NaNoWriMo Progress Report #1
Title: Tales From The Waste(?)
Fandom: NaNoWriMo progress on "Robombie-verse" story
Characters: Mel, Zero, a cast of thousands of undead!
Word Count: 2710
Rating: R?
Author's Notes: I will attempt to regularly post my NaNo progress. Keep in mind that this is NaNo, so pretty much the only editing I'll be doing is the real-time editing I do as I write. That means if I didn't notice it while I was writing it, I didn't go back to edit it. If you see something [in brackets], that means I'm iffy on it but I'm not sure how to fix it right now so I'm moving on. It's sort of a red flag to myself for when I go back and edit later.
THIS IS THE RAW CREATIVITY, HERE, PEOPLE. YOU ARE SEEING MY CREATIVE PROCESS.
Anyway, my point is, if there's some suck, that's why. I'm trying to just get this DONE. There's some research going into this, but I'm not letting myself get bogged down in it. Also, I can't promise daily updates like I did last month. I can try, but no promises. What I can promise is that each update will include all of my new progress between the previous update and the new update. For instance, today's progress report is everything I wrote on November first and second.
(At this point, I'm mostly just rewriting my previous Robombie-verse shorts and linking them together. Also, if anyone knows a quick way to convert .doc italics and such to HTML, I'd appreciate a heads-up. I don't have the time to go through and slap the codes on everything before posting. As such, by the way, no italics this time around. Sorry.)
Tales From The Waste(?)
"We should be recording all our adventures. Writing them down for posterity, so those who come after us can know how awesome we were."
"Surviving is an adventure?" Expressionless features belied the implied sarcasm. The sarcasm was always implied, because the tone never changed.
Glowering up at him, she tucked a short, dirty-blond strand of hair behind her ear. "We're surviving in a hellish, zombie-infested post-apocalyptic wasteland," she shot back. "Hell yeah it's an adventure, Zero. Future generations could learn from our zombie-killing methods."
"I have killed a total of ten zombies since this insanity began, Mel," Zero said flatly. It was the same flat tone he always spoke in. Either his model lacked the voice-modulation for anything else, or he had been damaged before they met. "You have killed four in the time I have known you. More likely they would be learning our zombie avoidance techniques."
Mel frowned. She thought it over. "That would make a terrible movie adaptation."
"I shall weep bitter tears at this loss," Zero replied. "My dreams of fame and fortune are dashed." He turned away to peer around the corner of the half-destroyed wall they were standing next to. They had spent the day wandering through a lonely patch of ruins, looking for supplies and a safe place to camp. So far the rubble had given no indication what it once was.
The setting sun was gleaming dully over the shallow scratches along the bottom of Zero's metal face, highlighting the thin coating of rust that had begun to form. It was bad enough that she imagined human expressions on that blank robot face, now Mel had whimsically taken to thinking of the scratches and rust as stubble. Rugged, manly robo-stubble. The kind of stubble that woudl have grown in if Zero were human and lacked the very time and tools necessary for basic grooming that they currently found themselves lacking.
Mel shook her head and grimaced. She needed some human interaction desperately. Human interaction that didn't involve a gun being shoved in her face, preferably. Though she wasn't sure she would hold out on that requirement given no other option. Attributing human characteristics to her mechanical companion was, no doubt, a sign of impending madness.
"I think I'm catching the Waste-crazy," Mel remarked, leaning back against the wall. She glanced at the nails on one hand and nibbled at the ragged growth.
"If you try to eat my face, you will chip a tooth."
Mel glowered up at him again. "You could at least act like you give half a shit."
"I apologize for not indulging your fleshy desire for hyperbole. Pretend that I expressed shock and dismay at your previous statement. I am now in mourning. Are you appeased?"
"Go to hell," Mel grumbled, kicking at a rock near her foot. As it clattered away, she thought it might not be a rock but the remains of a fossilized muffin.
"It is, as you alrady said, post-apocalypse," Zero replied, finally turning to face her again. The dwindling sunlight cast a sinister red hue on the lights of his normally yellow-white eyes. It was the same red that identified robots infected with the Zombie Virus. Mel shivered and rubbed away some goosebumps as Zero continued, "We are already in your human concept of hell."
