Present Day. Our intrepid heroes were barricaded up in a city so vacant that no zombies showed up even while she was running through the streets calling for him. We can presume this means it's been a long time since the initial green flu outbreak, and long after the setting of the two Left 4 Dead games.

Snickers crawled out of her bedroll somewhere around dawn, and went to stretch himself out before the apartment's broken windows. He buried his (already hooded) face into his forearms, and soaked in the heat of the morning sunrise.

Without eyelids, and with pupils as wide around as the socket, Hunters were indisputably equipped for hunting in the darkness. But even when the sky was overcast, Snickers relied much more on other senses than on vision; and he wouldn't go out prowling under a naked sun at all- not unless she blindfolded him.

Then of course he was a cat, after all, so he would lay out basking in a sunlit room all day if she let him- provided he felt safe and that his face was decently covered.

Maybe today was just that sort of day, though: a rest day. Well, then she wanted to steal some sunshine, too. She rolled sleepily off of her mat, dragged it over to the window, and bundled herself up against Snicker's flank. He was happy enough to be a pillow, and he was clean enough not to stink. She dozed, content enough with the present to pause worrying about the larger state of the world. Ranging about with only a Hunter for companion could be a lonely way to live out the rest of her days but, at the very least, it was better than dying suddenly, painfully, and alone.

She slept in several hours, and then lazed about conducting small but long-overdue maintenance work on various articles of gear: oiling hinges, stitching tight loose corners, gluing odds and sharpening ends. When her rear end began protesting such an abnormal lack of exercise, she got herself up and paced about and stretched. Snickers yawned and stretched back and forth, rolling about on his back with his arms and legs all curled up.

Even though Snickers had once been human, the Green Flu had changed his anatomy enough to classify him as a different species . He was a Hunter: His tendons and muscles rested easiest in a 'coiled' position instead of an 'extended' one. The curves of his shoulder-blades and clavicles had been mutated and distorted on even a skeletal level. His skin was not smooth; he sported thickened, coarse ridges across the length of his back and and limbs that reminded her faintly of Crocodile scutes, but which were at least clean of lesions and grime.

Most of Snickers' competition wasn't as lucky on that last point, and suffered from some degree of fungal infection. After all, few of them had the luxury of being scrubbed with a luffa by a friendly human helper, now did they? On the rare occasion that she had a fresh Hunter corpse to inspect (she tried to avoid confrontation) she'd seen what looked to be a wide range of various superficial mutations, skin infections, and overtaxed immune systems. Disease and Charles Darwin, she wagered, would pick off a great number of special infected if food-scarcity didn't get them first. That thought was humbling: that the world would go on turning without humans, leaving only feral zombie apex predators for evolution to act upon-

-Evolution required generations. Could zombies breed? There was nothing about the Green Flu to explicitly suggest they were sterile, and the diseased seemed to exhibit enough variability to suggest that somewhere, somehow, one individual from one subspecies would end up with all the mechanisms necessary to produce evil zombies babies. All it would take after that would be enough luck for the offspring to make it to adulthood and keep breeding. Snickers lived off tuna, and so zombies could hunt animals. Nature would find a way.

Maybe 'humanity' still lingered in the zombie genetic code, somewhere. Maybe luck and statistics would recreate intelligence from what remained.

What is the point of being so damn morbid? Was humanity even dead? No one was directing radio waves her way, and no one had been for quite some time. But perhaps the rest of the world had simply given up on North America?

Sometimes she worried that if she stopped talking out loud to Snickers, she might forget how to speak.

"But that's right, it's past bath time, isn't it?" she startled herself out of her own melancholy. He whirred peaceably, and rolled onto his stomach. Once weekly she did try to get his whole outfit off, but on the days between she always made sure to at least sponge-bathe his joints. Rituals helped her count the days, the weeks, the months, the seasons...

"Do you ever think about the future?" she asked him rhetorically, as she bundled his hoodie up against his shoulders, and scrubbed and scrubbed to his persistent purrs. "Am I really the only thing left in all the known universe still capable of any big questions at all?"

The way Snickers purred louder suggested he was actively and intentionally discouraging her from feeling lonely. And that, well, that would have to be enough.