Turn 8
Day -4
Little
You sit in your empty fire station, radios arrayed before you. You haven’t heard from Gregory or Erik. You try to send a message out on the Garrison channel, but you don’t get a response. You gather all the blankets together and make yourself comfortable, to get some sleep. You eat the last of the chewy popcorn, a candy bar, and a can of pears from the cabinet next to the fridge before you drift off the sleep.
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Strife
When the plague struck, you were on leave visiting your parents in Oak Harbor. Your cousin had been struck and killed by a drunk quad bike driver while she was camping out with friends at Opel Lake on the peninsula. There were only a few people at the funeral. It was raining, freezing cold, when they threw the mud on her coffin a week ago.
You remember your wife joking with you about funeral arrangements one time. She wanted to be cremated and the ashes mixed with glass to make something beautiful. You laughed and said you’d have someone make her into a toilet seat. That was just how it was, back then.
Oak Harbor was not spared the plague. As you drive away from it on a tree-lined country freeway, you remember the quaint touristy shops, the clapboard signs lining the boardwalk advertising snorkeling, jet skiing, whale-watching, and glass-bottom boat tours. The umbrella-carts selling polish sausages and snow cones and green tea ice cream. And all the espresso shops. Oak Harbor was a place people came but there was really nothing there, just a desperate sense that at any moment everyone would realize it and pack up to leave. Like you’d wake up one morning cold, with dew on your pillow, and all the buildings had picked up and snuck away in the night.
Your aunt Pilar is driving you in her little brown VW Beetle. It’s the old style, and you grew up affectionately calling it The Old Rusty Turd. Her wiry hair is tied back in a neat pony tail. You drive across the bridge at the west side of Westhaven. As you reach the bridge, you see concrete barricades and a thick snarl of stopped cars. Occasionally you see jerky, animalistic movement in some of them. There is no way to drive across.
You and Pilar pack up what you can carry and begin walking across on the pedestrian path. There’s a waist-high metal mesh between the path and the cars, and between the path and a 300-foot drop to the cold waves below. You walk in front, rifle slung across your back, pistol in your right hand. Pilar walks behind carrying a banged-up aluminum bat. You haven’t talked much since hearing the Garrison message and deciding to make a break for it. You spent the whole day looking for survivors in Oak Harbor and failed to find any. On the way south you did see tire tracks in the snow, and you now follow footprints on the bridge. They’re rapidly filling with the snow that’s falling from the steel-gray midnight sky.
A groaning shape rises up to your right, from the sargasso of cars, clawing at you desperately. You fire four bullets from your gun, and it staggers back, and you shoot again striking its head. It drops immediately. Another behind it approaches, and you carefully take aim before shooting it. Behind you, the clang of metal on metal says Pilar is fighting one of her own. There’s a muffled cry, and you see out of the corner of your eye something lurches over the mesh and slams into her, knocking her back against the outer railing. She flails wildly but it overbalances her, and they both go tumbling over the edge.
The echo of your shots has disappeared out into space. You step backward, still on the path, making new footprints in the snow. She’s gone. Like a gray ghost she floated back, wings spread, and disappeared into the night forever.
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Tuv
You get out into the warehouse and go from zombie to zombie blasting them with the shotgun. The first one, you shoot in the chest and it just keeps coming. The next shot takes out its jaw and neck, and it drops immediately as black bile flows out of its head. You quickly realize that hits to the head are far more effective. You manage to blow away ten more zombies in this fashion, and you stop four more from wandering in through an open delivery door by closing it before they could climb up the ledge five feet off the ground. The door catches two sets of arms, but you bang them with your hammer over and over until they pull back or in one case lose the arm to your side of the door. The arm flops around on the ground for a few moments, then twitches. You smack it with the hammer a couple more times just to be safe.
Most of the produce is still good. You figure it might have a good week left in it, in this weather. You take a big 30-pound box each of bananas, nectarines, pineapples, tomatoes, and potatoes, and a single delicious flat of blackberries. The front office has a small kitchenette where you microwave a potato. While you wait, you gorge yourself on fruit and a can of TaB.
After you eat, you take a warmer coat down from the coat rack in the office and head back out into the warehouse to fiddle with the electronics and salvage something.
(What exactly are you looking to do?)
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Nilocy
You think of firing off a few rounds at the Garrison to get the guards’ attention. But won’t that also attract the zombies? It seems hopeless. You and Drake start talking about abandoning the Garrison plan and leaving the city.
