Alex Fisher
Its been a little while, a good solid
week really since Molly and Alex had their brief encounter with the
horrors in that basement on a night out gone south. They had not parted
on the friendliest of terms, because in truth they could not agree on
what precisely to do about their shuffling opponents, and in the end
Alex had won out with the dial of a phone and the summoning of the local
boys in blue.
The zombies were killed of course, when they could
not be stopped they were gunned down, and their actions put down to the
berserker rage of men well and thoroughly on a drug induced frenzy. Alex
had remained for most of it, and only when the creatures were well and
truly dead, did she depart.
But they had shared numbers, and Alex
had said she would call, and soon, but as days turned into that full
week perhaps Molly had thought Alex had simply decided to retreat from
that looming darkness, to return to her simpler life. She might be
surpised if that was the case, when Alex called her up, and asked her to
meet downtown at the Denver fire department, or as it was known to
some, House 52.
It wasn't right to the modern building with its
many bays that Alex called her, but to a park just on the opposite side
of the road, it was there, under a tin roof stood Alex, before an
outdoor grill with tong's in hand and the sizzle of meat upon the grill.
She was dressed in her uniform tonight, obviously on duty, at her
shoulder sat a radio, ready to call her back to the house at a moments
notice.
But here she was, grilling in the face of the oncoming
storm, waiting as she gazed into the flame, her hair pulled back in a
simple, utlitarian pony tail.
Molly Toombs
The entire day and into the night had
promised storms, but not yet delivered them to this part of the state.
The sky had still been overcast all day, though, and proved to remain so
tonight. The moon and stars were blotted out from the sky by heavy
black clouds that sometimes rumbled promise but never seemed to deliver.
So,
when Alex called up and asked Molly to meet her at a park she was
skeptical. But, reassured that there was a roof under which to grill,
and lured with the prospect of a firefighter's grilled meats (everyone
knows firefighter grills like whoa), Molly agreed.
She arrived
dressed in a pair of khaki shorts (for despite the threats of rain it
was still warm and humid out) and a quarter-sleeved black shirt with a
boatline neck. Her hair was done up in a ponytail to keep her neck
ventilated in the damp warm air.
She waved to Alex when she
approached, and smiled too. As far as anyone could tell, she had
forgotten the zombie encounter entirely. Or refused to let it spoil her
fun. Or put on a really good act, one of those. Her eyes were already
trained in on the grill when she stepped near enough to Alex for
conversation.
"Hey, thanks for inviting me to the BBQ. How you been?"
Alex Fisher
Alex's
uniform was the a casual thing, a blue work t-shirt and a pair of brown
trousers, oddly enough held aloft by a pair of suspenders. When Molly
approached, dressed in considerably more casual attire and waved the
woman responded with a brief wave of the tong's. An act that was casual,
relaxed, as if she had chosen to forget about the situation as well, or
at least decided not to hold it against the woman who approached.
On
the grill was a veritable cornucopia of meats, from sausages to steak
to simple honest hamburgers there was considerably more meat there then
the two of them could conceivably pack away. But then, being in uniform,
it was likely that Alex was cooking for a whole lot more then just two.
She offered Molly a quick, sloppy grin as she let her eyes fall back to
the work at hand and nodded.
"No problem, theres always way more
here then the guys can conceivably eat. Bigger eyes then their stomachs,
thats for damn sure." She said as she turned the sausages.
"I
haven't slept well all fucking week." She says, though her features do
not betray that fact. "But otherwise I've been good, workin, drinking,
you know how it goes." She said as she tilted her head and glanced at
Molly.
"You?"
Molly Toombs
When she was
invited to meet in the park directly across the street from a fire
station, Molly had guessed that the grilling situation was intended for
the others on duty at the house. That might be part of why she was
still baring leg even though the sun had gone down (she still had the
excuse of early summer humidity, at least). Oh Molly, you scandalous
thing.
There was a comment about not sleeping all week, and
Molly's eyes flashed dark humor for a second and she looked like she
might have had a comment for it (Oh honey just you wait. I take pills to calm myself down enough to sleep at night.).
Instead, she shifted her eyes down from Alex's when asked how she had
been herself. Molly busied them with the visual surveying burgers (oh
yes, it was Memorial Day weekend, she was definitely eating a burger)
and clasped her hands together behind her back.
