[1015] Completely my fault
Apparently I can't leave well enough alone. Welcome back to the zombie 'verse, kiddies. You probably don't want to stay here.
askerian's original drabble can be found here. My companion piece is here.
This time Shikamaru gets some lovin', and a thousand more words than Sasuke got. Well. I'm pretty sure he doesn't appreciate it.
Again, unbeta'd, but who cares when apparently I'm a mad, zombie-writing, crazy woman? Comments and constructive criticism are always welcome.
It wasn’t smashing in his eighth skull with a baseball bat that made Shikamaru sick all over the trampled schoolyard grass. It was watching one of those human-looking monsters rip out the entrails of a uniformed corpse he carefully dragged to an empty stretch of parking lot.
Science was supposed to be pure. You formed a hypothesis based on the best evidence you had, and then you did everything you could to prove the hypothesis wrong. Whatever came up unblemished, untarnished--that was the truth. New rules pointed in new directions, and old rules beat down madmen’s dreams.
It seemed he really was too smart for his own good. Shikamaru’s stomach heaved again, and he dropped to his hands and knees and finished emptying the contents of his stomach.
His baseball bat hit the grass and rolled, coming to a stop at pair of worn sneakers. Lee reached down and picked it up without a word. The older boy turned back to survey the parking lot, and when Shikamaru was finally able to force himself upright again, he gave the weapon back.
Wiping the back of his hand across his mouth, Shikamaru managed to mutter a thanks. Behind him and to the right, he could hear Raidon whimpering, a non-stop litany of curses and prayers from between his lips. The freshman had shut down over half an hour ago, but at least he was still functional enough to start screaming a warning if he saw anything that moved.
“You were right,” Lee said. His normally cheerful, energetic voice had twisted into something wary and exhausted. The sound of a bone crunching between human teeth made him flinch.
Shikamaru’s stomach twisted and he had to bite his tongue to keep from gagging all over again. When he could trust himself to speak, he said, “Let’s go.”
Between the two of them, it was easy enough to quietly circle around the woman--thing--hunched over the disgusting remains of one of their teammates. By the time it heard or saw them--he still wasn’t sure which sense it was, or if it were both--it was too late.
It looked up--such a striking green--at him, but before it could do so much as raise an intestine-coated hand to grab him, Lee swung his bat.
It was like t-ball all over again, except instead of getting a cheer from your parents when you made contact, you got the crunch of shattered bone and a spray of blood and brain matter.
The body fell backward in a messy heap. Shikamaru wiped cold flecks of spatter off his face and neck. He kept his eyes on the thing that used to be a woman, for it was easier than looking at the once familiar corpse. “This one’s been gone for a while.” It slipped out without him meaning to, two tiny pieces snapping into place.
Lee glanced over at him, but kept on wiping the muck from his bat off into the grass. “How do you know?”
“Its blood is cool. Coach--” he stopped himself, started again. “The first time someone turned in our group, their blood was still warm.” He wouldn’t ever forget the feeling, the blood running down his arms, the way it felt to bash in a man’s head until everything stopped twitching.
“And her clothes. She’s in her pajamas still. It’s--” he paused to wipe off the face of his watch “--almost five.”
Lee stood up, his bat mostly clean. “Any clue why they eat people?”
“No idea.”
He had yet to see one of those creatures go after anything that wasn’t human. Granted, he wasn’t about to go around tossing live animals at those things to see if they’d take the bait, but they’d passed some road kill and birds and the like on their frantic run to the high school.
It made no sense. Absolutely no sense, Shikamaru thought as he and Lee carefully dragged what had been a woman away from its last meal and about fifty feet away for the set up of a second experiment. Humans’ bodies regulated body temperature, and so did a lot of other animals. If a human’s core temperature strayed too far from the norms, the person died. So how could this not-human creature be alive?
But it had to be alive, because rigor mortis was supposed to kick in after death. If you didn’t breathe, your body didn’t produce ATP, and muscle contraction and release basically stopped. A corpse didn’t start getting soft again until decomposition started in earnest, or at least that’s what the police procedurals his father loved had taught him.
