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

[etherthief]

"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]

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]

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]

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]

"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]

"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]

And it WASN'T. And they lived happily ever after for the rest of their days. THE END