Click.
The gun was empty. David opened his eyes.
"Damnit," he said. His voice echoed in the empty subway station.
He popped the cartridge from the gun, took a clean look through the barrel to make sure there wasn't a jam. Nothing.
"So this is how it ends," he thought. He looked at his leg. Or, rather, the bloody shreds of what remained of his leg, ending in a puddle of blood. The pain had mostly stopped, replaced by a dull numb sensation over his entire body. He felt extremely cold and weak. Even if he had two legs to stand on, he knew he lacked the strength to even get up from the dark corner of the floor Yoko had set him down in.
Yoko. Where was she? How long had it been? He had no sense of time here. Everything was dark, silent.
If she was really lucky, maybe she found a way out and escaped. If someone upstairs owed him a miracle, she ran into the rest of the group and they were on their way right now.
He laughed a little at that thought, the unlikelihood of it, and spat up some salty blood.
Even if she did get out of the subway, where was she going to go? The streets were overrun with them. And how would she find the rest of the group, assuming they were even still alive? When they got separated, no one had the time to pick out a rendezvous point. Everyone was too busy trying to run away from them.
Them. He still had trouble believing it. He had seen a lot of strange things over the years, as he wandered from town to town, but nothing like what he had seen in the last 24 hours. "Zombies", or "Undead" was what the doctor had called them – what was his name? George, maybe. Dead bodies returned to life, by reasons unknown, shambling, moaning, straight out of some horror movie. He had to make a mental adjustment the first time one came up close and tried to rip off his face. It wasn't some kid in a costume, it wasn't some elaborate prank. It was as real as the sweat on his face, and he had to get a real good grip on his plumbers wrench before he knew what to do.
The cop-guy had said that the entire city was overrun. That they had to get out, but some group was blocking off all exits from the city, trapping them inside. "There's still a chance we can get out," he had said. Something about some way out up north. They had been broadcasting it over the police radio system. "All survivors take the north route out of the city".
"Survivors." David had another short laugh at this, followed by a bloody coughing fit.
Yoko, though, she was a survivor. When they were holed up in that abandoned office building and the shamblers started pouring in through all the doors, she was the one who grabbed his hand, yelled at him to come "this way" and led him through a door he hadn't seen, down a stairway, through a basement with almost no light. When they got to the dead end in the hallway, he was ready to give up. But she spotted the HVAC duct, and they managed to squeeze through, going an inch at a time, until they found a way out.
All this from some scared, Japanese college student they found hiding in a closet. David figured she was going to be a liability, with the way she was so quiet, and held on to that backpack of hers so tightly. He figured wrong.
The two of them followed the underground route for almost an hour, probably weaving through the sub-basements of numerous buildings. Finally, they opened a door to find themselves looking into a long dark tunnel.
"It's the subway," David said. Yoko suddenly looked terrified. "What's wrong?"
"Jim, the subway operator, he told me he saw terrible things in the subways."
"What terrible things?"
Yoko was silent, as though she couldn't reveal a secret.
"What terrible things?" This time, a little louder.
"Gaichuu," she said quietly, followed by "Insects, giant ones." She looked at him, desperate. "We should go back up. Try and find the others."
David instinctively shook his head. "The buildings are all probably crawling with shamblers by now. Even if they survived, we'd never be able to find them."
She grabbed his hand with both her hands.
"Please?" she said.
Back up, where he knew the dangers, or down, into the unknown. Eventually, he acquiesced. They slowly backtracked, trying to find a way back up. David remembered in particular a long dark metal stairway that seemed to go up forever.
David blinked twice. He was slowly drifting off as he thought about what had happened to him. But then, he heard it again, the sound that forced him to attention.
A faint distant clicking noise.
Not a mechanical noise, he realized. It reminded him of the sound of snapping teeth, except louder and sharper. He shuddered again.
Whatever it was, it was getting closer.
