Jurassic World Special Edition Junior Novelization Read online

  Claire looked. The door was scratched with long claw marks, as if something had climbed up the door. “You think it…? Oh, god!”

  She hurried toward the stairs, saying, “She has an implant in her neck. I can track it from the control room.” She raced downstairs to her car, leaving Owen behind.

  As she drove to the Control Center, Claire called on her cell phone. “We have an asset out of containment. Put Asset Containment Unit on alert. This is not a drill.”

  Chapter Eight

  Flanked by the supervisor and a worker, Owen entered the paddock through a security entrance in the wall. He passed a jagged, broken tree stump. “She knock that down?”

  “Yup,” the supervisor said. He pointed at another stump. “That one, too.”

  Owen ran his fingers over the claw marks in the door.

  “That door’s thirty feet high,” the supervisor said. “You really think she could have climbed out?”

  “Depends,” Owen said.

  “On what?”

  “On what kind of dinosaur they cooked up in that lab.”

  In the control room, the words “CONTAINMENT ALERT” flashed onto the biggest screen. “Wait, what?” Lowery asked, startled.

  His phone rang. When he answered it, he heard Claire yelling, “Lowery! Get me coordinates on the Indominus!”

  Lowery started tapping his touchscreen. Masrani entered, straight from lunch, wiping his mouth. “What’s happened?”

  Lowery checked the Indominus’s coordinates, beamed from its electronic implant. “It’s still in the cage.”

  “That’s impossible,” Claire said over the phone. “I was just there.”

  “I’m telling you, she’s in the cage,” Lowery insisted. He put a video feed from the Indominus paddock up on the screen. It showed Owen, the supervisor, and the worker. No Indominus. “Wait. There’s people in there.”

  “Get them out!” Claire yelled. “Now!”

  Vivian tapped her headset. “Paddock Eleven, this is Control. You need to evacuate the containment area.”

  In the paddock, Vivian’s voice came over the supervisor’s walkie-talkie. “Paddock Eleven, do you copy?”

  Owen, studying the claw marks, looked back over his shoulder at the supervisor. His eyes widened, realizing what Vivian meant.

  But the supervisor didn’t. He spoke into his walkie-talkie. “What’s the problem?”

  “It’s in the cage!” Vivian said. “It’s in there with you!”

  The three men started to run back toward the security entrance in the wall. THWUUUMMP! A massive white foot slammed down, blocking the way!

  The supervisor and Owen ran toward the main door. But a clawed hand snatched the third man off the ground!

  Owen looked up at the huge Indominus rex, gulping down the worker, boots sticking out of her jaws.

  The supervisor opened the big door to escape.

  Masrani, Lowery, and Vivian watched the control room screen in horror as the Indominus rex snapped its jaws in the air and ran toward the big open door.

  “Close the door!” Masrani cried.

  “You can’t lock them in there with that thing!” Lowery protested.

  “Close it now!” Claire yelled over her phone.

  At the Indominus’s paddock, the massive steel door started to slide shut. Owen ran for it and slipped through.

  CLANK! Before the doors could shut, the Indominus wedged itself into the gap. The machinery controlling the door strained to close it.

  But with a huge push, the Indominus squeezed through the opening.

  The beast was outside its cage. Free!

  Owen slid under an excavator. He watched in silence as the Indominus looked around, sniffing the air.

  The paddock supervisor crouched behind a pickup truck, praying the beast would leave him alone.

  WHAM! The Indominus flipped the truck over like it was just a toy. “No…no!” the supervisor gasped.

  The dinosaur grabbed the man with its long teeth, tossed him in the air, and chomped down on him. The air was filled with the sickening sound of snapping bones.

  And she was still hungry. Now that she was free, she wanted to hunt. She sniffed the air, and then whipped her head around, staring right at Owen.

  He quickly pulled out his knife, cut the excavator’s fuel line, and poured gasoline all over himself.

