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Post by spiritandsand on Jan 19, 2013 4:27:39 GMT -5
Aira agreed with Henry, walking backwards in case that something would attack them; she would not make herself an easy target with the cured, the recovered around, who knows how many there were.
But then Pru suddenly approached the stranger. First suspicious, even reproachful, but then her tone switched to uncertain. Did she know this unfortunate man? Somewhere inside her Aira wished that she didn't, it would be risky to team up with an infected - even though he was "recovered", he could as well get a relapse and start attacking them, but if he was friend of Pru she would most likely insist to bring him along.
Aira didn't know if she should be practical and cold-hearted leaving the recovered, or follow her heart. She had lost everyone like Pru had, and if she had had a change to be reunited with just one of her loved ones she wouldn't have hesitated, infected or not.
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Post by vladimir on Jan 19, 2013 6:44:08 GMT -5
They were going to leave. They were going to leave! Relaxing a little bit, Reinhardt felt the shaking ease up slightly at the prospect of the three getting on their way and leaving him to his quiet routine here. Shoulders slumping, he let out a quiet sigh of relief as if he'd been unburdened by some great weight, nodding twice his approval but saying nothing for a lack of willpower to continue socializing.
That was when Pru really recognized him. Rey saw it in her eyes right away, he knew the look well by now. It was a narrow and accusatory thing brought out only when the girl was faced with a must difficult, most peculiar problem. He knew by experience that it was useless to try and throw her off the trail now, but at least he could hope to keep his responses ambiguous long enough for her companions to drag her away. "Ah was given it," he gripped the stock of his gun tightly as he said this, staring ahead as seriously as possible. It was not a lie and that was the best way to go about it. Children, he knew, had a tendency to sense falseness where they encountered it.
Unfortunately it appeared that even subversive intentions were not lost on the girl, before he had time to gauge her reaction he'd already called on him by name. "No," he answered almost immediately, though it came out so choked that it didn't carry and she likely didn't hear it from this distance. "No," he insisted, a little more this time, but it was no good and she already knew him.
Swallowing hard, Reinhardt realized that the sight of the gun pointed right at him did not bother him near so much as the sight of Pru's distress. What could he tell her? How? "Prudence..." he cringed slightly at having to say her name, feeling as if such a thing might be somehow insulting to her. "Ah never made it farther'n this."
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Post by vampirechicken on Jan 19, 2013 15:47:07 GMT -5
"You know him?" Henry said quietly, not feeling safer in the slightest. Even if she did know this man once, this new world was no stranger to betrayal. He resisted the urge to yank Pru towards the door by the back of her shirt, instead he moved slightly ahead of the girl and held an arm in front of her to stop her from moving any closer.
He gritted his teeth when the man responded,
"Be careful, he's been infected." he mumbled, low enough for only Pru, he was torn between the desire to protect her and the feeling that he had no right to pick her up and carry her away. This could be the only family she had left in the world. Or it could be a bloodthirsty killer wearing a familiar face.
The sound of a car engine buzzed in the distance, a familiar sound before the disaster but now a rare and often dangerous sign. Henry broke his stare from the man and looked back out onto the green highway. Nothing was visible in either direction and the noise stopped.
They needed to get out of here, they'd definitely lingered too long.
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Post by alexharvey on Jan 19, 2013 17:57:34 GMT -5
The girl hardly reacted to Henrys arm or to his warning. She kept staring in disbelief at the man before her, the voice had given her the last proof, it's familiarity although raspy. Her neighbor, her friend, her big brother. Wrapped in bandages hardly recognizable and yet the same person. Somehow. An infected. Did he have relapses? Rey wasn't the kind to. Then again, how was she to know, all she knew about the scale faces was what she had heard from colonies through the radio, when her father established contact with her cousins.
"I'm sorry...", she managed apathetic.
What she remembered from that was hardly anything she would like to think in connection with Rey. Monster was the most popular description. Uncontrollable murderous beasts. And those who tried to control it? Freaks, and that was the friendly version.
