ArchivedLogs:Throwing Down

Throwing Down
Dramatis Personae Kay, Cage
In Absentia	2013-11-16 Kay and Cage team up to save some kids. WARNING: gore and violence. (Part of Infected TP.)
Location A Subway Station
The city has undergone changes, since the start of the outbreak. The ambient noises of a bustling metropolis, the rumble of cars, the thrum of music, the din of voices, have all faded away into the concrete and brickfaced walls. Gentle chirps of autumn birds drift sweetly from trees and, lower, grittier, the harsh /rasp/ of dragging feet over the the sidewalks. Rising above it, the shrill tea-kettle scream of a child is piercing. To look up and down any street, the shambling semi-dormant dead turn their heads in unison. And then their bodies. And begin to move in a single direction. "Ah shit..." Luke mutters. His head whips up at the scream, and he walks out of the broken, plate glass display window. He's got a heavy black sweater on, and torn remnants of a pea coat, which is now basically a vest. He's also wearing heavy jeans and tan work books, and a balaclava pulled down over his face. In days gone by he would have looked quite the thug, but now he just looks like a survivalist braving the cold. He steps out into the street and rolls the mask up above his ears so he can hear better, making it look more like a knit cap. He listens briefly, and then nods when he sees what direction a little gang of dead are interested in. He starts jogging in that direction, glass and debris crunching under foot. Like some terrible exodus to the alter of the transportation system that was, the undead in their drifting, semi-mindless course bump shoulders, compact together, and begin to bottleneck down to pour down through the subway entrance. More muffled, further away, is another scream. It is answered with the throaty moans of walking dead, stirring up into excitement. Kay stands in the shuttered doorway of a broken into and thoroughly ransacked corner store. Heat eternally streaming off his skin in faint ripples, he doesn't look uncomfortable to the chill in torn off sleeves, his ratty MMMC kutte over a grunge-rock band tshirt, the sides of his head shaved. Absurdly /nice/ calf-high steeltoe boots. Such attire is, as are any that tend to venture out for too long, also torn and spattered, likely by use of the hammer hanging off his belt where normally there'd be a wallet chain, and (perhaps less common) singed and possibly smoking slightly off one hem. His eyes are locked on the subway entrance - and then snap to Cage as he jogs into sight. No preamble, he hisses 'psk!' and darts out of his hiding place to pull up alongside the other man, "--two kids." He utters low, kind of /casual/ save that he's not smiling. "Ran into a couple walkers, split down the tube." Cage barely muffles a surprised noise when Kay appears from the remnants of the corner store. He does a double take at the young man, and just manages, "Whoa, it's you..." A number of expressions fight for dominance, but only for a second. Luke shakes his head and then nods at the subway entrance. "Fuck it, pick 'em off from behind!" He glances at the tunnel entrance, back at Kay, and then charges full speed into the crowd, diving head first down the stairs through the crowd. Psh, young man - Kay is older than Cage. Though they both likely have a few extra lines in their face that might make them look older. "Surprise." Kay manages a distracted jazz-hand, falling into a spring behind Cage, thickening heat shimmers glowing off his hands. The undead don't immediately notice Cage, by virtue of his speedy entrance. They stumble forward, falling in amongst one another, making dead flat moans and noises that sound like 'rast!' and 'guh!'. But slow as they are, they are inexorable, and those nearest him begin to slowly turn their bodies, their drying corpse-eyes, towards Cage. He'll feel warmth at his back - where Kay has caught up with him and turned so their tailbones /point/ at one another. A much STRONGER wave of heat soon follows as he shoves out a fiery explosive wall to incinerate the undead coming up behind Cage reeling back. "Cleansing by /fire/, baby," he is saying this to try and sound playful. It comes out sounding -- blackly furious. The stairs Cage is shoving his way through lead down to a wide platform, which then drops off into the rails that lead off into the blackness of the subway tunnels. And the whole of it is /moving/ - a writhing shambling sea of undead heads and shoulders and extended arms, and a dull roar of voices. All shoving towards two small figures, a boy and a