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Primal Prey: Chapter 11
By Strider_Aragorn
Chapter 11
Chaos relived
Area 52, December 1999
The lights in CF1 shone brightly on Laurel Daniels as she attempted again to manipulate the genetic sequence of a dinosaur. She was familiar with this one by now, Metriacanthosaurus. Laurel’s boss, Dr Dodgson, had problems saying the dinosaur’s name, but Laurel had found something wild, ferocious and somehow calming about the metriacanthosaurs. She had even taken the time to name each animal. The older metriacanthosaur, Bigfoot, was named thus because of her disproportioned feet. The younger, smaller male was called Claw, because the first thing he did when he was born was to give Laurel a cut in the skin.
Claw was reaching maturity now, about four years old. Soon he’d be able to mate with Bigfoot. Laurel had waited for this for some time. The thought of naturally occurring dinosaurs under her control was thrilling to her. She smiled softly to herself as she checked her watch.
“Happy New Year, guys,” she called to the other eight members working in CF1. It was at night, and as she looked up, she noticed the floodlights on outside. In the light, behind its fence, stood one of the raptors. It was the oldest female. Technically, the raptors were all siblings with no parents, but Laurel didn’t like technical stuff. She saw it just staring in at the people. The pen, about a hundred yards away, was very tall, and none of the raptors had made it out. But, thought Laurel with a chill, they had tried.
“Not by my watch, Laurel,” replied Derek.
“Yeah,” added Jake, “Derek’s right. Twenty-eight seconds left”
“Okay,” admitted Laurel. She didn’t like being proven wrong. She changed her screen. The personal computer’s monitor flashed, then showed Each of the dinosaurs’ pens in turn. Every one of the carnivores was awake. Apparently, some dinosaurs were nocturnal. Lights blinked at the top of each fence, indicating power was on.
She looked back up at Derek. His strong features were tense as his fingers soared over the keyboard. Laurel wondered what kind of tests were going to be conducted on the fully grown adult dinosaurs. The juveniles had been subject to blood tests, samples, and all sorts of physical tests.
As she contemplated further what was going to happen to Bigfoot, she noticed that Jake was softly counting down. He must be on the net, thought Laurel. Probably surfing to find more about genetic engineering, even though he was quite good at it already.
“Ten, nine, eight …” he breathed. Laurel looked out of the window again. One of the armed security guards was walking past the velociraptor enclosure.
“… seven, six, five …” continued Jake. Laurel saw the raptor slowly regarding the security officer. She noticed the man shudder involuntarily. “… four, three, two …”
The raptor slowly raised its head to look up at the blinking light.
“One,” finished Jake. Then, all the monitors flicked off, and, simultaneously, the lights switched off overhead. Laurel cursed to herself, and looked out the window, through the thick bars installed. It was silent.
“What happened?” yelled Derek.
In the dim light Laurel saw Jake shrug. “Why-two-kay, I guess”
Y2K. The Year 2000 bug. Apparently computers, which controlled the world now, wouldn’t be able to cope with the switching over from 1999 to 2000. The computers would think it was 1900 again. Apparently that had happened.
“What do we do?” asked Laurel.
“I don’t know, wait I guess,” replied Derek. From outside they heard a series of rapid gunshots, then a human man scream.
Robert Thorne swung the helicopter to the left. He was still in his job, out of interest. He had received a call about a giant, ferocious-looking dog roaming a remote neighbourhood. It turned out to be a lost Doberman. Thorne had personally taken the dog back to its rightful owner, then flown out again. With him was Special Commander Gerard Bosley. Thorne had no idea why Bosley was Special, because he was pretty much scared by anything.
Seven years ago, Thorne had changed. He had gone to a psychiatrist to help him come to terms with his trauma. The psych had been confused, but Thorne had seemed physically and mentally sound. The psych had thought that Thorne had made up some kind of bull to annoy him. So Thorne had to take matters into his own hands. He had received one hundred and twenty thousand dollars from Hammond. The only reason he got that much was because his other team-mates were dead, and Hammond already had checks made out for them. So, he had just given all four to Thorne.
Thorne was then rich. He found a nice girl and they married about a year later. He had kept his dinosaur experiences a secret from her—he didn’t want to alarm her. As he straightened the chopper up again, he noticed Bosley pressing his headphones to his ears.
“Listen to this,” he said through the microphone. Bosley twiddled with a dial. Thorne heard static, then: “—kkk need—lp, suffered casu—ties, I—peat, SOS, we—d help, suffered casualt—please—lp immediately”
“What’s he saying?” asked Bosley. Thorne knew. He was quite an expert at decoding garbled radio-messages. He signalled Bosley to be quiet.
“We’re at Ar—ty-two, please send help”
“Ah, say again?” asked Thorne.
“—e at Area Fifty—o, and we nee—lp”
Bosley shook his head. “Man,” he said, “They got pretty poor radios. You know where Area Fifty-two is?”
“Sure do,” replied Thorne. He changed direction. “We’re on out way,” Thorne informed the person on the radio.
“Thanks, w—pretiate it. Hurr—ough, they’re … o—y God … hol—ey’re here!”
Thorne frowned at the unintelligible speech. Then he heard a high pitched scream, followed by an animal noise. He felt the colour drain from his face.
“What? What is it, Thorne?” asked Bosley.
“Radio HQ. Send back-up, asap!’
“Got it, Boss”
I hope we’re not too late, prayed Thorne. He didn’t want to clean up the mess.
5/6/2003 4:30:20 AM
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