Luke (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
burningdaylight) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
thearena2015-01-03 10:12 pm
burningdaylight) wrote in thearena2015-01-03 10:12 pm
Entry tags:
But give it enough time --
Who| Luke and Jane and Sam
What| Luke suffers a bad case of heartburn that ends up being a bad case of alien-birth. Later, Sam meets his first SPACE ZOMBIE and Jane gets in on the horror. A frantic, depressing mess ensues.
When| Last week of the arena.
Where| Around the science labs.
Warnings/Notes| GRAPHIC chestburster description, body horror, zombie nastiness, death.
You have to eat something, she said, and it had taken a while for the words to penetrate. It made more sense when she pressed a plastic-sealed package into his hands with a gentleness that was carefully absent from her tone.
No-nonsense Jane.
With bile sloshing around the burning emptiness of his stomach, he couldn’t begin to argue. It had been more of the dehydrated stuff, bland slices of fruit with a habit of sticking in his throat, but he choked it down gratefully all the same. Outside of doing a little berry picking, coming across unspoiled, non syrup-drenched fruit had been nothing short of a miracle back home.
To no surprise, she had shaken her head when he held some out to her, cooly uncompromising. She just watched him will himself to eat, a painfully slow process made worse by the fierce throbbing in his jaw, only satisfied when he finished and slumped more heavily against the wall to rest. She pushed smoothly onto her feet, then, promising to return with some water to chase it down with. A tingling heaviness had invaded his body, making mush of muscles, and all he could do was watch her slip away through his fever-haze, her name on the edge of his breath long after she had crept out of the lab and left him under the strange, sputtering half-light.
The passage of time is a difficult thing to measure. So much harder to grasp as he now eases in and out of consciousness to the distant sounds of screaming, of metal clattering against metal and the rumbling of small, contained explosions. He doesn’t immediately notice what begins as a little itch deep in the hollow of his chest, not with his brain thick with exhaustion and so many little agonies vying for his attention.
But this one, this niggling something won’t settle for having just a fraction of that attention. It decides to jerk him awake, blood screaming through his skull as he searches wild-eyed for the enemy he expects to find. And then it hits him, another stab of pain from the inside out.
Luke goes pale, his heart jogging in his throat. Semi-darkness and silence press in on him.
Jane’s not here.
And whether that’s a blessing or a curse he doesn’t have chance to decide because it’s happening, something’s happening, and he can’t stop it, his eyes wide and shiny with sick panic.
Convulsions come first. Then coughing, dry and then ragged and then wet, air wheezing in and out of his burning lungs. No rhythm, no pattern to any of it, rattling his ragdoll body and leaving him crumpled to the floor a dizzy, spluttering wreck, the tendons in his neck pressing cord-like to his skin.
He blinks, the ceiling spinning on its own axis.
He can’t breathe.
There’s a fullness in his chest, a stretched-to-capacity sort of burning that makes his eyes blur wet. He claws at his suit blindly, maddened. And that’s when it happens. That’s when something thick and slippery and muscular darts from behind his fingers with a restless flick of tail like a startled fish, thrumming with frantic life, squeezing itself under his breastbone, and he knows he’s no longer alone.
His mind tightens in the grip of a vice-like terror, ears ringing.
It’s trying to rip him apart.
The heavy thud of his pulse echoes through his body's hollows, every inch of sweating, tightening skin quivering. He sucks in jerking rabbit-breaths.
He can’t.
The thing butts at his cracked ribs and a bright spatter of sun-spots bursts across his vision, his throat retching a choked up scream he can’t bite back.
It’s bulging and flexing against them, against muscle and meat until they tear savagely and it all blurs together into a pain that clamps down on his brain with the ferocity of a living thing, wrenching it from side to side. He lets out an animal scream, his body arching and twisting uselessly and blood bubbling over his gasping lips, flowing backwards, gurgling into his throat. Tears squeeze out the corners of his eyes.
