Team Gai vs. Zombies [Naruto/WWZ]
Part 5: Interlude | Table of Contents | Part 7
Title: Part 6: Dreaming
Fandoms: au!Naruto, World War Z
Characters: Tenten, Lee, Gai
Word Count: 4,205
Rating: R
Summary: Tenten, Lee, and Gai are looking for Neji during a zombie apocalypse.
Author's Notes: Took me long enough. Much love to bookblather for helping me with the tarot card stuff, and drelfina for the Chinese. ♥ Not beta'd. edit 6/19/11 Added to the ending to help better explain the tarot readings.
sifu - pronounced "shi-fu"; ?Mandarin Chinese for "respected teacher" or "master", equivalent to sensei.
They left the attic through the window. Gai first, then Lee, then Tenten. She glanced up back at the window and the illusion of safety the little attic-room held as she adjusted her pack's straps.
Yeah, she hadn't forgotten the bird. She couldn't; she was going to beat him over the head with it.
The cloaking silence was back. Stepping carefully and silently was becoming second nature, as was the pattern in which she moved her rifle. Gai had point, with Lee next and Tenten last. They eased around the U-shaped building, always looking and listening for the smallest movement and noise. The courtyard was deserted. No new ghouls wandered about. The other bodies from yesterday hadn't moved.
Going as the crow flies back to her house would not take them over difficult terrain so much as there were a few streams, a shallow ravine, and a subdivision and a half between here and there. She tried not to dwell too much on the hell of just getting out of her house. If not her father's home armory and the timely arrival of Gai and Lee, she didn't think she would have had much of a chance. It was hard fighting a group of people that didn't react normally.
She amended that line of thought as they skirted past Isamu's body, the fabric of his pajamas fluttering slightly in the breeze. These weren't people. That had been easier to remember when they were essentially nameless faces.
Lee had guessed that Neji would take the straightest path and only deviate when necessary. Tenten concurred; she knew his mind worked like that. It also made the most sense because it would be the easiest path for them to take when following him. She could almost imagine that he was forging ahead, just out of sight.
"Hey!" Lee asked from behind her, giving her pack a tug. "Where are you going?"
She paused, blinking at his round black eyes in confusion. "When did you fall behind?"
"You sped up," Lee answered. "Can't do that."
"I..." She trailed off, and blushed in shame. "Right." Slow and steady and quiet.
They kept going until the sun reached an angle that Gai told them to begin preparing for the night. They scouted the trees, looking for one with branches to suit their sleeping needs.
They found one just as Tenten was beginning to get antsy. She readily helped fling the hook-tipped ropes into the spread branches, and tugged hard to make sure they held. She climbed the rope quickly and began the unpacking process.
First thing to unload was her rifle and make sure it was nearby and ready to use. She was their lookout, not that the height increased her vision by very much. Then she moved to a different branch and threw down the rope ladder so the guys could ascend quickly. Gai as usual was the last to come up, and he hauled the ladder up after him.
Lee was stringing up the canvas-and-rope hammocks they would be using to sleep in. So long as they were out of reach of grasping hands, they would be fine. Trees were the safest bet at night.
They settled for another meal of MREs. Tenten was eating slowly at a cracker covered in peanut butter when Lee nudged her. "Hm?"
"Are you okay?"
She frowned at him. "No," she said shortly. The dead were walking. One of her best friends was wandering alone in the zombie-filled countryside. And her father...
Her father had already left for BattleCon before everything went to hell. That put him somewhere in Las Vegas. Too far away for Tenten to do anything about except pray that he was alive.
She shook her head. "No," she said again.
Lee balanced his MRE precariously on his knee and gave her a one-armed hug. "We'll find him," he promised.
Which him? she thought. She knew the answer: Neji. But would they find her father, too? "Yeah, sure," she said listlessly. No longer hungry, she stuffed the rest of her food back in the MRE package and climbed up to where Lee had strung up one of the hammocks. She flopped down a little harder than necessary, which earned her a moment's disapproval from Gai. She felt a twinge of guilt and mouthed sorry. He nodded; he would take first watch.
"Wake me this time," she told Lee in a hushed whisper. "I want to be useful, too."
"All right. Sleep well."
"Much as I can," she muttered to herself. She was feeling depressed, and she didn't care. At least Lee had his dad. And she had them both, but it wasn't the same.
Would anything be the same, anymore?
~ ~ ~ ~
They reached the outskirts of Tenten's subdivision at midafternoon. There was no wall around the myriad of streets ribboning through the houses. And as it was a newer subdivision not located in the closer foothills, the trees of the forest had given way to plains where only the buildings themselves provided any features.
Tenten had a bad feeling she couldn't shake. It wasn't just the remembered horrors of when the first pair zombies came breaking into her house. She didn't remember much of it, that she had been doing a tarot reading and then the sounds of glass shattering and the moaning and screams and the images of grayed hands reaching, reaching.
If she tried, she could dimly recall grabbing a lamp and bringing it down on a zombie's head enough to kill it. The lamp had shattered in her hands, leaving them bloody. Then running down the hall to the weapons room, her legs shaking from so much adrenaline that they had nearly given out from under her several times. The second zombie had been close behind, teeth bared and occasionally stumbling as it followed. Its lack of coordination gave her the chance to make it to the room, and grab the naginata on hooks over the entryway.
