Day 43: Sun Room, Second Shift

[arc-wrench.livejournal.com]

When the shift changed, HK stayed put. Even after a long night of zombie killing, he had no interest in meatbag fuel, especially after all the discussion of chocolate with that rather strange meatbag. It was just making him crave the stuff even more than he had previously, if that was possible.

Oh, right. He was supposed to be looking for someone who was "VERY LARGE, WITH DARK HAIR." And also seemed to not know what lower-case letters were on the bulletin. As if that would help. He'd seen a likely candidate last shift, but talk of chocolate had distracted him.

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[dualistic]

No response to the note so far, although Harvey wasn't expecting Jason to hold out on him. They had been able to keep in decent enough contact with each other since their first meeting, so he could see no reason why the kid would decide to avoid him all of a sudden. He was probably in one of the other rooms and hadn't had a chance to check the bulletin yet.

Harvey could be patient when he needed to be, and so he'd been prepared to sit around and wait, but Jones happened upon him and the ex-lawyer straightened in his seat. The man didn't even bother to explain what had happened, although Harvey wasn't surprised that Jones was curious about how things had turned out.

"Neither of us got injured," he explained -- the sheriff's office had almost been cleared out by the time they got there, "and yes, I did. But what the hell happened to you?" He doubted Jones had meant to lose them, but he was still curious. The man had obviously made it out alive, but he could be sporting injuries where they couldn't be seen. It was better than wearing them on your face, Harvey morbidly thought.

[its-the-mileage.livejournal.com]

If Dent had picked up a secret cache of weapons for use in the hostile takeover of Landel's Institute, he wasn't sharing. The question was a fair one, though, so Indy answered instead of pressing for more information. He'd already missed his shot, unless he got lucky enough to make it to the town in one night and stumble across a working gun sitting around somewhere.

He thought back to the point at which they'd gotten separated. There was the fire, the smashed-up shops...just like those ruins, Indy thought suddenly. That kind of scenario could explain why the cash register had just been left--in a life-or-death situation, you needed weapons, not money. It wouldn't explain the scene inside the church, though.

That was a better point of discussion for Pierson than Dent, though, so Indy leaned back and explained, "Got surrounded by four of them and the only way out was through." He grimaced. It had been a stupid mistake, one he wasn't particularly happy about rehashing. "Sorry. I was planning on catching up to you and Ms. von Karma, but I finished up right next to a friend who needed a hand. Glad to hear you two didn't miss me too much."

[dualistic]

The explanation wasn't as interesting as Harvey had been expecting, but he also knew that Jones had very little reason to lie about it. He'd had no obligation to them, especially after he had gotten his "whip." To be honest, Harvey was more surprised that Franziska had stayed with him, considering her overall attitude. Maybe she'd felt a need to repay him. Either way, he wasn't going to question something that had been to his advantage.

"We made it all right, yeah," he replied. "It helped that the sheriff's office was already packed full of other patients who had cleared out most of the zombies there." Harvey usually wanted to do his own work for himself rather than relying on someone else to take care of it for him, but zombie killing was never going to be part of his job description. It seemed that a lot of these mental patients were surprisingly good at fighting. Then again, a lot of mentally deranged people were also ex-criminals, so that might have something to do with it.

Not that Landel's was at all what it seemed in the first place. There were lawyers, archaeologists, and who knew what else -- people who were so batty they thought they hadn't been human prior to coming here.

[its-the-mileage.livejournal.com]

"I'm surprised they left anything for you to find," Indy replied, not at all convinced that they had. Pretty generous of a crowd of desperate people just to hand over a gun. Franziska seemed a little too law-and-order to get a gun by force even if she'd wanted it, but Indy wasn't sure Dent would lose much sleep over taking one. Then again, trying to wrestle a gun away from someone who was determined to hang onto it was risky enough when you weren't in a room full of armed mental patients on edge. Maybe they really had had more weapons than they needed.

That meant a whole lot of people around here were probably armed now. Angry, scared, disorganized people. Might be more of a curse than a blessing. He wondered how many of them had any idea how to use the weapons they'd picked up.

There was something else he was curious about, too. "The people I talked to have sounded pretty familiar with the Zombis," Indy said. "Are those stories common where you come from?" He couldn't remember if Dent knew about the time-travel angle or not, but hopefully that phrasing would elicit a straight answer either way. Indy wanted to know why Landel was choosing that kind of experiment, whether it held some more significant meaning to certain people. Maybe Dent would have an idea.

[dualistic]

Jones definitely had a point about the gun, especially seeing how he had gotten there so late in the night. He had only gotten one bullet out of the chamber before it went back to morning once again, although that was probably for the best. He didn't need to be wasting the small amount of ammunition that he had. "You can say that again," he agreed with a short nod. He hadn't even had to fight for it, really. Everyone who had been there before him had taken what they'd wanted and there had just happened to be one last gun left for him. Sometimes life worked in his favor, even though such instances were rare.

The last thing that Harvey wanted to talk about now was the zombies; if he could have his way, he'd think about that incident as little as possible from here on out. It had all been so insane that he wanted to forget the whole thing had ever happened. And if Jones thought he was some sort of zombie expert, he had another thing coming.

"Common?" He gave a half-shrug with his good shoulder. "Everyone knows what they are, but they also know that they aren't real. I guess they're probably in a lot of the popular scary movies nowadays, but those were never really my thing." Then, his visible eye narrowed. "Why, where are you from?" Maybe zombies weren't well-known in some other countries, but Jones had definitely come across as American to him.

[its-the-mileage.livejournal.com]

Better play this one safe, Indy thought. Spiraling off into what would look like insanity or a flat-out lie probably wasn't the best way to keep on the good side of the guy with the gun. "New Jersey," he answered honestly enough. "I'm teaching in New York right now. But I'm not much of a movie buff, so I guess it makes sense that I've only heard of the things in passing."

Interesting. So Zombi mythology would be pretty common knowledge for anyone from Dent's time--which Indy put at 2009 or reasonably close to it, judging by the way Dent had reacted to his statement about the date at their first meeting. That might pack an extra punch of horror for those patients, seeing monsters step right off the silver screen. On the other hand, contemporary patients would likely also be the only ones who'd know how to kill the bastards. That could make them leaders--

Just more mind games, Indy decided. It probably wasn't worth overthinking.

[dualistic]

It wasn't like Harvey was any kind of movie buff either, but he still knew about zombies. Maybe Jones was just really oblivious because he was always holed up in a lab doing archaeological things -- or he was out in the middle of nowhere on digs for months at a time. Harvey didn't know very much about the profession and he wasn't going to display his ignorance by asking too many questions.

A lot of people seemed to come from around the New York or New Jersey area, though. Harvey didn't even think he could start speculation about whether or not that was a coincidence. Any of Jones' attempts to find patterns hadn't really led anywhere, had they? It seemed like a lost cause.

"Well, now you've gotten to know them up close and personal," he grumbled. That reminded him that the other man had seen his face uncovered last night and still hadn't reacted to it. Maybe they were going to pretend it never happened. Harvey didn't care either way at this point, so he wasn't going to harass the man about it.

The intercom went off again, and it was still that computer system. Harvey frowned at the words, not liking some of the implications in the slightest. At least it didn't seem like he would have to worry about anyone coming to see him -- none of the nurses had mentioned anything, after all. He glanced at Jones and shrugged. "I'll see you around, then." Right now he was more concerned with making sure Jason could find him.