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The sudden rain was what startled Grace awake.
He flinched beneath his yellow raincoat, thrown over his shoulders and opened his eyes with difficulty, instinctively curling tighter around himself as he felt cold seeping inside his body and under his skin. He would have liked to properly lie down, but the nook he'd found was much too small for him to fully stretch.
He had been a bit desperate after running away from a nearby horde of zombies a few streets down. He hoped he hadn't been seen, and he had blindly turned a corner, then slipped inside the first house with a slightly ajar door. The whole front of the shop had already been raided and destroyed, glass crackling under his feet, but the backroom, what he guessed was the boss's room, had a desk shoved against the door. He had managed to push it away, arms straining and feet almost slipping, hearing groans and grunts coming closer to the building he was in. But he had managed to create a small opening large enough for him to wriggle in before shoving the desk back against the door, just in time to see the first head of a zombie entering the shop.
He had stayed frozen and curled up under the rolltop desk, trembling in fright and hoping no one would be smart enough to get onto the roof and drop from the caved-in ceiling, where water now dripped down onto the floor, the smell of rotten wood attacking his nostrils as he took in shuddering breath. Finally, after a while, the zombies probably gave up and left him alone, granting him a short night of restless sleep.
After a minute of just taking in the cold and humidity of the room, he rubbed his eyes, irritated from the lack of sleep after being awoken by the slightest noise, confusing scratches from Rocky's claws and zombies dragging their feet against the pavement.
He looked down towards the small dog tucked on his lap, snoot pressed against his middle. Rocky was still sleeping soundly. Or at least, he would probably have if he had been anything but dead. He let his eyes wander to the matted fur at the dog's side, knotted with blood and a chunk of flesh missing from a nasty bite, seeping pus and well necrotised before they even met. Grace hadn't been here when Rocky had been bitten, but going by the few deep injuries that remained on the animal's body, forever sluggishly bleeding despite the clumsy bandages Grace had tried to wrap around his bony belly, it had been pretty violent.
No, Grace had encountered Rocky during one of the worst times of his life. It had been around a month since he's... left 'Earth', the last biggest human settlement of the US.
He hadn't been really asked to leave... Dwindling resources and scouting teams finding fewer and fewer areas to raid meant that the settlement was forced to repeatedly and randomly pick people to politely 'leave' the area. The official statement was that they were sent to other human bases. The unofficial sentence was death. Some went willingly, truly believing they were saving Earth by having fewer mouths to feed and, hopefully, finding some other bases they could join.
Others were unwilling.
Such was Grace's fate.
He had actually been in the research program and one of the leading scientists to try and fight the virus, which was ravaging the whole real Earth. But the lottery was the lottery, they couldn't begin to make exceptions. He had tried to plead his case, but loopholes and hopes labelled him a martyr sanctified with a mission outside the base, instead of just a sacrifice sent away for the greater good. It played well into the higher dignitaries’ spiel of hope and the settlement’s everlasting future anyway: have a martyr on top of a group of sacrifices. Have a scientist who willingly left to try and find a cure onfield, amongst zombies, since research off-field was beginning to stagnate and people were starting to doubt and dread what was to come, growing unsettled and anxious.
And indeed, their research had been stuck for a while. They had managed to find and contain the virus, but it quickly died without a host. Animals didn’t even count: the virus was much too intelligent and it adapted according to the host it found, evolving differently with every species it infected. They had the beginning of a cure, but they didn’t have the proper ‘test subject’ (Grace never liked that word, putting a grim shadow on his face every time he had to utter it during report meetings).
A talk about capturing zombies and bringing them into the settlement had been brought up and quickly shot down. There were too many risks of having the virus inside their base. The second idea had been to delegate a small scientific team to a location away from the main settlement, so that they could continue their experiments without the threat of civilian casualty, but they didn’t have the manpower. They would have needed equipment, electricity, tubes and wires, resources, and moved all the labs from one place to another. It was like asking God to come save them all. Even scavenging teams were stretched thin, people not wanting to risk their lives outside anymore. The ‘government’ tried to draft people weekly, but there were fewer and fewer volunteers each time until even a proper team was difficult to form at the best of times.
