Table of Contents

The Latest Episode:

Issue 0: The Sun's Conquest

The Story so Far:

Issue 0: The Sun's Conquest

Stuff I Gotta Say

I got nothin' to say

if you wanna email me, it's serialofthedead@gmail.com

Issue 0: The Sun's Conquest

Prologue

Undeath Toll: 0

It was a bright and sunny day. About a week before, it had been a dark and, actually, clear night. The day is when this tale begins, but the night is when this story begins.

The weather forecast for the day immediately following the night, as of 2 A.M., was non-stop rain, a darkening drizzle, depressive and dreary to the eyes of most. To the eyes of the man who begins this story, everything was depressive and dreary. He was a scientist. A mad scientist, of course.

This man was mad in a fairly unusual, though not particularly unique, way. Not in that he hated everyone and everything that exists; that’s an exceedingly common way to be mad. And he wasn’t mad in that he felt the world had slighted him; the world had been very kind to him, and had easily paid his way through college and given him very comfortable living arrangements. Nor was he mad in that he was megalomaniacal; he had no desire to rule such a chaotic world as this. He was mad in that he believed the world should be operated purely by order, that everything should be unchanging and linear[1], and that he worked towards this end every moment.

A week before our tale begins, our story begins with this mad scientist standing rather maniacally in a secret lab that was built, for some irrelevant and likely now indeterminable reason, deep beneath a suburb of Denver. He was delivering a monologue to his four laboratory assistants (for he was a government sanctioned mad scientist) on the success of his life’s work, which seems to him to have occurred just moments before.

“Finally,” went the end of his monologue, his tinny voice tinted with maniacality (for “mania” is too kind a word to describe it), his hand holding a sickly looking vial of obvious importance, “I have completed the virus, Anthrax Leprosy Omega, which will cure death!” One of his more observant, sardonic, and all around post-modern assistants used a small and simple device of her own invention to create a flash of sharp and quite nearly angular light and the sound of her metal trashcans falling down. The mad scientist was far too involved in his speech to give her a Look. “And with it, so shall we cure Life, and Chaos itself!”

“Yeah,” said the mandatory “dumb” assistant, educated in the ways of science but damned to be a trusting crony for his whole life who had a voice something like Ringo Starr’s, “but the government’s just goin’ to use it as a weapon, right?” The mad scientist looked at him and blinked., and spoke slowly.

“Ye-e-es… About that.” He dropped the vial, and before it had hit the ground he had pulled out of his labcoat a nasty looking switchblade and a simple revolver. In one motion he stabbed the nearest lab assistant in the stomach and shot the farthest lab assistant in the same. The sardonic lab assistant and the dumb one stood in shock for a moment, staring at the madman between them, who without hesitating shot the dumb one twice through the chest and tossed the gun to the opposite end of the room from the last one. He grinned dispassionately at her, for that is what mad scientists are supposed to do, and advanced on her with the knife.

“I must, you see,” he began without her asking, she being too busy trembling and backing away to ask, “make sure that the virus works before I begin full deployment. Don’t worry, you’ll be joining your comrades in a moment. I’ll be joining you soon as well—the virus should take ten minutes to fully activate, after first-death. Don’t bother begging—even if I spared your life now, you’d be caught within a year. And don’t bother screaming, either, the walls are soundproofed. Which you know, of course, but still, I feel I should remind you. Now, please, bare that pretty little neck[2] for me…” He lunged at her, but she had regained herself enough to throw herself to the side, causing his knife to collide with the metal wall, creating a particularly nasty sound. She stood and began to run towards the gun, ignoring her faintly gurgling co-workers as best she could, but the mad scientist had turned and grabbed her, holding her from behind in the classic knife-against-the-throat pose.

“And you’ll never be able to open the door; I altered it today to only unlock to my handprint. Do you see where hope, courage, and all those daft human things get you?” If he were the type to laugh, the mad scientist would have cackled then. His hypothetical glee was interrupted by a sudden flash of light and crash of sound—the sardonic assistant had managed to surreptitiously pull her device out of her pocket and get her hand up high enough to activate it directly in the mad scientist’s face. He shut his eyes, and dropped the knife and his grip on her as he clutched at his ears. He did not scream out in pain, which rather disturbed the young woman, but she still drove forward to reach the gun. She spun around and pointed it at the mad scientist and pulled the trigger violently, an expression of sorrowful triumph crossing her face.

One which faded quickly as his dispassionate grin, hovering some distance above the glint of a metal and bloody knife, approached her. “Hope! Do you see where it gets you?” he repeated. “I only half-loaded the gun, just so you could feel it, you foolish young woman. Don’t bother with terror, either,” he added suddenly. And, as she finally screamed the shrill scream of terror that comes from anyone dying in this situation, he lunged forward and slit her throat. She gurgled terribly as she slumped to the ground, blood spilling from her throat, her eyes rolling backwards. He watched as she died quickly, and then turned to survey the room.

The two he had shot were already dead, and the one he had stabbed was bleeding far faster than he should have been, and was breathing only barely. He nodded to himself, satisfied, and waited until all four were dead. Then he moved to the control panel for the facility’s doors and ventilation systems. He opened all the vents, and activated the fan that drew air out of his personal laboratory and distributed it throughout the rest of the facility. He turned to watch the corpses of the two he had shot.

As he waited, he went through a mental checklist; he had actually completed the virus the previous night, and had that morning sent nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine vials of it—its reproductive rate was astounding—around the world. His most guarded estimations assumed that one hundred of them would be shattered or opened by accident, and three would be shattered or opened on purpose, before any notable effect was felt. It was his hope, though that word is not quite accurate for this man, that the rest would be broken in the ensuing tumult. He listed, to pass the time, every place that he had sent them. It would be a waste to copy his list here, so it shall suffice to say that it was a very comprehensive list of the most centrally populated areas on the planet.

Finally, one of the first of the dead began to stir, and then the second, and then the young woman’s. As all three stood and looked around, quickly catching him in their sights and beginning to advance with a minimum of thought and speed, he smiled almost passionately, and there was a definite air of his eyes very nearly tearing up. He had predicted the possibility of not all the corpses rising, but He took the knife in his right hand and slit the wrist of his left, and as his last act as himself, Dr. Sunny Mabus (for that was the mad scientist’s name) fell forward onto the button that opened all the doors in the facility.

Ten minutes later, the body that had once belonged to the mad scientist stood and followed the other three out the door. A few hours later, it was a stormy, and Sunny’s, day.

Undeath Toll: 27

---

[1] Relatively linear, really. Very few things in the universe would work properly if they were truly linear; by linear, the mad scientist really means “describable by equations that I can write down in less than a 70 page notebook”

[2] This may seem a very emotional thing for a life-hating mad scientist to say, but he had always found the phrase “pretty little neck” the most mathematically brilliant phrase in the English language, which just goes to show that there’s no accounting for taste or a faulty ability to calculate.

Episode 47: Screaming Masses

Zach found himself waking up from a strangely lucid dream-the strange part was not the lucidity, as he was used to that-to a shrill, ear shattering sound. It took him a bleary-eyed moment to deduce that it was a scream. It took him a more awake moment to realize that the reason that it surrounded him was that everyone in his vicinity was screaming. It took him a much more armed moment to realize that he too was emitting the sound. He struggled against himself to silence the scream, and when he did was struck by a memory of a penguin being assaulted by something silvery, and then everything falling apart...

* * *

Laban had been lying awake all night, until he finally fell into a restless sleep populated by penguins and a strange feeling of revelation. That was about an hour before the screaming began. When Laban managed to quiet his rapid yelps, he took stock of the room.

Everyone was screaming; Disciple Dohntkallmeethat’s screams were the worst and Hanh was a close second. Scratch that, the man with the sword thought to himself, Ujer isn’t screaming. She’s as alert as me. Laban, normally, would have sighed in exasperation at this new development. Instead, he looked around in a daze. He knew that they were screaming for something, the same thing. All he could remember was something black and white being attacked by a snake, and then everything fell apart in the worst way possible…

* * *

Joan did not scream with those surrounding her. She had not been asleep when the screaming had stopped, and as such she had no memory of the penguin and the snake. She stood up and surveyed the room. Everyone else screamed

For the first time in her life, Joan Riese was frustrated.

* * *

Sunny lifted himself off the ground, his terrible inverted smirk reasserting itself over the momentary expression of sheer bliss that had taken control on his face at the moment of his awakening. He remembered clearly, becoming a snake, and snapping the neck of a small black and white flightless bird. It felt good

“I hate,” he whispered grimly and hopefully. He ran off into the light of the morning and killed the first living thing he saw.

* * *

“What the fuck?” Zach screamed as soon as he was done trying to piece together his dream. His coherent scream quieted some of the others, all of whom had still been wailing. The refugees in the television station who had stopped screaming slowly began to turn towards Zach. He looked out over them and spoke again. “What the fuck?”

“What the fuck!” some of them echoed reverentially. Zach blinked out over them and gripped his sword. When he raised it, all screaming finally ceased. Zach raised an eyebrow-several of the refugees raised their eyebrows in response-and sighed.

“What just happened?” Zach asked unto them. There was a pause.

“We know not, o great one!” someone called out. “What must we do to earn the knowledge?”

“Yes!” another voice cried out. “Tell us what we must do!” Murmurs and echoes of agreement ran through those gazing at Zach. Zach stared across them some more.

“Oh, Christ!” The crowd turned to look at each other, mystified by their leader’s words. “You people… I’m n…” Zach grunted. “I’m outta here.” He pulled his katana to his side and began to move to the hole in the wall barricaded with a small car and a pickup truck. Before he was far, he gave Kevin’s body a quick kick, just to make sure it wasn’t moving. As he advanced the hole in the wall, the crowd parted to allow him through. All eyes were fixed on him except for the two pairs owned by Charrone Portinari and Chaz Raymond.

Chaz and Charrone were looking around amongst their fellow refugees, wondering at this foolishness that even Tyree would find embarrassing. At least, both of them had thought that he would; he had been the first person to echo “what the fuck” to the new leader, and had not even paused to look at his old friends.

“Charrone,” said Chaz, “I think that the world is falling apart.” She turned and looked into his eyes, some clichéd imagery passing through both of their minds in unison.

“Then the best thing we can do is fall apart with it.” She snatched his hand and held it tightly in her own. He thought that she was warm; she thought that he was warm. They turned to watch the crowd.

Zach reached the hole in the wall and, before pressing onwards, turned to look at his followers with bemused disdain. He shrugged to himself before leaning against the dual-vehicle blockade and pushing both objects out of the way. He raised his hand to his eyes to shield them from the harsh light of morning. The refugees in the television station crowded behind him to be the first to stand with their new leader. Zach’s eyes quickly readjusted and he stepped out.

* * *

Ujer ran to Laban’s table. He stood confidently on the table he had been sleeping on, but when he turned to look at her his eyes betrayed his panic. Ujer tried to smile up at him, but it did not work.

“What do we do?” she yelled to him, barely audible despite their close proximity. Laban ran his lips through the phrase and then nodded.

“We get everyone to stop screaming.”

“Then what do we do?”

“We find that out later.” Laban dropped the sword onto the table and jumped down to Disciple Dohntkallmeethat and began to shake him. His screams would not quiet and his eyes would not settle. They caught Laban’s for a moment and held a terror that Laban recognized but could not define. Ujer scuttled to Hanh and leaned down close to his face. His scream was pushing forth a burst of breath which made her eyes water. She told him this and the scream faltered a little. She smirked grimly and began trying to make him laugh.

Disciple Dohntkallmeethat stopped screaming for a moment and sharply drew in a breath. Laban was already smiling at him when the scream returned to full power. Laban groaned and slapped him, which did not affect Disciple Dohntkallmeethat in the slightest. Laban stood and rushed to another screaming man, who was quieted more quickly. When he did quiet down, he began to speak rapidly and madly.

“He has been killed, the lord of all fantasy, the greatest dreamer, the Eternal Sleeper! We must never return to his realm! We will be destroyed!” cried out the man. His lips were trembling and his eyes were darting.

“Oookay…” Laban began to stand up, but the man’s eyes locked onto his own. They carried atop the terror that all the eyes bore a madness which froze Laban instantly. The man reached up and gripped Laban’s shoulders and pulled himself up.

“The next men to sleep will be destroyed! Death is a preferable fate to such a terror! This happened last-long before humans lived! The great ones could not… Oh, god! I must escape before I dream!” The man shut his eyes and began muttering something. Laban, blind to the man’s eyes, finally pushed him away.

“Look, man,” Laban muttered. “We can’t be worried about these things while…” The man’s mutterings grew to a monstrous utterance, reaching frequencies somewhere between those that Laban could identify. The eyes of all those who had regained control of their motor skills spun to watch the man. His eyes had burst open and were bursting with green and blue light. His mouth began opening wider and wider and soon was not moving at all, though the sound still came from it. White light erupted, pulsing in time with the chant. It reached a crescendo, and the man exploded in blue, green, and white light.

Half a minute later Laban’s eyes were the first to readjust from the blinding light. He gaped at the empty and charred spot where the man had stood. All screaming in the room had stopped, but the room was filled with a low rumble of confusion. Laban searched it; Ujer had Hanh propped on her shoulder and was blinking to readjust.

“Goddamn,” Laban cried out. Disciple Dohntkallmeethat lay on the ground, his eyes staring upwards. His breathing was shallow and his eyes were empty. Laban was most frightened by the fact that the poor kid was obviously not asleep.

* * *

Joan sat in the middle of the floor, her eyes shut, her hands pressed against her ears, and Excalibur limp in her lap. She bit her lip, trying to drown out the screams. She had been trained to deal with screams of all kinds. She was used to ignoring the pained screams of targets, of families, of children. She was used to silencing screams of terror, of horror, of uncomprehending pain. She had no idea how to deal with these screams.

Lucy and Steve were the first in the house to regain command of themselves. Steve jumped to the nearest person and began trying to calm them down. Lucy looked to Joan and frowned. Now, lies would have to be told to keep Joan in the messianic role that she needed to have to keep this army together. Lucy grunted and rushed to the next nearest screamer.

Within ten minutes, Lucy and Steve had hushed all thirty survivors. Each of them asked why their heroine was sitting in the middle of the room looking so troubled; those who asked Steve simply got a shrug while those who asked Lucy were told that

“She is consulting higher powers to determine what has happened.” Some of them would ask why she looked so pained. Lucy would respond “The higher realms are frightening places; she does this so that you and I will never have to visit them.” This invariably silenced the inquisitor, who would nod knowingly. They would then turn to look at Joan.

When everyone was silenced, Lucy approached their heroine, and bent down over her.

“They’re done screaming,” Lucy hissed into her ear. “You want to keep control of them, you have to do exactly what I say. And you do want to keep control of them. One person against those things is doomed. Now, be confident as you stand, and answer my questions cryptically.” Joan loosened the death grip that her eyelids on her eyeballs, though they remained shut. She pulled her hands down from her ears slowly and silently took Excalibur in hand. She stood without a twitch and when she was standing upright, she opened her eyes. The crowd sighed and Steve watched them. He watched Lucy as she stepped back and brought her voice to a boom.

“Mighty one, what have you learned in the higher realms?”

Joan frowned grimly at her, and then frowned grimly at the rest of her followers. “I have learned,” she said silently in a quiet but strong tone, “nothing of what has occurred. But I have learned what must occur. To survive, we must band together-we must form an army!” Joan’s voice had risen to a crescendo. Lucy’s eyes spread wide, and a smile crept onto her face for no more than a moment. It disappeared as she turned to the crowd.

“We must form an army!” Lucy boomed against them.

“There are weapons in the basement,” said Joan. “Each of you, take one!” The army, after a moment of milling about unsurely, scurried down to the basement. Only Steve, Lucy, and Joan remained in the room. Joan and Steve both looked at Lucy.

“Who are you?” Joan asked. Lucy and Steve smiled together.

“I am a psychiatrist and a sociologist. My husband is a soldier and my favorite book is The Art of War.” Steve chuckled gently. Joan lifted Excalibur and turned its hilt towards Lucy. Lucy laughed, and waved her hands.

“You have to be King Arthur,” Steve interjected when he saw Joan’s confusion. “My wife is merely Merlin.”

* * *

Zach surveyed the damage outside of the news station. Several of the surrounding houses had been burned to the ground or had simply collapsed. Those that still stood generally had all their windows smashed open. Some of the windows had been boarded up. Most of the doors swung in the morning’s gentle breeze. Some doors had been torn off their hinges and lay in yards and on porches. Some were simply gone. At least one could be seen nailed across the door of the neighboring house. The other buildings nearby had been ransacked. Their were interesting looking holes and collapses in many of the walls, each of which had a story that Zach did not care about in the slightest. All of the glass windows and walls had been smashed. The Burger King across the street now looked like a very large bus stop, as it had only one major wall and an entirely undamaged ceiling. Zach took a step forward and heard a motion behind him. He turned, katana at the ready, frozen halfway in a swing to the head of whatever was creeping up behind him.

A whole lot of people were flooding out of the building behind him. They looked around, some of them gazing at the cleansed world in awe. Zach blinked again.

“What the fuck are you people doing?” he screeched.

“We are following you master!” a voice-Tyree’s-called out. Zach narrowed his eyes, pondered at them for a moment, and then shrugged his shoulders.

“No skin off my ass if you wanna follow me. Just stay out of my way.” They all nodded in unison. He began to turn around, but then decided better. “It’s probably safer in there.” They shook their heads, and someone called out something encouraging that Zach missed. “Alright, whatever. Just don’t tell me you’re hungry. And try to get something to kill with; I don’t want to have to take care of every fucking thing.” They nodded in unison. Zach cocked his eyes at them and glared for a moment before turning. He looked around him once more, and then began walking East.

“To Moda Garden,” He muttered to himself. A few minutes later, a clatterous crash erupted from some distance behind him. He turned to look at it, over the heads of fifty followers (and Charrone and Chaz who, despite their skepticism, had decided that it was at least safest to follow someone with a weapon who had not expressed a desire to kill them) and saw that the tall news station building they had just left was no longer in the skyline. He shrugged.

“Guess it wasn’t safer,” he said loudly. After about ten minutes of walking eastward, they had only encountered a single “live” zombie which Zach had decapitated without hesitation, generating a tremendous rallying cry. Zach had a feeling it was going to get worse, and was suddenly glad to be leading an army.

* * *

The residents of the school gym were circled around the body of Disciple Dohntkallmeethat. Laban, Hanh and Ujer were at the center of the circle, leaning over him together. He was still breathing, and he seemed to be awake in every respect except for the fact that he would not move or respond to anything. Hanh’s eyes were still darting around rapidly, looking for something about which he was sure of nothing besides its desire to destroy everything. Laban and Ujer were focused on Disciple Dohntkallmeethat. The others were looking at him nervously, but their eyes kept straying to the charred point where the man had vanished. Laban finally moved.

“Does anyone know his name?” he asked loudly. Everyone shook their heads absently and then returned to their strolling gazes. Laban sighed. “I was calling him Disciple Dohntkallmeethat. Now that he’s… like this… it seems disrespectful. So, let’s just call him D, okay?” Some of the crowd nodded absently again, and Ujer put her hand on his shoulder. He sighed again. “D is for a lot of things,” he muttered. Ujer patted him, and then had her hand brushed aside by him standing.

“Hanh. You and this guy,” he pointed to the nicest looking member of the crowd, “pick D up and carry him.”

“Carry him where?” Hanh asked reverentially with a newfound stutter.

“With us,” Laban said. “We’re moving out.”

“Where are we going?” asked Ujer. Laban turned to smile at her.

“To cleanse the earth with a righteous army.” He reached down and grabbed the Sword of Laban. “It might not wake D up, but it can’t hurt.”

* * *

Joan Riese stood on the second step of the staircase that led to the second floor of the mysterious house that she had liberated last night, holding Excalibur before her in her best attempt at a valiant pose. On her left, and one step down, Steve stood with his arms folded behind his back, his torso thrust forward, and his eyes staring forward without wavering. Lucy stood to Joan’s right, one step lower. Her face was unreadable, but an unskilled face-reader would have seen faith in her eyes. A particularly skilled psychologist and actor would have seen this layer and the deeper one, itching for power. There was no one of any such skill in the ranks ahead of them.

The thirty stood in six columns, each five deep, doing their best to mimic Steve’s pose. Even the younger, rebellious ones did not refuse to fall in. Each of them held a weapon from the basement-most of them swords, but at least one mace was held, as well as a flail. One person held a crossbow and another held a short bow. Each had awkwardly affixed a quiver to their backs. There had been no guns in the basement.

The house, Joan knew, had been built primarily as an inconspicuous armory for her when she needed to complete an objective without using modern weaponry. On occasion, her masters rented it out to their own employers when they needed to keep hostages or their enemies somewhere for a time. Some of the upper rooms had once contained modern armaments, but Joan had ascertained that all of those had been removed sometime before all this had happened. She had told all of this to Lucy and Steve while the thirty were below getting weapons, after Lucy had explained to the other two what had to be done. They had filed it away for later consideration, because the army was beginning to come back upstairs.. After the first of the thirty had returned, Lucy had gone downstairs and within moments returned with a sword so short that it could almost be considered a long dagger. Steve still held the last modern weapon in the house, the shotgun that he had used to rescue those few of them who had survived. During the night, he had gone back upstairs to gather the rest of the shells in the building. While he had waited for his wife and the rest of the army to return, he had gone outside into the eerily silent morning and gathered those that the dead boy had left behind. When he had returned, he had immediately taken his place at Joan’s left hand.

“You,” Joan announced in her most authoritative voice, which just managed to be authoritative enough to convince the thirty, “are going to save the world. I am only the leader; you are the true heroes.” Lucy and Steve nodded to them. “We will be an army, an army to scourge this planet of that which will destroy it! When the world is safe, we will be honored as heroes, as kings and queens, perhaps even as gods! But we are not gods!” her voice was carried to a passion unfamiliar to her by the words. “We are simply humans. We are heroes! Follow me, and you shall have all the power a human can have, in this world and the next!” A cry rose up from the thirty, which shook the house. Lucy allowed a smile to dance across her face. “Let us advance, and slay the demons who do not belong here! The dead shall lie on the ground once more!”

Steve called out something unintelligible, and the six columns turned towards the door in one fluid motion. Joan stepped down the two stairs and advanced around the columns to the three person deep door. Lucy and Steve walked directly behind her, and when she reached the door they stepped forward to throw it open. The three of them advanced through it, followed soon by three of the columns and then the next three. When they were all outside, Joan, Lucy, and Steve turned once more to inspect the troops. They finished arranging themselves back into the six columns. Joan looked to Steve, who looked to Lucy. Lucy nodded, then Steve nodded, and finally Joan turned to the troops and nodded.

“We march!” she boomed. She turned once more and marched towards the center of Moda Garden.

Episode 46: Death: Cured?

“You won’t get away with this, Mabus!” Hunter yelled, shaking his body threateningly. His ray gun was on the floor at his feet.

“Most people don’t shake like that unless they’re being physically held,” Camron growled, thrusting the rifle into the captive’s back. After entering and making the four captives freeze, Camron had circled around them so that he was behind them. Hunter didn’t respond to the thrust.

“Get away with what, exactly?” Doctor Mabus asked absently as he continued to dissect the writhing and snapping Nole.

“Well, there’s a lot!” Hunter said, stilling his body against another jab of the rifle. “You’re knocking people out…”

“We never told you that,” Joseph interjected. Nurse Lotus’s voice was still weak from being shot, but she seemed to be a little better off than she should have been. Andy was standing stock still.

“…And dissecting the undead, putting everyone alive here at risk!”

“I am trying to save everyone alive here,” Doctor Mabus mumbled idly.

“To do that, shut down the man’s brain!” Hunter screamed. Amy and Desiree gave each other a look.

Doctor Mabus paused and looked upwards, toward nowhere in particular. Nole continued to thrash on the table. “I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure.” He nodded curtly and returned to his cutting.

“There’s nothing to prevent!” Hunter cried out. Doctor Mabus paused again.

“You’re right,” he said after a moment. “This disease is a boon. It is the cure for death.” He smiled distantly.

Hunter frowned. “Aegrescit medendo,” he said with perfect pronunciation.

“The remedy is worse than the disease?” Doctor Mabus translated casually, smiling. “Then you agree that death is a disease.”

“No,” Andy said distantly suddenly. Hunter and Camron were both surprised to hear him speak, and so turned their heads to stare at him. He looked blankly around the room and continued. “Life is the disease,” he mumbled. Silence swept over the room.

Hunter finally broke the silence. “That wasn’t as profound as you think it is.”

“Actually,” Camron responded, “It’s pretty profound. Life is a disease; fatal and sexually transmitted.” He jabbed Hunter in the back with his rifle for good measure

“Oh for…” Hunter would have shrugged his shoulders and shook his head, but the gun in his back suggested that he not. “That is so cliché! Spent all your time on the internet before we got together, didja boss?” He spat the last word.

“Don’t take that tone, Hunter,” Camron sounded hurt for a moment. “We can still be a team.”

“No, we can’t,” Hunter sounded sad. “It wasn’t meant to be in this universe. For one thing, Lotus wasn’t with us.” Everyone in the room except for Hunter, Doctor Mabus, and Nole froze. Hunter continued talking. “I tried to tell you that. I tried to tell you a lot of things.”

Camron’s voice was filled with wonder as he interrupted. “You’re not just crazy… are you?”

“I told you. I’m an alien.” Hunter prepared to strike, but was beaten to the punch by Desiree flying through the air. Amy had thrown her with all her might directly at Camron, and she struck him. He fell to the ground and his rifle scattered out of his hands, to the one side of the room with no one in it. Hunter spun and dove at it; Camron pushed himself up and leapt towards it; Desiree cried out and held her left arm with her uninjured right; Amy dove towards Desiree whimpering a half scream; Joseph struggled to try and get up; Nurse Lotus’s chair was knocked over; Doctor Mabus ignored all and continued to dissect his subject; Nole continued to thrash in his bindings. He had no legs now. Andy stood. Hunter and Camron both pushed each other, attempting to slow the other down, at the same moment. Amy reached the wailing Desiree and lifted her up. Nurse Lotus yelped and attempted to clutch at her throat, to confirm that the searing pain she felt wasn’t connected to a new bleed, but her hands were bound to the chair. Joseph, with a roar that sounded more like a grunt, ripped his hands out of the ropes and began to untie those around his ankle. Hunter and Camron continued to struggle with each other. Desiree’s screams softened to pained moans as Amy clutched her right arm comfortingly and examined her left arm carefully. Joseph got himself free and stumbled to the floor quickly to untie Nurse Lotus. Hunter and Camron stopped fighting directly with each other and both reached for the rifle. Andy continued to stand there. A shoe came down on the rifle from the shadows and dragged it just out of reach of Hunter and Camron.

The room froze except for the thrashings of Nole and the knife of Doctor Mabus, as all eyes except for those and Andy’s scrolled up the shoe that had claimed the gun, watching the figure bend over and pick up the rifle.

Corwin smiled at them all as he straightened back up. “Time to purge evil,” he said loudly.

* * *

“Daddy, where are we going?” Dinah asked her father in that sweet little voice that always made him smile.

“Well, honey,” he tightened his grip around her lower legs to ensure that she wouldn’t fall into the disgusting “water” below. “That’s very hard to explain.”

“Well, you could try daddy? You never told us what was down the caves in the basement!” Lee stepped over a dead rat.

“Well, one of them leads to the sewers that go to the basement of the hospital! Isn't this place gross? That’s why I never let you go down there.” Dinah giggled. “The others… Well, you’ll see.”

“Oh…” Dinah whimpered a little. They were both quiet for a minute.

“Daddy?”

“Yes, sweetie?”

“Doctor Ruby is dead.”

“I know,” Oswald said sadly. “He was my best friend, you know.”

“Tell me about him, daddy!”

“Jack Ruby was a great man…” Lee Harvey Oswald began.

* * *

“Okay,” Hunter said calmly, standing up very slowly. “Let’s think about this rationally.”

“Rationally,” Corwin said, “The best way to save everyone would be to kill the infected.”

“No,” Camron snapped. He too was slowly standing up. “The best way to save everyone is to cure the infection!”

“Okay, both of you make very rational points, but…”

“Quiet, alien scum!” Corwin yelled. He pointed the gun at Hunter and squeezed the trigger tightly. A bang erupted from it. A bullet erupted from it. A bullet struck Hunter in the torso. His torso seemed to wobble. Camron was the only one at the correct angle to see it become silvery…

“Kill him!” Camron screamed immediately. He began scrambling for some sort of weapon. Hunter, unfazed by the gunshot, sighed.

“This is just not a very good situation for any of us.” Corwin began to fire as much as he could.

In the meantime, activity in the rest of the room had resumed. Amy, after making sure that Desiree was not more hurt than she had been, was lowering herself to the ground carefully so as not to drop her friend in order to attain Hunter’s ray gun. Joseph had returned to untying Nurse Lotus, whose eyes were beginning to flutter as if she were going to fall asleep. Andy still stood stock still, and Doctor Mabus still sliced and examined various parts of the still-writhing Nole’s physiology. He severed the left arm at the shoulder, eliciting no direct reaction from the wolfish corpse.

“Look,” Hunter said after Corwin ran out of rounds and Camron had pushed himself to the back of the room. Before he could continue, Camron began yelling once more.

“One of the killers! He’s behind this! All this time that he’s been with us, he’s been against humanity!” Corwin grimaced in response to Camron’s words and threw the rifle drastically at the alien. It struck his neck, which shimmered silver and lined for a moment. Hunter ignored this and stared at Camron in puzzlement.

“One of the killers? Against humanity? My people would never kill humans! I can’t imagine...” A strange look crossed over his face, one that human faces are not permitted by their very arrangement to generate. “Oh, you mean… Oh, damn. I knew something was wrong when I lost contact…”

“JUST KILL HIM!” Camron screamed. “Axe to the forehead!” He began scrambling around for some sort of weapon again. Hunter looked puzzled again for a moment, and suddenly nodded vigorously.

“Yes, so, the prototypes did escape. Why did they come here, though?” He finally really noticed the two terrified men in front of him. “Oh. I should probably stop talking to myself about this in front of you two. Camron, Corwin, it would be very beneficial to everyone if you were to sit quietly right there for a little while.”

