Southwest Housing District G
February 6th, 2017
1021 Hours, Local Time
Apartment Building 8
A swift, brisk gust of wind chipped at the molding concrete of the ruined street and the faded brick of the buildings which squatted alongside it, whisking bits of brittle dust away from their cracks and crevices and speeding the old buildings toward collapse and degradation.
Building number eight loomed menacingly amongst its dying brethren, obviously having withstood the proverbial test of time with more enthusiasm than the others. The bricks of building eight had barely shifted over the years; large numbers of its doors and windows still remained boarded tightly; the whole place had the feeling of something still desperately clinging to what little life it had left.
A soft, low moan slid by on the wind, almost imperceptible within the sound of the wind bristling and brushing across the street – from the sound of it, the creature that had created the sound was nowhere near, but the sound itself was enough to set one's teeth on edge and neck-hair on alert.
Four black, huddled shapes were perched at the base of building eight's stairs, nearly shapeless save for the squarish angles and hard corners that jutted from their edges in strange places. Thin black tubes pointed from each of the shapes to building eight's well-boarded main door, but the identities of these tubes were hidden within the black things' huddled masses.
The shape closest to the door jerked and rose, thinning and extending upward like a shadow until it formed into its true being. It was a man, dressed from head to toe in jet-black military gear, his face covered by a gruesomely bug-like biohazard mask. The black tube revealed itself to be the barrel of a huge assault rifle which the soldier continued to point rigidly at the door.
The man's free hand shot up like a piston and spun once, a signal to his fellow soldiers. With almost complete silence, the three remaining black shapes scuttled forward, drawing upward to reveal three more soldiers, dressed identically to the first. The first (and apparently the largest) of the black-suited men dropped his hand and tapped a small white button on the side of his gun.
A buzzing crackle of background static jumped into the four soldiers' helmets as their comm systems were linked, immediately followed by the gruff, tobacco-hardened voice of their leader. As was regulation, he never turned away from the building or lowered his gun as he spoke; doing so was usually an invitation to sudden, messy death.
"Candy," he growled, indicating the soldier to his left, "On me…we're left. Rolph and Matheson, you're right. Simple and easy, boys - we've got confirmed reports of multiple grays, but the target's the Angel. You find her, you report, we're out of here. Got it?"
"Aye."
"Aye."
"Aye, sir."
"Good. All right, the grays are expendable, but the boys back home want the Angel alive. Don't mean you can't…coerce 'er a little, but she better be screechin' when evac gets here."
Candy, Rolph, and Matheson's heads simultaneously dipped in a single nod as their leader's hand rose and pointed two fingers toward the door twice in quick succession. All four sprung forward with frightening quickness, but Candy was the fastest; his boot swung upward and contacted the shoddy plywood with a crack. The slightly soggy boards imploded, blowing shards of plywood into the building's dark, decrepit lobby. The soldiers poured through the door, spreading to the left and right as their captain had designated.
The lobby was dark, gray, and small; cobwebs hung from the rotting rafters above while mildew grew in the linoleum below. Two hallways immediately greeted the doorway, leading left and right down the building's outer walls. The muted thumping of the soldier's boots was overcome by the creaking and moaning of the building's foundations…but the sounds that seeped down the halls and through the walls were not all from the dying structure.
Through their masks, Candy and the captain could see almost all the way down the hall. Apartment doors lined the right side, softly illuminated by the dirty gray light emanating from the high windows on the left. At the end of the hall was a door slightly bigger than the rest, just after the last apartment – the sign above read "Stair Case A". The two soldiers continued forward, almost running despite their hunched postures, setting the staircase as their goal.
They were about five meters away when something stumbled from the door frame, catching itself roughly against the left wall. In the moment before the triggers were pulled, they determined the thing's identity; it was a gray, of course.
The thing which had almost fallen on its face appeared mostly human, dressed in an old, worn-out suit with a pair of broken glasses barely hanging on to its haggard face – but it hadn't been a man for quite a while. The gray's skin was pale and dusty, and nearly as torn as its clothes; however, the wounds covering it were dry and black. The thing's white hair had all but fallen out, leaving a memory of itself in the mangy tufts which still clung to its cracked scalp.
But as always, the least human thing about a gray was its eyes. The thing standing in front of the two men turned, slowly, and looked at them over its glasses.
Its eyes were empty, completely clear of emotion, except for perhaps the look of slight, lost confusion. They were the eyes of a zombie.
"Mark!" Candy barked into his mic, then squeezed his trigger. The gray's chest exploded in a crackle of lightning, blowing bits of leathery flesh, bone, and sticky black spackle against the wall behind it. It stumbled backwards, bounced against the wall, and had just enough time to look down at its ruined sternum before a second rattling salvo blew off the top of its skull.
The gray's spine arced backwards, hung for a moment as the thing stared forlornly at the ceiling, then gave, allowing its body to drop to the floor in a heap. Candy walked over to the thing, placed his boot against the remains of its head, and made good and sure it was dead.