So they had to be breathing, maybe not much, and maybe that explained the lack of fine motor control. Yet no one he’d asked could remember hearing one of these creatures make a sound. Were they incapable of making noise? Or were they not breathing and thus not passing air through their vocal cords? If they didn’t breathe, their hearts probably didn’t beat either, because there was no point in circulating blood if the body didn’t need oxygen or nutrients. That would explain why that old man hadn’t bled all that badly when Neji had gotten him in the neck with his pocket knife back before Shikamaru had realized taking out the heads was the only way to keep them down.
But if they didn’t need nutrients, then why the hell were they eating people? Why would they glut themselves on human flesh if their bodies didn’t have a use for it?
Maybe if his mother had succeeded in bullying him into taking science courses at the local college this year, Shikamaru could come up with a working hypothesis. Having a genius-level IQ didn’t mean much when he didn’t have the facts he needed to come up with the answers he was desperate for.
Shikamaru scowled, knowing that if his mother could read his thoughts, she would be rubbing them in his face.
The next one that came wandered straight past the headless corpse of its fallen sister. And while that was a good piece of information--that they weren’t driven to eat each other, or at least not a body that had cooled so much--what shocked him was its size.
It was a small boy. Nine or ten, maybe, with a chunk of upper arm missing, a vicious crater left by inhuman teeth. Dried blood streaked his side and arm. A wound like that would have had any normal boy howling in pain, if he hadn’t passed out already. And without treatment, it should have kept bleeding.
At least Shikamaru had additional proof about the lack of a functioning circulatory system and transmission method--not that he needed more for the last. It was one of the first things he had figured out, along with the inability to feel pain and the way to kill them.
Raidon was still huddled against the wall, his arms tightly wrapped around his knees. He had fallen silent in the last ten minutes or so, much to his companions’ relief. Things were tense enough waiting for Neji’s return--if he is coming back, he’s been gone much longer this time--that they didn’t need any background hysteria.
Lee crept up beside him as the little boy fell upon what was left of the body. “I don’t see anything else coming.”
They’d learned the hard way that, if given the chance, the creatures liked to travel in groups, which was one of the reasons they’d chosen to make a stand outside, in the parking lot. With the locked school behind them and a mostly empty parking lot before them, they had a long, clear field of vision. But for safety’s sake they had chosen to make their stand by Coach’s--the abandoned SUV. The creatures weren’t able to climb well, and up on the roof they had been mostly successful at bashing in skulls before they could get bitten or eaten.
The other reason they hadn’t holed up in the school was that it had an alarm system, and Shikamaru still hadn’t been able to rule out sound attracting the things. The last thing they needed was for it to go off and draw the attention of everything within earshot. Their school, literally at the middle-of-nowhere crossroads of three country towns, was immediately surrounded by sports fields and spring corn. Old farmhouses stretched along the roads, but they’d seen nothing human emerge from them.
Or at least nothing human that had been willing to help them.
Shikamaru surveyed the parking lot and chest-high cornfields again, but saw nothing. “Come on.”
He was surprised to find out that the creature’s skin was still very warm when he grabbed it by its ankles in order to drag it to a different spot. “He’s new. His body temperature is too high for him to have been like this for long.”
Lee frowned deeply, and for once Shikamaru felt he was truly holding all of the older boy’s attention. “You’re sure?” His fingers flexed on the bats he carried, his own bat in his right hand, Shikamaru’s in his left.
“Yeah.”
They both looked in the direction the thing had come from. But there was no movement, just the faintest rustling of green stalks in the late spring breeze.
There were a dozen reasons why this small thing had wandered, by itself, in this direction, Shikamaru told himself. Perhaps the child’s family had been able to destroy the thing that had infected it, but couldn’t bring themselves to kill the new monster with a loved one’s face. Maybe the boy had been able to escape on his own and his progenitor had sought less mobile prey. Perhaps--
Raidon’s screaming shattered his weak hypotheses.
His head whipped back toward the school. It took a fraction of a second to count the creatures--seven of them, coming around the corner of the school--and just an instant more for him to draw the only realistic conclusion.
The last member of the freshman baseball team was going to die, torn apart in front of him.
