Episode 27: How Do You Solve A Problem Like Mario?

“Nurse Lotus, you stay here with Dinah. Camron, have one of your people stay with them. The rest of us are going to split up and search the hospital.” Dr. Mabus was taking charge of the situation. He wasn’t sure where the dictatorial ability had come from, but he did know that it was coming in handy. Nurse Lotus was confused as to its origins too, but it intensified the crush on him that she harbored. Considering their current situation, she decided that she had nothing to lose that wouldn’t be lost if she lost her life.
“Doctor Mabus, before you...”
He swooped in and delivered a passionate kiss to her–partly out of true dormant desire, and partly to avoid the conversation that he knew she was going to start if he didn’t do something. She was surprised by the kiss, but after a moment returned it. After another moment, he detached. “Nurse Lotus, stay here. I’ll be back. Protect Dinah at all costs.” He looked at the confused, tired looking man at the end of the row of seats. “You stay here too,” he commanded, shaking Andy out of his confused trance. “Help protect Nurse Lotus and Dinah.” He turned to Camron. “You, me, Joseph, and your wolfish man will search from the fourth floor and up; the other five can search the third floor down. This area should be safe enough for now.”
Camron stared angrily at Dr. Mabus for a minute, and then nodded. “Nole. With me. Fiona. You stay with the Nurse and the kid. The rest of you, go search the next floor up. Search every room on the way up. And bring weapons; we have no idea what that could have been.”
“I’ve got some idea what it could have been,” Nole growled between his teeth. “You shouldn’t have sent Cherry and Gworkin up together. They probably just screwed and were playing with a gun or something. Goddamn rabbits.” He stared angrily at the ground; and then Fiona’s friendly face caught his eye. She was smiling at him, and tilting her body in that way she did when she was trying to tell him that she cared about him. He got the message and smiled back, then looked to the ground ashamed. She walked to him and kissed him on the cheek, wordlessly.
Dr. Mabus and Camron had already begun advancing towards the stairs up. Nole growled and ran after them, Joseph not straying more than a quick aim away from him.
Fiona watched him go sadly.
Desiree took charge of the second group immediately, and made absolutely positive that they were all armed before they left, up the stairs.
A few minutes later, a shirtless, Mexican man, came barreling down the stairs. He turned towards the waiting area, looked shocked for a minute, and then pointed the hand gun he held straight at Nurse Lotus.

