Little Fleas

[Xsesiv]

Little Fleas

OoC Thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?p=15346914#post15346914)

"…odd band, but I've never heard anyone say they don't like 'em. Their last offering, Titled, entered the charts at number one and it was in the top five for seven weeks. It turned nine o'clock halfway through that song; time for the three-minute news. Nad?"

"Thanks, Nat. Top story tonight: hospital admissions rise beyond capacity almost worldwide as PHADE diagnoses soar. The outbreak was first detected in the US four days ago. Doctors insist there is no need to panic. They theorise that the virus is in some way related to HIV, has been lying dormant in the population for some while, and that it has an asymptomatic incubation period that appears to be growing shorter, possibly due to the summer heat. The Government's health officials advise that you contact a doctor immediately if you, or someone you know, grows pale or begins running a fever. Fortunately, the…"

The ageing coach driver flips a switch and the radio turns off briefly, the speakers around the coach pumping out his voice instead as he speaks into a microphone. Not as massively overweight as his stereotype, he is still podgy. Gentle-looking, with his salt-and-pepper beard unshaven, and wrapped up in a somewhat holey navy-blue woollen jumper, he looks a bit like a sea captain.

"Ladies and gentlemen," the driver announces with perfect diction, "my apologies, but it appears that the coach was not properly fuelled prior to departure. I'll be the first to admit that it should have been noticed before. We will shortly be pulling into a bus depot to refuel. This is not a scheduled stop, but it should take no more than a few minutes and we have thus far been making good time, so our ultimate arrival should not be delayed. Thank you for your attention, and, once again, for travelling with the Bus Bay."

He releases the switch, pulls off the motorway, and puts Natasha, Nadine and the Charts back on, just in time for them to be finishing the last story, which covers the results of the television awards given out earlier, and go back to music. The coach, in the sun of the summer evening, is nicely warm. This company's got a reputation, but this appears to be one of the decent coaches, with nice comfortable seats, working air conditioning, blinds that work, a chemical toilet that actually flushes and a complimentary hot-drinks machine, likely to be appreciated when the sun goes in and the coach gets cold. Nonetheless, a couple of people apparently do not want to remain on the coach a second longer than necessary, and take exception to the stop.

One is a young man, maybe sixteen or seventeen, dressed in a pink polo shirt, navy tracksuit bottoms tucked into his thick white socks, and training shoes. His hair is cropped short, plastered to his head with gel. Despite the abundant muscle which bulges almost grotesquely through his shirt, his bad skin and glassy, red-rimmed eyes betray a poor diet and lifestyle. He stinks of deodorant spray and spent the first few minutes of the journey spitting on the floor until the driver asked him to stop; he has since been spitting into an energy drink can instead. He swears once, loudly, and then mutters to himself.

Two fit youngish men who have clipped hair and wear smart casual clothing got on the coach together, but sat across from each other rather than next to each other and have not talked much. One, the shorter and slimmer, with black hair, and looking to be mixed black and white in ethnicity, throws his head back and groans "Christ's sake," at the news of a pit stop, while the other, a muscular blond type, seems to be less upset.

A third person that seems to be upset is a heavyset, middle-aged, tough-looking gentleman, with a deep tan, a brown leather jacket and heavy-duty cargo pants. His brown hair is long, his beard scrubby and unshaven. He, as was ascertained by about three of the other passengers when they saw him get on, is Jamie Jackson, a TV survivalist. Jackson is famous for having once had his left hand mangled in a tussle with a dingo, but also for his documentary series, Jamie's Survival, in which he demonstrates, with a wonderfully gruff demeanor, survival techniques – how to build camps, improvise tools, light fires, deter predators, obtain potable water, hunt, fish, forage and so on – in a different wilderness each week. He also has a reality show, Jamie Survives! in which he and one other survivalist who acts as cameraman are dumped off a plane somewhere in the world, miles from anywhere, with no idea where they are headed. The pair are picked up two weeks later. At the news of a stop, Jackson grunts and rubs his eyelids.

The rest of the travellers do not seem too bothered. Most of them are more interested in their current conversations than in complaining.

A white-blond, clean-shaven, slim man with a thin, interesting face in his late twenties or early thirties is dressed in an expensive, dark suit. He sits with a solid-looking but not unattractive woman about four or five years younger than him. The man's briefcase has not left his knee for the duration of the trip, nor has the woman's handbag left hers. She has bobbed brown hair, wears skinny jeans and a red hoodie, and the pair of them are struggling to entertain a bored-looking toddler with longish, dirty-blond hair that is forever flopping into his eyes. The boy is in bare feet, striped sweater and turned-up dungarees, shielded from the evening sun by the blind on the window.

In the back of the coach sit three people, chatting excitedly about some Victorian-stuff convention or other they just went to, not paying the driver any attention. One is a middle-aged woman in businesswear, her black hair plaited and streaked with grey. Her face and eyes suggest some Middle Eastern blood, but her skin is fair. Kneeling on her seat, leaning over the back of it so as to talk to her, is a pretty, pale young girl in black corset, abundant jewellery, heavy make-up and floor-length black velvet skirt, her dark hair back-combed so much it is wider than herself, but still reaching her elbows. She is small: five feet tall at the outside, and fairly skinny. Sitting next to her is a slim, charming, dark-haired young man in a mock-up of Victorian formal attire, in black and blood-red. He has an anchor beard, and is holding between his knees on the seat a strong-looking, brass-banded walking stick with a large brass knob for a handle.

Three more men, all looking to be in their early twenties, sit chatting together – apparently they attend the same university, and have got to talking about a lecturer they share who has some amusing ways. One of the men is black, fit, handsome and intelligent-looking. He wears a soft blue shirt and stonewashed jeans, sporting short hair and a trim beard. Another is slight, white, blue-eyed with messy blond hair, dressed in a white dress shirt. The last, who is about six feet eight inches tall, is not just white but positively pasty. He is also very heavily overweight with ill-advised corn rows, wearing a bomber jacket and a pair of black slim-fit jeans which he seems to have poured his legs into.

A tremendous young blonde woman, at least six feet tall and muscular with it, dressed in a university rugby-team sweatshirt and pair of men's jeans, sits alone near the back of the bus, the contents of a carrier bag strewn over the seat next to her. She is listening to music through earphones, reading a paperback collection of Edogawa Rampo, eating a shop-bought pasta salad with a black plastic spork, sipping alternately from a can of cola and a bottle of cider, and jiggling her leg up and down.

Sitting on the very edge of her seat is a frazzled-looking young woman, also sitting alone. She wears ginger dreadlocks with charms braided in, an oversized hoodie, home-made patchwork harem pants and flip-flops, and she reeks of incense. She has spent the entirety of the journey alternately knitting a striped scarf in vilely clashing colours with her eyes closed and staring vacantly out of the window. The scarf is now about seventeen feet long.

At the front of the bus is a small, thin, relaxed-looking sexagenarian gentleman who looks to be of Chinese extraction, again alone. He is dressed in a red-and-white checked shirt, knitted tank top with flowers embroidered on it, cords and loafers, with a walking cane leaning on the seat next to him, and he, too, simply gazes out of the window, smiling vaguely.

Also here are a slight young man with short brown hair and a number of facial piercings, dressed in a leather jacket, and another man, a muscular type, a little older, with cauliflower ears, close-shorn black hair and a squashed, thrice-broken nose.

[LimeSkeleton]

Seth Hartwell

The slight, blonde-haired man in the white dress shirt gives a loud snort of laughter, tipping his head back and gasping for air as his fellow students give a marvelous impression of Professor Hughes. Seth's freckled face is plastered with a large grin as he continues chatting with the other two men, but it slowly disappears from his face as he hears Natasha and Nadine bring up PHADE.

