ahhhcks (ahhhcks) wrote in prospectives, @ 2011-03-10 23:31:00 |
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Up until a little over a month ago, the only person in this world Nick trusted was himself. Now, he was entrusting his life to three virtual strangers. But it's not like he had a choice, not like any of them had a choice.
Well, that wasn't totally correct-- they could be on their way whenever they wanted, they didn't have to stay together. They also didn't have to live, because that would be the result of going off on your own the way things were now. If you didn't have someone watching your back, and you didn't want to stay locked in a room 24/7, it was really nothing short of a suicidal decision.
Initially, that was a strange idea to Nick, who had survived on his own since he was a kid. But even the shadiest areas of Boston had nothing on the kind of things they were going through now, and this was a completely different sort of survival for all of them to learn about. At the very beginning, that day they'd first met, he had planned to go his own way as soon as they got out of that hospital. It was an idea which he'd discarded the first time he'd hit the end of his clip with a zombie still running full speed right at him. Had that shot not been fired from behind him and blown it away, he'd have been as good as dead. It wouldn't be the last time he'd wind up in such a situation.
A bunch of good Samaritans, he was pretty sure that was the sort he'd ended up with, who wouldn't think twice about looking out for a stranger like that. For Nick, though, that theory contradicted with the most basic survival skill that had gotten him through life (and well) thus far: look out for number one. He came to realize that the best way to look out for himself, however, was to look out for his team mates. If one of them wound up dead, that was one less person watching his back.
That didn't mean, though, that he had to like any of them. But despite what he might say about them, they weren't going anywhere and neither was he, and they were there for each other where it counted. Maybe this was something like what family was like, although Nick wouldn't know much about that, not associating the word family with anything good. It's certainly a different relationship than he's had with anyone else in his life thus far, but that's probably expected, given the circumstances. Before the infection hit, there wouldn't have been a single reason for the four of them to have anything to do with each other, but now, it wasn't about getting to pick and choose your friends. It was either these people or going it alone.
Nick may have teased Coach pretty relentlessly, but he also recognized him as the group's central member, the steadiest person in it and the one they all wordlessly expected to give them some direction. He had a good head on his shoulders, and had helped keep Nick's on his own on countless occasions-- he was almost as good with a gun as he was. If they had gotten to pick and choose, Nick most likely would have picked him on his own.
Rochelle, she and him were probably the most alike. Which meant that when they got along, they got along really well, and when they didn't, they really didn't. She was pretty smart, too, which was a change up for the company of that gender he usually kept. Not to mention, the girl had a real nice body, so he probably would have picked her too-- someone would need to eventually get started on repopulating the Earth, after all.
And then there was Ellis. Nick wouldn't have picked that kid if someone had paid him to; he would have sooner chosen that grease monkey from the other group. Nick had no love for this part of the states, as was usually for the case for any big city boy in rural country, and Ellis pretty much embodied everything he disliked about it. Not only that, but his disposition completely clashed with Nick's own, who found his genuinely pleasant attitude both inappropriate and downright moronic in such a situation. Ironically, as a result, he ended up talking more with Ellis than any of the others, being that he said too much stupid shit for him to just let it go by every time.
For example, just then they were radioing the guy who had the boat that could get them from here to New Orleans, and somehow Ellis was the one who'd gotten the mic. When asked where they were, he started going into a long description of the old plantation house they were situated out front, explaining how it looked out front, what road they'd taken to get there (who even noticed shit like that at a time like this?) and it was around point of him trying to pin down if the house paint was 'beige' or 'cream' that Nick grabbed it from him and simplified that it was a big house in front of a big gate. All the other houses around here were little crappy-looking shacks-- he would know which one they meant.
"Real nice, Nick," Rochelle commented with light amusement as she checked how she was doing on ammo as they headed back towards the house where they'd decided to wait for the boat to arrive. "Let's piss off the man rescuing us."
"Did you hear that guy? You can't insult someone who's only got two braincells," Nick replied. "They don't even realize it. Right, Ellis?" Rochelle just sighed, but let that be, having other things to focus right now then breaking up fights between those two. And besides, for as sarcastic as Nick could be towards Ellis, it was like water off a duck's back most of the time to the younger man-- luckily for them, or they'd never get anywhere.
The house wasn't, at first, a bad place to stick it out. From it's second story, they could overlook the whole back yard, and a few well placed sniper bullets made short work of the infected. "Where the hell are these guys even comin' from," Nick commented as he focused the gun scope with the ideal target, soft skull. He pressed the trigger the second it lined up with the center, and was granted the rewarding sight of an explosion of zombie brains down below. "We swept the area clean before we called for the boat. How is it that they can always find us like five friggin' miles away?"