She couldn't believe Rey could be turned into something like that. Something this cruel. He was such a nice soul, he couldn't harm anyone, he'd be uncomfortable for weeks if he had the feeling to have insulted someone he liked.
Only then did she realize she was still pointing the gun at him. At Rey. How could she be pointing a gun at Rey?? She dropped it slowly.
"I'm sorry", she repeated, this time with an actual reason. Rey would never harm her in any way, knowing his character and temper he was probably terrified and deeply hurt from her pointing a rifle at him.
"I'm sorry" the rifle was by now hanging loosely in her hands. He would definitely be hurt, this wasn't the way she used to greet him. This wasn't the way she used to look at him.
She tried to remember what she used to do when meeting people originally. Smile. Smiling was the one thing she could always do. And she wondered in all seriousness how she could have forgotten how to smile within only 24 hours. She had to force her lips to twitch upwards until she figured they formed the warm smile she usually gave.
"Sorry. It's okay, i just didn't expect to...that you, well...I'm sorry, sorry."
She kind of had intended that to come out different, as in cracking a stupid joke about his smell or something like that. Also she was convinced she did something wrong with the smiling. Or were the tears supposed to accompany a smile. She didn't think so.
She kept smiling but she didn't feel like it, Mom was hung and shot, Dad was chopped into bits, her big brother had become a creature of possible danger she couldn't evaluate and somehow everything seemed to crash down on her. And she felt guilty, for being left. For being okay.
So she continued her smile, apologizing over and over, "I'm sorry, Rey. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm sorry."
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Post by spiritandsand on Jan 20, 2013 3:59:22 GMT -5
Aira slowly approached Henry, afraid yet intrigued by the recovered.
"Henry", she tentatively said with a low voice glancing at Pru, "do you think it is safe...? Let him tag along?"
Her face was twisted in a worried frown, one could see that she was trapped between the fear of Rey and sympathy for Pru; and now that she had seen how tortured these recovered were she doubted if she would be able to abandon even a stranger if they ran into one.
Maybe she thought that they could heal them somehow. There has to be a cure, or at least one in progress somewhere out there. Right? Or was this just her being naive. It seemed like the only way to keep her hope. And hope was the only thing that made her continue.
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Post by vladimir on Jan 20, 2013 9:33:18 GMT -5
Something came over him then and, for a moment, he was neither terrified nor consumed by shame. He forgot himself, himself as he was, and set down his gun in the cashier's desk so as to free his hands. "No, Prudence, it's a'right," he could tell she was a step from crying. Then she began to repeat herself, to force a smile, and he knew she was three or four steps beyond crying. There was a look on her face that he'd never seen before but could recognize in others, a distressingly common face among the homeless who weren't blessed to be too blitzed or mad to recognize the disparity of their own situations. She was giving up, that realization made his insides twist like a ball of snakes and his hands went cold and numb. Clasping them against the ragged logo on breast of his jacket by some subconscious knowledge that leaving them free would more readily bring her two companions down upon him, he vaulted carefully over the cashier's desk and got a good eight feet towards them before he remembered how scared he was.
That forced him to freeze again, eyes going wide as the situation returned to him. But he'd gotten so far now and it was so disquieting to see this neighbor girl, virtually family, have her psyche whittled away so viciously and suddenly. "Prudence, it's a'right, you're a'right," this time when he spoke it was a little stronger if for no reason other than that he was making an active effort to counteract the effects of social anxiety. Looking to Henry and Aira, he appealed to them with his good eye to let him closer.
"Everything's okay, it's all gon' be a'right," and he knew he wasn't lying, because if the world had enough mercy to let Prudence live this long and the conniving wisdom to bring her here of all places so as to stir him from his secretive, lethargic routine, everything was okay after all.
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Post by vampirechicken on Jan 20, 2013 19:17:35 GMT -5
Henry turned back to the others as the car sound faded away.
