Dangers Of A New World

I wake up at 8:30 the next morning, I get up, put my shoes on, and open up my backpack. I grab a pack of cinnamon pop tarts and eat them for breakfast. I drink some water, refill my water bottle in the bathroom and put the blanket I used in my bag. Then I put everything else away, leaving the water bottles on top for easy access. I grab my backpack and head downstairs. 'I'm going to check out that bunker real quick before I leave.'

I get downstairs and notice the stench, I assume it's coming from the blood and whatnot on the ground under the towels, from the fight with the zombies last night. I imagine it would be a fair bit worse if I hadn't poured bleach and left towels all over the area.

I set my bag down next to the door and go into the closet. I can see a little better now, and I see that the door down below is slightly ajar. 'I should look for a flashlight, it'll come in handy both now and in situations like last night. I'm glad that light doesn't draw the zombies' attention.'

I head to the kitchen and start checking drawers and cabinets and eventually find a maglight flashlight, I turn it on to make sure it works, and it's really bright. I search a little more and finally find some spare batteries for it. The batteries and flashlight are old, so hopefully, they work long enough to be of use.

I head back to the closet and use the flashlight to look down the hatch. I see that it goes down about ten feet, and the door is roughly six feet tall, plenty of space for my height of five foot eight. It looks like there is a little water on the ground but nothing deep. None of the ladder rungs look any worse than I thought they were last night, a little rusty but holding steady, so I start climbing down. I check each tread carefully as I go, just to be safe, by putting my weight on the next one without removing my other foot from the previous one.

I finally make it down, there is nothing in here. The room is about five feet wide and ten feet long, the walls are cement blocks painted white. The paint flaking off all over the place, and the door heading deeper inside the bunker.

I went up to the door, it was two inches thick and had a wheel like the hatch above had. I tried pulling on the wheel to see if I could get the door to move, and the wheel fell off. I pulled so hard, and it came loose so quickly that I fell back into the wall.

I hit my head on the wall, but it could have been worse. I looked to my left and noticed a piece of rebar sticking out of the wall at chest level, only a couple of inches to the left of where I landed. "Fuck that was a close one, can't give up now though." I grab the edge of the door and pull and push it back and forth, each time the door comes a little farther open.

A couple of minutes later, I got the door open far enough to get inside. I grab the flashlight that I set on the ground so I could see, and went inside. Inside it was four small rooms, one with three sets of bunk beds, one with a tv and a couch, a very small kitchen with canned food, a stove, and a fridge. The last small room was a bathroom that was more of an interior outhouse, thankfully it hasn't been used and doesn't smell as bad as it could.

Not finding anything of use, its time to get out of here and figure out what I'm going to do next. I leave the bunker, and as I'm climbing the ladder up to the closet, I hear a loud bang and feel the ground shake from behind the house. I get out of the closet and grab my bag before going to look out the window in the kitchen. Something had destroyed a portion of the wall, roughly twelve feet of it, right around where I left the dead zombies last night.

I look around, franticly attempting to find what made the hole in the wall. Not seeing anything I check windows on every other side of the house, I don't see anything, so I sneak downstairs. Listening carefully as I moved, I creeping towards the front door, Hoping that whatever made the hole in the back fence hadn't set a trap for me somewhere else.

I peek through the windows at the top of the large wooden door. Seeing nothing, I slowly turn the ornate brass door handle, opening the door as quietly as I can. I continue looking around and listening as I leave the house, shutting the door, as quietly as I can, behind me.

Remembering the sound the gate made last night, I decided to hop over the wall instead of going through the gate. I walk down the cement stairs of the small porch and walk over to the right corner of the courtyard, I jump, up as quietly as I can, pulling myself up to the top of the wall. I sit on top of the wall for a moment to observe my surroundings.

"son of a bitch, I might be screwed"...Looking around me, I see the same thing in the houses here that I saw when I left the alley. Brick houses smashed to rubble as if they are nothing; cars smashed together like they were toys, a couple of the cars had even ended up on roofs of houses that had somehow not collapsed, like a child playing with a toy car or dollhouse.

I hop down off the wall and sneak along the side of the road, listening and looking for what I am guessing is the giant I ran into last night. I walk three blocks before looking back, and I instantly regretted looking back. I got my first good look at the giant, but that wasn't what I regretted. The giant had thrown the body of a zombie high into the sky and was attempting to catch it in its mouth, the way one might with a piece of popcorn. The worst part was, the giant had a large enough mouth that if it caught it, it could eat it almost whole.

Standing around thirty feet tall, it was easily visible among all the rubble in the surrounding area. I keep low and close to the side of the road, up against the fences and walls running along the sidewalk in hopes of not being noticed by the giant. I keep looking back as I run crouched, still in a residential part of town, just to be sure that I am not being followed, and amazingly it seems to be oblivious to my presence.

