Welcome to Gaia! ::

(Hey, my character is Richie, I just teamed up with Maryse. You can join if you want and if it's okay with her though. let her and I get our characters introduced a couple more posts and you can join in. Don't worry, I'll let you know when your character is able to come in. I'll set up a post putting your character in a situation if you want. or i can just tell you when lol.)

Richie ran over to the passenger seat of the hummer. He was glad that the young woman had decided to drive. He barely knew how to put the thing into drive. He had only driven it because it was the only vehicle with keyes in it when he was escaping the military base. He buckled the seatbelt, looking in the backseat as he did so. Besides his quickly-thrown together survival pack, he hadn't had time to bring any other supplies. He set his shotgun barrel-down on the floor, the butt of it sticking up between his knees. As the young woman started to drive, they had heard crunches of the zombies underneath the hummer as it rolled forward.

After a moment of awkward silence, Richie spoke.

"Hey, I'm sorry about back there. I didn't mean to p*** you off. I was just in my 'survival mode.' I'm a beastly zombie killer when I'm in that mode, but all common sense about other people is gone. I havent had to worry about that, since the base I just came from was just overrun. I didn't ahve anyone to worry about." Richie paused a moment, realizing he was ranting.

"The names Richie, by the way."

So, what's your story? where'd you come from? how'd you get here, all that jazz," Joe said, trying to make light conversation to try to lighten up the mood.

Maryse rolled her eyes. "I don't have a story," she said, "Nothing bad ever happened to me."

Of course, that wasn't true at all. Her mother had been killed in a car accident when she was only 12 years old. Her father, unable or unwilling to take care of her, sent her to live with her uncle, her mother's older brother, in New Brunswick. Her uncle was a retired military man who loved her in his own way, but he had an insane moral compass and his punishments often bordered on abuse. On more than one occasion, he'd forced her to sleep out in the yard or take a bath in ice water. She was the only girl in her class in high school, so she didn't have any friends she could talk to. After she graduated, she moved out. She got a room above an automotive repair shop. She had to listen to metal screaming and tearing all day long, but the rent was next to nothing. She also landed a job as a bartender.

The bar she worked at had a reputation as being a real tough joint, but for the three female bartenders, there was no safer place in the world. They kept a bouncer at the table next to the door all night, big, strong, muscular men who drank for free, but never very much. If anything went wrong, the bartenders would slip out back and share a smoke while the bouncer took care of it. When she started, Maryse wasn't sure how well one guy, no matter how big, could keep a lid on so many rowdy customers. She quickly learned. Good bouncers didn't wait for a fight to break out. They watched the crowd and they could see right away who was going to be trouble—the ones who laughed too loud at dumb jokes, the ones who looked like they wanted to prove something—and, just as trouble was about to begin, the bouncer would jump in, grab the idiot's arm, and haul him outside. It was truly rare that a punch ever got thrown. Things usually ended well before that point.

When the zombies appeared, Maryse sought refuge at the bar, along with the other two bartenders, a bouncer, and a bunch of regulars. It seemed like a good idea, as the bar was relatively secure, but all the time they spent barricaded in the bar, along with the stress of fighting off the ever encroaching zombies, began to wear on their nerves after a while and they started to turn on each other. Eventually, the zombies found a way in. As far as she knew, Maryse was the only survivor. She heard that the military had established a stronghold in the Greater Toronto Area, so she wandered off in that direction, and she'd been wandering ever since.

She contemplating telling these things to Richie, but she decided against it. He seemed harmless enough, but she still didn't trust him. Not yet. Besides, where she'd come from wasn't nearly as important as where she was going, where they were going. Thanks to Richie, getting there would be infinitely easier.

"I," she paused, then corrected herself, "we are heading to Toronto. I heard there are survivors there."

((I'll take it!))

