Hello all, this is my first Minecraft fanfiction. It is a realistic take - meaning the characters are people not blocks, etc. Not a lot of Minecraft references are in this first chapter, however, but i hope you enjoy regardless.
The middle aged man did one last check of his front door, making sure it was locked, and slid the shutters in place across the windows to plunge the house into almost complete darkness; lit only by the constant glow of torches – but that was nothing new. Having a house in the side of a mountain meant once it got passed midday, he rarely got any direct sunlight anyway. He walked across the room and around a bend, following the corridor to the large steel one that sat at the end, unlocking it with the key he kept on his person at all times.
He'd made this house himself; taken roughly six months of long hard toil to perfect it and a very kind and generous blacksmith to supply the tools for him. He could see the town from his window, but very few ventured out and certainly not at night for fear of attack by the things that apparently prowled the nights. Bandits and the strange things known as 'Creepers' where most common, though you'd probably find the latter attacking the former, explosively – though raids upon the Town where also quite common, hence why it'd been so hard to find the supplies needed to make his house; it'd all been used in constructing a new stone wall.
Of course, with his previous work as a miner, Allis had sufficient leverage to ask for just enough to gain himself the things he needed without serious rebuttal besides the obvious 'suicide' of building a house outside of the protective walls. Naturally, it didn't take a genius to work out that Allis wasn't shy in the brains department, and this his house was literally set into the mountain about forty feet from the base and hidden enough that only a few knew how to find it, let alone get close enough to knock on the door.
Minus spiders but he hated them anyway.
The door was rusting and the hinges grated as he opened it inwards, leaving go of the handle he stepped inside before pushing it closed once more with an echoing bang. The room doubled as his storage facility, which is ironically how he'd stumbled upon his visitors in an attempted expansion project when digging deeper into the mountain. He chuckled thinly to himself as he stepped past rows of wooden shelves stocked with essentials, stepping around the final row and glancing down into the hole that sat a good three metres from the edge of the shelf to his wall, roughly four metres deep. He'd never gone down there past the first time, simply because he knew not to for fear of what could happen. Not from Patches, but the others – they were seemingly less tolerant of him than that male was.
They would come every night, a few moments after the sun had fallen behind the horizon, and Allis had never known why. It had frightened him at first, made him vomit all over the wooden floor of his home until his stomach cramped. It wasn't so much the sight but the smell; the collective stench of several rotting corpses a few feet from him had been much too hard for him to cope with; it smelled worse than anything he could have ever imagined. Now, however, that smell had mostly faded as the decay had finally began to die down in the group, replaced by an almost musty smell of oldness, as if you walked into a room covered in dust.
He glanced up to see the sun's glow finally vanish from the world, and the moon slipped out from behind clouds as if it had been awaiting the chance to rule the sky once more. The beam of moonlight filtered in from the specially constructed skylight to illuminate a good portion of the hole, though the darkness still clung on just past his field of vision – he knew a tunnel ran from where the hole was, though how many hundreds of miles he couldn't know, and didn't quite have the desire to know, either.
And then came the first sound; like someone with the rawest throat in existence trying to speak, accompanied by the thump-scrape of feet hitting – and dragging – one stone. He winced slightly, but knew they couldn't feel it – none of them could. It still didn't make it any less uncomfortable to listen too.
Finally the first figure detached itself from the light just as Allis sat down, folding his legs across and looked down. It was quite clearly dead; its head contained no eyes and there was no skin atop its head but a few clumps of thin wispy hair that threatened to detach at any moment. The mouth had no tongue; the throat had all but gone now, as had the rest of the body. The clothes (Allis assumed the burial ones) where nothing but tattered rags draped upon the form.
It was Patches, as Allis knew it would be. He was almost always the first to arrive, but not the last by far – and the one he'd known the longest, known being a rather loose term. Contacted would be more appropriate, he thought. The zombie (what else could it be?) shuffled further into the light, turning the sightless gaze up towards Allis.
"Evening Patches." Allis nodded courteously, eliciting a soft wispy hiss from the corpse – not one of aggression, though that had been present when they'd first met. He'd quickly learned that the undead where nearly always hungry, considering the time he'd tested it by throwing two cow corpses and they'd eaten damn near everything and still reached up for more.
Allis smiled and reached for his satchel, pulling out a piece of raw pork he'd gotten earlier in the day. He made the effort to feed them, because he had no idea if they hunted in the daytime down in those caverns. He imagined they did, but they took what he gave them without complaint – could they even think? Perhaps not like a human, but Patches certainly seemed smarter than the average dead man.
The corpse reached up with one bony hand as Allis likewise reached down. He couldn't reach the corpse and neither could it he (safety after all, even with one who wasn't so hostile and he had no desire to ever touch one!) And dropped the steak to the awaiting body. Patches caught it, or nearly did then dropped it. Quick as a flash he dropped to his knees and shovelled the meat into his jaws, cramming it in, chewing and tearing it with the few teeth still left in his body.
As more sounds echoed up the tunnel, Allis knew the others had arrived. None where so far along as Patches was (though truth be told, Allis imagined there was some sort of tomb within the mountain or they where the remains of hikers fallen into crags or unseen cracks) but they too were clearly dead. Two men and a woman not named. The woman had neither right arm at the elbow nor the right half of her face - she had died only recently, maybe a week or two. She was a new arrival, the two males weren't though. Unlike Patches, they were hostile and much more unforgiving of the human above them – they probably just saw him as more of a prey item than Patches did. They pushed past the long dead corpse who snarled at being knocked, reaching up and clawing at the stone, despite never being able to reach him. They couldn't climb either, so far as he knew, and even if they could, they wouldn't find any purchase on which to get up, and then be confronted by the steel door. If they ever did get up however, it'd be a nightmare for his food. He really needed to move it all, just incase.
He shook his head with a small chuckle at the aggressive zombies.
"I wish you guys had the sense Patches does, y'know." He spoke idly to them, ignoring the hungry snarls and moans they made "Still, I have a treat for you all tonight. I expected more than four, but I'm sure you'll eat it all anyway."
Now he turned to the bound and gagged figure that was tied up rather roughly behind him in an alcove, shaking with fear. Allis chuckled and walked over, ignoring her attempts to get away – she couldn't anyway, he legs where bound. He knew her well, actually – she was the Blacksmiths daughter, Alice – a pretty little thing, blonde hair blue eyes. She'd managed to find his house – and they way up – to inform him of the progress they'd made in the wall and inviting him back into the town. Naturally he couldn't resist, so he'd cracked her over the back of the head as she'd turned to look at something, dragged her into the storage room and tied her up.
She was currently trying to scream through her gag as he hoisted her onto his shoulder and walked back to the hole. Patches had finished his pork by now and was simply looking up expectantly in comparison to the others who were still clawing and snarling – Allis wondered if he could even see what was happening or if he had some sort of sense or something.
He smiled as he gave the girl one last look before he rather bluntly dropped her down the hole into the small crowd. Her gag fell off and she screamed, just before all four zombies fell onto her, biting and ripping with tooth and claw. It was Patches who shut her up by tearing out her throat, though it took a few pulls to do.
Allis sat down and watched the four corpses feed; glad he'd been able to make his small gathering at least somewhat happy for the night. It was about twenty minutes later that he realised just how tired he was, and he had a long day ahead of him. He glanced down at the feeding frenzy and offered them all a goodnight, before he turned away from the scene and left the room, intent on getting a good night's sleep in preparation for tomorrow.