She didn't remember screaming or swinging the bladed stick. She did recall the head coming off the shoulders, the mouth still snapping as the body twitched and fell and twitched some more before going still.
The next thing she recalled was Gai holding her, calming her, and then packing her things so they could get the hell out of Dodge. There had been brief arguments over what she could and couldn't take.
She shook her head. That was in the past. The initial wave of zombies seemed to have moved along, looking for fresh prey. Given the fact the Hyuuga estate was abandoned and its distance from everything made it more likely that her house had been engulfed and then left behind.
"We don't have much time until nightfall," Gai said quietly. "Keep your eyes peeled for anything, including a potential place to sleep the night." He glanced to Tenten, lifting an eyebrow in silent question. She gave him a bare nod back. "Then let's go."
They walked a shade faster than normal through the silent field of yellow-green grass. Tenten covered the right and front with her constantly moving rifle, Lee the left and back while Gai focused on the distance. So far no ghouls, but there was no saying how long their luck would hold up.
Slowing their pace once hitting pavement became a necessity so they wouldn't walk so loudly. The silence was so profound that Tenten bet the zombies would find them based upon her heartbeat alone. She was sweating with fear, and had to wipe her hands every few minutes on her clothes to keep them dry.
Back when Gai and Lee had come, there had only been that initial wave of about a dozen zombies, total. Two had gone into her house; the others had spread out. Surprisingly, they had managed to be dispatched by gun-toting neighbors with only some casualties.
Now...
Now, the neighborhood looked like a war zone a hundred times worse than the compound.
Smoke from a distant fire of large size trailed upward. Cars were higgledy-diggledy in the road, no few of them wrecked. A hydrant had been hit, and was still weakly gushing water. Dried blood smeared or blotted the pavement in places, and she saw handprints of either dirt or blood along buildings and vehicles. Cute fences were knocked or trampled down, doors hung open upon broken hinges. Windows were boarded up in places and broken through in others. (She spotted a lacy curtain fluttering on a breeze she didn't feel.) Flower gardens were withering and already rife with weeds.
Occasionally, they saw a body with its head destroyed by some means. Some were bashed in. Others had been shot, or even decapitated. What they all had in common was that they were still.
"I've got a bad feeling about this," Tenten moaned softly.
"You read the note," Lee replied, his voice equal volume. "He said he would go to your place before trying ours."
"I... Gai-sifu, if he had seen this place was full of zombies, wouldn't he have just turned and gone to your house?"
Gai glanced at her. "I would hope," he said.
Maybe then we should go... She didn't say it, however. But how could she convey the fact that with every step they took, the greater the pressure to just turn and run became, the greater the feel that something was terribly and horribly wrong? Above the horrors they had already seen?
Would they even believe her?
"I'M GOING 2 TRY FOR 1010'S PLACE 1ST...
IF I C NO1 @ 1010'S I WILL LEAVE A MESSAGE
IF I CAN. NEJI"
The words in the note flashed then faded from her mind and she felt her eyes heat with tears. He had gone looking for her. Nevermind his own safety. He could have gone with his family, but he hadn't, because he wanted to find her. But if he'd only waited one more day, one more day, she would've found him!
All three of them jerked their heads in the direction of the gunshot out of place in this silent neighborhood.
"Oh, God, someone's alive," Lee breathed. He took off in a flat run.
Gai swore and roared, "LEE!" before tearing after him.
Tenten blinked, confused, and gave chase a moment later. She had time to hate being small and female, to hate the way the laden bag she wore on her back clinked and jingled, to hate how heavy and loud her footfalls were, and worst of all the burn in her arms to keep the loaded gun steady across her chest. She couldn't hold it out in a firing position, after all.
She heard Gai calling after Lee, and Lee's lack of a response. She could only see Gai as distant growing figure; both men were incredibly fast. "Wait!" she called out, the word burning in her throat. "Gai-sifu!" But he was focused on his son, who was long since out of Tenten's line of sight.
And soon, so was Gai.
She couldn't keep running; she couldn't. With a pained sob of fear she slowed to a trot, to a walk, and to a stop. She put a hand out so she could lean heavily against the black truck and simply catch her breath.
Something thumped softly, but heavily.
Panting, sweat pouring down her face, Tenten lifted her head to peer into the vehicle's cabin.
A gray face with milky eyes stared back. Its mouth hung open, and she could just hear the moan through the car's glass. The zombie was belted in the passenger seat, and the thumping came from its fists striking the dash and window.
She screamed and stumbled back, falling on her ass but somehow still holding the rifle. She sat there, dumbfounded and fearful as the dead fist hit the glass, hit it again, and again, and again. She saw the glass begin to crack, saw the crack grow with each strike until finally the hand burst through and flailed at her. The moan could now be heard clearly.
They call others with the moans, she remembered Gai saying. Her heart pounded in her chest. She pushed herself up just as the zombie was punching out more of the glass, slicing itself up so that brown blood oozed. Then it began to pull itself out of the car. Towards her.
