Jurassic World Special Edition Junior Novelization Read online

  Masrani looked more impressed than concerned. “Anticipating where the food’ll come from—so she’s intelligent.”

  “For a dinosaur,” Claire said.

  Masrani noticed spiderweb cracks in the glass. “And that?”

  “It tried to break the glass,” Claire explained.

  “I like her spirit,” Masrani said, grinning.

  They watched as workers lowered a full side of beef into the paddock on a chain. Masrani, eager to get his first glimpse of the hybrid dinosaur, waited for Indominus rex to take its food. A palm frond rustled. Then…WHOOM! A clawed reptilian hand swept the side of beef into the foliage. As the dinosaur devoured the huge hunk of meat, Masrani got a glimpse of her muscular back. It was grayish white, with sharp bumps running down the spine.

  “It’s white!” Masrani said, delighted. “You never told me it’s white!”

  “Think it will scare the kids?” Claire asked.

  “The kids?” Masrani said. “This will give the parents nightmares.”

  “Is that good?” Claire asked, looking doubtful.

  “It’s fantastic!” Masrani said, stepping closer to the glass. “People will hate this animal…and they will love it.”

  As if the creature knew it was being discussed, the Indominus rex whipped its head around, looking over its shoulder directly at Claire and Masrani. Though its face was partially obscured by trees, its red eye was clearly visible, staring with malice.

  Claire took a step back, unnerved by the look in the Indominus’s eye.

  “Can she see us?” Masrani asked.

  “They say it can sense thermal radiation,” Claire said. “Like snakes.”

  The gigantic dinosaur kept staring in their direction, as though it was trying to figure out exactly where they were.

  “I thought there were two of them,” Masrani said.

  “There was a sibling in case this one didn’t survive infancy.”

  “Where’s the sibling?”

  “She ate it.”

  THUNK! The skeleton of the butchered side of beef hit the ground, picked clean by the dinosaur. Masrani gulped. “So this paddock is quite safe, then?”

  “We have the best structural engineers in the world,” Claire said confidently.

  “Mm-hmm,” Masrani said, sounding unconvinced. An idea occurred to him. “There’s an American Navy man on the island. Part of a research program one of my companies is running. Owen Grady.”

  Claire didn’t hide the fact that she wasn’t thrilled to hear this name. “I know who he is.”

  Masrani didn’t notice Claire’s reaction. “His animals often try to escape. They’re smart, so he has to be smarter.”

  “He only thinks he’s smarter.”

  Masrani eyed Claire, sensing some history between her and Owen Grady. Unfazed, he pressed on with his idea. “I want you to bring him in. Let him inspect the paddock. Maybe he can see something we can’t.”

  Claire frowned. But when Masrani looked at her, she was nodding.

  On another part of the island, in the Raptor Research Area, a pig was running for its life. BAM! The pig ran right into a steel wall. It squealed.

  It had a good reason to squeal. In fact, it had four.

  Four Velociraptors stared at the pig. They crouched, ready to pounce.

  But a whistle stopped them cold. They looked up. Owen Grady stood on a metal catwalk above them, holding his hand flat like a military command.

  The lead Velociraptor turned its bright yellow eyes back toward the cowering pig and lashed toward it.

  Another sharp whistle.

  “Watch it, Blue,” Owen warned.

  Blue stepped back into formation with the other three Velociraptors. The green-and-black Velociraptor next to her screeched up at Owen.

  “Don’t give me that, Charlie,” Owen told the dinosaur. He closed his hand into a fist, releasing the Velociraptors. They disappeared back into the foliage, leaving the pig alone.

  The other employees whooped and clapped. The lead Velociraptor handler, Barry, slapped Owen on the back, congratulating him. “You finally did it, man!”

  “Only eighty dead pigs ain’t bad, right?” Owen said.

  “And this pig will love you for the rest of your life,” Barry said.

  As they climbed down from the metal catwalk, a slightly older man in a suit marched up to them. “Owen! Heckuva job, buddy!”

