FILLED: RescueceedeeandcoApril 9 2012, 03:03:15 UTC
Ten seconds after Kevin fires the last of their ammunition into the Croats at the bottom of the escalator, three huge dogs crash through what's left of the glass wall. Another bound has them at the edge of the crowd, and then it's all teeth and blood and the Croats slowly realizing there's something alive behind them that maybe they should look into.
That would be strange enough, but then more dogs pile in, not nearly so big, but still plenty dangerous. Kevin glimpses what looks like a blood-smeared Golden Retriever leaping onto a man's back, but that's not as strange as the Croat going down under a Chihuahua and a Yorkie.
"What the hell?" Sharon mutters.
"Zombie dogs?" Kevin offers -- he knows his Resident Evil.
They really ought to be trying to find a way through the collapsed ceiling, find another way out, but Sharon has a twisted ankle and Jill needs a tetanus shot and the kids are exhausted and Kevin, Kevin has Croat blood on him and he's on borrowed time. He'd meant to save a bullet for himself. He'd meant to save bullets for all of them, now that they were cornered.
On the floor below, one of the big dogs ripped open a Croat's chest and plunged its muzzle in, emerging a moment later with something it swallowed down in one gulp. The Chihuahua and Yorkie are playing tug-of-war with something dark and bloody that rips between them.
"What's happening?" Jill says.
"Fuck if I know," Sharon replied, saving Kevin the necessity.
A Collie extricates itself from the middle of the killing field, delicately licking blood off its muzzle, and trots to the foot of the escalator. It pauses and looks over its shoulder, and it's joined by a bulldog and some small breed Kevin can't identify.
Sharon reflexively raises her gun when they start up, but she's all out of ammo, too.
Halfway up, the Collie gives a shake, and suddenly instead of a dog there's a naked woman climbing the escalator. She's lean and rawboned and not pretty, but her hair's the same reddish-brown as her coat was -- oh, god, this is insane -- and in another life Kevin might have bought her a drink.
"Holy shit," Sharon says.
The woman wipes her bloody hand on her flank, then tries to scrub the blood away from her mouth with her slightly-cleaner hand. "Have any water?" she asks. "Croat blood is foul."
Very slowly, Kevin picks up the nearest water bottle and hands it to her. She chugs, swishes, and spits over the side of the escalator. One of the dogs below barks at her, and she barks back. Then she pours the water out so her escort can get a drink. "Much obliged," she says, handing the bottle back.
Then the little dog lunges forward and bites his ankle, enough to break the skin. Kevin yelps and tries to pull back. The little dog doesn't seem phased, but it lets go without tearing a chunk out of him. "Can't you--" he says, but can't think of anything to say.
"Sorry to skip introductions," the woman says, shrugging. "But they'd have gotten you if we didn't move fast." She turned to the others, Sharon with her useless gun and Jill on the floor with the kids hanging on to her. "You can call me Taffy. How would you like to never have to worry about the Croatoan virus ever again?"
Re: FILLED: RescuejagfanljApril 9 2012, 13:46:28 UTC
Oh, I forgot to ask, may I add this to "My Prompts, Their Fills" an anthology I have on Archive of Our Own? If you'd rather I didn't post the fic, what about a link to here?
Re: FILLED: RescueceedeeandcoApril 15 2012, 07:17:09 UTC
What's Spike's line from BtVS about not wanting the world to end because of humans being like Happy Meals on legs? Yeah, that's how I see Eve's monsters regarding the Apocalypse. Humans and monsters are an ecosystem -- almost every kind of monster depends on the existence of humans in one way or another, for sustenance or reproduction or something. (I go into this, probably in way too much detail, in part D.) Croatoan is like the potato blight. The enemy of my food staple is my enemy. Demons are horrible things which are supposed to be dead, and angels? Are just aliens. And I'm reply to comments at 2 am and rambling, so, anyway, thanks for commenting.
FILLED B: ReserveceedeeandcoApril 10 2012, 12:35:29 UTC
There's a half-hour window to turn a human newly contaminated with the Croatoan virus into something not susceptible to the virus; any of the monsters are authorized to do that. Beyond that, they are supposed to take any uninfected humans to a reserve, as humans, if feasible. Skinwalkers are getting a reputation for interpreting 'not feasible' as 'a human we think is adorable and want to keep'.
