Dinosaur World 5

by Logan Jacobs

  “I hope not,” the soldier said warily. “But if they break it open, then all those weapons are suddenly in their hands. Did you see anyone with an axe out there?”

  “No, but I’m not discounting the possibility,” I replied. “This could be good, though. Your Jeep and our bikes are blocking their path to the doors. They can’t drive through the entrance with the Jeep there.”

  “But they can drive through my fucking Jeep,” Kat countered.

  “Fuck, we only have two bikes if that Jeep gets taken down,” I muttered.

  “We need to take them down first,” Hae-won said as she gripped her rifle. “Where can we get a good aim from?”

  The voices of the gang members started to move away from the door, and I held up a finger for a moment while I listened to the mumbled words of a man.

  “Surround this bitch,” the same thick voice ordered. “Them doors are locked, and someone’s holed up in there. I’m not wasting ammo trying to shoot through this shit. Take a look and find me a discreet entrance, yeah?”

  “Discreet?” one of the cronies snorted. “You’ve never been discreet a day in your life--”

  The loud thwack of something hitting flesh cut off the conversation, and it didn’t continue from there. They didn’t seem to be trying the front door anymore, and we heard their voices drift further away as they made their way around the building.

  “What do we do?” a young woman in blue scrubs gasped. “We don’t have any weapons.”

  “All the staff should go and be with the patients,” I decided. “Keep everyone away from windows and doors and hide if you have to.”

  The medical staff nodded, and they all started to hurry away from the lobby.

  “Amir!” I called as the doctor started to run. “Make sure Becka’s safe. Please.”

  “She’s the pretty blonde with the bandaged leg!” Hae-won hollered as well.

  “I will find her!” The doctor nodded and then disappeared into the ward.

  “Let’s get these bastards,” I said. “If we go one story up, we can get a better shot than we can on the ground floor without ending up in a tight spot.”

  “Let’s go,” Hae-won agreed, and we turned to find the stairs.

  “I have no idea where the stairs are,” Kat said. “Should we take the lifts?”

  “I’ve avoided using elevators,” I said as I eyed the silver doors. “If the power ends up being cut, there isn’t exactly a repair man we can call right now.”

  We heard the echo of a door rattling wildly down a side hall.

  “Fuck it,” I said, and I slammed my hand down on the elevator button. “We’ll risk it for Becka.”

  The elevator pinged as its doors opened, and we jumped inside before Hae-won hit the first-floor button. The doors closed, and I held my breath as we shot upward and stopped again quickly. The doors slowly slid open as an automated voice announced we were on the first floor, and we hurried out into the corridor.

  The lights above us were off, but the windows on this floor weren’t covered like they were downstairs, so there was enough natural light to see. The floor was more white linoleum, and there was a window to our left at the end of the hall. We raced toward it, and I peered down to see the red mohawk man and two of his giant cronies.

  The two men were prowling around in the hedges near the edge of the hospital, but Mohawk was standing around with his lanky arms crossed and a smug smirk on his face.

  “Mohawk’s got his gun in hand,” Hae-won observed.

  “What kind of pistol is that?” I asked and squinted through the window.

  “Makarov,” Kat answered with a shake of her head. “Pretty common for the gangs here to smuggle them in. Eight rounds of 9mm. I heard him shooting when he pulled up, but I didn’t get a count, so I don’t know how many rounds are left, or even if he reloaded.”

  “Shit,” I muttered.

  “The others have got a golf club and a two-by-four with nails sticking out of one end,” Kat noted as we stood back from the window. “Neither could shatter the glass of this place, but if they get impatient looking for a clean entrance, they could probably drive one of those vans straight through.”

  “Let’s take them out,” I sighed.

  The girls stood pressed against the wall to the left, and I stood out of sight on the right as I reached out for the window handle.

  Then Hae-won glanced at the hallway stretching behind her and silently pointed.

