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Post by Rhinn on Aug 3, 2011 14:23:24 GMT -5
Mikey took the flash light and turned it on. The light reflected off the back of the room and into his eyes. He looked to his left and his right. The room itself was 6 feet by 6 feet. He pushed the door open more and revealed it.
"It's an elevator, geniuses. There are no buttons, just a keypad for a code."
Zoe pushed the redial button on the phone. She waited for it to connect.
"How about if I blow your sphincter out with a .357, genius."
She was spared Mikey's answer when the phone connected. Without waiting she spoke.
"We have an elevator with a keypad. What's the passcode?
She listened while he spoke and then hung up.
She stepped in with Mikey and punched in the code. "1-8-7-9-2". The lights immediately came on and the doors started to close. Zoe stuck out an arm to stop it for Samuel. When the doors shut, it automatically began to descend.
"I guess there is only one destination."
It seemed like a few minutes... but it always does on an elevator, before the lift stopped. It was so quiet and smooth that Zoe didn't know if they had traveled just a few feet or 5 floors down. It seemed that there was more to this house than at first glance from the outside.
The doors opened swiftly, causing Zoe to jump. She had her revolver out and pointed at the doorway.
Instead of the old estate looking walls with dark wood and tapestries, this level was state of the art with solid white walls only broken up by 5 stainless steel, seemless doors. The elevator let out into a hallway that was about 50 meters long. At the end was circular lobby that ended in 4 doors. Each of them looked identical.
The fifth door was only 10 meters down the corridor on the left. It looked like the others, but it had a bulge in the lower half of the door, bowing back into the corridor. To Zoe, it looked like something on the inside trying to get out.
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Post by Mikey on Aug 9, 2011 3:03:01 GMT -5
“This is some bulls***…” Samuel muttered as he stood in the elevator, hunched down to fit his frame into the elevator that was more than a foot too short for him. “Who built this, gnomes?” He said, turning his gaze to Zoe.
“No offense.” He said, cracking a smirk. Mikey started to laugh, quickly shutting up when Samuel gave him a rough shove. He quickly went quiet as he hit the wall. When the doors finally opened, Samuel eyed the door that looked like it had been smashed in from the inside and looked at Mikey.
“Open it.” He said.
“Oh, hell no. I’d rather be shot, at least that wouldn’t be as painful.” He said. An audible gulp was heard when Samuel cocked his revolver. “Well… I might do it if I had a way to defend myself.” He said. Samuel thought for a moment and pressed his gun into the kids back, pulling out his knife and handing it to Mikey.
“Have at it.” He said. Mikey took it, looked at for a moment, and sighed.
“I meant…”
“Do I look like I give a s***? Get going.” Samuel said, cutting him off as he gave him another shove down the hall. The kid got to the door and grabbed the handle, swallowing the lump that formed there and eased the handle to the side. With a quick action, he flung it open and backed off, pressing against the opposite wall and holding the knife out in front of him.
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Post by Rhinn on Aug 9, 2011 10:20:48 GMT -5
"Yeah, well this gnome will bust your kneecaps if you aren't careful", Zoe said with a grin.
"Do ya'll need a room? I can go back upstairs for a while", remarked Mikey. Zoe slapped him in the ear. In spite of herself, she was beginning to like the kid. They might even have been friends... if he hadn't tried to kill her first.
Zoe watched as Samuel gave Mikey a knife. She kept her gun trained on him with the hammer back, but her finger off the trigger. Zoe moved out of the elevator by a foot or so but that was it. She watched as Mikey opened the door and jumped back.
Nothing lurched out at him. Mikey sagged with relief.
And that was when he was attacked. Two large dogs, obviously undead, lept at his throat. Mikey screamed and stuck the knife in the first ones stomach... which did absolutely nothing. Then his throat was ripped out and the dogs mauled his body.
Zoe squeezed off a round, sending a .357 round through the skull of the first dog. Its head blew open and splattered the wall and hallway with bits of brain and skull. It went down in a heap. Zoe knew that Samuel had the 2nd one. As she surveyed the mess she looked over at Mikey. He was still alive, though barely. His skin where the dogs had chewed through, showed signs of infection, turning brown and dead.
"Damn. Sorry about that", she said and she put the gun to Mikey's head and pulled the trigger, ending his misery and making sure he wouldn't get up again. Then she dialed the phone. This time she put it on speaker phone.
"Where the hell do we go now?" she said as it connected.
"Whatever you do don't open the first door, the infected family and dogs are in there", said the voice.
"Well we fracking know that now. Thanks for the heads up." Then Zoe hesitated.
