Kyle felt positive that if there ever existed a record for the fastest time a man has consumed an entire, foot long turkey sub, he had just smashed such a record to bits. No sooner did he allow his worries to drown beneath the succulent, several day-old meat, lettuce, tomato and Italian bread than did the entire sandwich disappear from his grasp. He recalled walking to take a seat on the bed where he and Veronica had spent the night, submitting his conscious self to her decision to separate, and then there was nothing. The sandwich was but a memory lingering on his tongue, leaving him alone once more.
Just as thoughts of Veronica began to flood back into his mind, Kyle found himself uttering, "But damn was that a good sandwich."
Of course, soon even that memory failed to satisfy him. Without missing a beat, Kyle left the security of the bed that had spawned a slew of emotions and bittersweet memories, and approached the table where Veronica had left her knife and magnum. He focused his attention on the closed door for but a moment, almost waiting for something on the other side to make its presence known, but only silence replied to his paranoia. Figuring that he couldn't afford to waste much time, as sitting in a hospital would actually do very little in aiding his escape from the city, Kyle attached Veronica's knife to his belt and slipped the magnum harness over his shoulders and chest. Stuffing what he could of the ammunition into his pockets, he wasted no time in bracing the doorknob, readying himself once again to face the horrors of the city.
"Right," he stopped himself before blundering out into the hallway. "Some sort of game plan would help, wouldn't it?" His words fell upon his ears, and only his ears, for Kyle was never one to stay his tongue even if no one else would hear him speak. It kept him at ease and in control, allowing him to focus on situations more clearly than if he allowed his thoughts to eat him from the inside out. "If she's heading towards the highway, I can probably meet her on the other side of the park and then just follow her out of the city… I suppose I'll have a one out of three chance of picking the direction she chose, though after what happened yesterday, I can't imagine she'd be willing to go straight through the park." He laughed after his voice fell completely silent, realizing full well that it'd be impossible for him to predict much of anything Veronica would do. "Kyle J. Cruise, zombie killer and stalker extraordinaire!"
The door shut behind him as his footfalls fell against the quiet air of the hospital, locking whatever he shared with Veronica within that one room. Perhaps, in an odd way, that door would stay shut and allow his memories of the previous night to remain untainted and whole for the rest of eternity. As much as Kyle wanted to believe that, however, he knew that he couldn't continue lingering behind that door, trapped within those walls. The veil of temporary peace had to lift from his eyes so that he could hope to rejoin Veronica once again, somewhere far from Raccoon City.
"Dead bodies, check." Kyle nodded his head as he approached the staircase leading to the first floor, passing the body of the nurse that Veronica had put to eternal slumber the night before. "Glad to see that things never change."
Moments later, Kyle was forced to eat his words as he stumbled upon a pile of goo-covered eggs forming in the corner of the first landing. Several small, slimy leech-like creatures slithered down the wall to congregate at the pile of unnatural slime, without a doubt in an attempt to forge more of their unholy army. Luckily, they seemed far too preoccupied with whatever sort of mating ritual they took part in to take much notice of Kyle's presence as he crept past. Daring not to utter a solitary word, deciding to leave fornicating hell spawn to their own devices, he chalked the entire encounter up on the "Things to Never Think About Again" chalkboard and continued on his way.
No sooner did he reach the main floor, however, did he notice one of the critters crawling up the side of his pants. With determination to smite anything far weaker than himself burning in his eyes, Kyle glared down at the leech-like creature and said, "Oh, you little bastard," right before smacking the thing to floor. Then, with only a faint hiss, it had a pleasant meeting with the bottom of Kyle's shoe, leaving nothing but a gooey mess in its wake.
Taking care to wipe off the extra slime from the bottom of his shoe onto the shirt of a nearby corpse, not wanting to accidently slip at the most inopportune moment, Kyle continued to the front doors of the hospital. At this point in time, the sight of several unmoving bodies ceased to make much of an impact on him. He vaguely recalled Veronica laying some of the mindless beasties to rest in that area while he stood on the line between consciousness and deep, numbing sleep. Then again, he mused, such a scene of surreal madness could have existed solely in his mind as a nightmare brought on by the venom.
