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When Sasha Deling had first started working for Prehistoric Paradise dinosaur theme park, she had thought her job would involve things like escaping velociraptors.
She was right.
However instead of screaming people running in terror from prehistoric killing machines, there was garbage scattered across the food-court and people complaining to management.
About the size of a turkey, the velociraptors were basically feathery coyotes with sickle claws. And like coyotes, the raptors had adapted very well to human presence. After all, a sickle claw was perfect for disemboweling garbage bags, half-eaten fish sticks didn’t fight back, and tourists would just give your food if you looked at them and made the right noises.
The little buggers were escape artists too, and managed to escape their enclosure at least once every week. Once free they would usually venture into the guest areas and raid the garbage cans, beg tourists for food, and try and lure the pigeons into a false sense of security by fluffing their feathers and pretending to peck at the ground. (It had only worked once, but they kept hoping.)
Of course it bore remembering that they were still ravenous carnivores. One of the worst incidents involving the raptors had seen blood splattered all over the walls of the Triassic plaza. The Stegosaurus Steakhouse had had a freezer fail over the weekend and as a result had been forced to toss out over fifty pounds of beef. Two days rotting in the dumpster, and then the velociraptors got out again. Rotting meat and blood everywhere. Itlooked like something out of horror movie. Nevermind the fact that every single one of them had rolled around in the entire mess and needed to be washed off afterwards lest they smelled like roadkill all week. A situation they were not in the least bit happy about.
—
Now, Prehistoric Paradise had a perpetual problem of keeping up interest in the park. Sure, bringing long extinct animals back to life had been mind blowing thirty years ago. But time took the edge off everything. That meant that as the novelty wore off, they needed new things to show off to the public and draw in new visitors. For them that meant new dinosaurs to show off, and that’s where the Science Department came in. It was them who searched for new sources of DNA to clone, and who tinkered around with the genes to produce new and unusual traits that drew in curious spectators.
Sasha could make suggestions to the science department. She could also veto any of the projects if she thought they were a potential safety risk or economically unviable. (But that involved a lot of paperwork so she didn’t do it unless she felt it was absolutely necessary.) In the end however she had no say in what the science department did or did not do.
When they had told her they were working on a new type of velociraptor, she had thought that meant they were experimenting with feather patterns again. They had already achieved some pretty striking results splicing in genes from domestic chickens. (The black laced pattern was her favorite.)
What hatched from the eggs on the other hand, resembled a velociraptor in the same way a shaved tiger resembled a cat. They had hard scales instead of feathers, and quickly grew to be the size of a small horse.
“Its was an experiment in feather development,” Dr. Sona had explained. “We wanted to see what certain gene tweeks were necessary to change scales to feathers.”
Sasha might have believed that if Dr. Hennak hadn’t told her it was an experiment in dinosaur intelligence, Dr. Irgatta hadn’t said it was an experiment with growth genes, and she hadn’t seen Jurassic Park.
Wanting to do tribute to a classic movie was one thing, but this was just tempting fate. On the other hand, there wasn’t any reason to think that these raptors would be too different from the other large carnivores they had on display. So she had reluctantly okayed everything. Still, she wasn’t taking chances. These new raptors weren’t going to be on display to the public until she was sure they weren’t going to escape their enclosure like the normal raptors. At the very least, while their large size made them more dangerous, it also prevented them from slipping through the small gaps in the fence the normal raptors were expert at creating.
Just to be sure she had ordered a special secured enclosure built for them, and hired a special handler.
—
Gary Gardner had started his career as a police animal handler, before an injury forced him to quit. He had then gone on to earn a degree in animal behavior and got a job in hollywood training predatory animals like wolves, bears, and large cats for movie shoots.
He hadn’t even needed the hefty salary and benefits package Sasha had offered him. Just the chance to work with dinosaurs (even freaky mutant ones) had him jumping on the first plane to the park.
His initial assessment was that these new raptors were smart. Very smart. How smart exactly, he couldn’t say, but smart enough to recognize their reflections in a mirror as being just that. According to Gary that intelligence was a double edged sword, it meant they picked up the training faster, but it also meant they needed more enrichment to keep them from getting bored. Not to mention the fact they were quick to pick up loopholes or figure out ways to avoid doing something they would rather not do. It had surprised everyone when they discovered that they had been stashing their fetch-balls in order to cheat on retrieval exercises.
