Chapter Text
Kenji Kon
Kenji fell in love with things that could either kill him or kill themselves—depending on the time of day. Out of habit or maybe out of coincidence, they usually ended up killing themselves. He couldn’t decide if that was the fault of being alive or of himself.
It was him, probably. No one else had trouble knowing that when something was hot, it wasn’t meant to be touched. No one else had trouble remembering which side of the knife was sharp.
He grabbed on blindly to the things around him. Clutching them close to his chest and hoped when he pulled away he wouldn’t find blood. People were violently teterring over the edge and Kenji couldn’t pull away his fascination with them. No, that wasn’t right. It wasn’t the fact that they were teetering—playing on the edge of purgatory and life that ensnared him. It was more, Kenji had fallen for them and one day, he found them on the edge.
And he was unable to let go. Sink or swim, they said. He’d always chosen sink; if they were going to fall from this height, it only made sense for him to go with them.
Who was he, if not made entirely of the people he surrounded himself with.
He shouldn’t have been surprised to see Darius’ corpse in the water below. The shadowy figure circling a literal drain in the ocean. Which, metaphorically, was kind of wild.
Darius had been the exception in every way that he’d understood. He was the most put together person he knew—outside of Dad, of course. He had a plan, then a backup in case that didn’t work. If all else failed, he’d throw himself at the obstacle with the certainty that he would come back without a scratch.
Most of the time, that had worked.
Now it hadn’t. And it wasn’t from some stupid plan going wrong. It wasn’t from their sloppiness. No. No. It was from nature.
More than that. More. It was from the water that always managed to take things from him. It was from him, again. Too used to other people being prepared, letting himself get taken into the folds of a plan without thinking of helping. He’d done it his whole life without a second thought.
Kye had a plan, there was no need for Kenji to question it. He was older, so he was smarter. He was older, so he was more prepared. He was older, so he had the pills and the booze. But the promise of a good night on his breath was enough to send him soaring.
Darius was better than that, he allowed the jabs at his pride, allowed Kenji’s antagonism far more than anyone else had. Where Kye would have snapped the leash, refusing to talk to Kenji until he came wallowing back; Darius gave him an eyeroll and shoved his shoulders. Gently.
He was always gentle, even when he was yelling.
It was the only thing he knew how to do, sometimes. He nagged at the heels of someone else, pulling the leash further. Telling him where to go and what to do and how to do it. As long as they didn’t know how easy it was to get him to do what they wanted, everything ran smoothly. He would joke and push back, but when it came down to it, he’d never think to go against them.
He was an idiot, it was easy enough to see. Following someone else—someone smarter, someone braver—made sense. It was no skin off his back to run on autopilot most of the time. He’d found the world was more enjoyable that way, when he was the wild plus-one Kye brought to the party.
In all that, Kenji had never thought to get them to put on a damn life jacket before they got on the raft. The shaky raft that clearly wasn’t going to hold, not in waves like that. But he’d joked around instead. He’d followed without question, without a second thought.
It was natural, an animal returning to its common ground; falling into old habits no matter how Darius had broken that mold. Kenji had become more than the other one and somehow, that wasn’t enough.
Bile pressed against his throat. The corpse rode the tide.
Then, slowly, there was the release. It was rare that he felt his voice slipping away from him in real time. It frayed and died in his chest, steeling itself away like it could somehow change things. It only ever made things worse, nowadays, but when he was a kid it had meant everything. Just another fucking habit he couldn’t shake.
There was a corpse rolling in the tide. Hitting the rock ledges, swallowed in the churning waters. There was a body hitting the water and chlorine filled his nose, filled his mouth. Everything stung and there was a body hitting the bottom of the pool. And there was a body churning in the water below, a shadow in the night that he could barely understand.
This wasn’t how this was supposed to go. This wasn’t—this wasn’t—
Darius wasn’t like Kye, he knew that more than he knew anything else at the moment. It was the only truth worth believing. Darius was better in every way, the kid was younger than him, but Kenji had taken to his old tricks. He wasn’t someone older, a guiding hand in the sea of dancing bodies and designer drugs. He wasn’t someone meant to guide Kenji, not in any way that made sense, at least. Trying to explain it—to explain how he would do anything for him was impossible.
Follow the fucking leader. Sometimes the simple explanations were the best, sometimes they were the only thing he could comprehend. Maybe it was deeper than that, it probably was. Someone like Sammy or Brooklynn could tell him, would tell him if they were here. But to him, that’s all it was.
It was—fuck, it was over.
Kenji stumbled back from the ledge, weak knees tumbling down the wide stairs. Hitting the ground. An involuntary hiss slid through his teeth, hands finding his ribs. Holding that old injury that never could quit. Holding himself together. Holding—
He could jump over the cliff’s edge. No, wait. He could go to the beach, he could dive in and grab his body. He had to—
He couldn’t remember exactly what Kye’s body had felt like in that water. If he had ever managed to reach him, no one had bothered to tell him. Kenji might’ve been too late—always too late. He might’ve died alone in there, with that wide smile. With those hands outstretched like a motherfucking king.
His hand found the part of his throat that dipped into his collarbones. Dug into the depression of skin there. Thumb pressing into it. Forcing a cough, a gag. He wasn’t sure how he wasn’t drowning. He should be drowning, that was how this always went.
People didn’t go where he couldn’t follow. That was the rule, maybe, or the thing that he’d created.
It was fundamentally wrong not to be drifting in the water beside it. For him to stay on land, for him to not try and reach out to him.
Kye had died alone, but he’d tried to change that. He’d reached out, tried to hold on in every way his muddled brain could understand.
Darius had died alone and Kenji never got the chance to reach out. It was self piteous in the worst ways, to think of himself when he was the one alive. It was the only thing he could latch onto as the world circled the drain.