Fighting down a scream, she raised her rifle and fired. She missed; the bullet hit the zombie's shoulder at the right angle to explode it in a burst of gore. Panic made her fingers tremble as she pumped a new bullet into the chamber, and the zombie was now dragging itself on the pavement towards her, groaning. It had ripped itself in half at the midsection and was trailing its guts, the large intestine a rope snaking back into the car.
She kept backing up, kept trying to steady herself, but the rifle didn't want to work. Finally, desperate, she clubbed the undead thing with the stock to get it to stop coming at her. It grabbed her ankle, then went still as she staved its brains in.
Unfortunately, the force of the blow had the unexpected side effect of firing the gun.
She looked up behind her in a panic and her vision swam. Coming slowly but steadily down the street was a veritable wall of zombies, all in different states of dress and decomposition, shuffling steadily at her.
She screamed. It was involuntary, and she stopped it quickly enough, but it only encouraged the ghouls. They groaned together, the sound so deep and primal it made the ground shake.
She ran -- only to fall flat when trying to take that second step. The hand. She'd forgotten about the hand. It held her ankle in a vice. The gun was dropped so she could scrabble at the cold, clammy, bloody flesh. The fingers were finally wrenched open enough she could tear her foot free. She snatched up the gun, and ran, the horde close behind.
The streets became more familiar and she knew she was getting close to her house. She still didn't see Lee or Gai. She needed to find them, she needed to find them now. Her feet pounded the pavemenet, her breath rasped in her lungs, but terror gave her wings like nothing else.
"Sifu!" she cried as loudly as she could. Tears streamed. "Lee! Where are you!"
The only reply was the sharp report of Gai's rifle.
The moaning was everywhere.
She rounded a corner just in time to see a child-zombie sink its teeth into Gai's hand. "NO!" Without thinking, she literally shot from the hip. Her aim was true; the child's head exploded in gore and the body dropped. Gai roared in anger and pain and used his now-freed hand to throw the other zombies clawing at him, away. He pulled out his pistol and quickly shot them in the head, then turned and began shooting into a writhing mass not ten feet away.
A mass from which Lee's leg protruded and jerked feebly.
Oh my god oh my god oh my god kept going through her head. Tears blurred her vision into nothing but smears of gray and black and brown and blood as she also fired at the zombies eating her best friend.
The zombies stopped moving, one by one, until they were all dead. Gai sat heavily, and Tenten, crying, dropped the gun to throw her arms around him. He put his uninjured hand over hers. "Tenten," he said, "Tenten."
"There's more coming," she sobbed.
Gai stiffened, sagged. "You have to hide. We made enough of a racket to draw the most of them." He smiled ruefully. "I'll keep them busy. You get going."
"I can't..."
"You can. Tenten. Find Neji. There are enough supplies still at my cabin that you two can hunker down for weeks." He pulled her into a hug, though careful of his hand. When she lifted her head, his face was as streaked with tears as hers. "Go, my little flower. My son and I won't follow, I promise."
"Sifu..." She was stalling, even though the moans grew louder.
He pulled her arms from around him. "Run, Tenten. Run now." He shoved her enough that she stumbled.
Still she hesitated, backing up a few steps. Then the shambling horde turned the corner, and blinded by her tears, she ran.
She ran and ran, barely noticing the landmarks, the only sounds penetrating the pops from Gai's pistol. She still ran and nearly cried out in relief when she reached her zombie-free house. Her hands fumbled for the key to the front door, and she shoved the door open. The place was dark and mercifully silent. She staggered through the house until she reached the garage. The cord for the attic's trapdoor still hung down, and she hauled it down with all of her strength. The built-in ladder came down, and she clambered up the wooden rungs as fast as she could, then hauled the ladder up behind her.
Daylight still drifted in through the windows, and she leaned back against the rafters, trying to stifle her sobs. Memories of the good times with Lee and Gai-sifu and Neji kept filtering through her mind as if determined to break her. She fought back the cries and screams until only in her mind did she wail.
Then she noticed the smell.
Something smelled bad. Really bad.
Her heart was in her stomach as she carefully took up her rifle. She moved slowly among the boxes of Christmas decorations and light-weight furniture, listening hard and sniffing carefully.
She spotted the foot, first. Sneakers, the kind that really did let you sneak up on someone. The foot was attached to a leg, the leg a torso, and the torso a head. The head was rolled to the side, hair blocking the face. Camping gear was settled next to the body. In fact, it looked like he was merely asleep on his sleeping bag. But he was the source of the smell.
That's when she noticed the gun, and the blood.
She dropped her weapon and dashed forward, grabbing his shoulders. "Neji? Neji?" she demanded, shaking him. As if that could wake him, could heal the hole in his head, could make the blood and brains go back inside his skull. He'd killed himself, she realized, and she could only hold him and cry.
"Tenten?"
Someone was shaking her. She startled awake, tears flowing, and took a few moments to recognize the voice... "L-Lee?"
His shadowed form sat down on the tree branch next to her. "You were crying in your sleep," he said sorrowfully.
