Post by Vespyr on Jun 4, 2012 17:44:00 GMT -8
OOC: Random IMRP between Mikey and I that I thought was worth posting.
Vespyr stood in the freezer, wearing jeans and a tank-top, her pale white skin no more chilled than usual by the frigid air. She crossed her arms and glared at the scarce selection of wrapped meat cuts remaining on the shelf. At that moment she blinked her dark lashes and her eyes glinted eerily the cold shadows she gazed into, something disturbingly inhuman in that the violet depths were unfathomable voids lacking any and all emotion.
Night and blood summoned the girl out of her lair and pulled her through the labyrinth of shadowy streets toward her prey. Vespyr had slipped into her trench coat, feeling strangely satisfied with the simplicity of the attire which she had worn for as long as she could recall. As much as she appreciated the commandeering aura of a uniform, she found herself appreciating the times when she didn’t need to wear one—didn’t need to be anyone’s Commander—and could forget her self-appointed responsibilities for awhile. In black jeans, a black tank-top, boots, and her trench coat, she was nobody again. Just a shadow on the street, with a short knife and a coil of wire.
Just north of the 405 was still relatively fertile hunting ground and Vespyr had dragged many a good kill home under the freeway overpass. Tonight she hoped for a female, young and fit. What she found was a female, young and somewhat underfed, but she would do all the same. The girl had been walking somewhat confidently down the sidewalk, as if she were in a slight hurry to get somewhere. Vespyr got to her first, dropping down from a lamp post and landing on the girl’s back. Their bodies toppled to the ground with Vespyr on top, already twisting midair like a cat to land in a crouch on top of her mouse. Violet eyes flashed coldly at the girl as she shrieked for help. Two seconds passed and the scream was abruptly cut off by Vespyr’s fist pounding once into the girl’s throat.
The shriek sounded off and Nathan stood up with his hackles. His eye glared into the dim lights of his house, the candle burning away indifferently. Screams and shrieks weren't an uncommon occurence, but it had been a while since the former salaryman had heard one so close to home. His adrenaline spiked, his heart pumping an unnatural amount of blood into his head, making him fall on his knees, coughing heavily. Nathan groped at his face with his cholesteral-dotted hands, hugging the his rifle closer to himself.
Once the episode had passed, the man uncrumpled himself into a stand, sliding himself into the confines of his closet, closing it after himself. What emerged was a man with a trash bag fitted over his body as a light mesh of "armor," covered with clattering trash can lids like a medieval suit of armor. On top of his head was a small pot, its long handle angled behind him. He bore his rifle under his right arm, a small kitchen knife held loftily in his left hand... and his self-entitlement over his grease-covered face. He coughed pollution, snorting in his filth, wiping away the excess with the plastic wrap covering his right forearm.
Going to the table, he scooped up the candle and fitted it into a nearby lantern... hooking it onto the still exposed notches of his worn belt. He lumbered to his door and slid his chair over with the butt of his rifle.
He clattered noisly back to the base of his stairs, the light jangling at his waist as he stepped up to it. Carefully, Nathan fingered the scope of his rifle, determining to figure the source from a safe distance...
Choking sounds gurgled from the girl’s throat as she tried to breathe, winded. Vespyr reached into the abysmal pocket of her coat and pulled out a wire fitted into a noose. She slipped it over the girl’s head, pulled it tight, and rose to her feet.
Someone else coughed. Vespyr’s head turned immediately at the sound cold eyes falling on the door of a nearby apartment building. Inhuman accuracy? Perhaps. Such things were not uncommon. As Vespyr stared emotionlessly at the closed door, the girl at her feet struggled to breathe and writhed uselessly on the sidewalk. A few seconds later, clattering sounds from beyond the door. A jolt of predatory excitement shivered in Vespyr’s cold veins, the opposing instinct to that which spikes one’s adrenaline, the fear of being found, in a game of hide-and-seek. Vespyr was ‘it’.
She left her prey on the sidewalk; the girl couldn’t breathe anyway and wasn’t going anywhere. A few silent paces brought Vespyr to the door behind which the clattering continued. She remained still until the noise stopped, just looming outside the door, infecting the sanctity of the space with her presence. Ten seconds would pass after whatever was inside had settled down and stopped making noise.
Then she knocked on the door thrice, slowly.
In rusted, golden letters on the side of the door glimmered the pieces of an old address of a 56391, missing the six, the three, and the one. Underneath it read dirtily "No Solicitors," a black stain of blood sprayed on the bottom left of it, ending at the base of the wrecked, discolored apartment.
