stateofdecay | 🧟 Clearing the Fairgrounds

Monday: 🧟  Visibility is poor today and the deep snow makes trudging around the Fairgrounds a soggy nightmare, but the group turns out in force to start clearing the horde by picking off stragglers at the edge in melee. It becomes a kill-count competition, with Mud  coming in first place, Dutch in second, and [Volunteer] and Hunter Jakobsen from the Fairfield group tying for third.

Tuesday: 🧟  Competition again today at the Fairgrounds, although with better visibility the group takes to the ferris wheel to use the carriages as sniper nests. Rather than simply counting kills, Dutch assigns Carter Betancourt and Russell Romero to judge sharpshooting kills on style and panache. The pair ultimately select Calliope Nightengale as the winner after they manage to shoot three zeds with the same crossbow bolt on their first try. Beginner's luck?

Wednesday: It's another long day of hard work at the Fairgrounds, but with a perimeter cleared the group can turn to digging pits to trap and burn the remainder of the zombies in. After Arwen Hartly sprains their ankle jumping down into a pit, they get re-assigned to lunch duty with Val and Kath Romero, who have set up shop at a nearby barbecue restaurant.

Just outside the secure perimeter, [Volunteer] gets caught in the crossfire of a snowball fight: Winslow Yates vs. Paget Yates and Jasmine Jakobsen, who are ganging up on him. Please help him here.

Thursday: Work on the pit digs continues today. Seth Romero enlists [Volunteer] as an extra set of hands to help him hotwire a nearby CAT excavator, which significantly expedites the process and means the group can make the pits much deeper, lowering the risk that they will fill completely.

Friday:  The burn pits are lit today, which will hopefully constantly draw the very sluggish nearby zombie horde into them. Shifts are set up amongst the Quad communities to make sure the fires are constantly fed and wood is chopped. Nobody is sure how long this process will take, or if it will be entirely effective.

The Fairfield group hosts a small cookout at the barbecue restaurant to celebrate completion of the project, which goes great until the wind shifts and puts them downwind of the burn pits. The event gets cut short as everyone heads home.

♡

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"Fuckin' watch this!" Mud hollers and shakes the last of his whiskey bottle into his mouth. That's not the thing he wants everyone to watch, it's just unfortunate.

"Ya watchin'?" He squints up at Carter in the next carriage, like a five-year-old making sure his mom sees his cartwheel, then hucks the bottle up in the air. As it falls down toward the shambling corpses in the fairgrounds below, he fires his gun... and misses the bottle completely. But does manage to hit a zed in the head, so it's not a total loss.

Carter had not been watching. She’d been dissociating and shooting zombies in the head, one after another, with the intention to do this until she dropped with exhaustion or they were all gone. She turns her attention back at the second call for it, though, with the sixth sense of any mom whose kids are about to do something dumb.

“Mud, be careful.” She admonishes without quite being able to help it, when that bottle hits the floor. “…But good shot.” Because it is, and she doesn’t want him to feel bad.

"The fuck you think Ima do, shoot my foot off?" he yells, though his gun is currently pointed directly at his foot so this is a distinct possibility. "HORSE?"

She doesn't do him the disservice of saying yes this is exactly what she fears, mostly out of a conviction that he'd shoot himself in the foot to be contrary. Carter blinks around at the ground, though, looking for this horse he's shouting about. "No shooting horses, either." She forbids automatically.

"Then we call it fuckin' ZOMBIE." Bold of Mud to assume he knows how to spell that word, but Mud is nothing if not boldly stupid. The carriage rocks dangerously as he shifts into a better hollering position. "Red raincoat," he points to a wandering zombie wearing a decidedly green raincoat in the midway area, "fuck up that bitch's arm."

Oh. This is a game. Mud has asked her to do a shooting game. That makes way more sense. "There's one less letter in HORSE. But that shouldn't matter." Says Carter, who does know how to spell ZOMBIE.

She's not sure she knows what colors are, though, when Mud makes his call. None of them have on red raincoats. Luckily, context clues display a zombie in a green one, and that's good enough. She reminds herself to look up facts on color blindness later, and then rids the zombie of her left arm, cleanly at the shoulder joint. She rocks her own carriage forward to grin, smug, down to Mud. "Get the right one, now."

Mud levels his gun at the one-armed zombie in some color of raincoat, seemingly unbothered by her fresh new amputee status. He'd killed a good 70 or 80 or 900 zombies yesterday (he didn't actually count and barely has an eighth grade education, those numbers might not be accurate), he's been using a gun for 70 or 80 or 900 years (see previous parenthetical), this should be no fuckin' problem.

There's a small ding! as Mud pulls the trigger and hits a bell on one of those rigged midway games instead. The bullet ricochets and hits a different zombie in the ear.

"Damn bitch, can't turn off this trick shot, check that out." The shot was all wrong, but that's not gonna stop this confidence.

🧟 Clearing the Fairgrounds

SCENES: TUESDAY

TUESDAY: Mud & Carter

TUESDAY: Mud & Carter

TUESDAY: Mud & Carter

TUESDAY: Mud & Carter

TUESDAY: Mud & Carter

TUESDAY: Mud & Carter

TUESDAY: Mud & Carter