He can’t--
He can’t but his body clings tenaciously, agonizingly to life even while hundreds of mean little teeth gnaw and gnash and he coughs up ropes of blood. It won’t let go until the moment the thing finally cracks him open and bursts free in a spray of blood and bone flecks, a fat, slug-like thing screeching triumphant. It thrashes around its nest and bats its little arms at the air, gleefully flicking blood onto the face and hair of its host.
Luke’s stiffened, claw-like fingers twitch faintly before going still.
What| Luke suffers a bad case of heartburn that ends up being a bad case of alien-birth. Later, Sam meets his first SPACE ZOMBIE and Jane gets in on the horror. A frantic, depressing mess ensues.
When| Last week of the arena.
Where| Around the science labs.
Warnings/Notes| GRAPHIC chestburster description, body horror, zombie nastiness, death.
You have to eat something, she said, and it had taken a while for the words to penetrate. It made more sense when she pressed a plastic-sealed package into his hands with a gentleness that was carefully absent from her tone.
No-nonsense Jane.
With bile sloshing around the burning emptiness of his stomach, he couldn’t begin to argue. It had been more of the dehydrated stuff, bland slices of fruit with a habit of sticking in his throat, but he choked it down gratefully all the same. Outside of doing a little berry picking, coming across unspoiled, non syrup-drenched fruit had been nothing short of a miracle back home.
To no surprise, she had shaken her head when he held some out to her, cooly uncompromising. She just watched him will himself to eat, a painfully slow process made worse by the fierce throbbing in his jaw, only satisfied when he finished and slumped more heavily against the wall to rest. She pushed smoothly onto her feet, then, promising to return with some water to chase it down with. A tingling heaviness had invaded his body, making mush of muscles, and all he could do was watch her slip away through his fever-haze, her name on the edge of his breath long after she had crept out of the lab and left him under the strange, sputtering half-light.
The passage of time is a difficult thing to measure. So much harder to grasp as he now eases in and out of consciousness to the distant sounds of screaming, of metal clattering against metal and the rumbling of small, contained explosions. He doesn’t immediately notice what begins as a little itch deep in the hollow of his chest, not with his brain thick with exhaustion and so many little agonies vying for his attention.
But this one, this niggling something won’t settle for having just a fraction of that attention. It decides to jerk him awake, blood screaming through his skull as he searches wild-eyed for the enemy he expects to find. And then it hits him, another stab of pain from the inside out.
Luke goes pale, his heart jogging in his throat. Semi-darkness and silence press in on him.
Jane’s not here.
And whether that’s a blessing or a curse he doesn’t have chance to decide because it’s happening, something’s happening, and he can’t stop it, his eyes wide and shiny with sick panic.
Convulsions come first. Then coughing, dry and then ragged and then wet, air wheezing in and out of his burning lungs. No rhythm, no pattern to any of it, rattling his ragdoll body and leaving him crumpled to the floor a dizzy, spluttering wreck, the tendons in his neck pressing cord-like to his skin.
He blinks, the ceiling spinning on its own axis.
He can’t breathe.
There’s a fullness in his chest, a stretched-to-capacity sort of burning that makes his eyes blur wet. He claws at his suit blindly, maddened. And that’s when it happens. That’s when something thick and slippery and muscular darts from behind his fingers with a restless flick of tail like a startled fish, thrumming with frantic life, squeezing itself under his breastbone, and he knows he’s no longer alone.
His mind tightens in the grip of a vice-like terror, ears ringing.
It’s trying to rip him apart.
The heavy thud of his pulse echoes through his body's hollows, every inch of sweating, tightening skin quivering. He sucks in jerking rabbit-breaths.
He can’t.
The thing butts at his cracked ribs and a bright spatter of sun-spots bursts across his vision, his throat retching a choked up scream he can’t bite back.
It’s bulging and flexing against them, against muscle and meat until they tear savagely and it all blurs together into a pain that clamps down on his brain with the ferocity of a living thing, wrenching it from side to side. He lets out an animal scream, his body arching and twisting uselessly and blood bubbling over his gasping lips, flowing backwards, gurgling into his throat. Tears squeeze out the corners of his eyes.
