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September 13th,
2011 10:51 pm
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It had taken him two days to work up the courage to come here, and now that he was standing in the street outside of her house, he couldn't even bring himself to climb the steps to the front door. Was she home? He knew she was, he could see her car in the street. But did that really mean she wasn't out? The streets were still such a mess after the quake and following zombie chaos -- zombies were real; he was still having trouble digesting that piece of information -- that she could have chosen to walk to work instead of bothering with her car. Still, even with that possibility, something in the pit of Jackson's stomach told him Maria was home. That and the faint glow from behind the curtains, a candle or a battery-powered lantern perhaps. She was home, and all he was doing was wasting time. What he hoped to achieve by delaying what felt necessary and long overdue, he couldn't even be sure. The sooner he marched up the steps and knocked on the door, the better. They had each known the other was in Boston -- and Bay Village specifically, the very same neighbourhood -- for months now and for one reason or another that was as far as it had gone beyond the odd communication across an online network that, while convenient, was still just another technological convenience. Maria had looked him up and made first contact after that strained reunion in the street, and now it was Jackson's turn to be proactive.
Of course, it was easier said than done. He was working on borrowed time, he knew. Venae Cavae was still undergoing repairs and so he had the night off work, but the vampire with whom he lived would not be out longer than a few hours. As it was he had wasted one after her initial departure working up the nerve to leave at all. It wasn't that Jackson was afraid of any consequences that might arise from sneaking out of the house. It was the simple fact that he was nervous enough to begin with. Maria didn't scare him, not anymore, and in truth she never had, not really. What he really feared was judgement and rejection, both of which he might deserve after the way he had treated her all those years ago, how he had cut the ties between them so forcefully and even cruelly. It wouldn't be unfair to throw that back in his face when he told her everything he had on his mind. Jackson had every intention of telling her why he had left, what had driven him to act the way he had, but on top of that, he also planned to reveal how exactly he had been living for the past few years. A cold ball of dread formed in his stomach just thinking about it, but it was too late to turn back, he told himself. He had come this far. All he needed to do was take the last few steps and just do it. Get it over with.
Jackson continued to stare at the door, hating that he was afraid to take those last few steps. It was just a door. What was the worst that could happen?
[ MARIA ]
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| email: Jessalyn Dahl & Sergei Salt |
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September 12th,
2011 9:13 pm
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FROM: Jessalyn Dahl.
TO: Sergei Salt.
SUBJECT: Recent Events.
In light of recent events I hope you won't mind that I forgo wishing you a good evening, though I do hope this email finds you relatively unscathed.
As a representative of NAVA and the Carnalia as a whole, it is my duty to pass on the sincere apology from our betters for not interceding on behalf of you and your Seethe. As you can imagine the situation was extremely delicate and it was felt that a prudent course of action was to provide support to the humans and allow them to take full control of the situation. It has placed us in a strong position in the aftermath as a result, and that will be beneficial to all of us in the long run.
Nicoletta would like a report on any casualties you may have suffered in the disaster. Please keep me appraised of the situation. I will be coming to Boston in three days' time to oversee NAVA action in the area.
- J. Dahl.
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| this is hell and we can't leave ( narrative ) |
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September 11th,
2011 6:54 pm
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An eerie calm fell over Boston. Bodies paved the streets, they piled up at doorways like snowdrifts and filled ditches. Graves in cemeteries across the city were left vacant, great gouges in the earth before each gravestone. Whatever had been controlling them, whomever had been giving them commands was gone and with it the zombie threat. Those who had been bitten fell into blissful unconsciousness, waking hours later to find themselves free of the disease that had changed them so much but not free of the injuries they had sustained in the chaos; their heads buzzed and the taste of human flesh was raw in their mouths. Buildings stood slouched into streets, power remained down. Overhead the oppressive clouds began to roll back, fizzing out as though they had never been revealing a beautiful late afternoon sky, cloudless and perfect.
Three hours after the end of the event the military moved in at last to join the ragged police force. News began to filter in through radios and the few working televisions in the area. Stay Calm. Do Not Panic. Everything Is Under Control.
Six hours after the end of the event a statement was issued by the government: A chemical agent had been released in the city, they suspected, and those who were responsible would be brought to justice through whatever means necessary. Jessalyn Dahl added her voice to the chorus denouncing the events in Boston as a heinous act of terrorism and that she and her people were more than happy to help the emergency services during this “troubled time”.
By the time night had rolled around survivors were stumbling out of their homes and into ruined streets. The city had been ravaged by the quake and the subsequent days. It would be days before power started to come back, weeks before water would be readily available across the city again, public transport was in tatters and half the police force was dead. It began to rain after dark, washing blood out of the streets, but rain wouldn’t be enough to cleanse the city of what had happened. Most residents suspected, in unison that night, that nothing ever would.
( NARRATIVE: PLOT WRAP )
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| log: estella ames and selia andrade |
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September 11th,
2011 10:54 am
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WHO: Estella Ames & Selia Andrade.
WHERE/WHEN: S.I.D. Headquarters, basement morgue. Sunday evening.
WHAT: Selia finally tracks down Estella as the source of the Zombiepocalypse and attempts to put and end to the situation.