"Do you two ever worry that this virus might be starting to get a little out of hand? I know people get worked up anytime a new disease starts spreading a little bit, but I just can't help but feel a little apprehensive." Seth nervously twists the silver class ring on his finger, a frown on his face. "I do hope this passes anyways, even if I do sound pessimistic. Bird Flu and Swine Flu did after all....Although this connection to HIV is definitely worrisome."

Seth shakes his head, running his hand quickly through his short and messy haircut. Upon hearing that the coach is stopping, Seth rolls his eyes and takes a short swig from a plastic water bottle. "Great, an unexpected stop, just what I wanted. At least it's not all that hot in here though. Hey Eddie, you have any of that orange-flavored Trident left over?"
Seth glares at the man who had been spitting earlier, clearly not approving of his attire, attitude or language. However, he quickly drops his gaze as the man looks about the coach and looks at his lap instead.

[Xsesiv]

"Last one," says Ed, the black man in the blue shirt, popping the pellet of gum out of its foil and handing it over. "Well. If it's related to HIV, shouldn't it be less infectious than flu? HIV needs blood contact, or body fluid exchange, doesn't it? If you haven't got PHADE already, you shouldn't get it. Trouble is, you don't know you've got it until a few months down the line, but that's getting shorter, so we should end up knowing who's got it and who's not. It'll probably be more or less self-contained – sorry to sound callous. Will you stop doing that?" he calls to the man Seth is glaring at, as he spits once more into the can with a splat, and is answered with a sneer.

"I dunno," lisps the big guy with the corn rows, whose name, Seth has learnt, is Tom. He is doing applied physical sciences, sharing Professor Hughes' biochemistry modules. "you guys' area, this, innit?" He swigs deeply from a two-litre bottle of supermarket cola. "Gah. Getting warm. You're finished this year, right?"

"Next year for me," says Ed. The coach hits a bump as it turns off the dual carriageway and the big girl splutters hugely as a bit of pasta salad goes down the wrong way.

[jolinaxas]

Eric Blake

Eric paused the copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas he'd pirated for the trip when the announcement came on. These things usually turned out to be completely useless, but you couldn't be too sure with this new disease going around, yeah? He listened to the announcement dutifully. The bus was going to be delayed. Well, they said it wouldn't actually be delayed as such, but that's what they always said. Fine, this damned bus could take forever if it pleased. He wasn't looking forward to being home anyway.

He'd considered having a chat with the goth girl in the back, but the combination of the odd fellow with the walking stick sat next to her and Johnny Depp's amusing progress through Las Vegas twisted on drugs kept him in his seat, earbuds in. Thus interrupted, he got up to stretch his legs a bit - he was packed into his seat, crowed by his backpack, messenger bag and guitar case. Upon seeing all that he was packing, his room-mate had wondered if he was moving out, and Eric honestly didn't know how to answer at that moment. No, he had said a minute later, just home to pick some things up, is all.

[littlebottom]

Brian Belsley

The rugby player has kept mostly to himself so far on the journey. As the announcement is made he crains his head to one side, a loud crunching noise comes from his neck, this noise is repeated as he tilts his head the other way. Next he starts to crack his knuckles, one by one, finally he twists his body clockwise first, then anticlockwise, producing more loud crunches from his back as he does so. He stretches his arms into the air or at least as much as his headroom allows him to.

This ritual complete, Brian stands up and begins making his way to the on board toilet, leaving behind 2 empty bottles of mangers cider and 4 empty cans of carling behind by his seat. As he goes towards the back of the coach he smiles a toothy grin at the girl in the rugby shirt, somewhat impressively considering the impression the rest of his face may have gave, he has no missing teeth. The rest of his face clearly didn't hold up so well, his nose thrice broken, his ears cauliflower, his right eye has hints of a fading black eye.

Once in the toilet the distinct sound of god save the queen being hummed quietly can be heard over the noise of liquid falling into liquid. A quick flush follows after a few moments, taps turned on only for the briefest of moments to dampen the hands more than wash them. The door opens as Brian is still doing up his fly. At this moment the coach hits a bump as they turn off the road, causing Brian to stumble forward almost ontop of the girl at whom he had smiled before, and was now spluttering somewhat sharply. "Whoa, sorry love. Didun mean ta almost squish yer. Nice shirt thow, you like abitta rugby?" Brian somewhat pleased at this accident.

[Xsesiv]

"Hiya," The goth girl, apprehends Eric as he strides up and down the aisle, dangling out of her seat as the coach takes a bend. "I saw you bring your guitar on. Are you in a band?" It's an excuse to start a conversation, not a serious query; it's fairly obvious Eric's in a band. "Are you any good? What do you play?"

The other pair in her group have got into one of those historical debates wherein each party tries to impress the other with their knowledge rather than argue a specific point; they flit quickly from was-the-Irish-Famine-more-due-to-Irish-landholders-than-to-the-British-government to was-colonialism-led-by-a-misguided-sense-of-benevolence to was-the-repression-of-the-Victorian-Age-played-up-in-later-years. "Bit out of my depth," grins the girl.

It takes the big girl in the rugby top a few seconds to reply. After she manages to dislodge the bit of fusilli, she says, eyes still watering, "Love it," in a fairly thick Welsh accent. "You look like you do and all, is it?" She eyes the blemishes resulting from violence that cover Brian's face. "Loose-head prop, I am. You're not drunk already, are you?"

[jolinaxas]

"Out of your depth? I don't know..."

Grabbing onto one of the poles for support, he leaned in, whispering.

"... seems shallow enough, just up their own arses, after all."

He leaned back, as though the progress of the bus had put him back where he was, and smiled.

"As for the band, that's a loaded word. Assumes all sorts of things about the people you play with, like that they'll always show up to practices and gigs, and the like. We played mostly punk, and I like to think I'm decent at it, whatever that means when all you play is three or four chords. They never went in for the complicated stuff."

[LimeSkeleton]

Seth seems both impressed and anxious that Eddie snapped at the man dressed in the ridiculous clothes, smiling and shaking his head at his friend. He always was a lot more confrontational than Seth. Not that he was complaining, however. Seth can remember quite a few times where his taller, stronger friend proved a wonderful asset against some of the jocks who occasionally harassed him on campus. "I suppose you're right about the spreading slowing down, Ed. It does make sense in theory, but such a strange virus suddenly popping up in those infected with an entirely different virus just makes me uncomfortable. I mean, just think about the symptoms; they have pretty much no similarities to HIV itself, so where the heck did it come from?" Seth shakes his head, his face looking to be deep in thought for a moment or so. He pops the gum in his mouth and begins chewing, then almost swallows his gum in laughter as the man with a broken nose almost falls into the woman who choked on her pasta earlier.
"I just graduated, yeah. Thought I'd try and experience more of our fine country than my hometown and college before I try and seriously get a job in the medical field though. Might even go on holiday in Spain for a week or two; I've been meaning to practice mi español. Wait just a minute..." Seth cranes his neck to get a better look at the middle-aged gentleman with the dark tan. "Tom, is that Jamie Jackson from Jamie Survives!? Do you think we can get an autograph? I used to love his show!" Seth has already pulled a pen out from his pocket, his face looking positively ecstatic. Bending down to grab his bag, he rifles through it to find a clean sheet of paper for Jamie to sign.

[Xsesiv]

She snorts, leans over, knots her hand into the Victorian guy's hair and half-pretends to shake him about. "Don't mind it. This guy knows what he's talking about but he's been an arrogant son-of-a-bitch ever since he was two."

"Shut up, Op," he says, struggling to remove her fingers from his hair, "you didn't even know me then."

"Yes I did," she rejoins, "we grew up together."

"I was four when you were born."

"Details. Punk's good, I suppose. Was always into the post stuff."

Ed throws up his hands, defeated by the nature of this disease. "You're right. High fever, nausea and shaking. Reminds me of gastroenteritis. Maybe sterile meningitis, actually. That can be down to autoimmune disorders. Well, either way, nobody's died yet. Hardly anybody, anyway. Hopefully, it'll die down."

