Chapter Text
April 7th, 2004, 3:00PM
Fallujah, Iraq, Industrial Zone
Marine Sergeant Jack “Mac” MacDonald, gripped his rifle tightly as he and his four man fireteam stacked up on the door to a small warehouse, two men on either side of the door. Mac took a deep breath, drowning out the echo of not so distant gunfire and explosions as he pulled a grenade off his vest. He looked across the door at Mitchell Black, a childhood friend and a man already well accustomed to kicking in doors and clearing houses, and nodded. Mitchell raised his rifle, nodding as he shifted his feet in preparation. Mac felt a tap on his shoulder, John Whitman signaling his readiness behind him, as Theodore Boone waved his hand from behind Mitchell to signal his readiness as well. Mac turned on his heel, swiftly planting his boot into the door just under the handle. The door swung violently inward, and Mac pulled the pin on his grenade and released the spool as he stepped back behind the wall and tossed the grenade underhand into the room as deep as he could get it. Screams of the insurgents inside were quickly drowned out by the bang of the grenade going off, and Mitchell swung in a heartbeat later firing his rifle as he stepped to the left, following the left hand wall of the small office space the door opened into. Mac swung in after him, firing his rifle at several insurgents standing near a desk with an old dinosaur of a computer sitting on it, and swiftly filed along the right side of the room. His eyes scanned for threats as he fired three rounds into the chest of an insurgent attempting to raise his gun, John and Theodore swinging into the room one after the other with rifles firing as they moved swiftly up the center of the room. A few more insurgents fell to the ground with screams of pain as Mac quickly moved to the window of the office, firing his rifle at a group of five insurgents scrambling around a poorly lit pile of crates and boxes in the center of a large warehouse space now stripped of its shelves and storage racks, the men illuminated by the little bit of daylight filtering through dust covered skylights above them. Mitchell quickly joined him, crouching to the left of him with his rifle firing in the direction of the crates. John and Theodore made sure the insurgents that they had just engaged with in the room were dead with a round to the head, before joining Mitchell and Mac at the window. Two Insurgents scrambled to get behind the crates and boxes as their three other comrades dropped from the hail of bullets, all of them dead before they hit the ground. The Marines dropped behind the wall below the window to reload and the insurgents quickly popped out to let loose a hail of bullets towards the window, the boxes stacked on the warehouse interior side of the window stopping any rounds from punching through the thin sheet metal walls and into the men behind them. Theodore pulled a grenade off of his vest and popped up, pulling the pin and tossing the grenade towards the boxes. An insurgent popped out and fired a round towards Theodore as the man dropped back behind cover, his eyes going wide as the grenade smacked him straight in the face. Theodore covered his ears as the grenade detonated, the insurgents screams silenced. He removed his hands from his ears slowly before shouldering his rifle again.
“Good shit, lets pop these crates open and see whats inside before more of these Jihadi’s come to find out why their weapons aren’t in their hands yet.” Mac said as he stood, scanning the warehouse for more threats before grabbing the windowsill and quickly vaulting onto the boxes stacked outside the window, the rest of the fire team providing cover as he did before following themselves.
“I still don’t understand why the fuck we need to find out who’s manufacturing these weapons, I mean who cares who made em when we can just destroy em?” Theodore complained as he and John crouched by the boxes, providing security as Mac and Mitchell began to open the boxes with a crowbar grabbed from near one of the piles of crates.
“The Brass care. They think there’s a new supplier these Jihadi fucks are buying from.” Mac grunted as he pried the lid off a crate, throwing the lid off to reveal a box full of weapons and munitions, all looking fresh off the assembly line. Mitchell whistled before reaching in the box and pulling out a brand new AKM.
“God damn Mac, look at these. Brand spankin’ new.” Mitchell turned the gun over, inspecting it as Mac reached into the box and pulled an RPG-7 launcher from the box, just as new as the AKM.
“Fuck me, our gear isn’t even this new! Look for some kind of identifier. A manufacturer stamp or something.” Mac turned the launcher around and inspected in, searching the weapon carefully. Theodore called out behind them.
“I see movement guys! Front, about 25 meters! Outside the far window of the warehouse!” Mac cursed and tossed the launcher back into the box, not finding any markings on it, Mitchell doing the same beside him with the AKM. They began to pull a number of different weapons out of the box searching for any kind of manufacturer markings.