-Just as the man had begun to shuffle back into the true riches of his holy city, three definitive knocks on his door rang into the empty apartment. For a moment, it echoed endlessly, smothering itself only in the piles of his treasure troves. The hackles shot up, tightening painfully as drops of sweat formed and dripped from the moist edges of his hunched frame. As though to make himself smaller, he tucked in his neck closer to his rib cage as he slowly shuffled around...
"I HAVE A GUN," he trilled, slowly moving up the rifle up to his head, crooking the butt against his shoulder as he held up the barrel of his Mosin with the back of his other hand, still gripping the blade. The light would flicker dirtily as he began to lumber down the stairs, a tower of magazines falling after him. For a moment, the man stumbled, stepping twice with his left foot on the staircase, once sliding on an old 1987 Playboy, the other on the very edge of the stairs. He coughed unheathily as he began to walk more gingerly, clattering loudly as he went, the light shining grimly against the musk staining the lantern's glass.
Nathan trained the barrel with a half-squinted eye on the doorway as he went along, frightened but determined to scare away this hooligan-bandit just like all the others. He was Nathan Posada. He had actually stabbed someone with that bayonet and scared away about six bandits. As far as Nathan was concerned, he was a god of the post-apocolypse.[/size][/i]
The corner of Vespyr’s lip twitched up for a moment, then disappeared into the emotionless void of her visage. She knocked again on the door, slowly, ominously, three times.
Nathan's shoulders jumped up higher into the nearly invisible gap between his chin and his chest, as he shouted in spite of himself, a cacophony of nonsensical gibberish. He sounded like an irate, trapped pig being squashed to death by a sinking landslide of rocks. In a moment of sloth strength, the man loaded down the barrel of his gun on the surface of his table and swept it across, knocking over dozens of cans onto the floor, two of them popping open, as if to add to the spoiled air inside. Inhaling deeply, the man allowed a controlled violence to enter him as he noisily pushed the table onto its side, and began to shove it up against the door, aiming the barrel of his gun right on top of its rounded side.
The barrel slid down, only being loosely held up by the back of his knife hand. Fear entered his voice in the light of this persistent bandit.
"I'LL SHOOT.
"GET AWAY. GET AWAY NOW."[/size]
Nathan, the invincible warrior. Nathan, survivor of the apocolypse. He shoved the butt of his rifle awkwardly against his chest to slam noisly into the trash can lids and metal pans he had taped to his body before aiming again.
Nathan, the man with the gun.[/size][/i]
Vespyr waited for the cacaphony to stop, and then knocked three more times. Only this time, as well as being ominously timed, they were louder and more agressive.
Nathan, the man who almost soiled himself.
His face grew redder at the louder knocking, gritting his teeth, staring bleary-eyed.
"STOP IT."
He began to side-step,scared annoyed. With his left hand, he tore away at the stapled in bed cover on the boarded up window adjacent to the door. Stained light would peer dimly through the cracks of the boarded up wood, as he lowered his gun, aimed at the window, angled at whoever was possibly in front of the door.
"STOP FUCKING KNOCKING OR I'LL SHOOT."
For the first time in his life... he found his finger on the trigger. His back shuddered, making the metal pieces grind over his dulled form.
Terror and madness. The knocking on the door like the endless, ominous tolling of a bell. For whom did the bell toll?
A knock for every one of them. The knocking would only grow louder, every two seconds, another knock, and another, shaking the door.
Nathan, whose deluded fantasies were beginning to crumble all around him.
"FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU. CAN'T YOU SEE MY FUCKING GUN? DO YOU WANT TO FUCKING DIE!?"
Nathan, whose dead fridge was almost too heavy for him to push. Almost. He began to back away from the door, the maddening door, his sallowed eyes the most open they had been in months. This was his world, his fantasy. No one had right to invade.
"FINAL FUCKING WARNING," he wheezed.
He could not believe he was about to shoot at someone, to shoot at his door. He couldn't believe that his finger was actually pulling against the trigger. He never knew how hard to pull that trigger was.
"THREE..."
"...TWO..."
Nathan, the former pacifist. The insulation of his plastic "armor" grew slick with the precipitation of his sweat, his rank loosening itself.
"THREE..." the man said.
Vespyr knocked.
"...TWO..."
Silence.
And then, one more encouraging knock.
"ON..."
He almost couldn't believe himself.