It was his fault. He had been too caught up trying to keep himself sane by focusing on thinking about things, conducting his insignificant experiments. He should have taken better care of Raidon, he knew the freshman was in shock, he knew that the freshman wasn’t going to make it without help. So what had he done? He’d shoved the boy in a corner and focused on Lee, who needed no one’s help, so he could selfishly draw on Lee’s strength to keep his façade intact.
Seven against two, and the analytical Shikamaru knew that they would never make it in time to save the freshman. He released his grip on the warm legs and took a step back. “Lee--”
But before he could bring himself to say there’s nothing we can do, Lee moved.
The junior, already famous for stealing home plate twice this season, screamed a challenge at the top of his lungs, and charged straight toward the crowd, the baseball bats slicing through the air with every thrust of his arms.
And when Lee slammed both bats through the face of the first creature, Shikamaru knew that none of them were going to make it out alive. If there were more of those things nearby, the screaming was probably going to draw them right this way. But beyond that, he knew that he was not the kind of person that ran from his mistakes. Even if they got him killed.
He had no weapons and no time to plan.
Raidon was scrambling away on his hands and knees in blind terror, screaming incoherently.
Lee was still shouting, whipping the bats around him to slam into the legs of the one closest to the defenseless freshman.
Shikamaru was an absolute idiot.
He broke into a sprint and didn’t stop until he plowed straight into a creature that had once been a woman. They went sprawling backward, a confusing tangle of limbs, and landed hard on the asphalt. Shikamaru’s knee hit the ground, sending an awful jolt of pain through his entire leg.
Shit shit shitshitshit--
He grabbed its head, one hand slamming under its lower jaw, the other hand squeezing down on the crown of top of its head. It bit straight through its lower lip but had no reaction other than to reach its own hands up to his face. One of its fingernails was missing.
He heard Raidon scream again nearby, a wail of agony.
Shikamaru twisted his body, sliding his weight down to its stomach despite the fire in his knee, getting better leverage while still keeping it pinned as best he can. He yanked up on its head, his fingers curling tight in its red hair.
And then he slammed its head back into the ground.
There was wet thud, like an eggshell cracking, but it was still moving, still trying to get a grip on his face. He hadn’t hit it hard enough, he didn’t use enough force--
“Get down!”
Shikamaru ducked and heard the sound of impact and bones breaking just above him. He jerked his gaze up to see a man whose entire right side of his skull was bloodily concave. It wavered, but gravity and momentum toppled it back and to the side.
Lee whirled again, a blur of motion and sound, and Raidon’s screaming stopped.
There was a sudden flare of pain at the side of his head, a hard grip on his ear, yanking him downward. The thing he had pinned to the ground had finally managed to get a hold on him, and even though he held its jaws shut, it still pulled him down toward its mouth.
Shikamaru reared back, even though it felt like his ear was about to get pulled off, and then drove down with all his might. He could feel the skull give beneath his hands, and after a second its hand dropped away from his sore ear.
Lee stood in a protective position over him, wielding both baseball bats like some crazed, anthropomorphic guard dog. Shikamaru surveyed the scene quickly.
Two were down and out by Lee’s handiwork, faces in ruins. Two more had been pushed back with broken legs, one of them trying to get upright, the other opting for a modified crawl. The fifth had simply been knocked flat on its back, broken ribs piercing through its skin and shirt. It foundered like a turtle, trying to roll itself over. Number six was motionless beneath Shikamaru’s knees. Where was the seventh?
Shikamaru staggered to his feet and nearly was unable to smother his yelp of pain. He’d done something to his knee, something that ached and throbbed and did not want any weight on it at all.
Lee was there in an instant, one baseball bat tucked beneath his arm so a hand was free to catch Shikamaru by the elbow. “Come on!” He yanked Shikamaru away from the regrouping creatures, and the sudden motion jerked his head around, so he could finally see Lee’s face.
The older boy’s face was streaked with tears.
His stomach wrenched. Shikamaru turned his head and finally located saw the missing creature. The back of his head was caved in, but that did nothing to hide the large chunk of bloody arm that hung out between his teeth.
Shikamaru wasn’t sure what was worse, that Raidon no longer had a recognizable face, or that he wasn’t capable of getting sick anymore.