"Oh, you know. Between work and raising a puppy--"
She
was holding a leash, by the way. This wasn't mentioned earlier, but
she did bring her dog along, because it would be cruel to leave a
7-month-old puppy of a large and lanky dog breed cooped up in an
apartment while you went to a park. If Florence could
understand the betrayal, she would never forgive her mistress. The dog
was sniffing around near the bottom of the grill, tail wagging.
"--not
much else. I just read in my spare time, really." She shrugged
casually, then glanced around. "So, ah, how long until the others are
supposed to come to join us?" It's difficult to tell if she's asking to
gauge how long they have to talk, or if she wants to check out firemen.
Alex Fisher
Molly
had come as they would say, well prepared. Dressed in her short's, with
her dog, and being as short and curvy as she was, it was quite possible
she would make for just as much a hit as the food on the grill. Alex,
wether she knew this consciously or not offered a brief chortle and a
nod in the direction of the firehouse. "Oh they'll be along in a little
bit, just in the middle of finishing up their weight training." She
smiled, slyly even as she looked for Molly's reaction to that before
flipping the burgers.
"Probably in the next, ten, twenty. Depends
on if Dillion turns into a prema-donna in the shower again." She shook
her head at the idea and closed the lid of the grill, letting the meat
bath in the warmth as she turned to Molly and gestured to the nearest
park table.
"Have a seat, if you like I have beer, though its just
for those of us off duty, so try not to sneak any to the others eh?"
She said as she hoped up on the table and sat down on the top, letting
her feet rest on the seat as she picked up an already opened beer.
"Id rather not have them drunk and fighting fires, makes for a really bad headline."
Molly Toombs
From
the solemn and evaluating look that Molly cast across the street, she
was apparently more concerned about the time they had to talk. She
didn't perk up or seem to brighten at the prospect of weight training,
and instead nodded and said: "Good," and left it there. "That'll give
us time to catch you up a bit."
The offer of a beer was met with a
smile and a nod. "I've understood that alcohol and fire don't mix
well. I mean, even on a chemical level that's a fact." Wherever it was
the beers were stashed, Molly would fetch herself one with a 'thank
you'.
Next she sat down with her can and/or bottle of beer in
hand, near as she could to the grill that Alex was tending, and sat so
she could face the woman still.
"So," she asked, cutting straight to the point, "how much have you read into things since that, ah, other night?"
Alex Fisher
Alex
drank in silence as she let Molly get comfortable, occasionally tearing
a piece of bread off a bun she had left out, and popping it in her
mouth. She chewed slowly, relaxed until Molly at last brought up the
night they had both been waiting to discuss. Molly might notice the
gentle tensing of the woman, as if she were preparing for a strike from
an unseen enemy. But she relaxed after a few moments and shook her head.
"To
be brutally fucking honest? I haven't I tried to blot that shit out,
get back to what matters to me." She said with another gesture to the
firehouse. "But...that worked about as well as a whore in a nunnery.
So.." She said gesturing to Molly. "The call."
She had tried to
block it out, tried to make it go away. But like so many others in her
situation, once that curtain was pulled back, it was so hard to turn
away. Alex still stood beyond the threshold though, still stood looking
in, if anyone could back out now...it might well be her.
"That
said, I guess it means the world is bigger, scarier, and faaar more
fucked up then I even I could come up with, and I like some twisted
humour." She took a swig of her beer, gulping it down before popping
another chunk of bun into her mouth and said, as she chewed.
"So...what is the deal?"
Molly Toombs
The
question roused a low chuckle from Molly, who took a drink of her beer
as well. When the mouth of the bottle left her lips she sighed for the
refreshment of the beverage, then settled to lean forward in her seat.
Her elbows propped on her knees and her bottle dangled loose but steady
from her fingertips.
"The deal is that things aren't what we've
always thought they are. Things we've been told are impossible are, as a
matter of fact, not. By this point, I'm pretty sure that nothing's
impossible."
Another sip, and she continued.
"I don't know
every single way a zombie could happen, but the most common way they
come about is necromancy. Magic of the dead. Someone must have
summoned them up and then locked them away and forgot about them, or
something." She shrugged, the gesture loose and summarizing. She'd
read about the incident in the papers, smirked to see she was accurate
in how they explained the incident.
"You can opt to take my word for it or not, but trust me when I say I've spent a lot of time looking into this."