Nathan tightened his grip.
"On...
"ONE---FUCK YOU."
*Click*
He did it. After forty-four years, he had finally pulled the trigger. He knew he would explode some day. He was surprised at how strong he was too---he didn't feel any recoil at all.
...At all...
Nathan stared.
There was no splintered wood, no hole in the door.
"ONE."
*CLICK*
"ONE..."
*CLICK*
"O-One..."
*click...*
Nathan, the man with a broken gun. He screamed at the door, pointing his bayonet at it. He had never once cleaned the gun, never once checked the bullets beyond loading, had never taken the clip out since 1999.
Nathan, the destroyed.
All he had was the equivalent of a spear. He had been pointing around a useless, heavy stick everywhere, sticking out his neck with a bravado that wasn't warranted. Just another stupid survivor, wasting away in his cluttered apartment, holed up in his imagination... and his fear.
He screamed at the door. He screamed at the gun. He screamed at the person standing behind the door. He screamed at himself.
Nathan, the forty-four year old whose voice still cracked.
There was no more knocking. Only quiet, inhuman laughter from behind the door. Mocking laughter, somehow made exponentially worse by the utter lack of emotion behind it, as if the person laughing did not care enough to mock him wholeheartedly. It was the indifferent laughter of someone amused by something as infinitesimal as a gnat buzzing against a windowpane.
Then the laughter stopped, while the man's screaming continued. Vespyr's face hadn't changed; had she even been laughing at all? She looked like something that couldn't possibly have uttered a sound even if it wanted to. Something dead, unreal.
Almost as soon as the laughter had stopped, there would be one last loud bang on the door, but this time it wasn't Vespyr's fist. It was her boot, landed right in the middle of the door, to smash a hole in it or tear the whole goddamned thing off its hinges.
---A blast of wind slammed the door, blowing away the propped up chair, shattering the table into pieces and splinters. Nathan stared, pointing his gun, just a little to the side where the table had flown and completely destroyed the bottom half of his stairs. Dust rushed up, as the odor and B.O. of the shoddy man's domain rumbled above, cut off from the world. There, Nathan would stare, disbelieving at the unbelievable strength that had completely destroyed his doorway.
His jaw dropped and his gun began to shake uncontrollably as he dropped his knife. He held the spear ahead of himself, as if expecting his fear to suddenly decide to run at him and impale itself on his bayonet.
Magazines and cassettes tumbled down the broken stairs, his precious hoard of trash tumbling down behind him.
Nathan, the man who could not move.
He squaked, his light not strong enough to penetrate into the darkness, unable to see the figure in all the risen dust and decay of his domain.
The terrible odor that flooded out from the shattered doorway was almost enough to make Vespyr take a step back. But she didn't. The girl wrinkled her nose for a moment, gritting her teeth at the sudden rush of reek. Her cold violet eyes narrowed and glared through the dust and darkness at the silhouette of a delapidated man, or perhaps just a pile of trash. Vespyr stepped impudently through the doorway, not intimidated in the slightest by the man or his weapon. She stared at him. Her unfeeling violet eyes bored into his, and all she could think about was the fact that he was about to die looking as ridiculous as he did.
Nathan stared ahead as the dust began to settle. He stared into the darkness, as his dirty lantern showed spots. Pale skin. Dark clothing. Unarmed. A girl. An unarmed girl.
It was impossible. There was no way that this thin, rail of a girl could have knocked back the door. She must have had a small bomb. That was the only explanation. Her face was obscured... and he could barely see it. His courage renewed...
"YOU BITCH. I'LL RUN YOU THROUGH."
...But he could not stop the shaking of his gun. He took a swallow of air, and he began to run at her, just pointing the bayonet at the girl... Straight at her heart. He would kill her for fucking with him.
He screamed his pent up spite of the world at her. She was the part of the world that he didn't understand, that was beyond him in the news... She was...
"---YOU FUCKING MONSTER."
Vespyr stood motionless beside the doorway, staring at the man with a dead look in her eyes, as if she were... bored with him. He ran at her. She didn't move. The sharp tip of his bayonet was a few inches from her chest. She smacked the gun away with the back of her hand, effortlessly but with enough force to send the thing flying across the disgusting room. All the while, her cold stare did not waver. Her lips parted and she spoke, both calmly and gravely, apathetic and stern. The unbiased voice of fate.
"This is the end of your life."