The North Central Reserve occupies a former university campus. It is surrounded by a twenty-five-foot-wall of wire and cement and steel and brick, and there are coils of barbed wire at the top. The area outside is constantly patrolled, usually by Wendigoes. The only way in or out is through a heavily guarded gatehouse complex.
The Reserve has dorms, common areas, an infirmary (with doctors and nurses), a well, a hydroelectric generator, a library, a school, a sports field, a swimming pool, a small herd of milk cows, and vegetable gardens. The humans choose a ten-person Representative Assembly to handle small problems and present their requests and concerns to the keepers. The humans got to decide on their own how to choose the assembly, and continually argue over who should vote, how to vote, how often to vote, who can run, whether you have to volunteer to run, and Mother knows what else. It keeps them busy and out of trouble.
The Reserve holds over three hundred humans and counting. Many of the increases are from delivery of uninfected humans found elsewhere, but there are also live births, enough that some of the hunting parties were asked to look for diapers and baby clothes, and a special trip was made for infant vaccines. This year they have the highest birthrate of the three North American Reserves. (Last year the Southwestern Reserve was experimenting with Siren-assisted captive breeding. It tripled their birth rate, but also increased their homicide rate from negligible to higher than the birth rate. The experiment was terminated and the spokesperson to the humans was publically decapitated and replaced, but things are still very tense.)
There are strict rules against worshipping Lucifer or demons, but anything else is acceptable (it's not like the angels are listening, and any pagan gods still around know when to tread lightly). Some still pray to the god of the angels. But some have started to pray to the Mother, even though she's not their mother. The reasoning seems to go that better someone else's mother who takes care of you, even if it's for her own purposes, then your own father who leaves you to be eaten by zombies.
All healthy adults in the Reserve 'donate blood' every three months. Barring sudden freak accidents, no one ever dies in the infirmary; keepers wheel the dying away, and return empty-handed with confirmation of their passing.
No one asks. Most people know. But the Reserve has an infirmary and a school and a hydroelectric generator, and there are Croatoans outside.
FILLED C: Something New 1/2ceedeeandcoApril 11 2012, 11:42:53 UTC
This time, a trio of ficlets on a theme...
...except it is apparently too long for one comment.
*****
The new creature is structured much like a chelicerate arthropod, but she decided it needed both pincers and fangs. It has three tails: stinger, ovipositor, and one more. It has legs for walking, legs for clinging, and legs for jumping; an adult can jump ten times its body length. It is the perfect size to curve around the top and back of a human head, where the third tail has easy access to the spinal cord. It will be able to hook in and take control of voluntary movement.
It has a mouth with which it can eat anything organic. It needs relatively high sulfur intake to live. In addition to the 'normal' mouth, it has two extendable mouths with hooks and suckers on the end. After it latches on, it can stab a tongue-like structure beneath the skin and, assuming it has successfully located a vein or artery, filter the blood. Its preferred food is the Croatoan virus, but it also finds demon meatsuits very appetizing. About six months of steady feeding would leave the human body brain-damaged but virus-free. Of course, at least to start with, the hosts will probably be killed by other infected humans long before then.
It reproduces by parthenogenesis. It lays clutches of five to twenty eggs somewhere warm, wet, and sulfur-rich -- for example, inside a Croatoan-infected human.
Everything needs a weakness. On a whim, she makes it indifferent to salt but very sensitive to mercury.
She picks a city, stands in the middle, and changes every live scorpion within ten miles to her new creature.
She doesn't name it. She's going to let the humans do that.
****
They're peering out of cover when a giant crab-thing leaps out of nowhere onto one of the croats and starts humping its head. The croat squawks, actually squawks, and flails ineffectively at the crab while the crab stabs it in the back of the neck with its tail or maybe a pointed tentacle. The other croats stare at it. One or two actually back up.
"What the fuck is that?" Dean snarls at Cas, hoping he's sober enough for a good answer.
Cas shakes his head. "I've never seen it."
"You're a lot of--"
"I mean it's new. This is something new."
