I do not own VALVe or any of its affiliates. Consider this a disclaimer to the characters/themes/what have you presented in this story.
Author's note: This is a sort of short-story continuation of Minus Human, but it's not necessarily a sequel. Thanks to JillDragon for making me put this back up.
Mountain Lodge Mayhem
by Kimmae
1
When they were in the city, it was easy; the streets were scattered with abandoned cars, some with their previous owners still seated behind the wheel, but even with those obstacles in the way it still wasn't hard to see an infected charging down the road. They could see zombies in buildings, on top of buildings, in back alleys, under bridges, and in the sewers, where it was blacker than the bowels of Hell. Even in the campgrounds, where they were flanked by trees on either side for miles around, it was easier to watch each others' hides and spot the fuckers coming from yards off.
Now it was hard. They walked down some decrepit highway—number 7 or something, trivially named Kent Cornwall Road—and on either side of them tall bushes and trees stretched and on, each greenery no shorter than six feet. They could hear a river flowing just on the other side of the bush, and towering above that was the mountain, silhouetted black against the night sky. They couldn't see the stars, there was barely a sliver of moonlight out to guide them, and they had no idea where they were going. Goddamn country.
Bill had flip-flopped with his own advice, but had eventually decided several hours earlier that they should have camped the night at the safe spot in Candlelight Farms Airport. At that point it had been only an hour or so after midday and they had plenty of supplies to last them for another twenty-four hours, or so Zoey announced. Louis was hopeful about the road ahead, saying they would be able to clear the country no problem and find an even cozier place to sleep for the night. Francis declared that he hated airports.
Six hours later, they were inching along in the dark, led only by the beam of their flashlights (which could die at any moment) and reacting to the slightest sound. Even with the flashlights, none of them could see past four feet ahead of them in the dark.
"I hate the dark," Francis quipped.
"Coulda fooled me," Zoey replied.
"Keep it down," Bill warned softly, chewing on his toothpick. He'd run out of Romeros two states back, and since had stuck a number of odds and ends in his mouth to fill the empty void in the corner of his lips—toothpicks, twigs, pens. The most appropriate thing he had found that he chewed on in the last week was a stick of gum, fresh from the package. He had chewed the entire pack in less than a day.
"What're the chances something's out there, huh?" Louis added, keeping his voice at a raspy whisper to appease Bill's warning. "Infected people gotta sleep sometime, right? Or even find warm places to sleep. They're probably not wandering around in the bushes right now."
"I'd rather not find out for m'self," Bill added quietly.
They continued on, shuffling like geriatrics over the asphalt to avoid tripping on anything they failed to see. Francis had stumbled a few times already, once stubbing his toe on a discarded car engine, once over a corpse sprawled on the road like a rag doll. Louis slipped on a puddle of mysterious black goo. They thought it was oil until Bill scooped up a sample and rubbed it gently between his fingers, giving it a sniff. "Not oil," was all he had said. He seemed to be more alert from then on, and the other three decided it wise to adopt a similar caution.
It happened back in early September—flu season had come early, and it was sweeping the Eastern seaboard with the wrath of a woman. It had been labelled a national emergency a week after that, much to everyone's surprise west of the epidemic, and roads were blocked and closed off to attempt to isolate the incident. It still managed to spread in every direction, simultaneously taking out the neighbouring states to the west and the south, and seemed to move more quickly than information could travel. It was a week and a half after the first infection that it swamped Philadelphia, and only a day after that that the four survivors had met each other in some of the most bizarre circumstances. Since then, they had stuck together, and splitting up wasn't an item on anyone's plates. After Zoey seemingly cut her ties with her hometown, they became each others' homes. Wherever one would roam, the others would gladly follow.
They were an uncanny group, to say the least. It was like watching any zombie movie made in the last ten years—the same formula seemed to apply to their lives as they stood right now. However, zombie movies ended one of two ways: The group survives in the end, finding the utopia untouched by the Armageddon, or they all die horrible deaths at the hands of the chaos. They hadn't died yet, but nor had they found any form of save havens. So far, all signs pointed that their fate be of the latter ending.