At his side, watching the same area of the yard with an M-16, Coach chuckled. "How good do you think their sense of smell is? 'Cause after that tumble you took in the swamp earlier, Nick, phew, I think I could find you no problem too."
"That's real funny. You think it's me the flesh-eaters are after? I'm like a three bite appetizer, while you're a five course steak dinner." He fired another shot then, which this time only grazed the side of it's skull, but at least it caused it to stumble and fall.
"Less talking, more shooting," Rochelle called to them from where she and Ellis were on the other side of the balcony, monitoring the other side of the yard. They were all doing a pretty good job so far, having really refined their team work after the past month, and had stopped making a lot of the elementary mistakes they'd made in the beginning. For most of them, a lot of it had just been about learning how to properly shoot a gun, although Nick had no trouble adapting to that part. They panicked less, and learned good strategies for certain situations, able to accommodate for each other's weak points. For awhile there, it seemed like waiting for this boat to arrive was going to be no sweat.
It was when he had seen this didn't seem like anything three people couldn't handle that Coach said he was going to head back inside for a second, to make sure the front of the house was still secure. Nick didn't have any complaints, he had no trouble handling their area of the yard.
He felt the thing, before anyone had the chance to announce it. That tell-tale rumbling that couldn't be made by anything other than the creature that moved way too goddamn fast for being as big as it was. "Shit, where is it?!" Nick called to the others, who were looking around just like him and having no luck. "Sounds like it's behind us!" Rochelle called back, and Nick cursed again, abandoning his sniper rifle for the shotgun at his feet, already having made sure it was loaded earlier. Just as he did that, the tremors ceased... and were replaced by a loud crash of splintering wood and shingles: it had climbed over the front of the house, and jumped onto the awning above where they were standing. When it fell through it, it separated Nick from Rochelle and Ellis.
Nick stumbled backwards, given that the thing nearly landed right on top of him, and he turned his head away as it bellowed a deafeningly loud cry. Which meant that everything was going to go to hell now-- what hadn't already sensed them up here would be drawn to whatever had gotten this beast's attention. But that might not be Nick's problem in a second or two here, as it lifted it's gigantic fist above his body, preparing to smash him beneath it.
Quickly, he rolled out of the way, and where he'd been a second ago was now a shattered piece of porch where the Tank had struck. He fired off a couple bullets then, but even a shotgun at point blank range was hardly enough to put a dent in the determination of these ones, all raw muscle and rage. He heard the sound of gunfire being aimed at the Tank's back then, Rochelle and Ellis trying to draw it's attention off him. But these huge guys weren't like the normal zombies, they wouldn't sooner go for the larger group-- once they picked a target, they'd stick with until either it or the target was dead.
Nick scrambled to his feet after he fired off a couple more bullets, knowing his best option at this point was to run. He couldn't get back through the main door to the house, the Tank's body so huge it completely blocked his path in that direction, but he could run around the side of the house, the balcony curving around it. It was only wide enough across for maybe three people shoulder to shoulder-- where the Tank was more like eight or nine-- but that didn't stop it's pursuit, it simply ran right through the railing and columns supporting the roof, sending that section of the house into collapse right behind them.
He saw the scaffolding that they'd initially used to climb up here. It wasn't too far away, but it was something a jump. A jump he might have thought twice about if he had a choice, but there wasn't much time to think at all now. So he climbed up on top of the railing, and then made the leap. And fell, his legs crumpling underneath him. It hurt, wood wasn't a very forgiving surface to land on and it wasn't exactly like he was training for parkour before the zombie apocalypse. It was pretty easy to ignore pain temporarily, though, when there was a Tank right on your heels, and he turned around on his side then, firing off a few more shots with the unfortunate knowledge that he didn't have any backup now, not with how much of the roof the Tank had destroyed. Rochelle and Ellis had probably headed back inside, but it would take them, what, ten to fifteen seconds to get back out here? He'd be lucky to be able to hold it off on his own for one to two.
He had two choices here. One: go down. He looked down. Down had a lot of infected now, a lot more than before the Tank had showed up. He'd counted his shots, too, and he only had one more before he'd need to reload. That wasn't going to handle a whole crowd and a Tank, not even close. Two: go back inside. He didn't know what was inside, but hopefully it couldn't be any worse than what was outside, and so just as the mutated beast had lept off the balcony and was about to land right atop him, he crawled back inside through the open window. Behind him, he heard the sound of wood beams collapsing, the scaffolding not being nearly strong enough to support the Tank's weight. That was nice, it would probably hold it back for a whole three seconds?
