Chapter Text
It was cold without Bumpy. Ben couldn't quite wrap his head around how it could be so hot during the day, the sort of heat that got sweat in your eyes and made clothes cling to your skin, when it was so cold at night. Or, perhaps, he had gotten more used to having her curled beside him than he cared to admit. It had made sleeping difficult, but it had been a comfort to not be alone.
The storm didn’t help. Each crack of lightning sounded like a branch breaking, each growl of thunder like it had come from the throat of one of this island’s many beasts - all the sounds he had learned, over the past few days, to fear above all else. Droplets of rain bit at him.
Slipping his fingers into the pawprint she'd left on the ground, Ben curled in on himself, in amongst his poor nest of leaves and twigs, and sobbed as quietly as he could into the leaves. He closed his eyes, and tried to sleep. He managed little more than that half sleep where the escape of dreams was still elusive, but thoughts ran wildly out of control. Thoughts of what he could have done differently on the monorail. Thoughts of whether any rescue would ever come. Thoughts of all the different ends one might meet in this place. He almost didn’t want to fall asleep - the dreams that would come from such thoughts were unlikely to be any more pleasant than his reality.
His eyes shot open. That hadn’t been the wind.
Ben could hear chirps. Not the pleasant song of birds, those had all fallen silent in the storm. No, the screeching, clicking chirps of the compy pack. They'd been watching him all day, following him to the berry bushes, the river, each time in greater number. Another chirp - this one sounded closer now, just outside the tent of branches. Curling his knees closer to his chest, Ben whimpered.
It was his fault, he knew; his fault that he was probably going to die. They'd been afraid of Bumpy. They weren't afraid of him. Maybe she'd come back, maybe that rustling was her, coming back to curl up in his bed. He wouldn't even fault her for taking up all the room if only she'd come back.
Another chirp, this time right behind his ear. Ben looked over his shoulder. Sharp teeth glinted in the moonlight. Glancing over, he saw two, three sharply fanged faces peering at him from between the branches of his shelter. Ben threw himself out of their reach, falling on the muddy ground beyond his tent of leaves, and shrieked as he turned to see… too many to count creeping in around him. He could feel his heart beating in his chest. They seemed to seep out of the black of the night, as though they were solidifying out of it.
He scrambled back to the safety of the large log that supported his tent, hugging his knees to his chest and stared at them over his arms. The formed a circle around him, as though still not quite sure whether Bumpy would appear again and see them off. She wasn’t coming. Ben closed his eyes, trying not to imagine what the next few moments were going to hold.
Their growls and screeches closed in around him, louder and louder even as he pressed his hands over his ears. This was it, this was his fault, this was...
No, this was not how he wanted to die.
Snatching up a large branch, Ben scrambled to his feet. With the same sense of rabid courage that had pushed him up onto the roof of the monorail, he let out a sound that seemed more to belong to this cursed jungle than to the throat of a timid boy. His heart still beat heavily in his chest, but it now fueled a frenzy.
Swinging the stick madly, slamming it at the compies and the ground alike, still screaming at the top of his lungs, Ben felt it make contact with one or two of the creatures as they scattered away from their easy prey, seeming to decide their plot would not be so easy after all. Panicked chirps vanished into the darkened foliage, feet scampering, and then all was silent.
For good measure, Ben threw the stick after them, and let out a triumphant whoop. "Yeah, that's right!" he shouted after them. "You're scared of me now! Ben Fitzgerald Pincus!" Dropping to his knees, he let out another scream, directed as much at the sky and the universe than it was at the animals. He was alive. And, even better, he wasn't being eaten alive, which anyone would mark as an improvement.
The storm raged on, lightning flashing across the sky. A heavy rain started to sheet down, and Ben pushed damp hair from his forehead. He panted, watching the darkness for any sign of their return. Nothing. One more shout, like a howl to the moon.
