1.1 A State of Decay
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Kaden Ye was having a spectacularly bad year, bad week, bad day. He was still hungry, still tired from driving all night, but even so he had to go out *by himself *into the fucking zombie-infested wilderness to find and fight some fucking plague zombies so that he could rip out some plague samples to culture a cure for his fuckup of a best friend.
Dammit, Einar.
These new freaks, blood zombies that looked like their skin just burnt right off, leaking red blood that would turn people into more like them… regular zeds were bad enough if they could mob you, but every contact with a plague zombie was a risk.
So he had to be quiet, but also fast. He could see regular zombies moaning and shuffling along, and while they wouldn't be much of a danger alone he couldn't afford the noise. He looked back for a moment while he crouched in the underbrush. The Firewatch Fort was up on a small hill, the tall fire watch tower granting a commanding view over the camp grounds. Zeds rarely had a reason to go uphill, but noise might carry.
Below the rise the countryside opened up into a main road with dilapidated junk yards and some small shops and a gas station. He clutched the tire iron in his palms and took a deep breath. Plan was to creep in silently behind the zed – what used to be a woman in a nurse outfit, probably some poor soul who got bit and died tending to the unprepared campers when shit hit the fan - kick behind the knees to bring it down, and the ram the tire iron straight down with all his weight into the bridge of the nose, crushing the skull and pulping the brain before it can even let out a warning moan.
That plan went all to shit when he heard a high-pitched scream from somewhere to the left.
The zombie turned around, its sightless eyes wide open, and it opened its rotting jaw to let out an almost excited moan.
"Dammit, Sayuri!" someone else screamed, a more masculine voice this time. "Get back here!"
"W-what's going on? Stay away! STOP!"
"It's a zombie, it won't listen to you!"
"WHY IS IT FAST?! AAAAH THESE ZOMBIES CAN RUN!"
"GET OFF HER!"
The nurse zombie began to run towards the noise. Kaden hissed. "Fuck this." He sprang up and intercepted the zed with a two-handed swing straight to the face. The zombie bowled over, its legs kicking up dumbly as its head went the other way.
Losing no time, Kaden Ye followed through with hard smashes into its head. Once, twice, three times. Until its head was a caved-in ruin. Blood splattered over his weapon and his own face. He spat out the bitter taste in his mouth.
"HRAAAAH!"
"There's more of them!" some girl shrieked again.
"You have a thing, use it! Just push them over or something!"
"Uh- all right! WATER!"
"Monika, give me a rock!"
"A wh… hang on! Oh wait I get it. EARTH!"
Kaden Ye ran for it, and circled around the hill and some rocky outcrops to see a bunch of teens in tan uniforms slowly being surrounded by zombies. Two of the taller girls stood almost back to back on a boulder rise.
A smaller girl – wait, was that pink hair – was holding a long stick like a spear to fend off a zed. That wouldn't hold for long.
Another girl was on the ground breathing heavily, while a teenage dude smashed in a zombie's face in with a rock. Kaden, his mind honed by seven months of survival in the post-apocalyptic zombie America, put together that he'd just recently wrestled off the zed off the girl.
The other zombies, three of them, were still shuffling uphill.
Kaden reached for the pistol at his belt. He only had enough bullets as what remained in the magazine. The selfish, rational part of his brain told him to just walk away, he had enough problems. The other part reminded him that there was safety in numbers, if he didn't help these kids here then he couldn't live with himself either.
The noise would bring other zeds, but there was no choice. He raised the gun and aimed at the zombie snarling and scrabbling at the little pink-haired girl. The stick she was using to keep it away was pushing into its throat, and stale viscous blood was starting to ooze out the tip. Not feeling any pain, it pushed through, and the stick broke.
The girl closed her eyes and winced like a dumbass.
But before he could pull the trigger, a fire-hose strong column of water came out of nowhere to punch the zed in the chest. The zombie fell down and began rolling downhill, letting out almost confused yelps.
"Natsuki! Over here!"
One of the taller girls, the one with long brown hair in a pigtail with a white bow, crouched down and lowered her hand to help the other girl get up to safety on the rocky point.
And yet the pink-haired girl hesitated to touch that hand.
The other girl grimaced and almost pulled back, then desperately dropped even lower, flat on her chest. "Come on!" she shrieked.
The boy was helping the other girl to her feet. The other zombies now also screamed their mindless attack cry and started charging uphill.
"Right, fuck this!" Kaden Ye sniffed in contempt and began shooting. Bang! Bang! Bang! The first two shots plunked mostly harmlessly into a zed's chest, staggering it long enough for the third to be a headshot to put it down permanently. He silently cursed at the wasted bullets.
