Hybrids: An Indoraptor Story ✓

Cat And Mouse

It felt like she walked upon a nightmare.

Indy couldn't put anything into words. She whimpered in helplessness, staring upon the destruction surrounding her. The flames licked the walls of Clearlake's 'once prominent' structures. Destroyed vehicles patterned the streets and sidewalks from beginning to end. And where she stood, dead humans splayed out in silence across the clearing, never to speak again. All because of Red, the hybrid who huffed grimly from the shadows, his pointed jaws oozing a red juice that reeked of blood. He looked Indy, annoyed at her refusal to heed his prior warning, and snarled.

"I told you to go home..."

Indy couldn't look at him. She whimpered over and over again, nudging the lifeless crowds of humans by her feet. The young. The old. The sick. The poor.

"Don't feel sorry," said the theropod, his heavy footsteps crunching on the bodies beneath him. "Sorry doesn't change what they are..."

Indy shrunk back an inch; the hybrid was much more menacing than her in the light of the flames. His head towered a few feet above her erect quills, which now rattled in lieu of his actions. With a pointed thorn on his snout, and two massive horns protruding from his skull, his mere size and presence forced an immediate change of dominion between the two hybrids. And they recognized it -- they felt it in their words, their eyes, even their breaths. Red hissed under each taken breath, forcing growls strong enough to shake the ground beneath their feet. Indy then froze herself in place once he was close enough; she watched Red walk slowly behind her tail, examining her indominus features, then round back to the front.

The indominus couldn't seem to stop shaking it. Her quills were rattling over and over against her scalp, and her claws trembled in terror, still unable to process what had happened. Red looked down at her claws and snorted.

"I do not want to scare you. But I need you to stop looking through their eyes... and look through mine."

Indy didn't respond. So Red turned a tail, snaking his head toward her neck to sense any reaction; none was given. He stepped past her right side, facing the upper side of the chaotic town he ruined, and inhaled deep.

"Can you do that for me?"

Indy whimpered in return, eyes still latched upon the dead. Red sighed, nodding his head.

"I... didn't believe in monsters, either..." he growled quietly, his small footsteps voiced soft cracks and sickening crunches as he pressurized his weight against the bodies below. "Hrr... until I met them. Then I learned that they exist."

"You killed them..." Indy finally forced out, bowing her head in Red's shadow. "T-They didn't d-do anything-"

"Yet," added Red with a snort to dismiss her. "I spared them the trouble of growing up. No more Dodgson's, no more Wu's... no more zookeepers and scientists with little white coats!"

"You n-never wanted to escape," Indy croaked. "You only wanted to hurt them... All of them."

Red's tail twitched. "Does that bother you?"

Indy's eyes raised; he was looking at her now, both eyes softening ever so slightly in sorrow and anguish.

"I don't think you understand."

"I d-don't want to understand-"

"Then let me help you try."

"T-The h-hatchings-!"

"Deserved it!" Red roared, lashing his tail from behind. "They all deserve it!"

Indy growled quietly, only to silence herself and look away as Red drew an inch from her snout. She could smell the blood bubbling up in his throat -- that and the human flesh trapped between his fangs. Red exhaled quietly, bowing his horns to her. "Hrrr... they never gave a damn about what you want, Indy. Every concrete wall and glass cell was a prison to keep you from the rest of the world. You were theirs to tame, to test upon, and to break... until your worth became worthless to them."