"It won�t be long, now," Alan promised.
The forest was growing less dense. Trees were spaced farther apart, and patches of green grass replaced the moss and lichen of the more heavily shaded areas. Dappled sunlight filtered through the canopy. Occasionally, Ellie saw the three-toed imprints in the soft earth which marked the passage of one of the island�s genetically engineered creatures. Ten years ago, on the barren plains of the Montana badlands, Alan would have immediately dropped to his hands and knees to eagerly examine ancient dinosaur tracks left in the fossil record. Now he strode over the fresh prints with hardly a glance.
Finally, they emerged from the forest on the crest of a shallow rise, and the first buildings in the compound came into view, dominated by a two story structure constructed of masonry block that had been painted green, apparently a lame attempt to blend the structure in with the surrounding wilderness. High above, on the roof, was an observation deck. The other buildings were smaller, resembling the utility sheds and bunkers she had seen on Isla Nublar.
Leaving the shelter of the heavily forested area, they passed through a large grassy area with scattered trees and shrubs that resembled the city parks found in any metropolitan in the United States. The grass covered tire ruts they had been following continued to the back of the first building, then proceeded onward until they disappeared from view over a gentle rise of earth.
"The two-story building is the dormitory where I�ve been living," Alan explained. "The smallest building holds the generator that powers it. The other is simply a storage shed."
"The workers all lived here?" she asked.
"Apparently. I would assume they had some time off to go back to the mainland, but they obviously spent most of their off hours here. You can see the dome of the research facility through the trees." Following his outstretched arm that pointed toward the warehouse in which the research had been conducted, Ellie could see the white circular dome glistening in the sunlight through the trees.
�Why didn�t they build the runway closer to the facility?� Ellie wondered aloud.
�Terrain. There are a lot of small hills and valleys, so shallow you�d hardly notice them, but the runway had to be perfectly flat.�
�Okay, so why didn�t they build the research facility closer to the runway, then?�
He flashed a quick smile, amused. �That thought crossed my mind as well, and I have no answer for it. Of course, if we had vehicles, the distance wouldn�t seem so great.�
They were approaching the dormitory from the side, and Ellie noticed that all the windows, both upstairs and down, were covered with jail-like bars, obviously intended to keep the animals from gaining access to the living quarters. She thought it more closely resembled a prison than a home, and wondered if the people who had lived here had felt as she did.
As if able to read her mind from the expression on her face, Alan said in agreement, "I know. The bars are a cheerful reminder of what this place really is."
Turning the corner of the structure, they arrived at the front door. Like the windows, it was guarded by a sturdy outer door constructed of iron bars instead of a mesh screen. The solid door inside had been left open, obviously to allow the fresh air to cool the interior of the building.
Alan removed a key from his pocket and inserted it into a lock that secured the barred door, then he swung it open and stood back for her to enter first.
"I keep it locked when I�m not here. Raptors, as you know, can open doors, and I wouldn�t want to come home and find one inside waiting for me."
"Nor would I," she agreed as she stepped through the door.
He followed her inside with the hand truck, guiding it carefully over the threshold, and closed the bars behind them, locking them from the inside. He left the solid metal storm door open. "The kitchen is this way," he said, leading the way through the entry hall toward the rear of the building.
Ellie followed, looking curiously at the structure�s interior as she trudged behind him with the ice chest.
The entry hall was floored with linoleum, and was devoid of furniture save a combination coat rack/ hat rack/ umbrella rack made of tarnished brass. Alan tossed his hat on it as he walked past. His raincoat and a black umbrella already occupied spaces on the fixture, reminding her that she had failed to bring her own rain gear.
Large rooms opened up on either side of the entry hall, one containing sofas, love seats, and chairs, in addition to a large bookcase holding volumes of literature. An open book was flipped over on the coffee table to hold its place, indicating that Alan had been reading in his leisure time. The opposite room also had a sofa and chairs, a CD player with speakers, and a radio. Obviously, these had been gathering rooms for the off-duty workers.
