Can someone explain the weird combination of Kill All Your Friends and WTH (by Avril Lavigne) that's stuck in my head? XD
TEENAGERS
We waited for days.
And they dragged. The haunting, lonely days, deprived of excitement and exploration, deprived of undead enemies to take down seemed completely endless, like God was testing our nerves making the time drag slower. If we hadn't been waiting for that window to go on the hunt again, it probably wouldn't have seemed as bad.
The days finally amounted to a week. In that week I had done nothing but go to work at night and watch the news, carefully waiting, hoping, for news of the building. It's pointless, I told myself. It's not important. A few gun shots in an abandoned building; the authorities probably just thought we were random teenagers out having a good time.
But those thoughts did little to calm my mind, for they were immediately followed with, Not so. They know we had a sub-machine gun. And there was the zombie that had fallen through the glass after I shot him. Right as the police arrived.
Can news casters read thoughts? Just as that particular undead entered my mind, the news lady started a new report. And it was about a dead man apparently shot and pushed through an upper window in an abandoned building. The authorities had been unable to locate a corpse, however. (Weird, I thought. It freaking survived?) And they were letting the investigation go, blowing it off as teenagers having fun.
The report continued, but I was dead to the lady's words. They thought we were teenagers. Teenagers! They were blowing us off as angst-ridden, gun-wielding teenagers! I shuddered as I went to refill my cup with coffee. Teenagers scare the living shit out of me.
I was going to call Frank immediately and tell him about the police abandoning their search, but my phone rang just as I lifted it. Toro was calling.
He had heard the same as I had.
So now we were free. It was time to go and capture the living dead.
Our first attempts to capture the living dead were less than fruitful.
I cannot tell you how many times we tried, we worked at it that much. The hard part is avoiding killing them while avoiding dying yourself. I have tasted the fetid breath of the walking dead, its rotting face less than an inch from my own, far too many times to ever be capable of forgetting it. I've also nearly been burned alive. It went something like this:
(Me, running for my life) "I may be about to die, but this is seriously working!" I had nearly reached Frankie's car when I was suddenly outrun by the walking dead. The running dead. It was fast. Faster than I had expected. I was caught.
I knew I was beyond hope the moment I felt its moist hand grasp my shirt. I knew it would capture me. Despite its weak and rotting flesh, it's grip was like iron. It pulled me in with a drawn-out moan. I could hear Frank shouting my name repeatedly, though it hardly registered in my brain that the name belonged to me. I stared into the face of the dead.
I have also far too often experienced the sensation of fetid meat spattering over my face as someone blasted a zombie skull with a bullet. Not a pleasant sensation.
Worse was the fire, the sudden blaze that burst up in front of me. "Frank!" I shouted, grasping the walking dead by the arms, unable to break its grip and grimly waiting for it to release me. Frank was shouting again, but I didn't hear any of his words.
I always thought the dead burn quickly. I have changed my mind. The burning of the dead is one of the slowest operations on the face of the planet. The fires spread across its chest, slow enough for me to study its steady progress. Had my own chest not been so close, the fire wouldn't have mattered to me quite so much. I strained back from its arms, but its grip was tight.
So I stood still as the flames approached, finally roaring down the arms of the walking dead in a great rush. My own arms burned with a smoldering pain.
And then there was nothing left of the dead but ash swirling in small circles in the faint breeze. The warehouse was suddenly silent. Smoke was rising from the blue sleeves of my baseball shirt, black-edged holes revealing burned skin on both my arms. My face and chest were spattered in gore. I looked up at Frankie, who was looking back at me apologetically. "Sorry," he said. "I didn't mean to blow him up."
So yes. That's why it's hard to capture the living dead. Sometimes they capture you. And a lot of times you destroy them before you can successfully incapacitate them.
We tried other ways of capturing them. Matt suggested we could use torches and surround them. Yeah, not so much. The living dead are not actually afraid of fire. I don't think they have instincts telling them that fire is, like, the only thing that can harm them and that they should stay away. No. The first zombie practically walked into the torch Matt was holding in its eagerness to get to him. I shot it before it could reach him.
Frank wanted to try fire extinguishers. That didn't work either. The result was Frank running for his life and having to explain to his boss later why the fire extinguisher was missing from their workplace.
So what is the best way to capture the walking dead?
The way you always capture someone before throwing them in your trunk. Duct tape.
