Episode 8: Amazing Hospitality (Warning, Minor Explicit Content!)

Judy had finally stopped screaming; now she was sobbing, curled up over Jill’s body. Mario was standing over her, his gun fallen at his side. A shallow wound across his chest was slowly oozing blood, but he didn’t really notice it. He was staring at the two bodies, the two corpses, the two unmoving shells, with bullet wounds straight through their heads.

"Poor sucker," he muttered to himself, staring at the dead Bat Boy. "I never even knew his name."

Judy continued sobbing, wailing the occasional "no" softly, soaking Jill’s corpse even more than it had been by blood and rain water. It had started raining the moment after Mario had fired the second shot.

Jill had opened her eyes after the blood had stopped flowing. She had reached out at the Bat Boy, pulled him in, and taken a huge chunk of flesh from just above his ankle. His screams were terrible as he fell to the ground, and she continued to consume him from the leg up, both of them on the ground.

Mario had pushed Judy to the ground, a few feet from Jill and the Bat Boy. He sprinted past them and dove into the car, cutting his chest on some rusty shards on the body of the car. He had grabbed the gun, stood up, and quickly shot both of them in the head. He then stumbled over to where he had thrown Judy; she was already crawling towards the bodies, wailing. He had turned and watched, and dropped the gun.

Rain had been pouring down on them for ten minutes now; the blood oozing from his cut had mixed with the falling water to make it look like he was bleeding a lot harder than he actually was. He reached down and picked up the gun, and slid it into his pocket. He went forward and stood behind Judy.

"We should get inside," Mario said in a dark, deep voice. "There might be more zombies out here."

Judy just kept sobbing.

"I’m not leaving you out here," he continued in the same voice.

She dropped a few more tears, and slowly turned to look up at him.

"She’s dead," she said in a very similar dark voice.

Mario nodded. "Dead."

"She’s all gone."

"Entirely."

"We should go inside."

"Yes."

She stood up, and began walking towards the hospital building. Mario followed, very close behind her. Neither of them showed any sign of emotion.

* * *

The Bat Boy had, in fact, been named Richard Corey. Well, that wasn’t really his name. It was what everyone called him. His real name was long forgotten by all, including himself. So he went by Richard Corey. Even the incident that had given him that name was forgotten. He knew that he had had the name since First Grade, and that it had involved a substitute teacher and Pluto, but that was all he could remember.

Besides that, he was a very uninteresting boy; just an average fellow. In an alternate universe, he led an army of cats about the universe, and eventually began hopping through multiple universes. He fought an evil man named Emirikol countless times, including in space, in dozens of alternate universes, and a few times through time. But that’s entirely irrelevant; in this reality, he was just a normal boy, who never did anything extraordinary. At all. Of note is this other incarnation's arrival at this exact location and time during a time-universe-hopping trip, and his horror at seeing what appeared to be his own dead body. He left without causing any alterations to the timeline.

He had been at the baseball game because, in an uncharacteristic bout of luck (which would have been unluck for the other him; the him from the other universe hated baseball.), he won an unusual contest at school that gave him a week of being batboy for the Rockies. He had gladly gone and done the job, and had arrived for his first day of work on July Fourth.

He had been overjoyed; he had arrived even earlier than the three hours prior to the game that he was supposed to. He had gotten right on the job, and kept eagerly bringing the bats whenever he had to; some player even signed a bat he had broken for him!

But then, right before the fireworks, on the little black-and-white TV that he carried with him everywhere, he saw a news bulletin that crazed civilians were attacking people at random. When the lights went out, he blacked out and dashed into the storage closet. He had hid there, weeping, until Todd had opened the door. And that was the Bat Boy’s entire story.

* * *

Mario and Judy made it all the way up to the hospital in complete and utter silence. If they had any heart left, it would have been a very disheartening journey. But Mario had just had to shoot two people that he had begun to get to know. Judy had just lost her best friend in the whole world.

It was not a happy time, to say the least.

