Skyler combed her damp hair back from her neck and shoulders with nervous fingers, leaning in close to the mirror in the apartment's bathroom. It was still light, at least; the building management had contacted the remaining tenants earlier in the day to inform them that the power would be being shut off later that night. The sight of her own rather freckled face stared back at her. There was a slight crease between her eyebrows, but at least she was freshly washed. Slowly though as she brushed her hair smooth, the thought began to sink in again that this… would really be the last night that she was spending in here. For a long while, anyways. She'd barely managed to finally step out on her own and strike out, and tonight was the night that they were being sent to evacuate.

After a few moments though she shook her head, forcing a weary smile onto her face. "Best enjoy this while you can," she muttered to herself. "Where you're going might not have the luxury of a steamy shower."

She was interrupted about then by the sound of a soft knock on the door. A familiar voice called her from her thoughts,

"Theo? Are you ready?"

"Death warmed over" would be an overly pleasant way to describe how Skyler looked right then. Thin streaks of blood trailed over the mirror in the bathroom of the dingy flat she'd had to substitute for a nice, sturdy safe house as she braced her uninjured hand up against it. Gingerly she ran the fingers on her other hand down the injured side of her face.

What she saw looked more like a special effect out of some horror movie than an actual, real-life injury. Not only were the four long and incredibly painful scratches down the right side of her face still red and brutally inflamed, but what remained of her eye had been reduced to little more than gore. She remembered something about the texture of an eyeball being something akin to a grape, and- Her face, already pale from shock and blood loss, went white. At least there was nothing left in her stomach at this point. Not entirely lucid from a combination of. Well, just about everything, Skyler let out a long groan and sagged down onto the bathroom floor.

"I look… awesome."

The rest of her trip here had been an adventure, that was for sure. After she'd freed herself from the fucking Hunter she'd been fully intent on finding the safe house she'd been after and locking herself in for the night, but soon she'd become dangerously dizzy and within an inch of passing out on her feet. Already she'd lost her lunch several times. Wouldn't that just beat all, to have survived the shit she'd just been through and then pass out in the open to make an easy meal? With that in mind she'd had to settle for taking up a temporary residence in the sad little flat in back of a long past looted convenience store. She'd just… continue to hope that nothing managed to track the trail of blood she'd had to have left behind her and that the barricade on the door would hold if it did.

After a while of just sitting there, she was forced to realize that soon she was going to have to do something about this. The blood was already starting to clot so she didn't think that she was going to bleed to death… probably anyways… but this seemed like the perfect grounds for getting a nasty infection if she didn't take care of it quickly. She still had a paltry first aid kit, but fuck if she had more than a general idea of how to use it. With a long, drawn-out sound of displeasure, she hauled herself back to her feet and over the sink.

"Carlin, I'm going to kill you for going and dying," she muttered near-unintelligibly, her face down in the dusty sink bowl.

Jesus. Half a year ago, she probably wouldn't have recognized herself like this. "Theodora Skyler, enlisting in the military and alive after four months of fighting waves of zombies and now being mauled by a mutant freak" just didn't sound like a plausible sentence, but here she was. Still not dead, yet anyways. She bet her sister would have said it was because she was a Taurus.

Arms feeling heavy already she tugged the pack down off of her back, dumping it down into the sink before digging through it for the kit. Grimly, she examined first the shallow slashes covering her chest, and then the reflection of the gore all over her face in the mirror. Very gingerly, she prodded at her clawed cheek with a couple of fingers.

Well. Might as well get the worst of it over with first. How hard could it be, right?

The Hunter wasn't even aware of his limbs collapsing out from under him again until the ground was rushing up too fast to meet his face, and he was left lying in a pile of his own limbs. He had to muffle a shriek of distress to avoid being heard.

Come on, he… he had to get up! He willed himself as hard as he could, panting raggedly with the effort. It hurt it hurt it hurt-

It wasn't easy, but it didn't take too long for him to get back to his feet. This still wasn't good, though. Even when he felt pain, usually he was able to continue on however much it might actually hurt, but this time was different. Slowly and certainly he could feel his strength leaving. He didn't totally understand why, but his body was failing him.

This… this was that woman prey's fault. All of this pain and weakness, she'd done this to him. Anger swelled up in him, his claws twitching on the ground. His head throbbed but at least it helped keep him on his feet.

