Chương 4: The Quest For Food

"I'm hungry."

"Shh! They'll hear you," Mandy furiously shot back at Jerry under her breath as the three of us slid the music classroom's window open as slowly as we dared. The cable ladder, made of looted power cords from every old computer in the lab, creaked but held more than well enough as we used it to bypass the top floor entirely and drop from the old lab's single window to the middle floor below.

In the middle of the night and with power out across the entire city and beyond, the thirty-foot drop seemed more like a gaping void waiting to swallow us at the slightest slip. The bottom was almost but not quite invisible, illuminated only by starlight and the faint orange-red glow of a dozen large fires raging in the city beyond. There were no signs of explosions, magical or otherwise, no green or purple lights dancing in the sky, the ever-present din of tens of thousands of vehicles absent.

There were still crowds though; small groups of figures barely visible in the dark, milling about in total silence but the sound of their shambling footsteps. We hurried through the window, and not due to the demands of Jerry's stomach. For my new strength the maneuver was easy, swinging from the ladder one-handed almost effortlessly.

The spear in my off-hand took the nearby zombie in the back, the large chisel that served as a spearhead sinking into dead flesh and cracking bone until the crosspiece made out of a metal pipe junction hit the zombie's back and stopped. Bracing with both legs and using the shaft of inch-thick rebar as a huge lever, I lifted the flailing zombie overhead then rested the butt of the weapon on the floor. With zero leverage, nothing to push against at all, all the undead monster could do was struggle uselessly.

"Stable ground! How much I missed you!" Jerry all but fell through the window, almost collapsing on the floor in relief. I snickered as he had to catch his breath after the enormous exertion... of climbing down a cable ladder.

"Behind you!" Mandy warned as she followed us in a second later, not nearly as gracefully as yours truly, but not an awkward heap like Nerd Boy either.

"Yeah, yeah, yuck it up," Jerry growled, giving me the finger as he slapped the zombie that had been "sneaking" up on him from behind. Lightning crackled at the point of contact like the mother of all cattle prods, the zombie collapsing like a puppet with its strings cut then falling into a seizure as all its muscles went haywire.

"All yours, Mads."

"Right." The redhead approached the twitching living corpse and started hitting it over and over with Jerry's improved hammer - where 'improved' meant 'stick the handle in a long pipe for extended reach and leverage'. At first she barely put any strength to each blow and jumped back after every hit, probably afraid the zombie would bite and/or fight back but after confirming it was basically helpless, she sped up until she was wailing on it with abandon.

I reversed my grip on the improvised spear, swung it over and hurled the impaled zombie to the ground, stepped on its back to pin it, drew the weapon with a squelch of dead flesh, then stabbed the buckling walking dead in the back of the skull, killing it instantly.

"Now this... is cool." I hefted the makeshift zombie-sticker and inspected it under the flickering light of Jerry's lightning.

"A bit heavy but it works." After my supernatural strength boost, at least. Mandy and Jerry told me it felt like trying to swing around a six pack of large water bottles, except worse.

"Saw something like it in a documentary once," Jerry mentioned as he finally got up.

"Medieval boar spears, you know? They had to stop three hundred pounds of charging muscle without breaking or letting the animal reach and gut the hunter, otherwise... well, you've seen Game of Thrones, right?"

"Is that the one with the orks?" I snarked, but before I could enjoy his indignant reaction the door banged open, Mandy let go a high-pitched 'eep!' and more zombies charged through the entrance.

"Hold that thought." The first zombie in line got a hurled desk to the face, bowling it over into the two zombies after it and dropping all three of them in a tangle of limbs. Picking up another desk in a two-handed grip, I swung it a full circle to pick up speed, catching another zombie in the side and sending it flying fifteen, maybe twenty feet with a tremendous crash of wood and metal on dead flesh. Dropping the bent desk on a fifth zombie's legs to trip it, I stabbed at it with the spear but missed.

Growling in annoyance, I turned the heavy weapon over like a baton, held it by just below the crosspiece with both hands and swung five feet of inch-thick rebar at the back of the awkwardly-crawling zombie's head. The spear-shaft rung like a small gong, but that's because it struck the floor after splitting my target's skull like a melon.

Glancing about, I saw Jerry disabling two zombies with lightning crackling on either hand, Mandy taking cover behind him and taking the occasional flailing swing at targets of opportunity. We had to get her some magic powers, too; we needed all the help we could get. Unfortunately, there was no time for her to sit down and fiddle with magical menus; the downed zombies were getting up and a whole line of their friends were waiting just beyond the door.

My spear charge got the next zombie on the throat rather than the head and it feebly flailed as it was dragged along for the ride until the spear slammed into another undead behind it. Caught between crosspiece and the second zombie's torso, the impact did bad things to its already damaged neck. When I tried to lift the two zombies the first simply tore off the spear and fell dead, its neck attached by a thin strip of skin and meat.

Its partner proved much more of an annoyance, blindly grabbing at the spear and refusing to let go. Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site. Trying to pull the weapon didn't work; kicking the zombie got my leg grabbed, dead fingers painfully trying to sink into my calf. Then another zombie came into the tangle of limbs and spear we'd become, determinedly biting at my shoulder. I yelled in more anger than fear; I was so done being those mindless things' meal on legs.