Bill had become the de facto leader, although no one had declared it out loud. Being the oldest and most experienced in any form of combat, Bill often counselled the others on what their next move ought to be. He had served for years in the 1st Special Forces Group, fighting two tours in Vietnam and taking shrapnel in his right knee. Wounded, but still combat-able, Bill had suddenly felt like his life had returned to normal once he donned his uniform and took his rifle in hand at the dawn of the Green Flu. He felt even better in command, although he had never been promoted to commanding officer in all his years in the army.
However, the rest of the group was a motley crew. Bill suffered more than one headache in his time when his duty shifted from command to babysitting. Francis was the worst of them—although he was in his early forties, he had the discipline of a puppy and a Superman mentality when it came to his mortality. He had tattoos covering every inch of his bare skin, save for his face, which seemed to tell a tale of his involvement in Hell's Legion. He had a bloodthirsty need for action, an undying love for hating things, and an illogical need to argue with just about every word that came from Bill's mouth.
Louis, on the other hand, was a thirty-something tech expert with a naive outlook on the whole apocalypse. He was the only one who was carting around the hope, and he certainly had enough for the four of them. But he had picked up skills with a gun in days that took soldiers weeks to learn, although his aim left something to be desired. He was not only intuitive with a gun, but with anything he came across. Louis puzzled their way out of a few tight spots more than once, and outsmarted a horde or two in their time together. Bill was able to put up with Louis to the extent that Louis saved their assess and only got giddy about it afterwards.
And the last, most unique addition to their fireteam was Zoey. Upon first sight, Bill never thought Zoey would make it longer than a day. A college freshman with the slender frame of a stick man, she didn't seem to have a lick of sense or experience about her. But her first words to them were: "Which direction are you headed?" Bill shoved a hunting rifle in her hands, and she proceeded to paint the town red. She had grown up in a small farm town in New York, and her father had taught her to shoot a rifle since she could attend grade school. After her parents divorced, her dad moved on to small town Fairbanks and Zoey remained on the farm, spending her days shooting down gofers, watching horror movies, and playing roughhousing games with the local boys. She was tougher than nails, but had a pretty visage to deceive; Bill liked to pretend that she was the granddaughter he never met.
The four of them had been all over parts of the Midwest in the past few weeks, but their recent misadventure had convinced them to get the hell out of Dodge and aim for greener pastures. They had set out from Ripken Stadium a week prior, putting the hellhole behind them and scarcely speaking of it afterwards. They marched for Norwich, New York, on an unlikely quest to find Zoey's remaining family. All of them knew they would not find anything short of a disaster there, but Zoey soldiered on, knowing that what she wanted most was to see with her own eyes what had happened to her hometown.
When they reached the border of New York state, headed north through Pennsylvania, the fields were alight in flame.
They headed back south, cut through a chunk of New York headed west (keeping clear of the capital), and on a whim continued on through Connecticut. They made small stops at boarded up houses and shops along the main routes, pilfering what they could from abandoned cars and trailers. No one had said a word about what they saw in northern New York, and Zoey was the least expressive of all. Upon approaching the border, her mouth had formed a thin line, and that had been the only reaction she offered, then and now. Bill wanted to offer her comfort, but he knew she was more stubborn than a mule and had the vicious bite of a rabid dog. She was tough, but he knew she was only human. If she wanted to talk, he would let her come to him.
Now they meandered through countryside after countryside, intermittently trying to plot a plan of action and a proper route, but failing to come up with any plausible plan. They hadn't been able to find a proper map since leaving Maryland behind, and so in their brief spurts of consultation with one another, they agreed to first find some sort of tool they could use to direct themselves, preferably a map. Once they actually found one, however, it was a game of gambling—they had no way of knowing what would await them in whichever destination they picked next, and from their previous experience with rescue missions, they had a meagre sense of trust at best when it came to outsiders.
"Is it dinner time yet?" Zoey asked casually.
Louis glanced at his watch and then at Bill. "It's a quarter to seven," Louis announced with a little hope in his voice, wagging his eyebrows at the old man.
"Give it half an hour, then we stop to eat," Bill said, patting the side of the sack hanging off his back.
