damned_institute | Nightshift 42: Hal's Used Cars

[from here]

The used-car dealership was one of those small, urban lots, where the cars were backed up against each other rather than sprawled over acreage so large that people would buy something just to drive it back to the showroom. The obligatory tinsel-and-flag regalia hung limply from poles. No breeze. No fresh air. Just the rising stench of decaying flesh. He should be used to this by now, right? Just pretend the fog was a putrescine stinkbomb. And watch your back. Shit. He wasn't equipped for this. At least the yard was quiet. Quiet enough that he should hear the things with enough time to run for it.

Somewhere in the race to the future, the cars had all come to look alike. Even the ones that were some unholy mating of station wagon and Jeep. How the fucking hell did they get those past the CAFE standards, even with the cookie-cutter aerodynamics? And aerodynamics they had -- all those sterile curves, cancerous growths on the fuel economy of a nation. The results of endless nights of Cambridge postdocs masturbating in wind tunnels and then selling the results to the highest bidder. Or a row of metallic-sheened turds, washed up on an asphalt shore.

"Find something cool, man. I'm going to do something really fucking stupid."

S.T. scowled at them all and found the ugliest of the Jeeps -- since when did Japanese companies make gas-guzzlers? He popped the hood. At least some things didn't change. He yanked out a rubber hose and dropped the hood shut again. This was going to be disgusting. He poured one soda bottle out on the ground while he popped the gas cap. The tube made a passable dipstick -- there was a fair bit of gasoline in here. Then he put his lips to the tube and sucked.

The best thing he could say about an accidental mouthful of gasoline was that for a split second, he couldn't smell death. Then he was spitting and hacking, one thumb still over the end of the tube. He'd successfully made a siphon. One bottle was filled, then another, then a third, before the level dipped too low and a pocket of air snuck into the tube. He capped the bottles, took a sip of the remaining all-artificial crap (jury still out on whether it improved the gasoline aftertaste).

He didn't notice that they'd been followed into the lot. Two zombies had snuck up behind him. A pair of moaning sighs, like the worst Playboy Bunny centerfold ever, echoed in both ears. He made a noise that was by no means a shriek and jumped up onto the running board, hands scrabbling at the roof rack for purchase. "Spider. Help? Now?"

Spider didn't want to watch S.T. suck off the jeep, but some stubborn sinew in his neck prevented him from looking away. And when the car began ejaculating gallons of transparent liquid, Spider's disgust melted into a kind of horrified curiosity. What did they fill their cars with in this brutal past? Blood plasma? Vodka? The piss of mental patients? The latter could serve as a cheap, renewable resource as long as the whole world was being institutionalized at the same rate as this New Jersey hellpit. Might be wise for him to ask S.T. about this before he actually started urinating on all the cars. The question was laboriously forming in the recesses of Spider's brain when a two-part-harmony of ghastly moans tickled his eardrums. At first he assumed it was the car. S.T. was servicing it pretty good. But just to be sure, he turned his head.

Before S.T. could even ask for help, Spider was charging.

"THESE ARE OUR CARS, YOU ROTTING MAGGOT-ORGY!" He howled, simultaneously ripping his entire forearm through the lead zombie's solar plexus. His fist came out the other side clutching a knot of rancid intestines, which spooled out of the carcass like a firehose drenched in spaghetti sauce.

"DIE YOU BASTARD, DIE!" Spider screamed, shoving his arm through the creature until there was no more arm to shove. The zombie's stomach flesh sagged spongily against Spider's shoulder, but still the thing moved. Its gnarled hands reached out for the journalist's tempting bald head, and the brains it contained.

The roof-rack was designed for kayaks or possibly just to suggest the owner might someday be rich enough to go on Safari, but it was sturdily attached. S.T. yanked himself up one-handed, rotator-cuff tendons shrieking but holding.

He kicked at the skull of the disembowled zombie. He tried not to puke his guts (in the figurative sense, thank fuck) up. Both succeeded. The skull bent a little under his feet. But soft-soled tennis shoes are not the same as steel-toed workboots, and the zombie only stumbled back.

"Go for the head, moron. Don't they have movies in the future, or were you too much of a poxy shut-in as a kid that you spent all your time hunting for scrambled porn?" S.T. paused to kick again. "Or are you actually a space alien? No, wait, if you were a space alien, you'd have to have watched television. Lightyears of Mork and Mindy reruns."

