Jurassic Park: A Novel (33 page)

More crackling.

More static. The loud crash of lightning. Then: “—Muldoo—need your car—ow—”

Gennaro frowned. “Is he saying Muldoon needs our car?”

“That’s what it sounded like,” Ellie said.

“Well, that doesn’t make any sense,” Harding said.

“—other—stuck—Muldoon wants—car—”

“I get it,” Ellie said. “The other cars are stuck on the road in the storm, and Muldoon wants to go get them.”

Harding shrugged. “Why doesn’t Muldoon take the other car?” He pushed the radio button. “John? Tell Muldoon to take the other car. It’s in the garage.”

The radio crackled. “—not—listen—crazy bastards—car—”

Harding pressed the radio button. “I said, it’s in the garage, John. The car is in the garage.”

More static. “—edry has—ssing—one—”

“I’m afraid this isn’t getting us anywhere,” Harding said. “All right, John. We’re coming in now.” He turned the radio off, and turned the car around. “I just wish I understood what the urgency is.”

Harding put the Jeep in gear, and they rumbled down the road in the darkness. It was another ten minutes before they saw the welcoming lights of the Safari Lodge. And as Harding pulled to a stop in front of the visitor center, they saw Muldoon coming toward them. He was shouting, and waving his arms.

“God damn it, Arnold, you son of a bitch! God damn it, get this park back on track!
Now!
Get my grandkids back here!
Now
!” John Hammond stood in the control room, screaming and stamping his little feet. He had been carrying on this way for the last two minutes, while Henry Wu stood in the corner, looking stunned.

“Well, Mr. Hammond,” Arnold said, “Muldoon’s on his way out right now, to do exactly that.” Arnold turned away, and lit another cigarette. Hammond was like every other management guy Arnold had ever seen. Whether it was Disney or the Navy, management guys always behaved the same. They never understood the technical issues; and they thought that screaming was the way to make things happen. And maybe it was, if you were shouting at your secretaries to get you a limousine.

But screaming didn’t make any difference at all to the problems that Arnold now faced. The computer didn’t care if it was screamed
at. The power network didn’t care if it was screamed at. Technical systems were completely indifferent to all this explosive human emotion. If anything, screaming was counterproductive, because Arnold now faced the virtual certainty that Nedry wasn’t coming back, which meant that Arnold himself had to go into the computer code and try and figure out what had gone wrong. It was going to be a painstaking job; he’d need to be calm and careful.

“Why don’t you go downstairs to the cafeteria,” Arnold said, “and get a cup of coffee? We’ll call you when we have more news.”

“I don’t want a Malcolm Effect here,” Hammond said.

“Don’t worry about a Malcolm Effect,” Arnold said. “Will you let me go to work?”

“God damn you,” Hammond said.

“I’ll call you, sir, when I have news from Muldoon,” Arnold said.

He pushed buttons on his console, and saw the familiar control screens change.

Arnold was no longer operating the computer. He had now gone behind the scenes to look at the code—the line-by-line instructions that told the computer how to behave. Arnold was unhappily aware that the complete Jurassic Park program contained more than half a million lines of code, most of it undocumented, without explanation.

Wu came forward. “What are you doing, John?”

“Checking the code.”

“By inspection? That’ll take forever.”

“Tell me,” Arnold said. “Tell me.”

Muldoon took the curve very fast, the Jeep sliding on the mud. Sitting beside him, Gennaro clenched his fists. They were racing along the cliff road, high above the river, now hidden below them in darkness. Muldoon accelerated forward. His face was tense.

“How much farther?” Gennaro said.

“Two, maybe three miles.”

Ellie and Harding were back at the visitor center. Gennaro had offered to accompany Muldoon. The car swerved. “It’s been an hour,” Muldoon said. “An hour, with no word from the other cars.”

“But they have radios,” Gennaro said.

“We haven’t been able to raise them,” Muldoon said.

Gennaro frowned. “If I was sitting in a car for an hour in the rain, I’d sure try to use the radio to call for somebody.”

“So would I,” Muldoon said.

Gennaro shook his head. “You really think something could have happened to them?”

