One more Chapter before I'm off to London for 10 days. I was a little reluctant at first, because I like to have the next chapter done before uploading a new one, and I haven't even started chapter 14 yet. But it doesn't matter, I'll work something out :I
Chapter 13 λ
"So Freeman passed through this place? All alone? At night?" Adrian asks, staring through a grimy window at a wide road below, were a zombie or two stagger across every so often. "Man, do I pity him."
Basil, busily scrubbing Walt's blood out of his shirt, doesn't answer.
After introducing himself as Father Grigori, the strange priest led them through Ravenholm, blasting zombies' heads off left and right whilst quoting scripture. And laughing. Eventually they came to large wooden house close to a church.
The ground-floor is protected by all kinds of bizarre traps, and on the first floor the rooms had been converted to workshops where new traps lie about in various stages of construction.
Father Grigori had shown them to the attic, which looks like it had previously been used as some kind of emergency hospital. The loft is long and rectangular, with a few covered-up windows and a couple of little bulbs dangling from the ceiling for light. Several radiators along the walls help to keep the temperature from inching towards zero, like it's doing outside.
A wooden divider sections off a quarter of the space. Adrian and Basil are in the larger space, in which two rows of beds dominate the longest walls, and a few large cupboards are jammed in wherever they fit. On the other side of the divider is a smaller room with only two beds. Sylvia found medical supplies in the closets, and is taking care of Walt in the smaller ward.
"Wonder what happened to the others." He continues. "I hope they're okay."
"'Course they are. You heard Blair, they can handle themselves." Basil replies, hanging his shirt on a radiator to dry.
"Yeah, I guess. Where is Blair anyway?"
Basil shrugs. "Maybe he went to dig himself an underground bunker. Who knows?" He flops down on the closest bed, fingers laced beneath his head. The door swings open and Sylvia enters, striding down the aisle to the supply closet. Wordlessly, she digs through for whatever it is she's looking for.
"So, uh, Walt doin' okay?" Adrian asks to break the silence.
She grabs a stack of medkits and crosses the room again, glancing at Adrian with a look of severe disgust. "He's alive." She says slowly, with a look that seems to add 'no thanks to you'. She leaves without saying another word.
"What's her problem?" Adrian asks when the door is undoubtedly closed.
"Oh, you know." Basil sits up, pulls off his shoes and lies back down.
"What? No, I don't know. But if you do, don't hesitate to share."
"Well, she was just telling me how it was a bad idea for your team to bring you."
"Why?" He splutters stupidly.
"Because the-- and I'm quoting here-- 'newb' is going to 'get us all killed'. Or something. Look, it's dumb, forget about it. You haven't got anybody killed yet, have you? No, then you're doing fine."
Adrian crosses his arms and sits on the edge of a bed. "So it was fine when it was her boyfriend who was holding us back."
"Just forget about it."
"Oh no, it didn't matter when it was Walt who almost got you killed. Did you see how close that zombie was to ripping your head off?"
"I was actually trying to not think about that." Basil says, unconsciously scratching the back of his head. "Where're you goin'?"
"To find Father Grigori." Adrian says without elaborating. Basil turns onto his side, closing his eyes to try and get to sleep, despite it only being early-afternoon.
Adrian descends the rickety attic steps, arriving at the end of a long, wide corridor with doors on either side. He stops, realising that he doesn't actually know where the eccentric priest is. A few metres down the hall, one of the doors is open, and he can hear the sound of someone pottering around inside. Or something, Adrian reminds himself. This place is full of headcrabs. He arms himself with a chair, which had been standing innocently to one side, and creeps to the open doorway. He peeks inside. The room is for storage, not a workshop, and is full of boxes and crates piled haphazardly with sheets over them.
Blair ducks as a chair flies over his head.
"Sorry, thought you were a headcrab." Adrian says, curiously lifting the edge of a sheet from a box. "What're you doing?"
