PANIC ROOM • KENJI KON

LIII. Welcome to Jurassic Park

Chapter Fifty Three:  Welcome to Jurassic Park

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The room was quite large, but overgrown with vines, flora, and moss, making the room pop with greens and little pink flowers. The roof was a dome made of glass, some of which was missing, showing the bright blue sky, while the rest of the glass was caked in dirt and dust. Some rusted scaffolding stood off to the side, covered in so many vines it probably couldn't move anymore.

The walls contained art work of velociraptors, gallimumus, and other small-ish dinosaurs, painted in greens and blues. The floor was littered with bones; one of which looked to belong to that of a T. Rex. Shadows cast around the room gave the atmosphere a rather creepy feeling.

"I don't like this. I don't like this..." Kenji said quietly, backing up towards the doors.

Something clattered to the right, and Kenji's hand slipped into Eva's. She offered a comforting squeeze.

A few compies stood around on the staircase and bits of rubble covered in moss. A compy scurried up a fallen beam with what looked like a metal nut in her mouth. She ran across a small ledge at the top of the room, where the glass of the dome ceiling met the walls. The compy dropped the nut in a nest made of sticks and twigs, where, balanced precariously on the edge, was their compass. The compy butted the compass with her head, and it moved a centimeter.

Eva flinched, scared it would fall and break.

"We gotta get up there," Darius said, determined.

"Well, the good news is, it's only, like, thirty feet in the air," Yaz pointed out.

He glared at her.

"Hey, we can climb that," Eva said, gesturing to the rusted over scaffolding to their left.

"Okay, but how do we get on it?"

"How about the vending machine?"

Darius, Yasmina and Eva were putting everything into pushing the vending machine across the visitor's center, and it was barely moving.

"One sec, guys," Kenji said from the front of the vending machine, where he was dropping two quarters into it. "I'm useless until I carbo load." He pressed two buttons. "Come on, J4. Come on, J4."

"Hey, doofus," Eva panted, "It's not plugged in." She stepped away from the side of the machine and softly pushed Kenji away, before pulling back her elbow and smashing it into the glass. The glass splintered, so she hit it twice more before it fell in a heap of shattered pieces on the ground below. She pulled two bags of red doritos from J4 and dropped them into Kenji's eager hands. "All yours, Pretty Boy."

"Yes! This is why I lo—ooove chips! Fuck, red doritos are so good! Whoo!" He opened the bag and threw a few small chips in his mouth, immediately frowning. "They're stale."

"Uh huh," Eva mumbled as she went back to pushing the vending machine with the others.

Eva swore she pulled something in her chest by the time they had it positioned in front of the scaffolding.

Yasmina pulled herself up to the top of the vending machine, then looked down at them. "Come on, guys. Just like this." She effortlessly used a vine to swing onto the scaffolding, which she scaled in a matter of seconds. She landed on a bar gymnastics style and pulled herself to her feet.