Re: quicklog: cat, matt, steve
[Listening to the voices inside the room reminded Matt of a memory, very, very old. It was often difficult for him to place dates on these things. Fifty years ago? Maybe? In the memory, he is in a bed with iron railings on four sides. Like a hospital bed, but not. In the next room, a man repeats his own name twenty times a minute. The man has been at it for almost two days straight, allowing Matt to calculate the rate with accuracy. Nothing else for his mind to do. The name loses meaning quickly, and after that, the endless repetition is nothing but a ricochet of white noise, while his eyes are pinned to the ceiling and sweat pools in the hollows of his breastbone.
He couldn't remember the name itself, now. Maybe it wasn't the man's name at all. Maybe he wasn't even there.
The man who approached in the pitch darkness also felt possibly imaginary. Matt could make out his shape, his head, the broad, thick object he held across his body that gleamed a little under the faint lighting (a chunk of metal?) and smelled like blood to his sharp nose. Just about everything around them smelled like blood, though.
He wasn't one of the walking dead ones, that much was immediately obvious. I can cover us - his voice, though, made the hairs on the back of Matt's neck stand up, and he didn't know why.
He lacked words for a response. Even after pouring all those words to Cat over the comms, now, face to face with this stranger in the dark, he had none. None was better anyway, though, with sharp-eared monsters past the doorway. He nodded, once. He also tapped the canister at his hip. It was an aerosol stolen from a ransacked lab, dented but intact. The man had already clocked the lighter, he figured. He should be able to put two and two together. Once they knocked these things off their feet, Matt was going to test his theory about fire.
Did Matt have any qualms about killing the things inside that had once been people? Did he have any question about whether it was ethical, or any philosophical hurdles to surmount? Judging by the quantity of blood on his left arm, splattered on his clothes and his boots, that was a no. These things weren't the people they had been. They had died. Now they were something else, something that infiltrated them, that puppeted them, something that spoke in their voices and took their bodies for itself. It made him feel like his skin was trying to part ways with his body, thinking about it.
He moved aside for the man carrying the flat, warped door as lightly as a wooden shield, and waited for go.]