He stood there in the rain, breathing heavily and slowly returning to a sense of himself, as though the wild thing that had taken him over was slowly retreating back into its cave. He bid it well, and thanked it for its good example. Pushing water from his face, he looked back at his tent and moved to right some of the branches that had gotten knocked over in his frantic attempt to get away from the compies.
Settling in again, though soaked to the skin and shivering again, he curled up. The leaves on the trees still rustled with the stormy wind, but he realized now just how much of what he had written off as the wind had been the creatures creeping in around him. It was quiet now. Perhaps he could finally sleep. Yet, for the first time in days, he felt wide awake. Almost... excited, like it was the first day of school. Leaning his head back, he let out one more triumphant shout, finding himself laughing almost uncontrollably after. He was alive!
After a while, he quieted, and just listened to the sound of the forest, to the crackle of lightning, and rolls of thunder. There was something almost beautiful about it now, peaceful.
The stick…
Ben groaned as he remembered he had tossed it after them. Scaring off the pack might serve for a few hours, but he didn’t want to be without some means to defend himself, however feeble, if they or something else happened upon him.
With a yawn and shivering, he picked himself up and went wading into the grass to retrieve it. Fortunately, it wasn't hard to find - he'd picked it to defend himself several days before as it was abnormally large and sturdy, so it flattened the grass around it. Giving it one last swing, still not quite able to believe what he’d achieved, Ben turned back towards his tent and felt something soft bump against his foot.
Jumping back, he squinted through the darkness at the dimly lit ground. It was a small mound, and paler than the surrounding grass. He poked at it with his stick. Nothing happened. Getting the edge of the stick underneath it, he flicked it out of the grass and out of the shadow of the trees, out onto the dirt and into the light of the moon. It was a compy. A dead compy.
Ben stepped back, regret tugging at his heart. He hadn't meant to kill one, only to keep from being killed. A life for a life had never been his intention, certainly not the life of something that was just trying to fill a painful hole in its stomach - a sensation to which, after a diet solely consisting of berries and water, he deeply related. "I'm sorry," Ben said quietly, taking a step back and gingerly stepping around the limp form, giving it a wide berth.
Retreating back into the tent, he sat with his back leaned against the log, the stick set ready at his side. The leaves above him did little to keep out the rain, his clothes continuously soaked and hair dripping icy water down his face.
Rudely, his stomach chose that moment to rumble, although it had given up such complaints days before in preference for a dull ache. Perhaps he would go down to the berry bushes for a midnight snack... or perhaps that would be pushing his luck. No, it was better to wait until morning, though with his heart still racing and his stomach aching, he doubted he would be getting any sleep.
Sinking down into his bed of leaves, a hand pressed against his stomach in an attempt to quiet it, he stared out at the shadowy trees and followed the movement of a moth as it drifted through the night air, disappearing into the grass not far from the still form of the compy.
Adrenaline had warmed him, he realized, as he felt it ebb out of him and, with it, the heat from his extremities. He shivered violently, taking one of the larger leaves from his bed and setting it over his face to at least keep the water from dripping down onto his cheeks or an increasingly icy nose.
If he could survive a few weeks longer, it would slowly get warmer, he told himself. The park had fallen on the 22nd, which meant that surely by now he was a few days into the new year. Just a few weeks…
He drew in a sharp breath and brought his legs closer to his chest. Somehow, the shivers made him feel even colder, and he did what he could to stop and just lay still. The thunder roared on.
He didn’t sleep that night, the darkness, in his cold, wet misery, seeming to last an eternity. Yet, eventually, the sun started to peek through the tree branches and the clouds dispersed from the sky. Eyes sore from tears, Ben emerged tentatively from his tent, flinching as one last, vindictive drop fell from one of the branches onto the back of his neck. The path around his camp was soggy and pitted with puddles.
He stripped off his top shirt, cold fingers fumbling with the buttons, and hung it from an outcropping stub of a branch on the log to dry out in the sun.
