On the street below, the shambling figure of a construction worker stepped out ahead of the massive beast, latching onto its foot when it planted on the ground. The dinosaur stopped and ducked its head downward with a growl so deep that Zaria could feel it in her chest. When the head came back up, she could see legs in tobi pants flailing around at the side of its mouth, and her imagination filled in the sounds of bones crunching. The annoying distraction gone, the scaled foot almost as large as the woman watching it, lifted again and carried the creature out of sight.

"Does that help you narrow down which zombie story this universe inspired?" Gu Cheng seemed to shudder a little and rolled his shoulders to loosen them.

"No!" Zaria hissed in a whisper. "I have never read a story about zombies and dinosaurs strolling through Tokyo!!"

"What about through somewhere else?" His lips pulled up ever so slightly in a smile.

Zaria narrowed her eyes. "Oh,you have jokes, do you? I'm gonna tell that dino to bite you."

The show over, she climbed down from the desk and finished rifling through the drawers and containers of the desk. There was a cellphone, but after finding it's charging cord and plugging it in, they discovered that the electricity was off. "I mean, that makes sense. If this is what the whole city is like, then who would be keeping the power running? The T-Rex?"

From the safety of the locked apartment with a dead again zombie in the other room, Zaria began to giggle. "Oh my..." she caught the inquisitive look being thrown her way. "Wearing his little hardhat and safety goggles, a little clip board in his tiny arms. 'Hiro, I need that report on the power spikes on my desk by 5pm. Don't make me eat you.'"

Gu Cheng just watched as she dissolved into a fit of giggles, trying to muffle the sound in her arm. When she finally seemed to be in control of herself again, he gestured to the stuff she had laying across the bed. "What do you want to do with all this?"

With a reluctant shrug, Zaria swiped her shirtsleeve across her eyes and tried not to think about dino boss. "I mean, if a zombie is trying to bite us then we could cover areas that would be most likely to be in between teeth with a reinforcement of duct tape and jean material so that it isn't tape directly on our skin. But, I mean, dinosaurs... I have nothing for that. You have a gun. But as great of a shot as you are, I don't think you can take down a T-rex. Not even with a perfect shot to the eye and into the brain. But what do I know. That was a freaking dinosaur!"

She sat on the edge of the bed. "Zombies and dinosaurs. I guess it could be worse."

The bed sank down on the other side of the pile. "How is that?"

Zaria thought back to the manacles attached to the sturdy bed frame. "I'm sure there is a way." The dino boss did not seem quite so funny anymore. " What do you think about the jeans idea?"

Gu Cheng nodded his head in agreement and went to get the duct tape while Zaria started to cut along the seams. He did not speak. She could tell that he was angry, but she didn't want to talk about it. He was in the wrong. If he hadn't grabbed onto her, then he might already be home. He wouldn't be walking around a decaying body in a home that smelled like death. Angry tears pricked at the corners of her eyes again. She wished she could be angry at him, but it was all her fault that he was in the situation that he was.

Gu Cheng came back into the bedroom, carrying all of the items he scavenged from the counter and placing them on the desk before closing the bedroom door. "Maybe the flies won't come in here."

"I should have thought about that. Sorry." Zaria blinked away the moisture from her eyes and finished cutting up the fabric. She left the leather jacket whole, for now. It was thick, bomber jacket style, and if reinforced with duct tape on the outside, it would give her whole torso protection. Then, she could focus on lining Gu Cheng with the jean material.

Gu Cheng removed some shirts that were left behind in the drawers and shoved them against the crack under the door. "If it is airborne and the inhabitant already caught it, then opening the window won't matter." Then he unlocked and slid open the bedroom window.

Unlike anywhere Zaria had ever lived, there was silence when the window opened and a light breeze blew into the room. No bird sounds, cars, people talking. No dogs barking, not even the sound of someone's too loud radio blaring down the road. "Eerie," she whispered. Her hand stilled, and she put down her scissors and crossed to the window.

The road outside was empty. At ground level, small shops lined the road opposite them, but she could not begin to guess as to what was inside of them. Brightly painted signs in reds, yellows, and greens ran up front of the building. It seemed like a nice little street. She could imagine scooters driving up the center while shoppers walked along the sides, ducking into the different stores. "Whatever it was, it probably happened quickly."

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

"Because of the abandoned studying?"

Zaria peered over her shoulder at Gu Cheng, who was still sitting on the bed, watching her. " I hadn't considered that, but that makes sense too. I was thinking that the shops all look like they could just be closed for the night. No broken glass or obvious signs of looting."

He responded with a short "Mm" and removed his backpack. Zaria watched as he pulled out the water bottle and took a drink, offering her the bottle when he was done.