They passively agreed, continuing on their shuffle. It fell silent for about five minutes—Bill was surprised that none of them had some sort of smart remark to make—before Zoey halted them.
"See that?" she whispered, hunkering down. "Right side of the road, on the shoulder, just at the crest of the hill."
The other three shone their flashlights in the general direction that Zoey directed them in. The beams were weak, and they could only make out an outline of something sitting on the road. Whatever it was, it was inactive—or dead, whatever it may be.
"What do we do?" Louis asked.
Bill shrugged, working his jaw and shifting the toothpick to the other corner of his mouth. "Go knocking," he suggested.
They crept on towards the outline several yards up the highway, each attaching his or her flashlight to their firearm of choice. Each was trigger wary by this point for ammo was running low, and they didn't know where their next bullet supply was coming from. Each was on his guard, and Zoey was the most vigilant of all. Something wicked had violated her over these past weeks, and Bill worried that the fierce warrior in her had drowned out whatever kind of woman she used to be—and ever would be again.
"It's a car," Zoey said, her voice no longer guarded. The three men lowered their guns, but she kept her pistols pointed, her eyes glaring down each firearm. "Looks like it was coming out of that driveway."
Francis pointed his flashlight at the gravel road behind the car. The vehicle was hanging halfway between a hidden intersection in the bushes and the main highway the troupe stood on now. A silver-gold Ford Taurus, early 2000's, unscathed, practically glittering with new-car shine. Francis scoffed. Bill already knew what he was about to say—
"I hate—"
"Save it, Soul Patch," Bill grumbled, approaching the car a little bit less guarded than he'd been traversing the highway earlier.
"Soul Patch?" Francis repeated with indignation, throwing his shotgun over his shoulder and stalking behind the veteran. "It's a friggin' goatee, old timer, not a goddamn mouche."
"Quiet." Zoey hushed them for emphasis. They all stood still, listening, but when no one heard anything further, they all continued on to the car, carefully shining their light upon it.
Zoey first pointed the beam under the car to ensure nothing was hiding under there. All she found was the corpse of a cat. Bill inspected the cab, meanwhile, and found a toddler in the back seat, long since lived. Francis rounded the car and popped the hood, looking at its credentials. "She's a virgin," he declared, closing the hood and patting it. "Still has all her parts."
Louis inspected the license plate, then moved to the driver's wheel. He studied it silently, and Bill could tell the man was deliberately avoiding the sight of the dead baby in the backseat. "The keys are in the ignition... it's got a full tank," he said. They waited a while, and then he finally added: "I don't think it has an alarm system on it."
"A'right," Francis said, reaching for the passenger door, "hop in!"
"Francis," Bill snapped, plucking the toothpick from his mouth and motioning with it at the backseat. "Don't be such a jack ass."
"Not like the kid minds," Francis said with an indifferent shrug. Zoey rounded the car, barely shooting Francis a glare before she gingerly opened the back door and cradled the dead body in her arms. The smell hit them like a battering ram, and Francis and Louis made displays of disgust. Bill gazed down forlornly at the child; Zoey held stern lips as she gently laid it in the grass at the edge of the bush.
"Who would leave a kid in the car?" Louis asked to no one in particular, sounding the most disturbed he'd been in the past few weeks they had together.
"Probably a caring parent," Francis said sarcastically, but Bill figured his words were closest to the truth.
"Well, should we drive it?" Zoey asked, looking to Bill.
He glanced at the car, then back at Zoey. "I haven't driven in over thirty years."
Zoey's eyes popped and she stared at the old man. "Really."
Bill shrugged nervously and fiddled with his toothpick, dropping his gaze. So Zoey looked next to Louis.
"I, uh... I only ever rode transit."
Now hopelessly baffled, she moved on to her last hope. Francis shifted his feet and tipped his chin up. "I only ride bikes."
Zoey remained frozen in place. Then: "Are you serious?" Francis looked sideways, trying to glance at the other men through his peripherals to see if they knew what the problem was. Louis shifted uneasily on his feet, scratching the back of his head as Bill glanced at a nondescript spot on the ground and shifted his toothpick from side to side in his mouth. "None of you can drive a car."
