Chapter Text
He did it. He actually did it.
Ben pushed his hair off his forehead and jumped up from his seat at the monorail control panel. The confusing, unlabelled system lit up - a beacon in the darkness and Ben was giddy.
Take that Jurassic World. Take that everyone who doubted him. Take that stupid flying pteranodons for ruining their perfect escape plan - Ben was the boss and he had saved them all.
It was almost unbelievable. Maybe his mom was right and he had faced his fears by coming on this trip. They all saw him as the weak one who couldn’t do anything, then he had climbed out of a freaking train car, while dinosaurs were trying to kill him, and miraculously found the right button to change the tracks. That was like... something only action movie heroes do. Not small wimpy kids who can barely run a hundred meters without getting tired out!
Now, they were going to get home and he could leave this whole place behind him.
Ben, still over the moon with himself and panting heavily, opened the door to the carriage with his friends in it. He was exhausted and certainly wouldn’t do anything like that again if he could help it, so he rested his arms against either side of the door.
They all whooped and cheered, and he was having a hard time believing it was for him. They were happy for him.
He did it!
“Go, Ben!” Brooklynn yelled, pumping her fist in the air.
“I can’t believe you actually did that,” Darius said. Ben snorted - he couldn’t believe it himself and he had been there.
Bumpy snuggled up to his feet. Ben happily bent down and gave her all the cuddles she needed. He rubbed her perfect imperfections and kissed her lightly on the top of her head.
It was hard to describe the elation in his body. Like bottled stars were being let loose and exploding, sending waves of light gliding through him. His fingertips buzzed. The muscles around his mouth ached from smiling so hard. Each call of his name was an electrifying shock of triumph.
“You did it,” Kenji said, pushing past the rest of his friends while they cheered his name. “You’re little scrawny ass actually saved us all.” Kenji placed his hands on Ben’s shoulder and for once he didn’t bother trying to stop his cheeks from flaring up.
They were all so proud of him
He did it.
He did i-
Kenji noticed the threat first. His arms flew around Ben’s head and he tried to push him down to the ground. Ben’s heart leaped into his throat and the world crawled to a stop.
Crash!
Glass shattered around them. Kenji held him tighter. Ben watched as claws stretched out in front of him. He clung to Kenji harder. His friend’s mouths fell open. His eyes stayed wide.
Sharp talons bit onto his side and Ben screamed. Kenji screamed. Then, his friends screamed. Kenji and Ben were blasted into the air, still tangled in each other’s arms, while the bird freaks fought over them.
One moment, his feet had been stable on the ground, and the next, he was being flown through gusts of wind and sharp pickets of glass. The night was suffocating, hanging heavy in his lungs. Squawking quickly became his least favorite sound and it drilled endlessly into his temple. Screams scrambled, claws slashed, Kenji clung to his chest nearly as hard as the birds did his legs.
“Guys!” Darius yelled, reaching out to hold both of them. Ben grabbed at his hand, pushing his fingers the farthest they would go, and—
he missed.
He missed.
“Hold on!” Kenji cried out. “Hold on, Ben.”
Ben couldn’t respond with much more than a shriek, wrenching Kenji close to him. The monorail chugged along endlessly, drifting far away. The boys were taken high, and then low, and then high again. They never stopped wailing. Leaves tickled his feet like mini daggers and the wind roared in his ears.
Why had he decided to come here? This was not worth it. One hundred percent Not Worth It.
Then, he was falling.
Falling and falling.
He crashed into a tree branch and Kenji spiraled out of his grasp. Eyesight fading, his stomach plummeted and Kenji dropped ahead of him.
He was falling.
Pain richochleid through him.
The world blacked sharply.
…
Darius blinked.
One moment they were there and the next…
Crumbling to his knees, he left his hand reaching out into the darkness. His breath was trembling and Brooklynn came to sit next to him. He heard her sniffle and Sammy sobbed behind him.
They were right there.
The monorail thundered along. Scratches on the tracks hissed. Trees drifted past, the wind blowing the leaves along in a swirl. Everything was calm. It shouldn’t have been this calm.
“Are they?” Brooklyn asked, looking down at the moving floor beneath them.
“They’re gone. They’re… gone,” Yaz stammered.
“No, they can’t be,” Sammy said, running up to the broken window. “They can’t be gone!” She cried. Yaz touched her shoulder, risking consoling the crying girl. Darius risked a glance up, his eyes filling with misty tears.
