Dinosaur World

by Logan Jacobs

“Nothing in the street,” Becka answered.

  “No, it’s clear,” Hae-won said.

  “Okay, let’s go through this way,” I said.

  We carefully took off our packs and bags so we could shimmy through the bars of the gate, and then we passed our loot to the other side. The process only took us half a minute, but it felt like forever, and I really hoped that a dinosaur didn’t think to chase us like the last time. We might be forced to drop the supplies if anything showed up, and then our whole trip would be wasted.

  Inside, the field was quiet, and we kept to the paths by the edges until we reached the buildings we could use for cover. Then we all ducked in through one of the paths and came out back in our little square.

  I was tempted to head straight for the gallery, but I forced myself to wait and look for threats before we continued. I could just make out the small shape of the raptors around the dead dinosaur by the gate, but there was nothing else around. I kinda figured they were a good indicator that the area was clear, since anything bigger would have scared them off and tried to take their meal, and anything similar to them would have joined in on the feast.

  We made it to the gallery, stepped inside, locked the door, and slid the glass case in front. As soon as we felt safe inside, we all dropped our supplies and weapons to the ground and let out a sigh of relief.

  “I am so fucking happy to be back,” Becka muttered.

  “Same,” I laughed.

  “Someone get this off of me, please,” Hae-won said and gestured to the chestplate.

  “Hold on,” I said.

  I went over, carefully undid the leather straps for her, and slid it up and over her head. Underneath, I could see she had been sweating in the armour and her thin white shirt clung to her skin. The shirt was cut low and her cleavage seemed to glisten. I looked back up to meet her eyes, and the dark-haired temptress gave me another knowing wink as she grinned.

  I couldn’t help but smirk back at her.

  “We need to sort all this food out,” Becka cleared her throat from behind us.

  I pulled my thoughts back into important survival mode. “Yeah, we should try to freeze some of it, while we still can.”

  “If the power cuts out like you said, will it matter?” Hae-won asked. “Won’t everything go bad?”

  “If the power goes out, the freezer can stay frozen for up to four days,” I explained. “As long as we don’t open it much and everything inside is already frozen through. It will start to go bad again after that, but at least that gives us more time. That’s all we are trying to do: buy some time so that the government can figure this shit out.”

  “Okay, let’s get this stuff up there and cold,” Becka said.

  I nodded, took off my own armor, and laid it out with my sword next to the girls’ equipment. Then I collected as many bags as I could carry and left the few remaining ones for the girls. I also kept the gun strapped to my back since I wanted to take a closer look at it.

  When we got into the staff room, I set everything down on the main table, and Becka started to spread it out so we could see everything we’d gotten. When she was done, I counted up the meat I had collected, three bags of pasta, four bags of rice, cans of tomatoes and other vegetables, a gallon of milk, a few bags of cheese, loaves of bread, a sack of produce, and various sauces and spices.

  “The rice and pasta will keep for a long time,” I noted. “The produce and meat, though, not so much.”

  “The tins and sauces will keep, too,” Becka replied.

  “So we should eat the rest of the sandwiches and pastries that we have from the cafe first,” I reasoned. “That stuff won’t last for much longer. Then we can use up some of the meat and vegetables. We can freeze a lot of the meat and the fridge will make the produce last a bit longer, but we should be careful about it.”

  “What about the milk and cheese?” Hae-won asked. “Those won’t last long, either.”

  “We can freeze some of the milk if we find a container for it,” I explained. “The cheese, though, we’ll just have to eat before it goes bad.”

  The girls nodded, and we set about storing everything in the right places. We kept out a few meat packages but threw most of it in the freezer along with half the milk we packed into an airtight container, and the loaves of bread, except for one.

