2013.08.06 - Shop Until You Drop Dead

It's a shopping mall in Soho, Metropolis. It is a pretty awesome mall most of the time. However, today is not one of those times. A noticeable rotten stench started to fill the structure -- most potent on the first floor. It was starting to make people ill. So workers went down underneath the mall to look around for any sign of damaged septic tanks or sewage pipes. As they wandered around down there, they discovered they were not the only ones wandering around down there. A worker turned a corner, and swept his flashlight over a darkened part of the room, and it passed over row after row of very unwell-looking people.

People who actually looked to be less 'unwell' and more 'in the process of decomposing'. The man had only a moment to take in the sight of veritable wall of glassy-eyed rotten bodies standing and swaying unsteadily. Then they swarmed him and his screams and the wet sounds of his flesh being rent by too-sharp fingernails and teeth filled the darkness when his flashlight fell and broke upon the floor. The other workers met a similar fate.

Around the time the survivors were running up the stairs in terror, one of them nearly making it to the top of the ladder only to be grabbed and pulled back down to his horrific fate with salvation in plain sight... The marble tiles in the food court suddenly cracked and jolted upwards as though having been struck from below. Almost no one even noticed at first, as they were more concerned with the smell and the screams they were hearing from the service corridor. But then the tiles broke even more, and very violently, as many rot-slicked hands forced their way up with inhuman strength, into the light. The foul odor only increased in its vileness at this breach of the floor, but few were remaining around to consider this. Those who did were likely to become among the first mall-goers to fall victim as the walking dead surged up into the mall proper and began simply trying to kill as many people as they could.

Naturally, the day started out ordinarily enough. Jubilee, mall rat and lover of shopping, was in the mall to check out the latest sales and styles. She would've been among the first people to leave at the sudden surge of stench, noise, and broken tiles, but two considerations came into play:

1. She was on the second floor, where the scent was weaker and often muted by the residue of cleaning supplies and air fresheners.

2. She was trying on a very cool pair of jeans at the time. No matter how bad the smell, had she noticed it, she was /not/ going to leave until she was done.

Not that she can't hear the sound of the tiles. "Wow... what's goin' on out there? Are they remodeling with a wrecking ball?" she asks aloud, blinking at the noise. Even in New York, you don't often hear of /that/ level of remodeling!

And then the screaming starts. Even up here, she can hear it through the open space surrounding the walkway on the second floor. "That's not good... and it doesn't sound like something that'll wait!" The teenaged mutant pulls up the jeans she was trying on and stuffs her feet into her tennies, stuffing her own things into her backpack and hurrying to see what the trouble is, holding up her jeans as she runs. "Oh, this better not be some kind of fire drill..."

By the time Jubilee gets to a place she can see what's going on, the brightly-lit mall has transformed into a vision that seems as though it would better belong in a movie like 'Dawn of the Dead' or something. Only this is no movie. There are real people being chased down and torn apart before the young mutant's very eyes. While the zombies -- or whatever these rotten things may be -- seem to lack fine manual dexterity, they are not the staggering movie undead with their arms outstretched, moaning about brains. They actively pursue, adjust their course, have at least some semblance of rapid mobility, and while observing them doesn't indicate they are intelligent in the way humans are, they even seem to be operating like a pack of hunting predators... Like wolves. They chase one man in awful palm tree shorts until he passes by a corner, where another three zombies are waiting for him and promptly pounce him.

It's all really gruesome and awful. There's blood everywhere, people are screaming, dying, or already dead. And that hole in the floor is still disgorging zombies into the mall. How many were down there!? Are they coming from somewhere else!? The dead things start making their way up the stairs and escalators, seeming to have the ability to navigate such just fine. Behind them they leave people who seem to have been torn apart by claws and teeth and supernatural strength, and yet not really 'eaten'. The zombies are not stopping to 'feed'. They simply kill or mortally injure, and then move on.

Of course, how much of this Jubilee takes in depends on how long she stands there on the second floor watching. Eventually she's probably going to have to move as the zombies join her up there.

Shrugging her pack onto her back by one strap, Jubilee hurries out of the store, dashing to the rail around the upper floor walkway to look down at the source of all the noise. And her eyes widen. And her knees turn to rubber. And her hands clutch at the railing so she doesn't fall down. And her held-up jeans slide down around her high-tops, leaving her gawking at the carnage in her bright purple hoodie and floral-print underpants. "Oh, fudge... oh, fudge..." she repeats softly. It's a scene that defies description, in terms of horror. Even though some part of her mind is taking note of what the monstrous things do, most of it is reeling. It's a zombie attack! And these things act /way/ too smart for most zombie movies!