"Thanks," she said and took a sip. "I wish we knew if the water was safe to drink. I don't know if we should even try filtering it."

They sat on the bed together. The pile of clothing lay between them, a convenient barrier. Gu Cheng averted his eyes, seemingly entranced by whatever he could see outside the window. His cold aura was under control. She couldn't tell how angry he was still.

Zaria got back up and moved toward the window sill. She pulled her phone out of her bag, checked the time, and placed it photocell up on the little ledge to charge. "Do you want to set yours up to charge, too? I mean, to top off the battery, I know that you were charging it earlier...in the clearing..."

The smell of decay had lessened with the cold air moving in through the window. Zaria looked to Gu Cheng as he set his phone next to hers, but he did not seem interested in talking so she sat down at the desk and pulled an extra ink pen out of the little metal cup. Flipping to a new page in the notebook, she began to doodle. What started as a star shape grew outward to become a random assortment of shapes. Then, the blank space between them was filled with swirls and zigzags and straight lines. As she drew, she heard thumps and scrapes from behind her, but she trusted that if Gu Cheng had something he needed help with, he would...not ask because he wouldn't need help, obviously. He was Gu Cheng. A small smile rested on her lips, and she hunched down farther until her nose was almost touching the paper she was working on. If she had to be stuck in a zombie apocolypse world with dinosaurs, there was nobody else she would trust more with her safety.

The smile slipped off of her lips. She was glad he was with her, but she wished he wasn't. She wished he was back home, in his own bedroom. Sitting on his bed and flipping through work emails. When the room grew too dark to see her work anymore, she put the ink pen down and pushed gingerly away from the desk.

The bed and mattress were angled against the bedroom door, and the tent was set up in the middle of the room. Gu Cheng was sitting in the opening of the tent with his feet sitting out in the room, tapping his finger on the screen of his phone. He looked up when she stood up from the chair.

"I brought in a pot to relieve ourselves. I thought neither of us would want to use that bathroom. We can dump it out the window when we are done. I can cover my ears inside the tent, or I can leave if you are uncomfortable."

"What about you? Won't you be uncomfortable if I am doing something like that while you are a few feet away?"

He did not answer. His feet disappeared inside the tent, and when she bent over, she could see he was lying with his eyes closed, his hands over his ears. Zaria pulled her toilet paper from her bag and went to the corner to do her business in the kitchen-style chamber pot. When she was done, she nudged Gu Cheng's foot and crawled into the tent so that he could take his turn. It was loud with her hands over her ears. She could better hear her heart beating and it pounded like a bass drum through her head. She felt more than saw Gu Cheng stick his upper body back into the tent, but he withdrew a few seconds later, so she kept her hands over her ears.

The light on her eyelids dimmed, and she opened her eyes again. Gu Cheng sat with his back to her, dragging the zipper to the door shut . Zaria removed her hands from her ears. "Do you want to try to sleep?"

"Mm," he responded, laying back on the other side of the tent. He did not move to take off his weapons. Zaria rolled to face the canvas of the tent, the messenger bag tugging on her neck as it fell behind her to the tent floor.

"Try and get some sleep," she said quietly in the darkening tent. "If anything happens, we will both wake up. No need to stand guard."

"You, too. We will need our energy tomorrow. Once we figure out what we will be doing," Gu Cheng agreed easily. Zaria thought he might actually mean it, so she closed her eyes and tried to calm her mind.

It must have worked because when she woke up, it was much brighter in the room outside. The comforting sound of steady breaths came from somewhere behind her, and she realized that Gu Cheng had not rolled over to her in the night. "I guess it makes sense," she thought to herself. "We don't need to share body heat." Negative feelings and thoughts wiggled through her brain, but she ignored them and sat up to relieve herself.

"What's the matter?" A sleepy voice whispered, and a hand reached out to touch her elbow.

"I'm just going to go to the bathroom. Go back to sleep." Zaria unzipped the flap just enough to get out and squatted over the pot in the corner. When she was done and used a few more squares of her precious toilet paper, she pulled herself up onto the desk and opened the window. Her hand stilled before she could pop out the screen to dump the pop. On the sidewalk across the street, a group of four teenagers were standing against a store front, looking up at the newly opened window. She could see them whispering frantically to each other, and one of them pointed up toward the apartment that she and Gu Cheng were crashing in. Zaria raised her hand and tentatively waved. A flurry of activity as they huddled together, looking up at her occasionally as if to make a point about something. A kid in a baseball cap raised their hand and waved back. She held up one finger and leaned back from the window.

"Uhm, Gu Cheng? There's some kids out on the sidewalk, and they look alive."