the feeling came from or why it came to him every time he looked at the sign. He had always kept it a secret from his pack and anyways, he did not feel he was being watched currently.
Silver Claw walked up to the entrance, passing into the shadow cast by the setting sun. It would be dark soon and he needed to explore the building to ensure its safety before night fell and plunged the inside to complete darkness. The air of the sparse lobby was musty with the hint of something unfamiliar. A light dust carpeted the smooth floor. Trials in the dust marked where Silver Claw and Sophia walked during previous excursions. A few larger disturbances marked places of play like the tearing of foam from the couch. The memory brought an amused snort from Silver Claw and then a deep sorrow.
A large desk greeted the entrance where large windows looked out over the yard. Beyond, a hallway led into the dark maze of passages and individual rooms. He saw the faint glint of metal from shut doors. A second hallway left the lobby and ran the length of the building's front. The windows were smaller and spaced out along its length.
Silver Claw considered the path he would take first when he heard a noise from within the building. It was the scuttling of feet on floor, two feet, not four.
"Sophia?" Silver Claw called out and ran into the dark.