"WIND!" the girl with the short light brown hair shouted at the incoming zombies, and pointed her fist at them as if punching the air.
And then out of fucking nowhere, this horizontal tornado came out and pushed at the two zeds, throwing them ass over end downhill too.
The guy with the messy black hair ran downhill, no hesitation whatsoever, with a large rock held on both hands overhead. He smashed their faces in and then looked around frantically for more zeds.
Then their eyes met.
Kaden Ye couldn't explain it. There was just this strange, almost electric feeling – it was like fear, but not. He found himself raising his gun up again, pointing it the teenager.
In response, the kid only raised his left eyebrow like a fucking Vulcan. He could tell the kid was even almost amused by the threat for some reason.
"Oh!" the girl standing by his side gasped. "There's someone." Then she raised her hands up in surrender. "Um. Don't shoot we come in peace?"
What the shit.
Like, seriously, what the shit is going on here?
-.
-.
There was something wrong with these kids.
And he didn't mean just the fact that they apparently had fucking magic. It was just that they were too… clean. They were even wearing uniforms in the middle of fucking nowhere. Who does that? Not in up county Washington State, no way.
Comparing to his wrinkled unwashed, zombie blood-stained clothes and jacket, they had improbably clean clothes and clean faces.
"… Zombies. There are zombies," the one with the long black hair murmured. "WHY are there zombies?"
This was all sorts of fucking impossible.
Everybody should already know about the walking dead by now. Why there are zombies, no one knew – but no one should even be surprised anymore.
"Is this Providence Hills?" the boy asked.
"Yeah?" Kaden Ye replied reflexively. "I think. I'm new here too. Who the fuck are you?"
The girls scowled a little at his rudeness, which really ticked even more his weirdness list. Who the fuck gave a shit about language anymore?
"I guess you could call me… MC. This is Sayuri. That's Natsuki. Yuri. Monika. And you?"
"Like MC Hammer?" Kaden Ye replied. "I'm Kaden Ye, but you can all me Full Pint."
"Like Guinness?"
"Shit, you're the first to get that reference. Most people just think it's because I didn't want to be called Half-Pint anymore." As an Asian-American, that was something he had to deal with in a school full of tall jocks. Even as an adult, now that he had grown to his full height which was actually average, he still had a round almost baby face.
His gaze went off to the distance. He supposed much of the reason he was friends with Einar House was that he was the only other kid that could be bullied more because the others would say "Ay-nar" with a pun on "Anal" and "Anal House."
He blinked at returned to the present. His finger was still outside of the trigger ring in basic firearm safety, but the gun was still only half lowered, pointed at the ground but ready to go up and shoot at any moment. "So what's going on here?"
"Nothing's going on here. We're lost and have nowhere else to go. Could you take us in for a while, sir? We can be useful." MC replied with a cheery grin that made Kaden Ye want to punch his stupid clean teeth in.
Kaden Ye sighed. "I'm… kinda busy right now. You see that tower over there? Go there, they'll take care of you."
"Do you need to kill some more zombies? Let me help."
"Kid, I don't know what's with the…" he raised his left hand and made wiggly motions with his fingers "but I don't need help. You're just going to get in the way. Get out of here, and tell them I sent you." He would deal with all that bullshit later, he had to save his friend first.
The kid turned to look at the girls. Then he nodded.
"All right. No sense risking it. See you back at base, Full Pint!"
-.
-.
Kaden Ye squinted suspiciously at him, then sighed. He moved aside and waved for them to go.
He watched for a bit in case there were any more zombies around, and then descended to where he was told some plague zombies were lurking.
An abandoned car lot with rusting hulks had some of those red-skinned zombies just standing around. One of the plague zombies was a huge fat one. Five of them.
Plague zombies were a hell of a lot more aggressive than regular zeds. But like all zeds they didn't actually see things as such, they reacted to sound and motion. If he could just take them down one by one…
He put aside his tire iron and readied his knife. One stab, straight into the brain.
He crouch-walked past a semi-trailer without a truck and behind the cover of a rusting red pickup. The plague zeds were walking around aimless, moaning and hissing now and then. He waited for one to walk past, and then he lunged.
Since the zombie had a bare upper torso, he didn't have anything convenient to grab to pull it down to the ground. With his left hand he grabbed it by the neck and stabbed straight into its temples with his knife in the right. The zombie crumpled without a sound.
Kaden Ye grimaced and wiped his wet left hand on his pants. The plague zombie just oozed red fluid, and its temperature was hot. How could a dead thing have a fever? If it was decomposing inside, how could it still be so active?
