xp_logs | Behold A White Horse

The team lands in Marsabit and splits up to investigate the seemingly deserted city. Kevin, Felicia and Kitty target the suspected AIM site.

The streets of Marsabit were empty and eerily quiet. No one seen through any windows, no sign of life anywhere else. It was as if it had been entirely abandoned. What was obvious was signs of violence; smashed windows, burnt cars, debris and random abandoned personal objects strewn about. It was like a riot had passed through but then left no one behind.

Kevin moved in the lead, face slightly deformed as he shapeshifted to optimize his senses. He moved at a careful, steady place, sweeping ahead with his rifle each time. Nothing in the city felt right, like the whole place was a waiting ambush, and he was the most likely to survive a surprise attack. They moved quickly to the small building housing an auto repair business that was supposed to be the front for the AIM lab.

Every hair on her body felt like it was tingling with static, an uneasy crawl, as Felicia trailed behind. One of these things was not like the other; able to take an attack, able to phrase through an attack, able to maybe get out of the way of an attack, possibly, and she was feeling it acutely, waiting. The locked door to the garage had her reaching for her hip pockets before she paused, only barely not palming her forehead.

"If you would be so kind?" she asked Kitty quietly, with what she hoped was an encouraging half smile.

Kitty nodded, giving Felicia a smile in return. She didn't speak, afraid that her voice would somehow go echoing off the walls and alert who--or what--ever might be inside that garage. Her body tingled as she slipped into insubstantiality, reaching for and then, through the lock, ghost fingers threading through tumbler and wire to disable the mechanisms that kept them out and others in. There was a click and a groan from the door as the lock gave way. Kitty stepped back from the door, then unphased long enough to crack the door a little and peek through before phasing again. She saw no signs of trouble-just a dimly-lit stretch of hallway.

"After you," she said.

After a short distance, it opened into the repair bay. Anything but a lab. Except. Once he'd fully cleared the room, he carefully searched it a second time, pausing at a small smear of blood that ended at the edge of a heavy and wide storage container flush against the wall. "Sorry Pryde, but I think we'll need your phasing a second time. Smart money says the entrance is this way." He pointed through the container.

She grimaced, staring for a moment at the smear. There wasn't going to be anything good behind that door.

"Whatever you say, boss." Taking a quick puff of air, she squinted, then slipped into the container. Darkness. And silence. Did she trust that quiet? She'd have to go substantial to reach for the flashlight at her belt, but she wasn't sure if there was something in there, waiting. Give it two seconds, then go. One... two... As she unphased, a series of smells flooded her nostrils--something sour, something sickly, something foul--but she repressed the urge to cough it all out. Kitty gripped the flashlight and she darted it, moving a little too quickly as she often did after the shift back into gravity. A beam of light swung across the ceiling for a half-second before she directed it down to the wall, then down again.

"Ah--" she caught her breath, stumbling back against the wall for a minute, phasing half out of the metal so that her back, hip, and foot jutted out. The flashlight shorted out, leaving her in blackness. Steeling herself, Kitty moved toward where she remembered the door to be, but she didn't phase until she was almost there. Her hands fumbled across the ridges of the container's insides, something moist dampening her palms. Finding the door took only a few seconds, but it didn't feel like it as her foot kept stuttering on what had once been alive. The handle rattled and she had to force her shoulder against it to slam it open, but she knew that the noise didn't matter anymore. Not here.

"I think...they're all dead." she whispered as her eyes met Felicia's.

Glancing at Kevin, Felicia crossed over, briefly placing her hand on Kitty's shoulder as she passed and finding the light. Further proving this was no ordinary garage, a back up generator kicked in somewhere, and the lights flickered to half life; broken bulbs still littered the floor, and ceiling light panels hung precariously, casting dappled half shadows on the gruesome scene. Releasing the breath she'd been holding sounded too loud in her ears of the complete and utter silence of the scene and she found herself unwilling to use her full voice as she spoke back at her teammates. "I count ten."

