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 Posted: Fri Dec 04, 2009 12:52 pm
Piper didn't want to play this game anymore. She was tired, both physically and mentally, and would rather just wake up from this nightmare or escape from whatever alternate reality she had fallen into. She was sure that any minute now, she'd wake up in her dorm and all of this would prove to just be a terrible nightmare. Maybe she had just eaten some bad food, or maybe she'd gotten that disease everyone was talking about and she was suffering from a really bad fever. What was it called again? Bacterial menifigits? She had no idea, but she was pretty positive it could cause delusions.
Still, delusion or not, this whole ordeal was starting to take a toll. Piper had wandered away from Sue and Yahya while they were exploring another part of the school. Her heart just wasn't in it anymore, it wasn't in anything. She'd been bitten, she'd seen one of her best friends die, and she'd lost her pet rock to the head of a vicious zombie. He had been a good rock, too.
Instead of abiding by the rules of surviving the zombie apocalypse 101, she had found her way to the bleachers over seeing the track. She'd climbed a couple of rows up and was now huddled atop a bench with her knees pulled to her chest and her face buried against her pajama pants. She didn't want to cry anymore, not with her head already aching and her eyes already puffy, but she could feel the hot tears staining the cotton. With a shuddering breath, she curled her arms around her legs, effectively making herself little more than a blue-topped ball.
She just wanted to wake up.
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Posted: Fri Dec 04, 2009 1:15 pm
There was a blur on the track field. The infection had made him run faster than ever before. He felt like he could even beat Jude in a race, wherever he was. He could've outrun Sonic the Hedgehog if he was real. He had power, and it was wonderful. Power brought confidence, something that Zeke had never had before. He didn't have to be humble anymore. Ezekiel Martin was great. Around the track's starting line, Zeke slowed down to a stop. He wasn't out of breath at all, I guess that came with not having to breathe! He knelt down and picked up his javelin, the same javelin that had been pierced through his body. With a grunt he thrust it back through the hole in his stomach. It was convenient, and left both of his arms free. However, when he glanced at the bleachers, he pulled the javelin back out and tossed it in the grass. He picked up something else and walked over to the bleachers where Piper was sitting. He stepped up onto the lowest rung of bleachers and looked up at her, and how she was practically curled up into a ball. It was cute. For once, Zeke actually noticed that a girl was cute. Was this because of the infection too? This confidence was overwhelming, and it made Zeke almost feel like he was alive again. Alive, and hungry.
"Why the long face, Piper?"
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Posted: Fri Dec 04, 2009 1:49 pm
Anything could happen in dreams and nightmares, anything at all. That's why she wasn't terribly surprised to suddenly hear the voice of the very boy she was mourning, speaking to her as if nothing had happened. After seeing Calintha, she supposed she should have expected this, but even so it was a little different. She'd seen Zeke die. She'd seen the javelin pinning him to the wall and his insides strung out like the strings of a marionette over Lucy's fingers. For a moment, she squeezed her legs tighter to her chest, hoping she'd just wake up, right now. No such luck, though.
Trying to muster some form of bravery, Piper slowly lifted her tear-stained face away from her knees. She wasn't trying to be brave because she was afraid of Zeke, no, she was trying to be brave because she didn't want to look down at his mangled midsection again. Yet, there he was, standing below her on the bleachers as if nothing had happened. She couldn't even look at him without reliving the sight in her head all over again.
"What a silly question," she mumbled, her voice strained by a sore throat and a stuffy nose. She brought a hand up to wipe away the lingering tears on her face, scrubbing at her cheeks before wiping them away on her pants. If he'd been anyone else, she might have asked him questions, been curious, wanted to know everything that had happened to him since they'd left him behind in the gym. Yet, she couldn't bring herself to. She just stared at him in a solemn silence, wavering between burying her heads back in her hands and throwing her arms around him.
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Posted: Fri Dec 04, 2009 3:53 pm
"I guess so, huh..." Zeke shrugged. "I don't know, it's really not that bad. My stomach doesn't hurt anymore, if that makes you feel better."
He rubbed the back of his head, a silly grin on his green-tinted face.
"Not having a stomach will do that!" It was funny, even though his stomach had been ruptured by the javelin, he was hungry. It was an awful hunger, one that was constantly on Zeke's mind. He wasn't trying to ignore it, not at all. For someone who had been so blunt when alive, Zeke was good at being subtle. His mouth was practically watering at the sight of Piper, but she had been his friend. He might as well try to cheer her up before he took her for dinner.
