Alice and Rain peered down into the darkness beneath the maintenance hatch, then to each other. "After you," Rain offered, gesturing with her bandaged hand.
"So gallant!" Alice complimented, fluttering her eyelashes. She climbed down the ladder, then held her arms out at the bottom. "I'll catch you, love!" she called up. Rain simply rolled her eyes and climbed down, wincing each time she put weight on her injured hand. She suppressed the mental image of actually leaping down into the crazy woman's arms, as her treasonous imagination insisted on putting them both in wedding dresses.
Once all five were down, they began making their way through the tunnels according to the Red Queen's opposite directions. "What the hell is this place?" Matt asked, probably. (Thank you, movie subtitles, for not naming the speaker).
"The utility tunnels," Kaplan replied, probably. (See above complaint). "They run underneath the Hive for water, gas, and power lines."
"Oh yeah, Mr. Hot Shit, you didn't know about them until five minutes ago," Alice pointed out.
"They weren't on the schematics," Kaplan defended.
"Oh, right, the same schematics that said you should be having lunch in the room where they were seeing if genetic supermonsters became more evil when you peeled all their skin off," Alice said. She accidentally walked under a spot where water was trickling down. "Oh ew ew ew," she said, making a face. "Is this poo water?"
"Sewage is a separate system, Abernathy," Kaplan pointed out, glad for the chance to one-up her for once. She stuck her tongue out at him.
"I've been in here before," Spence complained. Probably. (Fuck you, subtitles).
"Oh, like, memory-wise?" Alice asked. "Are you remembering anything else? I've been getting weird little flashbacks every so often too."
"We're going around in circles!" he insisted, making it clear it wasn't a flashback thing.
"This is the route the computer gave us," Kaplan insisted.
"You are making sure to follow it backwards, right?" Alice asked him. Kaplan stuck his tongue out at her, and she put on a scandalized expression.
Spence tried to escalate the argument, but Rain shut that down by grabbing Spence with her good hand and pushing him against the wall. "Enough already!" she snapped. "We have no choice but to keep moving, 'cause those things are right behind us. You got that?"
"Hell yeah, kick his ass!" Alice cheered.
Before Spence could reply, he found out that he was not, in fact, pressed up against a solid wall, but an entrance that had a mesh cover. Said mesh cover was spaced apart enough that a human arm could fit through. And many of them did jut out, almost simultaneously, as their owners attempted to pull Spence through the mesh and into their waiting maws. Spence cried out in fright as Matt and Kaplan pulled him away.
Alice turned away from the mesh and saw zombies had appeared in front of them. "I'm Keanu Matrix, motherfuckers!" she screamed as she unleashed a series of badass martial arts moves on them. At one point she leapt up, grabbed onto the overhanging pipes, grasped an oncoming zombie with her thighs, and snapped its neck with a twist. She made a mental note to show a non-lethal version of that trick to Rain when she finally saw reason and joined Alice in Tru Luv.
She looked ahead and saw the growing number of undead crowding the passage forward, far too many for even her mastery of unarmed combat. Kaplan and Rain were low on ammo, and might not have enough to clear the path ahead. She quickly glanced upwards at the pipes she had used and saw that there was enough space to climb up on top of them. "Alright, gang, it's time for some pipe dreams!" she called out, urging them to give up trying to stave off the invasion from beyond the mesh. Alice popped a few more necks and smashed a few more skulls as Matt and Spence climbed up, then followed them. Kaplan started climbing, but let out a shriek as a zombie got close enough to take a bite out of his leg.
"Oh fuck dis," Alice said, about ready to jump down and try to clear the area for him and Rain. Before she could, though, Rain managed to get a shot off, icing the zombie that had Kaplan, allowing him to be pulled up. Alice's heart stopped as she heard Rain cry out, and looked down to see another zombie sink its teeth into her wrist. "MY BELOVED!" She really did try to jump down then, but Matt and Spence pinned her, leaving her to watch helpless as motherfucking zombie JD showed up, gave her a little hickey, and Rain subsequently putting him out of his misery. She got pulled up by Kaplan before any other undead could reach her.
Once on the pipes, Rain examined her bloodied hand, then slowly held it over the edge, watching the droplets rain down on the zombies below, driving them into a feeding frenzy. Alice sat with her a moment, watching her face, seeing it already looking half-dead. She tried putting a hand on the other woman's shoulder, but was violently shrugged off. "Do you want to talk about it?"
"No." Rain didn't match Alice's gaze.
"Did you love JD?" Alice asked, in as soothing a tone as possible. Rain gave her an utterly seething glare then. "Hey, no judgment, I promise. This isn't about my incredibly one-sided crush, alright?" Rain withdrew the seething glare, but didn't respond. "If you don't want to talk about it, that's perfectly fine too, Rain," Alice continued. "Your feelings are valid, and if you don't want to share them, now or later, I understand. But we should try to clean and bandage up your booboos right now, okay?"
"I'm fine," Rain said, defensive.
"Rain, you're going to bleed out if you keep that up," Alice said gently, gesturing to the blood still trickling off the tips of her fingers. "What do you think JD would say if his ghost was watching us?"
Emotions warred across Rain's face for a quick moment. "He'd probably laugh at me for letting him get close enough to bite me," she finally concluded.
"Well, do you want him to get the last laugh?" Alice asked her pointedly.
