Day -4
Turn 2
Torak
You sit on the highway overpass in your truck. Feeling hungry, you grab an MRE packet and tear open the thick brown plastic wrapper. Spaghetti! A Red Bull helps wash it down and you’re set (Poor Taste Sense).
Looking up occasionally to make sure nothing is coming from the left or right of the overpass, you unfold the AAA map of the area. It takes up most of the dashboard of the truck.
The highway leads north to a larger city, about a 30 minute drive without traffic. Of course there’d be no traffic. To the south is the state capitol, also a larger city, also about half an hour away. Both are along the water. Inland an hour and a half is a mountain range running north and south. With few zombies in the mountains that might be a good place to head toward, but with little civilization come few supplies. You’d have to hunt or gather berries or something. And how long will you stay out there?
Irritated by your long hair in your helmet, and worried a zombie might grab onto it, you use your knife to shear most of it off. Hair gets everywhere, but you manage to throw a lot of it out the window. It’s bitterly cold, and the snow is about four inches deep. There are no tracks.
A couple hours pass. The sky lightens a little, and the stars fade. The snow continues to fall, but lighter now, and it’s half a foot deep. Your truck can manage without a problem, but you have no tire chains and you’re not particularly skilled at driving. When the sun comes up, you plan on taking it a little slowly, because it’s better to get there in one piece rather than wreck your truck in a ditch or something.
Dreadfang
You decide to eat up only the perishable food, and pack up all the stuff that’ll keep for a while. It’s cold out, and much of the food should keep for at least a couple days, so you mostly just eat eggs and dairy. The longer lasting food you pack up. The previous resident evidently meant to survive at least, as he filled his bathtub with water (clean) and there are plenty of containers of water lying around: soda bottles, milk jugs, etc.
With a harebrained scheme running through your mind, you start tearing apart the motor of the fridge in the apartment you’re occupying.
You use a second can of gas to spread all over the zombies waiting below outside. After spreading it out like that, you realize it’s too thin to catch, and you have to use up another can. But you do manage to burn them up, and that seems to have taken care of many of the zombies in the immediate area. The smoke drives you inside, where you start tinkering with the motor.
By the time the fire dies down, the sky is starting to lighten. You put your armor back on and go outside, looking around for zombies on the ground level. Nothing is moving, but your visibility is only about two blocks through the snow. It’s falling less now, but the snow is about six inches deep. You clank on down to the parking lot, and find a car with good ground clearance. You try kicking apart the exhaust pipe, but it seems like you’ll need mechanic’s tools to remove it. It looks like an easy job, but all you’re doing at the moment is bending the outer exhaust pipe down. Besides, what you’re after is the catalytic converter farther along the exhaust line. You try another car, and get the same result.
You go around to the front and smash the rear passenger window, reach through to unlock the driver door, and open the hood using the manual latch. From the engine you take a spark plug, and from the car you take a couple half-full lighters and some smokes, plus a large bag of white cheddar popcorn and a bag of Funyuns.
The sky is lightening. It will be dawn soon.
Sir Edmund
You sit tight in the manager’s office, rearrange some furniture to make yourself a place to sleep, and take a quick look around. There’s an old printer, a red Swingline stapler, a desk, and a crummy PC from almost a decade ago. Plenty of paper. There isn’t enough ventilation to make a fire, but it isn’t very cold in here so it’s not a big deal. You pry open a can of spam and enjoy it with ketchup and water from the water cooler.
All the keys on the manager’s set are labeled, including one marked “filing cabinet”. There are two filing cabinets, both different brands. Curious, you try out the keys, and find they open only one cabinet. The other is still locked. Even more curious, you bust open the lock with your claw hammer and find it full of papers, dirty magazines, and a bottle of Wild Turkey.
You sit back in the fake leather office chair feeling like a king among men, and soon drift off to sleep.
Aqizzar
You pass by your auto shop, realizing you don’t need to stop there. You turn north to Meridian, then east toward the landfill and the service station at the entrance. As you turn onto Meridian street, you see ahead of you the gas station / car wash / Taco Bell. Looming on the hill to your left (north) you see a big hardware store that looks like it’s under construction. But you know it’s open for business, has been for years. They just never finish the landscaping. To your right (south) is the winding entrance road to the landfill.
You stop at the gas station. The windows have been smashed in. There are a few propane tanks out front in one vending machine and big water-cooler bottles of water in a second vending machine. Inside there are two apparently normal corpses and one dead zombie, lying in a pool of black goop.
You take the opportunity to smash the two corpses in the head with your wrench. These heads hold only rotting brains, which nonetheless gush out bloody and with a sickening smell. You retreat, grabbing some packages of donuts and the three boxes of jerky on your way out. You get back to the tow truck, and look around again. The area seems fairly clear of zombies. Less disgusted now, you drop off the junk food and go back inside, holding your sleeve in front of your face. You wash up in the bathroom, checking your pallid face in the scratched mirrored steel. Fresh as a daisy.