He can’t--
He can’t but his body clings tenaciously, agonizingly to life even while hundreds of mean little teeth gnaw and gnash and he coughs up ropes of blood. It won’t let go until the moment the thing finally cracks him open and bursts free in a spray of blood and bone flecks, a fat, slug-like thing screeching triumphant. It thrashes around its nest and bats its little arms at the air, gleefully flicking blood onto the face and hair of its host.
Luke’s stiffened, claw-like fingers twitch faintly before going still.
It's walker time!
It looks to the plump, larval thing squelching in its grip and sinks its teeth into it, tearing out a chunk with a twist of its head. The alien squeals and squirms as pus-like fluid oozes out of its body, little teeth snapping uselessly. But it has met its match. Another greedy bite and another and another and then there’s little left of the chestburster but a bloody, dripping smear over the lurker’s mouth and strings of flesh caught in its teeth.
The corpse rises from hands and knees onto its feet with the unsteadiness of a newborn foal, looking all around the walls of the spaceport with blank hunger in its eyes.
eat eat eat
no subject
Which makes him really damn wary, since Sam is pretty certain he doesn't want to get into a fight with something that can keep going after that. He tenses, getting a better grip on his lead pipe as he gets closer - and then hesitates, because he thinks he recognizes him.
"Luke?"
no subject
The name means nothing.
It’s just another sound. One that directs its attention towards warm and living meat just begging to stripped down to the bone. Every last scrap of it.
That fierce and brainless need prods it along on fast-stiffening legs, blood still draining out of the ragged hole blown out of its chest. Lurkers don’t gauge threats and calculate risks. They don’t watch where they step, either. Even as it stumbles over a length of pipe left behind by some tribute and falls it's still moving, still pawing at the ground with that tortured determination, leaving a long, bloody streak as it drags its body along squeaky tiles.
no subject
He’s less tripped up by the determination of the crawling, because he’s seen wounded soldiers pulling themselves along with desperation, but that changes as soon as he realizes that not only is there no recognition on Luke’s face, there’s nothing. Sam’d thought he seen emptiness in people before, the ones who had nothing left and were beyond his help, but he’s revising his opinion right now.
This is what someone looks like when there’s no one home, when they’re still moving but there ain’t nothing human left about them.
Unfortunately, by the time he recognizes that, he’d already moved in to close and is well within reach of whatever the hell that is.
no subject
It reaches and snatches for him, tendons and fast-twitch sinew only freshly rotting, and blood-webbed fingers clamp around Sam’s foot like a manacle. By then it has pulled the rest of itself as close as it needs to be and bites down on his ankle with a force its clumsy, human jaws shouldn’t be capable of exerting, teeth sinking through fabric undeterred. But there’s so much it shouldn’t be capable of and it is, every second of its existence a seeming violation of logic and nature.
It doesn’t care.
This is all it lives for – that flicker of bitter almost-relief that only finding someone to spread its itching, wasting disease to can bring. And the meat, the meat, the need for it so wrenching and desperate it almost hurts.
nothing like some good old unfashionably late tl;dr
It hadn't slipped her mind that this might be the last time she'd see Luke alive when she scooped up her helmet and got up off her knees. It settled more heavily than usual on her shoulders now that it was down to just them. First Clem, then Nick. Now Luke was at death's door right on their heels. She's never been one for lying to herself. Water would buy Luke time, ease his pain some, but it wouldn't make him live. It's just a matter of time, for both of them. All she can do is toss some minutes his way.
The hearing in her left ear never came back, even after she had done her best to clean out all the blood. It imbalances her some, and she knows her hands aren't half as steady as they could be. To say she's running on fumes would be generous; this is as hard as she's ever pushed herself. There's no room for thought, no room for more than flashes of who they've lost, of the man waiting for her to come back, looking worse than when Carver beat him. Luke is her anchor now, a steadying, purposeful weight that could pull her down if she doesn't keep afloat. So she floats.
It took searching three labs to find a shower that didn't pour blood or bleach. After lowering her head into the spray, scrubbing at her hair and face even as she gulped mouthfuls of water down, she fills her helmet and turns to go. No other tributes come her way then, no booby traps or aliens. The knot of apprehension in her stomach sits taut and unresolved, pulling tighter as she turns each corner.