"...or so." Kevin was less rattled by the scene, but hardly immune. "This was... blunt force trauma. Someone beat them to death and tore them apart." He nudged a torn off forearm with his feet. "Why is the skin grey? And these... green growths?" He turned it over with his boot. "And there is a lot of blood, but not ten mens' worth of it. Pryde, find their databases and grab everything. Hardy, you look for any physical records or surveillance interfaces that might have been on. I'm going to clear the lab and see what they were working on."

"Right." Kitty tried to shake the thoughts out of her head as she walked through the warehouse, her steps echoing. Maybe those men had deserved what they got... But it was hard to imagine. She sat down in front of the computer silently, pausing for a moment before her fingers started clacking down hard on the keys.

Darcy, Angelo, and Sarah head to the city centre to try and access the city's CCTV archives.

Darcy wasn't particularly into the more spiritual side of her religion, but as they eased through the streets of Marsabit towards the building the CCTV backups were housed in, she considered changing her stance. Perhaps even crossing herself the way she'd seen some of the older goers at Matt's church do when they came across something they considered particularly unsettling. A double dose of protection. For now though, she pushed that to the back of her mind and moved forward. "I don't like this at all," she said into the quiet, voice hushed to not entirely break the stillness of the area. She couldn't even hear much of the comforting hum of background electricity, even, and that had her spooked at least as much as everything else they were witnessing.

They finally reached a T intersection, and Darcy gave the road a considering look in both directions. "If we were supposed to go left here, I think we're going to have to find a way to loop around," she said grimly, staring at a pile-up of cars amidst the giant rubble of what had once been a building or two. "Opinions and options?"

Angelo glanced up and around for the hundredth time since they'd got here, looking for - something. A threat, a person, anything that might explain what had happened here. "We sure can't go through. You got enough phone signal for Google Maps?"

Sarah glanced down at her phone, shook it in annoyance, and put it back in her pocket. "Nothing since we entered their air space. We get to do this blind." She glanced quickly around but there didn't seem to be any convenient shortcuts. "I guess we go the only way we can, and loop back the first chance we get. Maybe we'll find something interesting going the long way around."

"Well, at least now we know how we die," Darcy quipped, giving Sarah a nasty glare. "Because someone wanted to find something interesting. It's like you've never watched Scooby-Doo or a horror movie in your life." She turned to the right, moving as briskly as she dared in the stillness. "And no, no signal, can't even hear that background hum of electricity that most people don't notice missing until it's gone." She was kicking herself mentally for not marking down an alternate path or two, semi-blindly leading them based on what she remembered from looking at a few maps. Another turn came up, and she looked down the left hand side. Clear enough, at least as far as she could see. Worth taking the chance on.

"Looks like we're not too far out of our way", Angelo observed. "I just hope there's enough power when we get there to get the data off. How long would it normally take for the power to go out with no people?"

"Your guess is as good as mine." The car pile of rubble on their left looked familiar, and she pointed over to it. "I think we successfully made our loop. To the right?"

Darcy waved them on, hand moving in a so-so motion as she talked. "Depends on other factors, but anywhere from a day to a month, maybe longer at hospitals and places with backup generators or power structures that can handle not being watched constantly. Unless it's all killed at the same time intentionally." Another block or two of walking had them past the rubble and back on track for the path she'd actually memorized, the area still quiet.

About five minutes later, a faint hum of electricity broke the silence.

"There we go, something is still working around here", Angelo said, turning towards where he thought the sound was coming from. "But still no people."

Living or dead, and the lack of any dead was almost more worrying.

Not far ahead, a building came into view on their right with lights glowing sickly outside. The power was still on, but barely. Sarah eyed the door. "Do we have a way in or are we breaking the lock?"

"Little bit of both," Darcy answered, trying to press the handle and failing to move it. Either fail-secure, or this building had never lost power long enough to become fail-safe. From the faint hum, she suspected it went directly to some sort of vital only backup power. The lock was electric with a manual override, not entirely dissimilar from some of the locks at the mansion. She could do this. Her hand hovered over the lock for a few seconds, a low stream of visible electricity flowing from her fingertips and through the electronics until she heard the tell-tale click that would give them a few seconds to open the door.

Another press on the handle and the door opened, the inside air stale and warm as it brushed their faces.

Angelo stared over her shoulder into the building, which seemed as devoid of life and corpses as the rest of the city, a heavy silence filling it. "I really hope we find some sort of answer here."

