Day 403, 1:30 AM
"Sero?" Shiozaki gasps. "It... it's you."
Brainiac Sero stares at her, his eyes percing into her soul with those lifeless orbs of his. Vine backs away from the door, forgetting how to breathe. Remembering that there's a nail gun somewhere, she blindly reaches around her.
I have to put him out of his misery. I should've put him out of his misery when I saw him turn the other night, and I didn't. I have to put him out of his misery so he can move on to the afterlife.
"I need a nail gun."
Spiral looks at her. "Here ya go." He tosses a nail gun to her.
Muscle memory kicks in as she tries to check its ammo capacity and heads over to the back door. "Spiral, excuse me."
Spiral moves out of the way. "Okay, whatever you're going to do, don't waste ammo. Not too much, at least; we still need the nail gun for the runners."
"I just need one." She kneels and aims, picking out Sero like nothing. Quite the opposite of Where's Waldo. She licks her lips, lines up her sight, and takes a deep breath.
Now's the time to put you out of your mystery.
She steadies her breathing and aims until her sighs line with Sero's head. "Goodbye."
She squeezes the trigger.
The nail flies through the air, cutting through tiny invisible particles, before it lands in the brain of a walker that threw its forehead in the path of the nail and collapses.
Vine gasps. "What?" She aims again and waits patiently for the right moment. After choosing when she believes she's less likely to hit a walker as collateral, she squeees the trigger again.
Another walker throws its head in the path of the nail and bites the dust for Sero.
Vine gasps and lowers her gun, forgetting how to breathe again. She gulps as she realizes what's happening.
He's commanding the zombies around him to act as a meat shield.
Vine decides to change up tactics. Instead of firing right from the open doorway, she decides to change up the angle at which she'll fire. She heads to the center of the bus and opens the roof hatch. She climbs through after tucking her nail gun in the waist of her pants before climbing up. She carefully goes prone on the bus and crawls like a worm towards the back of the bus, resting on the edge.
She takes out her nail gun and aims at Sero.
Now, he can't use the zombies around him as a meat shield.
She takes aim, keeping her hands close to the edge and not dangling out before steadying her breathing.
"Goodbye."
Just before she can squeeze the trigger, Brainaic Sero's eyes land on her, and he ducks into the crowd, hiding like a child playing hide-and-seek in the grass.
"What?" Vine blinks in confusion and looks around. She tries to spot Sero again but her keen eyes isn't able to pick him up in this crowd of zombies. She backs away from the edge once she realizes its futile. "No."
Of all zombie types, why did it have to be a brainiac? Why did you have to turn into the smartest zombie variant of the undead army? Why couldn't you turn into a regular walker where didn't think for yourself?
Either way, her mission remained: she was going to shoot Sero to put him out of his misery.
Then a thought crossed her mind.
Wait, if a brainiac can control a zombie horde, then why isn't Sero doing anything? Why isn't he using the zombies to try and trap us in?
This idea prompts her to look outward to the zombie horde following the slow bus. After almost half an hour, Battle Fist kept the school bus at a slow pace so the walkers could follow after them without losing too much interest. That's when she saw the silhouettes of something in the distance. In the very back of the horde.
It seemed that several zombies in the back, far out of sight for those inside the bus, were veering off the road and heading into the forest in both directions. The zombies were sprinting before vanishing into the darkness of the overgrowing forest. Vine backs away from he edge, rising to her knees before shooting a look at where she believes Brainiac Sero is hiding in the crowd.
No, he's... he's been sending zombies into the forest from the very back. They're runners. They're... they're going to surround us!
She crawls as fast as she can to the roof hatch before putting her head through. "Battle Fist, runners! Runners are going around us! There's a brainiac in the crowd!"
In the driver's seat, before Battle Fist could say something, a runner that came out of nowhere charges at the bus from the right and smacks its head into the driver's window hard enough to splatter blood all over the glass. Battle Fist gasps and almost steps on the accelerator.
