Poughkeepsie Attacks!!!: Team Opera House

[gone_byebye]

The Bardavon Opera House in Poughkeepsie has been in operation since 1869. It's a big, intricate building, located solidly in the middle of town, and on all of Ray's distant PKE scans it shone like a beacon.

Possibly with good reason, since the streets around it are alive with mice.

Comments

[slayer_fray]

Mel shrugs, moving out of the way for the Nazis to escape.

"This is an opera house, right?" she says to Indy over the attempt. "You can use a prop."

[henry-jones-jr.livejournal.com]

Indy stops scowling at the rude Nunchuck Nazi and brightens considerably.

"Of course. Good idea, sis. There's bound to be something backstage."

He holsters his pistol and makes an urging gesture to the remaining Nazis. "C'mon, boneheads! What are you waitin' for? You've been granted a reprieve. Get outta here before we change our minds."

[gone_byebye]

"But I thought-"

"That's your problem," says Billy Club, staggering to his feet. "You thought. Peck isn't paying you to think. He's paying you to get the hell out of here and tell him what the hell is going on."

As realization dawns and the guys in robes get shoved aside in the mad rush for the stairs, the sound of things cracking under pressure begins to filter up from somewhere well down below.

[slayer_fray]

Mel shrugs, and turns to exit along with them, elbowing Nazis aside.

"OK, let's see if we can find the props department," she tells Indy. "I figure it's probably downstairs too?"

[henry-jones-jr.livejournal.com]

"Yep," Indy agrees, following behind at a casual pace. "And I reckon we can turn all the lights on now."

As they descend the stairs, hitting any light switches they see, Indy takes out the radio and presses in the send button.

"Come in, Ray."

"Indy and Mel reporting from the Opera House."

[gone_byebye]

"This is Ray," comes the reply. "Ecto and I are circling the IBM property looking for suspicious activity. What've you got?"

[henry-jones-jr.livejournal.com]

"We're pretty good here so far," Indy replies.

"We've sent a dozen Nazis packing. But... um... not before they unintentionally released a horde of walking dead. Not ideal. But we can handle it, no problem. We'll get back to you when they're all headless or otherwise dealt with."

[gone_byebye]

The silence that prevails for a few seconds is utterly boggled.

"Zombies," Ray finally says. "Where did they- oh, never mind. We can figure that part out later. Good luck not getting bitten.

[slayer_fray]

"Got a lifetime experience not being bitten," Mel chimes in sideways.

"Don't worry about us, Ray. We're doing jake."

[gone_byebye]

"All right," Ray says. "Catch up with you later, then. Stantz out."

It's a good conversation, a short conversation. Concise. Deals with what it has to deal with. Good thing, right?

Right.

Only thing is that in the time it took to have that conversation, the noises of cracking and banging have given way to noises of scrabbling and breaking. Where there are hospitals, there are dead people- no matter how good the hospital is- and where there are dead people, the opportunity exists to do awful things with them. Especially in October, when the barriers between planes are thin and the PKE levels are high. Stack enough half-right rituals and preparatory elements on top of one another and you eventually assemble a reasonably decent zombie resurrection spell, even if it only works at this time of year. Get offered enough money by a man with a grudge and a promise to overthrow what you and the rest of your Aryan Nation comrades see as a corrupted, rotten government using the ultimate in arcane power, and you get really good at the spell. Play with the right objects for long enough and you come up with a solid matrix for holding the spell in existence, even if it's more power than your brain can normally process- and you wind up marching those zombies to a nice, open, accessible strategic location.

Get startled at the wrong time by enemies who TOTALLY WEREN'T SUPPOSED TO SHOW UP UNTIL TOMORROW MORNING and you break the amulet and the zombies get loose and start scrabbling through all of the seats and booths and nooks and crannies of the opera house in search of someone to wreak terrible vengeance upon for being disturbed from what was SUPPOSED to be their eternal rest.

These zombies aren't driven by hunger. They're driven by rage- their summoner's, and their own. And they will find a way to vent that rage somehow.

[henry-jones-jr.livejournal.com]

Once the radio has been stowed again, Indy and Mel pause in the lobby, just outside the warped doors to the main auditorium.

"Hmm... sounds kinda rowdy in there already. Reckon we've got a full house on our hands," Indy remarks. "I hope you brought your A Game, 'cause I'm gonna need you to keep 'em all entertained while I go backstage and find a decent blade."

[slayer_fray]

"Indy," Mel says, drawing her scythe, "I am the A-game."

She turns away from the Stairwell, and finds a door to the upper circle seats, turning back to check he's ready.

[henry-jones-jr.livejournal.com]

"I know."

He gives her a grin and a firm thumbs up.

"Break a leg, sis."

[slayer_fray]

"Intend to break more'n that," Mel says, and barrels through the door.