A gunshot broke through the air as soon as Kyle pressed his hands against the shockingly cool front doors. Stopping in place, he fell still and looked through the glass doors to the outside streets, noting the lack of rotten corpses roaming around with a mixture of relief, "Good, I'm not going to get mauled on my way out," and deep concern, "So… What killed all the zombies and how long until I run into one of them?" He began to count the seconds while waiting for another gunshot, knowing far too well that the sheer impact of the noise meant that it couldn't belong to either of Veronica's handguns. If he had to guess, he would have attributed its source to some sort of shotgun or rifle.
"Great," he muttered, ever eager to keep himself as a companion regardless of how close to insane speaking to himself made him appear. "I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that the guys with guns aren't going to be up to grabbing lunch with me."
Another gunshot rang through the doors, thudding against Kyle's eardrums like a giant's footstep in the far distance. He continued to wait, letting his recent distrust of people with guns keep his feet secured in place. Every breath he took started to fog up the glass in front of his face, forcing him to wipe away the condensation every few breaths. Only after what felt like an eternity alone with his thoughts did two figures come into view in front of the hospital. An unarmed man in a grey uniform led a second uniformed man with one gun in his hands and another strapped to his back. It took a bit of willpower to refrain from approaching them and keep his innate desire to surround himself with others at bay.
After the two men passed out of sight, Kyle ventured out of the hospital, leaving its depths for some other forsaken travelers to stumble upon and wade through. Taking it slow, he approached the street, looking off in the direction that the uniformed men had disappeared into just in time to see their figures weaving through the mechanical heaps of vehicles that littered the street. Again, the urge to speak up and make his presence known rose in his chest, but a swift assurance that calling to the men would only lead to more trouble put his desire to rest and forced him to turn in the other direction. He had no idea which direction Veronica had opted to go in order to reach the other side of the park, as he felt sure was still her destination, but such a decision hardly mattered anymore. Following the uniformed men, he figured would, "only lead to a display of gunplay, the likes of which would probably leave me nearly headless with a sizeable chunk torn from my chest. And I'm a huge fan of my head and chest, thank you." Glancing down at his equipment, he shook his head. "Never bring a knife to a gunfight, that's what my grand-pappy always told me. Well, that and," he cleared his throat and did his best impersonation of an old man, regardless that no living creature would be able to watch his performance, "'Never trust a woman with big tits until you've gotten a firm hold on them and have made sure they're real. Now be a good lad and fetch me a beer. I'm in the mood to make your grandmother look attractive again.'"
Laughing to himself, as the laughter seemed to keep the smothering silence and stillness of the street from strangling him to death, flashbacks of his and Veronica's trek to the hospital the night before popped into his mind. Every few buildings that he passed offered a familiar glimpse back to a short bout of consciousness with Veronica doing what she could to carry him along. Eventually, he recalled the run in with the large, deformed creature and, subsequently, the rifle he must have left behind. After making his way through the mess of the immobile metallic corpses of vehicles and forever-motionless human bodies, trying to recall the location of the battle, he finally stumbled across the large body of flesh and muscle, resting in eternal death once and for all.
"And now's the part where it gets up and attacks me, right?" With little more than unease on his mind, Kyle scanned the vicinity for his rifle, never truly taking his attention too far away from the massive body of unnatural spite lying on the ground. After what amounted to little more than a meager search, as the lack of moving undead and the nearby corpse of a creature Kyle had no desire to watch stand up once more did nothing to aid his worried mind, he gave up looking for the gun. It would only be later that he'd assume the uniformed man with two guns had swiped his rifle, immediately forcing Kyle to call said individual a, "selfish, inconsiderate twatwaffle."