"I didn't see a family, did you?" she asked to Samuel. Then she heard moaning coming from the room and saw the milky blue dead eyes of two little girls and a woman advancing towards her. Zoe backed away, back toward Samuel and raised her gun again. Their images, though bitten and eaten away matched that of the girls in the pictures of the hallway.
"No".
It was half a murmur and full of dread. Zoe didn't want to shoot little kids. It was all wrong. Her hand shook, but she couldn't pull the trigger. She backed up more.
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Post by Mikey on Aug 11, 2011 9:46:48 GMT -5
Samuel squeezed the trigger of his revolver, his aim true, and the dog was soon sprayed all over the hallway. It’s skull had popped like a balloon from the soft nosed .44 round. He looked at the kid on the ground, a slightly indifferent look on his face. He had always been planning on killing the kid. This way just saved him a bullet.
Leaning down and picking up his knife as Zoe made another call, stopping what he was doing when she turned to him and asked if he had seen a family. He turned toward the room when he heard the shuffling, raising his gun when he saw the three females start to shamble out. He heard Zoe, saw the look on her face. She wasn’t the hard ass she pretended to be. Shooting a kid, it wasn’t in her nature. Samuel had the same nature, but he was also of the nature to kill a zombie when he saw it. He gave Zoe a gentle push, urging her down the hallway so she didn’t have to see what he was about to do…
Letting out a disappointed sigh, he lined up his first shot and easily killed the first of the little girls. He fired another, and the next little girl was down as well. The mother was the easiest shot to make, both accuracy wise and conscious wise, and as Samuel sent a round into her and took a deep breath.
“You the religious type?” He asked Zoe. A rare thing nowadays, but he’d met one or two in his time.
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Post by Rhinn on Aug 11, 2011 10:51:09 GMT -5
Zoe shook her head, and only tentatively looked at the heeps on the floor.
"Not really. I just wasn't ready for little girls to be zombies. I guess I thought it was only adults that turned... but seeing little girls and knowing that they had been attacked and bitten, screaming and crying until they died..."
Zoe cut off and choked down a lump that had risen in her throat. Then she closed her eyes and took a few deep breaths, getting herself under control.
"Sorry, I'm okay now."
The voice on the other end of the phone was quiet. "Is the infected put down?"
"Yeah, they won't be getting back up again."
"Fine, so the door you want is at the end of the hall." The voice sounded tight, as if the deaths of the undead affected him personally.
Zoe carefully stepped over the bloody stain was that Mikey, and the dogs and toward the doors. She also pulled a .357 round from her backpack and loaded it back into her gun. She knew it was only one round, but one never knew when it would come in handy.
Okay, we are at the foyer. We have 4 doors in front of us. They are arranged in a semi circle and..."
"Don't open the outer doors. They contain things that you don't want to get free. The code for all doors is 8-5-2-3-5-7. The door that should have the safe behind it is the 2nd door from the...."
The phone cut off.
"Second door from the what?", asked Zoe impatiently. When nothing answered but silence, she dialed the number again.
NOTHING.
Looking down, she saw that it was dead.
"That's fracking great. We have the code, but no door." She pointed at the two doors and then over at Samuel.
"Rock-Paper-Scissors?"
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Post by Mikey on Aug 18, 2011 7:36:21 GMT -5
“I’m more of an enie-meanie-miney-moe kind of guy.” Samuel said in a deadpan voice. He looked back and forth between the door for a moment and took a step forward. He put his shoulder to the wall and tried to listen for movement behind the left door. Nothing. But, he wouldn’t be surprised if they were sound proof. Probably were, they didn’t hear the thrashing that the dogs would have been doing to try and get out of the room. Just saw the damage.
“Over here.” He said, motioning to the right side of the door. Stacked on either side, they could both lean it and fire if they needed to. It was about all they could do at the moment…
“On three?” He asked more than said. He started to wonder if this was all worth the money, but hey. Get the money, get to Vegas, and they could do some serious living. That, and get some proper gear. Taking a breath to prepare himself, he shouldered his shotgun and checked the chamber. He grabbed the door handle with his left hand, gave it a turn, took one more look at Zoe, and threw it open, his shotgun trained on the room as a whole.
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Post by Rhinn on Aug 22, 2011 12:15:07 GMT -5
Zoe felt her heartbeat stop for a second as she aimed her revolver into the darkness and pulled the hammer back. It was at this time that she wished for something semi automatic and large capacity.
Out of her periphial, she was able to see Samuel aim inside with his shotgun.
One second went by and Zoe waited for the flash of teeth and wails of the undead to assault her.
