Beast Boy morphed into a leopard and sprinted through the hallways of the tower, taking corners with a leap-bounce off of the walls to maintain speed. His ear was agonizing, but he pushed the pain behind his instincts and kept on.
Starfire kept pace with him as they headed to the roof, neither speaking. The day wasn't even over yet and they'd already been subjected to a dervish of emotional situations. With a mental shrug, he pulled back a bit and allowed Starfire to pull ahead as they came to the stairs. A few corkscrew turns and an opened door thanks to Starfire lead them out to the afternoon sunlight. Without pause, Starfire leaped into the air and streaked towards PS118. Beast Boy flung himself off of the roof and transformed into a bald eagle, allowing the thermal currents coming off of the bay and tower to lift him into the sky. He set out for the warehouse district, quietly thankful that he didn't have to go back to the school.
In the still air it was peaceful. Beast Boy allowed the flying to calm him, eyes sharp on the streets below. Thankfully the citizens of Jump were used to the streets becoming dangerous at a moment's notice and they were largely abandoned. "On second thought," Beast Boy pondered, "maybe that's not such a good thing." Regardless, empty streets meant an easier time picking out any stray zombies...
How weird is your life when that sentence makes sense?
A glint in the streets drew his attention, and the sound of gunfire had him diving to the ground. He banked sharply at the last moment, wings flared to cut his speed, and then returned to his human form. Noting with faint relief that the bandage had not come undone and his wound was not worsened by his transformation, he landed next to a few police officers taking cover behind their patrol cars. "What's the situation?"
It was, perhaps, a mistake to startle them.
One of the younger officers turned and snapped off a shot as he shouted in surprise. Luckily, Beast Boy had processed the motion as a threat, and years of fighting criminals had honed his reaction time. He briefly blipped into a cat, allowing the bullet to pass through empty space, and waited until the officer had been calmed by his partner.
"Beast Boy, thank God! We thought a 419 had breached the barricade again." An older officer had turned to speak with him, pointing the others back towards an improvised barricade of dumpsters. Two unmarked vehicles were parked next to them, preventing the dumpsters from rolling forward when pushed by the zombies. "We have this alley cordoned, but this district is a maze. We're not sure where they keep coming from, but occasionally one just wanders out and towards us. We're all pinned down here and haven't been able to spare anybody to look for holes in the 419 quarantine zone."
The cat flowed back into Beast Boy's form, his injury catching the officer by surprise. "419? Zombies?" he asked for confirmation. The officer nodded. "I'll head back into the sky and look for where this hole is. If I can't plug it I'll report back here, officer."
"Bud. Call me Bud. This here's Gonzo," he gestured towards a swarthy man at the next patrol car, "and Tex," he finished, gesturing to the officer that had shot a round at him. Beast Boy looked at him askance, but he was focused on the barricade, and tensed. Whipping his head around, Beast Boy was just in time to see a quarter-sized hole appear between a zombie's eyes, showering gore out the back of his head. He couldn't help himself.
"Nice shootin', Tex."
The other officers laughed, and Tex scowled a bit, good-naturedly. "That joke never gets old," Gonzo chuckled. "Try being on this side of it," Tex shot back, a smile in his voice at odds with the expression on his face. "Sorry about a minute ago, Beast Boy. Undead horrors from our collective nightmares apparently make me jumpy." The changeling just waved it off.
"No worries," he said. "You guys can call me BB, since we're brothers in arms and all. Thin blue line, right?"
"More like thin green line, now," cracked Gonzo. Beast Boy smiled. He could dig these guys. With a wave, he morphed into a pigeon and made for the rooftops.
Looking down into the warehouse district, he could see that Bud's comment about the streets was pretty accurate. There were a number of meandering streets, blind alleys, and twisting avenues that were laid out without a clear design plan in place. He mentally marked where the "Thin Green Line" was in the mess of boulevards and rusted steel and concrete buildings. He saw other small clusters of officers holding their own positions, coordinating as best they could through their radios. They were spread thin, the topography forcing them to cover dozens of choke points. A shrill scream and the thunder of gunfire nearby decided his immediate course.