Joseph screamed in agony, startling even Doctor Mabus and Andy. Hunter spun to look, as did Amy and Desiree. Nurse Lotus had latched her teeth into Joseph’s arm. His scream continued to cut into their ears. Hunter took note of the fact that Nurse Lotus’s eyes were empty and frowned. Amy shot up and pointed Hunter’s gun at her and pulled the trigger. She cursed when nothing happened. Desiree bit her lip and, after a moment, began trying to push herself away from Amy. Amy gripped her more tightly. Andy returned to his frozen despondency. He stood in the middle of the room, doing nothing. Hunter pounced forward and jumped directly over the two girls, knocking Andy to the ground, and landing in front of Joseph and the dead Nurse.

Doctor Mabus continued to cut into the corpse of Nole; he had now severed the spine down to the fifth Thoracic Vertebrae, and Nole, despite the amputation of his arms legs and the majority of his torso, still snapped at the Doctor, gnashing his teeth. Doctor Mabus was unphased.

Corwin pressed himself farther into the shadows, trying to disappear, wishing he could remember how he had gotten so quietly into the room. Camron ran wildly around, looking for any sort of weapon. His face was screwed up into an expression of utter hatred. Two words would not leave his mind: “Betrayal” and “Kill.” With every thought of them, he became more furious.

Hunter paused to think for less than a moment, which is a very small amount of time. He screwed up his face into another expression that the human face cannot produce and thrust his right hand towards Nurse Lotus. His hand did not stop at the end of his arm and continued to extend, forming into a fist and then into a silvery, line-marked ball. It struck the Nurse in the forehead, knocking her back and detaching her from Joseph. Joseph’s scream abated and he fell to the ground, clutching at his arm where she had bit him. Hunter crouched down over him.

“Are you alright?” Hunter asked softly.

“Kill me, alien,” Joseph growled through a grimace. “I don’t care what your reason is, but kill me now. I don’t want to come back like her.” Hunter screwed up his face into still a third expression, and thought about it for what stretched on for him and the failing hunter an eternity. In objective reality, it was no more than a few minutes. Hunter’s face finally returned to human proportions and his body became solid again.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, apparently to Joseph. “I’m so sorry.” He thrust his left hand towards Joseph’s forehead.

Andy had not stood up, but was still breathing.

Amy began pulling back, taking a struggling Desiree with her.

“Let me go!” Desiree screamed.

“I won’t,” Amy whispered back. “I won’t let you go.”

“I’ll kill you!”

“I don’t care. I’ll be with you until then.”

“I don’t want you to die, Amy!” Desiree lowered her voice.

“It’s probably too late for that,” Amy chuckled nervously. “I’ll hold onto you until…”

“It’s some sort of physical issue!” Doctor Mabus burst out suddenly. Nole had stopped gnashing his teeth futilely as soon as the seventh Cervical Vertebrae was separated from the rest of the spinal column. “It must be spread by virus,” Doctor Mabus said, “But the actual condition of zombism is caused by something in the spine and brain!” He grinned madly. “I’ll just need blood samples from the infected to be sure…”

A piercing scream rang out from all directions, from outside of the Hospital. Six of the seven still alive in the room covered their ears and cringed in horror. Nurse Lotus began to crawl forward, towards Hunter. Andy joined the sound.

Episode 45: Rock the Boat

“I do not know who you are,” Captain Clark said, raising his hands slowly. “But I know now that you are in league with whatever is in the cargo hold.” Quasimodo Weishaupt did not react physically to the Captain’s words, although his mind began racing. He had not heard the Captain’s announcement over the intercom in his urgency.

“With their help,” he began to bluff quickly and deftly in Italian, “I am going to take this ship. We are going directly to Switzerland.” Captain Clark blinked; that was a stranger demand than he had been expecting.

“You cannot get to Switzerland from the sea. It is landlocked, and in the middle of the mountains.” Quasimodo twitched nervously and almost began to lower his gun. Captain Clark considered reaching to grab it, but did not. He hoped that this crazy man would be easy enough to deal with.

“Then take us to the point nearest to Switzerland along this sea path.” Quasimodo commanded.

“That will add at least five hours to the time it will take to get to land.”

“And will cut at least ten hours off of the time it will take me to get to Switzerland. Now, Do as I command, or I will bring my allies up from the cargo hold.” Quasimodo shook his gun intimidatingly, an international sign for “turn around!” Captain Clark obeyed, slipped down a GPS map and compass. He quickly calculated a path to the Northernmost part of Italy and set the helm in that direction. He gradually turned the engine of the ship to its maximum speed, and began watching the instruments carefully.

He hoped that First Mate Jesus would not be able to find Mate Rozenkrantzandgildanstern anytime soon.

* * *

First Mate Jesus knocked as hard as he could on the door to Mate Rozenkrantzandgildanstern’s room. He waited a very short moment, and then did again. The Mate was not responding. Jesus grumbled, imagining that they too had vanished. He did not like this tendency of people to vanish tonight. It did not go well with screaming and gunfire. It was extremely unsettling. More than that, though First Mate Jesus did not concern himself with things like this usually, it was worrying. He reached down for the doorknob and hoped that it was better cared for than the one to Second Mate No-Name’s room. He gripped it, and pushed it open.

Inside, he was surprised to find two beds; each contained a sleeping figure. Why, he wondered, would Mate Rozenkrantzandgildanstern need two beds? At first he thought maybe he had a son or daughter that he had to take with him on trips; he had never bothered to learn much about the Mate’s family life, after all, and neither had anyone else. But no, he realized quickly, both figures were male and approximately the same age. He wondered for a moment if perhaps the two were lovers-something that First Mate Jesus would not care about at all, because it was their business-but quickly realized that if they were, they would sleep in the same bed. And then he noticed that one of the beds was not really a bed at all; it was a cot, on which the sleeper barely fit. Finally it made sense; an un-ticketed passenger! Ah, well, that was nothing to be concerned about now. He moved to rouse the Mate in his bed.

Wait, that didn’t look quite like Mate Rozenkrantzandgildanstern… He had the right eyes-maybe-but not the right, well, anything else. First Mate Jesus was very confused. He looked at the second man in his cot; he had the right haircut. Jesus sighed in exasperation, and stopped caring. He reached out and shook both of them; they both woke with a start and rolled over to look at him.

“What’s happening?” the one in the bed asked wearily in Italian. The one in the cot nodded and rubbed his eyes.

“We don’t know,” Jesus could not decide which of the two to look at; his head kept swinging back and forth. He didn’t risk calling either of them by name, in case he called the wrong one the only name either could have so far as he knew. The sentence he had just thought threatened to destroy his sanity, but the concern for his life overrode this and he continued. “There is something in the cargo hold, and the frequencies are filled with horrible screams of pain and death.”

“Oh, god, not again,” the one on the cot said.

“I hope there aren’t barrels this time,” the one on the bed grumbled.

“Or incomprehensible non-Euclidean angles.”

“What incomprehensible non-Euclidean angles?”

“Last time, we ended up on an island, remember?”

“Not really, and besides, it was a long time ago; last time, we ended up on an island.”

First Mate Jesus watched this exchange in bewilderment. He really did not understand any of what was happening anywhere, and he didn’t want to understand anymore.

“The captain wants you, Mate Rozenkrantzandgildanstern.”

“Yessir!” Both of them said at once. First Mate Jesus almost hesitated, but changed his mind and turned to return to the helm.

* * *

“You aren’t getting all of them!” Gaz screamed. “There are too many!” Zombies were still coming up the corridor, and, despite Bob the Assassin’s perfect accuracy, they were slowly closing in over the mountain of safe-corpses. He wasn’t used to close range assassinations like this; he was used to taking the time to aim and focus and shoot. He frowned, pulled his gun close to him, and reached down to scoop up his fallen sunglasses..

“Head up,” he commanded brusquely, before turning and running up the corridor. Gaz followed him without hesitation. They rounded a corner in the corridor and encountered a door to the outside of the ship. Bob hesitated for only half a moment before throwing the door open. He advanced into the morning; it was light, but not very due to dreary cloud cover. A light drizzle fell over the boat, making the outer deck very slightly slippery. Bob slowed his speed just enough to ensure a maintained balance, and dashed up a staircase one person wide to a higher deck. He assumed that, since the enemy was coming from below, higher ground would give him a tactical advantage. A good assassin always takes every tactical advantage open to him. Gaz knew that this was what he was doing immediately, being an intelligent young woman, and sincerely hoped that his assumption was correct.

When they were both up, Bob put his rifle down at the edge of the staircase and, after pulling a sort of tripod thing out of his jacket, unfolding it, and affixing the rifle to its top, pointed the rifle downwards. He put a fresh ammo feed in, and slipped the old, unexpired one into a pocket on the inside of his jacket. When he pulled his hand out, he held two handguns which he quickly checked the clips on. He held one up towards Gaz without looking at her. She took it.

“I would prefer to focus my attention on the area where the enemy definitely is.” He said as if he were teaching her how an assassin worked. “You are to watch the direction down this deck that is open. If anyone comes, fire directly at them, no matter what form they take. The head is the preferable target, but I do not expect you as a non-professional to be capable of hitting that consistently. Aim for the figure, and do not concern yourself with the head, as most targets will be disabled by any hit to the main body. Do not fire until you are sure there is someone. Do not say anything if you think there is someone; I will know we are in danger by the sound of your shot. Do not concern yourself with anything ahead of me or elsewhere on the deck below; they are my concern. Do not move more than two feet from where you are; wait for targets to come to you. Do you understand?”

Gaz nodded, forgetting that he could not see her; he did, because of his specially reflective sunglasses. Even so, he repeated “Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Gaz said, forcing calmness into her voice. “I do understand. I will do what you have said. Thank you.”

“Bear in mind that I have not abandoned you only because you seem to show promise of usefulness,” Bob said after a moment. “The very fact that you know I exist means that you know too much for the long run. For the moment, we both need each other. When we are no longer in danger, I will have to make a decision about you.” Gaz blinked, and breathed in that halting frightened way of someone who does not want to cry. Bob shifted uneasily, wondering what he was supposed to have said.

They waited.

* * *

Burt and Daisy began, as you read last time, by charging into the zombie hoard. Both had started out simply; Burt begun smacking zombies in the torso with his broom or mop, which knocked most of them over and snapped some of the older ones in half, and Daisy had begun a whirling, graceful, even ballet-like pattern of stabbing and slicing with a pair of Deli knives. Neither at any time stopped to see the fates of their targets, and in this fashion, Burt moving too powerfully to let the zombies anywhere near him and Daisy moving too quickly for the zombies to actually touch her, the both of them found themselves on a third side of the cargo hold, without any doors. Daisy smiled proudly at Burt, who returned to her a look of acceptance of everything. Together, they turned away from the steely wall and surveyed the damage.

It took a moment for them to process that they had done almost nothing to the horde. Daisy noticed now that there were some biting heads and clawing arms struggling near the ankles of the majority. She looked to Burt.

“Weaknesses?” Burt asked brusquely.

“I was never trained in combat with this kind of invincible creature.”

“Their weaknesses, I mean.”

“Bastard.”

“I don’t know any either.”

“Strategic withdrawal,” Daisy said automatically. “Nearest door?”

“The one we came through.”

“Let’s go. Just don’t die,” the two of them leapt forward, and carefully began carving their way to the door they had come through. They moved more slowly and unsurely this time, because of their failure last time. Burt had the misfortune to notice one of his snapped-victims from the earlier assault grabbing his ankle at the very last moment; he had the fortune to pull his ankle away and crush the ankle-biter’s skull with his still strong broom.

They pushed their way towards the door.

* * *

John the Master Thief was now attached safely, by his climbing gear, to the top of a corridor which he estimated to be directly beneath the ship’s helm room. He clung desperately to the ceiling as he caught his breath and allowed the fear to wash over him. He had learned one way to deal with fear many years ago: he lets it wash over him, run its course, and then he no longer wanted to scream and vomit. He could then get his thoughts in order, which he soon did this time.

After about ten minutes of gripping the ceiling, he let himself drop, stood up, detached the suction cups from his hands and knees, brushed himself off, and walked calmly down another corridor. He spun and stared momentarily after a loud sound burst forth from where he had been, and a matching pair of holes appeared on the ceiling and floor at that same point. He smirked at his latest escape from death, having conquered fear for a while, and went on his way.

* * *

“So who are you,” Captain Clark asked his captor, hands raised, eyes glued to the meters and displays of the ship’s current status.

“That is not your concern,” Quasimodo Weishaupt said gruffly, standing threateningly a few feet behind him, directly in front of the door.

“You’ve hijacked my ship in the middle of a massive crisis without a word of explanation. Who you are is very much my concern.”

“It is not your concern!” Weishaupt boomed, and fired into the floor.

“Alright,” Captain Clark said meekly. A moment passed; all that they could hear was the disturbingly mundane lapping of the water against the hull of the ship.

“I am Quasimodo Weishaupt, the rightful heir to the throne of Bavaria,” the hijacker announced after a moment.

“I thought this wasn’t my concern,” the captain muttered.

Quasimodo ignored him and continued. “I am too late in my life and of improper birth to take the throne, and as such…” Quasimodo grunted and stumbled forward; the voice of First Mate Jesus cut through the cabin.

“I found Mate Rozenkrantzandgildanstern, and… Huh?” Quasimodo had spun and fired his gun. The bullet had lodged itself in First Mate Jesus’ stomach, and he was very confused at this development. Captain Clark took the opportunity to leap onto Quasimodo Weishaupt and try to wrestle the gun away. Mates Rozenkrantz and Gildanstern rushed into the room to pull First Mate Jesus to the side, out of some unusual instinct. The Captain and the Hijacker wrestled around vertically for a moment, and the latter finally escaped from the grip of the former; the gun, however, was now held by both of them, and pointed directly up. As they struggled invisibly with each other, and First Mate Jesus began to bleed to death, and Mates Rozenkrantz and Gildanstern crouched around uselessly, a new voice chimed from the door to the cabin.

“I’m here to steal the shi… Oh, I see, someone’s already doing it.” John the Thief smiled to an unwatching five. “Alright, you two go ahead and struggle with each other, and you three go ahead and be there. I’ll steer us to land.” He sidled around the struggling hijacker and Captain, neither of whom could spare their attention for him. First Mate Jesus was too focused on his bleeding to do anything, and Mates Rozenkrantz and Gildanstern thought that letting him take control was as good a plan as any. Unchallenged, John took the wheel and, after a cursory glance at the compass and map, turned towards land.

“This isn’t much tougher than flying,” he chuckled aloud.

* * *

Bob fired his rifle into the crowd at the bottom of the stairs. He was glad that the enemy had not presented any further obstacles; this was the only defense he could think of against them that would not require at least ten un-had minutes of set-up. As it was, he was keeping the entire force from advancing farther than the second stair from the bottom. He had, by this time, set down his hand-gun, realizing that he would not need it as all of the enemy combatants were focused on getting up the stairs to him rather than going around. He worried that eventually they would get smarter-and then worried that they were stupid without a reason.

Gaz had not yet fired her gun, but was getting antsy. She, despite her orders, occasionally glanced down the stairs at Bob’s field. There was a barricade of corpses beginning to form at the bottom of the stairs, and s stench began to rise from it. She swallowed hard, and held her gun forward.

A shadow moved around a round protrusion from the ship; Gaz pulled her finger closer to the trigger. The shadow moved again, and seemed to get closer. Gaz tried to focus the gun on it, and it moved again; she pulled the trigger. The shadow spun wildly, there was a clang, and it was in the air flying towards she and Bob. Gaz screamed as it fell towards her, and pulled the trigger madly twice more. The shadow spun mid-air, and there were two clangs. Gaz felt something smack her hand, and felt the gun fly to just beneath Bob. He spun and raised his own handgun at the assailant.

A thin and buff woman with her brown hair in a ponytail, a blue blood-stained apron on her front, a belt full of cooking sprays and utensils, and two frying pans in her hands stood above Gaz, with those frying pans held inches around her head. Bob pointed the gun at her aggressively.

“Don’t shoot at me,” Daisy growled, “Or your friend gets her head crushed.” Bob grunted, and lowered his gun. He returned to his rifle and fired into the crowd.

“Release her.” He said bitterly. “She thought you were an enemy. She is new to the game. She did not realize that you were a kitchen ninja as I would have.” Daisy smirked, and pulled her frying pans away. Gaz sighed, and looked at her.

“I’m sorry?” She said hesitantly. Daisy smirked at her.

“An amateur assassin should not be able to come so close to hitting a Kung Food adept.”

“She is mine,” Bob growled. “Do not consider it.”

“What the hell are you two talking about?” Gaz asked suddenly. Bob hesitated before his next shot, but said nothing. Daisy chuckled lightly, and then took on a grave expression.

“They’ve killed a master of Broom Jitsu,” she said. “I had to abandon him in the cargo hold. I do not know who either of you truly are, though your floppy hat tells me that you are someone I should wish to ally myself with.”

“Do not expect success in this,” Bob said gruffly. “Though for now, it is in all our best interests. Prepare for combat.”

Gaz stared between the two of them. This was not something that she had been expecting. All thought was eradicated from her mind when something shiny glinted through the air. She leapt down, grabbed her gun, and fired madly into the air. Daisy the kitchen ninja stared at her for a moment, and Bob took a glance at her through his sunglasses.

A large spray of water leapt over the edge of the boat, caused by the crash of something massive, and organic. Gaz looked over the edge, which was just close enough to see over. She grinned.

There lay a giant Jellyfish.

Episode 44: Greece is the Word

“Anna, I’ve been thinking.”

“Stefani, I really hope you’ve been thinking the same thing I have.”

“I’ve been thinking that we should stop knocking on doors.”

Charlotte glared at the two of them, and then spoke in French. “I don’t speak Esperanto, but I’ve been around the two of you long enough to have heard the word Stop.” They ignored her, and went on in Esperanto.

“Stefani, I am almost positive that you have the right idea.”

“Err-et-ay?” one of the American girls stumbled over her own tongue through the Alabaman accent. “Doesn’t that mean ‘mistake?’”

“No,” the other one said, less distinctly Alabaman and notably more intelligent. “It means stop.” She looked at Charlotte. “What are they stopping?” Charlotte ignored them and went on trying to understand Esperanto.

“Every time we open a door, someone’s having sex, dead, or both.”

“That was a nasty room. Disgusting.”

“So, what we have to do is just get out of here.”

“That was out!” Charlotte shouted in French. “Stefani, you just said Go Out!”

“Sword-Tier?” the first American girl malapropped. “There’s gonna be a fight?”

“No, stupid,” the second American scolded. “Sortir. Go Out.” She turned back to Charlotte. “Are they saying we should go out?” She paused, and thought for a moment. “Of the building, I mean? Because that sounds like a good idea. Everything inside is… Insane.”

Conversation continued in two languages, and angry questioning in a third, for several moments.

“We’re going to stop opening doors,” Anna said suddenly in French. Charlotte was taken aback for a moment.

“We can’t do that! There are innocent people in there!”

“Innocent people do not have lewd sex with strangers and eat each other!” Stefani snapped at her. Charlotte hesitated.

“Some of them might?” she ventured.

“Tell the Americans we’re leaving.” Anna said sternly. Charlotte hesitated, but knew that Anna always knew what was best. She turned her head back to the American girls as they descended to the seventh floor.

“We’re going to get out of the hotel. No one else is to be saved.” She spoke her English very carefully. The smarter of the two American girls began to nod, but the significantly dumber one (who was, for the record, not blonde) let her mouth fall open.

“We can’t just let them die!” She wailed. “They’re people!”

“You want to save them,” Charlotte said, “You can be their hero. We’ll be outside, trying to survive.” The smarter girl looked at her dumb companion-they were best friends back home. And now Jane-that was the smarter one’s name-knew that she couldn’t be a best friend how she had been before.

“Jessica…” She said slowly. “There’s nothing we can do for them.” She said suddenly. “They’re in God’s hands now.” Jessica frowned at her, but then seemed to think about it for a minute.

“So are we,” she whispered. “I hope he’s as forgiving as they say.” They advanced rapidly down several more flights of stairs.

A loud series of Bangs exploded from beneath them. The five girls froze.

“That doesn’t sound like sex or cannibalism!” Stefani squealed in Esperanto.

“Doesn’t mean it’s better,” Anna said grimly through clenched teeth.

* * *

U.S. Grant and Pyotr Petrograd had, with much incident, reached the Acropolis.

The Acropolis is a great, ancient city that towers above modern Athens. Well, it’s not really all that great, at least not big, when you think about it. It’s amazing, yes, but what really gives it the impression of greatness is how much higher it is than the rest of the city. Which, when you actually think about it, isn’t all that much. There’s just something inherent in it, that makes you feel as if you really shouldn’t go in. And, actually, when you think about it, it’s not really The Acropolis, it’s an Acropolis. There are acropolises all over in Greece. It’s just that the one in Athens is the most famous. Sort of like how there are lots of white houses in the United States of America, but everyone who knows about any of these knows especially of the one in Washington D.C. called The White House.

To get to the enterable base of the Acropolis from the edge of Plaka, one must cross several neighborhoods and go around the mountain. This is exactly what U.S. Grant and Pyotr Petrograd did. On the way, each of them had disabled seventeen zombies (though Grant, at the base of the mountain, claimed that he had counted eighteen for himself and sixteen for Pyotr) and together the two of them had looked up the ascent.

“They have soldiers everywhere,” Grant roared.

“They are a misled army of the people!” Pyotr announced.

“Oh, so you expect us not to kill the drones?” Grant turned on his best friend. Pyotr smiled.

“They are not our people, are they?” Grant smiled in return. They had made a right fist together, and charged up through zombie hoard. As they had gone up, they had barely slowed their ascent to collapse the heads of the “misled people’s super-soldier drones”, yet they lost count of how many they had crushed by the time they reached the city itself.

Though neither of them would have thought to make the joke, the Acropolis was now much more of a Necropolis. Zombies had swarmed over the entire ancient city, and there was now not a single road, passage, or ruined building that was not filled with the shambling dead. They seemed to be trying to live out dead lives in the dead city, sitting dazedly in empty homes, seeming without purpose. Until they sensed live flesh. Pyotr and Grant were oblivious to all this, knowing only that they were under siege by an army of uncontrollable creatures that had once been human, and could only be defeated by crushing the skull.

Soon they had reached the side of the hill city that overlooked Athens in the direction that they had come from. They spent a moment clearing their immediate area of the “super-soldiers”, and then looked out across it. Silence overcame them for a time.

“Holy Fuck,” Grant Stolid muttered.

“Jesus Christ!” Peter Gradine replied.

The rest of Athens was even more swarmed by zombies than the Acropolis. Every street was swarming with the recently deceased, and from some places the less recently deceased were still flooding into the world. On occasion, a blood curdling scream would erupt from somewhere, making the two men atop the Acropolis shudder. Occasionally, a quicker figure would dash across or down a street, but these still-living individuals were few and far between.

“We’re in way over our heads,” Grant said quietly, reaching up and removing the pair of briefs from his head.

Peter sat down where he stood. “This isn’t about us at all,” he whispered.

“I’ll bet it’s not even the Illuminati,” Grant’s voice leveled out, and his towel-cape slid from his back and crumpled to the ground. Peter waited a moment, and then looked all around them. Grant looked down at him. “What are you looking for?”

Peter screwed up his face in confusion. “For some reason, I expected Athena to show up and tell us that you were right about that.” Grant stared at his best friend, not daring to admit that he had thought the same thing. “I guess she’s not going to,” Peter said cautiously. Both felt that they had just missed a very rare opportunity somehow.

* * *

“Oh, god, someone with a gun is panicking,” Stefani hissed in Esperanto between the frenzied screams of some number of boys in two rooms, separated only by one, across from the stairs. Bullets flew from the doors of the two rooms.

“Why do they not run out of bullets?” Jane whined.

“The Texas Ranger corollary of the Stormtrooper effect,” Charlotte said dismissively.

“What?”

“It means they’re good guys,” Charlotte was quick to say. This still made no sense, but Stefani and Anna couldn’t understand her anyway. They stood in the corner of the hallway, at the foot of the last flight of stairs going down, and thought for a few minutes.

“Anyone notice a way into the basement?” Anna said in French. Charlotte and Stefani shook their heads, and Charlotte repeated it in English. Jane shook her head, and Jessica began to as well, but her face brightened into a smile.

“I did!” she said loudly and proudly, and was promptly shushed by her companions. She covered her mouth in embarrassment, but still smiled proudly. She repeated her self quietly.

“Where?” Charlotte’s voice was quiet with urgency. Jessica paused to think, and then her eyes brightened once more. She pointed down the hall, and before she had even begun to say “Down there!”, the others had returned to thinking. Barely any time had passed when Anna’s head shot up from its ponderous position.

“Back upstairs!” She commanded in French. “One floor up!” Charlotte conveyed the message to the American girls and all of them went. When all five of them were on the second floor of the hotel, Anna indicated room 208. “Directly above one of the rooms with the guns. Open the do… merde.”

She had just caught a glance up the set of stairs to the third floor that they had so recently descended. Now descending it were a number of corpses, and now that the five of them were paying attention, they could all hear the trudging shuffling of feet on the floor above them.

“Into the room, now!” Anna hissed through her teeth, and Charlotte did not have to translate. The girls pushed open the door to room 208 (which was, Anna thought briefly as she turned to follow the other four into the room after she had caught a glance of the farthest back visible zombie, who used to be her favorite teacher Mdme. Shannon, and tried to ignore the blaze of unending gunfire below, a very fortunate coincidence) and scattered in. Without having to even think about it, they began to barricade the door with everything they could find; the four who were not Anna quickly worked together to push the beds against the door, propping them on top of the chair that Anna had already slipped beneath the doorknob. They then, in a panic, pushed everything else that was not bolted down into the area surrounding the door, hoping that when the swarm did inevitably break through, that would at least slow them down. When everything had been moved, they paused to catch their breath. Anna did not pause.

She took a survey of the room now. Everything, really, dressers, beds, chairs, desks, TVs, nightstands, had been pressed against the door or scattered tightly around it. All that was left in the bulk of the room were the headboards of the two beds, which were part of the wall, and the hanging lights on the ceiling. And something very bad struck Anna.

“This room is an inside room,” she said softly. “There’s no way out.” Without translation, Jane too understood what Anna had said.

“What?” Jessica asked quickly. “What’s wrong?”

“We are screwed,” Charlotte moaned. She and Stefani sat down slowly, accepting their fates. Jane fell over and crumpled against the wall. Jessica’s smile slowly faded, and her body began to slump. Anna did not move, but stood there with her face screwed up in concentration.

“Don’t give up,” She finally said as a tearing sound began to emanate from the door. She looked at all of them, trying to catch any eyes, but unable to. She frowned harder. “We’ll find a way out.” Jane and Jessica did not even want to understand what she was saying.

* * *

A moaning behind Grant Stolid and Peter Gradine snapped them out of their contemplation of the stricken Athens beneath them. Grant leaned down and picked up his head-briefs and towel and reaffixed them without turning around. Peter looked up at him, not looking behind them at all.

“We gonna do this the easy way?” Peter asked.

“Of course not,” U.S. Grant smiled down. “We’re gonna go down fighting for God and Country!”

Pyotr Petrograd stood and smiled at his best friend. “We’re gonna go down fighting for the people!”

The two turned together to face the flood of corpses that had surrounded their position looking over Athens. The zombies were still shambling towards them. Together, they made a fist, grinned a manic grin, and charged forward.

Episode 43: Pompeii and Circumstance

When last we left the renegade archaeologists (Harry T., Willa R., Terra M., Melshell A., and Amanda P.) and their Sicilian tour guide (Giacinto B.) they had been trapped beneath a lava dome encasing the ancient city of Pompeii, and found themselves spontaneously surrounded by twelve speaking dogs. A strange cat mocked them (it spoke too) and then vanished. They also, though they will never admit it, believe that they have seen a statue shaped like a human walking about. Although it is common knowledge that all you out there in reader land hate these characters, because they are essential to an understanding of the events surrounding the rising of the dead.

As I was saying, the renegade archaeologists and their Sicilian tour guide were surrounded by twelve angry talking dogs beneath a rock dome enclosing Pompeii. They were intensely confused by these developments. The dogs, while not confused, were intensely pissed off.

“Fucking humans, fucking idiot humans!” The lead dog-who was very, very large, and very, very imposing, and very, very frightening-screamed simultaneously in English and Sicilian. “Do you have any goddamned idea what you have done you fuck ups?”

The six humans in the circle stood in paralyzed silence.

“N… No, we do not know.” Harry T. finally stuttered.

“Fucking human idiot fucks!” The large lead dog barked-no, spoke. “Fucking ruined it fuck again fucking!” All six of the humans held their breath.

A smaller dog, but not by much, with silkier, longer fur stepped forward and spoke in a gentle, feminine voice.

“Now, Jupes,” She said with a seductive lilt. “Don’t be so harsh on the poor little humans.” The six humans exhaled in relief. They had an ally amongst these scary dogs. “You’ll just make it harder for us to deal with this problem.” She seemed to snicker, which was even worse than the lead dog’s unrelenting fury. The six held their breath again, as the lead dog’s fury seemed to relent a little bit.

“You’re right, my dear Juno,” he said gruffly but sweetly. “Mars, how quickly do you think you can take care of them?” A Doberman, with ears sharper than any of the six humans had seen before began to growl.

“Mars doesn’t think, boss,” a small dog yapped rapidly.

“That’s right,” the lead dog chuckled, which is not a sound that is pleasant to the human ear. He seemed to be beginning to enjoy this. “He just kills.” The Doberman barked sharply several times, but did not advance more than a few inches. He barked again, and then seemed to venture a glance at the lead dog. He whined.

“You should really run,” a feminine voice purred, as Amanda felt a soft figure slink between her ankles. “I recommend jumping over those little ones, and running very, very fast. They won’t move, and Mars will run right into them. You might get lucky.” None of the dogs reacted to this, and none of the humans were willing to acknowledge it themselves. All of them, individually, decided that it was right. Each of them swallowed as one, and spun and ran and jumped over the two little dogs.

Harry and Giacinto were the first over, the space being just about large enough for two people. Willa and Melshell were next, and then Amanda. Terra mistimed her jump, and found herself tripping over the little dogs. One of them squealed out in pain, the other stumbled to the side. Terra screamed a guttural sound of terror, startlement, and pain. Melshell spun and called out to her, but Willa grabbed him by the arm and dragged him along with them.

