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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Old Drew Id" data-source="post: 1182268" data-attributes="member: 12175">Session 5 (6/4/2003) Blood And WaterSession 5 (6/4/2003) Blood And WaterCrystal heard the diesel engine roar from inside the building, and knew immediately what that sound meant, even before Joe announced his “plan”. She turned to meet Brother Cooper’s gaze in the dark hallway as Willie was screaming into the radio. He rolled his eyes and shook his head, then gestured forward with his shotgun. They continued to move up. They were near the end of the hall, now maybe fifty feet from the doorway leading out. Crystal could see the light from the scattered bonfire playing on the ceiling up ahead. On the left and right up ahead were two more open doorways before the end of the hall. Crystal darted forward and pointed her gun into the left doorway. An empty stairwell leading up. She nodded back to Cooper and started to move forward again when movement caught her eye on the stairs. She paused and leveled the gun at the stairs. Brother Cooper was up beside her now, his own shotgun covering the hallway, but close enough that he could see into the stairwell. It came quicker than she expected. The thug was suddenly down the stairs in an split second, and right in her face. She fired, and the shotgun kicked in her grip. The blast took the thug straight in the chest, throwing him backwards and knocking chunks of flesh off in multiple directions, but he remained standing. Crystal stood there in horror and the zombie took another step forward. She could see now in the firelight; its face was half eaten away with decay. His upper lip was corroded and hanging off at an angle, giving him a weird angry sneering expression as he approached.Brother Cooper’s voice was sudden, commanding, and angry. “I cast you out!” he bellowed as he pulled a plastic tub from his coat pocket. He splashed something on the zombie and in an instant the creature collapsed into a smoking pile of decay on the floor. The preacher gazed at the ruined corpse before them, then looked back up at Crystal and grinned, “You just gotta have faith, Crystal…although the holy water does help.”Crystal grinned and turned back around towards the other open door. As she turned, another zombie cam stumbling out of the doorway towards them. And behind the zombie, a woman with a gun. Crystal ejected the spent shell from her shotgun with a loud “cha-chink”. She leveled the gun at Mama Garcia, and smiled, “It’s about time, b*#ch!”. . .Willie saw the guy, but it was too late. He watched him fire in slow motion, and saw the bullet tear a baseball-sized hole clear through Taylor’s throat. Willie had served in combat before, back in the day, and even from this far away, he knew a fatality when he saw it. This was not right. This was not what was supposed to happen. This was not justice. Willie felt his anger boil over. The world went red.. . .Joe spilled out of the cab of the dump truck and ran across the clearing. He ignored the cracks of gunfire around him, and ran towards where Taylor had fallen. “NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!”  He was there, on top of her. A bullet careened off a barrel next to his head. He dragged her backwards, behind cover, and knelt down beside her. Her throat was a mess of ground meat. The hole was huge, and blood was squirting out from her throat in fast pulses like someone squeezing a juice box and spraying it everywhere. Blood was everywhere. Joe put his hands over the wound to try to stop the flow, but the blood just oozed around his fingers. “Taylor, hey, don’t die! No! Don’t die! Hey! Hey! Look! I’m not ready yet! Hey, look! I’ve got a spell I’m working on! Seriously! Wait! I’ve got a new spell! I just need a couple more days! It’s a healing spell! I can fix this! Seriously! Come on, Taylor! I was just kidding. You’re my friend! Wait! Seriously! F*CK! JUST A COUPLE MORE DAYS! Just wait! Just wait! Please! I can fix this!”The blood flow stopped oozing out from around his fingers. Joe felt his eyes burning and a heavy lump forming in his throat. The blood flow had stopped, not because she was getting better, but because her heart had simply stopped beating. Joe swallowed, and took a long slow deep breath. He removed his hands from the dead body. A crack like someone stepping on a dried twig sounded behind him. Joe grabbed Taylor’s gun from the ground next to her and spun around. It was the thug with the rifle, now aiming at Joe. “YOU SON