What he saw was worse. Wasn't that gate on the north side of the park? And... hadn't they already passed that? They were—
“We’re going back,” he muttered. It hit him. Shoot, shoot shoot, not only had they lost Ben and Kenji, but they weren’t even going to get off the island themselves. “The monorails going back!”
Screeching, the tracks turned sharply and Darius was thrown into a metal leg of a chair. Something must have happened when Ben had saved them and now they were getting further and further away from their salvation. Why did everything have to keep going wrong? He pulled himself up by the edge of the plastic seat.
“What do you mean going back?” Brooklynn asked, hugging herself and moving closer to his side.
“When we switched tracks we got on one heading north,” he explained, running to the control panel. There had to be something, anything, there that could help them. “We’re not heading towards the south docks, we’re heading away from them!”
He fumbled at the buttons. They were high-tech and fancy but when he pushed them nothing happened. They were just showy, and cheap, and a complete hoax - just like everything else in this stupid park. “Doesn’t anything here work?”
So, it wouldn’t stop. There was no way any of these buttons did anything and if they did it would be too late. They had to find a way down. “We have to get off this monorail now!”
Brooklynn grunted and scanned the horizon. “T-the track dips down up ahead,” she said. “We could jump there?”
Darius quickly spotted what she was talking about. It was a small dip, maybe only a couple of feet, but it would have to do. Unfortunately, there was no other way.
“We can’t. It’s too far to jump!” Yaz argued but Darius knew better.
“It’s the only way,” he said. The drop was rapidly approaching and no one argued any further, lining up like death row inmates at the edge. Brooklynn slipped her hand into his and he hoped she didn’t mind him pushing all his fears into the little squeeze he gave it.
“One,” he said, taking a deep breath. Yaz creaked her neck and Sammy gazed down. “Two.” Bumpy lined herself up with them. “Three.” This was the only way if they wanted to get home.
He launched himself out of the moving monorail, his stomach tying itself in knots while gravity took him. What was he doing? What was he doing? What was he doing? Brooklynn’s hand stayed pressed in his even as they approached branches.
One knocked him in the face. Another thwacked his knee. Shin, arm, shin again, neck, foot, cheek. Brooklynn yelped beside him and it was only then, falling between the brambles that he realized Sammy and Yaz weren't around. Their yelps echoed further away. Elbow, face, head, head, head.
Darius felt like a rag doll. At least he was losing velocity? Or was he already on the ground? His head knocked, his stomach was still falling, and the trees were dancing.
Face first in the mush, he clawed his hands forward. Body throbbing, nails clenched down into the muck. Brooklynn groaned next to him and his nose was filled with the murky smell of iron.
“D-Darius?”
He opened his mouth but no words formed, escaping him right at the tip of his tongue. His eyelids forced closed no matter how much he protested. The endless running was slowly catching up to him.
“Last ferry departs in 60 minutes.”
They could ma— Come on Darius stay awake. If he just found Sammy and Yaz, then the four of them cou— they c—
His eyes shut.
…
Sammy swiped hair out of her eyes. She had rolled against a tree, gaining a couple scratches and cuts along the way but at this point that seemed like the least of her concerns. The crickets buzzed around her but there was no sign of anyone but Yaz.
Had they really come this far just to be split up at the very last moment?
She couldn’t think about that. Right now, she had to worry about Yaz being okay. The fall could have been really bad for her leg or she could be injured even worse. Then they had to find another way to get to those docks because Sammy was not being stranded on this stupid island.
“Yaz!” She yelled, running towards her friend. She had got cold feet when jumping off the monorail and now they were separated. Who knows how much dangerous jungle between them all? “Yasmina!”
Yaz rolled over onto her side, making pained groaning sounds that Sammy did not like one bit. Why did everything have to keep going wrong? Suddenly, she sat up, hands flying to her ankle and hissing.
“Are you okay?” Sammy asked, getting down on her hands and knees. “You look like you’re in a lot of pain.”
“My leg is fine,” Yaz said. “I’ll live with it. But other than that, no - I’m not okay. A-are any of us okay? Kenji and Ben may have died and now we’re separated from Brooklynn and Darius with less than an hour to get off this stupid island!”
