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RIDE! ~ Pt.4
Oct. 28th, 2011 03:24 amContinuing the week long horror tour that is Coffin Hop:
RIDE!~Pt.1
RIDE!~ Pt.2
RIDE!~ pt.3
~ Pt.4
38 minutes to go:
Mitch calls a time- out after pedaling five minutes of steady climb. The heat’s jacked up and higher than normal; a brutal southern summer magnified with a tropical humidity. He slides down the mask, gasps for fresh air and gags instead on a furnace wave of rotten beef. He washes the bile down with glugs of water from the bottle strapped to the down tube. He snaps the respirator back on and slides up his goggles.
He and his Baby are huddled behind a wide stone pillar, under the awning to the entrance of a spacious multi-leveled parking garage. From here he has a clear view of the intersection of Boulevard and Parkway.
What he sees freezes him in shock.
He knows he has to keep moving but his body refuses to move.
He tries to look away but can’t.
He at least wants to stop weeping… but he doesn’t know how.
It’s too much to take in at once. Atrocity snapshots slow- burn across the retina and meld into the next.
There is a twenty-car pileup snaking behind a jack-knifed truck; surrounded by an island of mangled corpses still impossibly squirming and wailing in pain. A mist of flies disperses off a lone skeletal shadow as it crawls out of the wreckage of a still-smoldering ambulance. Cannibal banquet inside a peeled open school bus. Pink-purple intestinal tracts in a rainbow sheen puddle of gasoline. Squad car sirens illuminating a broken last stand; a wave of the Infected picking through the remaining scraps of raw cop meat.
The skyline behind the carnage in flames; a plume of acrid-gray smoke wafts off the Bank of America Building and vanishes into monstrous storm clouds whose swelling billows crackle with red lightning.
A series of sobs resounds from the depths of the parking lot, fluttering down the ramp and segueing into a growl of baffled hunger.
The wailing jars Mitch out of his paralysis and awakens his own appetite for life. He blinks the horror out of his skull and nods to himself with a terrified smile.
S’okay, his thoughts run cool over the heat of the situation, there’s still the tracks.
The moan is getting closer and doesn’t come alone. A sound of something thick and wet being dragged along broken glass echoes closer. Mitch slides down his goggles, grips the bars and soars out of the garage. He does not look back – either over his shoulder nor in the blur of his considerations.
33 minutes to go:
Shuffling aimlessly up the hill of the jogging lane, a flock of three Infected march. To their right, the hill slopes down gradually through a roll of freshly manicured grass before vanishing into a canopy of tree tops filling the valley of Innman Park below. To their left is Freedom Parkway, choked on a stream of frozen traffic; the myriad of vehicles abandoned or long picked clean of any sustenance. One of the flock, the smallest and slowest, straggles to a halt. It pauses for a moment before a small knoll in front of a curve in the Parkway. It gazes up at the black halo of birds circling around the spread bare branches of a lone tree engulfed in flames. It gurgles the memory of a word through a locked grin. A child’s stare of open wonder dances around restlessly tracking their flight. A trembling hand steadies itself as it reaches out towards the vision.
“On your left!”
The voice barks a muffled but clear authority; dragging the Infected’s attention from skyward bound into a painfully slow stagger-turn to its left…
… Where it is immediately doused in the face with an aerosol blast of blue spray-paint.
The creep shrieks and staggers back clawing at its eyes, as Mitch zips by confidently, rabbits around the other two shufflers and vanishes up, over and around the curve of the hill.
Running parallel to Liberty Parkway, The Terminus/Inselberg Trail is a scenic pathway snaking through the neighborhood for the recreational pursuit of the city’s bicyclists, joggers and casual strollers.
Right now, however, it trickles with a very different kind of foot traffic.
There’s a lot of them, but they’re spread out and yielding plenty of space between their advance. By the time most of the Infected register Mitch it’s only after he’s left them grasping in vain at his doppler ghost. In that regard, he finds them no different than they were in life. Zoned out in their own little world, locked in thought and somnambulating their way around through life-. most of them openly startled by his sudden appearance…
… He aerosol blasts another creep who comes staggering in ambush out from behind a tree and tosses the now empty can off its head before continuing on.