girl, huddled down by the tracks behind a semi-invisible wall that shimmers blue in a tight sphere around them. The boy, younger, is covering his face. The girl is standing, white-faced with terror and concentration, staring blankly at the ceiling as her eyes glow a blue the same as the wall around her. When Cage sees the kids huddled in the shield, he goes still for a full second. "Sweet Christmas..." he whispers, scanning the crowd of dead all around. It's no longer time for the merciful quietings he's been making such a great effort at all this time. He doesn't even draw his knife. He balls up his fists, clenched tight enough to crush stone into dust and looks over his shoulder to nod at Kay even as the dead start to swarm back up at them. "HEY! /HEY/!" he shouts at the top of his lungs, his voice reverberating in the concrete space. He's trying to get the attention of the dead scrabbling against the shield, but his shouting is probably more universally successful than that. Either way, he starts swing quick, hard jabs at every groaning face in his way. For man who can punch through armor plating, the only thing stopping him before was a sense of decency, and the bile in his belly. But the threatened kids have pushed all that to the back. Cage grits his teeth and marches forward like Gallagher on stage. Bone, skull and putrified gray matter pepper across the faces of the undead still approaching, Cage's fists passing through faces with a curiously muffled rapid-repetitive /crunching/. Scalp and flesh tear loose, are sent spiraling to spatter against walls. /FWOOM/ ssssszzzzle. Behind him, Kay incinerates a new wave, glowing with veins of red and orange embers that slowly fade to char-black. Not all are fully dead - but fried muscle and skin and charred joints and melted fat have fuzed them into melted walls that twist stuck together, tearing loose meat from bone when they jerk too hard. Kay takes one look over his shoulder, at what Cage had been looking at. And his expression goes dark, "COME on!" He raises his voice to join Cage's. And the dead come. The little girl doesn't seem to notice the shifting atmosphere. The tendons in her delicate neck stand out as though she were choking, her fists tremble. But the little boy has locked his hands around her, staring wide-eyed and filthy faced at the commotion. "--it's Luke Cage!" He screams with a desperate sort of hope. Tears streaming freely down his face, Luke's expression is otherwise pure stone, a bloody statue, a gory monument to death and destruction. A mumbled mantra begins to tumble from his clenched jaw, between shouts and squelching noises. "Not today, not this time. Not today, not this time..." Rinse, repeat. Luke focuses on cutting a direct path, letting Kay do what Kay does best - crowd control. Like parting the red sea, Luke smashes his way through the bodies tearing at him. His warm clothes are all in tatters now, but his exposed flesh doesn't show a scratch, and besides, he has Kay to keep him warm down here. Punch, /slam/, shove, throw, all the while cutting them closer to the kids. "Not today..." Crunch, slam, /slide/. Luke almost loses his balance on a slick patch that he doesn't give himself time to consider. "Not. THIS. /TIME/." The smell of cooked bad meat, the smell of dead bodies and something wetter, something like meat, like brain and organ and exposed muscle layer. And campfire. Burnt clothes. Controlling fire is not a fine science, it's an art, some of the damage to Luke's attire is likely from his companion, whose own clothes are also smoldering - he smacks a burnt hand at them, pats out spreading flames, then snarls and throws forward another explosion. His face is bone dry, weary and flat somehow. But he's murmuring to - but this, to Cage, "Keep going, almost there, buddy. Just a little more." So close to the children their dirty face can be made out in detail now, their sunken eyes, the days-old appearance of their clothes. The girl's eyes also stream tears, "-i-I can't..." she whimpers. And the glowing wall vanishes. And the little girl collapses into the little boy's arms. "Bwah!" Luke shouts in surprised despair when the shield drops. "No-no-no-no," Luke flushes with a fresh surge of energy and doesn't even stop to ask first. He turns and spins Kay to face him, and takes a heartbeat, looking into the man's eyes. Then, Kay is /flying/. Through the air. He doesn't throw him headfirst, but he launches Kay over the last few dead, hopefully to tumble and fetch up next to the kids. "Blast them back- /at me/!" "-ohshitfuck!" Kay is a rangy /bastard/, even his