Dark Fangs: Forbidden Fugitives

Chapter Twenty-Five

A cold mist curled around Jae's mind as she started to wake, decelerating her acuity. There was a dampness to the air that disquieted the quintessence of everything, inducing a kind of ambivalence in Jae. She took a quivering breath in and felt it shudder through her entire frame, cold and aching. 

     Where am I...what happened--

    No. The I-Raptor. Where is he?! Jae's green eyes snapped wide, and she cast frantic glances over her dark surroundings. When she ascertained that she was still in the cave, her heart stopped clawing like a rabid animal at her wounded rib cage. Oh...hold on....Jae shifted her blood-crusted forearms behind her to prop her forequarters up, and that simple movement, once again, drove strident agony into her sore anatomy. She ground her teeth jarringly, holding back a loud groan of pain, though that only made her clench her stomach, which only delivered more affliction.

     I can't catch a break! she thought miserably, waiting for the pain to ebb before she attempted again to push herself up to sit.

     A low, raspy moan behind her drew her strained attention. Jae swiveled her cranium to shift her bleary eyes for the source of the doleful sound, and repressed a grief-stricken gasp as she discerned Midnight Moon's broken, mutilated physique, sprawled on her side, suspiring weak, trembling breaths. The Thoroughbred looked helplessly impuissant, unlike her former, capable, strong, vivacious self. Her mane was tattered and blood-soaked, her hooves were cracked, stained, and muddied, and her fur was patchy, caked with mire and gore. Her eyes were barely open, but crusted with grit and pus, glazed over with what would soon become death.

     Jae's heart stammered in her chest. Midnight....

     Jae's head immediately whipped around and up to the ravine's chasm opening, to search for the red-eyed, monstrous face of the Indoraptor. Rain drizzled freely down into the cave, undisturbed by a scaly head obscuring its path down. Jae slanted her eyes at the chine-shaped slice in the ceiling. She did not trust what she saw; That animal was a brilliant, resourceful being, which had tricked Jae's Uncle into stepping into its own cage when it was previously in the hands of InGen, she reminded herself. She wasn't going to fall for this. 

     She wasn't going let it deceive her. 

     "Midnight Moon?" Jae whispered hoarsely, turning her attention momentarily from the narrow cave entrance. The horse sighed mournfully, barely stirring. Jae's anxiety only increased.

     I have to get that saddle pad. 

     Sensitively, Jae pulled herself to the nearest stalagmite and gripped it with her shaking, bruised hands, wincing, but trying with disconcerted centralization to ignore the agony as she dragged her distressed frame up. The girl clamped her jaws shut hard, focusing on that aching pressure as she pushed herself against the vertical stone, breathing with caution. She turned her torso to face the stream of rain that trickled through the skylight-like cavern opening, still awkwardly twisted as she used the pinnacle to support her off-balance body. A breath shuddered through her mouth, slithering through her teeth like a frosty plume of smoke. 

     Okay, okay, breathe, and stay calm. Don't focus on the pain. She told herself, blinking slowly. The rugged saddle pad was strewn over the edge of the seven-foot ledge Jae and Midnight Moon had cascaded over after they'd fallen the length of the real drop; the eighteen feet from the chasm opening to the floor, preliminary to that first scarp before the stone ground sloped and fell away to where they lay now.

     Being only roughly 5'7", Jae would have to figure out another way to make up for that extra foot and five inches. She sighed, releasing the tension in her jaw. This might take some time. She tilted her head up again to glimpse the tendrils of greenery that grew into the cave through the ravine slot, narrowing her parakeet green optics. 

     A branch could get me the rest of the reach up there. Then I could just knock down the saddle blanket. Jae thought, twisting around to scan the shadowy cavern range. If one possibly fell when we did...that would work. 

     Come on, come on, give me something here, God.

     A damp, rotting log caught her attention near the seven foot crag, at least four feet long, but decaying, it would be soft and crumping, triturating in Jae's hands. 

     But I could break a piece off, she told herself with a weak grin. Thank you.

     With an adamant mind set, Jae pushed off the stalagmite and traipsed towards the precipice, keeping her eyes set on the ground she crept along. The pain in her limbs was abhorrent, sharp with a burning-scraping throb, but she kept on, swaying and wincing. 

     I feel...slightly tilted, she realized after a moment, peering at her feet. Her sorel boots were so torn up and frayed that they were putting her off balance. The cave floor was so rough though, that if she took them off, she'd assuredly cut her feet. She sighed, rolling her eyes. Just go slower, I guess.

     A few more afflicted wails and whimpers proceeded from Midnight Moon's raw throat as Jae made her wary way towards the ledge. Each time one reached Jae's ears, she flinched in empathetic pain for her mare. She had to hurry.

     "Okay, here we go..." Jae thought aloud, crouching when she reached the rotting tree trunk. Tensing, she sank her fingers into it, testing how much decomposition it had actually already undergone. She shrieked when her fingers sank through the mushy wood like claws, a myriad of white squirming worms flooding out as the chunk of wood she had her hands curled around came away with hardly any effort on Jae's part. She recoiled, raking at her own hands with repugnance, her throat constricting and threatening to release a wave of nauseous bile. 

     In her unnerved hysteria, Jae didn't notice a shadow fall across the cave's aperture, and the red-orange glow of a reptilian eye prying in through the fissure above.

     A creeping feeling crawled on icy talons up Jae's vertebral column, and she went abruptly motionless, hesitantly lifting her eyes to the gap in the subterranean canyon ceiling. Her blood froze and her pupils shrank to pinpricks. 

     He was here once again, and this time he wasn't going to abandon his post.