A Very Zombie Christmas: A Left 4 Dead Christmas Story
Disclaimer: I don't own any of the characters or zombies. They all belong to Valve. I'm definitely not making any money off of this story!
Chapter 1: The Suburbs
"Alright, let's get in and get out quick," Bill's gruff voice said. He'd just broken the front window of an abandoned house. Almost all of the houses in this neighborhood were abandoned. None of them had been built with sturdy defenses in mind. Bill used the butt of his rifle to scrape loose remaining shards of glass so that the rest of the group could get through. His left knee, long healed after being punctured by shrapnel in Vietnam, popped audibly as he climbed through the window and into the darkened house. Bill looked around the living room into which he had just climbed and wrinkled his nose at the smell of decay, and at the sight of little toy cars strewn across the bloodstained carpet. "There may be kids," he added grimly. He tapped ash from his cigarette and onto the carpet. The residents wouldn't mind.
"Aw, great," Louis groaned, joining Bill in the living room as Zoey and Francis watched his back, his shotgun at the ready. His black dress shoes crushed one of the toy cars with a crunch. "I can't believe we volunteered for this."
"Zoey volunteered us. There wasn't any 'we' about it," Francis clarified as he climbed through the window himself.
Zoey was right behind him. She whirled to point both of her pistols at the empty suburban street as soon as she was through. Earlier, a former housewife had come shrieking around the corner of another house and surprised her. She was jumpy. "It was only fair," she said, tossing her head to get wisps of her long brown hair out of her face. "We used up all of their antiseptic spray. And you drank their last beer, Francis."
"Well, they offered," Francis replied with a shrug. Two days ago the four survivors had been traveling through the suburbs when they ran into the kind of zombie (they'd given up calling them infected – these things weren't sick, they were dead and hungry) that survivors had taken to calling a tank. A man showed up with a gas can and a lever-action rifle to help the small group take the creature down, and afterwards allowed them to patch up in his hideout. He, his wife, and his little daughter were still hiding out in their neighbor's basement, a month after the outbreak and two weeks after the neighbors became victims of the horde. The man had indeed offered Francis his last beer.
Francis's head snapped around as the angry babbling of a roused zombie echoed through the darkened, lifeless house. Bill stepped away from the door to a hallway on the right as Francis's shotgun boomed, catching a gray-skinned, screaming zombie directly in the face. By the shape of the torso that fell bleeding to the floor at their feet, the creature had been a man in his late thirties, in jeans and a black t-shirt. Francis stepped over the body and into the hall, firing another blast of the shotgun at a zombie who had been standing in the middle of the hallway, staring vacantly into the kitchen. "Let's find some medicine cabinets," Francis growled.
Francis and Bill made their way down the hall to the bedrooms while Zoey filled a backpack with usable foodstuff from the kitchen, and Louis shot two zombies in the postage-stamp-sized backyard through the kitchen window. He didn't bother to open it first, and broken glass clanked in the kitchen sink. His head rang from the sound of the gun's report in such a small space, but the survivors were getting used to that (or, more likely from Louis's perspective, were slowly losing their hearing).
Louis, for his part, still couldn't get over the way the living dead wandered absolutely everywhere. Once they'd eaten everybody they could get their overgrown fingernails on, the dead drifted aimlessly wherever they found themselves. Sometimes they would drift as far as a few hundred feet, putting themselves in the middle of the road, or face first against a fence, or behind a shower curtain in a bathtub (Louis hated that). There they would stand, or sit, or mill around on shuffling feet, until they heard something interesting. Louis thought they looked sad, sometimes, but he suspected he was imagining that.
Zoey thought that the zombies could smell as well as hear and see. The longer you stayed in one place, the more zombies would find their way to you. That was why most survivors kept moving, and why the group was surprised to find the family in the basement. Just trying to get a night's sleep tended to be an adventure. The evolved zombies seemed especially talented at locating living, breathing humans, so although the belching sound of a nearby boomer didn't cease to alarm the survivors, it had more or less ceased to surprise them. "Boomer!" Louis announced, for Zoey's benefit.
Zoey dropped a bottle of Flintstones vitamins into her backpack and zipped it, then cautiously poked her head out of the kitchen while Louis kept his gun muzzle trained on the back yard. The enormously obese zombie, with several curlers still lodged in its frazzled hair, was waddling toward the living room window that the four survivors had climbed through moments took a knee, lined her shot up carefully, and squeezed both triggers on her pistols. Outside, the boomer exploded in a cloud of blood, spattering the window frame and lawn with gore. She glanced over her shoulder toward the bedrooms when she heard a slamming door.