---The gun was forcibly ripped away from his hands in what felt like a gust of wind, an earthquake in his forearms. His calloused hands felt as though they had been bruised, he sputtered, wringing his hands, bending over and forward...
And then he heard her.
This was not happening. He still had so much to live for. He still had so many cans to eat. So many magazines to reread. So much of his past to relieve. So much glory to be had. He was Nathan, survivor of the apocolypse.
Nathan, the coward who closed the elevator on all of his coworkers on the first floor as the missiles came pouring down.
Nathan, the main survivor of stupid office building, climbing out of the wreckage.
Nathan, the man who had stored behind him months, possibly years worth of food to a single man.
Nathan, the hero who held the cashiers at gunpoint and directed them to his home, without so much as a can of thanks.
He was Nathan.
And this girl was nothing to Nathan.
Seven seconds.
He screamed the worth of his forty-fours in a roar that broke his voice. He gurgled at the girl and ran at her, trying to aim his frustrated, hurting hands at her neck. He would wring the neck of a girl if he had to. He would kill her and rebuild.
The man reacted much as Vespyr expected. No one ever liked hearing that. It never went over well. Vespyr scowled. The man ran at her, his stench barreling along with him.
Her first instinct was to grab his hands and duck toward his neck with her teeth bared, but the last thing Vespyr wanted to do was touch this man. So as he ran at her, she lifted her leg and shoved the sole of her boot into his chest, much like she had done to the door.
Nathan, the invincible.
He coughed blood in the crater he made in his apartment, right underneath the staircase. The trashcan lid fitted itself imperfectly... over his newly shattered rib cage. He stared forward, coughing. Bleeding.
Impossible.
It was impossible that this girl could do this. Impossible that the girl could be that strong, that fast.
It was impossible that he was so fucked.
Nathan tried to get-up... only to cough up more blood, the boot print caved over the center of his heart. It beat furiously against its new confines, trying not to burst.
Suddenly, Nathan realized he was about to die.
At once, he began to scream, sputtering blood, as more and more of his trash continued to flow, more and more violently, beginning to bury him... slamming onto his head, sliding off his face... leaving only his once pudgy face exposed.
"...You... y-you can't kill me. It's not right. I-I s-shouldn't die!
"D-Don't kill me.
"DON'T KILL ME."
Trapped. Stuck. Unable to move. His head began to bobble, his stupid armor weighing him down further in the trash that continued to bury him. His heart screamed for space. Everything hurt. His vision grew hazy, and he realized that smoke was coming out from underneath the pile, from the broken lantern, that he was bleeding lightly from the thigh...
...That a small fire was starting on his hip.
He began to scream.
"HELP. HELP ME, PLEASE."[/size]
"No."
Vespyr left it at that, and turned away, walking back through the ruined doorframe, leaving the man to burn alive. She foresaw that the man would die, but that didn't mean she would be the one to kill him.
She had more important things to tend to. The girl, her prey, was in death-throes on the sidewalk. She needed to be dragged to the butchery before her blood ran cold and congealed. She needed to be hung upside-down and drained, and then skinned, cleaved in half, quartered, and have all of the choice cuts sliced from her carcass, to replenish the supply of meat in the freezer.
On her way down the sidewalk, Vespyr thought about cooking soup.
[/blockquote][/size]
Six o' clock had ran on by. The only way that Nathan knew this was because the infernal alarm clock stuck in his wrecked car sounded off on six, on the dot, a sign from a different age that it was time to clock out from work. Now, the stupid swiss watch lay in a crumpled wreck of twisted metal and broken glass---far out of reach, but close enough to make a terrible, echoing din, every day, on the dot.
At first, this may have been something that Nate would have enjoyed, the watch being some sort of symbolic semblance of the old life gone and past, but several months later, the only reason he remained in the ruins of his old apartment was because it had proven to be a successful safe haven, fortified with cans of food, stockpiles of weapons, and the scattered hoard of his old life, happily left to collect dust on the ground. To Nathan, it was home.
...And to his home, Nathan was king. He woke up from his princely nap, staring in the broken shards of the mirror across from his room on his ruined mattress with springs jutting out of it. He stared back into the face of a middle-aged old man, with wrinkles on his face, and hair collecting on the once roundish curvatures of his formerly plump face. His ribcage wheezed mightily as he pushed himself up, grabbing for the loaded Mosin-Nagant at his side, custom-fitted with a bayonet, never fired. His broken windows were covered with old bed sheets, stapled into place messily by the side. The man pushed himself up, the mattress squeaking horribly underneath him... and he stood up into the filth of the old world.