"Would somebody please remind me why this is a good idea?" Bert asked with a slightly frantic note to his usually calm voice.
"Come on, Bert, no zombie would want to eat you," Frank promised, trying to find the end of a roll of duct tape. "You're too meager, and too wasted."
"Well I think we should use you, no zombie would want you. You're too short."
That struck a nerve.
"I am not short! I'm five foot four, I'm NOT SHORT!"
"Okay, Frank," I said, trying to calm him down (without success) as I went to retrieve the duct tape he had just dropped before chasing after Bert. Poor Bert.
"Stop messing around, I see one," said Toro sternly.
Frank and Bert froze in their tracks and we all stared, silent and still, at the walking dead just across the room.
We were in a new part of the abandoned building downtown, a large room similar to the storage room by the loading dock. We were gathered near the double doors on one side. The dark shadowy form of one of the walking dead could just be discerned on the other side near the opposite doorway. The shadows were deep, and our only proof of its presence came in small movements of deeper shadow and the inevitable shuffling made by long-dead feet.
"Okay," I whispered. "We need to go. Frankā¦"
Frank came towards me, reaching for the duct tape, while Bert walked with casual ease towards the center of the room, taking no trouble to disguise his movements. The living dead looked up.
"Try not to get bitten," Mikey warned me.
"Actually," said Toro, looking up from his gun sights. "It would be fairly interesting to see what happens to a wound inflicted by the walking dead."
I gave him a hard look.
"Though not one inflicted upon you," he amended, returning to the sights of his gun. "But Gerard, if you have to get bitten, I'd rather it was in the arm. Easy access for examination."
"I'll try to remember that," I promised sarcastically.
Frank grasped the end of the duct tape and pulled several feet of tape free. "Let's move," he whispered.
The walking dead had seen Bert. It was hard not to. I was staring at him, watching him make a scene as only Bert could. He wasn't doing anything absurd, just walking. He drew the eyes without even trying.
Frank and I stepped around him just as the walking dead was growing near, lifting the duct tape over his head and then dropping it low. About wrist level.
And then we were behind the walking dead, which at this point was no longer walking, not understanding, not comprehending, what was happening. Which gave us time to entrap him more completely. In moments we had his arms tight. He was roaring in frustration. Bert snatched a piece of our duct tape and smacked it over its mouth.
We bound its legs and carried it out into the storage area below the loading dock. Then Toro backed his car carefully down the incline. He popped the trunk and got out to help us.
After several moments of heaving and wrestling with dead bloated weight, we had the walking dead in the trunk. We all stood still around the car, suddenly comprehending our success. We had done it. We had captured one of the walking dead.
"Well done, boys," Toro said after a moment. "Let's go lock it in the basement."
In this way, we managed to capture three of the walking dead and lock them in separate cages in Frank and Mikey's basement. Frank and Mikey's basement was now officially the creepiest basement in the city. Toro was given unlimited access to that basement, and therefore a set of spare keys to the house.
And that was how we captured the walking dead.
This chapter is kind of uninteresting. I'm sorry. I've been trying to psyche myself up for writing this again by watching lots of older MCR videos and stuff. What I have succeeded in doing is obsessing myself with Bert McCracken. And the words "haute couture." ;) So I may soon publish a crack fic of stuff that I wrote in this fic originally, but that grew into it's own story that no longer belongs with this fic. I will say only that it is ridiculous, it has more Bert than this one, and there are droids. Like battle droids from Star Wars. XD
Anybody else think Bert's Killjoy name should be Wax Butterfly?
What I must do, as soon as I go back home (I'm visiting my aunt for a week right now), is roleplay with my brothers. That is exactly how I came up with all of the craziness that's in WE TRY TO GET ARRESTED, the jail scene (a lot of the roleplaying didn't get used, but the two guys in Mikey's cell are my brothers! :P ), and INVISIBLE SQUADRONS & CURES FOR INSANITY. My brothers also came up with the idea of a zombie throwing it's arm at Mikey and Frank XD The scenes and incidents are mostly my ideas, but I wouldn't come up with the details without the inspiration from my brothers.
*looks up at what she just wrote* Whoaaa...okay, that was a longer-than-usual author's note. D: Okay. I will go back to hyping myself up and trying to think of more scenes for you guys. Hopefully my next update will be BETTER.
Stay loud and just don't let go,
xoxo,
Rebel Rose
who wants nothing better than to lend some comfort to the eternally-pained Wax Butterfly. :)
