Jacob Frye

She meets his eyes squarely while he answers - on the road, it was important to watch for tells, for lies, for uncertainty or infirmness. She meant what she said though: the communities make it a bit obsolete. She knows he's not insane. She doesn't know him well enough to know for sure if he's lying to her.

But she does believe that answer, and doesn't correct his definition of what walkers are; if that's what it translates for him as, then that's as important as the number. Besides, there are those who define them as exactly that.

The corner of her mouth quirks. "That's the second question: how many people have you killed?" Because they are, indeed, two different questions where she's from. They tell two different stories, and this is where the lies usually show up.

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"Prempted that one, then." He says, with a little shrug. He assumed that the questions might be about how good at finding food you might be, if you had any medical training or had some sort of useful training, like in engineering or something more relevant to the future she lived in.

But maybe these questions are also a lot about the people who ask them what they needed. What they had survived.

"Like I said, I couldn't tell you. I wouldn't even want to hazard a guess." He's serious about that too. There are, unfortunately, some lives that are more important than others. Maybe he could remember how many missions the Council had sent him on, how many gang leaders he'd had to take out. But ordinary bastards that would kill you for your shoes? Men or women that were cruel by nature and killed because it was easy money? He doesn't know.

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Scavenging can be learned, and also there's a certain merit to someone simply surviving long enough to be discovered by a larger group; their physical condition is telling, too. Training can't be changed, and who a person was in the old world rarely matters in the new. Not enough not to be able to find a way to be useful, anyway.

But character? Honesty? Real desire to be a part of the group rather than taking advantage of them? These matter. Rosita nods, accepting the answer. It's not about the numbers, really.

"Why?" He's already told her once. She asks anyway, calm and even rather than accusing, straightforward and simple rather than an obvious trap.

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"Is that the third question, or just curiosity?" He asks, intrigued. If she's curious, she knows at least some of the details already, if it's the third question, then she's asking it because that's the game.

"Because there wasn't any other choice. Sometimes, you can knock someone out, if you don't think they deserve death, but if they're working for the bastard you're after, then they're likely to be just as much of a bastard. So you put them down before they do it to you, or before they do it to someone else."

That's all there is to it, in the end. Sometimes, you have to kill or be killed.

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So you put them down before they do it to you, or before they do it to someone else.

She almost laughs even though it's not funny, because it is; because she thinks of creeping down dimly lit cinderblock hallways and carefully opening doors to stab the men and women behind them as they sleep in their beds. Because if they wake up, if one of them sounds the alarm, all of her own people are dead. If her people die, Jesus's are next.

We don't want to kill. We don't like it. It happens.

She nods. "It was the third question," she says, and: "Thank you."

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"Did I pass?" He has to ask the question even though he doesn't know how relevant it is really, if she still wants to sign with him based on what he's told her, if she has concerns. Frankly, if she did he's sure she'd air them, but maybe she needs a little while to think. He wouldn't be upset with that either, he appreciates it's... a little much.

"What about you? What are your answers?" He has no idea of numbers, although he supposes it's probably pretty high on the monster count, and less so on the human. But he's not sure, not really. He also has no idea if he'll view her differently, but she did say she'd answer.

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She chuckles, shakes her head a bit at herself, at the concern; like she said, she's a different person these days. A wildly different person who does not shy from certain things she would have once avoided the same way most people in a functioning society avoid it still.

"You did," she assures him, not knowing how else to explain it. Then she holds up a finger: number one.

"I don't know an exact number on walkers. It's... a lot. When I first got here there was a thing where I was given a piece of paper with three facts on it for someone else, and they were given a piece with three facts on me. One of mine was a kill count, and the other two were true even though there's no way for anyone here to know them, so it's possible that one was too. It put me over five hundred."

Which is not out of the question. She hesitates a moment and adds, "I've worked with explosives a couple times. They aren't all directly or by hand."

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The number doesn't seem to shock him, horrify him or impress him. He accepts it as a fact, because he has no reason to disbelieve what she's saying.

"Explosives are a very useful tool to have at hand," He agrees, because he's used them himself. They are messy though, and not ideal for a setting where there's innocent people who might be wandering around. Or children.

