Finally coming out of shock from inflicting bodily harm on human-like creatures, Joel pulled Thomas and Jarod inside with their cargo, closing the door after. There were still more than a few zombies out there, being drawn by the alarm that was still going off.

"First things first." Nodding to Mauve, "Yes, you did have the only key, but the automatic locks on the doors have been disarmed, somehow. It is odd, that shouldn't even be reasonably possible. But there will be time for that later. Or, more exactly, if we don't hurry then there definitely won't be a later."

Most zombies were congregating around the alarm, but those that Thomas had bashed up earlier were beginning to rise where able, crawl when possible, and in general moved towards McCrae Hall in whatever manner was possible. A few unharmed zombies noticed and fell upon the injured with a ravenous fury. Even at that, others were still coming towards the building.

"We've got to get supplies. The cafeteria is in the back," he pointed beyond a mass of round tables and serving counters. "But what ever you do, don't eat or take anything made within the last 24 hours. We don't know what did this to everyone and I'd rather not find out later that we've been eating a zombie pie or the likes."

"But, we'll need something to carry the food in. The rooms above us are probably empty of zombies, just as the other dorm was, but we might find survivors. More importantly, however, are backpacks. We'll need those to carry the food and water in. I suggest we split up. Some of us gather the food and any bottled water in the kitchen, some of us to gather backpacks, and some of us to guard against surprise zombie attacks."

Feeling a twinge of guilt for ignoring Jarod's question, Joel forced his mind to consider what seemed to be a hopeless case. "And who was the last person to see Krylo?"

Frank came flying through the door so fast he almost couldn't stop soon enough before hitting a wall. It looked as if he made a 20 on his run the f*ck away check if this was D&D. "God damnit did you guys forget about me?" Frank said angrily to the rest of the group. He sat down taking a breather where he stopped. "Well whatever."

Jogging towards the entrance, Jack watched the others pile through the doors ahead of him. Only a few yards from the doorway, he threw his cigarette out and prepared to make the final sprint to the portal. Suddenly, there was a jerk on his right leg, throwing him off balance and nearly to the ground. "What the..."

Attached to his right leg was the zombified corpse of a 10 year old boy. The kid was naked and smeared in blood. The ghastly thing looked up at him with its dead eyes and hissed. "Jesus Christ! Get it off!" Jack shouted, the writhing zombie child clearly disturbing him. He flailed his leg violently, trying to shake the thing loose. Finally the ungodly creature came free, and Jack pulled back and punted the thing like a football. Its head crushed by the impact, the child flew about 5 yards and landed on its neck with a sickening thud. Jack raised his arms vertically above his head "GOOOAAALLL!! Hah ha!"

He turned around and saw the doors to McCrae slam shut. He stopped laughing. Seizing his bat, he rushed the door.

"Guys let me in!" He pounded on the thick steel surface. "Come on, let me in! You forgot Jack!"

A moan behind him sent his blood running both hot and cold. Slowly, he turned about. The surviving horde of zombies had surronded him in a rough semi-circle. They started moving in.

Jack hit the first one with his bat. Its head caved in and the creature collapsed to the ground. Jack pulled back to hit the next, but by now, the crowd had moved so close there was no room to move. The zombies quickly mobbed him. Jack realized that if those doors didnt open right now, he was going to be torn apart.

"Open the door! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD OPEN THE DOOR!!!"

Ben looked at Frank. "What? It's not like that was the most organized retreat in history. We're lucky any of us got here."

Ben turned to Joel and Jarod, his face suddenly looking pained. "Last I saw Krylo, he was still back in the dorm, digging through his bad and freakin' out because we were killing the zombies that broke in. I...I thought everyone was behind me when we made the run for it. I...I didn't look..."

Pounding on the door broke Ben out of his train of thought. Jack's shouting, followed the increased moaning of the zombies, made his blood run cold.

"CRAP!" he yelled, and ran over to the door. "I'm going to open it. Someone get ready to grab him, and as soon as he's in, I'll slam the door and hold it closed until we can lock it again!"

