*hi people! I hope you enjoy this fanfic about Zoey ^_~ I just finished playing the Left 4 Dead single player campaign and I had the urge to write about them. Sorry about the super-original title, too XD Anyway, I hope you enjoy 3

Prologue

Zoey's arm hung out of the window, tapping impatiently against the door of her car. The highway was packed today, although she had no idea why. There were no holidays coming up, and it wasn't like today was a very nice day for travel. The clouds overhead were dark and stormy, like there was going to be a— well, storm.

But the traffic was nonetheless bumper-to-bumper, and it didn't look like it would be letting up anytime soon. Zoey reached over and turned on the radio, hoping to distract herself from her frusteration with a little music. Much to her irritation, however, her favorite station was reporting news about some kind of outbreak in New Jersey. Something about a "Green Flu". Zoey snorted and flipped through the stations until she found one that wasn't talking about this new illness— which was no easy feat.

"What's the big deal about this damn Green Flu anyway?"she muttered under her breath. "Just wait— in a week, no one will even remember what it is."

She ended up being right, in a way. In a week, there would be no one except her to remember what the Green Flu was.

Zoey turned down Primrose Boulevard and scanned the houses for number 34. It was the first time she was visiting her mother since her parents' divorce a year and a half ago. It felt strange, but not completely. Her parents had never really gotten along. Her mother Carolyn wanted Zoey to have a good education and a well-paying job to sustain herself, while her father Wade wanted her to be a police officer like himself more then anything in the world. He had often taken her out to shooting ranges so she could get some experience with guns.

"Whether you chose to be a police officer like your old man or not," he had once told her, "I want you to be able to protect yourself. Girls should be strong and unafraid to protect themselves. You don't need a man to save you."

To encourage the thought that girls were just as tough and strong as boys, Wade introduced Zoey to horror films when she was very young. Ever since, she had had a sort of obsession with them, espeically if they had to do with zombies, slasher murderers, or extra terrestrials.

These things had led to Zoey preffering her father over her strict, traditional mother. When Zoey earned a film scholarship to Aldrich, she had been fully prepared to turn it down in order to follow in Wade's footsteps. However, her mother had insisted on Zoey accepting, and so she had reluctantly left for college. Less then two weeks after she started her first term, she got a call from Carolyn, asking how college was. It had gone something like this:

"Hello, Zoey. How are you? How is Aldrich?"

Zoey had glanced guiltily over at the TV, which was paused. She had been in the process of watching a gruesome movie in which all the actors were torn to pieces by a man with a mask and a chainsaw. "Um, fine, Mom. Aldrich is great."
"I'm glad to hear it," Carolyn said. She sounded genuine. Zoey felt even more guilty. "Are you enjoying your classes?"

"Uh..." Zoey didn't like lying to her mom, but what was she supposed to say? That she had gone to the first week and a half of classes, then holed herself up in her dorm room to watch horror movies 24/7? "Yeah. They're, uh, fun."

"Who is your favorite professor?" Carolyn seemed suspiciously persistant, but Zoey refused to give in.

"Um, I really like Professor...Furlong." Good thing her mom wasn't a horror fan.

"Zoey, you're lying to me, aren't you?" The sudden accusation took Zoey by total surprise.

"I— what— of course I'm not!"

"Last chance," warned Carolyn.

"I'm not lying!"

"Then why is it that one of your professors e-mailed me inquiring about your health?" Carolyn demanded furiously. "According to him, you haven't been attending his classes for a week."

"I've been...studying," said Zoey, gnawing anxiously on her lip. How the hell was she supposed to get out of this one?

"Studying what, exactly?" snarled Carolyn.

"Films!" Inspiration came to her like a lightbulb over her head. "I've been watching old movies this whole time. You know, research."

"Zoey, I do not approve of this!" said her mother. "I'm spending good money to send you to Aldrich, you know? And here you are, just watching movies!"

"Mom, I got here on a film scholarship," said Zoey. She faked exasperation surprisingly well. "I need to watch movies. I'll call you back later, okay? I'm in the middle of studying."

And she had hung up the phone, both satisfied and guilty with her performance.

She pulled into the driveway of 34. It was a pleasant, little house not unlike the one she had grown up in. She noticed her father's old Chevy pick up already parked in the garage and felt an brief twinge of surprise. Then she just groaned. Of course. She called him here to yell at him about me.