Tom looks over at the tanned man, trying to get a glance at his left hand, which he keeps tucked into his leather jacket's pocket. "Looks like it. I didn't follow it. Thursday evenings, wasn't it? I had stuff on when it was showing. Hey, Ed? You know that other survival guy off the telly?"

"I've heard it."

"He's got like eight kitchens."

"You've told me this one before."

"He must have – "

"Yeah, bare grills, I've heard it."

The dreadlocked girl sitting alone across from the three students chuckles almost inaudibly at this one.

The sun begins to set, and the light turns red and begins to die as the coach heads off the B-road and turns onto an industrial estate, finally pulling up in front of an enormous square, corrugated-metal building with a vast breeze-block garage tagged onto the side, several coaches parked under a shelter outside. The gates of the metal building are locked up tight, but the garage gate is open and the noises of tinkering come from inside. "I apologise once again for the delay," says the driver through the microphone. "We should be able to continue our journey very shortly. Thank you for listening."

"You'd better had," snaps the boy in the polo shirt. "I paid out the arse for this."

The driver leaves the coach and looks into the fuel tank with a pen light. He comes back into the coach and looks at the dashboard, then furrows his brow and enters the depot garage, leaving his passengers alone in the coach.

[littlebottom]

Brian smiles again when the lady asks of his rugby liking. "Like it? I live it, love. It's me job. Imma proffeshunal playa! Me names Brian Belsley. Wots yours?" Brian asks enthusiatically, hoping to maybe get a reaction out of his name, though he didn't hold his breath.

"naaah, I ain't drunk. Yet. Just bin enjoyin' a few like yerself it seems." Brian was enjoying his happy accident of saying hi to this girl.

As the bus pulls over, Brian is sitting in a seat near to the rugby girl, paying very little attention elsewhere at all, on or off the coach.

[Xsesiv]

"Don't ring a bell, sorry. I'm Georgia. Georgia Peake. Biff. Been about since Year Eight since anyone but Mummy called me Georgia or Georgie." She knocks back the rest of her cider as the driver returns with a square-jawed man with blond dreadlocks, jeans, and a grease-stained t-shirt.

The mechanic opens the front of the bus and looks it over, goes around to the sides to check the fuel, oil and water, then comes up into the coach and looks at the dashboard. He leaves the bus and checks the fuel level again, then comes back up and inspects the dashboard once more.

"Yeah, your gauge is busted, mate," he says to the driver.

"Excuse me?"

"Petrol gauge," says the mechanic, tapping it. "There's plenty in the tank but the gauge reckons you're nigh on empty. Could be down to any number of things. We'll have to drain the tank and look into it."

"I see. It isn't dangerous, is it?"

"Not until you run out of fuel halfway down the motorway."

"Well, what's the procedure in the meantime?"

"Change coaches."

"Honestly?" and the driver groans.

"Sorry, mate. It's a fault."

The driver turns to the inside of the bus. "Agreed. Sorry, everybody. We're going to have to change coach. It's nothing serious but we can't allow you to stay in a coach with a fault."

The smaller policeman and the boy in the polo shirt open their mouths, but before they can start their complaint there is a shout of pain from inside the garage, and a portly, youngish, shaven-headed man in a jumpsuit comes rushing out, clamping a rag to his hand. His left hand's bleeding badly, and has already turned the blue jumpsuit black.

[jolinaxas]

"Oh, come on - gotta be a bit more specific than that. You ask a dozen people what post-punk is, you get thirteen answe.... did you hear that?"

Eric turns in the direction the shout came from, and looks for the source.

[LimeSkeleton]

Seth Hartwell

Seth groans as the driver announces the need to switch buses and starts to pick up the backpack at his feet. However, he stops as he hears some gasps throughout the bus and looks out the coach window.
"Ed, Tom, do you see that?! Look at his shirt, he must have already lost quite a bit of blood! C'mon, we have to do something, Eddie." Seth unzips his backpack, pulling out a basic first aid kit and then standing up, edging past Tom and deftly stepping into the aisle before nearly running towards the coach door.

"Somebody call an ambulance please. Stay calm, this man needs assistance." Seth eyes the muscular rugby player questioningly. "You there, could you assist me? You look a lot stronger than me and we may need to move him if he collapses too close to the entrance. The last thing he needs is to be run over by another coach." Without really waiting for a response, Seth bolts out the coach's door and hurries towards the man, already inspecting the wound to try and find the cause. "What could it be? A sharp piece of metal? Broken glass? I hope he's had tetanus shots.."

As Seth gets close enough to touch the man, he stops and addresses him in a calm, yet firm voice. This was finally a chance to put his skills to good use. "Sir, what happened? Please remain calm, I'm trained in CPR and just recently graduated medical school. May I take a look at your hand?"

Assuming the man allows him to, Seth will first attempt to gauge why the hand is bleeding, and then will apply an ace bandage from his first aid kit.

[Xsesiv]

Most of the passengers look over to the commotion and look through the window at the bleeding mechanic with some interest. The dreadlocked girl continues to knit, the Chinese man is looking calmly out of the window on the other side, the young couple is trying to make sure their toddler doesn't look at the man bleeding, and Jamie Jackson has got onto his phone. Ed limps down the aisle and follows Seth out to the mechanic, but without quite such enthusiasm, and then Tom sighs and waddles out after them.

"Slipped and cut myself on the Danger: Highly Inflammable sign," says the portly mechanic, pulling back the rag to show off a nasty cut starting in the fleshy part of his left palm and carrying on down and across his wrist, and watching, satisfied, as his colleagues, and Tom, hiss and wince in sympathy. The cut is bleeding fairly badly, but the mechanic doesn't seem to be passing out just yet.

The mechanic sizes up Seth. "I'm off to casualty. No need for an ambulance, it's three minutes away." He does, however, allow Seth to apply the bandage, and while this is going on, the mechanic continues to chat calmly to his co-workers. "Don't need to be a doctor to tell this'll need stitches. This is my good hand, too, so I'm probably going to have to call my shifts off for a few days. Agh! Careful, that's sore. You might want to ring Kelly or...what's his name? Adam. See if one of them can cover."

"Looks deep, that. You know they got those signs on the cheap, mate," says the other mechanic.

"The corners have sharp tags on them. You should put in a claim for lost earnings," suggests the driver. "Lodge a formal complaint, too. You might get a settlement if you make enough fuss."

"At the end of the day, you're wasting my time," says the boy in the polo shirt, sounding a little shaken. He has appeared in the coach door to spit once more, out of the coach. The gob of spit flies over the driver's head and onto the tarmac. "Can we get on with it?"

[littlebottom]

Another coach? Ah well Brian wasn't on a schedule, although it is going to add even more time to this journey that well could have continued on regardless of the petrol gauge fault. "looks like we're gonna have ta swap coach. Want me ta 'elp with ya stuff?" Brian offers biff.

The commotion caught his eye at first, but he quickly lost interest when it turns out it was just a clumbsy mechanic cutting his hand. The sight of blood did very little to fuss Brian at all, he sees his own blood regular enough, and that of the opposing team a little bit more than probably what he should, but those studs can do some decent damage "accidentally"

[jolinaxas]

"I'm going to go have a look at what's happened."

Eric goes over to check out the commotion, and returns to chat when everything seems to be in order.

"Well, looks like we've got to move our things. I guess I'll see you on the other bus - I've got to get your opinion on ska."

He starts packing up his possessions, starting with the laptop.

[Xsesiv]

The mechanic's colleague seems happy enough to drive him around the corner to Accident and Emergency. The coach is vacated, the luggage hold is opened end emptied into another coach's, and everyone gets in and buckles their seat belts while the driver makes damn sure that the gauges are working on this bus.

Just as the brakes hiss and the coach leaves the estate, an ambulance pulls in, sirens blaring. It's taken well over the proscribed eight minutes – the Chinese man tuts. When the ambulance stops and disgorges its staff, it proves to be one sole paramedic.

