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[Magus]

It was too damn cold to think. It's funny how the human brain operates. If a person experiences something that is so completely unfamiliar in the most primitive sense, something that can't even be remotely attributed to any known schema, then the brain just doesn't translate that stimuli. The same thing happened when the Spanish conquistadors were sailing to the Americas. The Spanish galleons were clearly visible on seaborne horizon, yet the natives didn't even notice. The first person to actually perceive them was the shaman. The same thing was happening to us: Jacob, Solomon, Erin, and I.

The thing hovering before us was something so indescribable that, once an escape route had been found, my mind completely shut it out. It hurt, too. Damn did it hurt. I felt psychic daggers ripping from behind my eyes all the way to the back of my neck, tearing out any last mental drop of memory of the thing. The abomination, which had previously appeared as a glistening black, six foot long undulating worm with tendrils hanging down from its torso and a line of functioning human heads, now appeared to me as nothing but a imperceivable blur in my vision. The blur, which wouldn't come into focus no matter how hard I tried, radiated a visual aura of cold that permeated the dank, white locker Erin and I had happened to stumble into.

What had been a simple, covert trip to Wal-Mart to pick up some much needed supplies had turned into a not-so-delightful romp through Hell. Earlier that day, Erin had told me, in confidence, that the supplies (aka, food. I like to call them "supplies" to sound more professional) were running drastically low. Even the old canned stuff that no one really wanted to touch was beginning to dwindle, thanks to the abilities conferred by "Johnny," a neurotic nine year old who we found drowning in my pool about a week before. The kid has the ability to absorb and integrate any technological device into his biology, and then reproduce the powers of that technology. We use him as a microwave, mostly.

So, with the knowledge of our impending starvation, Erin and I set out for Wal-Mart, against all of our better judgment. We had been staying in my house in a semi-rural part of Pflugerville with the survivors of the Rapture event: Erin, who was a friend from church; Derek, my brother; Devon, his girlfriend; and Trey, Derek's former friend and the guy who Devon was cheating on him with; Johnny; and myself. Food doesn't go very far with five scared, hungry teenagers munching on it. Erin, who has the ability to phase through matter, and I, who can manipulate the winds and fly, set off to pick up food at Wal-Mart. Simple enough, right?

Wrong. Which was really rather ironic, seeing as I've seen so many horror movies. I should have planned for something like this to happen. Well, I did--I brought my katana, but that shattered after the damned ice-thing farted on it. Anyway, when we arrived at Wal-Mart, Erin found a way inside for me, but within the first five minutes of being there, a horde of the soulless remnants of the Rapture had appeared. The Rapture--that's what we've been calling it--was the beginning of the end. It all started when the moon turned black and the stars shown with a prismatic radiance, shining down to the Earth rays burning with colors beyond the scale of perception. The whole world gazed upon the aligned stars that night and then, in the morning, they were gone. Well, not completely. About two-thirds of the world's population had fallen into a non-responsive coma-like state at exactly the same time that night.

The Rapture hit the world at random, it seemed. The survivors were made up of all sorts, from big-wig CEOs, to Swedish melodic death metal vocalists, to Bible-thumping evangelicals, to your ordinary Joe the Plumber. The fundamentalists had been wrong: the Rapture had not taken the righteous believers to Heaven, or, at least God didn't take them all. Instead, He took the believer and unbeliever with no discernible pattern. A day or so after the Rapture, the coma-bound awoke, but they were different. Their personalities were gone. They were soulless creatures bent on spreading chaos and disarray in whatever form they found appealing to them. The "zombies," as we like to refer to them, come in all shapes, sizes, and sins. You've got your shambling, nearly robotic zombies alongside your bloodthirsty athletic ghouls as well as your lily white-skinned succubi. There is no pattern to their behavior, aside from being wholly inhuman. You can see it in their eyes. They're black. Completely and utterly black. It is as though the void of their pupils expanded to cover their entire eye, which seems a mirror to the void-moon hanging in the skies that fateful night.

The soulless took over what was left of the world in no time at all. It was like your stereotypical zombie B-movie, but on acid. The authorities were still frantically trying to recover from the massive damage caused by the Rapture when, all of the sudden, the coma patients just started attacking. Reporters were torn limb from bloody limb on the air before the news, as a whole, went offline. The things took over the towns first, devouring all that was in sight. They didn't just eat their prey, either. They desecrated them. On my way to get Erin, I had to drive through Pflugerville, and the zombies there had nearly tore the doors off my car. I saw a man frantically run in front of my car just to have his head literally torn off my those pale, twisted hands. Then, without thinking, the zombie threw the man's head at my passenger-side window, cracking it. The black-eyed abomination let out a gleeful howl then chased after me. There are countless other stories about the things, but all of us try to ignore them. We try to live on our own, away from their black eyes, and that's why we went to Wal-Mart.

In Wal-Mart, there had been a dozen or so zombies that had been locked inside since the Rapture. They quickly found Erin and I, so we had to take refuge in the walk-in refrigerator in the back. Interestingly enough, that's where we found Jacob and Solomon, two friends of mine. But, that's also where we found the insane man who sold what was left of his soul for a icy, floating abomination to keep the carcass of his undead wife fresh until a cure was found. Yeah, right. The man had tried taking our collective heads off with a cleaver, but, ironically enough, the floating, alien thing twisted off his own head and absorbed it into its abysmal body.

Then my brain died.

OOC: The last line was in reference to my character's defense mechanisms kicking in, but I also think this is well enough for a first post. This is mainly a recap for Jon, and the next post will actually cover more of the story. Hopefully it isn't too jumbled and incomprehensible. If you've got any questions, Jon, I'll try answering them in the next few posts. Hopefully this wasn't a terrible post. My skills are a bit rusty.

[Magus]

OOC: I apologize beforehand if this post seems too rushed.

