Chapter Text
After the Mosasaur drags the Indominus to a watery grave, after a T. rex and a velociraptor decide not to eat them, the four of them just stand there. Shocked into silence, hearts pounding in their ears.
Claire is the first to recover, sinking to her knees in front of her nephew. “Are you okay, honey? Are you hurt?” She pats her hands over Gray’s torso, looking for blood, terrified of finding any.
“I’m okay, Aunt Claire.” Gray wiggles out of her embrace, goes to his older brother. “Zach?”
Zach’s expression is absolutely unreadable; he stumbles a few steps away from the rest of the group, puts a hand to his side and then stares at the hand like he’s never seen it before. Gray is the first one to spot what is going on: the dark red color of Zach’s T shirt had hidden it, but Zach is bleeding from somewhere. “Let me see,” Gray says, pushing up the hem of his brother’s shirt, while Zach clumsily swats his hands away.
“Leave me ‘lone,” Zach tries to say, but his words come out all… mushy, somehow, and he sits down heavily on the nearest ledge. By now Owen has taken over for Gray; he unceremoniously rips the kid’s shirt off of him, from the hem upwards, and what the three of them see is absolutely unmistakable: on Zach’s right side, just above the waist of his jeans, is a massive puncture wound the shape and size of an Indominus rex claw.
Zach looks at the blood on his hand, then down at the gaping hole in his body. “Holy shit ,” he says, and it’s the last thing he will say for a while.
Owen snaps into action. “Gray,” he says to the traumatized younger boy. “Gray!”
The kid can’t drag his eyes away from his older brother, who has already lost consciousness as the life pumps out of him. “What?”
“Gray, look at me.” Owen is calm, but forceful. “Go over to that gift shop and get me as many of those T shirts as you can find. Okay?”
Gray nods, and scampers off, and he’s back with a handful of the souvenir T’s. “Don’t we have to pay for those?” he asks innocently as Owen takes a knife from his belt and starts slicing the cotton fabric into strips.
“They can take it out of my paycheck.” Owen rolls the kid over, floppy like a Beanie Baby, and swears again. There’s another puncture wound in the kid’s back, higher up and smaller. That means that the Indominus’ claw didn’t just go in but through . It also means the situation just got a whole lot fucking worse . “Claire!”
And Claire, the woman who has just outrun a T. rex - in heels - is at his side in an instant, a second pair of hands, pressing into her nephew’s bloody wounds and helping Owen tie up the makeshift bandages. “The chopper should be here in three minutes,” she says quietly. “Can we get to the helipad in time? I can maybe get Lowery on the radio if we need more time.”
“Nope.” Owen tests the knots he has made, and hoists the kid over his shoulder. Zach is over six feet tall but most of that is legs, so he’s not hard to carry around if you find the right center of gravity. “Let’s go.”
Claire grabs Gray’s hand and they take off, and some tiny part of her is expecting something else to go wrong - maybe the T. rex will change her mind - but it doesn’t. The chopper is on time, and the pilot clearly isn’t thrilled but the three of them sit in a row and thread the unconscious teenager across their laps. Blood is getting everywhere, and Owen is positioned where he can make sure the kid is at least breathing and has a pulse.
Gray is silent and his giant blue eyes are barely even blinking. He’s never been in a helicopter before; he’s always been a little prone to motion sickness and he’s got his jaw clenched so he doesn’t puke. Owen and Claire’s eyes meet over his head, the unspoken thought between them something along the lines of this kid is not okay .
“Gray,” Owen says gently. “How old are you?”
The kid is silent for a minute but he does respond. “Twelve years and seven months.”
Owen nods knowingly. “So that’s what… sixth grade?” Gray sniffles his assent. “And your brother? How old is he?”
“Sixteen years and five months.”
“And where do you live?”
“We live in Madison, Wisconsin,” Gray says, a little more animated. “It’s the state capitol.”
“Oh yeah?” Owen crinkles a smile at the kid. “I’m from Iowa, what’s the capitol there?”