Mitch is quickly approaching the overpass; a small slope up through yet another tunnel mouth. At least this one is lit up and showing the passage to be Infected- free. Mitch advances, but does so in a swerve to his right, making sure to leave enough space on his left should he have to suddenly u-turn back down in retreat.
Hitting the top of the climb, he reaches the beginning of the bridge and recons the scene before him. The coast is clear…not counting of course the small mob of freaks that’s been ambling behind in pursuit since he rode past them. The closest of them is only a few dozen yards down the hill.
My lucky day, Mitch puffs facetiously through the respirator’s grill.
Where the overpass ends, behind a veil of feral shrubbery, there is a small patch of wino trampled red dirt leading to the stone buttress directly beneath the bridge. Mitch dismounts and rolls quickly through the veil, ducking low to hug the railing wall and rolls his way to the top of the embankment. Down below the scene is empty. Graffiti tagged pillars stand, a few by Mitch’s own hand even, with the embankment walls covered in competing murals and ‘Wild Style’ free for all’s.
There is a muddied trail where the old Terminus rail tracks used to lay dormant from another century, another South. Before the Storm hardly anyone but the homeless, skate punks or taggers frequented the area. Now it seems to be just Mitch. He guesses the creeps are all sticking to high volume population areas. Makes sense – go where the meat is. But between him and the trail where the tracks once laid is one steep, as in suicidal- steep, drop. If he was a thousand packs of cigarettes and twenty pounds younger, maybe he could pull it off… and even then he’d be lucky to get down there with his Baby, much less his neck, in one piece.
A throaty croak rustles just ahead. The pursuing Infected are just starting to hit the top of the bridge by his best guess.
Nothing to do then but walk it down that sharp slope and pray he doesn’t attract attention in doing so.
He crouch-rolls up to the intersection where the buttress plateaus directly underneath the bridge, creating a little walkway normally filled with sleeping bags stuffed with unconscious derelicts. It’s there he sees the barrel of a pistol pointing straight at him.
The instinct is to leap back, but Mitch keeps his cool enough not to rattle and potentially give himself away. Instead he glances up from that barrel, down the pistol’s length, along the shaking fist clutching it and all the way to the bottom of the petrified face it protects.
A man is crouched low just under the awning between intersection of bridge and buttress. Out of shape, balding, bespectacled, 40-something and dressed preposterously enough in sandals. But in his other arm, flabby though it may be, a little red- headed girl buries her face in the Santa pillow softness of his sizable gut.
Mitch points to the bridge and mouths the next three words as if they need to be seen from a mile away: “They’re… behind… me!”
He places one finger over the respirator and prays he’s made himself clear.
Family Man nods and lowers the gun and wraps his meaty arms around the little girl. He places the barrel, soft as a kiss good night, to her temple. He looks straight into Mitch’s mirrored goggles and watches himself mouth back in return: “Go!”
Mitch just stands there a second before a collective groan washes over the bridge and cascades down his spine with a shiver.
He begins to make his way down the buttress, navigating the rain slippery slope with baby steps of his muddied boots. Baby wobbles in his hand, he feels the traction vanish under the steel toes and almost goes down ass- first before catching himself steady off the handlebars. The bike rattles. Above him he can hear the grunting and slobbering of the Infected pick up into a baffled frenzy… if one of them just happens to look over or down or veer off through the veil…
…but no.
Mitch takes the remaining descent down the embankment with heightened momentum picked up involuntarily. He looks up and catches Family Man still crouched there with the little one pressed to his belly and the pistol pressed to her head. Before he can react a gray blur streaks a few yards ahead and hits with a nauseating crunch. Then another. Then another.
Mitch realizes it’s raining bodies… the Infected must’ve heard him and mindlessly began shambling over the railing of the bridge to plummet off the two story drop unceremoniously. A fourth. A fifth. All of them lay there uselessly; trembling meat sacks stuffed with broken bones and undying rage.