“I don’t like this, Dez.” Amy was jittery; she held her mace, bought at a renaissance festival near Waco, Texas, with both hands, looking around fearfully. John, wielding an old time musket, stolen from a museum and restored, put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. It made her shudder just a little bit.
“I know, Amy. I’ve wanted something to happen for a long time, but... Now Cherry and Gworkin might be dead.”
“Screw them,” Corwin mumbled, letting his sword scrape along the ground, which he was expecting to generate sparks. “It’s us I’m worried about.”
“After all these months of comradery, you don’t care a lick about our cosmic brother and sister?” Hunter held in his hand what he claimed was a ray gun.
“I didn’t like Cherry anyway,” Amy said. “But still, she was one of us. Is. She’s not dead yet.”
A door ahead of them swung open.
“Well, she’s sort of dead, I guess,” Hunter said in shock at what came out.
“That is not something that I ever wanted to see,” Desiree said vomitingly.
“Sin!” John screamed. He charged at the nearly disrobed body of Cherry, her red jumpsuit peeled off her making her look like some sort of bizarre banana. Her breasts hung out, each pierced partway in the cleavage by what they all recognized as police issue rounds.
“John!” Hunter called. “Watch... Out. Oh, dammit.”
John had swung his musket at Cherry’s head, but had overshot; he went careening into her, and they went down, him on top. Her already chilling breasts gave him a terrible shiver, just before she, even as they fell, tore into his throat with all the might of her jaws. He screamed in horrible pain, drawing Corwin’s attention away from the sword dragging at his side. He looked up and suddenly realized that ahead of him, Cherry’s disturbing, disrobed corpse was eating John Edrews.
“Oh, gross!”
Desiree ran to them at the same time as Amy did. The former shoved John off of Cherry with her foot. Cherry struggled to bite into either the writhing and screaming John, or the foot of Desiree, but couldn’t manage to do either before Amy stepped over her, grinned nastily, and smashed her mace into Cherry’s skull, which did its best imitation of a watermelon meeting a sledgehammer.
“Ah, shit, all over my... AMY! LOOK OUT!” Desiree leapt forward, shoving Amy out of the way of Gworkin, who was hobbling towards Amy with the same hungry look he had always had. Amy fell to the ground, absorbing the shock with her shoulder, and looked in terror, seeing first Gworkin’s oozing guts, and then his hungry mouth biting into Desiree’s arm. Amy thought she heard two new screams of terror, one pained, one merely horrified, before she watched Corwin’s sword deftly pass through Gworkin’s neck. His teeth lost their grip on Desiree’s arm just before his head plummeted into place where Cherry’s should have been. Desiree stumbled back in pain, allowing Gworkin’s body to fall across Cherry’s.
Amy leapt up and grabbed Desiree’s arm forcefully and began examining it frantically. “You’re gonna be alright, you’re gonna be alright!” She rambled. Desiree stared at the gaping wound in her arm as if it were a gaping wound in her arm, which it most certainly was. It rather felt to her like she had a horrible gaping wound in her arm. That’s really not a good feeling to have when you know that it’s accurate.
“She’s not gonna be alright,” Corwin said sadly. He lifted his sword again, and advanced on Desiree. “We have to kill her before she can us...”
Desiree turned from her arm, and stared at Corwin as if he had a gaping wound in his head. What the fuck was he thinking, threatening to kill her? And talking about her as if she weren’t there?
“Corwin! Have you no sense of comradery whatsoever?” Hunter screamed as he positioned himself between Corwin and Desiree. He stood with his arms apart, blocking the path, but still held his ray gun in one hand.
“Hunter,” Corwin said, more focused than any of them had ever seen him, “I lied before. I wasn’t worried about us. I was worried about me. Now, you aren’t a threat to me if you don’t make yourself one. So move, and I can do us both a favor. Hunter shook his head and pointed the gun at Corwin.
“One step, and I will fry you.”
“Yeah, right, you loon. That’s just something you made out of tinfoil!”
Hunter grimaced, and pointed the gun, without looking, at Gworkin’s truly dead head, and pulled the trigger. The head evaporated, and everything went silent for a moment. Everyone’s eyes’ but Hunter’s expressed tremendous shock, as if they had just discovered that Hunter were actually an alien. Which was essentially what all of them decided the moment that there were no more solid dead heads on the ground.
“Desiree, get into that room. Amy, get John in there. Now.” Hunter’s voice was cool and calculating. They were seeing brand new sides of both Corwin and Hunter; Corwin had always been shy and distracted, now he was forceful and focused. Hunter was usually grinning and nonsensical. Now he was grim and, well, he still didn’t make sense to any of them. But Desiree and Amy did as they were told.
“Now, Corwin, will you let Desiree live?”
“Dammit, Hunter!” Corwin screamed; a vein even stood out in his neck. “She’s not going to live either way, and if you keep her alive much longer, she’ll kill the rest of us!”
“You get out of here, Corwin,” Hunter ordered, still calm. “You get out of here, or I will get you out of here.” Corwin didn’t move, but Hunter backed away, through the door that he had sent Desiree, Amy, and John through, into the room that Cherry and Gworkin had come from. He pulled the door shut, and locked it. Hunter wondered momentarily why the doors to a hospital room locked from the inside, but quickly it became irrelevant, when he realized that Amy, Desiree, and even John, on the floor, were staring at him.
“So... You are an alien?” Desiree asked.
“Sort of. Can’t explain it now.”
“What’s happened?”
“A zombie apocalypse. I thought that was obvious.”
“Dammit,” John said through tears and blood. “Corwin was right. If those really are zom(cough)bies, then I’m going to become one and... Goodbye. For the greater good” He already had his musket in hand. He kept it loaded with just one ball, as that’s all it could hold, and he saved it for emergencies. Before any of the other three could react, he had angled it and shot himself through the left temple. The ball had created, atop his head, a flap of skull, skin, and short brown hair that caused Desiree to finally vomit.
Corwin began banging on the door and screaming something that they couldn’t understand. They didn’t try to understand it. They were all too astonished.
The astonishment is why it took them nearly five minutes to notice the other corpse in the room; it was Judy’s, but they had no way of knowing that, nor of knowing that there was either a Judy or a Mario. And thus they had no way to know that there was a situation back in the lobby.