I should be beside him. I should be there.
Or maybe, fruitfully, that he should’ve taken his place.
His throat ached where his hands were constricting himself. Pressing in like that could do something, like that could push away the lump that made breathing impossible. There, in the peripheral, was a hand. Outstretched for him, scars encircling their fingers, their palms and for the briefest of seconds he thought it was Darius reaching out.
His breaths shook, hands tightening around his throat. His knees were split against the concrete. Not for the first time, he wondered what would happen if he just jumped into those waves. He should—no, no, he would. They would wait another day, he would make them wait another day until they could get Darius’ body back.
He would fight against that fucking current if he had to. He would pull him back to them. His family—they deserved that at least.
He knew the way Darius talked about them. His older brother was some heroic-figure, someone that came in and saved the day each time. Despite the little annoyances that Darius let slip, the jabs at his personality and habits that Kenji never actually understood but pretended to. Despite all that, Brandon was someone Darius loved. His Mom was like a saint, in the rare occasions that he could coax him to talk about her.
In the beginning, when they were at each other’s throats and Kenji was falling off the edge. When they had no real home other than scraps of lumber and metal sheets they would build into a home. When Kenji’s hands itched for a bottle and his throat threatened to close every other day.
“What’s so great about them?” He finally snapped. Cutting off his tangent about his home life and his mom and how everything was going to be ‘right as rain’ or some other positive shit Kenji couldn’t get through his skull. “
“Everything.” Darius said like it was simple, if he took offense to his words, he didn’t show it. Which only ticked him off more, back then. “She did everything for us. She tried to put our lives back together, after Dad…she never gave up on me.”
It was the first crack in who Darius was. Something more than an over excited kid clamoring for a chance to see dinosaurs. A little more human than the optimistic pest that had taken the lead, despite being so young. It made him human in a way Kenji had never comprehended before. That he too had lost and lived before he’d trotted into Kenji’s life and was here, now. Trying to survive the same hell.
It was stupid, but it rewrote everything. It started him along that all familiar path of following without question.
Kenji had clung to those words more than he’d care to admit. Flipping them over and trying to figure out if his mom had been like that. If he could pinpoint a memory with that kind of love seeped into it. Surely if they existed, he should be able to remember them. It seemed impossible to forget that someone could love you that much. But he came up blank each time, scrambling to find something his Mom had loved about him.
He didn’t know which was worse: never being loved enough to get those kinds of memories or forgetting the love that had existed. Like it was meaningless.
He couldn’t let another one of their family members die. He couldn’t—he was too late. All he could do was deliver the body, to hand them a cold fucking body and hope they remember what he was and what he meant to them. To end the mystery of not knowing if the people you cared about were alive or not.
Without a body, without a signal, there was no telling if they were actually dead. It would wriggle in their heads that he might still be alive. That they were wrong. He couldn’t let them spend the rest of their lives thinking their son was coming home.
That was the worst punishment of all, he wouldn’t perform it to someone else.
There was a hand hanging in front of him, scarred and welcoming. Kenji reached for it, holding it softly, like if he didn’t look too closely, he could pretend it was Darius’. If he didn’t pay attention to the change in scar tissue or the way the fingertips were calloused, he could pretend he was right there. That he wasn’t in that water.
“We have to go,” Ben’s voice was too steady. Too manufactured and Kenji wanted to scream at him, to make him break down. Because—because everything was falling apart. Darius was dead, completely, utterly dead and he was standing there without tears in his eyes. Without blinking.
More than that, his voice broke the illusion. His hand was so clearly not Darius’ that it was almost embarrassing to believe it for a moment. To pretend like he was with anyone else when he knew Ben’s hand far too well.
There was an urge to give in entirely. To let his voice slip away through the cracks like he so desperately wanted to. But more than that was the need to communicate, if only for Darius’ sake.
“Yeah,” He rasped, “I know.”
Jumping into the waves now would only kill him. He needed to get back to shore, then he could dive in. Could pull Darius back before Ben even knew what happened. Agreeing was the easiest way to make that happen. To move this right on along.
He couldn’t let what little was left inside him die, not until he returned their son.
“We can’t get his body,” Ben said. Kenji whipped his head up, paranoid that he could read his mind. But Ben wasn’t staring at him in horror like he would if he could somehow read all the thoughts buzzing inside his head. And if he somehow could, he was being remarkably calm about them.
He tapped the palm twice, a reassurance of who it actually was. Of what he was about to do. Kenji had accused Ben of being the perfect martyr for months. Now, it was his turn.
Sammy Gutierrez
“Eugh,” Brooklynn’s face wrinkled in disgust. Or she assumed it did. The light in the hall was too low to make even that out. But Sammy could imagine it, the slight pinches in her forehead, the line between her brows. She’d been studying Brooklynn’s face long before camp began, which was a little weird to think back on now. The way Sammy knew her—or a piece of her—before anyone else.
She knew Brooklynn had a particular appreciation for local cafes before anyone else. She knew the name of her one and only dog, Leia. A white maltese that had been on death’s door by the time she was recording videos. She thought she’d known her expressions too. But they seemed wrong, now. Over exaggerated for the screen, not in a way that made her look like a bad actor just…not like herself. She couldn’t imagine Brooklynn pulling out that look of disgust anymore. Once Sammy had seen the real one, she realized how it didn’t fit her face quite right.
She backed out of the hallway, into the little light the sky still offered them. Water soaked through the broken seams around the soles of her boots. She wouldn’t replace them, not now, not ever.
The soles could be peeling off and she’d double layer her socks and call it a day. She’d learn to be a shoe cobbler if she had to, it couldn’t be any harder than putting on horse shoes.