You loot the store of 20 bottles of water and two flats of Gatorade, a few bags of chips and some candy, and ten packaged sandwiches. You also grab a handful of lighters with a playing card design.
Loading all that into the passenger side of the truck cabin, you wander over to the gas station’s storage tank gasket. It reads ““WARNING – explosive hazard. Use only G32 certified pumping equipment”. You look around and don’t see any fuel trucks. You don’t have the right equipment to do this safely, but you could still do it. You decide to risk it.
You drive the truck a ways off downhill into the parking lot for the car wash. A 6’ concrete wall surrounds this part of the parking lot, and there are coin-operated vacuums here. From inside the car wash you find a length of tubing, which you tear off the machinery and bring to the fuel gasket. You use a hand tool to open the fuel tank, and lower one end of the tubing into it (Skilled: Mechanics). You bring the other end to the vacuums and put in a few quarters. But before you start it, you realize you need somewhere to put the gas. There were water bottles at the front of the store. You head back around the front and smash the vending machine. It does nothing. But you have tools, and the machine is cracked open in about 20 minutes (Skilled: Mechanics). You open three jugs of water and set them upside down against the wall to drain, and take a fourth back to your truck.
You sit and wait for the jugs to empty, and bring them to the vacuums. You use the vacuum to suck gasoline into the hose and then you drain it off into a jug. You manage to fill two jugs halfway (each one half-full is equal to a can of gas) when you run out of quarters. You also spot a zombie approaching from around the side of the service station. You load the two half-full jugs and the empty one into the back of the truck, get in, and run the zombie over.
Its body splits in half, the torso still clawing at your windshield wipers. You swerve to miss a parked car, and the zombie falls off and crunches three times under three sets of tires.
At this point, the sky is lightening and you’ve been working pretty hard all night. Tired, but still interested in taking more gas. Unfortunately, you’d have to stay up and rig the vacuum to work without coins, and you’re really tired. Six inches of snow on the ground, and the snowfall is slowing. It’s no problem because of your chains and your driving skill.
Immortal
You fool around with the locked handgun for a while. Still locked (Mechanically inept). You rifle through your supplies, each a bunch of them, leave some, and pack up what you had before plus a couple apples and the saltines.
You head out east toward the gunfire. The zombies don’t seem to care about it as much as you, and as you tromp through the snow you gather a small horde shuffling along behind you. They’re far enough off that while they’re unnerving, they’re not a serious risk right now.
Walking level, you reach an area with nice houses that quickly turns into a steep hill below you. The road curves around a wetland, enters an old tunnel, and exits heading south with an industrial district on the left near the water and a wooded hillside up to the right. Fancy houses dot the top of that hillside, all glass and big porches.
You don’t hear any gunfire anymore. You dart into an alley with a trash-compactor dumpster behind a convenience store. A back window has been replaced by a wooden hatch secured by a padlock and painted shut. You bang on it a little, and find it to be quite sturdy, but the latch was carefully broken at some point and set up to look like it was whole. You open it up, looking in. The storage room of the convenience store is dark and smells dusty. You climb in, close the hatch firmly, drag a shelf in front of it, and fumble around for a light switch.
Along the way you trip over something that rolls over and starts to move around. Panicking, you see a narrow strip of light from under a door, and dash over to it, jiggling the handle. Locked. You feel around for the light switch next to the door and finally find it, lower than where it should be. When you flip it, the white fluorescent bar lights in the ceiling flicker on with a hum, and in the stark lighting you see a little girl with vacant milky-white eyes staggering toward you.
You dodge her first lunge (Skilled: Athletics) but with her second she manages you bite you – you block with your hand, and her sharp teeth sink into the bite-proof fabric (Skilled: Melee). Horrified, you shake your hand around, trying to throw her off. She’s flailing wildly with her claws, but you swing her across to smash into a plastic box full of mayonnaise packets. She’s still holding on!
Again you swing her, upward this time, and smash her into a fluorescent light. The shards and gas are all over you and her, but she seems unfazed. Finally you pin her on the ground with your foot as she gnaws on your gloved hand, draw a katana, and try to stab her. The sword is too long for fighting this close. You drop it and grab a bottle of cheap wine from the shelf and smash the zombie once, twice, and finally its head caves in and black ichor spreads across the floor. The grip of its jaws eases, and you pull it off of you.
You sit back, huffing with the exertion. You check out your gloves, and while she snagged a bunch of threads she didn’t get through. It’s about the damage a small chainsaw would have done. Cleaning up with some paper towels, you notice a small cut above your wrist. Might have happened earlier while you were climbing on the roof or while you climbed into the storage room. Maybe from the shattering light. It really doesn’t seem like a big deal, and you get a band-aid from a box in the storage room.
You peek out at the convenience store through the little window in the locked storage room door. There are a couple zombies hanging out right outside the door, apparently drawn by the racket of your fight. You pull another shelf in front of that door and sit down to take a break.