As the coach gets back onto the southbound dual carriageway, the last of the sunlight fades away, headlights, taillights and the yellow-orange lights on the central reservation flickering past almost hypnotically. More than half the passengers settle down for a night's rest, the others try to keep themselves occupied in conversation or whatever else.

"Ah, ska. Kind of got put off by Bad Manners..."

"Knew I should have shelled out for the good prosthesis."

"Bugger it."

This last is from the smaller policeman, who's discovered that the coffee machine on this coach doesn't work.



The coach bumps as it gets off the motorway onto an upward-sloping gradient, jolting its passengers awake, if they were not already. The sky is greenish-purple and the sun has just barely come up behind a bank of cloud. The driver is slowing, finding the exit held up by a traffic jam.

A car seems to have recently crashed and rolled over. The emergency services don't seem to have arrived yet, and cars are avoiding the carnage as best they can, all the traffic funnelled down about four-fifths of a full lane. As if this weren't enough, four men and a woman, who all bear pretty nasty bruises, bleeding noses and facial swellings, looking to have been in some fight or other, are staggering along in the middle the road, towards you and against the traffic. They must be drunk out of their tiny minds. This is a main road, and it's a miracle one of them hasn't been hit. People, already impatient with the traffic slowed to such a crawl, are honking their horns and leaning out of their windows to order them out of the road.

[LimeSkeleton]

Seth smiles at Eddie, giving him a pat on the back. "Even with a crappy prosthesis you did more to help that man than most of the people here. Don't worry about it, I'm sure you'll be able to get one you'll like better eventually. Besides, you're still a better sprinter than I am!" He gives a slight chuckle and then takes out a novel he bought a while ago but hadn't yet gotten a chance to read. Seth tunes out the noises of the bus for a while, getting lost in his enjoyment of the novel's interesting story. Even if it was a bit unrealistic, Zombie Apocalypse stories were always good for a little bit of excitement.

Later that night, after deciding against really attempting to get any more sleep than small naps here and there. (He'd never needed much sleep anyways), Seth taps Tom on the shoulder. "Geez, what a wreck; looks like that car there tumbled right over. I do hope everyone's alright. Where's the ambulance?" Seth thinks back on the miniscule staff in the last ambulance he had seen. Are emergency services more busy than usual this week? Probably due to increased recklessness in the summer heat... Seth holds onto his bag as the bus swerves to accommodate the diminishing amount of space available for driving. The road's getting pretty dangero- What are those people doing in the road?! That's so irresponsible!" Seth frowns, opening up the window and sticking his head out slightly to get a better look. Idiots like this had always made him really angry. How could anyone have so little concern for their own lives? It's just so selfish.

[littlebottom]

Brian decides he probably should get at least some sleep considering his drinking. So he takes his seat on the new coach, preferably next to his new found friend, and chats for a while before suggesting they should both take a nap and continue chatting the next morning.

The coach jolts waking Brian from his slightly unsatisfactory sleep. Looking at the traffic doesn't fill him with confidence or hope. "looks like tha trips gunnar take lunger than spected agen." upon noticing the people in the street he says "what nutters, 'ave they jus' got outta their cars and walked? Tha jam'll never move if they leave their cars in tha midul o' tha road." Brian rolls his eyes and crosses his arms. He sits back in his chair, closing his eyes again and letting his head fall slowly towards Georgia's shoulder.

[Xsesiv]

"Hmm?" Tom has stayed up the whole night as well, alternately playing a portable games console with earphones in and writing in a notepad. At the point Seth catches him, he's got the earphones in. He pulls them out and looks at the crash. "Ah. Rough, that. Must have been going at one hell of a speed to turn over uphill, right? Could have been coming downhill."

"They'd have had to have gone over the barrier, Tom. Even more unlikely, seeing as how there's no damage on it." says Ed, who has spent the whole night in a state of half-sleep and has been roused by the conversation.

Tom turns his gaze to the four people staggering up the road. "Irresponsible? That's illegal, simple as."

"For God's sake, they're going to get themselves killed. Get out of the road!"

Ed adds his voice to the chorus of drivers who are demanding that the four people in the road vacate it and wondering whether or not they are stupid.

One of the men has apparently taken enough abuse. He smashes his elbow into the driver-side window of the nearest car, shattering it. A youngish man in a suit quickly gets out and shouts something at the man who broke his window, but there is no reply.

The four men and the woman slowly surround the driver, not moving but only making intense eye contact with him, at a distance of about two yards. The driver's eyes widen and he turns to get back into his car. As soon as the driver turns his back, one of the men clears the distance between himself and the driver in a split instant. The man grabs the driver by the shoulders and bangs him down on the ground, back-first. Here, he's obscured behind a car. All five pedestrians surround him, and it looks, from their movements, like they are beating him severely.

"Bloody hell," mutters the Chinese guy.

Another driver, in the car next to this scene, gets out to remonstrate with the five, and is punched once, in the head, by another of the men. It's a clean knockout. He folds up like an accordion, completely poleaxed, and immediately receives the same beating from all four men. The men then spread out and kneel over the drivers, two over each, and disappear from view – whatever they are doing must be fairly disturbing, as the car closest to them reverses quickly and smashes into the car behind it.

The woman, meanwhile, turns back to the first car and breaks the rear window with a punch, reaches in and appears to be pulling hard, then withdraws her arm. Her hand is now drenched in blood, and grasps by the wrist the pathetically pale arm of a young child, torn out at the socket, oozing and dripping blood. She puts the shoulder in her mouth and begins sucking on it. The men advance towards the next car.

All this has happened in the couple of seconds it takes people to start reacting. The traffic goes wild, swerving this way and that to get away, crashing into each other, knocking the wreck and the cars blocking the road aside, trying force their way past or, insanely, to reverse back onto the motorway. Just as the coach engine begins to rumble, one car, a large, heavy four-by-four, swerving as it speeds past, slams into the coach near the front, rocking it and driving the front corner nearest the door obliquely into the end of the step barrier at the side of the road. The little boy falls off his seat across the aisle and lands with his ribs against the seat opposite, then he begins to wail loudly, shocked and winded but probably not much hurt. The chemical tank under the toilet sloshes loudly; the fire extinguisher and the first aid kit attached to the wall above the stairs leading down to it come off and clatter their way to the bottom.

The coach is now blocking off an exit that leads back down the gradient and off to the left, serving a service station and a fast food restaurant. Three more people, two women and a man, also looking to have been badly beaten come staggering up this exit road, towards the coach. More to the point, towards that side of the coach with the door. The driver, who has gone very white, wrenches at the gear stick and steering wheel and pumps violently at the pedals, trying desperately to dislodge the vehicle from the barrier. The coach is hit again; a van suddenly smashes into the back of it, buckling the emergency door and cutting off any room the driver may once have had to manoeuvre. The policemen, who have taken up seats in the very back of the bus, smack their heads on the back window. Bits of hand luggage fly everywhere. People shout and honk at the coach as they pass.

The businessman quickly scoops up his son and does his best to calm his screams. The girl with the dreadlocks just slumps in her seat and looks totally defeated. Biff jumps hugely at the scene and her shoulder slams into Brian's ear. Ed and the policemen look more or less ready for action, but there's not much they can do at this point. Jamie Jackson and the boy in the tracksuit leap to their feet and rush up to the driver, and begin doing an impromptu good-cop-bad-cop routine.

"Come on, fella. Get the coach moving, you can do it."

"It's been Sod's Law since I got on this bus! You've got twenty seconds to get us off this barrier or I'm punching you in your fat face!"

[jolinaxas]

Eric spent a few minutes chatting before excusing himself back to his cramped seat to nod off for a bit. As with everyone else, he's awoken by the shudder of the bus. He got up and looked out the front window to see the disturbing scene.

"What in the..."

