The Luckiest Girl In The World

Making their way through the city looked ridiculous, but still beat trying to fight their way past all the exes clamoring at the gate. St. George was flying, carrying Eliot in a makeshift sling. Max clung to his back, bitching about how stupid they probably looked and pointedly ignoring any and all questions about the possibility of levitation. Dante was using some complicated series of jumps and a grappling hook...chain...thing. Max had been fascinated by it from the moment Dante had pulled it out and St. George was doing his best not to wonder where it had been hiding and why it sometimes changed color.

And, a goodly distance behind then fluttered a small, unobtrusive bird that just happened to be flying in the same direction.

As stupid as they all looked - and, in fairness, it was a little stupid - they were making decent time through the city, searching for Josh to hopefully find him and convince him to return to the Mount before Cairax finished worming his way inside the former hero and the possession was complete.

Many of those exes from the gate staggered after them, like paupers to a banquet, their arms raised in a futile attempt to grab and snatch at the heroes passing overhead. They crowd only grew as they flew back and forth across the neighborhood. Some fell behind, but there were always more to join the chase. By the time true dawn broke, there were sixty or seventy exes trailing behind them in a loose fan. They shuffled between cars, dragging against the sides, and added that scraping noise to the sound of their clicking teeth.

They'd been out for well over an hour, but still no sign of Josh.

( This is it! )

False dawn stained the sky as the Fandom contingent woke up and started getting ready. Today was the day of reckoning; the final battle against Cairax and then home, leaving this place behind them for good. Everyone was quiet as they readied themselves, tired, perhaps, or deep in thought. It was going to be a long, grueling day and a general feeling of unease hung over the entire Mount, like a dark fog had settled over the whole area.

The only person who hadn't gotten up with the rest was Kathy; her closet door had remained firmly shut as everyone else got dressed and ate a little if they could. She'd been quiet the night before, still angry over the decision to stay and fight maybe, or unsettled by the run-in with Christian's people. Either way, she'd retreated to her closet as soon as they'd returned, closing the doors firmly behind her in an unspoken command to leave her alone.

Which was all well and good then, but today they needed to get ready and no amount of brooding or hurt feelings would stand in the way of that. So when everyone was just about to leave, it was Eliot who went and tapped on the closet door to have her come out. And it was Eliot, a few minutes of silence later, who opened the door and discovered that Kathy was gone.

Again.

[And so begins the last day! Everyone modded with gracious permission from my team of rockstars. Previous post]

Max had waited until all of Kathy's friends had been tracked down and brought to the war council chamber. His nominal reason was because he figured they'd have a vested interest in knowing the timetable had moved up a lot, since they were the ones with a way out. Kathy was pretty sure that both he and Stealth were coming up with ways to convince the Fandom contingent to stay and help out.

Kathy wasn't sure how either of them hoped to pull that off. Neither Stealth nor Max had made a great impression the last time they'd dealt with anyone in Fandom.

Once everyone had been fetched and gathered, Max stood up again to explain why their situation had grown so much more dire with Josh's escape. For once, he didn't seem to be putting on a show for those benighted souls less educated in the ways of sorcery than he was; he seemed geuinely concerned about them understanding what was going on. Honestly, that worried Kathy a lot more than even the things he was saying. Max Hale hadn't done solemn even in the midst of the zombie outbreak. For him to do it now was chilling.

( What do you do with a problem like a Cairax )

[Many thanks to all my beloved preplayers! NFI, NFB. Adapted and improved from Chapter Twenty-Three of Ex-Communication by Peter Clines. Previous post, Next post]

With Freedom in charge of the Mount's police force - such as it was - he took it upon himself to patrol the inside of the Wall several times a day. Now that basic survival was no longer an issue and the population of the Mount so so large that it was impossible to recognize every person within the walls, petty crime was on the rise. It had increased over ten percent in the past few months alone.

He looked down at the kids in from of him. Two boys and a girl, barely in their teens. All three of them sat on the curb with their hands zip-tied together behind their backs. They'd been trying to steal a car for a quick joyride when he'd found them. They'd been cowed by his appearance and surrendered without a fuss. He was in the process of giving them a stern lecture when he heard a faint noise over the echo of teeth. He'd heard it before, in Afghanistan. A series of sharp pops echoing back and forth between the buildings. ( The sound of gunfire in a quiet city. There was nothing quite like it. )

[Preplayed with with magnificent tigerundercover/vdistinctive and adapted from Chapter Twenty of Ex-Communication by Peter Clines. NFI, NFB, you know the drill. Previous post Next post]

Kathy was pacing again. She couldn't help it. She knew it was frustrating Max to no end, but she was finding it real hard to work up a single fuck about that. She was trapped here, in her worst nightmare come to fucking life, and it was all his fault. If he couldn't handle a little pacing, that was on him.

