Hot Enough to Melt Hell and Burn Satan Too [Closed]

[nunpunching]

Who| Punchy and R
What| Some people are really chill about zombies.
Where| Desert arena
When| Week 3
Warnings/Notes| Dead sibling memories, zombies.

It's Punchy's turn to make a run for the watering hole while Tim stands guard over their supplies. If he's being honest, Punchy's glad for the excuse to get away; he likes to think he and Tim are partners, or, more accurately, that Tim is a handy sidekick, but he's been getting the niggling sensation that perhaps he's not the one calling the shots. Punchy's been spending a little too much time wondering where he got his ideas, been stewing in the uncomfortable sensation that they are, perhaps, not from his own head but from someone else's. It's not something he wants to ruminate on, but given that laying low doesn't cause for a ton of distractions, sitting around offers few alternatives.

He hasn't seen Topher or Holiday anywhere but on the screen. That's good, he thinks - the fact that they are out of reach means that worrying about them is definitively pointless. He can't do anything for them, so they can linger in the periphery like angels on his shoulder while he formulates a plot to help everyone.

That's just about the only comfort he can take from the tale the screens are telling. Every once in a while, he'll catch glimpses of Topher, doubled over and vomiting. Holiday, missing an entire arm. His note from Sherlock indicates that the footage is edited to look as damning as possible, so who knows if they're even still alive out there? Who knows how long ago these reels of his friends were taken?

In the twilight, the safest time to travel without risking heatstroke or death by a nighttime predator, the screens up above look like drive-through movie theaters. There was one in Punchy's hometown, some relic of a time long past, kept operating on Sunday nights because the denizens of Marysville had nothing better to do. Punchy went, once, a gangly eight year-old with hands and feet too big for his body and a gap in his front teeth, and when the boredom kicked in his big sister Judy took the GameBoy out of her glove compartment and let him distract herself while Sixteen Candles shone on ahead. He remembers the way Judy's friend in the front seat rolled her eyes - "shame we have to haul your baby brother around" - he remembers juiceboxes, not beer, in the cupholders in the front seat, but when he tries to picture her face he sees Molly Ringwald, smiling wanly when he protested that it was 'little brother', not 'baby brother'.

He doesn't remember her much. He just remembers that they identified her body by her dental records.

Punchy staggers over to the watering hole and kneels down on the bank, getting mud smeared into his knees. The earth around the little oasis is dry and scaley, like a mosaic. The water hole is getting smaller, and the ring of dark sand indicates how quickly - it's receded about a foot and a half today at least, not counting what must have dried up already from the morning. There's no natural explanation for this; it's obviously Game Maker work.

For a moment, just a moment, Punchy rests, slowly cupping water in his hands and running it over his burned, blistered face. Drops catch in the stubble on his chin that hasn't turned into a beard yet, either because he's incapable of really growing one naturally or because his Stylist decided that the five o'clock shadow was the most attractive look for him. A coyote on the other side of the watering hole looks at him, but doesn't approach.

He starts to fill his empty water container.

Comments

Sorry about the wait!

[shambler]

R's still trying to find his way back to Wyatt's camp. His sense of direction's about as fried as his skin - at some point he gave up anything fancy like tracking landmarks and guessing and falls back on what's the path of least resistance mentally. Shuffle forward until he bumps into something. Work from there. Turn his brain off, although half the time it's less of a conscious choice. Just happens, really.

It's somehow found the watering hole, the very one he'd wanted to tell Wyatt and Max where it was like he was a team-player. R stands there now, slightly annoyed, a a tiny little bump in that flatline in his head. After a moment he registers the sound of splashing, R turning and he's not the only one here. Another Tribute, this one young enough that he's wearing a five o'clock shadow like it's a novelty. Face looks like it's not much better off than his, going this bright red like it's been scrubbed raw. R would wince if he had the muscle control for it.

Instead he decides to wing it. He's not hungry, which means he thinks it's safe to have a conversation and he'd kill for one that isn't with Max asking these curt, guarded questions or the awkward silences with Wyatt. New territory. He'd say he can do this, except he's not sure and he's definitely had his better days looking almost-human. R staggers over, standing there swaying behind the Tribute before he gets the brilliant idea to clear his throat. Oldie, but goodie?

It croaks out.

"Hhgg...Hi," R goes for maximum word efficiency. Nothing fancy today.

Re: Sorry about the wait!