I run for about an hour and a half just to be safe, running through the yards and parking lots and any open space that gets me farther from the giant. I check the time, and its nearly 10:45. I have plenty of time to decide what to do, so I stop for a few minutes to catch my breath and check out my surroundings. The houses here make it look like I'm in the rich part of town.

Most of the houses are three stories tall, have metal fences around the yards, and a gate that opens up into long fancy driveways. Most even have the fancy speakers so that people can talk to people inside to ask them to open the gate. The house I stopped at had a large patio with rocking chairs, a couple grills, tables, and even a hot tub. I sit down in one of the rocking chairs and relax for a few while I drink some water. I relax for another half hour, looking around, thinking about where I should go and what I should do.

I see some skyscrapers off in the distance, as I'm watching I see one of the skyscrapers collapse into the ground and decide I'll avoid that area. I see that there are more forests and mountains in the direction that I have been running, so I decide to keep going in that direction, keeping the city on my left and giant behind me. Getting ready to leave, I notice I drank most of my first bottle of water.

'I'm gonna go inside to see if I can refill my water bottle real quick before I leave.' I check the front door of the house, and it is unlocked. The house is very spacious. In the entryway, there is a doorway to the left, a large curving staircase with one of those lift things for old people, and on the right is a double-wide doorway with no doors heading into what could have been a living room. There was no furniture, so who knows exactly what it was.

I check the door on the right, opening it slowly just in case there is anything inside, but it's an empty room just like the living room. I see a set of doors that don't have handles and look like they swing in and out. 'Those look like they might go into the kitchen.'

I cross the empty room and slowly open one of the doors. I see a zombie standing idle next to the sink. I open the door a little farther to check the rest of the room, and I don't see anything else, so I go in. I move around the zombie quietly and lock all of the doors into the kitchen. 'I don't want any uninvited guests like last time.'

Once all of the doors are locked, I sneak up behind the zombie and put my knife in its brain. This time I catch it when it collapses instead of letting it drop like dead weight. I believe that is part of what attracted the other zombies in the other house. I move the zombies' body away from the sink, thankfully I didn't get anything on the sink, and try to turn the water on.

Nothing comes out at first, but I hear a sound, like rushing air, so I leave it on and, eventually, some nasty water starts to come out of the faucet. It takes almost 15 minutes for the water to clear up, and even then, it probably had things I shouldn't have been ingesting in it, but that's why I ran it through the filter built into the bottle as I filled it up.

After looking around a little more and grabbing a few more cans of food, that happened to be in the cabinets, and a can opener that I was glad to find, I left the house. I look at my watch and see that it's nearly 11:30. 'I'll walk for another hour or two then stop somewhere to eat.'

"Sara RUN!!!" I hear a man yell, and a few seconds later, I hear a woman scream. I started running in the direction that I heard the them. As I get closer, I start to hear zombies. Lots of zombies, just around the corner from where I am. I could hear the woman crying, and it sounds like the man is fighting them, yelling at them to get back, for whatever good that is going to do against a zombie.

Carefully, I look around the corner, and I see five zombies grouped up around a door. I couldn't see the woman but, the man was standing in the door, attempting to hold them back, looking hurt pretty bad. He was bleeding from every place that I could see on him, and one of his arms was hanging limp at his side.

I drop my bag and seeing all of the zombies occupied, I sneak up behind them as quickly as I can without attracting attention. I killed the zombie in the back and take a few steps back to see what the rest of them do. I wait a few seconds, and the other zombies haven't reacted in any way, still trying to kill the man and woman in the house. I approach again, this time, I plan on killing them all without stopping. At this point, there are two zombies in the doorway attacking the man with the other two pressing up against them.

'The pressure those zombies are putting on that man must be intense.' By this point, I'm getting faster and more accurate with my knife, at least when it comes to dealing with zombies. I kill the two zombies in the back. When I do, instead of collapsing right away like you would expect, they fell into the zombies in front of them, putting even more pressure on the man. I move the two zombies off to the side as quickly as I can and kill the last two zombies. By the time I'm done with this, the man is on the ground on the edge of death.

"Jonny, are you ok?" I hear Sara say from somewhere inside the house. She must have herd the zombies go quiet and wanted to make sure he was ok. I was about to approach to see if there was anything I could do to help. As I get closer to the man, a faint glow appears on him, similar to what happened to the man in the woods, and he starts to heal. "Be more quiet and careful from now on" I yell through the door at Sara before taking off back the way I came. I get around the corner and grab my bag and take off into the twist of yards. "Wait, come back, we need your help." I hear Jonny yell behind me, but I ignore him and keep going. I don't know enough about this world yet to know if I can trust anyone. I wont sit by and let people die, but that doesnt mean I have to befrend or join them.