Spider's arm was sort of wiggling, covered in viscera. "Addendum: if you're going to have a monster burst out of your chest, get it the fuck over with."

Few things are as disturbing as watching a walking corpse reach hungrily for your tasty brains. But try watching a walking corpse reach hungrily for your brains while you have your entire arm solidly enmeshed in its clammy intestines. With two dead-pale hands inches from Spider's face, some vicious instinct shoved his anemic common sense away from the controls and took over. The journalist's intestine-drenched hand shot upwards, grabbing the back of the creature's head, then forced the dented skull down onto Spider's waiting knee, where it made a noise like a gorilla fucking a grapefruit.

"FUCK YOU!" yelled Spider, "SCRAMBLED PORNOGRAPHY IS A LEGITIMATE AND NECESSARY MEDICATION FOR MY CHRONIC SEX DEPRIVATION."

Edited 2009-08-02 02:16 (UTC)

"No thanks, dude. And I read Playboy for the articles." Right now, he would read it for the articles if he thought he could find a copy. The information drought was killing his brain cells. Much longer, and he'd be drooling like the thing walking over (no, through) its fallen comrade. He could only imagine what it'd be like for a serious journalist.

Wait. Spider? Serious? Was that a glaring contradiction? He hopped down from the roof and contemplated the possibility while he scooped up the gas cap as the only thing within reach to keep from skinning his knuckles on zombie eye socket. Naah, all journalists were nuts. Sometimes that meant screwing the story in the Harbor, though usually it just meant empty promises and tell-alls at restaurants that damned well better have beer. And sometimes it meant Zombie Hunting 101. Time for show, not tell.

He aimed for the bridge of the nose. Classic self-defense move. The ones they taught to girls and long-haired protesters of any gender, on the grounds that someone would come for them eventually. It was supposed to drive the nose into the brain. Instead, the nose just squashed. S.T. twisted, and the cap turned, and then clicked wetly.

The zombie toppled over backwards, gas-cap still protruding like a gameshow button in Double Dare: Back From The Dead. He stepped on it, and the requisite goo put in a cameo.

"Let's get the fuck out of here. The sales staff are circling."

Whether they ran on piss, vinegar, or nitroglycerin, the cars at least LOOKED similar to the metal murderbeasts of Spider's present. That was good news in the circumstances, as it meant one less hurdle in the race to select and steal a vehicle. Given the circumstances, Spider opted to yank his bloody arm out of the now-ex-zombie and hop immediately into a nearby rash-red convertible. He ran a slimy hand over the leather seats, then began poking at the plastic plate under the steering column.

"How do your cavemen cars start? Do I need to jam my feet through the floor and sprint us to safety, or are there high voltage wires in here that I can cross at random until something starts moving?"

"Got it in two. Should be a panel under the steering wheel. If it has screws, beat on it until they give." He was about to hop in over the door himself, when he heard something. A voice. High and feminine and speaking in full sentences.

Two figures were visible through the showroom windows. Both moved with purpose. Looking for something?

S.T. set the bottles in the backseat and nodded to Spider. "Don't electrocute yourself, man. I'll be right back."

[jumping down to here briefly, back in a flash]

Edited 2009-08-02 15:30 (UTC)

Unfortunately for Spider, whatever godforsaken Nipponese factory put this car together had done it properly. No amount of finger-prying was getting the steering column open. Maybe there was some kind of tool in the glove compartment ... a pry bar or a gun, or a chainsaw maybe.

In fact, the glove compartment contained nothing but an owner's manual, a copy of the car's registration, and ...

A PACK OF CIGARETTES.

Before he even realized what he was doing, Spider had ripped the top off the pack and had all of its contents between his lips, ready to smoke. But how to light them!

The car had to have a cigarette lighter. The little black knob at the bottom of the dashboard emblazoned with a stylized cigarette would be a good candidate. The problem was figuring out how to work it. Pressing it did nothing. The button merely popped back out. So Spider tried pulling it. It came out. He stuck it in his mouth, next to the cigarettes. It did nothing. He stuck his finger in the empty socket. Not even a spark. DAMMIT THE CAR NEEDED TO BE ON.

"DO NOT WITHHOLD FIRE FROM ME, DEMON CAR!" he yelled, once again attacking the steering column with his fingers.