They had to make it right? She couldn’t just get left behind in this place while everything crumbled around them. Sammy had no idea how to survive on her own, she had never even stayed a single night away from home before Camp Cretaceous.
Insects scattered around her face and Sammy couldn’t tell one tree from another. The tropical night was shockingly cold. Either that or the loneliness of being left behind was starting to kick in. Who knew what was happening to Ben and Kenji? And maybe Darius and Brooklynn had been badly injured in the fall!
“Attention. All park goers must report to the south ferry docks for immediate evacuation,” the ominous Jurassic World voice hollered throughout the island. “Last ferry departs in 60 minutes.” Sammy felt her throat close off and her hands begin to shake.
They had been so close but, like everything, it was starting to go terribly wrong.
“We won’t make it,” Yaz said, defeatedly tracing swirls in the dirt. “And even if we do, who knows if the others will.”
“Don’t say that,” Sammy said, digging her nails into her palms. “We’re all going to make it out of here. And if they don’t then we can make sure they come back for them.”
“I can barely walk an—“
“Then let me help you,” Sammy offered, reaching for her.
Yaz’s eyes narrowed and she swatted Sammy away like a fly, pushing herself up. “If we do get out of here then I’m certainly not doing it with a traitor like you.”
“Last ferry departs in 60 minutes.”
…
Brooklynn had done dangerous things before, been injured before, but never had anything hurt like her arm burned. Everything from her elbow to her shoulder and even further felt like it was about to snap off.
She wanted to cry out but she kept her mouth shut. There were still dinosaurs around everywhere and she didn’t want to lure them right to her, especially if she was injured. The best thing to do was to assess the wound and make sure she didn’t bleed to death.
It was hard to focus on anything. It was hard not to start hyperventilating and just panic, feeling her chest clench in. She tried moving her arm and it took too much effort just to get it to twitch. Maybe it was broken or something?
She had jumped with Darius. He must have been there somewhere. “D-Darius!” She yelled, as loud as she was willing to go without waking some slumbering beast. There was no response. Shit! What if he was injured worse than her? “Darius are you out there?”
All she could see were the stars. They were pretty, sure, but they weren’t helping anyone sitting up in the sky doing nothing. Head spinning, sitting up seemed like an impossible task. So, she settled for twisting her head to the side.
A gash ran down the length of her upper right arm. It was hollow and bits of tree branch lined the fleshy outline. One pine needle punctured the wound itself, close to her elbow. Liquid bubbled up from it, pooling in small side cuts. Instantly, the poignant smell of blood in the air became obvious.
“Shit, shit, shit!” She moaned to herself, gagging a couple of times. It would be worse in the light when the gore would be made clearer. It would also be worse the longer she left it. Because the longer she left it the more chance there would be of it getting really badly infected. “Darius,” she whimpered.
Someone, hopefully, Darius, coughed and she tried calling out to him again. “Darius, I really need your help!”
“B-Brooklynn is that you?” He mumbled.
“Yes, it’s me, and I really need you to help me!.” She didn’t want him to shut down before he even had a chance to think straight but this was something to panic about.
Shit.
“What’s wrong?” He asked, his voice getting less drowsy and slowly creeping closer. “Are you hu—“ Well that answered that question. “Oh my goodness… did that happen when we were falling or was it a dinosaur…”
“It doesn’t matter,” she snapped. “I can’t move right now. It’s only going to get it worse and I need you— I need you to help me clear the blood and put pressure on the wound. Then maybe we might have just enough time to make it to the docks.” Brooklynn was lying - there was no way they were making it to the dock in her current state and if he was thinking clearly Darius would know that too but right now he clearly wasn’t and she needed to do what she could to make sure he was okay.
“What do I need?”
“Is there any water nearby, preferably fresh? It needs to be washed.” She could feel the pain already but it needed to be done. It was step one on any medical evaluation, clean the wound then put pressure on it to stop the bleeding.
“There might be a small stream around here somewhere but I don’t know how long it will take to find. I don’t want to leave you alone for too long.”
“Step two then. Stop the bleeding. Get a clean looking leaf or something and put pressure on it until it stops bleeding. While you’re at it, maybe grab a rock I can rest it on to keep it above my heart.”
“You’re good at this,” Darius said, moving in and out of her vision, reaching high and low. He seemed to only be coming out of a painful stupor himself and she regretted not being able to help him feel better. No Brooklynn - this was an emergency. “How did you learn to do this again?”
