User:Matt Aries/History
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Prologue * Chapter 1 * Chapter 2 * Chapter 3 * Chapter 4 * Chapter 5 * Chapter 6 |
Prólogos
He wakes from half remembered dreams. Dreams, maybe memories of nightmarish acts. He is unsure of his real name, where he is originally from, but there are voices that talk to him. They tell him to do things, things he doesn't want to do, but he needs to in order to stay alive. Hoping that maybe one day, he can get out of Malton, alive. Splinters of memories dot his thoughts, and then a voice in him screams “RUN!”
Fight or flight instinct takes over. A primal need of survival embedded in our double helix. The ground is wet, the air is cold. Dirt seeps between his fingers as he stands. Stiff legs, aching with pins and needles, slowly fill with oxygenated blood.
Matt is running before he can walk. Stumbling, and shuffling turn into a sort of drunken jog. Muscles burning, breathing labored, he pushes harder, because they are everywhere. Those that want to kill him. The undead, but, also the survivors that know of him, and what he has done. He needs to make it to some place safe. He's inside a building, but needs to get his bearings first.
Head down on arms crossed on top of a tombstone, he's trying to desperately slow his breathing, while looking around for a familiar landmark, anything to tell him what suburb he is in.
To the East, about a block away, Lacy Cinema, he is in Stanbury Village. If he can make it there, he may be able to sleep in safety, while searching for gear in the surrounding areas to help him stay alive. Guttural moans are followed by gunshots in the distance. They are close. Righting himself, he stands ready to make the last bit of trek across the street.
“Just a little more.” Matt says through the rubber mouth slit of his mask.
A blunt object strikes Matt from behind hammering him at the base of the skull. He's going to die again. The world spins and goes dark. The last thing he hears is “I got ya, you mothah fuckah!”
In the dark Matt waits petting his rubber chicken. Stifling breaths of hot smelly air are building more and more in the clown mask he wears. Looking over a second floor railing, hundreds of survivors are prepping for combat by a fountain, once the pride and joy of Caiger Mall. Now it is just a statue of mold, and dirt. Just like everything in this city, it is tainted in some way.
Giggling over remarks his other voices are making, Matt explains to his other self, what he's going to do to a Fortress survivor group member. Inside a once over hyped coffee shop, this survivor is using his golden crowbar to take apart some wooden shelves, and ordering another survivor to bring them to the stockpile by the doors. An obnoxious reporter for Channel 4, is interviewing a red head, when she turns and gets the attention of all the survivors.
Matt stays to the shadows as he sneaks his way down the escalators. A trio of men are trying to one up another with zombie kill stories. BALLS TO THE WHALLS!!! shouts one as a bullet exits his nasal cavity, and enters the left eye of the unfortunate person across from him at their table who is eating out of a box of cereal with a rabbit mascot. Matt slaps another with a brick filled rubber chicken, screaming “cock smack” as the first slumps over dead. Spinning a finger around the box of cereal, Matt lifts up the first of the newly dead's head, and says.
“Still turning Trix hey Mark? HEE HEHE!”
Maniacal laughter echoes the hallway. Others turn towards the laughter, weapons drawn.
“CONTACT! Matt Aries!” Shouts someone in the crowd.
“Wake up! You napped enough!”
The dream fades, and the vale of sleep is lifted. Head pounding. A backhand slap across the cheek startles what little remained of unconsciousness. Hands bound behind him, mask laying on a table to his left.
“So Matt, I hear you kill survivors in the hopes that the undead will have nothing left to feed off of and then slowly decay and wither away. Is this true? Now we all know Necrotech started this somehow, but, I'll be damned if some fuck like you will take another survivor out. Not while I'm alive.”
A man using a knife cuts a apple that is in his other hand and uses the knife to guide the slice into his mouth. He sits on a chair looking out of a boarded window.
