Day -4
Turn 3
Little
Thoroughly rattled, you raise your shotgun into the air and fire at the ceiling. Dust and chunks of plaster come falling down. You don’t hear anything.
You walk carefully around to the side door that leads to the machinery behind the pins. The door is locked, and you haven’t been able to find any keys yet. You walk over to the nearest lane, standing on the polished wood, crouched down and peering into the darkness. You lay the shotgun on the floor, pull the pistol, and switch on one of your flashlights. Its weak light filters through dusty air and you see a concrete hallway with exposed piping and wiring running the width of the bowling alley. You reach closer, almost inside the opening, shining your light around, when you hear something hissing to your left. At the far end of the bowling alley, a huge black shape is boiling out of the pin setting machine. You instinctively squeeze off four rounds from the pistol, and the shape shrieks and rolls over and through itself up its lane, and gets around the corner to the barricaded front door. It’s a hallway with claw-machine games that leads from the bowling alley to the front door, and since you’re at the end of a lane the monster is out of your sight. You charge diagonally across the wooden lanes, to the promenade of old red carpet, and you can see your barricaded front door. There are a couple side doors which lead to back areas of the bowling alley, and it’s obvious this thing squished through one of those.
At this point you’re shaking, and cold sweat has broken out on your clammy skin. Almost as if you cannot control yourself, you step one foot in front of the other toward the hallway and the entrance. When you pass the first Hello Kitty claw machine, you’re startled to find it contains a zombie that lunges at you and pounds on the glass trying to escape. Its jaws snap and snarl and its hands leave bloody streaks. The lights go out, flicker, then come back on and you’re suddenly surrounded by a horde of shambling zombies. You empty your clip at them, but they keep coming. You climb atop an ancient Mercs arcade game but one grabs your ankle, tearing into your flesh and pulling you down by your leg bone. As the zombies tear into you, you scream and thrash, and sit up in the dim light crying out. Blankets are wrapped too tightly around you, and you breathe very fast over and over until you realize it was a nightmare. A small, high window in the concrete wall tells you the sun has come up. You don’t think you’ll be able to get to sleep again right now.
Torak
Checking your maps, you decide to check out the library a couple miles to the north near the 6th Avenue commercial district (it’s the horizontal one with a little bend in the east). You didn’t seem to attract any attention on the overpass. You drive cautiously, but fast enough that zombies aren’t a problem.
You arrive at the library a few minutes later. It’s light enough out to see, and the snow has stopped falling. You see a few tire tracks in the snow on 6th Avenue, but snow has fallen into them since they were made. The shops and nightclubs along the strip are quiet. But there are a lot of zombies around here. You circle around and get off the main street, and drive up a residential side street to the rear of the library. It’s a brick building with parking for 16 cars, with a locked metal side door and a locked glass front door. There are a few large ground-floor windows, including one big arched window made of 3’ square and triangle panels.
You figure the zombies are too thick out front, so you drive your truck right up to the large side window, roll down your window, and carefully smash out one of the 3’ panels in a corner. The glass falls mostly inward, but some falls between your truck door and the wall. You clear all the sharp glass from the frame and sweep off the sill, and take a good look around the inside of the library.
It has two floors, with two broad sets of stairs and an elevator leading up. There is a central area, and two wings. The restrooms and front entrance are off one of those wings. The other leads back to the metal side door. The upper floor is open in the middle, with shelves in the two wings of the library off the central area.
You throw your axe in. You manage to climb through your truck window wearing your armor. Once you’re through, you pick up your axe and look around. Looks like this place was closed down early on because you don’t see any corpses lying around or any zombies. The place is hardly defensible, though, unless you had enough people to defend the stairways. And any attacking zombies would be inside, just not upstairs.
You pound down another Red Bull (Weak Taste sense) and start browsing.
Nilocy
West side, house, no risks.
You sit in the chair, winding the radio. Its reluctant whirring is the only thing you hear. You’re unable to sleep, or eat, or think. You’re winding the radio because it’s predictable, and you control it, and because of that it’s the most comforting thing in this world right now.
