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Who| R, Howard Bassem, Guy Crood
What| R is separated from Howard by raptors and stumbles into a panicked Guy for zombie killing.
Where| Around the edge of what’s left of the island, possibly near the labs
When| Week 4
Warnings/Notes| Zombie-violence, gore, Tributes killing Tributes.

Howard Bassem

R’s been wandering in and out of what Howard’s called “his territory” – there’s no fences or lines drawn in the mud to tell him where that special chunk of jungle begins and ends, and sometimes he wonders if Howard even knows at all or if he’s just making it up as he goes along. Seems like it might be a Howard Bassem thing to do.

He catches Howard within sight of the cliffs that hadn’t been there a few days ago, the smell of acid drying out his sinuses. It’s so strong it almost overpowers that life-smell radiating off the human. He imagines it might even be strong enough to make the eyes water, but it’s just a guess: he wouldn’t know, personally. His eyes haven’t watered in years.

R shuffles up to Howard, trusting his stumbling, uneven footsteps to be telegraphing where he’s coming from. Howard’s jumpy at the best of times, after all, and in the Arena he’s on a permanent state of red alert. Anything strange, anything new is all labeled POSSIBLE THREAT.

“Gk,” R squeezes the sound out. The shreds of his tongue, lolling out with nowhere to go, twitch conversationally as he swings his head toward Howard, his Dead-grey eyes searching his face. He settles for gently nudging him in the shoulder since he can’t outright ask his question. What’s on his mind? For the days that R slows down or wanders, his mind must be racing. Calculating. Unable to rest. Is it the acid that’s bothering him today? Is he running out of food?

Or is it those weird, soft hooting noises? The crackle of undergrowth that R swears has been coming closer…

Guy Crood

It’s hard to shuffle when your intestines are getting tangled up in your ankles.

Between having half a face and his insides…not on the inside anymore, R thinks this probably qualifies as a bad day even for a zombie.

Howard called them “raptors” when they’d heard the hooting a few days ago, off in the distance. Him? He just got the impression of claws flashing, a thick tail swinging for balance, and an almost bird-like trill that suddenly escalated into a shriek as it slashed his stomach open with its hind foot. R hadn’t even realized he’d been disemboweled until he turned to stagger away and tripped on his own guts, slipped, and went down hard in the mud. He would’ve groaned a warning to Howard if he’d had the voice, if he hadn’t looked up while the raptor shoved its snout into his stomach and realized he’d already vanished. For all he knows, Howard’s already long gone. Survival of the fittest and the fittest is whoever’s willing to run screaming to the hills ahead of everyone else.

All R knows is he doesn’t make a good meal. He struggles against the raptor, his cold hands slapping up against a pebbly hide, and it jerks its head back in surprise. Food’s supposed to be choking on its own blood, slowing down. Dying. This one doesn’t seem like it got the memo. It tastes long dead. Rotting dead. With a snarl, the raptor had jumped back, bobbed its head, hissed, and then vanished into the jungle like a magic trick. It'd happened so fast that he would've doubted it happened at all until he felt the draft.

R got back to his feet and started shuffling. He told himself he’s going to look for Howard. After the first hour of wandering along the cliff side, he had to admit he had no clue what the battle plan was. It’s more wandering aimlessly. Zombie default.

It’s that wandering that sends him stumbling on Guy Crood’s campsite. There’s a few minutes of curious shuffling sounds approaching Guy, like someone’s badly injured, before R suddenly slaps aside a large leaf and introduces him to the wide, gross and rotting world of zombies.

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The ocean smells horrible. Somehow, that bothers Howard more than anything else in this Arena, more than the poison or the raptors or the colorful birds that are one hundred percent out of place with the Cretaceous period. He grew up near cliffs next to a beach like this, in California, and he knows what a beach is supposed to smell like. It's supposed to be salt and crispness cutting through humidity, or at the very least the ugly, coppery smell of bloodshed after a slaughter. It's not supposed to be vinegar.

But everything goes to vinegar after long enough, he could say. He wants to write that down, somewhere, sometime, as if it's some truism to his life. Everything gets sour and acidic. He kicks some pebbles down into the waves far below - they disappear long before can see them hit the water, but he wonders if they make a hissing noise. If they break apart.

