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Cerise had noticed so much leftover stuff while she had been scavenging with the old, crotchety professor and the weird, clearly special-needs kid that she figured something ought to be done with it. Everything could be repurposed, and it wasn't like anyone was coming back for it.

The well-stocked janitor's cart was a lucky find. They could always use the cleaning supplies, and the cart itself had already proved itself useful, providing much needed transportation for all of the other stuff she had found. The dry erase board she had managed to balance on top of a projector she had liberated from a classroom made the going a little slow, and she winced as every twitch of the cart's wonky wheels set a box of bells ringing. She was wearing one of the backpacks she had found, two more hanging off of a mop handle.

She paused, immediately tensing, as someone called out to her, releasing her held breath in an annoyed huff as she realized it was just one of the others. Oh. Not only was it one of the others, it was that guy, the one who didn't seem to realize that they were on Elm Street, not Sesame Street.

"Hi," Cerise replied slowly, already looking for a way out. There wasn't really anywhere to go, though, and she was trying hard not to alienate herself from people she never would have bothered acknowledging a month ago. They were all in this together now, she reminded herself. Even the weird ones. "I'm Cerise. Mitchell." She picked one of the clean cloths off of the janitor cart and put it in his hand in lieu of shaking it. "Find anything useful?"

"I got pretty much everything I could fit on the cart," Cerise replied, shrugging. "I don't really know what we're gonna do with these projectors, though. Maybe find a couple of doors that need to be propped open, or something." There, that wasn't so hard. Sure, the kid was weird, but at least he wasn't a zombie.

She came across a broken window and looked thoughtfully over her cart before taking out a couple of the trash bags. She carefully tore them down the seams before nailing them in place over the giant hole in the window.

Cerise watched James stomp the projector into submission with a look of disbelieving bemusement, suddenly very glad there was a cart between them.



"Yeah," she said slowly. "Okay. What did you say you majored in?" She found a window that just wouldn't stay shut and used the handle of the mop to barricade the opening.

Cerise had been busy sliding the dry erase board between the top of a wall across a wide open vent while James had been doing...well, whatever it was he was doing. She had just managed to fasten one of the bells to it--to give them a warning in case someone tried to break through from the other side--when his homemade soda bomb went off. She gasped, startled, as she was suddenly sprayed with fizzy soda and turned her head just enough to glare at him.

"Who," she started, her voice as icy as her eyes were narrow, "in their right mind would let you anywhere near children?!"

"Only every mother's patience," Cerise replied, looking pointedly at the soda dripping from the ceiling. There was another open vent that needed to be patched over, so Cerise opened two of the backpacks, stretched them over the opening, and nailed them in place. "Let me guess, you watched a lot of Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers when you were a kid."

"I mean, you're kinda supposed to grow up at some point," Cerise replied, bending to fasten a bell to the floor next to the hole in the floor. It did nothing to actually cover the hole up, but hopefully whoever approached it would kick the bell and look down at the sound before the stepped in it. Maybe that was counting on too much. "The news is topical, too, y'know, and it doesn't have puppets or whatever on it."

Cerise's eyes narrowed at James as he called her gloomy, as if they could be anything else in their situation. "Excuse you," she snapped, "maybe I'd be less ******** gloomy if the world hadn't turned to s**t around us! We can't all be sunshine and rainbows and--and so goddamn oblivious!"

Actually angry now--and it was nice to feel something other than scared, for once--she picked up the rubber band ball and chucked it at him. Whoever was unfortunate enough to walk down this hallway would either see the blatantly obvious holes in the floor or they could fall right through them for all she cared.