They Left Four Dying - Chapter 5
There was something wrong.
To state that something was "wrong" in the midst of the hell that had rained upon their little mountain town within 72 hours was moot, but the anomaly amidst the chaos in front of them stood out glaringly in Stan's sharp eyes. As he lowered his AK-47 assault rifle to better identify the fresh new challenger that stood a short distance away from them, a strong sense of trepidation arose in the depths of the adrenaline coursing through his veins. He vaguely remembered something that Kyle had said back in Jimbo's Guns.
"OI! STAN! WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING!"
The violent shout shook Stan out of his dumbfounded analysis, and he narrowly avoided getting grazed by a few dirty dead hands. The earlier experience of being clawed at by a she-devil had struck a thunderous chord in Stan's heart, and he felt as though he were running on pure adrenaline whenever he heard the gasping sounds of zombies coming from afar, the slightest sight or sound of something abnormal triggering an unnaturally animalistic sixth sense in the boy. It was his body's way of protecting him by revving him up to fight at a hundred percent body-engine capacity, and as Stan sent deadly rounds flying into heads with stunning accuracy, he silently thanked the wounds that had been inflicted on him (before taking it back. Getting sliced by claws seriously hurt like a bitch.)
Cartman didn't pause his unbroken bursts of shotgun rounds despite his angry outburst, his trigger-happy fingers beating out slugs of buckshot at the horde of infected at a constant, vehement rhythm. His new shotgun, as everyone could tell from the smoke that was occasionally rising up from its side, was getting quite a workout. There was no denying that Cartman had a little bit of gun-lust, but this time, in the midst of a hoard of zombie-wild-game, even Kyle wasn't complaining. He had gotten used to the reloading mechanism of his shotgun, and slid fresh shells into the weapon at almost twice the speed than he had done before.
Standing directly behind him was Kenny, the hood of his orange parka off his head as he wielded the sniper rifle like he was born to brandish the weapon, firing alarmingly accurate shots and blowing up heads into the seemingly endless horde that ran hungrily towards the group. No one bothered to mention that sniper rifles weren't exactly designed to be used at short range since Kenny had proven that he was more than capable of firing them at the hip, the rifle pressed against his side. When coupled with Kenny's semi-automatic in his other hand, the guns made the skilful dirty-blonde boy practically invincible.
Finally, there was Kyle. Sweet, once-wouldn't-hurt-a-fly Kyle who gripped on tightly to a duo of handguns, a mortified look plastered on his face as though the pistols were burning his skin. Twenty-four hours ago, the rest in their group would have attributed this to weakness, but as all of them had a chance to test out the insane recoil when firing with a Magnum variant that Kenny had called "the most powerful handgun in the world", they already knew that it was a massive undertaking to fire it with two hands, let alone one. Even Cartman had to admit (after firing Kyle's handgun once and nearly falling over in shock as the gun jumped itself out of his hand) that Kyle was stronger than he looked.
There didn't seem to be anyone else, aside from the four fighting warriors, still alive in the whole of South Park.
Realising that a couple of infected were getting alarmingly close, Stan growled as he shoved his rifle outwards, pushing a group of three infected that had reached his front to the ground. Finishing two off with a shower of rounds, he drove his rifle butt downwards into the skull of the third, a satisfying squelch filling the air as the zombie's corrupted brains collapsed inwards. Just as Stan was about to look upwards for the unknown infected again, something happened that made his blood run cold with fear and alarm.
The unusual zombie opened its mouth and whipped out a tongue that seemed far too long to fit in its mouth in the direction of the group of four. The fifth appendage traveled at such an alarming speed that Stan didn't have any time to react, the course of action hindered further by the absurdity of the zombie's attack. The tongue hit its mark and rapidly moved like a snake, wrapping around its target's torso and ensnarling his arms. Kyle screamed bloody murder as the zombie retracted its tongue, dragging him against the hard ground in its direction, his guns still clutched tightly in his hands, but unable to be used for aiming and firing at whatever was trying to kidnap him.
"WHAT THE FUCK!"
Stan's eyes were bulging out of their sockets.
"Shit! Kyle!"
Making a mad dash away from Cartman and Kenny who were still busy fending off the horde of infected, Stan simultaneously raised his rifle in the direction of the mutated zombie, ready to put it out like a light. As he pushed firmly against the trigger, he heard a hollow 'click', the empty rifle's chamber echoing with morbid finality.
"Fuck…FUCK!"
The tongue was dragging Kyle away at a speed that was frighteningly fast, Stan's movement also hindered by the abundance of corpses strewn at his feet. Gritting his teeth as he imagined a fresh batch of raw adrenaline flooding through his veins, Stan picked up the pace, somehow ignoring the lactic acid buildup in his tired legs. As he gained on his struggling best friend, who was visibly wincing at contact with the hard ground, Stan unstrapped a machete that he had picked up earlier from his side, swiping the blade in a single arc above Kyle's head, the tongue giving way and sending Kyle crashing into the ground writhing in pain and shock.
