Till Death Do Us Part

Kurt almost felt like he would fall out of his seat after zombies had started to close in on the car. With Heavy in, they could get out of here. However the little medic stood up quickly and came on into the back of the camper, allowing Sniper to get back in, the Red Medic went straight to the heavy, putting away his Blutsauger. "Heavy!" He exclaimed coming up to him, his medic instincts took over. "Are you hurt?" he said looking the Heavy over for any wounds. The smaller medic was a tad younger then most of them fresh out of Medic school and straight into the fire and by out, I mean kicked out. Despite his friendly appearance he got a bit crazy during surgery procedures as other on his team would likely remember.

"It's big enough," Leon replied with a slight smile, patting the Heavy on the shoulder as he slipped past him back into the front seat. "I suggest you guys hold on to something, we're gonna be moving at high speeds in a couple of seconds here."

The first of the horde had just started to tap the front of the camper when it suddenly shot backwards, squashing a few zombies that were unlucky enough to be directly behind it. Once he had enough room to turn, he did so rather quickly, then floored the gas and sent the little camper barreling like a bat out of hell down the dusty lanes in the map.

His keen eyes scanned the walls for some kind of entry or exit the delivery trucks had used to get in. It took a little while (by that, I mean maybe five minutes) but one finally came into sight. The fence and the barricade had already been ripped down when the zombies had initially swarmed in, so Leon didn't have to plow through everything like he had done when he had first gotten the camper and was going to rescue Oleg. Instead, he was able to speed up for a little bit and zip down the asphalt road to freedom.

Once the overrun base was left far behind, Leon finally slowed down and pulled over so he could get everything in order. He turned the camper off to conserve energy and give its engine some time to rest- it had never been used like this before- and squished past the Heavy and Medic to get to the back of the camper.

It was a little bigger than it looked on the outside, big enough to hold a small table with two little booths, a compacted sort of bunk bed, a few pantries to store food and supplies, a sink, and a tiny bathroom. It was homey and would be rather cozy; it was a little on the cramped side, however, simply because of how massive the Heavy was. Oh well.

The Sniper's first order of business was raiding his pantries for ammunition, which he found in one of the bottom pantries. There wasn't a lot left- just a few more rounds each for his Submachine Gun and Sniper Rifle- but anything was better than nothing at all. He then switched out his Sniper Rifle for the Huntsman he kept in case of emergencies. This was definitely considered an emergency, and it was going to be quieter than the loud rifle. These things seemed to be attracted to noise, after all, so the less noise he made, the better.

He then started rummaging around for food. Now that his adrenaline high was wearing off, he was starting to feel hungry again, and the last thing he needed was to die of starvation. He didn't know if he had any, as he normally cleared his camper out after every trip, and sadly that was the case here. Nothing.

"Dammit," he hissed under his breath in disappointment, standing up again and sitting on the counter. "We're gonna have to go into a town or something, 'cause we don't have any food and that's kind of an important thing to have." He paused a moment before adding in a calmer sort of tone, "My name's Leon. Leon Daggett." He tipped his hat to the two before fixing it, the brim having gone a little askew during the mad rush back at the base.

Oleg found himself quickly jaunting through several rather divided emotional states. For one, he’d finally found a medic. The butter to his bread, the Costello to his Abbot, the constant stream of whatever the healing gun shoots to his constant stream of bullets. In many ways this was to be a time of rejoicing. His face lit up into a massive grin again.

“Me-dic! Very good!”

Then, of course, the Medic had a fairly familiar look in his eyes. It reminded him of the last time Oleg had participated in what the company had called 'semi-elective medical procedures.' He wasn’t sure he had all of his ribs and was fairly certain several things had been sewn in on the wrong side. That and he was no doctor himself, but he was pretty sure tonsillitis didn’t require his chest cavity to be open. Oleg’s grin faded and he held up his hands, as though surrendering to someone with a firearm.

“No no no! I am okay!”

Then, of course, the cart started moving before the heavy really had a good grip on the situation. The normal cart was very slow, slower than the heavy’s own walk most of the time. When the camper shot back he pitched with it, his little legs flying out from under him. He bumped into the cabinets and slid back until his skull smacked the back door. When he’d gotten used to things he sat up and shook his head, but didn’t seem too much worse for wear. Maybe exposed the part of his pants that were scorched by the crit rocket that put him out so long.

