Us vs. the Apocalypse
Title: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Word Count: 1753
"And on your left, you'll find the remains of your friendly neighborhood Mohawk, also known as Mother Nature's gas station. Home of the free soda with fill-up promotion, and the best deals on glazed chocolate donuts this side of Haven! Brave dispatchers will recall how an expedition into this particular tomb resulted in the Curse of One Billion Flies, thanks to disturbing the corpses of the pump attendant and several last-minute customers."
Staring down at my tablet, I sighed heavily and tilted my head to one side, glaring at Mason over the top of my sunglasses.
"Really?" I asked.
"Ask Keenan, he knows all about it. Fucker and his nic-fits."
"It's true," Keenan murmured sleepily from behind my seat.
"That's disgusting," I muttered.
"So is Kee's smoking. You know he made me check six fuckin' places that day? Couldn't settle for just any sort of cig, no, they had to be prissy fuckin' special ones."
"Nice to know Haven is funding your lung cancer," I told Keenan. He snorted softly.
"Haven's been funding my premature death for six years," he retorted. "Me getting a pack of cigarettes at their expense isn't hurting anybody."
"Less, of course, some acne-faced high school virgin-turned-Ollie working the local corner store decides to eat my testicles for lunch," Mason observed.
"Pfft, afternoon snack at best."
"I can drop you off at the next snack shack, you know," Mason pointed out.
"Holy shit, you two, knock it off," I ordered, rolling my eyes. "I don't care if you bitch on Keenan's smoking," I told Mason, "just drop the tour guide routine. You've been doing it since we left Central."
"It hasn't been that long!" Mason defended.
"It's been four hours," I snarled in response, and turned my attention back to my dispatch notes. To his credit, Mason managed to stay silent a whole thirty seconds, perhaps a new personal best, before he cleared his throat.
"I have this tickle in my throat..." he moaned, and gave me a cocky grin. "You know what that means!"
"It means I'm about to shove a tire iron through your tonsils?" I offered.
"It means he has to sing it out," Keenan muttered.
"It means I have to sing it out!" Mason cheered.
"Yay me..." came Keenan's sleepy reply. I twisted to look over the back of my seat, but Keenan was already drifting off, curled against the door with the hood of his jacket pulled low over his face. How he managed to sleep through Mason's constant chatter was beyond me. On the other side of the bench seat, Dixon was sound asleep against the other door, Avery curled into his shoulder.
"Mason," I started, "so help me, if -"
"Flyyyyyyyyy me to the moon, and let me plaaaaaaaaaay among the - mmfftt!"
In hindsight, throwing myself out of my seat to clap my hand over Mason's mouth probably wasn't the safest thing to do when he was the one driving, but the alternative was shooting him to put me out of my misery, and nobody wanted to resort to that.
"I love you to death," I murmured in his ear, "but if you wake Dix up, I swear to God, I will peel you like an orange and feed you to a toothless Ollie. Understand?" His eyebrows raised comically at this last bit and he nodded, surprisingly me by only smiling when I pulled my hand away.
I'd read maybe three sentences in my dispatch notes before he started to chuckle, and try as I might, I couldn't ignore him. Sighing, I looked up at the ceiling of the truck with a silent plea for strength.
"Toothless Ollie," he snickered, looking over at me with a wide grin that was entirely contagious. "Good one."
"Thanks," I muttered, smiling despite myself.
"Why so angry?" he asked, giving me a playful pout. "Dix is supposed to be the grumpy cunt, not you."
"Dix is severely hungover, I think it's to be expected." I slid my fingers across the tablet, enlarging the pitiful map we'd been provided with, and upon finding no landmarks or street names, began rooting under my seat for the mapbook Mason kept there.
"Then perhaps Grumpycunt needs to learn to stop drinking the night before dispatches," Mason sulked. In reality, he had no issue with Dixon being abysmally miserable - our medic had torn strips off just about everyone in Central before we'd even gassed the truck. It was more the fact that, with our second truck needing repairs thanks to Keenan using Ollies as speedbumps, we were all forced to share the one vehicle for long drive to Kensington. For someone like Mason, who could barely manage a minute without bursting into song, idiocy, or a tirade of profanities, the trip thus far had been torture. Feeding him to a toothless Ollie likely would have been a mercy killing.