He wasn't done yet.
In retrospect, Stan could have easily realised that without a tongue to lasso people with, the zombie was practically defenceless and was no longer worth his time. However, an unfamiliar bloodlust and rage filled his bones, aided by the thought that Kyle had nearly been captured by one of the disgusting things. Yelling in fury, Stan raced up to the zombie, held his breath to avoid inhaling the strange smoky fumes that surrounded it, and with inhuman speed, sliced its head off with the skill of a master of blades.
That last bit was somewhat exaggerated, but Stan more than deserved it with his outlandish display of heroism.
Kyle sat there on the ground, a little shaken up by the whole thing, his eyes widened from Stan's sudden supposed mastery of the art of machete wielding.
"Shit...thanks, Stan. That was a smoker, I think. The ones with the abnormally long-LOOK OUT!"
Stan reeled back at the sound of Kyle shouting, and yelled out in shock as a tiny zombie hopped onto his back, crawled its way up towards his head, and covered his eyes with its gangly long limbs, its legs tucked under his armpits and rendering his arms unable to move, the machete in his hands falling to the ground. It was a truly terrifying thing, being suddenly ambushed by a jockey, and Kyle's back-humping metaphor from earlier was definitely not helping as Stan shrieked like a girl as the zombie tried to steer him further away from Kyle and into more infected that were coming their way.
Swearing under his breath, Kyle picked himself up from the ground, and quickly realising a potentially fatal mistake before it happened, holstered the Magnum. Even aiming properly and shooting the zombie straddling his friend's back would drive the round clear into Stan's body, possibly killing him. There were sometimes problems with limitless bullet power. Instead, Kyle raised his Desert Eagle, and, all the while knowing that a single misplaced shot could still wound or kill his struggling friend, he took a deep calming breath and lined his dominant eye up with the deadly pistol, forcing his mind to not panic.
He then exhaled slowly, and fired.
The single round drove itself into the zombie's skull and disintegrated upon impact with its corrupted brains, blowing the jockey's head clear off its shoulders and leaving Stan, though showered with zombie brains and blood, otherwise unharmed. Stan shuddered a little as he practically threw the jockey's corpse off him and raced back to Kyle, his legs still a little shaky from the fright he had just experienced.
"God dammit...that was some good aiming, Kyle."
The sound of shotgun popping caught their attention, and the two boys turned around, their eyes meeting Cartman and Kenny, who had finished fighting off the attacking horde and were jogging in their direction, cleaning up the few remaining staggered monsters in front of Stan and Kyle. Cartman was looking a tad out of breath after the attack, and his ammunition pouch looked significantly lighter than it had been before, while Kenny looked practically unaffected as he mumbled for the rest of them to watch his back as he squatted down to dislodge a round that had jammed itself in his FN SCAR assault rifle.
"I saw what happened from the corner of my eye, but Kenny and I were a little busy ourselves. Right after you guys separated from us we got ambushed by another goddamned hunter."
"...Sorry about that."
"Don't apologise, Jew. I don't think any of us expected a whole lot of tongue, and at least we temporarily separated in pairs, so we could look after each other. What the hell was that one, by the way?"
Kyle stood up and kicked at the "tongue" that had captured him, now practically a useless hunk of diseased meat.
"That was the smoker I talked about. It's dangerous...I think it was designed to pick people off and separate them from groups. You guys might have missed it, but Stan got ridden by a jockey immediately after that-"
"It sucks, guys. Really...you don't want to experience what I just did."
"-but I got rid of the thing before he could drive Stan into real danger. If any of us had been isolated...that'd really be the end of us."
"Great. Just…great."
If an artist-in-residence had been stationed in South Park at that point of time just for the sake of capturing images of film-worthy cataclysmic moments, the moment that the four boys were experiencing at that time, with a huge, dramatic backdrop of a sunset, shophouses, Stark's Pond, and countless dead bodies strewn across the ground, would have been the perfect picture for a work titled "Despair". It was clear to all four subjects that they had not expected the sheer craziness of being ambushed every fifteen minutes by a new hoard of zombies, and their facial expressions were expressing said despair perfectly. Kenny, legs tired, ignored the blood on the streets and sat down in the middle of the road, quietly poking at his jammed round with a swiss army knife and not saying a word. Kyle stared at Kenny working, absent-mindedly kicking the severed tongue that had ensnarled him, an expression of frustration painted on his face. Cartman silently placed his fingers into his ammunition pouch and counted his remaining shells, staring down at the ground and looking uncharacteristically lost.