She bit her lip, more a comforting motion than anything else. Catching it before she aimed, split lip when she accidentally bit down with the kickback. Not expecting the force when she was focused on the body dropping.
“Okay,” Brooklynn beat the flashlight against her palm until it flickered to life. It wasn’t as bright as it should be, but she wasn’t surprised by that. Most of their supplies were left in the collapsed upper levels of the hotel. They hadn’t bothered to grab anything other than Yaz.
She couldn’t say she regretted the choice. She didn’t. She’d make the same one a thousand times over—every time if she had to. She would never leave any of them behind like that. But—she couldn’t say she was thrilled by the idea of a dying flashlight.
“Okay, I can work with this.”
Sammy didn’t bring up the fact that she was right beside her. They did that a lot—talk to themselves like she wasn’t there. Bracing for an impact that Sammy would shield them against. Thinking they had to run into things alone, that she wasn’t right in step with them. It was fine, really. She would press bandages against their aching sides and let the world batter her.
Anything. All they had to do was ask and she’d do anything for them. Or, really, they didn’t have to ask. Sammy took pieces of information from them and held them against her chest, never to be forgotten. She would remember, and when it was needed, she would step in again and again and again.
Here’s the truth, as plainly as she could put it. File it away in a will for later use, in a suicide note when she stayed behind, because they deserved that at least: Sammy had already faced her worst fear and she was still breathing. Everything that came after was…not supposed to happen. It wasn’t eloquent or beautiful or a nice storyline tied up in the final act like Brooklynn’s deep dive videos were. No, it was a miserable reason that sounded too plain to make much sense.
The reasons for killing someone and the reasons for living were too plain and boring to make sense. She’d learned that the hard way, the rough way.
Why did you do it?
To live. But that sounded so childish, so wrong. Why pull the trigger? Why them? No, not them, not some faceless entity that she didn’t have to think about. Why him? A man, with a scar on his weathered chin and a family waiting for him.
She learned what it meant to live. The price that seemed too much to pay. Ending with a body dragged against linoleum floors.
Who did it hurt?
Everyone. Herself. But that was selfish, so she pushed it away. Because she was the least worthy person to be upset with it all.
She didn’t look at the floors. At the patches of white the flashlight managed to illuminate. She knew them. She knew the way blood squeaked against them when it was dragged. She knew the sting of chemicals and the fear clogging her throat.
There was a gun on her back and this was a well trodden story.
On Abuela's bad days before she left, she told the same stories over and over again. The same fairy tales with the same endings. Over and over again. They sat and listened out of politeness, but Sammy had always wondered if there was more to it than chipping memory. If those stories held something more than the rest. That they meant something—to her or to someone else—at some point. That there was something deeper in that message that she couldn’t quite grasp.
She never learned. She never would.
This felt like one of Abuela’s stories. This was a familiar phrase. This was the same hall. This was the—this was the the—
Her head swung around the hall, trying to make out where they were. Trying to—to understand. It no longer smelled like cleaning solution; bleach permeated her nose that nearly made her choke. But that was better than copper, anything was better than copper. No, there was a must that sank into everything that sat vacant. Of dust clinging to objects that would otherwise be used to daily. Of things left exactly as they were, waiting for the owner to come back for them. Of rot taking over the cracks in the surface, dampness seeping into the plaster.
The water sloshed as they moved, dripping off their shoes with each step. Black as the abyss, but thin enough that they could see the tiles when the light was shined against it. Revealing what it used to be.
“Gross,” Brooklyn whispered. She got that, it felt right to whisper in a place like this. A mausoleum instead of a laboratory. Black mold flecked the corners of the halls, spreading out like a terrible stain. It reached up to the ceiling, thick behind where the loudspeaker was mounted.
Sammy had grown up with mold spreading in the basement, in the corners of rooms and badly sealed windows when they weren’t careful. But nothing like this. This was—
“It looks alive,” Brooklyn gasped, hand reaching out to touch the parts near the water that had turned to a black sludge rather than spotted. “Brooklynn King and Samanta Gutierrez reporting for duty from the belly of the beast.” She gave Sammy a tiny smirk.
They could almost pretend to be doing this out of morbid curiosity. A few months ago and they might have, if Brooklynn hadn’t looked at her persona as hard as she had. If she let Sammy’s suspicious tendencies fall under the radar a bit longer. Maybe they could’ve been friends a lot sooner. Maybe they would have explored this place together, partners in crime.
A world where all her childhood fantasies could come true. The girl who kept her company on quiet mornings when she was trying to keep Fidel from drowning in his own vomit and Dad from driving home drunk. In the quiet mornings when the dishes were rotting in the sink and the cows needed to be moved and the laundry needed to be done.
On the mornings when it was all too much and if she didn’t stop thinking for just one moment she was going to implode on herself. Brooklynn’s sharp voice was there, a tether in the storm that kept her sane.
In that universe, maybe she’d never have killed Daniel. In that universe, maybe there wouldn’t be a thickness in her throat everytime she looked at her.
Probably not. But it was something nice to think about.
In that universe, maybe Sammy Gutierrez got to live.
Probably not.
Sammy opened her mouth to respond when it started. Something hummed from deep within the lab, a gutted sound of an old TV clinging to life or the cough of a tractor that had finally given out. It was old in its…newness. Out of place when Isla Nublar had fallen into disrepair. It didn’t belong here anymore.
Somewhere along the way she’d gotten on thinking that technology just didn’t exist anymore. Well, not quite like that. It was a distant memory that she didn’t touch on much anymore. Like a loved childhood toy that had gone to a distant cousin. It still existed, but only in fleeting passes and seeing it again struck her with a strange feeling she couldn’t quite comprehend.