  The Indominus lowered her head until her nostrils were only two feet from Owen. She sniffed again…and quickly reared her head back at the smell of the gasoline.

  The mighty beast turned and wandered away into the jungle. Owen exhaled, happy to be alive.

  Claire entered the control room. Everyone stared at her, stunned. On their screens, they’d just seen two of their fellow employees devoured by the Indominus rex.

  “Okay,” Claire said. “Everyone remain calm. It can’t get far. Its implant will shock it if it gets too close to a perimeter fence.”

  Lowery was staring at a screen. “It’s moving. Fast.”

  Vivian spoke into her headset. “This is Control. Put out a park-wide alert for—”

  “Hang up that phone,” Masrani ordered.

  Vivian looked at him, and then spoke again. “Uh, cancel that. Getting new information now. Everything’s fine.” She looked at Masrani for an explanation. Why didn’t he want her to put out a park-wide alert? That beast was out there, running loose!

  “Let Asset Containment capture it quietly,” Masrani said. “The very existence of this park is predicated on our ability to handle incidents like this. It was an eventuality.”

  Lowery snorted. “You should put that in the brochure: ‘Jurassic World: Eventually one of those things is gonna eat somebody.’ ”

  Masrani glared at him.

  “That paddock is four miles from the closest attraction,” Claire said. “Asset Containment can handle this. No one else is going to get…” She hesitated.

  “Eaten,” Lowery said, finishing her sentence for her.

  Chapter Nine

  In the security barracks, an alarm blared as the Asset Containment Unit (ACU) prepared to go after the Indominus. Eight men in navy blue jumpsuits with ACU arm patches put on claw-proof vests and grabbed electric rifles.

  Captain Hamada, a former SWAT team leader for the Tokyo police, twisted the handle on an electric spear. Blue sparks crackled from the tip.

  Outside the Velociraptor research stables, Barry guided two handlers as they used long poles to fasten leather claw guards over Delta’s talons. Delta didn’t seem to like the claw guards, so Barry was trying to keep her calm.

  “Easy, Delta,” he said in his native French. “Easy now, girl.”

  Hoskins stood behind Barry, observing. “How fast can they run?”

  “Fifty miles per hour. Sixty when they’re hungry.”

  Delta flailed her clawed arm. Hoskins was startled, but the handlers had her under control. Barry’s phone buzzed. He looked serious as he read the text.

  “Code Nineteen up north. They say we lost two guys.”

  “What’s a Code Nineteen?” Hoskins asked.

  “Asset out of containment,” Barry explained. “That new dinosaur—the big one.” He shook his head. “These people, they never learn.”

  Hoskins eyed the raptors, thinking. “They’re gonna learn all kinds of things about their asset now.”

  He walked away into the shadows, dialing his phone. “It’s me. Looks like we may have an opportunity.”

  Gray and Zach were riding the monorail. They passed over Gallimimus Valley. Below them, tourists in a safari Jeep laughed as a herd of Gallimimus ran alongside them.

  Gray was watching them through the monorail window, thinking that looked like fun. Then he spotted something. On the other side of the valley, an ACU transport vehicle raced toward an unknown destination.

  Along a shaded river, Apatosauruses grazed, munching on the vegetation. Park guests on the Cretaceous Cruise paddled by in glass-enclosed kayaks.

  VROOM! Behind the grazing dino
saurs, the ACU transport zoomed by, leaving a trail of dust. It was tracking the signal from the Indominus’s electronic implant. The men inside were determined to stop the Indominus before it got anywhere near these park visitors.

  Inside the control room, Claire, Masrani, and the control team employees watched the video feeds from the ACU transport vehicle’s cameras. “Such bravery in the face of danger,” Masrani said. “I’d go with them if I could.”

  Lowery shot Masrani a doubtful look.

  Just outside the room, a security guard called, “Sir? Sir! I need to see a badge!”

  Owen burst in the room, ignoring the security guard. “What happened back there?” he demanded.

  “You can’t be in here—” Claire started to say.

