by Logan Jacobs
“And anything we put on the back would get covered in dino blood,” Hae-won pointed out.
“Right,” I agreed, “but Tim could just plow through any of those small dinos that got in our way.”
“So how do we barricade the gate while we’re gone?” Becka asked.
“We follow our original plan and move some of the cars in front of the gate,” I said. “It may not be as effective as Tim, but it should help keep the hordes out until we return.”
“If we do this quickly enough, no one will ever notice that Tim is missing,” the Korean girl agreed.
“So, if we avoid the bombed out areas,” I mused as I mapped a new route on the map. “It looks like ten minutes to get there. So twenty minutes round trip.”
“Forty minutes to find what we need if we want to keep it to one hour,” Hae-won said.
“It would be nice if we could do it in less, but we’ll say an hour,” I replied.
“Well, I would be careful with those calculations,” Becka said. “This is the time under normal circumstances. We don’t know what roadblocks and obstacles we’ll run into along the way.”
“You’re right,” I said. “But we’ll set one hour as our goal. Besides, it’s not like we have to follow the posted speed limits. And Tim can probably drive over or through most obstacles.”
We all stared at the map again, and both girls finally nodded.
“Should we print out a copy of the map?” Becka suggested. “Just in case?”
“That’s a good idea,” I said as I sent the request to the printer.
“All right, that’s tomorrow’s plan dealt with,” Becka said. “I’ll get started on dinner, and I’m putting on some music. One of you can open another bottle of wine. Maybe something white this time? I put a couple of bottles in the refrigerator last night.”
“What are you planning to make for dinner?” I asked as I opened the refrigerator and peered inside at our options.
“There’s some curry sauce and a bit of pork left,” Becka replied as she started to pull out pots and pans. “And we have that rice. Add a few vegetables and we’ll have a proper curry.”
“How about a chardonnay, then?” I suggested. “We can open it when the food’s done. In the meantime, we’ll finish this bottle of red.”
“Don’t forget the music!” Becka laughed.
“I can do that!” Hae-won replied as she started to scroll through her phone. “I will play some BTS.”
“What?” I asked. “Who’s that?”
“It’s a K pop band, but they have a huge international following,” Becka explained. “One of my mates back home is obsessed with them.”
“I’ll pull it up on the laptop,” I offered. “It’s probably got better speakers.”
I pulled up YouTube, searched for the band, and saw a string of music videos pop up, most of them with crazy amounts of views. I clicked on one that looked popular, and a pop-y saxophone beat started playing, followed by a group of around ten or so fourteen-year old looking Korean boys dancing and singing in the video.
“Ohhh,” I chuckled. “A boy band. Of course they are popular.”
“Don’t worry,” Becka laughed over her shoulder. “You are way hotter than those guys.”
“Oh, yes, I like this song,” Hae-won said.
“I didn’t picture you as the pop music type,” I admitted.
“I like lots of things,” the dark-haired woman said. “But I have some pride in my country’s music. Besides, it’s made to get people in a happy mood.”
“I’ve seen some of the K-Pop videos with the girls who sing and dance. That’s a bit more my jam,” I laughed.
“Blackpink is the most popular girl one right now,” Hae-won chuckled softly. “But it changes every month. My favorite was the older group KARA. I watched them when I was a girl and practiced their ‘Mister butt dance’ all day long.”
“Uhhh, butt dance?” I asked. “This sounds relevant to my interests.”
“Let’s start with BTS,” Hae-won smiled as the music started to play. “They are also good. Maybe I’ll show you that KARA dance sometime.”
“Deal,” I snickered.
I had to admit that the BTS song beat was catchy, and though I couldn’t understand what they were singing, there was something calming and happy about the voices. I set the video player to autoplay, and then picked up one of the books that Becka had been going through. I flicked to pages she had flagged, then started reading past the point where she had stopped reading. Aside from the useful tips, it was an interesting story about a man who’s car had broken down in the Outback and how he had managed to survive with nothing but a knife and whatever he could find in the vast and arid center of Australia. I was so engrossed in the story, that I didn’t even realize that dinner was ready until a plate of yummy smelling curry appeared in front of me.
“That’s a good one,” Becka said when I finally set the book aside.
I realized I’d finished off my wine while I was reading, as had the girls. I retrieved a bottle of chardonnay from the refrigerator, found some clean mugs, and poured us each a hefty serving.
“It’s a really good story,” I finally replied as I took my seat. “I’d like to read the whole thing through without having to worry about finding survival tips.”
“It’s taking me longer than it should to go through it,” Becka admitted. “I keep forgetting that I’m supposed to be looking for information and not just reading the book.”
“I can’t imagine trying to walk through that place,” I replied. “Though the aborigines do it often enough.”
I took my first bite of the curry, then, and nodded in approval to the Brit. It was spicy but not tongue scorching, and the rice and pork were perfectly cooked. Even the bits of broccoli, of which I am not a fan, were tender and tasty. I started to scrape up large spoonfuls as my attention shifted from wandering the desert to eating the perfect curry.