Joel got ready and as soon as Ben opened the door, he grabbed Jack and heaved backward, throwing all his weight into it. Both of them fell backwards and well away from the door, which was soon shut again.

"You know," Joel commented to Jack as he got up, "it wasn't locked."

Looking through the glass, thick as it was it was quite transparent transparent, at the coming zombies he continued, "Which is a bit of a problem, really."

Jack scrambled away from the door he had just been pulled through. The blood had drained out of his face leaving him paler than Michael Jackson. His jacket was completely shredded and his tie had been eaten. He sat there shaking and watching the door for a moment.

He knew someone was talking to him, but he couldnt hear them over the pounding of his heart. The voice continued in the background, an incoherant stream of background noise. All he could do is watch the door, which had begun rattling from the efforts of the zombies.

Jack threw off his now-ruined jacket and ran towards the vending machine to the left of the door. His body still surging with adrenaline, he hit the machine like a football player, pushing the machine with uncanny strength towards the doorway.

The rattling turned into a shaking, and now the door was starting to come open. A decaying arm stuck itself through. Jack pushed even harder, and with one mighty shove, knocked the steel vending machine over behind the door. The crash of metal on tile was deafening. The heavy block of steel slammed the door shut violently, severing the unlucky zombies arm, and blocking the door from any future entrance.

His strength exhausted, Jack stumbled then sat down in the middle of the floor. He opened his mouth to say thanks, but he was too out of breath, so he just gave a weak thumbs up to the rest of the group.

Just for good measure, Ben sat on the vending machine, and threw the remains of his weapon to the side.

"You know," Ben said, "I find this entire 'not being able to lock doors' thing mighty frustrating."

Ben scanned the room. "Well," he said as lightly as he could, "We made it." He scanned the faces once more, then his expression grew dark. "Most of us, at least." he added in a whisper.

Mauve's head was spining.

"What are we going to do about Krylo?" She asked weakly. "He could be--" Suddenly she had to sit down. The constant moaning of the creatures outside and the repetative banging on the door were begginning to shred her nerves.

Despite all of this, she suddenly felt her face erupt into a macabre grin.

"Krylo's gonna ban us all into next week if we don't let him in," she snickered. It usually happened like this. Someone would tell her some horrible news, and suddenly she would start laughing. When her doctor told her she was going to need surgery, for example, the only image that would come to mind was Red Mage in his Deborah drag. (True story, people.)

She sobered quickly.

"We're trapped in here," she said quietly, "And Krylo's probably trapped out there. There's nobody else around, and we have no idea where these things came from. We've been able to destroy a few, but we have no idea how many more are out there." She finished her analysis by looking at the vending machine laying in front of the door. "We've got some food, but like Joel said we have no idea if the food is poisoned. Things don't look so good."

Suddenly she got an idea.

"Hey Joel," she asked, "Does this building have stairs to the roof or something? We might be able to get a better look at the situation from up on the roof. Plus, I doubt the zombies will be able to get up there from outside. And maybe we'll be able to see Krylo, or at least we can yell for him."

"There are stairs leading to the roof, but it depends on the door to the roof is locked or not. Free roof access is a bit of a liability for the school, after all. Of course, those doors," he motioned to the soda machine blocked entrance, "are supposed to be locked as well."

Joel shifted to a conspiratorial tone, "It wouldn't surprise me to find that whoever disarmed the automatic locks on that door made sure the other doors were shut fast." Looking towards the cafeteria, he continued. "There is also a loading dock in back. It should be locked as well... but someone might want to check just to be sure."

He started to move towards the cafeteria to follow his own advice when he stopped. "Oh, and as for the food. As I said, as long as it is more than 24 hours old it should be zombie-free. I usually eat here when I can't get away from research, which is always. However if you remember, yesterday we went out to eat for lunch and ordered pizza for dinner. Thus if it was in the food, it has to be from one of those two meals or else I'd be a zombie right now as well." He stood on one foot, touched his finger to his nose, and performed other feats quite similar to police alcohol tests. "As you can see, I'm not."