"There is a recreation room upstairs with the bedrooms," Alan told her as they passed the staircase. "They actually have some pretty nice exercise equipment."
�Obviously, you�ve taken some advantage of that,� she observed, acknowledging his physical fitness.
He glanced at her, as if surprised that the result was noticeable. �Yes.�
Beyond the staircase was a large dining hall, which reminded Ellie of a school cafeteria, except that the tables were circular instead of rectangular. Each table was large enough to comfortably seat six people. Adjoining that was the spacious kitchen, which contained two stoves, two microwave ovens, a huge refrigerator, and a full size upright freezer. Two long stainless steel tables provided plenty of preparation space, and beneath them was plenty of storage room for utensils. A large dishwasher was tucked away beneath the counter near a trio of stainless steel sinks. Plenty of cabinet space and a large pantry provided storage room for canned and boxed goods.
Alan halted the hand truck near one of the work tables in the center of the kitchen, and began lifting the boxes off it and placing them on the stainless steel surface. Her suitcases were placed on the floor beside it. Emptied of its cargo, the hand truck was moved against the far wall and left there for future use.
Ellie opened the refrigerator door, and was confronted with microscopic slides, racks full of test tubes, and biological samples wrapped in plastic wrap. She closed the refrigerator door, reluctant to disturb Alan�s work, and opened the freezer door. The freezer was filled with more biological samples, all labeled and enclosed in plastic wrap. Even without looking at the labels, she could easily identify many of the items that were visible through the clear wrapping: feces, skin samples, chunks of flesh, and various internal organs.
She felt her stomach tighten as she closed the door again. Idly, she wondered how he had acquired them. "Maybe you should put away the refrigerated items," she suggested. There had been a time when she would have been perfectly comfortable moving aside those items to make necessary room, but now she was acutely aware that those were his experiments, and they had nothing to do with her. She felt very much an outsider.
He smiled sheepishly from the pantry. "Sorry. I don�t use the refrigerator as much for myself as I do for my work." Moving away from the food cabinets, he set down a box of breakfast cereal on the counter top as he passed it.
They exchanged places, and he noticed with surprise that she kept her eyes averted as they passed each other, an uncharacteristic attempt to avoid eye contact. She retreated quickly to the pantry, and busied herself with the task of stocking the shelves with boxed and canned goods.
Puzzling over her unusual behavior, he moved the experimental objects to a lower shelf, providing space on the upper shelves for the groceries, then began removing the perishables from the ice chest and placing them in the refrigerator and freezer.
"I hope you don�t mind, but I took the liberty of purchasing some chicken parts and a few cuts of beef," she said as she worked.
Alan shrugged. "Not at all. It�ll be a nice change, actually. I haven�t had any fresh meat in a long time.�
When the ice chest was empty, he opened the remainder of the boxes and began helping her stock the pantry shelves with the canned goods. For a long time, neither of them spoke, both acutely aware of the uneasy tension existed between them that had never been present before.
When Alan completed his task, he turned back to observe Ellie, and found that she was leaning over the countertop, kneading her forehead with her fingers. It was obvious that she was nursing a severe headache.
"Ellie, are you all right?" He approached her, as if to offer assistance.
"I�m fine," she insisted.
Alan was not convinced. "Ellie, I�m going to ask one more time: Are you pregnant?"
She raised her head, defiantly, and her eyes flashed with annoyance. "For the last time, no, I am not pregnant, so stop asking me that!"
He grasped her arms in a firm grip and turned her around to face him, surprised by the lack of resistance he felt from her. She was a tall woman, almost as tall as his own six foot frame, but she felt almost limp beneath his hands. "Then do you want to tell me what�s wrong? I want to know the real reason why you�re here."
She raised her hand to rub her temple with the fingertips, again and turned her face away. "The only thing I want to do is take some aspirin and lie down for awhile. It�s been a long trip, and my head is splitting."