“Well, Hae-won found an interesting read as well,” Becka said with a nod to the Korean girl. “Neither one of you even noticed when I started yapping on about who should be on the next season of Strictly Come Dancing.”
“I was reading one of the books about dinosaurs,” Hae-won replied. “I hoped there might be something we could use.”
“And did you find anything?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” Hae-won sighed. “I’ve flagged pages where the dinosaurs look something like we’ve seen, but I haven’t found any real matches.”
“That makes sense, I suppose,” I mused. “The pictures in the book are a sort of best guess based on the bones they’ve found. And I don’t think anyone predicted all the feathers we’ve seen.”
“So how do the archeologists and paleontologists and whoever else tell them apart?” Becka asked.
“They look at bone structures,” the Korean girl explained. “But the differences are hard to see if you’re not trained to look for them.”
“So maybe the books on dinosaurs aren’t all that useful,” the blonde Brit noted in a disappointed voice.
“I wish they knew if there were any nocturnal hunters,” Hae-won said.
We all glanced toward the windows when Hae-won mentioned nocturnal dinosaurs, and I counted myself lucky that we hadn’t encountered any night hunters yet.
“Well, we haven’t seen or heard anything at night,” Becka said.
“That doesn’t mean they aren’t out there,” I replied. “We’ve made a point of holing up before sunset. If we do head north, we’ll need to make sure we find a safe place to stay overnight, somewhere the nocturnal dinos can’t get to us at.”
“I wonder if the dinosaurs from the library were nocturnal,” the dark-haired woman mused. “They did attack us at night.”
“And we haven’t seen any like those ones since that night,” I added as I considered the possibility. “The closest thing is probably the red raptor thing from the grocery store, but that had more feathers, and it was bigger.”
“N
ow you’re just trying to spook me,” Becka declared as she moved further away from the windows.
“Well, aside from survival tips from the Outback,” I said. “What else did you find?
Becka cast a last glance at the window, then turned toward the table again.
“I looked through that book you found on fishing,” she replied. “There was a lot in there on the different types of fish and how to trim them so you can remove the bones. I also flagged anything about knots, since that seemed really useful.”
“That’s one of the reasons I picked it up,” I said.
“Well, I’m not sure we’d want to go fishing around here,” Becka said. “The rivers are pretty polluted, and we’d probably get some kind of flesh eating bacteria.”
“Nice to know,” I replied. “Let me guess, the water is much cleaner up north?”
Becka smiled and ate another large bite of her curry. Hae-won shook her head, and I laughed, but at least we were all in a good mood again. We finished off the curry, and then Hae-won and I cleaned up the kitchen while Becka fiddled with the music selection.
“All these dinosaurs,” Hae-won mused as we dried the last plate. “And there are more coming through every day. Why would someone send dinosaurs here?”
“You think something is sending them?” Becka asked as she refilled our mugs.
“Do you not?” the Asian woman asked as she accepted the refilled mug.
“I don’t know,” the blonde girl replied and glanced up as she thought about it. “I mean, I guess that might be the most reasonable explanation.”
“Is it?” I asked after a moment. “It seems like a strange way to attack us, especially if you have the knowledge and technology to create these portals. Wouldn’t they have some sort of weapon that could just wipe us out without transporting dinosaurs?”
“But then where are the portals coming from?” Becka asked. “Are they just some sort of random, natural occurrence, and it’s our bad luck to be alive when it happens?”
“But the reports say there is a pattern,” Hae-won said as she moved to the couch with her wine.
“Lots of things in nature follow a pattern,” I pointed out
Becka grabbed the bottle of wine and moved toward the couch as well. She took a seat at the far end from Hae-won and patted the empty spot in between them.
“So let’s discuss,” Becka said.
I sat down between the two girls, and they both inched closer to me. Their scents mingled, Becka’s wildflower and Hae-won’s minty herb garden, and their soft hair touched my shoulders. Their thighs pressed against mine, and it was easy to forget that we were supposed to be discussing the rampaging dinos.
“So what’s the argument for a random occurrence?” the British girl asked as one of her hands found my thigh.
“It could be a wormhole,” I hypothesized. “Well, lots of wormholes.”
“Does that mean the dinosaurs didn’t go extinct?” the blonde girl asked. “They just traveled into the future.”
“Maybe,” I choked out as I tried to ignore the hand that was inching up my thigh. “What do you think, Hae-won?”
“I think there is too much thought behind this for it to be random,” the Korean girl replied in a serious voice as she studied the wall. “Yes, the appearance of the portals at certain times and places could be natural, just like Old Faithful. But the fact that there are so many carnivores being sent here isn’t possible if it’s random. Herbivores outnumber carnivores many times over in nature. That’s how they survive. So we should be seeing many herbivores, and just a few carnivores. And then there’s the fact that they come from different time periods. Why would all these random portals open in all these different eras and bring dinosaurs to the same point in time?”
“Wait, they didn’t all exist at the same time?” the blonde girl asked.
“No,” the dark-haired girl explained. “Some earlier dinosaurs were already extinct by the time the later ones came along. And though we’ve been able to find some close matches to the ones we’ve seen, they also look different, like someone added to their DNA.”
