A simple supply hunt for a source of water in the middle of Atlanta turns sour quickly for Erin as she come fist to face with a fuming, handless Merle Dixon.
Alone in the middle of the apocalypse with only a racist guy who doesn't know the differen...
"Being alone means you have fewer problems." - Whitney Houston
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Collecting herself up both mentally and physically, Erin slid the knife back into her jacket. The blade clinked against the others nestled in the same pocket. The stray's corpse had already begun to stink up the room so she wanted nothing more than to get out as soon as possible and away from the smell offending her nostrils.
However, there were still places she hadn't rummaged through yet, so leaving would have to wait. She'd just have to resign to holding her breath - it burned her throat just breathing in, so she wanted to refrain from doing so.
With the toe of her boot and the aid of her bat, she pushed the body out of the way of the door, hearing it squelch as the rotting flesh slumped against the floor. The doorway appeared to lead to a stairwell, blocked off by a pile of battered cardboard boxes that seemed to have been pushed against the door as some sort of blockade.
The weird thing was... she was sure they hadn't been there the last time she'd come through that door.
It seemed someone - or something with some level of consciousness or intelligence - had been there in the last week or so. It was unlikely it had been a stray, all they knew was walking and groaning, so that meant that a human had passed through here and evidently met some resistance from the strays roaming the building.
One of the boxes emblazoned a very clear, very bloody handprint on the side of it, immediately making Erin's mind jump to the worst conclusion; had the stray she'd just beheaded only recently been turned? To her, the sense of guilt that caused was almost the same as if she'd straight up shot a person... She only killed the dead, never the living...
Casting her uncertainties aside for a moment to focus on the task at hand, she peered up the stairwell, seeing that it went all the way to the top floor in a spiralling motion and was reasonably empty from what she could see. Her bat raised in preparation for anything that might try to jump her, she picked her way through the fallen boxes, trying her best to disturb the fewest she possibly could in case any more strays were lurking nearby.
Once she was clear of any tripping hazards, she scaled the stairs two at a time, keeping her back to the outer hand rail to give her the best chance of fighting back if she was caught by surprise. Her heart was beating steady and she kept her breathing shallow, knowing how attuned the strays' sense of hearing was to any sounds that indicated life and not wanting to take on more than three at any one time, especially in a cramped stairwell.
The only sound in the air was the slight, unavoidable scuffing of the soles of her boots against the edge of each step as she hastily made her way to the next floor up. Anyone else would have decided to get out of the place after the encounter with the first stray but Erin was fully aware that she had nowhere near enough supplies to keep her alive in the woods at the north edge of the city and, besides, she had enough weapons with her in the truck and across her back to arm a platoon - if the worst came to the absolute worst, there was plenty of ammo in the guns for her to put a bullet through her own skull.
It sounded drastic, but she didn't want to become one of them. No one did. If she was ever bitten by a stray, it would be her bullet to end it, not the virus. She didn't exactly know how the infection worked, but she figured a bullet to the brain would be sufficient.
As she reached the upper floor marked 'Level 4', she halted for a few seconds, listening out intently for any signs of life or whatever it was the strays had. Satisfied with the resounding silence that hit her ears, she kicked the door gently with her foot, keeping her bat raised above her shoulder and only lowering it slightly when she was met with another empty office, this one looking even more wrecked than the last one. She and Todd hadn't ventured any higher in the building so this ransacking was someone else's handiwork, someone with a lot less respect for the belongings of presumably dead people.
She searched the first few desks nearest the door, finding some tea bags in one draw and a tatty magazine with some half-finished crosswords and packing them into her rucksack. Perhaps the teabags could add a bit of flavour to the river water she'd been drinking for the past few months; she didn't trust the tap water after there were rumours it was infected with the virus - it probably wasn't, but she wasn't going to take that chance. A few reusable, polystyrene cups would also come in handy rather than using her hands so she dropped them in her bag too.
Thankfully, she also found some 'female items', as Todd always put it, in one of the desks and put as many as she could possibly take in the front pocket of the backpack for when that time came around again. She was running low on decent clothes as it was and she figured walking around smelling like blood was a bad plan with strays around every corner.
Speaking of blood, as she made her way through the office she began to notice handprints similar to the one downstairs in random places; the coffee machine, the doorframe to the bathroom, a few of the desktops and draw handles. The droplets of blood on the carpet had originally seemed to be from a rogue stray or something along those lines but now that she looked closer, whatever was bleeding seemed to have been stemmed in some way by a tourniquet or something similar. She highly doubted strays knew how to tie tourniquets...
Investigating further, she found the trail led towards the stairwell at the other end of the building where yet another print was bright against the white paint on the door. Strange... it was almost as if that blood looked fresh...
In her sudden anxiety, her heart rate had sped up as her mind ran away with itself, questioning everything as it began to put two and two together - was there another human here?
Whatever it was, it must have only passed through in the past day or so and something in the back of her mind told her that no strays had been up here, otherwise the blood would have been smudged or even wiped away completely by their clawing hands.
She headed quickly to the other stairwell, realising that whoever it was - if they were alive - appeared to have been bleeding out at a steady rate and there was no guarantee that someone who could tie a tourniquet could treat a wound properly. They could be suffering just beyond the door for all she knew and she was adamant not to lose another human... not when they were so nearby...
Forgetting the entire stealth and silence thing for a few seconds, she pushed through the door, avoiding getting blood on her own hand. That would only make her escape harder if she stank of human blood. She peered around the stairwell cautiously and nervously, her eyes frantically searching for someone who was wounded but finding no sign of anyone.
Well, no one she could see...
Not surprisingly, she should have been the one watching her own back as, before she could even react, she was thumped in the side of the head by a solid, bloody fist, sending her crashing to the floor and deep into the darkness of unconsciousness...