[LimeSkeleton]

Seth drops his book onto the floor, his eyes wide in shock. "Did that...did that really just happen?!" He looks up to see the two men harassing the driver into moving the coach, and rolls his eyes pointedly right before the bus lurches once more and sends him sprawling over Tom and into the aisle. He picks himself up shakily, grabbing onto the seat for support. "Have they gone insane? What kinds of drugs make people EAT other humans?!"

"Alright, alright, we can't panic. Are you two unhurt?" He addresses Tom and Ed, but then looks around to those nearest them, attempting to gauge if people are going to try to bail from the coach.

[littlebottom]

Brian feels the sharp pain in the side of his head, making him suddenly alert. He looks around quickly and doesn't get long to notice exactly what is going on before people are flung about by several knocks to the coach. "wats goin on?" Brian says with confusion throughout his voice. He notices the people now making their way towards the coach, one with a babies arm that it had decided was a tasty treat.

"what kinda sickos are these? On second thoughts I'd rather not know." Brian watches the. Carnage going on all around and begins to piece it all together that this is more than a simple sicko but a traffic pile up, panic and an entire bunch of these sickos. Brian remains seated for now holding onto the seat for stability as the coach attempts to get out of where it is stuck.

[Xsesiv]

The three people staggering up the exit, once they come within a few yards of the coach, sprint up towards the main door. Now, there's no exit from the coach, unless the five-inch gap afforded by the window counts for anything. Most people are looking around the coach, frightened, but unable to do much about their situation. The Victorian guy is dry-heaving. Biff is straining against the window, trying to push it from its setting. The engine stalls.

One of the women that rushed the coach takes hold of the coach door handle and begins to pull. A crack of daylight shows through the rubber sealing of the door. The bigger policeman sprints down to the front of the bus, takes hold of the inside handle and struggles to keep the door shut. The other two slam on the windowpane with their fists.

From the banging, the polycarbonate pane in the coach door begins to show white stress marks around where it has been screwed in. "Damn it, she's strong," says the policeman trying to keep the door shut, through gritted teeth.

"Get this thing moving!" shouts the boy.

"I'm trying, I'm trying," whines the driver, who looks close to tears, and is wrenching the controls all over the place.

The engine fires, the coach scrapes backwards as it shunts the van behind it away. It turns sharply to the left, and the gears grate as the driver speeds off down the exit. Jamie Jackson cheers. The policeman starts shaking the door handle, trying to dislodge the woman who's still attached to the outside.

"What the..."

The goth girl, Opal, is gazing out of her window. The car park serving the fast-food place and the service station is swarming with staggering, badly-beaten people: two or three in outfits from the station, some in the restaurant's uniform, most in everyday clothes. A few are missing limbs, ears or fingers, a few have bite marks on them, but most have just had the living hell beaten out of them, and they are smashing the windows, uprooting the decorative shrubs and ruining the cars in the park with anything that comes to hand, apparently just for the sake of it. As they see the coach, they approach it; mostly at a steady pace, but the two standing closest rush it with a speed that must break the world record.

One of them, a very obese grey-haired man in a jersey, tries to catch up to the bus from near the back, misses, and falls to the ground. The other, who's younger, fitter, and tall with a brown beard, leaps right out in front of the coach, and there is a horrible slam and crunch as he collides with it and is knocked away again, and then, miraculously, he gets to his feet a couple of seconds later, half his face scraped almost to the bare bone and the left side of his ribcage caved in, and begins to follow the coach once more.

[jolinaxas]

"I...what... I need a drink."

Eric goes over his backpack, literally throwing things about his seat as he looks for his bottle of cheap rum. Finding it, he unscrews the cap and downs a fair portion of it. He returns to the goth girl, bottle still in hand.

"I take it by your expression you saw the whole 'who needs a ribcage?' display?"

[Xsesiv]

"Yeah, I...yeah." She shakes her head quickly, as if tryng to wake herself up.

"We need to hole up somewhere." This is Jamie Jackson again, to the driver. "Somewhere that's got nobody there, we don't know how far this goes."

"Put the radio on, then," snaps the boy in the tracksuit bottoms, and the driver does, ignoring him and continuing to talk to Jackson.

"I know somewhere, I think," he says. "A service station, only a couple of minutes away. It's pretty out of the way, which is why it went bust a couple of years ago."

The radio has been giving a low-level hum. As the coach starts to move up a hill, the reception improves briefly, so that a few words can be made out: "...returning to life...blood-borne. They...its own...the signal tower..." and then it cuts out again.

The driver turns off the main roads while this is going on, gets onto a long but uninhabited looking side-road, apparently cut through a hill that was at one point forested but has been turned over to agriculture, and pulls up next to an old service station on the bank at the side of the road. It's a filthy building, and the lettering and emblems have long since been smashed by vandals, but otherwise very typical: a square building with a big shelter over the pumps. A car – an old red Vauxhall – is parked up outside.

"I thought you said this place was empty," says the big policeman, who's still standing in front of the coach door and staring in amazement at the woman still hanging onto the handle on the outside.

"It went bust about four years ago. It should be empty."

"Something's up here," whispers the girl with the dreadlocks, head still in her hands.

"What about her? We're stuck in here with her there, right?" asks Tom, staring out of his window with some interest at the woman who is still wrenching at the door handle having been dragged down several roads. Her right cheek's very swollen, her left ear has been bleeding and staining her white blouse, her few remaining teeth are bared and one of her legs has been broken in the thigh, giving her the appearance of an second knee with an impossible angle.

[littlebottom]

The whole event passes bybrian like a flash he must have been in some kind of shock since he didn't seem to react at all until part way down the road towards the abandoned services when he shakes his head as if to rouse himself from his daydreaming.

"with her still on tha outsidda tha door we can't get out safely. But er leg looks broke, she shouldn't move all that quick if we can get er outta tha way. Anyone got sumfink useful in 'ere to distract 'er or defend yerself with? Wot about in tha luggage hold iffa we distract 'er long enuff"

[LimeSkeleton]

Seth glances at the rugby player as he makes his suggestions before turning back to continue staring at the woman clawing frantically at the coach's door. "I don't understand...Even if she has gone completely insane, the pain should be astronomical. How can she even be alive, let alone conscious?" Seth nervously taps his foot before beginning to dig through his bag for his cell phone. Could this be happening elsewhere...? He begins dialing in his parents' home phone number, silently praying for an answer.

[Xsesiv]

The number beeps into the phone, and a dialtone plays, but it cuts off halfway through the first ring, answered by only an automated message.

"We are sorry for any inconvenience...but your call cannot be taken at this point due to...excessive network load...please try again later."

"Well, I'm not staying in here," says Ed, and he gets up and strides to the back of the coach, where he strains against the emergency exit, which has buckled into its setting. There's a horrible scraping noise as the twisted metal grates together, and everyone looks around for the source. As the policeman holding the door shut turns to look, the woman wrenches harder than before, he slips down the stairs and collapses against the door. With the combined force of him falling against it and the woman pulling, the door falls open, the policeman lands on the ground outside, and the woman straddles him and begins to punch him over and over again in the face.

Everyone jumps up. Ed and the other policeman rush to the front of the bus, the driver moves aside to let them through, and Biff clambers over the back of her seat to take over trying to get the emergency exit open. Tom gives it a couple of seconds' thought, then waddles up to help. The Chinese guy and the Victorian guy start using their canes to hammer at their windows.

[littlebottom]

Currently with the only main way out of the coach blocked by some crazy lady, who can now make her way in, an alternate exit seems like the best idea, Brian goes up quickly to lend aid in the opening of the emergency exit.

[LimeSkeleton]

Throwing his phone back into his bag with a groan of dismay, Seth slings the backpack over his shoulders and hurriedly makes his way towards Ed and Tom, not wanting to be left inside with the crazy woman. "What are we gonna do once this door is open? I have a feeling we'll look like easier targets once there's a group of us scattering like mice." Seth adds his (albeit limited) strength to the group's in the attempt to force the emergency exit open.

[jolinaxas]

Eric grabs his bags dispassionately and walks towards the group trying to get the emergency door open.

