If there were ever a time to say a situation had gone to complete shit, now was it. Heat overtook the air, burning hotter than any desert summer, as flames burst from the destroyed bus and ravenously burned the oxygen right out of the surrounding area. Shards of concrete and metal rained over the road like a mercifully short hailstorm, peppering everything around it with debris. A few mercifully small pieces of wall bounced off of Julian, drawing him out of his tight huddle in the truck just in time for him to steady himself when it started moving. His eyes were drawn immediately to the ruins of the garage, their entire livelihood built up over all these years, gone in a few utterly chaotic moments. More than that, the people inside who had been lost returned to mind, and for a few seconds, he felt the emptiness of loss wash over him. Close friends he'd known and worked with for ages, gone forever.<br/><br/>While Miguel drove them away, presumably to safety, Julian turned over and landed on his back in the truck bed, taking in a deep breath. In that time, nothing even seemed real. Maybe this was all just some big, fucked up nightmare caused by too many late night horror marathons and bad food. Yeah, he'd just wake up and everything would be fine. The shop wouldn't be gone, his friends and coworkers wouldn't be dead, and everything would be right back to-<br/><br/>He was torn out of the delusions violently, as Jason thudded right into his chest after a particularly hard turn. With a grunt and a reactionary flail, it took him a few moments to process what had just happened. "The hell?" He grunted out, sitting up more steadily after the forced snap back to reality. He looked over the others who now accompanied him, obviously a bit confused after those minutes of being completely out of it. Now that he was with them again, he gulped nervously and moved his legs once the truck came to another stop, and this time, weapons were being tossed over to them.<br/><br/>That proved to be one hell of a motivator. Julian stood up, ready to catch whatever was tossed his way, until he heard glass cracking uncomfortably close by. His head shot down to the window of Amanda's seat, where one of the not-people was using its own skull as a battering ram. As it drew back, Julian reached for his belt, desperately feeling around for something thick and weighty enough to use to aid the creature in its apparent goal of caving in its head.<br/><br/>After some seconds of fiddling, he nabbed a wrench from somewhere on his lower back, turning the thing over so that the adjustable part of its grip faced away from the thing, leaving the solid block of metal that made up most of its body for use as a club. He steadied his feet and gripped the top of the cab with his free hand, and after fighting with the revulsion that just looking at the things gave him, he swung down. The crack of metal against an already damaged, rotting head stuck out above even their cacophonous grunts and groans, and Julian felt his stomach doing backflips as he withdrew his arm.<br/><br/>The undead stopped moving, slumped against Amanda's window. Where the indent in its head had been, a deep pit now was, the forehead and upper left eye socket crushed under the sudden strike. The whole upper front of its cranium was falling apart, and from the wound leaked a thick slurry of black, decomposed blood and a mashed section of its frontal lobe. Its head smacked against the glass one last time as Julian delivered a second blow to the top of its skull, leaving a smear of an uncomfortably dark brown as it lost its footing and fell to the street.<br/><br/>"Fuck, fuck fuck fuck," Julian rapidly cursed, stepping away from the edge of the truck bed. He examined the wrench, and as the fluid from the thing's popped head started to leak down towards his hands, he dropped it instinctively. He did<span style="font-style: italic">not</span>want to touch whatever the fuck flowed through these things' veins. Finally, he turned and slammed a fist down onto the top of the cab, shouting through the still-open back window. "Get us the fuck out of here, man!"