hard-knit muscle mass has a serpentine /meanness/ that knots up prepared the instant Cage lays hands on him. Eyes wide, he /flyes/ like a demented Peter Pan, arms thrown over his head and slams bodily into the undead woman staggering to her knees to try seizing hold of one of the children. "--dude, unless you want --" Kay grabs a belt knife off his hip and, still lying on his back, his other hand fisted up in the dead woman's tangled hair, he shoves the knife through the woman's eye socket. /Grimacing/, "--a pair of barbecued /tenders/ you don't want me to do tha-aaaat!" Another member of the undead posse has dropped down to bite into his leg. The undead man's head incinerates with a sizzle of evaporating moisture. Hetruggling up to his feet, Kay shoves the kids behind him, backing them up to the wall. His eyes lock on Cage, still battling through the horde, so many animate, roving and snarling and frenzied corpses between them. And he grins unreassuringly. Raising his hands and aiming them at Cage, "Sorry dude. Gotta clear a path." FWOOSH - flames snarl across the ground, leaping up undead legs, catching on clothes rippling for a moment in the hard wave of heat - before the bodies inside the clothes are also rippling, peeling back from blackening bones and then exploding away against the walls. Cage is, sadly, also in this line of fire. Cage's eyebrows and goatee were just stubble for some reason, when he and Kay ran into each other today. Perhaps they had been burned off by some other incident. They were gamely making a return effort, until this setback. "Do it!" Cage shouts, and then he ducks down to one knee, covering his head with his arms. When the wall of heat blast past him, most of it is absorbed by all the dead bodies standing around, but his own outer layer of clothes puffs out in a shower of smoldering cotton. He's left with most of a yellow t-shirt, and his heavy jeans and boots. His bare arms and bald head however also immediately sizzle, layers of skin peeling back in a split second. He growls in pain, and drops to all fours. When the heat abates, he looks side to side, and hauls himself to his feet. Even as he moves, the fried skin on his arms ripples and starts to heal. He nods at Kay and grunts, "Take the boy." Luke scoops up the fainted girl and cradles her in his arms as if she didn't weigh a thing. Panting raggedly, Kay half falls on the boy to throw arms around him, smushing him into the smokey material of his shirt front. Those dead that were not destroyed in the blast register no shock for the explosion, for the massive loss of their own, only dragging themselves away from the wall they'd been slammed against. Up from the ground, leaving limbs and portions of torn of flesh left behind. "Got him!" Kay runs through the blacked trench between them, using the open front of his kutte to hide the child's face along the way. "Go go go!" Cage nods at Kay's urging, and holds the girl up close to his body, holding her tight so he can run. And run he does. He charges out the path he and Kay cut, lowering his shoulder to barrel through any wayward dead in good enough shape to still stand. When they emerge in the quiet street, the freezing cold reasserts itself to Luke's much more exposed form now. He shivers briefly through clenched teeth and nods down the street. "There's a shelter not three blocks down there. We can drop them off there." Cage clears his throat, hacks, and spits a wad of smokey black phlegm into the gutter. "Thanks for you help, brother. Couldn't 'a done that without you." He holds Kay's gaze for a moment, and then leads the way down the street. The little girl's arms are locked around Cage's neck like she wants to climb /into/ him, speaking in a flat childish rush through her sobs, "-he's gonna save us gonna save us 's okay nhhh hhh hhh." Next to him, Kay is stooped over coughing, the angry red burns heating his cheeks healing visibly in rapid time. His arms are crossed in an an X over the little boy's back, unthinkingly cradling his scarred-knuckled, long-fingered hand around the back of the child's head. Leather black vest, patches, bandana tied around his waist, shaved head - it isn't the sort of person that one would rush to hand a child to. But the boy's face is pressed hard into the side of Kay's neck, silently clinging. Through soot smears, Kay's stained teeth look white when he flashes them at Cage, "We should team up more often. You know how to ride a motorcycle?" He falls in alongside Cage, looking over his shoulder as the undead begin to emerge onto the street. Time to split. Never a better time.