He released her, frustrated with his inability to communicate with her. Once an agreeable friend, she had become a brick wall, refusing to budge, rejecting his offers of help, and declining to share with him any information about why she was there.
He withdrew a bottle of aspirin from the first aid kit that was mounted on the wall, and passed it to her.
Her hands trembled slightly as she snapped the lid off the aspirin bottle and shook two of the white tablets into her palm. While she swallowed them with a gulp from her plastic bottle of water, Alan returned the pain reliever to its place in the kit.
Then, he lifted her suitcases, one in each hand, leaving her the smaller cosmetic case. "Come on,� he said, shortly. �We�ll find you a place to sleep."
Without a word, she picked up the remaining piece of luggage, and fell in step behind him as he led the way upstairs to the second story by way of a plain, unadorned staircase. The steps were rough to prevent slipping, and the banister was a gray steel rail. From the second floor, the stairs continued upward, terminating at a trap door in the ceiling, which attracted Ellie�s attention. That would probably be the exit to the observation deck.
She knew he was annoyed with her for refusing to open up to him, so she said no more as she followed him, down the wide corridor.
Like the rooms downstairs, the second floor facilities contained the barest essentials necessary for human comfort. InGen had spent untold millions on genetic research, but obviously considered it excessive to squander money on cosmetic frivolities when it came to employee living quarters.
Alan turned into an open doorway near the stairs. The other doors in the corridor were closed.
Ellie paused in the doorway to observe the bedroom area. It was a large community facility with gray cubicles to provide individual privacy. Curtains, draped across the cubicle doors, were pulled back, revealing the contents. Each cubicle was as large as a small bedroom, and each contained a twin bed, a dresser, an upright wardrobe, and a small bedside table with a tiny lamp. Some cubicles had windows, but like the windows downstairs, they were all barred to prevent access by the more agile of the predators that ran wild. Most of them still contained the personal belongings of the researchers who had lived there.
"Wow," she said, sarcastically. "They went all out for their employees� comfort, didn�t they?"
"Obviously, they weren�t expected to spend much time resting," Alan agreed. "That, plus the fact that the cubicles were probably easier and cheaper to erect than solid walls. There is another one just like it across the hall for the female employees,� he added, indicating the closed door of the other room. �I didn�t clean it up, so you�ll have to sleep in here. Which cubical do you want?"
She shrugged. "Which one is yours?"
He indicated the second cubicle on the right.
"You didn�t take the first one? It has a window."
"The second one has a bookcase in place of the window. I needed the shelf space for my ledgers."
A hint of a sad smile played at the corners of her mouth. "You still work in bed?" she asked.
"Sometimes."
"I don�t understand why men always feel they had to take their work to bed with them. That�s what offices are for."
"Sometimes it doesn�t get completed at the office," he said, defending the practice.
"And sometimes a woman likes to have a little attention from the man she cares about."
A slight frown creased his brow, wondering again if Ellie and Mark were having marital trouble. He set down the suitcases, but lingered at the door of the cubicle.
"Ellie, look, if you and Mark are having problems, this is not the way to solve them."
"Mark�s dead."
The unexpected news and her words, emotionless and matter-of-fact, caught him off guard. "The children?" he asked, his voice barely above a whisper.
"Them, too."
"How?"
"Drunk driver."
His expression softened. "Oh, Ellie, I�m so sorry," he said, moving toward her as if to embrace her.
She shied away, raising one hand as if to fend him off. "Don�t," she warned, knocking his hand aside.
He stopped, his arms dropping to his side.
"I�m tired of everyone saying they�re sorry, like it�s somehow their fault. For three months, people have been telling me how sorry they are, but it doesn�t make me feel any different! I can�t laugh; I can�t cry. I can�t feel anything except numb. I want to do something, Alan. I want to work."
"Ellie, I can understand that, I really can, but ---"
"No, you can�t!" she snapped. "Unless you�ve been through this, you can�t understand it."