"Then we don't. We all go..."

He gives a look around, trying to find a relatively safe route.

"...that way?"

[Xsesiv]

"I'm sticking here," says Tom, putting his weight to work as he braces himself against the door. "Like you said, no point scattering, right? Wait it out in that station's my vote. Doesn't look to be any more of those loonies around here." There is a great shuddering creak as the twisted metal of the joints twists back the way it came, and the emergency door suddenly opens. Tom, who was leaning against it and using weight more than strength to get it to move, tumbles out and bashes his head painfully on the ground, and the other passengers begin to stampede out after him.

Outside, the smaller policeman and Ed have reached the man trapped by the woman, who is screaming "Help me! Get her off me!", as she beats him: teeth fly and his eye-socket crumples.

The woman on top of the big blond policeman bends her head down to his bloody mash of a face, mouth wide open and drooling, teeth bared. As the policeman's smaller collague rushed to his aid, he had rolled up his Daily Mirror, and now loops the rolled newspaper around her neck, puts his knee into her back and pulls, and, astonishingly, she seems to be winning, her neck against his whole upper body. Then, Ed joins in and between them, they pull the woman off her victim, leaving him to sob and clutch his face.

By this time, the passengers have come around from the back of the coach; only Jamie Jackson, Opal and her little group, the Chinese man and the driver are still on the coach.

The woman plants a solid punch into Ed's side and he stumbles and almost falls. With great effort and a cool-looking judo move, the policeman hurls the woman to the ground, in front of the coach. Her leg is further damaged in the fall, the angle of her second knee becoming acute, rendering her unable to stand. Nonetheless, she drags herself forward a yard or two and struggles manfully to grab at the nearest person, who happens to be Ed, but the driver edges the coach a couple of feet forwards and traps – or should that be 'crushes' – her good leg.

Everyone slowly comes out, forming a semicircle to look at the woman under the coach wheel, still thrashing around and grabbing at anyone that's closest. The toddler, in his mother's arms, his father shielding the pair from the sight, bawls out loud, and so does the beaten man. The woman under the coach makes nasty rattling-barking sounds, the smaller policeman falls to his knees by his comrade and tries to tell him the damage is not that serious, and the boy in the tracksuit, Tom, and Jamie Jackson utter expletives, but otherwise, nothing is said.

[LimeSkeleton]

Grimacing at the policeman's mangled face, Seth pulls out his first aid kit again, trying to lose himself in the act of doing what he's comfortable with. Never mind that the wounds came from a crazy woman still thrashing under a coach's tire, it just matters that the man needs help. It's gonna be just fine, sir. I can do my best to prevent the wounds from getting infected and I can try to stop the bleeding." Seth motions Ed over to him just in case the man goes into shock and needs further assistance, and then begins patching up his face, assuming the policeman does not refuse his help.

[littlebottom]

Brian makes his way out the back of the emergency exit, helping others out as he goes. Once out the coach surges forward trapping the woman under the tire, at this point Brian circles round to look along with the others "its unimaginable 'ow much pain she shud be feelin but shes still kickin n screamin eh? I don't know what kinda drugs make you act that mentul and feel so little pain, makes you wonder what's goin on 'ere. It wasn't just thisun after all."

Brian uses this momentary lull to collect all his belongings from inside which got hastily left behind, and asks if the driver could open the luggage hold so everyone can retrieve their stuff.

[Xsesiv]

"She was going to kill me, wasn't she?" lisps the policeman numbly, through swollen lips, cut by his broken teeth. His right eye socket has a blowout fracture but his eye has thankfully survived, and his left eye is already swollen shut and will soon become a lovely shiner.

Luckily, after Seth cleans him up, it transpires he's not as bad as he first looked. The damage was due to blunt force, and apart from the scrapes and lacerations around his face, he is only bleeding from his broken nose, albeit bleeding fairly badly. Seth would do well to apply a cold compress, if he had one.

The driver hops off the coach, avoiding the blood-drenched hands of the woman trapped under the tyre, pops the key into the locks of the cargo hold doors and swings them open, and begins transferring the luggage from the hold to the ground outside. He's being very quiet at this point.

Most of the passengers pick up their luggage and start moving it towards the service station entrance. Opal and the Victorian guy are exchanging testy-looking glares with Polo Shirt, and the family are moving all of a piece, like a wooden carving of a family. The girl with the dreadlocks stops dead, like a rabbit in headlights, and whispers to herself.

The Chinese man, the Middle Eastern woman, Jamie Jackson and the driver, meanwhile, have stayed to look at the woman under the coach, while the policemen stay where they are. "So," says Jackson, "What are we going to do about her?"

"Why can't we leave her there?" This is the Middle Eastern woman.

"Because we might need the coach again, in which case she's going to crawl off and try to kill someone else, by all indications, and, if she is drugged-up – "

"– which I don't believe for a minute – "

"– and she comes round, what then?"

"So what do you want us to do? Kill her?"

"We could just lock her up somewhere."

"Where? In the cargo hold? I've never heard such a stupid idea."

[LimeSkeleton]

Seeing that the woman with dreads seems troubled, Seth cautiously approaches. "Hello there. I'm Seth Hartwell, nice to meet you. I don't mean to intrude, but I just want to let you know that we're all going to be completely alright. Don't be afraid." He gives her a small smile and offers his hand to her to shake. However, he retracts it upon realizing there is still some blood on it from the policeman's wounds and grimaces before giving a small laugh. "Sorry about that. It looks like he's going to be just fine, by the way. Just small cuts and a bit of bludgeoning."

Seth's eyes widen at the suggestion that they murder the girl trapped beneath the coach, even if it would seem that she should be dead by now already. "Perhaps the best course of action would be to wait and see if whatever drug is in her system wears off and she returns to normal. At least, assuming she is suffering from some horrid concoction of chemicals. Reminds me of the guy from America that half-chewed off a bloke's face... Regardless, murder is definitely not the answer."

[Xsesiv]

The woman with dreadlocks fixes Seth with a wide-eyed stare and slowly shakes her head.

Over by the coach, the argument's continuing, while the woman slams her fists into the concrete, bloodying her knuckles. "Alright, so we leave her there to come back to normal. That's kind of you. When she does wake up, so to speak, she's going to find both her legs crushed and her face smashed in. She'll go into shock right off. You think she's going to survive long after that? In the meantime, she's a danger to all of us."

"We don't know what she wants. I think we should leave her there."

A rhythmic smashing noise begins to emit from the service station, as if someone were systematically trying to wreck the place, and then a big, powerful-looking man staggers through the door. He clutches something about four feet long and roughly pole-shaped in his hand, swinging it about.

When he raises the object and bangs it down onto the skull of the boy with the polo shirt, it transpires that this was once a double-barrelled hunting shotgun, which he is grasping by the business-end. The stock of the weapon is now smashed into splinters from being used to wreck everything inside, the trigger mechanism bent completely out of shape, the barrel bent so far that it almost resembles a bow more than a gun.

The guy in the polo shirt staggers but doesn't fall, but he swings a great arcing punch into the big guy that sends him spinning to the floor. As he turns over, a tremendous gaping hole can be seen in the back of his head, providing a lovely view of his brain and leaking blood, cerebrospinal fluid and grey matter down the back of his fleece.

Everyone screams and scatters. The family and the girl in the dreadlocks run into the station. Ed and Jackson run over to help the boy in the polo shirt in the fight, while he himself sits down on the floor and clamps his hands to his head. The big guy on the floor with half a skull takes a grab at Opal and gets hold of her ankle, but the Victorian guy takes a swing like a golfer and uses the knob of his cane to turn the guy's elbow inside-out, dragging his fingers off. Biff quickly jumps onto the small of the man's back and does her best to pin him down.

[jolinaxas]

Eric surveys the various acts of chaos happening around him - everything was falling apart, and fast. He began to yell.

"Everyone! Inside the station! Now!"