But in five years there hadn’t been a single incident. Gary hadn’t been mauled, and the raptors hadn’t made so much as a single attempt to escape their enclosure. Tourists came to gawk through the soundproof, two-way mirror without so much as a snarl. It was enough to make Sasha decide that her initial worries had been groundless, and she could focus on other problems. Like Evan Ford.
---
Evan Ford was Chief of Security for the park, and a perpetual pain in the ass for Sasha. He was a decent security chief, not the best Sasha had ever seen but he got the job done.
It was his attitude, specifically his opinion that a dinosaur hunt would be the hunt of a lifetime and how he wanted a stuffed triceratops on his den wall. That on its own wouldn’t have been a problem, if he had kept it to himself and didn’t start shooting his mouth off about it to the animal handlers whenever he got the chance. To make things worse he enjoyed taunting some of the larger dinosaurs content in the knowledge that they couldn’t retaliate.
The handlers hated him because it made their job harder, and their animals more likely to lash out. The allosaurus had even got to the point where it would start growling the moment it got a single hint of Ford anywhere nearby. Every day Sasha got complaints from the trainers telling her to get him away from their animals. It kind of reminded her of the squirrel that would torment her childhood dog by standing just outside of the length of the dog’s chain and watch the dog go nuts trying to get them.
(And she also knew what had ultimately happened to that squirrel, one day when the dog had not been chained up.)
The only dinos he didn’t bother were the raptors. When he had tried teasing one of normal ones with a strip of beef jerky stuck through the fence, one of them had pretended to fall for it, while two others had snuck up behind him and stolen the whole bag along with his tuna sandwich. And he avoided the other raptors because he was scared of Gary. (Not that he would admit it.)
The problem was that security wasn’t under her direct purview as park director, that was the responsibility of Corporate’s main security office. She had forwarded all the complaints to Security, along with her own requests to have Ford transferred somewhere else. But Walter Singein, the Head of Security, hated her guts and turned down her requests just to spite her. (That had also been why he had made Ford the security chief for Prehistoric Paradise in the first place.) When she had tried going around Singein and straight to the Board, they had ignored her.
It was at the point where the handlers were circulating a petition saying that if something wasn’t done about Ford, then they would be recreating the sacrifice scene from Blood Island II, only with a t-rex instead of a giant wolf. It wasn’t a idle threat either. Rexy may have been old and half crippled up with arthritis, but she hated Ford so much that the chance to rip him to shreds would be well worth getting up for.
To top it off, Gary was sick, really sick, and couldn’t make it to work. That left the junior handler, Berron, to watch over the raptors. It wasn’t that Berron wasn’t up to the job of taking care of them by himself, it was that he was nineteen, a junior employee, and unable to stand up to the Cheif of Security for the entire park. She had already gotten several phone calls from Berron, who was practically pleading her to do something, and that the raptors were getting really agitated.
So she was actually a bit surprised when her phone rang and instead of Berron, it was Carlos, her head of dinosaur welfare who kept track of what was going on with all the animals in the park.
“The raptors have escaped!” Was the first thing she heard when she answered the phone.
Sasha blinked. “Again? Tell George to get the net then.”
“Not the normal raptors! The other ones! The six foot tall murder lizards! They’ve escaped their enclosure!”
Oh fuck
—
It felt like someone had liquified a porcupine and reconstituted it inside his lungs.
Gary Gardner, huddled in his blankets feeling utterly miserable. He didn’t get sick often, but when he did it was usually a doozy. Stars danced in front of his vision as another coughing fit had him scrunched up like a canned shrimp.
There was no way he was making it to work. Berron could handle everything without him for a few days, while he rested up and recovered.
His phone choose that moment to start ringing. The ringtone stabbed straight through his skull, making an already agonizing headache worse. With a frustrated groan he reached over and flung it off his nightstand, straight into the laundry hamper. Where the ringing was now muffled out by two pairs of muddy safari shirts, a bunch of dirty socks, and a pair of polka dot underwear.