IC: My cheek and arms burned with red-hot pain, the type of pain that comes only from a superficially deep flesh-wound. A tear of pain formed in my eye, grew to its full weight, fell down my cheek, then froze solid before falling to the white ground below. The abyssal thing was radiating out an aura of frigid cold that was enveloping the room at an exponential rate. We had to get out, and fast.

"It's time to go." I shouted at the newly freed Jacob and Solomon, who had gotten as far away from the monster as they could. They were smart like that. I turned away from the demonic blur in my vision, then grabbed Erin by the wrist and made a mad-dash for the steel door. As the four of us made for the door, the room around us slowly froze over, the pristine, neon-white walls quickly froze over with a layer of sparkling sapphire frost. The frost moved with our every footstep, yet the floating demon stayed in place, its many, vaguely-human heads clicking their teeth together. I dragged Erin along as Jacob and Solomon led the way to the steel door. I stepped on a chunk of what I thought was ice and nearly lost my step, but Erin skillfully shifted her weight to support me. What a sweet girl she was. We looked back to see that we had tromped through a field of the frozen, shattered pieces of the insane man's corpse.

"Bubbles..." The single word ululated out from the floating abomination in a vaguely human voice, but there was a distinctly inhuman distortion to it. The heads were speaking in unison but with a thousand different voices that clashed with each other, creating a cacophany of hellish dissonance echoing off the frozen walls of the locker. I looked back to see the blur come into relative focus; its main head, the twisted, mangled former head of the insane man that tried to take an axe to our brains, opened far wider than any human head should. The sinews holding its jaw together snapped and popped as its mouth widened. It made a gurgling sort of sound, then a shimmering, vaguely blue sphere floated out of its mouth and through the air.

"Bubbles!" The thing howled as the blue sphere floated majestically through the air then made contact with the wall. The bubble popped and a sub-zero explosion of inverted fire froze the already frozen wall, shattering a massive hole in it. "BUBBLES BUBBLES BUBBLES BUBBLES BUBBLES BUBBLES!!!!" The creatures myriad heads howled in dissonant, insane glee as a dozens of the blue bubbles were vomited out towards us, the thing continually grunting, gurgling, and cackling all the while.

"It's really time to go, guys." I shouted, my voice cracking at the sight of my imminent, chilly death. Solomon got the door open and we all forced our way out. I slammed the door behind me, but as I tried to move my hands, the steel had gotten so cold that I tore the skin from my hands. A splatter of dark blood coated the door, then immediately froze over as I cursed. Loud. I lurched over, trying to put pressure on my palms, but it only made the pain more intense. I sobered up to the pain fairly quickly once I saw the dozens of zombies staring at us, their black eyes bright with the intent to kill, and tear, and rend, and feast.

OOC: I've got to cut this short for now. I promise I'll get to the more interactive part soon, and it'll totally be worth it. I promise. If nothing but for the laugh alone.

[Magus]

A low growl vibrated up from the mass of undead slowly circling around us. To the left and right of us gathered a group of pale, black-eyed children, the same children that had tried to tear Erin to shreds when she and I had first arrived. The zombie kids crawled and shambled into the pale light leaking in through the windows. Bald, nude, bestial looking undead leapt up onto the fallen ails and beared their bloodied, rotten teeth. Behind the horde of the dead sat the slothful, bloated corpse-people whos' inverted souls drove them to the sin of gluttony. There were two massive, slug-like undead with rolls upon rolls of never ending yellowing blubber. Festering sores had formed on their backs and where their rolls rubbed together, tearing their flesh off. They lazily cast their black eyes on us then, together, opened their gaping, razor-lined maws and howled and shrieked and roared.

The horde rose, then, in wild, chaotic unison, roared forward. And, with all the black, inverted glory of the Nameless One beyond the Veil, they shrieked and slashed through the air with their withered claws of hands, their black eyes set on our flesh and what lie underneath.

"We aren't going to die here." I growled and instinctively went for my sheathed katana. My hand felt the empty scabbard and I quickly remembered that my favorite blade had shattered not minutes earlier. I roared a curse as the bounding hordes got inches closer.

Then the winds returned.

OOC: Fight post! Erin and Jacob, feel free to go nuts and kill as many zombies as you want before I post again. I figure you're probably wanting to post too, seeing as it is an RP after all.

[Ameryn]

There was no way I could act normal after seeing that thing engulf the half insane man. I wasn't rational, I wasn't scared, but I was angry. I was angry that my world could turn into this nightmare. I was angry that no matter what we did or where any of us went, we were surrounded by grotesque creatures that would eat us. I was angry that most of the people I knew were either dead or killing others, and I was angry that my life would never be the same. Sure, I was only thinking of myself at the time, but it ended up coming in handy.

I looked at the nearest zombie-child, groping it's way toward me. I looked it straight in it's black, unseeing and said, "You are not taking any more away from me!" Full of emotion and determination, using my power was not difficult. My fist fazed right through the horrid creature, then went back to normal while inside the monstrosity's head, leaving a gaping hole where it's brain had been, black goop gushing forth and falling out on the floor. It was disgusting. I don't know who was screaming, me, or the thing I had just murdered, all I knew was doing that hurt, and badly. I knew I had bits and pieces of the monsters flesh embedded into mine, but I didn't care. I was too angry to care, and the pain made me focus. The thing collapsed on the floor, twitching violently but no longer a threat. Another zombie, in a moment of hunger and insanity, went after the fallen one, tearing into it's flesh, looking for some kind of nourishment. I knew that he was done-for.

A moment of euphoria. I had found a system, a way to combat these things. A way to take some revenge out on whatever had caused my world to turn not only upside-down, but inside out. Again, I looked at the next black-eyed zombie, and took aim. Nothing could stop me now.

[Arcuna]

((Look, look! I'm posting! Thank all that is holy; I'm POSTING!)

It never ends.

