Dinosaur World 2

by Logan Jacobs

  “Jason, look,” Hae-won said and pointed up to the faded orange sky.

  The silhouettes of what appeared to be extremely large birds had started to appear in the sky above us. There were at least two that had started circling and a few more were flying over.

  “Are those--?” Becka started to ask.

  “Shit,” I muttered. “Yeah, I think so. Come on, we’ve to get these off the truck.”

  By that point, we were simply rolling the heavier bags off the back and kicking everything else over the side. The last bag hit the concrete with a hollow thud, and we scrambled back into the cab of the truck without even bothering to look for the giant birds. Hae-won revved the engine, then yanked the wheel into a tight turn. The tow truck scraped against a couple of parked cars, and then we were barreling away from the park. I looked back and saw a pair of the dino vultures swoop down and land near the bags we’d just dumped.

  “Those vulture things are pretty smart,” I said. “They’ve figured out that we’ve been dumping the bodies here. We may need to start finding other places where we can leave the remains.”

  “Especially if we need to dump that giant dino,” Becka added. “That thing’s likely to attract all kinds of trouble."

  “I don’t even want to imagine what the fights over that thing would be like,” I said.

  “Maybe we should leave it,” Hae-won suggested. “The birds can eat it and then we won’t have to worry.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “It is pretty far from the gallery. I’m just worried that some bigger scavenger will show up.”

  “It’s getting dark,” Becka noted. “The street lights are coming on. Well, those that haven’t been destroyed.”

  “I’m not sure which is the headlights,” Hae-won said as she started to play with some of the buttons.

  “Don’t turn them on,” I said. “Drive slower if you need to, but I’d rather not use the lights.”

  Hae-won nodded, and then leaned forward. We were definitely moving more slowly, and though there were a few functional streetlights, for the most part the streets remained ominously dark. It was a tense ride back to the gate, especially when something roared off in the distance. Timothy finally came into view, and I barely checked the road for trouble before I hoped from the truck and ran to the carrier. I moved the vehicle forward, watched Hae-won drive the tow truck through, then backed Timothy back into place.

  “Butterfield’s?” Hae-won asked as I climbed back into the cab.

  “Butterfield’s,” I agreed. “Ahh, shit. We forgot about going to your dorm.”

  “We can go later.” My lover shrugged.

  “You sure?” I cleared my throat.

  “Should be fine for a few more days.” she whispered. “The timing is… we have a few more days.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  The tow truck bounced across the campus, the sound of the engine the only thing we could hear in the night. It sounded deafening in the silence, and I kept expecting something either to dive bomb us or to spit acid at us. Nothing appeared, though, and Hae-won finally parked the tow truck practically inside the door of the campus pub.

  “Let’s just grab the stuff we want and head back to the gallery,” I said. “We can get something for dinner and enjoy our beer without having to worry about getting home.”

  “Yes,” Hae-won agreed. “I’m starving. All we had today were crumpets and crisps.”

  “Okay, let me see what I can find,” Becka said and headed behind the counter. “I think there was a milk crate in the kitchen. Can one of you two grab it? We may as well take what we can carry.”

  “I can do that,” the dark-haired girl said and headed into the kitchen.

  “Are you planning on throwing a rager?” I asked the blonde Brit as she started to pull out bottles.

  “No,” she smiled. “But you’re the one that said we should get all the supplies we can. Alcohol is a good thing for trading, if we ever need it for that, and we can use it to clean wounds if we run out of the stuff we picked up at the clinic.”

  “Right, so it’s all purely for survival,” I teased.

  “Well, it won’t hurt to have a bit of a taste,” the blonde replied with a grin as she pulled out yet more bottles. “We’ve got to make sure we’re trading quality stuff, right?”

  “I thought you just wanted a pint,” I laughed.

  “I do at that,” the Brit said as Hae-won came back into the room with the milk crate and set it on the counter. “Let’s take a look at these taps. They’ve got Stella, Guiness, Strongbow, and Becks. Any votes?”

