The Lost Dinosaur |2| Nublar Seven Series

Contingency Plan

Hayden

I had been tossing and turning in my bed for a while now. I think the most I was going to get to sleep this night was one, two hours tops. Ben was sleeping on the floor by my bed on a thin mattress I rarely used. I tried to match my breathing to his, maybe that would make it easier for me to fall asleep. But every time I tried, I felt like I was going to die suffocated.

I made a mental note to pack some energy drinks as I listen to the night sounds. There was a party far away, because I could hear faint electronic music, in a dorm close by, someone was snoring and in another one there was some pounding I chose to ignore.

I don't know when I was able to match our breathings, but suddenly it was much easier to breathe.

"Hays?" Ben whispered. "Are you awake?"

"Can't sleep?" I whispered back. Somehow it felt wrong to talk in a normal voice.

"Yeah." He sighed.

"Same."

"What if something goes wrong?" He spoke so quietly I almost didn't catch it.

A lot of things could go wrong. With our ride into the island, with our ride out of it, with the volcano or the dinosaurs, or... there were too many variables. All of that was needless to say, but another wild variable was Camp Fam, what if they figured out our plan... they would totally come to help.

"Nobody knows we are going there." He continued. "If something bad happens, I don't want my mom wondering. Not knowing, holding onto hope. I don't want to break her heart, but I also want to help Bumpy."

"I get it. I don't care if it's selfish, I want to help Bumpy too." I said. "But knowing our families and Camp Fam, they would go hell and back for us." And that was what I was afraid of. I didn't want them getting hurt and putting themselves in danger for a choice that I made. If my therapist were here, she would say something about me having zero self-preservation when it came to my friends and family. I never really cared what happened to me if it meant they'd be okay. That was what had gotten me here in the first place.

Just because now I knew how my mind worked, it didn't change the facts that my choices remained. I was not apologetic. They'd be mad, but that will pass. What mattered was their safety. My family's and Camp Fam's. And that included Bumpy.

"We could write letters." Ben's voice was choked. "I guess this would be the first place someone would come looking for us... so we could explain, hopefully they'll never read it, but-"

"It's a good idea, letters... okay." I got up slowly and headed for my desk.

The room was lit only by my desk lamp. Behind me, Ben scribbled furiously in a notebook. The sound of pen on paper filling the room. Yet, all I could do was stare at a blank page. There were a lot of thoughts running wild in my mind, but none concrete enough to be worth writing down. By the time we were supposed to be getting up, my pen finally began to move.

...

The address Zia had given me was of an airstrip in the middle of nowhere. The flat land was surrounded by mountains on one side and a eucalyptus forest on the other. Our uber driver made a weird face dropping Ben and I here, I guess he wasn't used to dropping people in an airstrip that looked like it was used for smuggling drugs.

Another thing that could be used for some illegal activity was the plane. It was old and very small. It was a single-engine airplane with a propeller in the front; the wings connected to the ceiling of the plane and the whole thing was on top of normal car sized tires. The white plane had blue and red stripes on the side and the white painting reflected the sun rising over the mountains.