As you drive uphill, you see a shambler walking along toward downtown. But it’s carrying a backpack and a bunch of equipment, so you slow down to see. It turns to look at you, and then starts waving its arms. You back up the Mustang. He takes off what looks like a saucepan helmet and pulls back his hood, waving vigorously, and Drake opens the passenger door and climbs out. The man climbs in and takes off his gloves to warm up.
He introduces himself as Erik. You tell him about the Garrison and your plan to leave the city and give up on it. But he seems determined to get into it rather than leave.
Great! Nilocy and Pnx have found Keiseth!
Pnx
You take the opportunity to nap a little. As Caitlin drives uphill, you see a shambler walking along toward downtown. But it’s carrying a backpack and a bunch of equipment, so you slow down to see. It turns to look at you, and then starts waving its arms. Caitlin backs up the Mustang. He takes off what looks like a saucepan helmet and pulls back his hood, waving vigorously, and you open the passenger door and climb out. The man climbs in and takes off his gloves to warm up.
He introduces himself as Erik. You tell him about the Garrison and your plan to leave the city and give up on it. But he seems determined to get into it rather than leave.
Great! Nilocy and Pnx have found Keiseth!
Keiseth
You’ve decided to keep walking until you get really tired, and find a house to hole up in. You get quite close to downtown, to where you see the land start sloping downward. Every north-south street is level, and every east-west street (like the one you’re walking on) is a steep slope. You can see a lot of zombies down there.
A sleek black car drives by you moving uphill. It stops, and you turn toward it a little numbly. You realize you look a bit like a zombie, all wrapped up like this a shambling along. You wave, and the car backs up. You take off your saucepan helmet and pull back your hood, waving vigorously, and they open the passenger door for you. A young man gets out and pulls the seat forward so you can get in. You climb in, a boy and his dog taking up most of the small back seat of this sports car, and the young man gets back in and closes the door. The car is nice and warm, and you take off your gloves and open your jacket. My god, the seats are heated.
The driver is a police officer names Caitlin. The young man is named Drake. The boy is mute and nobody knows his or his dog’s names.
They explain that they went downtown to the Garrison and found it surrounded by zombies. Too many to drive through, in this car anyway. They’re looking around for ideas. One that they’re passing around is to leave the city and give up on the Garrison. But after coming this far that’s the last thing you want to do.
Great! Keiseth has found Nilocy and Pnx!
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Torak
After some introductions between you and Zak, you say that you’re barricading the place and he should go look for supplies. Zak walks around the perimeter with you as you talk, and you notice with irritation that the back of the lot that the store sits on is relatively open; there’s a crummy chain-link fence that gapes open gateless to an alley. Across the alley is a professional plaza with a dentist, a gynecologist, and a marriage counselor. But anybody could just walk right in, and building a wall to block it off would take all the lumber here and a day of work. Plus, neither of you know exactly what you’re doing when it comes to carpentry.
After some discussion, you decide to barricade the store building itself rather than the entire courtyard. The two of you do a check all around to make sure no zombies are hiding inside the fence or behind the building, and then the two of you start moving lumber inside.
Hours later, both of you are exhausted but you begin nailing the barricades together while Zak goes off searching for supplies. He asks you where you’ve searched. You tell him you haven’t searched anywhere in this neighborhood.
He leaves, and you get to work building. The store has a pair of big glass double doors in front, big enough to drive a pickup through. There are also two offices each with a large window, and there are some smaller, higher windows in the bathroom and in the back storage room. There’s a normal wooden back door as well off the storage room. The front windows all open by sliding, but the smaller windows in the bathroom and the storage room are hinged at the bottom and light chains keep them from opening more than a foot or so.
Zak returns perhaps an hour later, shaking snow off his shoes. Too dark to do any looting. You look past him outside and see more snow falling. Just wonderful.
Zako
After some introductions between you and Gorgath, he says that he’s barricading the place and you should go look for supplies. You walk around the perimeter with him as you talk, and you notice with irritation that the back of the lot that the store sits on is relatively open; there’s a crummy chain-link fence that gapes open gateless to an alley. Across the alley is a professional plaza with a dentist, a gynecologist, and a marriage counselor. But anybody could just walk right in, and building a wall to block it off would take all the lumber here and a day of work. Plus, neither of you know exactly what you’re doing when it comes to carpentry.
After some discussion, it’s decided that he should barricade the store building itself rather than the entire courtyard. The two of you do a check all around to make sure no zombies are hiding inside the fence or behind the building, and then the two of you start moving lumber inside.
Hours later, both of you are exhausted but Gorgath begins nailing the barricades together while you go off searching for supplies. You ask him where he’s searched. He tells you he hasn’t searched anywhere in this neighborhood.
