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.