till the World Ends, for ceptme

[bornrussian]

The sky spins, clouds become the dusty California ground, become mountains in the distance, clouds again, dirt. Light blue. Pale white. Dirt. The colors flash and despite Natasha's tight grip on the controls, the nose keeps dipping down, down, down to the soundtrack of angry beeping and wailing warning signals. Red lights flash rapidly, lighting up the dashboard and dancing across the grim line of Natasha's jaw.

The impact with the ground comes quicker than expected. Like the dirt rose up to meet them. The initial jolt rattles Natasha's bone and a bright taste of burnt copper bursts in her mouth. The quinjet slides across the ground, gravel spattering across the windshield and the whole world seems to shake apart. The harsh dig of the safety harness is all that keeps her in her seat, each jolt of the machine driving the breath right out of her lungs. Her head knocks straight into the headrest, pain blossoming in her head and turning into fireworks as each shudder and slide sends her careening again, hitting the armrests, the backrest, the headrest and finally ripping the controls straight out of her hands.

The quinjet shudders to a halt and the sudden stillness is startling. Somewhere in the long slide, the alarms stopped screaming at Natasha, the warning lights winked out of existence. Her breath comes ragged and loud in the silence. Her throat pulls together, her chest convulsing with little hiccups of breath as she struggles not to throw up on top of everything else. Her hands find their way back around the controls, the familiar and well-worn plastic (worn down into groves by another set of hands, wider and more calloused) is somehow comforting. There's nothing to be done, but holding on affords her a sense of control.

Okay. Damage control. Cracked ribs, sprained wrist, bleeding tongue and pounding head. Could be worse. Windshield held. No obvious breaches in the hull. Natasha forces herself to unwind her fingers from around the controls. They feel clumsy and too thick as she unbuckles the harness.

When the wrenching sound was followed by a sudden dip downwards, Natasha immediately drowned out the shrill screams coming from behind her. They weren't useful to her then. But now, she hears the soft creak of hot metal cooling rapidly, and her own breaths, but nothing else. No screams, no constant barrage of questions like what has been plaguing her since they took off from the Tower, no cowering whimpers. She doesn't want to look behind her. So, she turns quickly.

Well.

The hull held anyway.

It's a good thing she never bothered to learn their names.

Yellow-Jacket sags forward against his safety harness, head lolling forward at a strange angle. His neck must've snapped in the fall. Green-Shirt's harness must've snapped, or maybe she wasn't wearing it. Her body is crumpled on the floor, splayed across the tins that have spilled out of a torn cardboard box. The gallons of water that cost Torn-Jeans his life are now slowly pouring out across the metal floor through cracked plastic.

It's almost funny. This has been a clusterfuck from beginning to sharp and relentless end.

The quinjet is done for, that much seems obvious. Tony might've been able to repair it, but he's not exactly here. (As it turned out, Tony Stark was nowhere near callous enough for this brand new world. Who would've known?) Clint probably could have-- A bright grin, hands streaked with oil and the battlesuit rolled down to his waist, he's jerry-rigged this quinjet (or others) to give just another coupla miles too many times to count. Natasha's mind basks in the warmth of that memory, and it skitters across the grey and flat (tucked away and smoothed down so she won't keep snagging on them all the time) memories that follow.

Tony could have fixed it, Clint could've, hell Green-Shirt probably could have too, but the stark, unavoidable truth is that Natasha can't. Which leaves her on the wrong side of the country, with no means of transport, no back-up, and shit out of luck.

Goody.

Natasha steps over Green-Shirt's body, gingerly nuding the rolling tins away with the side of her foot, and grabs the shotgun from the weapon's locker. It's time to see what she's working with. The hydraulics of the rear hatch don't work and she has to force her way out. The sun is already high in the sky -- that's good, they're more sluggish during the day -- and she blinks in the sudden light. Her shoulders tense and hands curled gently around the shotgun, she looks around herself for any sign of movement.

Comments

[ceptme]

For the first few days, weeks, the quiet had driven him crazy. He's never had much of an affinity for nature; life has always been metal walls and airlock pressure doors, the constant steady thrum of machinery underpinning every other sound and vibrating through the floor underfoot, as far back as he can remember to sterile white and the smell of antiseptic. In a world sustained by the unobtrusive workings of life support filters and grav generators, silence has always meant something horribly wrong.

As it turns out, it's not so different here.

The sounds of their ungainly land vehicles stopped first, along with the hum of the power lines overhead. After a while the screaming mostly stopped too. It's nothing but the sounds of the planet now, wind stirring the plant life, various animals squeaking and growling and chirruping in the undergrowth. The quiet has its upsides though. Now that he's starting the learn the sounds this place makes, it's easier to pick out the ones that don't belong; the shuffling and moaning that comes along with the stench of rotting flesh on the air to warn of the arrival of-- whatever the fuck those things are.

He's seen a lot of horrible shit in his time, a lot of things most normal people would pay anything to unsee, but he's never seen anything like this. Every sense he has says that they're dead. He knows what a corpse looks like, grey and bloated with putrid flesh hanging from exposed bones, and he sure as hell knows what eyes look like after that last spark of vitality and awareness goes out of them. Everything he's seen of these things tallies up...apart from the fact that they're still moving around.

Not that it matters. He's a pragmatist by nature, and what they are and how they came to be really isn't his problem. All he needs to know is that they're a threat - and they were pretty fucking well filed under that category long before the first time he saw them rip some poor fucker to blood shreds - and how to deal with them. Shot to the head, fire in a pinch. Explosives work well, but most of the time they're not worth the way the noise draws more. They're not particularly fast or well-coordinated, but they're incredibly persistent and too dumb to be tricked or scared off. One of them's easy enough to see off. The problem is, you never see just one of them any more.

