We Are Awakened With The Axe [Open to All]

[applesaucemod]

The city has been abandoned.

Its infrastructure has been slowly deteriorating for quite some time, now. Traffic has long since ground to a permanent halt, taxis and trucks rusting by the curbs or abandoned mid-intersection. Most of the ground-floor windows have been shattered. Electricity is spotty, if it can be found at all. The eerie silence is broken only by the wind, the calls of crows, or the gentle collapse of some structure or other. And, of course, the occasional screams.

The city has been abandoned, but it is not empty.

What caused the various outbreaks hardly matters. Viral infection, fungal infection, some new or ancient bacterium suddenly released into the general populace - who knows? What does matter is that the city has become home to thousands if zombies, some slow, some fast, some mindless, some retaining a savage kind of intelligence. And they are all so, so hungry.

There are weapons to be found or improvised, and places to hide if you're lucky enough to come across someplace well-fortified and otherwise empty. Others have clearly had the same idea, leaving hastily constructed barricades in some places. You might even take those as a blessing, if the conspicuous absence of the original builders doesn't bother you. They're probably living on a nice farm somewhere.

One thing is certain: if you don't want to succumb to whatever plagues have ravaged this place, you will have to fight for your survival.

[OOC: usual dream party rules apply; all are welcome to participate, and characters can remember or forget at the players' discretion. Also, usual zombie rules apply: if you get bitten, you'll be turned into the sort of zombie that bit you. Whether your characters deal with comically dim shamblers or the terrifying sprinty variety is up to you.

Finally, let's just go ahead and say tw: violence and gore for the post as a whole, because it's gonna get messy, folks.]

Comments

[fucking_ebay]

It's almost like she's done this before. Peter swallows thickly, gaze still darting about in anticipation of the next attack, and gives a jerky nod. "Yeah," he agrees. "Yeah. Figured that. So you think we should go back," he gestures vaguely toward the street, "out there?"

[driftseeker]

His accent is odd. The peculiar way it stretches the vowels is vaguely reminiscent of Pentecost and the manner of his articulation, though she immediately steers her mind from that mental association. The entire city with its emptiness, the lack of car horns or murmur of a crowd, reminds her of Pentecost and the day she met him.

Right now, she does not want to remember Pentecost.

"I think a safe house may not exist," she says softly. "No matter where we go, they would only need to wait for us to come out."

[fucking_ebay]

"Has anyone ever told you that your inspirational speeches might need a little work?" asks Peter, because thanks, he really needed to hear that there's no safe place and the zombies are going to wait them out and eat them no matter where they go or what they do.

Coward that he is, Peter has never really let himself give in to the idea that escape isn't an option, and that holds true even now. "So we leave the city," he suggests, hardly realizing he's already thrown his lot in with this woman. He's alive, she's alive, they can be alive together. It only makes sense.

[driftseeker]

The man's testiness is no less off-putting than Dr. Gottlieb's, though he's yet to demonstrate any kind of similar skillset. Or any skillset at all.

"How?" she says. "The cars I've seen are beyond repair. Unless you would rather walk."

Raleigh whispers something about having been through worse in the back of her head.

She drops her rag and looks back at the other man.

"Shouldn't we call for help?" she asks uncertainly. "If we could broadcast a signal of some kind - so we could know if there is a place to escape to."

[fucking_ebay]

"If you've got a mobile, I'd be thrilled to put in the call for you." Is she just going to stand here all day shooting down his suggestions only to offer ones that are even less practical? It's not that he can't see the wisdom of it, just that he can't see the how. "We can start by walking," he suggests. "Maybe we'll find a car. Or maybe we'll find a RadioShack. I'd just rather not stay here."

Seriously, woman, he's literally ankle-deep in corpses right now.

[driftseeker]

"All right," Mako says. She moves back, scanning the city's horizon for a promising direction.

She has to stop when she finds herself suggesting one way and Raleigh suggesting another. Her hand lifts in an abortive movement to massage the side of her head, but she awkwardly twists the motion into facing the man again.

This is not Tokyo, and there is no Onibaba.

Raleigh is gone, and has been since she got here.

It is just her.

"A car might make noise." She frowns. "Do you know if they are drawn to noise?"

[fucking_ebay]

Is it just him, or is she acting a little...off? Peter's not sure what that gesture was meant to be, and he raises his eyebrows as he watches her turn to face him again. At least she's asking sensible questions now. He sucks in a deep breath through his teeth, looking away as he considers it.

"Probably a good idea to assume they are," he replies. "They're hunters, they'll hunt. They're not particularly bright, either, or I don't think they are, so -- anything. Anything they'd notice might set them off. Shit."

[driftseeker]

"Maybe," she says, settling for a direction somewhere between the two options and sticking with it. She begins walking, glancing partway back in case the man will follow.

