Chapter Text
UNTIL I SAY GO
Some wounds don’t bleed. Some shots don’t miss.
Survival isn't the same as living. Love doesn’t always mean staying. And loss doesn’t mean you're broken—just human.
CHAPTER 1 - NAKED EYES
Lily suppressed a sneeze and stayed very still, hearing intently. The room was in silence, save for the muffled sounds of the infected a couple of doors away. Nothing seemed to have heard her. Good. She relaxed her posture, and crouched behind a fallen and rotten desk, she breathed deeply. Time to move.
She had lost track of the months she had been traveling. She set off in spring, when the days start getting warmer, the mornings welcome you with the songs of new life and nights get shorter.
Now it was deep into winter, the land had frozen over under her feet, food was scarce and the daylight had become the most precious thing on earth. It was her friend and ally, a partner on her endless journey and a companion for her solitude. On sunny days, she would walk, almost run, the whole day to make the most of it. On cloudy days (most of them) she would tiptoe around trying to scavenge food or, if she was lucky enough, hunt it.
The worst was when the sun left her alone in the dark. In her experience, it was the safest and, at the same time, the riskiest time to travel.
True, you couldn’t see a thing, but that meant that neither could they. At night, before she found refuge, she would slow her speed and sharpen her ears. Somehow, with the absence of light, her other senses wakened with a keenness she didn’t know she had. She could hear them from miles away and, when the moon shone and her eyes grew accustomed, she didn’t even need to light up her torch.
Still, she hated traveling at night, and as soon as she got hungry, she would look for a safe corner to have her dinner and a restless night of sleep.
That was exactly was she was up to when she stumbled upon a group of infected. It had been a sunny day, and she had been walking nonstop the whole day. It had been very productive, she thought. She easily had covered at least 14 miles and could still feel the sun in her cheeks, and her chest would go up and down quickly as her body was getting used to the quietness. But she was exhausted, hungry and achy.
-Why did I think a hotel was a good idea? -she whispered to herself.
No doubt the idea of a room she would be able to shut to anything from outside was tempting. And even the better if she could find a decent mattress in which lay her sore body and to pretend, only for a few hours, she was safe.
-Stupid.
The chances of a big hotel being infested were high. And yet, when she came into the main reception and saw how empty and abandoned it was, she hoped… she shook her head. Never mind now, she will get rid of the infected on this floor first. If she was quiet about it, she could lock herself in one of the rooms and nod off for a bit. Then she will leave at first light, as always, quickly and in silence.
The place was pitch dark, and she had to light the torch on. It always made her nervous. She knew the infected couldn’t distinguish natural light from artificial one, but she kept expecting the day where they could, and then, the light would become a tool for her enemies.
She was in the first floor, crouched against a desk fallen over in the middle of the big lobby. She left the safety of her hiding place and walked hunched over to the next corner.
There was a runner in the next room; she could hear it. And she could hear two more in the following ones. She rolled her sleeves up and peeked through the corner with her torch. Nothing on the hallway. That made things easier.
The first room, the one with the runner inside, had no door, but luckily a sofa was blocking the view from the inside so she crouched flat out on the floor and dragged herself inside.
She took a glimpse and saw that the infected man was rummaging about, walking backwards and forwards with no intended route. His walk was slow and his back stooped down. He was also wincing and groaning as if in pain.
Lily incorporated herself into a squat; the infected was approaching. She waited patiently. She couldn’t risk a look, but she didn’t need to either, he was here.
With a brisk movement, she stood up and stuck her knife into his right eye, reaching the brain. He dropped dead instantly with a thud.
Lily smiled and bended over again.
-Next one, you fuckers.
* * *
She got rid of three more runners and a particularly disgusting clicker in that same fashion. She was almost at the end of the corridor already and just when she thought she could get some rest, she heard more upstairs, too close to leave them alone.
-Fuck –she sighed.
She was too tired to continue. She was starting to consider abandoning this hotel and looking for a safer place somewhere else when a sound she was too familiar with froze her blood in her veins and left her immobile. The infected where running down; something had caught their attention.
Shit!
Lily left aside her caution and run towards the other end of the hotel. They couldn’t have heard her, they couldn’t have! Then, why? She rushed down the stairs and stopped dead. There were more in the main entrance. Where the fuck were they all coming from? They hadn’t seen her yet so she quickly jumped to her right and hid behind some debris. She saw a hole in the wall a couple steps away and she hurried towards it, trying desperately not to make a sound.