  I looked around her shoulder and saw there was a second window not far away. I nodded, and the two girls hurried off to set up at the other window. Then I slowly opened the small, glass window beside me.

  It was rigged so no one could open it more than four inches, but this was just wide enough for the nose of my rifle to fit through. I could hear the conversation of the men below, and it was clear the red mohawk guy was the little ringleader.

  The other two men just grunted in agreement as he spoke in his high-pitched, manic tone.

  “Think I’ll get me a little nurse, as well,” he said and then spat on the ground. “Maybe we keep one of these fucking nerds alive if we find one with big fake tits.”

  The two giant men moved through the hedges some more and snorted laughter.

  “Yeah, that’s it,” Mohawk said and bounced on his toes. One of his eyelids twitched repeatedly, and I wondered if this guy was a druggy. “We’ll take all the shit we can carry in the vans, and find me a nice little wife. My balls have been blue for too long.”

  I wrinkled my nose and looked into the room ahead to see Kat slowly pull open their window.

  There was a sudden creak as the window moved, and we all dove away from sight as quickly as possible.

  “The fuck was that?” one of the men mumbled. “You hear that?”

  I risked a peek through the bottom corner of the window.

  Both cronies stumbled out of the bushes and looked all around, and Mohawk smiled in the creepiest way as he waggled his eyebrows at the darkened, ground-floor windows of the hospital.

  “How many women do you think are hiding out in there?” Mohawk asked as he clutched his junk. “If I could get two of them that would be even better. It’s the end of the fuckin’ world, I can take whatever I want thanks to these big bastard lizards.”

  The mohawk-man threw his head back with a scream and howled into the air, and I knew this was our chance. He and the other two were standing around in one clump, and they were distracted.

  I waved at the girls as I stood up and hid against the wall, and I started to count down on my fingers.

  “Three,” I mouthed. “Two, one.”

  I twisted, aimed through the open crack in the window, and pulled the trigger with mohawk-man’s skull in my sights.

  One of his friends moved just as I did, and the huge man lumbered into the crosshairs and accidentally took a bullet for his leader. The ringleader missed getting struck by mere inches as the blood splattered from his crony’s head and painted Mohawk’s shirt as red as his hair.

  The girls had both shot at the cronies, too, and both of the huge men collapsed to the ground.

  Then the mohawk-man screamed like a banshee, and he wildly started to shoot a volley of bullets up in the air toward us.

  Chapter 9

  The bulletproof glass of the hospital held out, but the heavy pinging of the bullets made my adrenaline spike, and I watched as the dents in the glass travelled closer to the opening in the window.

  “Mother fuckers,” Mohawk howled. “You think you can kill my people? You think you’ll live to tell the fuckin’ tale?”

  I got to my feet and ran at a low crouch to reach the girls.

  “This way,” I growled while the maniac outside finally let off the damn trigger.

  The three of us stayed ducked down and took cover in the corner of the hallway closest to my window. At least no stray bullets could reach us down there if they made it through the open gap in the glass.

  “I’ll feed you to the fuckin’ lizards
!” Mohawk screamed.

  Then I motioned for the girls to stay back while I listened to the chinking of mohawk-man’s reload.

  I started to edge toward the window.

  If he was going to do a super villain, movie-style monologue, then I would have time to put a bullet in his skull before he finished reloading.

  Or so I thought.

  “Show your ugly faces, you bastards!” Mohawk shrieked, and I was about to jump up before he sent three more bullets straight at the window, and one whipped through the opening and impaled the wall behind me. “We’re coming in, and we’re taking everything you have! I’m coming to get you!”

  I heard footsteps run off, and I dove back to the window, but he had disappeared from view.

  The girls rushed back to my side, and Hae-won swore under her breath.

  “We got two,” Kat said. “That’s a start.”

  “Only eight cronies left, and Mohawk’s currently got five rounds left in his mag,” I reported. “We’ll try the other side and hope he doesn’t reload. With any luck, the rest of his group will be clumped together somewhere like they were over here, and we can pick them off quickly. Are you both alright?”