“Brooklynn?” She breathed and she wasn’t sure if she’d actually spoken. There was the humming echoing back on itself. Too loud to be real. There was her voice, even in a whisper, too loud for a place like this. She nearly flinched when she heard herself. The water sloshing at their feet.
Her hand looped into hers. Sammy gave it a squeeze, proving that it was real and attached to something alive. Brooklynn moved far too slowly from her squat to her full height. The flashlight hun low in her hand, just barely illuminating their faces, cutting harsh lines in the shadows.
“Does this have something to do with the drone? Is there someone comin’ to rescue us?”
It was the worst possible time for a rescue. With all of them split up across the island with no way of contacting each other. With no way of knowing if they were gonna get Darius back in time, depending on what kind of shape he was in.
Brooklynn shook her head once, harshly. The light shook in her hand. “I don’t understand how.”
The humming spiked and Brooklynn pressed the light into her palm. Dulling the lighting into a red barely concealed. They pressed against the moldy wall, breath caught in her throat. For a long moment they didn’t breathe. The humming bounced back around, dipping and spiking before going back to that flat hum.
They waited an eternity before letting themselves breathe normally. Heavy with fear. Before letting their clothes rumple and their bodies shift in the water where they remained tense.
Brooklynn didn’t let the light go.
“We have to get the medicine,” Sammy said before she could even think of suggesting they leave. They couldn’t, they didn’t have the time to find another point of entry. Besides, Sammy already had this lab and the other dozen or so on the island mapped out and memorized. There were no other exits, there were no other entrances.
One chance to get this right. One chance to save her.
“We don’t even know if it exists.”
And it was all her worst fears wrapped into one. Because they were chasing a fantasy that was unlikely to save them, but it was a chance. Sammy had spent the last two years hoping for a fantasy solution to save her family and now, she had no idea if she’d done anything other than kill another one of their daughters.
The we have to try went unsaid when they met each other’s eyes. There was something to Brooklynn—the real version of her—that she’d never seen before. This new fierceness to everything she did, it reminded her too much of Angie. Too much of a person walking on the edge between fight and flight.
The key difference: Brooklynn didn’t give up on things, on people, as easily as Angie did. It might have been a childish hope that kept Brooklynn fighting, the kind of thing Angie had buried in the Texan dirt, but it was there nonetheless. And it was all she needed.
Sammy would do anything for them. All they had to do was ask, and this was a request, an admission without words. She would walk into Hell right alongside her, she would walk into Hell two steps ahead if she had to.
She unclipped the rifle from her shoulder. It was a 22, not the best but certainly not the worst thing she could be stuck with. More than that, it was something every good farmer hard sitting on their porch. Sammy knew the grooves of this gun well, despite having never held this specific one before.
The cartridge was loaded with bullets, not blanks. The safety was on. It felt too heavy, now, for her to be holding. Her arm ached in memory of the bullet skidding across her skin. Tearing her open without remorse.
Is that what it felt like to die by bullet wound? The skidding of skin; too hot and too bloody to understand. The scream caught in her throat as she ran for the hills. Doing anything to survive as it smeared against concrete and chairs and—and Darius beside her. Trying to hold her together as they took aim.
She swallowed the lunch coming up her throat. Letting the safety click off. It was too loud, she almost expected the humming to cease. Whatever was in the center room of the lab came after them like some horror movie she’d only ever watched from the corner of her eye.
Nothing came.
“It’s just the old labs booting up. Someone must be controlling them remotely.” But she sounded like she was trying to convince herself. If it were anyone else, they wouldn’t have seen through her facade. That much Sammy knew, she’d seen it too many times.
Everyone liked to pretend that this version of Brooklynn—this hardened girl who fought with Ben on the daily—was any more together than the vlogger who’d shown up on the island. And maybe she was better, more capable. But there were so many cracks in her image that sometimes Sammy thought she was looking at a mosaic instead of a person. All those shiny shards of light reflecting back on her like it could make her anymore real.
So she knew that the confidence was hard won and entirely fake. So she knew if she was with anyone else, they would’ve followed Brooklynn without a hitch. Without thinking that she was scared.
“Then you can find out who’s doing this, right? With your poking around in the wires.”
It was a reassurance she wasn’t supposed to need. From what she could see, her face softened with it. “Yeah. Oh my god, yeah, I can track down the source. We could—Sammy this changes everything. If people are trying to make contact with the island, we can get home.”
“Then stop stallin’ and let's go get ‘em, superstar.”
Brooklynn nodded once, sharp. Sammy could almost ignore the fear radiating off her, soaking into the mold covered walls they pressed themselves against.
Nessy the bat hovered just above the water. In this light, Sammy couldn’t make out the nails jutting out the sides of the thing. She couldn’t see the muck Brooklynn had dragged it through. But she knew it was there and she knew the wood was a moment from splitting down the middle from everything she’d put it through.
Whatever was in that room, whatever had come to an island that had been ripped apart at the seams, they would face it together. And if Sammy took a few more hits, if she came back more battered than Brooklynn, then no one would say anything about it. Not even her. Especially not her.
They moved through the water slowly, trying to disturb it as little as possible. They were better at this, after months of moving past dinosaur dens and quick-to-scare herbivores. But the puddles were so shallow that they were loud. Echoing off the walls of the laboratory.
Before they rounded the corner, Brooklynn flicked the light off, muttering, “Going dark, Captain.” Like they were in some Ester Stone episode. It was a comforting thought, because that show always ended happily. Sure, the seasons were tense and Sammy was always convinced they were going to kill Ester’s friends off, but in the end, everything was okay.
Real life wasn’t like an Ester Stone episode. There was no coming back if they didn’t make it the first time.