He made as if to go back into the cafeteria again when he stopped. "Of course, if it is a virus then it could be in the water. None of us drank from the tap yesterday, did we? ... Speaking of zombies among us, we might want to do an injury check. If this is like the movies, it can spread through a bite and the person who gets bit never tells anyone until it is too late."

(ooc: So hard to keep up, and everytime I feel up to posting something I find that the situation has changed. I'm not sure how much longer I'll be in this... but most of the things that were making me feel like I should quit have been corrected/gone away to some extent...)

Ironically enough, Krylo was safer than everyone else at this point. All the zombies were swarming McCrae hall, while he was still in the dorm. So, despite all their worrying, he was in a relatively zombie free zone, while they were being mobbed.

Had he known they were worrying, and had the situation been a bit less severe, he probably would have chuckled. However, the situation WAS severe, and he didn't know that they were worrying about him, so instead he just watched McCrae hall for a few minutes, through a crack in the door, trying to decide what to do.

If he went out there, they would most likely all come after him, well, once they noticed him anyway. There was no way he could make it through that Zombie horde equipped as he was now, and he still wasn't certain that they weren't just sick with some horrible leprosy/ebola/kuru/whatever else kind of disease, so, even though their brains were obviously destroyed, he didn't feel like he had the stomach to actually kill any of them.

Of course, that thought wasn't even a problem until he noticed the semi-truck with the dead driver in the parking lot.

There was a chance, slight though it may be, that he could get that thing running and, maybe, get the zombies away from McCrae hall. It would be like driving in a tank... the problems included the dead driver--which wasn't really a problem, as that our illustrious hero (anti-hero? non-hero?) had dissected human corpses in the past--and the fact that the 'legions of undead' or 'legions of the horribly sick' would undoubtably suffer some casualities as they seemed too stupid to avoid the truck... or at least too slow.

On the other, not being afraid of killing people, hand, Mauve, Mammoth, Jack, Thomas, Ecurt, Jarod with an 'o', Ben, Thought, Phoenix, etc. were all trapped in there, and the half-decayed...whatever they were... didn't seem to be giving up on getting in.

And, on the third hand, if he stayed out here, seperated from the others, he would almost certainly wind up dead.

Well, that was the kicker.

If he didn't go, the others might be able to fend for themselves, but how would HE survive?

The realization that he might die there, and there was nothing he could do about it, made him sick. His stomach churned with fear in a way that it hadn't ever done before and something inside of him snapped slightly.

[i]'Me or them... and I still plan on living forever,'[i] he thought jokingly--one of his natural defense mechanisms, and a small smirk played across his face, even as his stomach did somersaults inside of him, the back of his brain thinking of all the things that could go wrong.

He opened the door a bit wider and ran, crouching, toward the parking lot, watching the zombies out of the corner of his eye, watching for any sign that they may have noticed him, and, luckily for him, the sound and the fury of the alarm, along with the knowledge of ever so tasty morsels inside the building, kept them occupied enough for him to get to the truck which had ruined Jack's car.

The door was opened, and Krylo pulled the body out, trying not to gag at the smell of the driver's death-emptied bowels. He eyed up the seat and almost vomited, but he knew what he had to do, so instead of giving up, he pulled off the extra, long sleeved, shirt he had put on in order to help him avoid contamination, and laid it on the seat, over the mess of what had been left of the driver's vacated bowels through his pants. He then climbed in and sat down, closing the door behind him.

By this time, a few zombies had noticed the movement and were staggering toward the truck, but they were moving at Zombie pace, and, thus, Krylo wasn't too terrified of them making it before he started the truck, what with the keys still being in the ignition.

A quick glance showed him that the gas tank was empty, however, and so he closed his eyes as he turned the key, praying to several dieties that he never believed existed, that there were enough fumes to let this thing run at least that far.