And then you snap out of it. You look down at the radio and realize it should be fully charged right now. You flip the power button on and start turning the dial. It’s mostly static, but you do hear a repeating automated message to come to the old Army Garrison for a military airlift rescue.
You sit and listen to it for a while, then turn the radio off. You lean back in your chair, looking out the window as the dawn comes. Finally you pick yourself up and circle the inside of the house locking doors and securing windows. You head upstairs, closing the door at the top, and run yourself a hot bath. In the steamy bathroom mirror you see your blurry reflection. You put your hand on the mirror. Inside there are two bottles of sleeping pills. You stand there leaning against the sink while the bath fills up, holding back the medicine cabinet mirror, keeping it closed in case it opens on its own.
Your bathtub is full. You turn off the water and ease into it. Half an hour later you dry off and get into bed.
Pnx
You leave the boy with instructions to leave on his own if you aren’t back in 12 hours. He seems to understand but he doesn’t want you to go. He clings to your arms, and it’s all you can do to calm him and promise that you’ll be back. He’s crying as you leave.
You get out through a large ceiling vent that you break open in the kitchen. Once on the flat roof of the strip mall, you can see that the dawn is coming and the snow has stopped falling. There are tire tracks in the snow here and there, but they’re covered heavily with snow. You notice a single fresh bicycle track running down the street toward the south.
With nothing better to do, you follow the tracks south. You get to the end of the strip mall and find that the houses here are too far apart to leap. You get to the ground and start moving, leaving big footprints in the snow. Your legs are soon encrusted with melting snow. The zombies are still around, but they seem to have receded inside or underground or something. You spot one hanging out in a garden shed as you pass. A couple are ahead under a large evergreen tree. They start to shamble out into the sunlight to grab you, but you’re moving fast enough to get away (Athletic).
Four blocks from the police station, the bicycle track veers to the left and heads down 6th Avenue. You peer down the street and don’t see any sign of the bicyclist. You move on to the police station. It’s on a grassy rise, with a broad entrance road curving up to a parking lot for 10 cars. There’s a chain-link fence with barbed wire atop it for holding garbage cans, a similar fence around a parking lot and garage, and the station itself attached to the fence. There are security cameras watching every angle.
To get into a police car you’d have to get through the garage lot fence, or get into the police station and then through it to the inside of the garage lot. Standing in the outer parking lot, you see a bit of movement inside the police station. The lights are all on.
The windows of the police station are just big enough to crawl through with no armor or backpack – if you’re skinny. They’re blurry glass reinforced with a rounded-hexagon metal grille. The front doors are the same, flanked by a pair of tall, narrow reinforced side windows. There’s a covered porch that looks pretty sturdy, too, about 10’ square.
You decide to try the gate. You manage to pick the lock after some effort (Skilled: Lockpicking, Dextrous). Rolling it aside you find that the garage building is a metal shed big enough to hold 6 large cars or vans, and the lot has space for 10 cars. Currently there are four black and white police cars in the lot, with car covers. One looks different. You approach and pull the cover off. It’s a beautiful black Mustang. You stop, dumbfounded. Then you walk along the side, kind of giddy. It’s a late-model GT. It’s locked, but you know if you got in you’d have to hotwire it if you didn’t have the key. For one thing, you have no idea how to do that (Inept: Electronics) but also it would be a crying shame to rip up a car like this. Especially since it’s probably an undercover car or a drug seizure and packed with expensive after-market parts.
You turn toward the police station. If the car is here, the keys are here, right? Besides, you’d have to go inside for police car keys anyway, right? And there are probably guns inside, too, right? Convinced of the necessity, you wander toward the police station.