Mars the Doberman had launched himself at about the same time as Willa and Melshell had jumped, but he hadn’t taken into account the possibility of someone falling. He ran into Terra’s prone body and stumbled backwards. Beneath Terra, one of the small dogs still squealed in pain. She rolled over, letting the little dog free. It dragged itself away.

Terra found herself looking directly into the eyes of a confused and angry Dog of War. Foamy spots of spittle dropped onto her face.

“This fucks everything up even more!” she half-heard a barking voice say. The other half of her senses were dedicated to intently focusing on the Doberman above her face and not provoking it.

“Saturn, relax. We can deal with this.” That dog sounded almost motherly, the detached part of Terra thought

“If they damage even one of the Pompeiians before it gets out, the second wave will be diminished by at least two hundred deaths. So, Ceres, don’t tell me to relax, because we really, really need the second wave at full capacity.”

“We can just send Diana after them.”

“Mars would have been more efficient,” another feminine voice said. “But I don’t mind having to hunt them down.”

“Alright,” Terra recognized the voice of the lead dog now. “Diana, go after them. Do not damage any of the Pompeiians.”

“I guess I won’t be using Mars, then.” The Doberman slobbering angrily on Terra’s face whimpered gently.

“Is Janus okay?” the quick-looking dog had a distinctive voice too; somehow like Paul Schafer, the detached section of Terra’s mind mused.

“Not really,” yet another feminine dog said. “He’s dead.”

Several of the dogs made a scoffing noise. “That’s going to make it harder to get the Pompeiians out on time,” the voice that belonged to, the whole of Terra began to reunite and reluctantly admit it, the god Saturn, said angrily.

“The surviving humans will get through; we had that as a backup plan, remember?” the god who announced Janus’ death said.

“Why didn’t Janus see any of this coming?” a sultry voice asked.

“That’s easy… He was with the Aliens.” The purring voice said for all to hear.

“Discordia!” the lead dog burst. “You should not be here. Leave now, or I will have to ignore the wizard’s commands!”

“I’m not going anywhere,” the cat purred. “But I know that won’t stop you from trying. Catch me if you can, ‘Jupes!’” the cat cackled. Terra heard the lead dog pounding its paws off into the distance.

“What do we do about this one?” the sultry voice asked once again. “She is… Not as appealing as the taller one.”

“Kill her,” Saturn said.

“Wait!” the second small dog said quickly, before the Doberman ripped out her neck. She exhaled slightly in slight relief. “One of them cares for her. I felt it. We can use her to kill him without lifting a finger.” There was a pause.

“Here’s what we do. Cupid knows his shit here. Mars, kill her. But leave her… intact.” The Doberman growled in response, and dove its head into Terra’s chest, through the skin, through the bone, and bit her heart. She screamed in incomprehensible agony, and everything went dark.

* * *

The five surviving humans ran from the dog circle faster than any of them knew they were capable of. That tends to happen to people when their lives are threatened by incomprehensible things, including zombies or…

“Gods,” Harry said as soon as they had deposited themselves behind a less crumbled wall than the others. “Gods disguised as dogs.”

“The palindromes are amazing,” Willa said sardonically. “But I think right now we need to worry more about getting out of here.”

“We have to…” Melshell began shouting, but Amanda and Willa shushed him, and he continued more quietly. “We have to go back for Terra.”

“They’ll have killed her by now,” Amanda tried to inject some sympathy into her voice, but the words came out sounding very matter-of-fact. Melshell glared at her.

“They might not have,” Melshell growled.

“If they didn’t, they’ll be using her as bait to catch the rest of us.” Willa peeked around the corner. “We just have to get out of Pompeii, and get to safety.”

“They said something about a plan,” Giacinto said suddenly. The renegade archaeologists turned to him in mild surprise; they had almost forgotten about his presence. He looked across all of them. “I think that it’s a bad plan.”

“That…” Willa shuddered at the thought of saying it. “That cat said something about ancient residents of Pompeii?”

“Made of stone,” Harry conceded. “Long dead.”

“We saw one of them,” Amanda recalled urgently. “Walking around! Just before the doggods surrounded us!”

“Where’d it go?” Melshell asked nervously. There was a pause, and everyone else began to look around.

“You humans are not very fun to hunt sometimes,” a feminine voice said from above them. All five heads craned to look at the top of the wall they had stashed themselves behind. On top of it sat a majestic bitch, a female golden retriever with a strangely feline glint in her eye. “I’m Diana, Doggess of the hunt. I like to hunt.” She pulled back her lips, revealing a mouth full of teeth that were almost fangs. “If you do not let me hunt you, I will not kill you immediately. I will take you to Mars. Mars will kill you so painfully that you will wish that the instant that he does it in were shorter. So please,” she finished sweetly, lowering her voice to almost a whisper. “Run?”

Harry stared into her eyes with the fierceness of a traditional leader. They all stood there for a moment that stretched for nearly an eternity. Then Harry opened his mouth just a little.

“Scatter,” he hissed.

* * *

“It always makes me nervous when one of us dies,” Mercury said. He was the small dog, the quick messenger, left alone with the dead human, Mars, and the dead Janus. Mars only continued to growl at the dead human, but Mercury didn’t mind. “I mean, we’re gods. We’re supposed to be immortal. But over the last millennium, we’ve started to die. It was the big wake up call when Sekhmet died. I mean, that chick kicked some serious ass in her time.” Mars barked at the dead human. “Yeah, I know, at least she was killed by those damn aliens. That makes sense, even if it’s not fair. But Janus, he just got crushed by a falling human.” Mars whimpered lightly; Mercury didn’t bother looking. “Us Romans, we’ve got the worst of it. Everyone forgot us. They just think we’re just planets. So we got relegated. They took our power, and they put us in charge of this ridiculous phase 2. Because they knew it wasn’t necessary. They gave us this job to shut us up.” Mercury looked upwards, to the stone dome surrounding the city. “And they did.” Mars began to growl again. Mercury began to turn. “Is the damned human finally stand… Oh, fuck.”

Terra was finally standing, and was looking around curiously. She couldn’t find any food immediately. She looked at the three dogs; they weren’t food. They all smelled wrong, for one thing. Especially that one. She turned away. Something had moved over there. She began to walk off in its direction.

This was not what had startled Mercury. What had startled Mercury was that that Terra was not the only one who had stood up. Janus was standing too. Mars was growling at him, much more violently than the Dog of War had in nearly two millennia. Mercury stepped back cautiously, which is an interesting thing to see a dog do.

“Oh, Janus!” Mercury yapped nervously. “I, uh, didn’t see you standing there. I did see you lying there. It’s, uh, nice to see you standing there?” The tiny Janus growled rabidly and incomprehensibly. “Hey, uh, Janus, you, uh, you’re looking awful… Two-Faced,” Mercury whimpered he still mostly crushed and bleeding dog leapt towards the frightened god.

* * *

Harry T. crouched behind a wall. He hoped that the hunting dog had come after him. He knew she hadn’t. She had probably gone after… Melshell. Melshell was slow. Harry hoped that the others had made it at least as far as him. He looked around, and for a moment, saw nothing. Then he suddenly saw something.

On the other side of the wall from him, a stone statue stood. It had the look of a faceless individual who had experienced the horrors of two thousand years of death, and that was very much what it was. It turned, very slowly, to look at Harry. It reached out to him, and he was paralyzed with fear. It reached his arm, and began to close its soft fingers around his wrist. Harry began to wail, and pulled his arm back. The arm of the figure crumbled, and Harry froze again. The statue turned its head briefly to stare at its arm, which was crumbling towards its shoulder. The whole figure crumbled to dust. Harry stared at the motionless pile ahead of him. Realization flowed into his eyes.

“Oh yeah,” he whispered in astonishment.

* * *

“Discordia!” Jupiter shouted, storming into some ruins after the form of the cat.

“Jupes,” Discordia’s voice purred sarcastically and echoingly despite having nothing to echo off of from an unseen position. “I’m so glad you followed me.”

“Get out of my project, Discordia!” Jupiter barked at the construction in general.

“Oh, Jupiter, my dear, do you understand nothing?” She cackled. “Phase 2 isn’t your project! It does center around you, obviously, or we would have just left you out.”

“It’s my project!” Jupiter’s voice thundered, shaking the ruins, causing some little crumbling of the already crumbled pillars.

“Lord Jupiter,” the cat’s over-pronounced title for him bit at his ego, making him growl. “Did you not realize that this entire thing is impossible?”

“We are gods!” Jupiter said, not allowing the creeping doubt he had to enter into his voice. “We do the impossible every day!”

“But this is especially impossible! The volcano launched its molten rock directly and entirely at Pompeii? It solidified as a dome?”

“That was our doing!” Jupiter cried.

“That’s what you were supposed to think,” Discordia giggled. She stepped out into the room; her figure was no longer that of a cat, but of a spooky, smiling, blonde, human Goddess, wearing nothing more than a single white strap of cloth slung over her right breast, a small golden rope around her waist, and a single sandal on her left foot. Between her breasts, a chilly, jagged, curving dagger was pressed, not causing her to bleed. She licked her teeth at the father of the dogs, who found himself becoming more and more frightened and unsure. “Those ‘stone zombies’ out there are impossible, too; the people they represent died nearly two millennia ago, and rotted beyond resurrection over nine centuries ago. They’re made of plaster!”

“Then… Why?” Jupiter whined.

Discordia, goddess of Chaos, queen of the impossible, grinned wider. “That… Would be telling.” She pulled her golden rope from her waist and it resolved itself without cause into a golden apple. Jupiter screamed in terror as only a god can.

Episode 42: Please State Your Response in the Form of a Question

Everyone dreams. Some people dream of what they want. Some people dream of what they have. Some people dream of what they don’t want. Some people dream of what they fear. Some people dream of things that they never thought about before. Some people dream in the past. Some people dream in the present. Some people dream of the past. Some people dream in the future. Some people dream of what they dream of.

You can tell a lot from someone’s dreams.

* * *

A tangle of limbs was present in the back of the van. Between those limbs, two bodies were pressed against each other. The faces were facing each other, both with eyes shut, mouth open and most importantly smiling, and emitting a gentle snore. Her long brown hair was tussled in with his medium length blonde. They held each other as they slept, and dreamt.

The short haired acne ridden boy slept furiously, sitting erect in his own passenger seat. Behind him, a curly haired Mormon boy was stretched across the backseat, twitching in his sleep. In another car, the smaller and younger but more mature and older sister leaned against her big little sister, both sleeping comfortably. The passenger seat was tilted all the way back, and held a girl who was as old as either of them, moaning terror as she slept restlessly. A pretty and skinny girl curled up in her own leathery backseat and slept in a vaguely catlike position. Outside, the two adults paced around the four vehicles, pointing their guns into the woods and across the road. In three hours, they would trade places with the furiously sleeping short haired boy and the catlike pretty girl, and sleep in each others’ arms in the leathery seats, as the youths paced the perimeter and pointed their guns. For now, though, they talked, meaningfully, apologetically, lovingly.

Far distant, an accidental queen slept amongst her subjects, an unusually meditative rest. They slept restlessly. Amongst them an aging soldier and his wife slept too. He slept calmly but worriedly, she slept with a heavy conscience. Distant from that too, there rested gripingly another Mormon, an accidental hero, a strange redemptive force, on a hard table. He muttered complaints in his sleep. Near him slept his right hand man and his left hand woman. And distant from both of those too, an angry Asian boy, an accidental and uncaring savior, slept casually next to the corpse of his brother in programming. Neither body moved. An angry boy who was no longer a boy found himself sleeping, though he wasn’t tired.

An ancient hunter, a misplaced nurse, and a frightened bald man slept too. But it was a dreamless sleep, more of an unconsciousness. They had only flashes, of visions and of thoughts, and of death. The nurse heard a song in her sleep, a song of hope… but it was faint, and she could not remember the tune. The hunter felt that he was hunting himself, and that soon he would catch himself, and he had a brief vision of him approaching himself from within, but then he woke up… The frightened bald man heard a whisper from above him that wasn’t above him, and it said something that he could not recollect, something about the sky, something about escaping, something about codes…

The others dreamt in full.

* * *

Todd-who knew he was a Corporal, and should really write to his parents, but not about what had just happened-slid out of bed He smoothed out his short red hair. The room was stifling hot with the curtains drawn. Behind him, he heard AnJennifer roll over into the hollow left by his body.

Then, with both hands, and considerable vigor, he threw open the curtains and let in the round, white light of the full moon. Behind him, he thought he heard AnJennifer sigh in her sleep.

Behind him, the bed went glink. He began to say something and turned. As he did, he missed the penguin fly across the moon (but he saw it, even though he wasn’t looking, and he didn’t acknowledge it)

A wolf lay in his bed, its fur the same as AnJennifer’s hair. It looked nervous. The scene demanded that he draw his sword… He descended onto the bed and kissed the wolf’s muzzle, and stroked her fur. AnJennifer licked his face nervously…

* * *

She stumbled out of the door. She stumbled out of the door. She stumbled out of the door. On the other side of it was another door she stumbled out of the door.

She slammed into the fifth one-or was it the qilth? She could never remember when she stumbled out of qil, counting the doors (she stumbled out of). She stumbled out of the door out of the stumble. It got darker and darker and dark out of the door. Doors after doors after stumbled out of the door. Jennifer leaned against this one, hoping she stumbled out of the door. There was a voice on the other stumbled out of the door. It told her that it was stumbling out of the door to help her stumble out of the door. She believed the stumbling voice out of the door she stumbled out of the door. But she stumbled out of the door knowing that it would never stumble out of the door to her she stumbled out of the door. She stopped at a door (she stumbled out of the door) and looked through the peephole (it stumbled out of the door). On the other side, the friendly face of a young boy, ten, maybe, with an afro smiled at her she stumbled out of the door. On the other side the friendly face of a young boy, seventeen maybe, with blonde hair, smiled and loved at her she stumbled out of the door. On the other side the penguin waddled past, she stumbled out of the door, she wanted to stumble out of the door into his arms, she stumbled out of the door, trying to on the other side the friendly face of a young boy, seventeen maybe, fall into his stumble doors. On the other side, the friendly face of a young boy, ten, maybe, whispered for her to stumble out of the door, he was stumbling out of the door, she had shut the door for him to stumble out of the door she stumbled out of the door, searching for his stumbling arms.

She stumbled out of the door. She stumbled out of the door. She stumbled out of the door.

Jennifer stumbled out of the door…

* * *

Waldo was on a soccer field. The goal was Sylvie, the ball was a heart, but he wasn’t sure whose heart it was. The goalie was Sylvie, but she was also Mina and Elli. The other team was ten strong, all of them Todds and Minas and Ellis and Peters and a penguin. He was playing alone. His goal was his father, yelling incomprehensibly, telling him that he had done wrong, that he had to kick past the other team. His team’s goalie was his mother, but she wasn’t really there she was in the goal. Waldo focused, kicked the ball which was a heart. Elli the goalie caught it, and tossed it to Mina the goalie, who bit it, who tossed it to Waldo the goalie, who walked off the field with his heart… Waldo the kicker fell to his knees, pulled another ball from his chest, and kicked it again…

* * *

Elli was with his family. It was Christmas. His family loved Christmas. They were the most gently materialistic family that Elli had. The family penguin sat under the tree. They loved each other. Elli loved his family. He hugged his sister, he kissed his mother on the cheek, he was small but still as old as he could be and he sat in his father’s lap. He began to cry; he wasn’t sure why. He was just so happy here, in his house, with his family, the neighbors rotting on the counter. The blinding light from the floorboards lit all of them up like angels. Elli held onto his family…

* * *

Dawn could neveralways tell when she was dreaming. It was so similardifferent to realityfantasy. The fog of life lifted from her eyes for these hourseternities. She saw a crowd, it looked familiarstrange but apart from it was a penguin. She knew it was more important here than the crowd of friendsstrangers beckoningpushingaway tofrom her. She floated between two mirrors. One showed her as she was. One showed her as she was. One showed her as she wanted to be. One showed her as she had been. One showed her what had been in her, it looked like her, but it was sadder than her. The qilth showed her where she had to go, but it pointed in directions that didn’t exist. She went in them. She passed through five lands, always steps behind the penguin, and she was wearing a young girls’ blue dress and it fit her perfectly, that she thought was curious. The dream resolved itself into reality, and it was no differentthesame…

* * *

In here, Marty was in control. She woke up her sister, she made her mom stay home, she sat on the sofa. Her father kept bickering with her, though. That was the way she liked it, she decided. Then Mom went back to working all the time. She decided that was the way she liked it. Then Sister fell asleep. She decided that was the way she liked it. She had always wanted to be the older sister, but this wasn’t it at all, no. But she decided that was the way she liked it. She lay across the sofa, and grew, and grew, and grew, and she was huge, and her sister was tiny, but she decided that was the way she liked it. A girl waved out the window but Marty couldn’t fit through the door to see her, and her skateboard broke beneath her, and the penguin was afraid of her, and she was stuck trapped but she decided that was the way she liked it. In here, Marty was in control…

* * *

The scaled faces peered down at her. They were always peering down at her. When they were there at all, they were peering down at her. But she was always alone. When they weren’t peering down at her she was alone. She couldn’t move. She didn’t want to be alone. Being alone was worse than being peered down on by the scaled faces. There was a hopeless mewing all around her, she thought maybe the cats would come to her and not let her be alone, but the cats never came, and the mewing wasn’t really mewing it just sounded like mewing. It was cries for help. Mina didn’t understand the language-that was because it was all meows-but she knew that they were trapped like her. She didn’t dare cry out, and the darkness enveloped her again just after a penguin flew past, the mewing with her all around her, then the darkness was gone again and she thought she heard some people calling for help in English, and they were, but they were gone quicker than she was. Then it was dark, and she could understand some of the other cries for help, and they smashed her head in but she woke right back up…

* * *

She was hideous! She couldn’t stand it, being so hideous. So she moved into a cave, deep under a mountain, carrying her lost beauty with her, and she swam. And she fished and she ate fish (and a penguin) and she began to speak to her lost beauty which she carried with her, when she left it behind she was invisible and that was worse. And on her birthday, a horrible tiny man came and she was going to eat him with the help of her lost beauty, but he stole her beauty! She followed, but it took her nearly fifty years to catch up, and the horrible tiny man’s relatives had her beauty now, and they were taking it to destroy it, because too many people wanted to be as beautiful as she had been. She helped them, and they called her “Gollum” because that was the noise that she made, but the nicer one called her Sylvie, and he was nice to her, he wasn’t beautiful but he knew how hard it was to give up her beauty. She began to love that horrible tiny man who was nicer-they were Waldo and Elli, they told her, and Elli was the nice one, Waldo kept tying ropes around her and things-but he wanted to destroy her beauty, and she had to have her beauty. She promised her beauty that she would betray them and take it back. But she was too hideous to do it the right way…

* * *

(Later) Sally was at HQ, waiting for orders from Joe Hill. He came out, but he was silvery and liquidy. She thought nothing of it. She saluted smartly, and he flashed her a scaly grin. He produced a folder, manila with a picture of a penguin, and handed it to her. She read the label: “Case File Qil-Trans Universal Energy Leakage around Colorado”. She opened the folder. The first sheet inside said in big letters “Moda Garden-Highly Susceptible.” The next sheet was clearly a map of Moda Garden. There were Green Dots all over the map. The largest one was on George Custer Memorial High, and around that dot were words.

Sally’s head snapped up and stared at Joe Hill. He smiled his scaly smile again, and said in a croaking voice, “Trust me…”

* * *

(Later) Jack’s conscious mind didn’t know about the consciousness of his subconscious mind. His dream mind had an ability to navigate the dream world, and his subconscious was in control of that. It couldn’t reach his conscious mind, though, so the vast stores of information that he could find went to waste in the waking world. On the borders of the dreaming, if he was awakened, the subconscious mind got random tidbits of messages across, but they were never significant. The thoughts of the conscious mind always rained down into the subconscious, however, so it solved almost all of his problems before he knew they could be solved.

For ten years, his subconscious mind had spent almost all its time in Dawn’s dreams. That was where he had met the penguin. They were, as far as such things are possible, friends. Dawn’s dreams during that frozen time were a journey through unspeakable and incomprehensible worlds. The penguin was a native of the Dreamworlds, and it forced Jack’s subconscious to only watch her. It told him that she would never find her way home if there was anything comforting for her in the Dreamworlds. This sleep, Jack’s subconscious watched Dawn’s dreams again. She was journeying again, which she hadn’t done since she had woken up. The penguin told him that the map in the qilth mirror that she had stared into was the map to herself, and that her two major minds were trying to combine again like they once had. The penguin then pointed in a direction that was, as near as Jack could think of it, upwards. Jack looked, and there was a multi-colored sheet covering the dreaming. Jack asked what it was, and the penguin told him that it was another one of the side effects of the ripping of reality earlier. Jack’s subconscious understood and began to roam the dreamlands…

* * *

Joan is conscious of her dreams. It’s one of the unintended side effects of the training she received. She has no control over them, but she can tell the difference between dreams and reality. Many of her dreams are memories, and they are vivid ones. Tonight, she dreams of a job she carried out about six months ago.

Joan is upstairs in her room, in her dream. She is practicing emergency combat with her bed pillow, which is shaped like a penguin. She hears a knock on the door from downstairs. Her Masters, masquerading as her parents, open the door, and she hears cordial voices. The door to her room is locked, and the floors and walls are sound proofed, and the vents are closed so the sound doesn’t echo through them. But Joan has her secrets; souvenirs that she had secreted away from some of her more unusual targets. From a secret locked compartment beneath her bed, she takes some sort of sonic stethoscope. She presses it against the floor. Her Masters are talking to a young man; his voice is disguised as that of a commanding mysterious figure, but she can hear through the disguise. He is a teenager, in the better end of puberty, though his voice is still squeaking. The three of them work out the details of the job; the deal is disguised as a conversation whereby he is asking for a date with her. She learns, through this veil, that she is to assassinate three guards outside of a high rise apartment building. The payment is information on where to retrieve highly but imprecisely valued precious stones with a variety of remarkable qualities, none of which she cares about. The teenage boy stands and leaves, and Joan quickly returns the sonic stethoscope to its hiding place. While there, she risks bringing out the hyper-sensitive binoculars. The windows of her room are programmed to be conveniently tintable on command, so that she cannot see those who hire her. Her binoculars allow her to see through any number of objects, substances, and surfaces. She focuses them to look through the wall at the boy who hired her; He is hidden beneath a black cloak. She identifies the material as Quasi-Dimensional Silk, and focuses the binoculars to see through that too. All she can see before she has risked looking for too long is his brown, curly hair. She is curious.

Time Passes.

Three days or so after this, Joan is taken in a dark car to a tall apartment building in the center of Denver. She is made to understand that it is New Year’s Eve. When she is put out of the car across the street from the tall apartment building and led to an empty room in an office building across the street (she counts seventeen floors) she takes a quick stock of the other building. She counts twenty-three stories. She also counts three burly men hiding in the shadows around the building trying very hard not to look like they are hiding in the shadows around the building. She pulls her case to her and opens it. She quickly and calmly assembles the high powered sniper rifle inside. It is a thing of beauty. Affixing the silencer forces her to suppress an ecstatic whimper. As she lifts the gun, her chest heaves up and down with a longing breath. As she pushes it through the open window she licks her lips desirously. She aims and bites her lip. She pulls thrice in rapid succession, each one sending a shudder through her body, and with the third one she cries out sharply. She topples backwards, and gasps happily for breath. Fireworks are exploding off in the distance. After a couple of minutes, she sits up, smoothes out her skirt, and begins to disassemble the rifle. As she does, she looks out the window. From the seventeenth floor of the other building-in fact, the window directly across from her-A pretty teenage girl, slightly older than Joan, with brown shoulder-length hair, wearing nothing more than a tee-shirt and a pair of panties (Joan takes note of this only in case she is forced to do combat) has climbed out of her window, and is beginning to rappel down the building. Joan watches her for a moment, curious for a brief moment whether she knows about the assassination. She closes her case and leaves the room…

* * *

His last mission. The war of 2008. Horrible. Invading Australia, their army secreted. A madman developed a penguin bomb. His brother-bleeding. His brothers in arms-dissolving. His sisters in arms-screaming. Steve screams against them, it will counter that scream, aiming across, pull, shoot, kill kill kill kill…

* * *

Lucy Looked. Down: The earth was made of space. Left: The horizon became a Dragosaur. Right: The colors blurred together. Behind: The penguin led its army forward. Ahead: The spin slowed. Above: The sky wasn’t. Lucy screamed. Lucy called for her husband to protect her. Lucy did not see him coming. Lucy tried to run…

* * *

It is long ago. He is rich and powerful, living in Jerusalem. In his care are a set of brass plates, with a list of people who begat people; near the bottom are the names Sam, Jacob, and Joseph. A man comes to retrieve the plates, but he refuses. The man comes again, with much to offer. Laban takes the things, but does not give them the plates.

He is in Sunday school, a few weeks ago. He is listening to the story of Laban (the rich), wondering what his parents were thinking.

He is in a silvery world, inhabited by only penguins. A ghastly presence appears before him, and takes nearly an eternity to resolve itself into the face of Elder Smith VI. He smiles, and melts into a silverness that matches the world. “He lied,” Laban (the child)’s voice rings out through this silvery world…

* * *

Hanh is alone. He’s always alone. But then she comes, the Korean beauty, the goddess (she’s not really, he tries to tell himself, but he can never believe it) known by names innumerable, even though there is only one. But there are two, who look alike; why has he seen them, but never together? The Delaileh, she is the one he wants, to be with, to hold, to… The penguin shudders in tandem with him. The penguin always shudders in tandem with him, and watches what follows. He has a picture of her nude back, but here he has all of her, clothed as he wishes, he presses against her, he opens his mouth desperately, she wraps her long arms around him, she…

* * *

Ujer has no dreams tonight. She does not sleep tonight. She is arguing with herself-what is right, who is true, where is reality? She cannot find the answers-Is this a dream? she asks herself. If it were, she decides, she’d be able to sleep. What sense does that make, she counters, if she was dreaming she would be asleep anyway but who is really the savior? At one point, she thinks she sees a penguin walking at the edge of the room, but it was just a shadow…

* * *

“Zach…” a voice wafts in. Zach slowly opens his eyes in response. “Look familiar, Zach?” the voice wafts again. Zach is strapped to a tan colored table, by leather and metal and wood and a few things that he doesn’t recognize. He tries to stand up, and is surprised to find himself passing directly through.

“The fuck?” he cries out, as he stands up and examines the room. It looks like something out of Star Trek to him, though something tells him a more thorough knowledge of science fiction would cause him to compare it more to something from Star Wars. He looks around.

“Does it look familiar?” The voice wafts once more, slightly more urgently. Zach takes in the room. There are control panels, but they are not designed for use by a hominid form. In fact, the only place that Zach feels he fits (not that fitting matters at all to him, so he begins to sit in what appears to be a seat designed for a very small diplodocus, a kind of dinosaur that Zach didn’t realize he knew anything about and doesn’t care that he knows now, complete with a very long slot for a tail) is the table that he woke into this dream on; for he suddenly realizes that this is a dream, but not a normal one. Where’s that goddamn penguin?

“Yes, it does,” Zach says calmly, surprised that he doesn’t add a “fuck” or “shit” to it. “I can’t… figure it out…” He is surprised by the unsureness in his voice. He is surprised by being surprised. He is surprised by being surprised by being…

“Try to remember,” The voice wafts urgently, removing Zach from the cycle that had threatened to be perpetual. Zach tries to remember.

“You and me,” the voice wafts, slowly approaching, opening a door across the room. Zach spins to stare at the door; it is a tan-yellow color, like everything else in the room. “We were projects. Designed by THEM.” Zach hears the complete capitalization of the word, wondering how he hears it. Zach nods, remembering.

“The Silver ones… Like Joe.” Zach finds that he his no longer afraid of the oozing Joe Hill he had seen earlier.

“They can take any shape,” the voice wafts, becoming excited, and Zach can see it now as some kind of smoke, appearing near the table that he was strapped on. “But naturally, they are silvery, and scaly…”

“Reptoids?” Zach gasps. He has never heard the word before in his waking memory, but there’s something in the back of his head that brings up words. “Saurians?”

“They have another term for themselves,” The smoke begins to resolve into a human shape; it is peachish, barely visible against the rest of the room. A mouth appears, about where the mouth would be on a slightly short human man, and grins a Cheshire Cat grin. “The Anunnaki.” Zach is uncertain how he should react to this, so he does not.

“Why the fuck?”

“They needed soldiers, for the oncoming war.” The smoke resolves itself further; Zach recognizes it as the man who was just killed, and realizes that he is sleeping next to the corpse. That explains much, he thinks.

“What war?”

“The Zombie War. They needed soldiers, so that humanity would survive. They need humanity to survive.”

“Fuckers!” Zach exclaims.

“What?”

“Humanity is shit!” The dream-ghost of Kevin frowns.

“I was programmed to believe that. Stolen by the Other Side. I don’t know who they are; they stole me, reprogrammed me, to kill as many humans as I could, but to leave their heads intact. So they would become zombies, and kill more. You have to st…”

“Don’t give a fuck for you. What about me? And that hateful fucking bastard? He keeps killing people, but he did the Silver Reptoid thing.”

“He was stolen by the Other Side too. But I was just a prototype; you were too. I wasn’t nearing completion when they stole me. He was. He was also a more advanced project. He was genetically half Anunnaki. Not a prototype. The Other Side reprogrammed him. He is unstoppable.”

“Nothing’s unstoppable. And me?”

“You were a prototype, but you were earlier than me. When they were working on me-I remember it now, I remembered it when I broke all the programming…”

“Shit! Fuckin’ Tell me before I wake the fuck up you fucker!”

Dream-ghost Kevin glares. “I broke all the programming and now I want to save humanity again. I’m dead, though. I can’t be zombified; they mixed that up on you.” Dream-ghost Kevin hesitates. “You broke free before you could be finished. They couldn’t find you; neither could the Other Side. But they had a fail safe; I don’t know why. I don’t know why they told me. They didn’t tell me that either. When the spell was cast-they couldn’t stop the spell, you know, they couldn’t for some reason, they didn’t tell me the reason for that either-all of the incomplete prototypes were to die automatically. The Other Side shut that off in me, but no one shut it off in you.” Dream-ghost Kevin hesitates again. Zach glares at him. “What they did to you, it changed things in you. You… Retained intelligence under the circumstances.”

“What the fuck are you saying?” Zach yells.