  “The taps will be closed off,” I reminded her.

  “Yes, but I know how to start them again,” Becka assured me. “I worked in a pub for a bit back home.”

  “Really?” I asked. “How old were you?”

  “Seventeen, eighteen,” the blonde said casually as she stacked some wine bottles on the counter for Hae-won to put in the crate.

  “You can serve alcohol in England when you’re seventeen?” I asked. Back at home I was used to the rule being twenty-one to serve alcohol, but I guessed the legal age was eighteen here. Still, seventeen sounded off.

  “Well, yeah,” the British girl admitted. “It might not have been strictly legal when I was seventeen, but the country pubs never seem to care that much, and I was close to eighteen.”

  “Ah,” I snickered. “Well, I promise not to turn you in.”

  “Anyway, which tap should I turn on?” Becka asked. “I’m not a fan of Guinness, but I guess any of the other three are fine.”

  “No cider, please,” I said.

  “Yeah, I suppose that is more of a daytime drink,” the blonde mused. “Okay, then, it’s Stella or Becks. Hae-won, you said you didn’t like beer, right?”

  “No, not really,” the Korean girl said.

  “Bartender’s choice, then,” I suggested.

  “Hmm, I think I’ll go for the Becks,” the blonde replied. “Now I just have to find where they keep the kegs. Why don’t you lot start loading the crate?”

  Becka disappeared into the back while Hae-won began loading bottles into the crate.

  “How much are we taking?” I asked as she looked at all of the bottles on the counter and then looked at the crate.

  “We don’t need to take it all tonight,” I replied as I scanned the bottles. “Take those two full bottles. Oh, and this is a good whiskey. Fill the rest of the space with those wines.”

  Hae-won nodded, and between the two of us, we were able to fit everything I’d selected into the milk crate. That still left us with a large assortment that we could use later, though I hoped the dinosaurs would be gone by that point.

  “Right, who’s up for a pint?” Becka asked as she stepped through the swinging doors. “That cellar was tiny. I have no idea how they fit all those kegs in. I had to walk on top of them just to get to the nozzles.”

  “A pint sounds good,” I said as Becka pulled the saran wrap from the tap.

  “How can we carry it back to the gallery without spilling it?” Hae-won asked.

  “We can put some plastic wrap over the pint glasses,” Becka said as she started running the foam from the tap. “I won’t fill them up all the way.”

  “Hey, didn’t you mention coffee?” I asked as I watched her pull the first pint. “Where is it?”

  “There’s some bags of ground coffee up on the shelf there,” the blonde girl said and nodded back with her head.

  “How am I going to brew them, though?” I mused. We had instant coffee and K-cups, but no way to prepare anything else.

  “We’ll have to find a cafetiere,” Becka said. “There might be one around here somewhere.”

  “A what?” I asked.

  “You know, the glass pitcher with the plunger and the strainer,” the blonde girl explained.

  “You mean a French press?” I asked.

  “Why do Americans insist on calling everything French? French fries, French bulldogs.” Becka asked. “Do you thin
k that makes it sound fancy?”

  “Everything sounds better in French,” I replied as I moved behind the bar and started searching for the press. “Also, the French helped us Yanks kick your British asses back in the day. Remember that little revolution we had?”

  “You Americans always bring that up,” Becka groaned as she started on the next pint.

  I grabbed two bags of unopened coffee from the shelf, which I squeezed between some of the bottles in the crate, and then rummaged through the other shelves. I couldn’t find any presses out front, so I gave up and went into the kitchen. The place had been scrubbed before everyone left for the holiday, and the appliances positively sparkled. I also noted the large kitchen knives on the chopping block and the assortment of pots and pans stacked neatly on the counter. I poked through a few more cabinets, then wandered into the storage room. I finally found the collection of presses on a shelf and grabbed two. I considered taking the kitchen knives as I passed by them again, but decided we could collect those later if we really needed them.

