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.