She sat up, and felt the hammock sway. It was still nighttime; they were still in the tree Gai had found them. She rubbed her face and found it wet. "N-Nightmare," she managed. He pulled her into a hug and she clung fiercely. The images kept flitting through her mind. He rubbed her back soothingly.
Much later, she began to loosen her grip. "'m sorry. I shouldn't have..."
"It's all right," he murmured, still rubbing her back. "It's been a helluva two weeks."
She sniffled at him. "Shouldn't curse. Your dad would have a fit."
He chuckled softly. "Dad's asleep. But you're right." He squeezed her shoulder. "I know it isn't your turn for another hour or so, but do you wanna sit with me?"
"Yeah," she whispered gratefully, and put on the goggles when he handed them to her. The world was still dark, but the nearest area with the branches and leaves and Gai came back as pale green. She stared at Gai for a while, just watching him breath, then carefully moved to sit next to Lee with her rifle on her knees.
After ten minutes, she was too restless to keep still. So she reached into the lower pocket of her cargo pants to pull out her tarot deck, the same one she had been in the middle of using when those two zombies broke into her house.
"Going to do a reading?" he whispered.
"Mm-hm," she replied.
"What about?"
"Neji."
"Ah, okay."
She pulled out the deck, shuffled it. She focused on Neji, and on the present, and asked what faced him. Using her lap, she drew the first card from the major arcana. Her breath caught in her throat when she saw it. The Tower, upright. Usually, when she focused on Neji, the Chariot was the card to come up. Why the Tower, now? Shaking her head to clear it, she then drew a card from the minor arcana. The Seven of Cups, reversed. Her shiver had nothing to do with the breeze that rifled through the leaves.
Trouble, that was the main meaning the cards. Neji was in trouble, facing some kind of major change that he might not be up to task to overcome. Worse, difficult choices lay ahead, clouded by illusion - or rather by his emotions intefering with his normal logic. And the choices he faced... none of them good.
That... couldn't be right. Never, ever had she known Neji to let emotion rule him. Even in his note in his attic he stated that he was using logic as the reason to split from the family (even though a part of her knew he was using the bigger reason of looking for her). Frowning, she shuffled the cards. Her own anxieties had to be interfering with the cards. She held the cards in her hand and struggled to clear her mind. When she got it as clear as she felt she could, she tried again.
Judgment, reversed. The Three of Swords, upright. Indecision and the inability to make difficult, hard choices, while those choices still confronted him on all sides.
Again, it didn't make sense. Two readings, albeit both saying about the same thing, but... why didn't the Chariot come up? Every other time she had done a reading with Neji as her focus, the Chariot had always been the major arcana.
A thought struck her. Perhaps a future reading might be more informative?
Again, she drew from the major arcana. The sight of the Lovers might have onetime made her blush. Tonight, she just felt the blood flee from her face. Her hand shook as she turned over the card for the minor arcana. The Nine of Swords is anxiety, great grief, and pain. So, love that turns sour, badness involving someone loved. She swallowed the sudden lump in her throat; reshuffled. The next drawing was the Lovers again, and this time the Ten of Swords. Love and death, the two most potent signs. Death to the point of overkill.
She shook her head, then decided she would do this one more time. She focused on Neji, and thought of the future. Maybe this time she would get the Chariot.
No such luck. The Lovers, again. And this time, the Two of Swords.
"Oh, God."
"Something wrong?" Lee asked as she began searching through the deck.
"I'm missing a card. The card that I usually associate with Neji." And the readings I'm getting just feel so WRONG.
Lee didn't reply. She knew that he knew she would take the missing card as a bad omen, but neither one wanted to say it aloud.
Tenten's mind was still on the previous evening's readings all through her watch, and at breakfast in the daylight she looked through her deck. No doubt about it - the Chariot card was still missing. In fact, it was the only card missing.
When she put the cards down, she saw Lee was watching her apprehensively. "Still missing?" he asked softly. She nodded. "Which card?"
"The Chariot." Seeing his puzzled look, she decided to explain. "The Chariot shows a man controlling a chariot being pulled by a pair of sphyinxes, one white, one black. It's about balance and controlling one's impulses or the opposites of one's nature to move ahead in one direction in an orderly fashion."
"Neji in a nutshell," Lee half-smiled.
"Right. His sphinxes are logic and emotion. But when I tried to do readings on him, I didn't get that card. Normally, I always got that card. But I kept getting something else."
"What did you get?"
Tenten hesitated. She didn't feel like going into a full-on explanation of the cards, and they shouldn't be so distracted that they could ignore their surroundings. "Let's just say that the readings I got were that Neji is in trouble. Like, really bad trouble, the kind he hasn't faced before and where there are no good options among the choices to be made, which makes them even more difficult to make. I didn't get the cards for stagnation, meaning he's going to make whatever choice it is he feels is best, whatever the outcome."
"Hm." Lee stuck out his lower lip in thought. "So what made you say, 'oh God'?"
"His future. Extreme grief, anxiety; incredible pain. Death for someone he loves dearly. The last reading I did, I got the Lovers and the Two of Swords." Her voice grew quieter, showed her own pain and worry. "He's going to kill someone he loves."