Then, the bus bounces in the air with the sounds of loud crunching filling the air. Battle Fist stares at the wheel with wide eyes. Did a runner throw itself under the wheel? She decides to accelerate a little bit, but the bus bounces again when more crunching sounds like chips being crushed, fill the air, and Battle Fist feels herself fly out of the seat a bit.
They're running into the wheels! Battle Fist panics.
Before she can stomp on the gas, the bus bounces in the air from the back this time as more runners swarm under the tires.
"Shit. Fuck, fuck, fuck!"
After that, the bus was lifted off the ground, the tires unable to move the bus any further. They're officially stuck in a rut. Up a creek without a paddle. In a pit of quicksand.
Battle Fist leaps from the seat and runs to the door as runners pile up against it. "Stay out, stay the fuck out!" She put her shoulder into it to keep the runners at bay but she was human and with a limited amount of stamina, something the zombies were lacking and not needing.
Spiral comes over to lend her a hand as Froppy watches the back door after leaping forward. She quickly ran, closed the back door, and sealed it shut, pulling at the handles until she was certain they couldn't get in. There was only one entrance on the bus and multiple emergency exits, and Vine was on the roof, still keeping a lookout.
"What's the plan now, man?" Spiral demands as he helps barricade the door.
Battle Fist grunts. "I'm thinking, I'm thinking." She pauses for a bit, her concentration breaking when a runner headbutts the door hard enough to send her flying back a bit. "Shit, we're going to need a distraction. Froppy, we need you!"
Froppy looks at her. "You need me to jump into the forest and lead them away with my quirk, ribbit?"
"You read my mind. Hurry, get to the top, and do everything you can to draw them away. But be careful!"
"As if that wasn't obvious already. What about you?"
Battle Fist and Spiral push harder against the door. "We got our end covered. Now hurry, before they swarm the bus!"
Froppy leaps for the roof hatch and climbs out. Once she's standing up, she looks at Vine, who is clinging onto the roof as it tilts over a bit. She scoots backwards and towards the roof hatch.
"Ribbit." Froppy grabs Vine and throws her in the bus. "Be careful, stay safe." She closes the hatch before looking ahead of her. A tree is located only about ten to twenty feet away, and her tongue and leaping powers could give her a hand. Without wasting another second, she leaps for the nearest branch and dangles. She steadies herself on the branch in a perched position and observes the chaos of the bus.
The runners make the tires unspinnable while more runners swarm and swarm the the entrance, their combined weight succeeding at slowly but surely push the doo open and the pack of runners lead by the brainiac follow closely after the bus. Now was her time to help.
She flicks her long tongue outward until she is sure she has caught a fly. The walkers limping behind the bus look at her. She flicks her long tongue out several more times until she's sure she's caught their attention. The walkers limp towards her like a moth to a flame as she leaps from branch to branch to stay ahead of them, all while flicking her tongue and secreting some slime on trees while she's at it to find her way back. "Come on, let's go! Who wants some fresh made frog legs?"
She leaps off, the walkers slowly following after her, numbering in the fities to sixties but it wasn't enough.
While a large number of walkers broke off from the horde, the rest turned toward the bus in an almost reluctant manner, as if they were being pushed into staying behind while their fellow undead companions went for the frog-flavored snack.
About forty walkers surround the bus from all sides, and the kids inside realize the door isn't going to hold for much longer, even with all three of them putting their shoulders into it.
"Shit, shit, shit," Battle Fist curses again. "We gotta head for the roof, now."
"The brainiac," Vine reminds them, "there's a brainiac, and we gotta take him out, remember?"
Battle Fist grunts. "Find the brainiac and cut off his head, got it? And please, for the love of God, hurry."
Don't take His name in vain. Vine nods. "On it."