When the sniper introduced himself it took him a moment to assimilate the information. Names were not Oleg’s strong suit in the memory department, he tended to see things in the sense of uniforms and weapons. His employers thought it was perfect, so he didn't tend to ask questions. It took him a moment to even think of his own name, so often introduced as 'heavy weapons guy.'

“I am Oleg, I like sandvich also.”

Speaking of uniforms and weapons, he was almost certain there were less of them here than are normally on the field at any particular time. This caused Oleg to wonder aloud:

“Where are other little comrades?”

The Medic looked relieved as the heavy was alright though, assuming not as well as before as the camper had lurched from it's idle and they had begun to move, the smaller medic easily being thrown to the floor with the sudden movement, sliding a bit past the heavy until his side reached the bunk in the back. The blonde grunted swearing a couple times under his breath, his dove that had promptly thrown from his shoulder fluttering in the air, cooing in surprise as it retreated to Kurt who had begun to stand up, placing his hand on the wall so he wouldn't fall over. With one hand, the medic brushed down his coat and frown. The dirt was really starting to bug him.

Once they had soon stopped, Kurt squished to the cabinets, as he let Leon squish past his smaller form before he frowned. Going into town was possibly a danger. They couldn't know whether or not those thing were just here or even outside. He looked up with his pale green eyes and straightened himself as he too introduced himself. "Kurt Amsel." he replied with a nod from his head before he turned his attention to Oleg as he had asked a question. The little Medic seemed reluctant to answer that.

Leon knew it was a danger; last time he had been to town, things had been off. Something big had gone down in the world outside the forts- it just happened to spread to their world as well. But he didn't really see much choice in the matter. They needed food, plain and simple. Sooner or later all three of them were going to starve and then where would they be? True, he could go hunting, but he didn't like that idea much either. He had an incredibly bad sense of direction, so what if he got lost? What then? They weren't in a good situation here.

He sighed, fiddling with his shirt collar as Oleg asked the question, the Heavy sounding almost like an innocent child wondering why his fish was floating. "I don't know," he replied simply, which was the truth; he honestly didn't know if they were completely dead. If respawning ever worked again, would they be brought back? He didn't know. Not everyone was dead, too, he had seen people scatter before he had locked himself in the room in the spawn. Surely someone must've escaped the initial rush. It couldn't just be the three of them left out of everyone on base...

"I don't know," he repeated, standing up and pacing back and forth in the little camper before finally stopping. "Do we have a plan at all?" The Sniper could probably come up with one if push came to shove, but he wanted everyone else's opinion before jumping to conclusions.

‘Planning’ was not exactly a word in Oleg’s vocabulary. If it were described to him he would probably guess the closest thing he did to ‘planning’ was figuring out when to switch weapons and when to go find ammo for his gun. Usually this thing was taken care of by his extremely low survival rate in most of his jobs, because respawning always gave him a full drum. As it were the idea of planning was foreign to him.

“We go kill BLU, da? Isn’t this job?”

The heavy weapon’s guy stood and opened the door. He then pointed out of the door, to the right.

“We are not at place where job is. Job is that way.”

This was unheard of for Oleg. First little baby men from different teams working together to touch his gun. Second a cart on what is normally a point capture map. Thirdly a cart big enough to drive him away from that map, and fourthly not doing his job to completion. Win or lose, Oleg always completed his job, within the carefully set specifications of his employers. He was certain the rest of RED and, to some extent, even BLU operated under this mutual understanding. The possibilities were eking along somewhere in his thick skull as to what was occurring.

Then Oleg remembered: rocket, scorch mark, unconsciousness.

“Is this dream? Are funny walking baby men real?”

Oleg once heard that someone could have anything they wanted in their dreams. He thought very hard about how he wanted the biggest sandvich that he had ever seen: a quadruple sandvich.

The Medic stood by and listened, his brow furrowing at the current situation. As his bird returned to his shoulder, it cooed between his comrades speaking and he was left silent for a bit. His mind couldn't formulate a plan as of right now. The time since this all first started was all blurred for him, of running, blood and the only thought of surviving. The blonde looked directly to Heavy as he had begun to speak and he turned to him. Was Heavy just cluing into all of this? "It...Was zhe job, Heavy."

He put his gloved hands behind his back and walked over to the Heavy. "A lot has changed and so has zhe job. BLU izn't zhe biggest problem now." The Medic paused for a moment to let him process that. "Zhose 'funny walking baby men' you call are zhe bigger problem now. Zhis is no dream." Kurt stared up at the Heavy, being as short as he was and talking in such a serious manner as this it was hard to take him seriously. The Medic gazed out the door, hoping there were no zombies out there. Those who were good at reading a person however could clearly tell, the young medic was scared despite what he put up.