  “You have thermal cameras all over that paddock,” Owen interrupted. “It couldn’t just disappear.”

  “It must have been some kind of”—Claire searched for an explanation—“technical malfunction.”

  Owen couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Technical malfunction! Were you even watching? She marked up that wall as a distraction. She wanted us to think she’d escaped!”

  Claire shook her head. “This is an animal we’re talking about.”

  “An intelligent animal,” Owen insisted.

  “The ACU team is four hundred meters from the source of the beacon—the implant,” Vivian said. She wanted to say, “They’ve almost reached the monster,” but that didn’t sound professional.

  Owen looked at the monitors and saw the ACU troopers carrying electric rifles and shock sticks. “You’re going after it with tasers?”

  “We have twenty-six million dollars invested in that asset,” Masrani said. “We can’t just kill it.”

  “They’re right on top of it,” Lowery said, studying a screen with satellite imagery.

  Owen thought, Those men are all going to die. He’d seen what the Indominus could do. “Call them off,” he said. “Now!”

  “You are not in control here!” Claire snapped.

  Owen watched the monitor, shaking his head, frowning. When it came to the hybrid dinosaur, it seemed no one was in control.…

  Chapter Ten

  The ACU transport vehicle rolled up to a shallow stream flowing through the jungle. The troopers got out, coordinating their movements. They were tense.

  Moving in formation, they approached the stream. The guys in front held electric spears. The guys behind them had non-lethal electric rifles.

  There was no sign of life anywhere.

  Hamada spotted something lying on a rock. Something bloody. He nudged it with his foot.

  It was the tracking device, no longer implanted in the Indominus.

  The bloody implant appeared on the screen in the control room as Hamada held it up to his wrist camera. His voice came over the room’s speakers. “Blood’s not clotted yet. She’s close.”

  Masrani squinted at the big screen. “What is that?”

  “Her tracking implant,” Owen said. “She clawed it out.”

  Claire looked confused. “How would it know to do that?”

  Owen walked closer to the screen. “She remembered where they put it in.”

  Back at the riverbed, Hamada felt something warm on his hand.

  A drop of blood.

  It ran down one side of his hand. Another drop fell beside it, but this one ran down the other side of his hand. He noticed the other ACU troopers. They looked confused. Then they looked terrified.

  Something huge was moving. Among the green leaves and vines of the jungle, it was becoming visible. Right next to them.

  The Indominus.

  “It can camouflage!” Hamada shouted into his headset as he backed away.

  FWOM! The Indominus snatched Hamada off the ground, gripping him tightly in its long claws. “Open fire!” he yelled. “Take it down!”

  The troopers fired electric cartridges. One lodged in the dinosaur’s leg, sending a powerful shock pulsing through her body.

  It only made her angrier.

  The Indominus hurled Hamada to the ground, stomped on him, and swiped another trooper with her tail. The troopers fired nets at her, but she easily tore them off and chomped another trooper.

  The remaining troopers picked up their fallen comrades and stumbled back toward the vehicle. One of them pulled out a real weapon and fired live ammo at the Indominus. The bullets pinged off the bony plates on her back as she turned and raced into the jungle.

  Claire, Owen, and Masrani watched the heart monitors of the fallen troopers flatline. They stood stock-still, silent, appalled by what had happened.

  “God, what have we done?” Masrani finally said in a low voice.

  Owen looked up at the huge screen tracking every warm body in the park. There were thousands of them. “Evacuate the island.”

  “I can’t,” Claire said. “We’d never reopen.”

  Owen turned to her, staring in disbelief. “You made a genetic hybrid and raised it in captivity. She’s seeing all this for the first time. She doesn’t know what she is. She’ll probably kill anything that moves.”

  Now it was Masrani’s turn for disbelief. “You think the animal is contemplating its own existence?”

  “She’s learning where she fits into the food chain,” Owen said. “I’m not sure you want her to figure it out.” He stepped forward, staring at the map of the park with its thousands of visitors. “Asset Containment can use live ammo in an emergency. There’s a minigun in the armory. Send up a chopper. Use infrared to find her.”