OF A B%#CH!” Joe screamed. Then he was standing, and running forward, and firing. He emptied the gun into the thug from point blank range, three, four, five bullets in the chest. The thug fell lifeless to the ground, but Joe kept plugging away until the clip was empty. . . .Mama Garcia saw the gun and ran outside towards the bonfire. Brother Cooper motioned to Crystal to follow, and turned to the new zombie. “I got this one,” he assured her, as she took off after the witch. The zombie’s head was off at an angle. Perhaps it had originally died in a fall or from some other injury to the head. As it lurched towards the preacher with its head cocked off to one side, it seemed to Guyzell like its expression was almost innocent, like the way a dog cocks its head to the side when it sees something it doesn’t understand. “May the Lord have mercy on your soul.”Holy water splashed out, and like the finger of God, struck the zombie down where it stood.Gunfire was still sounding outside, and Guyzell realized some of it was coming from somewhere up above him. He would have slapped himself on the forehead if he had had a hand free. He pounded up the stairwell to the second floor. A dozen windows opened up onto the front of the building from the large unfinished room upstairs. The wind blew in with a frightening cat-like howl. At one of those windows, a dark figure crouched with a gun, firing into the clearing. Brother Cooper paused, unsure if his target was a person or a zombie, and he hesitated with his holy water in one hand and his shotgun in the other. The figure must have heard him, and turned around to face him. There was no skin on the face left, and only one eye in its socket. It grinned a skinless grin as the rifle turned towards Brother Cooper. Holy water splashed out, and judgment was passed down on the abomination.As Brother Cooper stood over the smoking debris, his radio crackled with Crystal’s voice. . . .Crystal fired after Isabel Garcia, but the witch was fast, and she ducked a stack of crates, firing backwards behind her. Crystal returned fire, but there was too much cover in the way. Growling a stream of obscenities, Crystal chased after her. Crystal rounded the corner of the stack of crates and saw the scattered bonfire and the still-running dump truck. Another gunshot ricocheted past her from near the dump truck. Then she saw the witch. She fired, and blood sprayed up from the witch’s arm. She dropped her pistol and howled an inhuman screech. Crystal stepped forward to finish the job, but something grabbed her ankles. She tripped and fell forward. The shotgun fell out of her grip and landed just out of reach. She twisted around to see behind her. A zombie was under the truck’s tires, where Joe must have run the thing over. It was caught by the waist, horribly mangled and twisted under the weight of the truck, but still very much alive and trying to win. It had Crystal by the ankle, and was dragging her back under the truck. She yelled into her radio, “Preacher! I could use some help here!”She tried to kick at the thing, but its grip was like steel, and she was pulled an inch closer under the truck. And then, from somewhere in the heavens above her, a Tupperware container, full of holy water, exploded onto the hood of the dump truck, showering her and the zombie with droplets of sacred power. The zombie’s grip failed as it fell apart, and Crystal scrambled to her shotgun. She picked it up and rolled towards the witch. Isabel Garcia was standing there, chanting. Crystal felt her hair standing on end as the words poured out of the woman, conjuring something filthy into the world. “The hell you will,” Crystal muttered. She pulled the trigger and blew the witch’s head off. Isabel Garcia’s body collapsed. Crystal breathed a slow sigh of relief, and then paused. She realized the witch had not been looking at her when she had been chanting. Instead she has been staring up into the sky. Crystal looked up. There was a figure up in the crane controls, a hundred-and-fifty feet up. The crane was still moving, pulling Scorse up to the top. The spotlights threw the whole thing into stark relief, as the whole tower swayed in the strong wind.Crystal dropped the shotgun and ran to the ladder of the crane. She unsheathed her knife on the way, and gripped it in her teeth. She felt her stomach grow cold as she began to climb. She already knew, there was no way she could make it to the top before whoever was in the top of the crane could reach Scorse.</blockquote>

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