By the time they get back to camp, Dean's been forced to decree that 'Croab' is marginally better than 'head-crab', because at least it doesn't sound sexually transmitted. They don't need Cas's groupies going for the medical supplies because they hear he's seen head-crabs.
And he'll have to look this gift horse in the mouth, because it probably has poison teeth, but still it's nice to have something preying on the croats, and it's the closest he's come to laughing in months.
(The shapeshifter embedded in the camp -- because no one thinks of anything but demons, anymore -- reports this development to the Mother, who is amused, but 'Croab' it is.)
Re: FILLED C: Something New 2/2ceedeeandcoApril 11 2012, 11:43:21 UTC
Fallen bodies aren't uncommon, but movement puts everyone on the alert, and one of the party -- a high-strung guy whose name Cas hasn't bothered to learn because he probably won't be around long enough for it to matter -- lets off a shot before Risa smacks his gun down. It's not a live croat. It's half a dozen Croabs, only about the size of a man's hand, chowing down on a croat corpse.
"Babies," Risa says flatly. "Is it my imagination, or does it look like they broke out of the ribcage?" No one disagrees, and Bob mutters something about chestbursters. "Keep your distance. We don't want those things getting a taste for human."
Croabs seem to prefer live croats, but also scavenge. Croabs jump and crawl. Bullets ricochet off Croabs unless you hit them right at the join of the exoskeleton, in which case the whole thing splatters all over everything within ten feet. Croabs have nasty-looking stingers, but no one's seen them in action. Croabs affect croat behavior, but there may or may not be any intent behind it (because really, anything would act different with a giant crab sitting on its head stabbing it in the neck, even with no mind control). They've found dead croats with no visible wound except a deep puncture in the back of the neck and deep, ugly hickies on the throat. No one's dared do a real close inspection of a Croab, because they're probably full of virus -- they eat enough croats for it. It's been eight months since they first saw a Croab spring into the scene, and it's gotten so they hardly ever see croats without seeing some... passengers.
Cas still can't get past the newness of them. For all they have to assume it's some plot of Lucifer's, it just doesn't seem likely. Everyone finds them horrifying but -- they go after croats, slow them down, probably kill them, and they ignore the uninfected. (A few years ago, he might have tried to believe they were made by his Father, to help. He's over that now.)
After the babies, they don't see any Croabs for the rest of the supply run until they're leaving the town. As they get into the hills, there's a place where they have a real good vantage of the interstate heading out of town. There's a line of croats shuffling down the highway, not quite single file, but closer than the resistence usually is, never mind most croats. Kent gets out the binoculars. There's a Croab on every head.
Risa hisses. "Dean needs to know about this."
What she thinks Dean's going to do about it, Cas can't imagine.
He knows what he's going to do about it. He's got a pill for that.
Re: FILLED B: ReserveclaudiapriscusApril 15 2012, 07:24:08 UTC
Ooh! more story. Okay, so first? the line about the skinwalkers taking home strays, figuraitvely speaking? Genius. I love the line about worshipping the mother, too, because it's got that just right mix of hope and despair and sideways humor ('father who leaves you to be eaten by zombies'), and the darkness of the last line...very nice.
That would be strange enough, but then more dogs pile in, not nearly so big, but still plenty dangerous. Kevin glimpses what looks like a blood-smeared Golden Retriever leaping onto a man's back, but that's not as strange as the Croat going down under a Chihuahua and a Yorkie.
"What the hell?" Sharon mutters.
"Zombie dogs?" Kevin offers -- he knows his Resident Evil.
They really ought to be trying to find a way through the collapsed ceiling, find another way out, but Sharon has a twisted ankle and Jill needs a tetanus shot and the kids are exhausted and Kevin, Kevin has Croat blood on him and he's on borrowed time. He'd meant to save a bullet for himself. He'd meant to save bullets for all of them, now that they were cornered.
On the floor below, one of the big dogs ripped open a Croat's chest and plunged its muzzle in, emerging a moment later with something it swallowed down in one gulp. The Chihuahua and Yorkie are playing tug-of-war with something dark and bloody that rips between them.
"What's happening?" Jill says.
"Fuck if I know," Sharon replied, saving Kevin the necessity.
