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 Posted: Mon Dec 21, 2009 6:06 pm
Everything had happened in a very short time for Topher. He was revealed to be a strange, special sailor senshi -- a Zodiac -- Taurus; second-in-command of the entire (slightly bemused-looking) band in the gymnasium. Students he knew. Students he didn't know so well. And now he was being dragged by Hero Barrett with fire in her eyes and no question in her heart as to whether Topher was coming with her; she was clutching her pen, she had a gun at her belt, and she was on a mission.
Hero Barrett usually looked as though she were on a mission. But now she was on a mandate from God.
"The last Zodiac was killed before he could die in the dormitory fire," she told him tersely, walking out of the gymnasium underneath the black sky to the edge of the forest -- the shield covered over a good chunk of the scrubland. "Murdered. I dug him up last week to confirm -- " That was disgusting -- "but the corpse is, unmistakeably, that of Jude Lawson."
Jude Lawson. Jude Lawson?
"Sailor Sagittarius."
Jude Lawson was Sailor Sagittarius?
"I don't need to be Sue Gottschalk to know. I am your captain, Taurus. If you would trust my judgement in this instance."
They were going to dig up a body.
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Posted: Tue Dec 22, 2009 1:22 am
Topher was rightly confused about everything. He'd just gone from scrawny kid who played Billiards to someone rather important. The poor boy had no idea why only the two of them were leaving the relatively safe gymnasium and out into the dark, black world outside. They were going to get killed somehow. It didn't matter whether or not she had a gun. There were flesh eating zombies running around. Sooner or later, she'd run out of bullets and his pool cue would break off in someones face and then they'd both be dead. Two zodiac senshi down. Evil would win. The earth would be plunged into a thousand years of darkness and that would be it. Game. Set. Match.
...And yet he was still following closely behind her without question, steps calm and confident, focusing on her every word. He hadn't known who exactly had crawled into the gym after he'd been ushered out but Barren Pines was apparently a pretty dangerous place. He could have easily been killed by anything. Monsters, crazy people, murder.
Wait murder? The gears in Tophers head suddenly began whirling around. Oh god. Murdered?! It just kept getting better. "Wait?...Jude Lawson was murdered and you..." The last few words were punctuated with obvious disgust. "Like...dug him out of the ground? There was a dead guy buried on campus?!" Topher started to recall all the times he'd taken walks around the school. He didn't step on the poor guy did he? Wasn't that bad luck?
Though, it all did seem to make sense if he in fact was Sagittarius. They would have been one short. Of course, Topher didn't quite know what the meant but that was probably bad.
Very bad...
"Well, if you're my Captain then I have to trust your judgment don't I? It's my job right?" One thing was certain about this job. Topher did not like the direction this was inevitably heading.
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Posted: Tue Dec 22, 2009 3:38 pm
"Yes, I dug him out of the ground," said Hero, glancing back at him with unfortunately the gaze of are you dense?. "For God's sake, Taurus, you were all murdered. The dormitory fire was arson. Every meningitis death was a kill. Don't you understand? Barren Pines was a trap."
Apparently Topher was not only the second-in-command, but second-in-command to the least gentle girl (girl? Something tugged on his memory) to ever have been put in existence. Hero Barrett was extraordinarily intimidating. Also, she had a gun, and Topher had no idea that if Hero Barrett aimed at a tree trunk she would probably only shoot leaves. She looked remarkably hardcore. "I wanted to make sure it was Mr. Lawson: ergo, Mr. Coral, I dug him up."
They were heading towards the scrubland. Hero stopped in the gloom by the gardener's shed. There were no spades. She got a hoe, and passed him one as well -- well, at least they were armed in the case of zombie attack. "Your job description is to trust my judgement," she was saying, "to trust your own, and to wrangle the rest of the Zodiac Guard. And to follow our Princess. That's our job: to secure our Princess."
They were going through the bushes now. They were going through the bushes to something that looked disturbingly like a grave mound. You expected Frankie del Rockham to jump out at you.
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Posted: Tue Dec 22, 2009 8:50 pm
As she spoke, Topher finally realized what he'd gotten himself into. Utter chaos. Complete and utter chaos. Murdered? Arson? Meningitis? Every thing about this place was a lie. If Barren Pines itself was a trap then had he just escaped it?
"But I didn't die..." He'd lived when nearly everyone else was dead. He'd lived when everyone was supposed to die. The entire little world he'd been in for so long was just a mockery of life. It was nothing more than a mousetrap and he'd just been lucky enough to escape with the cheese every time.