  Now I was confident that we had enough to last us a few weeks for sure. Past that, I didn’t know what we would do, but that was a problem for later. Right now, we needed to figure out how to make the campus more secure. I was set on trying to board up the windows in the gallery, and now that we had seen the large stegosaurus, I would have to think about boarding up the top windows from the inside as well. I still needed to figure out how to block off the gates, though, and I really didn’t know how to do that beyond running a bunch of chains across the bars.

  We picked up a few sandwich halves and some of the pastries and brought them over to the table for a small meal. I sat there thinking through the options while I ate when I remembered someone already had an idea.

  “Hae-won,” I started, “what was your plan for the gates? You said you thought you had an idea.”

  “Yes.” She paused. “It might not work as well as you want, though.”

  “I’m willing to hear it out,” I said. “I have nothing right now.”

  “Well, I was thinking that we could use cars to block the way,” she said and shifted her weight forward expectantly.

  “Hmm, how would that work, exactly?” I asked.

  “We can drive them to the gates and back them in a row up to it,” The blue-eyed woman explained. “We can even drive a few more in front of the row facing the side. It would be hard to get through for anything like the raptors, since we know they don’t like climbing.”

  “Hmmm,” I said as I considered her plan.

  It wasn’t the worst idea I’d heard. Sure, the cars wouldn’t be very tall, but they would at least be sturdy and dense, especially if we could fit them in a pattern like Hae-won suggested. The raptors might be able to climb over it, if they really wanted to, but it was unlikely that they would try unless they saw something tasty on the other side, and they wouldn’t if they were shorter than the cars. Without an incentive on the other side, there was no reason for them to bother trying to climb over them. There was only one major flaw that I could see in the idea.

  “How would we move all those cars there?” I asked the Asian beauty. “If we pushed them, it would take a long time, and I doubt there are too many with the keys left inside.”

  Hae-won shot me a knowing smile. “Just leave that part to me.”

  “What?” I had no idea what she could be talking about.

  “I’ll explain later, I promise.” Hae-won batted her dark eyelashes.

  “Ohhh, Hae-won is sneaky,” Becka snickered, and then she winked at the other girl.

  “Okay, then,” I sighed and shook my head at her mysterious behavior. “Let’s say we get that to work, then we still need to board up all the windows here. I think if we work together on that, I’ll only take a few hours.”

  “What are we going to board it up with?” Becka asked.

  “I was planning on using bookshelves,” I replied. “We just need to break them down and they’ll become sturdy boards.”

  “You’re right, they are sturdy,” Becka said as her nose wrinkled in thought. “The ones we knocked over on the raptor barely cracked. We’ll have to disassemble them if we want to use the wood. It will take a long time.”

  “Damn, you might have a point,” I said as I tried to think of how we could get everything accomplished with the daylight we had remaining.

  “You two should work on that,” Hae-won said. “I can handle the barricade on my own for a while.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked and looked at the dark-haired woman skeptically. “You would have to go outside the camp for cars. It would be dangerous.”

  “It’ll be less dangerous with just me,” she argued. “I’ll stay close
to the campus, and I can move easier with just me to look out for. I’ll be quick and quiet, don’t worry.”

  “It would save us a lot of time if we split up,” Becka commented.

  I let out a sigh as I thought over the girls’ suggestion. Normally, I would never agree to let her go out on her own to try to find all those cars, but they were right, it would save us a lot of time. Even if she couldn’t bring the cars in and she only found where some were for us to use, it would be a big help.

  I looked into her blue eyes and tried to figure out what the girl was thinking. She looked confident, and she had said she could bring the cars in. I supposed we couldn’t move as one unit forever.

  “Alright,” I said. “But you have to promise you’ll be careful and if anything comes up, you’ll come back and find us.”

  “Of course.” Hae-won grinned and nodded her head.

  “And you should take the gun,” I said.

  “Why?” the dark-haired girl asked. “Like you said, I don’t know how to shoot it.”

  “I’ll load it and show you the safety and how to hold it,” I replied. “I don’t expect you’ll actually need to use it, but if you get cornered in a bad situation, at least you’ll have something powerful. Also, we’ll hear the shot and we can come out and help you.”

