Sorry this chapter was uploaded late. My router broke then the modem broke, leaving totally isolated from the Internet for the last couple of days. Makes me realise just how grumpy I can get without my daily injection of Hetalia. I need hard copies dammit! Luckily for me Word isn't connected to the Internet so I can still do my writing. This chapter should be acceptable if a little belated.

I don't own Hetalia or Homestuck or Soul Eater or any of the mentioned bands, pieces of art, fiction or otherwise.

(Later)
So as I was saying: 14-foot wall of wood and metal with little to no gaps, a destroyed flight of stairs above it and a long drop to reach it. No one in their right mind would chance the jump. Security didn't -although these people are plainly not in their right minds. Perhaps they haven't discovered the ladders on the roof yet or they may be satisfied with shooting through the wood in the hopes a bullet will ricochet into one of our heads- which hasn't happened so far- until by sheer dumb luck they have killed every last one of us using this method and then feel they can try their luck jumping.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised there was a back-up plan. Ten back-up plans actually. How we missed the ten giant ex-mafia/bodyguards/professionally violent fools camped out in the store rooms is a slight mystery to me. Ok so we were afraid to go back to the boxes knowing full well they contain the remains (probably bullet ridden and rotting) of the teachers, the kitchen staff and the portion of the doctors from the med bay who didn't want to murder children. Still you'd think one of us would have thought to check, even if it was only briefly.

We paid dearly for our lack of foresight. Don't get me wrong! It could have been thousands and thousands of times worse! It pains me to say this… the loss of Gio Vargas is trivial compared to what we could have lost. He had no invaluable skills. He wasn't a doctor. He wasn't a mechanic. He wasn't a navigator or a negotiator or a killer or strong or good with his fists or good with guns or useful at all in this situation. Sure he was motivated and generally cheerful… but he was also expendable. Not as a person, just as a tool. I will miss him badly and Ven will miss him terribly, but on the whole the group can do without him. If we had to lose someone on that day I am glad it was someone like Gio, on whom our survival is not heavily reliant. Now if we had lost Sadie or Suzy? Losing either one of them would spell disaster.

Having jerked away from Sadie's hand, Hera moved away to check on Lili. She was doubled up in her cousin's arms, weak from a sudden attack of 'disambiguation' because her body had just remembered she used to have an arm that should have been in incredible amounts of pain.

"Can you do anything for her?" asked Luddie.

Sadie patted her gently on the back "'Fraid not. We haven't got the facilities...and I don't think there is an effective treatment for disambiguation. Allah! I wish I could do this damn doctor thing properly! She needs physiotherapy…oh fuck it I can find some basic exercises in the books." referring to the med bay library he has been relying on heavily for some of the major cases.

Without a word of explanation, he stood up and crushed the skull of one of the personnel with a few hard stomps. As he worked on the next skull he grunted: "I'm making sure they don't get back up."

My job with the semi had already made sure they wouldn't be getting up anytime soon, but we let him do it. By the time he finished the scene reminded me of three eggs broken on the ground with trails of yolk and whites inching away in thick runs

Ok I had to stop for a moment. The egg comparison got grosser than I am prepared to deal with right now.

There were screams all around. The few moments our exchange had taken were more than we could afford to lose. While Sadie took care of bodies, I waited on edge, expecting a flood of zombies at any moment. I knew before too long it would occur to one of the bastards to let some of the eager crowd outside inside. If that clever bastard then holed up in a safe spot s/he could let the deadskys do their work and then emerge to shoot it when we were all dead, disassemble the barrier and end up victorious in the Battle for World Academy.
(shut up me, don't name the fight stupid stuff! This is real life not Lord of the Rings you ass).

Less than a minute after I had the idea a deadsky tore around the corner. The deadsky rushed within 5 feet of Hera before Luddie whipped out a pistol from whence I know not and blew its shoulder apart, slowing it down. His hands were shaking. As Hera retreated to safety, I saw him take a deep, steadying breath. A cold type of flint entered his eyes. I could see him pushing aside his fear, becoming the killer again and…plugging the deadsky through its left eye. It fell roughly a foot and a half in front of him. Needless to say he got a kick from Lili for taking so long to hit his target.

We found Liz a short while later, using her full weight against a closet door to cram another of our undead visitors inside. Flesh hung from her leg in ribbons, blood poured as if being tipped from a pitcher and yet somehow she had managed to share her full weight on the leg and was making good progress against the deadsky who definitely did not want to be shut up in the closet. A hand clawed at the air above her head. This arm was severed and lay twitching on the floor after Luddie came to her aid and together they gave one last huge push.
"Now that's not normal." Sadie carefully prodded the arm with his foot "I wonder if this is the typical headless-chicken deal or if detached body parts can continue functioning even without the brain controlling and supporting it?"

"Science it later!" I said and dashed off. Don't ask me where I was going. I just wanted to find Kiku.

As luck would have it that is exactly who I bumped into. We almost shot and stabbed each other respectively, then there was an awkward 'oh-thank-god/the Buhhda-he's-alright' hug.

"Do you know what happened?" he asked in short breaths.

"Ivanova! She wanted us to, you know, to give in, like right there right then! She was talking about taking some of us for their ranks and killing the rest, even killing the littles first. We didn't say anything and she kinda…she sorta spoke to someone with a walkie-talkie and the next thing you know I have a semi and Hera's covered in brains and oh fuck I can't breathe-"

Accustomed to an occasional lapse in sense I experience, he calmly slapped me across the face and waited for me to pull myself together.