Part 5: Interlude | Table of Contents | Part 7
Title: Part 6: Dreaming
Fandoms: au!Naruto, World War Z
Characters: Tenten, Lee, Gai
Word Count: 4,205
Rating: R
Summary: Tenten, Lee, and Gai are looking for Neji during a zombie apocalypse.
Author's Notes: Took me long enough. Much love to bookblather for helping me with the tarot card stuff, and drelfina for the Chinese. ♥ Not beta'd. edit 6/19/11 Added to the ending to help better explain the tarot readings.
sifu - pronounced "shi-fu"; ?Mandarin Chinese for "respected teacher" or "master", equivalent to sensei.
They left the attic through the window. Gai first, then Lee, then Tenten. She glanced up back at the window and the illusion of safety the little attic-room held as she adjusted her pack's straps.
Yeah, she hadn't forgotten the bird. She couldn't; she was going to beat him over the head with it.
The cloaking silence was back. Stepping carefully and silently was becoming second nature, as was the pattern in which she moved her rifle. Gai had point, with Lee next and Tenten last. They eased around the U-shaped building, always looking and listening for the smallest movement and noise. The courtyard was deserted. No new ghouls wandered about. The other bodies from yesterday hadn't moved.
Going as the crow flies back to her house would not take them over difficult terrain so much as there were a few streams, a shallow ravine, and a subdivision and a half between here and there. She tried not to dwell too much on the hell of just getting out of her house. If not her father's home armory and the timely arrival of Gai and Lee, she didn't think she would have had much of a chance. It was hard fighting a group of people that didn't react normally.
She amended that line of thought as they skirted past Isamu's body, the fabric of his pajamas fluttering slightly in the breeze. These weren't people. That had been easier to remember when they were essentially nameless faces.
Lee had guessed that Neji would take the straightest path and only deviate when necessary. Tenten concurred; she knew his mind worked like that. It also made the most sense because it would be the easiest path for them to take when following him. She could almost imagine that he was forging ahead, just out of sight.
"Hey!" Lee asked from behind her, giving her pack a tug. "Where are you going?"
She paused, blinking at his round black eyes in confusion. "When did you fall behind?"
"You sped up," Lee answered. "Can't do that."
"I..." She trailed off, and blushed in shame. "Right." Slow and steady and quiet.
They kept going until the sun reached an angle that Gai told them to begin preparing for the night. They scouted the trees, looking for one with branches to suit their sleeping needs.
They found one just as Tenten was beginning to get antsy. She readily helped fling the hook-tipped ropes into the spread branches, and tugged hard to make sure they held. She climbed the rope quickly and began the unpacking process.
First thing to unload was her rifle and make sure it was nearby and ready to use. She was their lookout, not that the height increased her vision by very much. Then she moved to a different branch and threw down the rope ladder so the guys could ascend quickly. Gai as usual was the last to come up, and he hauled the ladder up after him.
Lee was stringing up the canvas-and-rope hammocks they would be using to sleep in. So long as they were out of reach of grasping hands, they would be fine. Trees were the safest bet at night.
They settled for another meal of MREs. Tenten was eating slowly at a cracker covered in peanut butter when Lee nudged her. "Hm?"
"Are you okay?"
She frowned at him. "No," she said shortly. The dead were walking. One of her best friends was wandering alone in the zombie-filled countryside. And her father...
Her father had already left for BattleCon before everything went to hell. That put him somewhere in Las Vegas. Too far away for Tenten to do anything about except pray that he was alive.
She shook her head. "No," she said again.
Lee balanced his MRE precariously on his knee and gave her a one-armed hug. "We'll find him," he promised.
Which him? she thought. She knew the answer: Neji. But would they find her father, too? "Yeah, sure," she said listlessly. No longer hungry, she stuffed the rest of her food back in the MRE package and climbed up to where Lee had strung up one of the hammocks. She flopped down a little harder than necessary, which earned her a moment's disapproval from Gai. She felt a twinge of guilt and mouthed sorry. He nodded; he would take first watch.
"Wake me this time," she told Lee in a hushed whisper. "I want to be useful, too."
"All right. Sleep well."
"Much as I can," she muttered to herself. She was feeling depressed, and she didn't care. At least Lee had his dad. And she had them both, but it wasn't the same.
Would anything be the same, anymore?
~ ~ ~ ~
They reached the outskirts of Tenten's subdivision at midafternoon. There was no wall around the myriad of streets ribboning through the houses. And as it was a newer subdivision not located in the closer foothills, the trees of the forest had given way to plains where only the buildings themselves provided any features.
Tenten had a bad feeling she couldn't shake. It wasn't just the remembered horrors of when the first pair zombies came breaking into her house. She didn't remember much of it, that she had been doing a tarot reading and then the sounds of glass shattering and the moaning and screams and the images of grayed hands reaching, reaching.
If she tried, she could dimly recall grabbing a lamp and bringing it down on a zombie's head enough to kill it. The lamp had shattered in her hands, leaving them bloody. Then running down the hall to the weapons room, her legs shaking from so much adrenaline that they had nearly given out from under her several times. The second zombie had been close behind, teeth bared and occasionally stumbling as it followed. Its lack of coordination gave her the chance to make it to the room, and grab the naginata on hooks over the entryway.
