Episode 14: Collisions and Collations

"Dawn! Wake up! Zombies!"

"Huambah?" Dawn rolled over and pulled her comforter over her. "Huambah" is not really what she said, but that’s the closest that English letters can get to spelling it. Imagine the sound that a cat with a tongue twice as long and half as wide as it should be and a crushed but functional windpipe would make as it was being gnawed on by a snoring shoggoth with no teeth, plugged into a malfunctioning amp running off of solar power and distorted to the max but at volume one, and you may come close to understanding the noise she made. But it was less angry than that.

"Oh, come on!" Zach marched over to the bed and pulled the comforter away from Dawn. She moaned again, this time the sound of a shoggoth being gnawed on by a snoring cat, while a grue assaults the toes of something in the corner which is plugged by a frayed amplifier cord into the shoggoth, which is also gnashing its teeth happily.

"Dawn! Wake up! Now!"

She peered up at him through squinted eyes and a curled body. "Kevin…? Izzatyou?"

"What? Kevin? No! Who’s Kevin?"

"Oh. Not Val Jean, either," she mumbled. "Weird, weird dream…"

"Dawn! Get up! Put on your glasses!"

"Wharmmm…." Was the sound that came from her throat. It had not, as Zach interpreted it, been intended as "Warm", but rather she was trying to articulate something that was stuck in her mind, but absolutely intangible. If a fully enlightened person had cracked into her brain at that moment, they would’ve seen something big and asleep and vaguely resembling a penguin. Luckily, they were all gone for various reasons, so nothing happened to her or the thing sleeping in her mind. It drifted away from her.

"Dawn! You need to get up Right Now!" He flipped the light on, and she hissed and tried to burrow into the bed.

"Damn! This is important!"

"Mmm?" Dawn asked. It was the most coherent thought she had managed to vocalize yet.

"Dawn, get your glasses. Stand up. We need to run. Fast!"

"Is that a sword?"

"Yes, Goddammit! Now get up!"

"Alright… Time… 1? What the hell is wrong with you!"

Zach screamed. "ZOMBIES!" emerged from between his lips after a fair amount of time.

"Zombies?" Dawn was now standing, in her bunny covered pajamas, glasses located and affixed to her face. She was as attuned to her base plane of existence as she could ever be.

"Yes, zombies!"

"Well, why didn’t you say so? Is that a sword?"

"Zach? What’s going on? Marty says that you and your friends are drunk?" Zach spun around at the sound of Dawn’s mother’s kind voice.

"What? No, not drunk! She’s drunk! The people outside are zombies!"

A sternness washed over Sally’s face. "Zombies?"

"Yes!"

"Are you sure?"

"Of course I’m sure!"

"Dawn, pack a suitcase," her voice was a strained attempt at motherliness now.

Zach and Dawn stared at her as she left, and heard the TV switch on, a few seconds of a report by phone, and then, very faintly, the crackle of a walky-talky.

"What?" Zach finally yelled shrilly.

"I’m not sure…" Dawn replied slowly.

"You better pack a suitcase. You got one?"

"Yeah, under my bed. Mom always made me keep one there…"

"This is fucking weird, man!"

"Marty, wake up your father!" Sally cried in the strained motherly voice.

Zach and Dawn blinked and hesitated a minute more, but then Zach dove under the bed and pulled out the suitcase (he found it instantly, using his cat-like ability to work outside of standard time) and Dawn dashed to the dresser to collect key belongings (she, too, reached the dresser with cat-like speed); within minutes, the suitcase was filled with sporadic clothes and Utena and Card Captors(subbed) dvds. She also had salvaged a few bits of jewelry, given to her by friends and ex-girlfriends, each of which seemed older than she thought it should be. Zach lifted the sealed suitcase, which was much heavier than it ought to have been, and the two of them left her room.

Standing at the top of the small flight of stairs between the kitchen and living room were an obviously drunk Marty and a sleepy and delirious Jack. Sally was nowhere in sight.

For those of you who have forgotten, Sally is Dawn’s mother, and Jack is her father.

"Whasgoingon?" Jack asked. "Val Jean, is that you?" he peered at Zach.

"What the fuck?" came Zach’s shrill reply. "Why do you people keep calling me Val Jean? Who do you think I am?"

"No, not Val Jean… or Legolas." Jack's mind snapped to their reality a lot quicker than Dawn’s had.

"What’s happening? Why are we up at 1:05 in the morning?"

"Zombies," Sally’s voice wafted in from the back yard. "Now, everyone get out here!"

In a stupefied obedience, brought on by the sheer bizzarity of the situation, the four of them walked out. Zach’s hand crept back to the hilt of his sword.

Sally was wearing a long overcoat, with an insignia that looked like a football on top of a triangle stamped on the shoulder.

"Honey," Jack asked softly, "What’s happening?"

