Bloody Murder.
"Owen— Ohw— O-wen!" You hissed his name through gritted teeth as you hurried after him.
He ignored you, but Owen was a stubborn man, who never listened to anyone but himself. Truth be told, it was a bit of a mystery why you even ran with the man. He didn't respect you a lick, was rowdy at the best of times, and didn't even try to pretend he wasn't undressing you with his eyes while you weren't looking. All in all, Owen was nothing to write home to mom over. Never mind that there was no such things as letters to mom any more. The quarantine didn't have postal service.
"Stop!" You wheezed.
Still, you had to try. He was about to do something stupid even for Owen's standards. The sort of stupid that could get him from alive, with a decent pulse, to dead and leaking his humanity all over the pavement. Owen kept loping up the street, deaf to your opinion. He stayed close to the wall on the right, and from how his shoulders were bunched forward and his chin thrust up, you figured he wasn't paying attention to anything but the corner that came up ahead.
You locked your jaw in frustration and cast a look around; Tall, white walls formed a narrow corridor around you. They were old walls, blocks of solid stone painted a brilliant white. Or they'd been white. Once. Before the Outbreak. Now they were filthy. Rain had washed soot and grime from the roofs, and an untold crime had left stains of blood and gore splattered at eye level just ahead of you. At least the alley was free of Biters, you thought. It would be a terrible place to be cornered in. You looked up. No easy way to scale those walls, even with the decorating outcroppings and the windowsills. You threw a yearning glance at the ribbon of brilliant blue sky above you, and then cursed Owen and his ridiculous plan.
He slowed, and so did you, then crept down a flight of stairs and into an open archway leading you both into a tunnel. The air cooled considerably down here, but the stench of stale piss and rotting meat was getting worse. At the mouth of the tunnel he finally stopped. Your hand darted out and you steadied yourself against the wall on your right while Owen peered around the corner. You exhaled a frustrated sigh. Your stomach lined itself with jittery ants as you waited, and when you leaned forward to take a look around his shoulder, the ants broke into a frenzy.
Over there, across the road that opened up outside the tunnel, you saw the man that Owen had been chasing after. He stood by the closed shutters of a pharmacy, a crowbar in one hand, while rubbing at the back of his head with the other.
"That's another human being!" You whispered harshly at Owen. "We can't just go around killing people. That's not right, it isn't."
"Do you want suppressants or not?" Owen shot back.
Of course you wanted Antizin. Rather, you needed it. But this? Where was the difference between tearing up people's throats as a Biter to bashing their skulls in as a human? You let the thought fester. There was a big difference. One was life. One was death. Yours.
Owen grabbed your elbow. He pulled, harshly, and dragged you into the street, until he yanked you down behind a red station wagon stranded in the middle of it. The man hadn't noticed you yet, but he'd turned away from the shutters and was pacing up towards two Biters that had come shambling along the street. The crowbar rotated in his right hand, cutting through the air. SWOOSH. SWOOSH.
He looked decidedly confident as he walked up to the Biters, shoulders squared and feet stepping lightly across the cluttered pavement. He knew what he was doing, didn't he? He was taller than Owen, too. By half a head at least, you figured from where you watched him through the grimy windows of the car. That made him quite the giant compared to you, and as you watched him knock the crowbar into the chin of the first Biter with enough force to knock the thing literally fly a meter or two, you were quite sure he'd snap you in half without breaking a sweat. Owen, now Owen was a burly man. A bit on the stout side maybe, but with heavy set muscle and a barrel for a chest. He'd be less easy to pick apart.
"Please," you said again. If begging was what it took, then you'd beg, you decided. "We don't have to do this." Or maybe you did have to, and it was good that Owen made that call while you were able to claim innocence?
"Shut up," he growled.
You glanced at Owen. His jaw flexed. His eyes were feverish.
"We've got to do this (Firstname). Rais wants him dead, and if we can get him dead, we can get all the Antizin we'll ever need. We'll be good."
His argument was solid, but killing a person? You swallowed. No one remained untouched by violence these days. That was a fact. That you'd had to defend yourself more often than you cared to remember, that was a fact too. Ever since the Outbreak had thrown Harran into Chaos is had been fight or flight, and running wasn't always an option. You knew, too, that you'd hurt people. They'd been out to hurt you first though. You'd defended yourself, damn the consequences. Damn that, maybe, just maybe, some of them hadn't lived. You'd never stuck around long enough to find out.
"Let's go," Owen tore your thoughts down. He scuttled around the car and across the street.
