User:Penguinpyro/story2
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Another Fine Day with the Urban Dead
Prologue: What goes up…
"Penguinpyro" breathed in the cold, frosty air. Speed was vital. In fast, out fast. He didn't want to end up like the others. He crouched down low, and quickly darted from out of cover. All clear, he ran-crawled through bloodied wreckage, his ragged, holed shoes thumping pavement lightly but furiously. He listened carefully, hoping with all his might no one saw him. But it was quiet. Quiet as ever. A few shouts and gunshots shattered the silence. Quiet again.
The super-city of Aldumont literally rose from the ground in two years, the product of a mysterious group of billionaires known as the Vankes. Little is known of their motivation in creating a city from scratch. Altruism, amusement, investment, perhaps simply insanity? No one knew. They didn't have time to ponder.
“Colossus city” "The metropolis squared", "The Titan of towns", the international press called it. A massive town, hundreds of miles in length, absolutely brimming with life, concrete and steel alike. It was to be the new London, a second New York, a Beijing all over again. A massive capital of technology, finance and culture alike.
Strict measures were taken to protect the “metropolis squared" from those who would despoil it- vandals, terrorists, criminals and worse. Tourism was limited, security was tight, with a massive police force, and much of the infrastructure was automated. In addition, military goods, especially firearms, were absolutely banned.
In a way, the security measures worked. No terrorists or crime lords laid a hand on the city. In fact, they didn't have a chance to.
No, Peng thought. Not shouts. Groans! Shit."
“All good things must come to an end.” The Vanke Society. Not much was known of them. Not much will ever be. What is known is that they visited Aldumont in September 2018. The Vankes headed straight to what was suspected to be a pet company. They left the day afterwithout fanfare. Paparazzi tried to get the scoop the company, but they found little.
It is not known why the Vankes created such massive city with hundreds of trillions of dollars, to host a single company. The most likely theory…
Camouflage.
There were many businesses and scientific laboratories in Aldumont. No one would notice just one of them.
Well, everyone noticed soon enough.
Shitshitshitshitshit!
Penguinpyro carelessly had stuck out his head above his cover while listening. He ducked back behind the burnt-out car and carefully unsheathed his only friend around here- a knife. Just in case. He hoped it wasn't necessary.
He felt an impact slam into his back. Penguinpyro flipped around before he hit the ground, and blindly drove his knife forward at about his neck level. The blade met resistance, and blood drizzled everywhere.
That company would revolutionize life and death itself. It was contained within a series of extensive, but unassuming and out-of-the-way buildings.
A simple, dull plaque in front of each building read “Welcome to the Future of Humanity…
…Necrotech Inc.!”
Necrotech threw away ethics, common sense and a healthy respect for nature in the name of progress.
December 2018. A Necrotech, or NT, laboratory made a mistake.
The details are unknown, seeing as how the city of Aldumont had its first blackout, cause unknown, at roughly the same time. When power was restored 5 hours later, the city quickly resumed business as usual.
Within 24 hours, there were flash riots, completely unexpected, in the streets. The cause was completely unknown. The police force, although tens of thousands strong and quite formidable, was, incredibly enough, defeated and killed by a much smaller mob of civilians and tourists.
The riots spread. It was soon discovered that the rioters fought with bare hands and teeth. They added many police to their numbers, and they attacked everything and everyone without reason, ripping people to shreds. Everyone who was not a rioter panicked and the city functionally shut down within hours.
A secret system of quarantines went into place. The city was placed under lockdown and the military quickly summoned in force to protect the city’s self-containing walls. Hundreds of thousands of workers, tourists and researchers were trapped in the city. A communications blackout brutally shunted them away from the outside world. The city became a blasted warzone, with civilians and military and rioters viciously battling for control of the situation.
The Vankes simply disappeared afterwards. No one could find them, and theories abound about who and what they were. Aliens in disguise trying to kill humanity, lunatics in search of immortality, God’s angels of death come to bring Judgement Day, game-seeking masterminds who created one big gladiatorial program…
No one knows. No one ever will.
After the initial shock, someone traced the cause of the riots to a pathogen, exact nature unknown, originating from Necrotech. Highly infectious and otherwise symptomless, the pathogen re-started the heart, muscles and the brain of anyone infected when they died. Harmless enough, except that it couldn’t regenerate some aspects of higher thought, resulting in a new being that wanted to feed, eat, and survive, and could easily figure out how, but lacked any concern for the well-being of others.