“You are not alive, you fool! You died 5 hours ago! You are a zombie…”

* * *

Sunny hates dreaming. He hates everything now. There is nothing that it can be said he mildly dislikes anymore. He hates it all.

He hates every action he takes, even in this dream world. When he kills things-which he isn’t enjoying, but it’s the only solution he can think of to his hatred, he hates thinking of how he could do it otherwise, so he doesn’t, he takes the easiest course-they don’t actually die. They disappear-he knows they just wake up. He hates that. He does not want them to be just… waking up. He wants them to die. But he hates that, too. He hates everything. He hates, more than anything, that penguin that is running from him, that’s always running from him. He shoots a silvery tendril forward from his hand and catches the penguin.

“I brought you here,” it says in a language that he hates. “I brought you here to protect them!”

“I hate!” Sunny screams, ignoring it. He squeezes and twists, snapping the penguin’s neck. The dreams begin to shake…

* * *

The penguin awoke. It was not really a penguin, of course, but that is how it always masked itself in its home realm. It had not been awake for centuries. It looked around its current residence, and in a forgotten, eldritch language, spoke:

“Fuck!”

Despite not having fingers, it did something comparable to snapping. A blondish human boy who looked about sixteen appeared before it.

"Oh," the boy said dazedly in English. "What now?"

"You have been outside and watching for a very long time, Mark Sky." The thing that put itself into dreams as a penguin rumbled in its language. "I have been inside and feeling for even longer."

"Uh-huh..." Mark Sky said slowly, curious as to how he understood what the thing had said. "What did you say you were?"

The thing ignored his words. "What have I missed, Mark Sky?"

Mark was silent for a moment. "You're the first thing to talk to acknowledge me for thousands of years; does that help?"

Episode 41: Dark Medicine

Through the darkness, Amy and Desiree heard a strange squishy thud, and then a grunt.

“That wasn’t the door,” Hunter said as he rose to his feet.

“Oh, good.” Amy scoffed and held on to Desiree. “The alien can’t see in the dark.” Desiree giggled softly.

“Come on,” Hunter grunted. “It’s these damn bodies. You can’t see in both the dark and the light at once.”

“Well then maybe you should switch over,” Desiree chided weakly.

“Oh, I suppose it’s that easy for you, is it?” The alien yelped back at them.

“Hell no,” Desiree said. “But I’m not expected to ‘minimize casualty,’ now am I?”

“Not by your nature,” Hunter growled. “But you’re going to help me.”

Amy pulled Desiree closer to her, to prop her up more easily. She now had her hand just beneath her best friend’s left breast so that she would be the first to know when Desiree stopped breathing. Desiree didn’t mind the hand at all. “That tickles,” she whispered quickly to Amy. Amy grinned and stifled a chuckle.

“He’s right, though, Desiree. We have to help him out.”

“Well, okay. But I’m still going to mock him.”

“Oh, nothing wrong with that,” Amy grinned. The two had now advanced slowly, so as not to run into any walls, to Hunter and the general area of the door. Amy groped for the doorknob with her free right hand, and after a moment pushed the door open. The two of them limped forward into the hall. Hunter grabbed onto Desiree’s shoulder to follow. They paused and looked in all directions.

“It’s fucking dark,” Desiree said. Hunter and Amy both slowly nodded in agreement.

“How are we going to get down?” Amy asked, looking towards where she thought Hunter was.

“Your gun flashed light, didn’t it?” Desiree offered.

“That’s a very dangerous way to see,” Hunter said. “I could accidentally vaporize the staircase.”

“Not if you fire it at us,” Amy said suddenly.

“Wait, what?” Hunter asked.

“It’s programmed not to harm any living flesh, isn’t it?” She asked. She barely hesitated, but Desiree jumped in to complete the explanation.

“So it should just hit us and do nothing but light up the room!”

Hunter stared at them, his eyes adapted enough now to the darkness to see their silhouettes. They looked back at him, with a slightly lower amount of adaptation. After a moment, he opened his mouth to speak.

“You goddamned brilliant humans!” He cried happily. “I would have just sat here for the twenty minutes it would have taken me to reshape my eyes that finely, but your non-linear thinking just… solves it instantly! I love you!” He giggled.

“Fire at me,” Amy said as he raised the weapon. Desiree spun her head to stare at her. Amy smiled at her, though the injured woman couldn’t see it. “I’m not ready to risk him hitting part of you that’s already dead.” Desiree smiled faintly.

“You’re amazing,” she said quietly.

“You’re my best friend. You’re my soul mate.”

Hunter shook his head. Soul mate was a term that had always made him feel iffy. He fired the gun at Amy, and the hallway lit up for a few seconds.

“That felt really good,” Amy said happily after it got dark again.

“I could feel that warmth from here,” Desiree added.

“You should market that thing to lonely women,” Amy called back to Hunter. “Give us another flash, and let’s start heading down.” He did, and they started moving down the stairs.

* * *

Nole cried out when Fiona bit his shoulder, from pain and from love. The scream slowly fizzled out as she chewed, and as she ripped away from him, he fell. Camron erupted into a guttural growl, his hands clenching into fists.

To everyone’s surprise, Fiona stopped chewing when Nole hit the ground. She turned her head slowly and awkwardly to stare at his body. The room froze as she seemed to kneel down, her eyes seemed to soften…

And Nole’s eyes opened. He scrambled to his feet. There was a moment, where he and Fiona seemed to stare at each other…

And he turned and hissed at everyone in the room. Nole and Fiona shambled forward.

The lights went out. Nole and Fiona grunted shortly, then moaned a hiss together. No one could see them advancing.

There was a scrambling of feet. Joseph felt a crushing blow to the back of his head-and he was unconscious. Andy yelped as he felt a similar blow, and crumpled to the ground. Nurse Lotus heard them, and called out to the darkness, “What happened?”

Silence responded, and then she heard the gentlest voice she had ever heard. “I’m sorry,” Dr. Mabus said to her softly, just before he knocked her unconscious with the butt of Joseph’s rifle.

* * *

Darkness. Total darkness. Pain. Echoes…

Oh, ow. Oh, that really hurt.

Andy opened his eyes, to the bright triage room. He shielded them instinctively. He stood up, slowly remembering where he was, already ready to run. He allowed his eyes to shift to where they could handle the light.

There was no one there. He was completely alone. The power was back on. He rubbed the back of his head, and found a highly sensitive bump. He groaned.

In the center of the room, Andy recognized blood stains. From… stomach-wound-girl and wolf-boy, he recalled. He turned. Where the Nurse had been, there was a small pool. Then there was a thin trail of blood, along where she dragged herself and stopping near the other pools. On his other side, there was a very small spattering of blood on the ground where the angry man with the rifle had stood. Andy turned to where the Mexican boy… Mario? had fallen. There was a horrible mess of blood, and a small spattering of brains, but no corpse.

He was the only body in the room. And he was alive. He was having trouble deciding whether or not this was good news. He also debated whether the lights being on again was good news. That, he decided, was better. At least he stood a chance of running without hitting anything.

Eventually he began to walk. The stench of blood in that room was overpowering, and not for the first time he was noticing the stains on the walls and ceiling from the initial cleansing of the hospital. He shuddered and quickly went up the stairs.

There was still no one in sight, but all the lights were still on too. He was shivering now, and the throbbing at the back of his head was getting worse. He shoved open a door, and jumped back yelping.

There was nothing inside. At least, nothing he could see. It was dark. He jumped in and flipped on the light, then jumped back yelping again. There was still nothing inside. He sighed in relief, and stepped back. He tried the room directly across from that one in exactly the same manner. Still nothing. He began working his way down the hall, falling into a rhythm of pushing, yelping, jumping, jumping, flipping, yelping, jumping, sighing, advancing. He got all the way down that hall, around the corner, and to the next corner.

When he turned the next corner, a wild-eyed man pointed a silvery gun at him and fired. A wonderful, familiar, warm sensation filled his body, temporarily alleviating his fear. When the wild-eyed man lowered his gun sighing in relief, the sensation vanished, and Andy became terrified again.

“Oh, good. You’re safe.” Hunter said quickly. “Get behind me.” Behind him, Desiree and Amy, the latter still holding up the former, smiled cautiously at Andy. Andy looked around nervously.

“Er?” he asked.

“Er? Look, just get behind me. We don’t have time for these complicated questions like ‘er’ right now.”

“Uh?” Andy couldn’t find any words. He was staring at Hunter’s gun now.

“Oh, for crying out… Amy, tell him what’s going on.” Hunter shoved past Andy, and Desiree, with her free hand, grabbed onto him and began dragging him along.

Amy turned and smiled at him, then turned and smiled at Desiree. Desiree smiled back and let go of Andy’s arm. He walked briskly beside them.

“The dead are rising from their graves,” Amy began quickly. “It is an apocalyptic situation organized by some enemy of Hunter’s people. Hunter is an alien whose mission is to minimize casualties in apocalyptic situations. He has a ray gun that vaporizes most things including the dead, but it doesn’t work on living flesh and we’re not sure about undead flesh. When we went downstairs, everyone but you was gone, and we didn’t have time to wake you up, because Hunter decided we had to go find the others. Now we’re looking for them. Oh, and for a while, the lights were off.” She smiled at him again.

“Geh?” Andy asked.

“Gun. Not kill. You, asleep. Not awake. We didn’t wake you up. Now you’re awake. Now you help us find everyone.”

“Oh.” Andy still didn’t understand, but no one was giving him a straight answer, so he gave up. His head was really bothering him anyway.

“You find anything in those rooms down here?” Hunter asked abruptly as they turned back around the corner.

“Nothing,” Andy understood that.

“All that’s left, then, is the basement.”

“Morgue seems most likely,” Amy offered.

“Nah, too likely to get attacked,” Desiree said much more strongly than Andy expected her to be able to with the way that she was being carried. “We barred off the morgue when we first moved in, remember?”

“Opposite the morgue, then,” Hunter said quickly. The four went downstairs together, back into the triage. “What happened down here, by the way?” Hunter said quickly. “I count at least four dead and one wounded.”

“Uh? Oh. Um. There was a crazy Mexican kid, Mario…”

“That’s our mystery rapist,” Hunter said happily. Andy stared at him in utter bewilderment. “Go on, then, what happened?”

“He shot the Nurse and, um, that girl. Then Lee Harvey Oswald shot him and took the little girl.” Amy and Desiree stopped moving, but Hunter was unfazed. Andy kept pace. “The Doctor came down, and the girl died, and she bit the wolf-boy, and then they came at us. Then it went dark, and then it went darker.”

“So, Oswald’s been here, eh?” Hunter chuckled, moving through the triage room at his original brisk pace. “That bastard fucks with everyone’s plans. Damn Illuminati is lucky that he didn’t stop them entirely.”

“Wait, what?” Amy asked, she and Desiree catching up. “The Illuminati?”

“It’s complicated,” Hunter pushed open the doors on top of the stairs down to the basement, “But for now, it’ll do you to consider them the bad guys. They are responsible for the zombies.”

“Well, then, they’re definitely the bad guys,” Desiree said. Hunter stopped on the first step from the top and turned to her.

He opened his mouth as if to speak, but then shut it as if he had thought better. He stared into Desiree’s eyes for a moment. “Yes,” he finally said, before turning and descending down the stairs. The other three followed him without further question. Andy touched the back of his head gingerly again.

At the bottom of the stairs, he stopped and stared at the paint on the wall. It was a deathly blue, whereas the walls were a sickly green and resembled smoothed stucco. Both were arrows. The top one pointed right, and above it was written MORGUE. The lower one pointed left and beneath it was written AUTOPSIES. Hunter pointed left.

“That way,” he said quickly. The four of them turned left, turned a corner, and went through the double doors that Hunter pushed open.

Inside, there were two slab-like tables, short ends facing the doors. Strapped to the one on the left was the completely stationary body of Fiona, stripped naked and hacked to pieces. On the other one, a body writhed, growling clearly. At the navel, Doctor Mabus stood with a scalpel and a pair of tongs. As Andy, Hunter, Desiree, and Amy stood in the doorway, the Doctor lifted out some unidentifiable organ and set it gently in a scale. He glanced at the reading, scribbled it down, and went back to cutting Nole’s writhing body. Desiree swallowed her vomit.

“Jesus Christ…” Amy whispered.

“Please sit down,” Doctor Mabus said casually. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”

“You have t…” Hunter began to speak.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Andy screamed in interruption.

“He won’t listen,” Nurse Lotus’s voice came from the left. Andy was the first to turn, then Amy and Desiree. Hunter continued to glare at Doctor Mabus. To their left, there were two metal chairs. Tied to them were Nurse Lotus and Joseph, both of whom were awake. Joseph had a large blood stain on his upper-right-arm, and Nurse Lotus had a large mass of white bandage wrapped around her neck. A spot of red was visible on one side. Both were tied to their chairs. “He’s lost it,” Lotus said sadly. “He’s lost his mind.” Joseph nodded in agreement.

“Run,” he growled.

“Doctor, you have to stop this now.” Hunter said.

“No.” Doctor Mabus said, not looking up from his incisions. “I’m researching.”

“You have to shut down his brain. He’s going to kill everyone in here.”

“The Doctor will continue what he’s doing,” a bitter voice said from the darkness beyond the tables. Camron stepped forward, Joseph’s rifle leveled at Hunter’s head.

“Oh, fuck,” Hunter groaned and raised his hands. Amy and Desiree followed suit. Andy stared around dumbly.

“You should have run,” Joseph growled at them.

Episode 40.6: The Others

The silence in Waldo’s car was uncomfortable for everyone. It was punctuated by the hiss of the rain against the frame of the car. The engine was unusually silent. He glanced at Sally in the passenger’s seat. She looked furious and guilty. Waldo was used to feeling that way, and so empathized with her better than he had with anyone in months. And he knew that the cure for him was always a distraction. But he didn’t know what had her feeling that way, so he had to think very hard for what would be a good distraction.

Sally was staring ahead, at the road. She didn’t know what to do, at all. She wasn’t used to not knowing what to do. Her family hated her. Her lies had come out into the open-all of them. Joe was dead. All of the agents of the Department of Extranormal Affairs were dead. Her family hated her. Dawn was never going to trust her again. Mina was some sort of zombie. Jennifer was back. Her family hated her. It all came back to that fact, that her family hated her. Everything she had done over the last ten years had been for her family. And now it had all blown up in her face.

Marty and Jack did not hate Sally. They knew this. They thought that she understood it too. Oh, they were angry at her, no doubt about it. Hell, they could tell that she was angry at herself. That made it better, somehow, knowing that she knew she had done it wrong. Jack had already gotten to the point where he had accepted that his wife had been trying to do the right thing, and while he would be short with her, he would not be giving her the silent treatment.

Marty and her mother had never gotten along perfectly. After Dawn’s coma started, Marty got depressed. She became rebellious and reckless. There’s a lot of psychology about attention and parenting and All Kids Are Like This and probably some Oedipus or Elektra complex in there. Really, Marty was just scared. And Sally was scared too. They ended up at odds with each other. But not so much that they ever stopped loving each other. And this was just another one of those instances. Sally didn’t know that.

Waldo took a glance in his mirrors at the three family members staring angrily out their windows. He couldn’t stand it any longer, and brought up what he hoped was the most harmless topic.

“So, Mina, huh?” Jack cringed, and Sally began to turn to glare at Waldo. Marty slouched. Waldo didn’t notice. “That was pretty amazing, what she did.” Silence filled the car again, and Waldo ignored the uncomfortable looks. “And when she came out with all of you. She didn’t have a scratch on her.” He waited again. He glanced at the clock; it read 4:00. “Too bad, isn’t it?”

“You should have told her, mom,” Marty said suddenly. Sally’s eyes softened and she looked back to the window.

“You don’t know what it was like,” she said quietly.

“I know damn well what it was like. I… We went through just as much as you did. But none of us went through what Dawn did.”

“You didn’t know what was happening!” Sally burst, tears beginning to fall from her eyes. “You don’t know what I had to do to find the answer!”

“You could have told us,” Marty said coldly. “We could have helped. We love Dawn at least as much as you do.”

“I was sworn to secrecy.”

“You were sworn to secrecy? About what? What were you doing that we couldn’t know about? It was all for Dawn, wasn’t it?”

“It’s more complicated than that, Marty. I joined the DEA so that I could save Dawn. But they needed me to do other things! There are weirder things out there than you know of! I have slain vampires, Marty! I’ve locked up Werewolves! I have stopped alien invasions!”

“But you couldn’t tell us what you were doing about my big sister? About your eldest child? And then you couldn’t tell her what had happened?”

“What?” Waldo said loudly. He was becoming more bewildered by the moment.

“It would have driven her insane! She may have fallen back into catatonia!”

“Honey, your mother was trying to do the right thing,” Jack said softly. “If she hadn’t kept her job secret from us, they would have kicked her out. Dawn might never have woken up.”

“That doesn’t excuse not telling Dawn…! That doesn’t excuse making us lie!”

“It made sense when she woke up, Marty. She always lived her dream in a haze; it was easier just to convince her that she had been in a coma for a few months, and that it was messing with her memory. It really was too dangerous to her to tell the truth.” Sally smiled faintly at her husbands words. “But that doesn’t mean it was right.” The smile faded. Jack turned to look at his wife. “It was a mistake, not telling her the truth. She deserved to know. She may have figured other things out. She’s a strong girl, Sally. She would have survived. You screwed up-but we helped you.”

Sally began to say something in her defense, but then decided against it. Marty knew from looking at her father that it was unwise to continue asking. Jack had nothing more to say. The three of them returned to sulking.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Waldo asked loudly and almost squeakily. He glared at all of them during a moment when he felt that he could look away from the road. They ignored him.

“What the hell?” he repeated. No one answered.

* * *

Sylvie gripped the steering wheel of her sleek car fiercely. She glared at the tail lights of ugly van through the rain.

“What are you doing?” Elli asked after about twenty seconds, a gentle chuckle in his words.

Sylvie blinked. “I’m not really sure,” she admitted, giggling a little.

“Well, stop. It’s really creepy.” She turned and smiled kindly at him-not her usual seductive smile, but an honest, caring smile. Elli smiled back at her.

After a moment, Elli spoke again. “I guess that wasn’t it.” Sylvie laughed despite herself.

“All of us made it out!” She squeaked her voice with surprise. “You thought that we were going to charge in and die, didn’t you? Your life flashed past your eyes!” She added a dramatic flair to it.

“Actually, just about every time I’m near you, my life flashes past my eyes. Remember the time you pushed me out the window?”

“Hey, there were bars to catch you there!”

“You pushed me through glass!”

“Oh, you were fine.”

“Funny, that. Not a scratch on me. But that was just dumb luck. Now Mina? How’d she do that?” They sat and thought for a few seconds.

“You don’t have any idea either, do you?” Elli asked.

“Not a clue.”

“I’m glad she survived.” He looked in the backseat. “I’m also glad that she gave me her rifle."

“I’m sorry I’m so cruel,” Sylvie said suddenly. “I’m sorry that I’m always trying to seduce everyone, I’m sorry most of all for hurting you.” Elli tried to say something, but she spoke too quickly for him to interrupt. “That was the worst. Because I wasn’t even trying to seduce you. I was really trying to comfort you. But you thought, and rightly so, that I was being my usual self. So, I’m sorry.” She paused, and before Elli could start to speak, said softly, “And I’m sorry about your family.”

All Elli could say, with a certain softness in his voice, was “I’m sorry too.” They sat in silence for a minute before he said “Thank you.” Sylvie reached out her hand to him, somehow doing it differently than she usually did, making it clear that it was just so that he would have something to hold. He took it and squeezed it. She squeezed back.

There was only sorrow and friendship in that car just then.

* * *

“Okay, everyone’s obviously stressed out,” Waldo said a minute after the seventh time he tried to get a member of Dawn’s family to explain to him what they were talking about. “We need to pull over and sleep.”

“We’ll need shelter,” Sally said automatically.

“We don’t have time,” Waldo stifled a yawn. “Sylvie and Mina haven’t slept for twenty hours; they’re liable to pass out at the wheel.” Actually, though he would never admit it, he was worried that he would fall asleep at the wheel. He hadn’t slept for over 44 hours, and much of that time awake had drawn adrenaline out of him.

“Oh. Well, we could sleep in Jennifer’s van.” No one could have missed the way that Sally spat Jennifer’s name.

“Right. Let’s pull over and talk about it.” Waldo put on his turn signal and pulled to the side of the road. Jennifer’s van idly followed without a turn signal. Sylvie rapidly followed suit, ignoring the turn signal herself. Mina pulled over right behind her.

Everyone piled out of the cars. Waldo and Sally were first, and advanced quickly to the space between Sylvie and Mina’s cars. Waldo was careful to stand near Sylvie’s door. Sylvie sighed at him from within her car and opened it. Elli got out too, and stood next to Sally. Jack and Marty caught up to the group just as Mina and Dawn climbed out of Mina’s car. All looked up and took a smiling note of the fact that the rain had stopped.

“Why’re we stopping?” Elli asked, leaning against Sylvie’s car.

“Everyone’s tired,” Jack replied. “Some of us are almost at each other’s throats. We need to sleep.”

“What about shelter?” Sylvie asked.

Marty stifled a yawn. “Too tired to look much.”

“Jennifer’s van is best,” Waldo said. “Todd said that they have blankets in there anyway.”

There was silence for a minute.

“Where are Todd and Jennifer?” Mina asked.

“Dammit!” Sally yelled. She dashed towards the front of Jennifer’s van, Waldo matching her speed on the other side. Mina and Dawn were directly behind them, and the others followed quickly, albeit they weren’t quite sure why.

Sally prepared to rip open the door, but first looked in the window. Waldo mimicked her actions precisely. Both of them stared. Mina and Dawn skidded to a halt right behind them. When the others caught up, they gathered around the front of the van to join in the staring.

There was silence for a minute.

“Wow.”

“Yeah.”

“I didn’t see that coming,” Mina said. For the first time that she had seen Jennifer in ten years, she sounded more confused than afraid.

“She has really nice legs,” was all Dawn could think to say.

“His aren’t bad either,” Sylvie offered.

“They do look strong?” Elli’s voice squeaked a little. He did his best not to look at anything specific, but his voice betrayed just whose legs he was talking about.

“He’s hairier than me!” Waldo burst-quieter than his usual bursts. He folded his arms and looked straight ahead, forcing himself to think only of Sylvie.

“Only on his legs, far as you know,” Marty snickered. She was enjoying the whole sight.

“Let’s be glad we can’t see much more,” Jack chuckled, almost approvingly. He ducked out of the way of a flying sock.

“Yet,” Dawn and Marty added together. The latter picked the sock up from behind her father and tossed it back into the van.

“Does he know how old she is?” Sally grabbed the car door again.

“I told him,” Mina said distantly.

“I didn’t know Todd liked older women,” Dawn said awkwardly.

“I just knew Todd liked women,” Waldo said in his usual level tones.

“Did anyone else notice how hot she is?” Elli said urgently.

“Todd did. Obviously.” Jack chuckled approvingly again.

“As much as I hate her,” Sally referred to Jennifer with the same disdain again, “If it weren’t for the two of them, none of us would be here.”

“Mom’s right,” Marty said. “I think we should let them sleep in the van tonight. Well, by sleep, I mean…”

“Yes, we know what you mean,” Sylvie said.

Everyone froze. Another sock flew out; Elli caught it and tossed it back through the windshield.

“Well. They’re slowly squeezing into the back.”

“How many blankets did Todd say there were?”

“He didn’t.”

“We’d better check.”

“There goes her shirt.”

“I hadn’t expected quite a plain bra.”

Everyone paused for another minute.

“We should leave them two blankets.”

“Yeah, let’s get around the back.”

Everyone hesitated for a little longer, and went around to the back. Dawn and Elli were last.

“You know,” Elli confided to the other seven as they unloaded some of the blankets, “This is what Todd’s always wanted. Do you know what that means?”

“That he’s really lucky?” Waldo suggested.

“Not so much,” Elli retorted. “Didn’t any of you ever watch that show Lost a few years back?”

“The bizarre one with the polar bears and that space ship?” Sylvie asked.

“That’s the one.”

“The one where nothing made sense?” Jack asked.

“Exactly.”

“The one where an episode or two after someone got what they wanted and had their past resolved they got killed off?” Marty asked.

“Bingo,” Elli said morosely. Everyone froze again, mid unpacking of the blankets.

“I’ll take first watch,” all eight said in unison.

Episode 40.3: Jennifer

A moment after they left Mina’s house, Todd realized that he was sitting in Jennifer’s lap as she drove. He blushed and ducked between her arm and leg, crawling across towards the passenger side. He hesitated to distractedly brush the glass off of the seat, and as he did felt her thighs against his legs. He blushed harder and crawled past.

Jennifer blushed a little too. She had felt three things against her thighs. She was pretty sure that he hadn’t noticed the third one.

Todd had noticed the third one; it had “sprouted” when he was distractedly brushing the glass of his seat; He liked the feel of her thighs against his own. He thought he had moved on quickly enough that she hadn’t noticed, but worrying about it made him blush a little more. He crossed his legs to try to hide it.

They sat in silence for about three minutes. The silence was broken only by the sound of the rain sputtering against the hood and the ancient engine sputtering against motion. It took them three minutes for them to notice that the rain was also sputtering against them. She cleared her throat.

“Why are we driving into it?” Todd asked in response.

“I don’t think Waldo likes me very much,” Jennifer blushed a little, pointing to his car ahead of them.

“I doubt that’s it. He probably just didn’t notice that your windshield was broken.”

“He seems like he notices a lot of things.”

“Now I see why they call it a windshield,” Todd evaded. “They should call it a rainshield too, though.”

“You seem like you notice a lot of things too,” she said quietly. “What did you and Mina talk about?”

Todd hesitated for a moment. He hadn’t thought about what he was going to say to her at this point since just before Mina had told him that she had died. He couldn’t remember what he had been thinking.

“Well?” she prompted.

“We talked about her,” he said. He looked up into her worried face and smiled. “Watch the road,” he said softly, “And let’s talk about you.”

She whimpered, an action that wasn’t familiar to her, as she turned back towards the road. A few drops of rain hit her face sharply. She hoped they would keep coming, because she wasn’t supposed to cry.

“You’re going to hate me,” she whispered.

“I’ll be the judge of that,” he said. “What happened to you?”

She whimpered again and tried not to look at him.

“Eleven years ago,” her eyes became unfocused and looked ahead. “I lived below the poverty line. I went to a high school where, for a while, things made sense.” She gripped the steering wheel, and hoped, almost prayed that Waldo wasn’t going to turn. “Then people started getting killed.

“I had a boyfriend. His name was…” she gulped. “His name was Bernard Rexi. We had been dating for only a week and then he…” She gulped again. “He was the sixth victim. And that wasn’t the worst of it! My best friends, my ONLY two friends, were ninth and tenth. I got mad.

“More people died. I knew some of them-some were theatre kids, like me. Some were jocks. The killer didn’t have a pattern. It just killed people. Different ways every time.” She paused. “By the end of the school year, half the students had been pulled out by their parents. Half the rest had been killed. My parents couldn’t pull me out-they weren’t around. I couldn’t leave, either. I had nowhere to go. I prayed to be the next victim.

“The day after the last day of school, there were a bunch of people who went back to school. They had figured out what it was, that was killing everyone. It wasn’t a person, they said, not exactly. I was going to go with them. To stop it. But when I got there, I hesitated. Joe was there; he didn’t like me then, either, but he said that he needed my help. To stop it all. He tried to get me to go in, and I was about to, when two men in a van…” She hesitated again, and looked around. “In this van. They came out. They told me to come with them, that I had a future with them. I had the feeling that they had been trying to get me all year. I was about to run into the school with Joe, to get away from them, but they hit him over the head with… A thing. I had to run. But they caught me. They threw me into their van, and then… It exploded.”

“You mean the school?” Todd asked.

“Whatever was in the school. I never found out for sure what happened. They knew, but they wouldn’t tell me.” She shut her eyes. “When they took me with them, to… Their headquarters, they told me some of what was going on. The wrong kind of energy had turned up underneath the school. It was killing people, and they couldn’t get rid of it. But someone at the school could; they just didn’t know who. They had to keep it open. They had paid off the principal to keep it open, so that the students would figure out how they could get rid of the energy. All they would tell me about that night was that the energy was gone now.

“I didn’t have anywhere else to go, anyone else to go to, so I joined them. That was ten years ago.” She laughed scoffingly. “Ten years ago, I thought I was joining the right sort of people. They made me stop aging, somehow. They said that it kept recruits healthier, to stop the aging process. I guess that’s why they did it. No one else in the organization aged, except for the really young ones.

“Five years ago, they finally told me who they really were. They were the Illuminati. The real ones. The secret hand that kept the world spinning. I could accept that. They gave me my black cloak, and sent me out to recruit people into the lower levels.” She smiled bitterly. “My first recruit, he was amazing. He shot up and was higher than me within three years. I was so proud of him at the time.

“A year ago, I found out that the Illuminati hadn’t been trying to get rid of the energy at all. They had been feeding it. They had wanted it to keep killing people.” She growled. “Population control, they said. They thought that I was the one with the power to close it. That’s why they had taken me that night. That was the only reason that I had been invited. I became angry. I thought I could hide it from them, but I couldn’t. Because right after, I found out about what they were doing… On July Fourth, 2013.”

“That’s yesterday!” Todd yelled.

“Yeah.”

“You mean, you were in the Illuminati, and they’re the ones who…”

“They called up the zombies. They escaped, to another universe. I objected. They knew they couldn’t handle me anymore. But I knew too much,” she giggled madly, “For them to kill me.

“They locked me up. They barely fed me, just enough to keep me alive. They barely clothed me. They gave me a rusty mattress to sleep on. I couldn’t stand it. Someone had to know.

“Around the time that 2013 started, I escaped. They chased me for a few months, but I managed to lose them. I managed to convince them that I was dead.” She looked nervously over her shoulder. Todd knew that it was towards the strange black box in the back.

“I tried to claim a normal life. I tried to forget what they were going to do yesterday. I tried to convince myself that I had been crazy. I tried to convince myself that no one would leave the world in that much ruin. I guess that my death didn’t change their mind at all. It may even have convinced them that it was even more urgent to get out of here. They went through with it.”

“My god…”

“I’m sorry, Todd. I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you… Anything. I’m sorry that I couldn’t stop them. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you that I was thirty. I’m sorry that I lied to you. I’m sorry.”

“Almost thirty,” Todd said, laughing a little. She looked at him, confused.