You leave, and he gets to work building. You grab a big blue wheelbarrow that has four chunky solid wheels and start rolling it through the snow around the lumber yard. You pick up various tools from a shed along with three tall metal canisters you can barely lift labeled “Oxygen”. There isn’t much more out here, and it’s getting pretty late. You drop the goods off at the front doors and see Gorgath hard at work inside.
You look out at the front street. Under the streetlights and the lightly-falling snow you see a small crowd of zombies fussing at the fence. They’ve been attracted by all the activity inside the lumber yard. Looking out the back way, you don’t see any zombies. But there also aren’t any working streetlights back there. You decide to just go inside and help build things. You turn the wheelbarrow over in the snow so it won’t fill up, enter the building, and shake the snow off.
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Sir Edmund
You and Aq finish up the last bit of barricading. It looks pretty good. You find yourself getting a little short with Aq, but he doesn’t seem to notice. Somehow that makes it even more aggravating.
The two of you decide to find some supplies from nearby. Aq doesn’t want anyone driving his truck, so if anyone goes out it would have to at least include him. He mentions that the gas station to the south still had a lot of food in it and some miscellaneous things that might come in handy. There are other stores around here too, which may be handy to loot. But it makes sense to take the truck to go looting.
He mention to you that he could use the manager’s keys to find his car and drive around looting. You stammer out something about sticking together, but you’re really just thinking about driving in an unfamiliar pickup in the snow up and down hills while zombies are everywhere. And you don’t even like driving in the rain!
Plus, you say with relief, someone needs to stay inside to use the forklift barricade mover, unless you just leave it open and hope nobody comes in through the automatic glass doors.
Aq leaves you to finish cleaning up around the barricades, and goes patrolling around the store to check the place out. He returns a little while later explaining that the place seems clear but he put down one zombie in the lighting section.
A little later you and Aq bring in most of the supplies from his tow truck, leaving enough for the two of you to eat and drink for a few days and also leaving all the fuel and unusable ammo.
You go off to sleep while Aq starts gathering things to weld to his truck. You climb the steps up to the office, and take a long look out over the store. Aq’s truck is parked there, and he’s down next to it holding pieces of metal up to it in various positions. You lay down but sleep fitfully.
Aqizzar
You and Jano finish up the last bit of barricading. The framework Jano built in a few hours while you slept has now been fleshed out and reinforced. You figure even if you drove straight into one with your truck, it might not break down, but it’s not invincible.
The two of you decide to find some supplies from nearby. You don’t want anyone driving your truck, so if anyone goes out it would have to at least include you. You mention that the gas station to the south still had a lot of food in it and some miscellaneous things that might come in handy. There are other stores around here too, which may be handy to loot. But it makes sense to take the truck to go looting.
You mention to Jano that he could use the manager’s keys to find his car and drive around looting. Jano seems reluctant to split up. Plus, someone needs to stay inside to use the forklift barricade mover, unless you just leave it open and hope nobody comes in through the automatic glass doors.
Jano finishes cleaning up around the barricades, and you start wandering the store to check the place out. You encounter a badly injured zombie in the lighting section of the store, where hundreds of display models of brassy chandeliers hang way too low from the ceiling. You must have missed him earlier. You quickly dispatch him with your wrench.
A little later you help Jano bring in most of the supplies from your truck, leaving enough for the two of you to eat and drink for a few days and also leaving all the fuel and unusable ammo. You fill your pockets with the 20 extra rounds, and stick the other full pistol under the driver’s seat of the truck. You’re still carrying around the one pistol.
Jano goes off to sleep while you start gathering materials and setting up your welding equipment. The sun has completely set, and snow is lightly falling outside under the streetlights in the parking lot.
You start welding, and suddenly hear a blast nearby through your headphones. You look over and see the barrel of a long gun sticking through the retail entrance barricade. You drop your welding mask and torch, and pull the pistol out of your pocket, and duck behind the front of your truck.
The man outside yells for help. You respond by asking him why he was shooting at you. He yells back that he needed to get your attention. He has pulled the gun back through the barrier. You hear him back off and start shooting again, and you hear the unmistakable sound of zombies getting blasted.
You decide to take the risk. You get into the forklift and move the barricade back enough to let a person through on one side. You grab your wrench and come out, hugging wall to stay out of his line of fire. He drops his gun, a shotgun, and pulls out an axe. The two of you circle the zombies, opposite each other, whacking away and knocking them down. The two of you kill a bunch of them. After they’re all down, he retrieves his shotgun and you bring him inside. You close up the barricade again and explain that your friend is upstairs sleeping at the moment. You introduce yourself to the young man. He seems a little strange, but you definitely get the sense that he really wasn’t trying to kill you.