Okay, it was also bugging Nick, too. She could see the little twitch around his eye with every step of her shoes on the tile--especially since she was making sure to clack them firmly as part of her 'Fuck You Max Hale' plan. She felt a little bad about Nick's annoyance, but hey, it wasn't like she asked him to hover. After news had spread about Tori's death earlier in the evening, he hadn't let her alone. He'd appointed himself her guardian angel, so he was just going to have to deal with a little pacing.

Or a lot of pacing.

The clacking of her shoes was a lot better than the clacking of the teeth outside. Now there was a noise that could drive someone mad. Kathy knew; she could hear the chattering of teeth all night long. Earplugs and loud music didn't help; that just meant that if anything happened, she wouldn't be able to hear it. If Legion were smart, he'd send out just a few exes late at night with ladders to climb over. Not a lot, not a loud invasion, but a few. Just enough to sneak past sleepy guards. Just enough to bite and raise an army inside here. Kathy wasn't going to give him the chance to get smart and sneak up on her, oh no. Even if it meant not sleeping at night because of the constant clack clack clacking by her chamber wall.

Clack clack clack. Fifteen steps from one wall of this room to the other. Clack clack clack Fifteen steps back. Clack clack clack. Fifteen steps to the far wall again.

Kathy was aware she might be going a little crazy. That was fine, so long as she took people with her.

( Some surprises on all sides )


Later, Kathy would only remember the rest of the night in snapshots. Nick would catch her eyes and she'd stare back, helpless and unmoving, until he broke eye contact again. And then she would pass out immediately into a dark and dreamless sleep. She woke up several times as they sped across the rooftops of LA, Nick thrilled to be Gorgon once more, up however many tiers he could get from her. She was like cocaine, he told her once; a hit from her was the best and purest high he could imagine, shooting him up so many tiers it was hard to keep count. She put the 'speed' in 'speedball,' apparently. He needed three more hits from her to cross the distance between the Mount and his old apartment and she crashed out after each one. She didn't wake up from the fourth time he drained her until they were in his apartment, waking up in his dusty bed to the sound of him crashing to the floor, his legs giving out at the same time as the energy from his last hit wore away. She must have caught his eyes again, because the next thing she knew, the sky was lightening to the east and they were running again, his dead cellphone tucked away in the harness with her, both strapped tightly to his back.

But the run home wasn't as fun and carefree as the trip there. At some point, Max's spell must have run out because they weren't just running, they were fleeing, being chased by exes that were ringed with blue flame, mouths open wide to show rows of shark-like teeth and claws made only to rend and tear. And Nick was slowing, dropping from tier to tier and Cairax's exes gained ground. One time, one of them got close enough that she could feel the heat of the fire on her cheek, smell the scent of rot that rose from it before it missed a jump and plummeted between buildings. "Last time, baby," Nick said, turning around to drain her one more time. And as the world floated away again, Kathy realized she was glad that she was going under again, that if Nick slipped or tripped or just didn't go fast enough, she'd be unconscious when Cairax got his talons on them.

She woke in the Mount, curled up on the box spring in her apartment - her first night in the Mount, she'd put the mattress on the floor in front of the door as an easy barricade - Nick's phone plugged into a charger and attached to the wall. Bleary-eyed but smiling for the first time since she'd gotten to Los Angeles, Kathy opened up Nick's contacts to see who on the island she could call.

[NFI, NFB, all the love to OOC. Previous Post. Next Posts here and here.]

Kathy didn't know why she was here. It was a question she couldn't answer for herself, never mind anyone else who might ask. But no matter how many times she tried to end up somewhere else, her feet had brought her here, right in front of the West Gate. Something about the conversation with Todd yesterday and the hungry look in the eyes of all those people, clustered outside the office. She'd sworn up and down that she didn't have the ability to talk to exes, but was she actually sure?

Wait a minute. Of course she was. This was stupid.

Once more, Kathy turned away, heading back towards town proper. Except then she thought about Todd's genuine grief and, once more, she found herself spinning back around and heading towards the gate again.

Fuck, she hated this place. It was turning her inside out over bullshit. But - fine. She'd go, she'd try to talk to a fucking zombie, she'd prove to herself for the last time that she didn't have any non-bouncy powers, and then she'd go back to her place and try to catnap for a few hours.

West Gate was on Vine and directly across from it was the guard station. She knocked, ducking her head inside to make sure if wouldn't interfere with the people patrolling the Wall if she just kind of...hung out there for awhile. The guy in camo - probably another Unbreakable, judging from his sheer size - seemed pretty unfazed by the question. A lot of people came to the gates, she realized, probably looking for familiar faces; the After Death folks especially. He pointed to a bright line painted on the ground in front of the gate, telling her to stay at least a yard behind it. So long as she did that, none of the exes would be able to touch her.