Mel stared at him for a moment, the she crossed her arms over her chest and jutted out her lower lip in an irritated pout. "Why is it that when I say shit like that it's 'fleshy hyperbole' but when you say it, it's dramatic?"
"Because I am a robot and superior to you in every way. Now quiet your meaty mouth-flappings before you alert the zombie down the street to our presence." Quickly ducking back around the corner, Zero motioned for her to follow him away.
"Liar," Mel hissed, shooting a quick glance at the corner of the wall. "There is no goddamn zombie over there." She still hurried to follor him.
He was an asshole and a robot, but Zero was better than nothing. Her last travelling companion had been her gun. At least Zero talked back. The minute her gun started talking to her, she planned to start seriously worrying about being Waste-crazy. Still...
"I hate you," she whispered. Mel sped up as she heard something behind them that was probably just the wind moaning like a continuous death rattle. It was just the wind.
"You write epic love poems dedicated to my perfection," Zero replied, reaching out to lightly grip her elbow so she would keep pace with him. The cold metal digits dug in uncomfortably when she stumbled, but they kept her upright and moving. "I am certain sparkly unicorn stickers are somehow involved."
The absurdity of that struck her and she suddenly chuckled. "Unicorn stickers in hell. Heh, good one, Zero."
"I am not uncertain you have not developed the Waste-crazy."
"Told you," Mel muttered, grabbing at his arm with her free hand. The moaning was getting louder.
Zero glanced back, then tugged at her to hurry her along. "Quiet, flesh-bag, I am mourning."
The moaning was fading, but still persistent. "We may outrun it, but it'll catch up."
"The zombie that isn't there," Zero said.
Mel growled and tightened her grip on his arm before tugging free and spinning on one foot. When she was facing the shambling wreck of rotting flesh, she reached back to grab her gun and planted both feet. Taking aim, she braced her back against Zero. "Not for long," she said. "Hey, brain-breath! This is Princess Boomstick. Princess Boomstick says 'hi'."
The blast of the rifle echoed across the stark, empty landscape and the zombie dropped without a sound.
Mel stared at it for a moment, then straightened, pushing away from Zero. She gave her gun a slight shake before reholstering it on her back. Turning to face him, she said smugly, "Five."
"Have you finished indulging your desire for melodrama?"
Mel threw her hands up and stomped past him. "God, I just can not win. Fuck you, Zero."
"Your squishy water balloon body could not handle intercourse with me." Zero easily caught up with her and matched her pace. "I must decline."
"Ew, gross!"
"Where are we going, flesh-bag?"
Mel rolled her eyes. "Duh, the same direction we were going a minute ago when the zombie was chasing us."
"The zombie is no longer a threat," Zero pointed out. "We could make use of this structure as shelter for the night, since you require sleep at regular intervals."
Stopping, Mel turned and narrowed her eyes at him. "Are you saying I'm slowing us down."
"Not at all." Zero stared off into the distance. The sun was low on the horizon. "We have no destination, so that would be quite impossible."
Mel growled and turned around, stomping back toward the crumbling ruins. "Well fine! Let's pick a destination, then. We can head out tomorrow."
"After you sleep."
"Hey fuck you," Mel snapped, turning and walking backward so she could point at him.
"You keep insisting, but I will continue to decline your generous offer."
"Ugh! Of all the robots I could get stuck with, why'd it have to be a perv?"
"Where do you want to go tomorrow?" Zero asked.
Mel sighed and shrugged. "I dunno, where do you want to go?"
"Do not put this on me," Zero said, drawing level with her. "Having a destination is your idea."
"Well...yeah." Mel ran a hand through her short hair and ruffled it. "I mean, we're like Waiting For Godot here, except instead of waiting, we're out looking for him. There's no point."
"The point is survival."
"Maybe that's not enough!"
Zero was silent for a moment. Then he slowly said, "Is this a human existential crisis? You need a meaning for life?"
Shifting her shoulders to adjust the hang of Princess Boomstick's holster on her back, Mel sighed again. "Nevermind, Zero. Let's just find a good spot to bunk down for the night." Muttering under her breath, she added, "Jesus Christ, this would be the most boring goddamn movie adaptation ever."