[nunpunching]

Punchy looks up, figuring that the coyote that was eyeballing him has probably decided to take a drink - and doesn't that sound appealing, just leaning over the water like a dog and scooping up the life-giving liquid with a sloppy shovel-tongue - only to realize that it's a person, someone who's been moving over the dune quietly and slowly enough not to catch his eye. Punchy feels his cheeks burn a little, but it doesn't show under the pink the sun's given him, nor under the cast of purple from the fading light; he should really be paying more attention. Vigilance is something Punchy's used to in eight-hour spurts, not as a way of life.

"Yo." Punchy's eyebrows press together above the bridge of his nose as he looks at the guy. The groaning can be explained as exhaustion (ain't no one a Chatty Cathy in this weather), and god knows that no one's been coming up looking like a model lately. Those Beyonce music videos of her shaking her thang in the desert, all moist lips and poreless skin? Punchy can now firmly say that they're bullshit. People are dying out here looking not like they stepped out of a tanning salon, but like posters for "this is your skin on drugs". Punchy's burned up to his damn eyeballs.

But even still, something's a little more off about this guy, about the slow shuffle that seems petrified rather than just exhausted. It takes Punchy a moment to place it - the guy's dead. Like Dead Kid Fred, only a little less rotten-green (although potentially just as rotten). Punchy feels a sensation in his chest like he's just gone down the drop on a roller coaster, and through the haze of fatigue he recognizes that it's empathy.

No, not empathy. Pity.

"You die here or you die somewhere else, homie?" Punchy says that nice and casual, not trying to be rude - god knows the dead can be hypersensitive about the littlest things - but he has to know. If the corpses being left out here to rot are getting up and wandering around, it might be something to keep in mind, even if they don't move very fast. Sleeping people don't move much faster than zombies.

[shambler]

R stares at the human, gaping because he knows and he was...cool with it? Casual? It's almost like asking him what his favorite color R (R isn't sure, but he's learning toward a tie between blue and gold) and what his favorite song is ("Strangers in the Night", hands down).

It's kinda nice, actually.

"Back...home. River?" R says with a startled gasp. He immediately shoves his foot in his mouth by being totally awkward and blurting his name since he really, really wants to be on a name basis with someone like this. "R. Name? You?"

In his hurry he sounds like a rotting caveman, R tottering toward the human and hoping he didn't come across as too eager. He probably did. In his experience, most people don't get this far in first impressions; it's worth grabbing at a chance like this no matter how much he'll trip over his own words and useless lungs. R staggers to a stop at what he assumes is a respectable, human-safe distance away. The sunburn's even worse up close, R thinking he'd like to wince if only he could. It's pretty...pretty something. If it wasn't for that smell and the voice, he could've mistaken him for a fresh zombie. One that took a Molotov cocktail to the face. Or two. Make that two Molotov cocktails.

[nunpunching]

Punchy can't tell if R's expression is a gape or is a glare or what; the guy's skin looks like an old cheap purse that was never really skin-colored to begin with. At least the lack of blood vessels seems to have spared R burning in the sun, but Punchy finds he prefers being bloody and tomato-colored to being covered in what appears to be pleather.

He stays where he is, not even tensing as R comes close. The guy doesn't look like he means him any harm, even if most of humanity's first instinct when faced with the walking dead is "oh my god what the fuck is that I'm getting out of Dodge". Punchy's either immune or oblivious to the baser impulses of normal people, and in this case it's the latter, because the idea of flinching away or running doesn't even cross his mind.

"Punchy." If he were in his normal threads, he's gesture to the name splashed across his chest in cursive font, but he's got just the plain black of his Zorro costume here. He drops his unoccupied hand to his belt and loops his thumb there. The desert has parched his hands full of little pink lines, like the cracks in the ground around the watering hole. "R?"

He waits for an indication that he heard that name right before continuing. "You one of us Tributes or one of the muttations, dawg? Just checking, not harshing on your looks or nothing."

[shambler]

It's probably not the first time R's been mistaken for one of the things here. Won't be the last. He knows he won't ever be breathing again, but he'd rather be lumped in with that "us" if he has a choice. R's chin wobbles up from his chest, those faded-out eyes fixing in Punchy's general direction as he nods.

"Us," R's groan sounds this side of approving. He likes the sound of us. Nice, short, friendly. "Lost. Trying to find...others. Friends...?"

He's not sure if he should be calling Wyatt and Maximus friends or not: R infected one's buddy and the other one murdered his. No idea what bad blood there is (was) between Wyatt and Aunamee, but he's sure it wasn't worth killing over. Anyway, it's nice to be able to groan a conversation here without feeling tension weighing heavy and invisible in the air, so noticeable even a zombie can feel it. Punchy's fresh blood. Feels it. Even smells it. He's not shying away, just standing there relaxed like the worst thing to happen to him today is a massive sunburn and not a zombie on his doorstep. Too bad he can't see his face, not without getting inches apart.