“Zombies” would become the proper word for them. The walking dead.
Efforts to evacuate the city were halted soon after the “outbreak”. It was discovered that the plague had earlier spread to everyone in the city, unnoticed, thanks to its lack of symptoms before death. Several rescue helicopters were shot down to keep the pathogen out of the outside world, killing the city officials and lead researchers evacuated first, but also removing a lot of information about the outbreak. The city was thrown into utter chaos after a second blackout permanently stopped the power grid.
“Its borders now locked down after a sudden government quarantine, Aldumont's trapped civilians now make their way through the derelict buildings, surviving the changing seasons to rebuild their fragmented society from the rubble upwards. Military cleanup squads patrol the empty streets, stationed in the city for the long haul, while embedded scientific groups continue the experiments that brought them here.” It was the Age of the Urban Dead.
Penguinpyro was one of those tourists just two months ago. He could not remember anything for most of those two months. It was a blur of panic, running, starving, hiding, sleeping and fighting.
He was one of tens of thousands who lived through two months outbreak. That was out of hundreds of thousands of people, probably millions, if the military and tourists were included. Understandably, Penguinpyro feared for his life every second of it.
First lesson he learned was “Don’t be seen.” Some of the survivors of the outbreak were lunatics. They shot everyone, zombie or not. The zombies were not much better. If they caught you, you were dead. You could at least run from zombies, but for the ones with guns, hiding was the only defense.
Penguinpyro needed a gun, any kind of gun. He managed to find a large carving knife early on, he knew not where, and had used it seven times in self-defense on the streets of Aldumont. That was as far as he could remember. None of those times ended well, and if it weren't for the abundant medical supplies in Aldumont, he would be one of the many dead now. Penguin now pulled that very knife free from a wailing zombie's bloodied eye socket.
The zombie flailed wildly, connecting a muscular hand with Penguinpyro's stomach. Penguinpyro stumbled backward, managing to recover in time to dodge backwards from the next strike. He kicked the zombie over, and ran as fast as he could, not thinking of any particular destination but "away".
He managed to somehow find himself behind the barricades of an abandoned building. Heaving and panting, Penguinpyro took the next few minutes to recover from the severity of that last encounter. These incidents with the undead were becoming more and more frequent. He didn't know how much longer he could last.
Yet...this all seemed… strangely familiar. He didn’t know why. Penguinpyro was cold, hungry, alone, tired, wounded and probably going to be food anytime now. He had never felt this way before, and he was suddenly homesick for his life before. He couldn’t remember much before. He had to clear up space in his mind. Survival had a VIP pass for his attention, and Remembering the Past had only a few dusty and crap-covered nickels.
While thinking, and hoping no one followed him here, Penguinpyro suddenly felt an urge to explore, to find something that was hidden, nearby. He didn’t know why or what he was looking for, but, it felt as if he was going to soon understand all this chaos…maybe even leave it! As something other than a zombie, of course. On a whim, he dared a quick trip outside, looked up at the signage on the building's exterior and saw it was a research lab. And this research lab was labeled, “Bellamy.”
CHAPTER One: Wake up, Penguin!
Penguinpyro sized up the building from just outside it. Shabby and out of the way. Barricades weren’t high enough to keep him out. A rock dropped to the ground before Penguin with a crisp “klack”.
It was covered in paper. Penguin unwrapped it and read it-“Follow the white TibbarRm.”
A short, Caucasian young man waved from a high window. “Welcome in.” he shouted.
The man had a rabbit tattooed into his right arm. How curious. That must be TibbarRm.
Penguinpyro shrugged. Okay then. I’m desperate. Follow a stranger if I must.
Penguinpyro climbed back up the barricades after Tibbar into a window on the second story. The building was dingy and dusty, not in particularly good order.
TibbarRm, without a word, led Penguin into a hall, and turned right into a side room.
Penguinpyro entered and saw a smoldering fire place, two large leather chairs, and a policewoman sitting in a chair. Tibbar walked to the side of the room and leaned on a wall, holding his hands.
The policewoman stood up. She was wearing a slightly modified Aldumont Police Department uniform with the letters “A.Z.S.” stitched into the chest. Her face was dirty and ragged but attractive.
She spoke with a slight Italian accent.
“At last… welcome, Penguinpyro. I am Janice Abernathy. Please…come, sit.”