  “Yeah, just pissed we get to deal with crazies on top of dinos,” Hae-won snorted.

  “We might have to get used to it,” Kat sighed.

  “Maybe, but right now, we need to finish this bullshit with this guy before they decide to drive through the lobby,” I told the girls. “He’s too much of a wildcard with that damn gun, and we can’t risk letting him in here.”

  We ran down the hall toward the window at the opposite end of the building. The corridor was long and branched off into multiple different wards and bathrooms, and when we reached the end, I could hear laughter down below and the sound of wrenching metal. Four hulking thugs were using a crowbar to try and wrench a side entrance door open, and the metal of the handle was starting to give way in their efforts.

  Mohawk wasn’t among them, but we would have a clear shot on these guys if we hurried.

  “Same thing again?” I whispered as I clocked the window slightly further down the hall.

  The girls nodded and stealthily made their way over to the glass.

  I pulled the handle and prepared to dive out of sight if it made a noise, but it opened smoothly, and the girls’ window did the same.

  I carefully aimed my rifle at the closest man, who was bald and had tattoos covering his head. I looked over at the girls, and Kat held her hand up to do the countdown.

  When her final finger reached her palm, I pulled the trigger, and the bullet lodged itself right in the back of the bald man’s skull.

  He fell against the door with a sickening crunch, and two of the other men were hit in the head by the girls. They all collapsed onto the concrete and were dead before they hit the ground.

  The one remaining man only had time to gasp before I took aim, and I shot him square between the eyes. He fell face down onto the pile of bodies, and the crowbar clanged out of the door handle behind him.

  “Nice one, Jason.” Hae-won grinned as I scanned the area for any other gang members.

  “They don’t know who they’re up against,” Kat chuckled. “It’s definitely amateur hour with these guys.”

  “Yeah, well, trigger happy amateurs are some of the most dangerous assholes with a gun,” I muttered as I stepped back from the glass. “That mohawk fuck is still out there with two others.”

  I knew it wouldn’t be long until Mohawk found more of his dead cronies face down on the concrete, and even though I didn’t know how effective his fighting would be, he seemed manic enough to make up for that somehow.

  “Let’s head back downstairs,” Hae-won agreed, and we started to run back down the linoleum hall to the elevators.

  “You sure we shouldn't just hunt for the stairs?” Kat asked warily as I hit the button next to the silver doors. “I know we said screw it, but what if one of those maniacs manages to fuck up the lifts?”

  “There’s no time,” I said as I glanced up to check the illuminated number above the doorway. “Let’s just not think about it too much, okay?”

  “Think about what?” Kat asked as the doors pinged open and we stepped inside. “The fact that we could live out the rest of our days in a meter-wide steel box and have to resort to eating each other? It hadn’t crossed my mind.”

  I snorted as the pretty soldier hit the ground floor button, and then I sighed with relief as we steadily started to move down.

  When the doors slid open, we ran out into the empty lobby, and I was glad to see the makeshift barrier of hospital beds was still intact. The fabric-covered doors were still in one piece, too, but I could hear the low murmur of voices right outside.

  I pressed a finger to my lips, and we stealthily jogged closer to the entryway.

  The voices were close to the door, and it sounded like there were two of them in total. They grunted with laughter when they spoke, and at first, I couldn’t hear the high-pitched leader’s voice in the conversation.

  Then the manic bastard must have come strolling over.

  “Well, boys,” mohawk-man said and hocked a loogie. “What do you reckon? Is this a treasure chest, or what?”

  “What do you think’s in it?” one man growled in a deep, Northern English accent. “I reckon they’ve got shit loads of guns in there.”

  “Nah,” another Scottish voice replied. “There’s no chance of that. They’ll have taken anything inside unless they’re completely daft.”

  “Fuck,” Kat hissed. “They’re talking about my Jeep. No chance are they touching that baby.”

