Dinosaur World

by Logan Jacobs

  “Great,” Becka sighed as it started raining. “Just what we needed.”

  “We’ll just hurry and get there,” I said and continued walking through the alley and into the next street.

  We kept moving through the rain at an easy jog until we finally reached the road the clinic was on. As we approached, I started to see the outside of the building. It was a single story white brick building with several windows along the side, a small ramp leading to the entrance, and a pharmacy attached to the side, but that wasn’t what caught our attention.

  The place was a wreck, like a tornado had just passed through it, and the three of us stopped running and groaned.

  Almost every window we could see had been smashed, doors were broken in and swung in the breeze, and bits of various debris were strewn across the ground in front. Glass, bricks, bottles of spilled pills, random furniture from inside, paper prescription bags, all of it floated around the space outside haphazardly.

  “Well, shit,” Becka said. “The place has already been raided.”

  “It looks like it,” I agreed. “We don’t know that everything was taken, though. There could still be the drugs we need. They’re pretty specific.”

  “Not sure whatever group, or groups, broke into here really cared about proper uses,” the blonde observed.

  I looked over the scene, and I had to admit she had a point. At first I thought that it must have been broken into by people like us that needed something for injuries, but the way the place was destroyed, it seemed excessive and pointless. It could have been a group of dinos for all we knew. I had a feeling Becka was thinking it was more like a group of drug addicts, though, and that fit the evidence, too.

  “Let’s get a closer look,” I suggested.

  “Okay,” Hae-won said.

  “Yeah,” Becka answered.

  We moved in closer to the building, and I could start to see inside the clinic door. It looked like the entire contents of the lobby had been thrown out onto the pavement because the room was pretty clear. While that was a worrying sign, the real concerning thing was the door.

  As it swung back into view, I could see there was blood on it. It was streaked across the front in a way that made me think of those nail marks in horror films where the victims were dragged.

  Inside the clinic it only got worse, and as I scanned down the hall, I could see a blood trail leading back and around the corner in a broken line. And along some of it, in dried bloody marks, were raptor footprints.

  Chapter 17

  “Do you think there’s still a dinosaur in there?” Hae-won whispered.

  “Maybe,” I replied. “The blood looks dried but there’s no telling if it left or not. It looks like the prints the raptors made in the library.”

  “But those orange ones look just like them,” Becka noted. “It could be them, too, or some crazy new thing, for all we know. Should we try to look somewhere else? There might be another clinic nearby.”

  “Give me a second,” Hae-won said and pulled out her phone. She typed a few things into it before she studied the screen and then showed it to us. “It looks far from here.”

  “Can I look?” I asked and took the phone from her outstretched hand. I saw the other clinic she had spotted and calculated the distance from where we were. “It’s nearly nine miles away.”

  “Shit,” the blonde grumbled. “It would take all day to do that trip.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed and handed the cellphone back to Hae-won. “Especially since it’s further out from campus. There and back would take us into the night, even with no other obstacles. I think we’ll have to take our chances here.”

  “I guess we do,” Becka agreed. “We’ve got the gun at least.”

  “It’s too close quarters to use it in there,” I explained. “If something gets too close, I won’t be able to stop it. We’re better off using our swords.”

  “I wish we had more guns,” the blonde observed. “Something like pistols would be nice.”

  “Look who’s going up a weapon class now,” I joked. “Let’s just keep what we have ready and stay close.”

  “Got it,” Hae-won said and adjusted her grip on the military sword.

  I took the lead and pushed on into the lobby. There was nothing in there besides a couple of chairs that someone had forgotten to heave out the front door.

  “What the hell happened here?” Becka mused in a whispered tone.

  “It is bad,” Hae-won observed.

  Parts of the front desk looked like it had been burned and there was broken glass and spilled liquid around parts of the floor. It looked like a bomb had gone off in the lobby.