She thought of Yaz’s pale face, of her weakening body. Laid over the couch in a back room. What if she woke up and they were all dead? She would be all alone, dying alone. Would she think they’d left her there? That she was too much to carry to the raft, that she wasn’t worth the effort now that she was sick.
She steeled herself. It was only a room, it was nothing. She couldn’t let her thoughts drown out the root of the issue: this was for Yaz. All of it. There was no backing out, that was never an option.
“That’s an all clear, Stone,” She muttered back. She wasn’t sure if Brooklynn heard her, but it was important to put it out there. To finish the phrase.
The gun was heavy in her hands, like she was a child again. Trying to get it positioned right against her shoulder while her cousins ogled at her. Back in that brief period when she was the youngest out of everyone. Her Dad held the muzzle while she pressed it into her shoulder. Her cousins were spread out around them in a wide circle. Sat atop a broken tractor or turned over water troughs. They had that grin that said they were better and Sammy’s hands were slick with sweat. Carmen was looking at her with soft eyes, she smiled when Sammy caught her gaze. Giving her a thumbs up, from anyone else, it would’ve been patronizing. But coming from her, she knew that it was real.
Looking back, it was dangerous. Her cousins were too close, within firing range. If Sammy had messed up that day—if she’d let the kickback push her into the dirt and the gun raised high into the air.
She swallowed, the air thick in her lungs, she didn’t want to think about what would’ve happened then. Water had soaked through her boots, through her socks. Her feet slipped inside her shoes, losing traction fast. She held that gun in a tight-knuckle grip. She wasn’t a kid just learning how to shoot, she was sixteen and had been doing it for years. As easily as breathing.
Pull the trigger, brace for the kickback, fire again, watch for the noise.
The last one was new and unnecessary. She suppressed that thought too.
The humming grew louder the closer to the room they got. This deep into the laboratory and the doors were left closed, even in the panic to leave the island, the scientists were too paranoid of their work being stolen. Was it paranoia if Sammy was there to do just that? She wasn’t sure, but the distrust in their fellow man was just plain rude.
Brooklynn stopped short, the water swished around them, crashing in tiny waves against the door. This one, this was it. The noise was emanating from this. She trailed her hand over its surface, hovering over the handle.
Like ripping off a bandaid and making life-changing decisions, it was best to be done all at once. Brooklynn threw open the door with all her might, tossing it back into the concrete wall where it swung it. More water rushed from beneath the door, trapped there. Sammy toppled back against the weight of it pressing into her legs. Stumbling as it tumbled around her. It was too dark to make out, too dark to tell what it was, but the water was…wrong. Too thick, like slime had tangled around her ankles. It flooded down the hall in both directions. Splashing water high against the walls and bouncing back against them. It hit the bottom of her shirt, a shiver running down her spine.
Brooklynn slipped, falling into her chest. Nessy dipped into the murky water, catching against her leather boots. Sammy winced, catching her by the shoulder and hefting the gun up high to keep it from getting wet.
Then, as soon as Brooklynn was stable, she charged into the room with all the confidence she’d never had. The gun found its way to her shoulder, pressing in, fingers wrapped around the trigger, holding the muzzle straight.
She poked it in first, throwing her body after it. Everything was unstable from the water, from the darkness.
She blinked at the light, spots flooding her vision from their sudden appearance in the corner of the room. She spun to the side, squinting her eyes in the dark for something—and foolishly, someone. She spun around again, careful to keep her foot. Water slashed up, slowly now, too thick to move like it should.
There was something wrong here.
Maybe it was in the air, maybe it was in the fact that she couldn’t see anything. Maybe it was the humm of technology that should very well be dead. All of it or none of it set her on edge. There was…nothing. Nothing real, at least.
“What the hell was that?” Brooklynn gasped. Sammy flinched, she was right behind her, Nessy ready to swing at anything near. “You could’ve gotten yourself killed.”
“There’s nothin’ here,” Sammy said instead, because it was more helpful. Any other time, she’d fall into an argument if it meant some understanding bridged between them. But now—now all she could think about were the hairs rising on her arms and the humming that shouldn’t exist, cutting all her thoughts short.
Brooklynn went through the same slow turn around the room, squinting in the dim light. It was better than the hall with all the blinking buttons and gray-tinted screens, but not by much. It only took her a moment to become fascinated with the screen in front of her, eyes fixated on the gray-glow.
“It’s on. Holy—crap, it’s on.” She trailed her hand around the door, trying to find the light switch. She flicked it once, twice. That didn’t stop her, if anything, it spurred her on. Muttering a thousand miles a minute under her breath.
All of the sudden, it was like the craziness of the night had faded for her. She was entranced in one thing and one thing only. Sammy wanted to scream, to pull her hair and rip her away from the screen.
It had taken so long to get here in the first place, and if they couldn’t find something—if they couldn’t find anything they would look in another facility. She’d tear Isla Nublar through the middle if she had to. But that meant there wasn’t time for her to click at the computer.
Yesterday, Sammy wouldn’t have said anything about it. She would’ve stayed by her side, watching her back without another work about it. But now Darius was washed up on the beach somewhere. Things were getting too serious for her to stay out of it any longer, placing herself as a neutral party only lasted as long as her guaranteeing their safety did.
She hadn’t been confident in that for a long time now.
She took the flashlight from Brooklynn’s hand, “I’m going to go search for the medicine. You see if you can contact whoever’s controlling those drones. Maybe they don’t know about us yet, we could catch them by surprise.”
Brooklynn raised an eyebrow, “You seem pretty sure that they’re an enemy.”
Sammy shrugged, then, realizing Brookylnn probably couldn’t see her outside of the computer light, grunted in response. How could she say that she didn’t trust them because of an odd feeling coiling in the base of her stomach, spreading through her limbs? That worry coated the back of her throat so thorough, sometimes she wondered how she was still breathing.