A Collie extricates itself from the middle of the killing field, delicately licking blood off its muzzle, and trots to the foot of the escalator. It pauses and looks over its shoulder, and it's joined by a bulldog and some small breed Kevin can't identify.
Sharon reflexively raises her gun when they start up, but she's all out of ammo, too.
Halfway up, the Collie gives a shake, and suddenly instead of a dog there's a naked woman climbing the escalator. She's lean and rawboned and not pretty, but her hair's the same reddish-brown as her coat was -- oh, god, this is insane -- and in another life Kevin might have bought her a drink.
"Holy shit," Sharon says.
The woman wipes her bloody hand on her flank, then tries to scrub the blood away from her mouth with her slightly-cleaner hand. "Have any water?" she asks. "Croat blood is foul."
Very slowly, Kevin picks up the nearest water bottle and hands it to her. She chugs, swishes, and spits over the side of the escalator. One of the dogs below barks at her, and she barks back. Then she pours the water out so her escort can get a drink. "Much obliged," she says, handing the bottle back.
Then the little dog lunges forward and bites his ankle, enough to break the skin. Kevin yelps and tries to pull back. The little dog doesn't seem phased, but it lets go without tearing a chunk out of him. "Can't you--" he says, but can't think of anything to say.
"Sorry to skip introductions," the woman says, shrugging. "But they'd have gotten you if we didn't move fast." She turned to the others, Sharon with her useless gun and Jill on the floor with the kids hanging on to her. "You can call me Taffy. How would you like to never have to worry about the Croatoan virus ever again?"
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There's a half-hour window to turn a human newly contaminated with the Croatoan virus into something not susceptible to the virus; any of the monsters are authorized to do that. Beyond that, they are supposed to take any uninfected humans to a reserve, as humans, if feasible. Skinwalkers are getting a reputation for interpreting 'not feasible' as 'a human we think is adorable and want to keep'.
The North Central Reserve occupies a former university campus. It is surrounded by a twenty-five-foot-wall of wire and cement and steel and brick, and there are coils of barbed wire at the top. The area outside is constantly patrolled, usually by Wendigoes. The only way in or out is through a heavily guarded gatehouse complex.
The Reserve has dorms, common areas, an infirmary (with doctors and nurses), a well, a hydroelectric generator, a library, a school, a sports field, a swimming pool, a small herd of milk cows, and vegetable gardens. The humans choose a ten-person Representative Assembly to handle small problems and present their requests and concerns to the keepers. The humans got to decide on their own how to choose the assembly, and continually argue over who should vote, how to vote, how often to vote, who can run, whether you have to volunteer to run, and Mother knows what else. It keeps them busy and out of trouble.
The Reserve holds over three hundred humans and counting. Many of the increases are from delivery of uninfected humans found elsewhere, but there are also live births, enough that some of the hunting parties were asked to look for diapers and baby clothes, and a special trip was made for infant vaccines. This year they have the highest birthrate of the three North American Reserves. (Last year the Southwestern Reserve was experimenting with Siren-assisted captive breeding. It tripled their birth rate, but also increased their homicide rate from negligible to higher than the birth rate. The experiment was terminated and the spokesperson to the humans was publically decapitated and replaced, but things are still very tense.)
There are strict rules against worshipping Lucifer or demons, but anything else is acceptable (it's not like the angels are listening, and any pagan gods still around know when to tread lightly). Some still pray to the god of the angels. But some have started to pray to the Mother, even though she's not their mother. The reasoning seems to go that better someone else's mother who takes care of you, even if it's for her own purposes, then your own father who leaves you to be eaten by zombies.
All healthy adults in the Reserve 'donate blood' every three months. Barring sudden freak accidents, no one ever dies in the infirmary; keepers wheel the dying away, and return empty-handed with confirmation of their passing.
No one asks. Most people know. But the Reserve has an infirmary and a school and a hydroelectric generator, and there are Croatoans outside.
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Permission to friend you?
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...except it is apparently too long for one comment.
*****
The new creature is structured much like a chelicerate arthropod, but she decided it needed both pincers and fangs. It has three tails: stinger, ovipositor, and one more. It has legs for walking, legs for clinging, and legs for jumping; an adult can jump ten times its body length. It is the perfect size to curve around the top and back of a human head, where the third tail has easy access to the spinal cord. It will be able to hook in and take control of voluntary movement.