She leaps for the roof hatch once more while Battle Fist and Spiral continue to hold the door shut. Vine climbs across the roof, keeping a steady pace because the bus is tilted and she didn't want to slide down. She climbs to the very back of the bus, or in this case, with the tilted angle, the top of the bus. She grabs the edge carefully and leans over. She remembers her nail gun and makes sure it's strapped firmly to her waist. "Have to find Sero and put him out of his misery."
You can do this, Ibara, you can do this.
She concentrates and peeks over the edge to try and where Sero could possible be. Her eyes adjusted ot the dark once moe and she could tell the differences between the walkers by their faces and she could never forget what Sero looked like.
That's when she spots him in the very back of the crowd of walkers, with two zombies surrounding him. Remembering the trick from earlier, she knows that aiming her nail gun at him isn't going to work at all. He'll just dodge or use a zombie as a literal meat shield.
Froppy is supposed to use her quirk to lure the zombies away but... I don't have a choice.
Without thinking, she uses her vines. She extends them until they reach Sero and grab him. Zombie Sero struggles against the bonds but Vine entraps him the same way she trapped Kaminari at the Sports Festival. She tightened the vine around him and used more of her vines to wrap around his fists so he can't do anything to stab her or cut her way out.
The walkers down below turn in her direction and reach up. Meanwhile, inside the bus, the walkers turn away from the door but some continue to press as they know survivors are on the other side. Battle Fist and Spiral are now sweating up a storm as they went beyond the limits of their stamina to keep the door at bay but now that less zombies were pushing against them, they had a chance and two against four was better than two against twenty.
Vine holds Zombie Sero up and stares him in the eyes, shaking her head in sadness. The person aht was once Sero is now nothing more than a lump of flesh. She saw him die freight inf front of her and resurrect as a brainiac. She could still see his features of the boy he once was. The boy she shared a bond with. She felt her lip tremble and quiver as she flashed back to all the good memories she shared with him. Mostly how he would he help her free the souls of zombies that had been trapped in their dead bodies so they can move on to the afterlife and teach him how to pray.
"Sero, it's time for you to move on."
A second vine appears and wraps around his head. Closing her eyes, she wraps the vine around his neck and squeezes.
Sero's head pops off like an action figure and falls off. Vine catches his head with both hands and holds it like a football. The undead creature was still alive and still gnashing its teeth at her.
Maybe I can leave him like this, she considers. He's harmless, and maybe... maybe a cure exists that can bring him back to life. Maybe... maybe there's a chance that he can be saved.
But how much of a chance did he have? Let's say there was a cure; how would it bring him back? As much as she tried to deny it, even to this day, she knew objectively that zombies were dead. Even though she had been killing zombies to free their souls, a tiny part lingered in her believed they might still be alive but no. That's not true. Sero is dead and all that remains of him is this: a headless, rotting corpse whose only instinct is to kill. If there was a cure, then it would have to be to revive him completely, something that reverts him back to his living state. Vine was sure that a quirk that allowed someone to rewind things back to their original state existed but the odds of finding that person in a world like this were slim to none.
There was no cure and hanging onto the head of zombie Sero would do nothing more than prolong his suffering.
With this somber expression in mind, she closes her eyes and takes out her knife. "Thank you, Sero."
She stabs the knife into his skull.
She couldn't give Sero a memorial, no, but at the very least, she could bury him. It wasn't much but a head was better than burying nothing. A part of her felt like a creep for carrying around Sero's decapitated head with her but she didn't care. She wanted Sero to be buried. She needed to. She wanted to say a prayer, to let him know in the afterlife that even if his friends didn't like him for his recent asshole behavior, he was still liked by her enough to give him a prayer and send him to Heaven.
Vine undoes her quirk and her vines return to her head with Sero's headless corpse falling into the crowd. The horde of zombies dissipates in multiple directions as their leader is now dead.
Froppy comes back after leaping from tree to tree and spots the zombies at the bus. She lands on a branch and flicks her tongue and secrets slime into the air. "Hey, leftovers! Over here, ribbit!"
This got the zombies' attention as they abandoned the bus almost completely and limp after her.