Out of all four of them, Stan easily had the most to be depressed about. The other three boys had sustained minor injuries, but he was the one who had sustained wounds that were potentially life-threatening, and though he had remained quiet about it for the sake of not alarming his friends, every step he had taken from Jimbo's Guns had brought a surprising amount of strain to his already weakened body. Kyle couldn't even tell Stan if any of the wounds that he had stitched up would scar, and the trauma of what had happened was still acting on his mind as flinched at every isolated sound he heard.
However, against all explainable reasons, Stan took in his friend's upset visages, sighed loudly, and spoke.
"Kenny, once you're done with that, we should go. Nightfall's about to come in about an hour or so, and we should find somewhere to stay for the night, preferably some place where we can stock up on food and water. Heads up, guys. I know this is tough, and there are still tons of zombies around wanting to chew us up...but we're all still alive, and we're all still together. That's what matters."
All three boys looked at their abnormally optimistic friend as they let him say his piece.
"We're still quite a distance from Denver, but we're going to take this one step at a time. We already know that there's no other way to do things here in an unpredictable redneck town like this one, and look at us. We're all almost eighteen and we're survived through the impossible together. Mutant guinea pigs, war with Canada, puberty-"
"Ugh."
"This is just...one more adventure. One last adventure that we'll ever have in freaking South Park. I say we do our best to survive through this, and once we hit the expressway we can all flip this damned town the bird together as fucking badasses. What do you say?"
Stan always had an innate ability to convince people of anything, and even in the midst of hell on earth he had proven himself to be a fantastic orator, small smiles already on his friends' faces. Cartman caught himself smiling, then immediately tried to pass it off as an itchy feeling on his nose before snorting halfheartedly.
"That was way too gay, Marsh."
Stan grinned. Saying that something was gay was Cartman's way of saying that he was okay. And based on Kyle's friendly shoulder punch and Kenny rising his feet with renewed vigour, they were fine as well. Kenny clapped a hand on Stan's shoulder before pointing in one direction, momentarily taking back control of the situation for the sake of making a new suggestion.
"The supermarket. We can camp over there for tonight. It's not far away, and though fleeing survivors would probably have raided the shelves already, there still might be some food and water left."
Everyone nodded their heads in agreement, and they set off, refuelled by another successful battle and well-meant words.
They reached the supermarket barely fifteen minutes before darkness hit South Park. For the first time in a long time, the car park was completely void of vehicles, the seventy-two hours of cataclysm having brought scary desolation to their little town in an instant. The boys found the glass door to the entrance of the supermarket smashed into tiny shards, and after breaking it a little more to allow their largest member to enter the building safely (Kyle couldn't resist making a fat joke, which Cartman cuffed him on the head for in order to substitute for yelling, which might have drawn straggling zombies to them), they lowered their weapons after doing a quick visual scan of the area, breathing a sigh of relief at what looked like a deserted supermarket.
Kenny, however, kept his smallest weapon, his deadly magnum, up. He turned and whispered to his friends.
"This place is huge, unlike Jimbo's Guns. We should physically go and check every corner to make sure nothing's inside."
The three nodded and reequipped their guns.
Suddenly, there was a loud bang from the inside of the supermarket, and the intact glass wall that was directly behind them shattered a split second later, the glass falling towards them as dangerous projectiles. Raising their large guns shielded them from most of the debris, but Kyle and Cartman winced as their skins were pricked by the falling shards. Kenny's eyes widened instantly, and he grabbed Stan, who was standing in front of him, by his shoulder and pulled the indignant boy to the ground, his head spinning to meet Kyle and Cartman's surprised eyes in anxiousness.
"Fucking get down, you two!"
The two looked perplexed, but did as they were told. Kenny's words proved to be pearls of wisdom when barely a second later, a continuous string of desperate shots rang out from the same area, flitting by uncomfortably close to their heads and burying themselves inside the check-out counter that they were hiding behind. The four boys were already accustomed to the sound of their own weapons after three days of fighting vicious monsters, but that was the very first time that any of them had to face down actual guns, and it took the firearm-adjusted ear of Kenny McCormick to instantly recognise that they were taking fire.
"What the fuck...why the fuck is someone shooting at us?!"
"I didn't even know there was anyone else alive besides us-EEP!"
Kyle shrieked girlishly when a round came way too close for comfort and penetrated the area of the counter that was next to his shoulder, Cartman involuntarily placing his hand on Kyle's shoulder and pulling him towards himself to keep him away from the firing, neither Nazi or Jew realising how close they were to each other as Kyle practically buried himself under Cartman's shoulder, whimpering at the close shave.
"Whoever's in there heard us come in, and honestly, everyone who walks in here might as well be a zombie to them."
"What the fuck do we do then?!"