Maybe if R goes slow. Suddenly he wants to see who Punchy is aside from a blur in burned red and black. See what he looks like. R edges one foot forward, then the other, and starts to sidle-shuffle his way closer, trying to make it so slow he'll look as non-threatening as possible.

[nunpunching]

Punchy doesn't recoil. Instead he leans in, squinting not just from the sun and the sand caught in his lashes but genuine curiosity. Punchy's always found something magnetic about the unusual, about the unknown, even after being in a superhero school made even some of the stranger things seem relatively mundane. Zombies are new, a welcome distraction from the dehydration and the baking heat of the sun.

"Sorry, last one of you corked homies I saw was all blue and shit. Ain't been out here on the sizzle for a few days." Punchy holds his hands out, as if to say hey, I mean you no harm. Now that it's established that R's one of them, one of the unlucky suckers dropped in here like anyone else, Punchy acts like he may as well be talking to an old buddy. "No shade though, dawg. We all look like we been spending a banger in the oven, yo."

He sits down - some of the scales of mud crack beneath him - and gestures R should sit with him. "You need drank, homie? To kick back a little? I can keep watch for you in case some speedster of shit comes up to shank us."

He's moving a bit fast, he figures, but this is what he's supposed to do. This is what he was born to do: protect people. Not scrounge around barely surviving, not slowly fade away from the elements. He's supposed to be American values (or whatever) incarnate.

Fake stars start to appear in the purple sky.

[shambler]

R gets close enough that the blurs start to resolve into actual features: he can pick out a nose, a mouth that's as cracked as his is; eyes. He goes for the eyes, of course. Eyes are where the soul’s at, supposedly. Whoever said that – they’re probably long-dead – is right, though. R could see the ghosts in the other zombies’ eyes. Some of them didn’t even have that much. Julie’s had this spark, a snap that crackled. R peered long and hard at Punchy’s face, trying to see who he was. He was Living: of course he had someone in there. No surprise there.

The problem was R had no clue what he was saying. Like they were words, English. He understood English. But Punchy opened his mouth and there was this – this stream of “corked homies” and “spending a banger” and R gets the concept of oven, but that’s about it.

At least the gesture to come sit still is universal. R grunts and obediently plops down: he’s lost so much weight thanks to his mummification that he doesn’t thud down like he used to. Now he sits there, hunched forward, arms limp in his lap and his hands curled into brown claws as he struggles to figure out what the hell Punchy’s saying. He needs a dictionary. Or an interpreter. Maybe both. Is there a polite way to moan for Punchy to slow down? Throw in some keynotes.

“Uggh….okay…sitting.” It’s safe to say that much. R pauses, his withered tongue flicking out to coat his lips. No saliva. It’s just like sandpaper at this point. “Think…only Dead here. Be…care…ful?”

He likes Punchy. He’s weird, he’s friendly, he’s not running in the opposite direction. Three out of three works. R already wants to hoard him to himself. If Shion’s still out there, he’ll have to find another human to teeth on.

[nunpunching]

"Nah, dawg, I don't gotta be careful when I got mad skills. I can school some motherfuckers like church up in here if I get hankered for it."

Punchy cracks his neck and flexes a bicep, which has, admittedly, lost a little bit of its formerly impressive muscle mass now that he's putting more effort into dragging water around than doing several hundred pushups a day. Manual labor, it turns out, isn't as conducive to washboard abs and arms like a gorilla as Youtube workout videos.

Having not received an answer, Punchy assumes from the look of R's shriveled-up tongue (God, no wonder it takes the guy so long to talk, he's working with what appears to be a faded pink Frito) that R meant to say "yes, yes, Punchy, I'm desperately thirsty and also you're exceedingly kind and super awesome for offering". He scoots next to R, then reaches over and cups his hands in the water, then holds the human bowl up to R's mouth, the fact that R's a zombie and probably eats hands for breakfast not even occurring to him.

Punchy's hands aren't burned at all. In fact, the pale skin on them looks like they're attached to a different person. He's been keeping them in gloves or under the hood of his puppet for the last few weeks.

[shambler]

No offense, but R really doubts Punchy's going to be schooling anyone soon. The only guarantee he has is winning the sunburn contest. R feels his face trying to form strange new shapes again, creaky at the edges, his slight smile cracking the paper-thin skin around his mouth. Funny. That's the word. He thinks Punchy's funny.