"I'll see if I can get us another vehicle at the base," I told him, finally finding the mapbook and flipping through it. "Have you been to Kensington since they evacuated it?"
"Nope." He steered around the wreck of a semi, slowing slightly to check the cab and, finding it empty, speeding up again. "Haven't been there since I was a teenager. You?"
"I had family there." I caught his agonized expression from the corner of my eye, and laughed. "Not like that. They moved before the city got quarantined." I traced the network of streets in the mapbook, matching it against the photocopied map I'd been given. "I used to love that city," I mused aloud. "I always thought it had so much personality. All the street art, the trolleys, the parks."
"The traffic jams," Mason added. "The vagrants, the street preachers..." He shrugged when I stuck my tongue out at him. "They're all the same, kid. Concrete butcher blocks, selling cuts of pride and dignity." If he noticed my shock - I was hardly used to Mason spouting off anything even the least bit philosophical or introspective - he didn't react. He simply stared at the road ahead. "Last time I was there was a family trip. Long weekend deal. We got just inside the city limits and got caught in a string of cars a few miles long." He cut across the four empty lanes of the freeway and drove along the offramp, the glittering skyscrapers of Kensington appearing out of the morning haze. "Some asshole caused a four car pileup. Traffic backed up until nobody could get into the city." We passed the bright orange and red quarantine signs as we headed for the overpass that looped across the freeway, fifteen feet tall and marked with reflective white letters. "World hadn't ended then, but it didn't matter. Sat in the car with my parents and thought I was gonna lose my fuckin' mind, trapped in that little metal box in the middle of summer with all those other folks around us, no way to turn around or get out. Da made us stay in the car, and we had no AC. It felt like hell on earth."
He slowed the truck to a crawl on the overpass, then finally stopped and cut the engine. We sat there in silence for a long time, me watching his jaw clench as he stared out the window, him lost in his thoughts. I realized, in a startling and entirely embarrassing ephiphany, that in the few weeks I'd been in Division 8 I'd assumed the Mason I knew was all there was to him - brash, foul-mouthed, obnoxious, and a touch insane. The comedic foil, really, something to counteract Keenan's callousness and Dixon's perfect-poster-boy presence.
"Get out," he said finally. I blinked, a cold knot tying in my stomach. Was he going to just leave me there, on the overpass, hours from home?
"Get..."
"I want to show you something." He opened the door and stepped out of the truck, then turned and stared at me through the windshield until I finally popped off my seatbelt and joined him.
The early sunlight illuminated the flat land around the city in a glowing golden halo, reflecting off pools of stagnant water and vast fields of parched and withered grass. From where we stood we could see the freeway beneath us, parallel to the city, and two more running east and west from Kensington's center like stretched limbs, aching for the horizon. The lanes heading into the city were barren save for a few cars here and there, but the ones leading out were packed with vehicles.
My eyes widened as I stared at it. Bulldozers had taken care of the roads near Haven, clearing them so that goods could flow in and Dispatchers flow out, so I'd only seen the traffic jams in photographs, which had never served to truly illustrate the enormity of it. Kensington, though, was doomed from the moment the infection started to spread - there was no wall, no containment, no safe zone. Just a dead city, handed over to the Ollies like a peace offering, along with anybody who may have survived trapped inside.
There were hundreds of vehicles, if not thousands, littered across the roads. Some had tried to cross to the other side, but had gotten stuck in the ditches. Others had tried to get into the fields and had bogged down in the swampy ponds or mossy muck. And everywhere, scattered on the roadside, hanging from rolled down windows or smashed windshields, and scattered in the fields, were bodies. Even as I stared, trying to understand it all, my brain pieced together the scenario - the massive traffic jam trying to get out of the city, the Ollies sprinting up the lines of cars and slaughtering people as they sat, belted in and effectively trapped. Some would manage to get out and run, but would quickly learn that the majority of people can't outrun a hungry Ollie.
"I wasn't far off, you know," he said softly. "Look at them all."
"I see them," I whispered solemnly.
"The way they issued the evac orders, none of these folks had a chance. Just sat there and waited for the end of the world, without even knowing it." He backed up and crossed himself - the religious gesture both surprised and, for some reason, frightened me. "Sarinists on the street corners, automobile graveyards, packs of Ollies roamin' the back alleys..." He sighed and shook his head, heading back to the truck. "The more things change..."