And here's a Neji companion piece.
askerian's original drabble can be found here. My companion piece is here.
This time Shikamaru gets some lovin', and a thousand more words than Sasuke got. Well. I'm pretty sure he doesn't appreciate it.
Again, unbeta'd, but who cares when apparently I'm a mad, zombie-writing, crazy woman? Comments and constructive criticism are always welcome.
It wasn’t smashing in his eighth skull with a baseball bat that made Shikamaru sick all over the trampled schoolyard grass. It was watching one of those human-looking monsters rip out the entrails of a uniformed corpse he carefully dragged to an empty stretch of parking lot.
Science was supposed to be pure. You formed a hypothesis based on the best evidence you had, and then you did everything you could to prove the hypothesis wrong. Whatever came up unblemished, untarnished--that was the truth. New rules pointed in new directions, and old rules beat down madmen’s dreams.
It seemed he really was too smart for his own good. Shikamaru’s stomach heaved again, and he dropped to his hands and knees and finished emptying the contents of his stomach.
His baseball bat hit the grass and rolled, coming to a stop at pair of worn sneakers. Lee reached down and picked it up without a word. The older boy turned back to survey the parking lot, and when Shikamaru was finally able to force himself upright again, he gave the weapon back.
Wiping the back of his hand across his mouth, Shikamaru managed to mutter a thanks. Behind him and to the right, he could hear Raidon whimpering, a non-stop litany of curses and prayers from between his lips. The freshman had shut down over half an hour ago, but at least he was still functional enough to start screaming a warning if he saw anything that moved.
“You were right,” Lee said. His normally cheerful, energetic voice had twisted into something wary and exhausted. The sound of a bone crunching between human teeth made him flinch.
Shikamaru’s stomach twisted and he had to bite his tongue to keep from gagging all over again. When he could trust himself to speak, he said, “Let’s go.”
Between the two of them, it was easy enough to quietly circle around the woman--thing--hunched over the disgusting remains of one of their teammates. By the time it heard or saw them--he still wasn’t sure which sense it was, or if it were both--it was too late.
It looked up--such a striking green--at him, but before it could do so much as raise an intestine-coated hand to grab him, Lee swung his bat.
It was like t-ball all over again, except instead of getting a cheer from your parents when you made contact, you got the crunch of shattered bone and a spray of blood and brain matter.
The body fell backward in a messy heap. Shikamaru wiped cold flecks of spatter off his face and neck. He kept his eyes on the thing that used to be a woman, for it was easier than looking at the once familiar corpse. “This one’s been gone for a while.” It slipped out without him meaning to, two tiny pieces snapping into place.
Lee glanced over at him, but kept on wiping the muck from his bat off into the grass. “How do you know?”
“Its blood is cool. Coach--” he stopped himself, started again. “The first time someone turned in our group, their blood was still warm.” He wouldn’t ever forget the feeling, the blood running down his arms, the way it felt to bash in a man’s head until everything stopped twitching.
“And her clothes. She’s in her pajamas still. It’s--” he paused to wipe off the face of his watch “--almost five.”
Lee stood up, his bat mostly clean. “Any clue why they eat people?”
“No idea.”
He had yet to see one of those creatures go after anything that wasn’t human. Granted, he wasn’t about to go around tossing live animals at those things to see if they’d take the bait, but they’d passed some road kill and birds and the like on their frantic run to the high school.
It made no sense. Absolutely no sense, Shikamaru thought as he and Lee carefully dragged what had been a woman away from its last meal and about fifty feet away for the set up of a second experiment. Humans’ bodies regulated body temperature, and so did a lot of other animals. If a human’s core temperature strayed too far from the norms, the person died. So how could this not-human creature be alive?
But it had to be alive, because rigor mortis was supposed to kick in after death. If you didn’t breathe, your body didn’t produce ATP, and muscle contraction and release basically stopped. A corpse didn’t start getting soft again until decomposition started in earnest, or at least that’s what the police procedurals his father loved had taught him.