Dropping my grip on the spear, I punched and pulled at the second walking corpse until its teeth broke and its jaw was dislodged, then dragged it over my shoulder in the most half-assed throw in the history of wrestling. Something tore and sharp, burning pain stabbed through my shoulder, but the second zombie was on the ground, with its back to me.

It went into a headlock before it could find its bearings and as soon as I had a secure grip, I started thrashing and shaking, exactly as we were told not to in those half-remembered self-defense lessons years before. There was a crack, which I more felt up my arm pressed against the zombie's throat than heard, and the dead thing went mostly limp. It wasn't dead but it might as well be as far as the fight was concerned. Which was when the other dead bastard bit into my leg.

"No. Fuck you!" I growled, pulled the spear it was no longer holding onto out of its chest then returned it with interest through its right eye socket.

"Die, you stupid rotting meatbag, die!"

"Maya, I think it's dead enou- eep!," a girl's voice said from behind and I was halfway through a sweeping horizontal swing before I noticed she wasn't one of the shambling undead. If she hadn't jumped out of reach... I wasn't sure I could have stopped swinging in time.

"Right." Leaning forth and using the metal spear as support, I scanned the room again for something, anything that needed doing. The music classroom had been thrashed, and it hadn't been just me using desks as improvised weapons. Half the furniture had been broken, spatters of what looked like black sticky goop under the blue light of Jerry's lightning covered just about everything, several windows had broken and the broken corpses of a dozen zombies lay around.

On closer inspection, not all of the damage looked new; a fight must have happened hours before we dropped in from above... maybe back when the zombies had come out of portals... had that just been less than a day before? It felt much, much longer.

"Whew! Good fight everyone!" Jerry congratulated us, then fell on his knees where he stood, his lightning dimming until it was mere sparks in the dark. Between the two of them and judging from the remains, he and Mandy had re-killed four zombies which couldn't have been easy. Running out of energy was expected, especially if his powers worked more like computer game magic. I felt restless instead, more like an adrenaline rush while high on sugar, a constant charge that grew and grew as the fight had gone on.

Five freshly slain zombies lay around my earlier position while I only recalled three kills. More injuries announced themselves through the post-battle euphoria, not just the bites on my calf and shoulder but a deep tear in my off-hand, a bloody gouge in my right thigh where a zombie must have bitten through my too-tight jeans because there was a piece of me... missing.

"Shit." The gouge was the worst of the lot, a jagged hole oozing red. It was also mildly smoking like the rest of my injuries, except in its case there was enough of the thin fumes to be noticeable, like a lit cigar pressed against raw meat. I blinked, blinked again, not entirely certain of what I was seeing. Then I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and counted to thirty. When I opened them once more the gouge was minutely, almost imperceptibly smaller.

It was healing, new flesh filling in slowly enough that a casual onlooker would think it a trick of the light - especially in the near darkness we were in - but there. Which meant things were working properly; I had been worried about that, unexpected rush of energy or no.

"Oh god... oh god... you were bit!" Mandy fretted, fists clenched in a death grip against her short skirt.

"What are we going to do now?!"

"Don't worry. I have no plans of dying tonight," I told her. Or at all, if everything was working as it should.

"None do," Jerry shot back with that smirk that meant he was making some nerd joke that flew over everybody else's head.

"Shut up and keep resting till you can spark properly again," I shot back and kept looking around.

"We really need the light." The door was still wide open but if more zombies had been around they'd have already swarmed us. Maybe we'd killed all those close enough to be drawn in by all the clamor but them... there! Something definitely twitched under that broken desk.

"Hello there," I told the zombie twitching around a broken back as it slowly healed, giving it a nasty smirk. The butt of the spear came down once, twice, and the ugly thing stopped twitching.

"Aaand, that's the fight done." Turning one of the few chairs to have survived the last twelve hours undamaged the right side up, I took a seat and tried to relax. The currents of warmth, surges of power flowing through me as if I'd been holding on to a power line except without the pain did not abate; they increased further. At least it felt great, the sensation almost crowding out the pain from wounds while muscle strain and exhaustion from the fight were completely absent. I could get used to this.

"I... I think I might have... magic, now?" Mandy announced rather uncertainly.

"It looks... weird? Not like either of yours, at least." She flicked the fingers of both hands, but not like tapping on a screen. Odd gestures going in circles that seemed familiar yet not?

"Might need some time to make heads or tails of this..."

"Take as much time as you need. More supernatural power on our side would be great." I had practically wasted most of a day making sense of mine, after all, and it wasn't as if we had anything truly urgent to deal with.

"Guys, I'm really hungry now," Jerry suddenly spoke up, and his stomach rumbled loudly enough to hear across the classroom. Well... that would teach me not to open my big fat mouth in the future. Where were we going to find food now? And just to hammer the point in, the current going through me hit a peak, then exploded... immediately followed by a very familiar hallucination plaguing my vision.

Name: Maya Wennefer Bio: female human, 17y3m3d Powers [2/3 pts] Progressive Regeneration I Attributes [1/3 pts] Might 5, Agility 4, Reason 2, Vigilance 3, Ego 4, Luck 1