"God damn it," Francis snarled, backing away from the door to a nursery. On the other side, a shrill voice was shrieking and tiny fingernails scratched at the door like an animal trying to escape. The sound of scampering feet and a high-pitched growl made him turn around quickly, raising his gun. Bill was faster, firing three shots into the little oncoming zombie before it had a chance to sink its teeth intoFrancis's leg. The boy had been wearing a blue sweater with a firetruck on it when he died, and he couldn't have been older than six. The zombie was missing most of its right arm.
Francis poked the corpse with a booted foot. "I hate kids." Bill, his bearded face lit by his glowing cigarette, chuckled and collected a few more bottles of pills from the medicine cabinet in the bathroom before following Francis down the hallway.
Francis carefully dismantled the smoke detector in the hallway, pocketing the speaker and some of the electronics. The other dead child's shrill voice faded as the group headed back toward the window exit to the street.
By unanimous agreement, the group of four decided to spend only one more night with the family in the basement before moving on again. They were heading north, to Toronto. They'd heard that the zombies don't move well in cold weather, and that there was a decent perimeter in place with hundreds of people living inside. Bill and Francis had argued for spending the winter somewhere warm, butZoey and Louis had pointed out that nobody they had spoken to and none of the messages no the walls mentioned a single defendable location south of Tennessee (with the exception of a few places in Texas).
Their next stop on the journey was a shopping mall near the suburban neighborhood, for supplies to take north. The long streaks between civilization was less hazardous due to the lower population of zombies, but between the dropping temperatures and the limits to the amount of food and water the four could carry, that route held its own hazards.
Not long after sunrise, the four were walking through the labyrinth of the neighborhood, picking off the zombies that still lurked within from the road. Tightly packed neighborhoods, they'd found, were full of zombies. Where did people go when they were sick? Home, to bed or to the couch in front of the TV. Except that in a day or two they died there, and in less time than that (only an hour or so now, the rumors on the walls warned) they were up again, shuffling around their homes, munching on the families who had just been feeding them chicken soup and prayers not long before.
"It was Thanksgiving that really did us in," Bill commented, shooting a zombie who had caught site of them and come barreling out from behind a neatly parked SUV. The thing sprawled back over the hood of the vehicle, dark blood running over the blue metal.
"What? Why?" Francis said, his eyes on the empty homes rather than looking at Bill when he talked. The survivors were used to this behavior now. They all did it themselves.
"It was all of the travel, right?" Louis said. At Thanksgiving, the roads weren't clogged with empty cars and the army hadn't bombed the airports yet, even though everybody knew something was horribly wrong. Humanity attempted to maintain normalcy right to the last minute. "Everybody who hadn't already gotten sick met someone who had."
"Basically," Bill agreed. "Reloading," he added, crouching on his heels to transfer ammunition from one of his packs to his stood behind him, pistols ready, to catch any wanderers from the front.
They started walking again, each person watching a different angle of approach for hungry undead. Louis was in the back, checking over his shoulder frequently to check for hunters. "Hey guys, do you know that tomorrow is Christmas?" He asked the others after another check of the empty street.
"What? That can't be right," said Zoey, looking back from her wary contemplation of a house on their right. That one's door and windows were boarded up, though. If anyone had died there, they were probably still stuck inside. Zombies reacted to closed doors like part of the wall, unless they knew you were on the other side.
Louis pulled a small calendar out of his pocket. It was an advertising vehicle for some realtor, but there was room for dates among of the realtor's contact information. Louis had been marking off days since mid November, and displayed the page that showed most of December's dates crossed off too. "I'm serious," he said. "Happy Christmas eve."
"God… it's been that long?" Zoey said, staring at the calendar. She felt like it was just last week that she'd just said goodbye to her roommate when the other girl left for Thanksgiving break. Zoey's parents had told her to stay at school, because travel was becoming dangerous. Getting out of her dorm after the outbreak hit there was a nightmare she'd probably have for the rest of her life.
"It's not getting any better while we stand here," Bill warned them. He led the way down the empty street again. "That's the gas station they told us about up there."
Author's Notes: Hi all! I'm writing this story as a celebration of the season (I'm agnostic and too lazy to put up lights) and because I always make up elaborate backstories for the briefly defined characters in action games. I'm really new to fanfiction publishing, so please let me know what you think!