"I hate to say it, but the Medic- Kurt's right." He was trying to make an effort to remember everyone's names; he'd get there eventually. "A lot's changed in the past three days. I don't think there really is any specific job anymore except to survive. Simple enough, right?" The last bit was hinting at sarcasm, fiddling with the brim of his hat as he thought. "I don't think the BLUs are going to even be that aggressive now, if we find any, because if we take them down they're not coming back, and vice versa. They'd have to be downright stupid to try to kill one of us now when we have a much larger fish to fry."

And what a nasty fish it was, Jesus. How were they going to handle this? This was insane. Was there a safe place anywhere? They could potentially crash at another base and maybe hide out there until an official plan was made.

What about the Administrator? She might know what's going on.

Oddly enough even this situation fit into Oleg's admittedly fairly narrow world view. He frowned:

"So job is like Arena, but we do not shoot BLU?"

He found this most troubling. Survival was not exactly a thing Oleg usually concerned himself with. He found it annoying when he would hold a control point in Arena matches only to be blown to pieces and stuck in the limbo of no respawn for fully minutes at a time.

Then again, the shambling baby men did not seem to possess explosives or sniper rifles, so the two big banes of his existence were taken care of if such a thing were true. The cogs were grinding somewhere in his skull, as to whether or not they resulted in something intelligible to others was yet to be seen. The restrictions on ammo would be a killer, of course, but then Oleg had his Killing Gloves he'd been itching to try, a normally suicidal endeavor on the missile laden battlefields of the various forts.

Oleg let the gears grind. Much like the tanks of his home country, his mind wasn't entirely open to the idea, but it was in the process of disengaging the hatches. Survival. None of the normal resources. No spawners of any kind.

Oleg thought to the days he'd first come to the locations of the various forts, where he would go occasionally between jobs when he had spare moments and found the act of his personal gun maintenance and attempts at what he called 'cooking' to be lacking.

"If we go to city, nearest one is that way."

Oleg had an impeccable sense of direction. While not entirely aware of it, most of this was based on quick recognition and assimilation of landmarks and spatial awareness, two things necessary for his line of work. While he could not describe it in such a way as to be useful to the rest of his team, his tactical perception was extremely uncanny: he knew where 'good' snipers would set up, where 'good' engineers would have their guns and place their teleporters. He went where he was needed because he knew how the ebb and flow of combat in the forts would end up, where the choke points and best open kill zones would be.

That said, this was always against BLU, how he would fare against this new enemy had thus far been punctuated in a prolonged, enraged bullet stream. He was already learning about them though, already hammering their behaviors into a pattern that he could understand and act upon.

The priorities for supplies might be left to his teammates, however. Case and point:

"I want boolets."

Kurt seemed to be thinking for a minute before he nodded back to the Heavy. "Yis, Exactzly Heavy. Inztead of shooting BLU, We shoot zhe zombies." He looked back to Leon with a nod. The dove on his shoulder fluffed slightly as it fluttered over and around between Leon and Oleg. The Medic looked out the door in the direction the Heavy was pointing and blinked. He wasn't sure if they should trust the sense of direction but who knew, the Heavy could've been right. Though at the statement of wanting bullets, Kurt nodded. "Mm... We'll get your bullets, Oleg.. Other then that, what we need right now is supplies, medical, food, water... I doubt zhe train will be coming now to deliver rations." He frowned, tucking one hand under his arm as he stroked his chin with a gloved hand. There was a moment however as Medic suddenly remembered something. "Uuh... Sniper? I mean, Leon?" He paused as he looked over to the RED Sniper with sudden realization. "Didn't you say zhere was anozher perzon?"

Leon had been silent, peering in the direction the Heavy had pointed. He couldn't honestly say if it was the right direction or not; he could barely read a map and make sense of it, let alone tell what direction was north. He'd have to trust Oleg for now, not able to tell on his own.

He became noticeably tense when Kurt mentioned the Sniper they'd left behind, tapping the counter with a finger rhythmically. It was the nervous tick that he had that gave a hint as to how he was feeling at the time- at this moment he was more nervous and guilty than anything else.