“Jennifer, you’ve been through hell. You’ve been through, like, three hells.” He smiled at her. “You were right to lie. I probably wouldn’t have believed it. You had to keep yourself safe. You did what you could to stop them-but there wasn’t much you could do, was there? The age thing… I don’t mind. I don’t think the law is going to have anything to say about it. I don’t think the law is going to have anything to say about anything for a while.”

“Todd?” She whimpered.

“You have nothing to apologize for,” he smiled.

“The rain isn’t still coming in, is it?” she coughed.

“No, it’s not. Your face is still getting wet, though.” She smiled, and her body shook with a sob. She unbuckled her seatbelt, and flung herself forward, wrapping her arms around him. She stopped pretending that she wasn’t crying. He squeezed her tightly, shut his eyes, and smiled kindly. “It’s alright, Jennifer… Let it all out.”

She hadn’t sobbed for more than ten years. She hadn’t been held in someone’s arms for even longer. Both felt wonderful.

The convoy had stopped, the van included, almost two minutes ago. Neither of them had noticed on a conscious level. She had been following Waldo’s car unthinkingly, and had gone exactly where he had gone.

Jennifer squeezed Todd tightly, the two being separated now only by their clothes. He squeezed her as tightly as she squeezed him, and the two knew, for sure, that they were in love. They knew because neither felt the third bit “sprout” until she had stopped sobbing so much. When she did, she chuckled gently, took her head up from his shoulder and stared into his eyes. She smiled, her eyes glistening from the tears. He smiled, his eyes telling her that everything was alright.

They kissed.

Episode 40: Dawn and Mina

Mina found herself driving more pointedly than she really meant to. She was surprised by this at first, but then remembered who was in her passenger seat. She shivered and accepted the pointed driving as something she had to do.
Dawn was busy staring at her. If Mina had been able to gather the courage to look at the eyes that she could feel staring at her, she would have been even more surprised. Dawn, though her stare was piercing and curious, was not entirely in the present. This shone through in her eyes, giving them an eerie sort of faded intensity. She found herself drifting through the past, trying to remember a day that to her was less than a year ago. But… She couldn’t remember it. It kept fading in and out. In fact, she couldn’t remember much of anything from that year before the coma.
Finally she broke the silence. “You saved us.”
Mina let out a breath, and lessened her grip on the steering wheel ever so slightly. She didn’t respond.
“You saved us,” Dawn repeated.
“I wonder if I can say the same to you,” Mina wanted to say. Instead, she said nothing.
Dawn thought for a moment. She considered repeating herself again, but thought better of it. “How did you get through the house without being killed?”
“Not sure,” Mina said.
“You weren’t even hurt.”
“I was killed,” Mina said quickly and quietly.
“What?”
“I was killed. It was the seventh time.” Mina couldn’t staunch the tears. The tears always came when she talked about her condition.
“Oh. Why?” Dawn was calm. She snapped back into the present, deciding that she wouldn’t be able to remember what she needed to remember.
“I don’t know. I don’t know!” Mina screamed, letting go of the steering wheel and slamming her hands against it.
They sat in silence for a minute, the only sound was the sound of the engine, the sound of rain on the body of the car, and the occasional sound of Mina sobbing.
“It’s my fault, isn’t it?” Dawn didn’t look away, and now her voice was soft, but not quiet. Mina glared at the road.
“I don’t know.”
“I think it is.”
“If you hadn’t…”
“What happened on that night?” Dawn asked suddenly. “All I can remember is a lot of light.”
Mina moved her hands around the steering wheel, trying to wring it nervously. The nervousness was incidental. She hesitated, but Dawn didn’t look away. She opened her mouth a few times, but couldn’t seem to put it together.
“What happened, Mina? What happened to you, and Jennifer, and to me? I can’t remember, Mina. I can’t remember what happened.” Mina turned away from the road, a look of worried horror slapped across her face. She stared at Dawn, filled with terror.
“You can’t remember? You can’t remember the night that…” Mina made a sound somewhere between a scoff, a chuckle, and a groan. She turned back to the road, and paused.
“You jumped in.” Mina said it very simply, but she was saying a lot with it. She was saying that she didn’t understand why Dawn had jumped in, she was saying that she didn’t understand what had happened when Dawn had jumped in, she was saying that there was something for Dawn to have jumped into.
“Into the... Into the darkness?” Dawn asked. Her voice was getting nervous, confused. She clearly didn’t know why she had jumped in, had no idea what had happened after she had jumped in, and didn’t know what she could have jumped into. Mina grimaced.
“Best way to put it. It was… A spinning… A hovering… It was a thing. A thing made of darkness.”
“What was it?”
“It was the reason.” Mina jumped at her own words. She suddenly understood most of what had happened that year, or at least understood how it related to her. She looked at the road.
“The reason…” Dawn whispered. She looked out towards the road. “Something else happened,” she said after a moment. “What else happened? Something happened with you and me…”
“You kissed me before you jumped.” Mina stared ahead. “It was a passionate kiss. It was… desperate.”
“Oh.” The memory came back to Dawn. But… It wasn’t quite…
“It would have been nice,” Mina said kindly but sharply, “If I thought kissing girls was nice.” Here was a mundane problem. Here was something that Mina knew how to handle. Here was the sort of problem that, 11 years ago, she had expected to deal with on a day to day basis.
“Oh. I’m… sorry.” Dawn sounded cold.
“It’s alright,” Mina said brightly, grabbing the normality of the situation, holding on for dear life. “I’ll let it go this time, because you’re so cute.”
Dawn slid the pieces of her memory into their positions in her mental jigsaw.
“I wasn’t me.”
“What?”
“That whole year, I wasn’t really me. I, on my own, I wouldn’t ever jump into a… thing. I would never have kissed you for my last kiss.” Mina turned and stared at Dawn with bemusement. “I did want to kiss you. Don’t get me wrong. I was deeply attracted to you. But I never was or wanted to be in love with you. The other thing in me was.”
Mina blinked. Dawn smiled faintly, as if what she said had made perfect sense. Mina turned to watch the road.
“I wonder what it was?” Dawn asked rhetorically, looking forward out the windshield.
“It was normal,” Mina said bitterly.
“Pardon?”
“It was normal, and you made it stop being normal! Why couldn’t it just be that you kissed me? That was simple. That was just me rejecting you. But now there was something else inside of you? Something that made you kiss me? That’s not normal! IT SHOULD BE NORMAL!” Mina was screaming.
Dawn looked nervously out of the passenger’s side window. “Sorry,” she mumbled.
Mina stopped screaming. Now tears rolled down her face. Steaming, angry, lonely tears.

Episode 39: Saviors

Sunny pulled the trigger and was immediately recoiling more than he had expected to. He saw something shine just above his face, realized that he couldn’t breathe, and felt the ground hit his back and ass from below. He hated that sharp feeling in his gut.
Zach dove out of the path of the shards from the shotgun shell just in time to avoid the searing pain and death they likely would have caused. Midway through his dive, he managed to change his trajectory in order to roll towards Sunny, driving his sword upwards and forwards.
Kevin elbowed his captor in the gut immediately after the shotgun blast erupted, freeing him and knocking his captor to the floor. He himself stumbled partway across the room.
Zach was confused as to why his sword hadn’t come back coated in blood. He climbed quickly to a crouch and tried to take survey of the room. He discovered that the shining barrel of a shotgun was pointed directly at his face, a level that would normally be at waist level. He reached for his sword sheath.
Sunny stopped his head spinning and began to take survey of the room; he was pressed against a wall, and the chinese kid was directly ahead of him. He leveled the shotgun without standing and pulled the trigger.
Kevin spun and took survey of the room. The crazy guy who looked familiar was against a wall, firing the shotgun again. The crazy chinese kid who felt familiar was pulling his sword’s hilt out. Kevin ducked and started running towards the crazy chinese kid who felt familiar. As he did he noticed that the cameras were now pointed at the room that the three of them were in.
Zach lifted his sword sheath from its steady position at his hip and swung it in an arc ahead of him. It stopped the shell’s pieces without any trouble, eliciting a gasp from those gathered in the station. Zach began to complete the motion with a forward run and forward swing of his sword, but was knocked off his feet to the side.
Sunny opened his eyes to discover a complete lack of his foe in his field of vision. He stood up and deftly reloaded his shotgun, and without hesitation he fired twice into the crowd who had gathered. They screamed; that was all Sunny knew about what happened to them. He began looking for his nemesis as he reloaded once more.
Zach swung his sword at his assailant; it swept cleanly through the air. Zach was pissed and began to stand up. The assailant was gone-and charging at Sunny. Zach scrambled to his feet and charged and Sunny as well.
Kevin crashed into Sunny, who was unaware of his approach. The shotgun went flying into the air. Zach swung his katana at it rapidly, slicing it into five pieces. He dashed to the other two, pointing his sword at Sunny’s gut and holding the sheath against Kevin’s neck. Kevin in the meantime had a knife of indeterminate origin pressed against Sunny’s chest. Sunny was unarmed and spiteful.
A crunching noise could be heard over the deafening silence.
All three of them suddenly felt a very sharp pain.

“Hruuuuuh ” Laban grunted as he slammed the Sword of His Name through yet another zombie, and part of a door. He was developing new grunts every time that he swung the sword; it kept things from becoming monotonous. They had, in the last hour, liberated three households from zombie wrath. Laban had counted himself as having killed ten zombies. He personally considered this an impressive number, especially for such a tedious action. He had always thought that killing zombies would be very rewarding, but right now, all it was was hitting things.
Hanh and Ujer, however, were both enjoying it greatly. Bang, drop, bang, drop. Both of them chalked their enjoyment up to completing the mission prescribed to them, assisting god, the fact that they were saving others... But deep down, it was just carnally enjoyable. It was really just icing on the bloody zombie corpse, so to speak, that they were saving lives at the same time.
Three families had been rescued, one of three, one of four, and one a pair of two. For simplicity, we will gloss over their names, descriptions, and histories, as they really are not important characters at all. You should know, though, that each of them has a very human life and backstory, and has done good and bad things, has made moral choices, has developed relationships and, in short, is just like you the reader, except not. And they likely have amusing and irrelevant connections to other things going on in the story. Perhaps one of them was Cody’s best friend; perhaps one of them had been a longtime follower of Quasimodo Weishaupt; it’s even possible that one of them would, under normal circumstances, have been Bob the Assassin’s or Joan Riese’s next target, or the next conquest of Martin or Delaileh. None of them would fulfil that near-destiny, however, as they would be too busy being... Well, you’ll find out what’s going to happen to them later. Right now, their importance is that they exist and have bene rescued by Laban and his two cohorts. Now, they follow him as one should follow a savior: diligently. They grab tire irons and crowbars and other makeshift weaponry every time they come across some. One unusually brave survivor pulled a gun off of an unusually dead policeman.
Laban sighed as he examined the carnage at the fourth house. The small army had, in the process of slaying the five zombies inside, smashed a large number of doors, counters, and one rocking horse. He stepped out of the house casually, hoping that no one would see him and he could get away to save the world on his own. It didn’t work; his eleven followers came out moments behind him. Wait, no, twelve-they had rescued a single person from this household. She looked to be about eight years old. In one hand she held a plastic baseball bat; in the other, a stuffed toy bat. Something about that image made Laban cringe.
“Okay. Next house.” He said with a sigh. The first eleven nodded; the twelfth sniffled, rose her bat, and clutched her bat close. They walked to the next house on the block-number 2317 Clark Ave.-and knocked on the door.
“Anyone need rescuing?” Laban shouted. “Because we’re a rescue party. I’ve got a goddamned magical sword and twelve followers. If you don’t respond, a crazy man-that is, me-is going to burst into your door and start lopping off heads. If you would rather not fuel what may be my insanity, just say so, and you can risk the zombies-which are, at best, a mass hallucination-on your own.” There was a moment of silence.
“There are five of us. Do you have food?” a timid male voice called out from the door. Laban cursed.

Joan stood in the hallway of the strange house in which a nervous party had earlier been held, and in which Excalibur had spontaneously appeared. When she considered this in tandem with the fact that she was protecting human life, she wondered what the hell had happened to her moral code. She put it down to being awakened by an attack on her own room by the living dead. That sort of thing can really cause a shock to your system that will turn your ethics on their ears.
She peeked into the room where the party-goers were trying to sleep restlessly. As if they hadn’t doen enough of that on the roof. She scoffed at the fact that they needed more than three hours of sleep every two days. She wouldn’t admit it aloud, but the scoff was only bitter about being forced to wait; there was no jealousy. Joan Riese, unlike every single super-powered creature in existence besides herself, had absolutely no desire to lead a “normal” life. She completely and utterly enjoyed her life of assassination and ass-kicking. She envied these normal people only in that they didn’t have to take orders. Or, at least, they didn’t seem to.
Well, come to think of it, neither did she, now. She had chosen to stay with these people, to protect them through the night. Why would she do such a thing without being ordered...? Had she any training, she would have known that in her eighteen years on the planet, she had developed a need to be ordered. Had she any training in political literature, she would have thought that now that her masters had become the shambling dead, perhaps The People were her masters. But she had not had any training in either of those fields. She had been taught English, Spanish, French, German, and a multitude of other languages. She had also learned, quite thoroughly, human anatomy, biology, and enough physics and practical calculus to make a college professor’s brain hurt.
Though Joan couldn’t realize these things, she could realize that one of the people had been watching her all night. In fact, in just an hour of watching Joan, Lucy had already figured out the things that Joan couldn’t figure out. Lucy knew of Joan’s life only that she had been subjugated to masters; she didn’t know about the assassin part. But she knew sympathetically that Joan was doomed to never be truly independent. Lucy also knew that, in a situation like this one, sacrifices had to be made. She frowned grimly at her own thoughts, and retreated from watching the troubled young woman. She tried to sleep in Steve’s arms, as she reflected with sorrow on their new savior.
Joan didn’t relax at all when Lucy stopped watching her. Peoples’ minds were a mystery to her, except for her targets. She now had a strange desire to target Lucy. She had never picked a target herself before-she didn’t want to start with an apparently nice woman.
She sat down outside of the community sleeping room and clutched Excalibur tightly. She wondered when she had decided to stay behind and guard these people as she drifted off to sleep.

“Laban,” Ujer said urgently.
“What is it?” He asked gruffly, tired of hearing his name spoken.
“You’ve got an army.”
Laban sat up from his intended-bed on a cafeteria table in the gym of an abandoned elementary school. Surrounding him on the floor, some sleeping, some shaking, some crying and some, most disturbingly to him, staring at him reverentially, were about sixty people of varying ages. Each of them held or had near them some sort of makeshift weapon, or a gun that they had happened to have or had recieved from the small cache that Laban’s friends had carried with them from S-Mart.
Laban knew, with a sinking feeling in his stomach, that these people would follow him until he died, they died, or all the zombies died. If it was the latter, it’d probably e even longer. If it was the former... Well, they would think that it would be longer.
“Ezekial, eat your heart out,” he muttered sardonically. Hanh chuckled obediently at his side, at Laban gave him a look that could create something to crash the Titanic. Hanh didn’t respond to the look. Laban cringed.
“Our elder thinks he’s Joseph Smith and tells me that I’m a poorly developed villain in The Book of Mormon. He also thinks that said barely villain has to be redeemed before the world finds its way to ending. And now I’m the leader of an army.” He said it aloud, the fifth time he said it to himself. “What the fuck?”
“Master!” one of the reverential ones-the one who had come from the fifth house with four family members-called out. Laban cringed again. It was almost becoming habit.
“What is it, Disciple Dohntkallmeethat?” He commanded. Dohntkallmeethat thought for a moment, and then figured out what his new name meant.
“Oh. Um. Well, we’re going to be hungry soon.” Disciple Dohntkallmeethat said timidly.
“Oh, good.” Laban crumpled back to lie down. “I don’t suppose anyone has a loaf of bread and a few fish?” There was a moment of silence.
“Er... I don’t think so, master.”
“Go away, Disciple Dohntkallmeethat.”
“Yes master.” Dohntkallmeethat retreated without concern about being insulted.
“Laban...”
“Quiet, Hanh. I want quiet. I want to sleep.”
“I think you’re their... Our new savior,” Ujer said calmly.
Laban sighed and pushed his sword aside. “Religion sucks.”

The three men reached down to their own stomachs, to feel for the pain. Zach dropped his sword’s sheath to do so. When they pulled back their hands, only one of them had any blood on it.
“No, that’s not...” Kevin whimpered. All three looked down at the gaping wounds in their own and each other’s stomach. Only Kevin’s oozed any precious bodily fluids. The edges of Sunny’s wound suddenly turned to a silvery ooze which stretched over the wound and seemed to become his skin. A tear in the shirt remained. Zach’s wound skipped the silvery ooze part and just scabbed over, not resembling his flesh itself very much at all. Blood dripped to the floor beneath Kevin.
“Nooooo....” He moaned.
“Shit,” Zach said abruptly.
“I hate finding out that I’m not human!” Sunny roared. He pushed forward, impaling his neck on the sword. He continued forward, the hatred in his eyes becoming absolute. Most people looking into those eyes at that moment would have been shocked to find that Sunny’s hate was not already absolute. Most people would go mad at an attempt to understand all the hatred that now filled his eyes. At that instant, all of the hatred in the universe began to funnel into Sunny. This would have been incomprehensible to most people. Zach was not most people. He realized and understood all of this. Mostly though, he didn’t give a damn.
Zach swept his sword directly down. It went directly down, right through where his spine should have been, right through where the concavity of his chest should have been, right through where his belly button should have been, right through the space between his thighs, and emerged from where the source of most male hatred comes from should have been. Zach did not look away from those hateful eyes through this slice, staring back into them with a dark intensity that action heroes dream of achieving. Neither broke their eye connection while the bisection all the way down Sunny’s body became filled with a liquidy, silvery substance which quickly reformatted itself into an approximation of what Sunny’s body had once looked like.
“Fuck,” Zach said when the hateful eyes didn’t fade out. Sunny didn’t even bother explaining what about this he hated. He punched Zach with a force that would usually be described in quantities of trucks. Zach did not bend to it, but sliced at Sunny’s shoulder. It was a smooth, unstoppable arc. It bounced off of Sunny with a deathly clang.
“Fuck!” Zach screamed. Sunny did not change his face at all. He shoved Zach aside, knocking him to the floor, and charged through the hole in the wall.
Zach climbed to his feet, lifted his sword, and began to walk towards the hall.
“Zach,” a voice coughed from the floor just behind him. Zach sighed and turned to look at Kevin. “Zach, you have to… Stay here through… The night… I’m going to… Die.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Zach said, without sympathy.
“I know… What you both are….. Dreams… Close dreams!”
“What the fuck are you talking about hobo man?”
“Zach… You know me!” And Kevin suddenly died.
“Fuck. Someone give me a pillow.” He sat down and leaned against the wall a few feet away from Kevin’s body, careful not to touch the pool of blood. He almost reached to rub the aching area where Sunny had punched him, but slowly realized that it didn’t ache.
A cameraman fainted. Silence filled the air.
“Someone get our new savior a pillow!” Chaz yelled to the gathered populous.

Cody Sky Episode 1-The Night

To be alive, all that Cody needed was to feel the wind against his face as he meditated. The grass beneath him was cool. The sky above him was empty. The Sky inside him was full. The world around him was serene. He opened his eyes after ten minutes and watched a troop of black helicopters fly overhead, overlapped by twittering birds. The dog in the next yard had been barking for the last ten minutes, at the yeowling cats another yard down. Cody smiled and stood calmly as his own dog, Mr. T, bounded up slobberingly. As he reached down to ruffle the fur atop the dog’s head with his right hand, he reached up to his own curly-brown afro with his left. He had taken some flak from his classmates about being a white boy with an Afro, but as he couldn’t help his hair style very much he ignored them. Coming down from his spiritual high from the meditation, he began to think about how he got Mr. T.
Cody had always been a smart kid. When he was one year old, he was walking and talking. At eighteen months he was reading. At two years, he had realized that his skin was white, but other kids had tan, brown, and black skin, and that didn’t matter. At three, he understood the basics of death. At four, he had read The Federalist Papers, the Communist Manifesto, and Aristotle’s Politics. At five, he understood the basics of most of the sciences, in particular Newtonian physics, evolutionary theory, and psychology. At six, he realized that all of those, as well as the Christianity his parents had enforced upon him, were a crock.
His early lessons occured over time, albeit quickly. His lesson at the age of six, however, came almost literally overnight. For months prior, he had wanted a dog. He had initially tried asking his parents for one. Afraid of what he would do to the dog with his massive intelligence, they wouldn’t get him one, under the pretense of him not being ready. After a week of this progression, he had begun scheming to determine ways in which he could coerce them into getting him a dog. After three weeks and two faked Lassie-Timmy-Well situations, He gave up on coercing them. Instead he began to go about figuring out how he could obtain a dog on his own. But he didn’t know how to. It was one thing he couldn’t figure out. His grandparent seemed like good candidates-but he needed them to get him that book about Freud. He had no plots or schemes to heist one himself. So he returned to trying to convince his parents to get him a dog.
The first thing he tried in this round of attempts was logical discourse. That had no effect beyond confusing them. He moved on to the first staple of manipulative children and girlfriends everywhere: the puppy-dog eyes. This served only to creep his parents out, as someone that intelligent should not have puppy dog eyes. It seemed to them, as it would seem to most rational people, that it when against the very nature of the universe. Cody metaphorically cursed under his breath and moved on to the classic technique of Tantrums. For over a week, whenever he encountered his parents he’d begin by calmly asking them if he could have a dog. When they inevitably said no, before they could begin to explain he began wailing, screaming, kicking, and crying. After a couple of days of this technique, his parents learned to ignore him. This was even worse than when he just couldn’t have a dog. So he stopped the tantrum throwing after 9 days. He spent a couple of days in silence, trying to decide what to do next. Instead, he got distracted by a desire to name his future dog. Even child geniuses are still children.
“Maybe I’ll name him Killer,” He said to himself. In his mind, of course-he had unintentionally taken a vow of silence when his parents had denied his tantrums. “Nah, that’s stupid. How about Sub-Zero? Or Spot? Fluffy is a dumb name. Maybe Damien? Or Spike? Peter? Paul? If it’s a girl I could call her Mary-No, dogs aren’t supposed to be girls! Oh, oh, I know! I’ll name him Dog!”
That thought-sequence took him two entire days to think out. Mostly because in between nearly every thought, he tried to convince himself to stop thinking of what to name his dog and go back to thinking about how he could get a job.
After another month of various insignificant and unsuccessful campaigns, he still hadn’t resigned himself to his dogless fate. He had made up his mind to call the dog Dog, and after those two days, he had barely given that matter any more thought.
Around this month-later point was his last day of First Grade. That was about two months before his seventh birthday, and five days before he finally got a dog. Cody Sky lived in the general proximity of a high school known as George Custer Memorial High. Their school year ended only four days after his elementary school did. The high school year had been supposed to run for another two weeks, but a series of gruesome murders that had begun on the first day of school had finally convinced the administration to shut down George Custer. Parents around the city of Moda Garden-where Cody lived-were outraged by how long the school had stayed open. The killer had not yet been caught. A large number of people, in particular students at the school, didn’t think that there was a murderer as such, as the killings were not consistent with each other, and a large number of them didn’t even seem physically possible. Cody knew all of this because he read the newspapers frequently, looking for things that hadn’t been explained. He then clipped them out and put them into a folder, hoping someday to explain every single one of them. His dream job was to be a researcher. Most children his age who wanted to learn more about the world wanted to be scientists; even that number in his age group was relatively small. But Cody? He wanted to sit with books, magazines, newspapers, and the internet, compiling a sufficient explanation and correlation for all events in the world.
Which is why that fifth night after his school got out for summer, the first night after George Custer Memorial High got out for summer, Cody got excited when the car driven by his father and containing himself, his mother, and his six-year-old cousin Mark passed by George Custer Memorial High. At his insistence, his parents-fed up now with trying to ignore him, just as they had become fed up before with trying to pay attention to him-slowed down as they passed. Cody noticed a number of cars in the parking lot. There was a light on in one of the windows, but he couldn’t quite identify the color of the light. It was from that light’s glow-the moon was new and residing beneath the horizon-that Cody noted the presence of two people in the parking lot. One of them seemed to be motioning hurriedly to the other, as the other stood where it was. A van squealed into the parking lot and out jumped two dark figures. One went to the hesitant one and began motioning to her. Cody presumed that the motions were accompanied by words-but he didn’t have time to try to figure out what they were saying, as the second dark figure pulled out something that looked like a narrow cylinder and violently slammed it against the head of the second figure that had originally been there. The hesitant one yelped and began running. The darkened figures followed her as she came towards the car that Cody was in. Cody watched her mystified as his father began to press the gas. She came beneath a street lamp and looked into the car-right into Cody’s eyes. He looked back into hers; they were green and terrified. She looked to be about eighteen, and, had Cody been older, he knew that he would have considered her beautiful. Time seemed to freeze right there-they had a connection, but Cody didn’t know what it was, and he didn’t think that she did either.
The car gunned off just as the darkened figures reached the girl. Cody tried to turn to watch what happened to her, but he didn’t see it in full. The car turned a corner just as the darkened figures began to catch up to her.
“Woah,” Mark said very simply.
“We need to get to a phone,” Cody’s father said. He angled the car towards the nearby parking lot of an S-Mart, wherein payphones were prevalent and surprisingly well maintained. He parked near the front and ran to the phone. As he picked it up, a terrible sound wracked the air. It was like a million screeches from all different sorts of animals, tires, and things rubbed against chalkboards, in combination with the explosions of uncountable bombs of unknown nature, with an undercurrent of the ghastly hymns of an infinite number of unearthly deities. As the sound began, Cody was the only one who didn’t cover his ears. He turned as quickly as he could to see an eruption of multi-colored light burst from just about where George Custer Memorial High would have been. Cody unbuckled his seatbelt and opened his door, then ran off. The following week, his parents would have the car fitted with child safety locks, which would only make it slightly more difficult for Cody to do such a thing. His cousin Mark, being the only one who had enough sense to pay as much attention to Codya s to his own pain, unbuckled his own seatbelt, opened his own door, and pursued Cody.
Within moments the two of them were just across the street from the high school, which was now not so much a high school as a glowing mass of multi-colored light, including some colors that had never occurred to Cody or Mark. The light seemed to be essentially a dome around the school that didn’t-Cody didn’t quite understand this-allow light to escape. From its top seemed to come a towering pillar that went farther than either of the children could comprehend, and yet didn’t go any farther than the top of the dome. Cody didn’t understand that either. Nor did Mark.
Cody wanted to run up to the dome, but he managed to resist. He could tell that it was dangerous, in part from the continuation of the sound of eruptions, screeches, and hymns. A military jeep swung into the parking lot all of a sudden. As it did, Cody noticed that the van was gone, but the rest of the cars that had been there still were. Out of the jeep came an old looking man, whose skin began to shine as he cursed loudly. It was a language that neither Cody nor Mark recognized, and Cody suspected that few people on Earth would recognize it. Both of them, though, knew somehow that the man was cursing. The man began to run towards the dome of light, and as he did his skin turned silvery and he stopped looking quite so much like a man. He seemed to be almost a silvery string as he passed through it. As he did, arcs of light began shooting out of it, twisting through the air and striking things. The things it struck vanished, or were transformed. One of them struck nothing and produced, just beyond the military jeep, what looked like a tall man with skin so dark that it actually glowed. He crumpled to the ground at the same instant that an arc of multi-colored light darted towards Mark. Cody turned to look, and found absolutely nothing. He yelped and turned back to the dome. He began to back away, but only in time for another arc of light to strike him. Everything went dark. Or maybe it went light. Or maybe sight had nothing to do with it; maybe it went loud or quiet instead. Maybe it went blue. Maybe it went sweet. He could never remember afterwards, and he wasn’t quite sure if “everything went...” would ever sufficiently describe it.
When he woke up he was somewhere else entirely. Perhaps not entirely; just a few blocks away, he realized as he sat up. Standing over him was a large dog with fur so black that it seemed to glow. It was panting happily and it almost looked relieved. It barked gently at him and stepped back so he could sit up all the way. Cody reached over and touched the dog’s warm fur gingerly, then absent-mindedly began to pet it.
“He’s ours,” a gentle, almost Godly voice echoed through his memory suddenly. Despite its angelicness, it sounded fierce.
“No, we programmed him in!” he remembered a voice hissing. Despite the phrase’s complete lack of ess sounds, Cody recalled an undercurrent of sibilant esses.
“You can have the other one,” the voice, one that he recalled reminding him of a preacher’s sermon on Jesus, had said dismissively. “He’s the pinnacle of our experiments on their minds. It doesn’t interest us anymore.”
“The other one is gone!” the hiss had snapped violently. “We lost him as much as you did!”
And that was all Cody could remember before his mother’s voice yelled out “Cody!” right behind him. He turned to look at her; the dog stepped back submissively but happily and sat down.
“Mom!” he yelled out in response. She ran up to him and took him up in her arms.
“Never do that again!” she said urgently. “No matter what what happens!”
“I won’t mom,” he lied, knowing that if he said anything about what he had just experienced or how important it was, she would panic and lock him in his room. “Where’s Mark?”
She squeezed him harder and leaned back from him, holding his shoulders lovingly. Her eyes were full of puzzlement. “Who’s Mark?”
Cody stared back at her. Very rapidly he thought through what was happening. He nodded internally. “Sorry. I must have hit my head.” He said surprisingly convincingly. He smiled at her and she smiled back, a little bit worried. “Don’t worry, I’m fine. Mr. T helped me out,” he said, motioning to the dog. He was surprised that he had said Mr. T; he barely knew who Mr. T was, and it was very different than the Dog that he had intended to name him. He let it pass, though. Mr. T barked gently, and then panted smilingly at Cody’s mother. She smiled back at the dog. “Well, then, we’re just going to have to give Mr. T a good home, aren’t we?” Cody smiled externally, but allowed a look of puzzlement to cross the face he bore in his mind. It was damned bizarre.
Now, Cody was looking down at Mr. T, whose fur was still so black that it glowed. He was only slightly smaller than Cody now, five years later. He was just as friendly, and just as mysterious.
“Who are you?” Cody asked Mr. T for the eightieth time in five years. The dog’s grin seemed to become more mysterious and understanding, just as it always did. He barked toward the window.
A man in a black robe was talking to his father. Cody strained his ears to listen.
“...if you programmed him in. He’s my son! He’s already screwed up enough!” he heard his father’s squeaky voice become angry. “He doesn’t need your occult things to push him farther.” Cody smiled to himself. Well, that sure was a coincidence! He stepped through the back door.
“Dad, it’s okay,” he said as soon as he was in. “I’m ready.”
His father wasn’t surprised by the fact that Cody had overheard him, though he did a fine job of pretending he was to try to put off the black-robed man. But it wasn’t what he asked about.
“Son, why were you naked in the backyard?” he asked in honest exasperation.
“I was meditating. I really think I need to learn from this man,” Cody said meaningfully. Mr. T trotted into the kitchen through the dogdoor and sat down. The man looked at the happy, mysterious dog. Beneath her robe, Jennifer frowned at the whole thing. She had to readjust the voice alteration device to maintain the masculinity of her character.