Sir Edmund
You sit sleeping in the office chair. You slowly awake, yawning. You feel decently rested. You decide to make a list of things you need from the hardware store:
safety goggles and fume mask or dust mask (gas mask if there are any available)
a big chopper (axe?)
chain saw (big!)
metal saw (for cutting metal)
nail gun
nails
wood (planks of)
lubricant (industrail big cans)
rope (lots of)
tougher clothing (if i can find it)
You nap a little more, then grab your shotgun and take a look out the window to the hardware store floor below. You see minor zombie activity. You unlock your office door and head down the stairs. They’re concrete, stairwell-style, doubling back three times before touching ground floor. There’s a fire extinguisher hanging on the wall at the bottom and some legally-required labor rights posters.
You crack open the lower door and slide out. A nearby zombie perks up, but you move on before he can catch up to you, keeping the stacked raft of shopping carts between you. You move along the part of the checkout area between the checkstands and the retail door. The doors are still whole, and the supplies are still piled up right at the entrance. Many of the things you wanted are here: a couple axes, a large chainsaw, a circular saw, a couple pneumatic nail guns, an air compressor, boxes of nails, various hand tools, work gloves and boots, knee pads, hard hats, coiled rope, and lumber. You notice that the wearable items were gathered in sets of 6.
You grab an axe and go back to the zombie that you avoided earlier. You set down your shotgun on the checkstand and watch as the zombie slowly makes its way around the shopping carts. You swing hard, over the corner of the last few carts, catching the zombie right in the side of the head under the ear. The axe is stuck, and the zombie stumbles forward and grabs onto the carts. The axe is pulled from your grip and the zombie seems to recover. It moans, opening its mouth, and a mixture of red foam and black bile trickle down its jaw. The head wound is bleeding black, just a little. You retreat to the pile of supplies, picking up your shotgun as you go. You grab another axe and put down your shotgun, and go meet the zombie halfway. This time you swing from the other side, but it raises its arm at the last moment and you cleave into its elbow. It tumbles to the side, crashing into a cash register. Again the axe became stuck and you lost your hold on it.
This time, you go for the chainsaw. You set it on the ground, hold it down with your foot, unlatch the safety, prime it, and pull the ignition cord (Skilled: Carpenter). It starts on the second pull, about the time the zombie stands back up and starts coming toward you again. Your chainsaw rumbles as you heft it up, holding the top handle with your left hand and the lower handle with your right. You spin it up, and its grinding whine fills the store. You bring the saw in from the left, horizontally, laying the length against the zombie’s side below the ribs. (Skilled: Carpenter). The zombie lunges at you, but the chainsaw rips into it. The zombie claws at you as the rancid blood flies, and soon you’ve completely sawn it in half at the spine. The lower half drops like a sack of bricks, but the upper half is pulling itself toward you along the ground. You step back and set the saw vertically right against its head, buzzing through its skull and covering everything around you in a shower of black gore. The zombie stops moving immediately.
Dripping, you look around. Zombies are shambling in from almost every aisle. It looks like you got their attention.
You set down the chainsaw and leave it idling as you grab your shotgun. You wrangle the zombies by weaving in and out of the checkstands, getting them together in a sort of open group. You line up your shots, taking your time to aim for the head, retreating to reload, and always keeping a checkstand or flat of goods between the zombies and you. Fifteen shells later, twelve zombies are dead or incapacitated, and you make sure they’re finished with one of the clean axes.
Immortal
Why did that horde of zombies have to pick you to follow? Aren’t there squirrels or something they could eat? You think about it a minute or two. Wait, if there are zombie dogs, are there zombie squirrels? What if you get bitten by a zombie flea? This really sucks!
You pick through the storeroom and eat your fill, and grab a bottle of aspirin.
You pull the shelf away from the boarded up window and peek outside. Nothing is in the alley. You climb out and look around. The zombies seem to have dispersed a little. You pick a path through them where there aren’t many hanging around, and make a break for it. You head down to the tunnel, intending to walk down the waterfront. You scan the tunnel – no zombies standing around, and in the reflection of the growing dawn on the pools of ice you don’t see anything lying on the ground. Looks pretty safe.
