I do not own Left4Dead or any of the characters. I decided to redo this story. Including weapons and infected from Left4Dead 2.
Separated
Zoey peeked around the corner, pistol held tightly in both hands. Down the alleyway from the corner, there were two infected Zoey leaned back around the corner, holding up two fingers. Francis nodded, stepping around the corner with his crow bar. One of the infected looked over at him and then growled, the other looking as well. A moment later, they were both charging at him. Francis walked forward to meet him. He swung hard, caving in the first infected's softened skull. Then, he pulled the infected sideways, knocking it into the other and knocking both to the floor. As the still moving one was standing, Francis swung at it, hitting it in the side of its neck, its softened flesh and bone both giving, the head spinning into the air.
"I hate zombies," Francis grumbled, swinging the crowbar to remove the blood and chunks of infected that had stuck to it.
Zoey and the others walked over and they silently made their way down the alleyway. They had been moving as a group for weeks, and their teamwork had improved dramatically since they began. Francis was, contrary to his appearance, their stealth killer, using his crowbar to kill small groups without drawing attention. Aside from that, he kept an M16 across his back. Louis was their walking pharmacist and pistol expert, sticking to a pair of pistols with seemingly endless ammo to fight, and using the rest of his pockets for a single medkit, and as much as ten bottles of extra-strength pain pills at any given time. He had some medical training too, since he had had to reset a broken bone for Francis, which Francis was still taking pain meds for. If Zoey was being honest, she was sure all of them would be addicts by the time they found one of the sanctuaries that were spread across America and were rumored to be infection free and safe to live.
Bill was their arms dealer, somehow being able to sniff out weapons and being able to find the best. He personally carried a fully-automatic shotgun, an AK-47, and a grenade launcher, in addition to pistols. How he carried ammo for it all, Zoey would never understand. Zoey herself favored one Sig Sauer P220 handgun, and an AK in case she needed something with more kick, like if there was a Tank or Witch.
As they left the alleyway, they formed a tight circle, facing in all directions and making their way across the parking lot they found themselves in. They could see the safe house door in the ground floor of the mall ahead of them. However, just as they were halfway there, a roar rang out into the late afternoon air. Francis swore and all four broke into a run. They were close. Barely three hundred meters. Then two hundred. Infected began to flood from the alleyways and streets all around them. A normal rush, as Zoey had begun to call the seemingly random and unwarranted attack by a small horde, was just that, a small horde rushing them and subsequently dying in a hail of gunfire. This was not that. Within seconds, the massive parking lot had hundreds of infected swarming into it.
One hundred meters. Fifty. They began to fire backward, not slowing down from a dead sprint, but still dropping infected. Twenty. Fifteen. Inevitability hit Zoey like a freight train, or maybe it was the Charger that was suddenly holding her two feet off the ground, almost a hundred meters from the door. The first impact made her head scream in agony, and her pistol skitter away. The second made everything go fuzzy. Suddenly, she was snapped back to the world as a bullet punched through her left calf. She screamed in agony, even as the Charger collapsed, landing halfway on top of her. She tried to scream again as her uninjured ankle was sprained by the weight shoving it into the wrong position, but the Charger's massive right arm had hit her stomach, robbing her of her breath. She looked around, seeing infected closing in. She reached for the pistol, but it was out of reach. Suddenly, bullets began to fly over her, Louis and Bill stepping up on either side, Louis spraying pistol bullets at the further away side as Bill fired his AK in one hand in short bursts, and his grenade launcher in the other, reloading it between shots one-handed thanks to the grenade launcher's sling, a feature they rarely found when they grabbed random guns.
Francis heaved the Charger up, rolling it off of Zoey, who scrambled to her pistol in time to roll over and drop three infected that had somehow managed to get to Louis. Then, Francis yanked Zoey up onto his back, Zoey wrapping her legs and one arm around him, firing with her right as Francis sprayed bullets from his M16, mowing down any infected foolish enough to try to get between them and the door. Fifty meters. Forty. Thirty. A Hunter leapt at Francis and Zoey, clearly wanting a two-for-one deal, only to be blasted out of the air by a shotgun blast from Bill. A Jockey leapt onto Louis's shoulders, only for Francis to put a pair of rounds through its head, knocking it off again. Ten meters.