This time, he got it loose.

Edited 2009-08-04 02:39 (UTC)

[aaaand back from here]

Spider hadn't even noticed he'd had gone, had he? S.T. drummed his fingers on the doorframe and sneered. "Move it, Mister I Can Only Hijack Flying Cars." He vaulted the door without waiting to see if Spider could react in time (he did), and landed directly in the gooey zombiejuice contrail Spider had left on the white leather. It wasn't an unfamiliar feeling. He'd gotten back in the old van after a gig wet and slimy on more occasions than he could tally, but it didn't make it appealing. And rotting fish beat rotten human in the scent department even when creepy fuckers hadn't installed odor amps in his head.

Whatever. At this point, he probably owed Bart royalties on that phrase, but it still bore saying. What the fuck ever. He eased the seat back, reached down between his legs, and started yanking. At the wires. Then he stripped them with his teeth, spat any resulting toxins over the window, and grinned. "Watch and learn."

Before he started connecting wires, he did a belated sniff test for gasoline fumes. None managed to penetrate the miasma of putrescine and cadaverine. Besides, it was probably too late. He grabbed the severed head of the cigarette pack and used it to twist -- the plastic would do as an insulator. The seatbelt alarm chirped. S.T. ignored it. A second twist and the engine growled its way into the menagerie.

"Bingo." He glanced at the dash. All systems go. "And we've got most of a tank. We can get halfway to nowhere." The seatbelt alarm was still beeping. He fastened his seatbelt. It didn't stop. Must have a pressure sensor, since a second symbols was still illuminated. "Strap yourself in and let's put the pedal to the metal."

He threw the gearshift in reverse and started backing out of the space.

Spider briefly weighed the pros and cons of wearing the seatbelt as opposed to constantly standing up in his seat and swatting at zombies as they flew past. One way would spare him the horrible high-pitched danger noise. The other way allowed him to constantly stand up in his seat and swat at zombies as they flew past. He opted for option C. He fastened his seatbelt and jabbed at the cigarette lighter with his finger. While waiting for it to warm up, he turned to S.T.

"Want a cigarette?" he said around a mouthful of cigarettes.

S.T. ignored Spider's seatbelt antics with the aplomb of an MBTA driver on quaaludes. Instead, he glanced past him at the mirror, long enough to get the perfect movie-camera bracketed shot of a zombie getting pulled under the wheel while the label proclaimed that objects in mirror may be closer than they appear. Or he assumed that was what it said; he couldn't read it from here in the dark.

Thump. The car bumped up and over several zombies. S.T. was pretty sure he could feel some of them squirming as he rolled over them.

Then he leaned over and plucked a cigarette from Spider's mouth. He wiped it off on his jeans. Good enough.

"Save a few of those for later. Might need them to light the matches." He jerked a thumb at the back seat, where the half-made Molotov cocktails were managing not to spread so many fumes as to light the car on fire now.

The cigarette lighter popped; S.T. lit his, then passed it to Spider. With an overdramatic flourish, he threw the car from reverse into drive, and peeled out of the lot. Zombies growled; the engine, and S.T., growled back.

[to here]

Utena had lost her small statue in scrambling for the pokers, leaving her with only one weapon. Nevertheless, Utena charged forward as well with one of her signature thrusts. The movement was better suited for use with a sword, taking some of the steadiness and accuracy out of her attack, but the power behind it was far from weakened. Aiming for a zombie head as though it were a rose upon a duelist's chest, she skewered her poker through the thing's brain and out the right side of its fragile skull. The zombie's moaning ceased almost immediately.

She covered her mouth to keep from gagging, as she wrenched her weapon from the corpse's head. I'm really sorry, she thought, as if the person behind the zombie could hear her. She looked up and around quickly and warily, keeping an eye out for any other creatures that might be trying to get the jump on them.

Perhaps a bit too enthusiastically if Utena looked too closely at her, Juri first hit her target with a very unswordsmanlike whack across the top of the head, then followed it up with a more precise thrust right through the creature's face. Not neat, because the poker had a hook at the end. When the thing fell down, she stepped delicately on the shreds of its clothing to pull the poker free, and then smashed it one more time with her candle stick for good measure.

She'd never admit to being nauseated, so when she turned to Utena she tried to seem serene. "Where do you think the car keys are?" she asked.

