What We Do
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Words… don’t feel adequate enough to explain the scene in the lobby.

To get out into the parking lot, I had used a back exit closer to the dorm rooms. That explains how we managed to miss this the first time around. It’s clear that thing decided to barge right in through the front door though; upon reentry I tense up out of complete shock. What once was a pristine, quaint little waiting room had been defiled with death. It wasn’t like a cartoon or a slasher movie - frankly it might have been more palatable had it been. No, there was just a single corpse on the floor, some poor attendant, with deep slash marks going down his chest. A pool of blood underneath him, and a long trail of viscera following from it into the building proper, as if that thing dragged someone else out behind it.

 I… I don’t think I’ve ever seen a dead body before this. I mean, I had the internet, we’ve all had shock images sent to each other. Mangled bodies and dying people. Hell, or even just history - like photos of war crimes we committed in Sigon and Fallujah. But there’s something so different about seeing it in real life. I’ve never had any real extended family to have dealt with death before. This is just… someone who isn’t here anymore. And he’s right here… I could physically touch him…  I pull my trembling hand from my lips, kneel down, and hold my fingers over his wrist. It’s… he’s still warm, but he gives no resistance to me picking it up, and I feel no beat in his veins. His arm flops back down to the earth and bounces like a rotten fish. 

‘Fuck, this isn’t good. I thought it would have just gone after us, beelined right for me.’ How… how would that be better? ‘Well, it wouldn’t be for us. But it would have meant everyone else is safe! Who knows what’s going to happen now. All these people are in danger…’ I can feel her gasp through my mouth - or it could just be me forgetting to breathe through shock. ‘Sarah! She’s still here! We need to find her now!’ I… I know I need to move, to help. But I still can’t take my eyes off the body on the floor. A man, someone I didn’t know, who had a name and a life and probably his own family, is dead. Because of me. Because we brought a feral killer directly here.

‘Snowbelle, listen. I know this is hard, I know this is something no one should have to see, to deal with. But my oldest friend, maybe my only family left, is in this building. And I’m not going to leave them to die. I can’t… you need to move.’ She’s… she’s right. Sarah, Joey, they’re both here, and I can’t lose them too. Slowly I pick myself up from the floor, and start making my way down to the hallway.

The blood trail was helpful in knowing exactly where not to go. With how I got my shit absolutely rocked by that thing two times now, I knew I wasn’t going to come running in guns blazing. I’ll just get my other arm chewed off. ‘Although you have to admit, Snowbelle. The thought of you going Rambo in your cute little skirt and blazer combo would be quite the sight. Our own little magical girl.’ I… no, I’d rather stay alive.

Creeping my way down to the backrooms, it’s almost as if a bomb has gone off back here. Papers are strewn everywhere, the lights have been smashed and are flickering in and out. From off in the distance I heard another one of those awful blood curdling screams, but it seems to be coming from the other side of the building. Still, I do the very brave thing of jumping nearly out of my pants (or lack thereof) and scrambling behind a door when I hear it.

Peaking into the dorm room, I can’t see anyone. Not Joey, not Sarah. In fact, looking into each of the rooms shows no one there. Not even the few other monsters that were holed up in this place. ‘You know, it’s pretty shitty that you keep calling us that. The body, I’ll concede. But you do know we have an actual name, right? We’re not hiding under your beds at night.’ I guess, yeah. And if you were in our closets I’d have already bumped into you in mine. ‘Oh, she does have a sense of humor after all!’ Shut up.

‘You do have a point though, ewe. Where in the world did everyone go? This is a safe house - either there should be bodies littering this place or they should be hiding in their rooms. It’s like they’ve been disappeared.’ She’s right - one of the doors looks broken in, and there’s whoever’s been living here’s things all over the place - but there’s no blood, and there’s no body. Whatever happened in here, it wasn’t a wild animal attack - not like that thing’s behaved before.