Zoey's stomach dropped as a solid wall of red rotting flesh and stupidly large muscles stepped out of an alleyway just beyond the safe room, a grunt registering in her ears even over the gunfire before the Tank thundered toward them. Francis shouted a warning, throwing Zoey sideways away from himself before the Tank's massive arm slammed into him, hurling him into Bill. Both crashed to the ground and Louis grabbed them off of the ground instantly as the Tank turned after Zoey. She scrambled away from it, oblivious to the other infected leaving the much more dangerous infected plenty of room to catch his chosen meal, swarming the others instead. Zoey looked to them, seeing them look to her, indecision clear in their faces, before Bill smashed a molotov on the lead infected heading for them, all three retreating into the safe room and slamming the door, locking it.
"No!" Zoey shrieked. "Please! Don't leave me! Bill! Louis! Francis! Francis please! HELP ME! ! !"
She saw Francis's face in the barred window for half a second before he moved aside, a flat white object, probably a table, was shoved in front of the window. She screamed in a mixture of fear and dismay. Then, the Tank picked her up, its hand wrapped almost all the way around her lower abdomen. For a moment, she was afraid it would crush her, or slam her back down like a Charger. Then, she found herself rag dolling through the air. She didn't even have time to scream before she slammed into a wall of infected, the infected breaking her fall. They scrambled out from under her instantly, moving in for the kill, only for a massive chunk of concrete to plow through them, killing them all. Miraculously, the only thing to hit Zoey was an infected's show, which split her lip open and made her head ring but didn't do much else. The Tank snorted and roared like a gorilla before thundering toward her again. Zoey screamed, reaching around herself for anything she could use for defense. What she found was a hand that had broken off of an infected. She hurled it at the Tank, hitting it in the face, and it jerked its head back, veering off to the side somehow, and crashing into the infected. It slowed to a stop, smashing the infected away from itself.
Instantly, a piercing mix between shriek and howl rang out and Zoey's blood ran cold. As if a Tank and a horde weren't enough, now there was a Witch. Then, as if to prove that it could always be worse, a Hunter crashed down on her stomach, knocking the air from her lungs before its claws tore into her side. She threw her hand up, slapping the Hunter, and it slashed again. Her forearm blocked it this time, shielding her torso but receiving the gashes instead. Then, as its arm pulled back again, a hand suddenly grabbed the Hunter by the face, yanking him off of Zoey, his foot slamming into the bottom of Zoey's chin in the process, stunning her. She groaned, holding a hand to her injured side, slowly rolling onto her other side as the Witch's shriek rang out again, almost directly over her now. She cringed, curling further into the fetal position. She hated this. The fear, the pain, the not knowing which of the infected would tear her intestines out first.
Finally, after a few minutes of not being touched, let along killed, she slowly raised her head, looking around. The infected were gone. Not all of them. A handful, probably twenty, were in the parking lot still, but all a long distance away, none closer than three hundred meters, and none in a group of more than two. She slowly pushed herself up into a sitting position, looking around. Lying about twenty feet away was the Hunter, its ribs jutting out of a gaping hole that took up the majority of the front of its torso, its ruined intestines and shreds of skin lying around it in a soup of flesh and coagulated blood. It looked like a corpse after a Witch got done with it. She looked a little more to the left, seeing the Tank lying about a hundred feet away, its back looking like someone had hacked at it with a chainsaw for a good twenty minutes, and its head having been ripped completely off and dropped beside it, one leg also having been removed.
Zoey stared, uncomprehendingly at the corpse before realizing that the witch also wasn't there. She looked around, then froze as she spotted it, pale grayish white skin caked in fresh blood over a layer of mud and grime, messy, filthy, blood-soaked hair falling around her head in clumps, bloodshot eyes with red irises, and a tattered tank top, long since ripped into a bra, and panties hanging off of her, both filthy and turning grey from dirt and stained with blood. The witch stared at her in silence, Zoey too afraid to move. The witch should be tearing her apart. It also shouldn't have killed the Hunter. The Tank maybe, since the Tank had thrown infected into it, Zoey suspected, but not the hunter. Speaking of infected, where the hell did they go?
