A/N: Chapter 9 is ready for deployment.
Valve owns Left 4 Dead. I don't. Moving on!
Time flies when you're outside of the calendar.
True, we had our routines, and I kept the dates checked in the log, but when you're on your own timetable, specific days sort of slip past you. I guess when you're in the so-called 'civilized' world, you sort of have a bit that keeps the date and time in check, if only because of deadlines and meeting and whatnot. It's always, Test on 6/21 and Appt. at 5:30 on 2/16 and such. Here, the wood doesn't ask you what the time is, and the water bucket doesn't want to know your schedule. It just needs to be chopped, or hauled, or skinned, or chased, or oiled, or what-have-you. This can lead, of course, to cabin fever, and some go flying off into the great blue sky of the madness of solitude. You do, however, keep yourself chained to the earth with routines.
Even when you have a zombie with you.
(Though it does make the schedule a hella lot more variable, I'll tell you that.)
Despite this, the first week went past with surprising…normality. True, I would occasionally find a dead squirrel here and there, and more of my time in the evenings was devoted to re-reading survival manuals, but it seemed less and less weird as time went on. The nagging doubts in the back of my quieted down, my trigger finger eased away, and I soon thought of him less as a zombie, and more as Denver.
The fact that he improved his vocabulary certainly helped matters.
Zombies…tend not to make for conversation partners, to say the least. Even sans the whole 'eat your brains' part, Denver didn't talk much for the first couple of days. He started to speak up after I read to him for a while; He was up to full sentences by the end of the week.
I think it was the reading. Well, partly. He seemed to stick to stuff that he heard from the manuals I read. This explained why he knew the word for, say, 'hatchet' but not for 'garden gnome', though here and there he'd say something that I was pretty damn sure I hadn't said/read to him. I wasn't really teaching him, anyways; it seemed to be more that he was remembering the words, and could recall them once he heard them.
I didn't ever tell him how I found him.
I think he had a vague idea of it; at one point, I saw him looking at his hands, and then mine, and then back at his, like he had an idea that his claws ≠ my fingers, but he seemed to shake it off and go back to what he was doing (Napping.)
I went to bury the pilot when Denver wasn't looking.
Partly, it was for sanitary reasons. Dead bodies are nasty things; they carry all sorts of microbes and shit that can make ya sick and attract pests. Plus, it just didn't seem right to leave the poor bastard out without a proper burial.
When I got there, there wasn't anything to bury.
The helicopter was gone; Just the skid-marks scarring the ground were it hit, and a wreck-shaped hole in the universe. The only reason I knew I hadn't been hallucinating about the crash was because of Denver, (And even that was into question) and the fact that there were still scorches on the boulder the chopper hit.
I suppose whoever owned it decided to take it back, dead pilot et al. How the hell they did it without me noticing, I have no damn idea. I decided to leave it be at that; It meant that I had one less mess to clean up.
Two weeks since The Helicopter Incident passed. At this point, Denver and I could have a fairly normal conversation, though every now and then he'd have to stop and ask what something meant. (Unfortunately, he was a quick learner, so he picked up a fair amount of swearwords before I started watching my mouth.) I'd been out of civilization for about a month now, so he was my only real reminder of the apocalypse surely happening south of us that I never really worried about. (Hey, I still have plenty of MRE's.)
Well, until I found the scratches, because God is a mean bastard.
It was a fairly normal morning; Den was sleeping on the Hideous Floral Couch (I offered him dad's old room, but he said he liked to be in front of the fire) when I came in.
"Up and at 'em, buddy." I said, tossing a pillow at him as I passed by to light the fire.
He groaned, and turned over, nearly falling off of the couch as he did so, managing to catch himself just in time. He sat up, and shook his head. "Mornin'." He growled, blinking muzzily.
"Trap checking today." I said. I only did it every so often, since you left your scent around the traps if you went daily, and didn't catch anything. (Denver confirmed this)
Breakfast was fairly subdued, and was (mercifully) not MREs, but jerky. It was late October, so the morning was cold, and there was a thin sheen of frost on the grass.
Den bounded ahead of me, leaving bare patches where the frost was. He hadn't caught any squirrels recently, mostly because they actually became clever enough to know how to get past him. Eventually, he gave up and came back.
The range of the traps was fairly wide, and I preferred to rotate them on a regular basis for the sake of variety. It encompassed about a 2-mile radius from The Cabin, and I was in the outer edges of one of the less-frequented areas, when I found the claw-marks.
Y'know the scratches I mentioned earlier? The ones around Den's eyes? Pretty damn horrifying, and they were still awful disconcerting to see if you weren't used to it. Well, I'll tell ya, they were paper cuts, practical BS compared to the ones I found on some poor mutilated pine tree about 2 and a half miles from home.
"What the hell." I said, feeling them over with my hands, "Made these?"
They were huge-ass, even bigger than the once Den made when he scratched his claws on the trees, sometimes. Though they seemed old (The bark's exposed inside seemed pretty dried and faded) it was still bleeding sap, like an open wound.
Denver took a sniff at them, and snorted. "'S too old to tell." He said, shaking his head. "Scent's too faded."
"Hmph." I grumbled.
"It looks almost like…bear marks. Bu this isn't normal bear behavior." I said, looking at the trees ahead, which were just as decimated. "Bear scratch up trees to sharpen their claws, sure. But they don't actively try to destroy them…"
At this point, I was starting to get a bit worried. It was probably nothing, but if there was something out there…
Den must've smelled it, because he answered my unasked question.