"Yeah... BLU Sniper. Saw her momentarily... She was the one shooting and drawing zombies to that one area. Idiot." He sighed, fingering the note that he had hastily shoved in his pocket before he had escaped. He'd have to burn it or something sometime, otherwise it'd be hanging over his head for the rest of his time out here. "She didn't come. We had to go." He sighed, looking down at the floor before sliding off the counter, closing and locking the door, and walking back to the front of the camper. "So we're going to a town? You know where it is, Oleg?"

Now that Kurt had mentioned food, having not eaten for three days, he felt his stomach rumble. His big hand rubbed his stomach as he contemplated something larger than his usual sandvich. He licked his lips:

"Quadruple sandvich..."

He blinked. Zombies. The idea hadn't occurred. Oleg, as one could imagine, did not appreciate the finer points of such pursuits as film studies or anything much beyond basic literacy. He had something of an understanding:

"So baby men are dead, but walk."

When the sniper spoke of town he looked to him and then raised a thick finger to a spot on the horizon. There were a few figures moving in the jerky, telltale way of the living dead, but none of them seemed to have taken notice of them yet. It was too rural directly outside of the forts to really draw them in force, but it did remind all present their tendency to wander aimlessly, to places they shouldn't be or, worse yet, where one wouldn't expect.

"Yes, is that way, unless they move town. I go keeling there?"

Oleg looked to his comrades. Even as the words left his mouth, he regretted them. He tried to save face, not wanting to seem greedy:

"We go keeling there?"

With the sniper pushing the idea of the BLU Sniper they had left away, he clenched his hand into a fist for a moment but soon let it go, knowing that they left her behind made him feel guilty though he wasn't directly involved in it, he sighed before hearing the Heavy mutter something about a quadruple sandwich and blinked once and nodded to confirm with Oleg's statement about them being dead.

However with Oleg suddenly pointing outside, the smaller Medic squished past him slightly to peer out the door. Zombies, out here?! And here he was thinking they'd get a chance to recollect themselves before having to fight again. He counted how many there were and looked back to the Sniper for input.

Leon narrowed his eyes, squinting down the road at the small mass of zombies milling around in the distance. "How many is that- a dozen or so?" He looked to Kurt for confirmation before glancing back at the undead again. "I'd actually prefer for you to not go out there, Oleg, if you don't mind. Direct combat with these things is dangerous, especially if there's a lot of them. One bite and you're pretty much dead." That was what he was guessing, anyways; he had seen a Scout get taken down by a horde since he thought he could take them all on with a bat. Obviously, he thought wrong- the zombies were not to be underestimated combat-wise. "It doesn't look like a whole lot so we might just be able to drive past them, conserve some ammo until we find some more."

Normally Leon would climb to the roof and pick the zombies off himself, now that he had a new silent Huntsman to shoot them with, but his arrows were limited and he didn't know if he'd have the chance to stop and pick them up again. He'd have to try to find some supplies to make more arrows later, simply because he'd lose some eventually. A bow wasn't much good if it didn't have any arrows to go with it.

He started the camper again, unsheathing his Kukri and placing it on the dashboard in front of him- just in case. The little van coughed as it was shaken awake again, although it appeared to be running a little smoother than it was before; at least, it wasn't rattling and bouncing and shaking like it was when he had been going above fifty-five miles per hour. "Hold on to something, we'll probably be jostled around a bit if we hit a thing or two. Not that it should hurt us, since this camper's built like a tank (an old tank, but a tank nonetheless), and should be able to take a lot of damage before it finally quits on us." He started down the road, the grumble of the engine attracting the shambling dead toward them a bit. Leon had been right, there was about a dozen of them- not worth stopping and fighting, not yet. If they encountered more, then they might have a problem, but until them the Sniper was happy to bypass an uneccessary skirmish and get to the main objective: getting to town.

As the camper shifted, the door swung shut from the force of motion and Oleg fell back onto something soft that he hoped wasn't either of his comrades.

Leon's words echoed in his head. One bite and you're pretty much dead.

It was strange, faced with mortality. He could die forever, something he'd never really been worried about before. Oleg tried to wrap his head around it but could only come back to those words. Oleg was muttering to himself, the words helped reflect his thoughts, made them real.

"Bite kills... slow... not smart... follow noise..."

It took him a few moments to come to the realization, and when he did his eyes lit up. He knew how to kill this opponent. The idea shook him to his core:

"We must be like spies."

Oleg frowned.

"We must fix dis."

