by Logan Jacobs
“Okay, it’s settled, then,” I said. “We’ll get this food together and break into Building C and check that room for a key.”
Becka went back into the kitchen and dumped all the food and water we could fit into her backpack. Then we crawled back out through the window, since the door lock needed a key to open from the inside as well.
We took another route and cut around by the library so we could avoid the main gate. Before long, we were in front of the building we needed and had located a window we could reach.
“Can I break this one?” Hae-won asked. “I’ve always wanted to break a window.”
“Knock yourself out,” I chuckled.
She found a medium sized stone and threw it at the window pane. The glass cracked, but she had thrown it more up than forwards so the stone came tumbling back down.
“Oh,” she sighed.
“It’s alright,” I snickered as I grabbed the stone and handed it back to her. “Here, you have to throw it through the window, not just at it.”
I gripped my hand over hers and used my other hand to angle her left shoulder toward the window.
“Just put your weight in your back foot,” I said. “Raise the rock up by your face like this.” I lifted the rock and her hand up by her ear. “And shift your weight forward when you throw.”
I ran her arm through the motion slowly. She turned back to look at me, and I realized how close our faces were. Again, I marveled at her flawlessly smooth satin skin and her sparkling eyes. I was close enough to smell her sweet flower perfume, and the scent of her made my heart slam into my chest more than the threat of a dinosaur attack did. I was probably imagining it, but for a minute as I looked into her eyes, it seemed like she was holding her breath along with me.
I let her fingers fall from between mine, took a step back, and cleared my throat. “Unhh, you know. Just aim through the glass.”
She nodded and looked away, readjusting herself into the position I had shown her. She wound the rock up to her face and threw it forward with her body weight behind her arm. The rock sailed through the window and shattered all the glass in the frame.
“I did it!” she cheered and smiled at me.
“Nice.” I grinned, “Maybe later I can show you how to throw a good punch.”
“I’d like that.” She winked at me, and I felt my face heat up.
“Let’s find that key,” Becka cut in as she tapped my shoulder.
We crawled in through the now open window and into a classroom, and I saw Becka glance around at the empty wooden desks and the whiteboard.
“This is one of my psychology classrooms,” she said. “It’s really odd, isn’t it? Seeing it here like this all empty.”
She looked to be lost in her own thoughts for a minute until the sound of Hae-won opening the heavy wooden classroom door cut through them.
“Which way is the room you mentioned?” I asked the British girl.
“Um, it’s right from here,” Becka said as she pointed to the right.
“Let’s listen,” I said for a moment while we were at the door, but when I didn’t hear anything after ten or so seconds, I nodded at them, and we walked down the empty hall.
Our footsteps echoed around us as we walked across the polished stone hallway, and a few automatic lights flickered on with a dull hum as we passed underneath them, but I didn’t hear anything that sounded like angry dinosaurs, and the hallways were absent of feathers and blood.
“Turn here,” Becka said.
We turned down a little side hall, and I saw the door she was talking about on the left. I wasn’t normally one for religion, but I said a small prayer for it to be unlocked.
Hae-won turned the handle and shoved.
Sure enough, the door moved on creaky hinges and swung open slowly.
We pushed our way into the room and started to look around. For some reason I had expected it to be smaller, something more like the closet we’d found in the library, but it wasn’t.
The place was nearly the size of the psychology classroom. Different boilers and gauges lined one of the walls like knights in steam-punk armor, and they occasionally let out a hiss that really did sound too close to one a dinosaur would make. There were tables and lockers, hoses, and shelves stacked with various cleaning supplies. I spotted one square locker on the wall apart from the other and figured that was probably where the keys were kept.
“Here,” I said and moved over to the cabinet. “I think this is what we’re looking for.”
I tried the handle, but it was locked and I saw that there was a tiny metal key hole toward the bottom.
“Great, now we need a key to get this key,” I groaned.
“That lock looks pretty simple,” Becka observed. “We might be able to pick it if we had the right tool.”
Hae-won reached into the front pocket on her back pack and took out a hairpin.
“Will this work?” She asked the blonde girl.
Becka took the hairpin from her and observed the piece.
“It could work,” she said. “Except the rubber grips on the ends will keep it from fitting the lock.”
“One second,” I said.
I reached into my own bag and took out one of my pocket knives. Becka handed me the pin and I took the knife and scraped off the little rubber ends before handing it back to her.
She bent the pin open and then continued to wiggle it back and forth until it snapped into two pieces. She held one in each hand and put them both into the lock chamber before moving them around and eventually turning the lock.
“Wow, I’m impressed,” I said. “If I had known you could do that before, we wouldn’t have needed to break in here in the first place.”
“It wouldn’t work on the gallery,” she laughed. “This lock only had like two pins, so it was easy. Believe me, my skills are limited to cheap diaries and old cupboards.”
“Good thing this was one of those,” I said.