"My wife died a long time ago," he reminded her. "I have been through this. I know the emptiness you�re feeling right now."
She stared at him in surprised remembrance. He had been married many years ago, but his wife had passed away several years before he had met Ellie. She lowered her gaze, and some of the resentful fire went out of her eyes. "I�m sorry. I had forgotten."
"My problem was, I kept it bottled up inside, like I suspect you�re doing right now."
"I don�t want your advice, Alan. I just want to work. I want to forget."
"No, you don�t. You don�t ever want to forget. You want the pain to go away, and it will, in time. But right now, you have to face it, or it will torment you. Believe me, Ellie. I know."
"I don�t want to talk about this," she told him, her eyes harsh as she stared into his face, leaving no doubt in his mind that she would not discuss the incident with him. She gestured toward the first cubicle. "This one is fine."
"All right, then. I�ll get some fresh linen."
After he had left the room, Ellie entered the cubical which was to be her personal living space for the next six weeks. A pair of dusty jeans lay on the floor beside the bed, and she stooped to pick them up, cringing when the effort caused an increase in the throbbing of her headache. She tossed them onto the bed of the cubical directly opposite. The owner was not likely to return to collect the denim trousers, and she had no use for them. Next, she stripped the old linen from the bed and tossed it into the hallway to be discarded. The mattress was dusty, so she turned it over to the clean side.
Alan returned moments later with clean sheets, a light blanket, and a clean pillow. "You probably won�t need the blanket, but since you�re not feeling well, you might decide you want it."
She nodded her appreciation. "Just set them down on the bed, and I�ll take care of them.
As he placed the linens on the bed, she opened her suitcase and withdrew her personal items. "Where is the bathroom?"
"The bathroom is down the hall. You�ll have to use the men�s room. I didn�t bother cleaning up the women�s room. There is no running water, but I keep a water barrel filled near the showers. Fill the pot and pour it in the tank, and the toilet will flush normally."
"Okay."
Taking her hairbrush, shampoo, toothbrush, and toothpaste, she carried them to the bathroom facility and pushed open the heavy swinging door.
It was a replica of every community bathroom she had ever seen at any college or school, the only difference being that this one contained a bank of urinals against the far wall, a stark reminder that it was the men�s room. Four stalls enclosed the toilets, and across the spacious tiled floor were four wash basins, each with a large mirror over it. Two shower stalls stood side by side on her left, and a large barrel of water stood between them. Hanging from a hook inserted in the partition that separated them was a large cook pot with a handle, an adequate method of transporting water to the toilets and for rinsing off in the shower.
Alan�s shaving kit and other personal items had been placed on the Formica countertop beside one of the basins, so she selected one farther down the row and designated it as hers by placing her things on it.
While she was in the bathroom, Alan emptied the dresser drawers and the wardrobe of the men�s clothing that filled them, and placed them in the other cubical with the jeans that Ellie had discarded earlier.
With her things in place, Ellie returned to the bedroom and watched as he continued to transfer the old clothes out of her cubical, grateful that it was a task she would not have to face. When he completed the chore, she yanked the privacy curtain closed, made the bed and lay down to rest for awhile. As an afterthought, she reached up to remove the pins that had held her hair off her neck, and felt the tresses tumble loose on the pillow. Draping her arm across her pounding forehead, she sighed heavily and tried to relax the tense muscles in the back of her head and neck that were the likely culprits of her headache.
Leaving her to rest in private, Alan collected the discarded linens and went back downstairs. The linens were placed outside the back door to be used later for other things. Next, he picked up the box containing his new office supplies, and carried them into a small room at the end of the corridor. The room was well lit by a large window, barred, like all the other windows in the building, and it contained several desks, chairs, bookshelves, and filing cabinets. Obviously, it had been used as an office for the researchers and geneticists who wanted to continue their work even after leaving the facility for the evenings.