  Owen was not excited to see Vic Hoskins.…

  Chapter Five

  Technically, Hoskins was Owen’s boss. He’d hired him to work for InGen, the company in charge of the Velociraptor research program.

  But that didn’t mean Owen had to like him.

  Hoskins smiled. “I was starting to think I’d hired the wrong guy, but you got those dinosaurs eating out of your palm!”

  Owen shrugged. “You came on a good day. It’s not usually a happy ending.”

  “Is that why you haven’t been sending in reports?”

  “We’ve been busy.”

  “Not too busy to cash your paychecks.”

  Owen brushed past Hoskins, but the older man followed him. “What do you want, Hoskins?”

  “A field test,” Hoskins answered. “You’ve proven the Velociraptors will respond to commands. Let’s put this research on its feet.”

  Owen kept walking. “These are wild animals. Trust me—you don’t want them in the field.”

  “I just saw a bond—a real bond—between man and beast.” Hoskins cut in front of Owen, blocking him.

  “You’re in my way,” Owen said.

  Hoskins didn’t budge. “Come on, man. You and I? We’re dogs of war. The military’s looking to reduce casualties. Most people would tell you robots are the future. But nature already gave us the most effective killing machines seventy-five million years ago! And now we know they can take orders!”

  Barry had caught up with them and heard Hoskins’s speech. “We finally make progress and that’s the first thing he says? Make a weapon?”

  Hoskins held both hands up. “Come on, gents. These Velociraptors have millions of years of instinct in their cells. Instinct we can program. Their loyalty can’t be bought. They’ll charge right into the enemy’s teeth and eat ’em, belt buckles and all!”

  “And what if they decide they want to be in control?” Barry asked.

  Hoskins shrugged. “Remind ’em who is in control. Terminate the rogues, and promote only the loyal bloodlines.”

  Owen shook his head. “You come in here. You don’t learn anything about them except what you want to know. You made them, and now you think you own them.”

  Hoskins looked surprised. “We do own them. An extinct animal doesn’t have any rights.”

  “They’re not extinct anymore,” Owen countered.

  “Exactly,” Hoskins agreed. “We’re sitting on a gold mine, and Masrani’s using it to stock a petting zoo.”

  “He’s trying to teach people some humility,” Owen said. “He doesn’t make weapons.” He faked left, then slipped past Hoskins on the right. Hoskins kept following him, grinning slightly.

  “You think the eighth-richest man in the world is only into oil, telecom, and family fun parks?” he asked. “Masrani’s so diversified, he doesn’t even know what he owns!”

  Owen realized Hoskins was serious. “How long has InGen been planning to sell this idea of using the Velociraptors as weapons?”

  “Since the day we hired you out of the Navy,” Hoskins answered. “Those animals could take the place of thousands of boots on the ground. How many lives would that save?”

  Owen closed the metal gate behind him. It locked automatically, leaving Hoskins on the other side. But he kept talking.

  “Look around you, Owen. Every living thing in this jungle is trying to murder the other. It’s the way Mother Nature refines the pecking order. War is struggle. Struggle breeds greatness. Without that, we end up with places like this, charging seven bucks for a soda.”

  Barry couldn’t believe it. �
�Can you hear yourself when you talk?”

  “This will happen with or without you,” Hoskins said. “Progress always wins.”

  “Maybe progress should lose for a change,” Owen said.

  In the Velociraptor enclosure, a young handler dropped a loop around the pig. Suddenly the pig bolted, pulling the handler into the arena! “Man down in the pen!” Barry yelled.

  The squealing pig ran into the bushes, where the raptors made quick work of it. Then they emerged into the open area, walking directly toward the young handler. He scrambled on the ground, backing away from the approaching Velociraptors.

  They moved closer.…

  Chapter Six

  Three armed Jurassic World troopers aimed their electric rifles at the Velociraptors. “Targeting raptors Blue, Charlie, Delta, Echo,” one of them barked.

  “Hold your fire!”

  Owen raced back onto the catwalk and dropped down between the raptors and the fallen handler.

  “Owen, no!” Barry cried.

  The troopers froze. They couldn’t believe what Owen had just done.