That statement applies to almost anything, really, as everything is dictated by Murphy's Law. Everything that can go wrong will, without hesitation. In this case, it was the endless chaos that, by definition, came with encountering beings both from within the grave and from beyond it. Even though we were rapidly freezing to death in a meat locker only seconds ago, it already felt like an eternity had passed since then, because the threat inside the main area of the store was also unimaginably immense.

For a moment, I lost all perspective and felt as though I was being swept away in this torrent of chaos, but as quickly as my clarity had vanished, it returned to me with a sudden realization: I am connected. My few surviving friends are all around me, and we are capable of survival. The abomination's screams of the word "bubbles" still rang in my ears and mind, but something about Erin slaying one of the beasts sobered me up and brought me back to reality.

I was unarmed. Solomon was still drained from his second real fight ever, and while I'm sure that we had entered the store with baseball bats, we clearly lost those sometime between arriving at Wal-Mart and finding ourselves trapped in the room with the otherworldly, many-faced eel. Going back in there to find a weapon was not an option if I wanted my blood to remain in a liquid state, and the cold had already crept out into the rest of the store. Enough, I realized, to solidify the now rotted dairy products on the shelf to our right.

I grabbed the nearest gallon of milk, ignored the searing cold seeping into my fingers, and swung it into the head of the nearest zombie. It was hardly the most effective thing ever, but the thing lost its balance long enough for Solomon to kick it in the stomach and knock it over. Another monstrosity quickly took its place, and Solomon was already holding the next gallon in preparation. He lobbed the jug at it and punched it in the face as it tried to stand back up. We each felt his despair at having used up his ability and sensed what he said before it even left his mouth: "We need to get out of here now! Chad, can you fly all of us?!"

((Yup, I'm definitely out of practice. Sorry this took so ridiculously long, as usual.))

[Magus]

Watching Erin tear the brain out of a zombie awoke something in me. It felt sickly, like something crawling underneath the skin of my stomach and down my spine. I stood there, transfixed on the blood and brain matter dripping from Erin's hand. The horde of ravenous undead slithered forward with an otherworldly grace, or lack of. I thought the feeling was fear enveloping me like a bleak black shadow, yet the scratching at the back of my mind was something more...carnal.

I looked up at the howling, shrieking things moving in on my friends and I and thought one thing.

It was my turn.

A torrent of wind shrieked through me and washed over the nearest group of undead, picking them up like leaves fallen off their unnatural branches. The gale winds tossed the pale abberations like rag-dolls in a hurricane, flinging them into the overturned ails and the wall behind them. The sound of bones snapping like pathetic twigs echoed off the walls, eclipsing the horrid growls of the oncoming dead.

I grinned. In seconds, several more pallid children had shambled forward, their black eyes focused on tearing Jacob, the nearest mortal, to bloody shreds. The closest undead's head snapped backwards, it's skull internally decapitated and hanging behind its body limply. It fell to its knees, then crumpled, lifeless, to the floor. The other raging children tripped over their fallen ally, but were quickly disposed of in similar fashion. I pressurized a sphere of solid wind and shot it out at the things. The bullet hit the creature's neck tearing a black, fetid hole in its throat, but a second bullet shot through the thing's eye and out the back of its head.

I shrugged off the dull ache forming in the back of my head. Using our newly developed powers was like any other form of exercise: using it came with a price. Exerting too much aerokinetic power would quickly take its toll on me, but the thrill of the hunt was too much to say no to. I reveled in the blood-lust. I had killed zombies before, but there was something new to this. I hadn't ever killed with my powers before. It was intoxicating.

"Fucking face-eaters!" I snarled, then grabbed a nude, bald creature by the throat. I looked into the formless abyss behind its eyes and smiled in pure jubilee as the abyss looked back. Then I caved in the things face and out the back of its head with a shotgun blast of pressurized air. I spun about, my trenchcoat flapping majestically behind me, as I roared and laughed and killed. The cold black slime that imbued the zombies with unlife dripped from my face and hands, but I didn't care. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I could feel my skinned palm shouting in agony, but the pain had an erotic pleasure to it. It felt damn good, but not as good as ripping the unlife from a zombie.

The store went black as I soared through it, the winds blowing behind me, cheering me on. The Soundless Voice spoke out to me without words as black blood splashed out like a new formed dismal sea. I cackled in dark silence as more undead came into the light; their horrid faces grinned with the scowls of my foes past. A shambling girl came into focus bearing the face of Jessica Conde, that bitch from 8th grade who made my life hell. I pointed a finger at her, grinned wildly, and her head exploded. Her friends arose from the darkness, pointing and laughing at me, calling me names; they danced around me with sinister glee in their eyes, rolling in the pain from my past. I lashed out with my power and crushed them all. I couldn't do it then, but I'd be damned if I'd let them off so easily now. I could finally have my revenge, and so I bathed in their blood.

"Chad's got man-boobs!" Cory, a supposed friend from my past, shouted at me. His voice ended prematurely due to the wind slicing through his throat.

"Sorry Chad, but I'm really not wanting to date right now," Alison, from church, said. A pressurized bullet tore through her heart like her words had torn through mine.

"I never loved you," A voice from the past rang out. I twitched, then went limp as a wave of repressed emotions suddenly came rushing back up. My eyes watered with her words. I found my hands wrapped around her neck, squeezing the life from her like she had torn mine from me.

"Die..." I whispered. Sweet, bloody catharsis. You are mine.

The mental darkness collapsed with a thundering boom. The steel door leading to the meat-locker groaned and bent for a split-second, then exploded off its hinges and onto the obese zombies inches away from Solomon.

"BUBBLES!!!" The abomination growled and hissed with its myriad heads from the now exposed meat-locker. An ocean of cold flooded into the room, sobering everyone up. I looked forward to see Erin struggling to pry my hands from her throat...

OOC: I'll finish this shortly.

[Magus]

OOC: Sorry about making double or triple posts right now. It will get much more interactive once we get passed the part I've already thought out. So, sorry about all this Jon--I hopes it's been entertaining at least.

