Inferno was back in Blood Gulch, aiding the remainder of the reds in preparation to strike and kill the weakened blue team.
The fact that they blew up his Mythos didn’t matter; he had several of the walkers back home and as such getting one blown up was merely nothing more than a minor inconvenience while he got a new one.
His whole affair with this team seemed to be a string of minor inconveniences.
Inferno’s mouth opened and closed a couple times while his mind was suddenly filled with inexplicable but terribly attractive visions of Nate being consumed with fire, then running around in terror with the tips of several large and pointy spoons protruding from him.
He smiled; these visions were common and quite pleasant.
It was just too bad that Nate was currently in a medical facility getting his legs replaced with cyborg implants.
It must be a terribly painful procedure; he hoped that they forgot to use antiseptic.
He closed his eyes and saw himself holding his trusty flamethrower, igniting the hospital that Nate was staying in. Nate, legless, was helpless as the flames slowly consumed him. His screams of pain only delighted Inferno further.
Inferno sighed in pleasure and leaned back in his chair further in preparation for a short nap.
Nate found himself sitting on an operating table, surrounded by medics. He couldn’t feel the lower half of his body; looking down, he noticed it had been chopped completely off.
“Great.” He told himself.
One of the medics turned to his cohorts. “We can rebuild him. We have the technology.” He paused for a moment and then said, quietly, “I’ve always wanted to say that.”
Nate sighed. “Great. My life is in the hands of even more idiots than usual.”
One of the doctors stuck a needle into his arm. Slowly, his thought processes grew cloudy until eventually he fell into a deep sleep. The last thing he remembered was making a mental note of how much antiseptic seemed to be going into his arm and a voice with a thick German accent saying, “Vhoops.”
Inferno finally was ready. Pie and Flyboy had returned, he had his flamethrower, and nothing would stop him this time.
Except perhaps the team of idiots he was stuck with.
Puma was the only remotely competent member of the team, he had a carefully-organized battle plan drawn out, just in case.
Cake and Inferno would flank the base from opposing angles. Inferno would create a diversion using his flamethrower while Cake hid with a sniper.
When the blues come running from the base to attack Inferno, Cake would pick off who he could with the sniper, then they would use attack plan bravo, go into delta six formation, then follow-up with a well-timed grenade.
If none of that worked, then Puma would be on the base’s computer and would simply launch an orbital and precise MAC (Magnetic Accelerator Cannon) strike on blue base. When questioned as to why they didn’t try that now, Puma said that it would be “too easy.”
While Inferno felt that Puma’s plan might work, it was still far too orthodox for his tastes. Rushing the base, each armed with flamethrowers and using the fire contained within to set the entire region ablaze was the best tactic, he felt.
He voiced this opinion with Puma at gunpoint. Puma was only too happy to agree with him on all accounts.
Meanwhile, Ducky had shown himself to be dreadfully incompetent within the first few minutes of his arrival. He tried simply relegating Ducky to unimportant medial jobs, but in response to Ducky’s increasingly annoying cries for Inferno to remove the helmet, Inferno had Ducky bound and gagged, a task the other members of red team seemed all too happy to carry out.
It wasn’t Ducky’s stupidity that annoyed him; he could deal with stupidity. No, rather, it was the sheer persistence with which he was trying to be stupid.
Simply put, Inferno simply didn’t like him.
Cake seemed to be as incompetent as Ducky was, until the subject of Blue team’s Commander Pie was brought up, at which point he turned bloodthirsty and ruthless.
Inferno became most pleased with him past that point.
Nate had no idea how long he slept, although it felt like forever and fifteen days. As soon as he was once again self-aware, he looked down and suddenly noticed that his lower body was once again intact. He stood up, slowly and carefully.
His legs seemed to be a lot stronger than he remembered, and he walked around some, admiring his newfound leg prowess. His time alone with his new legs was brought to a sudden end when one of the doctors entered the E.R.
He looked ethnically German, with tiny spectacles and oversized gloves complementing his long surgeon’s gown.
“Ah, you’re avake!”
“I guess you could say that.”
“Good, good. You had quite ze procedure!”
“I can imagine.”
“Yes, you should ve clear to exit ze hospital now, I vink we accidentally overdozed you with ze antizeptic, you slept for dayz.”