She slowly looked to the safe room, then back. She began to drag herself toward the door, for lack of a better idea, the witch watching. As Zoey passed her fallen pistol, she picked it up, taking it with her. After about thirty feet, the witch stood, walking after Zoey, eyes not leaving her. Zoey glanced at the door. Then back. She froze. The witch was kneeling directly in front of her. Zoey didn't move, breathe, or even blink. The witch reached out a clawed hand, lifting Zoey's injured arm and sniffing the scratches, then let the arm fall, poking a claw to the gashes in Zoey's side. Zoey shouted in pain, jerking away instinctively, the witch hissing. However, it didn't hurt her. It raised its claw to its nose, sniffing it before licking it off, briefly exposing her teeth, which were less pointed than the other witches Zoey had met.
Then, the witch picked Zoey up. Zoey went rigid, not daring to move. She could feel the claws against her skin, but they weren't cutting her yet. The witch began to walk, pushing the safe house door and easily breaking the bar and pushing everything out of the way, betraying her monstrous strength and entering the safe house, setting Zoey on an island table before walking back to the door, inspecting it from every angle before nudging it. The door swung partially closed. The witch pushed the door closed the rest of the way, staring at the bar to secure it. It had broken free of the wall, rendering it useless. After a moment, the witch pushed all of the furniture that had been barring the door back into place and turned away from it, back to Zoey. She stalked over to her captive possibly prey and grabbed a handful of Zoey's shirt. Zoey squeezed her eyes shut just seconds before a tearing sound reached her ears. She looked down, staring at the remains of her shirt and hoodie, both lying on the floor, leaving her in only a bra.
"Hey!" Zoey snapped, the witch staring up at her with an expression Zoey would almost call curiosity. "Was that really necessary?"
The witch turned back to Zoey's wound, reaching toward it but Zoey shied away from the claws. The witch stared at them, then lifted Zoey's own hand, staring at her fingers. The witch turned Zoey's hand over, placing her palm against Zoey's as Zoey stared in amazement, watching as the witch's claws shrunk back into fingers, the hardened flesh softening until they were as smooth as fresh skin. Then, the witch reached down, gently prodding at Zoey's wounds for a minute before Zoey lifted a hand, pointing to a medkit lying on a table. She couldn't believe that the others had left it, but she wasn't going to complain.
"I can bandage myself if you give me that," Zoey said.
She doubted the witch would understand, but clearly this witch wasn't going to kill her, yet at least, and she was so tired and disoriented from pain and blood loss, that she had no better ideas. The witch turned, picking up the red case and holding it out to Zoey. Zoey stared at her before taking the kit and opening it, pulling out disinfectant spray and coating her wounds before quickly bandaging her side and leg, which now that she inspected it was a clean through-and-through. She struggled with her arm, however, so the witch took the bandages, having watched Zoey work interestedly. She began to wrap Zoey's arm, actually doing really well, if a little tight. Once that was done, Zoey used an ace wrap that was in the medkit, by some stroke of luck, and wrapped her sprained ankle. Once finished, she stared at the witch.
She was so tired, and she really was about ready to decide to just sleep and let the witch kill her if it decided it wanted to. She looked to the bed nearby and pointed. The witch promptly lifted her, walking over and setting her on it, stepping back and sitting there. Zoey stared at her and felt a little bad about the witch seeming to be awaiting orders. Zoey scooted herself over carefully and patted the bed. The witch cocked her head before crawling onto the bed, sitting on her knees. Zoey carefully took the witch's arm, pulling her down into a laying position, the witch sliding her legs out from under herself, lying on her side and facing Zoey, staring at the girl. Zoey swallowed hard, forcing herself to ignore the impending death that her instincts were screaming about, and closed her eyes, struggling to find sleep. Finally, exhaustion won out over logic and fear.
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