The engine sputtered for a few moments, causing Jared's knuckles to whiten as he gripped the steering wheel, and then, finally, it turned over.

He put his foot on the gas, and the cab backed up, smashing into someone else's vehicle, so he reached over and quickly began fiddling with the shifts, grinding a few gears, but finally making the truck move forward.

From that point, he turned hard to the left, plowed directly through what was left of Jack's car, and then came back around toward the front of McCrae Hall, planning on chasing the zombies away from the door, or running them over, and then getting in before they could regroup.

Another few minutes and the semi was driving along the wall where the front door was, sending the zombies staggering away as quickly as they could, and causing Krylo to close his eyes and force down bile as he could hear, see, and feel the human bodies being crushed under his wheels when they couldn't get away.

OOC: Since I've been away all day, I'll say I fell unconscious.

IC: "Mmf... urgh..." Alex came to, and when his eyes opened, he noticed he was inside McCrae Hall. "Whew... I'm alive. Thanks, guys." He wanted to just lay back and rest, but figured that might be a bad idea. "Is everyone here? What's the plan at this point? We can't just hide in here indefinitely..." He tried to stand up, but was still sore and worn out. "Hmm... perhaps rest might be a good idea after all..."

Ecurt...he just stopped trying to reason. He decided it would be best to think of everything as a dream, especially since it sounded like someone outside had just taken a truck and started playing bumper cars with some zombies.

On a slightly different, yet still related note, Ecurt decided that his metaphors sucked.

"So...what now? I don't know about you, but I was kinda expecting that we'd all be dead by now."

"What's that noise?" Mauve asked. "Sounds like an engine!" To her limited zombie knowledge, the undead were pretty slow on the uptake. Could any of them learn how to drive a truck? Unless...

She ran up to the door and climbed up on the downed vening machine. Carefully she peered through the window. Zombies scratched against the glass with fingers like dried twigs. Something was moving behind them, large and fast.

"Move, darn it!" she snarled at the undead. "I can't see!" She stretched to see over their heads. It was--

"Holy-- It's a truck!" she yelled. "And there's someone in the driver's seat! A not-zombie someone!" She adjusted her glasses. "Oh my god, it's Krylo!"

Ben swallowed as bile rose in his mouth, seeing the full...er...'glory' of a semi-truck plowing through a horde of ghouls.

"And he's the guy who was complaining that we shouldn't be killing them." Ben muttered to himself.

Still, there was a basic problem to this: Krylo was still outside, and everyone else was inside, with the door firmly blocked.

Ben shrugged to himself. Well, if he makes it over here, he thought to himself, I guess we'd open the door for him.

Jack struggled to see what was happening from the back of the group.

"I'm going to see if I can get a better view from the second floor." he said, heading for the stairway.

He rushed to the second floor and into an empty dorm room. From the window he could see the semi cutting through the crowd like a scythe. He was close enough to glimpse Krylo grimacing behind the wheel of the careening vehicle.

Jack gave a shout of triumph. How is he going to get inside though? The front door is still barred and guarded by zombies, he thought. If he could get on the roof of the semi, I could probably reach him from here and pull him in. The question is, how can I get his attention?

Clarence decided to follow jack to the roof, maybe his sub-par Freerunning skills could
help Krylo, the semi weaved through the deadish things like a drunken
plow and saw jack sweating, Krylo was'nt gonna see them up there, Clarence decided to do what he did best, be reallly loud "HEY KRYLO UP HERE DUMBASS!!"
OOC: Do'nt get mad, It's a proven fact that insults grab the most attention
did you miss me?

"I dont think he'll be able to hear us. That semi is pretty loud." Jack shouted above the roaring engine of the truck below.

Looking back into the dorm, Jack searched for anything useful. After a second he rushed to the bathroom. The sounds of various items being shuffled and thrown about echoed from the small room. A moment later Jack emerged holding an extra-large hairspray bottle.