  On either side of the front desk, the lobby split off into two hallways. They both looked pretty much the same, and I wasn’t sure exactly which way we should go. I walked over to the far hall and looked down it. The blood trail continued in that direction until about halfway through when it started to fade out and disappear. I listened and thought I could hear something shuffling around deeper inside.

  “Let’s go down that hall,” I whispered as I pointed to the blood-free hallway.

  The girls nodded and we worked our way into the space.

  “Should we check all the rooms?” Becka gestured to the row of brown wooden doors with her blade.

  “Yeah, we don’t want to skip any and miss something important,” I explained. “Let’s start here.”

  I grabbed the first handle, turned it slowly, opened it a crack, and started to look inside. I was surprised to see it was a regular, clean doctor’s office. Aside from the cabinets above the counter, nothing was out of place.

  I walked over to them and saw that it was empty of pretty much everything. There were still some supplies like gloves and cotton swabs, but all the medicine and anything else that might have been there was missing.

  Hae-won stopped for a second in the room and handed her sword to Becka, “Hey, can you hold this?”

  “Sure,” the blonde girl said and took the sword from her.

  The Asian woman gathered up her long ponytail and started to wring the rainwater out of it. I hadn’t noticed before exactly how thick it was, but it held a ton of water, and I imagined it must have been weighing down her head quite a bit.

  “You good?” I asked as she let her damp hair fall back down and took the black sword back from Becka.

  “Yeah.” She smiled. “It was just bothering me. Thanks, Becka.”

  “No problem,” the British woman said.

  We moved on to the next room with a similar result and it seemed like there was nothing at all we could use, just some unopened urine test kits and tongue depressors. We went from room to room and found they were all in varied states of distress. Some were completely wrecked, like the lobby had been, but a lot of them were untouched aside from the cabinets.

  My spirits rose as we came across a supply closet at the end of the hallway, but then I opened the door and my stomach all again at the sight of the looted cabinet. Everything that hadn’t been taken was broken and spilled on the ground.

  “Fuck,” Becka said. “What do we do now, Jason? This place has been cleaned out.”

  “We don’t know that,” I argued. “They might not have taken everything, we’re barely halfway through the place.”

  “It seems pointless to keep going,” the blonde sighed. “Maybe we should go to that other clinic?”

  “We can’t leave without checking out the rest,” I whispered. “After that, sure, we can worry about someplace else.”

  “It’s still raining,” Hae-won observed. “Maybe we need to go back to the college and regroup.”

  “We can make that decision when it comes to it,” I replied. “Right now we still need to search the rest of this facility.”

  “Okay,” Becka sighed. “Let’s just do it quickly so we can get out of this place. It’s really starting to creep me out.”

  I closed the closet door, and we moved on to check the next room. Becka did have a point. This
whole abandoned and destroyed medical facility thing was really starting to remind me of something I’d seen in the walking dead. I supposed that was only fitting. It was an apocalypse show, and from what I had seen so far, this fit the bill for an apocalypse.

  The next room was empty, so we moved on while I wondered to myself which one I would prefer: zombies or dinosaurs. The dinosaurs definitely caused much more property damage, but zombies were more grotesque. It was one thing to shoot into the skull of a giant carnivore, but I wasn’t sure how I would feel if it was a person on the other end of the rifle. Zombies weren’t really people, but they looked like them so I had to imagine it wouldn’t feel great to blow their heads off.

  We turned a corner in the hall, and I noticed that this corridor circled around the back and must attach to the second hall I saw from the lobby. I could tell from here that some of the doors were opened slightly but there was no sign of the blood trail from the other hall so I tried not to worry too much.

  We came across the first door that was partially open, and I tried to peek through the crack before opening it further. I couldn’t see much, just the wall and the edge of a countertop, and nothing looked unusual, so I edged the door open. The room was like the others, emptied of most of its contents, but not really touched beyond that. I took a quick glance over the open cabinets and moved on to the next room.