  Owen raised his hand and approached Blue. “Put twelve amps in these animals, and they’ll never trust me again!”

  Hoskins watched, fascinated.

  “Stand down, Blue,” Owen ordered. “Stand down, girl.” Delta snapped her jaws. “Hey! What did I say?”

  Blue snapped at Delta, bringing her back into line. Owen stepped forward, within inches of Blue, and signaled to the raptors with his other hand.

  They backed off.

  “Open the gate,” Owen said without taking his eyes off the Velociraptors.

  When the handlers hesitated, the guy who’d fallen in the pen yelled, “Open the gate!”

  The heavy gate opened. The young handler slid out beneath it. Owen slowly backed up and rolled under the gate as it fell shut.

  Owen coughed on the dust. Barry offered him his hand. “You’re crazy! You know that?”

  Once he was standing, Owen extended a hand to the young guy and lifted him off the ground. “You’re new, huh? Ever wonder why there was a job opening?”

  The young guy’s eyes widened.

  “And never stand with your back to the cage,” Owen added. The young guy looked over his shoulder and saw Charlie, the raptor, right on the other side of the bars, with her mouth open wide.

  In the park’s Gentle Giants Petting Zoo, Gray snapped pictures of a young Triceratops. Zach shook his head. “This place is for little kids.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Gray said. “Wanna go on the spinning dinosaur eggs?”

  Shaking his head, Zach looked over at Zara, talking on her cell phone. She was paying no attention to the brothers. Zach got a glint in his eye. “Scatter,” he said to Gray.

  “Huh?”

  “Run! Go!”

  The two brothers raced out of the petting zoo, ditching Zara. She was so busy talking on her phone, she didn’t even notice.

  On Main Street, the boys weaved through the crowd. Zach checked back over his shoulder. Gray spotted a massive paddock and ran toward it. “T. rex! T. rex! T. rex!”

  Inside the T. Rex Kingdom, the boys saw a grove of redwood trees and a live goat on a platform. They made their way into the fake fallen tree where tourists were waiting to see the T. rex.

  A park employee, high in a crow’s nest, cracked a flare and tossed it at the goat, hoping to attract the T. rex’s attention.

  It worked.

  Suddenly the enormous T. rex burst out of the grove of redwoods, grabbed the goat, and devoured it.

  Gray felt sorry for the goat…but he loved seeing the T. rex! This was more like it!

  Owen returned to the simple wooden bungalow he’d built in a corner of the lagoon. The bungalow was attached to a silver Airstream camper with solar panels.

  He got to work on his vintage motorcycle, trying to put Hoskins and his ideas about dinosaur weapons out of his mind.

  But his solitude didn’t last long. A Mercedes drove toward his place, kicking up dust. “What do they want now?” he wondered.

  Claire got out of the car. She strode across the uneven ground in her high heels. “Mr. Grady? Can I have a moment? I need you to come take a look at something.”

  Owen looked puzzled. “Why are you calling me Mr. Grady?”

  “Owen,” Claire said reluctantly. “We have a dinosaur—a new species we’ve made.”

  Owen raised his eyebrows. “You just went and made a new dinosaur?”

  “Yes. It’s kind of what we do here,” Claire said, exasperated. “The exhibit opens to the public in three weeks. Mr. Masrani wanted me to consult with you.”

  Owen kept working on his motorcycle. He tossed a loose bolt in Claire’s direction. She jumped away when it hit the ground near her. “Why me?” Owen asked.

  Claire was wondering the same thing, but she said, “I guess Mr. Masrani thinks since you’re able to control the raptors, you might have insight into this asset—”

  “Asset?” Owen said, sneering as he wiped grease off his hands. “You’re in charge of all these animals, but you don’t even act like they’re alive.”

  “I’m fully aware they’re alive,” Claire said coldly.

  “They’re not numbers on a spreadsheet,” Owen continued. “You may have made them in a test tube, but they don’t know that.”

  Claire didn’t like being lectured by this…animal trainer. She turned to walk back to her car but stumbled in her high heels. Owen caught her.