So they continued the lottery and scrambled for more desperate ideas.
Grace had just been unlucky to have been picked in those dire times. Perhaps if it had been a bit earlier, Stratt would have slammed her veto down, stating she needed all her best agents working on the antidote…
But now, what use were they when they hadn’t found anything, not even a speck of progress in weeks? She was powerless and had to abide by the rules and laws of this new world.
Grace still thought sometimes she could have insisted and refused some more. She was at the head of the settlement, she was the ‘government’, she could have done something!
However, he also understood, in a way, that it wasn’t even a question of personal grudge, it simply wasn't within her powers. The population was beginning to grow anxious, which never boded well. The antitode needed to come into contact with live zombies to work. They couldn’t afford much more time. They didn’t have the resources to do anything anymore.
And all of that weighed on Stratt’s shoulders like a suffocating blanket. She had to make a difficult decision, regardless of past grievance, she had to think bigger than herself.
And Grace ought to do the same.
The only 'privilege' he got from being this highly ranked was to leave with a few extra packs of dried food inside his backpack.
The worst of all was that he had had to leave when both his twin and older brother had been sent out on a scavenging mission, not even two days prior. He guessed it was because Colt and Court were also pretty needed in the Earth base, with their military-like training, making them irreplaceable in the scavenging teams. They would have thrown quite a fit if they had ever learnt of their younger brother being sent to death, had they been present when the new lottery rolled and picked Grace out.
Grace himself hadn't cared when he was told he was to leave before the end of the day. He had wanted to stay. He had begged and even tried to run, but Stratt had just shaken her head, crushed by the weight of her responsibilities, making her force her head up even when her eyes kept lowering down in grief and guilt. He had been knocked unconscious after she had told him his brothers would be well taken care of, that at least she promised: she would do her best to prevent them from throwing their lives away, and his and their families would get the highest protection possible within the settlement for the sacrifice Grace had just made.
Grace would have loved to be included in that said protection protocol as well, but the hit made him crumble to the floor like a stringless puppet. Then, his body was carried outside of the city and laid in a small, secure but sterile bunker a few streets away from the base.
When he woke up, only Ilyukhina and Yao remained by his side, waiting for him to wake up with sadness etched on their face, as they told him they needed to move quickly. The rest of the batch had already dispersed, and it wouldn't be long before all of the quarter was entirely raided (if it hadn’t been already by previous groups and teams), or zombies would quickly swarm the place after smelling so many humans milling around.
They either needed to be quick to try and grab whatever resource they could, or they had to run and start afresh somewhere else.
Grace had been inconsolable for the next few hours, sobbing inside his scarf while Ilyukhina dragged him away, tugging at him with a hand clasped around his wrist, and Yao led the small trio through the darkening streets, ears strained for any kind of sound cue signifying that zombies were close by.
They survived a week.
They had found a small apartment complex, practically untouched after Ilyukhina had lockpicked several heavily guarded doors.
It was small, sparse, but relatively safe and furnished. Probably someone’s property who had begun to stock up on everything as soon as they heard on the news of a virus breakout.
They probably got bitten before making it to their safe place.
They made their base here for a while.
And then they got careless.
They hadn't accounted for the windows, fools that they were.
They hadn't realised that there had been a zombie patrolling the other building close to the one they had settled in. The small curtains hardly hid them, transparent and pale, and the roller shutters had broken down when electricity stopped months ago in the majority of the city. Earth had relied on its makeshift generators to provide for its population.
If one looked through the windows, they could see the wall of another building decorated with more rows of more apartments and below, a small street only wide enough for dumpsters to be shoved in. Grace could almost open the window, stretch his arm and stand on his toes, and he’d be able to brush the other wall easily. It was painfully claustrophobic, and when the apocalypse hadn’t happened yet, people probably would have spent their days with their shutters down as an attempt at privacy.
You could even see the interior of other dilapidated rooms from where Grace stood, nose against the glass and fogging it up as he morosely drew meaningless shapes with his finger.
It took the infected just one look to the side to spot them.
They had thought themselves safe inside that small apartment, door locked and obstructed by a shelf, the three of them sprawling around the couch and silently trying to boil a pack of Grace's ramen with saliva pooling in their mouth.