"Try to cheer up, Piper. It's really not that bad!" he took a couple more steps up the bleachers and held out what he had picked up. It was a tiny wildflower, a white one with crusted blood on it. It was gross, but it was the thought that counted, right?
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Posted: Fri Dec 04, 2009 8:08 pm
"A little," she admitted with a small sniff, rubbing at her nose with the back of her hand. The tears had mostly trickled off at this point, stopped by the appearance of Zeke. She even managed a small laugh at his joke, though she probably would have been more amused if she hadn't known that not having a stomach was the cause of his death.
Of course, being in a better mood meant that she at least had a passing thought as to what not having a stomach felt like. She dropped her eyes for a second to poke at her belly, a frown stretching over her lips. She decided she didn't like the idea much. She shook her head at the idea and looked back up at him, wrapping her arms around her midriff as if she were afraid her stomach might flop out of its own accord. "I think I'd rather keep mine."
When she looked up, though, her eyes landed on what Zeke was showing her - a pretty flower. It was a little blood-stained, but in a way, it was just like Zeke. Her faint, timid smile brightened and she reached out to take it from him, scooting forward a little on her bench as she did so. "I'll try, it's just hard to watch people.. die." Her sentence grew quiet towards the end, faltering on the last word, and her smile faded vaguely. Zeke was here though, talking to her, so not everything could be bad, right? "I'm scared no one is coming to save us, and what if.." she felt the tears prickling in her eyes again as her hand wrapped around Zeke's and the flower he was holding, looking for comfort from someone that had been there from the beginning of her nightmare.
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Posted: Sat Dec 05, 2009 9:07 pm
"It was difficult for me, too," Zeke admitted quietly. "Before the gym, anyway. Now, I don't feel so bad."
Zeke put his hand on-top of hers, feeling her living flesh underneath his rotting fingertips. She felt so warm, and he could practically smell the blood running under her skin.
"Does that make me a bad person? Piper, I'm not so scared. It'll be okay if it's like this, for awhile anyway. Soon, we'll all be a big family again. We'll all be infected, and then we'll find a way out of this school. We don't have to be afraid, we don't have to get hurt!"
Zeke shook his head.
"I've never been so brave in my life!"
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Posted: Sat Dec 05, 2009 9:30 pm
Piper thought about what he was saying, retreating to her mind like she so often did. She sat in silence, contemplating what made Zeke feel better now that he was, well, dead. Maybe being dead had just rotted his brain and he didn't have the sense to be upset anymore. Maybe being dead just made him feel better because he didn't have to worry about dying. She chewed at her lip as she tried to figure out what could possibly make Zeke so happy to be a zombie, especially given the fact that Cali had been so distraught over the very same thing.
"I guess it's easy to be brave when you can't die anymore," she said softly, her eyes turning to look at their hands where he had put his on top of hers. His were so.. cold. She couldn't tell a difference between his hands and the flower stem in her fingers, not by means of temperature at least. Even as she stared at his hands though, she was playing the words over and over in his head. They'd all be infected and be one big happy family? Everyone would be a zombie? Part of her was scared of that idea, while another part was.. thrilled. Zombies did have a much better chance of surviving in numbers than humans, usually, and if Zeke was so happy now that he'd died, would Piper be happy too?
Piper looked away from their hands and up to Zeke, staring at him in silence as she tried to imagine what the next week or two was going to be like for her. Was she going to die from starvation, or from a zombie attack like the girl that had eaten Zeke? Or would a SWAT team come in and slaughter them all for being infected? Maybe Zeke was right and being a zombie wasn't the worst way to spend the rest of her.. whatever.
"Is it really better?" she asked quietly, feeling herself quickly growing overwhelmed with all of these ideas.
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Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 5:16 pm
Zeke smiled. This was going perfectly! He knew that he had more speed as a runner, but was it really better? He didn't know. He was hungry. He was hungry, and there was Piper. He had never really noticed how pretty she was before. Well, that was a lie. He had noticed, but now it was different. He could actually say something. I mean, there he was, holding her hand. It made him feel some semblance of warmth. Was this his destiny, really? Was it his destiny to make Piper a part of him by ingesting her?
