Thread: big beer ad

I got this from h-bomb


link

Yea, my score is kinda around that range...mainly becouse the team I play on usually blocks doors, and camps. But hell, I dont need stats to tell me how good of a player I am. Fuq I beat Galaga.

Here are 3 vignettes of a larger story dealing with flaming zombies. With this submission, a question--how many submissions can we have? And can we edit submissions? If we can't submit multiple stories, can we take one down in favor for one that will be finished at a later point? Thanks. Also, the formatting allowed is pretty awful, so if you'd like a more aesthetically pleasing version, follow this link.


Flambies
Snuggled tightly in a cocoon of Thomas Lee sheets and blankets, Samantha happily watches a movie at midnight. The IKEA lights dimmed behind an IKEA shelf, she peers over blankets, her eyes fixed upon her wall-mounted 60" Sony Bravia. She is watching George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead.
Outside her window, down the alley and in the next yard, a man swings open a gate and slams it shut. Hearing this and terrified of the undead on the screen, Sam cuddles closer to a favorite Beanie Baby. A Beanie Baby that was fifty dollars, and the one she wanted most for Christmas one year. Current Value: six dollars or "priceless memory."
The man outside takes a moment to catch his breath and gather his thoughts. He stares at the ground. Through the cracks of the fence, and off the walls of the cobble-stone alleyway, orange light filters. He runs through the yard and up a flight of wooden stairs, spinning around to look over the fence. A wall of bodies, aflame, rush through the beginning of the alley way, arms flailing outward.
All this commotion has Sam up and out of her bed, staring out her window. She sees the man ripping up wooden steps and throwing them into her yard. Her condensed moisture words smash against the window, "Fucking lunatic." Assuming it is one of the city's ill-minded street denizens, she exits her room, the movie paused with the hero pressing a pea-shooter to his temple.


On her back deck Sam, oblivious to the fires several yards down to her left, yells across to the man, "What the hell do you think you're doing?!" Un-phased, the man readies a hose over the railing facing the yard, leaving it on full blast. He begins banging on the door, but these people are out of town. He smashes his hand through the door and unlocks it. Baffled, Sam turns to go inside to get her cell phone to call the police. As she does this, she immediately understands the nature of the man's behavior. Standing there, in the cold night air, with the encroaching fire there in front of her, she is unable to move. Something about the sight of fire, whether vast or small but especially of this magnitude, renders a human transfixed. In awe.

An inhuman screech comes from across the yard. Crashing through a window is the man, hands gripping the shoulders of a flaming person. He falls on his back and yells out. With built adrenaline, he heaves the person up and through the railings of the deck opposite of Samantha. He picks the hose up and douses himself, putting out patches of flame. Finally he notices her. He begins to say something when the wall of flame reaches the back of their apartments, and the man's gate busts open, several bodies falling through to the ground, which, covered in dry brush, catches immediately. In seconds, ten bodies pour through the opening and more climb over the fence. Scrambling to keep up with the larger bodies, children run with the pack, their flame flickering like a strobe light. The man directs the hose to them. Hearing the water sizzle, he realizes the amount of water he can utilize is fruitless and begins to run back into the apartment as bodies attempt to jump the gap in the stairs or climb the pillars of wood. This sets the deck on fire.

Sam, seeing several flaming bodies jump her own fence, runs back inside. She runs through the apartment, which seems enveloped in daylight. Reaching her front door, she swings it open and heads downstairs. Outside, Samantha witnesses the human condition.
On the street several friends are running for a car. The foremost friend stretches out his arm and unlocks his car ten feet away. This allows he and all but one of his friends to jump in the car. They leave him only to screech to a halt, faced by a horde of flaming zoo animals. A fiery elephant slaps the hood with a crimson trunk and the driver crashes through the windshield, his body sailing through the air and into the fire. The driver catches flame, and runs for his car toward his friends who are fighting each other to exit the vehicle.
"Over here," someone yells on Samantha's side of the street. The yeller, "Tom" perhaps, struggles with a handful of keys, searching for the right one. The left-behind friend, maybe "Fred," runs across the street. Eventually Tom gets it and they enter, not noticing her, and drive away.

The car takes a right turn past a CVS and 7-11 where the lights are off. They prematurely disappear from sight when the man from the back deck steps in front of her, saying, "FOLLOW ME, WE NEED TO GET IN THE BASEMENT!" as loud as he can. Samantha pees a little and passes out in the man's arms.

"Shit," he says.

Scuttling
Kristopher, the man dragging a limp blonde into a basement, recalls the past week with Dr. Fisher:

