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

[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.

[driftseeker]

She hisses out a slow breath between her teeth, eyes locked on the concave crater that was once a human face. Her stomach lurches at the sight of it and she has to look away, and clearly, he has to do the same.

She is grateful, at least, that he silenced the thing before she had to. Raleigh would have carried that necessity out grimly, stamping the thing to jelly with steady, composed intent, but that distance does not seem to be something she or her companion can allow themselves. Particularly if these things were once human.

She follows him and keeps her sword drawn. To keep it low and unprepared would be nothing short of a death sentence.

"I think there is a place ahead," she says, willfully steering her mind away from the curled, shivering streak of dead matter left behind them, "where there might be munitions. But the noise might draw more to us." It is why she opted to remain with her sword, which requires no reloading.

[fucking_ebay]

Peter, for his part, keeps the tire iron and almost allows himself to feel a little proud that when he saw it he used it rather than running away to let her take care of the problem. She could have handled it, he's sure, but somewhere along the line he's stopped being the person who'd make her do it to save his own skin (and lunch). He lets the metal rod drop to his side, but his grip on it is sure and his gaze is more alert than before.

He glances at her when she suggests guns, hesitates, then says, "You won't be the only person who's thought of it. Could find someone else alive there, could find the place looted, could find it torn to pieces after someone tried to hole up there."

[driftseeker]

She inclines her head slightly in acknowledgement. They are all options she has considered; firearms would be the first thing to disappear in an apocalyptic scenario, along with food and methods of transportation. She has a certain measure of experience in dealing with human nature first-hand in the event of something appropriately and unexpectedly cataclysmic on a city-wide scale.

"I was just wondering," she says slowly, unwilling to complete the thought but knowing she has, ultimately, no choice in the matter, "that if we find the bridge intact, if we should destroy it once we are across." She has difficulty meeting his eyes. "To make sure nobody follows us."

She does not need to utter the implications of such an act. She has already considered them, and is certain he is as well.

[fucking_ebay]

Peter's grip tightens, as does his jaw. He looks away, refusing to meet the gaze she can't quite bring to his eyes anyway. He doesn't like the suggestion, to say the least. Wishes she hadn't thought of it so he could pretend it never would have occurred to him, either. If anyone who got out ahead of them had any sense, they'll get to the bridge to find it's already taken out, because it's a sound plan. Logical. Better to cut out the tumor that is undead Manhattan, sacrifice whoever's still alive and trapped on the island rather than infect the mainland along with it.

"We'd better hope you are the first person to think of that one," he says darkly, unwilling to voice a decision.

[driftseeker]

"I hope so too," she says, the words nearly soundless.

She does not dare examine which part of her concocted that solution, precise and coldly rational. The memories flooding her head have ensured she already has.

You're protecting a city of two million people. You will not risk those lives for a boat that holds ten, says Pentecost says Raleigh says Pentecost.

Then let's go fishing, says Yancy says Raleigh says

She knows exactly what part of her is capable of formulating that plan, and it never came from Raleigh.

She turns a corner, and wishes she had not.

The crowd of them stretches so far back that she cannot see where they end. They pack into the street like sardines, a thick, softly rustling herd of flesh whispering against dead flesh.

Hungry eyes lock onto them both.

"Run," breathes Mako.

[fucking_ebay]

They've been lucky, haven't they? For a place with the population of Manhattan, there haven't been that many zombies (god, he just called them zombies in his head) shambling about. Maybe there was an evacuation. Maybe someone's come in and shot most of them.

Or maybe the things have just been congregating. Peter sees his companion freeze, registers something's wrong even as he, too, rounds the corner --

She doesn't have to tell him twice. Or even once, really. The sound that comes out of him is more moan than scream as he turns on his heel and sprints back the way they came, not thinking to even make sure she's coming until he's already in motion.

[driftseeker]

He is a tall, dark blur beside her, and that is how she knows he is keeping up. She sprints with incautious abandon, tearing frantically down street after street as the sounds of their slavering, snarling herd of pursuers grow ever and ever louder.

Run, hisses Raleigh. Get outta here, Mako.

For her part, she would love to. Unfortunately, she sees a very simple, unpleasant way out of the predicament.

She peels away from her companion, sprints down a narrow strip of alleyway, and lashes out recklessly with one foot, sending a contingent of aluminum trash cans cascading loudly to the ground with a roaring, angry clatter.

They like noise.

Oh, and she'll give them noise.

She does not yell. She simply sends another knot of trash cans clanging to the ground, and hopes it will be enough of a distraction. If he keeps running, he will make it.

He will have to.

[fucking_ebay]

Peter runs full out, not knowing where they're going or what they'll do. At every turn he expects to find another hoard of them, at every little stumble he expects cold fingers snagging into his back. Up, maybe, like before -- up to be trapped on some fire escape. Out over a bridge like they planned, except they were damned fools to think that all the ways out off the island wouldn't be chokepoints for the living dead.

She's a steady presence beside him as all their non-options flick through his mind, until she...isn't. He isn't in any kind of shape to run indefinitely, and when his steps finally slow through sheer lack of breath, he finds himself panting and sweating alone on the sidewalk. His breath catches when the realization comes to him that he doesn't even know when he last saw her, and he curses quietly.

He should go on, save himself. If she's fallen behind she's probably as good as dead...or she thinks she has a better shot at survival without him weighing her down. He should keep running (alright, walking), find another way out or another place to hide. He should save himself.

With a groan, he turns and starts walking back the way he came, twitchy and silent as he watches for reasons to bolt again.