“That would explain a lot.” Nate said, already bored to death with this conversation.
The doctor laughed. “Vould it, now?” He turned to the door. “Iv you feel you can handle ze outside vorld again, veel free to leave.” There was another small chuckle as he continued, “I vould imagine you vould be able to handle it by now.”
Nate nodded and proceeded out back into the outside world.
At long last, Pie and Flyboy had returned to Blue base.
“So how’s Bob?” Torn asked as Pie walked into the room.
“He’s dead. No one really cared.”
“That’s always pleasant.”
“Isn’t it?”
Pie walked into his cabin, grabbing the latest issue of Playboy magazine as he closed his door. Flyboy sat in his usual chair, which creaked like a creaky chair. Torn sat on the base’s tattered couch.
“Kinda boring without Bob here, eh?” Torn asked.
Flyboy nodded.
There was silence for a few moments as absolutely nothing particularly interesting at all happened. Then Torn spoke again.
“We should start a band.”
Flyboy nodded, bored to death already.
“No, really! I’ll be bass, you’ll be drummer, and Pie could be lead guitar.”
Flyboy glanced over at him. “None of us can sing.”
“We’ll all sing together!”
“Something tells me that’s not going to happen, Torn.”
“Alright, then Pie can sing.”
“Pie can’t sing.”
“We’ll be a rock and roll band. You don’t need to be able to sing.”
Flyboy considered this for a moment. “Yeah, you’re right,” he said finally before reclining in his chair once more.
There was a few more moments of silence.
“You know, the planets in this solar system are completely aligned tonight under the constellation Scorpio. Happens once every thousand years or so.” Torn said.
“Are they, now?”
“Yep. They say that very improbable things happen when they align under Scorpio.”
“If they only align once every thousand years, how can there be any reliable records of improbable events occurring? That would mean they haven’t aligned since the 1500s, and back then they were obsessed over finding this new place called ‘America’ and weren’t really too keen on determining probabilities.”
Torn shrugged. “Kinda boring without Bob here.”
“You said that already.”
“Did I?”
Flyboy sighed.
Nate walked in the door of red base to see the Reds all lined up for battle, save Ducky, who was tied up in a corner, struggling as Inferno put more duct tape over his mouth.
“What’s going on here?”
Inferno quickly flipped completely around and hid the duct tape behind his back. “Nothing, good ‘ol friend of mine. Nope. Nada. Nothing at all.”
“You guys were about to attack the blues without me?”
“Well…” Inferno started.
“Good idea. You all ready?”
Cake nodded feverishly, violent rage in his eyes, as if he would like to do nothing more than laugh as the blues died in anguish. This remotely disturbed Nate.
Inferno glanced around and dropped the duct tape, with nothing being particularly interesting about his expression due to the concealing mask of his ever-present helmet. “I guess so, ‘ol bean.”
“Good. We attack in an hour.”
Cake seemed disappointed. “Can’t we do it NOW?”
Nate was surprised at Cake’s enthusiasm; normally he couldn’t even get the soldier to pick up a rifle unless he promised not to force them to do push-ups until their arms fell off. He glanced at Inferno.
“Don’t look at me; I just had been talking to him about his family.”
Nate’s glance turned into a stare.
“Well, the subject of Pie was brought up, and he told me about how they had been rivals since birth…”
Nate continued his icy-cold stare.
“…And then he talked about how Pie stole his fiancé from him and married her before he was conscripted…”
It felt as if the temperature of the room had dropped a couple degrees.
“…And then he joined the other side just for vengeance, and… Well…” Inferno shrugged. “I only encouraged him a little tiny bit.”
An hour later the reds began their march. There were many things they expected to see when they arrived at the blue base: the blues waving a white flag, or maybe Pie dressed up in war paint and .50 caliber machine turrets set up around the perimeter, or maybe, just possibly, the base somehow becoming completely replaced by a pot of petunias and an unlucky sperm whale.
Of all the increasingly-unlikely things the various members of red team were expecting, seeing the blues holding musical instruments on the roof of blue base was not one of them. For some reason.
Nate halted their advance. “What. The HELL. Are you doing up there?”