  “You might want to change your shirt,” she told him, wrinkling her nose. “They’re very sensitive to smell.”

  She pulled free of his grasp and strode back to her car. On the back of her suit were palm prints from Owen’s greasy hands.

  Shaking his head, Owen followed her.

  Chapter Seven

  From the T. rex paddock, Gray and Zach had hurried to see the Mosasaurus feeding show in the lagoon. They made their way past droves of tourists, looking for two empty seats in the bleachers along the water’s edge.

  Over a loudspeaker, an announcer was saying, “The Mosasaurus is thought to have hunted near the surface of the water, where it preyed on anything it could sink its teeth into—turtles, large fish, even smaller mosasaurs.”

  But the crowd wasn’t really listening. Their attention was fixed on a huge shark, suspended in the air on a cable. The shark carcass was moving into position over the center of the lagoon.

  The shark was a snack.

  “Okay, folks, let’s see if she’s still hungry after already eating today,” the announcer said in a cheerful voice. “She’s a little shy, so be nice and give her a hand when she comes out.”

  Zach stared at his phone, texting. Gray tapped his arm. “Zach. Mosasaurus. Zach!”

  An enormous swell formed in the water. The crowd rose to their feet.

  Zach looked at a photo of his girlfriend holding a “MISS YOU” sign.

  “ZACH!” Gray said insistently. “You’re missing it!”

  Zach looked up through a forest of raised cell phones just in time to see—

  The Mosasaurus exploded straight up out of the water! It grabbed the shark in its massive jaws!

  The crowd gasped. The huge aquatic reptile crashed back into the water, soaking the crowd with a gigantic wave! People screamed and laughed.

  Zach and Gray looked at each other in disbelief. Then they burst into laughter.

  “It was fifty-five feet long!” Gray shouted.

  BZZZZKK! The bleachers automatically lowered so the audience could see the Mosasaurus under the water, devouring the shark. It finished eating in only a few terrible gulps. With a whip of its tail, the beast disappeared into the dark-blue depths.

  “That,” Zach admitted, “was pretty good.”

  “It had eighty-eight teeth!” Gray said.

  Zach laughed. He stuck his phone in his pocket. “Want to see something else cool?”

  At the Indominus rex paddock, Owen stared out the window of the observation tower. �
��What’s this hybrid dinosaur made of?”

  “The base genome is T. rex,” Claire said. “The rest is classified.”

  “You made a new dinosaur, and you don’t even know what it is?”

  “I don’t know the exact genetic makeup. The lab delivers finished assets, and we show them to the public.” She pressed an intercom button. “Can we drop a steer, please?”

  Owen squinted out the window, still not seeing the Indominus. “How long has the animal been in here?”

  “All its life.”

  “Never seen anything outside these walls?”

  Claire raised one corner of her mouth. “We can’t exactly take it for a walk.”

  Owen looked up at the cable system lowering the steer into the Indominus’s pen. “And you feed her with that?”

  THUNK! The slab of raw beef dropped to the ground. No animal emerged.

  “Is there a problem with our methods?” Claire asked.

  Owen cocked his head. “Animals raised in isolation, without parents, aren’t always the most functional.”

  “Your raptors were born in captivity,” Claire countered.

  “With siblings. They learn social skills. And I imprint on them at birth. There’s trust. The only positive relationship this animal has is with that crane,” he said, pointing up. “At least she knows that means food.”

  Claire looked skeptical. “So she needs a friend? We should schedule playdates, that sort of thing?”

  Owen ran his hand along claw marks in the glass. “Probably not a good idea.”

  Claire tapped her fingers on the glass anxiously. “Where is it? We were just here. It was just here.”

  In a back corner, the paddock supervisor looked up from a magazine. He checked the infrared monitors but didn’t see the red outline of the Indominus. “Oh, boy…,” he muttered.

  Claire turned to him. “What? What are you saying?”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” the supervisor said. “The doors haven’t been opened in weeks.”

  Owen looked at the inside of the paddock door through the window. “Were those claw marks always there?”