They seem less intelligent than kaiju, almost definitively. They seem to react to the typical external stimuli - heat, light, motion. Whether they can smell or are subject to any heightened sensory perception remains to be seen.

Mako does not want to think of kaiju, but even less does she want to think of the things they are up against now. Not alien. Not even monstrous, only in the vague sense that they were once human.

She sucks in a breath, and keeps walking.

"Unless we could create a diversion," she says, her thought process made vocal. "An explosion might lure them, if they are attracted to those sorts of stimuli."

[fucking_ebay]

Of course he'll follow. She has a sword.

Also, she's thinking ahead further than climb the fire escape. He'd feel bad about attaching himself to this woman in an unspoken demand that she keep on protecting him, but when has he ever felt bad about making a smart choice re: survival? Except that one time. And that other time. And the third time, when he almost -- yeah, fuck this, he's not continuing this train of thought.

"If any of the wrecked cars have petrol in them we can definitely make an explosion happen," he points out. "But we'd better know where we're going before we start making zombie beacons."

[driftseeker]

"We are in Manhattan," she says uncertainly. "Aren't we? I have not been there for very long - but it is an island." The question hovers just beyond her tone. Surrounded by water, but not the sea. If any of the bridges have been destroyed, they may not have any way to leave at all.

Mako quickly turns her mind away from that option.

"I'm not familiar with the geography," she admits, her voice shrinking slightly.

[fucking_ebay]

"Fuck," says Peter. She's right, it's an island -- and while he knows his way around by now, he's hazy on the bridges and tunnels for getting out. They've never been much use to him, thanks to the Rift.

The Rift! Can they leave Manhattan now? If the Rift has moved them forward in time, or to some zombie dimension, do the same rules still apply? "I think I know where there's a bridge," he says slowly. "To the west."

[driftseeker]

"I hope it is still standing," she says dubiously. Bridges were among the first landmarks to be destroyed by the kaiju as they ploughed resolutely through the metropolitan aggregate of human manufacture.

Zombies are not kaiju. The scale of destruction, Mako thinks she can safely assume, should be significantly different.

So.

Mako looks to the sky, searching for some indication of sun or moon or stars beneath the darkened underbellies of clouds.

"We can find a boat," she decides, hoping her approximation of 'west' is correct relative to them as she begins walking. "If the bridge is gone, we can still escape."

[fucking_ebay]

"We don't have a lot of other options," Peter points out tersely. "We stay here, we're dead soon. We hole up somewhere, we're dead later. If we can get off this island, maybe, just maybe we'll find an option that doesn't end with us dead."

If there's no bridge and no boat...he's trying not to think about it. He's not even going to suggest taking one of the tunnels out (hell no). Swimming can't be that hard, can it? People go swimming all the time.

[driftseeker]

"Then we head to the bridge," she says with a sense of authority she does not feel. "As long as we can get away, maybe then we will have a - "

Whatever additional motivational words she may have shared are lost in the clatter of something approaching from the side, very loud, very fast, its jaws gapped in snarling hunger.

Mako spins neatly and beheads it before she may stop to consider that action.

The thing's head hits the ground with a wet thunk, its body crumpling lifelessly after. She stares after it, frozen, her eyes wide as she struggles to discern if that act of harsh reasoning had been Raleigh's or her own.

We had no choice, insists Raleigh. It was them or you.

The thought does not help, nor does it belong to her. Mako lowers the blade to her side and steps away.

"We should go," she says, her voice trembling subtly.

[fucking_ebay]

"Jesus!" Peter flinches away from the crumpling body. "Going," he agrees breathlessly, grabbing at her elbow and setting off at a fast clip. "Going to the bridge. Still want to set off that bomb?"

This plan has more holes in it then...well, alright, it's only the second survival plan he's ever been a part of, and the first time worked out even though they went right into the belly of the beast. She's not Charley, but she's probably a lot better at this than Charley was. "They shouldn't be that fast," he's muttering to himself as he goes.

[driftseeker]

She stumbles behind him automatically at a fast clip, torn between opposing viewpoints. Mako wants to cut a slow, silent path to the bridge without a struggle. Raleigh favors the use explosive brisance.

She closes her eyes. She cannot remember when the city last looked this way. The kaiju did not tear their way through the buildings, but the place is no less desolate than if they had.

"Do you know them?" she asks, seizing the point that does not cause her mind to split two ways. "Have you met them before?"

[fucking_ebay]

Peter's mostly making a beeline, if one he's trying to make relatively stealthy. He doesn't know the first thing about sneaking, though (alright, he knows not to deliberately make a bunch of noise, but he doesn't know the second thing about it), and his breathing and footsteps are probably loud enough to alert anyone or anything paying the slightest bit of attention nearby.