Rain watched her blood fall onto the mob for a few more seconds, then withdrew her hand. "No, I guess not." She held her hand out to Alice, who began to clean it as best she could. "About your one-sided crush…" She trailed off as Alice once again met her gaze, and she suddenly forced herself to break the shared look, an uncomfortable heat spreading out in her belly, on her face. Alice didn't say anything, didn't even visibly react, but the same heat spread out within her, and she embraced the sensation.
"She was right," Kaplan muttered to himself a few moments later. "We're all gonna die down here."
"100% preventable, as I've remarked time and again," Alice commented without turning away from her work. "But don't turn into a whiny asshole now, Kappers… well, a whinier asshole, anyway." She shot him a quick bratty smirk before going back to the bandaging. "You don't see Rain moping and whining because of a few zombie bites. And she isn't dead yet, and neither are you. So get your shit together."
"She was 100% moping not five minutes ago," Kaplan pointed out.
"I may be half dead, Kap, but I can still beat your ass," Rain warned.
Once Rain was patched up, Alice did a quick job on Kaplan's bite, and they proceeded to crawl down the length of the pipes. They eventually passed through an opening into a taller room, one which let Matt and Spence (in the lead) stand straight up on the pipes. In this room the pipes were suspended by cables. Matt kicked in another mesh grate once he reached the end of the pipes and continued on into another dark passage, followed by Spence and Rain.
As Alice stood and walked across the pipe, she felt a little spasm under her. She tore her gaze away from Rain's ass, looked around, and saw Kaplan struggling to keep his footing. "Hey man, let me give you a hand." She reached out a hand to try and help steady him, but before he had a chance to grab it the mooring suspending the pipes broke free from the concrete and the pipes began to collapse beneath them, supported only by their own weight now. "Kaplan, you fucking nerd, don't let go!" Alice barked, trying to grab for Kaplan even as he lost his balance and tumbled off the side of the pipe into the waiting arms of the dead.
The pipes broke entirely, severing the electrical cables within and sending a great shower of sparks airborne. Alice found herself propelled forward toward's Matt's outstretched arm, and she wasn't sure if she'd simply leapt out of fright or if the electricity had zapped her and flung her forward. (Then again, if it was the latter it would likely have killed her). Matt and Spence joined forces to pull Alice up and away from the grasping zombies; once she got her footing, she saw Rain aiming her gun in Kaplan's direction. "Babes, for the love of God, don't murder him!" she pleaded.
Rain gave her a wounded look. "I'm not going to let what happened to JD happen to someone else if I can help it," she said. "Besides, I can't get a good shot on him. …I can't focus."
"He's, uh, right there," Alice said, worry clouding her face as she pointed to Kaplan, pinned against the side of a pipe by a zombie, screaming and struggling to break free.
"I can't see!" Rain cried out.
Alice quickly grabbed the pistol from her hands and popped the zombie threatening Kaplan once in the head. "Okay, Kaps, get the fuck outta there!" Alice called out. Matt and Spence joined in, calling out encouragements to him, until he was finally up and out of immediate harm. "Okay, now let's work out a way to get his ass back over here…" Alice trailed off, seeing Kaplan examine his revolver.
"That's lucky." Kaplan had emptied the revolver's barrel and was contemplating the lone live round he had left. He tossed the remaining shell casings to the ground, lost amongst the zombies' feet. With his eyes fixed on them, he said, "I want you to go."
"We will, once we haul your miserable ass over here," Alice stated.
"You're leaving me," he emphasized. "You can't kill all of them!" He gestured to the crowd of walking corpses, packed into the space like sardines. "And I'm not going anywhere. I want you to go. Now!" Seeing their reluctance, he began pleading. "Please, just do it!"
Alice watched as the others already began to move on, and hated them all a little for it. Even Rain. "Alright, but don't do anything rash, okay? I need a best man for when me and Rain get hitched, and you're currently at the top of the list. We'll catch up, yeah?" She gave him a forced smile, which he didn't return because quite frankly he found her aggressive flirtation with his squadmate utterly bizarre.
Alice turned and walked down the narrow passageway after the others, but only made it a few paces when the shot rang out. She stopped and thought she might start to vomit, until: "You're going to have to work for your meal!" The words echoed from the room she had just left, and she grinned.
"That's right, that's my motherfucking best man," she grinned.
XXXXXXXXXX
It's a really weird choice to make it seem to Alice and the others that Kaplan has killed himself, then reveal to us, the audience, that he follows the gospel of Seth Gecko and uses his last bullet on the next fucker that tries to bite him. Would it have given his big hero moment more weight if we were as surprised as they were? Was there some MPAA rule that would have bumped the movie up to NC-17 if it implied Kap had killed himself for longer than a moment?
Three chapters until the end! Are you all excited? Are you hoping for the prevailing of true love over false evil?
I do have good news re: the future of this series: I've figured out a solution to the "How do I reconcile Alice's OP superpowers with basically three entire movies, that doesn't involve Alice losing her superpowers for an incredibly contrived reason?" dilemma! I know more or less how the next five movies will play out for our heroines, and I can't wait to start writing the next one, tentatively titled "Alice, it's Apocalypsing!", starting sometime next month, since I fully expect to have the last chapter posted by the end of this one. I figure it'll take me a few weeks to finish it, and so I'll be able to start posting chapters by, oh, beginning of August?
If you can't quite wait until then, may I humbly suggest checking out my Fallout fanfic, 'You Only Live Thrice'? It's got a lot of similar elements — chaos goblin main character, slow burn gal romance, the postapocalypse, feral ghouls (who are functionally identical to zombies), etc.