Great! Aqizzar has found Dwarfaholic!
Dwarfaholic
You keep walking, trailing a growing crowd of zombies behind you. The night deepens, and the snow begins to fall through faraway streetlights. Soon your crunching boots bring you to a broad street. Signs point to the landfill to your right. You go that way, following the curve of the land, walking down a very shallow slope. You find yourself outside a gas station parking lot, the landfill to your south, the highway to the east in the direction you were walking, and a sharp rise in the land north toward a well-lit hardware store. You start the climb up the hill, still trailing zombies.
When you reach the top, you see that the hardware store sits in the center of a parking lot. There’s a driveway all the way around, and the parking is just one row for most of it, but it opens up around the front. You see 22 bodies lying in the snow as you pass them, mostly around the contractor’s entrance. There are five pickup trucks with various contractor’s markings on them. The entrance has been walled up. You continue walking.
You pass the greenhouse section attached to the main building. You see two bodies lying inside among the rows of plant shelves. The way in through the garden section has also been barricaded. This is a good sign, you think.
You continue around to the retail entrance. There are four pickups and two small cars in the parking lot. Snow covers them like bricks of white sod. The retail entrance is also barricaded, but from inside you see flashes of light. You approach, and the automatic glass doors open first on the outside, then the inside, and you’re at the barricade. Someone has driven a tow truck inside and there’s a man welding things to it. You try to make some noise, but he has headphones on. Behind you, you notice the zombies kind of catching up to you around the corner.
You stick the shotgun through and fire it off toward the ceiling. That got his attention. He pulls a pistol out of his pocket and ducks behind the tow truck, dropping his headphones and welding mask. The zombies approach closer. You pull the shotgun back out of the hole in the barricade and call for help. The man yells something about shooting at him. You yell back that you just wanted him to hear you. The zombies are pretty close now. You get out of the entrance and start blasting them one by one, while inside the man starts moving the barricade out of the way. You’ve fired off all eight shells that your shotgun carries as the man comes out and stays along the wall to stay out of your line of fire. You drop the shotgun and pull out your axe, and the man has a wrench. The two of you circle the zombies, opposite each other, whacking away and knocking them down. You kill eight with your axe and he kills seven (Smart, Strong, Dextrous). After they’re all down, you retrieve your shotgun and the man brings you inside. They have the barricade set up so a forklift can move it forward and back. He seals the two of you in and explains that his friend is upstairs sleeping at the moment. He introduces himself as Aq. He talks a lot in a funny accent, and it’s pretty irritating.
Great! Dwarfaholic has found Aqizzar!
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Dreadfang
You snuggle up in your warm little cave, and watch through a fog-frosted window the snow falling through streetlights outside. You try to sleep, but all you can see is the fear and the pain in Kim’s expression. Every time you close your eyes she’s there. She haunts you.
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Kagus
You take the stairs down, your pistol in one hand and your crowbar in the other, shotgun slung around your chest hanging at your hip. You peer down the stairwell, and see a few huddled shapes on the stairs a few floors down. The stairwell lights are flickering uncertainly. There is a constant whir from the security cameras that watch your every move. They’re out of crowbar-reach, and you’d rather spend your bullets on zombies or on this chicken-shit madman.
You descend the stairs, and try the door on the 5th floor. Locked. You continue down, and each floor is the same. You reach the third floor and find two bodies huddled in the stairwell covered in blankets. You gingerly start forward, and decide to test them out by throwing something. You pull out the folding camp shovel and throw it at one. It bangs him on the head. He doesn’t move, but the other one looks up sharply, his skin pale but not yet rotting, his eyes milky, red froth at his too-red lips. You take careful aim as he shambles to stand, and pop him in the head once. Horrible-smelling black blood pours forth from the wound, and splatters on the wall behind him. He drops immediately. The other huddled shape falls over to the side. When you inch down the stairs, you crack this other one’s head in with the crowbar, but it wasn’t a zombie and there was just normal skull and brains. It looks like these two were survivors, from the junk they’re packing around. Numb Nuts in the control room probably trapped them in here. One of them has a revolver with no bullets left.
You continue down, finding nothing more in the stairwell. At the first floor you look out into the foyer and see the front doors blowing open and closed just a little in the wind. Snow lit by the streetlights is falling outside.