Sammy was raised with unwavering trust locked tightly in her chest. She never questioned anyone’s motives, there was no need to. Not when everyone knew everyone back at home. Word would travel no matter how you tried to stop it. And eventually, you learned to avoid it entirely by always sticking by your word.
Here, though, things were different. Mitch had lodged a bullet in her arm for trying to save the poor dinosaurs. He’d tried to kill her, to kill all of them, for the prize of another head on his wall. There was a new wariness she didn’t appreciate growing in that scar, leaking into the rest of her body.
Trust couldn’t be so easily given out. Not again.
She couldn’t explain it, not really. Because she acted tough on the outside, like someone who couldn’t be torn down no matter what the world did to her, but Sammy knew the truth. She knew that her truth would ruin her. There was no easy way to explain what she’d done, what she was willing to do again.
There was no easy way for her to register it. Sometimes, she could almost forget. Let it fade into the back of her memory and she was just a girl who was raised on a farm with a family she loved too much to bear. But it always circled back, it always existed. A sin that stained her deeper than any of the others, she sealed her own fate when she agreed.
Brooklynn couldn’t get that. More than that, more—deep inside her, the truth of it, the crux of it—Sammy didn’t want her to know anything. Didn’t want anyone to know anything. Telling Ben had been a slip up and even then, he didn’t get it. He tried, she saw that, but it slipped out of his hands. Too big to comprehend, with words that only dug into old scars when it was meant to mend new ones.
Instead, she sticks to the thing Brooklynn expects from her. It was an art she’d mastered in Texas, in the back of a church that had been there longer than her bisabuelo had been alive. “I can’t leave Yaz like that. It’ll be faster this way.”
It was a nonanswer, so it wasn’t technically a lie. It wasn’t—a lie that is. She’d never been good at lying outright, but misdirection was a near thing and Sammy had too many years of practice in that.
Brooklynn’s hands froze on the keys and she was glad the gray light was too dim to see her features. To catch the look in her eyes. “Scream if you need help. We’ve got your back.” She nudged the end of Nessy with her shoe.
“Course.”
The corridors were exactly as she remembered them. Which made sense, honestly, it's not like the building had moved since the Isla Nublar collapsed. Besides the water ruining the idea of her holding onto anything from home and the mold growing on the walls—it was the same.
Creepy, but it had always been creepy.
Before it was creepy clean. Clean in the way that set her on edge, like a single scuff mark could send the whole thing into shambles and she’d be executed on site. Now, the darkness was only barely banished from the light in the windowless halls.
Everything was too loud. Her footsteps clanged against the floor, the water dripping from her clothes, dripping every time she took a step forward. Her breaths begging to be heard by…something.
You’re being paranoid. There’s nothing here. If people were here, they’d be in the only room with electricity. Everything’s fine. Just—focus!
She should have expected things to go wrong right then, they usually did.
The humming got louder the farther away she got from the room. Curling around the hall seductively luring her in with their mystery. Sammy paused in the middle of the hall, just listening, trying to make sense of it. Was it really—? No, that didn’t make sense.
The monitors that worked were with Brooklynn. This was—there weren’t even monitors this deep into the laboratory.
She kept the light pointed ahead, frozen on a spot in the water. She could make out the once-white tiles beneath, if only barely. Covered in a thick layer of grim and gray water.
A ripple, barely there and gone the moment she’d focused on it. Sammy had doubted herself in a lot of things, in everything really, but there were a few things she did know. When her gut was telling her something was wrong, the Lord was watching out for her once again and it was time to go.
But He had cast His gaze away from her a long time ago.
Another.
Beep.
She moved the light marginally in her hand, making sure to stand stock still. Most of the water had already dribbled out of her shirt, no more drops hit the water below her. And besides, it couldn’t have made a ripple that far away.
Beep.
She didn’t dare blink, didn’t breathe. Holding her breath as long as she could bare like that would make the water—like that.
Another, just barely. The water droplet glinted off the light as it fell down. A perfect, almost picturesque ripple appeared in the water it touched.
Beep.
Slowly, she turned the light up to the ceiling. Forcing herself to keep her eyes open for whatever came next. She was the kind of kid who closed her eyes on horror rides and hid under her covers when it got dark. She was a childhood coward and she faced the world with her eyes open because that was the only way everyone she loved could live.
Beep.
A scream caught in her throat. She stumbled back two steps, falling into the water. It splashed up high. Obscuring the thing—the thing. The thing. She couldn’t understand what it was. The flashlight fell from her hand, rolling underwater. In the muck, it was even more obscured. Casting vague shadows against the walls, against the ceiling.
A soft sound erupted from her throat. Too small. Too—not enough. Not compared to that. That was— Mother Mary and God above —that was—
It didn’t blink at her. Two shiny red dots focused on her. There were no pupils, or if there were, she couldn’t see them. Its head, what must be its head, cocked to the side like a curious herd dog wondering why it couldn’t be let in. Spines pressed and warped against the ceiling.
It was as frozen as she was, sticking itself to the corner of the hall.
If Darius were here, he would know what this was. He would know why they brought this thing back. It didn’t look right. But that could—that could just be the light. Right? There just wasn’t enough light. Most dinosaurs were beautiful, but not all of them had to be.
“Hey, there, little guy,” She hated the way her voice shook. She knew not to show animals fear, that was the first rule. If they sense fear, they would panic or worse, it would set off their predator-prey instincts.
It was not, in fact, a little guy.
A drop hit the water.
Beep.
