"Left 4 Dead: Butterflies in the Southern Breeze"
Two Hours Earlier...
"Can't we cut through the swamp? It'll be risky but I'm certain we can skip a few safe houses safely." a dark-skinned woman named Rochelle asked the other two who were planning their route.
A much larger dark-skinned man, a former high school coach funnily enough named Coach, shook his head while taking a bite of his burger he'd fished out from a fridge in the back of the truck stop they were holed up in. He put his meaty finger on the single line that separated two giant green blotches on the map. "This is the only road for miles, and what's worse is it was a major highway. There's zombies everywhere to the left, right, behind, and more importantly, in the road. Not to mention how many alarms that could still work out there."
Ellis, a young southern man, barely in his twenties, sat up from the couch and eyed a very small brown spot in the middle of the sea of green. He got up and pointed at it. "Why not go straight through the swamp? If we're right here, why take the time to go through a ton of car alarms and hordes if we could just wade through some water?"
Coach scratched his chin, where small stubbles of black hair were starting to grow. 'Shit must itch like Hell.' was Ellis' only thought. "That might work. But there's a issue."
Nick, the man who'd escaped prison just before the infection hit and was now tagging along so he could get somewhere safe. Away from any nosy police, preferably. Pointed straight up as the sounds of thunder echoed in the distance. "That... is the issue. 'Course the 'pocalypse had to start when a hurricane was supposed to blow through. Unless we hightail it, we'd end up swimming our way to New Orleans."
"Then we'd better start hightailing it." Rochelle rolled up the map and slid it into her backpack. She shouldered her hunting rifle and walked toward the barred door that separated the survivors from the horde. After a few second of everyone staring at her, she turned around with a glare, "What y'all waitin' for? We don't have all day."
The three guys scrambled for their guns and grabbed any supplies that weren't locked up or nailed down. Eventually they joined their comrade outside stocked up with five medkits, twelve pain pills, and six adrenaline shots. Not to mention a case of incendiary rounds that Coach carried proudly. Ellis carried two molotov cocktails and a spare gun. Each survivor was armed to the teeth, Nick carrying a M16 and an automatic shotgun, and Coach sporting a pair of P90's fully kitted out with silencers and a chainsaw over his back for close quarters. Ellis was their friendly neighborhood melee-expert. He held a fire axe in his hands and a Magnum on his side.
With their overwhelming arsenal, not a single zombie that got close to them lasted ten seconds. But even then, not a single one of them dared to approach a wooden shack that had sounds of cries and moans coming from it. They skirted around the shack, preferring to wade in waist-deep, murky, water than face a Witch.
They had a good reason to be afraid. There were notes and journals left in safe houses that detailed how wickedly strong those things were. One time they met a guy who'd been in a survivor group of twenty. He told them a kid had thought it was a good idea to throw a rock at a Witch. Within a heartbeat the kid lost his head and the Witch was tearing into her fourth victim. He only survived cause he'd been outside the safe house and he'd ran away so quickly a Hunter couldn't pounce on him. Which is to say, well over the normal human speed of 5 mph.
After two hours wading through swamp, swamp, and more swamp, they found themselves on the interstate on the opposite side of the swamps, right on the border of Louisiana and Mississippi.
"Whew... I've only got three mags left. We need to find a safe house in a few or we'll be toast." Coach looked inside his rifle and counted three bullets left in that mag. He'd ran out of P90 ammunition long back when they encountered a Tank, but he found a M16 on the body of a soldier who'd been a victim of a Witch's claws.
The others weren't doing much better. Ellis was forced to resort to his Magnum when his axe broke off in the Tank's thick alligator-like skin. Nick was using his rifle, his automatic shotgun had long since been lost when he was nearly drowned by a Swamp Man. Damn things could hide in water a foot deep and drown you in a twelfth of.
Rochelle, even though she had a brace on her right arm and having to use a pistol in her unwounded left hand because a Charger had smashed her into a tree and broke her arm, was still optimistic. "Only a bit further, we can make it."
Suddenly, they heard a Witch shriek in pain and two silhouettes appeared out of the heavy rain. They dove behind some cars and aimed their guns at the two silhouettes who seemed to be fighting.
"Infected?" Nick looked back at Rochelle, who had previously proved her twenty-twenty vision when she saw a Smoker from half a mile away in a horde of zombies.
She squinted her eyes, "Still raining too hard to tell. One's a Witch, no doubt."
Nick aimed his pistol and put his finger on the trigger, "Kill 'em both just in case." He went to fire, but Coach lightly smacked him with the butt of his rifle to get his attention. "Hey what are you-"
"Shut up, Nick!" Ellis hissed, "One's coming toward us!" He put both is hands on his pistol, ready to fire.
They stood up, careful to not be seen, as they slowly got closer to the figure, who just put a white bundle of something on the hood of a car.
Suddenly, the figure fell to his knees and collapsed into a puddle, blood pouring from a heavy wound in his gut and a ugly wound over his right eye. He'd fallen unconscious.
Rochelle was the first to react, "Look! He's wounded. Anyone got a medkit?" She ran to his side and worked the tattered jacket off of his body, revealing the wound. "This is a Witch's claw marks..."
Ellis saw something shiny in a puddle and picked it up, "Isn't this one of those ballee-song knives? The one's they flip around?" Ellis' attention, as well as everyone else's, was drawn to a large pile on the other side of a car. Blood was all over the place, but most of it was coming from the pile.