The idea of Punchy watching their backs almost makes R laugh. Something dry rattle in his chest. With an attitude like this, how did he survive this long in the Arena? Like seriously? R knows he has dumb luck on his side - plus a body that has a lot less needs overall than the other Tributes. But what's Punchy's recipe for success? He's still wondering about that when Punchy decides to close that space between them and shove water in his face. That human Life smell wafts up so close R inhales automatically. Pink, healthy skin. His mouth sags open in a gape.

He's offering him water. Doing the nice thing. Punchy has some really, really weird ideas about Dead, apparently.

The look R gives Punchy's blurry face is skeptical, a silent really?

Maybe he better drink. Be polite. He likes Punchy and doesn't want to drive him off. R slumps forward to drink from those pink, delicious looking hands swimming before his eyes. Before he realizes what he's doing, he's already lunging forward with a desperate gurgle. His teeth flash.

[nunpunching]

"Whoa!"

Punchy yanks his hands out of the way with raised-on-Nintendo too-many-hours-in-the-Danger-Room-expy reflexes. The water splashes on R's lap and the parched earth and runs down Punchy's wrist, into the dark cuffs of his sleeve.

"Yo, man, keep your grill outta my skinny, you hear?" Punchy frowns, but then shrugs. He'd be irritated but from the guy's demeanor, he doesn't seem like the type to try and sneak attack like that - maybe he's just got an impulse. Tourette's, chomping style. The Living Beartrap.

Well, Pseudo-living Beartrap.

"So." Punchy slaps his wet hands on his thighs, smearing dust into mud on his pants. There's really no way to get clean out in the desert, and to tell the truth, Punchy wouldn't say no to a spa these days. He's not even the spa sort of fellow, but the idea of a pool and a lounge chair and a little drink with a stupid paper umbrella in it sounds amazing right about now. "You don't do the food and drank thing at all? Just homies?"

[shambler]

R shrinks back into his shoulders, mortified. Couldn't even keep it under control for a few minutes, could he? Why did he have to look at hands and the first thought that crosses his mind is finger food?

"Ss...sorry. Keep...teeth to...myself," R mumbles, hanging his head.

Luckily Punchy takes it well, really well, and R slowly emerges from his hunch as Punchy continues to sit there and talk and do the complete opposite of the sane reaction to almost getting his fingers chomped off. He's doing this. Hanging out with the zombie. Having a conversation and, if R didn't know better, trying to send out feelers for his - his preferences, like he just automatically assumed he had some like any old person. What kind of Tribute is this guy?

"No. No...urges. They don't...fill," R says, hoping he can stop Punchy before he decides to shove new things to eat or drink and see if any of those magically change things. R sits there in the mud, listing slightly over to the side and dangerously close to leaning into Punchy's shoulder. "You...keep...it."

[nunpunching]

"That's right," Punchy says, although there's no ire to his little scolding. He sounds more like he's talking to a kid, showing them to wash their hands before they leave the restroom. Like it's just something R has to learn, you know. Left hand is the one that makes the L. Always look both ways before crossing the street. Keep your teeth to yourself.

Punchy shrugs and practically slathers water on his chin as he drinks more. Some part of him says not to waste it, but there's really nothing he can do to protect the water from the sun. That's how he thinks of it, naturally - protection. And futility. They go hand in hand these days.

"So, fingers. They the only shizz that fills you up, Ice?" It's small talk, but Punchy figures that most people don't exactly go out of their way to chat up the dead guys. He remembers Fred back in the Seminary, sitting in the lunch room alone, rebuffing him, sometimes - he was more eloquent than R, more capable of a solid diss that needled at Punchy's squishy, leaky pride - and he remembers thinking, that boy needs homies.

He remembers wishing he knew the way to go about being said homie, and falling short, left only as a stalker on some Livejournal clone predicting the worst.

[shambler]

Ice?

"Rrr," he insists, dragging out his groan in case this human needs his name spelled out again. R's a corpse but even he doesn't think Ice sounds anything like Rrr. Satisfied he's fixed their communication problem - okay, make that one of their communication problems - R uses the pause to think of what he wants to say next.

It comes fairly fast. He sucks in a rattling breath that wheezes out of his lungs.

“Other…parts,” he mumbles, not sure he likes talking this frankly about his new diet. Brains beats fingers any day of the week. Trust me. It’s times like this R’s almost, not quite, thankful he’s stuck with a stumbling, groaning speech impediment. Gives him an excuse to not say the first thing on his mind. Besides, half of it will get lost in translation from his brain to his mouth anyway.