Alex Fisher
Molly
tells her, just as she had on that night that she had considerable
knowledge, perhaps even experience with such situations, such beings.
She talks of necromancy and dead magic and a myriad of other things that
while they do not go over Alex's head, the look on her features did
indeed tell the story of Alex having resigned such things to the realm
of fairy-tales, or at the very least, religious mummery.
She
seemed to toy with her beer label as she did that, slowly but surely
peeling away at the paper wrapper, making confetti of it rather then
peeling the label off whole those hard blue eyes looking at the ground,
and then the grill before at last settling on Molly herself.
"Ok...sure,
I mean what fucking choice do I have, they were there, I wasn't on
anything, and it sure as fuck took alot to bring them down when the cops
finally showed up." She paused, as if trying to figure out what it
could all mean, and more importantly what it mean't for her life, for
her world view.
"Why the fuck would you want to look into this
sorta thing?" She asks before downing the last of her beer before
tossing it bodily into an open recycling bin.
"And better yet,
what the fuck does that mean for me? I'm no occult believer, hell I
don't believe in anything beyond what i see in front of my own two
eyes."
Molly Toombs
The smile that Molly gave Alex
when she inquired about why Molly would look into these things was a
sad expression. Almost self-pitying, like when somebody asks an
alcoholic why they keep going back to the bar. She looked back down at
her beer bottle; left the label completely alone.
"I find myself
much more comfortable feeling prepared for the things that crawl around
the city at night. 'Ignorance is bliss' works for the masses, but I've
just seen too much to subscribe to that anymore."
A pause for a
sip, again, before she carried on. "The good news is that you're not in
this nearly so deep as I am, so this doesn't have to mean
anything to you. If you want to act like nothing happened and carry on,
then nothing will change for you." Blue eyes hopped up to meet those
of similar hue. "Except we already know you can't just forget about
it. You said so yourself."
She twisted her beer bottle around in
her fingers, and dropped her eyes back down to watch the motion as she
pressed on. "So I guess it's up to you what it means. Probably just
that you're looking over your shoulder a bit more now. Looking deeper
into the weird shit you come across than what you did before."
Alex Fisher
Molly
explains as best as she can what it mean't for Alex, and in the end it
was precisely as she had expected, and precisely as she had feared. This
feeling manifests itself as Alex grimaces, plainly unhappy, plainly
pissed off as she swore.
"Fuck!" She was on her feet in a flash
and paced briefly before the table before moving to the grill and
throwing open the lid to inspect the food. She seems to calm herself in
that moment, using the normality of grilling settle her mind and her
spirit before she let out a long sigh.
"That so does not make my
day Molly." She said with a quick look over at the woman. "It's made it
about as pleasant as a trip to the gynaecologist. " She smiled ruefully
as she flipped the steaks and pulled a package of buns covered in foil
and tossed it on the uppermost rack before closing the lid again.
She
moved to the beer cooler then and grabbed another stepping up to the
table where Molly sat and cracked the bottle open on the edge of the
table before flopping down beside Molly and asking.
"How do you
manage it? I mean, what gets you through? If you've seen as much as I
imagine you have then how the hell are you still alive? It's nothing
against you, its just...i mean if zombies are real..." She lets it trail
off, as if to say..what else could be out there.
Molly Toombs
Again,
Molly answered with dark humor. She chuckled and shook her head
lightly, plainly in agreement with much of Alex's sentiment. She wasn't
thrown off by the sudden curse and pacing, but instead watched the
taller woman in firefighter's suspenders pace back and forth. While she
watched, she drank her beer.
Once Alex had settled beside her, Molly swung her legs back under the table and propped her arms on the table's top.
"It
sounds cheesy as fuck? But like I said-- I feel more... armed by
learning more about the things that are out there." The beer bottle was
set on the table, and her fingers stayed curled loose around the middle
in an absent cradle. She would still periodically steal sips here and
there while they talked.
"I stay alive because I'm not completely
reckless. I don't go poking monsters in eyes and looking for fights-- I
just act respectfully and try to keep out of dark alleys where I could
be made into something's food." Molly smiled here, and the expression
was bracing and apologetic both. Like she was sorry that Alex had to
have seen anything in the first place. It really did look like a much
happier life not knowing how helpless you actually were in the scheme of
things.