----- The zombie apocalypse might never have gotten the foothold it did if not for fear, paranoia, and xenophobia. It started as just a zombie outbreak. The dead started rising and the sick were quickly quarantined. For a while it looked liked there was a good chance of containing the disease before it became an epidemic. Mostly this was due to the help of robots, who were immune to organic diseases and couldn't be hurt by the zombies. With their help, it looked like the tide was being turned in favor of thinking beings.
Then people, scared and paranoid and looking for someone to blame, started spreading rumors. "I bet it was the 'bots that started it," they said. They claimed that AIs were finally tired of sharing the planet with the weak, fleshy organics and had started the plague to wipe out humanity.
That was nothing new, people had been blaming robots for various problems since they started becoming self-aware and demanding equal rights. Unfortunately, someone decided to do something about it. Someone decided to level the playing field. The zombie outbreaks were almost entirely contained and a cure, or at least a vaccine, was in the works when suddenly the Zombie Virus swept through the world's robotic population.
The Z-Virus was far more devastating than a human disease because it could be spread without physical contact. Any robot with their wi-fi turned on was at risk of catching it without any warning. Metal bodies with glitching AI shambled and jerked across the face of the planet, out to destroy anything bipedal. The fool responsible for programming the Z-Virus had, in their haste, included plenty of bloodlust for other robots but failed to define what a robot was.
As far as the robo-zombies were concerned, humans were just robots that squished and squelched when they dug sharpened metal fingers into them.
The robo-zombies changed everything. Robo-zombies, rombies, robombies, no one could really agree on a name and after a while it just wasn't a priority. With the Z-Virus running parallel to its organic counterpart, the zombie outbreaks went from almost-contained to pandemic in almost a week. Another month and thinking beings, both organic and mechanical, were fighting just to stay off the endangered species list. That was about when those who were still alive to do so began calling it a zombie apocalypse.
It was a year into the zombie apocalypse that Mel and Zero met. Mel was alone, sleep-deprived, in the early stages of Waste-crazy, and talking to her gun. Waste-crazy was what people had taken to calling it when too much time isolated from others, wanding the Wasteland with skittery nerves and a metric ton of post traumatic stress, made your brain just give up on sanity. Waste-crazy manifested differently in everyone. Some went on killing sprees, too far gone to distinguish between living and undead. Some started to think that they were zombies. Some escaped into their own minds, content in the safety of their happy place even as they were eaten alive.
Most, though, became an odd kind of functional crazy. It was almost impossible to tell they were insane until they said or did something that made no sense to a sane person. That was the kind of Waste-crazy that had begun to settle comfortably in Mel, though it hadn't fully dug its claws in yet. She knew that because even though she had taken to chatting with her gun as if it could answer back, it hadn't acutally begun holding up its end of the convesation. Mel dreaded the day when Princess Boomstick weighed in on an issue, but at the same time she was a bit curious what the rifle would say.
She had met Zero when he calmy said "Please do not shoot me" and Mel realized that her gun was shoved up against the middle of his metal face and her finger was poised loosely over the trigger. Mel hadn't been able to remember the series of events that had led to that arrangement, but since no zombies had retained the power of speech it had seemed a safe bet that the robot talking to her wasn't one. Unless she had gone Waste-crazy without realizing it and was just imagining the robot talking, but Princess Boomstick hadn't had an opinion either way so she had taken a chance. Lowering her gun, she had said, "I'm Mel."
Zero's name wasn't really "Zero," it was one of those "back to your root code" binary things that few humans could remember correctly. So Mel called him "Zero." In return, he sometimes called her "flesh-bag." They had agreed it was a fair trade.
They travelled together because Zero helped keep the Waste-crazy at bay. That was Mel's reason, anyway. She honestly wasn't sure why Zero stuck with her. Maybe robots got Waste-crazy too.
Peeking over a pile of rubble, Mel saw nothing but Wasteland in the fading light so she sat back down with her back against it. Glancing over at Zero, she asked him, "Is it true the robots started the zombie plague?" It was little more than a random absent thought, voiced for lack of a better conversational topic than any immediate curiosity.
Zero stared at her for a long moment and she imagined [irritation] on his blank metal face. "If it was a plot to overthrow humanity, I did not get the memo," he said, then looked away. " Does it really matter at this point?"
