"There is what?" Gu Cheng came out of the tent looking calm and collected, as though he had been awake and to a salon already. Zaria ran her fingers through her own curls, not wanting to know how bad she looked.
"I said there are four kids standing against a building across the street looking at me. I opened the window and they must have heard it."
Gu Cheng moved the desk chair and climbed up onto it as he had done the night before. The small group had spread out a little while they had their brief exchange. Two were standing a little farther from the group, facing outward with what looked like baseball bats in hand. The other two were having words. Bickering, if Zaria had to make a guess. Gu Cheng kept the screen in place but moved up until his nose was almost against it.
"They don't look much younger than you," he said to Zaria as he looked them over. She rolled her eyes but did not comment. The tallest of the group looked around carefully and then walked across the street, stopping close enough that Gu Cheng could hear him but not so close that he had to lean out the window to see. He spoke a few words that Zaria could not understand, and she was surprised to hear Gu Cheng respond in the same language. "Huh, I guess the pendant can only broadcast one language at a time..." She muttered quietly. Gu Cheng glanced at her but continued his low conversation across the distance. The boy returned to his group, and they huddled together for a moment before he came back.
Gu Cheng listened closely, nodding, then turned to face her. "We can go with them if we want to. They are on a water run and could use the extra hands to carry more bottles. They have not been to the convenience shops on this street before, so it should be a large haul. We do not have to go with them if you are uncomfortable."
"I mean," Zaria thought about for a moment. "In your world, I found someone helpful right away, and things did not turn out too badly. In the last world, things didn't go so great. If you feel alright with them, then I will follow you. My judgment about strangers is running 50/50 right now."
"I think that we can't stay here forever, we are going to be out of water by this afternoon if we can't filter our own. And they might have answers." He waited for Zaria to nod and then passed along their acceptance.
Zaria ducked into the tent and packed up what little they had taken out of the bags and placed the backpack on the bedroom floor so that she could break down the tent. Gu Cheng exchanged a few words out the window and then packed up all of the scavenged items into his pack. His improvised arm and leg guards were attached and held in place with a little more duct tape, and then he helped Zaria wrap her legs as well. When they were done, he took care of his chamber pot business while Zaria covered her ears and then popped out the screen of the window.
"They said that this building is still closed up, so their may not be a safe way to go out through the door. We can sacrifice our laundry line, I will help lower you down through the window, and then I will climb out once you are on the ground. We won't be getting the line back, though, I will need to anchor it to support me..." He looked at her closely, waiting for her opinion. She appreciated the gesture, but it didn't really matter too much to her, and she said so. They had other ropes that were thicker and more useful, and they might find more of the clothes line while scavenging with the group.
A loop was made in the line for Zaria to put her foot into. She vetoed the idea of wrapping it around her waist. The line was too thin. It would hurt supporting her weight and might not work anyway. It took some maneuvering and a boost from Gu Cheng, but soon she was hanging backward out the window, her legs outside and her upper body balancing on the window ledge. She worked the loop around the arch of one foot while holding on with the other hand and then gripped the line tightly as Gu Cheng lowered her to the street. A few feet from the ground, there was a distant thud, exactly like the one they heard the day before. Frantic whispers came from the other side of the street as the sound grew closer, and as soon as her unfettered foot was on the ground, she was ripping the line off of the other. "Stay there", she hissed up to the window, and ran across the street. She pulled her sword from her sheath and supported it with both hands as she backed into a small gap between buildings. Peeking around the corner, she watched as a giant shape turned onto the street, following its same path from the day before. One of the boys tried to pull her behind them, but she shrugged them off, sword up and ready to defend herself if needed. She was not going to stand by and hope it worked out while a predator was approaching her again.
Gu Cheng was no longer at the window. She guessed that he must have ducked down. Since he was right at eye height, it made sense. The sound of breathing stopped as powerful hind legs and a three toed foot came down just meters from where they cowered in the shadows. As the impacts moved farther on, she ducked her head around the corner again,looking both ways in case it had attracted any undead followers. She watched as it turned onto another road several intersections away in the distance.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
Across the street, there was a blur of movement as Gu Cheng pulled himself through the window and slid down the cord gracefully to the bottom. He ran across the street toward them, frost forming on the ground under his feet. Zaria pushed him past her into the alley when a blur appeared just past his shoulder. Gu Cheng skidded to a stop and pivoted in time to see Zaria's sword flashing forward and cutting through the head of a small child that was racing after him. She didn't know where it came from, but she saw the bloodied face and heard a wheeze, and her body moved before she could register what it was. With the heart barely pumping blood at all, there was very little spray as the blade cleaved through. What little spatter came from the sudden stop of the blade.