"Nick!" he heard one of them call his name then, and he looked to see that all three of them had gotten situated on the stairs. The back door at the bottom of them had broken down, and a whole sea of infected were rushing in now. Luckily, the stairs gave them a choke point, but when there were so many of them, it diminished the impact of their own advantages.
"It's not dead," Nick informed them as he joined up with the group again, pulling out his spare shotgun ammo and reloading while they covered him. "Anyone got any bile?" he asked, a sentence he would have a hard time imagining would be a part of his common vocabulary a month ago. Or maybe what would be harder to conceptualize was that someone would answer that by putting a glass jar full of green puke in his hand in response, and that it was something he'd be thanking them for. With that in hand, he headed back towards the window he'd come through. He saw the Tank was still there, already shrugging off being stunned by the scaffolding's collapse, and with plenty of infected milling all around it's huge body, trying to get up to the window that was too high now. "Bomb's away," he announced as he dropped the jar, which shattered on top of the Tank's head, spilling sticky goo all over it's body. This instantly diverted the attention of all the other infected from Nick to the Tank, now clawing and biting it, too many for it to defend itself from. They could finish up that fight, now, and Nick could return to help those on the stairs.
Round after round after round of ammo was unleashed on those trying to get inside, until finally they heard another loud sound outside. "Aw, shit," Coach cursed, "I hope ya'll got a lot more left in those guns of yours, because I'm about beat over here."
"Ditto," Nick commented dryly, his pockets certainly feeling a lot lighter now, never a good sign. "I don't think that was the zombies," Rochelle observed. "That sounded like an explosion to me."
"Great, so who wants to go check that with their face?" Nick asked, firing off a few pistol bullets into the infected that were still coming for them. "Ellis? That sounds like fun, doesn't it?"
"We all go," Rochelle intervened, "same as always."
"I hate always," Nick replied. "'Always' always seems to end with me in a lot of a pain. I've seen my life flash before my eyes like twenty goddamn times. This week."
"Well you are welcome to stay here, Nick," Coach returned. By this point, they had all started to back up, recognizing that the back door wasn't a viable exit. "The rest of us: through this window! None of them are over here on this side." One after another, they made their way out, Nick the last to jump out after knocking off a few more pursuers.
"There's the boat!" Rochelle exclaimed once they'd run around to the back again, and could see what the source of the noise they'd earlier had been: the gate had been blown open. Now they could see as far as the docks that were beyond the gate, and beyond that, the rescue they'd called for. From one point of view, it was a straight shot... but that was before one stepped back and really looked at what lay along the path of that 'straight shot'. Infected all over the place, coming out of the bushes and over the fences, and by the sound of it, not all of them were the basic try-to-bite-your-face off kind, sounded like there were some back humpers and Spitters in their midst, and probably more than that, knowing their luck.
"Just run," Rochelle directed them then, when she was sure they were all pretty much thinking the same thing. "Run and do not stop."
"I can do that," Coach replied with certainty, and added, "don't fall behind now, son," to Ellis. All of them were already pretty exhausted, this day as neverending as all the others had been since their time together started, but there was nothing like an estate yard full of bloodthirsty zombies to get your adrenalin going.
However, for as much as their bodies were ready to endure, they weren't superhuman, and as soon as he started to run, a small spike of pain ran up Nick's leg-- it must have been the way he'd landed on it on the scaffolding earlier. Not now, not now, he thought, trying to mentally force the injury away, but in the end it still slowed him down just one extra second too long, and he felt someone who wasn't one of his team mates grab his back. He couldn't shoot it at this angle, and more instinctively reacted by twisting out of the grasp of the infected who'd reached for him, but turned in such a way he ended up falling. Rochelle was the first to notice, and she looked back, calling for him to get up. He unloaded a couple of bullets into the thing's brain-- it was easier to think of them as 'things', 'its', 'creatures', anything but 'a person who used to be human just like him'-- and it dropped down dead beside him.
Again, Rochelle called to him, but this time, her voice sounded more desperate. He was going as fast as he goddamn could, what did she want? But then he heard his name yet again, followed by, "look out!" and he knew he was screwed after that, before he even turned his head and saw what it was. He didn't even know if he wanted to look, anyway. He did, though. And he was sorry he did-- not so much after spotting the first Tank, but definitely after spotting the second not far behind it.
"Shit...shit! GO!" he shouted as loud as he could at them, already getting back to his feet to do the same, but also already knowing that thirty foot distance between them put him in a much worse place than they were.