Torn took a tiny glance at the reds and turned to Pie.
“Pie,” he said, “the red team’s here.”
“Good. Everyone in tune?”
The blues nodded.
“Hit it.”
Flyboy, in the far back, banged his drum sticks together a few times and began to pound away.
The reds simply stared at the blues and dropped their weapons. Inferno himself immediately seemed to be lost in the beat and lost his normal homicidal edge.
Torn added a bass line to Flyboy’s beat, and soon enough Pie began to shred on his electric guitar.
Nate stared at the (admittedly pretty good) band in stunned disbelief. The music got louder, and Pie was about to start screaming into the mike when sirens began to wail, followed by flashing red and blue lights. The band immediately stopped.
“Ok, this entire thing is getting ridiculous.” Puma said, above the roar of the police sirens. “Why are there police in an active warzone?”
“I wouldn’t call this warzone exactly active.” Nate added. “Although this whole scenario seems pretty unlikely. Personally, I think the whole world’s simply gone to hell and back.”
Puma nodded as the police began to surround the area.
One of the officers pulled out a megaphone and shouted into it, “HANDS UP. THIS IS THE MILITARY POLICE; WE RECEIVED A REPORT THAT THERE ARE WEAPONS IN THIS VICINITY.” The megaphone was completely unnecessary, as the police cars had turned off their sirens.
As soon as one of the members of blue team opened his mouth, the sirens began to wail again.
“This is an active warzone, us having weapons is the entire reason why we’re here!” Flyboy tried to yell back at him, but to no avail.
The officer had, in fact, heard him and thought that Flyboy made a legitimate point, but he was also having a particularly nasty day: his tea this morning spilled all over his lap when he was about to take a sip, sometimes he felt as if the world secretly was out to get him, he thought his cohorts were constantly trying to aim at him in hopes of “accidentally” shooting him, and it had been a while since he got a paycheck. He was in a sour mood in general, and arresting people, he thought, would be the best way to lighten his day.
A few moments later, every member of both teams was in handcuffs and was being escorted to the nearest police station.
He didn’t feel any better.
They weren’t the first in line at the station; they had to wait in line for a little bit while 3 other convicts had their mugshots taken.
“What’s your name?” The officer asked the first one.
“Larry.”
“What are you in for?”
“Blowing bubbles.”
The officer shrugged and sent Larry on his way. “What’s your name?” he asked the next person in line.
“Curly.”
“What are you in for?”
“Blowing bubbles.”
After Curly went on his way, the third convict walked up.
“Let me guess. You’re name’s Moe.”
“No. My name’s Bubbles.”
After they had gone through the tape of the penal system, the reds and the blues were all crammed into what seemed was the world’s smallest jail cell. The bars were thick, there were little to no gaps inbetween, the floor was cold, and the toilet was clogged. Everyone save Inferno was shoved into bright orange jumpsuits.
Inferno was in a bright orange jumpsuit as well, but he got to hold on to his helmet, explaining to the officers that the helmet was a defect as part of a super-soldier experiment gone wrong and thus couldn’t be removed.
The officers seemed to buy this story and allowed him to retain the helmet, quite improbably. His success was only temporary: Once inside, Ducky gave Inferno a rather forceful hug, and Inferno’s helmet fell off, revealing quite feminine features and red hair cropped to the shoulder. Her face was dotted with freckles and her green eyes had the slightest tinge of insanity to them when admired closely, although not quite enough to detract from her overall beauty. Inferno’s sex appeal went from “Ew, gross, I would never do it with a guy” to “HolycrapholycrapholycrapIwanther”.
Inferno was a girl.
After this revelation, everyone was largely quiet inside the cell. Torn’s jaw dropped open. Puma closed it for him.
Pie was the first to speak. “Well, hello there, Madame Cleavage.”
Inferno responded by punching him in the face. “Yes, I’m a chick. Get used to it.”
Nate opened his mouth to speak, but Inferno cut him off. “No, I will not go out with you.”
Nate glared at her and flipped her off. Inferno pretended to cut off Nate’s head by making a slicing motion with her fingers. Slowly, the members of both teams adjusted to the newfound double-x chromosome among their ranks.