  When I returned to the counter, Becka had three pints poured out and covered in a few layers of plastic wrap each. I also spotted two large boxes of tea in the crate, and Hae-won was holding a set of wine glasses.

  “I’m going to go switch off the kegs so the air doesn’t ruin it,” the brown-eyed woman announced. “Last chance for a pour.”

  “I think we’ll be fine,” I replied.

  Becka nodded and then disappeared through the swinging doors.

  “She added some tea to the supplies,” Hae-won informed me. “It looks a lot better and there is even green tea. Did you find the thing for coffee?”

  “I did,” I said and held up the two presses. “I picked up an extra, just in case.”

  “Good,” the Korean said with a nod of approval. “I think it will fit on top.”

  I looped the handles around the necks of a couple of bottles of wine, then shifted a few more bottles to make a little more space for the tea and coffee.

  “Let’s go ahead and get this on the truck,” I suggested when everything seemed secure.

  Hae-won and I managed to carry the crate to the tow truck and slide it into the footwell on the passenger side. Becka and I would have to ride with our knees in our chests, but it would be worth it for some good coffee and a fresh pint. I heard the door to the pub open again, and Becka walked out with her three carefully wrapped pints of ale.

  “Drive slowly,” the British girl instructed. “I don’t want to lose a single precious drop.”

  “Yes, yes,” The Korean girl sighed. “I will be very careful with the beer.”

  We climbed back into the tow truck, slowly, so as not to spill the beer, and drove over the muddy ground and pockmarked sidewalks once again. It was tricky trying to navigate the quad at night without any light, and Hae-won had to slam on the brakes as the gallery suddenly loomed up in front of us.

  “Damn,” Becka muttered.

  “Did we lose some?” I asked.

  “No, I think we’re okay,” she said.

  “Let’s move the rest of this inside and then pull the truck out of sight,” I said. “Preferably by one of the other buildings.”

  “Whatever for?” Becka asked as we climbed out of the tow truck.

  “So it’s not obvious which building we’re staying in,” I explained.

  “Like it isn’t obvious already,” Becka scoffed. “We’ve got a bunch of boards on the windows.”

  “Those will be hard to see at night,” I replied.

  “Ah, you think those men might try to come here tonight?” Hae-won asked as she looked toward the gate.

  “Maybe,” I said. “Now that they know for sure that there’s someone inside. Someone with guns.”

  “And pints,” Becka added.

  We hauled in our final set of supplies, and while the girls sorted through everything to decide what to take upstairs right away, I climbed into the tow truck and moved it further away from the gate, on the far side of the main administration building.

  I hurried back to the gallery with the rifle in my hands. I could hear large wings flapping in the air even if I couldn’t see anything, and somewhere to the south I heard something caw. The mundane sight of moths bobbing through the air was a welcome one, and after one last quick scan for larger, less friendly invaders, I slipped inside the gallery, closed the door, and turned the lock.

  “Shall we move the barricade into place?” Hae-won suggested,

  “Yes, let’s,” Becka said. “Then we can take the rest of this upstairs, get cleaned up, and finally have some dinner.”

  We moved the barricade into place, stripped off our armor, then hauled the more critical supplies up the stairs and down the hall to the staff room. We still didn’t have any heavy curtains for the windows, but Hae-won grabbed one of the extra blankets and hung it over the slats while Becka lit some of the candles.

  It wasn’t the brightest light, but it was more than enough to see the blood and mud that coated all of us. We looked at each other, then grinned.

  “Okay, a bath to start with sounds good,” Hae-won said.

  “Right, I’ll go first,” Becka announced. “I’ll work on dinner after that. I already know what I’m going to make.”

  “Should we trust her?” I asked Hae-won.

  “You liked the pasta the other night,” Becka sniffed.

  “It was good,” Hae-won conceded.