Two seconds went by and Zoe strained to hear anything besides the pounding of her blood in her ears.
Three seconds went by and her finger was so tensed that it began to cramp.
By the 6th second, as nothing appeared, Zoe finally remembered to start breathing again. She sighed a little but didn't lowere her gun. Feeling on her waist, she pulled out her flashlight and turned it on, it's light beaming into an empty room.
Well, empty of anything moving...
Sliding forward, she show her beam on the walls and found the light switch.
Click
The room was illuminated with light. Instead of sterile walls, dark woods of cherry and mohogany surrounded the space. In the middle was a couch and against one wall were bookshelves, lined with books. It took her only a second to realize that it looked exactly like the lounge area, minus the fireplace.
In its place stood a massive titanium safe. There was no tumbler or key. Instead.. right in the middle of the door was a thumb reader... like the kind that high value buildings used to allow access.
Zoe looked at Samuel. She returned the light to her pocket, but didn't holster her gun.
"Just when I thought this was going to be easy", she said, stepping further into the room.
"Let's wedge the couch in the door. I don't want it to shut and lock us in here."
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Post by Mikey on Aug 23, 2011 0:20:27 GMT -5
“Good idea.” Samuel said, walking over to the couch and easily lifting it as he let his shotgun hang from it’s sling. Walking it over to the door, he put it into the doorway long ways. If they needed to, they could easily step over the arm and walk on it to get out. He walked over to the safe and took a look.
“Question is… Who’s thumbprint?” He asked, looking back to Zoe. “Did that thing come with a charger?” He asked. Without further direction, he didn’t know how they were going to get it open…
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Post by Rhinn on Aug 23, 2011 10:56:06 GMT -5
"Well if it did, I have no idea where it is at."
Zoe turned the phone over in her hand and looked at it. It had a place for a charger to go in, but no charger. She looked around the room for anything of worth, and then back at the safe. Then an idea occurred to her and it made her stomach lurch.
"I have an idea, but you aren't going to like it", she said. She pointed back out to the hallway where Mikey, the dogs and the zombies laid in a bloody mess.
"Maybe one of their fingers opens it. We could hack off their hands and try their fingers." Obviously, her first choice was the taller woman. The wife, or who ever she was, probably had access to the safe, but something in the back of her mind said that maybe it was the children.
Drawing her machete out, she took the time to pull on her gloves, hoping to protect her hands from the infected blood. Then she went back out into the hallway. Up by the bloody mess, she found the bodies of the two smaller children and the older woman. She ripped off Mikey's shirt and put it on the ground. Then she began the gruesome job of hacking the hands off the corpses. Each time the blade came down, a hand was severed and she stopped long enough to toss it onto the shirt. Soon, she had all 6 hands piled on the shirt. Picking it up, she went back to the roof and dropped them on the floor in front of the safe.
"Some of the hands are missing fingers or they are smashed, but hopefully one of them works. Otherwise, it is back up the elevator, out into town and trying to find a charger that fits this phone."
It was frustrating, being this close to your goal and having everything in this blasted world stand in front of it. Zoe sighed and picked up the first hand. It was a left hand and it was missing the pinkie and the ring finger. It was a smaller hand, one of the daughters. "Here goes nothing." She pressed the thumb to the reader... nothing. Then she continued to the pointer and middle finger. Neither of them worked either.
She tossed the hand down and picked up the next one. It was one of the mother's hands... her right. Zoe tried every finger on the hand and none of them opened the safe. With a snarl, Zoe threw it to the ground and grabbed the next one. This was the smallest hand... the girl must not have been older than 6. Zoe was almost able to cradle it in one hand.
Trying not to think about the little girl and how she died, Zoe slid the fingers in the reader. With the thumb, Zoe heard the lock click and the safe door swung open.
Zoe stepped back, looking at the safe. There on the other side, was stacks of hundreds, all bundled together in amounts of $10,000. There were 200 stacks and they took upper half of the safe. Underneath them, there were what looked to be precious stones, diamonds, rubies and the such. Zoe could also see a few very old, handguns, and there was an old Katana sword housed in a case.
All in all a pretty good haul. Zoe had never been a jeweler, but she thought that everything else was worth another $500,000.
She leaned in close to look at it when she caught the faint smell of burned ozone. She looked to her left and her hair fell from her shoulder and swung into the vault... where it was instantly vaporized.
Zoe lept back, spitting out a curse. She grabbed the end of her hair and it was cut cleanly two inches shorter than the other side. Cautiously, she picked up another hand and thrust the fingers into the vault. A faint grid of red laser lines lit up as it incinerated the hand. It only appeared for a moment, but Zoe could tell that the lasers were in a half inch diamond pattern.