“Okay,” he said to himself, stripping off his shoes and socks to ring the water out of his socks, “I’m okay… Just gotta warm up.” Several years ago, he'd memorized a book called "Everything You Will (Hopefully) Never Need to Know About Wilderness Survival". The family had been planning a roadtrip and he'd wanted to be prepared in case anything went wrong. His dad had mocked him for it, and the book had mysteriously disappeared halfway through the trip. Well, he hadn't needed it then, thank goodness, but wasn't this proof that he'd been right to read it? “I’m gonna make a fire. I just need…” he looked around the rain-soaked forest, “dry kindling…”
Even under the taller trees, the wind seemed to have spattered the wood with water and soaked it through. All Ben found was a single dry stick he thought would serve as a hand drill, but that would be little use without something to burn.
After an hour, shoes squelching, he had his way back to camp and tucked the stick under his tent where the ground that had been under him was dry. He leant back against the log, eyelids heavy and his limbs feeling similarly weighted by exhaustion…
Ben scrambled to his feet and moved to the end of the log and peered inside. It wasn’t like one of the hollow logs one saw in the movies, but rot had worked a slight hole in it that was about the width of his arm and went into the trunk about a foot. Tentatively, trying not to think about what sort of insect life might live in such a place, he reached in. The wood was dry!
Retrieving the stick, Ben got to work chipping off splinters with one end of the stick, prying it under the flaking wood and pushing until it gave. Cold fingers dug at it, tugging out the shards of wood until there was a decent pile sitting on the grass beside him. Ben gathered it up, and brought it back to the path, finding a mound of earth, slightly higher than that around it, which was already beginning to dry in the morning sun.
He ventured back into the nearby forest, this time searching not for dry and brittle branches but instead any that looked like they were dry enough to burn.
It took until the sun was getting low on the horizon, but eventually a fire crackled merrily. By this time, his clothes had nearly dried on their own, and his extremities had stopped feeling like they’d had ice pressed to them, but it felt a great achievement. He shrugged back on his blue overshirt and leaned against the log, setting his feet in front of the flame for his shoes to dry.
His stomach grumbled again. He’d devoted so much of the day to building the fire that he’d never gotten the opportunity to visit the berry bushes, although just the idea of trying to fill his stomach with more of the little red berries made his insides twist. They were food, yes, but more juice than substance. No matter how many he ate, it seemed, he still felt hungry and, often, a little ill after too. It would also mean leaving his fire unattended.
Ben buried his face in his arms, leant against his knees, and tried to steady his breathing, trying not to cry. His thoughts turned to the last real meal he’d had, which by his count had been almost two weeks before, and his stomach gave a painful lurch at the thought. Chicken breast and roast veggies and home fries with peppers. He’d picked out the peppers.
Peppers sounded really good now.
Picking himself up and resolving to break off a few branches and bring the berries back to eat, he caught sight of the green mound on the ground a few yards off. Ben closed his eyes and groaned. He’d forgotten about that. Before long, it would start to smell, both unpleasant to have around camp and a danger, as it was liable to attract predators. He’d have to bury it, Ben resolved, although he wasn’t sure what would be suitable to help him dig. Or, perhaps, he could burn it on the fire. Ashes wouldn’t attract predators, right?
Returning a while after, two broken branches in hand, Ben sat by the edge of his fire and began picking the berries off the branches. They weren’t bad, but given they were all he’d had to eat for days, the sweetness was starting to taste sickly. He forced himself to swallow them down, breaking off the twigs as he went and using them to feed his fire. A few more… His stomach made another rumble. What he wouldn’t give for a carob bar, and not for the first time he deeply resented the loss of his pack. Something other than berries, something with a little bit of protein. He gathered a few more into his palm and stared at them dully. He brought them up to his mouth, but had to stop as his stomach gave a painful lurch. With a shaky breath out, he poured the handful onto a pile of the leaves on his bed. Maybe he’d try again in a while.
A good enough time, then, to get rid of the compy.