"Tag along?" He mumbled sounding surprised, he was so far only deciding whether it was safe to trade with this man. The idea of having him travel with them seemed ridiculous, not an option. Hell the smell alone was enough to put him off the idea, not to mention he could relapse and tear them to shreds in their sleep. "Aira... I don't think..."
Henry practically bristled like an angry cat when Rey made his sudden approach towards them. He backed off about a foot, dragging Pru back by the front of her shirt. He did stop though, staring into Reys one visible eye and trying to determine is his pleads were sincere.
Prus parents were dead, and she was soon to discover her cousins were too, He thought of his lie with a pang of guilt. He let go of her shirt
"Don't... touch him." he warned.
The virus was only transmitted through blood of course but Henry wasn't a doctor or a scientist. For all he knew they were all already infected from breathing his air.
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Post by alexharvey on Jan 21, 2013 1:34:17 GMT -5
The girl was more or less lifted upwards when Henry grabbed her front, she clutched onto his arm as to not fall over, rifle still in hands and sharp. She looked up at Rey again, then to Henry, then Rey.
This was wrong, it was all so wrong. Rey was the nicest person she knew, the friendliest and kindest, but she was hiding from him behind a bulky stranger with a shovel, whom she barely knew for more than a day. She couldn't even name the list of things that were wrong with this picture.
As nice as Henrys intentions might have been, this was wrong, and Rey was currently the only person she would actually trust. And after all, he was still a person, wasn't he? So his body changed, but she could tell from his demeanor and the hurt in his eyes when she was forced to back up, that it was still him. Also his seemingly calmed ways of talking to her, she could tell he was trying to make stop crying, he never handled that well.
She simply slipped past Henry, dropped the rifle to the floor in the motion and sprinted the last few steps until she literally ran into Rey, wailing and clasping her thin arms around his waist.
She didn't even bother the feeling of hardened, cracking skin or the sharp stench, because somehow there was still the familiarity of Rey, that she had missed ever since he evacuated.
Also she bawled out what she had been trying to play over with her tough girl act since the morning.
"They're dead Rey, Mom and Daddy, they are both dead and...and I don't even know how I...I made it and I don't know and I'm so scared! And they are dead, dead, dead."
She sobbed into his jacket fairly embarrassed somewhere in the back of her mind, but the rest of her didn't much care. At least Rey was there. And if he decided to eat her fine, at least she didn't have to deal with all this shit anymore.
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Post by spiritandsand on Jan 21, 2013 4:10:45 GMT -5
Aira got startled by Henry's sudden move, she didn't quite knew what had caused it, but leaped backwards like a frog ready to get the hell out of there.... When Pru suddenly sprinted over to the recovered and embraced him. This was all very odd. For one year she hadn't experienced the presence of other people, and suddenly she was standing in the middle of an ethical crisis burstling with emotions.
And when Pru started her babbling she got strong unpleasant flashbacks of her own family's fate. She got dizzy and blinded by tears in her eyes. She couldn't breathe.
With teetering steps she headed for the outdoors. If anyone had called out for her she'd just waved dismissively telling that she just needed om fresh air.
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Post by vampirechicken on Jan 21, 2013 5:02:00 GMT -5
(DM post. After this vlad, me, alex, maria)
The outside of the supermarket:
The car park was green and vast, more like a field than anything. It blended with the highway only separated by a bent wire fence. The sun was low in the sky by now, it was about 4pm.
Something Aira might have noticed at this point that the dull sound of an engine had started again and was approaching from gwangi. She wouldn't be able to see anything yet though.
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Post by vladimir on Jan 21, 2013 9:33:09 GMT -5
Having a screaming child run at him struck a similar emotion in Rey to having an airplane suddenly veer from its flight-path and begin descending right at him, set to crash into him and, in all likelihood, obliterate him violently. The difference between the two scenarios was only physical, though that difference was (thankfully) much different, even with all her weight thrown against him Pru could not do much more than get him to lean back slightly-- and that out of surprise. For a moment, Rey was in solid shock. He stood stock still and stared down at her, his fingers clutching at his own jacket as if he were afraid that the article of clothing would slip away should he let go. He hadn't seen normal people up close for months and had forgotten how to speak to them, an ability only newly revived by this encounter. He'd forgotten how to trust other people and himself too, but most of all he'd forgotten that he was not surrounded by a solid aura, a force field to keep others from making contact with him, that he could be touched.