I opened the cabinet and looked inside. There were several rows of tiny metal hooks holding keys of different shapes and colors. Masking tape marked with sharpie labeled the hooks, but most of them had been abbreviated down to three letters.
“Which key is it?” Becka asked as she stared into the open cabinet.
I studied the different abbreviations, but I couldn’t make sense of them.
“I think this one,” Hae-won said and pointed to a key hanging on the hook labeled HYG.
“It’s the Heong Gallery,” she explained. “It doesn’t have a ‘y’ but it sounds like it does.”
I looked over the other tags, but I had to admit that that was the only one that seemed reasonable. There were three keys on the hook, so I grabbed all of them.
“Let’s go try these out,” I said. “We can always come back if we need to.”
We retraced our steps out of the class building, climbed out the broken window, and walked across the still-deserted square to the gallery. When I got up to it, I thought we had made a great decision in choosing it for a shelter. There were exactly three windows and they were all grouped closely to the entrance. It wouldn’t take us long at all to barricade them or board it up. The door was made of a solid oak reinforced with metal and it sat inside of a steel frame. It would take something stronger than even the larger dinosaur we had seen to push through it.
I tried the keys until the second one opened the door, and then we stepped inside the entrance to the building. The place smelled like lemon-polished oak, and I saw a reception desk in front of a coat check closet beside another metal door with only a thin rectangular piece of glass by the handle that led into the main gallery.
“Where are the lights?” Hae-won asked and searched along the walls.
I didn’t see anything, so I pushed open the door of the main gallery. It was completely dark except for the light coming from the windows in the entryway, but I could now smell the acrylic and oil from the paintings. I felt along the wall for the switch and came across a box that felt lik
e it should be the light switch. Instead of switches, however, the box had key holes.
“Hand me the other two keys,” I said to Hae-won, so she retrieved them and passed them over to me.
I stuck one into the keyhole and prayed it wasn’t really a light socket. To my relief it clicked into place and a quick turn lit up the space we were standing in. Once the light was on, I could see that there were two more key switches so I removed it from the first one and flipped the other two into the ‘on’ position.
Lights turned on deeper in the gallery, and I figured the third one was probably for the upper level. I stepped back and took a look around the building. Different paintings hung meters apart on the plain white walls. Some of them actually looked like art, but one of them was just a blue circle with a black line painted through the middle. It looked like a two-year-old could have painted it, so I thought Hae-won was right when she said the art was valuable.
Regardless of the art and plain decorating style, the place was spacious, windowless, and had strong outer walls.
I couldn’t have asked for anything better.
“This looks perfect, thank you Hae-won,” I said. “Let’s check out the rest of the place.”
We moved deeper into the gallery, and I noticed it had some extra interior walls. It was clearly for hanging more art, but it gave the place a maze effect that would be great for defense. After working our way through the lower level, we climbed up two short flights of stairs.
I stopped suddenly at the top of the stairs, and my heart skipped a beat.
There was an armory exhibit.
I could barely contain my excitement as I stepped over to the display. It was a full seven by twelve foot case full of various pieces of medieval weaponry and armor all stood up on wire racks or balanced on pins in the plush red padding on the back. There had to be at least twenty weapons and nearly as much armor, though none were full suits.
I scanned over the array to try to decide what weapon would be the best one to use. Several from the Seventeenth century looked to be more ornate than utilitarian, and I didn’t think they would do me much good in this situation, though I couldn’t help admiring them. There were fantastically cut axes with curves and cutouts that made them incredible to look at but inconvenient to wield. They were clearly intended to be ornamental and belonged to a royal guard unit that was never intended to see actual combat. I almost chuckled to myself when I realized that in the English Civil War, the King went into battle with men armed with gaudy weapons like this, whereas the Parliamentary forces were armed with pike and musket.
No wonder king Charles lost his head.
Then I saw the spear shaped weapons with decorated ends spiked with metal points. They were pikes and halberds from the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries and designed to thrust through or chop down on heavy knight armor like a hot knife through butter. I was more than certain that if these weapons were the bane of an armored knight’s existence, then they would be capable of cutting through dinosaur feathers and hide, but they were really long and meant to be used in an infantry block to protect musketeers and would be too slow and unwieldy for the three of us to use in a fight, really.
After that was the swords, and I knew here was where I would find my weapon. Some were big curved beasts, like pirate cutlasses, and others were extremely thin foils or rapiers that weren’t much good outside of a gentleman’s duel. A few of the military-style swords looked more promising. They had seen more use, but I felt confident they would stand the test of time.
My eyes zeroed in on a large sword, just past a couple cavalry blades. It looked sturdy, double edged, and super shiny. It had a hilt with the crest of a lion in a crown and a hand guard curving around one side of the weapon. The tag on the side read ‘Yeomen Warders Sword 1700-1799.’ These were also weapons of royal guardsmen, but ones that were intended to be used for combat purposes and not strictly for show. The Yeomen Warders guarded the Tower of London and, even in those days, were a practical military unit. From my studies, I knew it was a historical truth that all palace guard units started as crack military units of the highest capability and over time became ornamental dress units due to decades of poor training, soft city life, and no campaigning. But, luckily for me today, the Warders of the Eighteenth century were still in good enough fighting trim to carry weapons meant to kill.