"Gimmie a Harley and I'll drive circles around you," Francis said, affronted.
She scoffed. "But throw you a stick and all you can do is wag it?" Francis gave her a queer look. Zoey stared into their faces, the other two avoiding eye contact. "Wow."
"Well, what, you apparently can't drive, either," Francis retorted.
"I'm a farm girl: of course I can drive," Zoey said, opening the driver's door. "Tractors, motorized lawnmowers, trucks, cars—standard, automatic—quads, dirt bikes, motorcycles, boats... I can go on and on," she said, reclining against the open car door.
"Well, quit braggin' and get behind the wheel," Bill told her.
Zoey gave a mock curtsey and then slid into the seat, closing the door behind her. The cab light stayed on for a few seconds, allowing her to buckle her seat belt and find the ignition. Before she sparked the engine, however, she waited for the others to climb into the other seats. Louis and Bill took the back while Francis sat in the passenger's seat. "Shotgun," she had heard him say.
Once they shut the doors and settled in, she glanced at them all; Francis received a sidelong look, while Bill and Louis got a glance of her sharp eyes in the rear view mirror. "Should I start it?" she asked, looking at Bill in the mirror.
Before he replied, he hesitated, looking through the windows. It had been so silent outside that not even the crickets were rubbing their legs together. "Maybe you should wait a sec," he said carefully.
"Why?" Francis said. "Fire'er up, I wanna get to a Best Western before midnight."
"What about the house up the driveway?" Louis said, motioning over his shoulder. "I mean, there should be a house at the end of the driveway. Right?"
"Maybe we should check that out first," Zoey said, reaching for the ignition.
"Wait—!"
Zoey turned the key before she could heed Bill's warning. The engine sparked and roared to life. After she had started the car, she froze and stared at the wheel with wide eyes, realizing what she had just done. She hovered over the ignition, waiting, staring at Bill in the mirror. He stared back, his jaw locked and hard set.
The only sound they heard was the engine rumbling outside.
Zoey let loose a sigh of relief, and Bill relaxed his jaw, sliding down in his seat. "What?" Louis asked, oblivious to what had just happened. "Were you expecting it not to start or something?"
Francis chuckled heartily and slapped his knee. "Ah, Louis, life without you, I tell ya."
Louis grimaced in confusion as he stared at the back of Francis's shaved head. Zoey giggled nervously and Bill guffawed once.
Then she saw it. Out the back window, in between Bill's and Louis's heads, a dark figure stumbled on to the dark driveway, its legs illuminated only by the tail lights. She gasped; the air caught in her throat. Its legs were spindly and long, unnaturally stretched, and sickly pale. It didn't seem to have any clothes on, except for a few scraps of torn away clothes that it must have grown too long for. With the tail lights, she was able to see that it was well over eight feet tall, at the least—maybe even nine—and it looked as if it had an extra lump on its head, which had seemed to double in size, making the infected look like a melon propped up on a stick.
When it teetered forward to the car, Zoey yelped and pulled down the park brake, slammed her foot into the clutch, and pulled the gearshift into reverse.
The tires kicked up gravel as the car lurched back with such ferocity that Louis and Bill flopped forwards into the front seats and Francis smartly smacked his head on the dashboard. Zoey twisted herself around, propping herself on the back of Francis's seat to peer out the rear window as she collided with the infected. It was so tall that when she crashed into its legs, its upper body fell forward on top of the car, denting the hood.
"Jesus H. Murphy," Bill cussed, hacking his lungs out as he tried to get back into his seat. Francis was cursing a mile a minute, and Louis was screaming like a banshee. "Ohmigod!" drowned out both Bill and Francis and filled Zoey with more anxiety.
"Put on your seat belts!" Zoey roared as she yanked the car into first gear and sped off out of the driveway, letting the infected crumple to the road behind them. She hoped she had disabled it thoroughly; she didn't want something like that chasing them down through the state.