She stayed perfected still besides her head. Craning it up to try and see where the sound was coming from. There was something strapped to its body. In the darkness, she couldn’t make it out. But the tubes were a clear enough indication. Long tubes that had been ripped out from wherever they belonged. Hanging from where they were inserted between its spines.
“Oh, sweetie,” Less fear now. It still wasn’t moving. That had to be a good sign, right? “Those must hurt. I can try—I can get them out for you. Just—”
She began to move, shifting her legs just a bit. The water rippled out, made little waves against the walls of the hall. It was too loud in comparison to their silence. It was too much movement. Its eyes narrowed in on her. She froze again, angled up strangely with her arms propping her up.
The light flickered going in and out. It was meager, but enough. She didn’t want to be with this thing in the dark. She didn’t want to.
Sammy hadn’t allowed herself to want anything. Not anything that she could give up, but she wanted now. Desperately, bordering on a need. She wanted.
The light remained strong for a moment and she let herself hope it would stay that way. Illuminating the underbelly of the creature now. She could see the marks, the scars, from other tubes inserted into its stomach. Either ripped away or from old wounds. Whatever was on it now, it couldn’t pull it off.
Two things happened in quick successions. First the final beep of the machine on the creature. Then, the light flickering out.
For a moment, in the dark, she thought it would be fine. She was breathing too loud, giving away everything. But the creature remained still, red eyes glowing like embers in the dark.
Then it lunged.
A chill ran through the air, water splashing up. Claws scraping the tile below. It was too dark, she couldn’t see.
“Brooklynn!” She screamed, scrambling back on her hands and knees. Trying to see in the dark, to remember the path she’d taken. She knew this place at night, yes. She knew how to drag a body out of this place. But the halls were water filled and indiscernible from each other. “Brooklynn run! Run!”
She didn’t know if she could hear her. She didn’t know if it would do her any good. She had to try. She couldn’t leave her like this.
She threw herself upwards, twisting away from the creature. The gun on her back was meant for people, which sounded a hell of a lot worse when she said it in her head. It wasn’t meant for animals, for dinosaurs, that is. It wasn’t supposed to be for this.
Darius will hate you if you hurt it. You’ll hate yourself if you hurt it.
She was too slow moving through calf-deep water. Tripping her up, slowing her down. Her shoes slipped without traction, splitting apart with age like an overripe fruit. The thing moved silently, Sammy knew better than to think it wasn’t moving.
That was how they got you. The coyotes moved through the grass in a way that made it seem like they weren't moving at all. Until you blinked and suddenly they’d killed the livestock. This thing was still a predator, they still knew how to hunt.
She knew in the back of her mind that she wasn’t supposed to run from them. She should make herself look bigger, make herself scary. But there was an old fear caught in her throat and red eyes staring down at her like death.
It shouldn’t have been able to hang onto the ceiling like that. Animals didn’t do that. It shouldn’t have been able to contort around, all claws and jutting bone, sharp angles that didn’t make sense for it to even be alive.
There was still a gun in her hand. Waterlogged as it was, it might not even work anymore. Besides, it didn’t do jack when she didn’t know where to shoot.
Sammy moved blindly through the halls, hoping she would find Brooklynn or an exit or something—anything. The darkness was choking her out and a part of her still begged to go into the rooms. To ransack them for medicine because this was a failure and she couldn’t fail Yaz. She couldn’t be the reason she died by not listening.
Not again. Not again. Not again.
She didn’t set the gun right against her shoulder, not when she was running like this. Barely staying upright. Fumbling with the controls she’d know blind—which right now she was running blind ha! She fired down the long stretch of hall in front of her, banking hard to the left. The gun set her back, tumbling into the water, splashing too much, making too much noise. But the gun must’ve drowned it out. It must’ve.
She ran without knowing where to go. Cutting corners to close for comfort. Sammy twisted to the right, banging her head against the corner of the wall. She didn’t stop moving, couldn't stop moving for the warm blood spreading down the side of her face.
In retrospect, she should’ve known.
The creature didn’t roar, but most predators didn’t. It was a misconception that had her giving Darius sidelong glances. Predators didn’t howl before a hunt. The wolves moved silently before they had their kill, that’s what made it all that much worse when they took a lamb. The coyotes didn’t yip and bark when they took chickens from the coop and attempted to take down cattle.
Predators didn’t celebrate on the hunt. Predators howled when they felt threatened.
This thing had nothing to be scared of. Not really. Taking a gun with her was pointless now, there were no human threats, there never was. A gun did nothing against dinosaurs, in the end.
Darius had been right about that too.
It didn’t roar or shriek when it hit her. It might’ve been better if it had, if it gave her some warning before piercing her side. The heat spread quickly, jerking into her leg before her torso. It caught against nothing, pulling her down. She landed against her left side, pressing in the spines deeper. Breaking their tips against the floor. The crack of needle rattling out.
To her credit she didn’t scream either. Not then.
She didn’t know what she was doing, what she was seeing. She ripped the quills from her side in one final tug. Throwing them against the ground and running on. The creature was taking its time with her. Or maybe it hadn’t expected her to ripe them out, it had probably never killed something with thumbs before.
There was an echo down the hall, and an unholy shriek. It was too human, too much technology. That couldn’t be the roar. That couldn’t be.
“Get out, Sam!” A loudspeaker. Brooklynn’s too-robotic voice echoing through the entire building. “I’ll meet you there.” The creature didn’t move, entranced by the noise echoing everywhere. It looked at it like it was something new and she supposed it was.
She didn’t stop moving. Pushing herself towards some sort of door, some sort of exit. Did Brooklynn have the cameras booted back up? Did she know that Sammy was on the right path?
The exit sign was embarrassingly lit through the dim light from the tops of the door. Sammy threw herself at it like it was Heaven’s Gates and the devil was on her heels. She supposed it was.