“Shit I see em’ too! They don’t look like Jihadis!” John called as he shifted to be behind the crate to his left a little more. Mitchell and Mac began to search frantically. A sound came from the far end of the dark warehouse, the sound of someone using a tool to pry a door open.
“Shit, it sounds like they’re breaching the far door! Prep for contact!” Mac cursed as he dropped yet another weapon and turned to face the oncoming threat, dropping behind a crate and resting his rifle on top of it, aimed at the far end of the warehouse. The bright afternoon light shining through the windows on the far wall made scanning too deep into the darkness difficult because of the glare. Mitchell threw the weapon he was inspecting and picked up a pistol in one last attempt, crying out in victory as he noticed a marking on the side of the gun, on the receiver just below the slide.
“Found something! Says InGen! Who the fuck is that?” Mitchell asked as he turned to show the weapon to Mac, the sound of a door being kicked open echoing through the building and a few moments later several smoke grenades clattered across the ground towards the crates. Mitchell quickly stuffed the pistol into a pocket and dropped behind a crate as smoke slowly began to billow out of the grenades. Mac stared into the warehouse beyond the grenades, the dusty darkness broken occasionally by even dustier skylights as the smoke grenades slowly began to billow out thick white smoke.
“Fucking smoke! When did the Jihadi’s start using smoke!” Mitchell worked his jaw as he waited, his muscles tensing for a gunfight. He didn’t have to wait very long, as before the smoke had even obscured the floor of the warehouse men dressed in black gear moved out from the shadows to their left and right, rifles flashing as they fired at the Marines. Theodore turned to fire at the men on the right, managing to get 3 rounds off into the wall behind a black clad soldier before 3 of the mans own rounds slammed into his face and neck. Mac dropped onto his back as a round slammed into his shoulder and collarbone, his rifle going off into the ceiling above him. John never even got a single round off, having been the first one to be fired upon, 4 rounds slamming into his face and neck. Mitchell dropped behind the crate to his stomach, rolling over and aiming at one of the mysterious soldiers and squeezing off a round into the mans chest. The bullet slammed into the man, stopping him in his tracks and Mitchell moved to pull the trigger again, a rifle round slamming into his mouth stopping him. Mitchell fell back, his hands clutching his face as another round smacked him in the forehead. He went rigid, the tension slowly leaving his body as a raspy breath exited his destroyed mouth. The men quickly gathered by the crates where Mac’s team had just been less than 3 seconds before.
“Kirin you good?” A man asked, turning to the man Mitchell had shot in the chest. Mac looked up at the man, holding his neck in a desperate attempt to stop the bleeding, noticing patches on the mans shoulder, though his eyesight was strangely too blurry to read any of them.
“Good sir, plate stopped it.” The man said as he let his rifle hang by the sling. Mac noticed the same blurry patches on the man’s, Kirin, shoulder. He could almost make it out, straining his eyes to see.
“Good, lets destroy the crates and get the fuck out of here. Riley, get the demolition charges and start rigging the crates.” The man turned to one of the crates, his eyes stopping on Mac. The man stopped for a moment, before pulling out his pistol and walking over to Mac. Mac, strangely, was more worried about reading the patch on the mans shoulder than about the fact that the man was raising his pistol towards him. Just before the man pulled the trigger and everything went black, Mac swore he saw the letters I and N, connected together to make the word “IN”, with the letters “GEN” printed across them.
July 15th, 2012, 8:00PM
Isla Nublar, Hammond Creation Lab, Floor B8
The whitewashed walls of Henry Wu’s underground lab were transformed from an eye sore to nearly blinding by the dozens of bright white led ceiling and wall lights scattered across the laboratory space. Henry Wu himself had all but put it in his contract with InGen and MasraniCorp both that all “Interior Design” choices for his laboratory space required his approval. White walls, floors and ceilings made spotting any spills or potential contaminants worlds easier. On the far rear wall of the lab Henry Wu and the small team of scientists he considered good enough to work with him, sat a line of three incubators, just as blindingly white as the rest of the lab. Around the center-most of these incubators stood Henry Wu and two of his lab assistants, all dressed in sterile white scrubs, speaking tensely with one another. Inside the incubator, in a nest of straw and torn bits of felt and cloth, sat two large eggs. They both had a stony texture, one of them concrete gray and the other marble white, and both were in various stages of the hatching process. As the eggs shook and shifted with the efforts of the creatures inside a man turned to Henry Wu and spoke with gritted teeth.
“The hatchling’s internal temperatures are much too high.”
