by David Lewman
Copyright © 2015 Universal Studios Licensing LLC. All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, 1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., Toronto. Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
randomhousekids.com
ISBN 9780553536904 (hc) — eBook ISBN 9780553536911
v4.1
a
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Photo Insert
Chapter One
Gray Mitchell was in his bedroom, clicking through 3-D images on his red plastic View-Master®. His parents had given him three disks with dinosaur pictures for his fifth birthday. That meant he’d been looking at these same pictures for six years.
In kid years, that made the disks prehistoric, but he still liked them.
He also liked his model of two dinosaurs fighting on a volcanic island. And his dinosaur posters. And his books about dinosaurs. In fact, Gray liked anything to do with dinosaurs. Well, not liked. Loved.
And now he was finally going to get to see some real ones! Real, live, moving, chomping, stomping dinosaurs! He wanted to be ready. He wanted to remember everything he knew about dinosaurs when he finally got to meet them face to face.
“Gray?” his mom asked, opening his door. “Let’s move. Why are you looking at that now, honey? Grab your backpack. The flight’s in two hours.”
He kept peering into his View-Master®. “Dane County Airport is thirty-eight minutes away. Sixty with traffic.” Gray was very good with numbers.
Dane County Airport served Gray’s hometown of Madison, Wisconsin. There weren’t a lot of live dinosaurs in Wisconsin. In fact, there were none. Nada. Zilch.
“How many minutes to get your little butt in the van?” his mom asked. “Move, kiddo.”
Gray put the View-Master® in an outer pocket of his backpack, pulled on the pack, and followed his mom out to their minivan parked in the driveway. His dad was waiting in the driver’s seat. “Zach!” he called out the car window. “Vamonos!”
Zach, Gray’s sixteen-year-old brother, was standing in the yard, touching his forehead to his girlfriend’s forehead. She was in love with Zach. Zach liked her but wasn’t really sure he loved her.
“Call me every day,” his girlfriend said, close to tears. “And text me pictures so I don’t forget what you look like.”
“I’ll only be gone for a week,” Zach said sheepishly.
His dad called from the car again. “Zach, you’re not being sent off to war here.”
At the same moment that Zach’s girlfriend said, “I love you,” Zach said, “I’ll see you later. Bye.” He climbed into the backseat of the minivan, watching his girlfriend wave. She was trying not to cry, but it looked as though she was going to anyway.
Zach’s mom turned around and said, “I know it hurts, sweetheart.” But his dad didn’t believe Zach’s relationship with his girlfriend was serious. “Are you…are you going to be…okay?” he asked, teasing.
Zach blew out a big breath. He couldn’t decide which was more annoying: his dad’s teasing or his mom’s sympathy. He stuck in his earbuds, retreating into his music.
His mom glared at his dad as he started the car and began the trip to the airport.
Just outside the security checkpoint, the two brothers said goodbye to their parents. Gray’s mom knelt to hug him as he adjusted his waterproof fanny pack. It was filled with everything he thought he might need for his adventure with real dinosaurs.
“Passengers must be at the gate thirty minutes before departure,” he said. Gray hated being late. And there was no way he was going to miss this plane.
“I know, honey,” his mom said. She stood up, turned to Zach, and took his face in her hands. “Watch your brother,” she instructed. “And answer your phone. I didn’t turn on international roaming so you could snaptalk or whatever you call it.”
Their dad put his hand on Zach’s shoulder. “Listen to your mother,” he said in mock seriousness.
Zach nodded his head and rolled his eyes at the same time. Then the boys said goodbye and hurried through security. Their mom watched them disappear into the crowd. “I love you!” she called after them.
“Did you call your sister?” Dad asked her.
Mom nodded. “Yes, but my call went straight to voicemail. She never answers.”
“It’ll be fine,” Dad reassured her. “She handles twenty thousand people a day. She can handle two more.”
Hours later, the plane landed in Costa Rica. As the two brothers got off the plane, they saw signs directing them to the ferry for Isla Nublar.
As they shuffled up the gangway to the ferry with the other tourists, Gray asked, “How big is the island?”
Zach shrugged. He really had no idea, but he wasn’t going to admit that to his little brother. “Big.”
“But how many pounds?” Gray asked.
Zach made a face. “That doesn’t make sense.”
Once they were on the sleek ferry, it sped across the ocean waves toward Isla Nublar. Gray was so excited, he was bouncing. Zach noticed a cute teenage girl and put a little distance between himself and his brother. Gray noticed but didn’t stop bouncing.
In the distance, the island rose out of the sea. It had mountains that looked as though they might have once been volcanoes. And it was green, covered in dense jungle.
But Isla Nublar had much more than just mountains and jungle. It was home to the number one tourist destination in the world, where visitors could experience the thrill of witnessing living and breathing dinosaurs! And even though he would never admit it, Zach was almost as excited as Gray was to be on this trip.