“Goddamn psycho bitch!” Mario wailed, hold the gun shakingly in Fiona’s face. He stood over her, having already blown a hole in her stomach. Blood was oozing out of the wound, and her breathing was very shallow. Her eyes would be full of terror if they weren’t fluttering shut.
“Hey, come on,” Andy said in the most soothing voice he could. He was standing on one of the chairs, hunched over in fear, his arms splayed out in front of him in the universal sign of weaponlessness. Having spent the last three years working with troubled kids, he sort of knew how to deal with this. “That girl didn’t do anything to you. Come on, man, just put down the gun.”
Mario glared at him wildly. “No! She’s evil! She... She’ll rape me, man! She’ll take off her fucking clothes and she’ll make me fuck her!” Fiona sputtered a little, and Mario focused the gun back onto her. He saw that she was dying; his eyes, never having been emptied of terror, now with no more terror then they had ever had, scanned across the room.
“No one’s going to hurt you... What’s your name?”
“Mario. My name is Mario. Where’re the other bitches?”
“Mario, Mario, you have to calm down...”
“I’m not gonna calm down man! Where’d the other two bitches go?”
“Mario, that girl you’re standing over is the only one here.” Andy knew that it was obvious that he was lying, but he hoped that this kid was too hopped up to notice. “And she’s going to die. Mario, if she dies, you’re a murderer. Let me go get the doctor, and he can save her. We can still fix this.”
“No, man! There were two other bitches here! Their* gonna fuckin’ rape me! Can’t let them do that, man! I’m a man!”
“Mario, please, just calm down,” Andy almost stood up straight, but decided better when he took in Mario’s wildness once more. He considered mopping the sweat off of his shining, bald head, but decided, once again, that it was safer to stay just as he was. Even though this Mario kid only had showed aggression towards women, he had to be safest. “Mario, if you’ll just calm down, I can keep all the women as far away from you as you need. You just need to put down the gun, and then I can get this all fixed. Alright?”
Mario almost seemed to begin to calm down. Andy smiled internally, knowing that he had made some progress. Even after a year of retreating from the world of therapy troubled youngsters into the world of owning his own failed massage therapy clinic, he knew how to deal with these sorts of kids. After describing his own character to himself, he returned to the present and, finally ending the characterization that should have happened to him and dozens of others episodes ago, returned to trying to stop Mario and save the girls.
“But... No, man, they...”
“Mario, please just...”
His head suddenly slammed forward and to the right, towards Andy. Mario tumbled off of Fiona’s prone body, and after touching his head gingerly and grunting, he spun up and fired the gun at his assailant.
Nurse Lotus clutched at the left side of her neck with both hands, dropped the bedpan in her left hand, and crumpled to the ground in total shock.
“Damn Bitch! You saw her! She tried to rape me!” Mario screamed. Then he stood up, and spun at Andy. “And you, you lied to me! You knew those other two bitches were here!” He spun again. “Where’s the little one? Dammit, where’s the kid? There was a little girl here too!”
A quick sob came from a chair almost directly on a line with him and Andy. Mario pointed his gun at the chair and began to squeeze the trigger.
“Mario! Don’t!” Andy screamed, allowing instinct to take control at the final moment.
“Nits grow up to be lice,” Mario growled in a voice that he himself didn’t recognize.
Several shots rang out at once, and Mario’s head slammed back and to the left.

“There’s no one up here” Nole growled, sniffing the air for no particular reason.
“He’s right,” Joseph grunted, “I hate to say it, but the wolf boy is right.”
“We’re almost through the sixth floor,” Camron agreed. “After that, we just have to hope that they found Cherry and Gworkin lower down.” Dr. Mabus, despite his own misgivings, felt a wave of sympathy for Camron. Those two were members of his group, and, as far as any of them could tell, he had sent them to their doom. It was only right that Camron should be antsy about the whole thing.
“When we’re done, we can touch base with the other group. I’m sure they found Gworkin and Cherry. And the other eight...”
“I don’t like that,” Nole growled. He never seemed to actually speak, only growl. It was sort of disconcerting, especially to rabbits and deer. Joseph had a very powerful urge to just shoot him and have him stuffed. “Eight people don’t just... Vanish.”
“Four of them were patients at the hospital. All four of them were post-op, or mentally incapacitated, and at least one of them could barely walk. I think that the other four must have...”
“Sh!” Nole interrupted Dr. Mabus. He sniffed the air, and seemed to listen intently to the hall. After a moment he pointed to one of the doors.
“Wh...” Dr. Mabus began to ask, but Nole spun and growled “Sh” at him again. He had never heard anyone growl “Sh” before, but it was much more effective than hissing it. Dr. Mabus nodded, and Joseph and Nole went ahead, paralleling each other’s movements, to the door. When Camron and Dr. Mabus had positioned themselves behind the two soldiers, ready to burst in behind them, the former two shoved the door open and entered. And they promptly stopped in their tracks.
Camron and Dr. Mabus, both quite alarmed by this development, entered the room and clamored to see what was ahead of them.
They didn’t like what they saw ahead of them. Only half of what they saw ahead of them could like what they saw ahead of them. In that small hospital room, with overturned hospital beds, a TV up in the corner of the room, and a strange scent, they saw the mysterious Jack standing, almost bouncing on his heels, over the mutilated and partly nude body of Rena Desoto. He seemed to be smiling over his work, and when Nole and Joseph had burst in, he had actually bounced on his heels. He had hit his head on the ceiling and fallen back to the ground, but had retained his balance, seeming only slightly confused by what he had run into. Just a few feet away, Lizzie, emergency fire hatchet in hand, hair disheveled, stood over the 41 pieces of Hammy Klawy and the 42 pieces of Shane McDouble. When Nole and Joseph had burst into the room, she had turned to them and frozen, hatchet still at the ready. On the opposite side of the room from Lizzie and her victims, the clownish John sat amongst the partially eaten entrails of 28-year-old Eddie Plant. He had continued feasting even when Nole and Joseph had burst into the room.
And directly at the back of the room, standing on the radiator, grinning maniacally, arms stretched like a sinister god, Charlie stood, the swastika that hadn’t been on his forehead earlier was now emblazoned and glowing, in the place he had been scratching at.
“My children!” he announced. “I must ask you to wipe away heathens once more!” John, Lizzie, and Jack began to advance on the four newest occupants of the room.

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