The question catches him off guard, and he turns to look at her in utter confusion for a moment until it clicks in his head. "No," he says. "God, no. Whoever they...were, it wasn't anyone I knew."

But isn't that a comforting line of thought?

[driftseeker]

It takes her a further moment for the full implications of his words to hit, and -

Oh.

He means they were people.

But of course they were. They look like them, until something came along and stripped away all their awareness and humanity and reduced them to crumbling shreds of themselves. She does not know what might have caused that, and she does not want to think much of it.

Unfortunately, she already is.

"I mean - are you used to - running into them," she says, delicately, though there is no truly polite or delicate way to broach that topic. "I have never seen anything like them before."

[fucking_ebay]

Peter looks stricken at that. "Not -- not these," he admits. "I didn't think they were real -- I'm a fucking idiot, aren't I? Vampires and angels, sure, but it's zombies I thought were made up."

Would this have happened back home, he wonders, or is this purely the Rift's doing. "Were you here before?" he asks. "Here in New York, before - this shit?"

[driftseeker]

Living in a building owned by an angel has granted her a good indication of the legitimacy of their existence, but then, devoting the majority of her life to the construction of monsters to fight cloned alien war machines that crawled from a slash in the fabric of spacetime had also bestowed her with plenty of perspective.

But those things had never been human. That, to her, made a distinct, regretful, horrifying difference.

"I haven't been here long," she says, but her expression soon darkens into a puzzled frown. "I don't remember how long. I was in a building, somewhere - Hell's Kitchen, I think - "

Her voice dwindles into nothing as she thinks with increasing, alarming, dawning terror that she cannot link those events with these. She cannot possibly, because there is no connection, none at all.

[fucking_ebay]

"So you came through the Rift?" asks Peter, though he doesn't look at her -- his gaze is too busy skittering back and forth over their surroundings, always watching for movement. At least if it were vampires they'd be safe in the daylight. They'd never be safe anywhere else ever again, but they could at least stand in the daylight and know it wasn't coming right now. "Do you know someone named Gabe?"

[driftseeker]

"Yes." She looks at him oddly. "I live in his building. Or - I did." Again, her voice falters as a faint frown darkens the space between her eyebrows. "Before this, before any of it happened."

Except that, rather alarmingly, Mako is now having difficulty pinpointing when any of this happened. She remembers her life in a sequence of scattered, linear events, even clearer to her, who only recently relived many of them deeply and vibrantly and intensely through the nature of the Drift, but she cannot draw a direct line between arriving in Manhattan and when the city itself crumbled into a state of socioeconomic, zombie-fueled decay.

"When did this happen?" she asks, her voice small.

[fucking_ebay]

So she is one of Gabe's flock tenants. Might've been nice to meet her before the goddamn world ended. "I don't know," he admits. "I don't remember any of this. I was hoping you did."

But if she doesn't remember and he doesn't remember, that means...what? That he was right in his first assumption and the Rift skipped them forward in time or shunted them off into a shittier version of the world? "Gabe's a friend of mine," he says, circling back to a more comfortable topic. "If he's here, he can help --"

Possible explanations of the advantages of having an angel in your court are prevented by the guttural cry of a skeletal thing that comes crawling out of a broken car window, its nearly fleshless fingers grasping first at Peter, then toward his companion as the magician skitters away with startling alacrity.

[driftseeker]

"I just woke up here," she admits. This is, apparently, not a new thing to him, nor to her, in more recent memory. Being torn from one world to the next is not exactly a trend she would like to see more of, especially as she had only just begun to settle into Gabe's building. She had liked him and Johnny; she hopes that they are both all right, though if Gabe is with Johnny then surely an archangel would be enough to keep him safe?

She wishes she had her phone, but she woke up without it.

When something bony and shrieking flips out from a dented husk of a car's disintegrating chassis, Mako skips away from it just as swiftly. It scrambles over the crumbled dirt and asphalt, hands reaching for her ankles until she amputates its arms at the wrists with a swift stroke of her blade.

The noise it makes is inhuman, not unlike the howls of a dying kaiju, and Mako winces.

[fucking_ebay]

The unearthly sound is abruptly cut off by a CRUNCH that doesn't seem as wet as it should for the way the thing's head comes away more or less caved in by the tire iron Peter swings at it with both hands. He stands over it, panting and shaking, then abruptly steps forward and hits it again even harder at some half-imagined twitch of its limbs. "Goddamn," he says, one hand coming up to shield his mouth. He's seen worse, he's trying to remind himself and he's seen worse recently, but the thickness of the blood, the vacant eyes --

"Come on," he says, tearing his eyes away. He doesn't want to be here, he doesn't want to look at this.