Sheva's retreat took her down the longest of the corridors she had been fighting in, and she could see from the change in lighting in the distance that the end of the hallway opened up to some sort of exterior space outside of the building. Her MP-45 felt too light in her hands as she jogged down the hallway, warning her that its magazine was nearly empty. In the unrelenting haste of her recent engagements, she had had no opportunity to reload. But as the sounds of her pursuers faded in the distance behind her, she judged that she now had the time to fill her weapon with ammo once more.
Reaching for a replacement clip on her belt, she decelerated quickly, shuffling through a half-step before coming to a complete halt. She lifted her weapon up from her waist, and rotated it until it was nearly upside down, exposing the feedslot on the bottom of the grip that had moments before ejected the old clip. In one smooth motion, her left hand guided the new fresh clip into place, and then slapped it all the way in with heel of her hand, the faint scent of gun oil wafting briefly into her nostrils. The movement may have looked fluid and easy, but Sheva felt tension building inside her with each passing moment. She was always uncomfortable with the idea of standing still for any reason during a firefight, but she'd heard too many stories from the field that underscored the importance of this crucial stand-still-during-reload rule of her training, and though she'd never heard it, she knew that there was only one sound worse than than the loud hollow snap of a hammer falling on an empty chamber, and that was dull metallic thud of a jammed cartridge caused by an improperly loaded weapon. It was a sound that drained the blood out of your face in a heartbeat, because it meant the weapon would be useless until fully disassembled and unjammed.
Sheva ran for the daylight she saw in front of her, but the nearer she came to it, the dimmer and grayer it seemed to become.
When she finally arrived out in the open, she found herself atop a large outdoor deck-like structure that was crudely constructed from differently sized wooden planks, none of which were properly lined up or flush with any of the others. It looked like a large scale version of something built from the toy construction set of a poor crazed child. Every joint was crooked or warped slightly, with not a flat surface or long straight line to be seen.
But this was no time to be playing building inspector. The group she had left in her wake was still after her, and on the other side of the haphazard decking, a new group could be seen just taking notice of her for the first time. Some carried long staves in both hands. One carried a large pipe wrench, while another actually paused to light a rag-stuffed bottle it had pulled from a pocket in its rotting, ill-fitting clothing.
Sheva reached back over her shoulder as she turned to face the pursuing first group once more, grabbed the barrel of the rifle slung behind her back, and pulled its stock over and into her other hand.
She quickly glanced towards the second group, and judging that she had space and time, raised the rifle stock to her shoulder and nestled its side into her cheekbone as she pointed the weapon back down the stone corridor she had just escaped from.
This was easy. The enemy targets were all conveniently grouped by the hallway into a narrow field of view that fell almost entirely into the viewfinder. She calmed her breathing and let the red aiming bead drift across the heads, chests and shoulders of the shambling undead asshe squeezed the trigger. Pop! One fiend went straight back, taking down two more following along behind. Pop! Pop! They fell away, each with a single shot, and sometimes the same bullet would rip through two to equally lethal effect.
The first group having been eliminated, Sheva turned her attention back toward the second. It was then that she noticed him rounding the corner of the outside of the building at the other end deck for the first time: a very large hulking figure whose head was completely covered in some kind of red sackcloth. She could see that he was taller that any of the other zombies in the area, but it was difficult to judge how much larger, as he was further behind the main group. But he was closing the distance quickly.
Shooting a quick glance back down the corridor to make sure than no one on that flank was getting up again, she reloaded the rifle and brought it to bear down the new sightline. Now he was in the middle of the group, leaning back while seeming to spin in place violently. The creatures around him that once had seemed a deadly threat to her, now suddenly looked like sad little rag dolls as they were abruptly launched into the air up and away from this hooded human spindle, some of them in pieces that were broken apart from their torsos at the joint and sockets.
And even more quickly than the crowd of zombies had come together, it had been utterly dispersed, leaving only the faceless giant where the rotting and moaning throng had surrounded him only moments before.