Penguinpyro warily stared at her as he eased into a leather chair. How did she know his name? Was that even his name? Penguinpyro?! Who the hell would name themselves penguinpyro? He must have had a real name… but he could not r…
“Penguin…I imagine… you’re feeling a bit like Alice. Tumbling down the rabbit hole.”
“You could say that. It feels a bit-”
“You have the look of a man who accepts what he sees because he is expecting to wake up.”
“Y-you’re right. I wish this is just a dream. I just want to w-“
“Ironically, this is not far from the truth. Do you believe in fate, penguin?”
“No. Fate can kiss my ass. And stop cutting me o-”
“Why not?”
“I… don’t like the idea that I’m not in control of my life.”
Janice looked straight into his eyes, and lowered her voice.
“I know exactly what you mean!… Let me tell you why you’re here. You’re here because you know something. What you know… you can’t explain. But you feel it! That there’s something wrong with the world…”
“No shit. It’s the zomb-“
“You don’t know what it is, but it’s there.”
“I said I KNOW wh-“
This conversation was getting stranger and stranger. Penguin wanted to get up and leave this craziness, but something in the back of his head was keeping him in his chair…
“Like a splinter in your mind. Driving you mad!”
“Look, I want to sa-“
“It is this that has brought you to me.”
Peng fell silent. Couldn’t argue with that. Janice took out a large suitcase.
“It is all around us. Even now, here in this very room. You can see it when you look out your barricades, or when you turn on your radio transmitter. You can… feel it when you go to battle. When you go to church. When you use your First Aid Kits…. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth!”
“What truth?”
“That you are a slave, Penguin. That like everyone else, you are in a prison that you cannot hear or smell or taste or touch. A prison… for your mind. Do you want to know what Aldumont is?”
Penguin slowly nodded, both very disturbed and very intrigued.
Janice took out two small pies of different colors from the suitcase, holding one in each hand.
“This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pie - the story ends, you wake up in your safehouse and believe whatever you want to believe. “You take the red pie - you stay in Zombieland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes…
“All I’m offering is the truth.”
Penguin stared. For about two minutes. This couldn’t get much weirder. In fact, Penguinpyro was pretty sure he was dead or dying now and hallucinating something from a movie…
He shrugged. He felt hungry, and he might as well scratch his curiosity while he was at it. Might as well enjoy death or whatever is coming. Penguin grabbed the red pie, shoved it into his face, and took down the pie.
It tasted vaguely of alcohol and sugar.
Janice smiled faintly and rose from her chair. “Follow me.”
Penguin followed.
Janice led him to a cracked mirror in the corner of the room.
“Have you ever had a dream, Penguin, that you were so sure was real?”
Penguin stared into the mirror.
In it, scribbled in marker, were the words:
“WAKE UP PENGUIN. THE MALTON HAS YOU.”
CHAPTER Two: The pie, the tequila and the ugly
Peng remembered. He remembered it. He realized who, what he was. His real name, his old life, everything that was... before Aldumont. Maybe it was the resolved hunger. Maybe it was the tequila. Maybe it was seeing his own face for the first time in two months. Maybe it was the mention of that name…
He remembered. He remembered. This had all happened before.
Penguin felt sick. He vomited on the floor.
“Goddamn it!...”
“Yes, Penguin, you know why you are here now. Welcome… to the AZS.”
“I can’t believe it. M-m-Malton?!”
“Yes. Aldumont- UD Malton.”
“Oh god, oh god, oh god, oh go-”
Penguin felt himself blacking out.
Tibbar yelled into a walkie-talkie “Dammit, he’s hyperventilating.”
A couple of men burst into the room, and slapped Penguin in the face repeatedly. Penguin wildly twitched and then calmed down.
“I’m in a game… I’m in a game… I’m in a g-“
Janice cut him off again.
“No, penguin. This is no game, but the real world. The real world is Urban Dead. You now know the truth about it…
“We were all trapped here, unaware and forgetful of the nature of Aldumont. We still don’t know why, specifically, it was us that had to be here. But we managed to form the Anti-Zombie Squad, and we will get to the heart of this matter.”
“Are… are the others here too?”
Janice pointed to the two men who were restraining penguin.
“Dragei… Kane?”
“Aye, that be mah name. Sort ‘a.” Dragei muttered.
Janice looked Penguin square in the eyes and said, “The identity you had in the past life is no more. Here, you will continue to be known as Penguinpyro, the zombie hunter. Welcome to Malton. Sort of Malton.”