She looked over at Samuel. "DAMN IT!"
:: EDIT 09/07/2011 ::
Now they were really in a fix. Even if they tried to reach in with a telescoping pincher, the bills, the diamonds and stones were bigger than what the openings would allow. The money would be disintegrated immediately. Even worse, the diamonds would reflect the laser beams back into the room and Zoe had no idea where they would bounce. It could even act like a disco ball hanging from a ceiling and richocet the lasers everywhere.
No, there had to be another way. She walked back and forth for a moment and then turned to Samuel. Her eyes lit up with an idea, but it wasn't going to be pretty and it could possibly be dangerous.
"If we turn off the power, then it should shut down the power to the safe and we should be able to get everything out. The only problem with that..." Zoe took a breath to deliver the bad news.... "is that it also shuts down the elevator, and the electronic locks on those other doors. Once we do this, everything down here is free to roam and we have no way of getting out until the power comes back on."
Zoe looked back at the hallway and what the other doors held behind them.
"Also, if the power grid is not on this floor, then someone has to go back upstairs to turn it off. Wait for a call on the walkie talkie that all the loot has been taken out of the safe, turn it back on and then run like hell to help the other out with whatever is down here. The person left down here is on their own until the other's return."
She looked up at Samuel and put a twisted grin on her face. "You game?"
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Post by Mikey on Sept 10, 2011 16:37:14 GMT -5
After checking a moment to see if Zoe was ok, Samuel looked at the safe and sighed.
“It’s never f**king easy, is it?” He said with an annoyed tone in his voice. As he listened to her plan, he got to thinking. That did not sound like a good idea at all. Mainly because he was sure the locks would no longer he in place on the doors outside. They knew what had been inside one, but what about the others? With their kind of luck, they would house worse horrors…
“I’m not so sure about that. We don’t know what’s behind those doors, and we don’t know if we’re armed to take on whatever gets out.” He said. “We need a way to keep them closed.” He said. “Let’s get back to the garage. Maybe there is something we can use there.” He said, going out of the room.
They made their way back up the elevator, up it, and back to the garage where the tools would be. The resistance was small. They had closed the gate, and the raiders had killed about all of the zombies that had made their way into the yard.
Samuel showed little regard for noise or property as he rummaged through any kind of box, tool box, or compartment he could. And suddenly, he found what he was looking for. A small welding torch, along with a pair of welders goggles.
“Got it.” He said, victory in his voice. They could weld the doors shut. If they were strong enough to hold whatever was inside while the magnetic locks were in place, then there would be no problem holding if they were welded shut. At least, he hoped.
“I’ll go down, weld them all shut. You stay here, I’ll call you on the radio when I’m ready.” He said. He made his way back to the elevator and went down, wasting no time as he started to close up the first door.
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Post by Rhinn on Sept 14, 2011 11:43:47 GMT -5
Zoe followed Samuel back out to the garage. She had to admit, he had a fairly simple and brilliant idea. Weld the doors shut so that no one or thing would be free when they hit the power. Her only stop was at the dead leader to check his body for a charger… nada.
She followed Samuel back to the kitchen where he stopped her at the stairs to the basement.
”I’ll go down, weld them all shut. You stay here, I’ll call you on the radio when I’m ready.”
Zoe nodded and went over to the pantry and opened the door. She found the fuse box and stood ready. It would take some time for Samuel to weld the doors, so she started to fiddle with the phone. Then she had an idea. She wrote down the phone number to their contact on the wall. Then she took the back off the satellite phone and then the back off her phone. Switching the Sim Cards and batteries, she hooked them back up. Next, she plugged the phone number in her phone, which had fully charged. She saved it to her memory and stowed it in her pocket. A smile crossed her face. If it worked like she thought it would, then maybe they could cut out the middle man.
She decided it was time to check in. She dialed the number and on the 2nd ring, he answered.
“Where did you go?” he demanded.
“The phone ran out of power. I had to find a charger for it.” She lied. “We found the safe and we are about to turn off the power to shut down the security around it.”
“You can’t do that. The other doors…”
“We’ve taken care of that. We are welding them shut so that they won’t open.”
There was a pause as the man seemed to consider it. Then he asked, “How did you get the safe opened?”
Zoe paused for a second and then answered. “We cut the hands off of the undead and pressed them to the reader. One of the smaller one’s worked. It also held us see the laser grid. It burned nicely when we shoved it through.”
The man lost it. There was a string of curse words and threats that ended in unintelligible babble. Zoe held the phone away from her ear.