As they moved into the main room, Sarah pulled a bone from her shoulder and walked carefully along the perimeter. Everything was faintly illuminated with buzzing auxiliary lights, but the room was much darker than the outside and she didn't trust her eyes until they fully adjusted. "No monitors here. Let's keep going."

"Probably further back, I'm guessing behind more security." Darcy carefully didn't look as Sarah pulled the bone from her shoulder, choosing instead to pull a flashlight out of her belt and power it with a quiet click, the light aimed squarely at the floor in front of them as they moved down the hallway.

Several doors down, they finally came across the CCTV room, and Darcy gave the handle a cursory try - locked, of course - before sticking her hand on the scanner next to the door. Her eyes flared bright as she dug in, coaxing the scanner into believing that the hand on the pad had permission to enter the room. The door unlocked with a soft click, and Darcy pushed down the handle, moving slowly into the room.

Angelo was right behind her, skin extended ready to intercept anything that might fly at them... but nothing did, and he let it drop without comment. "Looks like everything's working fine in here."

"Except the point of camera rooms like this is somebody is supposed to be watching it." Sarah motioned to the two empty chairs in the room, and a half-empty cup of coffee on the desk with the monitors stacked along the wall. Compared to the casino security rooms she had briefly been in before, this was like walking into a museum. "You can't fix a situation if no one is monitoring the feed."

"Of all the things I haven't liked about this, at least this one is in our favor," Darcy remarked, heading towards the consoles. "You two mind keeping your eyes split between the door and monitors while I do my thing? I'm gonna be a little useless while I sort through the wheat and chaff to get the intel we need, but two firm taps to my back or shoulder should pull me out if I need to see something."

The coffee cup was cold to the touch, not that she'd expected it to still be warm after the lack of people outside. She grabbed a chair and pulled a pin USB from her pocket, turning it the requisite three times to slide into the two sided-port. "Without fail," she murmured, fingers flying over the keyboard as she let herself sink into the data. Her eyes flared bright again, eerie in the semi-darkness of the room, and as she rifled through the cameras and associated reports to figure out her download starting point, images flashed across the monitors.

Angelo turned his attention to the screens, trying to keep up with the images racing across them. As far as he could tell so far, it just looked like scenes of day to day life in a perfectly normal city.

Sarah stood back towards the doorway, watching the dark hallway. That they hadn't seen a single person since they landed only made her watch more carefully, because cities of people didn't just up and vanish. People had to be hiding somewhere, even if the majority of the population had fled. But the hallway remained quiet and empty.

A blip among the images a day or so before Marsabit went dark caught Darcy's attention. "That's different," she muttered to herself, winding backwards through the tape until she was a few minutes before the blip, and started downloading the information from that morning on. The images moved slower now, closer to twice the regular speed instead of a full fast-forward, and suddenly came to an abrupt halt. "What." Darcy cleared her throat, snapping out of her interaction with the console and staring up at the bank of monitors. "What the fuck is that?"

The screens had varying images frozen in place. Shambling horrors, clearly once human but now wrong, fighting with the people of Marsabit and causing chaos in the streets. Darcy rubbed her eyes, but no, the images were still there. "Are you two seeing this?"

Angelo was already leaning over her shoulder, staring at the screens. “Yeah. I - would love to say I don’t know what I’m seeing, but… yeah. Guess we have a clue where the people went.”

Unable to see the screens, Sarah took one last unhappy look down the hallway and stepped up behind her teammates. Watching a group of corpse-like creatures surround someone in body armor, she stared in confused horror as they tore him limb from limb. Like he was made of nothing more than wet paper. "...At the risk of sounding stupid, what the fuck are we looking at?"

"Those answers we were looking for." Although now she had more questions than answers. Still. "And, at a guess, the former people of Marsabit." The grimness of Darcy's voice matched the serious look on her face and the images on the screen sped back up as she decided getting whatever data they could and getting back to the bird was more important than watching. "I don't know about the two of you, but I don't want to grapple with those things. And I feel distinctly unclean after seeing them in the first place."