So they had to be breathing, maybe not much, and maybe that explained the lack of fine motor control. Yet no one he’d asked could remember hearing one of these creatures make a sound. Were they incapable of making noise? Or were they not breathing and thus not passing air through their vocal cords? If they didn’t breathe, their hearts probably didn’t beat either, because there was no point in circulating blood if the body didn’t need oxygen or nutrients. That would explain why that old man hadn’t bled all that badly when Neji had gotten him in the neck with his pocket knife back before Shikamaru had realized taking out the heads was the only way to keep them down.
But if they didn’t need nutrients, then why the hell were they eating people? Why would they glut themselves on human flesh if their bodies didn’t have a use for it?
Maybe if his mother had succeeded in bullying him into taking science courses at the local college this year, Shikamaru could come up with a working hypothesis. Having a genius-level IQ didn’t mean much when he didn’t have the facts he needed to come up with the answers he was desperate for.
Shikamaru scowled, knowing that if his mother could read his thoughts, she would be rubbing them in his face.
The next one that came wandered straight past the headless corpse of its fallen sister. And while that was a good piece of information--that they weren’t driven to eat each other, or at least not a body that had cooled so much--what shocked him was its size.
It was a small boy. Nine or ten, maybe, with a chunk of upper arm missing, a vicious crater left by inhuman teeth. Dried blood streaked his side and arm. A wound like that would have had any normal boy howling in pain, if he hadn’t passed out already. And without treatment, it should have kept bleeding.
At least Shikamaru had additional proof about the lack of a functioning circulatory system and transmission method--not that he needed more for the last. It was one of the first things he had figured out, along with the inability to feel pain and the way to kill them.
Raidon was still huddled against the wall, his arms tightly wrapped around his knees. He had fallen silent in the last ten minutes or so, much to his companions’ relief. Things were tense enough waiting for Neji’s return--if he is coming back, he’s been gone much longer this time--that they didn’t need any background hysteria.
Lee crept up beside him as the little boy fell upon what was left of the body. “I don’t see anything else coming.”
They’d learned the hard way that, if given the chance, the creatures liked to travel in groups, which was one of the reasons they’d chosen to make a stand outside, in the parking lot. With the locked school behind them and a mostly empty parking lot before them, they had a long, clear field of vision. But for safety’s sake they had chosen to make their stand by Coach’s--the abandoned SUV. The creatures weren’t able to climb well, and up on the roof they had been mostly successful at bashing in skulls before they could get bitten or eaten.
The other reason they hadn’t holed up in the school was that it had an alarm system, and Shikamaru still hadn’t been able to rule out sound attracting the things. The last thing they needed was for it to go off and draw the attention of everything within earshot. Their school, literally at the middle-of-nowhere crossroads of three country towns, was immediately surrounded by sports fields and spring corn. Old farmhouses stretched along the roads, but they’d seen nothing human emerge from them.
Or at least nothing human that had been willing to help them.
Shikamaru surveyed the parking lot and chest-high cornfields again, but saw nothing. “Come on.”
He was surprised to find out that the creature’s skin was still very warm when he grabbed it by its ankles in order to drag it to a different spot. “He’s new. His body temperature is too high for him to have been like this for long.”
Lee frowned deeply, and for once Shikamaru felt he was truly holding all of the older boy’s attention. “You’re sure?” His fingers flexed on the bats he carried, his own bat in his right hand, Shikamaru’s in his left.
“Yeah.”
They both looked in the direction the thing had come from. But there was no movement, just the faintest rustling of green stalks in the late spring breeze.
There were a dozen reasons why this small thing had wandered, by itself, in this direction, Shikamaru told himself. Perhaps the child’s family had been able to destroy the thing that had infected it, but couldn’t bring themselves to kill the new monster with a loved one’s face. Maybe the boy had been able to escape on his own and his progenitor had sought less mobile prey. Perhaps--
Raidon’s screaming shattered his weak hypotheses.
His head whipped back toward the school. It took a fraction of a second to count the creatures--seven of them, coming around the corner of the school--and just an instant more for him to draw the only realistic conclusion.
The last member of the freshman baseball team was going to die, torn apart in front of him.
