Dinosaur World

by Logan Jacobs

  “Okay, do you want to do that?” I asked Hae-won.

  She seemed to consider the idea for a few moments before she answered.

  “I think I would like to look up more about Korea and the threat from the North,” she said.

  “Okay,” I agreed. “We’ll each spend some time, maybe ten minutes, looking and then we can share what we found out together.”

  The girls nodded, and we all turned our attention back to our phones. I decided to set a timer on mine since I figured it would be easy for any of us to get sucked into all the stories there and lose sleep and possibly our sanity over it.

  I looked up things specific to America now and was overloaded with everything going on. There were some riots and lots of looting, like we had seen before, though not everyone was looting grocery stores. There were reports of people robbing electronic stores, jewelry shops, even high end clothing stores.

  Several famous actors were reported to have been jetted off to private bunkers. The president himself was in an undisclosed location and no one had heard from him in over a day. One article reported on several places being abandoned by workers on the appearance of dinosaurs. There were some mentions of hospitals where the doctors and nurses ran out, leaving all the patients to fend for themselves. It also reported prisons that were just abandoned by guards and police, leaving the prisoners locked inside their cells with dinosaurs roaming the halls.

  I was glad to hear the sound of my timer going off and I knew I had already started to be sucked down the rabbit hole.

  The girls looked up when they heard the noise.

  “It’s been ten minutes,” I explained. “What did you guys find?”

  “Nothing good,” Hae-won answered. “The North is convinced that Korea is responsible for the attack and they are threatening to bomb Seoul if they don’t answer for it. Thousands of people in the city are stuck in their apartments and the healthcare system is being overrun with injured people.”

  “I’m sorry,” I told her. “The US is not doing very good, either. I mean, we’ve got a bunch of guns, so they aren’t really talking about the ‘dinosaur’ problem, but there have been riots and looting and hospital patients being left to die.”

  We were all silent for a moment.

  “What about you, Becka?” I asked.

  “There’s something you two need to see,” she said and motioned us over to the table.

  We walked over to the table, and I wondered what could be so important that she wouldn’t give us a hint at least.

  She held up the phone screen and all I saw was a picture taking up the whole screen. It showed a dinosaur, like the two we had fought today, walking out of a strange looking circle and onto a city street. The circle was the confusing part of the picture and I studied it and tried to make sense of the image. Inside, the circle looked different from the surroundings, almost like a window into another place. Around the edges it glowed blue, the light caught the camera lens and blurred the edge of the circle.

  “What the hell is that?” Hae-won asked as she stared at the photo.

  Becka didn’t answer and instead flipped her phone back a page to reveal the news headline. It read, ‘Dinosaur Portal Caught on Camera: Who is Behind the Attack?”

  Chapter 9

  “What does that mean?” I asked Becka.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Nobody seems to be able to explain it. Apparently there were a lot of rumours about people claiming they saw portals like this before the dinosaurs appeared. We must not have seen it because most of the main media networks dismissed it as a conspiracy theory, something to do with aliens was the main explanation. Now that they have a picture, though, no one knows what’s happening.”

  I continued to stare at the image on the screen. It was hard to believe it wasn’t CGI since I had never seen anything look like that outside of a sci-fi movie.

  “Aliens?” I asked, “So they think that could actually be what it is?”

  “The article didn’t mention anything definite.” Becka shrugged. “But we don’t know of anything like this existing in science on earth.”

  “So, it’s like an alien invasion?” Hae-won asked. “That’s so weird.”

  “Maybe it’s some kind of scientific phenomenon,” I replied. “Like a worm hole or something like that. It doesn’t mean that we’re being attacked. It might just be some weird rift in time.”

  “So you think they are from the past?” Becka asked.

  “I mean, they smell like it,” I said. “Haven’t you smelled them?”

  “Yes,” Hae-won replied. “They smell old, like they’re stale forest.”

  “They just smell like animals to me,” the blonde girl argued.

  “No animal I’ve ever smelled,” I insisted, and then another thought hit me. “Becka, when was that picture taken?”

  Her eyebrows scrunched together and she scrolled through some of the article. “It says it was today at 4:27 pm. Why? What difference does it make?”

  “That was taken today?” I asked again, I needed to be sure.

  “Yeah, in Sussex,” the brown-eyed girl replied and looked at me in confusion.

  “They appeared here yesterday,” I said. “But another portal opened today. Do you see what that means?”

  I looked at the girls and I could see them drawing the inevitable conclusion.

  “More dinosaurs,” Hae-won answered.

  “Yeah,” I nodded, “and if they came again today…”

  “They might come again tomorrow,” Becka finished, “or any other day. They can just keep appearing, and it might never be over.”

  Becka’s breathing picked up, and I could see she was starting to spiral.

  “Calm down,” I said. “There’s no guarantee about that. We just need to be rational here and think about things a bit longer term. We know the portals can open again, but we don’t know that they will or how long they can keep doing it. We don’t need to panic, we just need to be smart.”

  The blonde girl’s head nodded but her eyes looked vacant, and I figured she must have all kinds of terrible thoughts spinning around inside. I looked at Hae-won to see how she was taking the news, but I couldn’t get a read on her. She seemed to be thinking but from the brief time I’ve known her, she seemed to be quite stoic, so I couldn’t read any emotions from her.