Nick, Coach, and Ellis all aimed their weapons, ready to fire at whatever was there. But when they rounded the car's back end, they stood there like mannequins with their jaws on the floor.
Before them was the bodies of a abnormally-huge Charger, and a Witch. The Charger had its skull sliced open on the right side from the eye, the Witch had her hand ripped off and blood poured from the stab wounds in her chest.
Nick put his wrist to his mouth as he turned away with a nauseous look on his face. Ellis wasn't so lucky and he threw up right there, his puke mixing with the gallons of blood forming a horrendous abomination of a mixture.
Coach grimaced, "This kid is..."
"Monstrous. I've never seen this kind of shit. And I've been locked in a room with serial killers." Nick stepped to the edge of the road and put his hand onto a car's hood to try and stabilize himself.
Ellis finally stood straight and wiped the shit off his mouth, "Y'all see a gun anywhere? 'Cause I'm holding the only thing that's sharp her- " He held up the balisong, then he accidentally looked at the two bodies again. He bent over almost at a ninety-degree angle puking again.
Coach saw whatever he'd put up on the car twitch and a low growl came from it. He raised his rifle and slowly approached the bundle. He went to take the white shaggy blanket off, but he realized it was fur. And the giant pile of fur was a genuine silver wolf. "This far south? This boy's been runnin' hasn't he?" He lowered the rifle, "So we taking both of them? The bandages tell me that this kid is trying to keep the dog alive." He asked Rochelle and Nick, who'd regained his composure but still looked a bit queasy.
"Neither of 'em can walk. There's a splint on the dog there." Nick pointed his pistol at the hastily-wrapped splint that was already starting to unravel, "If you can carry the dog I can try to carry the kid. He looks light enough."
Everyone, even Nick, who typically would tell a new survivor to go away, knew just how much the kid could help them. And the sense of compassion in him didn't let him leave a kid that wasn't even seventeen to die out in this Hell.
Ellis groaned out a single word, but it was enough to shake everyone to their senses. "H...horde." He struggled to stand, but eventually found his footing and he was careful not to look at the bodies again.
Rochelle grumbled, "Next safe house is a half a mile west. We'd better get moving, we might be there a long time and it's better not to have angry neighbors the entire time." She stuff the kid's bloody leather jacket into her bag and threw it over her shoulder along with the kid's backpack.
Then a familiar scream pierced the air, drowning out the heavy rain. And accompanying it was the rumble and roar of hundreds, maybe thousands, of infected.
Coach grabbed the wolf's legs, careful to only grip the healthy ones, and heaved the rather large-built wolf onto his shoulders.
Nick knelt down and Rochelle helped lift the kid onto his shoulder. Nick used his right hand to hold the kid there, who was thankfully pretty scrawny, and he used his left hand to wield his pistol in case an infected got too close.
Ellis grabbed Coach's rifle and ran alongside the other three, "Me and Rochelle will keep them off y'all. Y'all just keep runnin'." He fired two bullets, killing a Jockey instantly.
Rochelle fired into the oncoming horde, killing the leading zombies and causing them to trip up the rest, buying them a few extra seconds.
Up ahead, about a hundred meters, was a solid cement bunker with a red painted door. Beside the door was a symbol of a house with a medical cross in the center. It was their destination, a safe house.
Coach took the lead and barreled through the door, smashing through a pile of furniture and snapping the iron bar like a twig. He gently laid the wolf on the ground and grabbed a gun off the table, a chrome combat shotgun, and ran back out to face the horde. But when the others made it inside and went to run out to help, Coach's face was already being covered by a large trash bin he rolled in front of the door. Once the enormous dumpster was in place, a pair of gunshots resounded through the bunker as the dumpster leaned to the side as it's wheels were blown off.
"Coach!!" Ellis yelled as he smashed into the bin, trying to move it. "Coach the hell are you doing?!?"
Rochelle and Nick stood there, frozen in shock as they realized what happened.
"C'mon help me move this shit!!" Ellis yelled at Nick as he continued to struggle to even make the trash bin move an inch.
Nick laid the kid on the ground beside the dog and sat down beside them, "Ellis, he blew off the wheels. No matter what tries to get in, it ain't. Or whatever tries to get out." He hung his head and sighed, closing his eyes.
Rochelle had lost her optimism and collapsed on the ground beside the door. "He's gone..."
Ellis balled his hands into fists, "The... there's no damn way he's gone! Get your asses up and help me move this shit!" He slammed into the dumpster, causing Nick to stand up and grab his shoulder.
Nick shook Ellis like he was in a stupor, "Wake up Ellis! This isn't some video game were everyone survives or some fairy tale! He's gone! There's nothing anyone can do about that! Get it together!"
Ellis shoved Nick back and yelled, " 'Course you'd want him to die! You're a selfish bastard who wouldn't care if-"
"Shut the fuck up Ellis! I didn't carry that little shit here 'cause I want him to die here instead of a open road! Get your head out of the fuckin' gutter 'fore I blow it off!" Nick yelled back, pointing his gun at the kid who lay there unconscious.
Rochelle just sat there, she didn't even have the strength to cry, much less stop the two.
Unbeknownst to the three of them, the a fourth was starting to wake up.
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