Deadly Progress
Chapter 12
Shleeck!
"And that, is the end of that," Leo mumbles under his breath, pulling his knife from an undead man's eye socket.
Clearing the rest of the apartment building took a few hours, but it wasn't anything that he couldn't handle. The closest calls Leo's had were when he was nearly overrun clearing the first half of the building, and when he was chased down by that mammoth of a woman.
Shuddering at the nightmare fuel, Leo steps out of the downstairs office. The zombie he had just recently killed must have been the property owner or something, he had a pretty big keychain on him. Whether it was luck or universal plot armor, the majority of the keys were labeled with names of locations such as the laundry room, downstairs restroom, back door, front door, and so on.
With keys to every area of the building, he could explore more thoroughly without having to bust open every locked door he comes across.
The lobby is relatively empty with a few walker corpses lying around, which he skillfully took out a short time earlier. After taking one last cautious look around the first floor, Leo heads to the front of the building. The main doors are wooden with big glass windows on each side. Though one of the windows has a bloody handprint on them and a few splatters of blood here and there, they are relatively clean.
There's a dead body lying outside at the front of the building, completely torn up, but Leo tries to ignore it as he looks out at main street. The courthouse is situated directly at the end of main street, which would explain why the street was currently empty of any undead.
With the Grizzlies moving in and out of town so often, they wanted a clear path so that they wouldn't be slowed down while coming or going
During his many stakeouts in the apartment on the sixth floor, Leo occasionally would spot a lonely walker, and even groups, wandering down the road towards the courthouse. The Undead wouldn't stick around for long though, the sniper on the courthouse's roof would pick them off pretty quickly.
They kept small groups around the base of their walls, but he isn't entirely sure of the reason. His main theory is that they keep some zombies around as a form of defense against other survivors. Trying to sneak by their wall would be more than a little annoying with a bunch of undead trying to eat you.
Stepping back from the glass, Leo takes out the chain and lock from his backpack before securing the double doors. He doesn't quite like the idea of the Grizzlies coming to raid his apartment building. With the front doors chained shut, it would be another incentive to leave the building alone. Afterall, they had no idea that he'd killed all the undead within.
Finished up with the front of the building, Leo makes his way towards the two emergency exits at the back. With the keychain he grabbed off the property owner, he makes sure that each of the exits are locked and secured properly.
Eventually, he will need to drag all the corpses out of the building or something similar. Sooner or later, they will begin to rot even more and smell worse than they already do. If anything, Leo plans to at least move all the bodies down to the basement. Having a large pile of bodies at the back of the building would only invite trouble.
Once all of the zombies are dealt with and the doors all secured, Leo makes his back to the owner's office.
The office area isn't large at all, basically a small cubby with a desk situated in front to greet potential tenants. Looking at the bald man he had laid to rest earlier, Leo gets a thought. 'Did you have a room here, or did you sleep in one of the apartments?'
Sweeping his gaze around the back of the desk, his eyes land on a chipped oak door that is barely hidden away out of the view of the public.
"Bingo," he says with a smirk, keeping his knife at the ready as he puts his hand on the faded old doorknob. Wiggling the knob a little, he finds that the door is unlocked, but he doesn't want to barge in incase there is another undead inside.
Tapping his blade on the door a few times, Leo listens intently for any response. Not hearing anything other than his own breathing, he opens the door, carefully scanning the small room for any threats. Seeing nothing, he enters the room cautiously and immediately checks the connecting bathroom.
Twice now he's been caught off guard by the same person. He's been surprised by a few undead as well—one can never be too cautious.
After making sure the coast is clear, Leo tears the room apart with abandon, leaving nothing unturned. The room isn't large, but it is pretty cluttered, making his nose twitch from a mysterious sour smell and mothballs. Whoever the owner was, they seemed to be a borderline hoarder.
Piles of clothes, trash, and random junk littered the room, leaving him barely any space to walk without tripping over something. Not having the patience to dig through each and every pile, he prioritizes the closet and nightstand next to the dirty bed, checking them first.
"Ugh!" Leo groans as he swings open the closet door. The closet is filled with nothing but garbage and dirty pieces of clothing with weird stains on them.