Piles of magazines, empty cans, dirty piles of clothes, old electronics swamped the ground in heaps. The air was a sickly humid as the skeleton of a man pushed him through his riches, inhaling deeply his odor as he pushed himself along, holding the butt of his rifle under his arm as a crutch.
With sloth, the man would move on down his still intact stairs, limping slightly as he did, a soulless look going through his eye, his left hand gracing through the air at the once-present stair rail. He looked up into the hole of his ceiling, muttering as he did, as though part of a daily ritual.
Downstairs was the remains of the old kitchen. In it were the stores of his previous victories in the past months, being one of the very first to raid the supermarkets, the rusted carts piled up against the boarded up windows and patches of wall, his fortress secure, his door locked... the key in his grimey jeans. At the centerfold of it was a round wooden table, a can opener, and several dozen cans and food goods of miscellanious forms of food. Refried beans, sardines, spam, ramen, the works. On the other side of the table was a set of magazines and old newspapers that he still went through during the morning hours... for reading and relieving.
With a nonchalant grunt, the man sat himself on sole chair, loose skin oozing over, reaching for his lighter and renewing the life of the candle, at the center of his shrunken world.
Nathan grunted, staring to the side at the locked door... and grunted again, as he pulled towards him a can at a random, a practiced hand reaching for the can opener and plunging it in. He muttered something incoherent... as he stared at his door.
...And tucked his gun closer to his right side, flipping the rifle so the bayonet side was pointed up, the broken knife gleaming a warm, dotted glowing lights in the room. It was another night, just north of the 405.
Vespyr stood in the freezer, wearing jeans and a tank-top, her pale white skin no more chilled than usual by the frigid air. She crossed her arms and glared at the scarce selection of wrapped meat cuts remaining on the shelf. At that moment she blinked her dark lashes and her eyes glinted eerily the cold shadows she gazed into, something disturbingly inhuman in that the violet depths were unfathomable voids lacking any and all emotion.
Night and blood summoned the girl out of her lair and pulled her through the labyrinth of shadowy streets toward her prey. Vespyr had slipped into her trench coat, feeling strangely satisfied with the simplicity of the attire which she had worn for as long as she could recall. As much as she appreciated the commandeering aura of a uniform, she found herself appreciating the times when she didn’t need to wear one—didn’t need to be anyone’s Commander—and could forget her self-appointed responsibilities for awhile. In black jeans, a black tank-top, boots, and her trench coat, she was nobody again. Just a shadow on the street, with a short knife and a coil of wire.
Just north of the 405 was still relatively fertile hunting ground and Vespyr had dragged many a good kill home under the freeway overpass. Tonight she hoped for a female, young and fit. What she found was a female, young and somewhat underfed, but she would do all the same. The girl had been walking somewhat confidently down the sidewalk, as if she were in a slight hurry to get somewhere. Vespyr got to her first, dropping down from a lamp post and landing on the girl’s back. Their bodies toppled to the ground with Vespyr on top, already twisting midair like a cat to land in a crouch on top of her mouse. Violet eyes flashed coldly at the girl as she shrieked for help. Two seconds passed and the scream was abruptly cut off by Vespyr’s fist pounding once into the girl’s throat.
The shriek sounded off and Nathan stood up with his hackles. His eye glared into the dim lights of his house, the candle burning away indifferently. Screams and shrieks weren't an uncommon occurence, but it had been a while since the former salaryman had heard one so close to home. His adrenaline spiked, his heart pumping an unnatural amount of blood into his head, making him fall on his knees, coughing heavily. Nathan groped at his face with his cholesteral-dotted hands, hugging the his rifle closer to himself.
Once the episode had passed, the man uncrumpled himself into a stand, sliding himself into the confines of his closet, closing it after himself. What emerged was a man with a trash bag fitted over his body as a light mesh of "armor," covered with clattering trash can lids like a medieval suit of armor. On top of his head was a small pot, its long handle angled behind him. He bore his rifle under his right arm, a small kitchen knife held loftily in his left hand... and his self-entitlement over his grease-covered face. He coughed pollution, snorting in his filth, wiping away the excess with the plastic wrap covering his right forearm.
Going to the table, he scooped up the candle and fitted it into a nearby lantern... hooking it onto the still exposed notches of his worn belt. He lumbered to his door and slid his chair over with the butt of his rifle.