It has a mouth with which it can eat anything organic. It needs relatively high sulfur intake to live. In addition to the 'normal' mouth, it has two extendable mouths with hooks and suckers on the end. After it latches on, it can stab a tongue-like structure beneath the skin and, assuming it has successfully located a vein or artery, filter the blood. Its preferred food is the Croatoan virus, but it also finds demon meatsuits very appetizing. About six months of steady feeding would leave the human body brain-damaged but virus-free. Of course, at least to start with, the hosts will probably be killed by other infected humans long before then.
It reproduces by parthenogenesis. It lays clutches of five to twenty eggs somewhere warm, wet, and sulfur-rich -- for example, inside a Croatoan-infected human.
Everything needs a weakness. On a whim, she makes it indifferent to salt but very sensitive to mercury.
She picks a city, stands in the middle, and changes every live scorpion within ten miles to her new creature.
She doesn't name it. She's going to let the humans do that.
****
They're peering out of cover when a giant crab-thing leaps out of nowhere onto one of the croats and starts humping its head. The croat squawks, actually squawks, and flails ineffectively at the crab while the crab stabs it in the back of the neck with its tail or maybe a pointed tentacle. The other croats stare at it. One or two actually back up.
"What the fuck is that?" Dean snarls at Cas, hoping he's sober enough for a good answer.
Cas shakes his head. "I've never seen it."
"You're a lot of--"
"I mean it's new. This is something new."
By the time they get back to camp, Dean's been forced to decree that 'Croab' is marginally better than 'head-crab', because at least it doesn't sound sexually transmitted. They don't need Cas's groupies going for the medical supplies because they hear he's seen head-crabs.
And he'll have to look this gift horse in the mouth, because it probably has poison teeth, but still it's nice to have something preying on the croats, and it's the closest he's come to laughing in months.
(The shapeshifter embedded in the camp -- because no one thinks of anything but demons, anymore -- reports this development to the Mother, who is amused, but 'Croab' it is.)
****
Reply
Fallen bodies aren't uncommon, but movement puts everyone on the alert, and one of the party -- a high-strung guy whose name Cas hasn't bothered to learn because he probably won't be around long enough for it to matter -- lets off a shot before Risa smacks his gun down. It's not a live croat. It's half a dozen Croabs, only about the size of a man's hand, chowing down on a croat corpse.
"Babies," Risa says flatly. "Is it my imagination, or does it look like they broke out of the ribcage?" No one disagrees, and Bob mutters something about chestbursters. "Keep your distance. We don't want those things getting a taste for human."
Croabs seem to prefer live croats, but also scavenge. Croabs jump and crawl. Bullets ricochet off Croabs unless you hit them right at the join of the exoskeleton, in which case the whole thing splatters all over everything within ten feet. Croabs have nasty-looking stingers, but no one's seen them in action. Croabs affect croat behavior, but there may or may not be any intent behind it (because really, anything would act different with a giant crab sitting on its head stabbing it in the neck, even with no mind control). They've found dead croats with no visible wound except a deep puncture in the back of the neck and deep, ugly hickies on the throat. No one's dared do a real close inspection of a Croab, because they're probably full of virus -- they eat enough croats for it. It's been eight months since they first saw a Croab spring into the scene, and it's gotten so they hardly ever see croats without seeing some... passengers.
Cas still can't get past the newness of them. For all they have to assume it's some plot of Lucifer's, it just doesn't seem likely. Everyone finds them horrifying but -- they go after croats, slow them down, probably kill them, and they ignore the uninfected. (A few years ago, he might have tried to believe they were made by his Father, to help. He's over that now.)
After the babies, they don't see any Croabs for the rest of the supply run until they're leaving the town. As they get into the hills, there's a place where they have a real good vantage of the interstate heading out of town. There's a line of croats shuffling down the highway, not quite single file, but closer than the resistence usually is, never mind most croats. Kent gets out the binoculars. There's a Croab on every head.
Risa hisses. "Dean needs to know about this."
What she thinks Dean's going to do about it, Cas can't imagine.
He knows what he's going to do about it. He's got a pill for that.
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Seriously though, these are awesome.
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