Word Count: 1753
"And on your left, you'll find the remains of your friendly neighborhood Mohawk, also known as Mother Nature's gas station. Home of the free soda with fill-up promotion, and the best deals on glazed chocolate donuts this side of Haven! Brave dispatchers will recall how an expedition into this particular tomb resulted in the Curse of One Billion Flies, thanks to disturbing the corpses of the pump attendant and several last-minute customers."
Staring down at my tablet, I sighed heavily and tilted my head to one side, glaring at Mason over the top of my sunglasses.
"Really?" I asked.
"Ask Keenan, he knows all about it. Fucker and his nic-fits."
"It's true," Keenan murmured sleepily from behind my seat.
"That's disgusting," I muttered.
"So is Kee's smoking. You know he made me check six fuckin' places that day? Couldn't settle for just any sort of cig, no, they had to be prissy fuckin' special ones."
"Nice to know Haven is funding your lung cancer," I told Keenan. He snorted softly.
"Haven's been funding my premature death for six years," he retorted. "Me getting a pack of cigarettes at their expense isn't hurting anybody."
"Less, of course, some acne-faced high school virgin-turned-Ollie working the local corner store decides to eat my testicles for lunch," Mason observed.
"Pfft, afternoon snack at best."
"I can drop you off at the next snack shack, you know," Mason pointed out.
"Holy shit, you two, knock it off," I ordered, rolling my eyes. "I don't care if you bitch on Keenan's smoking," I told Mason, "just drop the tour guide routine. You've been doing it since we left Central."
"It hasn't been that long!" Mason defended.
"It's been four hours," I snarled in response, and turned my attention back to my dispatch notes. To his credit, Mason managed to stay silent a whole thirty seconds, perhaps a new personal best, before he cleared his throat.
"I have this tickle in my throat..." he moaned, and gave me a cocky grin. "You know what that means!"
"It means I'm about to shove a tire iron through your tonsils?" I offered.
"It means he has to sing it out," Keenan muttered.
"It means I have to sing it out!" Mason cheered.
"Yay me..." came Keenan's sleepy reply. I twisted to look over the back of my seat, but Keenan was already drifting off, curled against the door with the hood of his jacket pulled low over his face. How he managed to sleep through Mason's constant chatter was beyond me. On the other side of the bench seat, Dixon was sound asleep against the other door, Avery curled into his shoulder.
"Mason," I started, "so help me, if -"
"Flyyyyyyyyy me to the moon, and let me plaaaaaaaaaay among the - mmfftt!"
In hindsight, throwing myself out of my seat to clap my hand over Mason's mouth probably wasn't the safest thing to do when he was the one driving, but the alternative was shooting him to put me out of my misery, and nobody wanted to resort to that.
"I love you to death," I murmured in his ear, "but if you wake Dix up, I swear to God, I will peel you like an orange and feed you to a toothless Ollie. Understand?" His eyebrows raised comically at this last bit and he nodded, surprisingly me by only smiling when I pulled my hand away.
I'd read maybe three sentences in my dispatch notes before he started to chuckle, and try as I might, I couldn't ignore him. Sighing, I looked up at the ceiling of the truck with a silent plea for strength.
"Toothless Ollie," he snickered, looking over at me with a wide grin that was entirely contagious. "Good one."
"Thanks," I muttered, smiling despite myself.
"Why so angry?" he asked, giving me a playful pout. "Dix is supposed to be the grumpy cunt, not you."
"Dix is severely hungover, I think it's to be expected." I slid my fingers across the tablet, enlarging the pitiful map we'd been provided with, and upon finding no landmarks or street names, began rooting under my seat for the mapbook Mason kept there.
"Then perhaps Grumpycunt needs to learn to stop drinking the night before dispatches," Mason sulked. In reality, he had no issue with Dixon being abysmally miserable - our medic had torn strips off just about everyone in Central before we'd even gassed the truck. It was more the fact that, with our second truck needing repairs thanks to Keenan using Ollies as speedbumps, we were all forced to share the one vehicle for long drive to Kensington. For someone like Mason, who could barely manage a minute without bursting into song, idiocy, or a tirade of profanities, the trip thus far had been torture. Feeding him to a toothless Ollie likely would have been a mercy killing.