“Ohhhh, hello,” I cooed to the sword. “You and I are about to become best friends.”
Chapter 7
Becka and Hae-won walked up behind me and looked over the display.
“Does this mean we get swords?” Hae-won asked.
“It means we get swords.” I was riding a sudden high from our string of good luck and couldn’t help but grin.
“Are you sure we should take them?” the British girl asked. “They’re really old, it must be some kind of history exhibit.”
“We aren’t taking them,” I said. “Just borrowing them. When there aren’t any more dinosaurs, we’ll give them back.”
I looked at the display case and tried to spot how to open it. There was what looked like a sliding panel on the side, but it was locked. I tried all three of the keys and none of them seemed to fit, so I sighed and took a step back from the case. There had to be a key in here somewhere, and we would find it, but I was disappointed to have to wait to get my hands on that sword.
“We’ll come back for this,” I told them. “Let’s find that staff room.”
We wove our way through a few more walls before the main path led to another set of stairs, but I spotted a small side hall led off to a set of bathrooms and a locked door. I tried the only key we hadn’t used yet and it unlocked. I made a mental note to remember this door had a lock too and if we needed to, we could retreat back here if anything managed to get inside. I hoped we would be able to secure the front enough, so that wouldn’t happen, though.
Inside the room there was an old wooden table surrounded by several plastic chairs. Along one wall there was a counter, a sink, a few cupboards, a refrigerator, and a freezer. This room, unlike the rest of the gallery, had two small windows as well. In the corner there was a blue and white striped rug with a couch and matching chair around it. It wasn’t a huge space, but it would work for the three of us.
Becka went over to the fridge and freezer and searched through the contents.
“There are a couple more things in here,” she said. “Some frozen sausage rolls and mince pies.”
“How much?” I asked.
She stood there a moment counting them up.
“Six sausage rolls and twelve mince pies,” she answered.
“Alright.” I sighed. “At least we have somewhere to store the food from the cafe.”
“Yeah, I’ll put that in the fridge,” Becka replied and started to unpack her bag.
She finished quickly, and I looked over the contents inside the fridge and on the counter beside it. There wasn’t as much as I would have liked, and I was seriously starting to think we needed a plan to get more food before this situation got any worse.
For now, though, my focus was on getting the weapons out of that display case. I scanned the room more carefully and tried to think of where they would put a key. The counter had drawers, so I started with those. The first one held silverware, then teabags and instant coffee, the third was scattered condiment packets, and the fourth just napkins. I moved on to the cabinets which were mainly plates and mugs but inside the corner one a small metal hook was screwed into the wall and a key dangled from it.
“Yes,” I said, “this could be the key.”
I took it from the cupboard and was about to start back for the display case, but I saw Becka had gone over and filled the electric kettle and I raised my eyebrows at her.
“Fancy a cuppa?” she asked.
“Cup of what?” I replied.
“Tea, silly,” she said. “Or would the American prefer coffee?”
“We should check out the armory first,” I said.
“I know, but we can have tea while we check it, surely,” she replied.
“Do British people need tea to stay alive or something?” I sighed. “Is it one of the main food groups?”
She raised an eyebrow at me but didn’t respond.
“Fine, I’ll take a coffee,” I snickered.
“Me too,” Hae-won chimed in.
“Great.” Becka smiled and started making the drinks.
In a minute the three of us were walking our hot drinks carefully over to the display case. I set my boiling hot mug on the floor and grabbed the key from my pocket. It fit the lock perfectly and the side panel slid open. I reached in and began collecting the contents before I passed them over to the two girls to set out. When I had removed everything from the case, I looked at our haul spread over the floor.
“Wow,” Hae-won said, and she knelt down and ran her fingers over one of the armour breastplates.
“It looks about your size,” I commented. “Do you want to try it on?”
“Yes.” She grinned and nodded at me.
“Okay, next time we head out somewhere, I’ll help you fit it before we leave.”
I walked over to the sword that I had first spotted in the display and picked it up. The handle was smooth in my hands and the grip seemed about perfect. It was a decent weight, and I knew that it had probably been used in countless battles. The metal should definitely hold up under the weight of a dinosaur thrust.
I took one of my fingers and ran it over the edge of the blade. It wasn’t very sharp, but I could fix that with a stone and half an hour. I would have preferred a rifle or pistol, but I didn’t think my chances of getting one of those were very good in London, so a sword was just fine.
I looked over and saw Becka inspecting a short sword. It was just under a foot in length and the handle was black with what looked to be silver accents. It was pretty, and the blade was much sharper, probably due to disuse. She turned the weapon over in her hand and gave a few practice stabs at the air. Her blonde locks swayed with her movement, and her face brightened in amusement.
“It suits you,” I said.