Logs:The living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing.
| The living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing. | |
|---|---|
CN: Violence/zombies/fosse don't look | |
| Dramatis Personae | |
| In Absentia | 2024-02-10 "I weren't even in the cages no more, I still heard the stories." |
| Location
<BOM> Jenner Ruins - ??? | |
This sprawling compound was once on the bleeding edge of immunological research, and had over the years produced many lifesaving vaccines--and deadly bioweapons. It has lain for some years in disuse and obscurity, quarantined and swept under the bureaucratic rug while Prometheus moved on to better/worse things. Here and there the tall fences that ring the facility have been warped and torn, though it's hard to say at a glance by what. The grounds have overgrown, even the paved surfaces cracked open to make way for grasses, shrubs, and saplings. The buildings themselves are all perfectly intact, abandoned over horrors written in bright biohazard warning signs and errant pools of long-dried bodily fluids. Some efforts have been made to clean up the catastrophe. None have yet succeeded. It's growing darker and it's growing colder; it seems improbable that a wind should be quite harsh through the mostly-enclosed courtyard, but the rambling weeds and tall grasses are whipping heavily in it. After some delay for consultation with the remnants of the Brotherhood, Ion has returned -- only a little more dressed than he was for the New Orleans balm, baggy denim jacket several sizes too big for him hanging over his white undershirt and an extremely fleecey Rainbow Dash hat with a crest of rainbow fluff running down the top like a mane. The hat makes cheerful contrast to the crowbar he's tapping idly against one boot. "S'place really safe, then?" He's ambling over to idly drag his hook down one of the QUARANTINE AREA KEEP OUT signs, tearing it idly from the door leading in before he pushes it open with a creak. The look he casts over his shoulder is not unsympathetic, but there's a frank evaluation in it. "I weren't even in the cages no more, I still heard the stories." Scramble is dressed more sensibly for the weather in a long overcoat too wide for her shoulder over her battered cut, a waffle thermal shirt, jeans, and engineer's boots. Unfortunately, all of these things save the off-white shirt are in different shades of black, which might very nearly be more painful for her than courting hypothermia, to judge by her copious complaints earlier about the "Nick Fury-ass getup". She's not complaining anymore, eyeing the compound beyond Ion only a little warily. "I heard the stories, too. Folks make up crazy shit make it easier to deal with the real-life horror. Ain't no shame in it." She's hefting the shotgun slung over her shoulder experimentally, still unused to such a long weapon and faintly awkward. "Ain't no shame being prepared to fight off the hordes of zombies, neither." Though her flippancy fades quickly enough when she glances at their guide. "You gon be aight, Brother?" "What is safe. The government is not here. I think they are not likely to be here." Leo doesn't look particularly alright, hanging back with arms tight around his chest. "Only the dead are here." The flashlight in one hand is extremely sturdy but probably not a particularly weapon, and the sturdy utility knife at his hip is probably more useful around his boat than in Real Danger. Regardless of his tension, he's following after the others now, gripping the flashlight tighter and flicking it on as he steps inside. The beam illuminates a hallway dusty but mundane, typically institutional in its monotony, only the extremely over-secured doors betray its former purpose. "Most of the stories -- they had -- no idea. Wild conjecture that couldn't possibly -- understand." His voice has dropped to a hushed whisper once he's inside. He's not venturing too far down the hall, head bowed to avoid looking at the placards numbering and designating the rooms; he stops shy of one that, in a former life, was a chapel. "In all the fictions, even I had no idea. Which would have truth. If I had listened. Maybe I would have come back long ago." He's still determinedly not looking up at the closed door, at the window half opaque with its ancient crusting of muck, but his posture has tensed in a subtler bracing that seems out of place in the stillness, until he lifts a hand and raps the flashlight several times, sharp, on the glass. There's an answering thud soon enough, a shuffling and a shaking of the sturdy door, a thumping hand, a thumping head, visible in murky silhouette banging behind the filthy glass. The moan that follows is hollow and rattling, and it's soon enough picked up up and down the hall, a clamor of raspy voices howling in mindless echo as more of the doors start juddering. Leo's eyes have closed, and his voice is half-swallowed, now, by the hungry chorus. "Maybe I could have given my friends some rest." "Penfield's ghosts left with us. Maybe there's a kinda closure to that, too, but I ain't the one carrying them around." Scramble trails after Leo, clicking on her own flashlight -- a camo headlamp she's wearing around her neck -- to light her path when it gets too dark to see. When Leo knocks on the glass she frowns. "I thought you said ain't nobody --" Her brows scrunch even deeper at the THUD, then hike way up at its source. "Well, that's what I get for bringing up the zombie stories. Sorry y'all, I should have hung back, but I didn't think I was this far gone..." At Leo's conclusion, though, she's studying him with a slow dawning horror. "Wait. Shit, is that real?" "You want to go chill in the park, we have a look, we ain't gonna hold it against you." Ion is slinging his crowbar over one shoulder and trailing after Leo. His