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Dead Men Walking
Topic Started: Nov 28 2014, 02:20 AM (71,075 Views)
The Last Melon
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The Last Melon. Duh.
Roland frowned. "What do you mean 'done'?"
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DoctorYerishi
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Dude, wake up! We've got a world to save.
Eli's expression of dismay deepened, and he absently scratched the back of his head. He hated that he had to break this to them, if only because of how uncomfortable it made him.

"I was in New York when everything started going tits up," he began. "After those fuckin' things started getting back up from the dead, they set up these quarantine camps, started rounding us up. The army, I mean. And it was a mess. A real shit show."

He paused, and cringed at the all-too-recent memories.

"It was chaos," he went on. "No power, hardly any food and water, and hundreds of people in my camp alone. We were all terrified and confused, and so were the guys in the camo. They kept us locked up, whether we wanted to be there or not, and tried isolating the sick ones. Tried and failed, I mean. Pretty soon, they were hauling people off if they had so much as a runny nose. And that'd be the last we'd see of them."

He frowned as he continued.

"A lot of people with bites made it in. Took everyone a while before we all understood that's how it spread. All the while, they kept us in the dark pretty good, but word still got around. I heard that our guys lost contact with the brass in Virginia by the second week. By the third week, there was barely anyone in uniform left. They were losing people left and right, by sickness and desertion. Like I said -- chaos."

He took a deep breath.

"I got out, I won't get into how. Then the next day, I see helicopters dropping napalm behind me, and then flying off in the other direction. If there's anything left of the army, they're long gone. It's just us out here now."
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The Last Melon
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The Last Melon. Duh.
There was a moment of silence. Roland looked down at the radio he was still holding and sighed. "I always thought...I mean...I always knew that they wouldn't be this quiet this long if somebody was still giving orders. I just...I had to hold onto hope. Everybody had to."

He sat down again and looked at Randall. "What do we do now? Everybody's holding out for the army right now, we can't just tell 'em we're in it for the long haul. We're slipping as it is."
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Make-7-Up-Yours
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Is that so?
"The only people outside this room that know this are Aaron, Colin, and Glenda. For the time being, they've agreed to stay silent, but I am not sure how long the secret will stay."

Randall stuck out the tip of his tongue and bit it softly with his teeth. He was particularly worried about Aaron. Glenda barely spoke at all and Colin was fairly level-headed. He was sure they would be able to keep it a secret. But Aaron, not so much. If he let it slip that there was no military, there would be a panic. Hope was the only thing keeping half the camp running.

"Maybe all we need to do is make it through winter. Maybe the temperature will kill them all of." Randall suggested. It was kind of a desperate grasp at some sliver of hope, but even he believed it was possible. "At the very least, we should start stockpiling food and supplies. We have a good reserve right now, but I volunteer to start heading expeditions out daily to gather up as much food and water as we can possibly store. We'll need as much as we can to make it through winter."
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The Last Melon
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The Last Melon. Duh.
"Winter with no central heating and a tuberculosis epidemic? Randall, that's going to take a mountain of supplies and you know it. We've got 128 people in the building and another 53 more outside in the tents. Your teams are good, but we'd need trucks to bring in enough food to stock this place for the whole winter. How long before we pick Mount Kisco clean?"

Roland leaned forward and rubbed his eyes, putting his elbows on the desk. "Still, I'm not sure what other choice we have."
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DoctorYerishi
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Dude, wake up! We've got a world to save.
"Yeah, that's a tough one," Eli cut in, trying and failing to sound more sympathetic than he was.

These people seemed nice enough, and he had dropped a hell of a bomb shell on them, and that sucked -- but he still had his own worries. "But there's more you should know."

He shot a conspiratorial glance over his shoulder, then paused for a moment to shut the doors. When he turned back around, he was already sliding his pack off his shoulders. He immediately placed it on the desk, then pulled out the black canister he had retrieved from the man he killed earlier. Just the sight of it sent a shiver down his spine, and made him think of the dead body he had left back in that storefront.

"I found this on the way here," he said, which was actually pretty much true. "Look."

He placed the canister on the desk facing up, so Randall and Roland could see the bold instruction to 'not open' it. Then he retrieved the map he had taken, and hastily unfolded it. He took another deep breath, and pointed to the bold scrawl. It was the second time he had seen it, and it hit him almost as hard. Weirdly, he found it almost made it hard for him to breathe.