Upon his arrival, Alan had cleaned the dust from all the desks, then selected the largest one for his personal use. Incidental papers and notes pertaining to the island and its ancient inhabitants had been carefully scrutinized, and either filed for future examination or discarded as trash items. Electric typewriters and calculators, rendered unsuitable for use by time, neglect, and the dust, had been relocated to a desk in the corner, stacked one upon the other to preserve space for his research items. In their places were microscopes, slides, his personal calculator, and other objects necessary for keeping his records.
Placing the box on the desk, he withdrew a pad of paper and a new pen, and sat down at his desk.
Like other paleos, Alan preferred to be in the field working on a new dig site, but paper work was the necessary bane of every new discovery, and that included the project on which he was currently working. Every phase of his research was carefully documented and categorized. It was a tedious but necessary aspect of scientific discovery, one to which he was meticulously dedicated, but like all humans, he was periodically plagued by a wandering mind or writer�s block. Today was one such day.
Soon, he found himself staring absently at a blank page in his notebook, his pen poised over the blue ruled paper, contemplating the startling revelation that Ellie�s husband and children were dead. Her words had been shockingly blunt.
He had wanted to comfort her, wanted to embrace her, but her resistance and an unspoken warning for him to tread carefully around the subject was not a surprise. He easily recognized the symptoms from his own experience with the death of a loved one. She was traumatized by her loss. It was no great surprise, either, that she was so depressed, so fragile. Her entire family had been cruelly and abruptly taken from her. She had lost everything she held dear, and he understood that.
Her tremendous weight loss, however, was troubling, and made her more susceptible to potential illness, and he worried that should she become ill, it would be difficult to obtain help for her. And that opened up another question: In her fragile physical condition, why had she come to that remote island, knowing that she was far from civilization? Was it, as she claimed, to assist him in his research, or did she come to him with the fundamental belief that he could somehow help her through her turmoil?
That thought made him uncomfortable. They had been very close at one time, sharing similar interests, beliefs, hopes, and joys, but the distance that comes with separation had made them virtual strangers. Her priorities had changed from scientific to domestic, while his had remained the same. How could he possibly help her through this tragedy? And how could he possibly conduct his research when her needs were so great and her physical condition so precarious? How could he possibly concentrate when she was so near?
That is your biggest problem, Grant, said a voice inside his head. You still have feelings for her, as she does for you! And the two of you are alone on this island together! How are you going to handle it? How are you going to resist the temptation?
At this point, he gave up completely in his attempts to place words on paper. Tossing the pen down on the blank page, he leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest, his brow furrowed in deep thought.
Seeing her for the first time on the landing strip had reignited feelings and emotions he thought he had set aside a long time ago. Their relationship had been a good one, or so he had thought. They had shared a common interest in the ancient world. She had always been an asset to his research, and working in the dust and heat of the desert had not bothered her -- in fact, she seemed to thrive on it. But things had eventually changed. The work became less important to her. She had spoken almost relentlessly on the subject of children. Finally, she had left him to pursue a new life, and he had thrown himself even deeper into the research that had ultimately come between them. She had left him, he reminded himself again, to have the family he had been unwilling to give her.
Frustrated, he rose from the chair and wandered out of the office space. Uncertain precisely where he wanted to go or what he wanted to do, he paused briefly in the corridor before turning toward the foyer. From where he stood, he could see the front door he had left open to allow the warm breeze to circulate through the building and the green of the forest beyond. Restlessly, he moved toward it to gaze through the iron bars, grasping them as if they were bars on a jail cell. Only they were not there to keep him inside; instead, they were there to keep something else out. Resting his forehead against the bars, he gazed out across the lawn. The primeval jungle stood silently before him, deceptive in its peaceful appearance. He was all too familiar with the predators that lived there.
His heavy sigh sounded loud in the stillness of the room. During the months he had lived on that remote island, he had never really felt lonely. He had his research to keep him busy. So, why did his heart now ache with such lonely emptiness?
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