"World Security has been compromised. The Undiscovered Country has invaded before its time. We must get to safety, and then confirm the safety of the rest of the world." The motherliness was still lingering in her voice, just barely.

"Shit, she’s government!" Zach screamed, drawing his sword and retreating to the wall of the house.

"Yes, I’m government. But not in the sense you may think."

"What the hell does that mean?" Zach screamed, pulling his sword back but keeping it at the ready.

"I’m with the Bureau of External Affairs. We investigate affairs external to everyday reality."

Zach loosened up a little, but kept his sword out. Dawn and Jack watched the scene with utter incomprehension. Marty was watching, blinking, trying to put the situation into something coherent.

"Affairs external to everyday reality?" Jack asked slowly. "The supernatural? My wife investigates the supernatural for…?"

"Not the supernatural. The natural but rare. Nothing that occurs is supernatural, as there is nothing external to nature that can happen within it. That’s the first lesson they give at the academy. And we are funded by governments all over the world; we are the only bureau sponsored by every nation on earth."

"All of them…?" Dawn asked incredulously. Something felt familiar to her about this conversation, but she couldn't nearly place it.

"Yes, every full nation. Tribes who live on their own, no; they have mystics who do our job. Other cultures do as well, but their mystics are generally ‘leant’ to us."

"What the fuck?" Zach asked. Marty continued to stand and try to pull together a touch of coherence.

"We don’t have time for this!" Sally suddenly cried out. "We’ve got to get underground! I’ll explain down there!" She hit a button on a tree that none of the others had ever noticed before. The ground began to slide open, and a few specks of dirt trailed in.

"I haven’t had to use this entrance in five years," Sally grumbled, "and it’s always so dusty anyway."

The other four watched it slide open in more incredulity than anything else they had seen or heard that night. Sally began walking down into it, descending a staircase that the four of them were at a bad angle to see. She turned to them.

"Come along!" She called, the motherly intonation stronger now.

"Oh!" Zach suddenly came to his senses. "I… Left something inside!" He dropped Dawn’s suitcase and ran back into the house. He snatched a piece of paper and a pen from the table, and scribbled something down. He looked around for something to grab; he noticed that one of his guns had fallen. He grabbed it and began to put it in his pocket, but then hesitated. He put it next to the note, where he knew that anyone stopping at the table to think about the note would find it. He flipped on the light, dashed back out the door, snatched the freshly lifted suitcase from Dawn, and the five of them proceeded down the hatchway.

* * *

Mina and Sylvie peeked down into the mysterious cellar beneath the basement. It was a pure whitewashed hallway, made of the same sort of stuff as some shower walls. It looked sterilized, and was obviously lit with fluorescent bulbs.

"Looks like school," Sylvie whispered conspiratorially.

"Feels like a hospital," Mina hissed.

"Let’s go down!"

"No, we can’t go down!"

"We can’t go up, either."

"But if we go down we may never get back up!"

"But we’ll be stuck here if we never go down."

"But what if there’s something down there?"

"Of course there’s something down there!"

"Then why do you want to go down there?"

"Don’t you have any sense of adventure? You used to be cool." Sylvie, with an amazing degree of grace, swooped over the edge of the hole and fell in, landing on her feet. She looked both ways and then smiled up at Mina.

"I’m going this way!" She pointed, and, grinning and sniggering, ran off.

Mina’s eyes got that quality of terror in them that many people get when they fear they may never see someone very important to them again. She hesitated for a moment, during which the sound of raindrops began to flood into the house. This startled her sufficiently to make her stand up, crouched back down, grabbed the edge, and lowered herself down. She crouched for a moment after landing, and then stood back up and ran.

"Sylvie, wait up!" she cried after her.

Ten minutes later, the door at the top of the stairs came crashing in. Waldo ran down the stairs and saw the light emanating from the hatchway. He crouched by it…

* * *

Todd looked the note from Zach over again, shook his head in confusion, and began to put it in his pocket. Then he noticed something glinting in the light of the room, under a medical dictionary. He pulled the revolver out from underneath.

"Jennifer," he called. "They’re already gone. Zach left some note about the back yard or something." He stuffed the gun into his pocket. He hoped she didn’t see it. Just in case, of course.
"Well, we’d better go look there, then, hadn’t we?"

Todd went over to the back door-still open, of course, and judging from the number of bugs he suddenly noticed, it had been at least a half hour. Jennifer came up behind him. He turned and smiled at her, and the two left to the backyard.

Nothing seemed amiss, except for a large area of the lawn where the grass had been flattened and the tall plants snapped. Todd looked at this, while Jennifer wandered around. After ten minutes of searching to no avail, during which the rain had caught up to them, she leaned against a tree. A deep rumbling started up, and Todd began to slide to the end of the yard opposite Jennifer. Their eyes met as he leapt off of the opening hatchway in astonishment. They looked in together.