“Des Moines,” Gray says confidently. “And they’re the number one state for corn production in the entire country.”
“Yeah, well, that’s why I left.”
Claire doesn’t know how he does it, but Owen keeps the kid talking the rest of the helicopter ride. She even more doesn’t know how he does it but when they land Zach is still alive.
Claire has blood on her hands; she tries to wipe them onto her skirt but it’s totally ineffectual. The fabric is silk crepe and it was once very, very nice but it’s absolutely lousy for soaking up gore.
Owen is over at the triage station, engaging in a very loud conversation in rapid-fire Spanish that Claire only a little bit understands. It’s punctuated by some gestures and she definitely understands those. Finally she sees Owen start edging his way through the rows of cots. “Wait here,” Claire says to Gray, and meets Owen halfway.
“So what’s going to happen now?” Claire whispers. People are staring at her - maybe it’s just her outfit, splattered with dinosaur shit and painted with someone else's blood - but maybe they recognize her and she’s not ready for that just yet. “Please tell me he’s going to be okay. How am I going to tell my sister that… that I let her kid get bitten by an apex predator?”
“Not bitten,” Owen corrects her. “Clawed.”
She blinks. “Um, does it matter?”
“Well, if that thing had gotten its teeth into your nephew, we’d be having a very different conversation right now. Clawed might be survivable. Might.” Owen grimaces. “There’s a chopper coming from the mainland, it’ll have plasma and supplies. But it won’t be here for another three, four hours. He doesn’t have three hours.”
Claire’s knees turn to jelly and she puts her hands over her face, heedless of the blood that’s starting to dry on them. “Oh, god. So that’s it then?”
“Well, there’s good news.”
“How could there possibly - “
Owen gestures to his own forearm. “I’m O negative.”
The field hospital can, with Owen’s assistance, keep Zach from bleeding to death but they can’t do much else. The real problem isn’t the blood loss, or the path the dino carved through his internal organs, but the subsequent infection. Apparently (they figure this out much later on) the bacteria that was native to the Costa Rican soil had colonized the Indominus and there it had adapted, probably due to the dino’s ability to change its body temperature at will. What this means is that the penicillin the Red Cross brings in by the case doesn’t do shit.
Karen and Scott’s first impulse is to hop on the first plane out of there, but they can’t. For one thing, neither one of them has a current passport (this did actually come up, when they were getting the boys ready for their trip, but they didn’t think it would be an issue). For another, the Costa Rican government wouldn’t have let them in anyway.
So, what ends up happening is that Zach gets sicker and sicker, but the paradox is that the worse he gets the more dangerous it’s going to be to move him. It’s really starting to look like a no-win situation, until Scott has the idea to go to their congressman who calls in a favor and within twelve hours both of the boys are on a private jet out of there.
The Mitchells meet up with their kid in the hospital at UW Madison, and it’s not great. He’s heavily sedated, and they had to put him on a ventilator for the trip, since he hadn’t been overly committed to the idea of breathing. Like it was math homework he was putting off and not, you know, staying alive. They have him propped up on his side, draining all kinds of infected crap out of the wound. Gray isn’t allowed in to see his brother - which is kind of silly considering the kid was there when it happened - and Gray is not having it. So, Scott is down the hall trying to bribe Gray with a trip to the vending machine and Karen is alone for the moment with her firstborn.
Zach has always looked more like Scott’s dad than anyone, and now, sick as he is, he looks like Scott’s dad when the man was dying from cancer. It’s a little unnerving, really.
God. Karen had hated Scott’s dad.
Karen touches her kid’s hand, and then his face, hot as hell with the fever they’re desperately trying to bring down. He does actually respond to her touch, but he doesn’t make it all the way to the surface. As she pushes the sweaty strands of hair back from his forehead, a stray thought creeps into Karen’s mind: at least it happened to him and not Gray . And then she instantly hates herself for thinking it.