When the ferry reached the island, Zach and Gray made their way off the boat with the crowd of tourists. They scanned the landing, looking for their aunt.
She wasn’t there.
Instead, her assistant, Zara, a young woman in her twenties, stood waiting for them, holding up a tablet that read “Zach and Gray Mitchell.”
“Where’s Aunt Claire?” Gray asked his brother.
Zach shrugged. They ambled toward Zara, who introduced herself and led them onto the monorail.
Gray made his way down the aisle, gently squeezing between people to reach the front. The front of the monorail was glass, so whoever stood there saw everything first.
Gray reached the front window, pressed his hands to the glass, and watched as the monorail swooshed along on its elevated rails, passing through the jungle foliage on either side.
And then he saw it.
A huge gate with burning torches loomed in front of them. The top of the gate read “Jurassic World.” The monorail pas
sed through the open gate, and they were officially inside the park.
The monorail took them right to the hotel. Gray raced out into the busy lobby, feeling as though he were about to burst. Zach followed behind his brother with Zara, who pulled both of their rolling bags. Zara spoke in her crisp British accent. “Your aunt arranged to greet you at one o’clock. Could your brother slow down?”
“He doesn’t slow down,” Zach explained.
From halfway up the escalator, Gray waved back to them.
When they reached their hotel room, Gray ran inside. “Let’s-go-let’s-go-let’s-go!”
“Dude,” Zach said, trying to calm him down. “She said we have to wait.”
“I don’t want to wait anymore!”
Gray ran to the room’s balcony and threw open the door.…
Chapter Two
What a view! The park was beautiful and exciting—everything Gray had hoped it would be. From their balcony, he could see the lagoon, the visitors’ center, Main Street…
…everything but dinosaurs.
“When can we go see the dinosaurs?” Gray asked Zara.
“After you meet up with your aunt Claire in the visitors’ center,” Zara said. “At one o’clock. As I mentioned.”
Gray looked disappointed. He wanted to see the dinosaurs now.
But at that moment, Gray and Zach’s aunt Claire was busy doing her job. As an important executive of Jurassic World, she was giving a tour to three businesspeople she hoped would invest in the park. She led them through sliding glass doors of the Genetics Lab into a long glass corridor packed with tourists. Here the visitors could watch the park’s scientists at work.
“No one’s impressed by a dinosaur anymore,” Claire said, smiling. “Twenty years ago, de-extinction was right up there with magic. These days, kids look at a Stegosaurus like an elephant at the city zoo.”
Inside the lab, dinosaur eggs warmed in incubators. A baby Apatosaurus broke through its shell. Children pressed against the glass wall of the corridor, staring. Despite what Claire had said, they seemed fascinated by the newborn dinosaur.
“That doesn’t mean Asset Development is falling behind,” Claire continued as she led her three visitors through the hall. “Our DNA excavators discover new species every year. But consumers want them bigger, louder. More teeth.”
She led the trio into the Genetics Lab. The scientists were drilling into amber to extract ancient DNA, injecting fertilized eggs, and loading stacks of frozen embryos into freezers. “The good news,” she said, “is that our advances in gene splicing have opened up a new frontier. We’ve learned more from genetics in the past decade than in a century of digging up bones.”
Stopping before a 3-D display of a strand of DNA, she asked the businesspeople, “When you say you want to sponsor a new attraction, what do you have in mind?”
One man smiled. “We want to be thrilled.”
Claire smiled back. “Don’t we all.”
She swiped the touchscreen glass of the display case, and the DNA strand spun. “We think you’ll be more than thrilled by our first genetically modified hybrid, Indominus rex. A new species of dinosaur, built from scratch.”
“And not just built,” a nearby voice said. “Designed.”
The group turned and saw Dr. Henry Wu, the genetic scientist who worked for Jurassic World, and Jurassic Park before it. He had been there from the beginning.
“She’ll be fifty feet long when fully grown,” Dr. Wu continued. “Bigger than the T. rex.”
The three potential corporate sponsors looked intrigued, but not entirely sold. Claire said, “Every time we’ve unveiled a new asset, attendance at the park has spiked. We’ve gotten global news coverage. Celebrity visitors. Eyes of the world.”
She knew that was the sort of thing corporate sponsors loved to hear.
“When will she be ready?” the woman in the group asked.
Like a predator sensing an easy kill, Claire smiled. “She already is.”
Before she met her nephews at the visitors’ center, Claire stopped by the park’s control room. A couple dozen employees were watching the park on monitors.
Lowery, an engineer, knew she’d been meeting with potential corporate sponsors. “Did you close the deal?”
“I did,” Claire said. Lowery shook his head. He clearly disapproved. “Why stop there? Might as well let the corporations name the dinosaurs! Just like the ballparks.”
Valerie, a communications operator, answered a phone and said, “Your assistant is on line two. Zach and Gray are here.”