I turn away from the scene and make my way over to the large room, the one they were prepping the ceremony for us. This isn’t exactly a gigantic building, there’s only so many other places those two could be hiding. Slowly creaking the door open, I can see that it’s basically been entirely abandoned. The lights are completely out, with just the candles flickering away all over the place in the room, I can see two figures barely moving in the center of them. Maybe that’s Sarah and Jo hiding! I creep forward trying to make out the figures better - it’s a girl kneeling over another person who’s prone on the floor curled up. I lean in a little closer… and stop as I hear a huge cracking sound. Slowly looking down reveals that I’ve stepped on the tray with the dagger and blood bowl - if it wasn’t shattered before it clearly is now. As I look up I see the girl slowly turn its head to look at me, chewing big chunks of flesh from what I can clearly now tell is the donor body, some of it schlepping out of the half of the jaw that’s been dislocated and rotting away. 

It stands up and screams at me as it pounces on top of me, holding my shoulders, crashing the table even further, knocking shit everywhere. Tail flicking back and forth like a cat who finally caught it’s mouse, it slowly leans over, drooling heavily as its spittle slathers over my face, licking up my lips. This old trick again. I wave my hands around me trying to grab something to help. As it toys with me, I see it open its jaw as wide as it can go (which is pretty wide now thanks to my help), lean in, and: my fingers find the ceremony knife. I grasp it and plunge it directly into its face, slicing into its cheek, rendering its eye into naught but jelly and cataracts. As it rears back, I slam the knife into its chest, pushing it back off of me, hopefully puncturing one of its lungs and slowing the fucker down.

I scoop down to rip the knife out of its chest, and then bolt out of the room as fast as I can, fucking booking it out of there! I can hear it make pace behind me slamming into things clearly blind, loud banging and shrieking. I knock over a large cabinet behind me to block the doors, and I bolt as fast as I can down the hallway into a section of the building I haven’t seen yet, office cubicles going by left and right, hearing that fucking thing shouting behind me. Over my shoulder I can see it’s fucking crawling on the walls to get over all the shit I’m knocking over! I bolt over to the nearest room I can, slam the door shut, and push the filers over the door to barricade it closed. I can’t do anything else as I hear it start snarling and slamming into the door, claws scraping against it, I’m trapped, this is it! I slowly back up and trip over something laying on the far end of the floor, slamming on to my ass. Looking over and, oh god, oh god above, it’s another body! I yelp and crawl my way backwards under the desk, clutching the knife to my chest, the thing just snarling and slamming against the door, as I stare at yet another poor life snuffed out. Her head is basically popped like a fucking watermellon, almost entirely blown off from the side, splatter all over the wall with her slumped down onto the floor underneath it. All I can make out of her face is a mop of wet, grizzled blond hair behind her, stained over her nametag - “Betty”. That’s the final straw, can’t help it, I start sobbing here - I still didn’t know her, only saw her for a few minutes, but she seemed so sweet, she... she didn’t deserve this…

Pound Pound Pound against the door. ‘Scarlett, you have to stop. Stay still, hold your tears, don’t even fucking breathe. You need to stay absolutely stone silent here.’ Oh what, what now? ‘The body… it couldn’t do that. There’s no way in hell. All it has is claws and teeth, and that is goddamned blown open. Something else is doing this.’ As she speaks, a loud bang goes off in the distance. Oh fuck. I clasp my hands over my mouth tight, tears riveting down my cheeks silently, and force myself to stop rocking and shaking as much as possible. Pound pound pound. I feel like my entire nervous system is going to split from my body as I hear it give out another long, guttural scream against the door. And then… nothing. It just stopped. ‘Don’t you dare let your guard down. Stay. Still.’ I try to hold statuesque as I hear soft thumping from outside of the door, and then…

“Hey! Watch what you’re doing with the asset!” Voices. Muffled, but that was a voice. There’s people out there. “That shit was for an emergency, you know how easy this thing is to wrasle down and we don’t really know what it's gonna do to this thing. We don’t know if we’re ever going to get another one of these, you almost blew everything.”

More knocking and a second voice from right outside the door. “Look, we got everything we possibly could need, we’re done here. And so what if I juice it a bit? Better to deal with it with its back turned than try to cuff it awake on top of me, right?”

“Fucking spineless.” More heavy thuds, as his voice gets closer. “Whatever. Look in there and see what had that thing so riled up while I restrain it. It might be the kid after all.” Fuck, oh fuck. I hear the door clicking open as I go stock still, not even daring to take a breath.