Zeds, man. A year after the outbreak, all of them still made no fucking sense.
He was now out in the open. Kaden Ye froze and tracked the others. Another zombie with its back to him was walking parallel to an old blue bus. Slowly he tracked over it to it.
This one, despite being long dead, somehow managed to preserve its modesty with a tank top and undamaged black jeans.
Something fell out of its chest as he silenced it forever. Some sort of pulsating, globby mass of flesh held together by something like a hot red jelly substance. It was almost like it was breathing, or beating like a heart. He didn't want to touch that shit, no way.
The former Army Doctor (it was unclear which was more AWOL, her or the entire US Army), Dr. Gilliam, had given him plastic bags to collect samples with. Slowly and using some loose sheets of metal, he scooped some Plague Samples into the bag.
Then he heard a sharp hiccupping rasp, and the happy shriek of a plague zombie on the attack. FUCK! He turned around just in time to see a red zombie about to dive onto his back.
"Earth!"
A sheet of rock rose up from the ground and the plague zombie rammed face-first into it. Kaden Ye, scrambled back to his feet and took out his weapon. The other zombies, now alerted, screamed and rushed out of their cover.
MC and Monika peered from behind the chain-link fence surrounding the old car lot.
"What the fuck. I told you kids to go the fuck away!" he hissed at them. He looked back towards the direction of the town and the charging mess of zeds and decided it was the best of times to get the fuck outta there. He scooped up the plague zombie sample and ran.
"I had a feeling," MC said, starting to run uphill as soon as Kaden Ye approached.
"Earth!" Monika half-shouted, pointing her fist at the incoming horde. Several pillars rose from the pebbly soil around the car lot, and the zombies crashed into the barriers tangled with each other. Their noises would attract more zeds, but hopefully they'd linger around each other than following them uphill.
Kaden Ye looked at the girl's hand. She had a golden ring with a bubble center stone. Like a glass marble, there was a design behind the clear bubble.
"Earth…?" he whispered.
They ran uphill and vaulted over a wooden fence. Seeing no zeds on the chase, Kaden Ye paused to take some deep breaths. He squinted again, accusingly at the teenage boy. "You… you didn't even do anything."
MC shrugged.
"That ring… is that *Heart*?"
"Yup."
"What is this Captain Planet bullshit…" Kaden Ye wheezed.
MC smiled gently. "Planet's dead. We're on a mission from Gaia."
"Heh. F-fuck off, you Blues Brother."
-.
-.
Bpen Production presents
DOKI DOKI INTERPLANETARY
ECONOMICS CLUB
1.1 A State of Decay
-.
Dammit, Einar.
These new freaks, blood zombies that looked like their skin just burnt right off, leaking red blood that would turn people into more like them… regular zeds were bad enough if they could mob you, but every contact with a plague zombie was a risk.
So he had to be quiet, but also fast. He could see regular zombies moaning and shuffling along, and while they wouldn't be much of a danger alone he couldn't afford the noise. He looked back for a moment while he crouched in the underbrush. The Firewatch Fort was up on a small hill, the tall fire watch tower granting a commanding view over the camp grounds. Zeds rarely had a reason to go uphill, but noise might carry.
Below the rise the countryside opened up into a main road with dilapidated junk yards and some small shops and a gas station. He clutched the tire iron in his palms and took a deep breath. Plan was to creep in silently behind the zed – what used to be a woman in a nurse outfit, probably some poor soul who got bit and died tending to the unprepared campers when shit hit the fan - kick behind the knees to bring it down, and the ram the tire iron straight down with all his weight into the bridge of the nose, crushing the skull and pulping the brain before it can even let out a warning moan.
That plan went all to shit when he heard a high-pitched scream from somewhere to the left.
The zombie turned around, its sightless eyes wide open, and it opened its rotting jaw to let out an almost excited moan.
"Dammit, Sayuri!" someone else screamed, a more masculine voice this time. "Get back here!"
"W-what's going on? Stay away! STOP!"
"It's a zombie, it won't listen to you!"
"WHY IS IT FAST?! AAAAH THESE ZOMBIES CAN RUN!"
"GET OFF HER!"
The nurse zombie began to run towards the noise. Kaden hissed. "Fuck this." He sprang up and intercepted the zed with a two-handed swing straight to the face. The zombie bowled over, its legs kicking up dumbly as its head went the other way.
Losing no time, Kaden Ye followed through with hard smashes into its head. Once, twice, three times. Until its head was a caved-in ruin. Blood splattered over his weapon and his own face. He spat out the bitter taste in his mouth.
"HRAAAAH!"
"There's more of them!" some girl shrieked again.