DELIVER CURE TO ARGONNE NATIONAL LAB, it said.

Fuck, Eli thought, yet again.
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Make-7-Up-Yours
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Is that so?
Randall's jaw fell agape as he read the message scrawled on the map.

DELIVER CURE TO ARGONNE NATIONAL LAB.

"A cure...?" The words came out like a whisper. "I-impossible... where did you find this?"
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DoctorYerishi
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Dude, wake up! We've got a world to save.
Eli tensed up a little. This was the tricky part. He figured he just needed to let slip enough of the truth, without giving away the whole game. He may not have had much of a choice in doing what he did, but he didn't want to take the chance that his new friends wouldn't see it that way. He just needed to get this done as fast and smooth as possible.

"Believe me, man, those thoughts that are running through your head right now? I been having the same ones non-stop," he said. "But just yesterday, I stopped to rest in that wine bar in town -- just around the block from where you found me. A found a body there, with a journal. It was vague, 'mano, but I'm telling you it looked legit. This guy went on a secret mission to like, Europe, and brought this thing back. His plane went down just outside of town, and he was the only survivor. He made it as far as that shop before succumbing to his wounds. And he left all this behind."
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Make-7-Up-Yours
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Is that so?
Randall closed his eyes and rubbed the thumb and forefinger of his right hand against his eyelids. Between the fall of the military and this mystery cure, this was almost too much to process.

"A cure so soon after an outbreak like this?" He looked to Eli and then Roland. "As much as I would love to believe it, it seems almost too good to believe. He could have just found some yahoo who lost it and THOUGHT he had a cure. But then again..."

He couldn't remove the seed of doubt from his mind, however. If this was truly a cure, then they had to do whatever it took to get it to Argonne National Lab. It could be their ticket, no, the world's ticket out of this mess.

"I don't know. What do you think, Roland?"
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The Last Melon
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The Last Melon. Duh.
Roland squinted at the map, and then picked up the canister. "Argonne National Lab...well, that sounds legitimate, anyway. And if anybody would be able to make some sort of cure it'd be government eggheads, right?"

He held the canister up to the light and squinted at it. "Never seen anything like this before. Doesn't look like some random box some guy stuck his imaginary cure into. I mean, it could be anything, really." He put it down and looked at Eli. "Were these the only things you found on the guy? Anything else that could prove anything? Do you still have the journal?"
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DoctorYerishi
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Dude, wake up! We've got a world to save.
Eli shook his head. "There's only so much room in my pack, and it didn't seem important. It didn't say hardly much more than I told you. Just that he was a pilot, and that he couldn't hail anyone on the radio on the return trip. But we knew that already."

He decided in the moment to be just a little more honest than he planned. He didn't think Roland would blame him for taking the guy's weapon, and he didn't think he'd ask him for it either.

"Truth be told, he was also carrying the shooter at my hip, and the ammo that came with it," he said. He lifted his shirt up a little, showing off the fancy-looking grip. "The barrel says Tactical Supergrade. It looks pretty expensive."

He glanced at Randall, looking just a little sheepish.

"Not for nothing, but you're probably gonna wanna frisk people from now on. I didn't mean to hide this from you, but you can never be too careful."
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Make-7-Up-Yours
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Is that so?
"I suspected you were armed." Randall shrugged nonchalantly. "Anybody wandering out there without something would be a fool or dead."

He was surprised at how calmly that last part came out.

"I was trying to earn your trust. Taking away a man's only defense in this world is not a good way to start it." He paused. "And if you did try anything, we had you outnumbered anyway. Both out there and in here."
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The Last Melon
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The Last Melon. Duh.
"This is a refugee camp, anyway," said Roland. "Why would we be frisking people?"

He held his hand out. "Can I see it?"
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DoctorYerishi
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Dude, wake up! We've got a world to save.
Eli hesitated. Maybe he had misread the situation. Maybe they did expect him to hand over the weapon, even though it was probably one of the most valuable items still around, considering the country's current state.

"You can see it, but no offense, you can't have it," he said, as he drew the gun from his jeans.

He made sure the safety was on before he stretched towards Roland. He let the gun dangle from his finger, giving the former-cop a good look without physically handing it over.