Compared to her, he looked like a kicked puppy with no sense of direction besides obediently trailing behind her heels from fear of being punished. Hero's gaze had been enough of one. He was afraid of that gun going off, afraid of the zombies that were probably prowling through the woods as they walked, afraid of leaving Hero, afraid of Hero herself. In fact, the boy was just plain afraid of the whole situation. Second-in-command was turning out to be the worst job ever. However, if it was his job to help the princess then he would. It wasn't like he had much of a choice if he was second in command to her. Going against Hero's orders probably meant that something was going to hit the fan so he kept quiet out of fear of sounding like an annoying broken record. Whatever she told him to do, he would do.
The gardener's shed was there all too quickly and whatever they had come to do was close. It was all too real when he finally had to ditch the pool stick for the garden hoe and had to follow her through brush. With the evidence piling up, Topher was then looking at the suspected burial with a mixture of apprehension and horror.
"We're about to dig him back up aren't we?"
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Posted: Wed Dec 23, 2009 6:49 pm
"No, we're about to till the soil and plant root vegetables. Yes, we're about to dig him back up. Look lively, Mr. Coral." He'd never chosen to be second-command -- not in this life. It was a little alarming to just suddenly told that he was the right hand to be Captain, based solely on the fact that he was Taurus and came next in the star wheel, that he was something he'd never planned or prepped on. Sailor Taurus. Something would hit the fan if he went against Aries, and it would probably be him.
They came to a disturbed mound -- "Animals," said Hero, curling her lip -- and then she started digging. She hacked away at the soil, tossing it away in a pile next to the grave. The air smelled sweet and putrefying, and the soil itself was a little discoloured as they both worked. Somehow being with a pool stick and the zombies would have been a little better than digging up Jude Lawson. Especially when Hero went, "There," when they had dug a few feet down, the reek reaching his nose when instead of dirt there was suddenly a black garbage bag. She was pushing the dirt away with her hands now, hauling the stinking, disgusting black garbage bag up, pulling it out of the hole as she wiped the sweat off her brow with her forearm.
"Take the other end," she said.
It was a smallish garbage bag. She'd buried Jude in fetal position.
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Posted: Thu Dec 24, 2009 1:21 am
Topher would have rather been the dead one the moment they started digging up the corpse of one of their teammates. Anything would have been better than this. Anything.
Every movement of dirt brought the horrific stench up into his face. It was like the top layer of soil was the only thing that smelled like the forest. All the mulch and dirt further down was just dead and smelled like it. Soon, he was scraping through piles and piles of the stuff, eyes starting to water from the unbearable smell. Topher was sure he was going to faint if he had to go through it any longer until they unearthed the bag. Oh crap. Now he knew he was going to faint.
"Holy mother of God! How long has he been down there?! " The boy recoiled back, dropping the hoe to pile of earth he'd dug up, hands quickly covering his mouth and nose. This was absolutely disgusting. He'd followed someone he barely knew out into the woods dig up a dead body in a garbage bag. An unassuming garbage bag! That's what serial killers did! He was completely frozen in place, starring at the bag and trying to block the smell from assaulting his senses. The last thing he wanted to do was touch it. But it was obvious that some higher power hated him because she asked him to do just that. It was pretty much an order. His eyes frantically darted between the garbage bag and the girl holding it. The decision he made pretty much came down to whether or not he would end up in that bag too if he high tailed it.
That choice was crystal clear as he reached went to help her. "Okay..." he said breathlessly, taking the other end of the bag. Topher's face twisted in disgust when he could actually feel someone in there. The realization close to making him drop the bag, wish her the best of luck and run as fast as he could until this nightmare was over.
And yet there he was, cradling a dead body in his arms. This entire situation just felt so fundamentally wrong.
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Posted: Thu Dec 24, 2009 1:24 am
It didn't help that there were flies. There were lots of flies. Obviously they were getting into the bag somehow. Hopefully it wouldn't rip like an overladen shopping bag and -- deposit its contents on the ground. In that case, Topher would probably be sick. This was not exactly the glorious comeback that he'd expected as second-in-command, as Taurus.
They carried it between them like a prize, the smell making Topher gag most of the way. As for Hero, her face was like a stone -- grim-mouthed, looking like nothing, feeling like nothing, the empty Captain. Empty of emotion. There should have been some indication that carrying Jude Lawson's dead body meant something aside from wanting to throw up -- some misery, some hate. But there was nothing, and they carried it the long, long way back to the second gymnasium -- only to find, thank God, that there were people outside. Topher set down the body. Hero hauled it up now.
Now they were all there.
Including the dead one.
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