  Claire shook her head. “There are families here. I’m not going to turn this place into a war zone.”

  “You already have,” Owen said.

  “Mr. Grady,” Claire said, trying to control her anger, “if you’re not going to help, there’s no reason for you to be in here.”

  Owen glared at Claire. “I don’t need to be in here to help.” He turned and stomped out, pausing next to Masrani along the way. “I’d have a word with the guys in your lab,” he said in a low voice. “That thing out there. That’s not a dinosaur.”

  Masrani took this in, deeply affected.

  Claire watched Owen go. A small part of her wished he would stay. She turned back to the room, all eyes on her. “What’s the live count?” This was the phrase they used for the number of guests currently in the park.

  Lowery tapped his keyboard. “It’s 20,857.”

  Claire looked at her boss. “I have to close everything north of the resort.”

  Masrani nodded. He didn’t like it, but had no choice.

  Claire addressed everyone in the control room. “Okay, people, this is a Phase One, real world. Bring everyone in.”

  They all turned to their headsets, phones, and keyboards, getting to work, sending out alerts, just as they’d practiced. Every person on the island who was north of the resort area had to be brought into the resort. Immediately.

  Including Gray and Zach…

  Chapter Eleven

  The two brothers were standing in the VIP line waiting to get in a gyrosphere. The gyrospheres looked like giant hamster balls—plexiglass globes you could sit in, always staying upright while they spun through the countryside, passing close to the dinosaurs.

  “What they didn’t know at the time,” Gray said, “is the soft tissue is preserved because the iron in the dinosaurs’ blood generates free radicals.”

  Zach wasn’t really listening to his little brother’s lecture on the preservation of DNA. He was looking around at the other guests in line—people from all over the world.

  “And those free radicals are highly reactive,” Gray continued, oblivious of his brother’s inattention, “so the proteins and cell membranes get all twisted up and act as a natural preservative. DNA can survive for millennia that way.”

  Zach noticed the teenage girl he’d seen on the ferry. She was just ahead of them, climbing into a gyrosphere with her friend. She glanced at him and smiled. He smiled back.

  “So now even i
f the amber mines dry up,” Gray chattered on, “they’ll still have bones to—”

  “Shh,” Zach hissed. “Shut up.”

  Gray turned to see what his brother was looking at. Girls. He should have known. “I thought things would be different without your dumb girlfriend around.”

  “Look, you don’t get it, but you’ll understand one day.”

  “No, explain it,” Gray insisted. “What can you do with those girls that you can’t do with me?”

  The girls overheard that and giggled. Zach gritted his teeth. “Thanks, man.”

  “You’re welcome,” Gray said politely.

  The ride operator motioned the two boys forward. “Okay, fellas. You ready?” Zach led Gray into the gyrosphere behind the one with the two girls just as their ball left the station. The operator shut the door. “Enjoy the ride,” he said automatically.

  The sphere lurched forward and rolled away from the platform on a track leading into the open grassland.

  A phone rang. The ride operator held the next sphere back and answered it. “Hello.” He seemed stunned by what he heard. “Seriously?”

  He hung up and opened his employee handbook. He found the right page and started reading out loud. “Sorry, folks, ride’s closed. Everyone”—he turned the page—“return to the monorail and proceed to a designated safety area.”

  The visitors in line were not at all happy with this announcement. One said in Spanish, “I waited in line with three kids for an hour!” Another yelled in Chinese, “Do you know how much we paid for this trip?”

  The ride operator held both hands up. “Come on, guys. I just work here.”

  Inside their gyrosphere, Zach put his hand on the joystick, ready to drive. A screen lit up with an instructional video of a funny man dressed in a khaki safari outfit.

  “Oh, hello,” he said. “I was just doing a little predator tracking. Hobby of mine. I bet you’re wondering how to drive this thing. Maybe I can help.”