Francis finally collected himself as Zoey went from zero to sixty in no time flat. He held onto the dash and cussed enough to make a sailor blush. As Zoey turned on the high beams and adjusted her mirrors (she never would have heard the end of it if Dad were here with her) she saw the infected crawl out onto the highway on all fours, turning in their direction and halting in the middle of the road. It looked like a mutated spider, the way it walked, but that was the least horrifying of it all. It's head had become a small, shrivelled up organ at the top of its body, appearing to be vestigial now that the individual had mutated with the virus. The part she had mistaken for its large, swollen head was actually it's throat—ballooned to more than four times the size of its useless head, looking like a pair of huge black balls hanging off its stick-thin throat. The thing's little mouth opened—a pit of black on its pale, sickly body—and a jet of something came sailing at them.
The back window cracked under the force of the jet that had been launched at them. Zoey felt the car jolt beneath her seat; Louis howled even louder. "Quit yer wailin'!" Bill hollered, attempting to look out the back window at the creature that had attacked them. The entire window had been bathed in black.
"Seat belts, boys!" Zoey cried hoarsely again, reproach in her tone. She could not see out the rear view any longer, but she could see streams of people rushing out from the bushes onto the road from her side mirrors. Old farmers, men and women, dressed in dirty jeans and sundresses alike, chased down the Ford as Zoey ripped down the highway at seventy miles an hour. Shifting into fifth gear, she punched the accelerator and raced down Kent Cornwall road away from the horde. Francis rolled down his window, stuck his head out of it, and hollered, "Fuck alla ya!"
"Put—your—fucking—seat belt—on!" Zoey hissed, smacking Francis on the shoulder with each word. The car jerked a bit as she got more aggressive with her strikes, and Francis quickly pulled the seat belt over his shoulder and clasped it in place, gawking at Zoey like she was a Witch.
"Bill, Louis," she shouted over the roaring wind coming in from Francis's window, "watch the horde and tell me when we've cleared them. Francis, you shoot anything that comes close."
"Hells yeah," Francis said, pulling his shotgun up from between his legs and pumping the action.
Zoey scanned the long road furiously. It was only one stretch of road—no turns and barely any hills—but she had learned the hard way years back not to take chances. She saw scraps of a blown-up tire on the road, and she swerved to dodge it, causing all four of them to sway with the car. Bill and Louis now had their heads sticking out their own windows, Bill holding on to his beret and Louis letting his red tie flap freely in the wind.
"Oh, yeah, bitch, I got ya now," Francis sneered, leaning out the window and bringing the shotgun with him. A boomber wandered onto the road up ahead. She had an unnatural bloat to her, more unnatural than most Boomers were, with huge boils rising up on her naked skin everywhere. She had ballooned to the point where all of her clothes had been outgrown, and her sickly skin had taken a green, black and grey tinge to it, from head to toe. Francis tucked the gun into his shoulder, waited, and fired as soon as they got close. Nothing happened. Louis ducked inside just in time; the Boomer opened her mouth and gushed green goo onto the car as they drove past, splattering the side of the vehicle with her vomit, as well as Francis's upper half.
"Fuck!" Francis shouted over and over, wriggling back into the car. He hadn't been hit by much, but the smell hit them harder than the corpse had, and Louis actually kicked the back of Francis's seat in response.
"What the hell, Francis?" Bill growled derisively.
"Shoot with something else other than a shotgun," Zoey said, pinching her nose with her free hand while glaring at the biker in disgust. "You're not firing slugs."
"I'm not snipin' anymore, dammit," Francis bellowed. "You do it, Bill!"
"Agh, goddamn pussy," Bill mumbled just loud enough for Louis to hear as he climbed halfway out his own window (which had child safety locks on it, only rolling down halfway) and readied his assault rifle.
"They're falling behind!" Louis shouted into the car.
A path opened up to the left; with half a moment to spare, she took it, veering sharply off the road. Bill and Louis ducked back into the car as branches and other such foliage smacked them.
The path suddenly bent to the right—Zoey released the accelerator and began to turn early in order to drift into the curve. Right at the bend, smack dab in the middle of the path, was what she had feared most—
The high beams struck the Witch in the face and the haggard woman looked up with her glowing red eyes and grotesquely twisted face before rising to charge the car. Zoey punched the accelerator, hoping to hit the infected before it could get its claws up, and then—BAM—its head snapped against the hood before it went under; the car lurched upward as the body crumpled under the carriage. One of its claws punctured the floor in between Louis's and Bill's feet—the former howled with surprise as he lifted his legs up and tucked them in close, staring at the thin hole that had been torn into the bottom of the car.