(Whoa that's intense dude. )

The Medic had stepped out of the way once the Heavy set on seating himself, he leaned against the pantry in silence for a while. Hearing Oleg's muttered he looked to the Heavy not having expected such words to come from this man, he shifted, feeling uncomfortable with the whole concept of all this. It was something that scared him.

After they had started to get a move on, as the camper started he would set his smaller self on the counter, holding on so he wouldn't slide around. Being as short as he was, his feet didn't touch the floor and he took to swinging his feet back and forth for a minute, as he took off his gloves. Kurt scratched at the dove that cooed on his shoulder, a uncertain frown molded to his face. After remaining silent for sometime as they drove, Kurt glanced up to where Leon sat in the driver's seat. Tempted to say something however, he could not rise to the occasion.

Leon accelerated a little as the zombies neared so he could push through them, wincing as he felt one get sucked under the tires and squashed. It wasn't too bad, though, and pretty soon the small swarm was left far behind.

He, too, was pretty amazed at the Heavy's train of thought. Oleg was right- they needed to be quiet and stealthy, and they definitely needed to fix this. The question was how. The Sniper racked his brain for any past ideas to how this could've happened and finally landed on one instance when he had gone to town on the weekend with one of his friends.

While the Scout himself had been preoccupied with getting the next Saxton Hale comic, Leon had lingered at the newsstand and had been confronted with a startling headline: MASSIVE FLU VIRUS SWEEPS THE NATION. There had been several phrases in the story that had caught his attention-

Pandemic.

U.S. has never seen this kind of virus before.

Other countries experiencing similar problems.

CDC boggled.

Already several thousand fatalities.

Then there were the symptoms of the 'flu', which were just as frightening: burning fever, averaging between 105 and 110 degrees Fahrenheit; rasping cough; coma; and eventually death.

Worst of all, there was no cure.

Somehow, Leon didn't think that the 'flu' and whatever caused these zombies to appear was entirely unrelated. Just making an educated guess, here. But that was the thing; say it was a zombie virus. How the hell do you fix that? Pathogens were harder to contain and locate and treat. Unless there was a sort of counter-virus they could release, but he doubted that kind of thing existed at all.

It was quite a pickle, this whole zombie apocalypse thing.

(Was kind of doing that for lols but I'm glad it was effective )

The darkness of Oleg's thoughts abated in a desire to do something. Not that Oleg never simply relaxed, but usually this was after a long day of running, hefting his weapon and yelling. Having been out for three days hadn't been terribly exciting. That said, a moving camper as far as he knew left relatively little to do.

Oleg looked around the little living area and kept looking under things and into cupboards.

"No cards here."

More than a few might have known by now that for many heavy weapons guys the choice game between jobs is poker. Usually this is because there's at least one deck of cards lying around the forts, that is unless one of the pyros had lost and wished to express their distaste for the game via their trademark.

After a moment Oleg gave up, deciding instead to sit near the driver's seat so he could glance at Leon's driving. He wondered if there would be any of the little helpful signs that usually dot the forts, like 'Battlements' and 'Control Point' with a little arrow to set his comrades in the right direction. It seemed as though things were going smoothly for now.

He also noticed Kurt and his dove.

"Cat has caught tongue?"

Kurt had been preoccupied with his dove for the moment, seeming to be trapped in thought until Oleg had spoken to him. Despite mostly having kept to himself for the duration of his time on the team, he hadn't had the chance to really get used to the other team members and generally he found they never spoke to him unless in battle or getting a quick exam. Even then he preferred silence during exams.

Glancing up to the Heavy, his pale green eyes snapped back to reality and the dove fluttered from his shoulder as he had flinched slightly. "Mm? Oh, no." he shrugged slightly, straightening himself up as he held his gloves in his hands. He actually looked tired and one could likely understand why. Though it wasn't long before he slipped off his pack, that held the source power for his Kritzkrieg. Plopping the Kritzkrieg beside him and bringing the pack to his lap, he began to fiddle around with it as he checked his power supply on it.

Leon glanced back at his two companions before looking back at the road. "You still have power?" he asked, referring to the Kritzkrieg. Somehow he had a feeling that they were going to need it sooner or later.

He blinked as they passed a small green sign that had the name of the town, too scuffed up to read, and then the distance to the said town- five miles. "You think the Administrator knows what's going on or how to fix it? Her office, if I remember correctly, is set up in Teufort and I think that's not horribly far from here. If we stop here for supplies and keep going in this direction we'll hit Teufort and the base there too... Maybe they fared better than we did." Maybe. It was a long shot. "What do you guys think?"