There was more corruption in the video the closer they got to real time, and by the time they'd caught up to the evening before, the feed was nothing but intermittent crackling, reminiscent of trying to find just the right angle for a pair of rabbit ears to tune into the local cable station but not quite able to get there. Darcy removed the drive with a sigh, tucking it securely into her gear. "I really, really don't like this. We need to get back to the Blackbird."

Amanda, Gabriel and Jean discover horrors at the hospital.

Amanda's boots crunched through the broken glass that littered the road, the only sound in the silence. The witch had become increasingly twitchy as they'd made their way through the city, glancing around and over her shoulder every couple of minutes and at every intersection. She hadn't expected her mutant power to work in Marsabit, given its size, but there was nothing, as if her powers had been anaesthetised. At last the hospital building came into view, but if anything, her tension increased.

"I really don't like this place," she muttered, mostly to herself.

Gabriel, standing a few paces ahead of her, didn't reply. But he got the sentiment. He could remember the last time he'd seen this much devastation, and it was not a memory he cherished. But even that had been energetic. Chaotic. This was passive, and silent, and it made him tense. He was trying to stay alert, but in doing so, he was startled by every bizarre item he stepped on.

"Something wicked this way comes," he murmured quite suddenly as they moved toward the hospital. He stopped in his tracks and turned to look at Jean. "Don't like the idea of going into a hospital in the center of whatever this is. You sense anything?"

"It's what I don't sense that worries me," Jean said, her attention flickering toward the building. "With a hospital that big there should be hundreds of people, especially with how the streets look here. But I'm not sensing any--" She tilted her head.

"Wait, there's someone, but it's very faint. Hopefully it's just because of the distance."

Amanda nodded curtly and unclipped the safety catch of her holster. She didn't go armed often, but without a decent power source, she needed an alternative to the magic. At least the hours at the firing range weren't going to waste. "Well, it's the first hint of anyone we've gotten since we set foot in here, let's get closer and see if things improve. You got a direction for us?"

"I--" Jean was momentarily distracted by a pool of blood on the ground that was seeping out of the automatic hospital glass doors. One of the door windows was damaged, blood dripping down from the center of a spider's web of cracks. As the trio neared the doors, the doors opened, smearing blood across the ground like a paintbrush on a canvas.

The lobby was the aftermath of chaos. A man lay crumpled near the door, his face and head unrecognizable mush. Some of the overhead lights were blown, and the only visibility in one of the corner areas came from a vending machine.

Lobby furniture was overturned and strewn across the room. A security guard was sprawled on the floor directly in their path, a sea of red splattered across the white tiled floor from his arm being ripped off. The arm itself lay on a table halfway across the room.

Behind him, the hospital receptionist lay at an odd angle on the ground. She was in worse shape than the security guard, with her head and both arms pulled off like a petulant 3-year-old playing with a Barbie doll. Blood stained her candy striper uniform, dying it dark, dark red. Her head lay at her feet, looking more like a movie prop than real life. One arm was draped over her body, the other stuck out of a large potted plant after being thrown there.

Jean stared at the scene, transfixed in horror, before swallowing and nodding toward a door marked 'stairs.'

"T-This way."

Years ago, before the world ended, Gabriel lived with a roommate who had a kind of danger alarm. And as Gabriel stood, frozen in his tracks in a hospital in the midst of an apparent calamity, staring at horrifying corpses, his coping mechanism was to try and imagine how that roommate might have felt in this very situation.

For his part, his feet seemed frozen, and even though the sight in front of him was so gruesome that he knew he would almost certainly never forget it, he could not look away. "What could do this?" He wondered aloud, still not quite ready to follow Jean. "I mean, we've all seen some things, but..."

"Nothing like this," Amanda finished for him, her voice soft with horror. "It's like something pulled them apart."

"We should get going," Jean said gently. "I'm not sure what did it either, but it could come back. And if there's someone still alive, I want to help them."

It was the chance to save someone, anyone that kept her from dwelling too much on the scene and the people who had their lives cut short so horribly. She needed the focus.

If someone was still alive, and hurt, they might need medical attention.

And if they weren't innocent, and involved with what happened, they would pay.

