What Goes Around... (Part 27b)
This is PART 27b of a story that is being told in segments by twenty-seven different authors, campfire-style. Each author will take over the story with no prior planning and then pass it on after putting their own spin on it! Expect the unexpected! :) You can check our vmhq campfire tale tag for all of the previous installments or read the story as it develops on AO3. — Part 27b is written by @cheshirecatstrut.
This new tunnel Rubes found, just to switch things up, is artificially lit, fluorescents attached at intervals along the walls. Plaques at every junction read, “NO FIREARMS, NO SMOKING, NO CELL PHONES, NO LAPTOPS, PLEASE WEAR PROTECTIVE GEAR.”
“Something’s flammable down here.” Ruby pauses to consult the blueprint, points right. “Also secret.”
“Bunch of wine crates were stacked near the spot where you left Sean,” Dick says. “Old ones. I bet these catacombs were used for smuggling once. Toss a match on some two-hundred-years-buried booze, you’d have a big-ass underground bonfire, amirite?”
“Sure, but I don’t think that’s the reason for the signs.” Ruby taps one as they pass. “These mention modern tech, and someone’s keeping every light working.” She glances back at him. “Is it just me, or is your brain reverting to normal?”
“Haven’t smoked up in, like, half an hour,” Dick says. “And I’ve got what you’d call a high tolerance. There’s a roach in my pocket, still, but do you really want me to ignore the warnings?”
“Probably it’s best to hold off.” She stops at a metal door with a plaque that reads PROCESSING ROOM and tests the handle. “We’ll never save America from the Fuchsia Menace if we’re unexpectedly burned alive.”
Removing supplies from her purse, she goes through her straw-air-hammer routine again; the safety door swings open with a clang. Ruby’s eyes widen as she enters. Once Dick sidles through behind her, he totally concurs.
The big round space on the blueprints marks an enormous underground cavern, walled in rock machine-scraped smooth. Higher-tech coffins than the one in the barn fill most of the available floor space—they look like hyper-sleep pods from Alien, windows showing pink soup beneath. Gigantic steel tanks at the cave’s center sprout spiderish sprays of pipes, each attaching to one coffin. Dick wonders how any amount of revenge could be worth lying Matrix-style for DAYS.
“I KNEW IT!” he crows, prompting Ruby to shush him. His voice echoes. “Didn’t I call this scenario, last time we were theorizing? Seriously, I need to patent this weed– it’s, like, miracle shit, Rub-a-roni.”
“Did you breed and grow the particular strain in your pocket? No? Then you can’t patent it, dummy. Now hush. Something just started beeping over there, and I need to figure out what and why.”
She crosses the room, picking her way carefully between coffins; for lack of anything better to do, Dick follows. When she stops at a screen of scrolling, random-seeming words he looks over her shoulder, shifting his murse back out of the way.
“Is that the names of the pink dudes?” He squints at one line that reads ‘Henson’, and another, “Soloway’. “And if so, what do you think ‘BEGIN DETACHMENT’ means? ‘Cause it seems like some of these coffins are doing it.”
Ruby gasps as, with a loud, clanking hiss, half the tubes uncouple from coffins and begin, slowly, to retract. The list pauses, flashes a ‘DETACHMENT COMPLETE’ message, and begins scrolling again with new names.
“Shit!” she murmurs, and looks up at him with terrified eyes. “Shit, shit, shit, Dick, I think all these zombies are about to wake up! We have to hide; if they find us in here, who KNOWS what they’ll do?”
Dick casts around for a likely nook, but it’s a fucking cave. Notices part of the wall to their left contains an inset desk, and shoves her that direction. “Under there!” he hisses, as several coffin lids creak open. “Quick, we’re out of time!”
“But we’re not hidden!” she whispers back, obliging just the same. He scrambles in after and pulls the rolling chair in front. “They can see us if they look!”
“That Pez guy turned into a moron,” Dick argues, feeling his pocket to make sure the joint’s still there, for after. “Just shut it–I bet you a grand they won’t notice.”
One by one, the coffins’ inhabitants rise, in a flurry of flailing pink limbs and high-pitched shrieks. Hulks of various shapes and sizes, all clad in white t-shirts and briefs, claw and stumble free as if coordination was a casualty of the process. They land on heads and sides, with zero instinct for self-preservation, then bicycle like upended cockroaches until they make it to their feet.
The room fills, rapidly, with milling, squealing pinkness; Ruby clutches Dick in a way that would be gratifying under less gross circumstances. Then, abruptly, a voice booms out across the room. The hulks turn, as one, towards a white movie screen slowly descending from the ceiling.
Sean Friedrich appears in ten-foot Technicolor, wearing a laurel-leaf crown and toga, lit in such a flattering and gilded style Dick’s positive he directed this segment. Raising his arms like that Italian dictator from Call of Duty: World War II, Sean shouts, “Welcome to the Pantheon, demigods!” Then giggles, the way he always does when he’s had a shitload too much coke.
The Hot Pink Funky Bunch cock their heads and screech like a bunch of brain-damaged birds. But at least they quit staggering around, and a few actually try to listen.
“You’ve been selected, after a VERY competitive search, and gifted with powers FAR beyond those of mortal men,” Sean intones, voice getting higher and rapider as if someone’s switched him to fast-forward. “Now it’s time to USE those powers for our common good. And to teach the assholes populating the rest of the world their PLACE!”
Lots of howling punctuates this statement, along with rudimentary words; a few fights break out between Hulks that stumble into each other. “Please form a line,” Sean continues, more prosaically, “and walk through the door beneath the flashing red light to get street clothes. We’ll gather in the auditorium for a speech. Then you’ll be bused to the location specified on your liability waivers, so you can FULFILL YOUR HEROIC DESTINIES!”
More chaos accompanies this statement–the screen retracts into the ceiling as ‘A Film by Sean Friedrich’ flashes across. Then a red safety light, accompanied by a klaxon, begins flashing over a door on the far wall. The Hulks gather to stare, attracted by the noise and color. When the door swings open, they file out, screaming and punching all the way.
In the quiet after the last of them leave, Dick exhales, then checks to make sure he didn’t pee himself again. Ruby peeks out from beneath the desk.
“Come on!” She turns to tug urgently at Dick. “We need to LEAVE, pronto, and call somebody! If those guys are set loose all over the city to wreak havoc, it could become a statewide emergency!”
He shushes her frantically as booted footsteps echo through the room—this guy moves like he’s got a purpose, and more importantly, is wearing shoes. She hears, presses in close, but her silence comes too late. The feet pause, the chair’s jerked aside, and the owner of two denim-clad legs says, “Come out right now, you idiots. Don’t make me shoot.”
Ruby emerges slowly, hands up. Dick follows, wishing for once she’d let him go first. Then sighs with relief when he sees who exactly it IS, holding the gun.
“What the hell?” he demands, shoving their discoverer back a step. “You scared the crap out of me! Don’t you realize this place is dangerous?” Then, as the gun barrel pointed at him doesn’t waver, adds, “Wait, wait, wait…you’re not…IN on the whole zombie thing with these douchebags, are you?”
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