Ben stood and went over to it. He reached out for the legs and hesitated, the idea of the dead skin making his skin crawl. He let out a slow breath, and forced himself to grab it by a leg and carry it back over to the fire. Should he just toss it in? It would be night again soon and he hated the idea of smothering his fire right before sunset and suffering another night full of shivers and no sleep. Setting it down beside the fire, he stripped the smaller twigs off the two berry branches he’d brought, setting the scraps to the side to pick through for berries later. Wedging one on either side of the fire, with the thick branches tangled together, Ben tested the strength of the rack that was formed by the tangle. The compy was light. It ought to be fine. Gingerly picking it up by the ankle again, he set it carefully over the flames. “I am sorry,” he said again, settling back against the log and trying not to look as the flames bit up and started to turn flesh brown.
It didn’t smell as horrible as he’d imagined. Far from it. It was a smell that took him back home, to the barbeque his cousins had thrown the previous summer. Meat sizzling over a fire. His stomach growled, his mouth watering at the memory. He'd never much liked when his mom had brought home those full chickens from Costco - all the bones always creeped him out, but oh it smelled good. Better than good, positively delicious. It was basically a chicken... right? He opened his eyes and stared at the unfortunate compy, the shape of it twisting in his mind, distorting into one of those Costco chickens.
"You would have eaten me too if you'd had the chance," Ben said, defensively, and that seemed to lift whatever hesitation remained. It was true, wasn't it? This place was ruled by basic laws of nature, despite the attempts of those who had built it. Everything has to eat.
Ben reached forward to pick off a strip of meat - and withdrew his hand almost as quickly, burnt fingers going to his mouth to suck away the soreness. His stomach grumbled louder and louder as he waited for it to cook. When it seemed browned enough to be cooked through, he broke the hand drill stick in half and used it to lift the compy off the fire and set it onto his bed of leaves (the cleanest bed he could find). He held a hand over it, and sighed. Too hot to touch. Settling back in, the night closing around him, he sat and waited.
Ben distracted himself by attempting to count how many days it had been since he'd fallen from the monorail. He'd assumed that he'd woken up the next morning, but he couldn't be sure of that. But, say it was the next morning, there'd been the first day when he'd tried to find his way to the docks and found the path blocked by the Carnotaurus' territory. Then the next day, when Bumpy had shown him the creek and the berry bushes, and then... all the days after blurred into a sleepless monotony of water, food, fear, and failed attempts to sleep. Longer than a week. Two? That sounded about right.
His stomach gurgled again. Deciding that two weeks were certainly too long to wait for a decent meal, he reached over and pried off a strip of greasy flesh. Taking a deep breath, he stared down at it a moment, nose wrinkling. His nerves only allowed him one false start before trembling fingers brought it up to his lips. It's just chicken. Just a Costco chicken. Actually, it really did kinda taste like chicken, or like a greasy turkey. Not bad at all really. Tears pouring from his eyes in relief, he dug in, careful not to let any scrap of edible flesh fall away. In his excitement, in his haste, he bit his own inner cheek a few times, but couldn't bring himself to care. His throat hurt, as though it had become unaccustomed to proper food, and it all landed heavily in his stomach. But, oh, it felt amazing to have a full stomach again!
It was perhaps the best he’d felt since the fall of the park, since his own fall from the Monorail. Finally, his stomach had quieted and that shaky, weak feeling slowly left his hands. He experimented with a few berries balanced on top of a flake of meat and found that the berries were far easier to stomach when accompanied by a bit of protein.
Ben pulled away a small clump of meat from the neck. It was round and smooth, a little like the heart had been. Licking grease from his fingers, he popped it into his mouth. It wasn't until he bit down that he realized something was wrong. It burst, and out flowed a bitter liquid that spread out into his mouth and stung. Sputtering, he spat it out, spitting until the bitter taste began to fade. Ben glared at the offending lump on the ground in disgust. What -
He spat again, grabbing a few berries to try and clear the horrid, bitter taste away. It was too dark to head to the creek to rinse out his mouth. “Ugh,” he regarded the rest of the CostCo chicken, and weighed whether it was worth finishing the rest. Who knew when he would get food like this again? He reached out for another mouthful… and nearly tipped over into the dirt.
