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The Big Applesauce Moderators ([personal profile] applesaucemod) wrote in [community profile] applesaucedream2015-07-31 06:16 pm

We Are Awakened With The Axe [Open to All]

 photo zombie dream party_zpsbb0hfksu.jpg


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.]
etherthief: (whatever this feel is it's very intense)

[personal profile] etherthief 2015-08-03 01:54 am (UTC)(link)
"Oh yeah, next time we're escaping zombies at breakneck speed I'll be sure to file a formal request," she snaps back over her shoulder. "In triplicate!"

His followup report is met with an irritable tsk and a sharp turn into an alley. She darts through the narrow passage, leaps up and kicks off one wall, onto the low-hanging fire-escape ladder of the other. Parkour has never really been a thing she's done, so chalk that up to the power of adrenaline, she supposes.

"Here!" She kicks the ladder down to Rush's level, then jimmies open the window into the building, leaving him to wrangle the ladder back up.

The window leads into an abandoned apartment, but if she has her geography right they should be right over a bar, where they can hopefully get at a generator. She wades through upended furniture and strewn garbage, searching for the door.
lottawork: (sighhhh | so done w this bullshit)

[personal profile] lottawork 2015-08-03 02:05 am (UTC)(link)
"Thank you," he says crisply, rounding the corner with fierce precision and grasping the ladder with an admirable agility to match hers. He vaults from rungs to window in one smooth stroke, landing in a less-than-coordinated slide in the apparently empty apartment.

He rises, ignoring the abraded ache of his elbows and his hands and his knees, and regards the ladder coolly. He unhooks it from its purchase and watches it plunge to flatten the leading number of their pursuers below.

Rush closes the window and turns away.

The door, once they reach it, appears to be sealed or blocked from the outside. Mouth twisting in distaste, Rush lifts the haft of his weapon to put it through the wood, reducing a section of the obstruction to splinters.

"Fuck," he says, and draws back to strike again.
etherthief: (goddamnshitfuck)

some more body horror for the whole family

[personal profile] etherthief 2015-08-03 02:28 am (UTC)(link)
Iman huffs impatiently as he tries to bang the door apart. She could blast it down, of course, but she's already been playing it very fast and loose with the amount of energy she's using and she's about to redline hard, not to mention something of that caliber would probably draw a load of unwanted attention.

"Give me a second," she says, dropping their supplies and prowling back through the apartment. There has to be something they can use as a battering ram, something that would work better than a section of rebar.

She shoulders her way into a bedroom and-

"Ohshit-!" she yelps as something launches out of her from the dark, latching onto her shoulders. It's not even a full fucking body, it's like a torso or something, with incredibly powerful arms. The force of the collision slams her back out into the hall, and she's struggling to get a grip on it to dislodge it as its hand snags over her face, its jaw snapping at her.
lottawork: (scary | will end ur soul)

[personal profile] lottawork 2015-08-03 02:49 am (UTC)(link)
Asadi's reaction is explosive and immediate; he swivels to face her and deduces first that she is grappling with a partial body and second that any immediate blow he strikes has an extremely high probability of damaging her rather than the snarling thing pinning her, which would not be an ideal outcome.

It only occurs to Rush after he has looped the incredibly versatile pipe around the thing's throat and employed its own inertia to tear it from Asadi's front that the maneuver he has chosen to implement has placed it and himself in greater proximity.

Well, fuck.

Rush releases it at the same moment it fists its hands into the material of his shirt, and this is not, historically, one of his finer or more elegant ideas, but he is out of fucking options.

So he gyrates on his heel, spins and slams it against the wall, bringing his face dangerously close to its snapping jaws, and does so in rapid repetition until its struggles are somewhat reduced, and he does not know how to proceed except to take the insubstantial opening he has and so he takes it and he drops the pipe with a metallic clatter and wraps his hands around the thing's throat and he propels it to the nearest opening, which would be a window, which opens to him and to the possibility of ending this encounter with the high-pitched shattering and pinwheeling of glass.

He can hear the thing's howls as it plummets down the length of the building's exterior.

Rush backs away and gropes for the nearest lateral or vertical surface for support, his breathing ragged.
Edited 2015-08-03 02:49 (UTC)
etherthief: (intrigue | defiance | whoa now)

[personal profile] etherthief 2015-08-03 03:13 am (UTC)(link)
Iman sinks back against the wall and down to the floor as soon as it's torn away from her, and just sits for a moment, gasping and staring as Rush dispatches the creature with inelegant, brutal efficiency.