Backpack
-Two blocks of cheese
-Two bottles of orange juice
-Two apples
-Box of saltines
-Pocket knife
-Duct tape
-Fishing line
-Bells
Little
You look around the back sections of the bowling alley and find a break room. There’s a battery-powered radio plugged into the wall there, missing any batteries. In a utility closet you find a pair of cheap plastic flashlights powered by two “D” batteries. One is red and the other green. Each has two batteries that seem to have a good charge.
Food isn’t a problem – the freezer in the concession stand holds all kinds of junk food like nachos, corn dogs, polish sausages, etc. There’s also a supply of dry food like chips, candy bars, and bags of chewy popcorn.
You don’t find a sleeping bag or a cot.
And the bowling alley seems strangely empty of zombies. You still can’t figure out what it was you saw- WAIT what was that? Back behind the end of the bowling lanes? Where the machinery raises and lowers the pins?
You grab your shotgun off the concession counter and slink to the middle of the bowling alley. The darkened TVs above you, the eight sets of tables and benches for the players. You don’t see anything. Moments later you hear a door slam on the left side, closer to the entrance and farther from the mini golf. You want to get some sleep, you’re dead tired, but what is that thing? And if it’s not a zombie then who is it?
Pnx
You search house after house. At the fourth house, you stumble upon a young boy with some kind of Husky mutt in a closet. The boy looks terrified and hungry. Without thinking twice you get him out of the house and consider taking him back to the parkour club. But he wouldn’t be able to climb or jump, and the dog certainly can’t. Instead you get him to follow you to a teriyaki joint in a strip mall, you jimmy the lock open on the glass door and get the three of you inside. You push tables up against the front windows and usher them toward the back. The boy is mutely following you, and the dog seems to go wherever the kid goes. You spend some time trying to coax the kid to eat, to drink, to talk. But all you can get is nods and shakes of the head.
It seems his dad is at work, and his mom went next door to help a neighbor woman because she was sick. Hours later, the boy heard yells and saw a zombie, and got scared enough to hide in the closet. This has taken up much of your searching time, but in the teriyaki place there’s enough chilled food for a couple weeks.
The boy falls asleep. You can’t help but nod off a little yourself.
(Feel free to have a more active conversation with the boy, just post whatever you want to talk about or ask him about since it’s not an action post)
Keiseth
The two of you agree to work together, and head upstairs to see if there are any more zombies. There are none. You secure the door at the top of the stairs and look around.
She sits down on a low couch painfully. She explains she hurt her knee earlier, but seems to know what to do for it.
It turns out the woman, named Kim, just arrived. Her husband Malcolm is a nurse, working at the hospital mostly but at the prison two days a week. She hasn’t heard from him since the cell phone service went out.
There is some food and drink in the fridge. Kim seems unaffected right now by the deaths of her friends outside at the fire truck. She’s mostly talking about how she and Malcolm have been looking around at houses, stories about realtors showing them one house after another. Her conversation is really boring but her tone has an edge of desperation, as if she’s just barely holding everything together.
You wait, watching the snow fall outside, until the sky begins to lighten.
(Feel free to have a more active conversation with Kim, just post whatever you want to talk about or ask her about since it’s not an action post)
Kagus
You put on warm clothes and decide to strike out toward the Garrison, hoping to find people to help you.
You see a place here and there with piles of slain zombies. Not more than three or four in each of a half-dozen places. And you see only one or two zombies at a time shuffling around. You spot a zombie languishing on the ground leaned up against a chain-link fence with brown plastic slats woven through it. A screwdriver handle is sticking out of the side of its skull, black bile oozing out of the wound. It’s lying there convulsing, moaning weakly. You decide it’s not worth a bullet and pass it by.
Two blocks later, when you’re in front of a house with a law office sign out front, a silver SUV comes rumbling along. It stops in the street, and someone rolls down the window and waves you over. You look around, and trot over to the car. They open the door and urge you get in. With no better options, you climb into a rear seat and push aside a mountain of individually packaged junk foods.
The interior of the SUV smells like old marijuana smoke. The driver is a balding, intense man dressed in brown fatigues with a puffy black jacket over it. In the passenger seat is a gaunt old woman who awkwardly leans back and paws the air at you, smiling and praising God that they rescued you. Behind them and in front of you is a bench seat with a terrified-looking young man on the left and a very pregnant woman on the right. The pregnant woman is obviously trying to breathe regularly.
The driver explains they’re on their way to the hospital to get medicine for his daughter. It’s obvious he doesn’t know exactly what they need. The older woman is his wife, the young man is “my future son in law” as he grimly puts it. The driver is armed with a couple pistols at least and the wife holds a shotgun in an inexperienced way, as if she’s just holding it for him. The other two seem unarmed.
The driver is Sal, a retired Marine who used to run a butcher shop. His wife is Agnes and their daughter is Bernadine. The young man “what done knocked up B” is named Jimmy.
(Feel free to have a more active conversation with the folks in the SUV, just post whatever you want to talk about or ask them about since it’s not an action post)
It is now almost dawn. Remember sleep? A lot of you are pretty tired at this point.
Author
Topic: My Little Zombie Apocalypse (Read 42453 times)