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Posted: Fri Jan 22, 2010 7:11 pm
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Posted: Fri Jan 22, 2010 8:36 pm
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Posted: Fri Jan 22, 2010 9:22 pm
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Posted: Fri Jan 22, 2010 11:17 pm
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(it's no problem, most of us are) Rayde stalked the area checking every possible spot for undead, she wasn't making the same mistake twice.
She she walked she started humming a tune. She wondered where she had heard it. Ohwell, she thought.
As Rayde neared the rest of the group, she said, "Everybody prepped for tomorrow? If so get some rest, I have a bad feeling about it." She made the rounds to each of the remaining survivors, distributing food, ammunition, and water. As she gave out the last bit of food, she said to Shane, "Take this, you need it. We we're really close back there. I don't know if you know it or not. But, if we didn't get a call we might have ran out of food. We need to find resupply and quick. Keep an eye out for me while we're driving tomorrow." She said with a wink. She then went back to her brother. "Hey Charlie, you're up. It's your shift." He grumbled, got up and started moseying his way around the area.
Rayde sat back on the bench, flipped her glasses back up on her head and enjoyed the sunset.
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Posted: Sat Jan 23, 2010 3:30 am
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Posted: Sat Jan 23, 2010 4:06 am
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Posted: Sat Jan 23, 2010 7:37 am
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After teaching her how to shoot, Rayde taught Nilla how to fight. She taught her the basics of self-defense, hand-to-hand combat, and fighting with both blunt and edged weapons. She focused primarily on defensive techniques, because most offensive techniques designed to incapacitate or kill living human beings won't work on zombies. Lastly, she stressed the importance of avoidance. Awareness and avoidance of potentially dangerous situations is an important part of self-defense. Fighting to escape an attacker is typically much easier than fighting to defeat one, especially when that attacker is a zombie.
When the lessons were over, Rayde said Nilla should get some rest, unless she wanted to practice more. Nilla opted to practice more. It was difficult, without a sparring partner, but she managed. She only had to stop every once in a while when her body throbbed with pain. She was still recovering. From her accident.
Well, she assumed it was an accident.
The radio flared up again. Rayde picked it up, spoke into it, laughed. Nilla couldn't quite hear what she was saying, but she assumed she was speaking to a survivor. When she was done, Rayde looked over at her. "Heh, you hear that?" she said, "He's still alive. That means there has to be at least one reason to go to LA."
Nilla smiled and nodded.
Rayde flagged over the others and briefed them on the situation, then drew up a plan. "At sunrise tomorrow," she said, "We're going to load up and fight our way through the city. As soon as we find Andre, we're going to use his Radio station as a base camp for a while on our search for survivors, provided it isn't crawling with infected." She paused, lit a cigarette, took a quick drag, then continued, "Make sure you check your weapons and your supplies, I don't want anyone going without while we're here in unfamiliar territory." She checked her MP5, then said, "Any questions? No? Then I have first shift."
And with that, she walked over to the jeep to prepared for her guard shift. The others dispersed.
Nilla hadn't slept since she'd woken up in the hospital. She was tired, so very tired, but she couldn't sleep. She couldn't sleep at all. Instead, she wandered. She wandered through a landscape the colors of bleached bone. The rock beneath her feet looked white, whiter than her pale skin. The aspens and sequoias of the forest behind her had given up on the stony ground. From horizon to horizon all she could see were bristlecone pines, leafless, twisted things that looked undead by starlight. Their branches wrapped around their trunks like hurt people hugging themselves for comfort or speared upwards in accusation at the frozen sky. Some were dead outright, cracked and splintered. They didn't rot, it seemed, so much as erode.
She approached a river. Its waters, which at one time must have been crystal clear, now ran with dirt and debris. She sat down on the river bank and hugged her knees to her chest. She listened to the running water and, before she knew it, she was sound asleep.
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Posted: Sat Jan 23, 2010 7:59 am
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Posted: Sat Jan 23, 2010 8:24 am
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Posted: Sat Jan 23, 2010 9:16 am
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Posted: Sat Jan 23, 2010 10:08 am
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Posted: Sat Jan 23, 2010 10:17 am
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Posted: Sat Jan 23, 2010 10:20 am
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Posted: Sat Jan 23, 2010 10:23 am
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Nilla dreamed. She dreamed the kind of dream that comes out of nowhere, the kind of dream that has no discernible beginning, the kind of dream that just is.
She was standing in front of a bathroom mirror in nothing but a pair of pink panties and a blue and pink baby tee. There was something wrong with her, but she didn't quite know what it was. She sniffed one of her armpits and winced. There was a stale smell. Not body odor, necessarily. Something fouler.
She pulled the baby tee off over her head. The sleeves stank and she wondered if she could rinse it out in the sink with shampoo. She looked down, checking her skin, and noticed a nasty green discoloration on her abdomen, right above her sunburst tattoo. It must be dye from the cheap shirt, she thought, even though it was the wrong color. She turned on the shower. She slipped off her panties and saw that the discoloration was on her crotch, too. With a handful of soap she tried to scrub it off, but it wouldn't budge. Not one bit. She moved into the shower and tried again with a washcloth. Nothing.
The discoloration began to spread, slowly at first, then faster and faster.
It was then that she knew. It was then that she knew that the smell on her was the stink of death, the discoloration an external sign of internal putrefaction. She tried once more to scrub it off, but she only made it worse. Her flesh sagged and fell off in gobbets, her skin sloughed off in greasy strips, her hair came out in clumps. Her face melted away until nothing was left but a bare skull, a bare skull grinning out at the world.
Nilla woke up kicking and screaming and clawing at her own face with her hands.
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Posted: Sat Jan 23, 2010 10:25 am
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