He hears R long before he sees him, but a quick glance over his shoulder tells him that R's alone, and he's alright with that. For the most part he's been keeping his back to the water, figuring that more likely than not, the threats will come from the treeline. He's already traced a climbing route in his mind to get the hell out of Dodge, should the necessity arise.

He's sitting on the ground, rolling an empty can that once held processed meat between his palm and the dirt, looking at it kind of blankly as he tries to get his brain to kick into gear. He's hungry. He's used to hungry. By all standards he's been positively rolling in food for an Arena. But he's not used to everything being poisonous, and that's got him in a state of worry he's not used to.

"Come sit with me, man. I wanna talk at someone."

That much R feels satisfied he can give him - an ear and a total lack of interruptions. He won't even bite.

From the way Howard's fooling around the empty can, R's going out on a limb and guessing he's hungry and trying to take his mind off that increasingly empty pit collecting in a ball in his stomach. Once upon a time, he thought he remembered checking cupboards and fridges for food, as if hours later something magical would happen and bam, suddenly there'd be new stuff in there this time when he opened the door. Could be the same thing with Howard.

He joins Howard after a pause to plan how he's going to sit down without slumping over. Deliberately sitting instead of slouching isn't easy and because Howard's so tiny, it's a real danger he could crush him if he's not careful. It takes some careful maneuvering before R creaks and groans in his head and slowly folds his arms and legs down. Even with inches apart he can feel Howard's presence from his smell that's - by now - had time to stew thanks to a lack of a shower and his diet. "Cultivate" might be the polite version.

He swings his head toward the human, studying how today his cheeks look a little more sunken in than yesterday, the hollows of his eyes deep enough he wants to lose himself in them and bite -

Okay, Jesus, cutting that out. R drops his eyes, glad for a moment he can't feed. No mouth, remember? Last Arena? Ended badly. Wasn't fun.

He flops his hand at Howard, gesturing at his ear. All ears here, buddy.

Howard's mouth twitches to the side and he exhales - it's the phantom of a laugh, one with the humor sucked out of the middle. More muscle memory than anything. He taps the empty can against the ground rhythmically.

For the most part he doesn't look at R, just at the space between his knees, at the boots caked in mud. The aglets of his shoelaces have rusted, which surprises him, because when he was growing up those were always plastic. Here in the Capitol, even the clothes you slap on your cannon fodder, even the dressings of a future Jackson Pollock of mud, sweat, animal teethmarks and blood, obviously blood, has to be high-end and has to look hand-made.

He runs a finger along the inside of the brand on the side of his heel for some footwear company that didn't exist where he's from, and that he probably couldn't afford even if it did.

"I figured you'd want to talk about, like, the closet thing. Then I figured if I was going to talk about it, I didn't want you to be able to talk back." A little fucked up, he recognizes, but he never claimed to be a saint or anything even within the same zip code. "I just, you know, Epsy and me..."

He knows he hasn't been good to R this Arena. He knows he's made demands and said things he shouldn't, and he knows only about half of those were justified. He knows he shouldn't be using R as some sort of human trampoline just because R can't kiss and tell or gossip or anything like that.

But it doesn't really matter, nor does it matter that there are cameras on every inch of this island, really.

He doesn't mind waiting for Howard to gather his thoughts. R wouldn't be a good zombie if he didn't know how to wait (and wait. And keep on waiting for something he's not even sure the other Dead have a name for).

Although to be perfectly honest he'd hoped, vaguely, that this conversation would've happened when they both had lips.

He gets settled in, drawing his knees to his chest like he remembered Julie doing several lifetimes ago in his 747 when all they had to worry about was if she'd get eaten. It's not a natural zombie position. Too much planning. But it does the trick of keeping him propped up and he can loll his head over to watch Howard's thoughts play across his face from the pull the muscles in his jaw to the little line forming between his eyebrows. Is this a confession? Is it because dead men tell no tales? R's eyes are still locked on him as he finally talks, trying to look as attentive as possible.

The absence of his voice chokes him as he realizes there would've been a gap to say something. No, Howard, he still doesn't get it, he doesn't "know".

Unsure how to mime all that, he points a shaky finger at his brain, cold and stationary where Howard's pulses with life and paranoia, and shakes his head.

