Anne sat in a sort of dopey despair in her high-rise apartment. Her eyes were focused on the reflection she saw in the small amount of water that was left in a grimy cup in front of her. Aside from the occasional scream and moan sometimes close, sometimes not, she could only hear the ticking of her hanging grandfather clock and the murmur of her own pulse. She should have been crying. She wasn't.
She had comprehended as much of the situation as she could in her current state. The town was overtaken by zomb- no; she wasn't quite ready to call them that yet. For now, she decided to use the phase "cannibalistic twitching speech impaired stumbling murderers" which was somehow more reasonable in her mind than the truth of the predicament. Anyway, she was aware that most of her friends were dead- common sense and the lack of working telephones confirmed that. Help, if it was even coming, was going to be slow. Her chances of ever enjoying another red sunrise were slimming themselves by the second. Not that she really minded. Only her subconscious, hidden away in a more pleasant, unused part of her brain, even really cared if she lived or died.
She turned around the bottle of pills she had just taken with the water earlier described. It was supposed to help her with the "incident" she had been through a few months ago. The reason for the quotation marks was because she couldn't even remember what the damn incident was. Hell, some mornings it took a few hours of heavy thinking to remember her name. Though she wasn't the right mind to care or notice, Anne had now become a ghost of what used to be Anne Wrightfield- and inspired and steadfast reporter on her way becoming both an anchorwoman and Anne Steele. Of course, the promotion and marriage both were quite briskly thrown out the window after a few days on the various pills that flowed through her drug-ridden bloodstream.
Now she was just Anne, a woman with unkempt hair who smelled and dressed vaguely like a sack of potatoes. Perhaps out of forgetfulness or, more likely, pity, the landlord had not asked for rent for the past two months. Again, to reiterate, she wasn't in the right mind to care or notice. She wasn't even so much as fired as she just…stopped coming to work. She, for lack of better way to describe it, stopped everything after the incident- or was it these damn pills? Now she was just struggling with the idea of a biohazard outbreak being a bad thing.
There was a quick, tense beating at the door, and before she could even consider that it could be a cannibalistic twitching speech impaired stumbling murderer which would have taken a good five minutes for her, she had opened the door. Luckily for her, she supposed, it was nothing at the sort, but rather a sweaty blood-stained landlord named Mr. Bachman.
When Anne had been Anne Wrightfield, she had noticed the oddity of Mr. Bachman. He was tall, curt, handsome in any light- not what a landlord was expected to be. He looked in his middle-twenties, but he acted like he was somewhere in the teens- surprisingly, not in a annoying way. Actually, he was kind of wise, but he avoided confrontation like the plague, not to mention the energy that radiated from him like a lamp. Regardless, from his wavy hair and green eyes, to the clothes that never fit him as good as he would look without them, he was going to be quite a catch for whoever he chose to be his. All that was just described could not have fit him worse at the moment, however- he looked like hell just woken up.
"ANNe!" he blurted out as she almost thought she heard a crack in his voice, "Are you okay? We need to get out of here!" "Ohuh..why?" she said without emotion, her eyes trailing to the motley crew that was behind him. Although they were just a blur of faces now, they were very familiar people when she was Anne Wrightfield. There was Mr. Huxley, and old man who decided to spend most of his company with his deceased wife's ashes and two sickly looking Labradors, all three of them missing at the moment. There was Jacob Clark, a witty teen who carried some extra baggage but was more than nice enough to carry Anne Wrightfield's groceries up free of charge. Then there were Mary and Ashley, a lesbian couple who were more or less loners. None of them looked very happy, and it was blatantly apparent that it was because Bachman had decided to make a run through on every floor of his apartment complex to check for survivors.
Bachman looked dumbfounded, and he tried to give a look like what-the-hell-are-you-talking-about-why-it's-a-damn-bloodbath-here, but was missed entirely by the drugged up Anne. Finally, he spoke in a rushed tone, practically yelling out gibberish at her, "Mr. Huxley said he saw a police van stop over at Wildon and Parkview Ave. We think they might be looking for survivors," Huxley nodded angrily, while Jacob bit at a nail and the girls hugged each other.
Anne stood for a second, nodding her head, not so much absorbing the facts of the situation but bobbing her cranium around like an airhead. "Let me…just go get my medicine…Kay?" she said, beginning to shut the door before Bachman grabbed her wrist tightly, his knuckles turning white and her circulation turning off. "What in the HELL are you talking about?! We have to go- now!" he screamed as he tugged her out into the hallway.
She vaguely remembered murmuring something about never going anywhere without her medicine before she went along with his incessant pulling, breaking into a stumbling walk and joining the only survivors of Pelican Apartments.
