She's exiting Novaya Petrovka when she sees it. It startles her, shuffling out of the yard of the house she has just walked past, making the strange angry noises the infected do when they spot someone. She points her pistol at its head and fires. Her aim is true, but the sight of the corpse crumbling to the floor does not bring the usual satisfaction. That was it. The last of her silenced pistol's bullets.
She has plenty of bullets for her rifle, but the suppressor on that weapon is a piece of junk that Graves assembled with some duct tape and a plastic bottle the day before he died. She remembers his words when he gave it to her. "Ya got one quiet shot with that. Maybe two. Make it count."
She intends to heed his warning, but she is worried. Two shots are so easily spent. She needs to either find more bullets for her pistol, or another suppressed weapon. Whichever one it is, she needs to find it soon.
She sits with her back to the fence as she considers her options. She could head back south, and check the airfield again. She was there just yesterday looking for ammunition but not long after she got there she heard footsteps running right past her while she was looking in one of the military tents. She crouched and froze, heart beating in her chest madly, hoping that whoever it was would run past and not look in her tent. Luck was on her side that day, and they didn't. As soon as they were far enough, she quietly crept out and ran out the airfield. Safe, but empty-handed.
She sighs and tries to think about what Graves would have done if he was still there. Graves would have gone back to the airfield, and maybe continued towards Myshkino if he didn't find anything. But she's not him, and without him she doesn't feel safe in military bases. They tend to attract dangerous people. And she wants to stay north, because as soon as she has enough ammo and food, she's heading back to her place near the mountains, and she'll stay there until the baby's born.
The other option is to keep heading east towards Severograd and check the police station there. With luck she'll find another pistol with a silencer, one that takes more common bullets than the one she currently has. And it's almost on the way home.
Never mind what Graves would do, Severograd it is.
She stands up again wearily. She's hungry, and she's tired. She's managed to find enough food the last couple of days, but just barely. The baby stirs and kicks in her womb as if to give her courage, and she lays a hand on her belly. "Don't worry, we'll make it, you and I", she whispers, and she sets off on the road again.
It's a long walk to Severograd. And when she gets there, she finds nothing of use in the police station. She spends the night in a house on the outskirts of the city. After the long walk she's too exhausted to gather wood for a fire, so she wraps herself in a jacket she found in one of the rooms and sleeps restless dreams.
She dreams she's back with Cyrus by the well, at the house near Vyshnoye where she met him for the last time, after she told him she was leaving him. She dreams of him pointing the gun at his head, as he did that day. Except that this time Grave's voice doesn't come threatening through the radio to stop him in his tracks. Instead Cyrus looks at her and pulls the trigger despite her pleas. She wakes up sobbing.
She tries to tell herself it was just a dream, but the radio has been silent for so long now that she knows the father of her baby is almost certainly dead. He probably pulled that trigger that day the moment Graves and her were out of earshot.
It's hard not to blame herself, but she can't think about that. Not now. She tries to go back to sleep but it's in the dark hours before dawn that all the dead people she tries so hard to forget about rise and call for her attention. Cyrus, but also Vito, the friend she executed with a bullet between his eyes. And of course, there's Graves. Graves who got sick from drinking bad water and died on the road two days ago.
She definitely can't think about Graves.
She welcomes dawn with relief, because it means she can set out on the road again. It's easier to forget when she's moving.
She decides to keep walking east, towards a city named Novodmitrovsk according to the roadsigns. She's not familiar with it and she doesn't know what she will find there, but what else can she do? The airfied is too far away now to be an option. She can only keep walking and hope for the best.
She walks and walks and doesn't meet a soul. It's a good thing, she tells herself. Safer.
Novo is a big city. Its police station has already been emptied of anything useful, and she has to fire her rifle to kill the infected blocking her way out. Grave's suppressor is now a ruined mangled mess of plastic.
"One or two quiet shots.", he'd said. Guess it was just one.
She rips it off the rifle and reloads. Without a suppressor, she must only use the rifle as a last resort while she's in the city, but better be ready, just in case.
She keeps walking, past the boundaries of the city. She doesn't even know where she's headed now, but one foot in front of the other is the only thing she can think to do. She made herself and her baby a promise to keep fighting a while back, so she'll keep walking, until she finds what she needs. After a while, she smells the sea. She's always loved that smell, so fresh and free. Now it just smells like sickness and death. Graves didn't like the sea. She wishes he'd died in the mountains, where he belonged, instead of on the southern coast, near that sea he couldn't stand.
She's tired by the time she arrives to a harbour city on the coast. She's never been there and so she carefully scopes out the place. There is a big church in the center of town in the middle of a large square. She can just make out the police station on the other side. The other side of the square, which is full of infected.
She watches them, hesitant, thinking of what happened at Myshkino a couple of weeks ago. She'd fired a couple of loud shots at an infected on the hill for practice and suddenly three or four infected she wasn't even aware were there had seemed to come out from nowhere and rush her. Graves had shot them and then proceeded to lecture her about the danger of shooting loud weapons in infected areas for the next ten minutes.
His words echo in her mind as she considers what to do. "What's the point of going in an infected area, where all the infected just run after you? And then you'll panic, and then you'll get hit. And what if you die?"
"What would you have me do?" she yells back at him silently, furiously wiping away the sudden sting in her eyes. "You're the one who fucking died."
She takes a side street to avoid the square, and creeps silently behind the houses. There's a couple of infected there as well, but she takes it slowly and carefully, and gets by undetected.
She turns the corner, and the police station is in front of her. With three infected right in front of the door. She starts to back away slowly, but it's too late, one of them has already spotted her. His snarling attracts the other two's attention and suddenly she's running for her life. She makes for the field behind the side street, her closest escape route out of the city. She's so focused on getting out of there that that she doesn't notice the infected by the porch that she's running past and suddenly it's in front of her before she has time to avoid it. His teeth sink into her left arm and she screams.
She doesn't even think, she points her rifle, and shoots him straight in the head. He instantly crumbles into a heap on the ground. Her shot echoes ominously through the city, very loud, too loud, and she starts running again, but now there's no longer three infected after her, there's six.
She keeps running. She's going to be ok. She's not going to panic. She's going to take them out one at a time, methodically. She runs while she reloads, turns back, shoots. One down. Five more to go. Only there's not five now, there's eight.
Run, reload, turn, shoot. Another one down.
She's reached the field, she's out of the city now, running for the treeline 500 meters away, if she can make it there she knows she can lose them.
Run, reload, turn, shoot.
There's still more of them now though, not less. With every one she shoots, three more appear. The city is purging itself of its moaning and snarling underbelly, a rabid horde answering the call of her rifle. And they're gaining ground.
Run, reload, turn, shoot.
Outrunning infected never used to be a problem. But she's heavily pregnant now and she can't run as fast as she used to. Her belly jars painfully every time her foot touches the ground.
Run, reload, turn, shoot.
Her arm throbs. She keeps going, she just needs to make it to that treeline.
Run, reload, turn, shoot.
One more down, another catches up to her. She stumbles, reloads and shoots it. But by now the next ones are almost on her.
Run, reload, turn, shoot.
Her stomach sinks with the icy realisation that this might finally be the end.
Run. Reload. Turn. Shoot.
The air is full of their inhumane and wordless wail, and with each breath she takes her burning lungs fill with a putrid stench of death.
Run.
Trees so close but so far.
Reload.
She doesn't want to die that way.
Turn.