For the last few months stranded on this stupid fucking planet, he's been surviving mostly by keeping his head down. At night, when those things are more active, he finds somewhere with a sturdy door to barricade - or at the very least a tree or something else he can climb - and gets what sleep he can. And then once the sun's risen, he walks. He's hit a couple of cities and towns so far, but none of them have had what he needs. Until something usable turns up, it's just a matter of surviving. And fortunately survival is something he's very, very good at.

Now and then he crosses paths with other survivors. Some are fucking crazy, seemingly out just to murder a path through what's left of this world while they still can. Most are just people, tired and scared and doing what they can to stay alive. He doesn't pay them much attention. On the rare occasions he doesn't just slip away without ever letting them know he was around, he only stays just long enough to trade intel about the road ahead and maybe supplies if there's anything worth bartering for. Maybe it'd be useful now and then to have someone to cover his back, but it's not worth it. He can pass for Terran for an hour or two if he's careful to keep the cybernetics covered, but much longer than that and people start asking questions he can't answer, making references more recent than what decades-old scraps of Terran pop culture he's picked up from Quill. It's easier to stay alone. Certainly a lot easier than trying to explain to someone from this backwater of a world why the fuck he's so dead set on finding a functional deep-space transmitter.

The days are starting to get shorter and colder, and from what info he's been able to glean from the detritus of the local civilization, it looks like this hemisphere of the planet is about to enter its winter phase. He's managed to pick up some warmer clothes; stolen a jacket and sturdy boots taken from a boarded up store, traded in a thick set of gloves to a small band of survivors in exchange for lighter fingerless ones he doesn't have to take off to work his 'borrowed' rifle. He might end up needing more. He guesses he'll need to wait and see how cold it gets. If nothing else, at least the dust in the air that had made his eyes water and his throat itch and burn seems to be going away as the plant life gradually changes color.

The routine of the day is fairly well set by now. He wakes up in a nest of tattered blankets in the fork of a large tree around dawn, patiently chewing through a ration bar with the texture of cardboard and sipping from his supply of water as he watches the light grow clearer and brighter, listening out for the sounds of the dead moving around below. Eventually, when he's satisfied himself that he can risk moving, the blankets get rolled up and strapped back onto his battered rucksack of supplies - lighter than he'd like, he'll need to do another supply run soon - and he carefully checks and loads his rifle and sidearm before climbing down and getting on his way. He'll pause briefly for a rest and to eat about halfway through the day, veer aside to refill his water bottle or search any buildings he passes for supplies as necessary, but other than that the day ahead of him is nothing but walking until it's time to scout out a place to sleep.

He's grown so used to the quiet that it takes him a moment to place the low drone at the edge of hearing, growing steadily louder and closer. And then there's a roar of engines and a glint of light on a metal hull overhead, and for a moment - just a moment - he almost hopes that he'll look up and see a familiar flash of blue and orange coming in to land.

He doesn't, of course. Even if they're looking for him, the odds of finding any one person on the face of this blue-green speck are literally astronomical. The Milano isn't coming, not unless he gets them a signal to home in on. No, the craft overhead is definitely of Terran make, if a little more well put together than the sad tin cans he's seen sitting on abandoned airstrips. And-- fuck, it's in trouble if the falling pitch of the engines and the drunken way it's listing to the side is anything to judge by. Almost before he's finished having the thought, there's a sudden gout of smoke bursting from the engine and the list turns into an outright spin. He watches it tumble out of the sky to go down somewhere on the other side of the ridge to the north.

He tilts his head consideringly and reviews his options. The noise and the plume of smoke will have attracted the attention of every walking corpse for a ten mile radius, and the buffet table of dead crew and injured survivors will keep them there for at least the rest of the day. Now would be a very good time to take advantage of the distraction and slip on by. It'll be at least a week to get to the next city of any size, if the route he's picked out from the local maps he managed to scrounge up is any good - more if any of the bridges along the way are out, which is pretty possible - and a day's head start where he's probably not going to be attacked would make the going easier.

But on the other hand...it's not every day a supply bonanza literally drops out of the sky. Anyone with that kind of tech still working is definitely going to have something worth scavenging, even if it's only food and ammo. He's not gonna turn his nose up at that when it's barely even out of his way.

And fuck it, he's kind of curious about who around here still has the resources to be maintaining aircraft.

He doesn't abandon stealth entirely, but he does move more quickly than he has been as he slips through the forest toward the crash site. It's a bit of a scramble to get up the ridge, but the other side turns out to slope more gently, and once he's over the crest the plume of smoke rising from the downed craft is all the landmark he needs to make it the rest of the way quickly and easily. Slowing to a more cautious pace, his picks his way the last hundred yards to the still-smoking wreckage, which is-- huh. Less wrecked than he'd been expecting, actually. Score one for Terran tech.

There's a flicker of movement, and he instinctively tucks himself in against a tree for cover, half raising his rifle. One survivor that he can see; no dead yet. There's a gun in her hands, and there's blood on her clothes and on her face but she sure as hell doesn't move like she's injured. No, the way she moves spells out danger in more languages than he cares to name. His eyes narrow assessingly.

After a long moment he sets his back solidly against the tree he's using for cover and raises his fingers to his mouth to give a high whistle, his other hand still coiled ready around the stock of the rifle. It's a gamble, drawing her attention to him, but he's discovered over the last few months that startling armed survivors without announcing yourself first is a really good way of getting mistaken for one of the walking dead and shot at. He really doesn't feel like getting shot today. It'd be kind of a pain in the ass.

"One comin' in," he calls, rifle ready but dipped a little as he looks cautiously around the thick tree trunk. "Don't shoot."