“Stay here!” shouted Justin.
He ordered his fellow officers to fall in behind him, and they rushed off toward the sound of the gun shot. Scott didn’t give a damn about that order and raced after them. He had to see what had happened.
The others saw him and gave chase as well. Justin nearly stopped and rounded on Scott to give him a piece of his mind, but two more gunshots rang out from just around the corner.
“Dammit!” snarled Justin. Unable to ignore the more pressing matter, he rounded the corner to see a truly distressing sight. Salami sat against the wall, her uniform top torn open and one of her breasts exposed. Blood poured from her busted lip and trickled from her badly bruised eye. There were obvious bruises on her neck and breasts that could even be seen from a short distance.
On the ground nearby lay the body of her ex-boyfriend. His blood leaked heavily from his rapidly cooling corpse.
“Officer Salami,” said Justin.
Salami’s head snapped toward him along with her weapon. The other officers reached for their guns, but her hand soon began to tremble, and she started to cry.
Otakun moved forward, but the officers tried to stop him. Scott coldly told them to let him go as he was her boyfriend.
Seeing the sight of the crying girl, it was obvious what had happened. On a normal day there would have been paperwork, protocol, all manner of things they needed to do because of the crime scene. They did none of those things. They let Otakun go and he went over to Salami.
She dropped the gun and grabbed onto him even as the tears flowed more freely. “Oh-ota!”
“I…” said Courtney, her eyes wide. She looked over to Scott and had a brain fart. “You did this!”
“What are you on about now, woman?” asked Scott. “You know damned well I was trying to stop this from happening.”
Tosh sprang forward. “Don’t talk to my mother like that!”
“He did this!” snapped Courtney. “He knew it was going to happen! He was clearly in on it!”
Scott snarled back, “We could have gotten here to stop all of this if you hadn’t been so damned sure you know everything.”
“You knew this was going to happen?” asked Justin coldly.
“Dad! No!” exclaimed Jade.
Scott turned back to Justin only to discover that Jade’s dad had his gun trained on him. “Really?”
“You’re under arrest for suspicion of conspiracy to commit sexual assault,” said Justin.
Scott rubbed the bridge of his nose. Could people be any more predictable?
He tried to explain his situation, as did the others, but they cops were having none of it. Forced at gunpoint to comply with their instructions, he was marched to a small room nearby.
Someone had to be blamed, and this fancifully dressed weirdo was just as good a possible perpetrator as anyone. Unfortunately, for Scott they did not want to hear his apparent nonsense. He tried to show them that he was what he claimed to be, but they dismissed the little that he could show them in the room as nothing but sleight of hand.
He did not want to attack them, so shouting was out. The quick change of his clothing being reset was dismissed as the act of a quick-change artist. It was as though they needed someone to be guilty and since the dead man could not be made to pay for his crimes, Scott would have to do it instead.
Time passed quickly. A decision was made. He would not be executed or anything similar because they could not prove that his story was false. However, they clearly did not believe him. Rather, they chose not to believe him. Given his obvious insanity, they ruled that he would need to remain behind for the second evacuation attempt.
Scott knew that to be a life from the moment those words were spoken to him. There would be no second attempt. Even if there were one scheduled, the zombies would have long since overtaken the school.
He could have fought the decision. He chose not to do that. This round could be considered a fact-finding mission on his part. There was no need to cause a fuss. Instead, he was locked in a room across from the armory, one that had a little window that faced the hall.
Time passed. No one bothered to remove the corpse from the hall. Why would they? It was extra work for no good purpose.
Soon, he heard the oppressive sound of inbound choppers. He was not able to do anything about it at the moment, so he was forced to wait it out.
Nothing else to do, he stared out the little window into the hallway. Eventually, death would come for him. He might as well look at it while it made its way over to him.
The evacuation went on for several minutes. People ran back and forth to the armory for a brief time, one even looked him in the eyes then spat on the ground. Apparently, word had gotten out that he was a rapist’s accomplice.
Soon, no one came through the area. Instead, something else kept Scott’s eyes glued to the hallway. The corpse of the ground. There was something odd about it. “Has he gotten… bigger?”
He was not wrong. The corpse continued to grow larger. Soon, its uniform was shredded due to the sudden increase in body mass.
Scott could not help but laugh, more like cackle, at the insanity of his discovery. This at least explained where the second Gigantor came from. Though, he thought that the situation was still a bit off, given the fact that the man turned into a rapist idiot only an hour before he was to escape this hell. Seriously, what man in his right mind would take that risk?
“I wonder when he was bit?” asked Scott. That was another thing that made no sense. Wasn’t he inside all morning at the armory? When did he come in contact with one of the dead? Did dying in this world turn someone no matter what?
There were many questions in need of answers. Scott would get none of them. All he could do was wait. “Won’t be long now. Huh?”
Not long after he spoke those fateful words, he heard an explosive roar from outside. “The helicopter’s down…” he whispered quietly. “Were they on it?”
He assumed that they would be. Even if they weren’t, there was no way that all of them would survive three Gigantors and hundreds of zombies.