Thinking it over, Mel's shoulders slumped. Ahead of her she could see the pitiless vastness of Wasteland they had already wandered, behind the crumbled wall at her back was Wasteland they hadn't ventured through yet. Out there among it all, zombies and robo-zombies shambled along without a care aside from destruction of the living. Human and robot, they were both of them equally doomed.
"No," Mel sighed, "I guess not." She unholstered her gun and gazed at it mournfully. "What do you think, Princess Boomstick?"
"You do not have the Waste-crazy, quit acting as if you do."
Mel huffed and hugged the gun to her chest, giving the robot a lofty look. "Are you implying that talking to Princess Boomstick is crazy, Zero? You'll hurt her feelings!"
"Do not make me hide the princess in another castle, flesh-bag." Zero reached half-heartedly for the gun and Mel squeaked, scooting back.
"Hands off!" she snapped, setting the gun on her lap and pulling out a ragged handkerchief. She began to rub at the dirt and grime that had collected on Princess Boomstick since the last time they had had the time to sit down and not worry about needing to have her immediately handy. "Princess Boomstick is a lady, you can't get grabby with her."
"Get some rest. You clearly need it."
"I need to take care of this," Mel muttered, stubbornly scrubbing at a spot of hardened grey something clinging to the barrel.
"You need sleep," Zero argued. She jerked in surprise when he sat down next to her. She hadn't noticed him getting that close and that was as good a sign as any that she was reaching the dangerously unobservant stages of sleep deprivation. Adrenaline from the earlier encounter with the zombie was wearing off, leaving her feeling tired and drained.
Mel growled, "It's my watch. You had it last time."
"No doubt the undead hordes will be terrified into submission by your vigil," Zero said. "Words alone cannot express how much it puts me at ease knowing you are watching my back."
"It's my watch!" Mel snapped, turning to glare at him as she clutched the battered rifle. Zero watched her silently and heat rose in her cheeks. She hunched her shoulders and turned to look out at the horizon. There was a weak breeze rustling a few scraggly scrub bushes and shifting the sandy dirt.
"It's my watch..." she repeated, voice lowering to a whisper.
"Despite the fact that you are a stubborn idiot, this is true," Zero agreed. "But you did not sleep during my watch and now you are tired. I am fully charged."
Are you also NaNoing? Want to be my writing buddy? I'm DoctorV over on the site.
Fandom: NaNoWriMo progress on "Robombie-verse" story
Characters: Mel, Zero, a cast of thousands of undead!
Word Count: 2710
Rating: R?
Author's Notes: I will attempt to regularly post my NaNo progress. Keep in mind that this is NaNo, so pretty much the only editing I'll be doing is the real-time editing I do as I write. That means if I didn't notice it while I was writing it, I didn't go back to edit it. If you see something [in brackets], that means I'm iffy on it but I'm not sure how to fix it right now so I'm moving on. It's sort of a red flag to myself for when I go back and edit later.
THIS IS THE RAW CREATIVITY, HERE, PEOPLE. YOU ARE SEEING MY CREATIVE PROCESS.
Anyway, my point is, if there's some suck, that's why. I'm trying to just get this DONE. There's some research going into this, but I'm not letting myself get bogged down in it. Also, I can't promise daily updates like I did last month. I can try, but no promises. What I can promise is that each update will include all of my new progress between the previous update and the new update. For instance, today's progress report is everything I wrote on November first and second.
(At this point, I'm mostly just rewriting my previous Robombie-verse shorts and linking them together. Also, if anyone knows a quick way to convert .doc italics and such to HTML, I'd appreciate a heads-up. I don't have the time to go through and slap the codes on everything before posting. As such, by the way, no italics this time around. Sorry.)
Tales From The Waste(?)
"We should be recording all our adventures. Writing them down for posterity, so those who come after us can know how awesome we were."
"Surviving is an adventure?" Expressionless features belied the implied sarcasm. The sarcasm was always implied, because the tone never changed.
Glowering up at him, she tucked a short, dirty-blond strand of hair behind her ear. "We're surviving in a hellish, zombie-infested post-apocalyptic wasteland," she shot back. "Hell yeah it's an adventure, Zero. Future generations could learn from our zombie-killing methods."
"I have killed a total of ten zombies since this insanity began, Mel," Zero said flatly. It was the same flat tone he always spoke in. Either his model lacked the voice-modulation for anything else, or he had been damaged before they met. "You have killed four in the time I have known you. More likely they would be learning our zombie avoidance techniques."