"So are traps, if you can rig them. That's not always a luxury I had time for." He pauses, and then because he realises he's not actually even sure, at this point, he's just got a vague idea, he interrupts her in giving the rest of her answers.

"What actually... is a walker? I know it's a body, with a virus. Walking around. But... how?"

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This is a question she's gotten enough times here now that it doesn't visibly surprise her, but it's still a bit odd to her; it would be like someone asking what a tree is, or the warmth of the sun. They're always there, they're always a consideration, there is never a day when the wind doesn't carry their scent or the sound of their shuffling and gurgling, when she doesn't have to deal with one for one reason or another.

But she nods to show she understands while she tries to work out how to pack over a decade of near mundanity into an answer he has to ask about.

"They're people who died, and then the virus reanimated them," is the short answer. "There's a sickness that goes with it, that killed... Most of my world. But even those of us that didn't get sick have it, and when we die, it'll bring us back up unless our brainstem is destroyed."

She's put down so many of her friends at this point it doesn't even bear thinking of just one. It's the reason she sometimes checks the side of Jesus's head, because the last time she saw him, Aaron had already done them all the favor and now she can't stop herself.

"They're not human anymore though. There's nothing left of whoever they were. They chase down noise, and movement, and fresh meat. They decompose but until everything literally disintegrates they walk and walk and walk and never stop or get tired." Which can take years, depending on the climate and the weather. "And they're everywhere. Sometimes they group up in bigger herds and just mow down everything in their path. Biggest one I ever saw was easily several thousand strong."

Edited Date: 2022-10-29 08:47 pm (UTC)

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He listens, fascinated and mildly horrified, uncertain what sort of strange disease can so that to a person, what can make a body move like that and act in such a way once life is extinguished. Or where such an illness came from. But he's no scientist and neither is she, he may well not understand a more complex explanation.

"It sounds almost top incredible. It only effects humans? No other animals?"

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And indeed: "I don't know a lot about it. It moved too fast and by the time any of us might have been able to stop trying to survive it to ask questions, all the people that could answer them were dead."

But she's friends with Eugene, who comes closest; she does have some answers that others don't.

"Just humans. It didn't even hit primates like it did us. Walkers'll still eat other animals if they can catch them, mind you, so we're fighting for resources with them across the board even though they're not capable of thinking or planning or... anything that isn't walking forward and tearing something living apart."

Except - but she doesn't know what was wrong with the last herd she encountered, the one that almost killed her. That did kill Jesus. She decides not to mention the ones that were whispering to each other.

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He can understand that. A disease hitting so hard and fast across the planet that no one had time at all to work out the source, or a way to combat it apart from, well, combat.

"I suppose that's one thing to be glad of- that you aren't also fighting animals." He pauses a moment, thinking on what she'd said abut the massive group of them.

"Are they... learning that is a better way of attacking? The communities you mentioned all sounded like villages, nothing that big." How could they fight so many? Explosives, perhaps, but you'd need a lot. And even then...

"It takes a long time for a body to properly decompose in most circumstances. How long since this disease first hit? If you can keep them at bay, maybe at some point it will be over? Every walker would have decomposed?"

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[He likes sending little texts and pictures to those he cares about, little nothings that show he thinks of them when his words don’t always serve him. Though, sometimes, it’s to quiet a darker part of him that whispers more cruel things that he needs to chase away.

Regardless, as he is sometimes one to do, he starts with a picture. Usually it’s something neat he thought Jacob would like or a view that would be impossible to anyone but them, but today, it’s a bird.]

Ive been had

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How have you been had exactly? It seems to me you have a lovely companion.

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Shh she’ll hear you and it’ll go to her little head.

She acted like she was going out for a fly so I settled in for the quiet

Now she’s singing those bubble pop songs

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you should tell her she's beautiful.

And maybe if you dont want her to make her ownentertainment,
you should read to her?

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[He gives a dramatic sigh and looks at his interloper currently singing on top of his book abandoned on the bed. “Jacob says you’re beautiful. He’s usually right about these things.” Then goes back to his phone.]

I told her

She’s standing on my book. Also she’s not a child.
But maybe.
As long as she doesn’t start reciting the lurid parts

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There are lurid parts? Chris,are you reading a dirty book? Without me?