She exited the car and slammed the door, announcing her arrival. As started towards the front door, she noticed that the it was already wide open. It hung on its hinges, looking like a lion had recently clawed it to pieces. She stopped, confused and anxious. That was when she heard the screams, followed by three rapid gunshots.

Zoey raced into the house. She staggered into the first room she saw— the living room— where she found the most horrifying scene she had ever seen out of a horror movie.

Wade was standing several feet away from Carolyn, who was face-down on the ground, shaking violently, her limbs jerking every few seconds or so like she was having a minor seizure. He held his trusty pistol in both hands, still pointed in Zoey's mother's direction. Between the two of them, still draped across Carolyn's writhing body, was a bloody body whose limbs were twisted in all the wrong directions.

Even as Zoey watched, Wade stumbled across the room and collapsed on his knees beside Carolyn. Shoving the corpse off of his former wife, he gathered her shuddering body up in his arms and held her tightly to him. That was when he noticed Zoey.

"Call an ambulance," he said hoarsely. Zoey's eyes flashed from her mother to her father to the dead body and back again. Then she just swallowed thickly and nodded, running out of the room and searching desperately for a phone. After what seemed like hours, she finally managed to get her hands on her mother's cellphone. With shaking hands, she dialed 9-1-1.

"Hello, what is your emergency?" said a collected voice.

Zoey almost collapsed with relief. "I-I-I'm not sure," she managed. "I'm, I, I was visiting my mom and I heard gunshots, and when I walked in my father was holding a gun and there was a corpse and my mother was-I don't know what- please, just send an ambulance!"

"Please calm down, ma'am," answered the voice on the opposite end. "We're sending help straight away."

"Thank you!" Zoey gasped.

"Now, if you're still in your parent's house, I advise that you—"

Strange noises from the other room interupted the 9-1-1 woman, and Zoey dropped the phone and ran back to the living room. She stood in the doorway, mouth open in shocked horror.

Her mother was no longer her mother. She was mauling Wade, scratching at him with her nails and biting at his flesh with hungry teeth. Zoey inhaled sharply, and Carolyn whirled. Baring her teeth at her daughter, she lunged inhumanly fast towards her, shrieking.

A single gunshot rang through the air. Gore splattered against Zoey's face as Carolyn dropped limply to the floor, a fresh bullet lodged in her head. Wade sat in the same position Zoey had left him in, his gun raised and smoking. Slowly, he lowered his weapon and looked seriously at Zoey.

"Zoey," he said, slowly. "Zoey, baby. I'm so sorry. Come over here, honey. There's...something I need to talk to you about."

Numbly, Zoey made her way towards her father. She felt a brief moment of unease as she stared at the gun in his hand. He shot that stranger. He just shot Mom. He could shoot me too. Can I trust him? And then she realized how ridiculous that was. He had been trying to protect Carolyn when he shot that stranger, she was sure of it. And he definitely had saved her just now. Besides, her mother hadn't been herself. She had been attacking Wade himself before she had charged Zoey.

She fell to her knees in front of her father, whose many wounds were staining his simple blue shirt red. "Dad?" she said, in a small voice. "What's...what's going on? What just happened? Dad, please..."

"Zoey," interupted Wade, gently. "There is an outbreak of a new disease known as the Green Flu. You may not have heard of it, but it...corrupts people. Turns them into the undead. Into zombies. I know how ridiculous that sounds, but you saw what happened to your mother. One of those infected by the Green Flu broke its way through the door and bit Carolyn. I couldn't save her. I was too slow. I wasn't expecting...but that's beside the point. Carolyn was bitten, and she became Infected too, and tried to bite me. Zoey, she succeeded. I've been bitten. Soon, I will be infected with the Green Flu as well." His eyes welled with tears. "I don't want that to happen to me, Zo. I don't want to turn into a flesh-eating zombie and kill the people I love. So, Zoey, will you..." The tears overflowed from his eyes. Zoey hadn't realized she was crying until she saw the tears rolling down her father's weathered face. "...will you kill me, before I become an Infected?" He shoved his pistol towards her, and she took it with violently shaking hands.

"I...I..." Zoey was crying too hard to say anything. She forced herself to stand, wrapped her fingers around the gun's handle. She pointed it as best she could at her father's head, even with her trembling. "I love you, Dad."

The following gunshot would echo in her ears for the rest of her life.