That's when she sees the blood, painted out the doors to their lab in crooked, dragging sweeps. The knot in her stomach bursts and pulls apart in the middle. She doesn't remember dropping the helmet, or running in to find Luke gone, nothing but dark red where she had left him.
She follows the trail despite instinct screaming for her to go the other way. She has to know who did this, she has to know what happened, she has to do something besides wait for her turn to die.
He didn't get far. Though her hearing is blown half to hell, there's no mistaking the sounds of the dead, no forgetting the way they move. There's another man, caught by the ankle between teeth closing like a vise, and she's stuck rooted to where she stands. Her expression crumbles helplessly, a choked and hoarse keening escaping her lips before they clamp shut in a hardened line and the rest of her face follows suit. The shrapnel strapped to her thigh is now in her hand.
"Fuckin' sucks when they don't stay dead, doesn't it? By the way," she gestures to Luke's corpse with a cold jut of her chin, "it's contagious."
no subject
He hears someone coming before he can do anything, and has to split his attention so he doesn’t leave himself open for another attack while he’s dealing with this.
And then she says that.
“Appreciation the confirmation,” he snaps. “I’ve seen this fucking movie, thanks.”
He’d be less pissy - and more inclined to actually process what she’s saying - if he wasn’t currently trying to get the thing off of him. Instead, jams his switchblade into the tendons at the corner of the thing’s jaw, where he’d stick his thumb on a normal human if he was trying to get them to open their mouth, and hopes he can pry the jaw open enough for him to yank his leg away.
no subject
Life.
The muscles in its face seem to relax.
So good, so viciously good it doesn’t much notice the blade as it slides through loosening, tissue-paper skin and flexed tendons, its own blood oozing thick and slow and blacker by the minute. Then it finds its jaws are wedging apart little by little and it clutches at Sam’s leg like a man drowning, gurgling, its tongue moving uselessly in its mouth.
i'm gonna fight dw's notification system
The heaviness in her chest that settles deeper and deeper with every breath shoved in and out of her lungs starts to take form, no longer just a crushing sensation. It's loneliness. She's on her own again. As hard as she tried, everything she did, it was all ultimately worth less than shit, and she'd known it. This was a losing game from the start, she'd known that... but knowing didn't turn out to make it any easier.
To the loved ones we've lost along the way, and to the hope we see them again. That's what he'd said. She'd heard him loud and clear from where she stood in the dark while everyone else gathered around. It's impossible not to wonder if he ever imagined this is how they'd be reunited, with more blood and misery. Tears flare up behind her eyes, stinging her nose, but they never flood in, probably calcify before they get a chance to.
Jane shifts her grip on the shrapnel in her hand, the rest of her body lowering into a ready crouch. This tribute is a stranger, with plenty of bulk on his side that she's lacking, and you don't need your ankle to stab someone to death. She knows that pound for pound she'd lose, and logic still has a place in her head, though it's frothing over with cold rage.
"Fuck you. You're getting exactly what you deserve."
no subject
His eyes are still on the zombie thing, and he really wishes he had a gun right about now.
Then she’s cursing at him, and he looks over at her incredulously, two seconds away from asking ‘are you goddamn kidding me.’ It’s the cold rage that stops him. Unless someone’s a complete psychopath, that kind of anger doesn’t come out of nowhere. She’s looking ready for a fight, and he can’t tell if it’s because of him or because of the zombie. Sam keeps his grip on the switchblade, but he raises his other hand up, palm out, and takes a few steps back.
“You talking to me or Lu - that?” He stumbles over Luke’s name, because that isn’t him, and it feels disrespectful to call it the guy’s name.
tw. ref to suicide
A flap of skin and meat has peeled away from its cheek, the chalk-like whiteness of naked bone peeking through. It doesn’t know it. They never do. Its jaws just shift weakly, uselessly, like its testing them for the first time. And it just stares on and on. Begging.
kill me
A growl starts low in its chest, bubbling up into a strangled moan of pure, wrenching misery. Fingers stretch for her.
please