Cake and Pie alternated between staring at each other in disgust and staring at Inferno lustfully. Nate and Inferno were bonding by means of demonstrating how each would kill the other. Their gestures grew increasingly obscene, almost to the point where one would think they were flirting with one another. Torn was busy tattering up his jumpsuit. Flyboy and Puma began to discuss philosophy. Ducky, whom everyone had assumed would become Bob’s replacement as a source of humor, was busy doing a terrifically bad job at generating humor, pumping out cringe-worthy joke after cringe-worthy joke.
A lot of people assumed that Ducky was related to the sick and twisted narrator of this story.
They were only half-right; Ducky was only related to me through a brother’s sister’s cousin’s aunt’s second marriage. As such, he was thus only my stepbrother and was therefore not directly blood-related to me.
Mother sent me off to narrating school (a horrifyingly boring experience overall) and Ducky off to the army; we haven’t talked since, although I have become omniscient as a result of my experiences, while he is still delegated to having a first-person limited view of things.
A conversation was struck up among the captives in the prison cell about how the increasingly improbable events they have been going through, and eventually they arrived at the conclusion that this story was getting completely ridiculous and they were all fictional characters. Soon after, they began to discuss often they should try to break the fourth wall in their story.
Little did they know that an event was about to happen which not only was completely ridiculous (and what some believe to be irrefutable proof that everything in the world is actually 100% fictional and made up in some sick, twisted person’s mind), but also was about to save their hides.
Almost everyone on the planet was planning for this moment. Each had come up with a plan should it actually happen. Entire websites were set up devoted to strategies should it happen. For over five hundred years, man had been devising new ways of holding out should something like it happen. Few believed that it would actually happen.
A single zombie suddenly mindlessly wandered into the door of the police station.
The smell of human waste filled the air. The police guarding the jail cell immediately gained new underwear stains and ran out of the station. As one particularly fat and unlucky officer ran, yellow liquid streaked down his leg and left a wet trail on the floor.
That poor officer’s day had just achieved the impossible and had gotten worse.
Bob wandered up to the jail cell and waved at the familiar cowering figures on the other side. “Hi!”
Pie looked at him in stunned disbelief. “Fly, slap me.”
Flyboy immediately obliged. The slap didn’t help any, and Pie stared incredulously at Bob. “How did you…”
“Military super-soldier experiment using dead bodies, etc, etc, you know the typical zombie origin stories.” Bob shrugged. “I guess this time they just decided to use someone who didn’t have a brain to begin with.”
Puma’s jaw dropped open. Torn closed it for him.
“All who agree that we have officially jumped the shark, say ‘Aye!’”
Everyone murmured in agreement.
“Who’s the boobies?” Bob asked.
“Inferno. She was trying to kill you the other day.” Nate said. He paused, before adding, “In the sexiest manner imaginable.”
Inferno kicked him in the nuts, and Nate fell over onto the ground.
“The past few hours have been the most improbable thing I have ever experienced.” Puma said.
Flyboy glanced at Inferno, then Bob, and nodded.
“Any other zombies out there?” Torn asked.
Bob shrugged once more. “I don’t think so. I haven’t gotten hungry yet.”
“Are we dead?” Nate asked, cringing still. “I think I took one too many sniper shots the other day. Maybe we’re all dead and this insanity is what happens to someone after they die.”
Flyboy looked at him. “No, I’m pretty sure we’re all still alive.”
Little did Nate know that the events which transpire after someone dies were only slightly more insane than the events which were currently unfolding within the teams’ small jail cell.
“Open the gate. Press the big red button over there.” Pie said impatiently.
“OK!” Bob began to wander over there, but suddenly stopped. “Wait a second, I know better now than to press big shiny red buttons! They promise you donuts but never give you any. Instead, all they give you lies. LIES.”
“Please?”
“Alright, fine, I’ll press the button.”
The gate to the jail cell finally went up and both teams slowly wandered out.
“We’ve got to get to a vehicle.” Pie said. Both teams (and Bob) nodded and slowly walked out of the police station. Bob wandered into the street, scaring the hell out of a limousine driver and thus granting the teams an improbable means of transport.
Cake turned to Torn. “Lots of exposition in this chapter, eh?”
Torn nodded.
Originally Posted by Itsuki
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