It hadn't taken him long to realize something after he'd crawled back out from under the meager shelter he'd found: This wasn't something that would just go away if he hid out for a while, keeping low and hunting on the ground. He might have still been moving and breathing, but the life was leaving him as surely as his blood was still soaking out through his covering and onto the ground. She'd killed him. He was going to die.

But at least before he did, he could finish this. Could make sure that the one who did this to him died, too.

Every step was awful, and every move he made he had to bite back whimpers. He had to keep quiet; his brothers wouldn't hesitate to make a meal out of him if it looked like it'd be easy enough. Even as black danced in the corners of his vision, he snarled at one of the weak ones that started looking at him a little too curiously.

Eventually he got back to the point where he could smell her blood again. Up ahead, he could see the spot where they'd fought before. Already a few weak ones were snuffling around, trying to find some trace of the prey. From up above somewhere, he thought he could smell one of his long-tongued brothers and maybe see a couple of those strange floating things that they tended to give off. He hissed to startle them off.

Yes. She'd definitely moved on from here, and left a trail of her blood while she was doing it that not even the rain had washed away. Good. Very good. That would make her easier to track, and it meant that she was already weakened. He was sure that he'd hurt her badly even if he hadn't managed to kill her. An easy kill and then… and then he could stop and rest. The thought was the only thing that kept him going through the ache ripping through his gut and the fuzzy, tired haze that was starting to settle into his body.

He could rest once she was dead. With grim purpose, the Hunter agonizingly stalked onward.

A couple of involuntary tears rolled down the side of Skyler's face, already slick with sweat, as she carefully flexed her right hand to see how bad the damage was. At least it wasn't entirely crippled, but it definitely did feel stiff and painful to move, which was bad news for wielding a weapon. Too bad she was going to have to grin and bear it anyways. The ameteur bandaging she'd given it was going to have to do.

She'd definitely been right about her eye being the worst of it. All she really could do anyways was clean the area with some disinfectant and apply bandages, but even that had been enough to make her want to piss herself from the pain. It had all been a hell of a task, really, when she was newly half-blind. Just about everything was pretty disorienting right then.

At this point she was practically unconscious on her feet already, and wouldn't really have minded just falling over and taking a long, long nap right there on the bathroom floor. She was crashing hard from her adrenaline rush and had just been put through pain like she'd never been through before. Skyler was, in short, about fifty levels worth of done. Unfortunately though, that would have to wait.

With a heavy groan she hauled herself out into the cramped combination living room-kitchen. Christ, this place had some of the ugliest furniture she'd ever seen. Dizzily she hoped that whoever had apparently thought it was a good idea to stretch a rat pelt over a loveseat had gotten puked on by a Boomer or something. Oh fuck, there went her stomach again- She clumsily withdrew her canteen and forced herself to take a few long swigs. Usually she wouldn't be so indulgent with it, but the blood loss had to have dehydrated her. It did at least settle her some. Carlin would probably be telling her to keep herself hydrated, anyways.

Once she was at least fifty percent sure that she wasn't going to throw up again, she moved onto the business of actually securing the place. Who would have guessed that the newly proclaimed Ugliest Chair on Earth would be good for something after all? Putting all of her tired muscle into it she tugged and pushed until it was wedged in front of the only door to the outside. Even if something did start breaking through that, it would make enough of a racket to let her know about it. Without any plywood or anything to spare, she had to opt for simply making certain that the windows were shut tightly and pulling the curtains on them shut to avoid drawing any attention. Something would have to be relatively small to fit through them, anyhow. Not much bigger than her, anyhow.

"Good. Now I can sleep for the next fifty years."

Feeling accomplished, Skyler shuffled back towards the bedroom at the back of the flat, snatching her assault rifle up off the kitchen counter where she'd left it along the way. If there was another ordeal tonight, she was going to be pretty pissed about it.

He… he was sure that he was closing in now. He had to be. The scent of the prey's blood was still strong. At least, he thought it was. His sense of smell was sort of blending together in a sickening way and he was horribly disoriented. All he could really hope was that it was pointing him in the right direction.