Well, all right then.

"Rush." She pulls herself back up, her legs a bit shaky, and reaches out to offer a handhold. "Thanks."

There isn't much in the room to turn against the door, and her desire to search has been dramatically reduced. "Fuck this," she grunts. "I'm kicking that shit down."
lottawork: (aren't you tired?)

[personal profile] lottawork 2015-08-03 03:24 am (UTC)(link)
He looks at her as his breathing and heartrate gradually deescalate back to manageable levels and inclines his head in acknowledgement.

"Best not to prolong this, I should think," he says airily, as if he has not just engaged in repeated self-injury for the purpose of levering their mutual enemy out of the building's window.

He joins her, re-appropriating the pipe to slam it into the door and hack a rough exit from its construction.
etherthief: (destitute | miserable)

[personal profile] etherthief 2015-08-03 03:39 am (UTC)(link)
She lets Rush do most of the hacking work before stepping in to kick the blockade away. Exit made, they slip down the stairs quickly and quietly, stepping into... a cafe?

This is not where she thought she was. She stops for a moment, her shoulders slumped, then steps carefully toward the front windows.

"For fuck's sake," she mutters. "I got turned around. Bar's across the goddamn street."

And guess what's in the street.

"Fuck." She turns away, raking a hand up under her hijab and through her hair. "Now fucking what?"
lottawork: (bruh what up)

[personal profile] lottawork 2015-08-03 03:57 am (UTC)(link)
That was some fairly fucking poor planning on their part, though epinephrine was never historically complementary to tactical thinking.

"I suspect," says Rush, running a hand across the hint of beard on his chin, "that we may require a diversion."

Yes. Good fucking luck to whoever partakes in that maneuver.

He realizes belatedly that there are only two of them, and of the two of them, Asadi is by far the most technologically likely to engineer a working fucking signal, courtesy of her fucking arm.

"Fuck," he announces to no one in particular, and puts his weapon through the front window.

That gets their collective attention.

They hiss in violent, unionized hostility.

"All right, y'fuckin jobbies?" he says cheerfully, stepping over broken glass and into the street. "And good fuckin' luck to ye."

He sprints in the opposite direction.

They follow, a collating herd of slavering, furious, mindless, unintelligent, hungry monsters in search of the very fresh, very fast meat that has just openly taunted them.

Rush hopes Asadi will make it.

Rush hopes he will not die immediately, thus rendering this maneuver utterly pointless.

Rush hopes she will not sacrifice their predesignated plan for the sake of retrieving him from this exceedingly well-reasoned stratagem, doubtless with an ill-advised tactic of her own design -

Ah, fuck.
etherthief: (what the fuck just happened)

[personal profile] etherthief 2015-08-03 04:16 pm (UTC)(link)
"What are you- don't!" Her yell is drowned out by shattering glass, and oh, there he goes, brilliant, god damn fucking brilliant, he's taunting them now, fun. Aaand he's fucking off.

God, some days she could really just kill him.

She waits until the horde has passed, shambling and crawling after their overconfident fucking dinner, and then she slips through the window and darts across the street.

Getting into the bar is simple, a lot simpler than it would have been if there'd been two of them trying to evade a cluster of undead predators, which is good cause she doesn't have any time to lose. She slips in, scopes the place out - by some stroke of God's grace it appears devoid of zombies or breaches to its sturdy exterior. Good. She stashes their supplies behind the bar and immediately ascends the stairs, securing every door behind her as she goes.

She's on the roof in a matter of minutes, which might be a few minutes too much, and she bounds off in the direction Rush took, leaping from building to building like a goddamn ninja who isn't nearly as exhausted as she is.

She carries on for almost two blocks, terrified he took some weird side route, more terrified she's going to find him at the bottom of a feeding frenzy - but then there he is. Crawling up onto a dumpster in an evident attempt to scale a building and lose them.

Idiot.

She slips down the adjacent fire escape and aims another blast at the horde, slaughtering a few of them, knocking several back, disorienting the rest.

"Come on, then," she snaps, extending the arm for Rush to grab.
lottawork: (actually stole christmas)

[personal profile] lottawork 2015-08-03 05:18 pm (UTC)(link)
He can hear them behind him, mouths opening and shutting in unthinking asynchrony, footfalls fast and light. His momentum carries him in a wide arc around a corner without slowing.