Putting his luggage down, he runs over to the man who's been piled on.

"Look at the state of him, just deal with him - something heavy. Doesn't matter what drugs you're on if you can't think."

[Xsesiv]

Most of the people rush into the station after Eric makes his suggestion. Jackson raises his foot in its steel-toed boot and slams it into the hole in the man's skull, once, crumpling it, and then again, smashing his head flat, but the guy still flails around. Jackson swears as he steps back and slips on the slime that has adhered to his boot.

Ed picks up his hard-shelled metal suitcase and brings it down onto the man's forearms, then onto his shins, snapping them. Biff gets off him, and the guy thrashes around, very angry-looking but unable to get up, fight or see. The boy in the polo shirt flops over backwards and begins to snore.

Inside the station, it is fairly ordinary; fridges, too heavy to have been worth clearing out when the place went bust and long since empty, the glass fronts smashed, line the outside edge. Then empty gunmetal shelves, bent by blows, stand along the middle of the room. The counter has a closed backpack behind it, with a piece of crumpled notepaper on top of the shelf in front of the night-service window. The dreadlocked girl is reading the paper.

The men's toilet door is lying open, and the floor in there is soaked in blood, and bloody footprints lead from the toilet door around the tiles of the floor of the main shop area.

The woman under the coach has now twisted over and has got hold of something on the engine's underside and has started wrenching at it. The driver rushes over, shouting "Oi!".

[LimeSkeleton]

"Ed, be careful! C'mon, help me pick polo-man over here. We ought to get him inside before anything too crazy happens out here." Seth moves to pick up the man's feet, before noticing the woman scrabbling to grab something on the coach. "What now?! Does she ever stop?" He briefly runs his hand through his now-disheveled blonde hair nervously, wondering what could possibly be going on in his fair country right now.

[Xsesiv]

Ed picks up the man in the polo shirt by his legs and helps to lug him inside, laying him down on the counter. The driver, meanwhile, gets into his coach and drives it a few yards ahead, crushing the woman's legs beyond repair once and for all and taking the coach out of her reach, then gets out and heads to the station.

Inside, everyone sits in silence, broken only by the sniffling of the man whose face has been mashed, the snoring of the guy in the polo shirt and the door swinging open when the driver joins everyone.

"Well -" starts Tom, and "So;" starts Jackson, but the girl in the dreadlocks interrupts, reading aloud from the sheet of crumpled paper. While her own voice, when it emerges, is whispery and vague, she has a fantastic reading voice.

"To whom it may concern: (she starts)

I was going to hole up here till it was safe. Got bitten on the way in. Bloody zombie apocalypse, eh? No point deceiving myself, I know what PHADE will do to me by now. By the time you read this, I'll have blown the back of my skull off with my shotgun. If you've got kids with you, make sure they don't see me. I'll do it in one of the cubicles in the men's toilets.

Left my pack behind the counter, and that's my car outside. Help yourself. I hope there's something in it of use to you. There should be; I stocked up well. Used to be one of those preppers you heard about. But I'll sign off here; I won't be able to go through with it if I start thinking of what I used to be.

I wish you well.

(Signed) John Alderman-Beale."

There's a pause. Ed releases a long, low whistle.

"John Alderman-Beale had the right idea," says Jackson. "but these things look to be indestructible. And if it's PHADE, God, there are millions of people with that. We need some kind of a plan. First off, we're sticking together."

"Common sense, much?" says Tom.

"How long are we going to stay here?"

"Till it all blows over?" This is the mother; the first time any of this family have spoken to anyone but each other. Her voice is loud, but pleasant. "What if it doesn't?"

"Well, the logical answer is that we're going to have to think about making this place permanent."

"Reel it back. So, we're going to stay here, wait for any news, and try and get comfortable enough to wait it out."

"Some damn hope of this place being comfortable," says the Victorian guy, and Opal hits him in the arm.

"Good attitude, Hugh," she says.

"So, we're agreed?"

"No, we are bloody well not agreed," says the smaller policeman. "If something's up, I'm not sitting here rotting. As soon as Martin's patched up, I'm leaving with him. I'm an AFO, we can deal with this."

"I don't care if you're a mo-fo. If you're going to leave with him, take him now. You can't expect us to take care of him and then swan off with him after," says the father, viciously.

"Authorised Firearms Officer," says the Chinese man. "He might know where to get guns."

"Hang on, a cop running off to the station to pick up guns? Where have I heard that before?"

"Let's just wait this out. Please? And we'll try not to get on each other's nerves too much. If our friend Mr. Alderman-Beale got bitten, there's a good chance one of them's still around here."

[jolinaxas]

Eric watched and listened as the letter was read, waiting for a moment to speak in the panicked choir of voices.

"So... it's not drugs. Well, I guess I feel a little better about telling you to cave in that man's head before. Regardless, if this is what PHADE does, then I think moving anywhere is going to get us killed, as pleasant as the prospect of firearms would be. Admittedly, it would have been nice to have had that shotgun."

Looking around for anything heavy, he grabs a piece of shelving.

"First thing's first - we make sure we're not walling ourselves in with one of them. We need to make sure this place is clear."

[littlebottom]

Brian had followed the group inside, and listened as the letter was read out "Zombie apocalypse? Seems about right from tha way that thing wouldn't die..." Brian seems accepting quite easily of the fact this was a zombie apocalypse, but deep down he was still denying it.

"Well, armin' ourselves an' barricadin' might be a good idea first ta give us time ta think of a proppa plan." Brian looks around the immediate vicinity for anything that could fit the description of "weapon"

[Xsesiv]

In immediate display as weapons are the shelves which may be ripped to pieces and used as clubs, likewise the handles on the refrigerator doors may be ripped free. There's a large, dusty old fire extinguisher on one wall, secured with a length of chain, and a few people are carrying objects that might make useful weapons.

The service station proves not to shelter any more of the violent lunatics that have been rampaging around all day. There is a tiny staff room that seems to have been intended primarily for the preparation of tea, the furniture comprising a single counter with a sink set in it, a half-size fridge, a couple of electrical sockets, one of which the fridge is still plugged into (fuse tested and certified, 1996) and one set of cupboards. There is an exit here, a filthy, cracked-panelled door, once white, which leads out onto what was once a small paved area intended for the staff to take cigarette breaks, but which is now thoroughly overgrown.

"That'll need blocking up," says the Chinese guy, in reference to the door. "I could break that down myself."

The only other rooms in the place are an ancient stockroom (smallish, filthy, windowless, long since empty, and housing about sixty thousand spiders, but with a metal service door that locks very firmly) and the toilets: men's and women's, both furnished as you might expect. One of the cubicles in the men's has been knocked open, and the lock lies twisted on the floor. The mirrors over the sinks have been smashed up, and splatters of blood lie all over the shards.

The worst of it is behind the toilet whose door's been knocked off: a patch of blood, brain matter and bits of scalp, hair still attached, stuck to the wall behind.

"That's got to go," says the Chinese man. "It's unsanitary. Let alone disturbing." He heads over to the sink and turns one of the taps. Nothing comes out. He frowns, then brightens. "I worked for the water board once," he says. "and I know the service will run by itself for a few weeks. So if there's no water, it's only because it's been switched off at the mains." He gets up and strides out to find the mains tap.

Jackson and Ed, sitting behind the counter, are looking through the bag and depositing what they find on the table: a multi-tool, a survival knife, a quantity of rope, a flask (empty), a torch, some painkillers and a bottle of antiseptic.

"No food, though."

"He said that was his car outside. Chances are there's some in there."

Tom and the smaller policeman, and the father of the small family start dismantling the shelving units. "Right, so...um...how are we going to do this?"

"These windows are bulletproof, and the glass in the door. But it's not gonna lock, so block it up, do you reckon?"

Opal and the girl with the dreadlocks are looking on while Biff, Hugh and the small policeman struggle to shift one of the fridges out of the front door. "Make a good blockade, these," grunts Biff.