He kept his head down, moved to hide behind a turned over blue convertible. Bit by bit he advanced. He tried to get the drop on the man who'd knocked the feet out from under the second Biter, and was bringing his boot down on the thing's head. You didn't even know the man's name, but considering what Owen was about to do, that was probably a good thing.
Owen carried a metal baseball bat with him. He picked up speed. Started running. Raised the bat.
And you, you realised, were still hunkered behind the car. The fingers of your right hand were tightly clutched around the door handle, and no matter how much you tried, you couldn't get your knees to move.
"What the—" the man explained as he saw Owen come charging right at him. He sidestepped around the fallen Biter, brought up the crowbar in one hand, and extended his other in a placating gesture.
"Man, you don't want to—" he never got to finish the sentence. Owen swung his bat.
The swing came down hard. The man grabbed his crowbar in a two handed grip, and caught the blow. He staggered. Owen swung again. CLANK. Metal struck metal. This time he pushed back, just as Owen came swinging for the third time. Owen lost his balance, tripped.
"Stay the fuck down," the man barked at him, his crowbar raised in warning.
Owen didn't listen. He surged to his feet, swung his weapon to swat the crowbar aside, and caught the man in a shoulder tackle against his midriff. They knocked into the pharmacy shutters, which rattled loudly. Owen roared. He drove a fist into the man's side, once, then twice. Then an elbow cracked down on him, and a knee snapped into his stomach, and the roar turned into a series of grunts. The two men struggled against the pharmacy shutters, neither of them getting their weapons into the struggle through the struggle. Eventually, Owen had his head to the side (you winced at that), and forced to back out of the grapple. He withdrew three steps, his chest heaving as he sucked in air.
There was a moment, right then, when Owen seemed to reconsider his plan. He looked over his shoulder, looked for you, but then his hips twisted, and he got a knee forward and got the bat ready to retaliate.
The crowbar cracked into the side of Owen's head. You heard the crunch, that sickening crunch of bone giving way. And Owen fell.
One moment he'd been up. The next, he wasn't.
You felt your knees lose their lock. They turned weak and hit the asphalt. This couldn't be right. No. This hadn't just happened. Couldn't have. Your vision blurred, your throat constricted. There were tears in your eyes. Furious, hot tears. A tiny, broken wheeze squeezed itself through your lips.
"Fuck," you heard the man who'd murdered Owen groan. Something metal hit the pavement, and when you forced yourself to look again, you noticed he'd dropped his crowbar and was rubbing at the back of his head with both his hands. He paced away form the dead Owen.
Then his chin jerked up, and he looked right at you.
Your eyes widened.
He started towards you, pausing only briefly to stoop over and pick up his bloodied crowbar. Desperate anger rolled in front of him. It drew his shoulders forward, tensed his arms, and showed in every step as he marched for the car.
Halfway across, he paused, cocked his head to the side. Listening. You heard it too, the aggravated shrieks of a pack of Virals drawn by the noise of Owen's murder. They came piling over a tall wall, toppling down the other side and then rushing back to their feet with their air-rending shrieks ringing in your ears. You got to your feet, pushed yourself off the car, and with your legs still wobbly, hurried back into the tunnel.
"Hey!" You heard the murderer shout. 'Yes,' you thought. 'Make more noise.' Maybe the Virals would rip him limb from limb for it, and Owen wouldn't have died for no more than his own stubborn idiocy…
You returned when the noise died down. The street lay quiet and empty, save for a cluster of Biters that had been drawn forward by the ruckus maybe ten minutes ago. They were far enough away for you to dare walk forward. All except one, which was hunched over by the rear end of the flipped over car. You didn't find the man, but you really hadn't expected to. He'd probably run. Lived.
Ten minutes. Your eyes flicked to the Biter. It kneeled over a pair of baggy, beige cargo pants. They jerked while the Biter tore at the torso attached to the legs. Owen. It was eating Owen.
You felt sick. Or guilty. Probably both. Your lungs squeezed the last breath you'd taken tightly. It hurt. You looked away, and noticed Owen's baseball bat lying just a few meters to your right. You walked over to it, picked it up. It was heavy. Too heavy for you to lug around. But it'd do. You raised it high, stalked back to the Biter, and caved it's skull in.
Owen was ripped open, a grisly display of slick red worming itself from his abdomen. His eyes stared unseeing toward the skies. His mouth hung open. His head looked… dented. You squeezed your lips into a thin line, hunkered down, and found the vial of Antizin Owen had been carrying with him.
He'd not need it any more. But you would. You stood, squirrelled the vial into a pocket, and thought of all the Antizin you could get for avenging Owen's death.
You dropped the bat, looked around, and wondered where to start looking. Old Town was big, but he'd turn up. Eventually. And then you'd be ready.