Fingers latch around one arm, and his reaction is violent and immediate. He spins to impact the offending party's face with the butt of his pipe, bringing it to the ground, and resumes his randomized pathway without breaking stride.

He hopes Asadi has made it, and he hopes he is not about to die for the purpose of this moronic, hopeless, pointless, poorly-executed, poorly-rationalized attempt at a diversion.

There is a fire escape above the crumpled green silhouette of some disused dumpster for waste containment, and he scales it.

He can hear them as he scrambles for hand- and footholds, the crescendo of snarls and snapping teeth that drown out the clang as his feet slip from the fire escape's apparent instability.

Fuck.

His hand shoots upward in automatic, instinctive impulse, and catches something smooth and metallic that grasps his hand in response.

Rush looks up and smirks.

"Impeccable timing, as always," he says, levering his weight upward to scale the remainder of the space between the dumpster and the fire escape. He balances his weapon between both hands and jerks his chin in the vague direction of their objective. "Shall we?"
etherthief: (sweet | prim | not remotely innnocent)

[personal profile] etherthief 2015-08-03 08:02 pm (UTC)(link)
Iman smirks back and helps hoist him up before letting him go and turning back. "Bar's pretty well secured," she says. "Haven't checked the generator yet, but..." She trails off, letting her focus sit with maneuvering back across the rooftops. Once they've reached their access point she takes him down, checking that none of the exits were breached.

"Still clear," she says, keeping her voice low out of caution or paranoia. "Supplies are behind the rail. I'll go check the generator."

She raids the supply closet until she finds a flashlight and then heads off toward the basement access.
lottawork: (u r interrupting my work)

[personal profile] lottawork 2015-08-03 08:17 pm (UTC)(link)
Rush hums his assent, one hand curling around the back of his neck in absent reflex. He prowls the building perimeter as Asadi vanishes into the poorly-lit gloom. The streets are bereft, the exterior devoid of noise or motion beyond the distant clatter of whatever anonymous creature or organism may still be scavenging in search of something vaguely edible.

He runs his fingers over the planar surfaces of the building interior, nudging open whatever drawers have not been smashed or overturned or otherwise made useless. He finds nothing of interest.

He hooks one finger beneath the surface of a disused countertop and is rewarded by a quiet click for his efforts. Some concealed compartment underneath opens.

Rush drops into a crouch to peer underneath, one corner of his mouth twisting upward in a grim, satisfied smile.

He retrieves the gun and the meager supply of ammunition beside it and slides in a clip with the fluid catch and lock of a working mechanism.

Half-turning at the sound of footsteps, Rush glances up in Asadi's general direction. "Success?"
etherthief: (bemused | flirtatious | low level sass)

[personal profile] etherthief 2015-08-04 07:19 am (UTC)(link)
"Good enough," she affirms. "Had to talk it into working, but it'll do. Should kick on in a minute." She lays a big length of extension cord down on the bar and looks with interest at Rush's newest accoutrement. "Ain't that a sight," she says with a dogged grin. "Do better than with that pipe, that's for damn sure."

She hops up and slides behind the bar, crouching down to inspect their bag of gadgets. "All right, let's see here. Did you get me something nice for Eid al-Adha?" She smirks up at him, waggling a nice miniature radio he managed to grab. "You're a little early. But I'll allow it, cause you know what I like."
lottawork: (u wanna blow up a bank with me)

[personal profile] lottawork 2015-08-04 07:31 am (UTC)(link)
"Yes, I thought you might," he says, dropping into a smooth crouch beside her. The radio's orthogonal casing glints faintly in the dim beam of Asadi's liberated flashlight. "Resource-poor environments have a tendency to limit our options."

He rises, flicking the weapon's safety off and cocking it with a brief, metallic snap, sweeping their surroundings for any movement that would indicate a compromised position.

The streets, for their part, remain deserted, and silent.

"But we're pure dead fucking brilliant," he continues, still not looking at her, "so I imagine that shouldn't be a problem."
etherthief: (genuine delight | grin | possibly drunk)

[personal profile] etherthief 2015-08-04 06:00 pm (UTC)(link)
And it WASN'T. And they lived happily ever after for the rest of their days. THE END