The thing about only knowing how to look out for yourself was the assumption that everyone should do the same. It didn't occur to Nick, when the situation was as dire as this, to ask them to come back. On the surface, that was just his natural way of thinking, but more inwardly, there was the part of him that had come to want to see that these guys survive, felt that they deserved to. Hey, he felt he deserved to too, but shit happens.
So, more so than any time they had watched his back when they had no obligation to, when he saw them running back for him, he really couldn't believe it. "What the fuck are you doing? Get out of here!" Nick shouted at them, as they took aim and blasted a few of the infected running at his back. As for the two Tanks, they knew not to waste their ammo: no one had anything good enough left on them to handle one, let alone two. Running had been their only option, and Nick was pretty sure they'd just surrendered that option too.
"We're all getting out," Coach said to him then, at his side and shooting away a few more of those who had started to rapidly crowd around them. "Ain't noone gonna remember you as a martyr, Nick."
"No, they're gonna remember me as the guy with the three stupidest friends in the whole world. If anyone remembers us at all, seein' as we're all about to die here."
"Did you just call us your friends?" Rochelle said over her shoulder, clearing their path forward for them. "Would you look at that, our Ice Queen finally melted. And all it took was facing off with a couple of Tanks riding a zombie tsunami. I should of tried that with my last boyfriend; he had almost as many commitment issues as you, Nick."
It's what they all did-- they made jokes, but no one really found anything sincerely funny. It was because the alternative was to take their situation seriously all the time, and that was enough to drive a person mad when things were like this, constantly getting worse, not better, even when they kept moving forward. They got so used to it being like this, that even in the face of a pretty imminent, terrifying death, they were still acting that way.
The next thing Nick saw was the only sight worse than a Tank headed straight for you. And that was one of the Tanks pulling a huge piece of the concrete fountain apart, and then hurling it straight in their direction. Was there time to duck? Should they jump to the side? They had less than three seconds to decide something like that-- three seconds which ended up being the strangest ones in Nick's life.
He looked over at Coach. He probably planned to tell him to move, or some other straight-forward direction that didn't really need to be said but were blurted out in these panic situations anyway. But those words caught in his throat when the man literally disappeared before his eyes. There one second, not the other. Nothing had gotten to him; he had literally been swallowed up by thin air. It was so surreal that Nick even forgot about the fact that he himself still had to move. That was the first second.
The beginning of the second second was him overhearing the sound of Ellis' voice calling out to Rochelle. The end of it was Nick turning around to see Rochelle wasn't there any more when she'd been right next to Ellis a moment ago. The same with Coach, she was just gone.
The third second, he remembered he had a huge cement block flying at his head, and he turned just in time to see it less than a foot from his face.
Then, nothing.
When consciousness returned to him, Nick was almost afraid to open his eyes. He didn't particularly want to see how badly he was hurt-- although, the fact he was regaining consciousness at all was a perplexing fact in itself. Might as well get it over with, though... He opened his eyes, and discovered that wherever he was, it was not where he'd lost consciousness.
It was dark, for one. Muggy air had been replaced by a cool breeze. A courtyard was now open land, mostly sand and rock if he was seeing it right in this light. The hell...? He started to sit up then, and winced. That was a good sign though, wasn't it? You didn't feel pain in the afterlife, did you? At least, you shouldn't in a dream preceding the afterlife. Probably.
Another detail that his senses immediately picked up on was the absence he'd become very attuned to detecting over the past month. He was alone, or it at least looked like he was at first. "Coach?" he tried. Nothing. "Hey... big guy!" Again, nothing. Nick frowned, and started to stand up. He found himself brushing off the front of his pants by habit, even though his suit was so dirty that at this point it was hard to even tell it had once been white. "Ro'?" he attempted next. He was met with the same silence. "Rochelle?"
It was strange, getting no responses. He had become used to, and more than he thought, that he would always hear a reply when he called those names. They always kept close together. So even in this totally foreign location that he could in no way understand how he'd arrived at, he still was falling back on this basic belief that those people should be here, responding to him.
"Shit..." he cursed, running both his hands over his hair in frustration and a bit of anxiety when he still received no reply. Nothing was worse than being alone; whatever small mercy had saved his life, it seemed like he wouldn't be hanging on to it for long. His gun still only had a few more bullets left in it, and he doubted he'd be finding any ammo packs in the middle of-- wherever the hell this was. The desert? What desert was in Mississippi?
"...Ellis!" Nick found himself trying then, being ready to 'even' settle for him right now. That kid was always there with something stupid to say-- actually, way too many stupid things to say-- and it was actually his absence he'd find stranger than the other two who he'd more readily wanted to see in this confusing situation.