You continue down, testing doors, until you hit the very bottom. Under the stairwell where there should be more stairs there is a supply closet with mop and bucket, cleaning supplies, brooms, and a flashlight. You take the flashlight and test it out. It works. A whir and click above you reminds you of the cameras that hang everywhere. This one, however, is hung low enough to hit with the crowbar. You take the opportunity to smash it out. It takes a glancing blow, then a solid hit, and your third hit bashes its casing apart and leaves it hanging with wires pulled out. It might not have done much good, but it sure made you feel better. You go to the door at the bottom of the stairwell and find it unlocked. You check out the hall through the thick glass window. There are a few zombies shambling around, such that you’ll have to fight them if you go through. The directory shows this floor as the morgue. Maybe this wasn’t such a hot idea after all.
Suddenly the zombies start moving around more and crowd around away from your door. You hear them moaning and groaning outside. And then it slows down and stops. You hear a phone ring twice. You can’t see because of the angle of your door. You take a chance, opening the door and peeking out. There’s a young man festooned with weapons: a shotgun and bandolier of shells hanging around his shoulders, a big bulky pistol and a smaller one on his belt, a katana in hand and another strapped across his back, and wearing riot gear. He hangs up the red phone on the wall and looks at you. The floor around him is littered with dead zombies and his blade is black with their blood. You say to him, “There’s this freak in here who wants me to kill you so I can leave, but screw him. Let’s find him together and take him down. There’s an armory on the second floor we can hit before we leave.”
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Immortal
You pry open the elevator door a few inches and look out into a hall full of zombies. They claw in at the elevator car. You back up to the other side of the elevator and start hacking with your katana slashing down and pulling it out at the bottom over and over again. You cut off fingers, thick wedges of flesh, whole hands, and a forearm. After a couple minutes of this the zombies have nothing left to reach through with, and simply stand outside trying to shoulder their way in. You start stabbing with the katana, going for the head, dropping six or seven zombies outside. It’s hard to tell because sometimes a zombie gets hit and falls, but stands back up bleeding black goop from a head wound. Minutes later your blade is black and sticky, your hands are blackened, your arms are a bit tired, and the zombies have stopped moving outside.
You finish opening the elevator doors. As you peek out, a zombie’s hand grasps your ankle weakly. Its face leers up at you, its mouth a deep pool of black blood, its thick tongue swarming around. You stab it sharply in the head once more, and it stops moving.
You’re in a short hallway that opens up to the morgue. There are wall drawers for bodies, and several examination tables, and the other three walls are bound by counters and sinks and cabinets. The floor, a light blue square tile, is awash with old blood. It looks like they were just tossing bodies down here at one point. You make a quick count, and it looks like you actually killed about ten zombies outside the elevator.
The phone rings next to the swinging doors leading out of the morgue. You pick it up. It’s the woman’s frightened, pained voice.
She whispers, “My name is Charlotte. I found the morgue number in the extension list in this office so I could call you. I think he’s coming to find you. He grabbed all the guns and this crowbar he’s been hitting me with. He locked me in here and there’s no way out. I’m on the second basement, there are stairs somewhere around the elevator. Please be careful. I think he’s taking the stairs but there’s no other way up.”
You tell her you’re going to rescue her. She seems okay with that, and she hangs up.
You look around a bit, and find the sign for the stairs leading up. As you hang up the phone you see the stairwell doors open. Out comes a tall, fit man with short-cropped blonde hair, carrying a pistol in one hand and a bloody crowbar in the other, a shotgun hanging off one shoulder. He says to you, “There’s this freak in here who wants me to kill you so I can leave, but screw him. Let’s find him together and take him down. There’s an armory on the second floor we can hit before we leave.”
Fresh red blood drips from his crowbar. He motions toward the stairs.
---
Mulch Diggums
You heat up the food from the cookpot in the galley microwave and eat some of it while listening to Pavarotti on your CD player. You look around a bit for keys to the boat, but you don’t find any. You decide not to try hotwiring the boat, since you don’t feel confident that you know what you’re doing.
You decide to head back to the Shipwreck and check it out. Even though it looked busted out there might be survivors or loot there. And a bottle of something smooth might not hurt.
You walk back in the lightly-falling snow. It’s quite dark, and there aren’t many streetlights in this industrial part of town. You trip across one zombie but you bean it with your pipe before it can stand up. It drops, and you keep hitting it over and over and over. It’s not moving. You keep walking, your pants covered in sticky black gore.
The bar is the same as you left it when you passed by. You take a peek inside, and in the few lights that are still on you see the results of a big battle. There are zombie corpses everywhere. It looks like someone had fortified this place a bit and lived here a while, and you count 11 piles of bedding. There are three dead people, including one child, and some spent bullet casings on the floor. There are no survivors here.
You get behind the bar and take a dolly with a black milk crate tied down to it, and fill it with top-shelf liquor. You wash up in the bathroom and pull your cart back home to the boat.
Author
Topic: My Little Zombie Apocalypse (Read 42487 times)