Jack opened the window and climbed out onto the small ledge of the second floor. Steady. Steady! Dont fall into the mob of hungry undead.

Jack flipped out his lighter. Hopefully this'll catch his attention. Jack lit the torch and used the hairspray to create a plume of flame at least 8 feet long. He continued to shoot the flames into the air, hoping that Krylo would look over and see the signal.

Almost lazily, Joel walked over to the front door... from the outside.

But what? Hadn't he gone into the kitchen to check to make sure that the loading bay door was locked? Obviously, it wasn't locked.

From the loading dock he had heard the noise of a semi-running over a car. Such things tend to make a fair bit of noise. Figuring, and rightly so, that zombies aren't the best suited for driving vehicles, he deduced that someone must be alive out there. Conveniently, all the zombies were either still over at the other dorm, having been attracted by the alarm that was still going off, or too injured to be a threat. How injured, Joel wasn't prepared to ask. Or look.

Keeping his eyes locked on Krylo's head in the semi's driver-side window, he walked around the mass of twitching something. As he did so he repeated, quietly, under his breath, "It's nothing. It is no worse than 5th street after the bars close. It's nothing."

He continued to walk towards Krylo, hoping that he wouldn't be mistaken for a surviving zombie.

:D

Sean was annoyed. He had been dragged inside the hall by Sam only moments before the place had been mobbed by zombies. Everyone was shouting and running around like heads with their chickens cut off, and top of that there was the off chance that he was still slightly drunk.

Somebody mentioned something about viruses and food. Sean wondered: had he eaten anything suspicious lately? Moreso than usual? Probably not... and chances are if anyone in their group HAD eaten anything covered in zombie germs, it would have been sterilized by the vast quantities of alchohol that had been flying around. Something to worry about later, he decided.

There was this huge commotion near the front door, people were screaming and flaming blood was flying everywhere. It smelled like burning hair. Also, from what he could see over the melee, there seemed to be a large diesel truck barreling straight for the entrance. Remembering the first Terminator movie, the one that didn't suck, he dove to the side, landing heavily on his shoulder and creating an interesting pins-and-needles sensation. Wincing, he hobbled off towards the back of the building, out of what he predicted the path that a door-crushing semi might take. "Hey, you guys! It might be a good idea to step away from that door around now, in case Krylo decides to crash the party!"

...

(OOC: Hey, a hundred posts! Alright!)

OOC: Heh, this is pretty cool :) I happen to run a Zombie Survival server on Neverwinter Nights called Undead Nightmare. Check it out if you want (http://undeadnightmare.proboards49.com) :) I'm gonna make a post later ^.~

OOC: Insane Chocobo, let me see how I can put this. First off, you are going to need to sign-up first in the discussion thread. No offense, but just randomly posting in an rp here isn't exactly liked. Second, if you are going to post, don't post a fudging advertisement. I don't care if it has everything to do with the rp, just don't post em. And even if you are going to make that post into an rp, wait until you can make it an rping post, then maybe we might consider the possibility of the chance of thinking about letting the advertisement thing slide, but i doubt it.

IC: Frank was in the kitchen, looking around for something to eat. He took the suggestion of not getting anything that is twenty four hours young, but it was hard to tell whats old and whats new in the food area. He found some sodas in the bottom of a fridge that looks like they have been sitting there for a week, and he got the food stuffed in the back, not in the front, figuring that would be the older stuff. He was just putting his findings on the table for anyone hungry enough to go for.

When Joel, 'The Thought', ...uh... something, walked out into the crushed zombie corpses that had been near the door, Jared had just happened to be glancing in a rear view window and noticed him. Not only that, he even recognized him, and the gait of a human not afflicted by... whatever the hell it was that had gotten the other Zombies.