( It was a quick and dirty rescue. )
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| the lion's teeth are sharpened for war. |
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September 11th,
2011 4:11 pm
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They rose from the darkness all around her, biting, reaching, clawing from the shadows that stuck to them like tar. Maria reached for the boy as she'd reached for him a hundred times, he looked up at her with wide brown eyes and shook his head. Come on. Come on, she bellowed to him. They had to get out of the apartment before the zombies tore them to shreds, before they blocked off the last exit; a window.Maria yelled louder, shaking her head and the boy snapped to action, reaching out and grabbing her arm. A moment later he was back in the corner and she was reaching for him again, the moment stuck in a perpetual loop of how she wished it had happened. What had really happened was teeth sinking into her forearm, right through her shirt. Blood bloomed, the fabric sucking it up into a continent shape, like Africa. Maria wheeled, she roared, a feline voice coming from a human throat as the woman on her arm bit down harder. Maria slammed her into a wall, body checking her, she grabbed a handful of dirty-blonde, bloody hair and smashed the dead woman's face into a mirror but the teeth bit harder. She struggled and fought but the shadows and the zombies they stuck to expanded, growing and consuming the room around her.
Maria woke in a hot, sticky sweat, her sheets tangled around her legs, the wound on her arm throbbed. The memory of the night she'd gone after the therianthrope kid she'd been helping legally had turned into a nightmare and in her barricaded house it gnawed through her psyche. She sat up in her bed and pushed the sheets away hurriedly. It was only a small bite, a scratch really but it hadn't healed. In fact when she looked at it now it seemed to be getting worse. It was black and seething a rotten smelling liquid at her. Maria rubbed her face in her hands and stumbled downstairs to the kitchen.Half a gallon of water and some stale bread later and she still felt sick. Worse than sick. Her head started to pound. She chewed down a handful of painkillers and sat in her living room, waiting for the feelings to pass. They didn't. They only got worse and Maria just got hungry.
( NARRATIVE )
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| young hearts burst open, wounds bleed fresh |
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September 7th,
2011 9:19 pm
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Rubble skittered down the cracked sidewalk when she nudged a pile out of her way with her boot experimentally, the tall woman standing in the hot, sticky shadows between a pawn shop and an XXX movie store. It was dark and humid, oppressive. Selia Andrade had been sent to places in a bad way before; farmsteads in Iowa teeming with flies, dead bodies piled up in the barn, crack houses and inner-city slums with mutilated corpses crawling over one another in basements and wardrobes after a rogue necromancer had taken a long walk of the short cliff of sanity but nothing, none of the horrors she’d seen in her life, compared to Boston. An entire city on the precipice of destruction.
It was insanity. Car alarms whined up and down, caterwauling through the distant but pervasive groans of thunder from the black sky above. Fires burned in the streets, stores were being looted. Corpses ran in packs, jaws snapping, eyes wide and sunken, wild with hunger and rage.
This was not containable, that much was glaringly obvious. When the situation was curtailed there would be questions and someone would have to answer them. How had the dead suddenly started walking? Who was responsible? How was it stopped? For centuries her people had hidden themselves from the rest of the world, living in their compounds and training their young how to wield their powers, educating people like Selia, those individuals who could venture out into the world to protect the whole. For the first time while on a mission Selia didn’t know what was going to happen when she was done and concern grew in her like a cancer. This could be the end of a way of life, she thought, of centuries of tradition. They had all watched what exposure had done for the therianthropes and how the vampires flourished and were not eager to join the conflict.
A middle-aged woman with glass embedded in her chest and throat darted past and Selia pressed herself into the shadows. Now wasn’t the time for an internal debate on the situation, though. Selia knew she had to act as quickly as she could to find the source. That was her job, after all. That was what she had been trained for, to root out out and fix up problems, everything else was politics and not her problem. With that in mind she slunk off into the late-afternoon darkness of the cursed city and continued her hunt for the source.
[ NARRATIVE: Time is now unpaused and we're caught up to the real world. Boston is still under siege by the undead and panic has well and truly taken hold; news reports are scarce and vague, only telling people to stay inside and wait for help which they have been assure by the government is "on it's way". ]
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| you start to scream, but terror takes the sound before you make it; |
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September 7th,
2011 2:14 am
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She could hear them. It wasn't like anything she had expected - though one never really expects the dead to rise from their graves, do they? - and there was no way to compare it to the movies. Not really. They weren't Romero's zombies, slow and shambling groaners; Ronnie could hear the monsters outside as they tore through the neighborhood, grunting, hissing, and the screaming. All she wanted was to put her music in, blast something loud and raucous to drown all of them out, but she had the sneaking suspicion that the monsters might be drawn to the noise.
If nothing else, she had her work to distract her, and she tried to focus. Without general power, keeping the Hollow's main systems running should have been nothing impossible for someone else. Ronnie was, of course, always prepared. She knew her back-up generators wouldn't last for more than two days - three in a push - but she had to hope that something would be done by then. Of course, what the hell could actually be done about zombies?