As it turned out, Anne was the third apartment on the first floor. The second one refused to answer, and the first one had it's front door torn right off the hinges and Bachman was threatened to not investigate, so it was a short time before the reached the lobby- which was unfamiliar to her nowadays as northern Russia. The room, although small, was grandly decorated to suit the buildings name. Through various outings to furniture departments and pawn shops, he had furnished the entire front with assorted pelican-themed objects- right down to the pelican stationary. It all looked rather bizarre, Anne Wrightfield supposed, but if you began to think if he spent this much time on the furniture, then he most be one hell of a lightning bolt with fixing a broken water heater, which lead to you paying rent almost instantaneously arriving at that assumption. So it worked in an unexpected way for him. But still, there weren't even goddam beaches in Raccoon City, Anne Wrightfield would think. However, there wasn't much time for Anne to reminisce on better, lobby-filled days.
As Bachman opened the front doors to the deserted street, he suddenly lost grip and the wind ripped on of the antique doors to the concrete railing that led up to the entrance, the other closing in Mr. Huxley's peering face, as he jumped back from a mix of pain, surprise, and embarrassment. Not a word was uttered, however, as they all filed out to the thankfully devoid-of-zombies road.
The wind nipped angrily at Anne's ears and nose and she suddenly felt the need for a scarf. The air smelled of death, fire, and despair, and it was the kind of coldness that whenever you breathed heavily, the back of your throat burned with white heat. Newspaper flew across the street with no particular agenda, and the Carrie and Kline Co. burned off in the distance, sending thick haystacks into the sky, covering the already grey sky with thick smog. All of it looked beautiful to everyone but Anne, however; the lack of zombies could make any location paradise.
Mr. Huxley had kept to his word- there was a police van, a K-9 one, in fact, but he failed to mention that it had careened into a streetlight, the bulb broke and sending sparks harmlessly on the metallic hood. "Oh..my god," Mary yelped out, her voice carried loudly in the wind and grabbed at Ashley's windbreaker even harder than she had before, burying her cold nose into her warm clothing. "I…didn't know. I couldn't see! Damn these glasses!!" Huxley yelled with the most anger an old man could muster, taking his glasses off and almost throwing them to the ground before deciding better against it and retreating to jut cleaning them with the end of his shirt, before putting them back on.
Some time passed, or so it seemed to all of them. 30 seconds quickly became a few hours. Eventually, Huxley spoke, as if his fantastic reasoning might make up for his blunder, "Well, at least they have some guns. I suppose that would do better than the vase did earlier, eh Bradley?" he said with a crooked grin, almost breaking into a laugh before regaining some sense. He hobbled over to the street and Bradley Bachman shook his head before cautiously joining, leaving the women and children at the bottom step. Bradley did his best to slow his pace down to Huxley, and they eventually crossed the street. A minute later, and they were a rough ten meters away from Anne.
Huxley stood, frozen, as he looked through the window to the driver's seat. A face permanently stuck in terror had slammed into the cracked window, it's eyes scrunched up to the back of it's head as part of it's cheek hung out like vines on a tree. Blood leaked sloppily down the window and pooled on the face's shoulder. Eventually, though, at Bachman' nervous waiting, Huxley moved forward and he reached for the handle of the door. Bachman wasn't any help, firmly stuck in the philosophy that if it was Huxley's idea, it was to Huxley's gain and consequence. Instead he stood, one foot out to the side and tapping as he pretended to look annoyed and bored. A few moments passed, and Huxley opened the door.
Bachman wasn't quite sure what he was seeing at first. In a matter of a few blurred seconds, Huxley was dead. Right as Huxley had begun to kneel to pull for the officer's gun, a dog-thing had leaped out of the car and latched at Huxley's wrinkled cranium with a full set of overgrown incisors. More had followed suit, jumping out of the van like a macabre clown car, all of them taking aim at various parts of Mr. Huxley.
What made Bachman doubt his own sight was the mere appearance of the dogs. Flesh dripped from the creatures at every movement the made and parts of bones had tore through their skin, revealing a pearly white against their black fur. The leader had problems swallowing Huxley's brain due to it falling out to the concrete through it's exposed jaw, and he could actually see the one ripping tendons out of Huxley's thigh stomach swell with meat.
All doubt happened in a moment of two seconds however, and it didn't take long for Bachman and everyone but Anne scream. Loudly. Annoyingly- especially to the canines. They all lifted their heads, away from the meal, and peered at the survivors-slash-entrees as saliva dripped to the ground in an audible pitter-patter. Time seemed to slow to a stop…
Before…
Quickly…
Speeding…
Up…
The Chase was on. Huxley: 0, cannibalistic twitching speech impaired stumbling murderers: 1.