He attempted to turn to come up next to Joel so that the illustrious (or at least he would be considered illustrious after hosting a party that turned into a zombie bash) forumer could get in, thus facilitating both of their escapes from zombie town. Unfortunately for him, he really had no idea how to handle a semi-truck, and so what he had invisioned (and what would have happened if he had been in a car) as the semi making a hard left turn into a three-sixty at full speed, turned into the semi turning ninety degrees and then falling on its right hand side, while still skidding through a few slow moving corpses, and then taking another flip, landing it upside down and skidding a bit further before finally stopping.

Luckily, however, Krylo was the survivable type, and had actually taken far worse than being thrown into the passenger door (which was now on the ground) and then dropping to the ceiling, and so, a few seconds--just long enough for our not-quite-hero to untangle himself from various belts and buckles and place his stomach firmly back into his abdomen--after the truck had stopped moving Krylo was crawling out of the passenger side door toward Joel, waving a bit to signify he was alright.

Which lasted about 30 seconds before he put his hand in a pile of zombie carcass and began to vomit.

"What's Joel doing out there?" Mauve demanded. "I thought he was checking to see if the doors were..." she paused as realization hit her. "...locked." So apparently NOTHING was locked in this building. Great.

Krylo turned the vehicle towards Joel, probably to give him a lift. Well, that was good. At least he'd be safe--

The thought hadn't even completely formed in her head before the truck began to rock on its wheels. Almost in slow motion, the giant vehicle lurched over, balancing for an instant on four of its eight tires. Then time sped up and the truck flipped over itself, slammed through a throng of decomposing bodies, flipped again, and screeched to a halt on the bloodied pavement.

She heard herself let out a strangled yelp as the impact sent a body flying into the crowd clawing against the door. A mass of undead limbs slammed against the window and Mauve threw herself backwards, falling off the vending machine. She looked up, fearfully, but the window held fast. For a moment she didn't move from her new sitting place on the floor. Her heart was pounding almost loud enough to drown out the noise from outside.

"Krylo wrecked the truck" she reported to those behind her when she was able to talk again.

Jack watched in disbelief as Joel wandered out from around the corner and then as Krylo jack-knifed the semi. Krylo popped out of the top of the semi, apparently unharmed.

Jack tossed away the hairspray, lit himself a cigarette, and took a seat on the ledge.

"Whatever."

OOC: Sean, is there anything more horrific than a Furry? I'm not aware of it, and it was Halloween so there were probably several around. ;-) fixed the typo now, though.

IC: Helping Krylo up and handed him a clean handkerchief. The area was mostly depopulated now, the undead were dead once more, but the zombies that had been at the dorm with the alarm were heading over. Further, they had to either get inside and block the loading bay or find a few place to hide. Maybe someone had gathered supplies, but only Frank was in the kitchen when he left.

Leading, or more exactly dragging, Krylo away from the semi, Joel resumed a near-lazy pace back to the loading dock. It wasn't out of a sense of leisure, by any means. Rather, he was focusing so much on ignoring the squish under his shoes and the metallic smell of blood in the air that he couldn't spare a thought for speed.

Tom was in the kitchen. He was doing much in the way of helping Frank gather food. It was more like he was looking for any alcohol of any kind.

Tom was blessed with the ability to get so caught up in what he was doing, he would quickly forget the smaller details. One of which was that he was fighting zombies. Now that the hormones and adrenaline were lowering, he was starting to actually think about what he had been doing.

He needed a drink.

"We have anything in here at all that could dull my senses? Even a bit?"

Normally he would meditate at times like this. He would sit and enter his inner Tom and sort through the emotions, but he didn't have time. What he needed was a quick fix.

"Let me check" Frank replied. He rumaged through the fridge a bit more. "Looks like this was put in here less than a day ago, so if you want to risk it, here ya go." He tossed the beer towards Tom. "Think I need one for myself." He said as he grabbed himself his own. "Cheers." Frank said, and drank.

"I'd risk a lot of things right now for a beer."

Thomas opened the container and chugged about half of it right there and then. He could feel the numb blackness beginning to take over the front of his mind. He calmed down a bit.

"If I start gnawing on your arm, then we'll know that the food is tainted."