"An' I appreciate the good faith, Randall, I really do," he added, as he glanced across the room at the other man. "But seriously, you guys don't know how good you have it here. Not everyone's gonna be as friendly as me. Trust me on that."
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Strompy
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More posts, more Busey.
One week. Seven days. One-hundred-and-sixty-eight hours. Ten-thousand-and-eighty minutes. Six-hundred-and-four-thousand-eight-hundred seconds. The further you break time down the longer it seems to go. Brandon had been alone for just one week. A week which felt like years. It was strange that in situations like this an amount of time that would pass completely unnoticed normally seemed incomprehensibly... long...

How far had he made it in that time? From Patterson to Mt Kisco? Twenty to thirty miles 'round about. About thirty minutes by car. Maybe ten hours by foot if you were taking it easy. His brother would have run that kind of distance for fun. It's not just time that seemed longer now; when stepping out of doors means risking a horrific death.

He'd spent a lot of the week just hiding. The first day he'd spent in an attic, just sitting there, not eating, rarely drinking, hardly sleeping at all. The second he moved into a neighboring house where he got into their liquor cabinet and pantry, eating and drinking himself sick. On the third he ventured out again this time a short ways south.

He found another house and decided to stay there. Somebody had been through there already, a lot of the good stuff was gone and there was a zombie pinned to the ground with a piece of rebar in the backyard. It was maybe ten minutes that he stood there looking down at it as it reached for him in vain, before doing the courteous thing. He found a bedroom upstairs that had belonged to somebody around his age. His size too, found some clean clothes, warm stuff that he hadn't had an opportunity to grab before running. The aspirin in the bathroom cupboard was a godsend. As he closed the cupboard he considered his reflection in the mirror. Not his best look. Brandon was hot, that was a fact and he knew it, people like his face. Just not so much when he hadn't bathed in days, or shaved and was visibly hungover.

He found some shaving cream and a straight razor and decided to put them to use. He'd never shaved with a straight razor before and so inevitably he cut himself with it. Looking at himself again he watched as the fresh cut bled, staining the white shaving cream on his neck. It was hypnotic, and like a suggestion had been made he looked at the razor and contimplated just bleeding a bit more. Stain the white tiles and sleep forever. It was strange that it was then that he contemplated this is if he hadn't known about the Remmington 870 slung over his shoulder. No, though. He liked clean things. He finished shaving and looked at himself as if anew. After cleaning his hair and face he could almost smile at what he saw.

His mother's blonde hair and blue eyes. His father's cheekbones and jaw. Mom's nose. Dad's ears. He turned away and walked down the hall after placing the straight razor in his boot. It was going through the parent's bedroom that he noticed some familiar faces. This was Dylon's house.On the nightstand there was a family picture. Yeah, a couple years behind him in school, graduated last year. Dylon and his family. The zombie. He walked to the window and looked down at it in the back yard, he didn't know why he hadn't recognised him at the time but that was him all right, even with the hole in his head from Brandon's screwdriver he saw it now. These were his clothes. If he bothered to look he'd probably be able to recognise a lot of those things out there.

All at once Brandon sobered up, figuratively at least. Keep moving. Stay alive. Stop thinking, start acting. The voice in his head wasn't his own, it sounded more like his brother. The next four days were a lot of creeping, and even a fight when a zombie got wise to him as went through cars on interstate 684. He was headed toward New York and the huge number of cars he saw broken down, crashed or abandoned while headed in the other directions was disturbing. But there was no way the government would let New York go. There had to be people. Military, government something, somebody with some answers. What the hell was all this? How did it gappen? Why didn't anybody come for them before... why wasn't there any help?

He was looking house to house in Mount Kisco, finding something between zip and nada. Place had been pretty well stripped by somebody. Somebody standing right in front of him. Brandon ducked behind a bush and watched as a group took down a handful of zombies. There was some hubbub ahead. Looked like they found another survivor. They didn't keep a gun on him as they left so he wasn't a prisoner. Brandon decided to shadow them. Figure out who he was dealing with before he decided what to do about them, his dad's paranoid doomsday lectures resonating with him now.

Sweet digs. Cute blonde on watch playing gameboy. Something about the whole thing told him these weren't the cutthroat survivalists his father expected to spring up instantly. There might be somebody who knew about New York in there, even if there weren't he was tired of being on edge all the time all by himself. He wanted other people. With hands raised he walked up to the front gate. The watchman was engrosed in whatever she wss playing though and didn't seem to noticehim as he strode up clear as day. Even at ten feet away she hadn't noticed. Brandon grinned in amusement.

"Hi." he said, tilting his head inquisitively at the girl in front him.
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