estella ames. (camposanto) wrote in rulethenight, @ 2011-09-01 14:04:00 |
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Entry tags: | !narrative, !plot, estella ames, plot: night of the living dead |
demons talk to me, so that's who i'm leaving with. [plot narrative]
When the rumble and groan of shifting concrete finally faded, when the dust ground from the building itself had settled in a thick, gritty coat across everything, when the hiss of sparks flying each time a lightbulb burst in its socket in a shower of glass died into silence, Estella was still alive. More or less. She was faintly aware of coughing up grains that burned in her throat and nose, dizziness roaring through her in heady waves that made her want to retch on the coppery thickness coating her tongue. But deep in the basement of the S.I.D. headquarters, the ceiling of the tech lab was still intact. She wasn't pinned, and though she felt weak when she tested each limb, her mobility was fine. Nothing broken. Nothing agonizing. Just the sound of her own heartbeat pounding painfully inside her skull. She wiped the dust from her face, felt the wet trail from her nose that she couldn't see but could taste with perfect clarity, and slowly pushed herself up to her feet. Fishing in the pocket of her jeans, she pulled her cellphone free and brought the screen to life. Faint blue light washed over everything -- broken slides, samples in their vials cracked and leaking puddles of dark liquid across the surface of her work table, her microscope on the floor by her feet. She must have cracked her face against the viewfinder, but she couldn't recall. Precious seconds lost. One filing cabinet had tipped over, but the path to the door was clear, and she willed herself to cross the room through her dizziness. It would fade. She had to get out of here. There were so many other people in the building -- technicians, agents, filing clerks -- who knew how many had been less fortunate than herself, how many of them were trapped under desks or collapsed ceilings?
Nobody was out in the hallway. Broken glass everywhere, but some of the overhead lights were humming and flickering erratically, enough for her to see where she was going. She slid along the wall for support. Past evidence storage, where the door hung open on one hinge and no one responded to her hoarse call. The janitor's closet had spilled open, with mops and brooms laying in a broken tangle of bent handles on the ground. The acrid stench of bleach filled her nose, and Estella coughed again as she skirted the mess. The morgue was next. Had the medical examiner been caught inside? What if an agent had come down at precisely the wrong moment to see one of the cadavers for themselves? As much as she desperately wanted to get to the surface, up to the air and the light and other people, she had to check. The green metal door swam in her vision as she drew closer, and she reached out gratefully to press her hands against its cool surface for support.
Every single bone in her body was crushed and ground to nothingness with fragments working their way deep into her nerves. Agony ripping through her muscles. Iron spikes of rebarb puncturing her shoulders, goring her stomach, her thighs, stabbing holes through her lungs that made breathing difficult and screaming impossible. Hands, fingers, her ear was torn free, bits of her lit on fire and then running icy cold with shock. The pain shifted through her, one deadly injury after another, smashing her and crucifying her and slamming into her with the force of a car crash. A hundred instant deaths in the span of a heartbeat.
And then it was gone. Shuddering, gasping for breath and crumpled in a dark pile against the door, Estella fought the overwhelming hysteria of the tears that ran down her face and mixed with the smeared blood. Oh God. She'd seen violent deaths before, their mangled corpses in the lab or laying on the floor of their own apartments. In her dreams, she'd felt the impact of stabbings that she'd woken up to realize weren't real, or at least weren't her own; this wasn't new to her. But one demise was nothing compared to the casualties that she'd just experienced. Her chest was tight with the horror of all that suffering, her stomach writhing as she pressed her hands against her mouth to hold back everything that wanted to spill out -- screams, sobs, the sour bile in her throat -- useless reactions that she couldn't control but didn't have to indulge in, didn't have to give into. Whatever that was, wherever that had come from, it was gone now, and it wouldn't do her or anyone else any good if she dissolved into a weeping mess on the floor. She just needed to get ahold of herself. She just needed to force herself to breathe, calm down, and pull it together so that she could get back on her feet and finish what she'd started.
The door at her back rattled suddenly, jarring her teeth in her jaw as she pitched forward onto her hands. They burned and pricked from glass biting into her palm. But she wasn't paying attention to the pain anymore. Behind her, a high-pitched whine tracked slowly down the metal, dragging lower until she could pick out each individual note. Nails. Clawing from the inside. It was like her heart had stopped, her breathing ceased, and all she could hear was that scratching as the sound grew louder, new trails beginning above her head and joining the cacophony. Twisting around, she scrambled backwards through the dust, crawling away from the screeching as quickly as her shaking limbs would allow. Logically -- the only thing inside there would be survivors, injured people trying to get out, but -- every instinct was screaming no at her, something so intrinsically wrong that she couldn't bring herself to reach for the handle to let herself into that room to see if there was any way she could help. Rational thought couldn't justify her fear, couldn't quell the unsettling sense deep in the pit of her stomach that she knew what was behind that door. And it couldn't be let out at any cost.
Unexpected silence. Estella froze, breathing deeply. The quiet was oppressive, not welcoming, and she threw a desperate glance towards the stairwell. There was still an exit. She could get up now and make it upstairs and never think about this. She could get up now. Get the hell up, Estella.
The hallway plunged into sudden darkness as the lights flickered again. One second. Two seconds. There was the softest whisper of a breeze against her skin, raising goosebumps, and she opened her mouth with her heart practically beating in her throat, unable to make a sound despite the pressure rising inside of her. All at once, everything lit up again -- and Estella stared into the chalky blue face of a young woman whose bloodshot eyes were barely inches from her own. She couldn't move. She couldn't move. Formaldehyde and the iron stench of metal in her nose. Broken fingers caught her calves with shocking strength, and there were more hands grasping her shoulders, twisting around her waist, hauling her up from the floor and carrying her into the morgue where chrome doors gaped open and the long trays within hung crookedly from their mouths, contents empty. Because the room was filled with naked men and women, their chests Y-stitched from autopsy, throats gaping open from fangs tearing through their flesh, holding limbs ripped from them by eager wolf jaws, all of them crowding close around her as the victims of so many crimes carried her immobile body to rest on the cold, hard surface of an examining table. Their hands ran across her hair, her shoulders, along the seams of her jeans. One smiled down at her with half a mouth, his lips contorted from claws that had gouged across his jaw.
And then they stepped back, leaving her laying there, unable to scream, unable to cry, unable to do anything more than breathe. Trapped in the morgue of the Supernatural Investigation Division Headquarters with a battery of the undead circled protectively around her body as the rest of Boston, ravaged by the greatest earthquake yet and swathed in dark clouds rolling in like the chariots of Zeus, began to tremble again as the graveyards spit clods of dirt from long-dead relatives and friends digging out of the ground. The casualties of harried car crashes and collapsed buildings struggled free from the embrace of their new deathbeds and rose to face the earth again.
Into death, Estella breathed new life. And there was nothing she could do about it.