“The feathers,” I noted. “And some of them have been pretty smart. But does that mean some mad scientist somewhere is creating dinosaurs? And how is he creating the portals?”
“No one on earth has technology even close to this,” the Korean replied. “Yes, we can clone pets, but that’s because we have complete DNA samples, and we know what the final product is supposed to look like. As for the portals, that’s still something you only see in movies. In fact, most scientists would probably tell you that’s all it is, that you can’t really create portals like that.”
“You’re saying aliens did this,” I said as I looked at the dark-haired girl.
“That is my guess.” Hae-won finally turned to look at me and nodded.
“Bloody wankers,” Becka said as she polished off her wine. “Why would they do this?”
The blonde refilled her mug, then poured what was left into the other two mugs. Hae-won and I both took a sip as we pondered Becka’s last question. The blonde, meanwhile, rested her head on my shoulder and stared pensively into her mug.
“If it is aliens, it seems like such a bizarre way to attack us,” I finally said. “If you have that kind of technology, why not just send a bunch of ships into orbit and fry us?”
“Have you read that book?” the Korean woman asked scrunching her forehead together in thought. “Heong geo geim… I forget the English… I think it was called, Hungry Game?”
“Oh, the Hunger Games,” I supplied. “Yeah, I saw the movie, why?”
“I think it could be like that,” Hae-won explained. “Like a game or something.”
“You think they’re just watching us die?” Becka asked. “For fun or something.”
“Maybe,” the dark-haired woman said and shrugged. “It might also be a type of experiment.”
“Yeah, I thought about that, too,” I said. “It would make more sense than why they would pick dinosaurs. I mean, if they just wanted a competition to the death, why not godzilla or a giant moth? Why go with creatures that used to exist.”
“Yes, exactly,” the Asain girl said. “It does not make much sense unless they want to see if we can survive with creatures that existed on our world in a different time period.”
“But that would mean this won’t end anytime soon,” Becka replied. “They’ll just keep sending animals until we’re all dead.”
“And there are many more extinct animals that they could still introduce,” Hae-won said as she pressed her cleavage against my arm. “Animals like the saber toothed tiger and woolly mammoth.”
“I’m not sure which is worse,” I mused. “The idea that this is an experiment, or that it’s a game.”
“Well, if it’s an experiment, eventually they’ll just leave,” Becka said.
“Yes, but that could be years from now,” Hae-won said. “And after they have released many more species on us.”
“And if it’s a game?” I asked.
Hae-won bit her lip and considered the question for a moment before she replied.
“They will stay as long as it is entertaining,” she said. “If they grow bored, they will leave. But there may not be many people left by then.”
“Damn,” I muttered.
“There may be one more option,” Hae-won whispered.
“So let’s hear it, then,” Becka said with a sigh. “It can’t be any worse than the first two options you’ve suggested.”
“They want the planet for themselves,” Hae-won said. “Jason is right, an alien race this smart could fry us from orbit, but they’d destroy the planet too. But if they let the dinos do the work and then send them back to their own time, then they can move in and do whatever they want.”
I couldn’t decide which option was the most unsettling, and if any of Hae-won’s theories were correct, we were probably all fucked. Either way, our options were pretty limited. We could sit and wait for year
s for Earth’s previous inhabitants to show up, battling each one as they did, or we battled the dinos until the aliens grew bored with the show and left. And then there was the third option, which probably only ended when the human race itself was extinct. Though my wormhole theory didn’t seem likely, at least there was a glimmer of hope that we could survive.
“Well, that’s just bloody marvelous,” Becka griped when no one had said anything for several minutes. “We’ll be fighting these things for ages is what you’re saying.”
“That seems very likely,” Hae-won agreed.
“But this is all just a theory,” I sighed. “Could just as easily be that our scientists fucked up the CERN machine and created time portals.”
“CERN?” Becka asked. “Aren’t those the particle accelerator scientists?”
“Yes,” Hae-won and I said together, and then the Asian continued. “They force particles to go fast and then slam together so they can better understand the universe.”
“Bloody brilliant,” Becka sighed. “Sounds perfectly safe.”
“I’m sure someone will figure out what caused it,” I said. “And if it’s aliens, we’ll Independence Day their asses.”
“That was a good movie,” Hae-won snickered.
“Then we should go up north,” the British girl insisted. “It’s got to be safer than staying in the city, and we’ll have access to everything we need to survive.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But it would be dangerous to just drive off without a plan or supplies.”
“Yeah, I know,” Becka huffed. “It just cheeses me off that someone’s decided to fuck with us like this. What did we ever do to them?”
“There was a Star Trek movie,” I mused. “They had to travel back in time to find humpback whales to save the planet. It turned out that the whales were extinct in the future, and their alien parents came looking for them. Maybe it’s something like that.”
“That was also a good movie, too,” Hae-won replied. “The aliens tried to talk first.”
“Why bother if you know the ones you want to talk with are dead?” I asked.
“Great, so now it’s giant dodos,” Becka sighed as she stared into her empty cup. “Can we talk about something else now? I’m tired, and I don’t want my dreams to be filled with dinosaurs and aliens tonight.”