I can hear the metal of the filing cabinet scraping against the door as the man tries to push it in. “Damn it, it’s jammed. Hold on.” A massive thud against the door and I hear it clatter to the ground, and then scrape against the floor. The light flicks on and my eyes take a moment to adjust - I pull even tighter in on myself, clutching the knife ever closer. There’s a motivational poster framed up on the wall - a little kitten with a “hang in there!” underneath it, with little devil horns drawn on it. In the glass, around the splatter of poor Betty’s remains, I can see the reflection of the man at the door. Complete jackboot. Everything you’d expect - helmet, vest, sunglasses, mask, all in black. A big white patch on his vest, although I can’t make it out in the reflection. Zipties galore on his hip, pointing a big fuck off gun into the room. ‘Not a sound, not a single movement. This is it.’ He takes a few steps in… “It’s just a body.” He kicks Betty, and I want to scream. “Stupid fuckin’ animal was probably just hungry, could smell the blood out here. Kid got away with the rest of them, I’m coming out.” He turns back around, never reaching far enough to get around the desk.

“Whatever. Take the asset back to the van, we’re done here. I think we have enough of these freaks anyways, and Sarge’ll point us to the kid later. Torch it and we’ll call the trial run here a success.”

They both stomp off, the thing giving a low growling as it’s dragged along with them. I just, I sit there, still shaking silently, hands on my mouth, clutching that dagger tight. My eyes move back to poor Betty. It was people. What kind of people could possibly do something like this? ‘Who do you think Scar. Could possibly have attacked us. Again.’ Wait… those Patriot Prayer assholes were the Hunters? That’s what’s happening here?! ‘What, expecting knight armor with crusader banners? Nah, every two bit spineless thug wants to be fucking Blackwater now.’

I wait, still staring at Betty’s nametag. I can’t bring myself to look any higher than that. I still can’t bring myself to move at all, afraid that these monsters are going to pop out and realize I’ve been hiding here the whole time. Maybe I’ll just stay in this spot forever and wait for everyone else to save us. What was I even thinking coming in here? ‘Ewe, he said he was going to torch it - I think they’re going to burn the place behind them. If we stay here we die.’ Fuck, FUCK! I slam the palms of my hands against my temples, the knife hilt bouncing painfully off my head. If we go now those shitheels are just going to pop us, and we’ll be dead either way! ‘Ok… ok, here’s the plan. We wait five more minutes, and then we bolt. There’s an exit right through the dorms, so we don’t have to wind our way through the whole building with the goons in it. Easy as, right Snowbelle? And you’re not unarmed, so you’re good on that front too.’ 

Right. Right, ok. Breathing exercises. Ground myself. Deep breath in, hand up through my breast, deep breath out. Don’t think about the fire. Deep breath in, don’t think about the death squad, deep breath out. Hand down over my breast. Hold. Deep breath in, don’t think about how we’re going to take down a man holding an Uzi with a butterknife, deep breath out. ‘I mean, that was an AR, not an Uzi. Uzi’s are pistols, they have rifles.’ Breathe in, don’t think about the know it all in your brain, breathe out. ‘Hey!’ Hold… I burst out laughing. I’ve gone completely insane. I stand up, give one more look over to Betty. “I’m sorry.” Right then. Let’s go get murdered.

Bursting from the office, I can already smell smoke in the air. It’s at least a good sign that the hunters are off the campus entirely - I can just focus on finding my way out of here. I make a beeline towards the dorm rooms, when suddenly the air gets thicker and heat starts to blast my face. Turning a corner, I can see the entire area is in flames. Smoke is billowing out of almost all of the dorms, clogging the air heavily. Coughing, I drop to the floor, covering my mouth with my arm, choking up in the smog. The exit is right there, I just have to… I pull my shirt up over my mouth, and crawl my way past the burning rooms, the fires licking up the room where we all fought just earlier today. God damn it, why didn’t we stick together? Crawling past the door that'd been broken in, burning away any sign of a struggle. Flames lick up at me, and as painful as it is I avoid sucking in more of the awful smokey air. This hallway, turning the corner into the next, the fire not spreading as far but the smoke still billowing, and then…

Out into the oxygen. Out past the doors. Standing up and running as far as I can from this nightmare. Deep, heavy inhaling from the sweet manna from heaven - smoggy impure city air. A quick look and the van with the print is gone. They’re gone. We did it Lucy! We fucking beat that thing, and the hunters, and, and, ‘No. No, we didn’t do jack shit but put ourselves in danger for nothing. No Joseph. No Sarah. No Carl. No Declue. You don’t even have the car keys.’ I pat my blazer pocket and just find my phone and some gum - that’s right, Sarah drove us. ‘We lost everything.’