Greg had done something stupid; the military car he had stolen, had infact turned out to be a "s**t tip on wheels" as many of Greg's friends would have referred to it, it was certainly modern, but the car handled like a brain damaged horse and had been pretty badly damaged before Greg had even gotten in it, of course, this wasn't helped, when one of the zombies he knocked down, landed under his fast moving car. It couldn't of ended well and didn't, the car's chasis was taken off by the unfortunate male zombie that had wandered under his front wheels. The car bounced eight foot into the air and nearly rolled when it's wheels reconnected with the ground, sending it swerving into the wall of a small grocery store, the good news was that Greg's face hadn't been broken in by the car's steering wheel, instead, the brake pedal had been pushed into his leg by the crash, and it hurt like hell.

Greg pushed the s**t tip's door open and fell out; holding his firemen's axe close to his chest, and his handgun in his pocket. He stood up, muttering the word s**t under his breath as he put weight on his bruised foot. Greg stumbled away from the car and walked around the corner of the shop, he thought he was fine to find another getaway vehicle, when he turned around to see three shambling, undead shitheads following him, he turned to hit one of them in the face with his axe, but his foot gave way, and he fell.
"Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks, bollocks".
He muttered as he pushed himself away from the zombies with his good foot. Greg pulled his gun from his pocket, quickly turned the safety off and managed to shoot two of the zombies in the forehead and face, before re grabbing his axe and hitting the final zombie in it's leg. It collapsed, with a half dead shreek, before Greg introduced the inside of the zombie's head to the pavement via the jgged side of his axe. The zombie stopped moving, and Greg got back up onto his good foot, using his axe as a crutch, he turned around to look for a new mode of transport, to see two people exchanging food inside a hummer.
"Awesome!" Greg shouted before hobbling over to the car, hoping to God that the people where either alive, friendly, or preferably both.

Maryse grimaced when Richie offered her his food. It was all junk food, and just the sight of it made her sick to her stomach. It wasn't that she was concerned about her weight, or her complexion, or anything like that. She wasn't. She never had been and she never would be. She just hated junk food.

Suddenly, Richie spotted a survivor in the parking lot of a grocery store to their left.

"There's someone over there!" he said. He pointed. She had no doubt he would have jumped out of his seat if he'd been able. She slammed her foot on the brake. True to form, the Hummer took far too long to stop. Its tires screeched loudly on the pavement. She was sure the sound would attract more zombies.

"Well?! What are you waiting for?" she said, looking at him as if he were an idiot. "Go help him! Go, now!"

Maryse sat in the car, having shifted the gear into 'park,' watching, waiting. She heard Richie asking the man, rather forcefully, if he was infected, and, once again, the danger of infection became real for her. Very real and very frightening. She considered, very briefly, leaving them both behind, but she knew that, if she wanted to survive, she'd need their help. She needed someone to watch her back, especially when she was busy watching her front. Or vice-versa. Of course, she knew what men thought of when they looked at her, and she sometimes wondered whether or not she wanted a man watching her back or her front.

"Come on, Richie!" she called, "Dépêchez-vous!" She could hear the incessant groans of the undead rising up from behind the grocery store. There were more zombies nearby, they had heard them, and they were on their way, slowly but surely. Ever so surely.

Greg stopped suddenly, as the barrel of a gun was pointed at his face, he quickly lurched into an upright position, only to have his leg give way again.
"s**t it" he whipered as he fell to the ground with a loud thud, and pulled his hand gun from his pocket and pointing it at the amn stood before him. Then the man asked him a stupid question.
"Do I look like one of those flatulent brain lickers to you!?" He shouted, lowering his gun and pushing himself up onto his feet, once again using his axe as a crutch.
"Jesus Christ, your not gonna get very far if you shoot every living person you meet and ignore all the dead ones". Greg said before pointing to a few dozen undead that had materialized from behind the grocery store, Greg put his hand on the man's shoulder and whispered in his ear:
"I can't say from experience, but I'd say being eaten probably hurts so we'd better..." His voice then turned to a shout "...get the ******** OUT OF HERE!" He said before blindly firing a shot that clipped one of the zombies' shoulders, as he retreated to the hummer, with a frantic hobble, like if House had just s**t himself.