And then chaos broke loose.
The zombie launched himself across a broken window and smacked against theirs. He bumped against the thick layer of glass, but when it fell, it only fell one story down. The apartment below had all its windows broken as well, and the zombie quickly slipped inside, ran through the exit door, snarling and howling, alerting anyone nearby of fresh meat, and then a horde was spilling inside and swarming the door of their apartment.
It didn't take long before it was torn to shreds. Ilyukhina and Yao had been a bit quicker, but it hadn't been enough. Yao had taken his gun out and started shooting when he saw a zombie jumping on Ilyukhina as she was trying to snatch back their bags from the corner of the room. The noise had been damning, and more zombies piled inside the apartment in an instant.
Yao was easily overwhelmed, and his screams of pain as his flesh was torn by teeth and claws would haunt Grace's nightmares forever.
Ilyukhina had wrenched Grace out of his stupor, and together, they jumped out of the apartment the same way the zombie had tried to do: by the window. His knees almost broke from the impact, harshly landing onto the slimy, rotten, weeping trash bags littering the street. They quickly scrambled upwards, limping and running towards the end of the dark, narrow street.
They almost made it.
They almost escaped, and Grace had thought they would have been safe-
Until Ilyukhina got tackled by a wayward zombie as they turned the corner. She tried to use her knife to slash at the zombie's jaw, but it was too late, and a bite was already blossoming on her forearm when she had instinctively raised it to try to protect her face.
Grace had slammed his pipe two, three, four times, smashing the head to a gory blob, the zombie falling lifeless on top of a panting Ilyukhina with brain matter sipping away from its concave skull.
The damage had been done.
They didn't even have a gun anymore.
Grace had to use Ilyukhina's knife.
Her blood burned his hands as he took the bags from under her corpse.
He liked to think she was grateful that Grace had been by her side in her last moments.
She probably enjoyed less the vomit he left at her side while he staggered away, snot and tears almost making him drop and lose his glasses.
He had run, run, and run some more. He had always been good at running. And so he ran some more.
Finally, he had managed to get away from the urban zone and stretches of wasted lands welcomed him in with open arms. He could almost see Earth's few buildings in the distance when he had managed to hoist himself onto a nearby slop overseeing the wasted city.
He hoped his brothers were well.
He wasn't.
He walked some more.
He could have tried to make it back to Earth and beg to be taken back. But he knew he'd be killed on sight.
Dead people couldn't beg anyway.
He had been one since the lottery chose him.
He clutched at the bag's strips so tightly he feared he'd tear them at some point. The weight inside of it almost too heavy for his shoulders.
He had three small samples and a few pieces of lab equipment with him. His so-called 'mission'. Find a cure, there has to be one, they needed to have one. And it wasn't by idling around inside his labs that humanity could recover from the apocalypse.
At worst, there'd be fewer mouths to feed. At best, he'd find a cure and everything would be alright.
He nearly threw the bag on the floor and stomped on it.
Nearly.
Instead, he continued to walk and just walked and walked and walked.
And this was how he met Rocky.
He had been eating from a corpse, feasting on his flesh, gurgling, squelching sounds surrounding the otherwise empty area.
Grace saw him from afar and tried to back away as silently as he could, but the dog had already heard him. However, instead of attacking, he had come trotting after Grace. Even after he ran a few streets away, scared for his life, he had to stop to take his breath again and...
Lo and behold, just behind him, a dog was waiting for him, sitting on the floor and wagging his tail. It almost looked like a jovial, faithful little pet, if it hadn't been missing his eyes, probably clawed off in a fight, and the black trails he left behind him, the stench of death following his rotting corpse.
He followed Grace until he relented and slowly began to accept the dog as a reluctant companion. He 'tended' to the other's wounds and called the dog Rocky because it loved to paw at rocks on the side of the street and toy with them like they were insects. Also, probably because it was brown (or used to be) and round like a rock.
They never left one another afterwards.
And they saved each other's lives.
Rocky managed to ward off most of the lonely zombies by growling at them, posturing and showing that he was dangerous, deadly and definitely dead, while Grace hid behind him. And if a scuffle ensued, even with a putrefied maw, his fangs easily tore into the zombie's jugulars, sawing their head in half or at least, deep enough to slow them and let Grace run away.