Henry Wu hissed and turned to face the man, looking him in the eyes over the surgical mask he wore. “How high Darnell?”
“110.7 in egg 007 and 108.6 in 008.” Wu cursed loudly and turned his attention back to the eggs, grabbing a spray bottle from a surgical tray near by and liberally dousing the eggs with water. Over the next hour and a half the scientists did everything they could to assist the unborn hatchlings with their fight to enter the world but shortly after 9:33 PM, the eggs, whose shaking and shifting had slowly stilled, were gently opened to reveal two dead hatchlings. Henry Wu ripped his surgical mask from his face and threw it to the ground, angrily stripping his gloves off as he stormed towards his office door at the other end of the lab.
The Hybrid Dinosaur project had been plagued by an issue with the hatchlings internal temperatures being too high by a degree of magnitude since Masrani told him Claire thought the park could do with a “new” dinosaur to help revenue. While there wasn’t any real data to compare hybrid baby dinosaurs with, the target temperature Wu had come to for healthy and successful hatches was somewhere in the area of ninety eight degrees Fahrenheit. All of the labs attempts so far had been well over that number, with all of the hatchlings dying in the egg, or in the case of one particularly determined baby, dying shortly after breaking out of the egg. Wu sat down in his office chair and leaned back, rubbing his hands down his face with an exhausted groan. He turned at the sound of a knock on his door, Darnell standing stiffly behind the door. He motioned the man to come in and placed his elbows on the table tiredly. Darnell opened the door and entered the room, taking the seat in front of Wu’s desk. He wore a tight grimace on his face.
“Permission to speak freely, Dr. Wu?” Darnell asked after a brief moment of silence. The mountain of a man sporting a crew cut and with not a single hair out of place on his face, hailing from a farming town out in the middle of nowhere Kansas, was so obviously former military, and while years of formal education at Harvard and nearly a decade of experience in genetics labs around the states had done much to slowly draw some of his quirks from his time in the service out, just as many had stuck around. Wu had been annoyed at first by many of them, especially his treating Wu like he was the mans superior officer, but the man was nearly as good as Wu at his job, so Wu had quickly gotten over them.
“You may speak your mind Darnell.” Wu said with a tired wave of his hand.
“Thank you Dr. Another batch of dead hatchlings means the changes we made to the genome didn’t work. Four days and five nights amounting to nothing. I... I have been doing some thinking lately, and perhaps we should…” Darnell shifted uncomfortably in his seat. For all the confidence the man had during his time in the military, serving for nearly twelve years in the army with the latter portion spent as an MP at an army base in Texas, the man struggled to find the same confidence in his post-service profession. The man could walk into a room full of bickering and sniveling scientists visiting the park for a research paper and take charge of the situation with an iron fist, having men and women who mere moments ago spitting death threats at one another patting each other on the back and apologizing for transgressions committed years prior, but god forbid you ask the man his thoughts on a recent lab project, or to read a research paper he’d been working on in his spare time.
“Dr. Wu, I know you don’t share the same reverence for spirituality and the religion of Christianity, but I’m starting to wonder if maybe…. maybe god is trying to tell us that we shouldn’t be creating these animals.” Darnell coughed nervously and sat up a little straighter as he brushed a speck of dirt even Wu hadn’t noticed from his lab coat.
Dr. Wu sighed and scratched his neck, leaning over his desk with his fingers laced together. “Darnell, these things happen. Do you know how many tries it took me to get the T-Rex for the original park? Thirty four. It took the best equipment available at the time and the most accomplished team of geneticists ever gathered into a single room thirty four attempts to recreate a single dinosaur, and not even our first. Now, nineteen years later, we're doing something even more impossible. We still have the best equipment and the best team but we aren’t just copying something already made by nature and laid out before us, albeit with holes, like we were so long ago. We are creating new creatures, a species never seen before because it has never existed before.” Wu yawned again, his eyelids feeling heavier. “Go and get some sleep Darnell, we’ve all had a long day, and some rest will do you good. We’ll worry about The Indominus Project in the morning.”
Darnell sighed and stood from the chair, shaking his head as he turned to head for the door. He stopped halfway out the door and turned back to Wu.
“I understand what you said sir, but that doesn’t make me feel any less like I’m being given a warning from a higher power. Are we even sure we understand what we’re truly trying to do in this lab?”
Darnell stared in the direction of Wu for a moment, thinking, before looking the man in his eyes. “Because I’m not so sure we do……. Goodnight Dr., I’ll be here first thing tomorrow morning.”