IC: I stared into Erin's eyes in absolute horror, my hands still loosely wrapped around her neck. I couldn't move them. I couldn't move at all. I was in a dread shock at what I could have done. I nearly strangled Erin while thinking she was Kat. What the hell had happened to me...?

One of the few upright ails exploded in a plume of sparkling frost throwing frigid shards around it. The explosion rung out through the store shocking us all into action. Though, it also got the attention of the undead locked outside. In seconds, the glass exits out of the Wal-Mart were lined with undead, their mouths bloody. The zombies beat on the window with black, bloody stumps for hands. The abysmal creatures had ground down their own hands trying to claw their way to the ceiling to devour Erin and I when we had first arrived. They were relentless in their insanity.

A string of smaller frost explosions rocked the Wal-Mart. The babbling, multi-headed horror hovered in strange majesty towards Jacob and Solomon, who were beating some of the last remaining zombies with various dairy products. "Watch out!" I shouted at them, after ignoring Jacob's earlier comment at me. A wave of frost was slowly covering the store emanating from the abomination. The abomination sloshed one of its heads towards me and vomited up another bubble in my direction. I grabbed Erin and jumped to the side as the bubble slammed into the floor and exploded in frozen-fire. Erin landed on her feet, but I stepped on a can, tripped, and fell to my butt. That's me: the epitome of grace.

I cursed. I had been doing that much more these days, justifiable or not. "Bubbles. Bubbles. Bubbles, the abberation cackled in a psychotic mantra as its other heads belched out a continuing stream of sapphire spheres. The hollowed out store would crumble in a few minutes if this kept up.

"Erin, get Jacob and Solomon and get to the back of the store. I'll distract it." I barked at her in a much more authoritarian voice than I thought I could ever muster. Every group needs a leader, and I was falling nicely into that script, even if it was going to my head. I gave Erin a slight push as I got to my feet, but I accidentally missed and pushed her butt, which totally ruined the dramatic command not seconds earlier. I gave her a "my bad" shrug then nodded to her to get out. A string of explosions rocked the store again.

An arc of thin, pressurized air hurled out from my hands and cut through the monster's front-most face. It howled with a chorus of dissonant voices as the face fell from the creature in two black, oozing chunks. Unwholesome slime spurted from the wound, but, in seconds, the disgusting chasm gurgled and birthed a new head to replace the old. It wailed like an infant for a moment, then howled "bubbles!" like a screeching child. The attacks continued.

The two oozing chunks that had fallen away from the creature twitched on the ground, then long, gnarled fingers grew out from them at strange angles. The chunks twitched, and then dashed towards me on the oddly shaped fingers. I cut through them with a sword of air and, luckily, they stayed dead. Their mother, however, would not be slain by such methods. I was the only one with such prominent, ranged offensive abilities, and they wouldn't work. Hell, I could barely even muster the strength to use my abilities, let alone widdle the thing down to non-existence.

"Erin!" I shouted, dodging another explosion of ice. "Erin! Phase through the front of the store and pile up as many propane tanks as you can!" I shouted at the girl. If wind couldn't kill the thing, then fire had to. Well, so I hoped...

[Ameryn]

I could've punched out Chad's brain. I almost did, but there were two things that stopped me, his hands felt different...warmer than the buttload of zombies that had already tried to grab me. The second reason I stopped was lack of air, and I looked up in horror to see him staring at me with an incredible amount of anger in his eyes. 'Stop!' I mouthed, though I couldn't speak and tried to pull his fingers off my neck, all the while hoping that no zombie was about to attack me from behind. It seemed like forever, but he finally let go, and we continued our defense. When the bubble monster started attacking, I gladly followed Chad's lead. He was good at being the leader of the group, a position I wouldn't want in the least.

After Chad awkwardly pushed me away, I found Jacob and Solomon fighting with whatever they could find. Most of the zombies lay on the ground by now, twitching or completely dead, so it only took a moment to find a clear rout to the back of the store. "Jacob! Solomon! This way!" I pointed back to the store, then turned to hear more instructions. Propane, I had to get the propane.

Running to the front of the store, I stayed clear of the windows, not wanting those zombies that were outside to see me. All the large cans of propane were stacked on a rack right outside. Oh boy. This was going to be fun. I wished that I had worked out more. I could phase through matter, but gravity worked on me just fine. I was much more comfortable with my power now and was able to phase through the wall that lead outside easily. I pulled on the easiest can of propane I could reach, and gracefully dropped it on my foot. "OWWowowowowoow!" I shouted, really wanting to hop around on my good foot. That can was HEAVY. I knew that this might be our only chance to destroy the monster that kept burping the ice bubbles at us, so I picked it up, stumbled through the wall with the tank, and dropped it on the floor with a thud. I cringed, hoping it wouldn't explode, and went back for more. It got a little easier once I knew what to expect, and I knew that it wouldn't hurt until after I stopped, so I brought them in, one at a time, stocking them in a pile near the front of the store for whatever Chad was going to do with them.

There was a pretty big pile of the tanks inside the store when a zombie spotted me and started running clumsily toward me, also attracting attention of those around it, including all the ones that had pounded their hands off on Wal-Mart's stone walls. "Disgusting." I muttered, and phased through the wall again. I turned around and bonked my head on the wall of propane that I had created. Now my arms were dead AND I was dizzy, plus that would leave a nasty red egg on my forehead, I slumped against the wall and shook my head at how clumsy I was. Out of breath, I called to Chad who was doing his best to hold off the bubble creature, "Chad! Propane...zombies....*breathe* outside..."

Soon enough, everything started hurting. My hands were stinging with the flesh of the zombies' brains embedded into my skin, I had cuts and bruises all up and down my arms from the creatures' claws, my forehead and foot felt like they'd be purple and blue for a few days, and I was altogether exhausted.I was too lightheaded to move. I hoped that I had brought in enough of the cans, and I hoped that Jacob and Solomon were okay back at the end of the store. I couldn't see them, I hope Chad had a plan, I could see him trying his best. There was no more anger left in me, all I could do was hope that everything would be okay.