Adrian expects Blair launch into some longwinded lecture on the dangers of chair-tossing, but instead, the soldier says, "Looking for supplies."
"Ah. Found anything good?"
Blair stares at Adrian, not well skilled in the art of small talk.
"Well, uh, I'll just be, uh, going then." Adrian stalks out of the room. He looks through the mesh fixed over large window at the end of the hall. A little explosion goes off in the graveyard around the church, and Adrian hears the characteristic laugh. He goes down the steps cautiously, taking a submachine-gun from a cupboard crammed with various types of guns.
He goes through the back door, which leads to a tiny alley less likely to be zombie-infested, and is instantly hit by a wall of cold. The alley leads right up to the cemetery wall, with a ladder placed against it. He shivers, holds the weapon under his arm and climbs the ladder, then falls the two metres from the top of the wall on the other side. Gets up, dusting himself off. He picks up the gun and makes his way towards the manic laughter.
He finds Father Grigori at the heart of the cemetery, piling up a horde of dead zombies for a bonfire, explaining why he hadn't run into any on his way over.
"Hello Brother! I see you made it in one piece." Father Grigori cackles.
"Yeah, you're pretty thorough." Adrian answers.
Father Grigori goes back to stacking wood around the corpses. After a while, he looks up to see Adrian still standing there. "You seem troubled, brother."
"Well, I got this problem. Seeing as I can't aim worth a damn--"
"Brother."
"Sorry uh, worth a… uhm… seeing as I can't aim to save my life, I was wondering if you had anything that doesn't need any directing. Because this—" Adrian holds up the SMG. "—is good and all, but if you just pull the trigger and swing it about the ammo tends to run out quick, plus then there's also the possibility of hitting someone on our side, and then there's the--"
"I see your problem brother, but the trouble is that I have already given away my only shotgun." Father Grigori says apologetically. "But wait here, and I will see what the lord will provide." He turns and enters a little stone crypt, returning a while later with a long, complicated-looking gun. He offers the gun to Adrian, who takes it half-heartedly. "It is not exactly what you requested, but short of giving you my own Annabelle there is not much I can do."
Adrian inspects the gun, as not-quite-dead zombie laying in the pile regains consciousness, and swipes its mangled claws at Father Grigori. "It is not me you want, but the light that shines through me!" He yells, blasting its head off with his dear Annabelle. It looks complex, with lots of tubes and bits of wood. Adrian glumly thanks the father, who tells him to "Tread lightly, for this is hallowed ground!"
He lightly treads back to the wall, climbs over, and sneaks into the wooden house. On the way back to the loft, he peeks in the storage room; Blair isn't there anymore. He shrugs and climbs the wooden stairs.
By the time he gets back, Basil is already snoring softly. Adrian places the guns on the bed where he had dumped his pack, and lies down on next one. He closes his eyes and tries to get some sleep, but can't due to an irritating inability to sleep when the sun's still up. He tosses and turns, and eventually sits up.
Adrian stares around the room, then picks up his new gun, yanks the protective mesh off the window overlooking the busy road, and takes aim at a zombie through the sophisticated scope-thingy. He pulls the trigger. Nothing happens. He tries to figure out what's wrong, then carefully places the gun back on the bed after almost dropping it out of the window. He picks up his old SMG instead, and takes aim through the crosshairs. He squeezes the trigger, looks at the gun stupidly, tugs off the safety catch and squeezes the trigger again.
An inconveniently placed barrel of unspecified explosive material blows up two metres away from the zombie, taking a shop-front and many of the windows from the nearest buildings with it. He hears Basil snort loudly and awaken with a start.
"Whassgoin'on?" He yells, glancing around the room with blind eyes.
Adrian, temporarily blind for different reasons, stumbles away from the window. Sylvia comes running in, then stops abruptly in the door way. She glares at him, then stomps back to the smaller ward, slamming the door behind her.
Basil swings his legs over the side of the bed, rubbing his eyes, and yawns. "What time is it?" He asks.
