Experiment Paul AU 2.0

Emma (ft. The Ghost of Hidgens Past)

The sky in Hatchetfield was an unnatural electric blue, and the wind was too cold for this late into summer. Emma Perkins sat alone on the roof of an abandoned apartment, watching the sky get darker. She knew she would have to get moving eventually, as hordes of those damned musical zombie-alien shitheads seemed to grow larger and unfortunately more musical during the night. She sighed. It's now or never, she thought to herself, reluctantly getting up. If I don't move now, there's a good chance I'll fucking die.

Emma opened the door, walking down the stairs. The boards were rotten and stained blue. She didn't remember killing an Infected on these stairs, but she had a gut feeling she most likely had. She was the only survivor, after all.

As she continued her descent down the creaky and torn up stairs, she heard a click. A hologram of Hatchetfield's resident biologist, Doctor Henry Hidgens, came into focus next to her. He already seemed annoyed.

"What do you want now, Hidgens?" Emma said with a sigh. She liked the biologist better when he wasn't permanently attached to her head.

"I just thought I'd come by- don't roll your eyes at me, Emma- to tell you the elevator works better than stairs. Use the elevator, you don't know what's on these stairs."

"I don't know what's in the elevator, either!" She retorted, "The second the door opens one of those blue bastards could jump out and tear off my leg! And if I become a musical alien, you'll be stuck in my musical alien head forever, fucker!"

Hidgens was silent for a few. On the rare occasion Hidgens wasn't talking, she could hear the mechanical hum that came from her hologram projection implant (patent pending). "Fair argument. Just don't become a musical alien, I don't want to be in your musical alien head."

Emma smiled a little. Her head's resident hologram, as intolerable as he was, sometimes cracked jokes that made him a little less intolerable. Sometimes his stupid jokes reminded her that survival was still a plausible option, but if she didn't survive Hologram Hidgens would find a way to kill her again.

She opened the front door, stepping quickly around a bright blue bloodstain right outside of the building. "Damn," she muttered, "Are these things finally killing themselves now?"

Hidgens hovered around the bloodstain, investigating it. "Interesting," he finally said after 5 minutes of probably useless examination, "This bloodstain is new. You didn't kill it, which leads us to your hypothesis- they're killing themselves. That's somehow plausible, but we must consider-"

"Consider what?" The voice didn't belong to either of them. It was cheery and sing-song, as if being serious was something the speaker did not understand and they just wanted to sing.

Emma slowly turned around. Hidgens just stayed in place. Now standing in front of her was a man, blue eyes, an impossibly wide smile, with a torn shirt and tie covered in the Infected's signature blue blood. For a split second Emma considered the possibility of him being a survivor, but quickly dismissed it. He was singing now, after all.

"Hidgens? We need to fucking run."