She found herself in a kind of squared staff room. The doors were closed, but that was no guarantee; she had seen infected bursting them right open when they had a mind to it.
-Right, that was sudden... -She sighted. She was temporarily safe, but she didn’t want to stay there a minute longer than necessary. In fact, it was not necessary at all to stay- What has it brought them here?
She looked for a way out. The only problem being, with the doors closed, she had no way to know which way was the way out.
-Think, Lily, think!
She looked around with her torch. A bunch of desks with shit on top of them; those could provide some shielding in case a stray came in. Some debris on the right side of the room and on the end… there could be a way out, hopefully. The room made a turn into another room, and Lily followed. An infected banged on the door behind her, but it didn’t open it.
-I have to fucking go -she said to herself.
The ceiling had collapsed and it had made a hole in the floor. She could see spores down there and more office-like setting. All the staff department, canteen, admin, etc must have been underneath the hotel.
Another infected, or the same one, opened the door with a bang and Lily crouched instantly. She looked at the hoe in the floor. She really didn’t want to go down there; she could deal with one infected and close the door again. There was still the problem as to what to do next but, for now, she will get rid of…
-Shit.
It wasn’t a runner, nor a clicker or a stalker. It was something much, much worse: a bloater.
It was the slowest of its kind, and the most lethal. Impossible to kill stealthily and covered in a fungus armour. If she stayed in the room, she was dead. Lily didn’t think it twice.
She jumped.
* * *
As she landed, she prayed there were no stalkers there. She really couldn’t deal with them now.
Luckily, and despite of the hundreds of dragging footsteps above their heads, the few infected down there seemed unperturbed.
Lily positioned herself between a desk and two walls. Safe for now, she rested her back and allowed herself to recover her breath. She hadn’t been running for long but the adrenaline and hunger had left her breathless.
She could still hear the bloater in the room above, and she prayed once more that the fragile-looking ceiling wouldn’t collapse with its weight.
She swore under her breath. She was stuck now. In the stinking, spores-filled basement of a building, surrounded with infected at every corner, she wondered whether she should risk making her way out or spend the night there and wait the horde to pass.
The spores didn’t bother her. That was the whole reason she was traveling in the first place.
Her stomach rumbled and she pulled out a little snack from her rucksack. She also drank some water.
She decided she couldn’t stay there. She could hear infected, of course, but not many, although the horde was making difficult to distinguish which sound belonged to her floor, and which to the upper one. And the bloater was making her nervous.
Seeing that she had managed to find her way to the staff working area, it would be a good idea to try and find the staff exit, usually located at the rear of the building. It occurred to her as well that maybe the horde was at the front, and she wouldn’t have to deal with many infected if she got out from the back. This thought was encouraging.
She finished her second snack, had another long sip of water, and rolled her sleeves back up.
-Right -she whispered to herself, determined.
She crouched, squatted and dragged herself along the corridors and rooms of the staff quarters with her torch on. Sometimes, one room was giving way to another, and to another, only to find herself in the main corridor again. In a couple of occasions, she found herself in rooms without exit such as locker rooms, bathrooms and more office rooms.
As she predicted, the slowly walking horde upstairs was loud enough to interfere with her senses, but not loud enough to stir the quietness of this floor, for which she was extremely grateful. She managed to stealthily kill a couple of runners and she stuck an arrow right into a clicker’s head. She also just got around some of them, the quieter ones, too tired to engage. But she had being going around for an hour and she still hadn’t found an exit. She was in one of the non-exit rooms, and, actually, it was the second time she ended up in there.
-Shit -she swore, louder than she intended. She lowered her voice-. This place is a fucking maze!
She looked around, just to make sure there wasn’t an exit somewhere that she hadn’t seen before. But no, all four walls around her, and not a single window. She moved to the next piece of furniture that provided cover and, just as she was ready to proceed to exit the room, she saw something that chilled her head to toe. She stayed very still in position, with her legs prompted for a run.
Right in front of her, a couple of eyes were studying her in frozen surprise.
Lily thought they must have been going in circles around each other, crouching and dragging themselves, so focused on the infected that none of them thought of the possibility of another soul trapped in that nightmare. It was dark, and her torch was pointed towards the floor, but she could see without a trace of a doubt that there was another person in front of her, crouching underneath a desk and looking right back at her.
But that wasn’t what froze Lily to the bone.
She could also see, quite clearly, those person’s eyes. Eyes that were clean and shiny, and they were not looking through the glass of a mask.
They were as naked to the spores as her own.