"Yeah," Gabriel said after a few seconds. He wanted someone to squeeze his shoulder or his hand, just to ground him a bit, but this wasn't the place, and these weren't the people he'd want to ask. He wanted to hit his vape, but he'd never asked whether that was mission appropriate, and he was wary of doing anything that might attract attention.

"Here, let me take the lead," he finally said, moving past Jean in front of the door. "Super speed and all." He glanced back to make sure Amanda was ready, then nodded and pushed open the door to the stairs and let out a sharp gasp.

In front of them a body — well, half a body, limbs were missing — was sprawled on the stairs, its vacant eyes staring directly at Gabriel, its mouth open in horror. Dried blood practically painted the stairs, tracing a path from where this person had tumbled down steps after it had been... well, Gabriel wasn't even sure what.

Behind Jean and Gabe, Amanda made an odd hiccuping sound, as she fought to suppress her gag reflex. The sight was bad enough, but the smell of old blood and shit and decaying meat that had been trapped behind the door wafted out in an invisible, noisome cloud. The witch clapped her hand over her nose and mouth and managed, thickly: "Let's get past this as soon as we can."

Reaching into her pack, Jean offered Amanda and Gabriel a KN95 mask. It wasn't much, but it'd hopefully help a bit with the smell. She slipped it on behind her ears, covering her nose and mouth with the mask as she carefully walked past the person and up the stairs. One stairwell, then another, until they'd reached the third floor. Jean paused at the door before opening it, catching a glimpse of the floor through the door window.

She drew in a breath. "We're almost there. Just...don't look down," she said.

Opening the door, the hallway flickered from broken overhead lights and the flashing red of alarms. The floor was a mess, with overturned medical equipment and furniture...oh, and also the people. There were six or seven bodies strewn about. Some had just been bludgeoned to death, some had missing arms, legs, heads. It was indiscriminate: doctor, nurse, patient, visitor, child. No one was spared.

All of the patient doors were open, all except for one near the end of the right wing of the hallway. A light was on.

Amanda had been noting the lack of anything remotely like looting. Apart from the signs of struggle, there was nothing, no indication that the perpetrators had been after anything but the people inside. The drug cabinets in the nurses' station they passed were untouched, valuable equipment left alone, except for where it had been used as a shield or a weapon. "This doesn't make sense," she muttered through the mask. "It's like someone came in and beat them to death."

At the sight of the light ahead, she glanced at Gabe. "It could be an ambush. Want to check?" With his speed, any possible foes wouldn't even know he'd been there.

"Want is an interesting word to use," Gabe replied, but it was clear that he would go. He hadn't taken the mask from Jean; the smell wasn't the thing that was bothering him, but there wasn't anything to protect you from your sense of dread.

"One sec." He eyed the drug cabinets, making a note to come back and rifle through them before they left, then took a few things out of his pockets that he thought might make extra noise. "If there's trouble, you'll know."

To them, it looked like he took off. But within his own perception, Gabriel was moving slowly and deliberately, even as everything around him was practically static. Still, even as he knew he was safe, the crunches of glass underneath his boots startled him. For the most part, every room he passed was the same: Bodies and blood and destruction. Gabriel didn't linger much, except to see if he could sense any life.

So he was startled when he came upon a room that looked clean, and when he saw a woman who appeared to be alive and intact inside. He thought he could sense her moving, and so he took a few steps back, and then returned himself to the normal flow of time inside the universe.

Quietly, he stepped toward the door, ready to withdraw his gun or run in a flash if needed.

Unlike the rest of the building, power was still on and the hum of the ventilation was present. She was sitting huddled in the corner, head down. One wall of the room was dominated by a thick glass window and signs in both English and Swahili cautioned 'clean room' and 'do not open' on the thicker pressure sealed door. Below the window was a transfer bay, where materials could be placed and safety rotated into the room, and on the one side of the glass was a simple intercom in order to speak.

Gabriel watched her, unseen, for a few seconds. She was trapped, yet also saved from whatever had ravaged this place, it seemed, by some kind of infection or something. The uncomfortable feeling in his stomach returned, and he instinctively reached for his communicator, then remembered their situation.

Jean, he attempted to broadcast, letting down all the shields he'd learned to build up. We've got a live one. I'm gonna engage, but head this way.