He clattered noisly back to the base of his stairs, the light jangling at his waist as he stepped up to it. Carefully, Nathan fingered the scope of his rifle, determining to figure the source from a safe distance...
Choking sounds gurgled from the girl’s throat as she tried to breathe, winded. Vespyr reached into the abysmal pocket of her coat and pulled out a wire fitted into a noose. She slipped it over the girl’s head, pulled it tight, and rose to her feet.
Someone else coughed. Vespyr’s head turned immediately at the sound cold eyes falling on the door of a nearby apartment building. Inhuman accuracy? Perhaps. Such things were not uncommon. As Vespyr stared emotionlessly at the closed door, the girl at her feet struggled to breathe and writhed uselessly on the sidewalk. A few seconds later, clattering sounds from beyond the door. A jolt of predatory excitement shivered in Vespyr’s cold veins, the opposing instinct to that which spikes one’s adrenaline, the fear of being found, in a game of hide-and-seek. Vespyr was ‘it’.
She left her prey on the sidewalk; the girl couldn’t breathe anyway and wasn’t going anywhere. A few silent paces brought Vespyr to the door behind which the clattering continued. She remained still until the noise stopped, just looming outside the door, infecting the sanctity of the space with her presence. Ten seconds would pass after whatever was inside had settled down and stopped making noise.
Then she knocked on the door thrice, slowly.
In rusted, golden letters on the side of the door glimmered the pieces of an old address of a 56391, missing the six, the three, and the one. Underneath it read dirtily "No Solicitors," a black stain of blood sprayed on the bottom left of it, ending at the base of the wrecked, discolored apartment.
-Just as the man had begun to shuffle back into the true riches of his holy city, three definitive knocks on his door rang into the empty apartment. For a moment, it echoed endlessly, smothering itself only in the piles of his treasure troves. The hackles shot up, tightening painfully as drops of sweat formed and dripped from the moist edges of his hunched frame. As though to make himself smaller, he tucked in his neck closer to his rib cage as he slowly shuffled around...
"I HAVE A GUN," he trilled, slowly moving up the rifle up to his head, crooking the butt against his shoulder as he held up the barrel of his Mosin with the back of his other hand, still gripping the blade. The light would flicker dirtily as he began to lumber down the stairs, a tower of magazines falling after him. For a moment, the man stumbled, stepping twice with his left foot on the staircase, once sliding on an old 1987 Playboy, the other on the very edge of the stairs. He coughed unheathily as he began to walk more gingerly, clattering loudly as he went, the light shining grimly against the musk staining the lantern's glass.
Nathan trained the barrel with a half-squinted eye on the doorway as he went along, frightened but determined to scare away this hooligan-bandit just like all the others. He was Nathan Posada. He had actually stabbed someone with that bayonet and scared away about six bandits. As far as Nathan was concerned, he was a god of the post-apocolypse.[/size][/i]
The corner of Vespyr’s lip twitched up for a moment, then disappeared into the emotionless void of her visage. She knocked again on the door, slowly, ominously, three times.
Nathan's shoulders jumped up higher into the nearly invisible gap between his chin and his chest, as he shouted in spite of himself, a cacophony of nonsensical gibberish. He sounded like an irate, trapped pig being squashed to death by a sinking landslide of rocks. In a moment of sloth strength, the man loaded down the barrel of his gun on the surface of his table and swept it across, knocking over dozens of cans onto the floor, two of them popping open, as if to add to the spoiled air inside. Inhaling deeply, the man allowed a controlled violence to enter him as he noisily pushed the table onto its side, and began to shove it up against the door, aiming the barrel of his gun right on top of its rounded side.
The barrel slid down, only being loosely held up by the back of his knife hand. Fear entered his voice in the light of this persistent bandit.
"I'LL SHOOT.
"GET AWAY. GET AWAY NOW."[/size]
Nathan, the invincible warrior. Nathan, survivor of the apocolypse. He shoved the butt of his rifle awkwardly against his chest to slam noisly into the trash can lids and metal pans he had taped to his body before aiming again.
Nathan, the man with the gun.[/size][/i]
Vespyr waited for the cacaphony to stop, and then knocked three more times. Only this time, as well as being ominously timed, they were louder and more agressive.
Nathan, the man who almost soiled himself.
His face grew redder at the louder knocking, gritting his teeth, staring bleary-eyed.
"STOP IT."
He began to side-step,
"STOP FUCKING KNOCKING OR I'LL SHOOT."