Edited 2013-11-18 10:13 (UTC)

"You don't- don't think? Oh. Don't know." Howard's knack for picking up on the what's wordless and not terribly animated seems to serve him as well in this relationship. "Well, I mean, we uh. We split. That's all."

Painfully. Howard wasn't prepared for it to be painful like that - he assumed that the absence of the discomfort the relationship caused would be replaced by relief, but instead the basements of his heart just flooded with guilt and anger. Which is fitting, he thinks. Fits the upstairs.

"That's all," he repeats, watching the negative space in some of the leaves against the sky. If you unfocus your eyes enough, the shadows of the branches look like lace, and Howard imagines that's true for just about all of Panem. Cross your eyes a bit and you can ignore that you die every two months. Breathe shallow and you don't notice that R smells like an unplugged fully-stocked refrigerator after a hot day. Tune it out and you can't hear any screaming.

But Howard's not the best at tuning it out, and so he hears something in the brush. Instantly he's on alert. His hand's in his pocket with the knife even before he registers that he's heard something. His eyes are wide, nostrils flared slightly, lips tight over his teeth.

"You smell anything?"

They did?

He's still processing that when Howard switches tracks, perking up like a rabbit about to go bolting in the bushes. R's slower to pick up on that vibe. His own head comes up, less jerking attentively and more bobbling like he's not worried about what's out there on an island specifically tailored to kill them. The first thing he sees is a wall of jungle, a lush green screaming in his face that makes it hard to see the forest for the trees. Exchanging a look at Howard, R turns and sniffs. It's more of a whuffling sound, an animal's instead of a man's.

Smells flood his nose; most of it comes from Howard, the smell of body odor and sweat and a scalp that's gone past the point of feeling scratchy with oil, overlaid with that electric Other that distinguishes him from the Dead. Life-scent slithers temptingly through his sinuses. There's also crushed vegetation, he guesses. It takes R a moment to realize there's something else. He's been around it so much that unless it's bleeding and fresh, he's learned to turn his nose up at it. Regard it as part of the background of the airport.

Meat. Rotting meat. And it's not the negative-imprint of another zombie, either.

R slowly nods after sniffing again to make sure. Maybe this heart-to-heart - if that's what this is, he's not sure - will have to wait. He reviews the last few minutes and he's sure that smell wasn't there before. It's like leftovers from a hunt if they could teleport.

His hand creeps out to grab Howard's, squeezing, as he gets unevenly to his feet, facing toward where the rotting meat smell is strongest.

The jungle's silent.

The attack explodes from the trees on the right, coming at Howard because he's smallest, weakest.

Immediately, Howard regrets having his back to the cliff. His heart makes an Olympic pole vault jump up into his neck as he scrambles back from the blur bearing down on him - the suddenness of the attack means that he doesn't even have enough time to recognize what it is - and finds nothing but air behind his hand.

Thankfully, his other hand's squeezing R's, and as he nearly topples off the edge he manages to keep from going entirely. The creature bears down on them, all claws and teeth, and Howard screams as its hook claw rends a gash in his shirt and his shoulder.

As dangerous as the cliff is, it saves his life. The raptor has to pause to avoid going over the edge, and it gives Howard a chance to roll and scramble on the ground. Pebbles slice into his palms and leave a smear of blood on the cliff rock. He gets to his feet even as a the teeth from the raptor whip past his ear. He sprints the fastest fifty yards he's ever managed.

The raptor's feet slide from the edge of the cliff. Howard pauses, not to watch, because as far as he knows he's still being pursued, but to find R.

R's never seen anything like it. It's fast, darting after Howard before R really registers it: the sweet, rotten meat smell fills the air, a hiss crescendos into a shriek, and a long wedge-shaped snout riddled with fangs materializes right next to them.

By some miracle Howard actually survives the encounter.

R watches mutely as he scuttles away, the adrenaline flooding through his body and putting it in flight-mode. Jesus, who knew a human could even move that fast? It's like he dropped, rolled, and teleported. Between the fresh blood wafting in the air, Howard's own life-scent ionizing his frontal lobe in all the right places, and the raptor, R's too distracted to get much shuffling-for-safety in. He makes it a few steps forward before the raptor slams into his side, sending him tumbling hard to the ground.

Next thing he knows, the raptor straddles him. Its foot flashes. The big claw, curved like a scythe, whistles.