* * *

"So, okay, let me get this straight. The city, probably the state, probably the nation, and probably the entire world, has become infested with the living dead, correct?"

"Yes."

"And Zach came and woke us up to warn us about it?"

"Yes."

A muffled girl’s voice echoed from ahead of them. Sally tensed up slightly.

"And mom, you work for a covert multi-government organization dedicated to protecting the world from the unusual?"

"Yes."

"Who has a horrible network of tunnels and offices beneath our city, which all lead to the head office of this organization that also happens to be based beneath our little city?"

"Essentially."

"And no one has ever noticed this before?"

"Not entirely."

"Are you sure this isn’t a work of fiction?" Marty asked.

"Yes!" The other four said in unison-again. The walls were a hideous and painful shade of bright, luminescent white. The only one who didn’t seem to be bothered by it was Sally, who seemed to be completely at peace and used to it. Marty was the most effected, because of her inebriated state. And she had been asking the same questions over and over again.

The scenery was almost identical the whole way down; occasional, mostly hidden doors, the same color in their entirety as the walls, floor and ceilings. In fact, if someone walking through the halls weren’t paying attention, they might think that it went on for eternity in every conceivable direction.

And then they came up on a section that was lit a bit differently from the rest. Sally held her hands out, signaling for them to stop. She reached down towards her belt. Zach reached behind him and pulled out one of the guns he still had. He very casually passed it over to Dawn who, after a moment of not noticing it, took it, looked at it, looked at Zach, looked at the gun again, and pocketed it. Once the gun was taken, Zach’s hand twitched towards his hilt.

And a man, with a young but strong build, came falling into the room, hitting a crouch and turning to look at them.

In Waldo’s face was a powerful looking, obviously semi-automatic handgun. A few feet behind it, he could see a simple, S-Mart bought handgun. And then he noticed off to his right a katana at the ready to slice his head off.

"Hey, you’re that guy!" Marty finally said after a moment of the five confused faces looking into the one confused face. "Little Dawn’s friend!"

"Dawn?" He asked.

"Waldo?" Dawn asked.

"Waldo?" Zach uttered, lowering his sword

"Zach?"

"How the hell did you get in here?" Sally yelled, the only one who hadn’t yet lowered her weapon. It was still pointed straight for the center of Waldo’s forehead.

"The door was open!" he yelled.

"What door?"

"Well, okay, the door was locked. But once I got past the locked door, the hole in the floor was open…"

"Where was this door?" she screamed, shaking the gun to emphasize the fact that it was in her hands, and that she was prepared to use it.

"In Sylvie’s house!" Waldo screamed defensively, throwing his hands up. "Put that thing away!"

Suddenly Sally realized that she was pointing an implement of death at a teenager. She put it away and adopted the motherly tone again. "Get up, we have to get moving. This is getting more complicated all the time."

"Hi, Waldo," Zach said as they began moving again. Waldo followed in astonishment. Zach reached back and handed him a gun. Waldo took it carefully, and put it in his pocket, first making sure that the safety was on.

* * *

Faint screams of rage echoed down the hall ahead of them. Todd reached out and instinctively grabbed Jennifer’s hand. She chuckled under her breath and hoped that she wasn't blushing, They quickened the pace, down the disconcertingly white walls.

* * *

In the catacombs beneath the bomb shelter beneath Elli’s neighborhood, the light was bright and the walls too white. Elli thought that he heard something echoing down, but he wasn’t sure. They spent about an hour trying to decide whether or not they should try going down there.

By the end, the group was in two camps: those who wanted to stay put, and those who wanted to search the brightly lit halls for a safer place. Elli and his family were in the second group, and, since Elli had already had experience fighting zombies (the story had gotten around rather quickly after his arrival), he was chosen to lead them in their exploration. When the entire camp was in, the stay-behinders sealed off the entrance.

They walked for a long time, and for a long time they didn’t find anything. All the faintly outlined doors that they found were locked.

The mysterious hallway-it took them a while to realize that there were no offshoots, or at least none that weren’t behind doors-was immensely long, and uninteresting. But they continued moving.

Eventually they came across an opening in the ceiling. All they noticed at first was that the lighting there was different. Then they looked up and saw the open cellar door. They lifted Elli up through the opening to take a look.

Elli recognized it as Sylvie’s basement. And then he noticed the splintered door at the top of the stairs. And then he noticed the faint light filtering in through the small windows.

The next thing he noticed was a shambling corpse wandering around the room. He kicked the person holding him, who dropped him, making a loud, wumph.

"Run," he hissed through clenched teeth. They all began running in the direction that they had been going, but the zombie had already noticed them. It fell through the hole and spent a good thirty seconds trying to figure out how to get up. Then, through some unknown instinct, followed them.




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