"Plus, we need the space. Sorry I'm not helping, but..." Opal flexes her arm tightly: her bicep shows it very little. "Probably just get in the way." She looks down at the unconscious boy on the counter. "Not a good sign if his nose is bleeding, is it?"

[littlebottom]

Brian eyes the length of chain, but probably wouldn't be able to use it that effectively, and instead for now, takes a sturdy looking bit of shelf, It's not much, but it will have to do for now.

Once he has collected his weapon of lack of choice, he begins helping moving the refrigerators to block the entrances as and where need it. "Is there any access to tha roof? If not, could be useful to make some access. A gud lookout."

[Xsesiv]

After the first fridge is dragged out, Biff clambers onto it and pulls herself up onto the roof, and from here, proceeds to jump and grab hold of the roof of the pump shelter, pulling herself up, twenty feet above the ground.

"Looks clear for a bit. There's some crawling ladders up here. Could use them to get up here, if you want." she says, and a moment or two later a couple of long aluminium ladders clatter to the ground beside the shelter.

The Chinese man begins fiddling with a large red tap mounted on the side of the building, and a couple of seconds later, all the taps come on inside, blasting water into the sinks.

The polo-shirt man's eyelashes are fluttering and he has begun bleeding from the ears. "For God's sake," says Opal. "Anyone know what to do?"

Ed comes over and looks at him. "Looks like he's bleeding inside the skull. He's going to need trepanation."

"He needs what?"

"We need to drill a hole in his head and let the pressure out."

"But he'll get an infection, right?"

"Probably. Damn it, I've only read up on this. I don't have a clue what to do."

[LimeSkeleton]

After having spent the last couple of minutes in shock from the sudden turn for the worse the day had taken, Seth shakes his head suddenly, remembering there are people here that need him. "I think I know the basic principles, Ed, but it's not like anything we have here is sanitary. This just isn't an ideal location for any sort of medical procedure, really. But seeing as we have an extremely unorthodox situation and a man who really needs assistance, I suppose we'll just have to make do." The thin, blonde man rolls up his shirt sleeves carefully, his face completely stoic in concentration. Seth begins looking about the building to locate any materials that could possibly assist him in improving the man's condition, as well as something that could be used to sterilize whatever he uses.

[Xsesiv]

Ed goes and picks up the bottle of antiseptic, multi-tool and survival knife from the table and brings them over, then heads to the staff room sink and washes his hands as best he can.

"Okay. From what I remember, we need to shave the area, cut a flap of skin, scrape the hole in the skull, put something to cover the hole, and then put the flap of skin down again and stitch it up. If you want to go ahead, go ahead, but I'll do it if you'd prefer," he says, observing the man lying on the counter.

"When they were doing this to get rid of demons, they used to use a coin hammered flat to cover the hole," supplies Hugh, watching the proceedings with some interest.

"That could work," says Ed, "but we'll need something to do the hammering. Not to mention something for stitching him up after."

Tom leaves the station, scratching his head, and makes a bee-line for the coach. Jackson leaves as well, but heads for the red car that John Alderman-Beale mentioned was his. The dreadlocked woman disappears into the stockroom. Biff is still on the roof of the pump shelter, and the Chinese man has wandered around the back of the station.

[jolinaxas]

Eric had finished having a look around when he was drawn by morbid curiosity to the impromptu surgery that was about to take place.

"Alcohol sterilizes, yeah? I'd prefer you find some something that isn't drinkable, but if push comes to shove, I've some rum with me. Would that even work? This is no where close to my area of expertise."

[Xsesiv]

Ed opens the multi-tool. "It'd probably be better for washing the wound out, if you can spare it," he says. As he speaks, he takes a wad of tissue from his pocket. He douses a couple in antiseptic and wipes down the survival knife and the multi-tool's knife blade. "Better than this stuff, I mean. It might be a bit too harsh –" and he flips the bottle of antiseptic over. "– yep, external use only."

Ed takes the survival knife in one hand, and the boy's hair, fingerful by fingerful, in the other, and hacks it off very short along the side of his scalp that was hit by the blow, if not shaving it. He wipes off the gel from fingers and blade on the boy's shirt and puts the point of the knife against the scalp. A line of blood immediately begins to trickle down the skull. Hugh turns away, gagging, and walks out of the front door.

"You want to take over, Seth?" Ed asks, looking up at him pleadingly.

The Chinese man looks into the stockroom and reels quickly back out again. "When you're done with the surgery, you'll want to get over here, doc," he calls. Opal comes over and takes a look, does a double-take, and then rushes inside, followed by the Chinese man.

Tom's voice comes in from the outside, played, rather loudly, over the coach's speakers, by the sound of it. "Breaker, breaker; this is Thomas Gunnar. Does anybody read me? Not right, this. Hang on..." Jackson's voice can be heard to swear.

[LimeSkeleton]

"I'll try my best, Ed. Keep an eye on him while I do, we don't have any monitors to keep track of his vitals here." Seth carefully lines up the knife and begins the surgery after wiping his hands with the tissue covered in antiseptic. His face is completely blank with concentration, but a few beads of sweat betray how nervous he really is. "Thanks for the rum. Appreciate it. What's your name? Don't think we've met before. As Seth makes halting small talk, he continues the difficult procedure, painfully aware of just how dangerous performing an operation like this is.

After some time passes, Seth looks up at the two men near him. "Anyone got a coin? Pretty much anything will do, just wipe it with a bit of the rum. We gotta stitch him back up soon, so make it quick, please."

[Xsesiv]

The trepanation's performed in fine style. The flap of skin is cut back neatly, exposing the skull, the hole is scraped in the skull with the multi-tool, and the blood contained within is allowed to drain out, hopefully washing immediate risk of infection with it. The blood that comes out is dark red, venuous. Lucky, really, because the pressure of an arterial bleed could have killed him.

Meanwhile, Opal and the Chinese man physically drag the young woman out of the stockroom. Apparently, she's a taken the approach of passive resistance: she's not doing much against them, but is making it very hard for them to move her. Her face is now very pale – paler even than Opal's. Her hands are soaked down to the wrists with blood, which drips onto the floor. Her harem pants are also covered in blood, her flip-flops have come off, and her right hand is held in a firm fist, with Opal intermittently trying to get her to open her fingers.

"Chuck us those tissues," says the Chinese man. "I was in the Saint John's, I'll do what I can."

Ed, busy with watching the boy in the polo shirt, tosses his pack of tissues to the Chinese man, who squeezes them to the girl's wrists.

"Her name's Jessica Morrigan, she's still awake, she'll talk to you but she's being really uncooperative. She did it to herself, see," announces Opal, angrily. "She's got hold of a piece of glass and damned if she's going to let go of it. Looks like she was really trying to, you know, end it. Not just hurt herself. She's lost a crapload of blood."

"She's been bleeding really quickly," says the Chinese man. "I think she got a couple of arteries."

"If she'd really wanted to kill herself," supplies the driver, quavering, "would she not have told us? Or asked us not to try to help her, or written a note, or something?"

"If you want to kill yourself you don't arse about telling people and making notes," says Opal, "you go and do it as soon as possible."

"What about John Alderman-Beale?"

"Exceptional case."

"Was it really, though?"

"Ye– look, I don't have time for this. Give me that glass, Jess. Get your hand open."

When the flow of blood from the boy's skull begins to stem, Ed, who's gone quite pale, fumbles through his pockets and produces a fifty-pence coin, which he wipes in a rum-soaked tissue and puts over the hole. "That should be f..."

The boy sits up suddenly, cursing like a sailor and slapping his hand to the side of his head, the flap of skin flopping around and the 50p coin flying through the air. He brings his hand away from his scalp and finds it bloody. "What the hell do you think you're doing?" he roars, looking around at Ed, Seth and Eric in turn.

The smaller policeman has got his friend up, and supporting him under the arm, they leave the station through the front door.