"Gray o' the day, boys!" He shouted jovially, shaking a tooth from the grip of his boot. It was a popular phrase; getting the first kill on these sort of missions was always a joy. Good-natured laughter crackled over the comm, then cut short as Matheson's voice uttered the arrival of another hostile.
"Mark." He said quietly, and the sound of hushed gunfire echoed down the hall. The "confirmed reports of multiple grays", it appeared, were confirmed indeed, but this was all but commonplace. Candy and the captain turned and hustled up the stairs, making their way quickly to the second floor. A third gray met them just around the corner, and its jaw fell slack just before it was-
"Mark!"
-dispatched.
Over the next fifteen minutes or so, the cries of "Mark" and the cackling of gunfire were the only things to be heard in the deserted building, punctuated here and there by the moans of the dead. The four-man squad swept up and down the building, kicking down every door that wasn't already hanging open, and slowly eliminated the already dwindling zombie population within.
In apartment C3, they found what they were looking for.
Rolph and Matheson were the first to come across the room, hidden away in the back of the third floor. It gave with a soft crunch, letting the two see the creature that was huddled against the far right corner.
"Ah-hah," Rolph whispered to himself and he as his partner hurried inside. They spread out as much as possible in the confined space, keeping their rifles trained on the corner. Matheson tapped the side of his gun again, making sure his comm was open like he always did, and spoke.
"We got 'er, sir. Room C3, right side."
"On our way." The captain replied.
Matheson looked up again just as whatever sat in the corner did the same.
A strange creature indeed was in the room with them.
It was a girl in her late teens, maybe early twenties, or at least it had been at some point, but it seemed that the point in question had already come and gone. Her skin wasn't quite a gray, but rather a very pale shade of blue, and her dark brown hair – or was it purple? – covered her right eye. The eye that was visible was horribly blood-red with a pupil that came to a harsh, sharp line like that of a cat. Dark, dry blood ran from her eye to her chin past her nose, which was covered by a strip of medical tape.
The thing that had been a girl had a soft, rounded face and a slender build; she might have been attractive at some time in the past. Now, her right arm was missing below the elbow, leaving only a stump wrapped in gauze to emerge from her sleeve. She wore a dirty white nurse's uniform, with a collar that was tight around her neck and a large red cross on the chest. The uniform's skirt came most of the way down her thighs, but Rolph found himself wishing it came down a lot farther; her pale blue legs ended, basically, in blood.
It was unclear whether the blood came from lacerations in her ankles or whether it was just being excreted like sweat, but the zombie's feet were completely slick with bright crimson liquid. It wasn't in low supply, either; a fairly large pool of the stuff had gathered around her feet.
Rolph's hand jumped to the front of his mouth to staunch the vomit trying to jettison from his throat before he realized that his mask was in the way. He choked and swallowed, feeling the burn of stomach acid at the back of his throat. When he looked up, the dead girl was staring at him. Her cat-like eyes were not empty like those of the grays, but they were distinctly inhuman; they made him think of demon's eyes. The soldier brought his gun upward with such a jerk that Matheson looked over at him in surprise.
"Stop it," Rolph growled, his teeth clenched together tightly, "stop it."
"Al…" Matheson's voice came, "what are you-"
Albert Rolph moved too quickly for his partner to have stopped him, even if he had tried. In a moment, he stood over the tiny zombie, his shoulders heaving with heavy breath. She looked up at him, her dead eyes soft and accusing.
"Stop it!" Rolph cried, and swung the butt of his rifle down. The stock collided heavily with the side of the girl's head
Crack.
The little zombie jerked away, holding her good arm to the side of her head as if to protect herself. She cried out, a high-pitched sound that was halfway between and yelp and a moan, and hunched even further into the corner.
"Disgusting little-" Rolph began, raising his gun once more, but a hand on his shoulder stopped him. When he turned, the captain stood behind him, his free hand pressed to the side of his helmet.
"This is Zeta squad, HQ – package in custody, calling for evac." He said, giving Rolph a pat on the shoulder. He took his hand from the side of his head and gave Rolph a look that was visible only through the limiting eyes of his mask. "That's alright, kid. Plenty of time for that back home, yeah?"
Rolph stared at him for a second, then dropped his gun back to his side with the long breath of a sigh.
"Right…sorry, sir. Things just…creep me out, 's all." The younger soldier said.
As Rolph turned back to the door, Candy walked up to where the captain was standing. He was fingering his rifle's safety, almost nervously, which struck the captain as odd; Candy wasn't usually one for nervous.
"Sir?" He said, squinting down at the pitiful creature sitting on the floor.
"Yeah?"
"This zombie…this, er, Angel – haven't I seen her somewhere before?"
"Eh? What do y'mean, corporal?"
"Her face, sir, it's…familiar, maybe?"