  “Whatever this really means, right now it means that we need to get those supplies,” I said.

  “Yes, we need to make sure we have food, and I think I can block the gates,” the Asian woman added.

  “Yeah?” I asked her. “That would be great.”

  “I think I need some sleep,” Becka said after she was finally able to get out of her own head.

  “That’s a good idea for all of us.” I nodded.

  We all took turns using the bathroom and getting ready for bed before we locked ourselves inside the staff room and turned off the light.

  Hae-won came back into the room wearing a loose black t-shirt that was a bit too big for her. It almost entirely covered up the baby blue shorts she was wearing underneath. I took a second to admire her slender, toned legs in the outfit and noticed how pale her skin was. It was almost like porcelain and it looked just as smooth to the touch.

  Becka wore a set of matching light pink silk pajamas with a spaghetti strap top and long flowing pants. The fabric was thin, and I could see the nipples of her perfectly shaped breasts pressing up against the fabric. She had put her blonde hair up into a large bun, but one tendril fell over her shoulder directing my eyes to her perfect cleavage.

  I did my best not to stare and readied myself for bed, and when I was brushing my teeth in the bathroom, I thought about how nice it was going to be to sleep on an actual mattress tonight.

  “Jason,” Becka called out to me when I stepped out of the bathroom. “You are sleeping in the middle.

  “Uhhh, you sure?” I asked as I looked over at the three mattresses and saw that Hae-won had taken the outside spot and Becka was lyi
ng on the mattress by the wall.

  “Yes,” Hae-won nodded, and then she patted the bed next to her. “We’ll feel safer with you there.”

  “Okay,” I cleared my throat and tried not to look too excited before I hit the lights and then crawled into my spot.

  We all laid there and tried to sleep, but I wasn’t getting very far. After a few minutes of pointed silence, Becka spoke up, and her warm breath caressed my left cheek.

  “You know, in that article about the portal, the government said we should stay inside,” she whispered.

  “Is that what you want to do?” I asked as I turned to face her, and the tips of our noses gently touched.

  “I’m not sure,” she replied without pulling away from me, “I know we’ll need food in a few days, like you said, but they could figure this thing out and stop it.”

  “I don’t think we can rely on that,” I answered as I tried to ignore the effect the beautiful blonde woman was having on my racing heart.

  “They’ve killed a lot of the creatures, you know,” she argued, “and some scientists are studying some of the bodies, trying to figure out where they came from.”

  “That might be the case,” I replied, “and they might have some answers eventually, but I just don’t know if that’s something we can wait for.”

  “I just…” she trailed off as her soft brown eyes stared into mine, “I don’t want to die.”

  “I know,” I whispered. “None of us do, we’re going to work together to make sure we stay alive.”

  “And what if this keeps happening?” Becka whispered as her eyes drifted down to my lips. “Are you and Hae-won going to go back to your own countries?”

  I didn’t know what to say, the question had actually never crossed my mind, and I was about to tell her this when Hae-won cut in.

  “I don’t think I would go back,” she said. “There isn’t much there for me. Besides, it seems like they are in more danger than England.”

  “But what about your parents?” Becka asked as she raised her head a bit to look over my face. “Don’t you feel like you need to find them?”

  “They’re fine without me,” she said. “They have money and bodyguards, plus my older brothers. They might even have a safe house somewhere.”

  “Then won’t they want to find you?” I asked as I rolled over so I was staring at the dark ceiling.

  I heard her take a deep breath in through her nose.

  “They will understand,” she replied. “They will know it’s risky to come back and expect me to figure something out here.”

  We were all silent for a few seconds as we took in her response. I know what Hae-won was saying sounded like the rational thing to do, but it made her parents sound pretty harsh. It could have just been a Korean thing, since I’d heard that Asian parents tended to be strict. I wondered if she was right and they really would go to a safe house without trying to find her, or if she was underestimating their parental attachment.

  “I might want to go back,” I said. “I mean, it would be hard to get a flight to Indiana, so I would want to wait until we knew more about this, but I do have a lot of family I should go back to.”

  “Do you have siblings?” the Asian woman asked.

  “No,” I replied. “But I have parents, grandparents, a few cousins. I’m sure everyone would have stuck together there. I mean, my mom is far away but everyone else I mean.”

  “I feel like I need to get back to my mum, but I don’t know how to do that,” Becka finally said. “I don’t want to go alone, and I know you two couldn’t come with me. I saw the news about people being attacked trying to escape the city, but I just can’t imagine her there all alone.”

  “Won’t she have family, or friends?” Hae-won asked.

  “Sure, she has loads of friends,” she laughed, “but I wouldn’t trust them with my left tit in a crisis, let alone my mother.”

  “I don’t understand,” the dark-haired woman said.

  “They aren’t reliable,” Becka explained. “They aren’t going to check in on her.”

  “I know you’re worried,” I said and tried to sound soothing. “You’re afraid something could happen to her, but I’m sure she’s feeling the same way about you. Do you think she’d want you to put yourself in danger trying to find her?”