So, he didn't answer her question. Instead, he just leaned forward and started to suck on her wounded shoulder. With his grimy fingers he delicately reached under the bandage and peeled it away, not wanting to touch the rest of her unwounded skin yet. That would come later. He wanted to savor it. So, he clamped his mouth over her old bite wound and sucked, like a vampire with rabies or something. Maybe he was trying to be romantic, but as he started to suck stray bits of flesh off of her wound and into his greedy mouth... any semblance of romance faded and was replaced with pain.
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Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 6:19 pm
Piper stared at Zeke with furrowed brows as he began to get closer to her, finding the situation growing a little uncomfortable. She had no problem invading other people's space, that was certainly true, but there was something odd in the air that she couldn't quite put her finger on. She didn't have a name for it, just a feeling that it was something she had absolutely no expertise in. Then again, what did she ever have an expertise in?
When he leaned down she tried to scoot away, her head turning to the side to look where she could go, but realized that scooting backwards would simply dump her into the space between the benches behind her. Thus, she turned back to look at Zeke just in time to have him latch onto her shoulder. At first, she was just stunned into immobility, then pain began to blossom from her shoulder and a grimace formed on her face.
"No, Zeke, stop it," she tried to shove at his shoulders, uncomfortable with him being so close, especially now that he was, you know, sucking her blood. Didn't zombies eat brains? Vampires were the ones that sucked blood! She tried shoving in vain again, only to feel Zeke beginning to actually scrape away at her flesh. "Zeke!" She actually screeched this time, her nails digging into his rotting flesh as the pain began to rise, much like she had done when he died. The only difference between her mourning cuddle and this was that she was trying to push him off, get him away, just stop the horrible pain that was beginning to cloud her thoughts.
It was fine to think she could be brave and accept this fate until it actually came to claim her, and now she was just a screaming little girl, afraid and alone as some warped version of her friend fed on her. Tears began to pour, tears that meant something completely different than the ones she had been shedding before. Where was Sue? Where was Yahya? Why did she have to be so silly and come out here all alone?
"Zeke, please don't," she sobbed, squeezing her eyes shut as she tried to shove at his head, yanking at that once bright hair, "it hurts."
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Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 8:22 pm
If only it had been Ezekiel Martin that had been on her shoulder. But, it wasn't him anymore. Zeke couldn't even apologize, or reassure her that it would be over soon. The "gentle" sucking turned into gnawing, and he reached into her wound to rip meat off of bones. He lifted up the arm closest to him and started to move it up and down, trying to rip it off like someone would rip off a chicken leg. It didn't work so well, especially with Piper crying beneath him.
Something in Zeke faded back into consciousness, and he gave her a kiss on the cheek. It was gone right after that, however, and instead of a kiss, he sank his teeth into her rosy cheeks.
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Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 8:51 pm
It hurt. It hurt to know that one of her best friends was now trying to devour her. It hurt to know that she had become nothing more than a meal to him. Most of all, though, it just bloody hurt. Her sobbing cries had turned into guttural screeches, all coherent thought tossed out the window as she fought and kicked against the leech that was trying to drain every ounce of life out of her body. Her nails scraped at his face, digging into his rotting flesh and her legs flailed against his own, aiming for anything that would be sensitive enough to knock him away. Unlucky for Piper, zombies didn't feel a whole lot.
As he tried to wrench her arm clean out of its socket, as he pulled strip after strip of meat off of her clavicle and scapula, Piper screamed. Maybe she was screaming for Sue and Yahya to come and save her, or maybe she was screaming for Zeke to wake up and break free of the monster that had taken over his body. Whatever she was screaming for, it didn't come, at least not in time for the poor little flutist. Her screams began to trail off as her consciousness started to fade, becoming nothing but hoarse chokes as a fuzzy darkness crept into her vision and blurred the image of the friend-turned-monster that loomed above her.
Then, from nowhere, there was a gentle kiss against the flesh of her cheek. To her, it was the last moment of kindness in the hell of a world she'd fallen into, and her mind faded with that kiss being the last thing she remembered in her short life. Her consciousness left and her body went still in the cruel arms that had once comforted her. Around her blood spilled from her wound, staining the bright metal of the bleachers as it blossomed outward, and her hand fell to drop the pale flower it had been clutching into a sea of red. Her life force ebbed away as that sea of blood trickled over the edge of the seat, pouring down into the darkness beneath the bleachers.
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