"You've been asleep for all of half an hour." Adrian retorts, turning back to the window to aim almost at a zombie.
Basil gets up, stretching, and strolls around the room. "What's this?" He asks in an awed voice, picking up the new gun. He turns it over in his hands, looking at it from every angle.
"Meh, Grigori gave it to me, but it doesn't work." Adrian shrugs as yet another zombie hobbles away with its life. He hears little clicks from the gun as his friend does something complicated with the various catches. Basil then stands in front of the window, effectively pushing Adrian out of the way, takes aim, and fires. With an almighty boom, a little headcrab hopping across the road falls dead mid-leap.
"It's a little loud…" Basil mutters, scrutinising the weapon.
"I didn't know you could shoot like that." Adrian says coolly, pushing Basil out of the way and aiming at a zombie in the street below. It hobbles out of sight as another, a metre away, falls over instead.
"Yeah, me and m'dad used to go hunting at weekends. Wow, this gun takes me back…" Basil stares at the gun wistfully, lost in his memories. Eventually he snaps back, and says, "I'll trade ya' my SMG for it."
"I already have an SMG." Adrian says. "But then again, it is for a friend. And luckily for you, it's too complicated for me. I don't like these fancy guns that do all the work for you, just give me something nice and simple, that's what I like--"
"Thanks." Basil says quickly, shining the wooden handle with the end of his white t-shirt. "Means a lot."
Adrian twists the mesh back over the window and sits down on the edge of his bed, as Basil gives the hunting rifle a touch of the ole' spit-shine. Blair comes trudging up the stairs, carrying a frayed potato sack over his shoulder.
Blair chooses a bunk at random, and empties the sack over it. Bits of old junk and metal fall out, followed by some hand-tools and a large plastic torch. He picks bits randomly and inspects them, sighing angrily every so often.
"What's up?" Adrian asks.
"I found this torch, but no battery." Blair answers, without looking up.
"So you're trying to make one." Adrian says, not quite convinced. Blair doesn't stop working or look up. Adrian gets up and strolls to his backpack, and digs around for the combine battery-pack he had picked up on the way to the church, back in City 17. "How'bout this? Will this work?" He asks, tossing the canister.
Blair looks up just in time to catch it. He turns it over, looking for some kind of label. "I think it will… yeah." He says suspiciously, glancing at Adrian, and trying to figure out why anyone would want to give away something as valuable as a battery. "Er… thanks." He says finally, turning back to his work.
Adrian sits back down, feeling a like some kind of Santa Claus. He twiddles his thumbs for a while, then asks, to the room in general; "What happens next?"
"Eh?" Basil asks.
"Well, we're not gonna hang around here for the rest of our lives, are we?" He says. " 'Cos Grigori's already asked me if I want to be baptized, and I managed to put it off, but eventually he'll remember and--"
"Where d'you want to go?" Blair asks. "We have food here, and relative safety. Grigori is kind of weird but I can live with that, if it means that--"
"I think Adrian's right." Basil says thoughtfully. "We came here on a mission, and just because some things've changed a little, that doesn't mean we should abandon it."
"By 'some things have changed a little', d'you mean the five people who were either shot or captured, assuming they survived a train crash? Is that what you mean?"
"Well, I guess, but we--"
" 'Cos somehow, for some reason, I'm not suddenly tempted to follow in their footsteps!" Blair yells.
"Fine, you stay here!" Basil says. "But I ain't gonna hole up in some dingy town just because some coward decided that he'd rather not risk his own damn neck than fight for the resistance, who saved his life and took him in in the first place."
"I'm not a coward!" Blair shouts back. "I'm just thinking practically. What good are you to the resistance dead?" The two soldiers continue to argue at each other. Adrian, who can see the pros of both arguments, studies his ragged fingernails, the wall, the floor, and his bootlaces.
Comments λ
Whoo, working the Christmas-Spirit right into this chapter :I
Merry Christmas [or the equivalent holiday of your choice]!