  “Okay,” Hae-won replied, though she didn’t look convinced. “If you think I should, I’ll take it.”

  “Great,” I said. “We should probably start working on these projects, then.”

  “Okay, I’m ready,” Becka said.

  “Let’s go,” I replied.

  We all headed back downstairs after we had finished the small meal. I got my sword ready, picked up the chestplate, and went to help Hae-won put it on, but she stopped me.

  “It’s too heavy for this,” She said. “I’ll get used to it soon, but now I need to be quick and quiet.”

  “I don’t want you to go out there without any armor,” I sighed.

  “Okay, then something else.” She looked around at the other pieces we had gathered there and pointed at Becka’s arm and leg guards.

  “You don’t mind, do you?” she turned to the blonde.

  “No, of course not,” Becka said. “Just be safe out there.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” The Korean girl replied as she started to put on the armor.

  I had a feeling that would be harder to do than she thought, but I tried to trust in her confidence and focus on my own task.

  As soon as Hae-won was ready, I grabbed the toolset, and we peeked our heads out the door, saw that it was clear, and exited the gallery. I looked again toward the dinosaur carcass as soon as we were out in the open. It had been mostly picked clean and the small raptors were nowhere in sight.

  Hae-won waved us goodbye and left with her black military sword in hand and the rifle slung over her shoulder. I hadn’t given her any instruction on how to operate the rifle, but the Korean beauty had proven to be pretty resourceful so far and I suspected she would be able to shoot it effectively if she had to. Then Becka and I were left alone outside the gallery watching her walk away.

  “Okay, handsome.” Becka turned to me. “We need to hurry up and get these shelves done. I know she said she could, but I don’t think Hae-won can block off both entrances by herself. The faster we’re done, the sooner we can help her.”

  “Handsome?” I raised an eyebrow, smiled at her, and had a flashback to when she’d stroked my cock in her sleep last night.

  “For a yank,” she snickered. “You ready?”

  “Yep,” I agreed. “We should start breaking down the bookcases, then.”

  The British girl nodded, and we both walked toward the library. We got into the old domed building, and I studied the stacks to decide where we should start.

  “Let’s go upstairs,” I said, “Those shelves are knocked over, it will be easy for us to work with.”

  We headed up to the second level, past the carpet with claw marks in it, and looked over the toppled shelves. I picked a row and went over to see just how difficult these things would be to take down. I tested the side of one with my hand, then tried kicking a shelf off with my foot, but it didn’t budge.

  “What if we dropped them off the balcony?” Becka asked as she watched my vain efforts.

  “I don’t know,” I replied, “For one it would make a ton of noise, but also it might break it too much. We need pieces that are longer than the windows themselves. If we start splintering everything, it’s not going to work.”

  “Guess we’ll figure something else out,” she sighed.

  “There are some nails I can see holding the sides together,” I explained. “If we can work those out with the hammer, it might be easier to take the whole thing apart.”

  “Yeah, but there’s only one hammer,” she replied. “One of us will just be sitting around. That isn’t a good use of time.”

  “You take the hammer,” I said and reached into the tool kit to pass it to her. “I can use the flathead screwdriver.”

  She took the tool from me and joined me by one of the shelves. We both got to work starting to work the nails out of the solid wood. The screwdriver was a bit hard to work with at first, and by the time I had one nail out, Becka had already removed three. The next one went a bit easier though, and I thought our pace would work.

  After we had worked out all the nails we could see, we tried again to pull the shelf apart.

  This time there was some give in the wood, and I thought we could take it apart. I had to leverage it and hold one side with my foot, but soon a side panel popped off. Becka made quick work of the middle panels, and she stood on the other side panel and pulled up on the shelf pieces. They popped out easily, and I let her work on that while I started getting nails out of the next shelf.

