What do you do when a feral catches your scent in the Dead Zone, while you’re trying to get into the underground safe haven to retrieve a bit of loot for Captain “Nutjob” Chuck?
Three options. Option 1: you run. And when you run you better believe that you have to run fast, and run hard, and pray to whatever deity you still believe in that you don’t trip on something, because if you fall, the feral is going to catch you.
Option 2: you try to fight it. Which, let’s be honest, isn’t a great option either, because ferals are notoriously hard to take down. They’re the deadest kind of undead, and they make up for it by their resilience. One time I sliced a feral’s head clean off with my katana. The head rolled off with the teeth still clacking, still trying to bite me.
Which brings us to option 3: blow the bloody bastard up. Which makes a lot of noise, which might just attract the attention of the rival clan, which might give me a chance to sneak into their HQ. Two birds, meet my stone.
I fix my goggles over my face, roll up my sleeves and tighten my bracers. Got to make sure nothing gets caught. Only one shot at this, after all.
Kiss the homemade pipe bomb-and-launcher combo. Old Snaggletooth, I call her. She hasn’t failed me yet, and I hope she won’t this time.
I launch the pipe bomb at the feral and--kapow--it hits, and a good portion of the feral’s body gets blown away. It roars--and even now the sound sort of rankles my nerves, I gotta admit.
From my hiding place I watch a head pop out of a manhole, a few yards away from where the feral is now dragging itself with just one of each limb. It surprises me that the head belongs to someone who can’t be much older than a teenager, and it pains me to do this to him but this is my chance.
I leap from my hiding place and strike him, hard enough to stun and draw blood from the soft part of his skull. (Stun him only, I hope, though I can’t stop to check.)
From there I follow a tunnel, and head deeper into the underground city, and make quick work of anyone who crosses my path.
There are few of them, mercifully few. Mostly civilians and survivors who really shouldn’t be alive. A gun, a sword, a strong stomach. These three things help you survive, maybe even thrive in the Dead Zone.
I follow Captain Nutjob’s coordinates, through the safe haven’s twisting tunnels, into a cubbyhole. Where I find it. The loot we’ve all been fighting over, swaddled in a woman’s arms.
It’s not its mother, that much I know. Its mother died--had to die, because she’d been bitten by one of the rotters topside.
According to Captain Nutjob, the mother fought off the infection for weeks, until she delivered the baby. And then after she died… well. After you die, you turn into a rotter. One of those shambling, hungry undead.
Story goes, the baby’s got some kind of antibody in it. Some kind of cure in its blood. Something that’ll win the war.
Something this small, imagine.
The nursemaid looks at me with big, pleading eyes. “Don’t hurt me,” she says. “Don’t take it.”
“One or the other, lady.” I draw my gun, aim it right between her eyes. “You or the baby.”
To be continued...
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