  This one had the door slightly opened, too, and I followed the same method I had used in the previous room. There was nothing unusual about the sliver I could see, so I pushed the door open further.

  Then I noticed the blood on the floor.

  Three of the large, bright red raptors had squeezed themselves into the room and were chowing down on someone’s body. Each of the raptors had to be close to five feet tall and at least six feet long. They all but filled up the room, and when I opened the door, the first one was only inches from the entrance.

  It saw me immediately, and I rushed to pull the door closed. The girls gasped as they saw the creatures, and then one jumped toward us and got its head through the door before I could close it.

  “Shit!” I hissed as the raptor screeched and snapped at me while I fought to keep the door closed and stay out of its reach.

  “Got it!” Hae-won came up beside me and used her sword to stab the dinosaur.

  She caught it through the throat, and its screeches came to an abrupt halt. Blood poured down her sword and into the hall and the beast’s eyes went dead, but the door still wouldn’t shut, and the two other raptors had started to claw their way to the door.

  The next one started to step over the body of the first raptor and snapped its jaws out through the space. Hae-won stabbed again with her sword, but this one wasn’t stuck in place like the first guy. He dodged her attacks, and when she drew the sword back to aim again, he moved like lightning and went straight for my hands on the door handle.

  I pulled them back just in time to keep them from being crushed and sliced apart by the raptor’s powerful jaws. The door swung open as soon as I let go of it, and the raptor slipped out and spilled into the hall between Hae-won and I. She took a quick stab at the creature, but the sword glanced off his arm as he dodged to the side.

  We backed up in either direction down the hall. The raptor had divided us, putting Becka and me on one side, and Hae-won on her own on the other. Becka and I readied our swords as the third raptor pushed through the open doorway and into the hall behind his friend. Both of them faced Hae-won and took a few steps in her direction.

  “Draw their attention this way!” I told Becka, and then I started to shout, “Hey, ugly, over here!”

  The one nearest to us turned to look but then quickly went back to focusing on Hae-won. They clearly thought it would be better to pick her off as the single target.

  We had to do something to help her and fast because they started to crowd in on her.

  “Jason, what do I do?” Hae-won shrieked from across the hall.

  “Hold on,” I yelled.

  I saw her adjusting her sword to strike, but I knew if they dodged they would use the chance to lunge at her. Even if she managed to hit one, the other was bound to do some damage.

  “Don’t swing yet!” I shouted as I tried to sound confident. “Becka, we’ll both attack the one closet to us!”

  “Got it!” Becka replied.

  “Now!” I yelled.

  Then the blonde and I charged forward toward the exposed back of the dino farthest from Hae-won.

  I thrust my sword into the raptor first, and the tip plunged about two inches into its side as it tried to turn around at us. Becka’s thrust was a bit off target, and the tip of her smaller blade kind of poked across the edges of its feathers like a spring bouncing off the side of a wall.

  The raptor let out a screech as it tried to dance away from the tip of my sword, but I just stepped forward and shoved my arms out as much as I could in an attempt to push my weapon in deeper.

  “Becka!” I gasped when it became obvious that I needed her to deliver the killing blow.

  “Die!” The blonde beauty stepped to my side and swung her sword like Luke Skywalker when he first got his lightsaber. It was clumsy and awkward as fuck, but the edge of the weapon still connected with the chest of the raptor as it tried to back away from me, and the creature screamed as her weapon tore a four-inch gash across its shoulder.

  The distraction was all I needed, and as the raptor stumbled away, I yanked my sword out, lifted it over my head, and brought it down on the dinosaur’s skull as if I was splitting a piece of firewood in half with an axe.

  The raptor didn’t even scream, it just parted in two like this was a Japanese anime cartoon, and then blood sprayed across the floor like a spilled paint can.

  I glanced over at the second beast just in time to see him abandon Hae-won and turn his full attention to me. It let out a screech, lowered its head, and then sprang forward like an angry puma.