She didn't remember screaming or swinging the bladed stick. She did recall the head coming off the shoulders, the mouth still snapping as the body twitched and fell and twitched some more before going still.
The next thing she recalled was Gai holding her, calming her, and then packing her things so they could get the hell out of Dodge. There had been brief arguments over what she could and couldn't take.
She shook her head. That was in the past. The initial wave of zombies seemed to have moved along, looking for fresh prey. Given the fact the Hyuuga estate was abandoned and its distance from everything made it more likely that her house had been engulfed and then left behind.
"We don't have much time until nightfall," Gai said quietly. "Keep your eyes peeled for anything, including a potential place to sleep the night." He glanced to Tenten, lifting an eyebrow in silent question. She gave him a bare nod back. "Then let's go."
They walked a shade faster than normal through the silent field of yellow-green grass. Tenten covered the right and front with her constantly moving rifle, Lee the left and back while Gai focused on the distance. So far no ghouls, but there was no saying how long their luck would hold up.
Slowing their pace once hitting pavement became a necessity so they wouldn't walk so loudly. The silence was so profound that Tenten bet the zombies would find them based upon her heartbeat alone. She was sweating with fear, and had to wipe her hands every few minutes on her clothes to keep them dry.
Back when Gai and Lee had come, there had only been that initial wave of about a dozen zombies, total. Two had gone into her house; the others had spread out. Surprisingly, they had managed to be dispatched by gun-toting neighbors with only some casualties.
Now...
Now, the neighborhood looked like a war zone a hundred times worse than the compound.
Smoke from a distant fire of large size trailed upward. Cars were higgledy-diggledy in the road, no few of them wrecked. A hydrant had been hit, and was still weakly gushing water. Dried blood smeared or blotted the pavement in places, and she saw handprints of either dirt or blood along buildings and vehicles. Cute fences were knocked or trampled down, doors hung open upon broken hinges. Windows were boarded up in places and broken through in others. (She spotted a lacy curtain fluttering on a breeze she didn't feel.) Flower gardens were withering and already rife with weeds.
Occasionally, they saw a body with its head destroyed by some means. Some were bashed in. Others had been shot, or even decapitated. What they all had in common was that they were still.
"I've got a bad feeling about this," Tenten moaned softly.
"You read the note," Lee replied, his voice equal volume. "He said he would go to your place before trying ours."
"I... Gai-sifu, if he had seen this place was full of zombies, wouldn't he have just turned and gone to your house?"
Gai glanced at her. "I would hope," he said.
Maybe then we should go... She didn't say it, however. But how could she convey the fact that with every step they took, the greater the pressure to just turn and run became, the greater the feel that something was terribly and horribly wrong? Above the horrors they had already seen?
Would they even believe her?
"I'M GOING 2 TRY FOR 1010'S PLACE 1ST...
IF I C NO1 @ 1010'S I WILL LEAVE A MESSAGE
IF I CAN. NEJI"
The words in the note flashed then faded from her mind and she felt her eyes heat with tears. He had gone looking for her. Nevermind his own safety. He could have gone with his family, but he hadn't, because he wanted to find her. But if he'd only waited one more day, one more day, she would've found him!
All three of them jerked their heads in the direction of the gunshot out of place in this silent neighborhood.
"Oh, God, someone's alive," Lee breathed. He took off in a flat run.
Gai swore and roared, "LEE!" before tearing after him.
Tenten blinked, confused, and gave chase a moment later. She had time to hate being small and female, to hate the way the laden bag she wore on her back clinked and jingled, to hate how heavy and loud her footfalls were, and worst of all the burn in her arms to keep the loaded gun steady across her chest. She couldn't hold it out in a firing position, after all.
She heard Gai calling after Lee, and Lee's lack of a response. She could only see Gai as distant growing figure; both men were incredibly fast. "Wait!" she called out, the word burning in her throat. "Gai-sifu!" But he was focused on his son, who was long since out of Tenten's line of sight.
And soon, so was Gai.
She couldn't keep running; she couldn't. With a pained sob of fear she slowed to a trot, to a walk, and to a stop. She put a hand out so she could lean heavily against the black truck and simply catch her breath.
Something thumped softly, but heavily.
Panting, sweat pouring down her face, Tenten lifted her head to peer into the vehicle's cabin.
A gray face with milky eyes stared back. Its mouth hung open, and she could just hear the moan through the car's glass. The zombie was belted in the passenger seat, and the thumping came from its fists striking the dash and window.
She screamed and stumbled back, falling on her ass but somehow still holding the rifle. She sat there, dumbfounded and fearful as the dead fist hit the glass, hit it again, and again, and again. She saw the glass begin to crack, saw the crack grow with each strike until finally the hand burst through and flailed at her. The moan could now be heard clearly.
They call others with the moans, she remembered Gai saying. Her heart pounded in her chest. She pushed herself up just as the zombie was punching out more of the glass, slicing itself up so that brown blood oozed. Then it began to pull itself out of the car. Towards her.