I… I just walk from the parking lot, down the sidewalk, into the city as the building behind me starts to burn down, flames licking past the roof. Someone must have called the fire department - I can hear the sirens off towards the way I’m walking. I slump down against some building and just, let go of my will to do anything. I watch as the fire trucks blast past me to the burning building, and then slump into my knees, arms holding them tight against myself and go numb.

And then a buzzing brings me out of it - something is going off in my pocket like mad. I reach in, pulling my cell out, buzzing over and over. Through the screen that’s been heavily cracked from all the shit we’ve been doing these last few days I watch text after text come in over a messaging app.

“Hey buddy, pick up your phone.” “Answer your phone dipshit, what are you doing?” “I swear if you get yourself murdered I’m going to fucking kill you” - fifty or more texts like that from the past hour and a half, three missed video calls. It’s Joey. He’s Alive! I flick over to the tracker on my homescreen to see: big x’s over the call, wireless, data indicators. Big notification message saying there’s no service on my phone. My parents must have cut me out of the plan. Like they’ve cut me out of everything. He only got in contact when my phone connected to this shop I’m sitting on’s free wifi.

I pull back up the app and I slam on the phone button as fast as I can. It only rings for a second before I can see Jo’s stupid, ugly, wonderful mug. “Liam! What the fuck, where are you! I thought they got you! Are you ok?”

“Who fucking cares, are you ok? Is Sarah with you?”

I can hear him scoff though the phone’s receiver, although I can easily see his huge smile, he’s not even trying to hide it. “Yeah, we both were with Declue when we got attacked. She was shuffled out of there quickly and us with her. I tried to make them come back for you but it was happening too fast... I’m so happy you’re alive man.”

“Joey? Is that them? Are they alive?!” I can hear Sarah shouting from behind him, and then almost rips the phone out of his hands as I cackle. “Holy shit, I was so scared you two were goners! Where the hell were you!”

I laugh again. “Honestly, I thought I was too! We ended up right in the middle of the shit, you won’t believe it.” I can feel a cocky smile on my face - I don’t know if it was me or Lucy. “We went fucking Rambo on them.”

It’s only a few minutes after telling them where I am when a car pulls up in front of me and honks a jaunty little tune on it’s horn. I run up to greet the two people I care about the most, but stop at the passenger’s door when I see a gaunt, wiry man get out of the front seat instead. Casually laying a handgun against the roof of his car in his grasp, pointed at me.

“Hey Liam! Funny meeting each other way out here. Gotta say, something tells me youse haven’t been upfront with me the last time I asked if you saw anythin’ funny. I feel like I’ll get a straighter answer this time though.” Mr. Harrelson nods towards his gun as if I was a moron and didn’t notice it immediately. “Get in the car, we’re gonna go for a little drive.” I open the door, sitting in defeat. “And by the way, nice costume son.”

Eenie meenie meenie meenie 
miney miney moe
The lucky ones are gonna 
be the first to go

Hey y’all! Oops, it sure has been an entire year! Gee, sure do love living in interesting times! The Cool Zone rules huh! Who the fuck needs precedented times, cowards?

I want to give a big shout out to Morri (author of the very entertaining Thaw) because, like, she's great. Go read her work, it actually updates ever :v

If you wanna follow me anywhere else, you can find me over at my twitter @Cassie_Sandwich where you'll find me just on my bullshit 24/7. 

Thank you so much for reading, and for being so patient with me as I stewed around. Seriously, it felt so great finally going back, and I hope I can keep this energy up going forward. And as always, I crave that delicious, manna from heaven serotonin that comes with feedback, so feel free to comment below!

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