Episode 38: Oh No More Characters

We take you once more to the moments before the Zombie Crisis arose. This was hours upon hours ago, nearly immeasurable in thoroughly confused and frightened human standards. It was a time when presumably human figures in black cloaks sang in graveyards. It was a time when few innocents had any idea that a Zombie Apocalypse was possible. It was, more than anything, a time when Burger King was still open.
Specifically, we speak of a Burger King in Denver, Colorado, just west of Moda Garden, and just southeast of Coors Field. We enter it at a moment shortly before the dead began to rise. Perhaps five minutes. Behind the counter, we find a pudgy white man wearing a traditional Burger King crown, a papery hat coated in deep fry oil. He seems to be in his late twenties, but the amount of acne assaulting his face suggests that he’s only seventeen years into his, now likely short, life. He is vaguely despondent, vaguely depressive, vaguely depressing (what with being a twenty-eight year old man working at a Burger King) and, as all fast food employees, could easily be considered vaguely human. He has always done his job with little open complaint, in part because he is the Assistant Manager. This gives him a feeling of self-satisfaction, which is made ironic by the fact that being Assistant Manager just means that he has to work the night shift alone. He has been through twenty-two robbery attempts. His name is Edgardo Church.
The man with darting eyes and an unnecessarily heavy jacket at that booth over there, the one holding his cheeseburger much as a squirrel holds a nut, who has large black bags under his eyes, is named Kevin Simpson. He really has no important history, and is very nearly a homeless bum. Had anyone ever thought to take him to a psychiatrist, or had he received the money to go to one, he would have been diagnosed as violently schizophrenic. It’s a very apt diagnosis. For some reason, unknown even to him, he often supposes that people have given him the nickname “Rider”, leading him to introduce himself to strangers as Kevin ‘Rider’ Simpson. Beneath his heavy winter jacket, he has a cheap handgun, stolen in an unusual act of bravado and skill from a pawn shop.
Now entering the store are three rowdy, talkative, and threatening-to-whitey African Americans. At the lead is Tyree Davis. He’s fairly tall, twenty-one, and, even when sober, is undeniably stupid. He’s quite different from sober at this moment. Since he’s entered, there’s been a very loud string of what sounds to both Edgardo and Kevin as modern ebonics. In reality, it’s just a loud, slurred version of low vocabulary English, strewn with curse words. The things he is saying, as well as the things he usually says, are entirely inane, and so are not important to recount. He holds in his left hand a football, which is now in his right hand. Every few seconds, he suddenly grips it in both hands, shakes it gently with his words, and then pulls it away with the other hand. When he doesn’t have both hands on the football, he tends to have his arms spread wide, making it difficult for anyone to walk beside him. Which is why his companions are just behind him.
The lovely young woman shaking her head dismayingly is Charrone Portinari. Had she been born thirty or forty years before she was, she would have been called by her hypothetical contemporaries a “foxy mama.” Being a child of the 90's and Oughts, she is known by her horny contemporaries as “a sexy baby.” While she doesn’t particularly care for the sexism inherent in the epithet, or in the objectification of her body, she does enjoy knowing that she is, to speak frankly, a sex fantasy for a number of the boys she knows. She has a trim waist, a fairly large bust, wide hips, and, the part she’s most proud of and most embarrassed by, a large ass. Her skin is very dark, though far from literally being black. She’s fairly intelligent, though not pedantic, or overbearing. Some may want to draw parallels between her and Sylvie, but they would be correct at all, except in the fact that they’re both female, sexy, and enjoy being sexy. Charrone does not, however, use her overwhelming sexiness to her extreme advantage intentionally. She spends her free time with Tyree (and their other companion) merely because the three of them have been friends since childhood.
The third member of the party is Chaz Raymond. He wears his hair in a combination of corn-rows and dreadlocks, which is quite possibly very painful. The dreadlocks came from a period where he felt like taking no care of his hair; the corn rows came from a desire to fit in with a slightly off idea of what was “in” at the time. The combination of the two came from a desire not to cut his hair after he decided to begin brushing and combing it; he couldn’t brush it past the dreadlocks, meaning that both sections were growing. After a few months, the clean section had gained enough ground to become corn-rowed. It’s a very difficult process, corn-rowing dreadlocked hair. Besides his bizarre looks that combine two black stereotypes, Chaz does in fact have a personality. He’s quite similar to Charrone, in part because they grew up together, though majorly because he is madly in love with her. He, like her, is twenty-two. She, to his dismay, is dating Tyree at the moment, and he is Tyree’s best friend. He is intelligent, though not quite as intelligent as Charrone because she’s got natural intelligence and he doesn’t. He, like her, is kindly, and, out of loving mimicry of her, disdainful of Tyree.
Edgardo, upon seeing the entry of a group of three black people-all of whom he characterized immediately by, not only the tone of their skin, but primarily by the flamboyant, annoying, and idiotic manner of Tyree-immediately unlatched the case over the emergency silent alarm button. To be fair to his racial profiling of the three, sixteen of the twenty-two robberies he survived were committed by African Americans. The other six were, contrary to his most general expectations, committed by “Whitey.” Since becoming Assistant Manager of this Burger King nine months ago-he had worked there for nine years and three months prior-he had significantly changed his opinion on races, particular the plethora of Mexicans that he had noticed in Colorado. It did not, however, suggest to him the truth: that individuals make their own decisions about their own lives, and that it has little to do with race, only with raising which is often effected by race.
Tyree approached the counter. He began to order some set of burgers, fries, and drinks that were incomprehensible to Edgardo. His hand fluttered closer to the button.
“Come again?” he asked hesitantly.
“We want three Double Whoppers with cheese, two normal Whoppers, four large french fries, two sides of Chicken Tenders, a large Coke, a large Sprite, and a large Dr. Pepper,” Chaz quickly translated. Tyree, having no idea that his words were slurred, as he always forgot his tendency to slur them, gave Chaz a confused and partly angry look. Chaz shrugged. He was much more sober than Tyree was, and knew how to deal with drunks, especially drunk Tyree. None of the four noticed the gradually increasing pitch of the sound outside, or the increased twitchiness of the strange, oft unnoticed Kevin Simpson, nor did they notice the fact that he was cringing with his eyes shut and beginning to claw at his ears.
“That’ll be twelve dollars and fifty nine cents,” Edgardo said guardedly, allowing his hand to drift away from the silent alarm button.
“No it won’t, Homes,” Chaz said threateningly, holding his hands in his pockets and stretching his letterman jacket threateningly. Edgardo deftly and subtly hit the silent alarm button, and then stuck his hands up in the air. Chaz and Tyree laughed, and Charrone gently smacked Chaz on the arm. He looked at her pretending to be hurt and rubbed his arm.
“Sorry, man, I was just messin’ with ya,” Chaz pulled his wallet out of his pocket and pulled out twelve dollars. Edgardo’s mouth swung open and his arms swung down.
“I...”
“Sir, I’m very sorry for that,” Charrone interrupted. “They’re just a couple of frat boys, you know how it is.” She gave Chaz a friendly nasty look. “But I expected better from this one.” Chaz blushed gently and fumbled to get thirteen dollars out of his wallet.
“No, I just...”
“Everybody down on the ground!” a flustered voice cried out from the booth in the corner. Chaz, Tyree, and Charrone all turned around slowly, while Edgardo turned just a little bit, then raised his arms quickly once more. A disgruntled, unkempt man in an ancient, torn winter jacket held a revolver in his left hand, and the right side of his face with his right. He had the gun pointed at Tyree. Tyree smiled drunkly, stumbled, and fell respectfully down to the ground. He began to stand up not-so-respectfully. Charrone and Chaz both obeyed instantly, and, after attempting to pull Tyree back down, covered their heads.
“Heeeeey, man,” Tyree-who Chaz and Charonne hadn’t managed to bring down-slurred almost coherently. “You don’t need that gin... Gone... Shooter here! We ain’t gonna hurt ya,” He stumbled forwards a little. Kevin didn’t particularly notice, as he was too busy clutching his face in terror.
“No, No, you’re going to hurt me!” He screamed. “You and your damned song! It’s making me crazy! You want me to kill, you bastards, you want me to kill, so I’ll kill!” He screamed, getting progressively louder, drowning out what little the other four may have been able to hear of it, but unable to block it out from his own ears.
The clock struck 11.
“What the fuck is that?” Edgardo screamed as the entire sky lit up with white, green, and red lights intertwining. Kevin heard the song stop, and he began screaming in relief. Chaz, overcoming his bewilderment, decided to display his hearty bravado, and leapt across the room from his position on the ground. He collided with Kevin, knocking the revolver across the room, and knocking both of the two down. Kevin’s head connected with the tiled floor with a sickening crack. But rather than scream more or die, Kevin’s eyes tore open.
“Experiments!” He screamed a moment later. Chaz forcefully pinned him to the ground. Kevin stopped struggling, and smiled wisely. Charrone got to her feet, ran over to the gun, and picked it up.
The store stood still for a moment.
“That was confusing,” Tyree finally slurred.
“Those weren’t fireworks,” Kevin said coyly.
“And those aren’t people coming out of that house,” Edgardo stuttered. Chaz looked out the window, as did Charrone and, after a moment, Tyree.
“Or that one,” Tyree said almost coherently.
“It’s bad,” Kevin snorted. “I know it better than you,” he nearly sang. Chaz pushed down on him suddenly again.
“I’m locking the store.” Edgardo grabbed his keys. He looked to Charrone, being that she had the gun, and in crime situations the one holding the gun is in charge generally. She nodded as soon as she understood. He walked to all the doors and locked them.
Chaz wouldn’t let Kevin up to see what was going on. Fortunately, Kevin felt that he knew what was going on. He knew, like many people would if they had seen it, that there were zombies outside. How he knew this, he only half knew-and you don’t really get to know it anytime soon either. At least, not in this episode.
You do get to know, however, finally, why zombies were so quick to reach places distant from grave yards. At least, you get to half know it. Edgardo, Chaz, Tyree, and Charrone were in prime positions to join the small group-several thousand or so large-who saw zombies advancing out of what had previously been thought to be homes. Previously, many of them were homes. Most of those that had been had been lived in by those who were wearing black cloaks that night. Many of them were also positioned along Ley Lines, as well as at convenient points where magickal energies collided perfectly-much like those that we spoke of in relation to Michael, the natural hero, and Andy’s House.
And they were coming out of domestic residences by the dozens.
It took about an hour for a large number of zombies to build up around the Burger King. Throughout that time, Chaz sat/crouched on Kevin. When the zombies were right up against the West Glass Wall, however, Chaz couldn’t take it anymore, and joined the other three pressed against the counter. Kevin stood up, brushed himself off stylishly, and went to cower with him. Chaz made sure that it was on the far side from Charrone, for a couple of obvious reasons. Not much significant was said during this time, except for the slow realization that these were the living dead, and that it was entirely likely that no one would come to rescue them. This continued for another half hour or so, when the shambling corpses outside of the glass window reached a critical mass. Charrone passed the gun over to Tyree, who passed it fumblingly to Edgardo, who slipped it through his fingers like a hot potato right into the hands of Chaz, who, shrugging mentally, handed it right back to Kevin. Kevin nodded, zipped up his jacket, and pointed it at the glass.
The glass shattered.
A split second before Kevin was about to fire, a red sedan with military license plates burst through the zombie hoard. It sat and sputtered for a minute, then started up and flew into reverse. Kevin went dashing through the gap in the zombie army, and was quickly followed by the others, Charrone at the rear. As they passed into the street, which was relatively zombie-free due to their concentration on the Burger King, Charrone waved a thank you to the driver of the red car. She turned to run as fast as she could after Kevin and the others. The red car tore off into the night, and the group from Burger King tore off into the ABC News building.
A shelter had begun there, as shelters had begun in all local network broadcast centers. They somehow seemed safer to people than the prescribed shelters that had been in place in case of a nuclear attack. Many of the prescribed nuclear bunkers were, in fact, defunct and full of things that you don’t want to take with you to a post-apocalyptic setting. Used condoms will do no good against nuclear mutants or magic-powered zombies. ABC Colorado Headquarters was housing one hundred and seventy three employees, and, at that point, fifteen civilians. When our five entered, it was twenty civilians.
Kevin instantly handed the revolver to a surprised security guard, and wandered into a lounge, to lounge. The other four found their own places. Tyree found a place to nap, in order to try to sober up. He, much like Marty, had no idea what was going on, due to his extreme drunkenness. Chaz and Charrone, meanwhile, began to share intimate moments, proud of themselves and each other for having contributed to the defeat of Kevin before he stopped needing to be defeated. Edgardo headed into the news room, behind the cameras, to try to get some sort of an idea of what was going on. There didn’t seem to be any real need to keep him out; it seemed beneath the situation.
As the night progressed, more and more survivors trickled into the station. It was about 1:30 when they officially declared themselves a zombie shelter, what with the ten floors of sleeping space.
It was 2:00 when the government made an official statement. What that official statement was is not yet pertinent to the circumstances. Amongst our current heroes, the only one who really cared what the government had to say was Edgardo. When he tried to tell the others about it, they didn’t care. Before he could even start with Kevin, the latter said very simply, “The government is dead.”
At about 3:45, Tyree woke up, sober enough to try to comprehend what was going on. He found Chaz and Charrone, who pretended that they had not just made out, and the three went, for an indeterminate reason, into the news room. Kevin was already there, having completed his self-assigned lounging duties. He wasn’t wearing his winter coat anymore. Beneath it’s bulky, almost obese frame, he was actually a gangly and skinny man, perhaps even lanky. He was grinning smugly at the news reporters.
All smugness dissipated from the room, however, when a Naydeer truck came barreling through the wall just behind Kevin. There was another moment of silent bewilderment as everyone-for everyone had been a safe distance from the wall when it burst in-turned towards the wall and tried to figure out what the hell had just happened. Then there was a “chunk” sound, and the truck slid a little bit farther into the room. Everyone jumped back. And out of the truck burst a tallish, gangly, crazed man with a shotgun. He spun his head around the room furiously to survey it, and dashed, apparently at random, to Kevin. He held Kevin by the back of his shirt and pointed the shotgun at his head. He glared hatefully at the hole in the wall as a Chinese teenager brandishing a katana dashed through the gap.
“I hate crashing ca...” The man said as he turned the shotgun to point at the Chinese teen.
“Oh, shut up!”

Episode 37: How To Break Into Things With a Sword

“Dammit, get back here ” Zach screamed again, running at a speed that even some cats have envied. As he turned off of Norton Avenue-again-he sliced the head off of a passing zombie, again. Sunny was moving at an incredible speed, moving generally southerly, apparently propelled by the power of sheer hatred. Zach may have been propelled by the same thing, but as far as he was concerned, it didn’t matter. He wondered only casually how Sunny was moving so quickly. The fact that he himself moved so quickly in this situation, and not slipping in the rain, seemed perfectly natural to him. It didn’t seem normal at all, but Zach considered normality to be irrelevant to everyday life. Especially when the dead were rising from the dead.
A shotgun blast erupted from around the next corner. Zach cursed again-that was the third person that Sunny had shot since they had left Sally’s military base thing. He turned the corner and saw the man lying on the ground, breathing shallowly, and clutching at his mid-section as his blood, bile, and guts mixed with rain water. He gurgled a scream. Zach looked up from him, towards the sound of a running motor that he hadn’t heard initially beneath the rain.
“I hate driving!” Sunny screamed from the dying man’s car as he tore away.
“Shit,” Zach said aloud. Now he didn’t have time to kill this guy. “Sorry,” He said without sympathy as he dashed across the street, diving through the closed driver’s side window of a Naydeer Brand Pickup truck-which, despite obviously being twelve years old, was shiny, running well, and, to Zach’s benefit, extremely easy to hotwire. He didn’t know this, however, as he had never expected to hotwire a Pickup. He knew how to hotwire compacts, limos, hummers, and nearly every other sort of vehicle that Naydeer Corporation built. Except for pickups. He didn’t have time to figure out how they would have varied the wiring (as the Naydeer Corporation invariably did, with all its products, in a quite ineffective attempt at improved security) and so drove his sword into the dashboard, straight through to the engine. It started immediately, for absolutely no good physical reason. When he pulled the sword out (freshly dried by the sudden heat of the engine) the engine stayed on. He slammed down the gas pedal, and took off after Sunny, now moving generally north by northwest, though perhaps a bit more west than that.

Laban swung the bastard sword that he now did believe had once belonged to his namesake through the neck of another zombie; it was the twelfth since he, Ujer, and Hanh had left the Underground complex. The two he was traveling with had mostly just stayed behind Laban, looking around nervously, in the case of Ujer, and cautiously, in the case of Hanh. Ujer occasionally let loose something explaining how the whole situation was impossible; Hanh would retort with a reference to God or something. Then Laban would kill another zombie, glare at them, and they would be silent for another few minutes. Laban was rather irritated with them. He could handle that there were zombies, that he had been chosen as some sort of redemption avatar, and that he had to do whatever the hell he was supposed to do with two unarmed and chatty teenagers, but the fact that those two unarmed and chatty teenagers had completely swapped personalities in the last few hours was just unnerving.
“You two need to stop being unarmed,” He said suddenly after that twelfth zombie fell to the ground, knowing that he couldn’t do anything about their personalities or excessive chattiness. He also knew that he really didn’t want to spend the entire night-or however long this took-doing nothing but protecting them.
“What weapons shall we have, great Laban?” Hanh said. Laban stopped moving once he had turned his head to stare at him. Hanh was gazing earnestly at Laban, apparently unfazed by the rainwater dripping through his hair right into his eyes.
“Great Laban?”
“Well, Elder Smith said that you’re...”
“Shut up,” Laban said. Ujer snickered. “You too.” Ujer stopped snickering and stared intently at Laban. “We’re going to get you two weapons. Then the three of us are going to kill every single damned zombie we come across. Then Laban will be redeemed or whatever, and we’ll all get to go back to our normal lives.” He turned and began walking. The two hesitated silently for a split second before following.
“Where are we going to get weapons?” Ujer asked a bit louder than usual to be heard over the rainfall, suppressing the hint of sadness in her voice, after a minute of uneasy silence.
“What religion do we subscribe to?” Laban replied, trying to sound Socratic.
“Mormonism,” Hanh replied.
“And what do Mormons have more of than any religion short of Scientology?”
“Truth?” Hanh suggested.
“Happiness?” Ujer ventured.
“Close. Money. And what company has, as its primary stockholders, Scientologists and Mormons?”
“The Naydeer Corporation,” Ujer said, wondering what he was implying. Honestly, he wasn’t implying anything, and neither was the author; it’s just a convenient connection, and has been a matter of curiosity for him for a long time. This is just his way of explaining it in an entirely different universe than his own.
“And where, according to the Naydeer Corporation, should one go to Shop Smart?”
“S-Mart,” Laban said, knowing the ad-campaign very well. Boomsticks and whatnot.
“And, seeing as we’re on a mission for Mormonism, where is, undoubtedly, the smartest place to shop without money?”
“S-Mart,” Ujer cried out. “We’re going to steal guns?”
“No, we’re commissioning them for the sake of Mormonism and the world,” Laban smiled to himself.
“Since we’re on a mission for Mormons, the Mormons” Hanh said reverentially, then looking off towards the distance so as not to suffer Laban’s new glare.
They arrived, ten minutes later, at a hill overlooking a still-glowing S-Mart sign, which was above a still-glowing glassy entrance to what, unbeknownst to the three of them, was the only S-Mart in the nation that had not yet been broken into. Standing between them and perfecting the robbing of S-Mart, there was a writhing mass of lost zombies, just above a parking lot paved with asphalt, oil and gasoline, and little bits of dead and undead people.
The rain picked up.
“Oh, shit,” Hanh said, characteristic more of Classic Hanh than New Hanh. Ujer and Laban both nodded in response.
“We need a plan,” Ujer said after a minute.
“A distraction.”
At that precise moment, an unnaturally shiny car burst into the lot from its east side, to the right of the three Mormons. They watched with utter bemusement as it tunneled through the sea of the undead. When it was about parallel with the a in the glowing S-Mart sign, an unnaturally shiny truck, moving about at the same speed as the car, burst in as well. It began swerving, seeming to intentionally hit zombies that the car had missed. They heard angry screaming from both cars, but couldn’t understand any of it. A moment later, the car was gone; a slightly larger number of moments later, the truck, too was gone. The majority of the undead, too, were gone. Or, at the very least, not moving anymore.
The rain died down.
“Oh, shit,” Hanh said once more. Ujer and Laban both nodded in response. Laban leapt up and started running towards the glowing, unbroken doors of the last untainted temple of capitalism in America. Hanh and Ujer were close behind him within moments. As he approached, he held the sword ahead of him, arms extended, point forward. He let loose a mighty battle cry and smashed through the door, first with his sword and then with his body. The glass sharded around him, but in a stroke of luck, not a single one cut him. Hanh slowed down to allow Ujer through first, and she suffered no wounds either. Hanh made it through safely as well. They had reached the store completely zombie free.
“Back of the store,” Laban said urgently.

Joan smashed open the door basement. The sword was both impossibly light, and impossibly smashy. As in it smashed things easily. She swung it-noticing only now that the blade was almost as long as she was tall-which, being an anachronistic weapons master, she knew was impossible. Then again, being an anachronistic weapons master assassin meant that most things that were supposed to be impossible weren’t. Especially when she suspected what she suspected about the people who had ordered her “creation”. But that seemed entirely irrelevant now. Now, she was killing corpses, which was so much more fun than mutilating people. In fact, while this paragraph has been narrated, she has killed, in various brutal ways, a dozen zombies. And this paragraph has taken less than a minute to narrate. Oh, wait, make that a baker’s dozen. Now fourteen. Now fifteen, and we’re caught up.
She felt satisfied with the relative clearing of zombies from the central room of the house-mansion, and so bolted up the stairs. She found herself in a strange looking hall, with a number of doors, some open, some not. There were also a number of zombies in the hall. Joan spun the sword stylistically and began slaying. It took only two minutes to clear it. She took stock of the situation once more; she then noticed the string dangling from the ceiling at the top of the stairway. Assuming (correctly) that it was the way to the roof, she jumped up and pulled it down. She climbed up it with the sword with no problem.
There were no zombies in this attic space. There was, however, in the corner-she could see by Excalibur’s glow-an overturned, small, wooden staircase. As she approached it, she noticed that above it there was an uneven square of space on the ceiling. She deftly flipped the staircase back to its rightful position and climbed it, despite its incessant wobbling and teetering. She studied the square of uneven space for a minute, and then thrust Excalibur upwards through it.


The man that Sunny had shot and Zach hadn’t had time to finish was named Steve Irving. He had been a huge fan of animals of all sorts, and had in fact once survived the sting of a Stingray’s barb to the heart. He had not been able to survive man’s weapon, the shotgun. But he had managed to resurvive it, and was beginning to shamble to his feet. His second life was cut short, though, when a nearly unidentifiable object smashed through the walls of his house, cut his head clean in half, and vanished through the house across the street...

“Jesus Christ!” someone on the roof screamed. He had been watching the crating that had been placed over the gaping hole in the roof all night, even through the rain. He wasn’t sure why, but he had been. And, of course, he had been watching when an incredibly long, shiny, and pointy thing burst forth from it. There was utter silence on the roof for a moment as the pointy thing sat there. And then it began moving around; had the sword been shorter, it would have looked to the roof people like a shark’s dorsal fin.
“What the...?” Steve leveled his shotgun at the crate.
Splinters of whatever kind of wood the crate had been made with-something dark-scattered across a very small area of the roof. They rested in small puddles, that began to grow around them. Suddenly, the shiny, pointy thing vanished. The roof froze once more.
A young, pretty girl with brown hair pulled herself up through the rounded hole in the crate. With her, she brought a very large sword.
“That’s a big fucking sword,” someone said a moment later. Joan nodded in response.
“I think that you were the people stuck on the roof?” Joan asked conversationally. Steve stopped for a moment. The question confused him. They were obviously on a roof. He wondered if maybe he really was tired.
“The house is empty now, I think,” Joan said, not waiting for the response. “You should probably leave now, before more come.” She dropped herself back down the box. After a moment of confusion, the roofers pushed the crate away, and began descending back down the staircase. Steve stared at Lucy.
“That was weird,” she said, shrugging. She headed for the staircase. Steve nodded and followed.

As in all S-Marts, the firearms were kept at the back of the store. As in few S-Marts, the firearms were still hidden behind glass. Laban quickly rectified this by smashing it open with the Sword of Laban, which was an action that most people would have taken with a baseball bat or sports bike. But Laban decided that, if it was a cutting weapon and a stabbing weapon, it should also be used as a bashing weapon. He broke open all the glass cases-a courtesy taken by most of the first invaders of S-Marts that night-before beginning to take the weapons that personally desired. He stuffed some sort of pistol and a box of rounds into his pockets. He then went searching for a shotgun.
Ujer and Hanh reached the firearms just in time to see Laban smash open the second to last of five cases. Ujer automatically went to the farthest case, and Hanh went quickly to the nearest. Ujer took some handguns; Hanh took a rifle and a case of rounds.
Laban had found the case with the shotguns, but all of them were too unwieldy. He picked up a nice one and examined it carefully. He looked around the area; he needed something to saw off the end of the shotgun, so he could carry it. Nothing he could see; so he moved to gardening tools.
Sure enough, he found a nice chain-saw there. He tried to turn it on, but it wasn’t gassed up. He remembered there being a gas station outside the store. He thought about it for a moment. Should he go fuel up the chainsaw just to have an extra, very strong weapon? Then he had another thought. He looked carefully at the chainsaw. Then he looked carefully at his left hand. Then he looked carefully at the chainsaw again. He nodded to himself, and dropped the chainsaw, and the shotgun. He returned to the firearms case, took another box of slugs, and turned to his companions.
“Ready to go?” He asked genially, in his cheered-up sarcastic manner. Both of them nodded. “Good. Because we’re going to fuck up some zombies!”

Zach marveled at how resilient Naydeer Corporation automobiles really were. He had read online that they could take a beating, but this was insane. Sunny had taken the car over several medians, through a parking lot swimming with zombies, and halfway across both Moda Garden and Denver, all the while slamming as hard as he could into anything that seemed to move. Zach had followed Sunny in his truck through and over every obstacle, and even gone out of his way to strike missed zombies in that parking lot. He went after most of the moving things that Sunny missed; that is, two zombies. Now, Zach was pointing his katana at Sunny as Sunny, holding a scruffy looking man around the throat with one arm, pointed his shotgun at Zach with the other in a crowded news room. Halfway into the news room was Sunny’s barely dented stolen car, along with a pile of rubble that half buried it. Just outside of the building, pressed against Sunny’s car, was Zach’s truck, which, despite being probably twelve years older, was only slightly more dented than Sunny’s car.
“I hate crashing ca...”
“Oh, shut the fuck up!” Zach screamed. Sunny furrowed his brow, hating being interrupted. He squeezed the trigger.