And Grace had managed to save Rocky from an unfortunate encounter with a duo of survivors. At first, Grace had been beyond relieved and ecstatic at encountering more humans in this wrecked world, and the duo had been more than happy to chat with him. That was, until Rocky showed the tip of his snoot. Then there had been shouts of alarm and makeshift weapons raised. Grace had been forced to knock one down with his pipe and choke the other until he fell unconscious.
Rocky thankfully had stayed behind and did not engage, letting Grace...
Then they had been alone once again.
And they walked, walked, walked.
Inside a city, out of a city. Inside a shop or a house, outside of them.
Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat.
They never met other survivors after that, but plenty of zombies from which they narrowly escaped.
Which was where they found themselves now, in the small boss room, curled up under a rolltop desk that was pushed against the door to prevent zombies from spilling inside.
At some point, he had to wake up a bit more fully, even when his eyes watered from the humidity in the air and the pressure in his chest became too tight. He caught a cold not long ago, they were approaching autumn now. Or winter, he didn't truly know. He gently pushed Rocky off his lap, making sure that his body didn't press on any of the dog’s injuries. Although he knew they didn't hurt, he still didn't want to upset the bulging flesh and rummaged through his bag.
There was only one remaining viable sample.
One broke after he took a nasty fall trying to escape a zombie and had to use his backpack as a shield to avoid a bite to the neck.
Another one had been used when they'd managed to find a zombie stuck under a car, unable to move but still twitching and growling, uselessly clawing at the air. It gave him nothing. He cried when the sample turned useless, and then he tightly hugged Rocky for comfort, even when the smell of rotten flesh turned unbearable.
Now, there only remained one.
And then... And then what?
He feared what would happen if he ever failed the third sample.
He pushed the lab equipment aside, trying to make as little noise as possible while the glass clinked together and took out one of his last packs of dried noodles. He'd been trying to ration and only took one small bite every three days.
He nibbled at it, licking at the salt and savouring the last grains of chemicals bursting on his tongue, and then forced himself to put it back inside the bag before taking out a small piece of mouldy and dried bread he'd managed to find under a shelf in one of the last supermarkets they'd gone to see. It tasted awful, but he forced himself to swallow anyway.
Then he patted Rocky to rouse him up, and soon after, they were back on the road.
However, this time, they didn't go too far away. Grace was growing tired from this much walking, and he had tried to reason that the boss's room could be used as a small base for at least one or two more days. He insisted that there were more shops they hadn't looked through, and streets in which they currently walked had a surprisingly minimal amount of zombies roaming around, despite the city's size. Rocky whined and softly yapped in disagreement, but after a while, Grace managed to convince Rocky to at least stay for one more day.
Rocky was strangely smart. Not in the 'animal who can draw and respond to a command' way, but in the 'I can speak and answer to you, human to human' way. Rocky remained a dog, but his consciousness and awareness, his ability to answer and the glint in his eyes told Grace of a sentient intelligence not so dissimilar from a human's. It wasn't long before Grace began to talk to Rocky, and Rocky answered as much as he could. Rocky couldn't talk like humans, given he didn't have a tongue anymore, chewed and swallowed a long time ago, and didn’t have the proper vocal cords, but it never stopped them from communicating anyway.
Still, Grace felt a little bit less lonely by Rocky's side.
And so they spent the day slowly making their way into every available shop, astounded when they didn't encounter a single zombie aside from one or two from afar, but they always managed to hide or run away before they were noticed.
He was currently rummaging under some shelves and then on top of them. Once he had managed to grasp a lone, forgotten skittle bag from underneath a piece of furniture using a long stick to hook it towards him. He had sobbed at the taste of sugar on his tongue. It also tasted of sadness and unprecedented unfairness while he recalled the man he thought to be a friend. Instead, what he just got was a bat to his temple.
He was on his palms and knees, trying to peer at the darkness, when he heard Rocky yip sharply.
Grace immediately scrambled up, just in time to see Rocky growl at the entrance of the shop, supposed to stand guard and alert Grace of any incoming threat.
