Dr. Alan Grant's Arc

Chapter 1 of 11

Grant crouched in the mud beside a downed service road and listened for the raptors he could not see. The two children crouched behind him, quiet the way he had taught them to be quiet. He was a paleontologist. He had spent thirty years digging up bones in Montana, and now he was three miles deep in a park where the bones walked, and the radio in his hand had been dead since the storm knocked out the fences. He had told the children this was an adventure. He said it again now, softer, so the boy would stop shaking. The girl watched Grant's face for the lie and did not find it, because Grant had made himself believe it too. That was the only trick he had left. Hammond had paid him to come here and look at miracles, and Grant had cried when he saw the first one alive, and the old man in the straw hat had cried with him. Grant had known then that taking the money was a mistake. He knew it better now. The goal was simple. Reach the visitor center before dark. Without a radio, without a signal, no one would come looking, and the raptors tested fences at night. Grant had written a paper years ago arguing they hunted in packs. Reviewers had called it speculation. None of them had called him this week. He pushed the children into a wall of broad, layered fronds beside the road and told them to stay low. Through the leaves he saw the shape of a maintenance jeep tipped in a ditch, one door open. He crawled to it. The dashboard radio was smashed. But under the passenger seat, wrapped in a grease rag, he found a flare gun and two shells. He checked the shells twice. Both dry. Grant brought the children out and walked them east along the ridge until the trees thinned and the roof of the visitor center showed through the canopy, still a mile off. He would not reach it before dark. He knew that now. He knelt in the grass, loaded one shell, and fired straight up. The flare climbed and burst orange above the trees. He loaded the second and held it. Someone at the center would see. Someone with a working radio, a woman he had worked beside in the dig sites, a mathematician who had warned them all before the fences failed. Someone was still alive in that building. He had to believe it. The girl tugged his sleeve and pointed back the way they had come. In the wet dirt of the service road, fresh tracks crossed their own. Three-toed. Deep. Spaced for a running stride. The flare had been seen. Grant put his hand on the boy's shoulder and started walking faster, not toward the center now but toward the nearest tree line, because the thing that had answered him was not coming from the visitor center.