“You finished, Mr. Potty Mouth, or should I hang up?”
“How dare you treat my..”
“Your what? Your family, you coward. Send someone down here to get your money and leave your family trapped down there. No decency at all. They’re better off where they are at than with you.”
Zoe hung up and turned off the phone. She had a suspicion that the man owned the house. He knew too much about the inside and what was in there. She had deliberately set him off…
Hopefully that didn’t mean that he’d unleash hell on them before they made It to the docks.
She waited for Samuel’s signal.
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Post by Mikey on Sept 14, 2011 18:10:49 GMT -5
Sparks flew all over as Samuel put the finishing touches on one of the welds, sealing the last door of the hallway. He turned off the gas and watched the small pilot flame go back to being about as long as the flame from a Bic lighter. Smirking to himself as he pulled out a cigarette, he used the gun to light it and then pulled the radio out of his pocket.
"We're good. Shut it down." He said, and several seconds later the lights went dark. He picked up his flashlight as drew his gun, taking a breath of smoke as he waited for a moment. If he was going to die, he was getting his last cigarette in, goddamn it.
He stayed quiet for a few moments, cocking the hammer of his revolver just in case he had to get a quick shot off. Taking another breath and sighing, he breathed out the fear in his mind. If he went out, he was going out as the predator, not the prey. A state of mine was all it took sometimes, and if you told yourself that you were the worst thing hiding here in the dark, even you would believe it.
He walked toward the room at the end, his light shining the way for him. He got to the safe and stuck the light inside, just to check the security lasers. They were off.
"We're good." He said into his radio, grabbing the loot from the safe and loading it into his bag.
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Post by Rhinn on Sept 16, 2011 10:41:02 GMT -5
Zoe had just put the phone back in her pocket when she heard Samuel's voice come through on the walkie talkie. She acknowledged Samuel and then pulled the master breaker down, shutting off power to the entire estate.
She listened as an eerie silent settled over the pantry. Zoe pulled her revolver out and waited. Without the whine of the refrigerator and the air conditioning, Zoe could hear the creaks of old house.
A large muffled thump sounded from upstairs followed by another. The floorboards creaked as if something upstairs was just let out of a cage.
"Damn it, damn it damn it", muttered Zoe. With the power shut off, they were both cut off from each other. Hopefully she'd get the call from Samuel saying to turn it back on soon.
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Post by Mikey on Sept 25, 2011 7:07:31 GMT -5
Most of the valuables in the safe were easy to get into his bag. The cash and jewels were easy, and the handguns didn’t cause him too much trouble. The sword, he settled on just putting it over his back and tucking it into the strap of his bag. Grabbing the walkie talkie, he keyed the button as he made his way out of the room.
“Done, turn the power back on.” He said as he made it to the elevator, his finger on the button as he prepared for her to flip the power back on. It was starting to get creepy down here, and another thought had entered his mind. What if the doors weren’t what was keeping whatever was behind them at bay. What if there was an electronic anesthesia system keeping them asleep? He didn’t want to find out, he just wanted to get the hell out of here. They could take one of the cars in the garage and get the f**k out of here in a hurry. He had seen a truck, they could load her bike into the back of it. She sure didn’t want to be riding a motorcycle into a zombie horde.
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Post by Rhinn on Sept 26, 2011 11:52:05 GMT -5
“What are you talking about? The power is on”, Zoe responded back into the walkie talkie. She waited a few seconds for that to sink in and then snickered. “Just kidding. Here we go.”
She flipped the master lever, sending power back through the house. She felt the hum of a generator kicking back in and then began to flip the breaker back to the ON position. Little by little the house came back to life as power was restored to all parts of the house. She waited a few seconds and then asked.
“Did it work?”
Static responded but that wasn’t surprising. If he was in the elevator, all signals would probably be cut off. Overhead, the thudding got louder and she heard the scraping of something moving along the ceiling and walls. It sounded like it was coming from every where. Not wanting to be waiting out here alone, Zoe went down the stairs to the basement. She would meet Samuel down at the elevator.
What neither of them knew was that Samuel was right on with his guess of anesthesia, but wrong in what it was keeping asleep. When the power shut down, the freezer systems in the attic were shut off. What Zoe and Samuel didn’t know was that the freezer systems had to be turned on manually. They also didn’t realize that the attic of the Jefferson Estate houses a BOW plant. The freezers had kept it at bay. Now, coming to life, it was search out food and the basement had two life forms. So, while the power had been off, the entangling vines and branches of the bio-plant was traveling through the ventilation systems to the underground rooms and through the hallways leading down from the attic to the kitchen. (think Plant 42).
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