[Magus]

OOC: Alrighty, I'm skipping you Jacob. Tough break Also, this post might not be entirely realistic. I don't know enough physics to verify and, instead of taking a risk, I'm going to god-mod a bit

IC: My head was killing me. I could feel a slight trickle of blood oozing its way down from my nostril. I had overused my powers and, consequently, I felt a horrendous pounding in my head that blocked just about everything save from the most basic, instinctual and automatic drives. Fight or flight; well, hell if I could leave the damned Wal-Mart, and I didn't know any other option on how to fight the freakin' bubble-monster.

So, I pushed on. Migraines be damned.

"Jacob, Solomon, get to the freezer and close the door!" I barked at them. The abomination floating in the center of the store replied by vomiting up another volley of ice-bubbles at me. I dodged them fairly easily, but I nearly fell to my knees from the cacophonous surge of pain that jetted through my head. The pain, with its epicenter in my brain, rushed down through me. It felt like someone took a sledgehammer to my stomach; I was dizzy, nautious, and felt like I was going to vomit if I so much as moved.

"Erin," I shouted, then immediately lurched over and gagged, trying to hold back the oncoming storm of vomit. Another sphere of ice; I barely rolled away and felt the icy shards of the blast splash onto me like burning embers. "Erin," I mustered up enough strength to say again. "You need to learn to phase more than just yourself right friggin' now!"

With that, I shambled to my feet. The mere act felt like it took all my remaining strength. My muscles screamed at me; my brain threatened to knock the both of us unconscious from overwork. Mind and body be damned, too.

I burst into a full on sprint towards the front of the store, a volley of sapphire, icy-spheres floating majestically behind me. If even one of them so much as touched me, I'd flash-freeze and, most likely, shatter into a million pieces. Good times. I made sure to run away from the stack of propane tanks just in case a stray bubble decided to hit it. I'm not entirely sure if propane will explode if it gets too cold, but I wasn't going to experiment with it now. I jetted in between the check-out ails, each step giving me more cover from the otherworldly thing. I ran until the front of the store, then jetted to the side, making sure to grab Erin's hand on the way. The two of us darted off to the produce section, then stopped firmly in our tracks.

The thing let out a wicked cry, its myriad heads gurgling up songs of the joy of the hunt and bitter frustration. The sordid dissonance echoed off the walls of the abandoned Wal-Mart as the thing swam through the air towards the front of the store, getting between us and the stack of propane tanks. Its freezing aura slowly enveloped the steel tanks forming a thin line of frost. The metal creaked and grew bitter from the extreme cold as the thing set its hundred malformed eyes onto Erin and I.

I took Erin's hand in mine and grinned at the monster, pointing a outstretched finger at it like a gun. "On the count of three, phase us out of existence for thirty seconds." I whispered to Erin, never taking my gaze off abomination. "One. Two. Three. FINGER BANG!" I shouted as a bullet-sized sphere of wind pressurized around my finger tip then surged outwards. The bullet whizzed by the bubble-monster and slammed into the propane tank...

[Ameryn]

I stumbled in a half knocked-out state of consciousness as Chad pulled me along. What was he asking me to do? I didn't understand, I had never phased more than myself and objects smaller than me... but the adrenaline hit me real fast once I realized what Chad had planned to do..blow up the propane and explode the monster. I could outrun zombies, maybe, but no way I could outrun a blast of fire and shrapnel.

I panicked a little as Chad shot some kind of air missile at the can of propane. It was so small and fast that it cut a bullet-sized hole in three or four of the cans, and the gas began to leak out, hissing and filling the air with it's own smell. I realized that anything could cause the whole store to blow up now, all it would take was a spark. The freezer where Jacob and Solomon were seemed sturdy enough to keep them safe but Chad and I weren't quite as safe. I didn't know if I could do what I needed to do, Chad was quite a bit taller than me, but I had to try.

I latched onto him in which would have looked similar to a loving embrace if it had not been such a life-or-death situation, squinted and focused, trying to use the last of my adrenaline-fulled energy into phasing both of us. Once I thought we were both safe, I started counting. 1... 2... 3... 4... Suddenly, a bright light, and then the world shook. I closed my eyes and had the strangest sensation. Heat flooded through both of our bodies, passing through as if we were just air. I could feel the force of the explosion push us both across the floor a little. 19...20...21... I wondered what had caused the explosion. It was Wal-Mart after all, it could have been anything. 23...24...25... I hoped that some dumb zombie had been playing with a lighter or match to cause all the propane in the air to explode.

27...28....29....30... when the noise died down, I let go, and automatically phased back into normal existence. When I banged my head against concrete, I realized I had fallen on the floor, oops. Everything started to go black... I saw a big black pile where the cans of propane used to be... bodies of zombies from both the outside and in were dead and burnt on the floor, the freezer door was open, the zombies that had gathered where they saw me were all dead now. The thing... whatever it was gurgled and let out a disgusting vomit-burp, and a heavy bubble exploded out of it's mouth on top of it's burnt corpse. I turned my head to see that Chad was okay, but he seemed to be in shock. Odd experience, I suppose. I lolled my head back one more time before my vision went black...

[Arcuna]

“Back in?” Solomon shouted. “Seriously?” The two of us were already running. When we saw Erin stacking the tanks, Solomon had pulled me aside and insisted that I help him gather the psi necessary to set them off. Convincing him of anything was like trying to empty the ocean with a spoon, so I gave up trying to convince him that my power didn't amplify his. It should go without saying that it didn't work.

Somehow we failed to realize that the abomination had even left the meat locker. I could feel Solomon's stubborn fear pulsing through me, and for the first time, I felt it beneficial to shut off my field if we were going to get anywhere. “Come on,” I said, “You don't have it in you to fire another bolt right now. Let's get to safety and try again later.”