Something was wrong. His mouth started to feel numb, radiating out from where he'd earlier bitten his cheek. The campfire and remains of the compy blurred, and Ben sunk back against the ground. He watched, for a moment, as embers of the fire danced into the air, sensing rather than feeling a contented smile spread over his lips. It was beautiful… but something was wrong.
Something was wrong and he felt... calm? Calmer than he remembered ever feeling. And that, in itself, had Ben up on his feet.
He swayed. The ground seemed far away and close all at once and the numb feeling spread increasingly down into his throat and up into his face. His heart felt slow, as did the world. Everything was fine, everything was perfect. Which, he reminded himself forcefully, was wrong because he was stranded, alone, on a dinosaur-infested island. Which meant this calm feeling was what was wrong, which meant... Hadn't Darius, in one or his many, many, many dino-lectures, mentioned that the bite of a compy was venomous? Had he found some sort of gland?
Throwing out a hand to balance himself against the log, Ben gazed around the glade that had been his home for the last two weeks. He'd bitten into the venom gland then, he thought calmly. That, he reasoned (in a way, the calmness really helped with thinking things through), that probably meant that either he would pass out or be paralyzed soon. Or dead, he added, dully. None of those options would be particularly good and would probably mean he would get eaten. That thought didn't fill him with any particular fear but he sensed that it ought to and that was enough to not want to be.
Or he could curl up under his leaves, a voice said in his head. He could lay there and wait, and something would come along and end this nightmare. Would that be so horrible? “I…” Ben tried to speak and felt blood from biting his tongue. I don’t want to die.
The forest floor would be dangerous. So... a tree?
With conscious thought, he made himself look up. He had never been one for climbing trees and even on a good day, he wouldn't be able to climb most, but he remembered one, not far down the path. When he’d gathered branches for his tent, he’d managed to get up into it a little ways… It sounded exhausting. Just lay down, said a voice in the back of his head. Just go to sleep.
The numbness had worked its way into his chest. With stumbling steps, he followed his earlier path, searching the shadows of the trees for the familiar tree. There. There it was. He forced himself forward, and stopped at the base of the trunk. Gazing up into the dimly lit branches, it occurred to him that it would be a lot easier to just lay down in amongst the roots. It would be comfortable. Simple.
No, he thought firmly. I'm not dying today. A numb hand reached out, limply grasping at one of the vines that provided a handhold up into the tree. By focusing on it, he made his fingers close around it. Now, the other hand. Now, a foot (at least those weren't numb yet) and another. He reached for the next branch and - The ground slammed hard against his back and for a moment Ben remembered what it felt like to hurt. He gasped, coughing, and took the opportunity to try and spit out a little more of the venom. Collapsing back down on the ground, he stared up at the tree branches and the twinkling stars between them. It really was beautiful here, there were more stars than he had ever seen back in Chicago. There were more twinkling lights than there were staring down at a city, late at night, when the sprawl of urbanization turned to a scattering of gold and silver and blue specks of light.
It was beautiful, and the grass was soft and gentle.
And this wasn't where he was going to die. Rolling upwards and grabbing onto a vine to pull himself to his feet, Ben started again. This time, when he reached the same branch, he found another foothold to push himself a little higher. Calmly, methodically, he searched for a handhold, a foothold, until he'd reached the last branch, almost at the top of the tree, that seemed able to bear his weight. Hugging it, like his cat would over the arm of a chair, he closed his eyes and let the numb calmness overtake him.
When Ben awoke again, it was midday. At least, he assumed it was, as it was bright enough for him to see the forest floor far below him. Somehow, the night before, he'd managed to climb higher than he'd thought and it occurred to him that he ought to be terrified. And yet that calmness persisted, and from up here its insistence that he was safe felt vaguely true. Go back to sleep, the calmness whispered, and he obliged. The day blurred in and out. Occasionally, he’d stir when something moved down below, the movement of branches or grass as they swayed in the wind capturing his mind for a time until his eyes grew heavy again.