"Only one thing left for us to do, if the guy's panicking and firing indiscriminately. You guys had better start praying that they're not hostile."
"What? Kenny, what the fuck do you-"
Kenny cut Stan off by standing up and shouting as loudly as he could towards the source of the firing, ignoring his friends' fierce hisses and their urgent tugging at his pants leg to get back down into safety.
"Hey! Whoever's in there...we're not zombies, and we're not infected!"
The firing didn't stop, and Kenny winced as a bullet whizzed past his ear, nearly blowing his brains out.
"How the fuck do I know that you're not lying about being infected? Fucking get out of here!"
All four boys stopped short at the sound of the voice. They might not have been perfectly attuned to the sound of gunfire, but that voice, that distinctive, monotonous voice, was one that they had heard as the background to their adolescent soundtrack in way too many occasions to be so easily forgotten. The four boys had lost most friendliness and contact with their childhood friends for a while, but the one who was still the most connected amongst all of them met the owner of said voice nearly weekly on a non-zombified day for football practice. Stan hoisted himself to his feet, shielding Kenny with his own body, and spoke softly but clearly into the sudden silence that had engulfed the supermarket.
"Craig? Is that you?"
There were a few tense seconds of stillness in the air before a lone figure emerged from the shadow-filled supermarket rows, wearing a familiar blue jacket, a slightly askew blue chullo hat with a yellow poof ball on top, and a single pistol clutched firmly in shaking hands. Craig Tucker visibly squinted his eyes and took in the familiar, four-troublemaking sight in front of him, caught sight of his football teammate, and exhaled heavily, lowering the gun and practically collapsing against the shelves.
"Thank God...we thought we were the only ones left."
Kyle and Cartman picked themselves off the ground and all four stepped forward, all feeling relieved at finding someone familiar who was still alive, but also a little disturbed by the bad state that Craig appeared to be in. As they walked closer, they realised that Craig's blue jacket was dirtied with old blood, there was a significantly large bandage wrapped around his right arm, and he wasn't looking bored (which would be typical to Craig), but distressed, evidence that he had also seen much of the horrors that they had encountered on the long path from Mephesto's lab to the South Park supermarket. Stan stepped forward first, being the most familiar with their old classmate.
"Craig...are you okay?"
Craig winced in pain before speaking.
"Yeah...just tired, that's all. Plus one of those fucking asswipe demons got too close, ran straight at me and smashed me into the broken glass wall that you guys probably entered from. I lost more blood than you can imagine...been camping out here for the day."
"That was probably a charger."
"What? Did you say something, Broflovski?"
Kyle visibly paled at being addressed so rudely by their old friend. He had never been particularly close to Craig, but the boy was well-known amongst students in their same grade for being more abrasive with his words and tone than most. Craig's rudeness sparked a loud "EY!" from Cartman, and Kenny stepped forward protectively, growling menacingly at Craig. Stan frowned before glaring at his teammate.
"His name is Kyle, Craig, and you don't have to be so bitchy."
Craig shook his head in exasperation.
"I'm sorry...we've just...it hasn't been the best few days."
All four boys' eyes widened. For Craig to apologise for anything at all was unprecedented. They realised that he must have seen true danger for his personality to shift in such a drastic manner. Kyle then realised something that had blown past their attentions the first time Craig had said it, and he ventured a hesitant question.
"Wait...did you say "we"?"
Right on cue, another person stepped into their row, shaking violently, another handgun seemingly glued to twitchy hands, and the four boys flinched a little as they found themselves staring down the barrel of yet another gun. Craig silently gestured to his companion that it was okay, and as the gun was lowered, the boys spotted long, messy locks of bright blond hair. Cartman instantly groaned as he recognised yet another person from his childhood, and though he had been hoping for somebody who could deal good firepower when needed, it appeared that they were stuck with babysitting somebody who, by his standards, was practically an invalid in the midst of a zombie apocalypse.
The boy blinked quickly as he took hesitant steps towards them. Kyle gasped as he recognised one of his few friends from outside of their group of four, and raced forward to wrap him in a tight embrace, the boy who was even shorter than Kyle yelping a little at the sudden contact, but quickly melting into the hug, biting back tears.
"Tweek...thank fucking God you're okay!"
Author's Note - Transitional chapter, which is inevitable for a fic where most of the scenes involve gun firing and my wild imagination. I was debating with myself about bringing auxiliary characters into the mix, but I figured it'd probably a good idea, as there's only so much descriptions that I can milk out of Stan, Kyle, Kenny and Cartman. How these characters will eventually be used still remains to be seen, but I'm formulating fresh plots as we go about this, so hopefully I'll be able to juggle two more popular South Park characters.
Reviews Appreciated.
~SUITELIFEFAN