Good. Now, all she has to do is double back, get this zombie horde to merge with the zombie horde she left in the forest, then give her friends enough time to clear the bus out.
Once the bus was clear with only a few stragglers left, Battle Fist and Spiral kicked the door open and climb out.
The zombies all but vanish into the forest, giving them time to focus on the runners trapped under the tires. They're still alive but unable to move and each tire had at least three to four zombies underneath.
"Let's do this!" Spiral grins as he removes his knife. He steps back as the runners helplessly try to grab him before he stabs them in the brain one by one. Battle Fist decides to help by tending to the runners stuck in the tires on the other side.
Once they finish the deed, Vine leaps down and cradles Sero's head in her arms like a baby.
Battle Fist uses her quirk to quickly lift the bus up by the grille while Spiral pulls the bodies out as quickly as possible. "Hurry man, we can't use our quirks for too long, otherwise, Froppy won't succeed in distracting the zombies."
Spiral drags a body out and kicks it to the side. "Jesus Christ, I'm going as fast as I can!" He heads to the passenger side and begins removing the zombies. "I'm going, I'm going!"
Once they clear out the runners and the bus would good to drive again, Battle Fist carefully puts the bus down and climbs into the driver's seat.
Spiral stops near Vine and looks at the head in her hand. He breathlessly gasps. "It's... is that..."
"It is," Vine chokes a bit, holding back her tears. "I had to put him down. He... he was the brainiac controlling the zombies and..."
"I'm sorry. I wasn't close with him but you were. I'm sorry for your loss."
"Thank you. But he's finally at peace. Once I bury him, he can move on to the afterlife."
"Keep the head close to you then. Come on, we gotta get ready." Spiral climbs in the bus and pulls Vine in. "Come on, let's go."
Vine climbs in, and the two take their seats.
A few minutes later, Froppy returned. She leaps and lands on the side of the bus near the entrance and climbs in. "Okay, zombies have all been driven away; what's next?"
"The original plan," Battle Fist answers. "We lure this horde to the cliff, and we push what's left of the horde over." She honks the horn. "Come on, the quicker we do this, the better."
"And we got all the runners so we just got the walkers to deal with, ribbit."
"And Vine took care of the brainiac." Spiral pauses. "Well, she put the brianiac out of his misery."
Froppy looks over and spots Vine a few seats back, holding Sero's head. Remember what she said about Sero have turned, she looks away, unable to stand the sight of her friend. "Is... is he..." She couldn't find the right words. So Vine answered for her.
"He is... he's at peace."
Battle Fist closes her eyes with a soft expression and honks the horn again. "No, stay on task, gotta stay on the task at hand. Come on, we gotta go this." She honks the horn four more times. "Hey, zombies! Schools about to start; get on the fucking bus!" She honks the horn louder this time.
Finally, after waiting for so long, the walkers come out of the forest and limp towards the bus. Battle Fist continues honking the horn and only steps on the gas once they're about five feet away. She resumes the pace they took earlier and leads the walkers towards their destined destruction.
"Okay, we should be at the cliff shortly." Battle Fist taps the wheel. "Come on, we can do this, we can do this."
"And what do we do afterward?" Froppy inquies.
Battle Fist licks her lips. "We'll check on the straggler team. Afterward, we'll head for the team that stayed behind at Mister Donuts. Then, once everything has settled, we'll head for the wildfire team and give them a hand.
3:00 AM
With Chargebolt
"Jesus Christ, why won't it end!" Chargebolt shouts.
Thin Ice pants heavily behind Chargebolt as he feels himself starting to freeze a bit. "It's a wildfire, a fucking wildfire, what the fuck do you expect, dumbass?"
Chargebolt revs the bike and drives around another pit of fire. Thin Ice freezes the fire in place before lowering his hand. Chargebolt stops near a tree. "How are ya doing, man?"
"Not so good, not so good. Man, I'm freezing." He shivers. "Brr, man, it's so cold. Is it cold in here or is it just me?"