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"They aren't learning anything. They're dead, mindless. They walk straight into walls and keep doing it until the wall breaks down or they're shifted in a new direction. The groups happen because they're attracted to sound so they pull towards one another if there's nothing louder, or they all get trapped in a corner. That, or they were all together when they died, which is why the cities aren't safe."

This is all so standard for her that she barely has to think about it; like someone else describing how to put gas in a car or sharpen a pencil.

"The big group I saw was because they all kept getting trapped in a stone quarry and couldn't get back out. We had to break it into smaller groups to deal with so they wouldn't - there was a big truck blocking the exit, so they would have moved it enough to get out eventually and a herd that size would have rolled right over us."

Because no, the communities aren't that big. All they could have done was move out of the way and who knows what that would have meant in the long run, if they even had enough warning to get clear in the first place.

"It's been - it's hard to know exactly, but ten? Twelve years? And yeah they'll thin out over time. But they don't die if they freeze over or get stuck in mud, they just sit there waiting to be turned loose again. They're trapped in mines, and rivers, and houses. Plus we're all infected. Anyone that died as we go turns into one too, and that's fine if you see it, but - we had one man who had a heart attack or something in his sleep. He tore his wife apart asleep next to him because she didn't even know he'd died, got two of the kids before their screaming woke the rest of us up to help.
It's... A mess, still. "

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Im sorry were you looking for an invitation love?
They’re very explicit in their descriptions.

What if you prove distracting?

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I do quite enjoy listening to you read.

If I'm distracting to you, then I suppose I take over reading. If I'm distracting to the bird, then I get to pet her and you get to go back to your book in silence.

Or were you thinking of another solution?

Edited Date: 2022-10-31 07:44 am (UTC)

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He takes in that information, the way that walkers behave, the way they gather, the fact that they don't seem to have anything but instinctive drives behind them, and no ability to work things out. And perhaps that's what makes it all the more horrifying to think about, that they can get you, even without thought, even without logic, even without any of the usual abilities that animals have.

And the only way to put them down is to destroy the brain stem, which requires a very strong blow or the like to the base of the skull. Not easy. And probably not something many people knew about in the early days of the disaster.

"Fuck," He breathes out, the story about the man and his family far worse than what she'd described in the cities or anything else so far. It's just far too common, and too easy to imagine. It'd be a bad enough thing to have your spouse die next to you but to then... The rest makes his stomach churn. There's not much that does that anymore.He takes a breath, slow in, slow out, trying not to imagine it. Trying not to think about it, push it away. It's not here. That's not his world. And for the moment, it's not hers either. They're here, and while here isn't pleasant, it isn't that.

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For the moment it's not hers, but she lived through the fall; she doesn't let her guard down anymore, not ever. That's why she carries the knife everywhere. That's why she dresses in layers, why she checks for windows and doors, why she has stashes of supplies and food in a couple different places throughout the city.

That's why she sticks with Jesus, with Carver. They know what she's been through and vice - in broad strokes if not details. They know without having to talk about it that, like Jacob is discovering now, the daily cruelties are sometimes worse than the more widespread horror.

She lets him sit with it a moment, sips her water, doesn't apologize. At the very least, she needs him to understand why not to sneak up on her, why to wake her up if he's around rather than try to slip past her sleeping. When she finally speaks again, she says, "There's someone from my world that's been here a lot longer than me'n Jesus. He says we're not contagious here. Whatever they did to us in that first exam -" Her voice goes hard; she hates them for it, even with the advantage of being at least temporarily cured as a carrier of the virus. "- it neutralized it. We won't spread it here."

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There is no need for her to apologise. There's nothing she's done wrong, merely explained some of the truths that she lives with every single day. It's a horrible thing to have to live with, to always have in your mind. There are things he knows people here can't accept or understand about his time, but he thinks her reality is all the more difficult to come to terms with.

"Do you trust him?" It seems a fair question. She's mentioned Jesus, but hearing that there's someone else from her world too- three of them, the lucky buggers- makes him wonder why she hasn't mentioned him yet. Maybe she doesn't trust him, but what she says the other man has told her, it fits with his understanding.

"They do something to us, when we arrive. They make a clone of us, do God knows what else, and they heal us of things we're carrying." He gestures to his eye, which they certainly had a hand in sorting out. "So I think it's likely. I only wish that we could find out how, for you all."

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