Feeling defeated, Thorne moved back toward the entrance to the shed. He paused for a moment, staring out at the moonlit night. And then, as he waited, he heard the unmistakable sound of breathing.
Inside the store, Levine moved from window to window, trying to follow Thorne’s progress. His body was jumpy with tension. What was Thorne doing? He had gone so far from the store. It was very unwise. Levine kept glancing at the front door, wishing he could lock it. He felt so unsafe with the door unlocked.
Now Thorne had gone off into the bushes, disappearing entirely from view. And he had been gone a long time. At least a minute or two.
Levine stared out the window, and bit his lip. He heard the distant snarl of the raptors, and realized that they had remained up at the entrance to the laboratory. They hadn’t followed the vehicles down, even now. Why not? he wondered. The question was welcome in his mind. Calming, almost soothing. A question to answer. Why had the raptors stayed up at the laboratory?
All kinds of explanations occurred to him. The raptors had an atavistic fear of the laboratory, the place of their birth. They remembered the cages and didn’t want to be captured again. But he suspected the most likely explanation was also the simplest – that the area around the laboratory was some other animal’s territory, it was scent-marked and demarcated and defended, and the raptors were reluctant to enter it. Even the tyrannosaur, he remembered now, had gone through the territory quickly, without stopping.
But whose territory?
Levine stared out the window impatiently, as he waited.
“What about the lights?” Sarah called, from across the room. “I need light here.”
“In a minute” Levine said.
At the entrance to the shed, Thorne stood silently, listening.
He heard Soft, snorting exhalations, like a quiet horse. A large animal, waiting. The sound was coming from somewhere to his right. Thorne looked over, slowly.
He saw nothing at all. Moonlight shone brightly over the worker village. He saw the store, the gas pumps, the dark shape of the Jeep. Looking to his right, he saw an open space, and clijmps of rhododendron bushes. The tennis court beyond.
Nothing else.
He stared, listening hard.
The soft snorting continued. Hardly louder than a faint breeze. But there was no breeze: the trees and bushes were not moving.
Or were they?
Thorne had the sense that something was wrong. Something right before his eyes, something that he could see but couldn’t see. With the effort of staring, he began to think his eyes were playing tricks on him. He thought he detected a slight movement in the bushes to the Tight. The pattern of the leaves seemed to shift in the moonlight. Shift, and stabilize again.
But he wasn’t sure.
Thorne stared forward, straining. And as he looked he began to think that it wasn’t the bushes that had caught his eye, but rather the chain-link fence. For most of its length, the fence was overgrown with an irregular tangle of vines, but in a few places the regular diamond pattern of links was visible. And there was something strange about that pattern. The fence seemed to be moving, rippling.
Thorne watched carefully. Maybe it is moving, he thought. Maybe there’s an animal inside the fence, pushing against it, making it move. But that didn’t seem quite right.
It was something else….
Suddenly, lights came on inside the store. They shone through the barred windows, casting a geometric pattern of dark shadows across the open clearing, and onto the bushes by the tennis court. And for a moment – just a rnoment – Thorne saw that the bushes beside the tennis court were oddly shaped, and that they were actually two dinosaurs, seven feet tall, standing side by side, staring right at him.
Their bodies seemed to be covered in a patchwork pattern of light and dark that made them blend in perfectly with leaves behind them, and ith the fence of the tennis court. Thorne was confused. Their concealment had been perfect – too perfect – until the lights from the store windows had shone out and caught them in the sudden bright glare.