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Hero watched in open befuddlement as Jude bodychecked the door to one of the unused rooms, the ones that were always kept locked; one shoulder decking made it rattle, but as he bore up and gave it another -- even heavier -- one, it finally cracked on its hinges; another shoulder-check and it gave in entirely, and fell inwards into the room.

She immediately strode in after him before he had any ideas -- the room was old and reeked of age and disuse. And on the bed there was a mummified corpse dressed in a Barren Pines uniform.

Hero felt her gorge rise in her throat.

"Dear God," she said, and found herself doing something uncharacteristic: repeating herself. "Dear God, Lawson."

"GODDAMNIT, LAWSON!"

Hero was throwing one epic equivalent of a Hero temper tantrum. He could hear her swing at the doorway in pure frustration, but his attention was on the shoe and the mummy; when, unbidden, it slowly unfolded itself up at the middle, looking at Jude with a hungry hiss from a tongueless mouth. It was dead. It was very dead. This was not a case of a student with severe anorexia. Gobbets of hair clung to the scalp, and it gave that low, sibilant hiss again: and Hero was kicking at the door, but he'd somehow managed to wedge it in the frame.

"GODDAMNIT, LAWSON, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD! THIS IS SENSELESS!"

No, Hero, this was Sparta.

And the dead student was rising to its feet.

Hero had had her own chain letters too, but they went on a slightly different wavelength than Jude's slightly desperate heavenly spam: dear God, please give me the strength to see this through. Hero never had to barter with her Lord to not die.

"JUDE!"

At it bit me, the noise on the other side of the door increased. Hero would probably be bursting in soon. Not soon enough to make the mummy resist; at the biting, it had suddenly doubled in effort to get to him, pressing its horrifying shrunken face up to his -- and its mouth was suddenly questing all over his face, blindly, for the part that it had bitten, just like an unruly girlfriend. It wrapped its fragile arms around him, still clad in the tattered Barren Pines cardigan it had obviously died in, and made a low death rattle deep into Jude's mouth as it bit down again and suckled at the blood greedily.

Hero sounded as though she was pounding the door to death now.

At this point Hero Barrett burst in like an avenging angel, sword held aloft. It was a wooden sword, but the thought counted. Without even a word as to the fact that, you know, there was a living mummy attempting to make Jude its blood bank, she simply joined in on the carnage -- slid her sword through a large rent in the sweater and through flesh that was fine and thin as paper, through dried-out organs to pull it up and through the shoulder. This raggedly severed the other arm, and she discarded the sword rather than bothering to use it again.

They then proceeded to disassemble the zombie.

"Are you all right?" Hero panted, one arm locked around the head -- jerking it back and trying to tug it off, but the damn thing seemed attached to its spinal cord.

Jude could have told her that snapping was going to work better than 'tugging' there.

"You're bleeding," she said, in 'disapproval' rather than 'sweet feminine concern'. The annoyance was obvious: it hit you, Lawson.

It was unfortunate for the universe, for Hero Barrett, and for Jude Lawson, that fate had put them in a situation plus insane adrenaline plus slightly near-death experience adding on to the insane amounts of deja-vu they experienced near each other which could definitely be equated to some kind of deep-seated, latent attraction, because he and Hero were suddenly making out frantically.

Hero kissed like a dude, though. Even if you had never kissed like a dude, you could tell that Hero kissed like a complete dude. She wrapped her arms around him as they brutally swapped saliva, standing over a horrifying dessicated corpse, staggering a little into the wall as they made out like they planned on making interior mouth maps for later. Hero mumbled something that could have been "dear Jesus," or equally "dear Judas", or possibly even, "Jude", it was all up in the air.

And the corpse was still there, in pieces. Nice. Great.

"I actually wish I could say I had no idea what you mean," she said, "but I do." They were both holding each other, each a little too hard, as frantically as they'd kissed. They'd both been two dominant people searching for a c***k in each other's armour, which had been -- interesting, to say the least. Hero would have called it 'pleasant', which therefore meant in Hero parlance it was translated to 'awesome'. "I've known it for a while. Sometimes it literally hurts to think -- as though there's a blockage there; they've tampered with us, Lawson. And I have no idea how."

Jude was taller than she was. She was murmuring down into his shoulder, which was probably the most feminine thing she'd done. They did both find it romantic. They were going to die later. "Every time I'm near you, it's as though, it's like I've forgotten something. And I dream. I know I dream, vividly, but in the morning it's... died, stillborn." She sounded frustrated. "Sometimes I see people talking to themselves and I've tried to disturb them and can't. And for God's sake I don't go near the nurse's office. That place is a mortuary."

Literally, nowadays. She raised her mouth and kissed his lips methodically, his lower lip, his upper lip. Then more roughly than she had a right to, being Hero Barrett, defender of the debate club, but. "There's no escape. It has to be destroyed."

"Don't you remember what happened the last time you went off half-cocked like this?"

It came out of her mouth like machine-gun bullets, and even Hero looked surprised. There had never been another 'time'. There had never been any occasion Jude had, to their knowledge, go off. She looked as though she wanted to spout more, but then she muttered "Oh, God, I don't even know what I'm saying, God help me," and was rubbing at her temples. "Lawson. La -- Jude. Realise this. They will never let you go. They will never let you leave. There's nobody to help but ourselves. You do realise they're always watching? They're probably watching even now."

She still looked disturbed. He knew what he was doing. She knew what he was doing. It was clear to them both. "Can you never do a single thing I ask?" burst out, but she was looking more and more irritated and fatigued, and less convinced of herself.