  I was ready for him, and as he flew in the air toward me, I took my sword in both hands and swung across. All those summers playing baseball paid off and my swing was timed perfectly. The creature’s teeth nearly touched me, and I swear I could see down its throat as my sword sliced clean through its neck. The head separated from its body and the momentum carried it forward. It hit me square in the chest and knocked me off balance, but then it fell to the ground.

  I backpedaled a few steps and got my footing back before looking down at the decapitated dino. I must have done a good job in sharpening the weapon, because it had cut cleanly through the creature’s neck with only a few tears on the line of cut skin.

  Blood seeped from both sections and pooled together on the white and blue linoleum tiles. It looked dark next to the brilliant orange and red of the feathers. The creature’s eyes were still open, his mouth still locked in the open position, but there was nothing behind the absent gaze.

  “You got them all?” Becka asked.

  I looked over to the two women and saw them standing by the second dinosaur’s corpse. Blood spotted Becka’s top and arms, and I thought it must have gotten on her when she pulled the short sword out from the creature. It laid at her feet in a heap, completely lifeless.

  “Yeah, I think so,” I replied and looked to the one Hae-won had stabbed that was still laying in the doorway.

  “You are totally badass,” Becka said.

  “I actually feel a bit… lightheaded.” I dropped my sword as the world started to spin, and I had to focus on taking a bunch of deep breaths to keep the adrenaline crash from knocking me out.

  Hae-won ran toward me and wrapped her arms around my chest, followed quickly by Becka. The blonde put one arm around my neck and the other around Hae-won’s. I squeezed them both tight around their waists, and we stayed there a few moments, still shaken from the encounter.

  Then Hae-won pulled my mouth to hers and kissed me deeply.

  The world stopped spinning as her mouth devoured mine, and I sighed as soon as our tongues began to touch and
explore each other’s mouths.

  “My hero,” she purred after she had bit my bottom lip and pulled away from my mouth. “You are a good swordsman.”

  “He’s fucking badass, is what he is,” Becka laughed, and then I gasped in surprise when the beautiful blonde woman put her hands on my chin, turned my head toward her, and kissed me.

  Becka’s mouth was just as hungry and passionate as Hae-won’s, and she moaned into my mouth as soon as I pushed my tongue down her throat. She pushed her body harder against mine, and I couldn’t help but drop my hands so that I cradled an ass cheek of each of the girls.

  “God. Such a bloody good kisser.” Becka sighed as soon as our lips parted, and she gave me another quick peck before she ran her tongue over my lips like she was licking a lollipop.

  “Ahhh, wooow,” I gasped, and then I looked to Hae-won and cleared my throat. “I… Uhhh…”

  “It was my bad,” Becka sighed. “Sorry, Hae-won. I know he’s your… well… I was just caught up in all this, and Jason is so good, and--”

  “It was sexy,” Hae-won whispered. “I like watching you both kiss.”

  “You… Wait… What?” I asked, and the room started spinning again.

  “Oh?” Becka snickered. “So you like this?”

  The blonde pulled my lips to hers again and sucked them into her mouth. Our tongues urgently pressed against each other’s for a good ten or fifteen seconds, and then we parted.

  “Yes,” Hae-won said as she nodded. “I liked it a lot. You are both very attractive, and I know that Jason likes kissing you.”

  “You kiss him,” Becka demanded.

  “Gladly,” Hae-won whispered, and then she gently pushed her lips into mine while Becka ran her fingers through my hair and down the sides of my neck.

  “Sooo… uhhh… okay,” I whispered as soon as Hae-won and I finished kissing.

  “That was hot,” Becka purred, and her brown eyes were smoldering.

  “I think we… we… we gotta find this shot. Right?” I asked as I nodded toward the door.

  “Right,” Becka cleared her throat, and then the three of us pulled apart and glanced over at the office the dinos came out of.