Chapter One: The

Its been hell these past few days. With the undead roaming the city and me, my girl friend, two of my best friends, three people we meet the first day of the outbreak, all now sharing my apartment. We are located in, I should was located in, Raccoon City, which will at this point be referred to as "the hell hole", Satan's ass, or any plethora of names that denote its status as the city it once was.

It was hell out there, it was hell in here, basically it just sucked. I on day watch today, sitting outside the door to our apartment. The apartment building was deserted execpt for the few people that, when alive, locked there apartment door, and had succumbed to the infection.

As I light up a joint that i'd rolled before coming out here, I pondered the fact that even though the zombies were to stupid to turn a lock knob on a door, they had managed to infect most of Raccoon City's population. How stupid those idiots were. As the effect of the pot began to hit me, I took a long hit, and thought, if only I had acted sooner.

If only I had known this was going to happen, I could have saved more people. Before the outbreak, a labourer with no real plans ahead of me. I smoked pot all the time and it contributed to the fact that I was only a laborer with no real career. My girlfriend was the one that really supported our little two person family, her being a doctor and all. We hadn't even really talked about marriage yet but we were happy where we were at in our relationship.

At this point I was halfway though the joint and had a decent buzz, so I put it out with my fingers. One time, a couple of nights ago, I staid out here with my friend Jason, we got completely blistered and it was horrible. We became paranoid and thought we heard nosies all night long. We crept around the building, going places we really shouldn't have, like the basement. You think a dark, cobwebbed basement is scary normally, try smoking a blunt and, add to that the fact that there were a huge amount of zombies and god knows what else lurking around. Luckily, there never was anything in the building and we made it though the night. Besides, i wasn't going to be getting anymore pot anyways.

Familiar nosies now seemed strange and foreign to my ears. The moans and occasional knocks from the apartments up stairs scared me. Even though we all had put up with the zombies incessant noise for a week now, the pot enhanced every sound, making it seem as if they were right next to me. I sat in silence on a wooden chair. Holding my antique Heckler & Koch G3 rifle loosely, so it was pointed at the floor. I listened, taking in every sound, editing out the familiar ones, listening for anything different. i looked around, taking in my surrounding and preparing for the couple of hours ahead. I hoped that nothing would happen. The stairwell was deserted and I heard no out-of-the-ordinary sounds. The building was very old and was centered around the stair well. On every floor the stair well could be found in the center, and could be easily accessed from every apartment. It only made our situation worse because, unlike modern building which use elevators as primary and the stairwells as secondary, there was no small door to blockade. which meet that if a zombie were to make its way into the building, nothing would stop it from walking up the stairwell to me.

After the first day of our self impossed imprisonment in this building, I opted that we should leave and try to find a more defensable location, but no one agreed with me. i could see why looking at all of the things that are out there, but still, what is living if we cannot guaruntee our safety?

Suddenly, a noise downstairs. a window shattering. I barely heard it above the moaning of a certain corpse that used to go by the name of Mr. Nickajack, and I immediately stood and raised my rifle, aiming it the down the hall towards the stairwell. I suddenly remembered how important stairwells were in the urban street fighting of the Battle of Stalingrad in WW2. I have studied military history all of my life and thought of it as some kind of coping method for stressful situations.

The standard alarm calls for waking every one up; the watchwan and a volunteer would go and investagate. These rules were written down on paper and agreed upon by all members of our little society.

Yet, on this night I decided to ignore our written rules and investigate by my self. I reasoned that there have been a multitude of false alarms lately and everyone inside the apartment behind me needed the sleep. Besides, maybe the pot made me hear it.

Thump...thmup... thmup...

OK, that definitely was something. I could hear it, slowly ascending the stairs. It was daylight, but still the light in the hallways were dark and gloomy. It began to fill my soul with dread and a feeling of being doomed. Maybe we wouldn't survive this Apocalypse and we would all be ripped to shreds in this new world.

The wall separating me from the stairs leading down extended to about twelve feet to my left. My rifle raised, I advanced slowly towards the end of the hall, towards a window that had the perfect view of Raccoon city's destruction a week ago. I took care in my steps, as I already had in my mind a map of all the boards the squeaked on this floor. Unfortunately, those boards were spaced out and I almost had to jump my way to the end of the hall, listening to the thumps that grew louder by the time I reached the spot.

I knelled down and used my knee as a rest for the end of my gun, as this would allow me to fire more accurately and keep the my profile smaller so that maybe I could run before it spotted my if I didn't kill it.

Thump...thump...thump...thump...

It was approaching faster now. I knew it wasn't a zombie because it moved too fast. One of the women we meet on the day of the first huge zombie attack explained to us her story of a strange, non-zombie creature that attacked her and her husband. She barely spoke English and was an immigrant from Russia. She still can't describe what it was that attacked her, other than that it was devil incarnate. She lost her husband in the encounter. Maybe this wasn't a virus but some form of supernatural phenomena. Would bullets even harm a beast of which attacked Natasha Vladsitok and took her husband away? I certainly hoped so.