Reinhardt and Henry were on the same page for a moment, a second or two in which he stared down in horror at Prudence and feared that this closeness might render her infected. But then something came back to him, a conversation about the pox back on his family farm. He remembered how his mother told him that once you had it, you'd always have it because some sort of medical complexity left a reservoir of the virus tucked into some little space in your spine. She'd also told him that you couldn't give it to someone unless the sores came back, and even then you couldn't give it unless the sores burst. He wondered for a moment if his own condition was like this. He'd gone so long without expressing symptoms, but at the same time the occasional pains in his abdomen and the constant ruination of his skin was enough for him to suspect that the virus would never really leave him. Care was required then, and this he knew, but pushing the little girl away and frightening her more was not.
Raising one stiff hand, Reinhardt pat the girl's hair gently, though it was obvious that he was taking care not to risk direct contact. "Hush now, it'll be okay Prudence. You're going to be fine." he avoided commenting on the parents, he wasn't sure how to approach the situation and found it best not to bring it up. For a moment this scene reminded him of his home, every little sibling to come running up from the road with a scraped knee or broken bicycle for some familial aid. It reminded him of just how much he missed his family and just how much he worried for them, something he'd pushed to the back of his mind after waking up in that lot. He had realized subconsciously at this point that if he went back, he was likely to find his whole family dead. After all, Ambrose, his most continually present sibling by virtue of his ironically parasitic nature as the not-quite-youngest little brother, had been with him when he'd tried to go south initially. But...
When he'd woken up in the lot with his traveling clothes torn and bloodied and Ambrose's prized lexus, windows smashed and blood on the dashboard, parked not a half mile away with all his supplies still there save for what rats and squirrels had scavenged, Ambrose was not there. With Prudence sobbing into his northface and the thoughts of home, of his brothers, of the one who'd gone missing all gnawing at his mind, Reinhardt was consumed by a sudden and strangely human emotion. He wanted to protect Prudence, yes, his little sister and survivalist protege. But he also wanted to find Ambrose and his siblings and his parents, and the best way to do that was to head for common ground- Tennessee.
Looking up slowly, Reinhardt looked between Henry and the woman standing just outside the door.
"Please, let me come with you."
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Post by vampirechicken on Jan 21, 2013 19:56:05 GMT -5
Henry winced when she completely ignored his warning and barrelled right into the man, sobbing into his jacket. There was nothing he could do anyway, and why did he care? This girl was someone he had only met this morning. He had no more right to take care of her than this disfigured man, from the way she was acting, he had to be a brother or a relative of some sort.
He supposed he was just tired of being alone, well what had he expected? He gripped the shovel tightly for a moment, staring at the pair.
"She's all yours." he said quietly, more to himself than anyone else. Pru would hardly care if he slipped away, they were strangers after all.
He turned away, noticing curiously that Aira was teetering off to the door looking out of sorts.
"Aira, we should get going anyway..." he walked out next to her when she mumbled about taking a walk. He was trying to figure out what their plans would be from this point, would he take Aira south still? He didn't know if there was safety south, or in any direction for that matter. A voice behind him stopped him right at the door.
"Please, let me come with you."
Henry turned back, letting Aira slip away past him. He wasn't sure how to respond to this.
"Why?" he said, the surprise in his voice making him sound more angry than anything else. "I don't think so... Take Pru to her friends southeast." He added apathetic "Dalton is overrun with looters." he said also, no longer caring how Pru would react, that was Reys problem now.