Sasha knew he was at home sick. If it was a real emergency they could come over here and get him themselves.
---
“What’s the situation?”
“Well, I went to the back room to start thawing out the chickens for their feeding,” Berron swallowed nervously. “And suddenly I realized they were being really quiet and when I went to check on them they were gone.”
“How did they escape?”
Berron let out this small choked gasp and his hands waved in the air, as if he was trying to explain something he didn’t have the words for.
“We pulled up the video footage from the enclosure,” Carlos interrupted. “You’re going to want to see this.”
The film showed all four of the raptors clustered around the keeper’s door to their enclosure. Sasha watched in stunned disbelief as one of the raptors walked up to the keypad and, with one long curved claw, typed in the access code and the door slid open.
“We… we were experimenting with a new puzzle feeder.” Berron finally stammered. “The raptors pressed the right sequence of buttons and they would get a reward. I… we… it never occurred to us that they could use those skills to escape the enclosure.”
“Oh god,” a headache was building behind her eyes. Press the buttons in the right sequence and they get a reward all right. “Where are they now?”
“According to their tracking tags they’ve just been hanging around the enclosure.” Carlos reported. He grimaced. “Ford is getting the containment teams together as we speak.”
“Of course he is.” Sasha pinched the bridge of her nose. “He’s probably been dreaming of something like this ever since he started working here.”
—
“Lock and load boys!” Ford jacked a clip into his assault rifle. “Remember that these are dangerous beasts here. Don’t be afraid to shoot to kill if you have to.”
“And you better remember that this is not a big game hunt!” Sasha interrupted over the radio. “Those raptors are worth half a million each. I swear to god Ford, if anyone gets hurt because you-.”
With one flick, Ford turned the radio off. “Alright boys! Let’s roll!”
The security jeeps ripped down the road towards the raptor enclosure, screeching to a stop in front of the entrance. Men with body armor and assault rifles poured out.
“Fan out!” Ford ordered. “Make sure we’ve got a solid perimeter so those lizards can’t escape.”
“Uh, Chief?” one of security men tapped him on the shoulder. “You might want to turn on your radio.”
Frowning, Ford switched his radio back on.
“YOU DROVE RIGHT PAST THEM YOU IDIOTS!” Sasha screamed. “THEY WERE HIDING IN THE BUSHES BY THE ROAD AND YOU DROVE RIGHT PAST THEM! THEY’RE IN THE ADMIN PLAZA RIGHT NOW TRYING TO BREAK INTO YOUR OWN SECURITY OFFICES!”
---
Breaking into the security offices hadn’t been all that hard. The doors opened automatically. There wasn’t even a receptionist there to scream at them. It was sunday, the park was closed for maintenance. All there was was four sets of muddy raptor tracks splitting off in four different directions.
Chief Ford had naturally order the teams to split up to track them. Delta team had followed one set into the basement, Alpha had followed one set into the elevator, Echo had followed the set that went into the stairwell, Chrono was following the tracks that led down the main hallway, Beta was covering the front entrance in case the raptors tried to circle back, and Omega was watching the elevated walkway just in case.
Chrono Team in fact was right on the case. The muddy tracks on the floor were as plain as day. They turned the corner, guns at the ready, and burst into a storage room.
“Keep your eyes peeled,” the captain ordered. “We’ve got it cornered, no telling what it might do.” They split up, two men going down each of the aisles between the shelves.
“What the hell?” The tracks abruptly cut off. Instead of a trapped raptor, there was several streaks of mud on the floor and a black mat. One of the ones from the front entrance, the captain realized. The ones you used to wipe your feet on.
That was when the door to the storage room slammed shut behind them and locked.
—
The headache was getting worse.
“Just got an update from Chrono Team,” Leroy, the security liaison reported. “They’re locked in a storage room on the main floor. Delta is locked in the electrical room, Echo is trapped in Chief Ford’s office, and Alpha is still stuck in the elevator.”
“GET ME OUT OF HERE!” Ford screamed over the radio.
“You’ll be out of there as soon as Delta figures out the right breaker to switch on,” Leroy assured him. “Omega is on its way to get Chrono and Echo unlocked.”