“Chances are,” Muldoon said, “that they’re perfectly fine, but I’ll be happier when I finally see them. Should be any minute now.”

The road curved, and then ran up a hill. At the base of the hill Gennaro saw something white, lying among the ferns by the side of the road. “Hold it,” Gennaro said, and Muldoon braked. Gennaro jumped out and ran forward in the headlights of the Jeep to see what it was. It looked like a piece of clothing, but there was—

Gennaro stopped.

Even from six feet away, he could see clearly what it was. He walked forward more slowly.

Muldoon leaned out of the car and said, “What is it?”

“It’s a leg,” Gennaro said.

The flesh of the leg was pale blue-white, terminating in a ragged bloody stump where the knee had been. Below the calf he saw a
white sock, and a brown slip-on shoe. It was the kind of shoe Ed Regis had been wearing.

By then Muldoon was out of the car, running past him to crouch over the leg. “Jesus.” He lifted the leg out of the foliage, raising it into the light of the headlamps, and blood from the stump gushed down over his hand. Gennaro was still three feet away. He quickly bent over, put his hands on his knees, squeezed his eyes shut, and breathed deeply, trying not to be sick.

“Gennaro.” Muldoon’s voice was sharp.

“What?”

“Move. You’re blocking the light.”

Gennaro took a breath, and moved. When he opened his eyes he saw Muldoon peering critically at the stump. “Torn at the joint line,” Muldoon said. “Didn’t bite it—twisted and ripped it. Just ripped his leg off.” Muldoon stood up, holding the severed leg upside down so the remaining blood dripped onto the ferns. His bloody hand smudged the white sock as he gripped the ankle. Gennaro felt sick again.

“No question what happened,” Muldoon was saying. “The T-rex got him.” Muldoon looked up the hill, then back to Gennaro. “You all right? Can you go on?”

“Yes,” Gennaro said. “I can go on.”

Muldoon was walking back toward the Jeep, carrying the leg. “I guess we better bring this along,” he said. “Doesn’t seem right to leave it here. Christ, it’s going to make a mess of the car. See if there’s anything in the back, will you? A tarp or newspaper …”

Gennaro opened the back door and rummaged around in the space behind the rear seat. He felt grateful to think about something else for a moment. The problem of how to wrap the severed leg expanded to fill his mind, crowding out all other thoughts. He found a canvas bag with a tool kit, a wheel rim, a cardboard box, and—

“Two tarps,” he said. They were neatly folded plastic.

“Give me one,” Muldoon said, still standing outside the car. Muldoon wrapped the leg and passed the now shapeless bundle to Gennaro. Holding it in his hand, Gennaro was surprised at how heavy it felt. “Just put it in the back,” Muldoon said. “If there’s a way to wedge it, you know, so it doesn’t roll around …”

“Okay.” Gennaro put the bundle in the back, and Muldoon got behind the wheel. He accelerated, the wheels spinning in the mud, then digging in. The Jeep rushed up the hill, and for a moment at
the top the headlights still pointed upward into the foliage, and then they swung down, and Gennaro could see the road before them.

“Jesus,” Muldoon said.

Gennaro saw a single Land Cruiser, lying on its side in the center of the road. He couldn’t see the second Land Cruiser at all. “Where’s the other car?”

Muldoon looked around briefly, pointed to the left. “There.” The second Land Cruiser was twenty feet away, crumpled at the foot of a tree.

“What’s it doing there?”

“The T-rex threw it.”

“
Threw
it?” Gennaro said.

Muldoon’s face was grim. “Let’s get this over with,” he said, climbing out of the Jeep. They hurried forward to the second Land Cruiser. Their flashlights swung back and forth in the night.

As they came closer, Gennaro saw how battered the car was. He was careful to let Muldoon look inside first.

“I wouldn’t worry,” Muldoon said. “It’s very unlikely we’ll find anyone.”

“No?”

“No,” he said. He explained that, during his years in Africa, he had visited the scenes of a half-dozen animal attacks on humans in the bush. One leopard attack: the leopard had torn open a tent in the night and taken a three-year-old child. Then one buffalo attack in Amboseli; two lion attacks; one croc attack in the north, near Meru. In every case, there was surprisingly little evidence left behind.