"I'll see if I can get us another vehicle at the base," I told him, finally finding the mapbook and flipping through it. "Have you been to Kensington since they evacuated it?"
"Nope." He steered around the wreck of a semi, slowing slightly to check the cab and, finding it empty, speeding up again. "Haven't been there since I was a teenager. You?"
"I had family there." I caught his agonized expression from the corner of my eye, and laughed. "Not like that. They moved before the city got quarantined." I traced the network of streets in the mapbook, matching it against the photocopied map I'd been given. "I used to love that city," I mused aloud. "I always thought it had so much personality. All the street art, the trolleys, the parks."
"The traffic jams," Mason added. "The vagrants, the street preachers..." He shrugged when I stuck my tongue out at him. "They're all the same, kid. Concrete butcher blocks, selling cuts of pride and dignity." If he noticed my shock - I was hardly used to Mason spouting off anything even the least bit philosophical or introspective - he didn't react. He simply stared at the road ahead. "Last time I was there was a family trip. Long weekend deal. We got just inside the city limits and got caught in a string of cars a few miles long." He cut across the four empty lanes of the freeway and drove along the offramp, the glittering skyscrapers of Kensington appearing out of the morning haze. "Some asshole caused a four car pileup. Traffic backed up until nobody could get into the city." We passed the bright orange and red quarantine signs as we headed for the overpass that looped across the freeway, fifteen feet tall and marked with reflective white letters. "World hadn't ended then, but it didn't matter. Sat in the car with my parents and thought I was gonna lose my fuckin' mind, trapped in that little metal box in the middle of summer with all those other folks around us, no way to turn around or get out. Da made us stay in the car, and we had no AC. It felt like hell on earth."
He slowed the truck to a crawl on the overpass, then finally stopped and cut the engine. We sat there in silence for a long time, me watching his jaw clench as he stared out the window, him lost in his thoughts. I realized, in a startling and entirely embarrassing ephiphany, that in the few weeks I'd been in Division 8 I'd assumed the Mason I knew was all there was to him - brash, foul-mouthed, obnoxious, and a touch insane. The comedic foil, really, something to counteract Keenan's callousness and Dixon's perfect-poster-boy presence.
"Get out," he said finally. I blinked, a cold knot tying in my stomach. Was he going to just leave me there, on the overpass, hours from home?
"Get..."
"I want to show you something." He opened the door and stepped out of the truck, then turned and stared at me through the windshield until I finally popped off my seatbelt and joined him.
The early sunlight illuminated the flat land around the city in a glowing golden halo, reflecting off pools of stagnant water and vast fields of parched and withered grass. From where we stood we could see the freeway beneath us, parallel to the city, and two more running east and west from Kensington's center like stretched limbs, aching for the horizon. The lanes heading into the city were barren save for a few cars here and there, but the ones leading out were packed with vehicles.
My eyes widened as I stared at it. Bulldozers had taken care of the roads near Haven, clearing them so that goods could flow in and Dispatchers flow out, so I'd only seen the traffic jams in photographs, which had never served to truly illustrate the enormity of it. Kensington, though, was doomed from the moment the infection started to spread - there was no wall, no containment, no safe zone. Just a dead city, handed over to the Ollies like a peace offering, along with anybody who may have survived trapped inside.
There were hundreds of vehicles, if not thousands, littered across the roads. Some had tried to cross to the other side, but had gotten stuck in the ditches. Others had tried to get into the fields and had bogged down in the swampy ponds or mossy muck. And everywhere, scattered on the roadside, hanging from rolled down windows or smashed windshields, and scattered in the fields, were bodies. Even as I stared, trying to understand it all, my brain pieced together the scenario - the massive traffic jam trying to get out of the city, the Ollies sprinting up the lines of cars and slaughtering people as they sat, belted in and effectively trapped. Some would manage to get out and run, but would quickly learn that the majority of people can't outrun a hungry Ollie.
"I wasn't far off, you know," he said softly. "Look at them all."
"I see them," I whispered solemnly.
"The way they issued the evac orders, none of these folks had a chance. Just sat there and waited for the end of the world, without even knowing it." He backed up and crossed himself - the religious gesture both surprised and, for some reason, frightened me. "Sarinists on the street corners, automobile graveyards, packs of Ollies roamin' the back alleys..." He sighed and shook his head, heading back to the truck. "The more things change..."