"What an absolute pig," he mutters to himself, scrunching up his nose as he spots rotting food and old pizza boxes scattered around. How someone could live amongst piles of trash is beyond his understanding.
Not having high hopes of finding anything useful, Leo wades over to the nightstand and pulls open the drawer, only to be pleasantly surprised at what he finds inside. Amongst a stack of adult magazines lay a 9mm handgun and a small box of ammo.
Smiling to himself, he puts the ammo in his inventory and takes out the handgun to examine it. The gun is in decent shape, a little dusty, but in good condition.
Now that he found another firearm and has some ammunition for it, he allows a small weight to lift from his shoulders. For his .38, he only has four rounds left and so he is much more apprehensive when it comes to using it. That doesn't mean Leo is going to be using his new pistol often, though. Like with his revolver, he would only use it for emergencies, and will be keeping it loaded in his inventory to pull out when needed.
Not wanting to stay longer than he needs to within the pigsty of a room, he makes his way back up to his apartment.
The short trip is uneventful, if a little creepy. With no power in the building, the hallways are decently dark and there were a lot of shadowy spots. Because of the low lighting from the occasional window at the end of a hallway, the corpse filled hallways looked like a daunting scene straight from a horror film.
As Leo steps over the occasional corpse while nearing his apartment, his mind begins to wander towards Victoria, thinking back to her strange mood swings.
He could tell that beneath her tough girl act is a young woman barely holding herself together. Whatever the cause of her emotional trauma, he's sure that the root has a high likelihood of involving her sister in some way.
Victoria may be a badass survivor, but she is a human like everyone else, and everyone has something that they're dealing with.
Not only has she unintentionally showed him that she has deep traumas to work through, she also gave him a peek into what kind of person she was before the apocalypse. While she could have killed him numerous times, she instead showed him kindness. Victoria allowed him to spend the night, gave him information, and had even fed him.
The metaphorical door to friendship has been opened, and he fully intends to step through.
After meeting her, his loneliness has ebbed quite a bit. For the first time since coming to this world, Leo has finally had a cordial and civilized conversation with someone. As lonely as he is feeling, he's sure that Victoria is also experiencing a sense of loneliness. Afterall, she's been surviving alone much longer than he has.
Letting himself fall into the couch with an oomph, he releases a relaxed sigh. It feels good to settle down and unwind a little bit after spending a few hours clearing any undead lingering around the building. The job was stressful and kept him very tense the entire time.
Kicking his boots off, he lays his head back over the couch with a satisfied smile, wiggling his toes freely. Before long, Leo dozes off for a quick nap.
—
Kneeling down upon the soft earth, Victoria hardly notices how the moist ground dirties her dark leggings as she gazes upon a large, smooth, round stone in somber silence.
The stone is simple, yet, out of place at the center of the calm and quiet clearing. While the stone wasn't anything special, the clearing was. Long before the outbreak, during happier times, Victoria and her older sister would come here to play when she was a child—escaping the world's troubles as the young girl imagined she was in a faraway magic land.
That's where Victoria likes to imagine her sister is, somewhere magical, somewhere safe, somewhere far away from the apocalyptic hellhole that the world has become.
A simple rock isn't what she feels that her sister deserves for a grave marker, but it's all she could find. Victoria had thought about making a simple cross for her, but she didn't feel that it was very appropriate. Her sister had never been the religious type, not that she knew of, anyway.
She knew that her sister had believed in something, but it wasn't ever anything that Victoria talked with her about.
Her sister was a firm believer that one must develop their own belief system, their own personal faith. She believed that everyone's relationship with a higher power, the universe, or whatever was out there should be personal and kept to themselves.
Closing her eyes, Victoria takes a deep breath before releasing it out through her nose. When it comes to faith, she doesn't know what to believe anymore.
To her, it's pretty obvious that if there was a higher power out there, they didn't discriminate. No matter who you are, what god you believe in, or what age you are, no variable seems to matter—nothing matters…
If the world ending had taught her anything about life, it's that although we all live differently, we all die the same.