Blood pooled from her nose, into her teeth. Down her chin onto the top of her shirt. Her side was wet. All of her was wet, but that too was hot and wrong and she needed to throw up.
Sammy made it to the treeline, just out of sight from that lab, before she threw up her lunch—dinner?— potato chips. It tasted more like blood coming up, but she supposed that was from her nose running into her mouth the moment it was open.
Sammy braced herself against her knees, not ready to get up yet. That thing couldn’t be real, it couldn’t. And it certainly wouldn’t be entertained by Brooklynn’s trick with the loudspeakers for long.
She pressed her hand into her side, wincing before her fingers even grazed the wound. Bad. This was bad. This was all so bad. Darius wasn’t back yet to identify the thing that definitely shouldn’t have been created. Yaz was hurt and now she was hurt without medicine or food or anything. She was making it worse again. She was going to get them killed again. It was going to be her fault again.
For not listening. For throwing herself into things she shouldn’t be involved in.
“Sammy?” Brooklynn whisper-yelled. She opened her eyes, taking stock of where she was. This—she recognized this too. They weren’t far from the raptor pens she’d thrown that man into. Just over the ridge and there it was.
It had been far too easy to throw a body into.
“What was that thing?” Sammy gasped in greeting.
Brooklynn held her gaze with a look she couldn’t decipher. Like something ancient had made its home in her bones, an old weariness that made her want to reach out, before stopping short.
“Wu’s next big project.” When she spoke, she noticed it. Her tongue flicking against the missing place in her mouth. A tooth had broken in the time since she’d been gone.
She wanted to deny it, to say that no one could possibly make that on purpose, but she’d seen the damage the Indominious had done. She’d seen the Indominious in all her reckless glory, in all her destruction. It was exactly the kind of thing that could’ve saved her family, if she got the information to Mantah Corp. It was a big enough scandal, a giant genetic code, it was everything her future was riding on. A part of her itched to get to her burner phone, to shoot off a message about the creature.
“The Scorpios Rex. It’s not—Wu never finished it. It wasn’t ready to be let out to the public yet. Eddie—the birthday guy—said Wu made monsters. I thought he just hated his boss, not that he.” She laughed softly, bitterly, “I guess I should’ve assumed, huh?”
It was never meant to be seen by the public. Because she knew from that first glance, that creature was meant for dead. Or maybe it already was, a Pet Cemetery re-imagining that would send Yaz on a rant. The Scorpious Rex was born dead and this was what came after, the creature that shouldn’t—it just shouldn’t—
“It’s going to destroy everything.”
Brooklynn didn’t say anything to that, didn’t look at her. That was confirmation enough.
Sammy discovered there really wasn’t a difference between a mausoleum and a laboratory. Not when Wu created things like that. It was unreal in every possible way. Which sounded strange, coming from her. Sounded like the kind of thing her parents would say about dinosaurs—that God had taken them out of this world for a reason. That they were no longer suited for this place, so they were abominations. And maybe they weren’t—once—but that didn’t matter now.
It sounded old. But for the first time—or maybe just the first time since Carmen—she found herself believing them. That thing was born dead, there was no changing that.
“I’m going back in,” She said it only as a precaution. As a warning, but not a question or an invitation. She was trying to get better about that—asking things. Yaz had drilled it into her head for months, you were supposed to ask or tell someone before you did something. Not just do it.
Sammy had never had to ask before doing anything before. It was a new sensation she was slowly getting used to.
Brooklynn gave her a slow nod, there was the fierceness in her eyes that Sammy had been doubting for months. The kind that was a little too much like Angie’s. Too bold to be safe, something that could get her killed if she didn’t get out.
It was something that crumbled easily, in her experience. But Brooklynn wasn’t Angie, wasn’t even close. Her lip pulled on the corner into a too wide smile. There was a gap where the tooth she knocked out should’ve been. Bloody rivets spilling over her tongue, her lips. She looked like a movie hero.
“I need something too.”
If it were anyone else, they’d ask too many questions about why Sammy would run right back into the belly of the beast. But Brooklynn had been doubted, had been prodded, too many times for her to dare bring it up. Despite her curiosity that she knew burned through her.
She never thought she’d be the same as someone like Brooklynn. But they were forged from the same stuff. Fed doubt in their abilities until they could no longer choke it down.
Now it was time to make it mean something.
She ignored the blood sloping down her side. Fiery hot pain spreading over her ribs. Ignored the way her body wanted to sink into the dirt. There wasn’t time for that, not when Yaz’s life was on the line. Not when there could be something worth taking in there.
Brooklynn passed her coat and she realized she was shivering. Sammy tugged it on, hoping that it would hide the wound long enough that they could get in and out.
For Yaz.
November 23rd, 2015
Correspondence: Manhattan, New York
CCTV-#E03
Attached Image:
[Image shows ankylosaurus specimen mangled beyond comprehension. Plate has been split in half, as though cut with a single claw, down the center. Body torn through the stomach and back, head nearly unrecognizable. No flesh has been stripped from the body nor has decomposition set it.]
Attached Report:
[Species (common name): Ankylosaurus
Sex: Female
Age: Unknown; estimated young adult
Upon further inspection of the creature, its body is remarkably intact. There are no ruptures to the internal organs beyond damage suspected from the broken rib cage. Without proper testing equipment the conditions of the Subject are unknown, but there are strong suspicions of disease. Flesh has blackened around wound site(s) and has continued to spread throughout veins. Camera images are unable to show any more details of the creature. Estimated time of death should be two days ago due to lack of decay but has appeared to be over a week old.
No other carnivorous creature has attempted to make contact with Subject’s body. E-750 continues to remain elusive from cameras.]
You were right.
-H.S