[gone_byebye]

Outside, Mel will remember, there are mice, and they are everywhere. From the upper circle seats where she stands now, the main hall looks oddly similar to the scene in the street: grey things, scrambling and shambling and crawling all over, clawing at this and gnawing at that. But the mice are far more natural in their movements, bewildered, hungry things that they are. The shapes below were poisoned into unlife by foul magics, and they move with the unease of things that have only the vaguest idea how motion ought to go.

They can hear, though, and when there is light they can see- and the flare of light from Mel knocking her door open is enough to draw quite a bit of attention.

Past a certain point zombies no longer bother to attempt to walk. The inner ear disintegrates fairly early on and the corpse loses all its natural sense of balance. Crawling, however, is easy, and swiftly done if one no longer feels the signals of pain. Climbing's not that different from crawling. There's just more gravity involved.

The angriest ones are coming, and aside from the sounds of dead hands scrabbling for purchase, they are absolutely silent.

[slayer_fray]

Angry, violent undead things surging towards her with intent to kill in painful gory ways?

It's like being at home.

Mel's beaming as she charges forward, scythe in hand. Flipping into a one handed stand on the railing of the upper circle, she presents quite the target.

[gone_byebye]

She does indeed. The dead of Poughkeepsie see life and motion and surge towards it, decaying, rotted faces distorted with inchoate rage. Clinging to a railing and moving forward is slow business, and some of them fall all the way to the seats below trying. Others simply heave themselves over into the upper circle to make the swarming towards her that much easier.

[henry-jones-jr.livejournal.com]

While Mel makes herself the center of attention, Indy's first port of call is the nearby Lighting Box. Once he's at the controls, he haphazardly flips a bunch of switches, and then rotates some dials for good measure. The random combination fires up enough spots and floodlights to throw an almost psychedelic mess of color onto the stage curtain—certainly enough to see by.

"And there was light!" Indy proclaims.

Maybe not the best idea when he's trying to fly under zombie radar, but it had to be said.

[gone_byebye]

Zombies freeze, and heads turn. The ones that haven't yet worked out the climbing of walls dig fingernails like yellowing claws into the chairs in front of them, shoulders hunching to unnatural degrees.

Were they yet capable of speech, they would hiss in fear and fury.

[henry-jones-jr.livejournal.com]

Indy wastes no more time. He breaks out his trusty bullwhip and casts it towards a centrally located chandelier—one of many such ornate fixtures that hang from the ceiling. As always, his aim is accurate, and the tightly braided leather wraps around one of the lower stems.

After a tug to check the secureness of the hold, he clambers onto the railing, takes up the slack, and leaps out...

"Be right back!"

His mid-air cry is a poor substitute for a Tarzan call, but the swing itself is very effective. It takes him in a graceful arc over the assembled un-dead in the stalls and allows him to land just beyond the first row of seats. A deft flick of the wrist releases the whip and brings it back to him. And it's already re-coiled by the time he gains the stage.

Now would be a great time for an 'exit stage left' in the narrative. Unfortunately, the curtain is down, so Indy has to lift a section of it and duck under. We don't even see which side he runs off to.

[gone_byebye]

If it's any comfort, the Tarzan call would be wasted on this crowd. Their heads lift, their half-blinded eyes track his swing, but they haven't got what it takes to truly appreciate the archaeologist's theatrics.

About half of them are dropping back to the floor and scrabbling on all fours towards the front of the auditorium, single-minded in their pursuit of the last living thing they saw. The others are hesitant, or still looking this way and that between where Indy had been and where Mel was when last they saw her. They'd be sitting ducks if they were a little less revolting of a sight.

[slayer_fray]

So much for providing a distraction.

"Hey!" Mel screams, flipping onto her feet on the railing and swinging around at the nearest few zombies.

The just to make the point, she somersaults over into the main circle seats.

[gone_byebye]

Now they're focused. Unlike the living, the dead don't stay conflicted long. They're coming after her as fast as their awkward, grey-hued bodies can manage.

[slayer_fray]

That's what Mel's talking about.

The first few to reach her are those dropping down after her, and she hacks through them easily as they hit the seats, then she flips onto the backs and slices through more.

Mel likes it when things are simple. And you can't get much more simple than a girl and her scythe against an army of the brainless undead.

Hack, slash, stab, jump. Her smile fades into concentration as her scythe moves in a blur.

[gone_byebye]

From above, the scene looks almost like the sort of thing you might see at a fish market- specifically, the crab section. Ever looked at one of those? The crabs spend all their time climbing over each other and whatever part of the wall of their bucket they can reach, only to fall down and claw at each other again. It's a little like that, with the zombies climbing and clawing and lunging without so much as a hint of comprehension that anything else might be going on around them, except that the fish market doesn't usually have someone in the middle of the crab bucket smashing the crabs to pieces.