“Tell her I’ll be there in five,” Claire said. She noticed Lowery’s curious look. “My sister’s kids.”
“You’re related to people? Actual human beings?” Lowery asked mockingly.
“Funny,” Claire said, not amused, as she walked briskly out of the lab.
Chapter Three
Gray ran up the steps of the towering visitors’ center. “This is it! Hurry up!”
Zach lagged behind. “Dude, chill.”
Chilling was not on Gray’s agenda. He slipped through the glass doors into the visitors’ center and looked up. A skeleton of a T. rex petrified in a column of amber loomed over the hall. The monorail sliced through the open space above it.
In a 3-D display, a character named Mr. DNA explained the park’s invisible fence system. “With our new invisible fence technology, the dinosaurs can stay in designated zones without bars or cages!”
An animated Stegosaurus approached a red line. A light around his neck flashed. He stopped and backed off.
Gray ran up to a display called “A Brief History of Neo-Paleontology.” A genetic sequence scrolled by rapidly. Gray said, “Cytosine, guanine, adenine, and thymine. The same four things writing the code for everything that ever lived—”
Zach caught up with Gray and grabbed him. “If you get lost, I’m not looking for you. Mom and Dad aren’t paying me for babysitting.”
Babysitting? That hurt.
“Gray?” asked a voice behind them. “Is that you?”
They turned around and saw their aunt Claire, kneeling, holding her arms open awkwardly. “Aunt Claire!” Gray said happily, running in for a hug. She stood up and faced Zach. “Wow, Zach, the last time I saw you, you were”—she held her hand out, indicating a height even shorter than Gray—“that must have been, what…three, four years ago?”
“Seven,” Zach said. “Close.”
Ouch, Claire thought. But she smiled and said, “So you got your VIP passes. And these are for food.” She handed Zach an envelope. “Zara is going to take good care of you until I’m done working, okay?”
Gray was disappointed. “You’re not coming with us?”
Claire’s phone buzzed. “I wish I could,” she said, feeling guilty. “But tomorrow I can take you into the control room and show you what goes on behind the scenes. That’d be cool, right?”
Zach and Gray nodded, looking abandoned.
“Okay,” Claire said, smiling. “I’ll see you tonight at six.”
“Don’t forget the thing with—” Zara reminded her boss.
“Eight,” Claire corrected. “What time do you go to sleep? Or do you go to sleep at different times?”
She looked at her phone. The text read, “BOSS COMING.”
“Right. Have fun,” Claire said to her nephews. She turned to Zara and said, “Take care of them, okay?” Then she walked off quickly, leaving the boys alone with her assistant.
On the park’s helipad, a helicopter labeled Jurassic One landed. Her hair whipped by the wind from the chopper’s blades, Claire ran up to the door in her high-heeled shoes and climbed in. At the controls sat Simon Masrani, the billionaire who was Jurassic World’s biggest investor. Next to him was a weary flight instructor.
“Claire!” Masrani shouted, greeting her over the noise of the helicopter.
“Mr. Masrani!” Claire shouted back. “You’re flying?”
“I got my license!” he announced, grin
ning. But the flight instructor shook his head. “Well,” Masrani admitted, “almost. I only have to pass two more tests. Now show me my new dinosaur!”
He moved the controls. The helicopter lifted off the pad but spun around in a circle. Claire gripped a strap tightly. Masrani sucked his teeth. “Got it! Got it!”
They soared over the valley. Claire opened a notebook to a drawing of the new dinosaur’s home, a steel paddock in the jungle. “So the marketing department thought we could offset costs by selling naming rights to the new paddock. I just closed a deal this morning—”
“Enough about costs,” Masrani interrupted. “Don’t forget why we built this place, Claire. Jurassic World exists to remind us how very small we are. How new. You can’t put a price on that. Now, please! We’re flying! Breathe!”
Claire tried to breathe as the helicopter veered around the curve of a mountaintop. Below, a steel structure stuck out of the jungle.
The home of the Indominus rex.
Chapter Four
Masrani landed the helicopter next to a massive, open-roofed steel paddock still under construction. The flying instructor jumped out of the chopper and ran to the nearest bushes. Claire heard retching sounds.
“Is he okay?” she asked.
“He’s just being dramatic,” Masrani claimed.
The billionaire noticed construction workers adding concrete extensions onto the paddock’s massive walls. “We’re still building?”
“We’d planned to open in May,” Claire explained, “but Asset Containment insisted we build the walls up higher. It’s bigger than they expected.”
Masrani smiled. “They had to build a bigger crib for me when I was a child. It’s a good sign.”
Claire led Masrani into an area encased in thick glass. Paddock supervisors monitored infrared displays. The red outline of a large animal could be seen on a monitor.
“We hit a few speed bumps early on,” Claire said. “It began to anticipate where the food would come from. One of the handlers nearly lost an arm. The others threatened to quit if I couldn’t guarantee their safety.”
