Dr. Alan Grant's Arc

Chapter 8 of 11

The heavy step came again through the wall, closer now. Grant stood in the middle of the control room and listened. The children watched him. Ellie watched him. He had no name for what was outside because he could not see it, and without seeing it he could not guess its reach, its bite, or whether the steel door would matter. He had forty minutes of battery light and a barricade of office furniture. He needed to know what was coming. He crossed to the console and looked at the small monitors. Most were black. Two showed static. One showed the front approach of the visitor center from a camera mounted above the main entrance. The picture was gray and grainy, but the palms along the walk were clear, and the empty pavement between them. Grant leaned close. Ellie came up beside him. The boy climbed onto a chair to see. The girl held the puppy and stayed against the wall. On the screen, one of the palms shook. Then the next one. Something big was moving through the planted trees near the entrance, pushing the trunks aside like weeds. A raptor stepped out onto the pavement in front of the doors. It stopped. It turned its head back toward the shaking palms, and its whole body went low and still. Grant had never seen a raptor do that. The raptor bolted. It ran across the frame and out of sight in under a second. The palms parted. A tyrannosaur walked out onto the pavement. Grant knew the skull before the rest of the animal cleared the leaves. He knew the jaw. He had held a cast of that jaw in a lab and measured the teeth against his hand. On the monitor the head alone filled a quarter of the screen. The animal stopped in front of the glass doors and lowered its snout to the ground where the raptor had stood. It smelled the concrete. Then it lifted its head and looked, for a long moment, straight at the camera. "It's hunting the raptors," Grant said. His voice was steady. He had wanted this answer and now he had it. The bigger animal did not want the building. It wanted what was around the building. The steel door in the ceiling duct and the scratches on the east lock plate were no longer the first problem. The raptors would have to choose between staying to work on the control room and running from the thing on the pavement. Grant turned from the screen. Malcolm was watching him from the floor. The old man who had built the park was not in this room, but Grant thought of him then, of the money he had taken, of the tears they had both shed at the paddock. He told Ellie to move Malcolm away from the door. Whatever the raptors did next, they would do it soon.