Continuing down the street, wishing to put a great deal of distance between him and the creature that had hunted him and Veronica, it wasn't long before he once again spoke aloud to himself. "Avoid scary men with guns: Check. Try to find more firepower to no avail: Check. Avoid getting my head crushed by a pissed off, reanimated monster: Double check." He made his way around a decapitated corpse, stepping onto the sidewalk, not for a moment considering how little the sight of a headless body affected him. "Now, I just need to walk around the entire park… No problem, right?" With a short laugh, he threw his gaze up towards the sky and added, "Unless God wants to fuck around some more. How 'bout it, big guy?"
Hours later, God's wrath would fall upon Kyle like a hailstorm of flaming, exploding boulders. After weaving his way along the street that bordered the edge of the park, finding mostly the bodies of the recently re-deceased laying in his path, he turned a corner to continue his trek around the perimeter of the park. As if taunting him, a single crow perched upon an entirely useless phone line cawed as he walked by. With each abrupt, rude noise the black bird let out into the air, Kyle could only imagine the creature throwing out a slew of insults at him in bird-tongue. Eventually, he flipped the little devil-incarnate off and, surprisingly, it stopped cawing for about three seconds, possibly stunned by his display of annoyance and frustration. Then, of course, it started up again, ever determined to have its feral cries burrow forever into Kyle's brain.
"I swear," he muttered as he made his way around a car, leaving a lone zombie to struggle its way around the vehicle in order to reach him. "When I make it out of this mess, I am taking up bird hunting."
The cawing stopped.
"Yea, you heard me! Every weekend, me and my rifle are going out to the woods looking for feathery bastards to shoot down from the sky. Then, you know what?"
Silence.
"I'm going to eat the bodies because revenge tastes so sweet basted in honey barbeque sauce." Kyle licked his lips, feeling certain that he had caught the crow's attention. "I like my bird with an extra helping of IRONY!"
The bitter air spoke, "Irony!" in echo, each last call fading into nothing more than the last until only the sound of a crow's wings fluttering remained. Then, without so much as a solitary caw to say goodbye, the black demon-bird was gone, most likely off to harass some other poor individual roaming the streets of Raccoon City.
"Yea! You better run-Er, fly! Whatever!" Kyle waved his fist in the air as if attempting to bend the forces of nature to his whims and smite the bird from the sky with a lightning bolt.
For a moment, the rumbling beneath his feet didn't even seem real. Kyle stumbled over his curses towards the disappearing crow, taken by surprise at the faint vibrations running up his legs. Next, everything fell still, save for the few wandering zombies still shuffling along, lost within the river of unmoving metal that had become the street. Looking towards the buildings lining the side of the street to his left, then the expanse of park at his right, Kyle had all of five seconds to realize that he had inadvertently stumbled across something to make his day exponentially worse. The rumbling in the ground started up again, this time exerting stronger vibrations through his legs. By the third mini-earthquake, he began to run.
"I don't know what the hell is going on," he uttered to himself in between breaths, "but given this city's track record, I'm pretty sure that I don't want to find out."
Sliding over the hood of a car, Kyle avoided one of the nearby animates, allowing the mindless creature to fall to the ground following its pitiful display of dexterity. As if the city had developed some twisted form of a heart, the tremors continued in a rhythm, occurring almost every few footsteps that Kyle took. It didn't take too long for the sounds of the earth breaking beneath the force of the quakes to become like small explosions. Before Kyle could so much as yell out from his near collision with a zombie, the metaphoric heart finally burst. From the cracked rubble of the street and the dirt-debris of the nearby park emerged a large, mud-covered worm, four long, over-sized, sharp mandibles protruding from a circular mouth at its head. The creature stood like a tower of decayed, pale, pulsating flesh filled only with rage and hunger.
Another one of those rare, almost never heard of occasions struck once again. Kyle fell utterly speechless, save for a single, solitary curse that managed to slip through his lips before fear and sheer hopelessness seized his body. "Fuck…"