You pass through the tunnel. There’s a sharp corner where cars have to beep their horns, but you can see past it if you’re against the outer part of the curve.
You walk along, past an abandoned copper smelter at the north end of the industrial zone, and continue southeast. Train tracks run through weeds beside the road. The industrial area is dark and dirty. There’s a huge container ship loaded with dingy multicolored shipping containers. Other than that, you can’t see much from here, and it’s enclosed by a tall chain-link fence. On your right is a steep wooded cliff.
You continue southeast and pass the first of two wooded gulleys. The train tracks, elevated above the road here, have an overpass bridge where the road goes under and switches back up the side of the gulley. You continue along the waterfront road.
At the second gulley, the barren industrial setting turns into a manicured strip of park between the road and the water. Covered in snow, the sidewalk improves and you don’t have to walk in the road anymore.
Coming out of the woods under this second rail bridge you see a homeless man bundled up in clothes. He’s shambling around, and you can’t see his face. You decide it’s not worth the risk that he’s a zombie, and move on quickly. You look back a hundred feet along and see him still kind of shambling in your direction.
Up ahead in the brightening dawn you can see the oldest part of Westhaven. There are some shops, but it’s not exactly a full commercial district, so it’s unmarked on the map. But there’s a coffee shop, a bicycle shop, a Subway sandwich shop, a bar of some kind, and some professional offices.
Kagus
They say you’re the first person they’ve seen alive. They’ve seen quite a few zombies, but haven’t really stopped to put them down.
The man seems to be pretty much in charge of everyone. His wife has no personality. Jimmy is just scared, mostly of Sal it seems. He worries over Bernadine, and keep dabbing her forehead with a cloth. Bernadine seems to be holding up well, but the baby is occupying most of her thoughts. She’s not much for conversation right now.
You try to nap for about twenty minutes, but Sal keeps up a constant chatter about the government. It’s his opinion that the government set this all up, and the message from the Garrison is just their way of gathering up anyone who might have survived so they can get rid of all the witnesses. He plans to take his family to a friend’s mink farm to the east, out in the woods where zombies won’t be everywhere.
The hospital marked on the map is actually four hospitals, all clustered in the same 4x3 block area. There are large parking garages, and right now you’re between two 20+ storey hospital buildings with an elevated section between them connecting across the street. A ramp leads from the road up to the emergency entrance, which is actually inside the building.
Sal drives the SUV right up to the emergency entrance, running over a zombie that was wandering around in the ramp area.
Sal gets out, grabs the shotgun from his wife, and yells from outside for Jimmy and you to come with him. It looks like the wife is staying to guard Bernadine. Jimmy whispers something to Bernadine, and starts to kiss her, but she’s busy having a contraction. He gets out awkwardly, and Sal hands him a pistol. Jimmy stares at it in his hand. Bernadine suddenly gets very nervous and doesn’t want them to go. Sal puts his foot down – the wife and B are staying in the car. He, Jimmy, and you are going in for the medicine. You don’t want to go into the hospital, but then again you don’t really want to stay out here either.
Suddenly Bernadine cries out, holding her belly. The baby seems to be acting up. And just as quickly, you made up your mind to stay and help guard the pregnant woman. You say as much to Sal.
Sal was on his way inside, Jimmy trailing behind. He stops, and turns. He’s angry, and his face is flushed. “What do you mean, runt? I told you to come with us into this godforsaken hellhole so we can save my little girl, and that’s what you’re gonna do!” He’s holding his shotgun along his forearm, against his other elbow, like in a hunting magazine. You refuse. After all, how many zombies are in that place? You sure don’t want to go in there.
Sal raises his shotgun and points it at you, as you pull your pistol and point it at him. Sal laughs. “Well boy I know I’m gonna hit you, questions is, are you gonna hit me?” In the standoff, Sal’s wife in the car is making no noise, and Bernadine has quieted down a little. From the left, you hear Jimmy’s voice say “We’re tired of this. You’re gonna get us all killed” and a quiet click. Jimmy is holding his pistol pointed at Sal’s head.
