The exercise:
A whole day earlier than the last possible day of the month to do it, let us return to Out of the Woods.
Managed to get my course assignment completed and submitted this evening, after spending a couple hours on it yesterday morning and three more this afternoon. I went into the office to do it, for ease of concentration and lack of child-sized distractions.
Looking forward to not being in the middle of elections the next time I have a major assignment coming due.
3 comments:
Ooh, a voice! I like what you've done here; bringing in the possibility of help from somewhere without actually making it available, and the hint of normalcy in all the madness is a nice break. We have two months to go after this, and I kind of see this ending with either everyone dead (if you're left in charge) or everyone leaving towards where they think what's left of civilisation is (if you're feeling generous) but I can't see this being cured in the time we have. So for now, even though I'm double-posting, I'm leaving you with a little space to indicate where you'd like to take this :)
Mine
"The shamblers don't speak," he said after a couple of seconds where I was straining to hear any more sound, wondering if I'd really heard a voice or not. I was glad he was saying he had. "Maybe they don't have enough blood in them?"
"I don't think there's enough thinking going on for them to speak," I said. "It's a complicated thing, speech. Did I ever tell you I wrote a paper on it once?"
"Every time we go to a party," he said, winking at me. If his grin wasn't so impish I'd have slapped him but... well, it was him. And I loved him. "Right, ok, actually you reminding me of that makes killing these things a little easier. If they can't think enough to even grunt like a guinea-pig then they're lower than animals."
"Guinea-pig?!" I decided not to pursue his example any further. "Anyway, do we go and look for this voice?"
"Of course! It's not a shambler--"
"We think!"
"--fine, it's not a shambler, we think, so it's either whoever was fighting them off, in which case they could do with some cavalry, or it's someone who's just arrived like us."
"And then they're our cavalry," I said. "Makes sense. You've cheered up a bit."
He paused, then smiled and it was still a grim smile for all that was a light of humour about his eyes now. "We know how to kill them," he said, "and we know we're faster than them. It doesn't feel completely hopeless anymore, it's like... it's like there's a chance we might win."
We unlocked our door cautiously, listening acutely for any shambling noises but the corridor outside was empty and there were no signs of anything having dragged itself along it recently. The smell was worse; now the charnel-house smell from below was competing with the barbecue smell from above and it turned my stomach, so I breathed through my mouth and tried not to complain. Without any more noises to guide us we went back the way we'd already been and pushed on further into the building, assuming that if the owner of the voice was near us they'd have found us first. I found myself sweating even though it wasn't really that warm any more, and my fingers trembled if I didn't grip my axe tightly.
The first two rooms we tried were terrifying when we had to open the door and then disappointing in their normality. One was a small office for someone senior: a desk, two chairs, a potted plant, a filing cabinet; and the other was a post room with a sack of unsorted mail still sitting on the floor. We checked the sack just in case; it was envelopes, packages, and a cylindrical package that looked like it might be a bottle of alcohol. He took it out and set it on a desk for us to come back to and I wished we could have taken it with us.
At the door to the third we heard soft singing coming from round the corner so we left the room alone -- my heart was pounding, wondering if something would emerge from it after we went past and I kept glancing over my shoulder -- and went round the corner. On our left was a glass door leading into a canteen and through it we could see someone sitting at a bench with their head in their hands. They were the source of the singing. On the floor around them was the same kind of vile mess as we'd seen in the meeting room: blood, dismembered limbs and the slowly creeping bodies of the shamblers.
I opened the door and it creaked loudly as though the hinges were warped. The door stuck, halfway open and the singer looked up, turning around. With a slightly glazed look on her face she lurched to her feet and picked up a chef's knife from the table.
"I can keep this up all day," she said, her voice wobbly. She looked like she hadn't slept in three days. She waved the knife. "Come on then, stagger over here and let me carve."
"We're not shamblers," I said, uncomfortably aware that if she ran at me I was blocked in by him behind me. "We know you're not either, because you can talk."
Greg - delighted to see you still think I'm a monster when it comes to fictional characters and their fates :P
Mine:
The woman stared at me blankly for a moment. though the knife in her hand was worryingly steady. She wore overalls that were covered with so much blood and gore that I couldn't tell what color they were supposed to be. I gripped the axe tighter, my knuckles going white.
After what felt like an eternity she grimaced in confusion, then spoke.
"Shamblers?" she asked. "What the fuck are shamblers?"
"Those things," I said, pointing at the bodies on the floor with the business end of my axe. "At least, that's what we call them."
"Oh," she said, a half smile appearing on her face. "I call them Energizer Zombunnies. They just keep going and going and going..."
She laughed then, and I shivered. It was, I felt, the laugh of someone teetering on the brink of madness.
"Yeah, they don't know how to quit, do they?" he asked over my shoulder. He sounded as tense as I felt. "So that was you that left the message on the wall then?"
"The one and only," she said and gave a little bow, her hand flourishing out to one side. It was then that she seemed to remember she still held the chef's knife and put it back down. "Sorry about that. Though I'm sure you can't blame me, given the, uh... situation."
I sort of grunted an acknowledgement and eased the rest of the way into the room. I lowered my axe but felt no temptation to put it down quite yet. I saw as he came to stand beside me that my partner did the same with his weapons and took comfort in his solidarity.
"You guys hungry?" she asked suddenly. I found it difficult to not look at the carnage surrounding us. She laughed again but I couldn't tell if it was as a result of my poorly concealed reaction or because the voices in her head had told a good joke. "Come on, I've got a pot of soup simmering in the kitchen."
She turned and, without a backward glance, started limping toward the only other door in the room. I exchanged silent glances with him and, after a moment, he shrugged and moved to follow.
"Just," I said, grabbing him by the arm, "just... stay alert, okay?"
"Oh, don't worry," he said with an especially grim smile, "I'm definitely checking my bowl for stray body parts."
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