Something very bad was approaching. I could feel it.

I continued squatting and waiting. It was right below me, ascending the stairs to the floor right below. I would see it hopefully, before it saw me. When it walked steadily around the staircase and into my view, I was astonished by who I saw.

It was no monster, but a homeless man named Darrel that I knew from around where I worked.

"Don't move!" I said. He turned and looked up at me.

"Yo man!" He said and started to come up the stairs. I told him not to move but I knew from his actions that he wasn't a zombie so I lowered my rifle. The black homeless man walked up the stairs quickly and grabbed me.

"Look we need to get in yo apartment and hole up for a while." He said quietly. Matt looked in his eyes. He was scared, and he didn't look so well.

"What do you mean?" I asked, looking down the stairs.

"There's some fucked-up monster thing following me man. I saw it earlier at the library where I was stayin' and it almost got me! It has this fucked-up long tounge and no skull or anything, com on man lets go!" He said and walked past me. I watched him as he walked down the hall, making his way to my apartment door. After I thought about it for a moment I knew it wasn't strange for him to show up here, as I invited him over to drink with me once.

"Hey just go in there and tell Marcus to come out here with the other rifle." I said as he put he's hand on the door. He nodded.

"Oh and we sleep during the day so try to be quiet." I said as he opened the door and stepped inside. I turned and continued looking down the stairwell when I saw the horrid thing that Darrel had described. it moved silently and was fast, as it wasn't there a moment before. Its body was humanoid in shape but that was its only resemblance to a normal man. Its skin was a dark pink, the color of living muscle. its head was dominated by an exposed brain, and its mouth was nothing more than a row of large, sharp, and menacing teeth. It had no eyes, so perhaps it used sound or smell to detect its prey. It crawled on to the wall above the stairs and slowly crept towards me. I don't know how it managed to do that because the massive claws on the creature "hands" didn't seem to go into the wall. The creature was about ten feet from me when I raised my rifle and lined up a shot at the creature's head. A fact flashed though my head, any living organism needs a brain to survive.

Suddenly, it stopped moving. I tensed and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. The saftey was on. I quickly flipped the swicth and when I did the creture jumped towards me, a loud shriek emenating from the creature's mouth. I pulled the trigger and at the same time a long tounge shot out like a spear. I ducked slightly and it barley missed my head. The loud BANG!!of the rifle deafened me momentarily and I barely heard the creature let out another shrill scream. It had fallen on the stairs and its tounge had retracted almost instantly. It flopped around on the stairs for a moment, then in a flash flipped over and tried to crawl away. It was much slower now and a sickly green blood poured onto the wooden steps from a wound in its shoulder. I saw Marcus run out of the apartment as I fired again. This time my aim was true and I destroyed the creatures brain. A mess of brain matter and swamp green blood now lay scattered across the floor as far as I could see on the floor below us.

Marcus ran up, his AR-15 rifle pointed down the stairs toward the dead body.

"Don't worry, it's dead" I said as I felt in my pocket for that half of a joint that I put out earlier.

"What the fuck is it?" He asked me.

"Fuck if I know man." I said putting the joint in my mouth and lighting it. He slowly walked down the stairs towards it, his rifle pointed towards the dead body the entire time. He used to be an EMT a few years back and was more of the doctor in our group, so he was used to the gore being up close and personal.

"Don't get to close. Don't want to end up like Brain downstairs." Brain was an aquatints of mine that lived, or did live, three floors below me. I had to shoot his wife after the virus got into the water supply and she turned. He went crazy and just cuddled with her headless corpse for awhile. Eventually we got him away and three days ago he started to icth all over and complained of being hungry all of the time. Marcus told me that maybe he was infected. Even though he wasn't bitten, Marcus siad maybe some of her blood got into him somehow, and he was slowly turning. He started to get violent, so we had to duck tape him up and put him in the bathtub of his apartment.

"don't worry, i'm not an idiot." ,he siad and looked at me. I looked at the jay and found that I had already smoked most of it.

"I almost died." I said aloud. Marcus went down to the corpse.

"The thing had a goddamn tongue about five feet long, like some kind of frog or something." I told him.

"Yeah I can see it. You took out half of the fucker's brain." He said.

"Thats what hollow point bullets are for man." I said and laughed a little.

"Is it safe out there?" Darrel called out from down the hall.

"Yeah! Come see my new trope!" I yelled back. My girlfriend walked out first, then Darrel and Jason.

"Are you alright?" She asked concernedly. I nobbed.

"Damn you didn't wake me up to smoke with you?" Jason said.

"Look at that beast." Darrel said and Marcus stepped away so the others could see the body. Jessy gasped.

"You killed that?" She looked at me with shocked eyes. I nodded. She hugged me and asked if I was ok. I let my gun drop and embraced her. A random fact popped into my head as I looked out the window. The population of Raccoon City was around 1.5 million at the time of the outbreak. Somewhere out there in the massive jungle of apartment complexes and skyscrapers. I wondered how many zombies were in the two Umbrella Towers alone. How many other creatures like the one I killed were out there lurking, waiting?