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 Posted: Mon Dec 07, 2009 8:20 pm
On the whole, Tara was not terribly disturbed by her current state. The hunger was the worst part, but she found that she could distract herself from it for brief periods. The best part was easily the fact that she was not dead. Even if it wasn't true life, Tara would cling to unlife with her last unbreath, rather than face the final darkness again.
In the meantime, she set out to find what exactly unlife entitled her to. There had to be something to it other than the hunger. And the fact that she was able to think and move and breathe with a badly healed spine and a dented skull. There were many others out there like her, Tara knew, but she didn't want to enlist their help. What Giselle had told her had made her wary, and she didn't want her progress impeded by fighting. She also doubted that anyone would want to help her with this kind of research. People rarely did.
So Tara began subjecting herself to everything she could think of. When possible, she took safety precautions. When it wasn't, she crossed her fingers and reminded herself that if she wasn't dead now, anything she did was unlikely to kill her. She stayed away from anything she believed would actually lead to her death, instead trying to see the limits of her unlife.
First, blunt force trauma. That was easily tested, by smashing her arm with a rock. It hurt, but not as much as she might have expected. There was bruising, but it faded surprisingly fast, the blotches appearing and disappearing within an hour. Cutting her arm open with a bit of glass she found yielded a small amount of dark green blood that congealed almost immediately. Picking at the scab was fascinating, and Tara wished she had her microscope to study some of the cells she was dealing with.
Not just the microscope. Any one of her shoeboxes would have helped. The blood typing kit, for example. Was her blood still type O, or would it be unidentifiable? What was its pH? Or her food testing kit. Was there any way to gain sustenance from something that wasn't human flesh? These questions distracted Tara, and she made slow progress as she tried to remember all of them for later. Even a notebook would be immensely helpful.
When her limited knowledge of pressure points and exposure both gained no information, except that neither bothered her unduly, Tara hit a wall. She was running out of things she could test without specialized equipment. There was only other thing she could think of. Trying to ignore the gnawing pain in the pit of her stomach, she found the nearest tree and began to climb. Jumping out of it wouldn't kill her even if she was alive, but what would it do if she was undead?
Before she could find out, she caught a glimpse from the tree and froze. She knew that Giselle had told the truth. The dormitory was gone. But seeing the charred wreck that remained was a shock to the system. Thoughts of jumping forgotten, Tara just stared at the burnt remnants of her home away from home. She could see some other students, not well enough to recognize individuals from that height, but enough to see that it was chaotic over there. She was right to work alone. If she tried to organize, she'd either be distracted or killed.
Still, the sight of the others brought pangs of loneliness that almost washed away the hunger. Not for the first time, Tara thought about looking for the few people who mattered to her. "No," she told herself firmly. "If you want to help them, you will find out what is going on here and how to fix it."
But she kept looking out from her spot in the tree, not jumping. Not yet.
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Posted: Fri Dec 11, 2009 7:24 am
The best thing to do for the hunger, Laney found, was to keep herself busy with other tasks. She'd tried just eating -- finding a box of graham crackers in the middle of her laborious efforts to magic a cappuccino into being for Uranophane. But the graham crackers had been downed in a few greedy fistfuls, crammed chipmunk-cheeked into her mouth and then, not without some difficulty, eaten. Then she'd stood at the water fountain by the semi-intact gymnasium for two whole minutes, guzzling cool liquid refreshment. Laney did not feel remotely refreshed. Nothing diminished undead hunger, she'd found.
"High on the hill sits a big old house with something wrong inside it," she sang herself along now. Her voice was more than a little slack. "Spirits haunt the halls and make no effort now to hide it. OooOOOoooOOOooooo - ooooo..."
Now she was foraging for clothes, so she wouldn't have to keep going about in her school uniform. It had gotten more than a little dingy in the time since the school had burned, and though each new day brought her back to pale, just slightly off-green but otherwise normal skin, after the night had done, her clothes always smelled exactly like they'd been worn by a mouldering corpse. She felt it was rather low on the list of Ways to Make Friends and Influence People.
But finding clothes was no easy task, since it was the dorms that had burned down. She currently had a spare sweater and was slightly swimming in a boy's gym outfit, the basketball shorts looking like red mesh culottes. Her uniform was tied tightly up in a plastic trashbag, owing to the smell, and slung over her shoulder. She sat beneath a tree to rest awhile.
"Normandy is fine and fair, so Normandy is where we'll go. I can show you a beach where the peach blossoms grow, and I know how to reach a man who knows a man who knows a cozy inn, a friendly place, with rows of windows facing the sea! This time of year, the air (I hear) is rare and clear and warm in Normandy..."
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Posted: Fri Dec 11, 2009 12:29 pm
It was impossible not to notice the singing. At first, before it was clear enough to be anything more than a noise, it bothered her. It wasn't like she needed peace to work in, but it might have helped a little. Then again, finding peace in a post-apocalyptic wasteland wasn't all that likely in the first place. Tara sighed and ran her hands through her messy hair. How long had it been since it had been washed and brushed?
Then the noise became a voice, and the voice became words. The words were fine, but it was the voice that made Tara's heart, if it was indeed beating, stop. There was only one person in Barren Pines who would sing show tunes at a time like this.
Why hadn't it occurred to her that Laney was undead too?
Tara stayed in the tree for several moments, wrestling with her feelings. On the one hand, common sense told her to stay away. The thought of another person nearby rang a dinner bell in her brain that she tried desperately to ignore. Laney wouldn't be safe. On the other hand, this was Laney. The one person who really, really got it, whatever "it" was. If Tara had hit a wall, maybe together they could break it down.
On the other hand... Tara shook her head. She only had two hands, and they both wanted to reach around Laney and rip into her innards give her a hug. She would just have to be strong. Somehow. She'd work out the details later.
The tree she was in rustled as she tried to pick a branch to jump from. She was in the lower branches, since serious injury wasn't on her agenda that day. Just a little scuffing, maybe some bone bruising, but that was all she wanted. Finding a suitable place, she crossed her fingers and shoved herself away from the tree with as much force as she could muster.
"One small step for man, one giant leap for zombiekind!"
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