Utena wasn't sure how necessary it was for Juri to hit the zombie that many times, but didn't question her. Instead, she shook her head, trying keep the bodies on the floor out of sight and out of mind. "Probably in some sort of back room. Don't know where that is in here, though." She felt very naked without the flashlight she had become accustomed to having at night. The shadows of the show floor seemed to loom closer and thicker every time she tried to see through them. Between that and the odor of decay, she felt as though she were going to be enclosed completely if she wasn't careful. It was like the lid of a coffin slowly threatening to close on top of her.

She grit her teeth, forcing herself to stay focused. "There are only so many places to look. We'll find them," she assured herself and Juri, striding away from the cars and toward the darkened, peeling walls, looking for any office-type doors.

"We'll have to split up then," Juri decided. "Yell if you need something." She was calming down some. She wasn't sure why the zombies made her so angry. Maybe it was that she didn't like feeling helpless. Well, that was one that wasn't getting up again.

She didn't want to touch the doors or the walls here. Somehow the decay seemed creepier here than at the Institute. But she thought maybe there'd be a panel with the cars' keys somewhere on the walls.

Utena nodded and gave a vaguely committal sound. She kept the poker up as she would her sword, keeping a careful eye out for moving shadows where there ought not to have been any. She brushed against the ruined wall with the back of her hand at one point and shivered with dull revulsion. Thankfully, she eventually found her way over to a front desk of sorts, and behind it was a door that still looked official enough despite the decay. Hopping up and over the low gate, she made her way over to the door. Not surprisingly, it was locked. What did startle her, however, was the sudden loud sound of groaning behind it after she tried the knob. Salespeople who were in there when the change happened? Maybe Zombie Hal himself? Utena wondered warily.

"Damn," she said, chewing the side of her lip lightly as she turned around, looking for Juri. It was hard to tell where her schoolmate was right away in the dark. "Juri, I think I found the office, but it looks like we'll have some trouble if we try to go in there!" she called out, hoping that she was yelling in the right direction. "You find anything else that might help yet?"

S.T. jogged over to the showroom door. It opened without a fight. He didn't leave the door -- sneaking up on anyone tonight would go well beyond the bounds of asshole. Besides, if it was the lesbian ninjas again, he needed his hands. Though it didn't look like them. He cleared his throat.

"Excuse my sexist ass, but do you ladies need a hand?"

The search of the wall wasn't turning up anything useful. "Right!" she called back to Utena. "I'm not finding anything either." Including horrible undead wanting to eat them. That was a benefit, she supposed.

She reached a corner and turned reluctantly back to join Utena. She supposed they'd have to search the cars next. Then someone came into the door. Juri raised her poker and crouched, facing the door. What was this?

"Who are you?"

[OOC: Pardon Juri's attitude. I'm glad to see you.]

Utena tensed for a moment as well at the unexpected male voice addressing them, but relaxed more readily than did Juri. She kept her poker up, but more for any other zombie attackers. "We want to get one of these cars going, but the sales office sounds full of not-so-friendly types," she explained, ignoring Juri's defensive question. "Don't know how much you can help with that, though."

"Sangamon Taylor, hotwire specialist and all-around not-idiot." What was it with cars that turned even smart girls into blithering morons? He stopped that thought before it could gain momentum. He was close to the point of not just missing Debbie, but missing her inability to follow the simplest instructions when it came to basic maintenance.

"Who the fuck needs keys to start a car? Pick one. Preferably outside, unless the part where you drive through a plate-glass window is non-negotiable." It would look kind of cool. Burst through the window, like some all-girl reenactment of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But having to backtrack for a fresh car with an unbroken windshield would spoil the coolness factor faster the hyperactive town-blight that had hit this whole place between one breath in and one out.

He held the door open. "After you."

Edited 2009-08-02 16:11 (UTC)

With a glare at Utena--she was too mature to roll her eyes--Juri straightened up and lowered her poker enough that it didn't seem quite as much of a threat. Then she nodded and walked back out like it was her idea. Even in this horrible skirt and t-shirt from the Institute's rag bag, she could look graceful.

"Thank you, I'm Juri." she said belatedly over shoulder. The outside air didn't really smell that much better, but something about not having that rot confined made it much easier to breath. "I don't particularly care which car."