“I'm taking you in, there is a rather nice bounty on your head. Those extra food rations I can turn around and get some more ammo. We're gonna stay here until dark and then we're off to the lounge. You try any shit, and I'll gut you. Your worth more alive then undead, and honestly easier to deal with, so keep your mouth shut, and behave. You hear me?”
Confused, a migraine, and nauseous, Matt looks around unsure of his surroundings. He speaks with a slight difference in his words, inflections of syllables are off, a lack of a normal accent.
“Where, where am I? Who are you?”
“You're gonna play the amnesia card? Come on now that's a poor attempt. You're not thi...”
A rotten male arm with long jagged and chipped nails reaches between the boarding of the window on the left for Matt. Two boards up another gap allows a knife to give access to the brain of the zombie. It slumps over hitting the barricade dead.
“What the fuck was that!” Matt shouts.
The bounty hunter notices in the nights light Matt is now sitting in his own excrement. Knowing that everyone in the city has faced off with the undead, and has gotten past the initial shock, no longer wets themselves at the sight of the 'Zed'.
Grabbing Matt by the hair he pulls sharply towards the ground to look at the area that was hit by the back end of his ax. Swollen and bloody, the hunter swears to himself.
“Do you know your name?”
“You called me Matt, so yeah I guess.” Matt shrugs unsure.
“Do you know who I am?”
Thinking for some time, Matt has a worried and confused look. Apologetically he replies, no.
A look of fear is building quickly. Panic is about to set in. Panic normally attracts attention, and in Malton every type of attention is unwanted. The hunter sighs long and hard.
“Fuck! You better not be fuckin' with me. So help you god. If you do, I will show you no end of hell.” Looking for signs of faking and finding none, he continues. “What's the last thing you remember?” “A vague recollection of a dream, before you woke me up so rudely. You said I am a killer, not exactly sure how I'm suppose to take that. That is extremely unnerving.” Matt blurts out in complete disbelief.
“I'm no Doctor, so I can't tell if you're faking shit or not, so forgive me if I am a bit guarded. However, you do show signs of memory loss from the limited training I have had in the service. I'm gonna cut your binds, and you take a seat over here at the table, but, you even think about anything, I'm dumping your dead body off the roof. Hear me?”
Matt nods in understanding, as the lawman cuts the zip tie. Standing up slowly Matt is purposely trying to not make any sudden moves to provoke his warden, who takes a seat at the other end of the rectangle table. His gun is brought out and set on the table next to him to as a show of force, and seriousness.
He drops his head and sighs, while locking Matt in a gaze, that psychotic killer turns away from. Something the officer knows all too well Matt Aries would never do.
“Where do I begin?” He ponders for a moment.
“I am Aiden, and you and I got some history together. So I know all about you, and I can tell something is off, and I don't mean in your normal ways. I ain't seen anything like this from you before, so I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt I initially have. Anyways I'm babbling here, I'll get to us in a bit, let me give you the backstory of what's going on. You ain't gonna believe it, but, I'm telling you it's real, and you better see it as such, cause the proof is right there.” He points to the dead zombie outside the barricades.”
“I ain't seen ya in about 5 years, I can only assume being that I found you in that graveyard, you were a zed that entire time. Wait, a second, I'm going at this all wrong. GOD! This is tough, how do I explain everything?”
Left hand on his forehead he thinks long and hard how to explain the events that lead up to the here and now. Right hand begins to tap the pistol. Which makes Matt visibly uncomfortable.
“Sorry about that, some habits are hard to stop as you already kn... damn … sorry.” stops tapping.
“It was mid summer 2005, everyone is getting ready for the holiday. Explosions were heard all over, I thought they were fireworks at first, but I heard those screams, the first of many. Shit hit the fan fast. Not sure if anyone knows exactly how things started, but, I know a few months earlier everyone here gave a DNA sample to the new Necrotech company. Their still on file to this day, odd. We were all told taking 1 flu shot and a DNA sample would have us free of all sickness and disease for the rest of our life. Crazy part is that shit actually worked, but the side effects are a mother fucker.”