Mel frowned. She thought it over. "That would make a terrible movie adaptation."
"I shall weep bitter tears at this loss," Zero replied. "My dreams of fame and fortune are dashed." He turned away to peer around the corner of the half-destroyed wall they were standing next to. They had spent the day wandering through a lonely patch of ruins, looking for supplies and a safe place to camp. So far the rubble had given no indication what it once was.
The setting sun was gleaming dully over the shallow scratches along the bottom of Zero's metal face, highlighting the thin coating of rust that had begun to form. It was bad enough that she imagined human expressions on that blank robot face, now Mel had whimsically taken to thinking of the scratches and rust as stubble. Rugged, manly robo-stubble. The kind of stubble that woudl have grown in if Zero were human and lacked the very time and tools necessary for basic grooming that they currently found themselves lacking.
Mel shook her head and grimaced. She needed some human interaction desperately. Human interaction that didn't involve a gun being shoved in her face, preferably. Though she wasn't sure she would hold out on that requirement given no other option. Attributing human characteristics to her mechanical companion was, no doubt, a sign of impending madness.
"I think I'm catching the Waste-crazy," Mel remarked, leaning back against the wall. She glanced at the nails on one hand and nibbled at the ragged growth.
"If you try to eat my face, you will chip a tooth."
Mel glowered up at him again. "You could at least act like you give half a shit."
"I apologize for not indulging your fleshy desire for hyperbole. Pretend that I expressed shock and dismay at your previous statement. I am now in mourning. Are you appeased?"
"Go to hell," Mel grumbled, kicking at a rock near her foot. As it clattered away, she thought it might not be a rock but the remains of a fossilized muffin.
"It is, as you alrady said, post-apocalypse," Zero replied, finally turning to face her again. The dwindling sunlight cast a sinister red hue on the lights of his normally yellow-white eyes. It was the same red that identified robots infected with the Zombie Virus. Mel shivered and rubbed away some goosebumps as Zero continued, "We are already in your human concept of hell."
Mel stared at him for a moment, the she crossed her arms over her chest and jutted out her lower lip in an irritated pout. "Why is it that when I say shit like that it's 'fleshy hyperbole' but when you say it, it's dramatic?"
"Because I am a robot and superior to you in every way. Now quiet your meaty mouth-flappings before you alert the zombie down the street to our presence." Quickly ducking back around the corner, Zero motioned for her to follow him away.
"Liar," Mel hissed, shooting a quick glance at the corner of the wall. "There is no goddamn zombie over there." She still hurried to follor him.
He was an asshole and a robot, but Zero was better than nothing. Her last travelling companion had been her gun. At least Zero talked back. The minute her gun started talking to her, she planned to start seriously worrying about being Waste-crazy. Still...
"I hate you," she whispered. Mel sped up as she heard something behind them that was probably just the wind moaning like a continuous death rattle. It was just the wind.
"You write epic love poems dedicated to my perfection," Zero replied, reaching out to lightly grip her elbow so she would keep pace with him. The cold metal digits dug in uncomfortably when she stumbled, but they kept her upright and moving. "I am certain sparkly unicorn stickers are somehow involved."
The absurdity of that struck her and she suddenly chuckled. "Unicorn stickers in hell. Heh, good one, Zero."
"I am not uncertain you have not developed the Waste-crazy."
"Told you," Mel muttered, grabbing at his arm with her free hand. The moaning was getting louder.
Zero glanced back, then tugged at her to hurry her along. "Quiet, flesh-bag, I am mourning."
The moaning was fading, but still persistent. "We may outrun it, but it'll catch up."
"The zombie that isn't there," Zero said.
Mel growled and tightened her grip on his arm before tugging free and spinning on one foot. When she was facing the shambling wreck of rotting flesh, she reached back to grab her gun and planted both feet. Taking aim, she braced her back against Zero. "Not for long," she said. "Hey, brain-breath! This is Princess Boomstick. Princess Boomstick says 'hi'."
The blast of the rifle echoed across the stark, empty landscape and the zombie dropped without a sound.
Mel stared at it for a moment, then straightened, pushing away from Zero. She gave her gun a slight shake before reholstering it on her back. Turning to face him, she said smugly, "Five."
