“You mean, find it on the video?” She shrugged. “I can try.”
“Try,” Thorne said. He glanced at Levine, who was across the room, pounding on the walls again. He picked up the radio.
“Sarah? It’s Doc.”
And the radio crackled. “Doc? I’ve had to stop for a minute.”
“Why?” Thorne said.
Sarah Harding was stopped on the ridge road. Fifty yards ahead, she saw the tyrannosaur, going down the road away from her. She could see that he had Dodgson in his mouth. And somehow, Dodgson was still alive. His body was still moving. She thought she could hear him scream.
She was surprised to find she had no feeling about him at all. She watched dispassionately as the tyrannosaur left the road, and headed off down a slope, back into the jungle.
Sarah started the car, and drove cautiously forward.
At the computer console, Kelly flicked through video images, one after another, until finally she found it: a wooden dock, enclosed inside a shed or a boathouse, open to the air at the far end. The interior of the boathouse looked in pretty good shape; there weren’t a lot of vines and ferns growing over things. She saw a powerboat tied up, rocking against the dock. She saw three oil drums to one side. And out the back of the boathouse there was open water, and sunlight; it looked like a river.
“What do you think?” she said to Thorne.
“I think it’s worth a try,” he said, looking over her shoulder. “But where is it? Can you find a map?”
“Maybe,” she said. She flicked the keys, and managed to get back to the main screen, with its perplexing icons.
Arby awoke, yawned, and came over to look at what she was doing. “Nice graphics. You logged on, huh?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I did. But I’m having a little trouble figuring it out.”
Levine was pacing, staring out the windows. “This is all well and good,” he said, “but it is getting brighter out there by the minute. Don’t you understand? We need a way out of here. This building is single-wall construction. It’s fine for the tropics, but it’s basically a shack.”
“It’ll do,” Thorne said.
“For three minutes, maybe. I mean, look at this,” Levine said. He walked to the door, rapped it with his knuckles. “This door is just—”
With a crash, the wood splintered around the lock, and the door swung open. Levine was thrown aside, landing hard on the floor.
A raptor stood hissing in the doorway.
A Way Out
Sitting at the console, Kelly was frozen in terror. She watched as Thorne ran forward from the side, throwing the full weight of his body against the door, slamming it hard against the raptor. Startled, the animal was knocked back. The door closed on its clawed hand. Thorne leaned against the door. On the other side, the animal snarled and pounded.
“Help me!” Thorne shouted. Levine scrambled to his feet and ran forward, adding his weight.
“I told you!” Levine shouted.
Suddenly there were raptors all around the store. Snarling, they threw themselves at the windows, denting the steel bars, pushing them in toward the glass. They slammed against the wooden walls, knocking down shelves, sending cans and bottles clattering to the floor. In several places, the wood began to splinter on the walls.
Levine looked back at her: “Find a way out of here!”
Kelly stared. The computer was forgotten.
“Come on, Kel,” Arby said. “Concentrate.”
She turned back to the screen, unsure what to do. She clicked on the cross in the left corner. Nothing happened. She clicked on the upper-left circle. Suddenly, icons began to print out rapidly, filling the screen.
“Don’t worry, there must be a key to explain it,” Arby said. “We just need to know what—”
But Kelly was not listening, she was pressing more buttons and moving the cursor, already trying to get something to happen, to get a help screen, something. Anything.
Suddenly, the whole screen began to twist, to distort.
“What did you do?” Arby said, in alarm.
Kelly was sweating. “I don’t know,” she said. She pulled her hands away from the keyboard.
“It’s worse,” Arby said. “You made it worse.”
The screen continued to squeeze together, the icons shifting, distorting slowly as they watched.
“Come on, kids!” Levine shouted.
“We’re trying!” Kelly said.
Arby said, “It’s becoming a cube.”
Thorne pushed the big glass-walled refrigerator in front of the door. The raptor slammed against the metal, rattling the cans inside.
“Where are the guns?” Levine said.
“Sarah has three in her car.”
“Great.” At the windows, some of the bars were now so deeply dented that they broke the glass. Along the right-hand wall, the wood was splintering, tearing open big gaps.
“We have to get out of here,” Levine shouted at Kelly. “We have to find a way!” He ran to the rear of the store, to the bathrooms. But a moment later he returned. “They’re back there, too!”
It was happening fast, all around them.
On the screen, she now saw a rotating cube, turning in space. Kelly didn’t know how to stop it.
“Come on, Kel,” Arby said, peering at her through swollen eyes. “You can do it. Concentrate. Come on.”
Everyone in the room was shouting. Kelly stared at the cube on the screen, feeling hopeless and lost. She didn’t know what she was doing any more. She didn’t know why she was there. She didn’t know what the point of anything was. Why wasn’t Sarah here?
Standing beside her, Arby said, “Come on. Do the icons one at a time, Kel. You can do it. Come on. Stay with it. Focus.”
But she couldn’t focus. She couldn’t click on the icons, they were rotating too fast on the screen. There must be parallel processors to handle all the graphics. She just stared at it. She found herself thinking of all sorts of things—thoughts that just came unbidden into her mind.
The cord under the desk.
Hard-wired.
Lots of graphics.
Sarah talking to her in the trailer.
“Come on, Kel. You have to do this now. Find a way out.”
In the trailer, Sarah said: Most of what people tell you will be wrong.
“It’s important, Kel,” Arby said. He was trembling as he stood beside her. She knew he concentrated on computers as a way to block things out. As a way to—
The wall splintered wide, an eight-inch plank cracking inward, and a raptor stuck his head through, snarling, snapping his jaws.
She kept thinking of the cord under the desk. The cord under the desk. Her legs had kicked the cord under the desk.
The cord under the desk.
Arby said, “It’s important.”
And then it hit her.
“No,” she said to him. “It’s not important.” And she dropped off th
e seat, crawling down under the desk to look.
“What are you doing?” Arby screamed.
But already Kelly had her answer. She saw the cable from the computer going down into the floor, through a neat hole. She saw a seam in the wood. Her fingers scrabbled at the floor, pulling at it. And suddenly the panel came away in her hands. She looked down. Darkness.
Yes.
There was a crawlspace. No, more. A tunnel.
She shouted, “Here!”
The refrigerator fell forward. The raptors crashed through the front door. From the sides, other animals tore through the walls, knocking over the display cases. The raptors sprang into the room, snarling and ducking. They found the bundle of Arby’s wet clothes and snapped at them, ripping them apart in fury.
They moved quickly, hunting.
But the people were gone.
Escape
Kelly was in the lead, holding a flashlight. They moved, single file, along damp concrete walls. They were in a tunnel four feet square, with flat metal racks of cables along the left side. Water and gas pipes ran near the ceiling. The tunnel smelled moldy. She heard the squeak of rats.
They came to a Y-junction. She looked both ways. To the right was a long straight passageway, going into darkness. It probably led to the laboratory, she thought. To the left was a much shorter section of tunnel, with stairs at the end.
She went left.
She crawled up through a narrow concrete shaft, and pushed open a wooden trapdoor at the top. She found herself in a small utility building, surrounded by cables and rusted pipes. Sunlight streamed in through broken windows. The others climbed up beside her.
She looked out the window, and saw Sarah Harding driving down the hill toward them.