And indeed, there was one: a zombie was standing in front of the door. The light made it so that the interior of the shop was plunged in darkness, while a faint light, grey from the overhead clouds, lightened the back of the zombie's head.
Oh crap, Grace looked around and immediately cursed himself when he realised he'd chosen a shop without a single door on the back. Only one was behind the cashier, but it was obstructed by toppled boxes and a piece of the wall that had fallen over. The only open and easiest exit was through the main door, which was now blocked by a single zombie.
The corpse was not tall, but large. Whoever it had been before, they had to be athletic, and it only made Grace's fear rise. Zombie retained their bodies' characteristics even months after their deaths. If they were agile in their living days, they could easily fit and slither their way inside tight barricaded spaces. If they were packed with muscles, they could easily break bones in a fight. And that zombie looked in peak condition.
Grace's hand gripped his pipe more tightly. Although it had seen better days, he felt a sort of sick attachment to it. And despite its bent shape, even after so many smashes around, it never broke.
Rocky must have also sensed this particular zombie was dangerous because even though he snarled and growled menacingly, he was also not attacking right off the bat. He was probably waiting for Grace to make the first move: either run away, as he was the real target, or join Rocky in a desperate joint attack.
Crouching low, he began to approach the two zombies, using the toppled shelves as a way to conceal his body and hoping the stench of Rocky's blood covering him from head to toe was enough to fool the human zombie into thinking no dinner was hiding inside the room. He made sure to look at the floor, not wanting to stumble or worse, step on something crunchy, his metal pipe angled in front of him and at the ready.
The zombie was suspiciously still. Grace will take any advantage he could and didn't question it much. He had seen his fair share of strange behaviour. Movies made it sound like they were mindless, brainless, slow creatures, but in reality, they were much more mobile. Even when they didn’t retain much of their cognitive functions, they sometimes had that spark of lucidity that made them unpredictable and even more dangerous. Yao and Ilyukhina were the main example of that...
As he grew closer, the zombie's profile became more defined. There was a whole chunk of his cheek missing, the side row of his teeth on full display, and he also missed an arm, torn away and still dripping blood. His whole body was covered in fresh dark blood, still glinting and wet under the light, which made Grace's heartbeat jam against his ribcage because that only meant the zombie had just recently killed someone else and-
He didn't have the time to finish his thought.
The zombie suddenly snapped his head to the side, aimed perfectly at where Grace was hiding, and with inhuman speed, ran and slammed against the shelf, making it tilt to the side. Grace only narrowly missed getting crushed under the huge plastic rack by running to the side. Rocky finally howled and jumped, fangs aimed for the neck, but the zombie raised his arm to defend himself, and Rocky only managed to bite and tear at his forearm. The zombie grunted, but Grace was already raising his pipe high over his head and smacking it as hard as he could on the other's back. There was a deafening crunch and a yell of pain and....
What?
Grace swung instinctively to the side as soon as he recovered his balance, but the zombie managed to sidestep and dodge the pipe, stepping backwards and out of Grace's range while shaking off Rocky by also plunging his teeth into the dog's side after he raised his arm close to his own head.
Zombies normally didn't feel pain, but Rocky was different. He teetered on the edge of life and death, looking more like a real being than an infected, reanimated corpse. The wounds he had suffered before his death had numbed completely, but any new wounds could only be treated as normal injuries. This meant that as soon as the human zombie's fangs tore through Rocky's side, the dog's maw instinctively slackened while whining in pain. He fell to the floor but quickly got on his legs, evaded a swipe of the other zombie’s leg, and turned towards Grace, limping at him before pushing him backwards with his unharmed side while he resumed growling as loud as he could.
However, the zombie didn't try to attack any more. He didn't even try to leap at them, or run away, or even do something.
He just stood there, head tilted down and glaring at them with deadly accuracy.
"You..." Grace stuttered, eyes wide in shock and his hands shaking around his pipe, "You're... alive...?" he whispered.
The zombie scoffed, the skin around his cheek flapping as his head twitched.
"Wished I was," was what the zombie answered in a rasped, low voice.
It left Grace speechless, his pipe clanking on the floor in utter shock.
.
.
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