Episode 36: Saving Private Sally

Waldo was the first one to regain control of himself when they arrived at Mina’s zombie laden house. Sylvie was next, and then Todd. The three of them climbed out of their respective vehicles in a hurry, weapons in hand, but didn’t take any action.
“Shit,” Todd said sadly and loudly.
Faint sounds of gunfire erupted from within the house.
“Less shit ” Waldo announced bravely, snapping his solid black semi-automatic pistol out of his sweater pocket. He prayed to nothing in particular that it had enough rounds, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He pulled the trigger twice more, futilely. He cursed, and looked at it. He hesitated before reaching for the space between his belt and pants, grabbing the oversized clip that he had been struggling to carry without slipping for the last few hours*. He flipped the gun over, gave it a look, and jammed the clip in. He pointed and began squeezing the trigger at the house. Two zombies fell, and another stumbled.
Todd pulled out his own pistol and began firing into the crowd. He didn’t have one of those super-clips like Waldo, but he had grabbed a couple of magazines or clips; he wasn’t sure which. He didn’t much care. He just wanted to kill the zombies and save Marty, Dawn, Jack, and Sally.
Sylvie was third to begin firing, due to the circumstance that her gun required adjustment and aim. The particular rifle she had picked had been constructed to hold thirty rounds; she had spent about twenty-five so far, and had only one magazine-a ten round one-available to replace it. She did not know how few she had. She kneeled with her right leg, bending her left leg to keep balanced, held the gun in two hands, left hand farther forward and the right on the trigger, pressed it against her body in a way that no one else could have, which was sensual without her actively trying to make it that way. She pulled the trigger.
Elli rolled himself out of Waldo’s backseat and surveyed the scene. He personally didn’t think that it looked good. But he wasn’t quite ready to let yet another friend die without doing anything. But he didn’t have a weapon. He looked into Waldo’s car and saw nothing; He couldn’t bother anyone who was shooting to get a spare weapon, and he wasn’t sure that any of them had one to spare. And from what he could tell, Jennifer and Mina were paralyzed by whatever was bothering them. He froze and took another survey of the situation. This time, he dove into the passenger seat of Waldo’s car, pulled a lever, and scrambled back out. He regained his footing and sped to the trunk, slamming it open immediately on arrival. It bounced back at him, but he stopped it deftly. He lifted the mat and began unscrewing the tire from its place.
Mina had much more internal conflict than Elli did, and about as much as he should have had. She knew exactly what she would have to do. She knew that her secret would come out. She knew that the weapon sitting in her back seat would be useless. She knew that Dawn would remember. And, perhaps worst of all, she didn’t know what would happen when a zombie killed her or after Dawn was okay. She opened her door. But she didn’t unbuckle her seatbelt.
Jennifer was too confused, in every way, to do anything. But she did something anyway. She let her root instincts take control, just as she had earlier. She stopped thinking with her brain, she stopped thinking with her heart and in a general sense, she stopped thinking. She grabbed the Glock that she had stashed in the cup holder, stepped out of the car, and began firing into the horde. No sound came from her save for the sound of her gun fire. And no zombie that she aimed at didn’t fall.
And yet the tide wasn’t turning. Or, rather, it was turning-from the inside of the house to the crowd with the guns. And the zombies were beginning to advance. Only a few, here and there, fell. All of those that Jennifer targeted (plus, due to the power of her gun and her particular form of aiming, a notable number behind those) fell; about half of those the others targeted fell. They missed often, whether it be hitting the torso, the arms, or not hitting anything at all. And the gunfire within the house grew louder.
Todd reloaded his gun. Jennifer did the same. Waldo didn’t have to. Then Todd reloaded again. And Jennifer did.
And Sylvie ran out of bullets.
She stared at her gun, terror filling her heart first, and then her eyes. She reached into her pocket which she knew already was devoid of ammunition. She stood all the way, and stared at the zombie horde, approaching at a speed only slightly slower than shambling. She took a deep breath, exhaled it with a moaning wail, and, though tears began to stream down her eyes, she firmed her muscles, and took a stance holding the rifle like a baseball bat. A tire rolled past, knocking down a single zombie who tripped a small number of others, all of whom slowly got to their feet. Sylvie ignored it, knowing deep down that she would never think about it, for she would be dead too soon.
Elli had unscrewed the tire and rolled it with as much force as he could into the zombies, using his slight skill in bowling to angle it between Sylvie and Waldo. He didn’t even hesitate to watch what it did, and returned to the trunk. He pulled out a tire iron, examined it carefully, horribly, and slowly advanced to a position just to Sylvie’s right.
“This is it,” he said, his voice level and grave.
“Sorry,” Sylvie whispered to him, not looking, meaning it.
“For the zombies? You really do have a big ego.” He allowed a hint of the old Elli in. Sylvie couldn’t help but smile, and she lost her composure for a moment. Elli didn’t look at her, and she didn’t have any way to tell it, but her mascara was running. She firmed herself once more, and prepared to charge alongside Elli.
Jennifer ran out of bullets, save those that she couldn’t carry from the van. She didn’t even pause to curse. She dropped the pistol and pulled out the thing she had in her belt loop. It curved, almost pointedly, and she could feel its barbs poking her hand gently. She didn’t pray for it to work. She didn’t even hope for it to work. She threw the boomerang, much like one would throw a frisbee, a way that anyone who knows boomerangs would have the greatest disdain for. It spun through the air, towards the advancing horde, at about Jennifer’s neck level.
A rifle identical to Sylvie’s, as well as a largish box of bullets, crashed to the ground just in front of her and Elli. This gave them pause. They both looked to the left, and on Sylvie’s side stood Mina, her jaw more set and her eyes more teary than both of them combined. Without looking, she reached her hand out to Elli. Confused, but somehow sure of what she meant for him to do, he handed her the tire iron, knelt down, and picked up the gun. Sylvie didn’t move, but stared at Mina.
“I won’t say goodbye,” Mina sobbed suddenly. “I’ll be back before you know it.” Sylvie dropped her own gun and reached out to stop Mina, but it was too late. She had vanished into the horde. Todd and Waldo both stopped firing for a moment, out of pure shock. A series of violently soft “splats” could be heard over the continuing din of gunfire inside the house. Todd smiled faintly and began firing again. Waldo accepted Mina’s sacrifice and began firing again himself.
The boomerang reached the army. It began slicing cleanly through skulls and heads. Few zombies in its path escaped its direct wrath. Most of those who did were dead children, though some were incredibly tall. Those who were incredibly tall began losing what little bodily fluids that they had left through the tops of their chests. It only slowed them down because an occasional one of their number would stop to look curiously at it.
Sylvie lifted her gun back up, more focused than ever, out of sheer anger. She slid the box of bullets that Mina had dropped for her to a point between herself and Elli, reloaded the rifle, and retook her position. She and Elli fired at the same moment, and continued firing at their own speeds until they had to reload.
The boomerang began to curve its path, but not before it reached the house. Mina, half watching from just short of the stoop because of the zombies surrounding her, trying and failing to take a good bite, saw it saw through the front wall of her house, shattering two windows and halving what little was left of the door. She smashed a zombie head and dove through, just before the front of the house could collapse all the way.
The boomerang finished its curve and, fortunately, came out through the back of the zombie horde. It mowed them down, just as it had before, except this time from behind. It would have been a much more satisfying sight than the away-trip, had anyone who was observing it been at that time satisfiable. The heads, necks, and torsos that it passed through exploded forwards, splattering the remains on whatever was directly ahead of them. But it’s hard to enjoy such sights when you’re worried that your friends and companions may be amongst those exploding.
Todd loaded his second clip of three. He began firing mindlessly and hopefully once more. He wasn’t concerned with how many zombies he killed, just that he killed as many as he could.
Waldo guessed that he had fired about fifty rounds. He also estimated that he had killed about 30 zombies, but he worried that he was estimating high. He worried that he wasn’t doing enough to kill them all. He worried that maybe he had accidentally hit Mina-something that now, unlike before, he was honestly concerned about-or that Mina had just lost it and thrown herself into the fray for no reason. He worried that the zombies would get through, and kill him, Todd, Jennifer, Elli, and most importantly Sylvie. He worried that his dad would escape his personal crisis and come after him. He worried that maybe Jennifer was psychotic and was doing things to Todd. He worried that maybe he had wasted the last year and a half pursuing Sylvie. He worried. And he fired.
The boomerang was still on its return path; it had just now escaped the sea of zombies, and was approaching Jennifer. It showed no signs of retracting its barbs; Jennifer allowed her intelligence to take control of her once more and ducked as it flew past her head. She spun and watched it go through the windshield of her van, shattering it messily. She didn’t see it go through the back of the van, but she heard a “clunk” that was to her the sickening clunk of metal cutting through metal. She cringed at the sound. She didn’t stop to wonder where the boomerang was going.
Mina first noticed that there were only about a dozen zombies left in the slowly crumbling house. She smashed one, then another. They began to turn away from the door leading to the basement in the kitchen and converge on her. She smashed a head or two. The gunfire stopped. She bit her lip.
Elli stood, and watched the front of the house’s facade crumble. He wondered just what the hell had happened, not to mention whether Dawn’s family had made it out alright. He kneeled and began firing again.
“We’re going to run out of ammo!” He screamed over the din of gunfire.
“We’re not going to retreat!” Todd yelled back at him. He fired once more and reloaded for the last possible time.
Mina died for the seventh time. But then the zombies around her fell to the ground, holes clean through their heads. Dawn stood just outside the basement door, smoking gun (a Desert Eagle, for gun connoisseurs) in hand, facing Mina with absolute severity. Marty, Jack, and Sally stood behind her, watching both of them in bewilderment.
“Back door,” Mina said, standing up, completely devoid of wounds. The three nodded urgently, clutched their guns in tight, and ran away from the crumbling of the house. Dawn stared into Mina’s eyes for a moment, then turned and followed, with the latter directly behind her.
Todd watched the entire house crumble. He cursed.
Jennifer got into her van, eagerly brushing the glass off of the seat first. She started the engine and reloaded her Glock, promptly exiting the van once more and shortening the number of zombies from about 5 dozen.
Elli and Sylvie stood up as one entity; Elli continued firing as Sylvie reached down to pick up the box of rounds.
“Todd, it’s over!” Waldo yelled, carefully sidling to his position.
“It’s not over,” Todd yelled back, ignoring Waldo’s movement.
“We have to escape!”
“We came back for them, we’ll have them!”
“No, we won’t!”
“Yes, we will!” Jennifer yelled, startling Waldo.
“Go!” Mina screamed, looping around the back fence of the collapsed house. The five stared as she, moments behind Dawn and her family, ran towards them. “Start the cars!” She screamed once more. Todd, Jennifer, and Elli continued firing, but Sylvie and Waldo ran to their cars and started them. Marty, Jack, and Sally were the first to reach the group; all three piled into Waldo’s car. Jennifer grabbed Todd and pulled him to her van, forcing him to cease firing. Waldo began to pull out as Elli stopped firing and made for Sylvie’s car. Jennifer pulled out after Waldo, and Sylvie was right behind.
Both of Mina’s doors were still open. Mina dashed into the driver’s seat, and Dawn leapt into the passenger’s seat. They shut the doors just as zombies reached the hood; Mina started the car just as zombies reached the door; and she drove away just as zombies had begun to force the doors open.
It had been seven minutes since the convoy had arrived back at Mina’s house.

Episode 35: Minimize Casualty

“Send her over here and let me kill her, or I’m going to shoot you, Hunter. Amy, by the time you could get over here, I’ll have had enough time to turn and cut you. Desiree, well, you aren’t even armed and I’m going to chop off your head anyway.” Corwin had a firey look in his eyes, a passion that none of the other three had ever expected to see in him. Most of the group had begun to believe that Corwin couldn’t be passionate about anything.
“I dropped my dagger in the hall,” Desiree said guiltily.
“Corwin, you don’t want to do this,” Hunter said forcibly. He was slowly raising his gun, hoping that the action would go unnoticed by Corwin. In the meantime, Amy was pushing Desiree behind her, so that Corwin would literally have to go through her to get to Desiree. She stared at Corwin with an intensity similar to that in his own eyes. Desiree looked down towards her feet sadly.
“Hunter, leave that gun at your side, or else...” Hunter gritted his teeth and raised the gun and puleld the trigger quickly three times. A moment later all four of them opened their eyes; Hunter was unharmed, and Corwin was unarmed and unharmed. He stared at his empty hands in bewilderment. Desiree and Amy stared at his empty hands in bewilderment as well. Then, Corwin looked back up and glared at Hunter. Amy did something quite similar.
“What the fuck, man?” Corwin screamed. “This isn’t over!” He turned and ran into the darkness of the hospital. Hunter sighed; Amy continued to glare at him.
“Why didn’t you kill him?” She screamed. Hunter turned and looked at her with sadder eyes than she had seen outside of fiction.
“My mission.” He said simply.
“And what is your mission?” she verged on sounding sarcastic.
“To minimize casualties.”

“All of them appeared to be one entity,” Dr. Mabus said as the descended the stairs almost calmly.
“Stop saying that,” Nole growled, still holding his stomach.
“We should’ve stopped to look at that,” Camron said to Nole.
“I said no,” Nole barked. “We should get back to the others before they send another group out to find us.”
“The doctor looked at it,” Joseph offered. “Wouldn’t be coming down if it wasn’t something he had to do up there.”
“How can four individuals be one entity?” Dr. Mabus continued, repeating himself. The others couldn’t tell if he was trying to talk to actually talk to them, or if he was just talking to himself. Either way, the conversation was rather disconcerting. “Some sort of shapeshifter, as well. A shapeshifter who can become four of himself. And if it was a human, it must have also been insane. If we did not succeed in killing it, it may return. If it isn’t dead, how can it be killed? And why would it be traveling alone? There is likely to be another one nearby.” The others tried not to stare at him in astonishment. All three of them knew that if there was another one nearby, it would be more careful than the one they had just killed. It would protect its forehead. Camron shuddered involuntarily at the thought of another one. Nole and Joseph controlled their shudder impulses.
They reached the stairwell that led to the triage lobby. They began descending that stairwell without any hesitation, just as they had with all of the others. Suddenly Nole stopped, sniffing the air. His eyes grew wide, and his mouth grew dry. He stopped holding his stomach, and he bolted down the stairs into the center of the room. The other three hesitated, but quickly followed. Dr. Mabus was the first to realize what was happening. He dashed ahead of the others, into the center of the room.
“Fiona, Fiona!” Nole wailed, his voice empty of its growl, filled with only concern. She smiled up at him, weakly.
“Nole,” she rasped.
“Fiona...”
“She’s lost a lot of blood,” Dr. Mabus said, examining her abdomen. “I need... Lotus? Where is Nurse Lotus?”
“I’m right here, Doctor,” she was returning from the hallway, with several blood bags. Dr. Mabus sighed in relief when he saw her, and returned to working on Fiona.
“I could repair this wound if it weren’t losing blood so fast,” he grunted. “She must be a hemophiliac.”
“No,” Camron said sadly, looking on the scene. “No.” He shook his head. “She’s not a hemophiliac. Nole won’t stop bleeding either.”
“Or me,” Joseph suddenly noticed that his arm was still losing blood where Gacy had cut him.
“Blood’s stopped clotting,” Dr. Mabus said quietly in his detached voice. He looked up at Nurse Lotus.
“Feed the blood into her,” he ordered. She nodded and hooked a tube into Fiona’s arm. She hooked the other end into the first bag of blood and began feeding it in.
“There’s a lot of internal damage,” Doctor Mabus said suddenly. “We probably can’t save her.” He looked up at the people around; First Camron, then Joseph, then Nole, then Andy, then Nurse Lotus. “Or anyone else.”
“Nole, I...” Fiona coughed, and a small amount of blood came out.
“Fiona! Fiona, don’t die, don’t die...” She smiled up at him again. “Fiona, I love you...”
“I” cough “love you too.”
“This isn’t how it’s supposed to happen, Fiona...”
“But it’s how” cough “It is happening...”
“Fiona?
“Nole... Survive...”
“Fiona? Fiona?” He leaned down and looked into her empty eyes. “Fiona!” He howled aloud.
Doctor Mabus shut his eyes, stood up, and began to step away from the body. “Nothing to do,” he whispered. The others stepped back reverentially as well, bowing their heads.
Andy, however, only bowed his head for a brief moment. And then he remembered something.
“Doctor, the little girl’s father came,” he said suddenly. Dr. Mabus stopped bowing his head as well and turned to look at Andy.
“Lee was here?” He asked. He smiled faintly. “Well, Dinah’s safe. Dr. Ruby would be happy.”
“So, he really was Lee Harvey Os...”
“NO!” Nole’s voice erupted. Joseph had pointed his gun at Fiona, ready to fire should she rise. Nole had pounced up and swatted the gun away with his roaring cry. To Joseph’s surprise, it had gone skittering across the room, leaving him unarmed. Now, Nole faced him down, his arms from his sides as if ready to gore the man. Nole’s nostril’s flared. Joseph smiled a knowing smile.
“You have probably killed us all,” he said quietly. He raised his arms to show they were empty, took a step back, and sat down in one of the black chairs. Nole growled at him once more before turning to Fiona, who, to Nole’s twisted delight, had begun to stand.
“Fiona!” He said happily, not growling at all, perhaps even verging on whimpering.

Sounds. Not dark. The Notdark. The Notquiet.
Scent. Scent. Familiar. Good. Charming. Food. Food... Coming! Food coming! Eat, Eat, Eat!
Sound. Sound. Loud sound. Pain Sound. Happy sound? Happy pain sound? Other sound. Not like the Quiet Dark. Make new sound. Food, not food. Food cold. New food.
Other! Other self! Food? Not food. Friend.
Darker.

“To minimize casualties?” Amy asked
“Yes. My mission, and that of my race, is to minimize casualties in apocalyptic situations.”
“Apocalyptic situations?”
“Why don’t you just prevent the situations?” Desiree asked smartly. Hunter sighed.
“Because they are essential to the... I can’t tell you that,” he changed his mind mid-sentence.
“You can’t tell us that?” Amy roared. “You can’t tell us that? Is it some sort of Government Secret? A Cosmic Secret?”
“Yes.”
“Yes?”
“It’s a secret of my government. It is a secret of the cosmos.”
“Oh, fuck off!” Amy roared. “Corwin is dangerous, and you know it! Killing him would probably have saved dozens of lives! And you couldn’t do it!”
“Hey! I wanted to! But because of my mission, my weapon is programmed not to harm any living flesh!”
“Any living flesh?” Desiree asked. “At all?”
“None.”
“Dead flesh, though?”
“Yes.”
“What about undead flesh?” Desiree looked up at him. He paused and narrowed his eyes curiously.
“I don’t know.”
“That’s great,” Amy sighed.
The room went dark.
“That’s greater,” Desiree said sardonically.
Screams erupted from far beneath them.
“And that’s greatest,” Hunter sighed. “Come on.” He bolted for the door.

Previous Episode
Next Episode

Episode 34: Gonna Keep it in the Family

“That’s Charles Manson back there,” Camron said very matter-of-factly.
“Right now,” Nole growled, “Let’s be concerned with the serial killers that are coming at us.” He readied his katana, but as always, waited for Camron’s command.
“That’s Lizzie Borden,” Joseph confirmed, taking a step back and readying his rifle.
“And John Wayne Gacy,” Dr. Mabus said in a manner suggesting not fear but fascination.
“Yeah, and I’ll be that one is Jack the Ripper, right? Let’s just kill them!” Nole was almost pouncing forward, but still waited for Camron.
“Yeah,” Camron said, lifting his gun and firing.
Jack bounded towards Dr. Mabus, but his journey was cut short by the careful aim of Joseph. They spring-heeled man lost his control mid bound and went crashing to the ground; instead of staying down, he began to crawl to his feet, still moving in the direction of Dr. Mabus, as Joseph, barely fazed by Jack’s unwillingness to die, fired another round straight into his head. His skull seemed almost to ripple as the bullet entered it, and he only stayed down for a moment. Joseph was fazed this time, but still fired twice more before John Wayne Gacy’s knife tore into his arm. He cried out, just as Nole drove the clown to the ground.
Before Gacy had reached Joseph, he had been facing off against Nole. Nole had repeatedly slashed his sword at the clown, but, grinning, he had jumped out of the way each time. Nole then had taken a wild dash at Gacy, who sidestepped it and ran directly to Joseph and slashed. Nole had quickly gotten up and, after recovering his sword, tackled Gacy and drove his sword into the clown. He twisted it and then moved it up and down, at which point Gacy laughed and threw Nole across the room.
Lizzie, meanwhile, had been advancing on Camron, who held his gun at arm’s length and fired at her. Every bullet connected, causing only a rippling of her being. She didn’t even slow down. She wasn’t going very quickly anyway. Camron pressed himself into the corner, but didn’t cower. He was saving one bullet to shoot her at close range. She was about to reach him when Nole flew into her, knocking her over. The axe fell out of her grip and skittered across the room. Camron ran forward to pull Nole off of her and away.
Joseph had turned his attention to Gacy; he had shot the knife out of his hand, and then had fired directly into Gacy’s eye. Gacy gripped at it and stumbled backwards, at which point Joseph slammed the barrel of his rifle over the clown’s head. While Gacy was on the ground, Joseph reloaded his gun deftly.
Dr. Mabus reached down to pick up the axe that Lizzie had been using, and swung it hard at the once-more standing Jack. It connected just as hard, and forced the ripper back down to the ground. Dr. Mabus looked up towards the back of the room, where Charlie stood laughing with a glowing forehead. It gave him an idea, and he rushed towards the leader.
Nole kicked Lizzie in the face as Camron helped him up, slowing her rise. Nole had dropped his sword once more near Gacy, and was now gripping at his stomach in pain. Before he could help Nole further, Camron spun and fired a round into the approaching Jack, who, mid-bound when the shot connected once more, was knocked out of control again.
John Wayne Gacy had found Nole’s fallen sword, and was lifting it to bring it down on Joseph. Joseph was firing at the clown with one hand, but it wasn’t having any effect. Joseph thought he was finished when a horrible scream erupted from the back of the room, accompanied by a flash of yellow light. The three serial killer combatants froze in the middle of what they were doing, mid-pose, mid-expression. Joseph, Nole, and Camron all expressed their confusion via faces of utter shock. They turned to the back of the room.
There, atop the radiator, stood Dr. Mabus, holding the hilt of the axe, which he had driven into the forehead of the now-screaming Charles Manson. Dr. Mabus’s face was set with an expression of fascinated focus. Slowly, the three frozen serial killers began to lose physical coherence; first, their bodies began to look dried, almost scaled. Then they collapsed into a silvery good and flowed into Charles Manson. Charlie then, moments later, followed suit, becoming scaly and then silvery and finally gooey. Then he appeared to dissolve. The axe that Dr. Mabus had been holding clattered to the ground. He looked across the room.
“That was certainly interesting,” he said before stepping down off of the radiator.

“Daddy!” Dinah squealed happily, as children do when they see their fathers under such circumstances.. She dashed up from her hiding spot, leapt over Nurse Lotus, and hugged the man with the smoking gun. Lotus, gasping faintly for air, rolled her head to watch her go. Fortunately-or unfortunately, in the long term-her body had numbed her neck so that she couldn’t feel the pain. Andy couldn’t decide whether to look at Fiona, who was breathing shallowly, Lotus, who was breathing sharply, Mario, who wasn’t breathing, or Dinah and the man who was apparently her father, both of whom were breathing normally. So Andy decided to look at all four. He looked at all four alternatingly until a couple of seconds later when Dinah’s father had leveled his gun straight at Andy’s head with the single arm that he wasn’t using to hold Dinah. When the gun was pointed at him, Andy focused on the man who held it.
“Thank you for taking care of my daughter,” he said in a tone befitting a generally friendly man who really just wanted to be left alone now and was willing to use a gun to do it. “But you don’t have to do it anymore. You also have no reason to follow me, and at least one reason not to. So it would be wise not to.” He then lowered the gun, turned and swooped away. As he left, those still living in the room heard Dinah speaking to him glowingly and quickly.
Andy didn’t wait for him to leave his line of sight to move over to Nurse Lotus to look at her neck.
“First Aid Kit,” she gasped as soon as she could see him clearly. She pointed to the cabinets behind the triage desk. Andy nodded and ran to the cabinets. As he did, he looked first at Fiona, who was still alive with blood pooling in her stomach, and beginning to overflow. He turned away quickly, wishing he could do something but knowing that he didn’t know enough about medicine. He had to help Nurse Lotus first, because he could do that. When she was better and Doctor Mabus got back, then maybe they could help the bleeding girl. He hadn’t even managed to learn her name, he realized. And then he glanced at Mario, whose name he had managed to learn. And the new shape of his head reminded him of something.
And then he managed to learn Dinah’s father’s name without anyone else in the room.

“We have to get out of here,” Amy said once she had regained her wits from watching Cherry, Gworkin, and John die, and then coming across the strange naked corpse of the woman that they didn’t know was Judy.
“But Corwin’s out there,” Desiree said, clutching at her left arm. “And he’s going to kill me.”
“He’s not going to kill you!” Amy yelled frantically.
“He’s right, though,” Hunter said slowly. “You’re going to die and become one of them.”
“No she’s not!” Amy said, turning to Hunter with tears in her eyes, ready to attack him.
“Yeah, I am,” Desiree said. Amy turned back to her, not ready to attack anyone anymore. Desiree looked happy and sad at once. It was a look of acceptance.
“Dez...”
“Amy, we all knew that one day some of us would die. We were ready for it.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Amy, you have to promise me something.”
“No, No, don’t ask it!”
“Look, this is all very fascinating,” Hunter began, but the two girls ignored him.
“When I change...” Desiree said.
“Desiree!”
“Amy! As soon as I change, you have to kill me!”
“No!”
“Promise me! I don’t want anyone else to do it, I want you to do it!”
“Desiree, I can’t, I just can’t...”
“Yes you can, Amy.” Tears began streaming down her face as well. “You’re going to have to let me go, and I need you to prove that you can.”
“Desiree...”
“Please, Amy.”
She paused and looked at John on the ground. She shut her eyes. “Okay, Desiree,” she finally said. “I’ll do it.”
“Good.”
“Okay, now that that’s over, we need to find a way out,” Hunter said. “Desiree, as long as you’re still human, you’re still an asset. So try to stay alive for as long as you can.”
Desiree nodded. Amy bit her lip as she watched her.
“How about the window?” Hunter asked. He walked over to it and stuck his head out. He then pulled his now wet head back in and shook it.
“No?” Desiree asked.
“Everything is too narrow and too wet. I think that the dead girl there came in through here. With someone else.”
“You mean... There’s another zombie in the hospital?” Amy asked, trying to get past the fact that she was going to have to shoot her best friend very soon.
“Maybe by now. But she and Gworkin and Cherry were all killed, at least the first time, with a gun. Neither Cherry nor Gworkin used a gun. Which means that there’s someone in here with a gun, probably a man, and a violent rapist at that judging from these girls, who is very dangerous. And probably shirtless.” He pointed to the discarded men’s shirt on the floor next to the girl.
“Maybe he’ll take care of Corwin?” Desiree suggested.
“That wouldn’t be good,” Hunter said grimly.
“Why not?” Amy asked harshly. “We let one problem deal with another, and then we have one less problem to deal with.”
“It just isn’t,” Hunter barked.
“You have to explain that!” Amy yelled. “You’ve just sprung it on us that you really are an alien...”
“Which I told you many times,” Hunter rolled his eyes.
“... And now you’ve got astounding powers of logic and a passion for protecting people who are trying to kill us?”
“Look, Amy, I know it’s a lot, but I can’t exp...”
“You have to explain it,” Desiree chimed in. “You owe us that much.” Hunter scoffed in response.
“I owe you? Oh, that’s rich. You really want to know what I mean? What I’m doing here? I...” He was interrupted by the door behind them finally bursting open.
“Give me Desiree and you two can live!” Corwin screamed, pointing Gworkin’s crossbow at Hunter with his left hand and holding his own sword in his right.

Joseph suddenly fired his rifle. Doctor Mabus looked behind him in time to see Rena Desoto slump against the wall and fall back to her redeath. Joseph decided to take no chances, and spun and fired a round into the skull of Eddie Plant, who had not found cause yet to rise from the dead. The other two patients were in so many pieces that even if they did have enough of their brains still together to become zombies, they would not have been able to really do anything.
“Thank you,” Doctor Mabus said after a moment.
“You don’t sound sure of that, Doc,” Nole growled, still clutching at his stomach.
“Nole,” Camron asked slowly, “are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” the wolfish man growled. “The fat one just stabbed me in the stomach. I’ve had worse.” Camron shut his eyes.
“I know,” he muttered. “I’m sorry.”
“Camron, shut up.” Nole growled kindly. Camron smiled weakly.
“Where are you going,” Dr. Mabus said cautiously as Joseph began walking out the door.
“Back down. We found our eight.” Dr. Mabus nodded and followed. Soon after, Camron and Nole, after sharing some discomfort over the Doctor’s demeanor, followed as well.

Andy had brought what looked like a household first aid kit back to Lotus. He had then put a couple of things that he wasn’t quite sure what they were on the small hole through the side of her neck, and then wrapped a bandage around it. She had guided him through the whole process, which would have been much easier had it been someone besides the guide who was injured through the neck.
“Why do you have a normal old first aid kit here?” Andy asked, trying to sound casual, as he wrapped the gauze around her neck.
“If someone sustained a minor injury and there were no doctors available,” she smiled at him gently.
“It was a good idea,” he smiled back. He finished wrapping the bandage, and Nurse Lotus propped herself up. She took a glance around the room, and noticed that Fiona was still breathing. She pushed herself forwards and crawled to the bleeding, gasping, still living girl.
“We have to stop this bleeding,” Nurse Lotus said sharply. She turned to look at Andy. He nodded.
“What do you need?”

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Next Episode

Edits, Recons, and Changes (By Episode)

July 2, 2006

Episode 1: Emphasized Todd's attraction to Sylvie. "Todd insisted to himself that it was safe to bring her up when he was around, but really, it wasn't."

Episode 2: Aurora->Moda Garden; Introduced the 4 named Mormon characters. "Once they had gone, however, Elder Smith VI, the leader of their congregation, began to look slightly worried. He made sure that three particular youths were nearby."; Emphasized Sylvie's character. "The only thing that even slightly bothered her about this was that sometimes she hurt them, because they got the wrong idea. But deep down she thought that most of them deserved to be hurt, so it wasn't a large bother."; Casually introduced the Mina-Ten Years thing and slightly altered her character. "Mina was an ex-pothead who felt, rather wrongly, that she didn’t have much of a personal personality, and thus strove to be like the most appealing person she could find. She had been doing it for upwards of ten years."; pointed out that Sylvie's parents are asian. "Sylvie’s parents are currently attending the same party as Waldo’s, being one of Lucy's unnoticed asian families"; A number of other minor changes to word choice and grammar.

July 3, 2006

Episode 3: Introduced Jennifer's character more aptly; numerous minor changes to word choice and grammar.

July 6, 2006

Episode 4: Jennifer Consistencies; Waldo opens the door instead of Todd; Waldo consistencies; Various other minor changes

July 7, 2006

Episode 5: Zach's independence emphasized. Few other minor changes.

Episode 6: Nothing Major.

August 9, 2006

Episode 7: Emphasized Todd's "romantic" nature, and Jennifer's mysterious past. Made Waldo's dialogue more realistic.

Episode 8: Todd is no longer Solasis. Removed the mood breaking warning framing the rape implication. Minor changes.

August 10, 2006

Episode 9: Primarily dialogue and narrative fixes. Fixed Mina's continuity, as well as Sylvie's Parents'.

August 11, 2006

Episode 10: Mostly minor gramatical changes. Made stronger mention of Dinah's Daddy's "Scary Place", and their connection to Doctor Ruby. Foreshadowing added as well.

Episode 11: Steve's weapon is now consistently a shotgun; he does not waste bullets; he calls zombies Ghouls; Sunny now hasn't smiled in ten years instead of 5. Minor Gramatical changes as always.

August 16, 2006

Episode 12: Mostly gramatical errors; removed full reference to the war in the Alternate Universe; repaired a couple of character descriptions, in particular Fiona. Changed a "their" to "there". That was an embarassing one.

September 1, 2006

Episode 5: Changed Zach's "loyalty" thing. Also mentioned Becky and began characterization slightly earlier.

Episode 33: Mina

“They’re going to come through the door,” Marty said. “They’re already in the house. Any minute now, they’re going to come through that door.”
“That’s the most coherent thought you’ve had all night,” Jack said.
“Gallows humor. Hey, mom, does that ever help out in the field? There’s a lot you have to tell us after ten years.”
“Marty, can we please talk about that later?” Sally whispered urgently to her youngest daughter.
“It’s morning,” Dawn said quietly.
“What?” Jack asked.
“It’s been morning for about four hours now.”
“But 12 o’clock is midnight; it’s the middle of the night. Not the end of it.”
“I’m glad to see you three are getting along,” Sally muttered.
“I’ll be mad at you when we’re not about to die anymore,” Dawn said. “I’d rather die with my old, honest family than the ten-years-later one that thrives on deception.”
They were quiet for a minute as the zombies rustled around upstairs.
“I’m with Dawny,” Marty said.
“Yeah,” Jack said. “The family that, er, doesn’t lie together, stays together?”