Suddenly I felt a blunt pain on the left side of my head. I stumbled, spun, and hit the cold floor. I realized just a bit too late that I hadn't at all been watching where I was running, and a stray zombie had taken advantage of that. There was curdled, frozen blood all around me, but thankfully none of it was mine. There was no time for fear. Panic, yes, but I didn't freeze up once. The one and only priority this instant was to eliminate the threat of the creature looming over me.

For the second time, Solomon proved to be far more powerful than any of us suspected. I looked up to see that he had stopped, turned around, and without thinking, fired a construct from his hand. The zombie's head snapped forward awkwardly, then was ripped right off of its shoulders as Solomon made a tugging motion. He swung his imaginary chain around once, then slammed the head back into the body, causing it to fall aside.

I got to my feet and tried to catch him before he fell, but I'm not exactly the strongest person ever. “I wish you knew you could that while we were surrounded,” I said as I dragged him the last few feet into the locker. The handle had shattered from the cold, and the floor was slippery from frozen condensation, but I managed to pull the door ajar before slumping against the inside wall next to Solomon.

The blast shook the walls and caused the animal carcasses to swing. At some point I guess my aura started to flow again, because the image of a certain Urameshi Yusuke firing a Spirit Gun filled my head, and I had no choice but to burst out laughing. Of all the references he could have made.

“Damn,” Solomon sighed. “I really wanted that shot.”

I patted him on the back. “It's okay, you're still pretty damn full of epic when my life is in danger.”

“Or deus ex machina, I guess.”

[Magus]

I woke up in a pool of my own vomit. Coincidentally, when you've been surviving on canned food for weeks, your vomit starts to become, for a lack of a better word, peculiar. Luckily for myself, I wasn't able to sense the God-awful stench rising up from the pallid-pool bubbling around my face. Being forced awake after you've completely exhausted your energy gives off a certain surreal feel to reality. Your senses are blurred and dull, and everything starts to feel like you're living in a painting and.

The first thing I felt was a pair of strong rubbery arms lifting me to my feet. The sounds of reality came rushing back in dull thumps and slurred mumbles, and, eventually my sight returned as well. All of my muscles ached and felt like they would give out on me, but the strong arms held me up. I tried looking around but didn't see much. It was a blur of dismal gray, charred black, and the pale rays of light bleeding into the broken building.

When my senses came into focus, I saw three figures clad in the typical gray-blue haz-mat suits worn by the military and CDC and the like when investigating a highly dangerous area. I, however, was wearing jeans and a trench-coat. Well crap. The suits were helping Erin, who had fainted as well, up and out of the massive hole that had been blown out in the front of the store. Two more suits were helping Solomon and Jacob, they too looked exhausted, but not quite so drained as Erin and I. That's what showing off got us, I suppose. The three suits all had military grade assault rifles hanging over their shoulders.

"Can you hear me?" A muffled voice spoke at me calmly.
"I think..." I grumbled, then promptly lurched over and vomited again.
"You'll be fine, kid. Let's go." The man in the suit said, put an arm around my waist, then pretty much carried me through the blasted remains of the Wal-Mart to the world outside.

"Survivors! More soldiers in the fight against the zombie-ism!" A distinctly female voice rang out as soon as Erin, Jacob, Solomon, and I made it out of the Wal-Mart in one piece. I hung my head low, still trying to hide my eyes from the blinding sunlight. It was still pale, almost hollow light, but it was still bright enough to blind...especially someone who had just snapped back to consciousness.

"Miss Commander, there were only four survivors and no signs of the undead." Another suit spoke up, this time in a female voice.

"Did you find anything else?" The other female said, her voice ending with an oddly bubbly...quirk.

"Yes Ma'am. We believe there are traces of one of the lesser specimens within, but it badly burnt and we were unable to get a positive I.D. by visual alone." A male voice spoke out from my side.

"Would you like us to take a sample?" The female suit asked.

"Was the War justified? YES! Oh, hold on..." The woman shouted, then, without pause, fired off a single round with her own rifle. The head of a zombie twenty yards away exploded. "Oh, right. Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer. You know the drill, boys and girls." She commanded, the nassly timbre of her voice counter-productive to words she just spoke.

"I know that voice... I thought to myself, still shielding my eyes. My muscles were still aching and my brain still thumped behind my eyes, but I had mustered up the strength to stand on my own. I put a hand on the haz-mat soldier's shoulder and he slowly loosed his grip on me. Then, I looked up at the woman in charge.

Sarah Palin was standing on a military jeep wearing a stars-and-stripes bathing suit, her fists at her hips like a proverbial super-woman, her hair blowing majestically in the wind.

"We all told her it was silly, but she insisted. Just go with it..." The soldier next to me whispered. Apparently I had let out an audible "W.T.F?" upon seeing the...oh God...Commander.

[Ameryn]

First, there was just a hint of consciousness. I could feel something on my arms, and then being pulled up. After a moment or two, my eyes fluttered open slightly, and I realized I was on my back, with two people hovered over me.

"Not a single burn..." the female one said. "Just like that other kid. How could that happen?" "Your guess is as good as mine." the male voice answered. "Quite an explosion, but at least it killed all those zombies inside... oh, I think she's awake...." the figure looked down at me. "It's okay, we're here to help. Can you here me?" he asked. I answered in kind of a groan, and smiled timidly.

"She's awake." the female voice stated somewhat flatly. I already didn't like her, but they helped me to my feet. I could feel the man's arm around my waist and was a little embarrassed. No doubt I was covered in ash, soot, and zombie. What a great first impression, not that it mattered, but still.

"Sit here and don't go wandering off." the lady said. Rude. I thought, but nodded. She briskly walked off, muttering something about reporting back to the "commander in a bathing suit" ...what? The man chuckled and patted my shoulder, "Don't worry about Carrie. She's just trying to get things done. You can rest here for a while." I nodded, and asked, "Is... everyone okay?" He smiled, "Yes, you four survivors are quite lucky. That was a nasty explosion. I have to report back to Ms. Palin now, will you be alright?" I just nodded and gave a little "Mhm."