  Becka grabbed some clothes, a towel, and a bar of soap, and then headed for the bathroom. Hae-won looked at everything we had carried upstairs, then started to organize it. I started to help, but she batted my hand away.

  “Check the news,” she suggested. “I don’t want you getting any of that gore on our supplies.”

  “Is it that bad?” I asked.

  “If it was your blood, I would think you were dead,” she replied as she pointed toward a particularly nasty mess on one leg.

  “It’s not that bad,” I protested, though in truth I was happy to leave the sorting to someone else. A day of chopping up dinos and scrambling across rooftops had left me sore and wondering if we had any aspirin.

  “Just check the news,” she laughed as she moved around the room.

  “Okay, fine,” I said and went to take a seat before I realized there was blood on my jeans, too. I would need to find a way to wash them soon.

  “Maybe see if there’s anything new about the portals,” Hae-won suggested. “See if anyone has seen one like the one we saw today.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “That’s a good idea.”

  I found my phone under a pile of electronics and checked the charge. I still had enough power to do a few searches, but I would definitely need to plug it in overnight.

  “Mostly it’s just a list of places where the portals have been seen,” I said as I scrolled through the results. “There’s some scientific papers that deal with what the portals are and how to close them. Oh, wait. This looks interesting. There’s a pattern to how the portals appear.”

  “What do you mean?” the Korean girl asked.

  “One second,” I said as I pulled up the article and scanned it. “It says that the portals may appear at set times and locations. I guess they noticed one kept opening on this rugby field every other day, so they think it’s possible they all have patterns.”

  “Is that pattern true for every place?” the blue-eyed girl asked. “That would mean another portal will open here in two days.”

  “But another article says some appear more frequently than others, and in random places,” I sighed. “There are also some that seem to be random. They just open up in a place where one’s never opened before, and so far, it doesn’t reappear. And there’s one in Russia that always appears in the same spot, but it happens at different times.”

  “Every pattern seems random, until it starts again,” Hae-won observed as she stacked up supplies in one of the empty cupboards “Maybe the pattern hasn’t completed a cycle yet, or has been too difficult
to notice.”

  “Makes it hard to predict when the next one will open,” I replied.

  “For now,” she said. “But as they gather more data, they will start to see the pattern.”

  “We should probably start a chart of the one we saw,” I mused. “See if we can figure out what its pattern is.”

  “We should track any of them that are near us,” Hae-won added. “That way, we will know when to avoid certain areas.”

  “Someone must already be doing that,” I said as I went back to the search results and typed in a new search. “Okay, there’s tons of stuff on people trying to find the patterns to the portals. It’s going to take forever to sort through it all and find the ones that apply to our area.”

  “Perhaps I can find an easier way to find what we need,” Hae-won replied. “I’ll need to think about it.”

  “Think about what?” Becka asked as she stepped into the room.

  “Sorting through massive amounts of data about the portals,” I said.

  “My brain hurts just from thinking about it,” Becka replied.

  “You go next,” Hae-won said with a nod in my direction. “I will finish putting this away, and then I can help Becka.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “Yes, I don’t mind,” the Asian girl said with a smile. “It gives me time to think.”

  “You can do that in the bathroom as well,” I pointed out.

  “Go,” Hae-won insisted.

  I knew when I was being dismissed. I grabbed a towel and my bag and retreated to the bathroom. A shower would have been wonderful, and I dreamed about sneaking into the dorms and standing under a long, hot flow of water instead of splashing water on myself from the sink. Somehow, I scrubbed the worst of the day’s grime from my skin and scalp, and even used the razor to shave the scraggly hairs that were starting to grow in. I was as clean as I was going to get, and after giving myself an approving nod in the mirror, I pulled on my trusty sweatpants and t-shirt and returned to the staff room.

  “Your turn,” I announced as I stepped into the room.

  Hae-won nodded, then gathered her supplies. She stepped next to me as I dropped my bag on the floor and waggled her eyebrows. It took me a moment, but I grinned and dug the soap out of my bag.