“Oh, just get ready to shoot,” Sally said. She hefted her gun and pointed it towards the door. She wasn’t ready to start joking about their family’s collapse like the rest of them were. Unfortunately for her, she had forgotten that friendly mockery of obstacles had been what had kept their family from collapsing that long.

“Oh, god, I kissed him... That’s awful... I shouldn’t have kissed him. He’s too young for me. It’s evil. I’m a pedophile,” Jennifer was rambling to herself as she followed Mina’s car. She didn’t realize that she was very nearly tailgating Mina, making sure she didn’t lose her, and watching to make sure that neither of them tried to kiss the other. Suddenly, she felt horribly betrayed. If he really loved her, why would he leave her for Mina?! Mina was nothing. Was he just toying with her heart? Was he going to stop loving her so soon and begin to love Mina instead? Oh, god, what if the two of them were conspiring to break her? Or, even worse, what if they decided to? What if they decided to conspire to destroy her when Mina told Todd what she was really like? She was terrified. Oh, no, no, Mina was going to tell Todd what she was really like, and then no one in the group would like her, and she’d be alone-again! But she wasn’t really like that anymore. That’s how she had been ten years ago. Until about a year ago. But she had changed! Oh, god, Mina was going to ruin her one chance at redemption! She began to consider just leaving on her own. That would make things much easier. Then she wouldn’t have to worry about whether or not Mina hated her, or whether Mina had made Todd hate her. She would just be free of it all. And alone. And the memory of the kiss came back to her. She touched her lips. Oh, god, it felt good. And that brought the guilt back. She slammed her hands down on the rim of the steering wheel and played through the whole cycle again.

“Why did I have to go and kiss him on the cheek? I‘m awful. I should’ve just... Told him it would be okay... Or something. Dammit! I’m horrible. And I should’ve stuck to the plan. I should’ve gone to Mina’s car. Ugh!” Sylvie paused and glanced in her rear-view mirror, just before remembering that there was no one behind her. She looked ahead and saw the back of Jennifer’s van.. She gripped the steering wheel and bit her lower lip gently. “No, no, this isn’t my fault. I was doing the nice thing. And they’re all ignoring me and attacking me. Elli has no right to treat me like that, even if he has lost his family. And that Jennifer woman-she stole Todd and made Mina insane! The only one I’ve got is Waldo, and he’s with Elli. None of them would come with me, would they?” She paused as she turned with Jennifer. “Now I’m talking to myself.” I trickle of blood touched her tongue. She stopped biting down and touched her lip gingerly. “Oh...” She wiped the blood away. She convinced herself to stop talking to herself. It struck her that maybe they all really did hate her, except for Waldo. And Waldo even. What if they had realized that she was really just a desperately lonely girl who thrived on feeling sexy? They would never speak to her again! She would be alone! But, no, no, that wasn’t what she was really like. Only the boys and girls who didn’t like her said she was that way. It wasn’t true, it was just bitterness. Yeah. And now, they all would think it about her. She began to consider just leaving the group, on her own, so that she wouldn’t have to deal with their hatred. She would find a different group of people, people who properly liked her. But she realized that she did like these people. Even Jennifer was interesting. Mina was her best friend. Dawn needed protection. And the boys were sweet. And then she remembered Elli, and the guilt returned.

“So, Mina,” Todd said kindly a couple of minutes after the four-car convoy had left Sylvie’s house. “What’s the story?”
She shut her eyes for a second, remembered that she was driving, opened them back up, clenched the steering wheel, shut her eyes again, opened them again after remembering once more that she was still driving, and sighed nervously.
“Mina, whatever it is, you don’t have to be afraid.”
“Why did you come with me?” She asked in a voice that was obviously nervous but obviously trying to sound accusing.
“Because Sylvie ditched you.”
Mina scoffed. “Yeah, that’s new.”
“Sylvie ditches everyone.”
“No, being ditched,” she whispered.
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing.” There was a pause for a minute. “Why is Waldo leading us to my house?” She yelled in her particular way of almost whining loudly instead of yelling. There was another moment’s pause. “Alright. You want to know what happened?” Her voice was that of someone who had overcome fear with anger. “It started almost eleven years ago...”

“Hey, Elli, it’ll be alright.” Waldo said not turning away from the road, being the only person in the group who could talk to someone without trying to look at them. Elli, meanwhile, was lying in the backseat, having just in the last few minutes finally allowed the true severity of his situation wash over him. His emotional spectrum, unlike the others, was all of one kind: Sadness. It was a wide spectrum of sadness: Guilty sadness, Lonely sadness, general sadness. But none of it, unlike the others, involved betrayal or anger. Waldo, meanwhile, was on his guilty stage. He kept asking himself how he had let Elli’s family be killed. How he had saved Elli when Elli was sure to be nothing more than alone. And then of how he had let Elli slap Sylvie, which she hadn’t deserved, and hadn’t said anything about it. And then he thought of how he had let Sylvie go alone, and about how he had been prepared to let Sylvie not take her dear, dear car, the thing she loved the most in the world. “It’ll be okay,” he said aloud involuntarily, quickly adding an “Elli” to save face. Elli didn’t notice. Elli wouldn’t have cared anyway. He began to cry. Not to sob; he was far past sobbing. He just cried. Without noticing this fact, Waldo began to feel a little bit betrayed. After all, saving Elli’s life had been the right thing to do, for Elli especially, despite what he thought earlier. And then Elli had gone and slapped the woman that he, Waldo, loved, pushing her farther from both of them. The ungrateful little... And Todd had insulted Sylvie too! Waldo gripped the steering wheel and told himself that he should just convince Sylvie to leave the group with him, in either of their cars, leaving the other for the others. And then he realized that the others would never let them do that, and that he wouldn’t want them to. He resolved to stay with them, and began to feel guilty for even thinking of it, and then again for the other things.

“... I had to keep going. My best friend had been killed. I had no reason to leave. I had to keep going, and help them find out what was happening. Dawn, she said that she was... Seeing something. I trusted her too much to not help her. Jennifer was helping too... And more of us were killed every week. More students pulled out. And...” Mina really began to cry. “Dawn survived an attack, and she knew where it was all coming from. That was the last day of school. A few days later... We went to stop it. Jennifer was supposed to come, but... She didn’t show up. She didn’t show up!” Mina paused to catch her breath. “The thing... The black thing... It started to spin... It stopped just being black and Dawn...” Mina shut her eyes for a moment once again, and gripped the steering wheel even harder. Todd saw her knuckles turning white. “Dawn threw herself in,” she finally said. “She threw herself in, and the colors exploded, and then... That was the last thing.”
Todd began to realize some of what he was afraid to find out. “And... You were...”
“I was as old as I am today,” Mina said quietly, through the tears.
Todd tried to continue the conversation to suppress his personal concerns. “Is that what you’re really afraid of?” It didn’t work so well; as she talked, he began to realize that Jennifer must have been the same age too. He began to feel terrible. He had basically just made her into a pedophile, he thought.
“Yes... Well, no... Sort of.” She sighed nervously again and shifted her hands on the steering wheel. “I woke up somewhere I didn’t recognize, not knowing what was happening. I could barely remember the last year, only that something bad had happened. It took me two weeks to get home, and when I got there...” She choked down a sob. “My family... They were different. After they stopped being afraid of me, they told me that it had been two years...”
“You had been unconscious for two years?”
“I don’t think so... No, definitely not. It turned out I could only vaguely remember the last three years. Not the one that I had thought I couldn’t remember. I had been awake. I...” She couldn’t choke back her next sob. “I figured it out when my little brother killed me.”
“What?” Todd yelled. He pressed himself up against the door of the car. “You’re not dead!” The statement had made him lose his train of thought just after the betrayal phase. As Mina was speaking, he had been thinking that Jennifer had lied to him, and that she had been keeping it a secret, so that he would fall for her. Where this a novel, he knew, he would have felt also betrayed by his heart. But he didn’t. And now he had forgotten the betrayal anyway. Now he thought he was in the car with a super-intelligent zombie.
“I didn’t die,” she yelled. “See, this is what I was afraid of!” She swerved the car slightly which, unbeknownst to her, panicked Jennifer behind her, and caused Sylvie to think that Jennifer must be drunk. Elli and Waldo, being in the lead and caught up in their sorrow and the road, didn’t react because they didn’t notice. “If you knew, I knew you would be afraid!”
Todd shook a little in fear, no longer of Zombie Mina, but rather of Angry Mina. “Mina, it’s okay, it’s okay. Just tell me what happened.”
She furrowed her brow, as tears streamed down her cheeks. “He thought I was a fake. My little brother, I mean. He dropped something very heavy on my head... I think I died, but only for a minute...” Todd stared. “He ran. He ran away, and he was gone. My parents, they thought I had killed him or something. They killed me too.. It didn’t take again...” Todd’s eyes grew wider. “I hid in the basement... I hid there for years... My parents, they didn’t know what to do but send food and water down... They wouldn’t talk to me or anything... It was there that I remembered... The year at school... The two years that I had lost... I didn’t remember much...”
“The two years... Someone did something to you, didn’t they?”
“Yeah... I can’t remember who they were... But I knew it was because of the... Thing... And I remember that they killed me three times, too.”
“You’ve died five times?” Todd almost yelled it. Mina swerved a little again, causing the same reactions in those behind them.
“Six... I tried to run away two years ago... And I got hit by a truck...” She giggled almost insanely. “That was actually my favorite. It’s more fun than something hitting you on the head, or getting shot in the head.”
“Why did you come back to school?” He asked suddenly, not wanting to be left alone with the resurfacing thoughts of terror, primarily about what Jennifer wanted with him. What if she was driven insane by whatever had happened?
“I don’t know... I wanted to. I wanted to get my life back. I thought maybe if I lived normally, I would stop not dying... Then.... Dawn showed up... She was the same age either. But she didn’t recognize me. I was almost glad for that, except that it worried me. And then this happened, and there was Jennifer, the same as ever... And she knew both of us. And she was... Just the same. Just the same...” She whispered. She looked up at the road sharply. “What about the others?” She said scared. “Did any of them age? What about Lucky? What about Seth, and Summer? And Dave? What about that cop? Are they all still just the same?”
Todd stared at her. But he wasn’t thinking that much about her anymore. He was thinking about Jennifer. He had briefly considered not going back to her car, to avoid the confrontation. And then he realized that she had tried to tell him, that she would’ve been telling him right now if he hadn’t come to Mina. And that he still loved her.

All six trains of thought in that convoy became derailed when Waldo stopped his car, though. They all stared at Mina’s house in horror, concerned now only for what was inside.
All that could be seen of the house was the zombie horde.




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Episode 32: Dawn

“This is my house,” Mina gulped, still nervous but managing to suppress a stutter or a sob. She walked up the step and unlocked the door. She pushed it open. Everyone breathed a small sigh of relief when nothing emerged to attack them, and they all entered the house. Mina tried the lights, and was relieved to see that they worked. She was tired of the things the dark made her see.
“Where are your parents?” Jack asked in a kindly voice.
“Um... They’re in Vegas or something.” She said quietly.
“Well, we can’t do anything about that,” Jennifer said, a sudden understanding of Mina flowing through her voice. Mina looked at her, and tears began to fill her eyes again. Jennifer’s eyes became apologetic, which, though meant to comfort Mina, actually frightened her further.
“We have to get moving,” Sally said gruffly. The interruption calmed Mina, and made Jennifer think that her efforts to reconnect with Mina’s good side were being sabotaged. She was very wrong; as Mina was just afraid to reconnect with her. Still, Jennifer marked it mentally as another cruel act of Sally. “How are we going to do this?”
“Well,” Todd began, “I think that we need to stay in groups of at least two, for safety. In case a car breaks down in the middle of zombies. We only have one car right now, and it can seat up to six if we squeeze. That means that we can get two cars. Jennifer has a big van, and it’s already stocked with blankets, so we need that one. We want the most space we can have, to fit all of us as well as supplies. Waldo’s car is more roomy than Sylvie’s, so we should get that one.”
“My family is staying here,” Sally said stonily, giving Jennifer a nasty glance as she did.
“Well, I guess that narrows down who’s going. Mina, you drive. Sylvie, you’re her second. Waldo and Elli will get Waldo’s car, and Jennifer and I will get the van.”
Sylvie had long ago wiped the tears from her eyes, but her mascara had vaguely run. She did her best to keep her expression nonchalant and gently happy, but she kept glancing almost angrily at Elli, and wouldn’t make any real eye contact with anyone. Todd, Waldo, Mina, and Elli all noticed, but Waldo was the only one who put her before anyone else. He vowed to talk to her about it when he got a second. Todd was more concerned with Mina and Jennifer, neither of whom seemed to have any prospective emotional support outside of their group, and who seemed to have some sort of real problem. The same problem seemed to be connected to Dawn, further worrying Todd. Elli, meanwhile, was filled with depression, self-loathing, and an abhorrence for Sylvie. Mina was too scared of Jennifer to do anything about Sylvie’s problems.
“Get going!” Sally commanded. “We can’t stay in one place for too long. The longer we’re in one place, the longer the zombies have to find us. We do not want that to happen. Got it? Then go. Quick. And Mina, take your key with you. We’re going to lock the doors and hunker down here until you return. Return as quickly as you can, please.” Mina nodded nervously, biting her lip, in response. The six designated to go out for cars left quickly. Before leaving, Jennifer gave Sally a look that could kill sheep, and Todd gave Dawn a reassuring smile. She didn’t return it, because she was too busy holding her head against the pain of the strange memories that weren’t quite memories.

Mina’s car was loaded and started without incident. Sylvie sat in the passenger seat. At Mina, Waldo, and Elli’s insistence, Jennifer sat at the far right of the back seat, Todd pressed up against her, Waldo on his left, and Elli farthest left. It worked out well; Sylvie didn’t have much of a particular opinion on Jennifer, nor did Jennifer have a particular opinion on her. Todd and Jennifer were, in the eyes of Waldo, acting like rabbits during mating season. Elli and Waldo were both terrified of Jennifer, but not nearly as much as Mina was, and Elli was still angry at Sylvie.
“Let’s get Jennifer’s van first,” Mina suggested, attempting to be subtle but failing terribly. Everyone seemed to agree with that course of action and so, without incident, they reached Dawn’s house. There was one zombie stumbling around just outside of the van, but as soon as he and Jennifer were out of the car, Todd had shot it in the head with one round. It fell to the ground. Jennifer stared at him in astonishment, as did the others. Waldo stuck his head out the window.
“When did you get so good at that?” he asked earnestly. Todd looked at the gun.
“I can honestly say that I don’t know.”
“That’s weird.”
“I’ll say. Now, let’s get moving!”
Jennifer nodded slowly and hurried to the driver’s side of her van. She unlocked the door, climbed in, and unlocked Todd’s door from within. He climbed in, shut the door, and turned to smile at her. She stared at him cautiously for a moment, and then started the van. Mina began to drive away, and Jennifer followed. She glanced at Todd every couple of seconds.
“Alright, it’s time for you to start explaining,” he said calmly and quietly.

“Mom, there’s something wrong.” Dawn said suddenly. Sally grimaced and turned away from the window.
“What do you mean, sweetie?”
Dawn’s eyes looked panicked and accusatory all at once. “I mean... Something’s not right. I’m older than Marty. But everyone says that she’s older than me. My memory jumps from the beginning of summer break after my Sophomore year of high school to the beginning of Christmas break in my Junior year of high school. I can’t even quite remember the end of Sophomore year, or most of the year itself. I know something bad happened. And, for some reason, none of my old friends are around, but I can’t remember them anyway. I just know they existed. And I know that somehow I know Mina from a long time ago, but she is just as old as she was even though I know that it was a long time ago. And the same goes for the crazy woman.” Sally looked away from her daughter, to Jack. He shook his head. Sally bit her lip, and tears began to fill up her eyes. Marty leaned back in the recliner that she had claimed for the time being.
“You know, I could explain it to the squirt without feeling bad about it. I didn’t do anything except play along.”
“Stop calling me squirt,” Dawn said, turning to Marty with blazing eyes. “You’re supposed to be the squirt.”
Marty smiled with a vague amount of liquor still in her. “That’s right.” Dawn spun and glared at her mother.
“You have to tell me what happened.”
Sally covered her eyes with her hand, and propped her elbow in her other hand. “Dawn, I can’t...”
“Sally, you have to.” Jack looked up at her. “I’d tell her, but you know more than I do. I would just mix things up more.” His eyes were filled with more concern and parental love than Sally knew hers had been in almost ten years. Sally sighed heavily, and looked her eldest daughter in the eyes.
“Dawn... Please, you have to understand, that I was trying to help...”
“I still don’t know what you did to me!” Dawn yelled.
“Dawn, it wasn’t... Oh... Dawn...”
“Start with my Sophomore Year. That’s when it started, isn’t it?”
Sally shut her eyes tightly. “Yes. Yes. There was something terrible happening... Students were being killed... But still, you, and we, wanted you to go to school. Not many parents did, but enough to keep the school open for those who did. And it was your choice too, it was your choice! You wanted to find out what was happening. That’s what you said. You said you needed to know what was happening. You had been seeing something... You couldn’t describe what, but you had seen it. And you kept going, and they kept dying, and, oh, Dawn, you had always been so dreamy, walking with your mind in some sort of fog, but then, after the end of the school year, there was something in the school... You and some other students went to find it, and then... It exploded. It was this burst of multi-colored light... And some of the kids who had been there, they... Different things happened, Dawn. No one knows exactly what happened there! Some of them disappeared, some of them changed, and you... You went into a coma. Joe, Joe had been investigating it, and he was trying to get there that night, but he was too late... He found you. He couldn’t save you... No one ever knew exactly what happened, oh, Dawn, we couldn’t figure it out! All of you were there one minute, and minutes later some of you weren’t, and none of you were all the way there, and you were in a coma... Joe got you to a hospital, and they said that there was nothing they could do... It didn’t take us long to notice that it wasn’t just a coma, oh, god, it wasn’t just a coma... You weren’t aging. Your metabolism had basically stopped. And Joe, well, Joe had recently become the Director of the Department of Extranormal Affairs-he took you out of the hospital and put you into a special hospital where they studied those things and, oh, Dawn, it took us so long... Joe hired me, I watched over you, I did jobs to make it easier for the Department to help you, and... Oh, Dawn, it was just so long...”
Dawn’s eyes were misted over with too many emotions to name. “How long was it?” She asked quietly.
Sally could no longer speak. She was on her knees, sobbing.
“Nine and a half years,” Marty said quietly. Dawn spun to look at her. “You were asleep for nine and a half years. I watched my beautiful big sister become my adorable little sister. It made me kind of queasy. Why I started drinking.” Dawns eyes softened on her little sister. Or was she her big sister? She shut her eyes tightly and turned towards her father.
“How much of this did you know?” she asked quietly.
“Not much of it until tonight,” he said, his voice strangely resigned. “I knew about the explosion, I knew about the coma, and I knew about the metabolism. They told me,” his voice was definitely bitter towards his wife, “That the hospital was a special children’s hospital for children who need to be hospitalized but show no signs of recovery. They told me that you couldn’t take up a bed at the normal hospital anymore. I visited you, with your mother, once a week, for nine and a half years. Nine and a half years, without ever knowing a thing about what was really happening to my eldest daughter.” Dawn nodded; she was already forgiving her father, and her sister. She knew she wouldn’t be able to really forgive them for a while, but they were already on the road. Her mother, however...
“Why did you lie to me?” she whispered. Sally choked on a sob, and burst out with another sob. “I asked you why you lied to me,” Dawn hissed.
“The doctors said...” Jack started to say. But Dawn held her hand up to stop him.
“I asked my mother,” she said pointedly. Sally let loose another sob, and then another. Dawn glared at her patiently until, nearly ten minutes later, she stopped crying.
“Why did you lie to me?” She asked once more.
“Oh, Dawn, please, understand, I didn’t think you could take the shock... I couldn’t let you go into another coma. You might never have woken up from another one! I couldn’t gamble your life like that... I had to give you a chance, slowly introduce you to the world... Oh, Dawn, I’m so sorry...” Dawn continued glaring at her mother, who had begun sobbing again.
“And the two of you went along with it?” she asked without taking her eyes off of her mother.
“We didn’t have much choice, Dawn,” Marty said. “It made sense. I didn’t want to see you go into another coma. That was too scary.”
“If we didn’t go along with it, we could’ve lost you and your mother.” Jack looked at the ground again. “I hope that you can forgive us.”
Dawn shut her eyes. “I don’t kn...” She was interrupted by loud moaning outside of the house. Sally spun and readied her gun, still sniffling, but managing to fight back the tears. Jack, Marty, and Dawn all readied their weapons as Sally went back to the window she had been looking out of and peeked out of the curtain. She flung the curtain back closed and backed away from the window.
“Basement. Now.” She commanded, pointing her gun alternatingly to the window and the door, slowly backing away. Her family did as she said, because they knew that, at least in that department, she knew what she was talking about. They went to the basement door, Marty and Dawn descending first. Jack held the door open for Sally as she slowly backed away. When she got to the door she turned and ran quickly down. Jack shut the door.
It didn’t have a lock.

“Todd, I uhm... Oh, god, I’ve been planning this for almost an hour, but I still don’t know where to start.”
“Start with the easy part. You, somehow, knew Mina, Dawn, and Joe before all this, didn’t you?”
“Was I that obvious about it?”
“You, and them.”
(And the author and narrator. They were trying to build up, you know, a sense of mystery and wonder. Instead, they flat out told you that something happened ten years ago between the four of them. At least they didn’t come out and tell you what happened. Dumbasses. Should have built up the mystery better.)
“Oh. Well, you know that much now. So, I guess I should tell you how I know them?”
“Oh, first I want to make sure I know as much as I think I know. You don’t have a family anymore, do you?”
She blinked at him. “No.”
“You’ve been through several family like structures, haven’t you?”
She blinked again. “Jesus, how are you doing that?”
“Apparently, zombies and beautiful, powerful girls bring out the best in me.”
“That’s just... Oh.” She blushed slightly. Mina’s car had stopped and parked; Jennifer parked her van right behind the car.
“And you know where the zombies came from, don’t you?”
“Sort of...” Three figures came out of Mina’s car.
“And you’re falling in love with me?”
“I think s... Hey. Woah. Oh, dammit.” Todd smiled admiringly at her.
“I fell in love with you a couple of hours ago. When you held me in my house, when I was crying. You were so strong, but so soft. And I don’t mean physically. Emotionally. You seemed so... Psychotic. And then you were just so... Gentle. And I fell for you.”
Jennifer shut her eyes. She was torn. “Todd... We... There... I have to tell you something else... Oh, god, I’m going to... Oh...”
Todd touched her shoulder. “I think it can wait a little while. Something’s not happening like it’s supposed to. See how Waldo’s yelling, and Sylvie’s walking up the driveway, and Mina’s alone in her car? Sylvie isn’t doing things according to plan. She never does. There’ll be no stopping her. And Mina can’t be alone. She’ll lose it.” Jennifer cursed under her breath. “I’m going to ride with Mina. I promise you, when we leave her house, I’m going to ride with you. I’m going to listen to your story.” Todd unbuckled his seatbelt and opened the door.
“Wait,” Jennifer said. He stopped and turned. “Todd, why don’t we just... Let’s go away. Together. Now.” She looked hopefully, and sadly, at him. “It’ll be... So much easier...” Todd smiled at her.
“You know I can’t do that. You’ll follow us still, right?” he asked. She looked away and began to say something. He stopped her and leaned up and kissed her passionately. She was caught off guard but, after a second, put her hands on his shoulders and returned the kiss. He broke off. “You’ll follow us still, right?” He repeated. She nodded. He smiled and jumped out of the van.
“See you in a few!” he said before shutting the passenger door.
“Give it up!” he yelled out to the still yelling Waldo as he walked to Mina’s car. “She’s not going to listen to reason. Let her take her car. It’s more room for supplies.”
Waldo and Elli looked at Todd, looked at Sylvie, grimaced, and climbed into Waldo’s car. Todd got into Mina’s passenger seat, halting her tears once more.
“Mina,” he said kindly, “You’re not alone.”

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Episode 31: A Stroll Through Town

“Honey, why did Joe Hill just melt in front of us?” Jack asked quietly.
“Jack, I can honestly say that I have no idea,” Sally said, staring at the place where he had disappeared.
“Fuck,” Jennifer whistled.
“Shit,” Marty concurred.
“Why didn’t the explosion kill him?” Waldo asked. Mina whimpered in response. Todd glanced at her, and she hid her face.
“Was it some sort of biological weapon he was using?” Todd asked.
“Who was that?” Elli asked.
“He blew himself up to save us all,” Sylvie said, half through real tears and half through crocodile tears.
“Joe...” Sally whispered. “Who were you...?”
Mina whimpered again.
“Mom...” Dawn said to Sally, noticing how scared Mina was. “We should go.”
“Yes,” Sally said softly. “Yes we should.”
“We can try to figure Joe out another time,” Jennifer said, somehow making it very pointed at Sally. Sally gave her a horrible look, and seemed to be about to burst, but she turned.
“Mina, lead the way to your house.” Mina whimpered once again, but then she began walking North. Everyone followed in a cluster, which only nearly didn’t have Mina actually inside its boundaries. She sniffled quite a bit as they walked. For the first ten minutes, everyone did nearly nothing except walk and look out for zombies. There didn’t seem to be any around. They began to relax a little after those ten minutes. It wasn’t exactly relaxing, though. It was more changing the focus. Everyone refocused their energies elsewhere.
Jennifer refocused her energies on what she was going to do about Todd. She had really screwed things up there. For both of them. Because she was feeling things that she hadn’t felt in so very long... She was scared. She was scared that it would all happen again. She had to be clear with him now. Before she made things unchangeable.
“Todd...” She began.
“Wait,” he said quietly.
“Wait?”
“You don’t want to say this in front of Sally. She dislikes you enough already. You don’t need to make her hate you even more.”
“Todd, no, I really have to...”
He smiled into her eyes. “I want to wait. Until we’re alone.”
She looked down at him gently. “Todd...”
He grinned. “It’s weird; you’re taller than me, you’re looking down at me, but I feel like we’re... At each others’ levels.”
She stared at him in astonishment. What the hell did he know? Who was he? He couldn’t be... No, there’s no way he could have been... Him.
“Okay. We’ll wait.”
“Thank you,” He smiled some more. “Besides, I think that Sally really wants to talk to you...” Sally had slowed down to be almost walking at Jennifer’s side. Todd caught Jennifer’s eye once more before moving off and winked.
As Todd walked away, he smiled inwardly. He had never been able to wink. He had tried and tried, and that had been the first time he had ever managed it. He scanned the group briefly; Jennifer and Sally were walking together. They weren’t actually walking together, it seemed, just side by side in the same apparent direction. Elli was propped up between Waldo and Sylvie, who seemed to be talking to him in hushed tones. Jack, Marty, and Dawn seemed to be having an everyday inane conversation. And there, at the front of the group, not with anyone in particular, and vaguely twitching every few seconds, was Mina. Todd suddenly felt very cruel. Mina was scared, terrified, and no one was even walking with her. He decided to overcome the guilt by walking with her.
“Mina,” he said gently. “What’s wrong?”
She looked at him through her teary eyes. “What do you mean?” she asked unconvincingly. “I’m... I’m fine.”
“You always were a bad liar,” He smiled. She snorted.
“I wasn’t always a bad liar.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means nothing.”
“Okay. So I’ve barely known you for a year. But you’ve been a bad liar that whole time.” She smiled weakly at that.
“Todd, there’s a lot you don’t know about me.”
“There’s a lot I don’t know about you, that’s true. There’s a lot I don’t know about Dawn and Jennifer, either.” Mina’s eyes filled with their strange sort of shock that they sometimes did. “I was right, wasn’t I? You and Jennifer and Dawn... And Joe? What happened to you?”
Mina bit her lip. “Nothing. I don’t know Jennifer. I’d never seen Joe in my life. I swear...”
“Okay. Mina, whatever happened, it’s okay. And I’m here for you.”
“Yeah. That helps...”
“Do you want me to walk with you?”
“Actually, yeah. I’m... Lonely.”

Dawn cast a quick glance in Mina’s direction. Todd had his hand on her shoulder. Dawn cast her eyes down. The deja vu and presque vu was back, and with it a small wave of despair. What the hell was happening? She stopped participating in the conversation she was having with her father and sister about whiskey. Both Marty and her father were pro-whiskey, yet the two of them managed to be arguing about it. Dawn knew that they were insane. And she knew that at one point she had been older than Marty. She was sure of it... She touched her head gingerly with her right hand.

Sylvie had also looked up at Todd comforting Mina. She sneered lightly. She was used to both of them paying attention to her, not each other. And especially not that Jennifer. Todd was smitten with her and Mina was terrified of her. Neither of them had even really looked at Sylvie since right before Joe had sacrificed himself. She became concerned. Perhaps she was mattering less...? Well, Elli and Waldo were still with her. She didn’t think that Waldo would ever stop paying attention to her. Well, except for right now, but she was alright with that.
Since their energies had been refocused, they had been carrying Elli and trying to comfort him on the loss of his family and community. Not only had he lost them, but he felt that he had led them to their doom by taking them down those tunnels. He was in awful shape. Emotionally, that is. Physically, he could have walked just fine. But Waldo and Sylvie knew that he couldn’t do it on his own. He would be liable to just stop.
“I killed them,” he whispered.
“No you didn’t,” Waldo said matter-of-factly.
“Yes I did! If I had just stayed... If I hadn’t wanted to go down those tunnels...”
“Elli, it’s not your fault,” Sylvie said in a voice that was at once comforting and chipper.
“Okay, think of it this way,” Waldo said. “You and your family made a sacrifice. If you had stayed there, there would have been too many of you. Supplies would have run out. Your entire community would have died.”
“No... We always stocked enough supplies for the whole neighborhood. We... They would have survived.”
After Sylvie saw Todd comforting Mina, she decided that the best course of action would be to kiss Elli on the cheek. So she did and said “It’ll be okay.” To her shock, Elli slipped loose of her assistance and slapped her.
“I just lost my entire family and you’re trying to seduce me? I need comfort. I don’t need you.” Elli carried the half