pace slows as they enter, voice dropping in mimicry of Leo's, church-hushed in the empty hallway. "{I sure the fuck in no hurry to see the bones of Mendeleev, and we ain't had half the horror show there you gone through. You --}" He's trailing off as Leo stops, and only has a second, brows raised, on the verge of a question, before that first THUD draws a sharp yelp and a startled backward jump; for an instant there's just an electric crackle where he was. He's back in place a moment later, eyes wide, lifting his hook to reflexively cross himself. "Jesús, María y José --" He's breathing this out, still wide eyed, and the look he's turning up and down the hall seems kind of dazed. "{Boy here I think you just speaking poetic like you do, you really can --}" His mouth snaps shut, and for a moment it's Leo and not the shadows behind the rattling doors that he's giving a look of stark horror. And then he swallows, draws in a breath, and nods, his eyes fixed on the chapel door. "{Alright, brother.} We help you see to your people." --- Scramble's a decent shot, and at this range the shotgun is a forgiving weapon. It isn't, however, easy to reload. She's only just managed to shove a cartridge in when the shambling husk of a man she's been backing away from catches up and bears her to the ground. She uses the barrel of her weapon to fend off the snapping jaws and scrabbling fingers of the desiccated zombie, just enough to roll them over so she's on top. She chambers the round as she rises to her knees and fires point blank. The zombie flops back down unmoving, the dry rattle in its throat silenced at last. "Oh, fuck." Scramble is sitting back on her heels, trying to not hyperventilate as she flexes her left hand, which bears ragged marks of nominally human teeth. "This mean I'm infected?" She holds the wound up for Leo's examination, her hand shaking badly. Leo has been hanging back, keeping a wary eye on the hallway. He's frowning as he turns back around -- though he hasn't touched the door it's slammed shut with an abruptness that seems to startle him more than the shotgun blast. He's taking a nervous step further away from it before pulling his attention back to Scramble. He blinks -- blinks again -- and as he looks from her shaking hand to her face his brief and mild incredulity is fading to sympathy. "Not now," he assures her, "but we should still bandage that." --- This room is a ruin, but the carnage spread round is oddly more bloodless than might be expected with so many corpses so recently strewn around the cafeteria floor. There's one more withered husk still groaning, but not for long; Mystique has just pulled a long marlinspike from the head of a (former) guard now draped across a table and is pirouetting to drive it quick and neat through a figure whose scrubs are just tatty rags, now. It puts her back to the doorway, if briefly, and as she's yanking her weapon back she doesn't seem to notice the hungry corpse that is lunging for her. If Mystique hasn't noticed the zombie behind her yet, the crunch of an unusually stout white cane caving in its face might tip her off. The cane whips around and drops the corpse to its knees -- perfectly lined up for the slender sword that flashes from the dark hallway to sever its head. Out of that same darkness, Destiny steps daintily over the mess that had once been a janitor. "No one to watch your back?" She tilts her head and clicks her tongue sharply. This might signal disapproval from someone else, but is just her way of glancing around -- perhaps for the source of the sudden cold draft sweeping down the hall. Whatever she hears, neither that nor the cane-sword still in her hands stop her going up on tiptoe to kiss her wife. "Really, love. You're impossible." --- Sprcht! There is something surgical about the way Heather is dispatching the remaining walking dead roaming the hallway. She catches the falling corpse (the remaining scraps of his Nerds on Call polo and spirals of cat 6 cables marking him as a very unlucky network technician) and rests it against the leftside wall as she has with any of the previous ones encountered. "A terrible time to be caught without a bat. It would be genre appropriate." There is a doppler effect on her recorded voice as she blurs to another target (clearly a former inmate), plunges her chef's knife into the brain stem and makes a couple of quick motions to separate it from the spine. And then down to the leftside wall. "Bat, no bat, you always look ready to pose badass as hell in front of some apocalypse ruins." Ion is just stepping out of an adjacent cell. His grime-encrusted crowbar hooked now through a belt loop to leave both hands free. The body he's carrying is too much of a mess, skull cracked and caved in and leathery face half sunk, to be easily identifiable, but they're slight and slender and he's fetched a very clearly well-loved and well-worn copy of The Last Olympian from the cell to lay down gently together with the body. He's tilting his head, listening for a moment to the now-silent hall. "Shovel be better, now. We not done till these people got a proper rest." There's a brief ripple that shivers down the hallway, cold and prickling at skin and ruffling the pages of the book Ion has just set down. It coalesces -- almost -- just beyond the pile of bodies, a young chubby brown-skinned man in street clothes who seems to keeps shifting just out of phase with tangible space. He's examining the pile of fallen bodies with an almost wistful expression, starting to reach for one of the scrub-clad labrats but pulling his hand back when it goes right through. But he's got a fey smile on when he looks up at Heather and Ion, grateful and teasing all at once. "Rest? C'mon, if you've got genre savvy you should know a place like this was made to be haunted." | |