Sal, still looking mostly at you, grins. “Let me take care of this right here, and I’ll get back to you in a minnit” he says, as he ducks out of Jimmy’s line of fire and swings the shotgun around to Jimmy’s belly. Jimmy fires, Sal fires, you fire. And Sal drops straight to the ground, his shotgun under him. There’s silence for a moment. The car door slams, and Agnes walks wide-eyed around the front of the car. She stumbles toward Sal’s collapsed frame and crouches on her knees, crying.
Jimmy was struck by one of the shot pellets, in his arm. The group doesn’t have any first aid supplies, so you wrap it up tightly with a strip torn from his shirt. He’s holding the arm close, holding the pistol in his left hand. You finish tying it up just in time to hear seven gunshots followed by click after click, and look over to see Agnes with one of Sal’s pistols in her hand. She’s shot him, and keeps pulling the trigger a few more times. She has a twisted, angry expression on her face. And she sits back down on the cold concrete, still crying. You and Jimmy manage to get her back into the SUV, in the back with Bernadine.
She still needs medicine. Jimmy gets the prescription from Sal’s cooling corpse. You loot the shotgun and 7 shells, and Jimmy grabs a couple clips for Sal’s pistol. He looks in at Agnes, still holding the other (empty) pistol, and pockets both of the clips.
Standing outside the emergency room entrance, you can see farther in a directory showing where the pharmacy is. This is the closest entrance. There are two sets of automatic doors, forming a kind of airlock. There are no zombies in the airlock, but beyond in the waiting room you see many huddled unmoving shapes and a couple zombies shuffling around aimlessly.
What now? It seems like Jimmy still wants to go in for Bernadine’s meds, but he doesn’t want to go in alone.
Dreadfang
You go search the burned zombies and don’t find anything of much value. There is a Daisy Duck watch that’s still working somehow, despite being well-singed. You pocket it.
You walk south toward the fire station. The streets are clear of zombies until you get near the fire station, where there are a couple stragglers which you dispatch with your swords. You see the corpses of three firemen who died on either side of the driving compartment of the truck. They lie on the ground, not wearing fire fighting gear, but instead just pants and dark blue t-shirts with the city fire department logo.
Both metal garage doors are closed, but you see lights on inside. You clank on up to the metal door and knock. You don’t hear anything. You bang really hard a few times, and back up to look up at the windows of the second story. A man approaches the window a moment later, looking down at you. He looks back, and then at you again as a woman goes to the next window and looks down at you. The woman motions to the side door, and both of them leave the windows.
You go around to the side door. There’s a concrete sidewalk all around the building, with a concrete brick planter all around the outside and a wooden slat fence beyond that. In the planter there is a row of man-sized manicured juniper trees, covered in snow. You reach the side door and they open it, letting you in and closing it after you. He has a pot helmet and a curtain rod for a weapon, though he has a nice sword at his belt. He introduces himself as Erik. Kiseith and Dreadfang have found each other!
She introduces herself as Kim. She wears jeans and a dark blue t-shirt, a little ripped up, a black sports bra underneath, barefoot, and short-cropped brown hair. She’s holding a hunting rifle, no scope, with a messenger bag and a makeshift thigh sling for her axe. She seems to be favoring her left leg.
The three of you go upstairs. The space has plenty of sleeping spots. There’s a bloody cloth and a bowl of bloody water next to one couch. Kim sits back down there while you all talk, drops the cloth in the bowl, and kind of pushes it under the couch.
Kim and Erik explain what’s happened. Kim summary: she’s waiting here for her husband, a nurse, because she knows he’d come to her fire station to find her. Erik summary: fought through some zombies on the way here, met Kim, and decided to stay with her for now. Erik wants to get to the Garrison. Kim wants to go also, but she can’t leave without her husband.