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Post by alexharvey on Jan 21, 2013 21:57:07 GMT -5
Pru almost recoiled when Henry inclined he was leaving them alone. Take Pru to her friends , that meant he was leaving them alone? He couldn't! They needed him. The more the better, she had only met him today, and she felt safe around Rey, but all the time she could tell Henry was just being protective, which was a lot considering how shortly they had met. She turned away from Rey, one hand still clutching on to his north face jacket, the other reaching out for the older man. She didn't want them to separate, she wanted Rey to tag along with them. Them to stay together.
She didn't even know where it came from, probably from her losing her parents just last night, but suddenly everyone separating from her for more than eight feet made her insides twist terribly. She didn't want to be alone, she didn't want to be left. No one should leave her, it tore at her whole being to be left.
"Henry", she whined rubbing her eyes with her sleeve, "Henry wait I-"
Thats when her brain started to digest the statement about Dalton. Dalton was overrun by looters? Dalton was overrun? Dalton was ... what?
She wanted to tell him that was a bad joke, a terrible one. Hadn't he agreed to bring her to Dalton? But...if he had known, the why. Why did he lie to her. Did he want to protect her? She couldn't tell anymore, and it didn't even make her sad. Instead she just sagged to the ground onto her knees, her hand letting go of Rey, the other falling next to her. She felt empty. So she WAS alone. There was no one left. Only her. How she wished she wasn't left. How she wished she wasn't alive.
"Why didn't they kill me too", she mumbled.
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Post by spiritandsand on Jan 22, 2013 6:29:53 GMT -5
Despite being highly dizzy Aira noticed the tension raise between the others; they were all frustrated about if the group would split, plus the risk of taking the scaleface with them. What they didn't know was that they actually agreed on the one important thing in all this;
"You can come with us", she said in a newly found serious tone after having cleared her head, "we need all the help we can get if we want to survive."
Aira kept her sentences as short as possible since she was still not feeling well, but frankly she was getting impatient about this emotional struggle. She accepted the stranger; surely he could contriute with something they couldn't. Also it would make Pru happy if her friend stayed, and Henry happy if Pru stayed. So. Of course they needed to be together. She just didn't know if any of them would be happy if she stayed. That didn't really matter as long as they didn't throw her out. Something told her they wouldn't, but she was paranoid by nature.
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Post by vladimir on Jan 22, 2013 7:17:00 GMT -5
Well, he hadn't expected much of anything else from them so, at the very least, Rey was not risking his neck emotionally. The man had known from the beginning that there was a far greater chance of them rejecting him than there was of them taking him and, in a way, felt that this was fate telling him to take a back seat and just let the world continue around him. It would not be so bad, he thought, to return to being alone here in the dark. The bravery which had struck him, the desire to get back home down south, was still there and still as emotionally influencing as ever. But now he was aware of its nature and had begun to entertain the idea that it was nothing more than a romanticist notion and that he'd never make it anyways. Yes, maybe giving up was a good thing, but then... there was Prudence too, and half the rationale of leaving was to keep an eye on her. His momentary meekness was wavering, leaving in him a conviction to do as opposed to not do, the strength of the conflicting impulses leaving his mind a frothing mess.
When his senses came back to him he found Pru sagging onto the floor and managed to only just put together what had happened in time to take a step forward and reach for her, though he seemed to reconsider touching her as things were. He didn't look at Henry or Aira, after all he could not know them well enough to judge them or reprimand them. In the end, it was his fault regardless of how one looked at the situation. If he'd remained quiet and scrunched up then perhaps they'd have left him be and taken the girl somewhere safe. Reinhardt did not know what to do with Prudence now that he'd been given her, after all, he'd not asked for her company until long after she'd begun to break down. What could he do, after all? He had food and shoes and flashlights, sure, but no car and no gasoline. Car. It was a sensible thought, but why had it occurred to him? Car...? Car.
There was a car coming and he could hear it. Straightening up, Reinhardt leaned down to touch Prudence's shoulder gently and begin to guide her to the checkout desk at a careful pace, coaxing her as he needed until he was able to get hands on his shotgun. He said nothing to Harry or Aira, after all he suspected he was imagining the sound. But if he wasn't...? Well, it was too loud for him to dismiss totally now.
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