Fighting down a scream, she raised her rifle and fired. She missed; the bullet hit the zombie's shoulder at the right angle to explode it in a burst of gore. Panic made her fingers tremble as she pumped a new bullet into the chamber, and the zombie was now dragging itself on the pavement towards her, groaning. It had ripped itself in half at the midsection and was trailing its guts, the large intestine a rope snaking back into the car.
She kept backing up, kept trying to steady herself, but the rifle didn't want to work. Finally, desperate, she clubbed the undead thing with the stock to get it to stop coming at her. It grabbed her ankle, then went still as she staved its brains in.
Unfortunately, the force of the blow had the unexpected side effect of firing the gun.
She looked up behind her in a panic and her vision swam. Coming slowly but steadily down the street was a veritable wall of zombies, all in different states of dress and decomposition, shuffling steadily at her.
She screamed. It was involuntary, and she stopped it quickly enough, but it only encouraged the ghouls. They groaned together, the sound so deep and primal it made the ground shake.
She ran -- only to fall flat when trying to take that second step. The hand. She'd forgotten about the hand. It held her ankle in a vice. The gun was dropped so she could scrabble at the cold, clammy, bloody flesh. The fingers were finally wrenched open enough she could tear her foot free. She snatched up the gun, and ran, the horde close behind.
The streets became more familiar and she knew she was getting close to her house. She still didn't see Lee or Gai. She needed to find them, she needed to find them now. Her feet pounded the pavemenet, her breath rasped in her lungs, but terror gave her wings like nothing else.
"Sifu!" she cried as loudly as she could. Tears streamed. "Lee! Where are you!"
The only reply was the sharp report of Gai's rifle.
The moaning was everywhere.
She rounded a corner just in time to see a child-zombie sink its teeth into Gai's hand. "NO!" Without thinking, she literally shot from the hip. Her aim was true; the child's head exploded in gore and the body dropped. Gai roared in anger and pain and used his now-freed hand to throw the other zombies clawing at him, away. He pulled out his pistol and quickly shot them in the head, then turned and began shooting into a writhing mass not ten feet away.
A mass from which Lee's leg protruded and jerked feebly.
Oh my god oh my god oh my god kept going through her head. Tears blurred her vision into nothing but smears of gray and black and brown and blood as she also fired at the zombies eating her best friend.
The zombies stopped moving, one by one, until they were all dead. Gai sat heavily, and Tenten, crying, dropped the gun to throw her arms around him. He put his uninjured hand over hers. "Tenten," he said, "Tenten."
"There's more coming," she sobbed.
Gai stiffened, sagged. "You have to hide. We made enough of a racket to draw the most of them." He smiled ruefully. "I'll keep them busy. You get going."
"I can't..."
"You can. Tenten. Find Neji. There are enough supplies still at my cabin that you two can hunker down for weeks." He pulled her into a hug, though careful of his hand. When she lifted her head, his face was as streaked with tears as hers. "Go, my little flower. My son and I won't follow, I promise."
"Sifu..." She was stalling, even though the moans grew louder.
He pulled her arms from around him. "Run, Tenten. Run now." He shoved her enough that she stumbled.
Still she hesitated, backing up a few steps. Then the shambling horde turned the corner, and blinded by her tears, she ran.
She ran and ran, barely noticing the landmarks, the only sounds penetrating the pops from Gai's pistol. She still ran and nearly cried out in relief when she reached her zombie-free house. Her hands fumbled for the key to the front door, and she shoved the door open. The place was dark and mercifully silent. She staggered through the house until she reached the garage. The cord for the attic's trapdoor still hung down, and she hauled it down with all of her strength. The built-in ladder came down, and she clambered up the wooden rungs as fast as she could, then hauled the ladder up behind her.
Daylight still drifted in through the windows, and she leaned back against the rafters, trying to stifle her sobs. Memories of the good times with Lee and Gai-sifu and Neji kept filtering through her mind as if determined to break her. She fought back the cries and screams until only in her mind did she wail.
Then she noticed the smell.
Something smelled bad. Really bad.
Her heart was in her stomach as she carefully took up her rifle. She moved slowly among the boxes of Christmas decorations and light-weight furniture, listening hard and sniffing carefully.
She spotted the foot, first. Sneakers, the kind that really did let you sneak up on someone. The foot was attached to a leg, the leg a torso, and the torso a head. The head was rolled to the side, hair blocking the face. Camping gear was settled next to the body. In fact, it looked like he was merely asleep on his sleeping bag. But he was the source of the smell.
That's when she noticed the gun, and the blood.
She dropped her weapon and dashed forward, grabbing his shoulders. "Neji? Neji?" she demanded, shaking him. As if that could wake him, could heal the hole in his head, could make the blood and brains go back inside his skull. He'd killed himself, she realized, and she could only hold him and cry.
"Tenten?"
Someone was shaking her. She startled awake, tears flowing, and took a few moments to recognize the voice... "L-Lee?"
His shadowed form sat down on the tree branch next to her. "You were crying in your sleep," he said sorrowfully.