After he left, I realized what he said. Ms. Palin? Commander in a bathing suit? What the...? I looked over to see Chad, Jacob, and Solomon nearby, all of them looking worn out and dirty. I chuckled, "So much for getting food."

[Arcuna]

The door to the freezer abruptly slammed open, and I realized that I had begun to drift off to sleep. Three people in Hazmat suits rushed into the room and immediately began to inspect us as we tried to scramble to our feet. “Are you injured?” one asked us anxiously.

“I'm fine, I'm fine,” I tried to say. One of the suits helped Solomon to his feet while I refused assistance from the other two. It occurred to me that this was the perfect opportunity to use my power; instead of asking first and risking them becoming defensive or hostile, I got to the point.

I was relieved to sense genuine good intentions from them. They had clearly assumed authority that they didn't necessarily have previously, but their intentions were good. Next I felt surprise, but far from shock, as they realized what was going on. I call it my Alpha field, I said. Or, I think I said it. Conversations are strange inside of a strong field, but at least they're coherent to involved parties. My friends, Chad, Erin? I summoned a mental image of them in my mind, and almost instantly they had it too. An outsider likely wouldn't have realized that I was asking if they were okay.

Sick/alive/conscious, their minds responded. They'll be okay. Come outside ((meet them/others)) As we made our way outside, I queried who they were and what they were doing here. With my eyes I saw more Hazmat people taking samples from the remains of the frost eel and two people helping wounded but alive Chad and Erin outside; with my mind I saw—the way you see when you imagine just about anything—devastation, panic, and chaos not unlike what we had already seen, but from the perspective of people who had, for the most part, been trained to handle various crises to some degree. The zombies were obviously new, and we all suffered from the pain of loss—I learned from the two military personnel out of the three people that our beloved President was dead now, zombified and then annihilated by an Alaskan governor who now waited outside—but these people were doing what they could to find survivors and form a plan of action against whatever was going on. Apparently the thing that breathed frost bubbles was not the first “thing” they had seen.

They wanted us to get into a helicopter where we'd be taken to relative safety, but first I insisted that they let me get my backpack from my car. On the way back, I glanced over at Ms. Palin, the acting commander of this operation, and I suppose she felt me wondering, with some degree of doubt and cockiness, what her “power” was. I felt her smirk at me as she continued to oversee operations, and I proceeded back to the chopper.

The first thing I noticed that was out of place was that Solomon was not only alert, he was excited. Somehow he was fully recharged, or so he thought, and he was eagerly talking with the other three survivors already seated inside the vehicle. The second was that once I climbed inside, I instantly recognized one of the passengers.

Natalia?

She looked up at me, but while she could tell I was addressing her, the name didn't register as her own. In fact, nothing did; she was just...empty.

No sooner had I locked eyes with the boy sitting next to her when I felt a dizzying high as my aura intensified and expanded outward. The emptiness inside his mind was staggering as well, but for one tiny moment, I—we, all of us—felt as though we knew absolutely everything and that we were becoming one. It was like a dream; I truly believed that this boy was Third Impact incarnate...

[Magus]

"We have to get them to the choppa." Commander Palin announced, her gaze focused intently on a pile of rubble off a couple dozen feet away.

"The what?" The suit holding Erin upright made the mistake of asking.

"The CHOPPA! GET THEM TO THE CHOPPA!" She turned her head and bellowed at the obviously inexperienced soldier. Anyone who hadn't picked up on a certain Austrian dialect that zombie-butt-kicking Alaskan governors tended to inherit over the years was obviously green behind the militaristic gills. As soon as she shouted, her head snapped back to the pile of stones as a bloodied undead pushed its way into the light...only to have its head blown into a deluge of festering chunks with a single, well-placed bullet. "They're easier to spot than a moose in a Christmas sweater. Poor thing never had a chance." She said with an ironically cute smile given the fact that she had just turned a former-person's head into spaghetti with gore-sauce.

I, for one, was rather impressed. The four Hazmat soldiers ignored the occurrence as if it had become commonplace. It was rather strange, though. I had been exhausted beyond the point of passing out, beaten, nearly had my head cleaved off by an insane one-armed man, and nearly flash-frozen by something just plain wrong, and yet the presence of others filled me with a newfound strength. They were inexplicably, indescribably alive, and after living in relative solitude for a week or so, I had all but given up on the concept of other survivors. Perhaps it was Jacob's power, of which I still couldn't describe, working on me, but I felt a certain unexplainable connection to the people.

The man who had helped me to my feet led me to the jeep. The soldiers helped position the four us in the backseat of the military grade vehicle. As the other three found their seats behind the steering wheel and next to the Commander in the back, a female soldier removed a glove and extended her palm towards us. A stream of thread-like energy pushed its way out of her fingertips and around the four of our waists. The energy grasped onto the sides of the vehicle and crystalized into something of a energy polymer. It formed one, collective seatbelt for the four of us. She then smiled behind her mask, then put her glove back on and took the passenger side seat.

The engine started. It seemed like forever since I had heard an engine running. Just days before the Rapture I would have even noticed the sound. It had become that scripted in my mind. For some odd reason, I wondered if "Johnny," the neurotic nine old living in my master bathroom, had gotten his absorbant hands on an engine before.