He doesn't realize at first that the reason it's drafty is because his guts are spilling out from the gash cut into his torso. Intestines flop out, shriveled and still glistening with that tar that used to be his blood. R wonders dimly if he should scream. You know, just to try it on for size. See if it'll make it suddenly hurt. Instead he lifts his head up to search for Howard, the raptor bending down to tear at what it (assumes) is dying prey.

Edited (typos) 2013-11-21 12:40 (UTC)

Howard pauses there, torn between two impulses. The basic one, the one that starts at his brainstem and radiates outward in a primordial radiowave of run you fucking idiot just run, pulls him further, to the forest. But the other, the inexplicable, stupid other, it forces his hand down to the ground.

He picks up a rock.

"Get the fuck away from him!"

And he throws it. It smacks into the raptor's teeth with a wet snap and a spray of R's guts from the side of the dinosaur's mouth. The raptor shrieks and turns, and by then Howard's got a stick. His hand and the wound on his shoulder are tied together by a wet ribbon of fresh blood.

The raptor steps off R for a moment, nostrils flaring, cat's eyes staring uselessly side to side. It sees its prey more by heat and smell than with those black and yellow slits. It takes a step towards Howard.

Howard decides that that's a good moment to start acting instead of reacting, and he rushes back over the ground he was so quick to run over a second ago, swinging the stick like an axe. The raptor backs away from R, losing its footing briefly as one leg goes over the edge of the cliff. It gives a strange barking sound as it pulls back up.

Howard bets it's calling for its buddies.

"Move, R, move!"

The raptor lunges back at Howard this time, and he only just jams the stick in its face in time to avoid getting his face bitten. His abdomen isn't so lucky; the hooked claw rends a nice gash from his chest to his pelvis.

The run you fucking idiot instinct comes back in full, nourished by the red blood starting to soak his clothes. Howard jams the stick at the raptor one last time, and then he runs. Fast as he can. Far as he can.

He doesn't stop to look for R this time.

It was almost like a tsunami, the expression of fear on Guy's face. There was that initial offshore earthquake of surprise that someone had stumbled on to where he was, making him reach for his spear. Then the "I'm-determined-to-survive" look that had instantly been on his face - i.e. the normal crashing of the ocean waves - suddenly faded, like waters suddenly receding from the shoreline.

It didn't take long, thanks to the paleness and lack of blood, for Guy to quickly realize that this wasn't a living person who shouldn't have still been alive but rather a dead one. (That shouldn't have still been alive even more.)

That receding ocean drew farther and farther away, Guy's eyes getting wider and wider, and just when they were almost at the point they should have been falling out of his head, that was when that hulking beast of a wave went crashing back to shore to unleash untold devastation.

The scream he let out, if anyone heard it, probably made them think he was being killed. It was a "Goofy just fell off the cliff" scream, a yodel of unrestrained horror.

"AAAAEEEUUHH AHH HA AAAAH!"

Apparently a fear of the dead not quite being dead enough was something that reached very, very far back in human instinct.

Enough that the first thing Guy did was run over and try to stab R in the chest with his spear.

Edited 2013-11-12 04:13 (UTC)

It was the blood-curdling(?) yell(?) that threw him off, R starting in surprise. Was that sound supposed to even come out of a human throat? He's heard every possible death rattle, gurgle, and sob and everything in between. That right there? That's a new one. It was loud enough R expected the forest to start teeming with other Dead hungry for this new, surprisingly vocal meal on two legs.

He guessed he shouldn't be surprised when the Tribute stabbed him clean in the chest.

The spear punched through, sliding between his ribs. It must've skidded off something on the way in because it didn't impale him all the way through. Instead of red blood, something rank and black and tar-like began to bubble out reluctantly around the shaft. Instead of crying out, R groaned out of instinct...only without a functioning mouth, all he could manage was a pathetic gurgle as he dripped ooze. He made matters worse by stepping forward onto a bit of withered intestine hanging out his stomach and tearing it off with a thick squish.

Can we cut it out with the spears? R had it up to here with getting stabbed with spears, from Hyperion to Eva and now to some guy who couldn't even scream properly. It was like he died a spear magnet or something, Jesus. R reacted by falling back to Undead 101, his hand coming up and grasping uselessly over the spear for something vague. He wasn't even sure what he was grabbing for. This guy looked like he'd probably be good eating. Then again, the hunger thought that way about anyone with a heartbeat.