"There isn't anything coming this way, I think. The wind is blowing towards us, and I don't smell anything."
This was a bit more reassuring, but I kept the Glock close anyways.
Then there was the deer.
It was just a quarter-mile south from the claw-marks, and about a mile west from the helicopter crash. For some reason, I'd decided to go off the beaten path; maybe it was just me being shaken by the claw-marks.
The woods were quitter here, which was unnerving. Even in the cold of fall, you could usually here a bird here and there, or maybe a squirrel running (Usually from Denver, but I digress) around.
I chalked it up to the upcoming winter, but my growing sense of unease couldn't be shaken.
It was Denver who found it.
I heard his screeching from ahead of me, and I came running, gun out, hackles raised.
"What the h-" I started, and stopped, as soon as I saw what it was.
It was a stag—only hours dead, by the looks of it—torn open and clawed, like the pilot from before, but, oh God, the shreds were so much bigger…
Blood stained the ground around it, and even I could smell the sharp tang of it in the air. The head was still intact, the eyes open, and glassy, starting towards the sky and seeing nothing…
Like I said, I'm not naturally squeamish, but even now, my stomach churned a bit.
Denver was circling it, tensed up, and growling, which scared me, as he only did it nowadays when he was truly spooked. When he saw me, he stopped circling.
"Bad smells. Big thing." He managed to say, snarling, his speech degrading in his fear.
I just nodded, gun still drawn. "Is it still around?" I asked, quietly.
He shook his head. "Gone now."
I put the Glock away, but didn't relax. Instead, I approached the body, surveying the damage. Den stopped growling, but I could sense his unease as he followed me for a closer look.
"It's a bear, alright." I said, examining the bite marks. Too wide to be wolf, too big to be another zombie.
But what kind of bear, I thought, does THIS kind of damage?
The only kinds of bears in the region were black bears, and they usually didn't go for stag. What kind of predator would simply eviscerate their prey, and leave it there, uneaten?
Wait….
"Smells…" said Den, suddenly, "…sick."
"Sick?" I asked.
"Like…" he said, lost in thought. "Like angry things."
"Angry things?"
"Like… me." He said.
"Like… you-sick?"
"Yeah. That sick."
Fuck. Just what I need, a zombie-bear. "I thought the reports said it wasn't zoonotic..." I started, but my thoughts turned to another part of the report. Mutated rabies virus…
Damn.
"What do we do about it?" Den asked, now next to me, as I was kneeling next to the carnage. The smell of blood was filling my nose and making my head hurt.
His voice was low, and lined with caution, like he was afraid that if he spoke too loudly, the bear would show up there and then.
I brushed the dirt off of my cargo pants as I got up. "We can't leave it running around." I said, trying to sound confident. "It's scaring off the game, and if it gets to The Cabin…" I trailed off.
"We can't take the risk, that's all. I know how to take care of it." I said, and with that, I turned and made my way back home.
Keep behind Marcy. She still smells a little bit scared.
I don't like this. The thing back there, makes me scared, the scent is going away now, but my head still feels scared…
/Bad smell big thing run pounce run away rival run/
We're back home now. Marcy says to wait outside, and sHe comes out a moment later with some big-metal-thing on her shoulder.
I stare at them. Very scary big-metal-things.
She had a gun too, but not her little one; It's big, and long, and she has it on her back. It smells like smoke and fire, and it hurts my nose.
She starts going back to the blood-bad-smelling place, but she doesn't smell scared, much. She smells… angry. Not big-angry, but little-angry, like…
/Determined/
I don't walk too close to her, a little bit because of the big-metal-things.
When she close to the bad-blood-smell-place, she says, "Can you smells the trail from here?"
Sniff. Try to get the smell under all the blood.
/Blood kill prey chase bite/
I shake my head. "This way." I say. The smell is a little bit told, but strong. Smells angry, like big-angry..
/"TANK! SHOOT IT!"/
I still hear the noises in my head, sometimes.
Marcy followed me, and I follow the smell. We walk a long time. Very long time. The smell gets stronger…
"Here." I say. The smell stops, and goes into a dark-rock-place. Very strong here. Smells like predator. And sick.
/Jump run pounce run flee/
Growl at smells.
Marcy smells a little uneasy, now. Haven't ever been around here. Far from home. Not familiar.
She takes off the big-metal-scary thing.
"No use trying to shoot it in the dark." She says, very quiet. She pulls open the metal-thing, and I see it looks like the traps she uses.
It's very big.
I stay away from it. Stay away from dark-place too. Can't hear much in it, but smell…
/Blood prey kill run/
"No black bear." She says, looking at the trap, "Is going to avoid that, much less an infected one." She smells a little less afraid, but still scared when we go home.
Later, when she reads me General Tacticus' Doctrines of War Strategy and Annihilation, she smells uneasy.
I don't think she will stop smelling that way until the bear is dead.
A/N: Things are picking up now, are they not?
I know it's a bit of a cop-out with the time-skip... :/ I actually did have dialogue etc. for the interval I skimmed over, but it was resolutely terrible, so I cut it out of the story. When I've had a bit more practice, I might post a a separate story going over that part in more detail (Which I'd love to do!) but for now, I'm afraid that's all I have for you.
Please leave a review berating me for this lazy piece of writing, and recommend it to your friends if you still liked the story despite this. Until next chapter!
-Author
