Ripper: An Indoraptor Story ✓

Against All Odds

No sane creature should ever run away from their demons.

It was true of course -- no matter how broken they may seem, or how much fear they carried. A deer counters his or her hunter, a human contests his internal anguish, a vermin contends the mosquitos who long for blood from the child it protects. Only the strongest survive; only the crippled, impure kinds who'd wrestle these growing ordeals can keep their wishes awake. Surely it was a fact, it was written in the stars.

Perhaps I was mistaken when I considered sanity as a predicament to survival. 

I was nowhere near sane. 

And so I ran.

The oddness of it was simply this random decision. Running from a battle was peculiar of me -- after all I was designed to kill anything and everything regardless of who controlled me. Never once in this journey had I held back from a cause unless it concerned the fate of another. But as Death drew near, cackling in my shadows and licking the tender flesh now spoiled by the hilt of two copper bullets, perhaps I was right and just to avoid the rules of nature and fend for myself. I knew fate brought me here, fate demanded a sacrifice of some kind. Now I was one of the many on that list of victims yet to come, and reasons of immortality was simply out of the question. The end was near: the end of INGEN, the end of friendship, the end of love, the end of this miraculous, and impossible journey.

Even the end of me.

Nothing was bound to last forever, this was in no doubt true. But one's legacy does last, and so far I left none for anyone to understand. I hadn't made my mark, I hadn't let my eyes sink upon the beauties of this fantasia the humans adore so much. I didn't want to die, not yet. I needed to prove myself...somehow...

It can't end like this...

It's too early...

Part of me believed this mad dash into the corridors of INGEN was cowardly. But in retrospect I think this was the smartest decision I've ever made, and the only one I can think about as I boosted into the halls of a door-infected maze of my abandoned home.

Back in the room poor Owen had fallen, but unlike the fate of his loving raptor was merely unconscious to the ravages of blood loss. As for his mate, she managed to blow some strikes here and there, before taking a violent crack to the skull by the persistent Henry Wu. A nasty gash of dark red soon glimmered upon her forehead, though she was barely conscious enough to stare at him, tears and rage glowing like a fire her eyes. The woman huffed and growled like an animal bound to pounce, but her primitive side was weakened by her soft humanity and resulted in an unfortunate disadvantage.

"I'm not going to kill you, Claire," Wu muttered softly, folding away his bloodied gun and pinning it against his side, "But if you invade me once more...I won't hold back."

"Then why don't you?"

"Because you're none of my concern at the moment," Wu responded, swinging the gun with a simple twist. The hilt of the gun whacked against Claire's cranium a second time, and where she had been previously crouching was now an empty space. The dropping of Claire's body echoed in the room as Wu stepped back, blinking down at the unconscious woman with no sanity left in his eyes and spoke once more:

"So stay out of my way."

A soft, regretful inhale wafted through his nostrils, and upon the silence that rigged his eardrums, the scientist turned, facing the direction to where I had fled and began his heavy march through the hallways.

And his little pet hybrid? He was nowhere to be found.

Wonderful.

I had no time to hear this conversation, unlike yourselves, for I had a life to keep alive from his wrath. Truth be told I was unaware of where to go or what to do, the ideas rushed clean out of me the second I left, only consumed by the idea of how painful dying would be.