  “We can’t move the barricade,” Hae-won whispered. “We need to find another way.”

  “Let’s try the fire door we came in through,” I said.

  “Perfect.” Hae-won nodded. “I wonder how many of them are left out there. They don’t sound very worried, which isn’t a good sign.”

  “Yeah, I thought Mohawk would be shitting a brick by now,” I admitted.

  We kept our rifles held high as we ran down the dark lobby toward the fire exit we’d been ushered through earlier. As we approached it, the maniacal laughter of Mohawk rang out through the building, and I heard a huge thump of metal on metal.

  “They’re probably trying to break into the weapons,” Hae-won hissed. “I don’t want to imagine that guy holding a grenade launcher.”

  “We found your toys!” Mohawk suddenly screamed with a cackle. “Very kind of you to leave us presents! Once we break into this box here, we’re going to mow every fucker in this place down. Sound good? Good!”

  “Absolutely fucking not,” Kat spat as she reached for the silver bar of the fire exit.

  “Have you guys got enough ammo to take down another group?” I asked, and the girls nodded. “Okay, then I say we take the assholes by surprise.”

  Kat glanced down at a fire extinguisher by my feet and grabbed it.

  “We can use this to prop open the door,” the soldier whispered as she handed it over to me. “If we need to, we can jump straight back inside, okay?”

  “Let’s go.” Hae-won nodded.

  “Be careful,” I warned.

  Then Kat slowly pressed down on the handle of the fire exit. The door opened silently, and I placed the fire extinguisher down to keep it ajar for us.

  The group of men were on the other side of Kat’s Jeep from where we were standing, and there was an ambulance just ahead that we could hide behind to get a clear shot.

  I raced over to the cover of the emergency vehicle, and the girls sprinted behind me. The sunlight stung my eyes after getting used to the dimly lit hospital, and I blinked to try and adjust to the change in brightness as quickly as possible.

  The snide chatter kept going in Mohawk’s group, and it sounded like they hadn’t spotted us.

  I stood at the back of the ambulance with my back against the cold metal, and the girls crouched near the front end.

  With a quick peek around
the corner of the vehicle, I could see Mohawk prance around the Jeep, and he looked too amped up to stand still. He was jittery and grinning in the creepiest way, and he kept circling the vehicle while one of the larger men tried to pull at the lid of the storage box.

  There were three of them altogether, and it looked like the hyper ringleader was still the only one with a gun.

  “It doesn’t move,” the largest of the men grunted as he pulled the lid of the box with giant hands.

  “Make it move,” Mohawk spat. “What use are you if you can’t open a fucking box? Put your back into it.”

  The large man grunted and gave another attempt at prying open the storage container with his bare hands.

  I looked at Hae-won and Kat, and they gave me a nod to show they were ready for action.

  “Three, two, one,” I mouthed at the girls.

  Then we jumped around the side of the ambulance in unison, and I immediately put a bullet in the skull of the man at the Jeep box.

  The mohawk leader had already dove under the Jeep by the time Kat tried to take his shoulder out, and Hae-won left the second crony bleeding on the concrete.

  I heard Mohawk’s gun clatter to the ground just before he swore to himself, and I was about to drop down and flush him out when we heard something that made us freeze in our tracks.

  The ground had started to violently shudder, and the familiar sound of enormous footsteps rang out over the concrete parking lot.

  Something big was on its way to us.

  “Oh, fuck,” I groaned.

  “These fucking dinos,” Hae-won growled.

  A few seconds later, we saw a herd of seven triceratops race around an office building and charge straight for the hospital.

  Although they were herbivores, they were massive and would easily be able to crush us under their feet as they ran. The dinos didn’t need to be bloodthirsty to be dangerous, and it seemed that something had really scared them.

  As they stampeded over the hospital signpost, their huge heads rolled from side to side, and they roared in unison. It would only be a matter of seconds before those massive feet reached us, and adrenaline raced through me with every heavy footstep.