Zombies, Run! Mission Nine: Part One
New chapter! Huzzah! (This takes into account some re-writes done of the last chapter, so, yeah.)
Master post.
Mission Eight: Part One
Mission Eight: Part Two
Chapter: Mission Nine - A Voice in the Dark: Part One
Summary: Wounded, alone, and in the dark, Five knows she's not having the best day of it. She has to get home before she's declared lost and locked out and she seriously doubts there's a spare key under the doormat.
Rating: PG-13.
Warnings: None.
Spoilers: Mission eight & nine.
Mission Nine
A Voice In The Dark: Part One
Five awoke with a sudden shiver, cold and blind and frightened. It took her five pulse-pounding seconds to work out where she was, and what had awoken her.
She forced herself to stay still for ten seconds, counting down in her head. It gave the initial adrenaline some time to come down from jolting high to nervous purr.
Five sat up carefully, mindful of her injuries, and peered very cautiously through the slats of the wooden door behind which she was sequestered. It was nothing more than a cupboard, a built-in closet in the wall of the room, but it was additional security she knew from bitter experience and countless lectures was necessary.
The room looked empty, but Five remembered the low, scratching noises and the guttural moan that had awakened her, and stayed still, breathing lightly, for at least a minute. The window in the room beyond showed pitch black skies with a light speckling of stars; it was unlocked, though shut. That was her way out if things got as nasty as she suspected they would.
Her escape plans warped slightly, becoming the memories from only hours previously: escaping the car park and heading home, Five had found that the shots being fired from the Canton morons was attracting more attention than she had thought. There was a whole swarm heading in from the suburbs, at least a hundred, and there was no way she was ever going to get through that.
By that point she was back in the suburbs, deathly aware of what could be waiting ahead of her, and knowing with a leaden certainty that she would never be able to outrun them. Her breathing was beginning to sound desperately laboured, muscles sullen and leadlike, and there was a slight dizziness creeping in around the edges of her thoughts. Her fingers and toes were cold despite the exertion of exercise.
Damn, she thought, scared and angry, glancing down at her bicep. Her arm looked like it was wearing a red sleeve, uniform shiny. Her face felt crusty from congealed blood. This was… bad. Really bad.
Five assessed her options with brutal speed, moving at a slow-steady five miles an hour. She had maybe five minutes before even her change of direction wouldn’t keep her away from the swarm. A rattle of machine-gun fire broke out distantly behind her, stark in the still air, as if to hammer the point home.
There was a rule amongst the survivors, amongst those who had made it to Townships and safe havens. It was something everyone knew, something Sam and Eugene and all the guys in the radio tower echoed with endless patience: Don’t be out after dark. Don’t be out after dark. The advice given to those caught out was to hole up, somewhere high and above a bottleneck, to keep silent and hidden and wait it out. And don’t sleep; zoms were more active at night, and they often couldn’t be seen until they were right up close, and by then it was too late. Too many people had been lost to unexpected swarms.
Five was beginning to entertain the idea that she didn’t have a lot of choice. She abruptly changed her running gait, pushing her last few watts into her legs and picking up to a punishing seven miles an hour, watching and assessing. She only had minutes.
Moving quickly and angling her direction to miss the head of the swarm, Five knew that it was time to hole up and defend, or die. She didn’t have an awful lot of plans that involved dying.
She knew that most of the houses would be impossible to defend, missing doors and hidey holes full of waiting crawlers. She needed a building with a locked front door, closed windows, and some sort of access to the next floor. Five reckoned she probably wasn’t going to get it.
There was a long, drawn-out moan from the road ahead, just around the bend of the next curve. Five slammed left, hard, barrelling through the open front door of some abandoned house and shutting the door as quickly, and as quietly, as she could.
Fresh adrenaline sang along her nerves, sharpening her wits one last time with that familiar chemical push. Five paused just long enough to check the state of the road through the door’s peep-hole - the first few zombies had rounded the corner and were staggering, lurching and crawling toward the industrial complex - before she spun to face the hallway. A second later, her right hand had jerked the axe from its tether on her back, coming free in a smooth arc. Five hefted it for a moment, utterly silent and watchful.
