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"Goddamn Hammond," Alan says when he sees the push alert from the New York Times. Then, "Ellie, wake up." It's somewhere near 2 A.M. but Nublar and Sorna had turned him into a light sleeper and that particular nervous habit has proved harder to kill than a genetically engineered raptor. His glasses are still sitting on the nightstand and so he has to squint a little at the screen to read it properly—Ellie and the kids gave him hell for weeks when he finally caved and increased the font size—but his eyes aren't so bad that he can't recognize the earth-shaking magnitude of the situation spelled out by the headline.
LIVE: Seven different species of dinosaurs have been spotted in and around the Northern California town of Mendocino. They are believed to have originated from the closed Costa Rican theme park, Jurassic World .
"Alan?" Ellie asks, half asleep and eyes blinking shut against the light off the screen. "What is it?" He offers the phone in lieu of an answer, waits as her vision adjusts enough for her to read it, knows she's finished when her whole body goes fossil-still.
"Goddamn Hammond," Alan says again, pressing his fingers against the bridge of his nose. "I don't care that he's dead. Damn him for his recklessness, damn him for the parks, and damn him for every act of foolishness that's followed." He lets out a slow sigh, rubs at his eyes. "I'd never admit it to the bastard, but Ian was right. It was only a matter of time until something like this happened."
Ellie has the full article open now, but it's no more than a short paragraph, this story is developing at the bottom. "We don't know what this is, yet. Maybe it's just another San Diego."
"A half-dozen people dead plus some kid's labrador?"
"Short term," Ellie says. "Containable. It sounds like whatever species have been seen so far are all herbivorous."
"You trust the people of Mendocino to know the difference?"
"I trust them to recognize sharp teeth." She sighs, pulls her thumb across the screen to refresh the article even though it's been no more than a minute. "What a mess. What an absolute mess." She hands the phone back to him, lets out a tired exhale. "What I wouldn't give to put Hammond's genie back in the bottle."
"What should we do?"
"Sell any remaining stock in InGen?" He raises an eyebrow at her and she smiles a little, but there's no humor in it. "That was a joke. I don't know, Alan—what can we do? We're academics, not dinosaur hunters. Our only relevant experience here is not having died twenty-five years ago. We could offer ourselves up in an advisory capacity, I guess, but even then, there are plenty of people out there who have done hands-on work with them. Whatever insight we may have had is outdated by over a decade at this point. Comparatively, we're like—"
"Dinosaurs?"
"Exactly."
Alan exhales, considering. "You're right, I know that, but I just—" he breaks off, turning over the phone in his hand. There's a video embedded in the article, a grainy thumbnail of what looks like the back of a Stegosaurus. The way the image is frozen, it looks like the Stego's tail is in mid-motion, suspended on an arc that would take it through the wall of a garden shed. With any luck, Ellie is right, and all the theropods were killed by the eruption on Nublar. Then again, if luck was playing any role here, Hammond's experiments should have failed at the start. "It feels like we should be doing something, doesn't it?"
"It does."
"What if we drove up there?"
"To Mendocino?" Ellie asks, and he nods. "Tonight?"
"I was thinking first thing in the morning, maybe. Wait until more reports come in. Who knows—maybe this will all have been cleared up by then, anyway."
"You think?"
"No, but I've never tried being an optimist before."
Alan refreshes the article again and sees a new paragraph of text, bare bones information that mentions three additional species—including a suspected Allosaurus—have been spotted near I-20 heading east. Life finding a way. Goddamn Malcolm. Goddamn Hammond. Goddamn it all.
—
The next day does bring more news, and none of it good. The current theory is that Hammond's former partner, Benjamin Lockwood, funded some sort of rescue operation to Nublar, retrieved an unknown number of species that were brought to his Northern California estate for a black market auction, and at some point during this process—predictably, Alan thinks—the dinosaurs escaped and bedlam ensued. Further details include: Lockwood's body in an upstairs bedroom, his death attributed (surprisingly) to natural causes; correspondence between Lockwood's assistant, Eli Mills, and an auctioneer, both of whom are still missing, though suspected dead (and, Alan presumes, suspected eaten); and an unknown theropod body in Lockwood's front hall, impaled on the horns of an Agujaceratops skull. Most of the servers in the lab below the estate were blown skyward, but of the data that's been recovered, it seems to be another genetic experiment, a cross-breeding of the Indominus with a Velociraptor.
("They never fucking learn," Alan says when he gets to that section of the report, hands white-knuckled around his coffee cup. "This has Wu's fingerprints all over it. Not enough to put raptor and rex DNA in a blender with whatever else they could get their hands on—no, he had to scale it down and make it twice as clever. If this wasn't intended for military application, I'll eat my hat, then buy another one and eat that, too.")
Though the article leaves a good number of questions unanswered, it does make clear that Hammond's follies have again found their way to the mainland, and with a sense of permanency this time. New sightings are reported with alarming frequency as the morning goes on, increasing in both the number of different species and the distance they've traveled from Lockwood's estate. Tracking efforts have been mobilized, but it's all too little, too late—not to mention the public debate that sparks up again over the question of recapturing or killing.
"Okay," Ellie says once they've read through the reports, putting her phone face-down on the kitchen table and burying her face in her hands. "It's a mess. Officially. This makes what happened in San Diego look like an incident at a petting zoo. We've got at least twenty species running loose—including, so far, a T. rex, a Baryonyx, and an Allosaurus—that are all spreading further apart by the moment, and as of now, the best method of tracking them is to wait for someone standing by to post about it to Twitter."
