Nightshift 42: Hal's Used Cars

[fencing_captain]

[ from here]

The business had been open when the changeover happened, so the doors were unlocked. Juri pushed them open with one of her feet. It was too quiet as she stepped into the dark showroom. It wasn't as big as she expected such things to be, but silent cars surrounded the offices. The stench of the dead filled the air though. Her ears didn't

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[toxicspiderman]

[from here]

The used-car dealership was one of those small, urban lots, where the cars were backed up against each other rather than sprawled over acreage so large that people would buy something just to drive it back to the showroom. The obligatory tinsel-and-flag regalia hung limply from poles. No breeze. No fresh air. Just the rising stench of decaying flesh. He should be used to this by now, right? Just pretend the fog was a putrescine stinkbomb. And watch your back. Shit. He wasn't equipped for this. At least the yard was quiet. Quiet enough that he should hear the things with enough time to run for it

[iwascloned]

Spider didn't want to watch S.T. suck off the jeep, but some stubborn sinew in his neck prevented him from looking away. And when the car began ejaculating gallons of transparent liquid, Spider's disgust melted into a kind of horrified curiosity. What did they fill their cars with in this brutal past? Blood plasma? Vodka? The piss of mental patients? The latter could serve as a cheap, renewable resource as long as the whole world was being institutionalized at the same rate as this New Jersey hellpit. Might be wise for him to ask S.T. about this before he actually started urinating on all the cars. The question was laboriously forming in the recesses of Spider's brain when a two-part-harmony of ghastly moans tickled his eardrums. At first he assumed it was the car. S.T. was servicing it pretty good. But just to be sure, he turned his head

[toxicspiderman]

The roof-rack was designed for kayaks or possibly just to suggest the owner might someday be rich enough to go on Safari, but it was sturdily attached. S.T. yanked himself up one-handed, rotator-cuff tendons shrieking but holding.

He kicked at the skull of the disembowled zombie. He tried not to puke his guts (in the figurative sense, thank fuck) up. Both succeeded. The skull bent a little under his feet. But soft-soled tennis shoes are not the same as steel-toed workboots, and the zombie only stumbled back.

"Go for the head, moron. Don't they have movies in the future, or were you too much of a poxy shut-in as a kid that you spent all your time hunting for scrambled porn?" S.T. paused to kick again. "Or are you actually a space alien? No, wait, if you were a space alien, you'd have to have watched television. Lightyears of Mork and Mindy reruns."

Spider's arm was sort of wiggling, covered in viscera. "Addendum: if you're going to have a monster burst out of your chest, get it the fuck over with."

[iwascloned]

Few things are as disturbing as watching a walking corpse reach hungrily for your tasty brains. But try watching a walking corpse reach hungrily for your brains while you have your entire arm solidly enmeshed in its clammy intestines. With two dead-pale hands inches from Spider's face, some vicious instinct shoved his anemic common sense away from the controls and took over. The journalist's intestine-drenched hand shot upwards, grabbing the back of the creature's head, then forced the dented skull down onto Spider's waiting knee, where it made a noise like a gorilla fucking a grapefruit.

"FUCK YOU!" yelled Spider, "SCRAMBLED PORNOGRAPHY IS A LEGITIMATE AND NECESSARY MEDICATION FOR MY CHRONIC SEX DEPRIVATION."

[roseoverture]

Utena had lost her small statue in scrambling for the pokers, leaving her with only one weapon. Nevertheless, Utena charged forward as well with one of her signature thrusts. The movement was better suited for use with a sword, taking some of the steadiness and accuracy out of her attack, but the power behind it was far from weakened. Aiming for a zombie head as though it were a rose upon a duelist's chest, she skewered her poker through the thing's brain and out the right side of its fragile skull. The zombie's moaning ceased almost immediately.

She covered her mouth to keep from gagging, as she wrenched her weapon from the corpse's head. I'm really sorry, she thought, as if the person behind the zombie could hear her. She looked up and around quickly and warily, keeping an eye out for any other creatures that might be trying to get the jump on them.

[fencing_captain]

Perhaps a bit too enthusiastically if Utena looked too closely at her, Juri first hit her target with a very unswordsmanlike whack across the top of the head, then followed it up with a more precise thrust right through the creature's face. Not neat, because the poker had a hook at the end. When the thing fell down, she stepped delicately on the shreds of its clothing to pull the poker free, and then smashed it one more time with her candle stick for good measure.

She'd never admit to being nauseated, so when she turned to Utena she tried to seem serene. "Where do you think the car keys are?" she asked.

[roseoverture]

Utena wasn't sure how necessary it was for Juri to hit the zombie that many times, but didn't question her. Instead, she shook her head, trying keep the bodies on the floor out of sight and out of mind. "Probably in some sort of back room. Don't know where that is in here, though." She felt very naked without the flashlight she had become accustomed to having at night. The shadows of the show floor seemed to loom closer and thicker every time she tried to see through them. Between that and the odor of decay, she felt as though she were going to be enclosed completely if she wasn't careful. It was like the lid of a coffin slowly threatening to close on top of her.

She grit her teeth, forcing herself to stay focused. "There are only so many places to look. We'll find them," she assured herself and Juri, striding away from the cars and toward the darkened, peeling walls, looking for any office-type doors.

[fencing_captain]

"We'll have to split up then," Juri decided. "Yell if you need something." She was calming down some. She wasn't sure why the zombies made her so angry. Maybe it was that she didn't like feeling helpless. Well, that was one that wasn't getting up again.

She didn't want to touch the doors or the walls here. Somehow the decay seemed creepier here than at the Institute. But she thought maybe there'd be a panel with the cars' keys somewhere on the walls.