"Neeeguguh!" That sounded more zombie than human, didn't it? Not quite your standard zombie groan but definitely not articulate enough to be human.

Guy made a lot of funny noises like that, though, especially when he was doing things like stabbing someone and having them not die.

He yanked the spear free and tried to stab R in the eye this time. It wouldn't reach his brain, even if it did connect. The flint was hard but it wasn't sharp, not enough to really slice through the bone of of his eye socket. It certainly wasn't long enough.

Zombies and sharp pointy objects usually didn't mix.

Today wasn't any different.

Between the stream of...noises bubbling out of the Tribute's mouth and the fact that he was already off-balance, R didn't stand a chance. Before he knew it the spear jerked itself free of his ribs with a squish, black blood splattering, and now it was on a collusion course with his face. This was the part where it should hurt. He braced for it. There wasn't a spike of agony when the spear pierced his eye. The world flashed white, went dark on that side as he staggered. More of that rank tar wept down the side of his face in a death mask. Somehow his brain was intact.

Wow, that's amazing it didn't -

R started to count his lucky stars, his one good eye fixed on the human almost like a silent accusation, when he stumbled back and his foot hit a grand total of nothing instead of ground. The cliff yawned up behind him, acid lapping at the bottom of the rocks.

...Uh oh.

He pitched over the side without even a scream. As R's Arena deaths went, it was fast. Seconds instead of hours, days. Whistling air. A glimpse of the shreds of his guts flapping away. He thought he might've seen a few seagulls pinwheeling above the cliff he took a swan dive from. Then the ground rushed up, the rocks grew large, and he smashed into it with a dull thump.

Guy was left standing there, clutching his spear, staring off in the direction the dead guy-thing fell. For a moment, he forgot to breathe entirely, until he finally remembered to inhale, making a strange, raspy, terrified squeaking noise - almost like a reverse whimper - as he did it.

Then the same thunder that had rumbled through the air when Mindy died rumbled again and Guy jumped in place with another terrified squeal.

After a little while of just standing there trying to will the world into being just slightly less horrifying, Guy finally edged over to the cliff side and cautiously peered down.

Yeah, that guy was definitely dead. Maybe even for good this time.

The question burning in Guy's mind was still 'How had he been alive at all?' Jaw missing, guts hanging out like the stringy insides of a squash, so far beyond living that he wasn't even bleeding from it all...

And how much pain had he been in? Had he been completely numb? Had he been in agony?

Now that R was dead down on the rocks, Guy's fear immediately gave way to overwhelming pity. Had the people who'd brought them here done this? After all, they could bring back the dead, couldn't they? What if it wasn't all the way back?

Even though he was still trembling, even though that edge of fear was still sharp enough to cut to the bone, he couldn't help but show at least some compassion.

"I'm sorry," he called down, and the words were carried away on the wind. More quietly, he said, "I'm sorry this happened to you. I'm so sorry."

Then, on a rock at the cliff's edge he dragged the point of his spear. It was still covered in the strange dark viscera of R's body. Guy didn't dare touch it but if it was whatever equated to blood for the dead young man on the rocks below, it was what had to be used. He'd used Mindy's blood, after all, and the point of it was that it needed to be the same. For them all. If he was going to kill anyone, if their lives were being frittered away because of people who were horrible, he had to show the respect for their lives that the ones behind all this weren't showing. And it had to be the same respect or it wasn't respect at all.

So Guy dragged the tip of his spear against the rock, and he drew a crude little symbol that was the sun. He drew another crude little symbol that was like a burning flame. It was the same he'd given Mindy, drawn on her forehead and cheeks, a light to follow and a light to hold back the dark on the journey.

Then he tried to clean the heck out of that spear without touching it by running it through the grass. Clumpy dark stuff was left behind as he did it.

"Euuueegh. Oh, that's so gross."

He didn't have time to fuss over it, though. His screams might have gotten someone's attention. So Guy quickly grabbed his vine bag and set out, his heart still pounding, leaving behind a makeshift gravestone and the sound of a hovercraft echoing from the distance.

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Howard

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Guy

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Annnd R's dead

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