“I’ve done like a million safety tests. How to deal with injuries is always on the list. I never thought I’d need to actually use it but here we are.”
“Sometimes I forget you’ve done like really crazy stuff,” Darius said. He pushed the rock underarm and it convulsed, sending pained shivers, like waves, through the rest of her body. His eyebrows tied themselves together and he clenched his teeth together. “This might hurt,” he warned. Brooklynn rolled her head to the other side, childishly pretending that if she couldn’t see it happening then she couldn’t feel it.
Shit. Fuck. Shit. Fuck. All she wanted to do was just chop the whole arm off already and be done with it. It was like someone was taking a knife and grinding it into the wound, sending what felt like bits of her arm spewing out around her. She screamed. Maybe it was a terrible decision. She screamed anyway. Fuck!
Darius fumbled wildly, chatting himself and working rapidly. “I’m sorry, I’m super sorry."
“No problem,” she gasped. “It’s much better than the alternative.”
“And what would that be?” He asked, loosely tying together some leaves to form a bandage.
“Letting it get bad so I get sick and die. Before modern medicine people used to die from this kind of injury all the time.”
“And we aren’t getting back to modern medicine anytime soon are we?”
“No,” she admitted, dodging his eyes. “We’re stranded.”
…
Yaz was a simmering bubble of anger. Not all of it was directed at the girl freaking out in front of her but a lot of it was. She had sabotaged their only way to contact for help by taking Brooklynn’s phone and while the others seemed to have forgiven her, the others also weren’t here. They were gone, lost, and that was because they couldn’t get help from anyone.
If they had a way to contact help then Kenji and Ben wouldn’t have been taken off the monorail and they wouldn’t be lost in the middle of nowhere. Oh, and she wouldn’t have a leg that was currently on the brink of exploding into a million tiny shards.
So, don’t mind her if she was a little bit stressed.
“Yaz, I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry,” Sammy tried explaining. “I know what I did was wrong and I hurt so many people by doing it. But I promise I never meant anything by it and I’m going to do my best to make it up to you.”
“Well, we missed the boat for that by quite a bit. Neither of us will be fast enough to make it to those boats on time and we don’t even know where we are.”
“Well, we have to try.”
“All that’s going to happen is we’ll waste our energy and just give ourselves up to die faster,” Yaz said. “How long without Darius can we go before a dinosaur on the loose gets us. What if Toro comes back or that Indominus Rex thing? And neither of us has a map or basically any knowledge of the park at all. I’m only here because I can run fast, not that I can do that anymore, and you’re only here because you’re a traitor!”
She slumped over, letting some of the tears that she had forced inwards from Ben and Kenji’s death slip out. What were they supposed to do in this situation? Clearly, no one around them even cared about some random kids who happened to get stuck in the middle of whatever was going on. They would just be added to some death toll somewhere, left to rot on an island.
“Yaz I—“
“And now the two of us are all alone. Ben and Kenji are gone. They’re dead, and there’s nothing, nothing, we can do about it. Brooklynn and Darius could be dead as well. We could be the only ones left and even then we won’t last much longer.” Yaz dragged her good leg up to her chest and buried her head. Back starting to shake, she choked on sobs convulsing in her throat. “face it. It’s hopeless.”
“No,” Sammy said. Yaz caught her resisting putting a hand on her good leg. “It’s not over until I say it is and I say that we still have some fight left in us. Yaz, we still have to try. How do you know that the others are gone? You don’t so we have to believe that they are out there somewhere and that someone is going to come back for us eventually.” She stood up, hands triumphantly on her hips. “For now I’m going to say sorry one more time and you need to accept that we are going to have t work together.”
Yaz peeped her eyes out of her endless, dark, cavern. Sammy was crying but it didn’t show in her rock hard voice. Tenuously, she held her breath and her stance. “Are you with me?”
Yaz wiped her eyes. “Fine,” she said. “But only until we find a way off this island and then... I never want to see your face again.”
Sammy clearly didn’t mean anything truly wrong by what she had done but Yaz couldn’t just get over how her heart had been split into smithereens and then spat on. She had defended Sammy when all along she was the one being played. She had put her faith in Sammy once before and now she knew she had put her faith in the wrong person.
This time, there was no one else around. She had a broken ankle that, despite how she tried to play it, was a real pain in the ass and she wouldn’t last a second on her own, neither of them would. She didn’t forgive her, not at all, but she was willing to start working on it.