He turned towards the sounds, just a half-block away. The scream became more shrill, a raw, animal sound heralding panic and terror. Beast Boy flew as quick as he could, arrowing over the gravel roof of the building below and appearing suddenly over open space.
Three stories below, a female officer lay on her back, firing rounds into another officer. Behind them, a body lay twitching on the ground, and a bit further down the alley was another makeshift barricade, this one of office furniture and a box truck.
Beast Boy dove over the edge, transforming into a mountain gorilla as he landed. A mighty heave threw the standing officer off of the prone one, revealing a blonde woman frantically grasping at a wound on her arm. He looked back at the officer he had thrown, already standing up and staggering towards them once more with an obviously broken leg.
"Lethal force is authorized."
"The first priority is containment."
Robin's words tolled heavily in Beast Boy's mind, morals and duty warring briefly.
"Robin, what if a citizen or police officer is bitten?" asked Starfire with a blank look on her face.
"The first priority is containment," Robin repeated meaningfully.
He acted.
Instinct guided his movements, as they often did in a fight. Retaining the gorilla form, he pulled back and punched the officer he had just thrown full in the face. The strength of a mountain gorilla was too much for his opponent. Bone structure designed to protect against punches from other humans cracked and shattered as the force of six men was applied to the thin bone and cartilage just under the nose. He could feel his fist burrowing into his opponent's face, forcing razor-edged bone shards into the brain through the nasal cavity.
The officer dropped instantly, and Beast Boy was torn between his instinctual satisfaction at eliminating a threat and the horror of having ended a human life.
Something suddenly struck him. It hadn't been more than a minute since he had entered the fray, but something was definitely off. He was feeling uneasy, the instincts of a dozen and more animals screaming at him that something was wrong. He turned back towards the downed officer and was confronted with a charging woman, eyes bloodshot to the point that her sclera was red, and mouth opened in hungry anticipation. Her firearm was abandoned on the asphalt where she had lain until recently. With hardly a thought, he grasped her by the neck and forcefully slammed her head against the ground. A sickening crunch marked the end of the newly created zombie.
This posed a new problem. With no other officers at this location, the small clutch of zombies beyond the improvised barricade would not stay contained for long.
"The first priority is containment."
Sometimes being a hero seemed decidedly unheroic.
Beast Boy shifted to a deinonychus and leaped upon the box truck. From this new vantage point he was able to see a dozen or so zombies swarming about on the other side. They were an eclectic bunch, some wearing dress shirts and ties, others in tank tops and jeans, and still others wearing jumpsuits of various colors. It was with a sick feeling in his stomach that he saw a young boy amongst the adults, no older than ten.
"The first priority is containment, the first priority is containment," he thought to himself repeatedly. He bunched the incredible muscles in his legs, a spring-cord tension created, waiting for release. A massive jump threw him into the morass of undead creatures. He immediately set to destroying this now-unopposed group. The elongated claws on each of his feet were used initially, disemboweling the closest enemies. Although slowed by tripping over their own intestines, the attack was otherwise completely ineffective.
With a half-hysterical refrain of "What Would Romero Do?" running through his head, he switched to a grizzly bear. Nearly six feet tall at his shoulders, Beast Boy was a mass of muscle and primal fury. Rearing up to nearly twelve feet tall, Beast Boy roared a challenge and began swiping strongly with his clawed forepaws. The first few blows knocked the heads of the zombies clear of their shoulders and flying to knock into walls and other zombies. Heedless of danger and frenzied with hunger, the remaining zombies continued to press in towards the whirling green death machine. A quick switch to human form gave him a few moments of breathing room and he quickly cast about the alley for something he could use to even the odds. Nothing caught his eye. Another shift to an elk and a broad, strong sweep of his antlers took out one more zombie and knocked others off their feet.