"Have you finished indulging your desire for melodrama?"
Mel threw her hands up and stomped past him. "God, I just can not win. Fuck you, Zero."
"Your squishy water balloon body could not handle intercourse with me." Zero easily caught up with her and matched her pace. "I must decline."
"Ew, gross!"
"Where are we going, flesh-bag?"
Mel rolled her eyes. "Duh, the same direction we were going a minute ago when the zombie was chasing us."
"The zombie is no longer a threat," Zero pointed out. "We could make use of this structure as shelter for the night, since you require sleep at regular intervals."
Stopping, Mel turned and narrowed her eyes at him. "Are you saying I'm slowing us down."
"Not at all." Zero stared off into the distance. The sun was low on the horizon. "We have no destination, so that would be quite impossible."
Mel growled and turned around, stomping back toward the crumbling ruins. "Well fine! Let's pick a destination, then. We can head out tomorrow."
"After you sleep."
"Hey fuck you," Mel snapped, turning and walking backward so she could point at him.
"You keep insisting, but I will continue to decline your generous offer."
"Ugh! Of all the robots I could get stuck with, why'd it have to be a perv?"
"Where do you want to go tomorrow?" Zero asked.
Mel sighed and shrugged. "I dunno, where do you want to go?"
"Do not put this on me," Zero said, drawing level with her. "Having a destination is your idea."
"Well...yeah." Mel ran a hand through her short hair and ruffled it. "I mean, we're like Waiting For Godot here, except instead of waiting, we're out looking for him. There's no point."
"The point is survival."
"Maybe that's not enough!"
Zero was silent for a moment. Then he slowly said, "Is this a human existential crisis? You need a meaning for life?"
Shifting her shoulders to adjust the hang of Princess Boomstick's holster on her back, Mel sighed again. "Nevermind, Zero. Let's just find a good spot to bunk down for the night." Muttering under her breath, she added, "Jesus Christ, this would be the most boring goddamn movie adaptation ever."
----- The zombie apocalypse might never have gotten the foothold it did if not for fear, paranoia, and xenophobia. It started as just a zombie outbreak. The dead started rising and the sick were quickly quarantined. For a while it looked liked there was a good chance of containing the disease before it became an epidemic. Mostly this was due to the help of robots, who were immune to organic diseases and couldn't be hurt by the zombies. With their help, it looked like the tide was being turned in favor of thinking beings.
Then people, scared and paranoid and looking for someone to blame, started spreading rumors. "I bet it was the 'bots that started it," they said. They claimed that AIs were finally tired of sharing the planet with the weak, fleshy organics and had started the plague to wipe out humanity.
That was nothing new, people had been blaming robots for various problems since they started becoming self-aware and demanding equal rights. Unfortunately, someone decided to do something about it. Someone decided to level the playing field. The zombie outbreaks were almost entirely contained and a cure, or at least a vaccine, was in the works when suddenly the Zombie Virus swept through the world's robotic population.
The Z-Virus was far more devastating than a human disease because it could be spread without physical contact. Any robot with their wi-fi turned on was at risk of catching it without any warning. Metal bodies with glitching AI shambled and jerked across the face of the planet, out to destroy anything bipedal. The fool responsible for programming the Z-Virus had, in their haste, included plenty of bloodlust for other robots but failed to define what a robot was.
As far as the robo-zombies were concerned, humans were just robots that squished and squelched when they dug sharpened metal fingers into them.
The robo-zombies changed everything. Robo-zombies, rombies, robombies, no one could really agree on a name and after a while it just wasn't a priority. With the Z-Virus running parallel to its organic counterpart, the zombie outbreaks went from almost-contained to pandemic in almost a week. Another month and thinking beings, both organic and mechanical, were fighting just to stay off the endangered species list. That was about when those who were still alive to do so began calling it a zombie apocalypse.
It was a year into the zombie apocalypse that Mel and Zero met. Mel was alone, sleep-deprived, in the early stages of Waste-crazy, and talking to her gun. Waste-crazy was what people had taken to calling it when too much time isolated from others, wanding the Wasteland with skittery nerves and a metric ton of post traumatic stress, made your brain just give up on sanity. Waste-crazy manifested differently in everyone. Some went on killing sprees, too far gone to distinguish between living and undead. Some started to think that they were zombies. Some escaped into their own minds, content in the safety of their happy place even as they were eaten alive.