Time to change the subject. R turns his half-blinded face toward Punchy. He did have tasty looking fingers, though. At this point R would’ve even wasted his time on fingers, the hunger churning all over as if he could ever forget it’s there.

"What...about you? Food?" Favorites? R meant to ask what Punchy's favorites are, but he can't manage a three-syllable word right now, too distracted watching the human splashing water all over himself like it's going out of style.

[nunpunching]

"Well, yeah, not just fingers, I figures hands aren't your aces up. Ain't no one bustin' their balls for a hand when they've got a wide-on for the long pig, am I right, homie?" He holds his hand up as if for a high-five, clearly not keeping his own hands to himself even if he's making the same regards of R's teeth. "And I'mma call you Ice, unless you got some kind of mad grief with nicks, 'kay?"

He flops back, cradling the back of his head in his arms and stretching until the edge of his black tight shirt reveals a pale strip of skin on his abdomen, on those abs he's spent truly heinous amounts of time on.

"I'm all about ridin' a sucrose high, mofo. Gummi worms, Red Bull. Taurine." His eyelashes flutter. Looking at the sky hurts; the sun is so bright in this Arena that even in twilight the reflectivity makes him squint. He makes a little groan sound and rubs a hand over his stomach. "Been getting pretty keen on coyote and shit here, though."

[shambler]

R's so distracted trying to figure out what Punchy's saying that he totally misses the cue for a high five, staring at it mutely. It only clicks after the fact that it's the same one Howard shot him and by then it's too late. Punchy's already taken his hand back. Damn.

(He's not a fan of Ice. It makes him almost miss Howard's Rob).

"Not...much here." R remembers Gummi Worms but not Red Bull. And he has no clue what Taurine is. Pretty sure none of those are here. Coyotes and rattlers and rabbits with death screams, sure. "Hun...gry?'

R shifts to see that the Punchy-shaped blob is lying down. Is that what they're doing? Should he be lying down too? If it gets as cold as it's been the past couple of nights, he'd had to worry about all his joints locking into place. If he lies down, he might not be able to get back up again until the sun baked him. R remains slouched near Punchy, trying not to (obviously) sneak peeks at him over his knees.

[nunpunching]

Punchy pats his stomach and smooths the top down over his abs. "Dawg, if you know a joint we could pop in for some fine carbin', I'm all ears. Acing up desert wildlife ain't as beasting as it sounds."

Better than the sugarland he died in, he guesses. The one he sees on the screen. As much as Punchy's a junk food addict, even he knows a bad idea when he sees it. He may usually live off of a solitary vegetable per month, but the Capitol has managed to top even that.

"Barring that, I could take a serious dirt nap, fo' shizz. Bet Tim wouldn't mind if I caught some Z's. You up to keeping an eye out for me, Ice?"

Punchy doesn't actually plan on sleeping, at least, not for a bit. He wants to see how R reacts without making R feel as if he's being interrogated. They got a good thing going on right now, and there's no need to throw useless paranoia around.

[shambler]

Carbin and beasting and fo' shizz and R's stuck wondering if his grasp of English is rotted here and there. He doesn't think it is, although to be totally honest, it's not like he had a lot of people to double-check before all of this. The lost look he fixes in Punchy's direction has nothing to do with him being a walking corpse.

He thinks he's asking about food. R shrugs helplessly. Don't look at him - he's got nothing. R slouches to sit facing forward, staring at nothing in particular with his mouth sagging open as he thinks. A few gnats check him out, get bored, and then start making a beeline for Punchy.

"Keep...g-guard for...you?" R isn't sure he heard that right. "Could try...but..."

Trailing off, he resists the urge to swing his head to look at Punchy pointedly - at all that fleshy pink goodness that's teasing the hunger. After the near miss with the fingers, does Punchy really want to test his luck?

[nunpunching]

"You think I'm worried you're gonna lay me out, brother? No offense, dawg, but you move like sludgin' and can cap your ass in twenty seconds if I want, even sleepwalking."

He doesn't look like he could right now, all sprawled out as if he were post-bender on the beach, but he's still got quick reflexes and, more importantly, one eye open. Little grains of sand are caught in the orange lashes.

Punchy kicks up one foot, loops it over his knee, leaving his legs making lazy triangles to frame the water.

"We don't gotta talk, you need. I just like...company, I guess." He shrugs and laces his hands over his stomach.