Shudders ran constantly through his body even though he still felt horribly fevered. He was soaked to the skin and, as close to the ground as he was crawling, his coverings were actually dragging into puddles. There were high places all around which he could escape to, but he'd tried jumping, and it had been too much of an agony to take. He didn't feel safe at all on the ground like this, and besides that the climbing and jumping was one of the few things that brought him joy besides the killing. Something else the woman prey had taken.

Kill her, then rest. Kill her, then rest.

He let the thought drive him onward. It was about all he could focus on, anyways, he was so dizzy. There were a few times that he wasn't even entirely sure that he wasn't just sort of… floating. Eventually though his surroundings became strangely familiar, and for a few moments he had to just stare, blinking blearily and working out just where he was.

This was… he was staring down the passageway, to the entrance to his nest. Had he gotten confused and wound up back here? No though. The scent really was clear, and he realized that she… she was in there. His entire body tensed up and quivered.

She had invaded his nest. After escaping from his attack and wounding him so badly that he was practically a meal for the weak ones and couldn't even jump, she'd actually went and taken over his territory.

Unbearable rage boiled up in the Hunter, washing over him in a wave. It wiped out all thought except for that. No. He wasn't going to allow that. He wasn't going to die with his prey in his nest, and without her blood fresh on his claws. Despite the physical screaming in his gut, he managed almost close to a sprint as he closed the rest of the distance. He was going to appease his fury with her flesh and blood. Raising his head up towards the sky, he bared his teeth and let out a killing screech.

He hoped that the woman prey could hear him.

Skyler's equipment belt hit the floor like a ten-ton sack of bricks. Before she could even take off her boots she let out a wordless moan and fell face-first into the mattress, burying her face deep into it. Goddamn. If there was one thing she was grateful to this place for having, it was a real mattress and not a cheap rollaway cot or sleeping bag like was present in a lot of designated safe houses. She was ready to never move again, even if for some strange reason all of the bedding was missing off of it. And for a long stretch she didn't, just laying there and trying not to think too hard on any one part of her that hurt. In one way or another practically everything was cut, bruised, sore, or stiff.

Ugh though. After a while, it started to get to her that something or other in here smelled pretty funky. Like sweat, or rotten blood, or some combination of the two. Even if the place looked relatively intact it wasn't a particularly surprising scent, but it was getting in the way of her time trying to forget about every single thing that had happened that day. She supposed she could get rid of whatever it was before she passed out.

It turned out not to take as long as she thought to figure out what is was. As soon as she rolled halfway out of bed, she saw the edge of a couple of blankets sticking oddly out from under the bedframe, which also solved the mystery of where all of those have gone. Tugging one of them out revealed it to be worn and lightly stained with some telltale red-brown splotches. She investigated this with a suspicious frown, pondering that this didn't seem like it had been used as rag to bandage someone's injury or something. What in the hell?

Curiously she knelt onto the floor and peeked underneath the bed and, sure enough, there was a whole mess of bedding. Sheets, a comforter, even a couple of near-shredded pillows, all just laying in a weird pile under there. Most of them looked similarly stained. It seemed sort of like…

Fuck. Like something had been laying in there after having rolled around in blood. What it looked like was some kind of nest. Did the infected even do that? Closer inspection turned up the half-imprints of bloody footprints that had previously been nearly invisible against the carpet, so her conclusion was: Shit. Yes, apparently they did. And that she'd managed to set up camp for the night sitting directly over the top of one of them.

The realization was unsettling and immediately made her tense up, looking in every direction even though she was pretty clearly alone in here. After a minute though she shook her head, shrugging her shoulders. Well, too bad for whatever had been staying in here. Sorry buddy, but there was a new tenant. Whatever it was had probably died by now anyways.

Of course, it was right fucking then though that she heard the enraged shriek of a Hunter from outside, immediately causing her to bolt straight upright and grab her assault rifle up from on top of the bed. That had been close. As in, really close. Not a yard from the outside of this place, she didn't think.

The part of her brain that simply did not want to deal with any more of this mess tried to tell her that, well, maybe it wasn't whatever lived here, and if she remained quiet enough it would quickly move on. Which lasted up until she heard the sound of one of the windows in the living room being smashed out and shattering on the floor.

Furiously Skyler shook her head, ducking out of view behind the door frame and holding her rifle at the ready.

And at that moment, she was gripped with the powerful sense that some mysterious, cosmic entity had to be seriously. Fucking. Kidding her.