She sat up, and felt the hammock sway. It was still nighttime; they were still in the tree Gai had found them. She rubbed her face and found it wet. "N-Nightmare," she managed. He pulled her into a hug and she clung fiercely. The images kept flitting through her mind. He rubbed her back soothingly.
Much later, she began to loosen her grip. "'m sorry. I shouldn't have..."
"It's all right," he murmured, still rubbing her back. "It's been a helluva two weeks."
She sniffled at him. "Shouldn't curse. Your dad would have a fit."
He chuckled softly. "Dad's asleep. But you're right." He squeezed her shoulder. "I know it isn't your turn for another hour or so, but do you wanna sit with me?"
"Yeah," she whispered gratefully, and put on the goggles when he handed them to her. The world was still dark, but the nearest area with the branches and leaves and Gai came back as pale green. She stared at Gai for a while, just watching him breath, then carefully moved to sit next to Lee with her rifle on her knees.
After ten minutes, she was too restless to keep still. So she reached into the lower pocket of her cargo pants to pull out her tarot deck, the same one she had been in the middle of using when those two zombies broke into her house.
"Going to do a reading?" he whispered.
"Mm-hm," she replied.
"What about?"
"Neji."
"Ah, okay."
She pulled out the deck, shuffled it. She focused on Neji, and on the present, and asked what faced him. Using her lap, she drew the first card from the major arcana. Her breath caught in her throat when she saw it. The Tower, upright. Usually, when she focused on Neji, the Chariot was the card to come up. Why the Tower, now? Shaking her head to clear it, she then drew a card from the minor arcana. The Seven of Cups, reversed. Her shiver had nothing to do with the breeze that rifled through the leaves.
Trouble, that was the main meaning the cards. Neji was in trouble, facing some kind of major change that he might not be up to task to overcome. Worse, difficult choices lay ahead, clouded by illusion - or rather by his emotions intefering with his normal logic. And the choices he faced... none of them good.
That... couldn't be right. Never, ever had she known Neji to let emotion rule him. Even in his note in his attic he stated that he was using logic as the reason to split from the family (even though a part of her knew he was using the bigger reason of looking for her). Frowning, she shuffled the cards. Her own anxieties had to be interfering with the cards. She held the cards in her hand and struggled to clear her mind. When she got it as clear as she felt she could, she tried again.
Judgment, reversed. The Three of Swords, upright. Indecision and the inability to make difficult, hard choices, while those choices still confronted him on all sides.
Again, it didn't make sense. Two readings, albeit both saying about the same thing, but... why didn't the Chariot come up? Every other time she had done a reading with Neji as her focus, the Chariot had always been the major arcana.
A thought struck her. Perhaps a future reading might be more informative?
Again, she drew from the major arcana. The sight of the Lovers might have onetime made her blush. Tonight, she just felt the blood flee from her face. Her hand shook as she turned over the card for the minor arcana. The Nine of Swords is anxiety, great grief, and pain. So, love that turns sour, badness involving someone loved. She swallowed the sudden lump in her throat; reshuffled. The next drawing was the Lovers again, and this time the Ten of Swords. Love and death, the two most potent signs. Death to the point of overkill.
She shook her head, then decided she would do this one more time. She focused on Neji, and thought of the future. Maybe this time she would get the Chariot.
No such luck. The Lovers, again. And this time, the Two of Swords.
"Oh, God."
"Something wrong?" Lee asked as she began searching through the deck.
"I'm missing a card. The card that I usually associate with Neji." And the readings I'm getting just feel so WRONG.
Lee didn't reply. She knew that he knew she would take the missing card as a bad omen, but neither one wanted to say it aloud.
Tenten's mind was still on the previous evening's readings all through her watch, and at breakfast in the daylight she looked through her deck. No doubt about it - the Chariot card was still missing. In fact, it was the only card missing.
When she put the cards down, she saw Lee was watching her apprehensively. "Still missing?" he asked softly. She nodded. "Which card?"
"The Chariot." Seeing his puzzled look, she decided to explain. "The Chariot shows a man controlling a chariot being pulled by a pair of sphyinxes, one white, one black. It's about balance and controlling one's impulses or the opposites of one's nature to move ahead in one direction in an orderly fashion."
"Neji in a nutshell," Lee half-smiled.
"Right. His sphinxes are logic and emotion. But when I tried to do readings on him, I didn't get that card. Normally, I always got that card. But I kept getting something else."
"What did you get?"
Tenten hesitated. She didn't feel like going into a full-on explanation of the cards, and they shouldn't be so distracted that they could ignore their surroundings. "Let's just say that the readings I got were that Neji is in trouble. Like, really bad trouble, the kind he hasn't faced before and where there are no good options among the choices to be made, which makes them even more difficult to make. I didn't get the cards for stagnation, meaning he's going to make whatever choice it is he feels is best, whatever the outcome."
"Hm." Lee stuck out his lower lip in thought. "So what made you say, 'oh God'?"
"His future. Extreme grief, anxiety; incredible pain. Death for someone he loves dearly. The last reading I did, I got the Lovers and the Two of Swords." Her voice grew quieter, showed her own pain and worry. "He's going to kill someone he loves."
Part 5: Interlude | Table of Contents | Part 7