Scott drew back from the window and sighed. A roar shook the school as the Gigantor outside his room awoke. It scented the air then cried out, “Protein!” before it bashed its way through the wall into his room.
“What took you so long?” asked Scott calmly.
When he awoke in the white room a few seconds later, he sighed once more. “This is going to be a long day. I just know it.”
Once he returned to the apocalypse, he immediately ignored everyone in the room except for Otakun. “We have somewhere we need to be, Otakun.”
“W-we do?” asked Otakun, surprised by Scott’s sudden change in demeanor.
Scott looked around the room. “I’ll explain to the rest of you later. Please don’t follow us.”
“What’s going on?” asked Saiko.
“Can’t talk now. Otakun and I need to do this alone. I’ll explain in a few minutes,” said Scott.
“Why Tubby?” asked Momoko. “Why just him?”
“Yeah…” said Otakun.
“It’s about Salami, Otakun. Now come on. We don’t have much time,” said Scott.
Several of the others began asking questions but Scott just repeated himself. He would tell them later.
Once he took Otakun down the hall a short distance, he led him down a nearby hallway and told him everything. Otakun’s eyes widened briefly then slowly narrowed. “I’ll kill him!”
“No, you won’t!” hissed Scott. “As much as I would love to see that guy dead, if he dies, he’ll turn into a Gigantor.”
“So, what do we do then? Tell the police?” asked Otakun angrily.
“No. We sneak over there. We wait quietly behind the corner,” said Scott. He then leaned in close to Otakun and whispered. “We listen. We wait. I go kick his ass when the time is right, and you take Salami out of there.”
“Right… Ok... Why do you get to kick his ass?” Otakun was fired up
and ready. He was practically bouncing up and down at this point.
“If he shoots me, I get a do over,” said Scott. “If he shoots you, I have to go kill myself to give you one.”
Otakun did not seem to be entirely convinced. Though, he was listening to Scott’s words.
“Besides, shouldn’t it be you who gets her out of there and takes her to see the other officers? You’re together. Right?” asked Scott.
This mollified Otakun somewhat. Though, he began to sweat a little as well.
The intercom blared out the fact that an evacuation team would be there within the hour. It was news that noticeably cheered Otakun up to some degree.
“Don’t be nervous, bro. We got this,” said Scott.
“I’m not really nervous,” said Otakun.
“Sweating pretty bad…” said Scott with a grin.
“Yeah, there’s something going around here. The flu or something. People have been getting sick all morning,” said Otakun.
“Everyone seemed fine?” asked Scott. He had not noticed anything like an illness among the group before. If he were honest, he had barely spent any time with them before he ran off.
“We didn’t get much sleep last night, and even with the barbecue this morning we’re still kind of beat,” said Otakun.
“Maybe you got food poisoning from the barbecue… Unless you saved me some. It would be perfectly fine that way,” said Scott.
“It could be that, too,” said Otakun while trying to smile. “Plus, we’re happy to see you and Saiko made it.”
“OK… Well, don’t push yourself. Let’s take care of Salami, and the douche, then get you some rest,” said Scott. He didn’t know which offended him more. The douche, or the fact that he had missed a barbecue.
The duo rolled up on the conversation not too much sooner than Scott had arrived the first time. He did his best to keep Otakun from running forward when Salami started to talk about how she was with Otakun and that he shouldn’t be doing such a thing.
The moment that she started crying out for him to let her go, Scott turned the corner and rushed the guy. This time the would-be rapist managed to see him coming, but he was still taken by surprise. A mighty ham fist rammed into side of his head. Once again, he was sent reeling.
“Scott!” exclaimed Salami in surprise. “When did you—”
“Salami!” called Otakun.
“Otakun!” cried Salami.
While the love birds rushed into each other’s arms, Scott beat the absolute shit out of the other guy. He pulled his gun from its holster and slid it over to Salami, before he went back to wailing on the now misshapen idiot. He wasn’t dead by the time that Scott got done with him, but he would never be called a pretty boy again.
A few minutes later, the story was explained to the police officers running the survivor encampment. Scott was once again nearly hauled off for further questioning, as he had severely beat the guy. However, they decided to let it go. Salami was obviously shaken, and their story that he and Otakun had come to see her since she might not know what he had made it to the evacuation center checked out.
Time passed. The helicopters were soon inbound. Scott relayed information to the officers about what he had heard from another survivor, or so he claimed. There were several of those ‘giant zombies’ in the area. Which was why that survivor refused to come to the place.
It was a convenient lie, true. However, a few of the officers had seen such creatures first-hand. They were more than happy to tell the helicopter pilots that they needed to fly straight up on take-off.
All was good. Everyone was seated. Scott remained silent when the badly injured and exceedingly sick were told that there was a medivac helicopter enroute to pick them up since they had special needs. He could do little for them himself. There were supplies that he could convert to help them out, but the effects were slightly muted when used by someone not part of the system. Healing was greatly accelerated, but a med kit would not regrow a normal person’s arm or cure dementia. Food available at the school would do even less.
