"Heroes aren't always the ones who win. They're the ones who lose, sometimes. But they keep fighting, they keep coming back. They don't give up. That's what makes them heroes" -Cassandra Clare
Jake
My eyes snapped open and were quickly blinded by a light, not bright enough to actually hurt me, but bright enough to startle me right after having my eyes shut for hours. I instinctively squeezed them shut and took a second to process what was going on.
It's morning, I thought with a sigh. I rolled over to grab my glasses and check the clock, just like I did every morning. But that's not what happened. Instead I fell off the bed. What the heck? My nightstand was usually right there… wait…
I opened my eyes and stood up to see that I was in fact not in my bedroom. Now I was thoroughly confused. Where am I?
I could just barely make out an unfamiliar room lit up by a set of flickering overhead lights and a big window streaming in afternoon sun. There were three more empty but clearly used beds and a table across the room, with a halfway opened door in the corner leading into a hallway I couldn't see.
Suddenly I remembered something. Sburb.
The thought only confused me more. What happened to the game? Where was I? How did I fall asleep? How did I get here? Where were my glasses? What was going on?!
I looked down. I was wearing tan shorts, white sneakers and a pale yellow shirt with the Hope symbol on it. I don't even own this.
Suddenly I heard footsteps. I panicked and ducked behind the bed, because apparently in the moment I had decided that would actually be helpful in the event that there was some psychopathic killer after me. The silence of me holding my breath in fear was broken by the sound of the door creaking open, followed by a thankfully familiar voice.
"Jake?"
I recognized it instantly and stood up to see the blurred figure of Dirk leaning against the doorframe, in black jeans and a heart symbol t-shirt. The sight of him calmed me down a little and slowed the whirlwind of thoughts racing through my head. At least I wasn't the only one in this place, whatever it was.
"You're awake", he said.
"Yeah, I… where are we?" I asked, squinting as I looked around the room. He walked over to the table and handed me my glasses, which just made me feel silly for not having found them myself.
"I don't really know", he shrugged.
I put on my glasses and turned to the window to see if I could recognize anything now.
"You might not want to-" he started, but I had already looked down at the street below. I screamed and staggered back. Crowded in the streets were sickly-looking humanoid figures, covered in gashes and blood. I turned back to Dirk, my heart racing and my mind already filling to the brim with all sorts of horrifying explanations for what I had seen.
"Are those…" I trailed off. He nodded.
Zombies.
I sat down on the bed, struggling to take in the situation. He grabbed a piece of paper off the table and sat next to me.
"I woke up and it was just you and me. It was only a couple hours ago, but you weren't waking up for some reason so I decided to walk around the place and see what it was. I think it's some kind of research facility. There's a kitchen, a lab, and a couple rooms full of weapons, but I have no idea how we got here."
"W… what about the other beds?" I asked.
"Roxy and Jane I think. They're gone, but they left this", he said, handing me a note written in Roxy's barely legible loopy handwriting:
Guys-
So sorry me and Jane had to leave. It's been weeks, and we weren't sure if you were going to wake up at all. If you do, well, you've probably looked out the window already, so… yeah that happened. We're just as clueless about all of this as you guys probably are. This place has a bunch of stuff though. You know, food and weapons and stuff. We tried not to use too much so you guys would have it. I left a map and circled where me and Jane are planning on going. It should be an abandoned house. We'll stay there for a while since we don't really know where else to go. I hope we see you there!
-Roxy
Well at least they've got a plan, I thought. Dirk handed me the map Roxy wrote about. There were two places circled in bright pink pen. Judging from the buildings I had seen out the window, one was the place we were in and the other must have been where Jane and Roxy went. It looked like we were in some kind of small city, and the house where they were was just outside of it.
Dirk pointed out some buildings on the map. "I figured we would go to a couple convenience stores on our way there to rest up and get supplies, since there's a crapload of them out there." he explained. I nodded, still not quite sure if I believed what was going on or if I could handle it if it was. Fighting imps and villains in Sburb was one thing, but these were zombies. They used to be real people, and if I slipped up I could be in serious trouble. I wasn't ready to fight zombies; I would die for sure!