Inexperienced people imagined horrific proofs of an animal attack—torn limbs left behind in the tent, trails of dripping blood leading away into the bush, bloodstained clothing not far from the campsite. But the truth was, there was usually nothing at all, particularly if the victim was small, an infant or a young child. The person just seemed to disappear, as if he had walked out into the bush and never come back. A predator could kill a child just by shaking it, snapping the neck. Usually there wasn’t any blood.

And most of the time you never found any other remains of the victims. Sometimes a button from a shirt, or a sliver of rubber from a shoe. But most of the time, nothing.

Predators took children—they preferred children—and they left
nothing behind. So Muldoon thought it highly unlikely that they would ever find any remains of the children.

But as he looked in now, he had a surprise.

“I’ll be damned,” he said.

Muldoon tried to put the scene together. The front windshield of the Land Cruiser was shattered, but there wasn’t much glass nearby. He had noticed shards of glass back on the road. So the windshield must have broken back there, before the tyrannosaur picked the car up and threw it here. But the car had taken a tremendous beating. Muldoon shone his light inside.

“Empty?” Gennaro said, tensely.

“Not quite,” Muldoon said. His flashlight glinted off a crushed radio handset, and on the floor of the car he saw something else, something curved and black. The front doors were dented and jammed shut, but he climbed in through the back door and crawled over the seat to pick up the black object.

“It’s a watch,” he said, peering at it in the beam of his flashlight. A cheap digital watch with a molded black rubber strap. The LCD face was shattered. He thought the boy might have been wearing it, though he wasn’t sure. But it was the kind of watch a kid would have.

“What is it, a watch?” Gennaro said.

“Yes. And there’s a radio, but it’s broken.”

“Is that significant?”

“Yes. And there’s something else.…” Muldoon sniffed. There was a sour odor inside the car. He shone the light around until he saw the vomit dripping off the side door panel. He touched it: still fresh. “One of the kids may still be alive,” Muldoon said.

Gennaro squinted at him. “What makes you think so?”

“The watch,” Muldoon said. “The watch proves it.” He handed the watch to Gennaro, who held it in the glow of the flashlight, and turned it over in his hands.

“Crystal is cracked,” Gennaro said.

“That’s right,” Muldoon said. “And the band is uninjured.”

“Which means?”

“The kid took it off.”

“That could have happened anytime,” Gennaro said. “Anytime before the attack.”

“No,” Muldoon said. “Those LCD crystals are tough. It takes
a powerful blow to break them. The watch face was shattered during the attack.”

“So the kid took his watch off.”

“Think about it,” Muldoon said. “If you were being attacked by a tyrannosaur, would you stop to take your watch off?”

“Maybe it was torn off.”

“It’s almost impossible to tear a watch off somebody’s wrist, without tearing the hand off, too. Anyway, the band is intact. No,” Muldoon said. “The kid took it off himself. He looked at his watch, saw it was broken, and took it off. He had the time to do that.”

“When?”

“It could only have been after the attack,” Muldoon said. “The kid must have been in this car, after the attack. And the radio was broken, so he left it behind, too. He’s a bright kid, and he knew they weren’t useful.”

“If he’s so bright,” Gennaro said, “where’d he go? Because I’d stay right here and wait to be picked up.”

“Yes,” Muldoon said. “But perhaps he couldn’t stay here. Maybe the tyrannosaur came back. Or some other animal. Anyway, something made him leave.”

“Then where’d he go?” Gennaro said.

“Let’s see if we can determine that,” Muldoon said, and he strode off toward the main road.

Gennaro watched Muldoon peering at the ground with his flashlight. His face was just inches from the mud, intent on his search. Muldoon really believed he was on to something, that at least one of the kids was still alive. Gennaro remained unimpressed. The shock of finding the severed leg had left him with a grim determination to close the park, and destroy it. No matter what Muldoon said, Gennaro suspected him of unwarranted enthusiasm, and hopefulness, and—

“You notice these prints?” Muldoon asked, still looking at the ground.

“What prints?” Gennaro said.