Kiseith
You try to assure Kim that her husband is safe, and he might be elsewhere. But she’s adamant that he would look for her here, and she doesn’t want to leave. The two of you go downstairs and check the entrances, and realize you forgot to close the second big garage door. No zombies came in, and you close the door. Kim is limping.
You go about securing the rest of the place. To your horror, it looks like the zombie you killed before Kim shot the second one was still able to move. It crawled toward your staircase going up, about 10 feet along the white-painted concrete, smearing black blood as it went. You smash its head in again just to make sure, but it doesn’t respond.
The two of you get back upstairs, and you nod off to sleep.
You wake to a banging on metal sound outside at the front. You look over at Kim, who has her jeans off and is holding a bloody cloth to her wounded knee. She has a bowl of water, which is reddish as well. She looks surprised. You slink over to the window and look out. There’s a man below in medieval metal armor, swords sticking off his metal gloves like Wolverine, a backpack and a bag at his side full of junk, looking up at you. He waves in a very un-zombie-like way, and you see a bunch of keys dangling from his fingers.
Is that a Pikachu key ring?
Kim hobbles up next to you, and looks down. The man in armor puts both arms out at his sides, as if to say, “Well? Can I come in?” You look at each other and wordlessly decide it’s best to let him in. Kim motions out the window to the side door, and says “side door” though he probably can’t hear her. Kim goes to her couch and puts a bandage on her left leg, and puts her jeans back on. She grabs her rifle and waits for you to get your stuff together.
You go downstairs and open the side door for the man. He comes in, and you close it after him. He’s wearing relatively clean metal armor, but it’s obvious that it’s wearing him down. He introduces himself as Gregory. Dreadfang and Kiseith have found each other!
The three of you go upstairs. Gregory explains all that’s happened to him. Summary: he killed a bunch of zombies and came here.
Aqizzar
You take a few minutes to get everything in your truck settled. You discover that of the six boxes of ammunition you found, one is all pistol blanks, one is full of rifle bullets, two are for light pistols, and two are for much heavier pistols. You load the two pistols with 10 rounds each, put the safety latches on, and pocket them.
You also rearrange the goodies you looted, putting as much as you can under the seat and behind the seat. The gasoline jugs are in the back anyway, along with the big water jug. You put the rest of it on the floor of the passenger side, the two flats of Gatorade first, so someone can just jump in if they need to.
You drive up the hill to the hardware store. On this side, the parking lot is just a road all around the store, with a single row of nose-in parking on the other side. There are a few pickup trucks with metal or wood frames on the beds, with contractors’ logos painted on the sides. There’s a propane-powered forklift under a shed roof on the contractors’ entrance with a light golf cart beside it. There are heavy shopping carts, as well as larger carts that look like playground equipment for carrying lumber and concrete from inside the store. The automatic doors have been broken open, glass is everywhere, and blood stains the ground. There are about 10 corpses just inside the contractors’ entrance.
There is a zombie shuffling around in the parking lot. You time it just right and run him over. THUMP-bump-bumpbump. You pass a greenhouse full of lovely plants. There is no snow on the roof. The door is manual. From here you can see the retail entrance, and a larger parking lot with 5 rows of about 10 spaces each. Nobody in sight, and the retail entrance’s automatic doors are closed and whole.
You continue driving up past the retail entrance. It looks like someone was piling supplies inside from throughout the store, but didn’t get to bring them out. As you drive past, planning on continuing around to the entrance, you hear gunshots from inside. There’s a man in a yellow construction helmet inside darting around among the checkstands, blasting zombies with a shotgun. You stop the truck, and take a quick look around. There’s a zombie shuffling around the far side of the parking lot, but it’s not coming toward you. Inside the man seems to be handling himself pretty well. His front is covered in zombie goop though. After he finishes shooting them, he reloads the shotgun one last time and grabs an axe. You see him working on the other side of the checkstands, hacking at the zombies on the ground.
Dreadfang and Kiseith have found each other! So feel free to RP whatever. I'll try to keep up more with conversation posts.
Author
Topic: My Little Zombie Apocalypse (Read 42463 times)