Something near him moved. Ben groaned and paid it little mind until his whole branch moved, stretching outwards as though trying to escape from the tree. He convinced his eyes to open, and found himself a foot away from a massive grey face. It snipped off the green ends of his branch and stood, staring at him, the leaves slowly disappearing into its mouth.
As the branch sprung back, Ben felt like he was slipping, but couldn’t coax his body into readjusting.
What had Darius called this kind? A brachiosaur. It had large, brown, intelligent eyes, and stared at him curiously. Its nostrils, oddly positioned at the top of its head, snuffled at him, the breath warm against his skin. Its large, leathery muzzle pushed at his foot, and shifted him back to a more secure feeling spot on the branch. Don’t fall, Ben could imagine the creature saying. It would have a great, strong voice, he decided. Like Morgan Freeman. “Thank you,” Ben whispered back, his voice thin and throat dry. Feeling as though the great creature was standing guard over him, Ben passed out again.
By evening, he had come around a little. The sauropod from his dream (Had it been a dream?) had a good point. He ought to sit up, position himself a little more securely until he felt up to climbing back down. Except he couldn't... or his body wouldn't. Not a single muscle in his body seemed willing to respond. Ben tried to use the trick of the night before, throwing all his concentration into raising his head. Moving his arm? His hand? A finger?
I'm paralyzed, he thought, with a vague sense of concern cutting through that eerie calmness. Sorry, Mr. Sauropod, falling or not isn't really up to me. No, if it were up to him, he never would have been here in the first place.
-
Ben set his book down on his lap, listening carefully to the voices slicing through the kitchen door. Curled up on his lap, his cat, Puffball, purred loudly. She had thick grey fur, getting thicker now that winter was approaching. “Shh, I can’t hear,” Ben whispered. He brought his hand out of her fur in the hopes she'd quiet. Instead, she gave him a disdainful look and jumped down, stalking down the hallway towards his bedroom, fluffy tail flicking in the air.
He could hear his mother’s mousy voice, though muffled by the door it was hard to make out the individual words. Although even when she was in the same room as you, it could be difficult to hear her clearly. He caught the words “going to hate it” and “been looking forward to the internship at the library” and grimaced. They weren’t going to make him drop out of the internship program now, were they? He’d had to beg to be included - several letters had been involved - as it was technically for those going into college not for high schoolers. The entire period of winter break spent amongst books, the dewey decimal system, and people who didn’t think it was strange to get overexcerted by a good book - it would be bliss!
"It'll be good for him!" That was his father. Somehow, Ben doubted he was talking about the internship; he’d rolled his eyes each time Ben brought it up. While his mom was at least making an attempt at keeping her voice low, his dad was making no such effort. "The kid’s a wimp. Aren't you worried that he's going to end up -"
"Keep your voice down!"
Ben frowned. He slowly closed his book and set it aside, as though it being open could somehow distract him from clinging onto his parents’ distorted words. Leaning forward in the chair, Ben closed his eyes, focusing hard on the sounds coming through the door.
Something, something, and a bad word. Ben felt his stomach do a flip.
"Boys like dinosaurs, they like ziplines and kayaks!" His dad was making it easy to hear him now, no longer making any attempt at all to keep the conversation in the kitchen. "A bit of dirt and wilderness, it will help him! I'm not going to have one of those people for a son!"
Heels clicked at the kitchen tile, and in a panic, Ben sprung from his chair and hurried down the hallway. Behind him, he heard the kitchen door open and the conversation move out into the living room. He'd left his book, but there'd be no going back for it now. Puffball was waiting for him in his room, perched on the edge of his bed with her tail wrapped neatly around her legs, purring again. She greeted him with a meow that sounded more like... a chirp?