Newton's first law of motion, a small part of her brain, informed her. The blood on the blade kept moving when the sword suddenly stopped. Her chest heaved with the adrenaline. When no more sounds of anything moving came, she slowly let out her breath. She turned to face the shocked Gu Cheng and hissed, "You idiot! Did you even check if there was anything besides the freaking big dinosaur before you threw yourself out the window?"
"You were in danger," He said, as if that explained everything. Zaria noticed the group watching them with wide eyes. The lone girl in the group was rubbing the arms of her button-up white top.
"It's getting cold out, isn't it," she said with a pointed look at the others behind him. Gu Cheng closed his eyes and took a deep breath. As he released it, the air warmed a few degrees. She carefully stuck her head out again to check the road, but there was no movement that she could see in either direction. Behind her, she could hear the whispered conversation, but she didn't know what any of them were saying.
After a few minutes, Gu Cheng spoke softly from behind her. "Joseph Zaria, we are going to go to the shop next to us now. They have asked that you and I stay outside to watch out while they go in and clear the creature that they can see through the glass of the door." He moved past her and stuck to the brick of the building while he slunk to the far side of the shop's door. The other four followed him,stopping at the door until she could slide into position behind them.
Zaria pressed her back against the glass and rested the tip of the sword on the ground next to her to give her arms a break. During the time camping, while they waited for the pendant to charge, she spent a lot of time building up her stamina and working on strengthening her muscles. It had not been enough time, though. If she tried to hold the heavy blade at the ready, she would be worn out before she got a chance to use it again.
The door opened with the jangle of bells that sounded ear splitting in the silence. The leather band and its offensive noisemakers that were attached to the door bar were removed and gently placed to the side, and the four teenagers disappeared inside the store. There was a crash from within, and Zaria tensed. Nothing else came along, and a few minutes later, the door opened again, silently this time. She gave Gu Cheng a look as he walked in before her. She didn't say anything about their tactics, though. These kids had survived here longer than she had. Her motto for this world was becoming 'What do I know?'.
Inside, she could see immediately that it was a large chip display that was knocked over to make the ruckus before. She stepped around it, and the corpse of a round man in an apron, and walked toward the group gathered in the third aisle. Everyone but Gu Cheng was whispering excitedly while pointing out shelves containing hundreds of water bottles. Zaria left the group and walked back to the door, where reusable shopping bags were on display. When she returned with them, four sets of eyes blinked owlishly and then started whispering excitedly as they took them from her arms.
"They are excited that you had such a great idea. They were wondering how they would carry enough with them all being individual bottles and not large jugs." Gu Cheng murmured quietly to her.
"Were they just going to fill their arms and be defenseless the whole way back to their home?" Zaria opened her bag and started fitting as many bottles in the messenger bag as she could. Since she removed most of the things to put in Gu Cheng's bag before leaving the last world, there was a fair amount of space. When she was done, she took Gu Cheng to look in the other aisles. In one that contained laundry detergent, she found little packs of line cord. She tossed a few to him and then opened one and walked back to the reusable bags. The others grew quiet when she walked back to the water and started to fill the bag completely full of waters and then began tying the cord to the handles. She indicated to Gu Cheng to lift the bag up and then turned so the bag would be against her back. The cords went over her shoulders, and then she laced them through the belt loops around her waist, around several times so the wait would be more distributed. "Ugh, not comfortable, but my arms will be free," she said with a groan when he released his hold. She had him lift it one more time and shoved some sponges from the laundry aisle under where the cord was resting on her shoulders so that it would not cut in so much.
Someone else went back to the laundry aisle and came back with more sponges and cord, but Zaria did not stay to watch them. "Is there anything else that you can take? Why do they just want water?"
Gu Cheng relayed the question, listening intently to the young girl who had a perplexed expression on her face. When she was finished, he nodded and looked back at Zaria. "She said that only water is dangerous. They have lots of pantry type items gathered from other trips, but water is harder to find. Not all areas are in the big dinosaurs' territory, so the zombies are more plentiful. I think she was saying dinosaurs plural, not possessive."