"H-how many have you seen? I killed three. Sadie, he was a total dumbfuck, he literally charged these huge guns and-"

"I've seen one. I ran in the opposite direction."

"Anyone else?"

"Apart from you, no. Wait, there's Doitsu-kun."*

I noticed their quick hug was a lot less awkward. (Why am I worried about this? Shut up Al someone is dead.)

"Where's Ven and the others?"
"Follow the guns." Kiku suggested. "Hera-kun, you have something grey in your hair."

We followed the guns and found most of the others. We arrived just in time to get covered by the innards of a member of the invading force whom Mei refused to take shit from. Luckily I had my mouth shut, so I didn't accidentally eat any…I don't know if I want to relive this you know. I think you can work out for yourself what happened.

There were ten of them and more of us. They wanted it, we needed it. Deadskies were everywhere. Gio got in the way if one of them and he was bitten. There was no time to say goodbye, not even for Ven. He saw it happen from across the room and shot him through the skull twice. I saw Gio crumple and thought it was a stray bullet which supplied me with this maniacal burst of energy that gave me the balls necessary to repeat Sadie's earlier stunt. It ended with the deaths of two more Security personnel at my hands. The rest were taken care of with guns, except for one whose neck was broken when she was kicked in the face by Kiku and Mei simultaneously from opposite directions.

The windows, boarded up, were opened briefly to shove out the corpses of the Security personnel. Gio too. First we wrapped him up in a sheet. Then he went out too, the windows were re-barricaded and I went back to the barrier to inform Ivanova of our survival.

"How was it?" I heard her call excitedly.
"Scary as hell you sick fuck. We're all alive by the way," I lied "They're not. I wish you'd hidden with them. Kiku really was eager to show you his roundhouse kick. So are you gonna say something? Have you got anyone else waiting for us or what that the only back-up plan? YO! YOU'RE BEING ADDRESSED! COMMON COURTERSY DEMANDS YOU RESPOND!"

She hasn't yet.

"Do you want to know your blood type?"
I was busy staring at Liz and Ven unconscious in neighbouring beds to realise I was being talked to until he repeated the question. "Sure."

He sat on the edge of Ven's bed, holding two sheets full of text. "Alfred Francis Jones, blood type AB negative. Rarest type. About 4% of the global population have this type of blood. Do the medical world a favour and don't die, you might be the last example in the world."

"My twin must have it too."
"Mattie? You're not identical are you?"
"We look similar enough that you've mistaken him for me all five times you've met."

"He might. I'll test him if I get the chance." he gave me a smile half way between indulgent and hopeful. "We can't let Suzy die either. He's a special snowflake too."

"Is he a highblood like me?" I laughed, but Sadie's face was blank. "Dude. Homestuck. The web comic?"
"Never read it. While you guys were procrastinating on the Internet I was studying."

I booed him and threw a pillow from the next bed "Homestuck is never procrastination!"

"That web comic is the reason you signed your name as 'Karkat Vantas' on the math midterms last year isn't it?"
"I got distracted. Shut up, let me live it down." thankfully he didn't mention the time I signed my history test as 'L the flantabulous genius' and I swear to God that was a genuine mistake.

"What's your blood type? Said the mosquito at the bar."

He smiled at my bad pun. "I'm O negative which means I can donate my blood to anyone." He gestured for a pencil and made a note of this in the margin. "I had better let everyone know who can give a transfusion to whom."

I made a noise like a siren "It's getting dark again, bad Sadie, bad Sadie."

He rolled his eyes "Our world is dark right now." then we spent around half an hour committing blood types to memory.

Realising I could never force Sadie to read Homestuck kinda hit me in a funny way. I don't know why a detail so small has made me so sad, but it feels like a huge loss. It's made me understand how much we have lost in a way. If the world outside is dying in the same way our school has, then we're going to lose much more of human history.

Okay, Homestuck isn't exactly a Da Vinci equivalent, but it is-was- quite a good story, which I'll never finish by the way. The point is we're going to lose the records of human creativity and achievement. The music of Vivaldi and Beethoven and all those other classics, the some of the better contemporaries like the King Blues and Coldplay. All those pieces of art in museums that will surely be ransacked, the Mona Lisa and the Thinker and Whistler's mother. The libraries full of Dickens and Rowling and books that can tell you anything or everything about the world depending on what you're looking for. And the people. The good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly, the kind, the cruel. Most are going to die, if not all of them. If aliens actually do visit our post-apocalyptic Earth, they'll find a smoking ruin populated by desperate scavengers.
then again, the might visit our school if they do I'm going to introduce them to Audrey and say "This is a human."
I'll point to Sadie, who has bags under his eyes the size of quarters from the hours he works now, and say "This is what human perseverance looks like." and to Lili "This is what human courage looks like." and to Liz "This is what human strength looks like." and to Ivan "I don't know what that is or even if it is human, but he's okay too." and to Suzy "This is what human kindness looks like."

Then I would get aboard their spaceship and fly everyone to a safer planet. The spaceship might even belong to some familiar faces. Who knows? A virus that turns people into zombies, a spaceship full of the Homestuck trolls.

Anything could happen. If the spaceship does land then Karkat and I can be mutantbloods together.

*I know it's a pet peeve of peoples' when countries are called by the country titles while they are in other forms, but bearing in mind at this school they were instructed to refer to each other by the names of their countries Kiku would still call Luddie 'Doitsu-kun'.

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