“Alright,” Sasha turned back to Berron. “How smart are these things exactly?”
“I don’t know,” Berron shrugged. “I mean, intelligence is one of those things that is hard to quantify. Gary, I mean Mr. Gardner, said he thought they were at least on par with corvids, with a good chance they might be as smart as some of the brighter monkey species. It’s just…”
“Just what?”
“Just that sometimes he’d get drunk after work and he’d tell me that he actually thought they might be smarter than chimpanzees, and…” he wrung his hands. “I came in to check on the raptors one night and I found him trying to teach them how to disarm a bomb.”
“Great,” Sasha muttered. This was the first she had heard of a trained animal handler trying to teach demolitions skills to apex predators. “Wonder what else he tried to teach them?”
*BANG*BANG*BANG*
“Agghhh! FUCK!” one of the security men screamed through the radio. “IT’S GOT A GUN!”
---
He was drunk. He knew damned well you should never handle a firearm when you were drunk unless you wanted to get people killed.
So he didn’t.
”Remember,” Gary slurred. “Gun safety is important. Always make sure you have you finger off the trigger until you are ready to shoot and… HEY, HEY, HEY! Gun safety! Never point a gun at anything you don’t want to shoot!”
---
There was an running gun-battle raging down the main shopping street of the park. Six teams of security officers vs a pack of genetically altered velociraptors with guns. The security guys had numbers and automatic weapons on their side, but apparently the raptors had the crucial intellectual edge.
Thank god the park was closed today.
“...and Beta team is taking cover behind the Hadrosaur Hotpot” Leroy reported. “They’re getting too much crossfire from Delta and Alpha teams to break cover.”
Sasha shook her head. “We’re recording this right?”
“Oh yes,” Ziva, Sasha’s personal assistant, nodded. “Every bit of it.”
“Good.” She was going to roast Singein before the Board. The way this was going she would have been better off hiring that damned velociraptors as security officers than the people he had put here. Bunch of trigger happy idiots.
She didn’t even want to think about what it was going to cost to repair all the damage. You just couldn’t sell your theme park as a family friendly place to visit if you had bullet holes in everything.
“Looks like they’re heading into Parking Garage A,” Carlos reported. “There’s only one way in and out so unless they find some other way to escape it looks like Ford’s got them pinned down. That’s weird, they’ve shown more tactical sense than that.”
“Maybe Gary taught them how to hotwire a car,” Leroy joked, laughing weakly.
The sound of a car engine being started up came through the radio.
“Leroy,” Sasha said. “Shut up please.”
—
He was drunk. He knew damned well you should never drive when you were drunk unless you wanted to get people killed.
So he didn’t.
”Hey! You know the rules!” Gary slurred. “You come to a complete stop at stop signs! A rolling stop doesn’t cut it!”
—
The security department of the park usually busied itself with drunk tourists, lost kids, and shoplifting from the gift shops. In theory they were also supposed to deal with dangerous escaped dinosaurs that were beyond the scope of the handlers to deal with on their own. In other words, if the t-rex or any of the other large predators got out and started reinacting Jurassic Park.
Which had happened roughly never in the park’s entire history. Rexy, the t-rex, was old and arthritic and never got up unless she absolutely had to. The baryonyx knew it just had to wait by the waterfall in its enclosure for food to come, (and it was very patient in that regard,) The allosaurus considered anything smaller than a full grown steer not worth bothering with. While the carnotaurus was still a juvenile and wasn’t up to tackling anything bigger than a chicken.
Still, the security team had plans in place and had regular drills just in case something like this happened.
Of course none of their plans had ever included high-speed car chases, but most of the guys on the security team thought they were doing pretty well. (Sasha, who was mentally totaling up the damage, disagreed) ‘Expect anything’ was the security department’s unofficial motto, and while it was being pushed, they were ready for anything.
Except the raptors stopping for the red light.
—
Teamwork was essential for a velociraptor’s survival, and it was something Prehistoric Paradise’s original raptor pack knew well. After all, it took the combined weight of all five of them to tip over the weighted garbage cans. Not to mention it took two working in concert to thwart the new latches (tested against racoons from five different cities) and get the lid off.