Dangerous space, dangerous space, her brain chanted. She let her eyes focus naturally, relying on her peripherals to spot moving shadows. Nothing so far.
She placed one foot in front of the other with painful slowness, moving steadily down the hallway. It was identical to every other house she had been in since she had started raising the suburb for supplies. She knew the layout.
The kitchen was square, well-equipped, in total disarray and empty. There was a blender lying smashed on the floor, marred by red stains. The cupboard doors were all open and empty.
A quick glance confirmed what she had suspected - the back door connected to the kitchen was open. She crept across the lino and closed it silently, turning the key in the lock by increments until the tumblers dropped with the faintest click. Five paused again, ears alert: nothing. The zoms must be on the main roads.
She moved back into the hallway and glanced briefly into the living room, quickly assessing: the windows were all intact bar one. The jagged edges glinted in the afternoon sun.
Shit, thought Five, quickly moving back into the hallway and closing the living room door. The place was effectively indefensible. Still, she didn’t have a lot of choice. The moans from the main road were growing louder and more numerous, serving as a stark reminder.
She moved quickly up the carpeted stairs, pausing at the top to listen again. So far, silence.
It took her about three minutes to make sure the house was clear, axe always at the ready. The place had three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs, one of which with a built-in closet in the wall. There was stuff scattered around as though someone had left in a hurry.
She didn’t think about it much; the tiredness had begun to paralyse her fingers, arms stiff, and her core temperature was dropping sharply. Blood loss fatigue, she thought resignedly; she’d known it had been coming, and she knew now what it meant.
Five slipped into the main bedroom, closing the door behind her. The room had a double bed, unmade, two bedside tables and a vanity table with a large mirror. There was a bookcase lying in pieces on the floor.
She almost tripped over an upended toolbox next to the bed, so she pushed it up against the door, figuring it would do as early warning. She drank the half-empty bottle of water next to the bed greedily, ignoring the stale taste, and sat on the chair in front of the vanity table. She swung her pack from her shoulders, undoing the side zip and rummaging about inside. The pack of bandages were easy to locate.
Five used her teeth to rip into the plastic packaging, pulling out several sterile pads, micropore tape and four rolls of linen. She moved with brisk efficiency, using the water from a bottle in her pack to soak a wad of tissues from the table and pressing it against her arm. The wound exploded in a brief firework of pain, seeming to jolt the whole of her body. She didn’t let her mind drift; she taped a pad over the wound on her arm without giving herself time to think about the fierce, hot, dull ache. The idea of it getting infected was… unthinkable.
She wrapped the thin linen bandage around her arm, starting from her shoulder and stopping just above her elbow, just as her mother had taught her when she was a kid. The bandages looped over each other in a neat V pattern, holding the pad firmly against her arm, and she tucked the last of the linen under itself to secure it.
Five finally risked looking into the mirror.
Jesus, was her first spontaneous thought, grim and surprised. There was blood coating almost the entire right half of her face, drawing a broad red swathe down her neck and under her runner’s shirt. It was crackly and flaking, though the wound itself was still oozing.
She used the same rough cleaning technique as she had on her arm, using the pain to feel the extent of the damage. It was a deep, quick graze three inches along her side of her head; Five was grateful for her short hair, turning her head with a wince to examine the damage to her reflection. She didn’t dare touch it.
She taped a pad to that wound, too, using liberal amounts of the micropore. She unrolled a second roll of bandages, holding it at the middle and winding it around her forehead, keeping the bandage straight and trapping the pad firmly against her skull. She had a lot of spare material after three or four revolutions around her head, so she tied the long ends in a knot against the back of her skull and used her hunting knife to tear off the extra material. She had a good few feet left, so she packed them back into her her rucksack, standing up.
Whoa. Dizzy.
She moved to examine the closet. It had a few clothes in it; a couple of jackets, a coat, some shirts. Five tossed the jackets and coat to the floor of the closet, curling up on them before covering herself with a dressing gown and some shirts. The wooden-slat doors were easy to close from the inside. She was out within minutes.
And now here she was, sitting in the still darkness, listening intently as her heart’s hammering pace slowly started to slow.
There was a sudden scratching at the door and a low groan. Five jerked involuntarily, mouth dry. Shit, she thought. There's something trying to get in.
On to part two.