Besides that, the decision came from higher up in the food chain. Had he the power, he would have saved them all. Even if he tried to help them now, there would be no room for them on the helicopter. He was lucky that he and Saiko could be taken on as neither of them was seriously injured.
No time was wasted. Scott made a quick save just before the helicopters landed. In the worst-case scenario, he would just restart from that morning. As things stood, he wanted everyone who could to have the greatest chance to escape.
There were only two helicopters. The moment those copters landed, people who were deemed VIPS were put on the first helicopter even as supplies were quickly loaded in the rear. Keiko hopped out then started to walk toward the second group of people. She spotted Summer and immediately ran toward her, with a relieved smile on her face.
“Summer!” cried Keiko!
“Keiko!” cried Summer!
‘My destiny!’ cried Scott internally. Keiko was even hotter in person than the anime! Tall, fit, tan and ready. She was dressed up in special operations equipment and looked like she was ready for anything.
The moment the first helicopter was loaded, it took off straight away. It went directly upward, despite the brief complaints from the pilot. Direct vertical lift-off was certainly possible, but it put a heavy strain on the engine. The last thing they wanted was a fatal stall during a rescue operation. Mention of giant zombies in the area kept him focused, however.
Jade put her hand to her mouth and shook her head. Scott watched as Tosh went to her and comforted the girl. She had caught the flu, or whatever it was that was going down. For that matter, so had Tosh. Even he was sweating a bit now.
The second helicopter soon took off and rose straight into the air. It had gained quite a bit of altitude before a car flew toward it. That car, thankfully, fell well short of its goal. It crashed down to the ground with great force.
“Finally,” whispered Scott as he leaned back against his bench seat. “It’s finally over…”
He decided to close his eyes. Running all morning, and multiple deaths, had taken their toll on him. Resting his eyes shouldn’t be a problem.
Scott even drifted off to sleep briefly. However, after a few minutes he awoke to the sound of someone violently vomiting.
“Grandpa?” called out a young teen boy.
Scott looked quickly to the sound of the voice. His skin began to crawl as he saw the sallow complexion of the old man. He looked… dead.
“No…” said Scott as a low moan escaped the old man’s lips.
He looked to his left and saw Jade vomit profusely. Her skin was pale and the dark circles around her eyes had intensified.
“Otakun?” asked Salami. “Hey Otakun…?”
Scott’s head snapped to where Salami and Otakun sat. “No…”
Otakun looked incredibly pale. Though, he could see that he was still breathing.
“What the hell?” asked one of the soldiers. “Why?”
Scott looked to where the soldier was looking. It wasn’t at the sick people that the man had turned his attention, it was the other helicopter that was even now flying just ahead of them. A small flailing figure fell toward the ground at high speed.
Not long after another passenger fell, and then three more fell. The helicopter suddenly veered toward the ground and raced downward at high velocity. It exploded on impact.
“God dammit…” whispered Scott.
Grandpa’s eyes opened. They were milky and clouded over. His grandson’s plaintive cries turned to desperate screams when the toothless old man tried to gum him to death.
“Infected!” snarled one of the soldiers.
An old woman sitting close to that soldier woke up from her nap and lunged at him. She still had her teeth. The soldier tried his best to fight her off, but it was a lost cause. They were too close, Too clustered together. It was not long after that when the second evacuation helicopter dove
toward the ground, the screams of the dead and dying preceding it for but a moment.
Scott sat in the white room sometime later. The room kept his emotions in check, but he was still filled with anger and sadness. “The barbecue. It had to be…”
What kind of barbecue was it? How could it cause this situation? The timing of it was similar to how food poisoning tended to hit people at around the same time when they ate something bad. Was the meat tainted? Why didn’t cooking it kill whatever was wrong with it?
He did not know what to do. He could return to the morning autosave, but if it really was the barbecue it was impossible for him to stop it. Everyone, all his new friends, were already dead. They just didn’t know it.
“Can’t go back in time to fix this,” he said quietly. “I’d have to be able to teleport, and even then, it probably happened before I woke up.”
Scott rubbed the bridge of his noise. He did not have enough materials to make health restoratives that might cure their illness. Even if he found a pharmacy, he would be hunting for it all morning no doubt. There wasn’t one on the route that he knew.
He would have to turn back the clock in order to have enough time to help everyone. The problem was that he did not know how to do it.
“There’s no way…” he said softly.
Scott was lost for a time. He sat on the floor and stared belligerently at the save points available to him. He refused to believe that there was nothing that he could do, but he could not think of anything.
“If it was just a damned boss fight, I could trade in world points for fuel. Make some Molotovs,” he said.
Thinking outside of what was immediately available in the world reminded him that he was not forced to use only what he could scrounge up in the apocalypse to solve the problem. He had an entire world that he could call upon, provided he could get to it.
“If… Then!” He performed a few mental gymnastics and realized that there might be a way out of the situation after all!
Scott rushed over to his monitor and looked at the situation carefully. All he had to do to gain access to the world that he had recently unlocked was to finish his current mission on Nowhere. A quarter of an hour would pass in the apocalypse, but that would still leave him quite a bite of time to get to the school.
Power Fantasy Page 38