"You have a thing, use it! Just push them over or something!"
"Uh- all right! WATER!"
"Monika, give me a rock!"
"A wh… hang on! Oh wait I get it. EARTH!"
Kaden Ye ran for it, and circled around the hill and some rocky outcrops to see a bunch of teens in tan uniforms slowly being surrounded by zombies. Two of the taller girls stood almost back to back on a boulder rise.
A smaller girl – wait, was that pink hair – was holding a long stick like a spear to fend off a zed. That wouldn't hold for long.
Another girl was on the ground breathing heavily, while a teenage dude smashed in a zombie's face in with a rock. Kaden, his mind honed by seven months of survival in the post-apocalyptic zombie America, put together that he'd just recently wrestled off the zed off the girl.
The other zombies, three of them, were still shuffling uphill.
Kaden reached for the pistol at his belt. He only had enough bullets as what remained in the magazine. The selfish, rational part of his brain told him to just walk away, he had enough problems. The other part reminded him that there was safety in numbers, if he didn't help these kids here then he couldn't live with himself either.
The noise would bring other zeds, but there was no choice. He raised the gun and aimed at the zombie snarling and scrabbling at the little pink-haired girl. The stick she was using to keep it away was pushing into its throat, and stale viscous blood was starting to ooze out the tip. Not feeling any pain, it pushed through, and the stick broke.
The girl closed her eyes and winced like a dumbass.
But before he could pull the trigger, a fire-hose strong column of water came out of nowhere to punch the zed in the chest. The zombie fell down and began rolling downhill, letting out almost confused yelps.
"Natsuki! Over here!"
One of the taller girls, the one with long brown hair in a pigtail with a white bow, crouched down and lowered her hand to help the other girl get up to safety on the rocky point.
And yet the pink-haired girl hesitated to touch that hand.
The other girl grimaced and almost pulled back, then desperately dropped even lower, flat on her chest. "Come on!" she shrieked.
The boy was helping the other girl to her feet. The other zombies now also screamed their mindless attack cry and started charging uphill.
"Right, fuck this!" Kaden Ye sniffed in contempt and began shooting. Bang! Bang! Bang! The first two shots plunked mostly harmlessly into a zed's chest, staggering it long enough for the third to be a headshot to put it down permanently. He silently cursed at the wasted bullets.
"WIND!" the girl with the short light brown hair shouted at the incoming zombies, and pointed her fist at them as if punching the air.
And then out of fucking nowhere, this horizontal tornado came out and pushed at the two zeds, throwing them ass over end downhill too.
The guy with the messy black hair ran downhill, no hesitation whatsoever, with a large rock held on both hands overhead. He smashed their faces in and then looked around frantically for more zeds.
Then their eyes met.
Kaden Ye couldn't explain it. There was just this strange, almost electric feeling – it was like fear, but not. He found himself raising his gun up again, pointing it the teenager.
In response, the kid only raised his left eyebrow like a fucking Vulcan. He could tell the kid was even almost amused by the threat for some reason.
"Oh!" the girl standing by his side gasped. "There's someone." Then she raised her hands up in surrender. "Um. Don't shoot we come in peace?"
What the shit.
Like, seriously, what the shit is going on here?
-.
-.
There was something wrong with these kids.
And he didn't mean just the fact that they apparently had fucking magic. It was just that they were too… clean. They were even wearing uniforms in the middle of fucking nowhere. Who does that? Not in up county Washington State, no way.
Comparing to his wrinkled unwashed, zombie blood-stained clothes and jacket, they had improbably clean clothes and clean faces.
"… Zombies. There are zombies," the one with the long black hair murmured. "WHY are there zombies?"
This was all sorts of fucking impossible.
Everybody should already know about the walking dead by now. Why there are zombies, no one knew – but no one should even be surprised anymore.
"Is this Providence Hills?" the boy asked.
"Yeah?" Kaden Ye replied reflexively. "I think. I'm new here too. Who the fuck are you?"
The girls scowled a little at his rudeness, which really ticked even more his weirdness list. Who the fuck gave a shit about language anymore?
"I guess you could call me… MC. This is Sayuri. That's Natsuki. Yuri. Monika. And you?"
"Like MC Hammer?" Kaden Ye replied. "I'm Kaden Ye, but you can all me Full Pint."
"Like Guinness?"
"Shit, you're the first to get that reference. Most people just think it's because I didn't want to be called Half-Pint anymore." As an Asian-American, that was something he had to deal with in a school full of tall jocks. Even as an adult, now that he had grown to his full height which was actually average, he still had a round almost baby face.