For the first time in his life... he found his finger on the trigger. His back shuddered, making the metal pieces grind over his dulled form.
Terror and madness. The knocking on the door like the endless, ominous tolling of a bell. For whom did the bell toll?
A knock for every one of them. The knocking would only grow louder, every two seconds, another knock, and another, shaking the door.
Nathan, whose deluded fantasies were beginning to crumble all around him.
"FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU. CAN'T YOU SEE MY FUCKING GUN? DO YOU WANT TO FUCKING DIE!?"
Nathan, whose dead fridge was almost too heavy for him to push. Almost. He began to back away from the door, the maddening door, his sallowed eyes the most open they had been in months. This was his world, his fantasy. No one had right to invade.
"FINAL FUCKING WARNING," he wheezed.
He could not believe he was about to shoot at someone, to shoot at his door. He couldn't believe that his finger was actually pulling against the trigger. He never knew how hard to pull that trigger was.
"THREE..."
"...TWO..."
Nathan, the former pacifist. The insulation of his plastic "armor" grew slick with the precipitation of his sweat, his rank loosening itself.
"THREE..." the man said.
Vespyr knocked.
"...TWO..."
Silence.
And then, one more encouraging knock.
"ON..."
He almost couldn't believe himself.
Nathan tightened his grip.
"On...
"ONE---FUCK YOU."
*Click*
He did it. After forty-four years, he had finally pulled the trigger. He knew he would explode some day. He was surprised at how strong he was too---he didn't feel any recoil at all.
...At all...
Nathan stared.
There was no splintered wood, no hole in the door.
"ONE."
*CLICK*
"ONE..."
*CLICK*
"O-One..."
*click...*
Nathan, the man with a broken gun. He screamed at the door, pointing his bayonet at it. He had never once cleaned the gun, never once checked the bullets beyond loading, had never taken the clip out since 1999.
Nathan, the destroyed.
All he had was the equivalent of a spear. He had been pointing around a useless, heavy stick everywhere, sticking out his neck with a bravado that wasn't warranted. Just another stupid survivor, wasting away in his cluttered apartment, holed up in his imagination... and his fear.
He screamed at the door. He screamed at the gun. He screamed at the person standing behind the door. He screamed at himself.
Nathan, the forty-four year old whose voice still cracked.
There was no more knocking. Only quiet, inhuman laughter from behind the door. Mocking laughter, somehow made exponentially worse by the utter lack of emotion behind it, as if the person laughing did not care enough to mock him wholeheartedly. It was the indifferent laughter of someone amused by something as infinitesimal as a gnat buzzing against a windowpane.
Then the laughter stopped, while the man's screaming continued. Vespyr's face hadn't changed; had she even been laughing at all? She looked like something that couldn't possibly have uttered a sound even if it wanted to. Something dead, unreal.
Almost as soon as the laughter had stopped, there would be one last loud bang on the door, but this time it wasn't Vespyr's fist. It was her boot, landed right in the middle of the door, to smash a hole in it or tear the whole goddamned thing off its hinges.
---A blast of wind slammed the door, blowing away the propped up chair, shattering the table into pieces and splinters. Nathan stared, pointing his gun, just a little to the side where the table had flown and completely destroyed the bottom half of his stairs. Dust rushed up, as the odor and B.O. of the shoddy man's domain rumbled above, cut off from the world. There, Nathan would stare, disbelieving at the unbelievable strength that had completely destroyed his doorway.
His jaw dropped and his gun began to shake uncontrollably as he dropped his knife. He held the spear ahead of himself, as if expecting his fear to suddenly decide to run at him and impale itself on his bayonet.
Magazines and cassettes tumbled down the broken stairs, his precious hoard of trash tumbling down behind him.
Nathan, the man who could not move.
He squaked, his light not strong enough to penetrate into the darkness, unable to see the figure in all the risen dust and decay of his domain.
The terrible odor that flooded out from the shattered doorway was almost enough to make Vespyr take a step back. But she didn't. The girl wrinkled her nose for a moment, gritting her teeth at the sudden rush of reek. Her cold violet eyes narrowed and glared through the dust and darkness at the silhouette of a delapidated man, or perhaps just a pile of trash. Vespyr stepped impudently through the doorway, not intimidated in the slightest by the man or his weapon. She stared at him. Her unfeeling violet eyes bored into his, and all she could think about was the fact that he was about to die looking as ridiculous as he did.