Then it was time to feast. A half eaten cup of fries was devoured, a bag of bacon flavored chips was torn open to get at the crumbs left on the bottom, and one unfortunate rat barely had time to squeak before the raptors chomped down on its neck. Then they found the greatest prize of all, an entire box of freezer burnt chicken burgers.
The sounds of screeching tires, gunfire, and park benches being run over was ignored as they tore off pieces of cardboard and sliced open plastic wrapping. Life in the park had taught them that loud noises posed no danger to them and running away from them usually resulted in people coming in and taking your garbage.
(They could however spot a park employee at hundred meters, and were getting better and better at recognizing when someone was trying to get close enough to get them with a net.)
There was a brief bit of excitement when a flaming tire dropped out of the sky and rolled passed them. Lots of hissing, screeching, and displaying of teeth and tail fans until they realized that it wasn’t after them or their chicken burgers.
—
Ford let out a snarl as he kicked the SUV door open and hauled himself up out of his vehicle, which was on its side. All around him he could see security officers helped each other out of wrecked and burning vehicles. The entire security team taken out by one red light. A six car pile up.
Blood was dripping down his face from a cut on his forehead and he was seeing red. Not from the blood, just from pure primal rage. He had been hurt, he had been humiliated. He wanted to kill something.
Sasha was yelling something through the radio again. He switched it off with one flick. Probably more bullshit about not damaging her precious park or shooting the damned raptors dead. Fuck that. He was going to kill all four of those scaly freaks and mount them in his office.
Then he saw them, crowded by the back door to one of the gift shops, watching the activity with interest. Ford jammed a clip into his gun and charged. The raptors darted into the store before he could fire on them, so he just charged in after them.
He just saw a tail turn a corner into a storage room, but that was enough. He stormed straight into the room, gun at the ready and began searching between the rows of boxes stacked higher than his head.
Had he not been so pissed off, he might have realized several things. First, that it was an extremely ill advised idea to start shooting off a gun in a room filled to the brim with boxes of fireworks. (The entire stockpile being set aside for the park’s anniversary celebrations in fact.) Two, that the raptor he was chasing had been hiding behind the door as he came in, and had already slipped out of the room. And finally, that this was the exact same thing that had gotten him and his entire team trapped in an elevator once already.
At least not until he heard the sound of something metal clattering across the floor, the door slam shut and the click of it locking behind him.
Then the lights went out.
“SHIT FUCKING FUCK!” Ford swore and he fumbled around in his pockets for his lighter. He flicked it on and peered into the darkness, half expecting snarling raptors to be charging out of the shadows at him. There was nothing, just the brightly colored boxes of fireworks stacked around him and a strange muted hissing sound.
There was something lying on the ground. He could just barely see its outline from the beam of light shining in from under the storage room door. It hadn’t been there when he had come in, he was sure of that. With one last glance to make sure the raptors weren’t waiting to pounce on him, he bent down to get a closer look holding his lighter out so that he could see.
It was a propane tank with the safety valve torn off.
—
Sasha poured herself a glass from the bottle of cheap vodka being passed around the control room. “Well, at least they picked the ugly gift shop to blow up.”
“They also took out the tracking tower too,” Carlos said grimly. “I’m not getting anything from the tracking tags now.”
“Of course they did.”
—
Gary woke up feeling better than he had all week. He still felt sick, but the headache was now nothing more than a mild ache in the back of his skull, and he found he actually had the energy to get out bed. He no longer felt like he had inhaled a cactus and when he coughed it wasn’t like getting sucker punched in the chest.
In fact, he thought as he climbed out of bed, it might be a good idea just to swing by the raptor enclosure just to see how Berron was doing. It was his first time taking care of the raptors by himself after all. Not go back to work, just pop by see if Berron needed help with anything, then go back home and back to bed.
He tossed on a pair of pants and a new shirt before fishing his phone out of the laundry hamper and wincing at the display.
247 missed calls, 623 missed messages. A lot of people had really been trying to get ahold of him.
“It can’t have been that important if they didn’t come to get me,” he told himself as he grabbed his coat and got into the car.
He could sort that mess out later when he got back.