Aiden drifts off in thought, lost completely to the here and now. A groan from a few blocks off drags him back to the present.
“My guess is something went wrong, really wrong at one of those facilities. I woke sometime late at night to the sound of an explosion.” He drifts off again eyes welling up slightly, but battles back the emotion and memory of loss.
“People were attacking other people, those that were fatally wounded stood back up after some time, and were attacking again. I shit you not … zombies are in Malton. There is your evidence right there.” Motions to the body once again.
“What I can't figure out is, the government somehow found out quick. The bridges were bombed, the tunnels buried, walls erected, there is no way out of Malton, not even in death. Many of us tried to escape, but were met with the military on the other side. We eventually all stopped and started to prepare for surviving until they storm in.”
“Wait what do you mean? No death? Get the fuck out!” Matt interrupts.
Aiden rolls his eyes. “Yeah I know, sounds like some old text based, clicker game back in the day, but, I am serious. We found out that whatever happened, Necrotech has some type of serum that is taken from the undead and can revert the dead cells and revert the zeds back to their living form. So as long as you were scanned and there is a DNA file on you, you're basically immortal … surprise! Welcome to hell.” Laughing at the fact of how crazy it even sounds.
“It all went to hell fast, but, it got progressively worse. The prisons, and psych wards were all let out, guess it was seen as cruel and unusual. So every nut job and killer is out roaming the streets next to rotting bodies walking around craving their meat. Great idea I tell ya.”
“For a while the military was dropped into the area, 101st Airborne, and the U.S. Infantry, they worked with the local law enforcement, the Department of Emergency Management and The Fortress. This lead to tactical supply drops. This stopped suddenly, and those inside Malton were left here with no word from the outside world. Rumors quickly spread, and some even tempted fate by trying to get out. Automated defenses, land mines, and the like prevented anyone else from trying again after several died, and came back undead.
It has been a back and forth fight in here every since. Some days the Zeds have the upper hand, some days we survivors do. The only factors never changing are we never get sick, we never age, and if we die, we can be revived. Besides that, those that kill fellow survivors … will kill every chance they get. This brings me to you Matt.”
Aiden leans in on his elbows, arms crossed on the table.
“While I don't know everything about you I can tell you what I do know, the ramifications of your actions, and what you can be if you were in a different frame of mind. There are many things that are hearsay about you, but, I will leave that to you to determine what is real, and what is made up by you.”
He looks to the ceiling before continuing.
“It is said, that when all hell broke loose here, you were locked away in Malton's Insane Asylum down in New Arkham. I personally have gone there to see if this was true and get more insight into my target. However, it was burned to the ground. Nothing but ashes remained when I got there so many years ago. I leave that for you to figure out if it is fact or fiction. After a few instances with you I know you are a fractured man, a schizophrenic with many known personalities. Some are aware of one another, some are not. For all I know, this might be a new personality that manifested itself after I knocked you out. You are a killer, and you love it in some demented way. Often laughing manically after a kill, your most dominant persona Matt Aries also known as the killer clown, has resorted to tasteless humor. A brick filled rubber chicken is used to slap unsuspecting survivors in the face. If this was a normal place, not hidden away from the eyes of god, I would kill you for what you have done, if it meant you would actually die.”
He gestures angrily. “When all this shit is over and done with, I'm gonna find you. I WILL PUT A BULLET IN YOUR FUCKING BRAIN!”
“If you do have amnesia, you might one day remember the old ways. You have a chance here to redeem yourself and the things you did. One day if you remember your old ways, you can look back and make a choice. A choice to help, those in need, as well as your own self.”
“When it's dawn we are going to run it back to the bounty lounge, I'll explain your situation, get you checked out. Get your bounty off, and you can figure out what to do from there. That sound like a plan to you?”
Matt nods in agreement.