“Fine by me,” Sammy said, offering her hand again. Rolling her eyes obviously, Yaz let herself be helped. “Go us! We are going to make the best dinosaur survival team that anyone has ever seen!”
…
Kenji was honestly so sick of being on the run from dinosaurs. It nearly always ended with him having his face covered in dirt and sweat getting stuck in all the wrong places. Right now, sand was literally permeating into his eyes, and some weird wet thing was slobbering on his ear.
Shoot! Was he being eaten? Kenji rolled away, ignoring the many, many bruises that were packed all over his skin, trying to get away from whatever wet monster was trying to munch on him.
Ugh. Being on this island was barely ever fun after the first three times he had been here and now it was getting really bad. This was by far the worst trip to Jurassic World he ever had. At least the other times when he was doing boring shit he wasn’t being dropped from a hundred feet in the air and getting that up close with the attractions.
Kenji swatted the creature away, relaxing when he noted that there weren’t any teeth champing on his ear, so it must have been one of those plant eating ones. He could just have one more moment to drift off, catch a little bit of extra sleep, and just relax—
“Ahhhhhhhhhhh!”
Kenji bolted upright, ignoring the cramps and dizziness that came along with the sudden movement. What was happening? Was there another dinosaur?
“Who’s there?” He asked, rubbing his eyes clean of the musty grains. “If that was some really weird dinosaur roar then I have officially given up on this park again.”
“Kenji!” A voice - Ben, whimpered. “Oh thank god. I thought I was all alone. I woke up and everyone else was gone but now I see you and Bumpy.”
Right, the green blob in front of his face but have been Bumpy. That certainly made more sense. She was friendly for sure. How the super cuddly-wuddly baby dino had found them in all this thick forest he didn’t want to know but it was nice to have an extra familiar face.
“Yup,” Kenji said. “Bumpy and I are both right here Ben.”
“Phew. I’m not alone and then maybe, now that it’s a bit lighter it will be less scary to try and get to the docks.” He stood up, trying to tie together the railing strands of his pack. His hands suddenly halted “Wait, wait, wait, no, no, no, no, no. It’s light and we got on the monorail when it was getting dark and it said that we have two hours to get to the last ferry. If it’s this light then it has obviously been much more than a couple of hours.”
Kenji swallowed. “So we missed the boat,” he filled in for him.
“Kenji we missed the boat! I’m never going to get off this stupid place and we are going to be abandoned. I mean, all of our friends must have made it off by now if they didn’t try and look for us so it is just going to be us on the island.”
“Woah. Woah. Woah. Ben slow down. If our friends made it off the island then won’t they get someone to come back for us. Besides, my dad wouldn’t just let his son, or any of his condos, go unreduced from this place. We’ll be fine” Kenji laid back down in the road, kicking one leg on top of the other.
“No! You don’t get it. They all think we are dead. No one is going to risk sending anything for two dead people.” He pointed his finger between the two of them, his eyes deadly serious and full of panic that Kenji wanted to stamp out as fast as he could. “We are totally alone and it’s useless.”
Kenji looked down at himself. He was scratched and bashed, baking under the intense Costa Rican heat, and he totally wasn’t equipped for this despite how well he knew the park. Post-apocalyptic survival was some new territory for him. Just as much as trying to be the sane one in the conversation was.
But it was up to him.
“No one said anything about being alone,” Kenji said, dusting himself off as he stood up. “I have you, you have me, and both of us have Bumpy. And as for getting off this island - didn’t you say you had the whole evacuation plan memorized? Is there anything on there that we could use?”
Tapping his foot, Ben bit his lip. Suddenly, just when Kenji was sure he would come up with nothing, his hand shot into the air like a rocket ship. “Right! There’s the emergency beacon on Mainstreet. If we can get to that then we can radio for help and then they’ll know for sure that we aren’t dead.”
For someone so fearful, Ben really held an impressive amount of creativity and confidence when he needed it in that little head of his. Kenji smiled and nodded encouragingly. Maybe it wasn’t over yet. They may be only with each other for company but it wasn’t the worst company in the world.
“Mainstreet it is!” Kenji said, marching forward confidently.
Ben got out a map and sheepishly pointed in the other direction. “Uh, Kenji... I think it’s that way.”