I woke up to the sound of insects. Not the familiar buzz of city skeeters or the high-pitched drone of mosquitoes, but a thick, alien hum—low and vibrant, like the air itself was vibrating. It pressed against my eardrums, pulsed down my spine. I blinked.
Light. Dappled. Warm. It filtered through thick fronds, tall stalks, vines so green they almost hurt to look at. My hands were in dirt. Real dirt, loamy and soft, not the concrete-and-gravel blend I remembered from the zoo. There were leaves near my cheek, oversized and wide-veined. Everything smelled like heat and old plants and wet stone.
I sat up slowly.
The back of my head throbbed. My fingers brushed through tangled hair, into damp soil, and I stared at my palms like they belonged to someone else.
Alive.
I was… alive?
I ran a hand down my chest. Shirt still torn. Scabs on my palms. But breathing. Thinking. Moving.
I stood—awkward, disjointed. My legs felt like stilts. My shoulder twitched from some memory I couldn't quite pin down. The world spun once before snapping back into place.
A cage.
A fall.
Still water.
And teeth.
I staggered backward until my spine hit the trunk of a tree. I stayed there, breathing fast, heart trying to pound its way through my ribs.
"I died," I whispered. "I died to a crocodile."
My voice sounded stupid in the open. Weak. Cracked at the edges.
Then the phrase just… formed in my brain.
I got Shreddered by a crocodile.
And that made me laugh. A weird, dry bark of a sound that didn't feel like it belonged to me. I pressed a hand to my face. Shredder, they always called me. The guy who made it out. The one who shredded the dares, the stunts, the games. Now I was the punchline to my own name.
I looked around.
No fences.
No signs.
No zoo noises. No speakers playing soft instrumental music. No hum of distant electricity. Just trees. Tall, old, massive trees and vines looping like ropes over half-buried roots. Something moved in the distance—a slow rustle through leaves too deliberate to be wind.
And then I heard it.
A sound I didn't know how to name. It came from deep beyond the trees, from the belly of the forest. Not a growl. Not a snarl. Not anything from a normal animal. It rolled through the air like thunder pressed through a throat—wet and gurgling and far too low.
I didn't wait.
I ran.
Branches snapped against my arms. Thorns clawed at my sleeves. My breath came sharp and ragged. I didn't know where I was going, didn't have a direction or a plan. I just knew I had to move—away from that sound.
Then I saw it.
At first, I thought it was just part of the trees—a dark silhouette buried in the growth. But as I got closer, the angles became too straight. The shadows too sharp. I stopped at the edge of the clearing and stared.
A building.
Sort of.
It looked like it had once been something larger. Now only a chunk remained. Metal beams, rusted and leaning. Concrete choked by moss and vines. But there were walls—three of them still standing—and a roof, caved in on one side. A shattered door hung open like a loose jaw. Inside, everything was dark.
I moved toward it without thinking.
The moment I stepped through the doorway, the air changed. Cooler. Stiller. My footsteps echoed.
The interior had collapsed in on itself, leaving wreckage like a ribcage. I picked my way over broken glass, snapped boards, strange machinery half-swallowed by mildew. Shelves hung empty on rusted brackets. Papers littered the ground, soaked to pulpy fragments.
Then I saw the bones.
Not human. Too long. Too sharp. Jaws stretched like nightmares, rib curves taller than I was. Some were bleached white, others still dark with the imprint of whatever they'd last touched. They weren't arranged. Just scattered. As if something massive had torn through and left its leftovers behind.
A wave of cold swept over me.
I took two slow steps forward, squinting into the dim.
And then I saw it.
The wall.
Painted white once, now grey with dust and claw marks—but unmistakable.
The logo.
Black and red, curved like a sickle.
InGen.
I froze.
"No," I whispered. "No, no, no."
But I couldn't look away.
The InGen logo was smeared across the wall, faded but still readable. The name that belonged in a movie. In a franchise. On merchandise.
Fiction.
It was fiction.
But it was right there. Right in front of me.
And I—Shredder, idiot prankster, part-time urban explorer—was standing in the dead, rotten heart of it.
Jurassic Park.
This… this looked exactly like the abandoned lab from Jurassic Park III. The one the characters stumbled into. Where the failed experiments were. Where the truth was buried under dust and broken tubes.
And now I was here.
I pressed a hand to my mouth and turned in a slow circle, eyes taking in every jagged shadow, every torn metal frame, every scrap of ruin. My stomach dropped in stages.
I wasn't in the zoo anymore.
I wasn't even in the world I knew.
And somewhere out there, past the trees and heat and buzzing air—
Something was still breathing.
Something that didn't belong in cages.