"I hate Twitter," Alan says, reflexive.
"I know you do." Ellie smiles at him a little, then lets out a slow breath. "So what should we do? We know more than we did last night, but really it's just enough to tell us that this situation is worse than we could have imagined. I'm ready to jump in the car and start driving if you are, but at this point, I'm not sure what good that would do."
"Might feel better than just sitting here," Alan says, lacing his hands behind his neck to keep them from reaching for his phone again. "But no, you're right, I'm not sure what it would actually accomplish."
Ellie's quiet for a moment, fingers drumming an absent rhythm on the table. They weren't exactly young when Hammond first brought them to Nublar, but looking now at the ridged veins on the back of her hands—thinking of the new wrinkles across his own forehead and his hair that's gone grey-white in recent years—it strikes Alan how much older they've both become. Maybe too old to be playing games like this.
"Can I ask you something?" Ellie says.
"Always."
"Imagine that we did have a plan, and we knew exactly what was needed to make a difference here—what side of the debate would we be on?"
"What do you mean?"
Her hands are still restless, index finger tapping lightly against the wood. "Half the world seems to think they should be shot down as they're spotted, and the other wants to see them safely rounded up and brought to some sort of preserve. We never talked about it much when it was a question of the eruption on Nublar, but now I'm curious"
Alan frowns a little, brows pulling together. "They're dangerous, Ellie. That's more true than ever with no fences or open ocean between them and the rest of the world."
"The sauropods aren't."
"They're megafauna that belong to a different age. They can still do damage on a scale that society isn't ready for." He looks at Ellie, a little surprised. "You think they should be kept alive? After everything that's happened?"
"Don't get me wrong, I'll be the first to agree that everyone would be better off if all of the raptors had died before they'd been hatched, but—" she breaks off, smiling at him a little helplessly. "I don't know, Alan. I think back to when Hammond first drove us around in that Jeep and you turned my head to look out the window and it—it was all of my childhood dreams come to life. Nothing could compare to seeing the bones that I'd spent my life studying brought to life in front of me and standing sixty feet tall, and I know you felt that, too. Look, say what you will about Hammond—and God knows that I have—but whatever may have been the end result, you can't deny that there was something noble in his intentions."
"I seem to remember another saying that has to do with 'good intentions'."
"Alan—"
"They're not real, Ellie. You know that. They are, at best, distantly removed cousins of the dinosaurs that really lived, and probably more closely resemble whatever amphibian DNA that Wu mixed into the fossilized blood. Whatever you felt—whatever we felt—on Nublar after seeing them for the first time, it was just a fantasy."
Ellie's smile turns a little sad. "It was a pretty spectacular fantasy." She pauses, then reaches out to take one of Alan's hands, both of them weathered and older, palms still a little callused from years spent in the field. Ellie's thumb runs a gentle pattern over his skin. "I'm going to ask you for a favor now, alright? For me, and for the sake of your younger self, I want you to imagine a world where it's not all or nothing. Where kids can grow up learning that raptors actually had feathers, and where they can visit a preserve and see the drawings from their picture books come to life. You don't have to remind me of all the bad that's come from the parks and Hammond's efforts, but you can't lie to me and pretend that there wasn't some good in there, too."
Alan makes a noncommittal sound in the back of his throat—which is as close as he's willing to get to a yes—but then he does let his mouth twitch towards a smile, lifts their joined hands and presses a kiss to her knuckles. As if he could ever say no to anything she asked of him.
Ellie gets up and moves to take their emptied mugs to the sink, and as she starts to run the water, Alan does as she's requested, allowing himself to remember the bright moments among the bad. Weighs the terror he'd felt at seeing the T. rex chewing through the Jeep's roof towards Lex and Tim against the moment of resting his palm against the gentle curve of the Brachiosaur's nose. Watching the Spino's hungry jaws carve through the hull of the Kirbys' chartered plane with all the ease of crushing a soda can. Leaning his body on the belly of the Triceratops and feeling its breath thrumming all the way through his chest.
No, Ellie's not wrong—for all his flaws and his arrogance, Hammond had managed to build something beautiful. Still, it's just as much a lie to pretend that the near-death experiences shouldn't weigh heavier than the rest. Were those brief moments of splendor really worth Muldoon or Arnold or any of the others who'd lost their lives for the sake of Hammond's hubris? Not to mention whatever poor civilians might now stumble into the path of the wandering Allosaurus or Baryonyx or any other not-yet-identified theropods who have found their way to the mainland. It's too much cost with not enough reward. Would it be worth it if the carnivores were gone? You can't play that game when the technology is already there; someone is always going to get ambitious and want something with more teeth.
It's a question that keeps him up at night, even after he and Ellie have decided that there's nothing for them to do at the moment—other than keep an eye on their phones and wait for a call from the government or InGen. So they wait, and Alan wonders, and meanwhile news reports still surface with regular frequency of sightings. It's a disaster with no obvious answer, and he's no closer to coming up with any sort of solution—but at least if there's a decision to be made, it won't be coming from him.
And then the presumed-dead Claire Dearing calls Ellie about a potential rescue mission for the last remaining Velociraptor and the whole question suddenly stops being so theoretical.
Goddamn it.