Without waiting for them, he stepped into the room, pointing his gun at the glass.

The woman looked up and her exhausted, haunted expression flipped immediately to panic as she tried to push herself further away from the drawn gun, huddling more into the corner.

It almost felt like no time had passed before Jean was in the room. Her eyes never left the woman on the other side of the glass, but she was keenly aware of the gun in Gabriel's hand.

"You can put the gun down, Velocidad," she said. "I don't think she did this."

"But I think she might be able to give us an idea of who did," Amanda added, approaching the glass. Time for good cop, bad cop, and she knew she looked unthreatening. "Hi," she said to the woman on the other side. "We aren't going to hurt you."

"Stay away! Stay away!" The women screamed, panicking just at the sight of another person.

~"It's okay"~ Jean said, both physically and mentally as she made eye contact with the woman. "We're here to help. Can you tell us what happened?"

The woman met her gaze, but terror had rendered her mute. Instead, a flood of images washed over Jean through the telepathic bridge. Her long series of days in the guaranteed clean room due to a possible ebola infection. The fear being bleached out by the sterile surroundings and boredom of the small room and nothing but endless television. Then the panic of a crisis, watching doctors and other staff racing back and forth on the other side of the glass, seen through the open door. The pandemonium of a hospital suddenly under the pressure of a sudden disaster as familiar to Jean as her own bed.

And then the nightmare began; the screams, the purposeful activity through the door replaced by panicked haste. The first sounds of bone breaking, blood splattering, and grey emaciated figures studded in luminous green growths chasing people down, beating them savagely to death in front of her and then mindlessly wandering off. And it got worse. Watching the shattered corpse put itself partially back together, seeing the green pustules emerge as the skin turned ashen and eventually, getting to its feet, a version of the same creature that killed it.

For a few moments Jean's attention seemed elsewhere, her eyes unfocused as she stared toward the woman's direction, seeing but not seeing. At first, her face was emotionless, but as the memory unfolded her body tensed and she stood a little taller, curling her fingers into tight, trembling fists. Her face twisted, eyes widening, her breath quickened.

Suddenly she let out a soft harrowed gasp, tearing her eyes away from the woman and taking staggered steps backward.

"Where did they go..." she whispered.

"Jean!" Gabriel looked at her, alarmed. He tightened his grip on the gun, which he had lowered but kept hold of just in case. The pit in his stomach grew; he had rarely seen her so rattled. He was almost afraid to ask, but her comments necessitated the question. "Where did who go?"

"The corpses," Jean said, meeting the woman's eyes as she herself spoke. "They came back to life. They killed...everyone."

She let out a breath, her mouth dry as she tried to keep herself calm and focused. "Velocidad, I lied. You'll need the gun. Please keep an eye on the outside door. We need to move this woman, but we have to make sure she stays quarantined in case she's infected. If there's a clean room like this, there's usually some sort of suit and mask. Daytripper, can you help me find it?"

"Wha-- Yes. Yes, I can do that." Amanda shook herself alert again, away from the images that corpses coming back to life had stirred. Zombies. It had to be bloody zombies. "If it's anything like Muir, there should be something close, for the staff to use when they're doing their tests." She was mostly speaking to herself as she headed towards the row of long cupboards which lined the far wall. "Nothing, nothing, noth... ah-hah!" She pulled out a white suit folded up and sealed in a plastic bag and tossed it over to Jean before collecting booties, gloves and a facemask. "Let's get her ready and the get the fuck out of here." She didn't need to add the thought they all shared: 'Before the corpses come.'

At the AIM location, they confirm the fate of the missing citizens.

There was nothing for Kitty to hack. The data was not encrypted. The men had died while still frantically working on it and the screens showed camera footage of people keeling over, changing, and re-animating as the skeletal grey figures sporting glowing green growths. They howled and loped away in search of prey. Other videos showed them attacked on mass, battering survivors to death and tearing them apart.

"Fuck. OK, just take the hard drives. Hardy, grab those sample containers. Whatever happened here is still happening here and we need to get the hell out." Kevin clicked on the comms. "Everyone, as soon as you have your intel, retreat back to the Blackbird. ASAP."