Utena breathed a sigh of relief knowing that they wouldn't have to deal with keys to get a car going. "Thanks a lot. We're glad for the help. I'm Utena, by the way," she said, following Juri quickly to the door. Suddenly, she was feeling self-concious of her ridiculously pink skirt again; combined with not appearing to know that much about cars and her age, the getup made her look a lot more feminine and helpless than she really was.

They made their way out to the lot and Utena looked over the cars, trying to figure out which one looked the most secure. Despite herself, her eyes kept going back to a late 90s model red sedan. She supposed it was a sense of familiarity and homesickness that was doing it, even though the car wasn't the same type as the one she had seen around Ohtori campus. "That one's as good as any," said Utena as they got closer to the car.

And they never said what they meant. Women. Whatever. Red suburban housewife grocery-mobile it was. He strolled over and tried the door. Open, no alarm. That saved him a lot of trouble. And the panel didn't require a screwdriver he didn't have. That saved a hell of a lot more.

"It's simple. Pop this panel off here." He pointed to Juri, since she looked less invested in the whole car plan. "You can make sure we don't end up as zombie kibble while I figure out what the color scheme is under here." Somewhere along the line, car wiring harness design had sacrificed clarity for a false veneer of security. Went with the wood trim. The ability to slow down potential thieves for thirty seconds or so had trumped the simplicity of red=hot, and so on. Either that or the designer was colorblind.

S.T. yanked a handful of wires free and stared at them. No wire cutter. Eh, a mouthful of lead solder wasn't going to kill him today. He stripped the wires with his teeth, holding them carefully clear of each other when he got to the ones he thought were live.

"When you turn the key, it completes a circuit. All we're doing is skipping the middleman." He connected two wires. Nothing. "Like this." The second pair was the auxiliary power -- the dash lit up and the windshield wipers came on, plastic squeaking over safety glass. Then another two, and the engine drowned out the noise with a dull roar.

"That's all there is. Keep those two pairs of wires together and you're in business." He twisted the insulated sections together, and dropped both pairs. The ends fell apart, and the car went quiet. "Find something to hold those together. And don't touch the wires with bare hands." The latter should go without saying, but not everyone could be Sangamon Taylor. Or even versed in basic electrical theory.

"Now, are you sure you two'll be okay on your own?" He looked back to where Spider was dicking around with something on the car. They could take two more -- two guys, two gals, a couple of cars and quiet small-town streets. It had all of the trappings of an entirely different movie genre. Well, and Spider. Self-described acute victim chronic sex deprivation. On second thought, the zombies would only eat his brains. These two would quite possibly kick him in the nuts just on general principle alone since he had shown up with Spider.

[heading back to here after being turned down]

Edited 2009-08-03 01:53 (UTC)

Juri watched what he did. When did he think she'd need another reason to steal a car. "Thank you," she said, trying to be gracious at the last. When he vacated, she sat in the driver's seat and slipped the sleeve of her flimsy jacket over her hand to twist the wires back together. She hissed at the heat even through that.

"Utena, do you have anything that can hold these together?" Juri's poker and candlestick were sitting outside the car beside her.

Utena watched attentively until S.T. was done. While she doubted she would ever need to know how to hotwire anything else again, it was still something she had never seen done before, and thus it was interesting.

She got in the passenger side after Juri. "Not sure," she responded to Juri's question, looking over the inside of the car quickly. The last thing her eyes landed on was her own skirt, and suddenly, Utena had an idea. "Hang on a sec," she said, gripping the bottom of the white material where there weren't any thick seams to contend with. With a bit of effort, she got it to rip, and within a minute, she had two strips of white fabric off one side of the skirt. "That should do," said Utena, handing the strips to Juri. "Just wrap them around and tie them off."

Well, that was a direct solution. Juri took the strips and tied them around the wires, knotting the thick cloth as firmly as she could. She lay her poker and candlestick across her lap then and closed the car door. "This might be bumpy," she cautioned and put the car into reverse.

Utena had to grin a little bit as she watched Juri tie the fabric around the wires. Even if it wasn't much, she liked to think that she had taken a little revenge against her stupid, floofy skirt. She would have been tempted to throw the thing off altogether if that didn't mean running around Zombieville in her underwear.

"Figured as much," she said as the pulled out of the dealership, already plowing into a few approaching zombies as they headed out onto North Street.

[To here]

Edited 2009-12-09 05:41 (UTC)

Nightshift 42: Hal's Used Cars

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