Giving him an appreciative nod, Kathy went out to the designated location and just stared through the bars for a moment. These were spaced a lot wider than the bars that made up the East Wall, wide enough that she was able to get a full view of the street beyond it. She'd...pretty much been avoiding doing that very thing since she arrived and yet, here she was now, doing that exact thing.

( Fuck, this was stupid. )

[Adapted from Chapter 18 of Ex-Communication, by Peter Clines. NFI, NFB, OOC is nice to get. Previous Post Next Post]

A week. She'd been here a week already. And as much as Kathy wanted to sit in her room all day and sulk at the unfairness of the universe for sticking her here, she was really, really bad and doing nothing. Just ask Raven! Or Dante! Or Anders! You know, if they were here. She was especially bad at doing nothing when just outside her window were several hundred exes all chattering their teeth at the guards on the walls above them.

So, as an accredited EMT in a place where trained medical professionals were few and far between, Kathy had volunteered to work in the clinic for a few hours every day, in part to spell Dr. Connolly and give the poor woman a break, and part to keep herself busy so she didn't run screaming mad watching every minute tick by that she was stuck here.

Boredom mixed very oddly with hypervigilance.

Today, though, even this place was slow. With regular scavenging runs currently on break due to demonic activity in the neighborhood, fewer people were getting hurt. The last patient--Deborah Jenkins, 33, sliced her arm on a rusted railing--had been discharged this morning. Kathy had remade the bed, cleaned up the patient area, taken stock of equipment and supplies, folded bandages, thrown a load of sheets in the washing machine...and now was stationed behind the desk reading the treatment of thrush, an outcropping of oral yeast. Not really her thing, but it was that or Connolly's notes on the ex-virus, and of the two...

( Yeah. Oral yeast outcroppings it was. )

[Adapted and mangled from Chapter 16 of Ex-Communication by Peter Clines and, oops, I made myself sad with this one. NFI, NFB, OOC is great though. Previous Post Next Post]

Kathy stood under the Paramount Pictures arch, which at one point, had been the main gate separating the Mount from the rest of Los Angeles and the millions of dead that had been walking in it. She remembered it clearly, even though she wished she didn't. Her last memories of the gates had been fighting in front of them. She'd fought Gorgon there as one of Rodney's controlled puppets. And she'd fought Eliot there, trying to eat him while he'd tried to bring her home. In the end, he'd had to break her neck to get her to stop.

She wondered if that snap still echoed in his dreams the way it echoed in hers.

Not that she had slept much in the past few days.

( Just another day in ex-LA )

[Heavily adapted from Chapter Two of Ex-Communication by Peter Clines because chronology isn't the boss of me! NFI, NFB, OOC is love. Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV and then onto Part VI.]

The body of Hiram Jarvis stretched out on the hospital bed, handcuffed to the railings. Restraints ran across its chest and legs. A bright red foam brace, the kind used for neck injuries, held its head down. The corpse had started moving three hours after Jarvis died. It had been moving a lot more in the five or six hours since then.

( This is all very normal )
***
On the bed, the corpse pale skin was taking on the soft colors of life. The veins faded behind the flesh tones. The ex - the man - let out a slow sigh, waking up from his faint. Sweat glistened across his forehead. "Jesus, that hurt," he said. "I had no idea it was going to hurt so much." He opened his eyes and Color leaked back into the irises, like an old Polaroid photo where an image formed out of a haze. Max looked at all of them, pride written all over his features. "Now who wants to talk about whether or not I'm a real sorcerer," he announced, only to realize that nobody was looking back at him. "Hey," he said, rattling the handcuffs on the bed. "Did y'all just miss my amazing impression of Jesus? Because I'm pretty sure that was impressive. You should all be very impressed right now."

*Uhhh, Max?* Zzzap said, his buzzing static voice managing to sounding uneasy. *Was your resurrection meant to come with any unintended side effects?*

"Well, I mean, we talked about--" He tried to shift in the bed to get a better look at what everyone was staring at. "You did the symbols all done, right? I mean, I'm assuming yes, or we wouldn't all be here."

"That's the problem," Danielle said and shifted so Max could see past her. "We're not all supposed to be here."

In the center of the cluster of superheroes, Kathy Li - known to most of them as Banzai - was sprawled on the floor. She stared back at them in horror for a long moment, making eye contact with each one as if verifying that, yes, they were who she thought. And then she scrambled to her feet and bolted out the hospital room door.

[And now starting the ACTUAL canon catchup! Taken (and adapted, and twisted to all to hell) from Chapter Thirteen Ex-Communication by Peter Clines. NFI, NFB, OOC is love]