By the time the seventh and last of the creeps takes the plunge, Mitch is well on his way down the open trail where the trains of another century once roared.
RIDE!~Pt.1
RIDE!~ Pt.2
RIDE!~ pt.3
RIDE!
~ Pt.4
38 minutes to go:
Mitch calls a time- out after pedaling five minutes of steady climb. The heat’s jacked up and higher than normal; a brutal southern summer magnified with a tropical humidity. He slides down the mask, gasps for fresh air and gags instead on a furnace wave of rotten beef. He washes the bile down with glugs of water from the bottle strapped to the down tube. He snaps the respirator back on and slides up his goggles.
He and his Baby are huddled behind a wide stone pillar, under the awning to the entrance of a spacious multi-leveled parking garage. From here he has a clear view of the intersection of Boulevard and Parkway.
What he sees freezes him in shock.
He knows he has to keep moving but his body refuses to move.
He tries to look away but can’t.
He at least wants to stop weeping… but he doesn’t know how.
It’s too much to take in at once. Atrocity snapshots slow- burn across the retina and meld into the next.
There is a twenty-car pileup snaking behind a jack-knifed truck; surrounded by an island of mangled corpses still impossibly squirming and wailing in pain. A mist of flies disperses off a lone skeletal shadow as it crawls out of the wreckage of a still-smoldering ambulance. Cannibal banquet inside a peeled open school bus. Pink-purple intestinal tracts in a rainbow sheen puddle of gasoline. Squad car sirens illuminating a broken last stand; a wave of the Infected picking through the remaining scraps of raw cop meat.
The skyline behind the carnage in flames; a plume of acrid-gray smoke wafts off the Bank of America Building and vanishes into monstrous storm clouds whose swelling billows crackle with red lightning.
A series of sobs resounds from the depths of the parking lot, fluttering down the ramp and segueing into a growl of baffled hunger.
The wailing jars Mitch out of his paralysis and awakens his own appetite for life. He blinks the horror out of his skull and nods to himself with a terrified smile.
S’okay, his thoughts run cool over the heat of the situation, there’s still the tracks.
The moan is getting closer and doesn’t come alone. A sound of something thick and wet being dragged along broken glass echoes closer. Mitch slides down his goggles, grips the bars and soars out of the garage. He does not look back – either over his shoulder nor in the blur of his considerations.
33 minutes to go:
Shuffling aimlessly up the hill of the jogging lane, a flock of three Infected march. To their right, the hill slopes down gradually through a roll of freshly manicured grass before vanishing into a canopy of tree tops filling the valley of Innman Park below. To their left is Freedom Parkway, choked on a stream of frozen traffic; the myriad of vehicles abandoned or long picked clean of any sustenance. One of the flock, the smallest and slowest, straggles to a halt. It pauses for a moment before a small knoll in front of a curve in the Parkway. It gazes up at the black halo of birds circling around the spread bare branches of a lone tree engulfed in flames. It gurgles the memory of a word through a locked grin. A child’s stare of open wonder dances around restlessly tracking their flight. A trembling hand steadies itself as it reaches out towards the vision.
“On your left!”
The voice barks a muffled but clear authority; dragging the Infected’s attention from skyward bound into a painfully slow stagger-turn to its left…
… Where it is immediately doused in the face with an aerosol blast of blue spray-paint.
The creep shrieks and staggers back clawing at its eyes, as Mitch zips by confidently, rabbits around the other two shufflers and vanishes up, over and around the curve of the hill.
Running parallel to Liberty Parkway, The Terminus/Inselberg Trail is a scenic pathway snaking through the neighborhood for the recreational pursuit of the city’s bicyclists, joggers and casual strollers.
Right now, however, it trickles with a very different kind of foot traffic.
There’s a lot of them, but they’re spread out and yielding plenty of space between their advance. By the time most of the Infected register Mitch it’s only after he’s left them grasping in vain at his doppler ghost. In that regard, he finds them no different than they were in life. Zoned out in their own little world, locked in thought and somnambulating their way around through life-. most of them openly startled by his sudden appearance…
… He aerosol blasts another creep who comes staggering in ambush out from behind a tree and tosses the now empty can off its head before continuing on.