A bellow smoothed into a roar as Beast Boy shifted into a jaguar and pounced forward. The agility of this new form allowed him to dodge amongst the dwindling group of undead. He landed on one prone zombie and dispatched it with a quick bite to the skull, the jaguar's killing trick. the next few minutes were a blur of grasping claws and snapping teeth. Eventually there were no zombies left, just a heavily breathing jaguar in the middle of a corpse pile. As he morphed back into his human form he became very conscious of the fact that he had killed several people. The taste of blood, brains, and other less-savory things coated his mouth and tongue, and he had a spill of crimson across his entire front. He turned to the side and vomited noisily, his stomach disgorging the swallowed bits as well as the remnants of his tofu-egg sandwich from earlier in the day.
Once his stomach settled, Beast Boy staggered to his feet and lurched back to the two officers. He averted his eyes from their ruined faces and crushed skulls. The male officer still had his holster snapped shut, gun ready at his hip, waiting to be drawn in defense of justice. It would continue to wait. With numb fingers, he removed the officer's badge and fumbled at the radio on the officer's belt. Finally pulling it loose, he followed a cord to the mouthpiece on the officer's shoulder. He pulled that off as well, then made his way over to the other officer.
Her face had slackened to a peaceful neutrality, death bringing ease to those features which had been horrifically twisted by unnatural forces. He reached down and plucked her badge off as well. Finally collapsing near the discarded gun, Beast Boy pulled the radio mouthpiece from the radio. Pulling out his own communicator, he attached the radio to a few cords. This was something he had hoped to never need to do. Connecting his communicator to the radio would transmit an identification code to the police dispatch in addition to his message, ensuring its authenticity.
"Dispatch, this is Beast Boy. Do you copy?"
A brief pause and then static as the communicator connected. "Dispatch copies, Beast Boy. What's your 20?"
Looking briefly at the communicator, he rattled off the GPS coordinates. "Dispatch, be advised. We have two officers down, code 419 contained. Repeat, code 419 contained."
Another pause. "Dispatch copies two officers down, 419 contained. Do you require EMT?"
"Negative. Beast Boy out."
He disconnected the communicator and absently slipped the two badges into a pocket. He reached down and picked up the gun, its grip still slightly warm. Beast Boy just stared at it for a minute, reflecting on the senselessness of the horror that Jump found itself in. His instincts suddenly flared to life, a hundred birds taking flight in his mind. Quickly turning his gaze skyward, he saw a tornado spring into sudden, impossible life. Without conscious thought, Beast Boy stuck the gun into his belt and became a swallow, winging his way upwards to get a better look at the maelstrom that suddenly appeared from a clear sky.
It was clearly unnatural, a cyclone of fire and a distressingly familiar black energy. He gained altitude, using the outer eddies to ramp himself higher. He was above the funnel now, and looking down showed…
Jon and… was that Raven?
It stopped as suddenly as it had started. Jon was flung out of the weakening storm and began falling rapidly. Raven flew forward, a screech ripping from her throat as she realized she would not be able to reach Jon in time. Beast Boy shifted into the form of a peregrine falcon and dove after the falling man, quickly closing the distance between them. He morphed into a pterasaur, grabbing Jon's shoulders with his claws and spreading his wings wide to slow their fatal fall towards the rooftop below.
With a final flap, Beast Boy settled his cargo on the rooftop and reverted to his human form. Bare seconds later, Raven landed with a flare of her own wings, in a crouch. Beast Boy looked towards her, conflicting feelings washing through him. It was clearly Raven, but she was a study in contradictions. She smelled the same, but she looked very different. The wings and tail were almost afterthoughts to the four ruby eyes adorning her face. Historically, a Raven with four red eyes was a bad thing, but she also wore the white colors of her most stable form. When an overlong tongue slipped from her mouth and began to clean her face his paralysis broke. He took a tentative step forward, trying to look as nonthreatening as possible. "Uh... Raven? You in there?"
Her head quirked to the side for a moment, and then she stood. Her wings draped around her in imitation of the cloak she was not currently wearing. Her tail slipped into a more relaxed and non-threatening position. Her eyes remained red, but calm. She met his gaze and replied, "It's me, Beast Boy. I'm back."