Landing on her feet in the overgrown garden, Vera glanced up at the kaleidoscope of colours pervading the sky: scarlet, tangerine, vibrant fuschia and deep violet. It was beautiful, so beautiful in fact that she almost forgot that the world she lived in now was the polar opposite of beautiful. Listening out for any primitive calls, any clicks or rustling, any sound at all, she made her move, tossing her backpack over onto the asphalt and hopping the battered fence.
Cars lay abandoned in driveways, rusting beneath a year's worth of rain, hail and shine. No one had enough time to escape, and those that tried ended up as Groaners anyway, the exit highway bumper to bumper with people - an easy target. A car could come in handy, but by now, the batteries were long dead. Reaching into her bag, Vera picked out the marker and the crumpled city map she'd found in an old geography textbook and tried to pinpoint her location. Biting down on the cap and holding it between her teeth, she marked an 'X' on 61 Springer Street, Hestia. Lightly dragging a sharpened nail across the various pathways on the map, she placed another 'X' on a wholesale depot up north-east - guaranteed to be stocked with some food.
Now that she had a destination, all she needed to do was get there.
Before slinging the bag over her shoulder, she took the hammer out, opting for a more powerful weapon over the tiny blade in her pocket. Memorising the map to the best of her ability, she traced her steps, trekking cautiously through the remains of the city she once knew. Everything was different: whether ravaged by fire, flood or other means of destruction, nothing was the same. The buildings were akin to carcasses, their foundations like brittle skeletons, barely holding together. If this was the state of her city, imagine the rest of the world.
...
Vera felt something was off. In the midst of this anarchical warzone, she hadn't seen a single soul, dead nor living. It was much too quiet. Looking around her, she saw nothing. Nothing to her left, nothing to her right, nothing above, nothing - a sudden grip on her calf from beneath a parked car startled her out of her stupour, and she battled with decaying hands to free her leg. Its jaws pulled forward from its skull, almost hanging, and it slobbered hungrily over her jeans, trying to suckle into the tender flesh of her achilles tendon. Grunting, she kicked inward into the Crawler's head with the heel of her boot, over and over again until its grip loosened enough for her to regain her center of gravity and swing down on it with the claw side of her hammer, cracking through softened cranium and into undead brain. She sighed, elbowing the window of the automobile to smash the glass and taking a cloth from the dashboard, cleaning the brain matter off of her trusty weapon.
The euphoric adrenaline high Vera had just been experiencing faded, and she began to shake, trying to control her breathing as she leant on the driver's side door. Her first kill. One of many to come.
'I needed to do that. That was not a person anymore.'
Subconsciously reiterating this to herself, her heart rate slowed, and she continued navigating towards the depot. Holding her now-aching elbow, she scolded herself for being so rash and careless, muttering a "Fucking idiot" as she walked.
...
It was around noon, signified solely by the sun, arched atop the domed sky like a crown, bathing her path in warm light. Deceptive. That gave her a deadline: Five and a half hours tops until dusk was upon her again. Making it to the 'X' before dark was the goal, and, according to her map, she was halfway there - that was what she knew.
What she didn't know, however, was another story.
- thanks for reading! <3
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Red Dawn
Horrora zombie novella. the outbreak is spreading across the world, turning people into flesh-gnawing monsters. nobody knows why, nobody knows how, hell, nobody is even alive! Vera Russett, better known by her alias: Gh0ul, has been living barricaded in...