Kane Izzy and Dragei let go, and Penguin carefully stood up. Everything was still flooding back to him…
“I know AZS-fu."
“Show me.”
“No, but seriously. Enough Matrix crap, Janus. Janice. Whatever your name is. If it even is Janice.”
“Re-enacting the Matrix seemed like the coolest way to snap you out of it, Peng. And all our real names are irrelevant here. Past life doesn’t matter anymore.”
“True… So… this is real, we have the AZS here, and we’re going to be fighting zombies all day? It could turn out all right. Except the part where we die horribly and bloodily.”
“Correct.”
Janice paced around the room.
“Aldumont doesn’t have an antidote for the zombie cure. Yet. So what dies stays undead… We haven’t encountered several key AZS members, mostly the newer ones. The city is mostly ruins, because the zombie hordes are getting organized faster than the survivors. We have to fix that.“
“And how do we fix that?”
“We’ve heard the center of anti-zombie research is here, in West Grayside. We hope that by gathering members, we can better protect and speed up the development of the antidote. And if the antidote comes along, not only will there be more survivors, they will have hope against the zombie hordes and something to unite around. Each of the problems will fix each other. Hopefully.”
TibbarRm stepped into the conversation.
“Penguin, you probably have had a long day. Maybe you should get some sleep. I’ll show you to your room.”
“Okay. I have to think on this a while. Night then. Oh and, Janice, what was in the blue pie?”
“Equal parts tranquilizers and lard.”
“…
Okay, fine.One last thing, though- if I have to wear a trenchcoat and somehow have to save ‘Zion’ or something, I am killing you all. Just know that.”
“Fair enough.”
CHAPTER THREE: Smolders
That night, Penguinpyro slept like a baby, upon a mountain of blankets and a small, bare mattress. He was cold. But that didn’t matter- he was happy here.
It was the first uninterrupted sleep he had in a while. There were armed, trained guards everywhere in the building and he had been fed. There was no need to wake up and ready his knife at the slightest sound in case zombies broke in. No worries of succumbing to the plague while he slept. No voices of hunger in his stomach, prodding him and forcing him awake from the pain. No…groans… or screams of the dying or dead to haunt him. No feelings of regret, self-pity and homesickness. Here, he did not worry and fret in an anxious imitation of unconsciousness. He slept for the first time in months.
The sleep continued nearly without dream. He saw a bits of his old life- his old apartment, vague faces long-past, the warm, flickering fireplace that he admired every weekend … and his not-so-old life… the bloody and pain-contorted faces of the freshly killed, the shrill screams of those being dragged to their deaths as he helplessly hid and watched, the blood… the blood that was everywhere, telling its silent, incomplete tale of death, woe and suffering to all who smelled and saw....
"Whoa."
Penguinpyro woke up, shivering and dazed. It was that time of day, very early morning, when it became bright for a few minutes, but actually wasn’t a sunrise.
Penguin looked at his mattress. He had left a perfect brown outline where his body had touched. The outline was un-smeared and solid, a testament to the stillness of his deep sleep.
It was about this time that penguin realized he must look like shit… He left a brown outline on a relatively clean mattress. Yep. He totally must be shit now.
Penguin quietly went downstairs and confirmed it in the mirror he looked in earlier.
In the mirror was a tall, dark-haired and tanned man of undeterminable ethnicity, even more so since his face was caked with dirt, soot, saliva and blood. His face could have been white, Asian or Hispanic, depending on the angle and lighting you saw it in. His reflection was a complete mess, dressed in thick rags resembling bloody dirt more than clothing, his starved body gaunt and barely muscled, and his hair a long, solid mass of greasy crap. He didn’t know how he smelled- his nose had adjusted to the odor- but from appearances, it was a wonder that Janice could keep a straight face talking to him.
“Looks like shit” was an upgrade from this.
The man looking in the mirror took his knife and a relatively clean rag and cleaned himself up the best he could. He threw away as many rags as he could while remaining decent, and then went upstairs back to bed. He would have time later.
Penguinpyro woke up at some time in the afternoon, his refreshed mind as clear and calm as it could get. He woke up to find some clothes- a plain white T-shirt, a pair of jeans and some socks lying next to him.
The other AZS were practicing anti-zombie combat downstairs when Penguinpyro walked in. Between the crude clean-up in the morning and his new clothes that were actually clothes, Peng ended up merely resembling shit.
Janice exclaimed, “Hey, you’re up, Peng. And now that I see you in daylight, you kind of resemble shit.”