"Heading to the evac point, Commander." The driver spoke plainly, then pulled out of the unhallowed Wal-Mart parking lot and onto what was left of the highway. I had seen the outside world before in night-trips to save Erin and flights to demon infested grocery stores, but I didn't fully comprehend how much destruction the Rapture had caused until I was in that jeep. Stores that were bustling not two weeks ago had their windows shattered and their goods stolen or destroyed. The roads had fallen into disarray and chaos. Abandoned cars stilled lined the asphalt shoulders, some whole while most others brutally shredded. Whatever the Rapture actually was, it hit the world all at once. With the ticking away of that fated second, the majority of the world fell into a coma where they were. It didn't matter if they were in bed, driving, or anything else. It came like a thief in the night, and chaos followed in its wake. Comatose drivers had driven off the road and smashed into each other all over the world. Airplanes who's pilot had been taken fell from the sky and scorched deep scars across the land. All of man's beloved technology couldn't save him from whatever the Rapture was. No matter how far we tried to distance ourself from the chaos, it always comes shrieking back from out of the shadows.

The worst of it all was the bodies. The Bible's Rapture was supposed to save those it took from Death, but this Rapture seemed to make them more prone to it...or worse. The decimated government and its bureaucratic limbs didn't have nearly enough manpower to remove all of the butchered bodies that had been strewn about the world when the Rapture hit. People had been flung out of moving cars going eighty miles an hour. There isn't much left of a body when it tears through a glass windshield going that fast. The city was painted a dismal shade of red; blood from the dismembered corpses had soaked into the asphalt, staining the white stripes an odd pink color. Severed, still-bloody human parts had been piled along the sides of the road before the comatose awoke into unlife. That's when it had gotten worse. So much worse.

A human head crunched under the jeep's powerful tires as it crawled over the abandoned road. As we drove, we heard the sounds of ghouls shrieking and feasting on whatever they could find, from beast to mortal and even themselves. There was the occasional wail of another survivor, but their screams of terror always turned into screams of horrid anguish as the things befell them. Luckily the sound of the jeep eclipsed the sounds of their death. The soldiers knew they couldn't save them and once drive off course. Some buried altruistic part of me wanted to help them, but I knew we couldn't.

Of course, the sound of the jeep drew some unwanted, undead attention to us as well. Luckily Commander Palin was up for the challenge. The turret mounted to the back of the jeep hailed down a rain of bullets on whatever roaming mass of fiends dared raise a skeletal claw at us. The thing about Sarah Palin, too, was that she never missed. Not once. That made for an interesting scene. Imagine a torrent of daggers tearing through withering human flesh going insane speeds. Most of the time, there wasn't much left of them but a juicy mass of zombie-goo.

A single, jet-black helicopter stood in the distance, a moat of the dead encircling it. The blades atop the helicopter whirled into motion as our jeep crossed the horizon. The soldiers slew a few rogue ghouls on the way to the copter, but the journey was fairly uneventful as far as post-apocalyptic escape-routes go. The soldier parked the jeep in a chained in gravel court, then the soldiers piled out. The female soldier dissipated her energy-belt and helped the four of us out and towards the helicopter while the others covered the jeep in a camouflage tarp. One of the soldiers inside helped us in first, then Palin and the other soldiers got in behind us.

It was odd, but Jacob seemed to recognize one of the three survivors inside the helicopter. As he looked at the other, his power flipped on again. It was different this time. It was deeper, more real. For a split-second that lasted for eternity, I felt my body annihilated by forces unseen. My Self was no more, for we all had been plucked out of autonomous existence and thrown into the ocean of infinity, of which we made up both a drop of the ocean and its entire body. I was not myself anymore, but we were All. I felt what everyone was feeling. I saw what they were seeing. And, bizarrely enough, I saw what they were feeling, and they saw what I was feeling, for we were one in the same. No more did I see the soldiers as non-individual suits, but as people with their own unique stories. I saw Jerry, the inexperienced one, hugging his only daughter's soulless corpse to his chest. I saw Mary, the female who had strapped us in with her power, holding the seven survivors in her arms as her own children. No more did I see Sarah Palin as an idiotic soccer-mom. I now saw what her mind wouldn't let sink into her unconscious. She and her family had personally come to help President Bush at Crawford. I saw her staring blankly as the President tore her family to shreds. I saw him topple over her, his black eyes intent on devouring her flesh. I saw her do what she had to do: shoot him in the head. I felt what she had felt: failure to help her candidate, failure to instill her morals on her own children, failure to save her family, and failure to help herself. I felt her devotion welling up in her. I felt a drive to take a stand for my country, for it was the only thing I had left.

I felt myself looking damn good in a bikini.

Despite the transperonal bliss, that was still pretty weird.

I felt a wave of humor ripple through the group-mind at that thought. I felt Erin calling me a dork. I felt Jacob fighting back an urge to go on a mystical, Evangelion fueled rant. I felt the jealous Solomon felt for saving the day, and he understood that I never meant to steal any sort of glory. I, we, had to do what had to be done and we, I, suffered the consequences for abusing our, my, powers.

The other three survivors seemed to clash with the unity, though they couldn't exactly fight its tide. The girl, who physically appeared as a teenage girl with white skin and black hair. She had dyed the tips of her hair scarlet, which matched the color of her shirt. Despite wanting to identify with her style of dress, her personality was so...void. In the ocean that we had become, her portion was the abyss. We all went to fill her, yet she retained none of our essence and we felt nothing in return. It was a dark feeling. Bleak and dismal. The other survivor, a fifteen year old boy, had a certain innocence to him. He had been fidgeting with the seatbelt buckle when we had arrived. He was studying it, genuinely curious as to what its purpose was as if he had never seen one before or, if he had, didn't comprehend what it was. His mind was...young, far younger than his physical body. It wasn't the same blankness from the girl, but a relatively clean mental slate.

I felt an immediate connection to the last survivor. Old memories of lying on my dorm-room bed, trying to avoid making it squeak with each shift in weight, filled the oceans' group-mind. Memories of mutual girlfriend problems and late night McDonald runs and Colbert Reports were shared between the group. Before I knew it, I was physically staring at Jon, his metallic claws glimmering from the pale light outside.

OOC: Alright Jon, it's your turn buddy. I'll probably talk to you before posting, so if you have any questions or suggestions on what to write about, just ask me.