  “No,” Becka huffed. “I suppose she’d have a go at me for even considering it.”

  “Then the best thing you can do right now is to stay safe,” I added.

  “I know what you mean,” she sighed. “It’s just hard.”

  “Tomorrow, we’ll get those supplies and barricade everything,” I said. “Then we can try to work on contacting everyone’s family again. There must be something wrong with the communication network. We’ll figure out how to reach them.”

  “We could try to find a radio,” Hae-won suggested. “Or we could make one. Maybe then we could talk to the police or something. They could tell us more.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “You know how to make a radio?”

  “Yeah, and a few other things,” she replied.

  This girl kept getting more and more interesting.

  “Anyway, the point is that we can figure it out,” I said. “I’m going to try to get some sleep. I’ll set an alarm for six so we can set out as soon as there’s some daylight.

  “Good,” Hae-won said and rolled over onto her side.

  The girls fell silent and I thought some more about Becka’s question as I drifted off to sleep. On the one hand, it did seem like America might do better against the dinosaurs, since we had a shitload of guns and ammo, and it might be nice to be around family. On the other hand, I couldn’t imagine leaving Hae-won and Becka here to fend for themselves. In just over a day, I’d become extremely protective of them, and the thought of not knowing what would happen to them when I left was almost frightening.

  I woke up in the middle of the night when I felt something touch me, and I blinked my eyes awake to the dark night sky and moon casting a silver-navy light through the window. For half a second, I thought there were dinosaurs in the room, but then I realized that there was something pressing down on my cock and chest.

  I tilted my head forward a bit, and the same time I saw that the two women’s arms were causing the pressure on my chest and groin, I felt both of their bodies curled up and pressing warmly against my sides. Hae-won’s arm was laying across my chest, and Becka’s hand was right on top of my now very hard erection. There was a blanket and my shorts between our skin, but my breath caught in my throat when I realized that she could definitely feel every inch of me in her fingers.

  I let out a slow exhale and then turned my head toward the blonde beauty, but as soon as I saw her sleeping face I realized she was deep asleep and had probably set her hand there by accident. In sleep, Becka was somehow even more beautiful, and her long eyelashes contrasted perfectly with her high round cheekbones. The stress of the day was gone from her brow, and I realized the warmth I’d felt against my shoulder was the press of her full breasts against me.

  I smiled and turned to Hae-won. The Korean girl’s breasts also pressed into my side, and I felt them move against me with her breathing. I thought about our kiss earlier, and I wondered if the stoic-seeming woman had actually been flirting with me and wanted some kind of relationship, or if she was just being nice because I had saved her life. I knew I wasn’t ugly, but I’d never been super great with women, and I had only dated two girls in highschool. I was normally really shy around girls, especially beautiful ones, but the past day had really helped my self-confidence.

  “Mmmm,” Becka hummed in my ear, and then I felt her fingers close around the shaft of my cock and gently stroke me.

  My breath caught in my throat as I glanced back to the blonde’s face, but she still looked dead asleep, and her hand kind of pulsed once more around my tense erection before it relaxed.

  Yeah. She was totally asleep. Wasn’t she?

  It wasn’t like I could ask her. I mea
n, I could, but then it would let her know that I knew that she’d accidentally felt me up. She’d probably be embarrassed if she hadn’t intended to do it.

  I released an exasperated breath, closed my eyes, and enjoyed the feeling of both women touching me. My cock really ached under Becka’s hand, so I didn’t really know if I’d be able to sleep, but then suddenly the alarm was going off with the high pitched beeping, and I jerked awake.

  “Good morning,” I said as I looked over to the women.

  Their eyes were open, and they’d taken their hands off me, but neither of them had moved an inch off the beds, and their breasts were still pressed against my shoulders.

  “So early,” Becka moaned.

  “It’s not that early,” I said. “Come on, we need to get going.”

  We scarfed down some pastries we had gathered from the cafe the other day, and Becka insisted on a cup of tea before we set out. I gulped down a cup as well and got changed back into jeans and a t-shirt.

  We headed down to the lobby and strapped ourselves into our various pieces of armor. Once we were all prepared, I went over the plan.

  “Okay, so there’s a Tesco Express three streets over,” I began. “That’s what we’ll check out first. If it’s already been raided and we can’t find anything, there’s a Sainsbury’s further down.”

  The girls nodded in agreement. I assumed they both knew the routes to those stores since they were frequented by the kids on campus. I made sure to give all our swords a quick check before we headed out.

  In no time we were headed out the main gate and past the dead dinosaur. Up close, the thing was even more gruesome than I had imagined. It had definitely been shot several times and the marks from the bullet holes had started to collect groups of flies.

  “Do you think we should move it?” The blue-eyed woman asked.

  I looked over the corpse, “Yeah, I think we might need to pull it outside the gate at least. Something else might try to eat it and we don’t need it to attract anything.”

  My mind went to the five other dinosaur corpses that were currently on campus. Ideally, we should move those outside of the perimeter. Right now they weren’t an issue since they were small and mostly indoors, but in a week or so, anything would be able to smell them. I made a mental note to add removing them to the list.