He stood up. "So, if you want I'll show you around a little", he offered. I nodded and stood up, still shaking from shock. Trying not to look out the window again in fear of passing out or screaming, I followed him out of the room and into the hallway where the lights were still flickering a concerning amount.
"Here's the kitchen", he said, leading me into a room with faded green and white tiles on the floor, a mini-fridge, and a stove. While Dirk looked around at the room, I opened the fridge. Inside were a couple bottles of water, some sandwiches, and three energy bars. "And that's why we can't stay here", Dirk said when he noticed me looking at the lack of food. He was right. It seemed like that was all there was here to eat. Roxy and Jane must have expected us to leave quickly.
Next we went into a lab. There were a few tables with shelves on top, covered in chemicals and tools I couldn't identify. I walked over to one table that seemed to have some kind of abandoned experiment set up.
"What's this?" I asked Dirk. He shrugged. I reached behind it to read some papers that might have had some information about what it was, but I instead knocked over a beaker that had a mysterious pink liquid in it. The glass shattered, and it spilled all over my hand. This didn't go unnoticed by Dirk, who quickly spun around and ran over to me, cursing loudly.
He looked at my hand, not seeming to know what to do about it any more than I did. "There's a sink over there", he pointed hurriedly at the other side of the room. I rushed over to the aforementioned sink to wash it off, but I was still freaking out. It wasn't burning my skin or anything, but there was no limit to what that could have been!
"Now would be a really good time to figure out what that was!" I said. Dirk picked up the papers I was trying to grab and quickly brought them over to the sink.
He studied the papers. "Yeah, I have no clue what the hell this is saying".
"Is it toxic?" I asked.
"I don't know, I'm not a chemist! On a scale of one to ten, how dead do you feel?" he asked.
I dried off my arm. "I feel fine", I said, unamused by his sarcasm. "We should probably bring that along with us, maybe someone else knows", I suggested. I was really worried that I was slowly dying, but I pushed away the feeling because I knew there was nothing else we could do now.
Dirk folded up the papers and stuffed them in his pocket before leading me out of the lab and into a room full of weapons. A lot of weapons. He pointed me towards a table with some on it. "I grabbed a sword, and I think these are the kind of pistols you use," he said, handing me them. I grabbed a belt with holsters from a rack on the wall, and put them inside. "Also, you might want something with a blade", he suggested. I walked over to the area with a bunch of different knives and unenthusiastically grabbed a dagger.
"I don't know how to use this just so you know", I told him.
"What's there to know? You just stab things with it", he said.
"Easy for you to say," I muttered. Dirk had practically been using his sword since the day he was born.
He pushed a practice dummy over to me. "Go ahead, try it," he said. I hesitated for a moment before thrusting the dagger into the dummy's chest.
"There, it's dead. See? Easy," he said. I shrugged and slid it into my belt just to humor him.
"How are you not nervous?" I asked him.
"What do you mean?"
"Well, there's a crowd of zombies outside, we're the only ones around, we don't know how we got here, and now we're going to go fight them. Even though I'm clearly yet reasonably freaking out, you're acting like this is nothing new!"
Dirk pushed up his shades. He tried to subtly tilt his head away from me, but I noticed. "I don't know; I mean I was awake an hour before you woke up. I've had time to… try and figure things out."
Until then I hadn't really thought about what he had done before I woke up. The thought of him freaking out like I had was strange to me. He always seemed to have everything together, even when it was obviously falling apart. That couldn't have been what he meant… could it?
He quickly changed the topic. "We should probably leave tomorrow morning. There's not really enough food for more than that, and I'm sick of this place already", he said.
"Sure" I agreed. Even though it meant having to go fight zombies and start this journey that was sure to be a nightmare, this building was quickly starting to become a bad memory. I wanted out of it as soon as possible.