Nathan stared ahead as the dust began to settle. He stared into the darkness, as his dirty lantern showed spots. Pale skin. Dark clothing. Unarmed. A girl. An unarmed girl.
It was impossible. There was no way that this thin, rail of a girl could have knocked back the door. She must have had a small bomb. That was the only explanation. Her face was obscured... and he could barely see it. His courage renewed...
"YOU BITCH. I'LL RUN YOU THROUGH."
...But he could not stop the shaking of his gun. He took a swallow of air, and he began to run at her, just pointing the bayonet at the girl... Straight at her heart. He would kill her for fucking with him.
He screamed his pent up spite of the world at her. She was the part of the world that he didn't understand, that was beyond him in the news... She was...
"---YOU FUCKING MONSTER."
Vespyr stood motionless beside the doorway, staring at the man with a dead look in her eyes, as if she were... bored with him. He ran at her. She didn't move. The sharp tip of his bayonet was a few inches from her chest. She smacked the gun away with the back of her hand, effortlessly but with enough force to send the thing flying across the disgusting room. All the while, her cold stare did not waver. Her lips parted and she spoke, both calmly and gravely, apathetic and stern. The unbiased voice of fate.
"This is the end of your life."
---The gun was forcibly ripped away from his hands in what felt like a gust of wind, an earthquake in his forearms. His calloused hands felt as though they had been bruised, he sputtered, wringing his hands, bending over and forward...
And then he heard her.
This was not happening. He still had so much to live for. He still had so many cans to eat. So many magazines to reread. So much of his past to relieve. So much glory to be had. He was Nathan, survivor of the apocolypse.
Nathan, the coward who closed the elevator on all of his coworkers on the first floor as the missiles came pouring down.
Nathan, the main survivor of stupid office building, climbing out of the wreckage.
Nathan, the man who had stored behind him months, possibly years worth of food to a single man.
Nathan, the hero who held the cashiers at gunpoint and directed them to his home, without so much as a can of thanks.
He was Nathan.
And this girl was nothing to Nathan.
Seven seconds.
He screamed the worth of his forty-fours in a roar that broke his voice. He gurgled at the girl and ran at her, trying to aim his frustrated, hurting hands at her neck. He would wring the neck of a girl if he had to. He would kill her and rebuild.
The man reacted much as Vespyr expected. No one ever liked hearing that. It never went over well. Vespyr scowled. The man ran at her, his stench barreling along with him.
Her first instinct was to grab his hands and duck toward his neck with her teeth bared, but the last thing Vespyr wanted to do was touch this man. So as he ran at her, she lifted her leg and shoved the sole of her boot into his chest, much like she had done to the door.
Nathan, the invincible.
He coughed blood in the crater he made in his apartment, right underneath the staircase. The trashcan lid fitted itself imperfectly... over his newly shattered rib cage. He stared forward, coughing. Bleeding.
Impossible.
It was impossible that this girl could do this. Impossible that the girl could be that strong, that fast.
It was impossible that he was so fucked.
Nathan tried to get-up... only to cough up more blood, the boot print caved over the center of his heart. It beat furiously against its new confines, trying not to burst.
Suddenly, Nathan realized he was about to die.
At once, he began to scream, sputtering blood, as more and more of his trash continued to flow, more and more violently, beginning to bury him... slamming onto his head, sliding off his face... leaving only his once pudgy face exposed.
"...You... y-you can't kill me. It's not right. I-I s-shouldn't die!
"D-Don't kill me.
"DON'T KILL ME."
Trapped. Stuck. Unable to move. His head began to bobble, his stupid armor weighing him down further in the trash that continued to bury him. His heart screamed for space. Everything hurt. His vision grew hazy, and he realized that smoke was coming out from underneath the pile, from the broken lantern, that he was bleeding lightly from the thigh...
...That a small fire was starting on his hip.
He began to scream.
"HELP. HELP ME, PLEASE."[/size]
"No."
Vespyr left it at that, and turned away, walking back through the ruined doorframe, leaving the man to burn alive. She foresaw that the man would die, but that didn't mean she would be the one to kill him.
She had more important things to tend to. The girl, her prey, was in death-throes on the sidewalk. She needed to be dragged to the butchery before her blood ran cold and congealed. She needed to be hung upside-down and drained, and then skinned, cleaved in half, quartered, and have all of the choice cuts sliced from her carcass, to replenish the supply of meat in the freezer.
On her way down the sidewalk, Vespyr thought about cooking soup.
[/blockquote][/size]