Was he prepared to face whatever was soon to find him? He certainly had not been prepared when they reached the top of the stairs, to find a veritable army of zombies behind a closed door. Yoko had screamed, which seemed to give them added vigor. They ran down the stairs, taking the steps in leaps. But then, right at the base of the stairs, David fell with an awkward twist to his ankle. He struggled to get up, fell again, and barely had time to cry out before they were upon him. One zombie tackled him, and two more grabbed his leg. He wrestled with the one on his back, twisting the zombie's head back until he could get a clear shot with his gun. He fired, and the zombie fell back. Almost as a response to the gunfire, he then felt a horrible tearing sensation in his lower leg. With cold shock, David watched as two zombies proceeded to rend his leg to bits with their bare hands. The pain was excruciating. He managed to shoot them off, but he could see five more tortured faces and outstretched decaying limbs descending the stairs at a rapid pace, and the pain was making him see white at the edges of his vision. He started to drag himself forward using his arms.
There was sudden explosion behind him that rendered David momentarily deaf. He felt his body slowly being propelled forwards, and then nothing.
When he came to, Yoko was finishing applying a tourniquet to his leg. He wondered, momentarily, where she had learned to do that.
She had come back and used the precious hand grenade given to her by the former police officer in the group. "For emergency use only," he remembered the cop saying. The explosion had triggered a minor structural collapse, destroying the stairway and blocking the bottom door with twisted metal wreckage.
"That was quick thinking," he said.
She nodded. "I think they can't come down that stairway anymore. But now we have to find another way out."
"I'm not going to be much help," he said, and looked at his bloody leg.
She didn't respond, and simply started pulling him up. With a bit of effort, he managed to stand on his remaining leg, and winced.
"Does it hurt a lot?" she asked. He nodded.
With his arm over her shoulder, they limped down the tunnel, through an abandoned station, and then through a long maintenance hallway. It was arduous. Every step seemed to take forever. David was just waiting for another group of zombies to tackle both of them from behind.
Eventually, they reached another hallway with a long upward grade that appeared to end in another set of stairs. David looked at it, and then looked at his leg, and knew what had to happen.
"No more," David said. Yoko stopped, looked at him.
"I can't go any further and I'm slowing you down," he said. "You should go on. Try and find a way out."
She shook her head, again looking terrified.
He pushed the gun into her hand. "Take this. It's empty, but you might be able to find some bullets somewhere."
She shook her head. He tried again, and she pushed it away. She kept dragging him too, until he protested again. And again.
There was a look of pain in her eyes, as she lowered David into a shadowy corner of a long room, its purpose unknown and perhaps forgotten. She insisted on leaving him with a candy bar she had in her backpack. A treasured possession. He tried to give her the gun again, but she refused.
"I'll find everyone, and we'll come back for you," she said before she left him. It was said with honesty, although David doubted her chances. But he didn't say this. Instead, he simply said, "Good luck."
She looked around briefly, and then ran off, into the darkness, leaving him alone. He could hear the steps of her sneakers on the metal floors recede, until there was nothing.
That was some time ago. Since then, David figured he had probably drifted off several times. There was no way to tell. The entire time, the place had been silent, until now.
The clicking noise again.
David gathered the remaining strength he had left. He tried to raise himself to a better sitting position, to see into the murky darkness. As David tried to sit up, propping his back higher against the wall, his hand brushed up against something small, hard and cold. He looked down.
A single bullet. It must have been in his pocket, maybe fell out when Yoko set him down.
The clicking noises were getting closer.
Gritting his teeth, he mustered the strength to pop the bullet into the cartridge, and load the cartridge back into the gun. The gun felt too heavy, like someone had tied a 20-pound weight to it.
The clicking noises were still getting closer. He squinted in the darkness. Still nothing. But then, he detected it, faint at first, then stronger. An acidic stench, similar to the smell he had encountered when cleaning away dead roaches underneath a sink.
He struggled to raise the gun to his temple. His hand shook.
"Sorry I can't stick around," he said out loud, to no one in particular.
David closed his eyes.