Now it was the captain's turn to squint. It seemed odd that Candy would recognize a zombie, of all things; after all, his team usually didn't let the things live long enough to show up somewhere else, unless…unless he knew her from when she was alive, and that would have been a startling coincidence, because Candy was from Minnesota.
Which was quite a ways from where they were.
Squad Zeta's captain squatted low, dropping his gun and letting it hang by his side. The zombie's face was turned away so that her dark hair almost completely obscured her face, so he took hold of her chin with a gloved hand and turned her to face him.
She didn't seem, well, familiar at first – just the usual features of what people had started to call "smart" zombies: the strangely colored eyes and skin, the way the eyes looked, not quite empty…no, she was just a-
Wait. No, that couldn't be right. He'd only looked over the "files" the desk boys had come up with once or twice; it couldn't have been that he'd seen her in there somewhere.
But it was. It hit him suddenly, so hard that he let out a little gasp of surprise, but Candy was right, they had seen her before. And that meant-
The captain jumped to his feet with such suddenness that Candy was almost knocked backward into Matheson, who hadn't moved since they had all entered the room. He spun like a dervish and almost screamed into his mic:
"Everybody, weapons up!"
Rolph jumped and turned towards him, a tiny sliver of panic suddenly jamming itself into his brain. "What is it, sir? She's not-"
"Not her, idiot! Now, weapons up! She's not the only one-"
Squad Zeta's captain was never allowed to finish his sentence, because he was inconveniently interrupted by the wall behind him exploding. A large chunk of rotting wood hit him in the side of his head as he turned, splattering the right side of his mask with spongy chunks of housing.
An unearthly bellow of rage pounded through the air, nearly deafening the four men. The hole that had been a wall suddenly gave birth to an enormous, lumbering shadow, but the thing was moving too fast to clearly see what it was. Squad Zeta's unfortunate captain, his vision obscured with filth, never saw it coming.
Halfway through the captain's turn, he was caught in the middle of the forehead by a huge piece of metal that surged from the darkness like a bullet. He didn't even manage to make a sound as his mask, quickly followed by his skull, caved in with a crunch. The captain's body went dead-slack just before his body was hurled, head-first, into the wall behind him. The newly dead body hit the wall with a wet sound, then tumbled to the floor.
Candy swore and jumped backwards, immediately tripping over Matheson, who had started to move forward. He screamed and fell backwards, riddling the ceiling with the bullets that had been meant for whatever had just killed his commanding officer. Matheson, then, stumbled forward in response, directly into the grasp of the huge hand that swung forward to meet his head. Huge, muscular fingers wrapped around the soldier's head, lifting him into the air as Matheson, forgetting his gun, grabbed at the thing encircling his skull in a panic.
The hand lifted him about two feet off the ground and, without hesitation, snapped into a tight fist. Matheson's arms fell, rag-dollish, to his sides as his head suddenly ceased to be circular. The hand whipped outward, throwing his limp body into Rolph, who went down like a sack of wet kittens.
Candy lifted his gun once more, only to have it ripped out of his hand as that huge slab of metal swung, bending the rifle into a crumpled mess which splattered into a menagerie of little metal parts against the wall. The huge creature stepped forward, lifted a massive boot and brought it down on Candy's chest, crushing his sternum, ribs, and any of those pesky vital organs that happened to get in the way. Candy gurgled and was gone.
Private Albert Rolph struggled like a madman to rid himself of Matheson's increasingly crunchy corpse as the monster that had killed all his squadmates lifted its boot from Candy's chest cavity. Now that the thing had finally decided to stand still, he could make it out; it was a Heavy.
The zombie before him stood well over seven feet tall, and was built like three tanks stapled together; its arms, legs, and neck bulged with muscle and pulsing veins. A gray welding mask covered its face, and he could hear the thing's thick, heavy breathing from inside. It wore a large, filthy camouflage jacket and ragged black jeans that appeared to be held to its legs only by the virtues of the strips of duct tape sporadically wrapped around its legs. Its feet were clad in two great steel-toed work boots, the right of which was now shiny with blood.
Instead of a right hand, the zombie had a huge meat-cleaver erupting from the sleeve of its jacket.
The giant creature raised its head and sniffed the air – it sounded like a snake getting caught in an old lawnmower – then turned to face the private. Rolph screamed inside his helmet and pointed his rifle at the thing's face, jamming at the trigger again and again but too panicked to realize that the safety was, in fact, on.
The monster took one thunderous step towards where Rolph lay, but hesitated when the girl behind him let out a whispery little moaning sound. The welding-mask clad beast stopped for a moment, turned, and grunted something in response. As the private watched, the girl looked at him, hesitated…and pointed at the dead captain before moaning again. The monster seemed to contemplate this for a second, then unceremoniously turned back to Rolph, lifted its cleaver-hand, and buried it in the man's skull, almost cutting his head in half.
Rolph's hands dropped, letting his gun clatter across the floor.
Squad Zeta was dead.