That former part of her brain takes a moment, but it finally gives her a mental smack that gets her going again: 'Those things are /dangerous/, airhead! Get moving! There are people in danger!' And she blinks, coming out of that dangerous fugue. "This is /so/ not good. I've gotta do something!"

But nothing's coming to mind. Well, other than pulling her pants up, which she does, this time doing up the buttons. "If they're this smart, they'll come here sooner or later. So this is no place to be. But there's no way down except through them!" She begins running along the walkway, away from the stairs that the zombies will find any second, looking for some way out of here. And people who haven't become Purina Zombie Chow yet.

There's already a rush of people trying to escape by various means, which mostly serves to get people stuck in such, others to be crushed or trampled, and many of them to simply become sitting ducks for the undead. The skybridges seem to be a somewhat less crowded passage, but at the rate people are escaping across it to another part of the mall, they'll have nowhere to go if they get stuck. There are elevators, but that's probably not a good idea because of the lack of room to maneuver. Really, what needs to happen right now is either stopping the zombies -- which is probably not the first thing on any person here's priority list -- or running to the opposite end of the mall and getting out onto the street from one of the larger store entrances, and hoping someone more qualified deals with the undead.

One thing tho note is that the far end of the mall -- despite some of the smarter people fleeing through such rather than trying to force their way out through the more nearby exits -- seems to be zombie-free. Either they haven't gotten that far yet or they have chosen not to extend their hunt that far. The zombies also seem to be slowing down their emergenge from the hole in the floor. Maybe that's the last of them.--Oh, but now something else is coming up out of there. It looks a bit like a large blob of brown and green gross in a vaguely humanoid form, and it is taking its time to round up the zombies and call them back in some foreign language that might be Russian. They don't seem to be chasing anyone anymore, just... Gradually returning to that... Thing.

Not being a video game heroine, Jubilee just does her best to help people she comes across, which is a pretty small number. Many have found their own ways away from the mess, which isn't always an escape. Pausing at a skyway to blast away one of the startlingly fast undead, the mutant girl lets a terrified couple squeeze past her. But that thing's getting up...

Jubilee tries. She really does. But her conscience won't let her simply turn up the heat on her plasmoids and simply /incinerate/ the once-living monsters. Instead, she uses the explosive force of her fireworks to blast them away from herself and others, keeping the way clear for people to escape.

She's aware of the shape forming on the ground floor near the original hole, drawing the zombies back to itself. She just isn't paying it a lot of mind, since she can't understand what it's saying. Also, it's clearing the way for a lot of people to escape, and she's not about to stop /that/.

Oh, hey, someone with super powers. Though people may still be terrified, they at least pay attention to the guidance being offered and some semblance of order is afforded in some locations -- mainly the ones near Jubilee. They just kind of assume she's a hero of some kind. There's still a very justifiably panicked hurry to get out of there, but fewer people are getting smashed by fellow humans. Eventually, with about forty or more of the zombies clustered around the hole in the food court floor, the gross thing that smells even more like rot than the walking corpses around it busying itself with a large bottle it got from... Somewhere, and most of the other people in the mall who are alive enough to escape having done so, it's Jubilee who is still there -- unless she choose to make her escape instead of observing what happens next.

Glowing green light seems to be rising from the bodies of those who have already died and streaming towards that bottle.

Jubilee really /would/ like to get out of here, but that gross /thing/ has her curious. Especially once it pulls out that bottle. Even smart zombies aren't much on tool use, and seeing one hauling around glassware is just a little unusual.

And then the glowing green light starts. Jubilee blinks as she sees where it's coming from. "Is it... soultaking?!" she asks aloud, staring as the light streams closer to the bottle. "No... no-no-no, tell me this isn't happening..."

And then she realizes that the creature is within range of her fireworks. Concentrating, she summons a swirl of glowing plasmoids, hot and bright, and sends them shooting out over the heads of the zombies, aiming at the thing - and the bottle!

The rotten thing screams in rage, its voice sounding distorted -- like a woman trying to yell underwater. As it recoils from the sparks, the bottle is both struck by the fireworks and knocked over by its owner. It smashes instantly upon hitting the ground, and the shards of it rise into the air and fade out of existence like they were never there. The zombies turn to start heading for the stairs, but then the blob-woman-thing just seems to gather herself or itself and vanish in a flash of green light. The zombies all fall to the ground like puppets with their strings cut. The green light that was flowing from the more fresh corpses turns mist-like and disperses. That was a remarkably simple solution. But if that thing had decided to stick around... Things might have gotten ugly.

Well, uglier. They were already pretty ugly, as evidenced by all the de-animated dead and newly-dead still lying about.