They stumbled into the bit of the hospital that looks like an airlock. They tried to pass through the second set of sliding doors to get into the triage area, but the doors wouldn’t open. They looked up, moving simultaneously, to see that the doors were, beyond not opening, blocked by a huge stack of chairs, desks, and other clutter.

"Damn," Mario muttered.

"So… It would have been useless anyway…" Judy whispered. She fell backwards onto the ground, and started crying-silently this time.

Mario growled. "This isn’t going to stop us." He began banging on the glass.

"Let us in! Let us in! We’re alive!" he screamed.

Judy just watched him, tears streaming down her face, down her neck, and down onto her chest.
He began to bang harder, and scream louder. His chest wound, which had managed to scab itself over, was ripped open. He began oozing blood again. Judy continued to just watch.

He finally gave up, and stumbled backwards.

"We’re going to die," Judy whispered. "We’re going to die, horribly, become those… things…"

"No we’re not!" Mario growled, whirling on her. "I’m not going to die! Not here, not now!"

"There’s no way in," She stared at him, eyes empty. "There’s no way in, and there’re monsters out here. We’re going to die."

He stared at her, into her eyes, in amazement. She was ready to just… give up? Just like that? Condemn herself to death? He… he wasn’t ready to do that. No matter how awful things were, he couldn’t stand to just… give up.

She kept looking at him, eyes never filling with anything. "I don’t want to die a virgin. At least, not entirely." She smiled an equally empty smile. "You can do what you want with me. Just, promise to give me an orgasm."

He was even more shocked than before. No girl had ever been this up-front with him before; And the certainly hadn’t given him that sort of offer. He looked her up and down; she had a damn nice body. He shook his head. Couldn’t do this. She may be hot, and there was a good chance this was all going to end soon, but he couldn’t just… take advantage of her like this.

"No." he said. "We’re not going to die. We’re going to live long enough for you to find a boy who you want to… lose your virginity to."

She frowned for a moment, and put on a disturbingly empty, sultry smirk. She crawled up to him, and climbed up his leg in a most disconcerting way. He tried to back away, but she had wrapped her arms around his midsection.

"You’re not going anywhere, darling," she purred emptily at his crotch-level.

(This is more like something J… a voice in her head said.)

(Shut up, another interrupted.)

She loosened her grip on him by releasing one arm. She moved that hand towards his crotch, which was only inches from her face now, and began to unzip his jeans.

"I’m sure I could make you very, very happy," she said, releasing the button.

"No!" He finally said, pushing her away.

She pulled herself up and pointed the gun that she had pulled out of his pocket at his head. "Fuck me, asshole," she smirked (emptily), and pointed the gun at his crotch for a moment. He stopped struggling to keep his pants up.

* * *

The twenty-three people inside had heard the pounding at the door. They had heard the screaming. They had even heard the "No!" and some of the conversation. Most of them had been brought to tears. They had thought that the ensuing screams had been from zombies attacking and devouring the people outside. Most of them felt guilty, felt responsible for the deaths of the strangers outside. But they had known that they couldn’t do anything. They had known (or thought they had known) that opening the doors would lead to their complete and absolute destruction. So they had just sat there, listening.

Each of these twenty-three people had a story. Some of them shared their stories. But we can get to their stories later. They’re not important now, and we have more important things to talk about(not to mention that the author will need filler material later anyway. As a preview, one of those people was, coincidentally, Todd’s Uncle Andy). We are concerned now with two residents of the hospital, a doctor and a nurse, the only two left in those professions. The rest had either fled, attempted to flee and died, or killed themselves.

The doctor-Doctor Mabus-was rather worried. Not particularly about the raging horde of zombies outside, they were just a new thing to study. Rather, he was worried about what was causing the raging horde of zombies outside.

The nurse-Lotus-was rather worried as well. Unlike Dr. Mabus, Lotus was worried about the raging horde of zombies outside. She couldn’t care less about what was causing them. He could. And so he was speculating.

"It must be some sort of disease; what else could cause it? I mean, if just a few were walking perhaps it could be explained by lightning striking in a surprising place and restarting their hearts, but a whole army of them…"

"Yes, but doctor…" Lotus tried to interrupt.

