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Primal Prey: Chapter 10
By Strider_Aragorn
Chapter 10: Nevada desert
Area 52, December 1999
Lewis Dodgson walked over to the fence. Through the humming bars, he saw a deer. The creature’s liquid black eyes blinked softly at Dodgson. It was a doe, its brown fur sleek. It blinked again at Dodgson.
The humming fence cut off an area from the rest of the cloning facility. Behind Dodgson was CF1, CF2 and CF3. He had to build CF3 because of the immense task behind creating the dinosaurs.
In the fence, the doe blinked yet again. Behind it was rough terrain, full of rocks, mesas and so on. The dusty ground was grey, and in the failing light Dodgson thought he glimpsed some movement behind a large rock jutting at a forty-five degree angle from the ground.
On either side of the deer were more rocks and boulders. Perfect hiding places for small hunting animals. Dodgson wasn’t at all surprised when the attack came. From the left and right, two wolf-sized animals with long, stiff tails leap simultaneously towards the defenceless grazer. The two tailed creatures hit the deer at precisely the same moment.
There was no noise. The deer fell to the ground dead. Soon blood puddled around the poor animal. The attackers were raptors, six feet long and deadly. Dodgson thought unhappily about his experience with packs of Velociraptor on Jurassic Park and the other island they landed on.
As three more raptors emerged from the rocks to join the feast, Dodgson observed the animals. They were totally indifferent to his presence. He looked at one of the dinosaurs. It had a long tail, stiff for balance, muscular legs with feet holding three toes, one of which was a large, scythe-like big claw. On the insides of the legs, small toes of no particular adorned the ankles. The dinosaur’s back led up the neck to the long head, packed full of backward pointing teeth. Large, intelligent eyes sparkled in their sockets. The predator’s arms were thin but muscular, with three claws each. As Dodgson watched, the animal he was watching held the deer’s body down with its hands while the head pulled up some meat.
The animals were well adapted for killing. But InGen’s dinosaurs were different. Their raptors were six feet tall, and seemed almost sluggish compared to BioSyn’s. Also, InGen’s males had stripes, crests and all sorts of other display features. Dodgson’s didn’t. They were just smaller than the females, and a slightly brighter colour, less dull red than the females. Both genders were reddish orange with black stripes down their backs. Dodgson assumed that therapodal dinosaurs simply evolved to all have stripes. His tyrannosaurs and raptors had stripes. His dilophosaurs, though, didn’t. Nor did Dodgson’s newest dinosaur. He forgot what it was called, but it was brown.
It didn’t really matter. Dodgson got back in his jeep and drove over to the tyrannosaur enclosure. He immediately spotted it. It was lying on its stomach, parallel to the fence. Its small, beady eye opened as Dodgson neared. He looked the dinosaur up and down.
The nose was squarish, much like the whole head. It had two ridges, one above each eye. Its eyes were dull, almost docile. Dodgson eyed the teeth, and changed his views of the animal. He looked then to the thick, muscular neck. The curved back extended into a long, thick tail that made nearly half the dinosaur’s length. Its two hind limbs, extended out in the direction of the tail, were thick and looked like they could crush steel. The pathetically small, two-fingered forearms looked useless. With each breath, the tyrannosaur’s chest heaved.
It raised a hand to swipe at a fly. Overall, the dinosaur was forty feet of trouble. Dodgson had discovered that dinosaur’s metabolisms were extremely primitive. He understood that dinosaurs’ brains were also very primitive. They did not even register pain. He found that out when one of his Dilophosaurus bled to death because another one had bitted its leg while it was asleep. The attacking dinosaur had severed the sleeper’s main artery—the aorta, Dodgson reasoned—and the dilophosaurus had simply bled to death.
He also had other problems. When trying to conduct scientific experiments on the tyrannosaur, he had one of his team hit it with MORO, a powerful tranquilliser. He bade his handler administer three times the normal dose for an elephant. The tyrannosaur, after forty-five minutes, had finally collapsed, unconscious, so that the research team could administer the tests.
Then, during the tests, after twenty minutes of unconsciousness, the tyrannosaur had woken up, and killed a scientist before slipping back into unconsciousness. Then again, thought Dodgson, the tyrannosaur wasn’t an abnormally large elephant.
Then, after taking all sorts of safety precautions, he found out that Dilophosaurus did not spit venom. Instead, it used a different type of toxin, more related to scorpion poison than anything else that the dilophosaur injected into another animal through its teeth. It had a poison sac in the lower jaw, of all places. But Dodgson somehow didn’t know how to remove it. He couldn’t get his scientists to remove it, and he didn’t want the animal to die, and, he thought unhappily, dinosaurs are expensive animals.
He sighed. Then he drove over to the next pen. Mamanchisaurus, Dodgson thought. He looked in. There was a large trailer full of plants, and a huge animal was eating out of it.
A diplodicoid, mamanchisaurs were mammoth monsters from a distant time. They were docile and pretty much harmless, unless one stood under its foot. It was about seventy feet long, and its long graceful neck measured almost thirty-five feet. It had a ridiculously small head full of peg-like teeth. Its tail curled up near the end and uncurled. It had massive, pillar-like legs supporting it, three of which had to be on the ground at all times, lest the animal fall over.
Dodgson had had a seriously hard time trying to feed the mamanchisaur. There was only one, but the one would eat four truckloads of greenery a day. It ate what a herd of African elephants ate in a month in one week. Dodgson had to get all sorts of permission to feed the animal, including permission to deforest some Hawaiian islands.
All in all, Dodgson was happy with his lot. He had four stegosaurs, five raptors, six dilophosaurs, one tyrannosaur, one mamanchisaur and two of those new ones that Dodgson had no idea how to pronounce. He sighed as he thought of the embryos he lost in the tyrannosaur attack on the second dinosaur island. He looked up Baryonyx and Proceratosaurus at the nearest library.
Baryonyx was apparently like the sail-backed animal that had eaten Jack Long, but smaller, and with a huge claw on its front arms. Proceratosaurs, apparently, were relatively small carnivores, about as big as dilophosaurs, that had horns on their noses. It was apparently related to Ceratosaurus or something like that.
Dodgson sighed again. He wanted to sell miniature dinosaurs in the new millennium. So far, his cloning had been a success. But every time they tried to manipulate the genetic sequence of a dinosaur, to stunt its growth, the creature came out deformed and died pretty quickly.
He was going to have to do something. The question was, what? He had no idea about how to make mini-dinos. Hammond had succeeded about ten years ago in making a mini-elephant, with little stubby tusks. Hammond was now dead. Dodgson was lost. He would have to develop the technology himself. He had a limited bank balance, he reminded himself. But somehow, he had to impress the public, or millions of dollars would be wasted.
3/1/2003 6:51:43 AM
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