  In a matter of nearly an hour, we had broken down four shelves and I thought that we had all the materials we would need for the windows.

  “Great job,” I told Becka. “You are pretty handy with a tool.”

  “Yeah,” she replied as she stared into my eyes. “I think you’ve got a bit of a guess at how good I am at handling your tool.”

  “What?” I asked as my jaw dropped and my mind returned to last night.

  “Your hammer?” she said as she wiggled the tool in her hand. “Orrrr… were you thinking of another tool I handled?”

  “Are you fucking with me?” I cleared my throat and felt my face turn red.

  “Not yet,” she purred. “But I suppose we should stop flirting and get back to work.”

  “Is that what we are doing?” I asked. “Flirting?”

  “Are we?” She raised an eyebrow. “It does quite seem like the end of the world. I’m not sure it’s proper.”

  I stared at her for a few moments and almost asked if she was awake last night when she played with my cock, but then I bit my lip and just glanced back at the bookshelf we’d torn up.

  “Let’s get this stuff over to the Gallery,” I said.

  “Right,” she replied, and then we both grabbed a hunk of bookshelf, lifted it, and carried it down and out of the library.

  The trip across the open space between the library and the Gallery was uneventful, but Becka and I still twisted our heads around every few steps to check for stalking dinos or any signs of Hae-won. We didn’t see either, and we both let out thankful sighs as soon as we got the wood inside our little fort.

  It took us three trips but soon we had all the material in front of the gallery windows and we could get to work covering the glass.

  “I know you Americans are good with guns, but do you know how to board up windows?” Becka asked when everything was set.

  “I mean, yeah.” I shrugged. “I’m pretty sure you just cover them with boards and nail them in.”

  “But what about the boards?” She persisted. “Do you know how big they should be? Should we make panels or just nail up a bunch of pieces?”

  “I don’t know,” I sighed.

  “Mayb
e we should look it up before we start,” she said. “There has to be some kind of Wiki How page or something.”

  Becka seemed to doubt my ability to apply wood to the side of a building, but I had to admit it wouldn’t hurt to use a real reference.

  “Okay, fine,” I said. “Let’s have a look.”

  I pulled out my phone and googled ‘boarding up windows’ and a few videos popped up in the top of the search results page.

  “Oh, that one looks good.” Becka squeezed herself closer to me so she could point at my phone, and I played the result she liked.

  It was a DIY tutorial from Home Depot and the combination of the cheery music and the soothing voiceover nearly made me laugh out loud. It was hard to believe we were using this video as a reference in a dinosaur apocalypse.

  “There, it says the boards should be eight inches wider than the windows,” Becka remarked. “Four inches extra on each side. Now the windows will be more secure.”

  “I think we should make panels,” I said. “They used one solid board, so none of it had a weak point. If we find all the right size boards and lay them out, then cross some smaller support panels across them, it will hold together a lot better.

  “Yeah, that does sound like a better plan,” she agreed as she smirked at me. “See, a little research always helps. Sometimes you’ve got to feel around something before you try it. Right?”

  “Yeahhhh,” I said as I raised my eyebrows at her.

  “What?” she asked innocently.

  “You are trouble, aren’t you?” I snickered.

  “Let’s just nail… the boards in. Eh?” She pointed at the tools on the ground.

  Becka was giving me a sly smirk, and I knew that she was trying to bait me about last night. I didn’t quite know what that meant other than she maybe wanted to fuck me, but there hadn’t really been any flirting besides that. Then again, I wasn’t exactly the best with women, so she could have been sending me all sorts of signals I missed. I guessed stroking my cock while I slept was a pretty obvious clue, but I still wasn’t quite certain that she was actually awake for that.

  I couldn’t help thinking that she was right about the research stuff. There was a lot of stuff that none of us knew how to do, things we might have to be able to if this disaster went on much longer. I wondered if it would be worth figuring out what those things were and gathering up research before there was a power outage that left us without the use of our phones.