"And whenever someone dies, they get up and start moving too… They become one of them. And when that one guy got bit, we couldn’t stop the bleeding, the blood refused to clot uh isn’t that strange?"

"It really is, but Doctor…"

"Now, the dead people getting up could be explained by the air being especially charged with electricity, which is a very unlikely scenario but a reasonable explanation, I suppose, given the circumstances, but the inability to clot? Perhaps, but I can’t imagine why electricity would do such a thing…"

"Doctor Mabus!"

"So it must be a disease, certainly. But it’s not like any disease that I’ve ever heard of, perhaps it’s a new strain of malaria or HIV or even the plague. It seems to infect everyone, so it’s probably related to the plague, I suppose. But why does it only attack dead or dying bodies? Why hasn’t it killed all of us itself?"

"Doctor Mabus, none of this means anything!" He stopped and stared at her, wonder in his eyes. What could she mean? "We’re surrounded by walking corpses! What does it matter what caused them, what matters is how to stop them!"

Doctor Mabus smiled faintly, the smile of someone who has just heard a very funny joke but is pre-occupied by something more amusing, which the joke fits into somehow. "Well that’s easy we’ve seen that shooting them does no damage, it slows them down a bit but only for a moment, but when we deliver a traumatic blow to the skull it stops them entirely. Then they must be functioning entirely from the brain. Perhaps the heart isn’t even beating? But then how could they move? I wonder if they can feel…? I must test them…"

Lotus sighed in frustration. Doctor Mabus was in charge here, he was the only doctor left, but he wasn’t listening to reason. She stormed back to the triage and began to make sure that everyone was okay.

Doctor Mabus was the Chief Resident at the hospital. He had a certain detached quality; everything that he experienced was a sort of experiment to him, testing the boundaries of medicine, science, even reality. He did connect with people. Well, rather, they thought that they connected with him; the connections were just more experiments to him. In another universe-the same that Richard Corey and Rick are important in-he was a horrible warlord who had made a bid to take over the world through a pawn, and a number of other ploys. This Mabus was vaguely aware of this potential of his; but it had never seemed an important thing to act on. Other factors had seemed more important to test.

Lotus was a nice girl, of about twenty-three, and had been a nurse for a couple of years now. She cared deeply about people, and had a sort of school-girl crush on Doctor Mabus. She, too, played an important role in the alternate universe, and was a dormant siren. In this universe, that supernatural quality would never be achieved; she never had any reason to sing. The other her was a passionate singer, and burst into siren mode when singing a battle hymn after watching her lover die. This her hated singing, because when she was twelve, rather than encourage her, her choir teacher had lied out of jealousy and told her that her voice had no potential. So she had become a nurse.

It is interesting to note at this point that Doctor Mabus, Richard Corey, Todd, and four other complete strangers, all bear a vague resemblance to each other. Just looking at any of them, and looking at the other later, you would not notice this, but if you could manage to line them all up together, you would definitely notice something. They all had light-to-dirty blonde hair which they tended to grow long, blue eyes that occasionally looked grey, and, oddly for males, wide hips. In the alternate universe, all this played a very important role (Todd was the counterpart to a boy named Solasis, but they were not the same person in any way; rules of cosmic balance dictated that this Solasis have a counterpart of some sort in this universe, whether or not there was any actual ), but in this universe it never came up because it was purely by coincidence. They were in fact half-brothers, but only in the aforementioned other universe. But that’s just something that you may find of interest; it has absolutely no bearing on the plot of this Serial.

* * *

Judy sat, gun right next to her, re-affixing her bra. "That was nice," she drolled emptily, as she finished and reached down and grabbed the gun again. "It sort of hurt the first time, but after that it was amazing."

Mario watched her carefully. She was absolutely… terrifying. He was scared. Just plain scared. Had he been a different man, he would have almost enjoyed her raping him. But… Dear god.

"Now, we should try to find a way in. Make those assholes inside pay for trying to kill us." She had no, absolutely no quality in her voice. She began to walk around the building.

He pulled up his pants and almost ran away; instead, noticing the gun she had casually pointed at him, he followed.




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