Mitch is quickly approaching the overpass; a small slope up through yet another tunnel mouth. At least this one is lit up and showing the passage to be Infected- free. Mitch advances, but does so in a swerve to his right, making sure to leave enough space on his left should he have to suddenly u-turn back down in retreat.
Hitting the top of the climb, he reaches the beginning of the bridge and recons the scene before him. The coast is clear…not counting of course the small mob of freaks that’s been ambling behind in pursuit since he rode past them. The closest of them is only a few dozen yards down the hill.
My lucky day, Mitch puffs facetiously through the respirator’s grill.
Where the overpass ends, behind a veil of feral shrubbery, there is a small patch of wino trampled red dirt leading to the stone buttress directly beneath the bridge. Mitch dismounts and rolls quickly through the veil, ducking low to hug the railing wall and rolls his way to the top of the embankment. Down below the scene is empty. Graffiti tagged pillars stand, a few by Mitch’s own hand even, with the embankment walls covered in competing murals and ‘Wild Style’ free for all’s.
There is a muddied trail where the old Terminus rail tracks used to lay dormant from another century, another South. Before the Storm hardly anyone but the homeless, skate punks or taggers frequented the area. Now it seems to be just Mitch. He guesses the creeps are all sticking to high volume population areas. Makes sense – go where the meat is. But between him and the trail where the tracks once laid is one steep, as in suicidal- steep, drop. If he was a thousand packs of cigarettes and twenty pounds younger, maybe he could pull it off… and even then he’d be lucky to get down there with his Baby, much less his neck, in one piece.
A throaty croak rustles just ahead. The pursuing Infected are just starting to hit the top of the bridge by his best guess.
Nothing to do then but walk it down that sharp slope and pray he doesn’t attract attention in doing so.
He crouch-rolls up to the intersection where the buttress plateaus directly underneath the bridge, creating a little walkway normally filled with sleeping bags stuffed with unconscious derelicts. It’s there he sees the barrel of a pistol pointing straight at him.
The instinct is to leap back, but Mitch keeps his cool enough not to rattle and potentially give himself away. Instead he glances up from that barrel, down the pistol’s length, along the shaking fist clutching it and all the way to the bottom of the petrified face it protects.
A man is crouched low just under the awning between intersection of bridge and buttress. Out of shape, balding, bespectacled, 40-something and dressed preposterously enough in sandals. But in his other arm, flabby though it may be, a little red- headed girl buries her face in the Santa pillow softness of his sizable gut.
Mitch points to the bridge and mouths the next three words as if they need to be seen from a mile away: “They’re… behind… me!”
He places one finger over the respirator and prays he’s made himself clear.
Family Man nods and lowers the gun and wraps his meaty arms around the little girl. He places the barrel, soft as a kiss good night, to her temple. He looks straight into Mitch’s mirrored goggles and watches himself mouth back in return: “Go!”
Mitch just stands there a second before a collective groan washes over the bridge and cascades down his spine with a shiver.
He begins to make his way down the buttress, navigating the rain slippery slope with baby steps of his muddied boots. Baby wobbles in his hand, he feels the traction vanish under the steel toes and almost goes down ass- first before catching himself steady off the handlebars. The bike rattles. Above him he can hear the grunting and slobbering of the Infected pick up into a baffled frenzy… if one of them just happens to look over or down or veer off through the veil…
…but no.
Mitch takes the remaining descent down the embankment with heightened momentum picked up involuntarily. He looks up and catches Family Man still crouched there with the little one pressed to his belly and the pistol pressed to her head. Before he can react a gray blur streaks a few yards ahead and hits with a nauseating crunch. Then another. Then another.
Mitch realizes it’s raining bodies… the Infected must’ve heard him and mindlessly began shambling over the railing of the bridge to plummet off the two story drop unceremoniously. A fourth. A fifth. All of them lay there uselessly; trembling meat sacks stuffed with broken bones and undying rage.
By the time the seventh and last of the creeps takes the plunge, Mitch is well on his way down the open trail where the trains of another century once roared.