"Just you. Come on, you're out of gas, let's go back."
He does a u-turn on the bike and rides in the direction they came, following the ice path Thin Ice left for them. "Hang on, man, we'll get you back to your team in no time."
"Hot chocolate, I need some hot chocolate, now."
"I'll go for some hot chocolate too."
"Nah, I'd just steal your hot chocolate."
With Jirou
"Keep the water bombs coming," Earphone Jack orders as she helps lift the bucket from the car Rule drove into the trailer of the semi.
BtB collects the water to make more water balloons.
"This is going to be easy," BtB says smugly. "Now the process is going to be faster this time."
With Deku
After separating from his crew, Deku heads deeper into the forest on foot as the fires begin dying out. He catches up with the familiar face from earlier, Backdraft, and decides to help him fight.
Backdraft sprays at the flames before moving into the forest, stomping out any flames that dare to stay ablaze. Backdraft is there with the other three firefighters. Even though they're putting out the flames, it was Backdraft doing most of the work.
Deku approaches him from behind. "Hey, I got an idea to make the flames go out quicker and for you to not use so much water!"
Backdraft looks at him. "It better be a good idea, kid, because I'm getting thirsty right about now."
Dekuy pulls out a bottle of water and tosses it to him. "It's not much but take it." He steps closer. "Okay, here's my plan: I use my quirk to shrink the size of the flames, and then you can put them out. Because they're smaller flames, you don't need as much water and if there are some sparks remaining, I can just extinguish them. You can't overuse your quirk or else you'll dehydrate yourself and I'll burn myself. This way, we can use our quirks with risk of overuse."
Backdraft looks at him, his expression hidden behind his mask. "Good idea, kid." He lifts his mask a little to drink some water. He keeps his face covered, but the mask lifted just enough for him to take a sip. "My firefighters will take care of any zombies in the area that sneak up behind us."
"Right."
With Stamp
"Okay." The firefighter climbs down from the water turret and inside the fire truck. He heads for the driver's seat whee H20 is. "Hey, the flames seem to be dying out; we're doing better than we did at the last wildfire."
"Fuck yeah, man." H20 shifts gears. "Okay then, time to head for another spot."
"Ow," Stamp yelps. "Ow, ow! Something bit me!"
H20 leaps out of his seat. "Zombie!"
Stamp pats at something on his leg like someone patting out flames. He screams suddenly, clawing at his calf before he falls to the ground.
H20 screams suddenly and clutches his stomach. "What is that?!" He screams at the top of his lungs before falling flat on his stomach, convulsing like someone suffering from a seizure.
Screams fill the bus as the two firefighters lie there on the ground with their bodies now being covered from head to toe with zombie rats. The rats overwhelm them and cover every inch of their body, not even leaving a pocket of air for them to breathe. After a few seconds, the two screaming firefighters now resemble a mash of humans made of rats screaming at the top of their lungs, flaying their arms like they were trying to reach for something. After a while, their screams lowered in volume before devolving into groans. They go silent and motionless on the ground as the vermin move off of them but by the time they do, there's nothing left of them but bloody skeletons.
Character Cards
Chiasa "Webby" Ueyama
Quirk: Webling (She can shoot webs)
Occupation: Wedding planner (Formerly); member of Last Light
Age: 29
Birthday: July 2nd
Height: 155 cm.
Blood: O
Likes: Bathrobes
Dislikes: Poetry
Other Facts: Underwent breast enhancement surgery.
Zombie Kills: 81
Human Kills: 4
Nobu "Leaps" Kanmuri
Quirk: Cricket-Hopper (He can leap similar to a cricket or grasshopper)
Occupation: High School Gym Teacher (Formerly); member of Last Light
Age: 38
Birthday: January 19th
Height: 171 cm.
Blood: AB
Likes: White chocolate
Dislikes: Caviar
Other Facts: JSDF Veteran
Zombie Kills: 80
Human Kills: 4