Most, though, became an odd kind of functional crazy. It was almost impossible to tell they were insane until they said or did something that made no sense to a sane person. That was the kind of Waste-crazy that had begun to settle comfortably in Mel, though it hadn't fully dug its claws in yet. She knew that because even though she had taken to chatting with her gun as if it could answer back, it hadn't acutally begun holding up its end of the convesation. Mel dreaded the day when Princess Boomstick weighed in on an issue, but at the same time she was a bit curious what the rifle would say.
She had met Zero when he calmy said "Please do not shoot me" and Mel realized that her gun was shoved up against the middle of his metal face and her finger was poised loosely over the trigger. Mel hadn't been able to remember the series of events that had led to that arrangement, but since no zombies had retained the power of speech it had seemed a safe bet that the robot talking to her wasn't one. Unless she had gone Waste-crazy without realizing it and was just imagining the robot talking, but Princess Boomstick hadn't had an opinion either way so she had taken a chance. Lowering her gun, she had said, "I'm Mel."
Zero's name wasn't really "Zero," it was one of those "back to your root code" binary things that few humans could remember correctly. So Mel called him "Zero." In return, he sometimes called her "flesh-bag." They had agreed it was a fair trade.
They travelled together because Zero helped keep the Waste-crazy at bay. That was Mel's reason, anyway. She honestly wasn't sure why Zero stuck with her. Maybe robots got Waste-crazy too.
Peeking over a pile of rubble, Mel saw nothing but Wasteland in the fading light so she sat back down with her back against it. Glancing over at Zero, she asked him, "Is it true the robots started the zombie plague?" It was little more than a random absent thought, voiced for lack of a better conversational topic than any immediate curiosity.
Zero stared at her for a long moment and she imagined [irritation] on his blank metal face. "If it was a plot to overthrow humanity, I did not get the memo," he said, then looked away. " Does it really matter at this point?"
Thinking it over, Mel's shoulders slumped. Ahead of her she could see the pitiless vastness of Wasteland they had already wandered, behind the crumbled wall at her back was Wasteland they hadn't ventured through yet. Out there among it all, zombies and robo-zombies shambled along without a care aside from destruction of the living. Human and robot, they were both of them equally doomed.
"No," Mel sighed, "I guess not." She unholstered her gun and gazed at it mournfully. "What do you think, Princess Boomstick?"
"You do not have the Waste-crazy, quit acting as if you do."
Mel huffed and hugged the gun to her chest, giving the robot a lofty look. "Are you implying that talking to Princess Boomstick is crazy, Zero? You'll hurt her feelings!"
"Do not make me hide the princess in another castle, flesh-bag." Zero reached half-heartedly for the gun and Mel squeaked, scooting back.
"Hands off!" she snapped, setting the gun on her lap and pulling out a ragged handkerchief. She began to rub at the dirt and grime that had collected on Princess Boomstick since the last time they had had the time to sit down and not worry about needing to have her immediately handy. "Princess Boomstick is a lady, you can't get grabby with her."
"Get some rest. You clearly need it."
"I need to take care of this," Mel muttered, stubbornly scrubbing at a spot of hardened grey something clinging to the barrel.
"You need sleep," Zero argued. She jerked in surprise when he sat down next to her. She hadn't noticed him getting that close and that was as good a sign as any that she was reaching the dangerously unobservant stages of sleep deprivation. Adrenaline from the earlier encounter with the zombie was wearing off, leaving her feeling tired and drained.
Mel growled, "It's my watch. You had it last time."
"No doubt the undead hordes will be terrified into submission by your vigil," Zero said. "Words alone cannot express how much it puts me at ease knowing you are watching my back."
"It's my watch!" Mel snapped, turning to glare at him as she clutched the battered rifle. Zero watched her silently and heat rose in her cheeks. She hunched her shoulders and turned to look out at the horizon. There was a weak breeze rustling a few scraggly scrub bushes and shifting the sandy dirt.
"It's my watch..." she repeated, voice lowering to a whisper.
"Despite the fact that you are a stubborn idiot, this is true," Zero agreed. "But you did not sleep during my watch and now you are tired. I am fully charged."
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