It was his fault. He had been too caught up trying to keep himself sane by focusing on thinking about things, conducting his insignificant experiments. He should have taken better care of Raidon, he knew the freshman was in shock, he knew that the freshman wasn’t going to make it without help. So what had he done? He’d shoved the boy in a corner and focused on Lee, who needed no one’s help, so he could selfishly draw on Lee’s strength to keep his façade intact.
Seven against two, and the analytical Shikamaru knew that they would never make it in time to save the freshman. He released his grip on the warm legs and took a step back. “Lee--”
But before he could bring himself to say there’s nothing we can do, Lee moved.
The junior, already famous for stealing home plate twice this season, screamed a challenge at the top of his lungs, and charged straight toward the crowd, the baseball bats slicing through the air with every thrust of his arms.
And when Lee slammed both bats through the face of the first creature, Shikamaru knew that none of them were going to make it out alive. If there were more of those things nearby, the screaming was probably going to draw them right this way. But beyond that, he knew that he was not the kind of person that ran from his mistakes. Even if they got him killed.
He had no weapons and no time to plan.
Raidon was scrambling away on his hands and knees in blind terror, screaming incoherently.
Lee was still shouting, whipping the bats around him to slam into the legs of the one closest to the defenseless freshman.
Shikamaru was an absolute idiot.
He broke into a sprint and didn’t stop until he plowed straight into a creature that had once been a woman. They went sprawling backward, a confusing tangle of limbs, and landed hard on the asphalt. Shikamaru’s knee hit the ground, sending an awful jolt of pain through his entire leg.
Shit shit shitshitshit--
He grabbed its head, one hand slamming under its lower jaw, the other hand squeezing down on the crown of top of its head. It bit straight through its lower lip but had no reaction other than to reach its own hands up to his face. One of its fingernails was missing.
He heard Raidon scream again nearby, a wail of agony.
Shikamaru twisted his body, sliding his weight down to its stomach despite the fire in his knee, getting better leverage while still keeping it pinned as best he can. He yanked up on its head, his fingers curling tight in its red hair.
And then he slammed its head back into the ground.
There was wet thud, like an eggshell cracking, but it was still moving, still trying to get a grip on his face. He hadn’t hit it hard enough, he didn’t use enough force--
“Get down!”
Shikamaru ducked and heard the sound of impact and bones breaking just above him. He jerked his gaze up to see a man whose entire right side of his skull was bloodily concave. It wavered, but gravity and momentum toppled it back and to the side.
Lee whirled again, a blur of motion and sound, and Raidon’s screaming stopped.
There was a sudden flare of pain at the side of his head, a hard grip on his ear, yanking him downward. The thing he had pinned to the ground had finally managed to get a hold on him, and even though he held its jaws shut, it still pulled him down toward its mouth.
Shikamaru reared back, even though it felt like his ear was about to get pulled off, and then drove down with all his might. He could feel the skull give beneath his hands, and after a second its hand dropped away from his sore ear.
Lee stood in a protective position over him, wielding both baseball bats like some crazed, anthropomorphic guard dog. Shikamaru surveyed the scene quickly.
Two were down and out by Lee’s handiwork, faces in ruins. Two more had been pushed back with broken legs, one of them trying to get upright, the other opting for a modified crawl. The fifth had simply been knocked flat on its back, broken ribs piercing through its skin and shirt. It foundered like a turtle, trying to roll itself over. Number six was motionless beneath Shikamaru’s knees. Where was the seventh?
Shikamaru staggered to his feet and nearly was unable to smother his yelp of pain. He’d done something to his knee, something that ached and throbbed and did not want any weight on it at all.
Lee was there in an instant, one baseball bat tucked beneath his arm so a hand was free to catch Shikamaru by the elbow. “Come on!” He yanked Shikamaru away from the regrouping creatures, and the sudden motion jerked his head around, so he could finally see Lee’s face.
The older boy’s face was streaked with tears.
His stomach wrenched. Shikamaru turned his head and finally located saw the missing creature. The back of his head was caved in, but that did nothing to hide the large chunk of bloody arm that hung out between his teeth.
Shikamaru wasn’t sure what was worse, that Raidon no longer had a recognizable face, or that he wasn’t capable of getting sick anymore.
And here's a Neji companion piece.