Ronnie squeezed her eyes shut. It seemed that no amount of focus on her computers and her data could keep her mind away from what was happening on streets outside. She could smell terror laced in with the stomach-twisting scent that some of the undead carried with them. Outside, something gave an awful, inhuman bellow, loud enough and close enough that Ronnie startled violently. A hard push send her rolling chair flying back from the desk where she sat - she all but flung herself into the opposite wall. Panic welled, fear not far behind it; with a whimper, Ronnie clapped her hands over her ears and shut her eyes for good measure. Her frantic heartbeat was like thunder in her ears, but she still couldn't keep out the screaming...
[DUNCAN]
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| and i will rise up, though i be a dead man. |
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September 6th,
2011 9:45 pm
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Unlike many less fortunate Boston residents, Matt Reeves had had the option of simply locking his doors against the undead hordes and staying safe and sound indoors. He'd been in his apartment when the earthquake had begun, not yet ready to head in to Labelle for an evening's work; his building had withstood the quake with relatively minor damage, a few cracked windowpanes and a now-nonfunctional elevator the only real evidence that anything had gone wrong. When the screaming outside had started, the doors had held. Nothing out there was getting in unless Matt opened the door to it, and he could have simply twisted the deadbolt and waited this whole thing out. He had food and water, after all, by sheer luck he even had power. As far as he could tell, not a one of his neighbors had so much as poked their heads outside, and he quietly congratulated them for being smart enough to stay out of danger and keep themselves safe. He could have done the same.
But Nell was out there. Holed up at Labelle, barricaded inside with the rest of the early evening staff, with who knew how much time before something forced its way through; she'd made a good show of sounding confident on the network, but he knew her, he could tell when she was putting on a show. She wasn't nearly as sure of her safety, or that of the people she was hiding out with, as she pretended to be. And so here he was, a block from the entrance now, a duffel bag filled with first aid supplies and what weapons he'd been able to scrounge up slung over one shoulder, a metal bat held loosely in one hand as he made his way down the largely deserted street. Well, deserted by the living. The dead were another matter.
They were fast, and they were strong, and they didn't care about damage unless it was enough to put them down; he only had to make one mistake in order to be completely screwed, but so far he hadn't made it. There was blood on his clothes, on his hands and on his face, but most of it wasn't his, and what was had come from shallow cuts and scrapes. He hadn't been bitten, that was all that mattered. Twisting, he caught an approaching zombie that looked newly-dead with the bat, right across the temple - it wasn't quite enjoyable to see it go down as the side of its skull caved in, but at this point he couldn't pretend it wasn't satisfying. Even better, it gave him a moment's quiet to let Nell know he'd made it there, before they closed in again and he couldn't split his attention between fighting and communicating.
Outside, was all the message said before his phone was back in his pocket and his hands were busy again. She'd said the side door was unblocked, and he could see it from here, once it opened he was just a few seconds' sprint away.
[ NELL ]
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| THREAD: Yasmina & Jacques, Open to Edward & Sophie |
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September 6th,
2011 10:19 pm
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WHO. Yasmina & Jacques, Open to Edward & Sophie (should they like to thread crash)
WHEN. Good question.
WHAT. Yasmina & Jacques arrive at Edward's run-down shack (that could be a penthouse!) in East Boston. Discussion of future Anarch seethe? Spin the bottle? Vampire fun times? Killing zombies? You'll have to wait and see!
( We gonna light it up like it's dynamite )
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| the witnesses were run to ground, put the bastards underground. |
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September 6th,
2011 10:49 pm
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Daniel met up with Ana on the floor where the agents' offices were housed. There were men and women rushing about but no one paid them any mind as they walked away from the centre of activity and towards the stairwell that would lead them down, all the way down to the basement if they were lucky. They had agreed to go to the morgue together, and that was where they were headed; they only made one stop on the way down to grab vests and extra ammunition for the sidearms hanging at their hips. Better safe than sorry. They had both seen the talk on the networks, one of the only things that seemed to be working properly after the fierce quake, and given their line of work it didn't hurt to be careful. Neither of them were the sort to go rushing in blindly, and so it was that they slowed as they drew closer to the basement level of the S.I.D. headquarters in downtown Boston.
The building had been damaged during the quake, there was no way such a structure could go without feeling the effects of such a violent natural force, but the stairwells were relatively untouched. There were cracks and buckled railings, fractures arced up the walls like questing fingers, but they managed to make it all the way down without having to navigate any kind of collapse. Daniel honestly wasn't sure whether or not to take that as a good sign. If the stairwell was clear, why hadn't Estella -- and anyone else working down in the morgue at the time of the quake -- come up already? Already he felt better for the vest he had donned, and the weight of the gun at his hip felt reassuring. His hand settled on the grip above his hip as they eased their way to the bottom of the steps. The lights were flickering.
"Why do I feel like I'm in a bad horror movie right now?" It wasn't really a question, more a statement, and a rather cynical one at that. Ahead of them stood the doors that would lead through to the morgue and the labs that were also housed below street level, but there was no sound coming from the other side. No movement, no voices. Nothing. Daniel's uncertainty continued to grow and his hand no longer simply rested on the butt of his gun, but gripped it.
[ ANA ]
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