—
The staff entrance to the raptor enclosure was quiet when he pulled up. Normal for a sunday. Him and Brennon were usually the only people who came here except for the vet and the meat delivery guy. There was however a cloud of black smoke coming from the direction of the central avenue. Weird. Maybe the taco joint had another grease fire.
The raptors clustered up against the safety glass the moment he stepped through the door, letting out a chorus of happy chirps mixed with what he recognized as their food call.
A red flag went up in Gary’s mind. Brennon should have fed them already. It wasn’t impossible of course, that they were faking it in order to trick him into feeding them twice. They had done it before. But that had been when Brennon was still new and wasn’t wise to their tricks. When he checked the prep area, he found the chicken earmarked for today still sitting on the thawing tray in the fridge, and the knife and buckets laid out as if Brennon had started getting their meal ready and walked away halfway through it.
Another red flag. God, hopefully the kid wasn’t stuck at the bottom of a set of stairs with a broken leg or something. This wasn’t like him at all. But when he checked the entire building, he failed to find Brennon either asleep in the office or trapped in the staff washroom. Thankfully he also didn’t find the kid’s dead body lying at the bottom of the emergency stairs, or even worse, in the raptor’s enclosure.
He was really worried now. However the raptors were living things, and their meal was over three hours late. It was his responsibility to make sure they were looked after.
Feed the raptors first, then find out what happened to Brennon, he decided. He grabbed a knife and began filling one of the buckets with meal sized pieces of chicken. He was nearly done when his phone rang.
“Hello? Sasha? What’s going on? … I’m at the raptor enclosure. … Then tell George to get the net.” He cast a confused look at the four raptors crowding around the viewing window. “What do you mean they’re loose? … No they’re not. … Yes, I’m positive. … Yes, I’m looking at them right now.” He let out a long sigh and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Alright, if you insist.” He swung his phone out towards the viewing window. “Say hi to the director!”
A chorus of happy chirps answered.
—
It was always amazing how quickly things got back to normal after a disaster, Sasha reflected.
When all was said and done, and the firefighters had gotten the burning wreck of Dino Dan’s Gift Shop put out, she had set the entire maintenance team out to fix as much of the damage as they possibly could, cover up all the obvious bullet holes, and clean up the six car pileup blocking the main avenue.
The maintenance team had worked fast. So fast they had only had to close the park an additional day, and for that had earned a hefty bonus in Sasha’s opinion. Dino Dan’s was still a burnt out ruin, but the maintenance folks had put a construction fence up and were slowly getting everything cleared away. (It also served as a conspicuous excuse as to why they had been closed that extra day.)
Gary, for his part, thought the whole story about the raptors blowing Ford to bits was the rest of the staff collectively pulling his leg. According to him, Ford had overreacted when the raptors got out, and the raptors had been so freaked out by the screeching vehicles and shooting, that they had headed straight back to the one place they felt safe, their enclosure. The gift shop being blown up was either a horrible coincidence, or possibly the result of Ford smoking dope somewhere he shouldn’t have.
To be fair, this was the story Sasha was feeding to the general public, the authorities, and the insurance adjusters. (The world just wasn’t ready for giant genetically engineered velociraptors with guns.)
All and all, things were back to normal. Gary had reported that the new lock had been installed on the door to the raptor’s enclosure, a gallimimus swallowed a camera and needed surgery, two teenagers were caught trying to sneak into the triceratops enclosure to get a closer look at the new baby, and the CEO of SkyRyse had the sandwich stolen right out of her hand by the velociraptors (The normal ones this time.)
That being said, there was still a lot of fallout from the whole incident that needed to be dealt with. At least half the bullet holes still needed to be patched up, half a dozen park benches needed to be fixed, the delivery van the raptors had stolen needed to be replaced, along with five security SUVs, sixty five windows needed new glass panes, the tracking tower had to be rebuilt, ten security officers had been shot and were in the hospital, twelve more had been injured in the crash, Singein was panicking and as a result was trying to blame everything on her, (She couldn’t wait to show the board her favorite takes from that security footage.) and Dino Dan’s had been blown to smithereens with Ford inside. (Which had also cost them over fifty thousand dollars in fireworks.)
“Well, what do you know,” Sasha said, leaning back in her chair. “Net gain.”