The rifle felt suddenly heavy in Sheva's grasp, the barrel drooping down and away as she blinked twice incredulously, as if it would clear her vision, because she could not believe what she was seeing. This dude had to be at least ten feet tall, and in both hands he was dragging along behind him an ax whose handle was probably a few feet longer, and whose head was as twice as large as the one on his broad and naked shoulders, trailing sparks and faint wisps of smoke as it was dragged along on the ground abehind. The hood had made him at first seem some sort of executioner, but now with no obstacles to her line of sight, Sheva could see that he was also wearing some sort of heavy black apron that was freshly spattered with the blood and half decomposed entrails of the zombies that had surrounded him earlier, making him appear like some sort of butcher of ghouls.
The monster took strides that were long and swift, and it moved towards Sheva with alarming, sure-footed rapidity. Sheva suddenly felt as if as there were barely enough time and space to even raise up her rifle once more, so she turned and fled down back the corridor she came from, cursing and muttering to herself that she surely wasn't getting any closer to the landing zone by heading in this direction.
At the far end of the hall she spied something of hopeful tactical value: a window-sized opening in the wall that led into a different room. Sheva slung the rifle over her back once more, freeing her hands which she placed on the sill, and then vaulted through the window into a sideways shoulder roll on the ground whose momentum carried her back up onto her feet with her rifle facing back through the opening she'd just come through. She aimed her weapon and fired.
It would have been a gross understatement to say that the monster was shrugging off the rifle shots. The hulking brute didn't even flinch once, although Sheva could see clearly through the scope that each round was penetrating the beast with an substantial eruption of blood. With still a few yards to go before the axman was at the window, Sheva moved the aiming point to the middle of the hood, hoping to pierce the soft tissue of an eyeball or oral or nasal cavity, but each shot seemed just as ineffectual as the ones before it. The monster didn't even seem as if it were going to slow down as it approached the other side of the opening.
Rather, without any apparent hesitation, the executioner stooped, and then with its long legs simply stepped through the window, the length of its legs allowing it to clear the sill easily, and pausing only briefly to thread the ax that was trailing behind him through the opening.
The creature's scarred and distended abdomen became suddenly taut with exertion, and instinctively Sheva knew that an ax stroke was to follow in an instant. She stepped both to the side of and towards the monster, knowing that if her opponent kept both hands on that long ax handle, she would be much safer fighting on the inside.
The ax stroke came nowhere near Sheva, landing instead on the stone floor to her left with a deafening crash that instantly filled the air with an enormous cloud of dust and sparks of made hot iron and stone chips that stung the exposed flesh of her face, shoulder and arm on the left side of her body.
The executioner paused momentarily, leaning forward, some of its weight supported by the ax that was still being grasped by both hands. Sheva was close enough to him now to smell the sweat, blood, soot, and decaying tissue that was caked onto his titanic frame, and as the unwelcome odors creeped into her nasal passages, her throat began to close and choke with nausea, but only for a second before a new surge of adrenaline suffused her body once more.
Before the stooping giant could lift its ax from the floor, Sheva struck the nearer of its legs with her heel just behind its knee, causing to it sink even lower to the floor, its head hanging down further still, revealing to Sheva that the hood it was wearing was secured with thick tapered wooden splinters that pierced through and into the monster's head from all sides and directions.
She held her rifle high above her head, the barrel pointed upwards, her muscles stretched out all along her lean, lithe tension-filled body, but a body too soaked with adrenaline and fear to sense the sickness lurking inside of her gut.
Sheva brought the butt of rifle down on the top of its head with all of her might. Its sturdy wooden stock landed with a wet, muffled crunch, and a stinging heat flared up in the palms of her hands, skinned as the rifle slid upwards within her grasp from the force of the blow.
It was dead, a heavy mass of limbs slumping further down but held together by muscle and tendon suddenly gone limp, as if someone had thrown off the creature's main circuit breaker.
Sheva ran for the landing zone.