Alex Fisher
Molly might imagine how this
would be for someone like Alex, strong, in charge of her own life and
having fought tooth and nail to get there. She might well know first
hand out of her own experiences what it would be like to feel at the top
of your game, bowing to no one, and then find out that for all your
efforts there is still something bigger, badder, and hungrier then you.
Something that wasn't just another human or societal habit, but
something genuinely dark, and perhaps even alien.
Alex certain
looked unhappy as she listened to Molly, her lips pursed and her legs
splayed out infront of her as she leaned back into the picnic table as
if trying to relax..but failing.
"Ok..so all I gotta be is
respectful, the opposite of reckless and stay out of places I'm not
supposed to go too..." Alex looked at Molly with her brows raised as if
the joke in those requirements should be evident, some of them might
well be but regardless the firefighter shook her head slowly and a dark
chuckle slipped from her lips.
"Well at least I'll know what I'm
getting into next time." She sipped her beer as she sat there, her head
turning to the grill to inhale deeply, the look on her face turning to
one of attention, as if smell alone could tell her the meat was ready.
"You
might be better armed, but how do you stand up to some of these things?
It isn't possible that you've been looking into this stuff for who
knows how long and you haven't had to fight to survive, especially as
I'm guessing the shit out there doesn't care if we think were at the top
of the food chain."
Molly Toombs
"Oh Alex, that's
just looking at it all wrong." Molly's lips pressed together too, and
the expression was concerned. She had a good idea of the kind of woman
Alex was, and she respected it. Strength was a valuable asset-- it made
heroes and legends and changed the world over, after all. But human
strength was capped, regardless of who you were, and Molly knew full
well that it was hardly worth anything compared to other beasts that
she's met and shaken hands with personally.
"There are things you can try to
do to defend yourself. But there isn't any one single thing that's
going to prepare you against everything that's out there. What might
protect you against... say.... zombies? That won't keep you safe from
ghosts."
Molly decided that facing inward on the table while Alex
faced outward was uncomfortable for conversation, so she swung her legs
around and propped her elbows up on the tabletop behind her. The beer
was already more than half gone at the pace she was sipping, and she
took another swig before pressing on.
"We're soft and vulnerable
compared to the horror stories. We might get lucky and, with the right
tools and know-how, manage to fend for ourselves long enough to get away
with our lives. But overall it's better to just turn tail and walk the
other way when something sets its sights on you."
Which is hilarious advice, coming from Miss Toombs.
Alex Fisher
Molly
offers candid advice, honest and true. IT just seems that Alex is set
in her ways, or simply still in too much shock to make good use of it as
she shakes her head. "Not every predator is going to let you walk away
Molly, most don't. Once somethings got its eyes set on you, its
generally you or it. Thats how it works in the wild, I can't imagine it
working much differently here."
She sighed as she stood up then,
moving to the grill one more time to pull open the lid and examine what
lay within. "Alright.." She said warmly, her tone perking up as she
spoke. "I might not be on the top of the fucking pyramid anymore, but at
the very least I can eat this beef without worrying about it biting
back." She said as she started to pull things off onto a plate, wrapping
some things in tin foil so it would still be warm once the others
arrived.
"What can I get you?" She asked, looking over at Molly
once more. "Burger, Sausage? Maybe a side of firefighter?" She asked
with a lopsided grin before managing a laugh, trying to change topics at
least briefly to something more mundane, something manageable.
She
plated a burger for herself, slapping a slice of cheese on top and
letting it sit on a nicely toasted bun while she waited for Molly's
order.
Molly Toombs
"Yeah, I know that. Which is
why it would probably be a better choice for you to just learn to avoid
it instead of go wading in like I did." Oh Molly. She sounded so
resigned to her own fate.
But then Alex was up and they were on to
other subjects. Molly's answer was to smirk, the expression switching
pretty easily to playful. "Burger. And if side of firefighter's on the
menu, I sure wouldn't mind being introduced."
That would be all
that they said on the subject of weirdness and what bumps in the night.
There would be enough time to finish grilling and to get all of the
meat cooked and plated up before thunder cracked and the sky burst
open. Everyone would have to finish eating inside, and so they did.
Maybe Molly got a name and a phone number. Maybe not.
But she did
get a burger and a beer out of the situation, that's for certain. And
an assurance that she would be in touch with Alex too.
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