Kane pointed and laughed.
Janice ignored him and put her hands on her hips. “Let’s clean you up, dirty little Penguin.”
Penguin went shopping/looting at Pole Mall. White-orange tennis shoes, black jeans, black long shirt under a ripped white T-shirt , goggles, a sooty rather than dirt-caked face, short, clean hair and a surprisingly fast recovery of musculature later, Penguin came out looking excusably ragged and dirty.
“Excusably”, because here, appearance was secondary to survival, and most people were dirty because they had no choice.
His dignity taken care of and his exhaustion take care of, Penguin had business to attend to.
CHAPTER FOUR: Embers
First things had to come first. Penguin did not know how to fight. He could frantically struggle with some control over his stabbing, but that was it.
He had taken some kung fu classes, but that was years ago, and he did not remember most of his Forms, much less how to kill strong, fearless former-humans swiftly and expertly. And the ability to kill strong, fearless former humans swiftly and expertly was not enough for AZS standards. You had to be dangerous in this business.
Peng had survived seven times with his knife due to luck, staying calm and slicing away aggressively enough to hurt weaker zombies. This was not sufficient for AZS standards. Compounding the problem was his near-total lack of experience with firearms, a vital tool for any zombie hunter. So, Penguinpyro spent the better part of the day training with AZS squad Captain Nikulas Dragei.
Dragei was a slight, Scottish man, in a leather jacket and jeans who wielded a claymore, a large Scottish two-handed blade, with a swiftness and spirit that belied his detached demeanor. He had some hearing and sight problems, but was a patient, keen tactical thinker, and thus he was teaching Penguinpyro today.
The others in the training room were Janice Abernathy, Luckydogpsycho, Bhuwannabe, Beer Ref, Dark Butters, Forensic Hoffman, Gunslinger, J.R., Kane Izzy, TibbarRm and Darla Snow. Not the full deck of AZS, but those cards would be dealt once the AZS met them. Penguin, so busy in his training, had no time to familiarize himself with all them. He had only met three so far.
Janice was a short-haired, enthusiastic brunette who threw herself with mischievous enthusiasm at everything she did. Her joy and humor were infectious, and showed even when she got down to business. She was also a crack shot with a pistol, and could outrun any other AZS (or so that’s what she said).
Kane Izzy was… well, Kane Izzy. Long haired, lean, muscular and packing an attitude that could level buildings. A bandolier full of knives, a tactical vest full of knives, a belt full of knives, a pair of really large knives in hip sheathes, a set of tiny knives in his boots, probably a lot more knives Lord knows where, and keen, critical wariness earned him the moniker “Shankopotomus”. He wasn’t the nicest of people, but he was the first person you could rely on to pull off dirty jobs to satisfaction.
TibbarRm was a short, rather quiet fellow in a tactical vest and sweat pants, with the rabbit tattoo that Penguin saw earlier. He moved with a strange grace that hinted at some kind of hidden secret, but Penguin didn’t get the chance to get to know him any better than that.
“No, Penguin! Ye cannae be swingin’ that axe around like a big, fat sword! It leaves ya open! Ye got to prod and manoover with it, threatin th’ enemy, keep it in their face!... Dae as Ah say, not as Ah dae! Claymores work diff’rently, Ah kin swing it around an’ chop heads with it because that works for a claymor!”
Dragei’s berating woke Penguin up from his day-dreaming about the others.
Penguin was waving around a rusty pipe for practice. He just got past the grappling lesson, and would soon be moving on to killing moves, throws, ass-kicking, et cetera.
Penguin learned quickly- far, far more quickly than he had expected, and it secretly worried him. It was if his mind had unconsciously prepared him for this kind of thing through all of his life, and now it was manifesting in his quick learning. It helped that the AZS had instructors to help him learn much faster than on his own, but still, it was hard to believe.
Penguin shared that thought with Dragei during a break in the sparring and drilling.
“Aye, it happens a lot. New AZS learn fast, because they’ve been fahtin’ for moonths and can now refine their skills an’ gather their thoughts or somethin’. Ye’re a special one though, Peng. I’ve nevar seen anyone like ya, peng, th’ way ya learn. Ye’re speshil because ya let yer bloody guard down all the time, now don’t get cocky, and watch yer footwork while ya swing, Peng! This isn’t a game! Again!”
Penguin resigned himself to taking his time learning.
TO BE CONTINUED