His gaze went off to the distance. He supposed much of the reason he was friends with Einar House was that he was the only other kid that could be bullied more because the others would say "Ay-nar" with a pun on "Anal" and "Anal House."
He blinked at returned to the present. His finger was still outside of the trigger ring in basic firearm safety, but the gun was still only half lowered, pointed at the ground but ready to go up and shoot at any moment. "So what's going on here?"
"Nothing's going on here. We're lost and have nowhere else to go. Could you take us in for a while, sir? We can be useful." MC replied with a cheery grin that made Kaden Ye want to punch his stupid clean teeth in.
Kaden Ye sighed. "I'm… kinda busy right now. You see that tower over there? Go there, they'll take care of you."
"Do you need to kill some more zombies? Let me help."
"Kid, I don't know what's with the…" he raised his left hand and made wiggly motions with his fingers "but I don't need help. You're just going to get in the way. Get out of here, and tell them I sent you." He would deal with all that bullshit later, he had to save his friend first.
The kid turned to look at the girls. Then he nodded.
"All right. No sense risking it. See you back at base, Full Pint!"
-.
-.
Kaden Ye squinted suspiciously at him, then sighed. He moved aside and waved for them to go.
He watched for a bit in case there were any more zombies around, and then descended to where he was told some plague zombies were lurking.
An abandoned car lot with rusting hulks had some of those red-skinned zombies just standing around. One of the plague zombies was a huge fat one. Five of them.
Plague zombies were a hell of a lot more aggressive than regular zeds. But like all zeds they didn't actually see things as such, they reacted to sound and motion. If he could just take them down one by one…
He put aside his tire iron and readied his knife. One stab, straight into the brain.
He crouch-walked past a semi-trailer without a truck and behind the cover of a rusting red pickup. The plague zeds were walking around aimless, moaning and hissing now and then. He waited for one to walk past, and then he lunged.
Since the zombie had a bare upper torso, he didn't have anything convenient to grab to pull it down to the ground. With his left hand he grabbed it by the neck and stabbed straight into its temples with his knife in the right. The zombie crumpled without a sound.
Kaden Ye grimaced and wiped his wet left hand on his pants. The plague zombie just oozed red fluid, and its temperature was hot. How could a dead thing have a fever? If it was decomposing inside, how could it still be so active?
Zeds, man. A year after the outbreak, all of them still made no fucking sense.
He was now out in the open. Kaden Ye froze and tracked the others. Another zombie with its back to him was walking parallel to an old blue bus. Slowly he tracked over it to it.
This one, despite being long dead, somehow managed to preserve its modesty with a tank top and undamaged black jeans.
Something fell out of its chest as he silenced it forever. Some sort of pulsating, globby mass of flesh held together by something like a hot red jelly substance. It was almost like it was breathing, or beating like a heart. He didn't want to touch that shit, no way.
Then he heard a sharp hiccupping rasp, and the happy shriek of a plague zombie on the attack. FUCK! He turned around just in time to see a red zombie about to dive onto his back.
"Earth!"
A sheet of rock rose up from the ground and the plague zombie rammed face-first into it. Kaden Ye, scrambled back to his feet and took out his weapon. The other zombies, now alerted, screamed and rushed out of their cover.
MC and Monika peered from behind the chain-link fence surrounding the old car lot.
"What the fuck. I told you kids to go the fuck away!" he hissed at them. He looked back towards the direction of the town and the charging mess of zeds and decided it was the best of times to get the fuck outta there. He scooped up the plague zombie sample and ran.
"I had a feeling," MC said, starting to run uphill as soon as Kaden Ye approached.
"Earth!" Monika half-shouted, pointing her fist at the incoming horde. Several pillars rose from the pebbly soil around the car lot, and the zombies crashed into the barriers tangled with each other. Their noises would attract more zeds, but hopefully they'd linger around each other than following them uphill.
Kaden Ye looked at the girl's hand. She had a golden ring with a bubble center stone. Like a glass marble, there was a design behind the clear bubble.
"Earth…?" he whispered.
They ran uphill and vaulted over a wooden fence. Seeing no zeds on the chase, Kaden Ye paused to take some deep breaths. He squinted again, accusingly at the teenage boy. "You… you didn't even do anything."
MC shrugged.
"That ring… is that *Heart*?"
"Yup."
"What is this Captain Planet bullshit…" Kaden Ye wheezed.
MC smiled gently. "Planet's dead. We're on a mission from Gaia."
"Heh. F-fuck off, you Blues Brother."
-.
-.
Bpen Production presents
DOKI DOKI INTERPLANETARY
ECONOMICS CLUB
1.1 A State of Decay
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