"So, you still haven't told me why we're here, Fisher. Or why I couldn't come the first time," Kristopher hisses through his pearly teeth.
"Ampulex compressa," Dr. Fisher responds.
"The wasp?"
"The wasp."
"What about it?"
"It evolved in tandem with roaches-- developed a toxin that it injects into their brains. Inducing the toxin makes the roaches follow a scent back to the wasp's nest, where it becomes an incubator for the wasp's eggs, who hatch and eventually utilize more roaches for procreation."
"Well, we're not going to find any wasps in a dark cave."
Dr. Fisher grins and cuts at the skeleton of a Fuji with a rusty knife.
"That's disgusting." His friend and more formally apprentice, Kristopher, sits on a damp mound of granite. Staring in concern for his mentor, not friend, he iterates his point, adding, "You're going to get lockjaw or something."
Dr. Fisher uses the force of a thumb opposite the rusty, though sharp blade, sliding it toward him. "You know nothing. Apples are good for you, clean out your teeth. And I'll be fine."
Kristopher continues to stare, annoyed. He sighs and looks up at the sky of rock. A drop of water drips. Drips right into his eye. Putting up with moments of eternity, Kristopher reminds himself this is worth it. Misery and his mind wander to gold watches and beautiful women. "You know, we should probably be doing work. You've been carving for thirty minutes."
"Twenty-six, and what's your hurry? I could cut this forever, given the right sharpness. You can always get smaller pieces, if you understand how. We need to understand how to find what we're looking for. And we'll find it when we find it."
Kristopher begins a retort, but the air is knocked out of him, as the granite stump gives way to his weight. Dr. Fisher rises cautiously. His understanding of caves shaken, just not as much as Kristopher's.
"What the fuck?!" Kristopher belches angrily from within a sunken rock formation. "That is not supposed to fucking happen. Is this one of your tests, one of your tricks... I am so sick--"
"Wait!" A scuttling noise echoes, and Dr. Fisher continues over discontented whispers from Kristopher, "Do you hear that?" Kristopher's hands push down on the outer rim of his accidental rock fox-hole, and he pauses.
"Yeah. I do. What is it?" he whispers, calmly excited.
"It's what we're looking for."
Dr. Fisher turns his helmet-light to full and Kristopher is blinded. He returns the favor, but Fisher is already creeping down to a nearby pool. "In there," he says, pointing through a hole in the wall.
"What about in there?"
"You're climbing in there."
Normally one for confrontation, Kristopher trades his grief for anticipated glory and fortune. He begins to move himself forward in the crawlspace to the pool. He promptly sticks himself the wrong way, and can't move forward.
"I'm stuck!" he yelps. Frantically shifting his weight, he continues, "I think I can get out, but I can't go forward anymore"
"Wait! What can you see?"
Kristopher stops panicking and remembers the new car he needs. "Just a wall." He turns his head. The light moves with him, panning the wall. Outside of the hole, Dr. Fisher paces. Bites his nails.
"Anything yet?" Fisher ponders aloud. Before Kristopher responds, Fisher gets his answer. Light beams outward from the hole, enveloping Kristopher and startling Fisher. He shields his eyes and asks Kristopher if he can see it.
"Yes," he breathes, "it's beautiful."

Answers
Samantha awakens, her face smushed against cold slate. She pushes herself up and rubs her eyes. Her stranger-savior rocks back and forth, hands on his knees. She looks behind him, where the ancient iron doors are sealed.

"You can't begin to imagine the drugs they pumped into these things. Hunger amplification, high concentrations of melatonin, I don't know what they were trying to accomplish," Kristopher shakes words from his head. "No, I didn't think this would happen."
Samantha contorts her face, puzzled. "Isn't that the stuff in your skin?"
"No," he responds. "Melatonin is in your brain. Regulates your rhythm, uh," he pauses-- straining his eyes in the darkness of the basement. He continues, "Sleep patterns, dreaming, belief in the supernatural even. Might be linked to the God gene, I don't know. Melatonin is triggered at night, in our brains. I remember when I was a kid, I got frightened by the dancing stuffed animals on the shelf next to my bed-- kids have a hard time discerning between reality at night because of melatonin and the developmental level of their brain."

Samantha pouts, remembering the flickering children. She thinks of something--How can insects have melatonin?-- to ask him to keep him talking. She is comforted by his knowledge.

Kristopher begins again, knowing that telling her something about how it started will release him of the burden. The longer winded he is about how it happened, the longer he can keep from thinking how it is happening. "Nearly all life has it, regulates the circadian rhythm, you know, the physiological cycle of day and night, night and day. They first discovered melatonin in insects back in the seventies--in the compound eyes of crickets. And when inducing more than was 'natural,'" he says, using facetious air-quotes with his fingers, "their night activity increased substantially." He chuckles, "Eventually eliminating day-time activity. Not the case, here, though. Not completely."

Samantha brews. At this point, Kristopher has run out of things to say to her. He doesn't feel he can communicate on her level, which, for him, is much lower than he is willing to venture. Able only to see dim reflections off his eyes and protruding cliff-face of a nose, she wonders aloud, "Why in their eyes? Is that the only way we can tell whether it is day or night? Can't we feel the sunlight or lack thereof on our skin?"

At this, Kristopher perks up, remembering the gruesomely bloody candle-wax face of a body, dripping gaps in the face, six inches from his own face. "They don't have eyes, he says."
They launch into a verbal foray.
"You said you found these in a cave, right?"
"Right."
"Was there any light down there?"
"No, we had these heavy fucking helmets mounted with lights. You know, like Hollywood."
"You were in California," she smiles.
"Yeah, not twenty miles from the edge of the wild-fires."
The conversation dies with Samantha's last, sleepy thought, "Will they ever burn out?"
Kristopher begins to fall asleep as fire sweeps through the city, conforming the minds of all willing beings. His last thought is of the time he poured into getting this far in his career. All the time he wasted to get more money, to lay claim to new discoveries. Discoveries that belong, now, to the whole of Earth. All humanity- consumers consumed. With Samantha asleep, he removes a translucent box from the inside of his coat. Within the box, a white mantis-like creature is stretched by hexagonal distortions on the outside. Kristopher shakes his head as the inside of the box ignites and extinguishes several times.

I'd say its alright, there are errors in them, but its an alright story.

There can only be one submission but you can still add to the story if you want to.

Originally Posted by Leroy

There can only be one submission but you can still add to the story if you want to.

http://l4dforums.com/247-question-about-contest.html

To the best of my knowledge, you can. Please correct me if I'm wrong... it might save me some writing.

Yeah you can enter more than one but only one can be judged. Or out of the whole writing, of how interesting and how they like it...something like that.

Thanks, DT. Having it on my blog doesn't discount it, does it?