But Zoey had other worries. The engine made a more desperate noise—a constant high-pitched whining—and the wheel seemed more stiff, harder to turn. The front axle had been busted after running over the monster.
"Shit!" Zoey cursed, slamming the wheel. They obviously couldn't stop now; she had to push the car until they reached safety. If they reached safety.
Everyone remained silent—even Boomer-splattered Francis—for the next five minutes, as Zoey wound her way through the bike path at alarming speeds. But nothing and no one else met them on the path, and the horde seemed to be far behind them. The bike path rounded out and ran straight for the last several hundred yards, and at the top of the hill at the end lay another road.
Learning from her previous mistakes, Zoey slowed the car down to a crawl and slowly inched out onto the road, hoping the whirring sound of the engine wouldn't attract more infected. The street they pulled on to was deserted, but it appeared that they had rolled into a small town. Nobody knew where they were, and they didn't need to voice the fact to each other. Their dumbstruck faces reflected enough about their knowledge of their surroundings.
Down the road heading west was a bridge leading over the river. East, nothing. A sign straight across from them gave directions. It was brown with a series of pictures of stick men doing various activities..
"Let's go west," Bill said, "there's beds that way."
So Zoey fought with the car to turn left, and she slowly drove down the road. She was afraid that at any minute more infected would come pouring out of the bushes and catch up to them. She didn't dare crawl over fifteen miles an hour.
Five minutes down the road, just over the river, they came across a hotel on the right side of the road, through the trees. Breadloaf Mountain Lodge was a series of cabins tucked away in the trees on the side of the road, with a residence just neighbouring it. Zoey slowly pulled into the parking lot in front of the front office, next to the only other car there, and put the car in park. She cut the engine hesitantly, knowing that they would never be able to start it again.
They sat in darkness for a few moments, the only sound being their breathing. Finally she reached up above her and turned on the cab light.
"We made it," she commented almost dreamily.
"You're startin' to sound like Louis," Bill chided. "Francis, open the glove compartment."
"Why?"
"Just do it, you loafer."
"Normally I'd get all biker gang in your face," Francis said, opening the compartment and shuffling around in it. "But I'm not sure if that was a compliment or an insult, so I'll let it slide."
"Anything in there?" Zoey asked.
"Uhhh... hey, old man, there's some smokes for you!" Francis tossed back a twenty pack towards Bill, who swiped it out of the air almost greedily. When he opened his palm, he saw that he was holding a pack of Camels.
"Damn," Bill said, tucking them in his pocket. "It'll have ter do."
"Lesse here... there's insurance and registration here... a police radar, piece of shit gadget... and a map! Finally, a mother fucking MAP!" Francis pulled it out and fanned it open, howling with laughter all the while.
"Shh!" Zoey whispered desperately.
"Put that in your pocket for now," Bill grumbled. "I think we should concentrate on finding us some rooms for the night."
Francis folded up the map, his movements sharp and jerky, like a toddler who wasn't getting his way. Louis then glanced at his watch. "7:12," he declared with a jubilant air.
Zoey looked over her shoulder at Bill, her eyebrows raised high.
Bill slid the pack off his back and handed it to her. "Dig in."
Francis grabbed at the pack first. "All righ," he said. "I've been drooling over these sandwiches all day. Sandwiches! Just too bad we didn't find any roast beef."
"You're not going to eat in my car, are you?" Zoey shot angrily at Francis.
"Actually, lady, this car belongs to one... Timothy Ethier, so, no, we're not going to eat in your car. Besides, it doesn't look like you treat it all too well in the first place."
Zoey glanced around the car. The front was slightly dented from ramming into the Witch, as was the top of the car from hitting the mysterious infected; the rear window was slathered in the same black substance Bill had found earlier on the highway; faint smoke was rising out from under the hood. She knew that the right side of the car would also be bathed in Boomer bile.
"All right then," she said faintly, receiving a sandwich from Francis, "eating in the car."