"I miss you sis," Victoria finally utters, breaking the gentle silence permeating the area. "I miss you so much…"
Her sister had always been there for her.
Their parents died when Victoria was still young, her big sister was all that she had ever had. Every time she was down, her sis would be there to pick her right back up again.
"I don't know what to do anymore, Aly, I'm so lost."
Her sister was her guiding star, she was her role model. Without her encouragement, Victoria would have never left Flintrose to continue her education. She was more than happy with staying in her cozy little hometown helping her sister run the flower shop.
Aly didn't want that for her little sister, though. She wanted Victoria to travel, to make friends, to experience the world beyond their small secluded town. Before Victoria left, her sister told her that she was proud of her, and that's all Victoria ever really wanted.
Victoria wishes she'd told her sister that at the time, because that was the last time she had seen Aly alive.
Not realizing how long she's sat by her sister's grave, she notices the sun beginning to dip below the trees, telling her it was getting close to dark. Reaching out to touch the stone with her hand, Victoria caresses it softly for a moment before laying a white lily against the hard surface.
"I'll be back soon, sis," she whispers quietly, her voice being carried by a gentle breeze that seems to ruffle her hair. "I love you." Standing up and shouldering her bow, Victoria begins her short trek back towards town.
She made this journey all the time when she was a child, she practically knew these woods like the back of her hand.
After walking a few minutes, a few hundred meters away from the nearest building, Victoria begins to hear encroaching voices. Muttering a short curse under her breath, she looks around for a moment for somewhere to hide.
Spotting an easy tree to climb just a few strides away, the stealthy young woman makes her way towards it and quietly climbs up, settling herself on a thick branch to stay out of sight.
Victoria didn't have to wait long before two men came into sight, both bearing firearms.
"I'm telling you man, people turning to us for help are getting more and more scarce. I don't even know if there's anyone left alive in town except us," one of the men says carelessly, looking to be around mid-to-late twenties and carrying a small handgun.
"Well, if we stopped killing those desperate dipshits, we'd have more people to share our shit with," the older of the two responds dismissively. He's an older gentleman who seems to be at least fifty carrying a bolt action rifle.
Hearing the two talk about killing people so freely, Victoria's eyes begin to narrow and her jaw clenched tightly.
These two were members of the Grizzlies. They were probably out hunting, hoping to get lucky. Ironically, it seems that the hunters have become the prey.
"Sharing is caring and all that," the younger man laughs lightly, not talking about supplies anymore.
"Oh please," the man with the rifle grunts. "The only thing our group tends to share is women and ammo."
Victoria's eyes harden, righteous fury filling her predatory gaze.
Quietly removing her bow from her shoulder, she grabs an arrow from her quiver with her free hand. Taking aim at the older man first, a small smirk plays at her lips.
"It's been a while since we've caught a real beauty. The last one was a little too old f—" He doesn't get to finish his statement before an arrow finds itself neatly lodged in his throat.
Dropping his rifle, he falls down, grasping at his neck unable to speak, the only sounds released being wet gurgling noises.
"Joseph!" His friend yells in shock. Proving his cowardice, he immediately tucks his tail, turns around, and attempts to run back the way they came.
He didn't get far, though. Before he could take even a handful of steps, a second arrow pierces center mass, embedding itself deeply and comfortably between his shoulder blades.
Victoria's second target drops heavily to the forest floor. With a shot like that, she didn't have any doubt that he's dead, or would be dying rather soon. The arrow severed his spine. He wouldn't be going anywhere.
Preparing another arrow just in case, she waits a few minutes for any potential stragglers before finally deciding that there is no one else.
After climbing down from her perch, she calmly approaches her two victims with a knife in hand.
Arriving at the body of the older man with an arrow sticking out of his throat, wet gurgling growls reach her ears. His eyes have already turned a dead milky white, indicating that he's officially an undead monster, rather than just a monster.
Internally debating for a moment whether she should let a sick individual like that suffer as an undead, she sighs before plunging her blade into one of his eye sockets and into his brain. One less walker to worry about, the better.
He wasn't the first person Victoria had killed, and he definitely would not be the last—not even close. She wants every member of the Grizzlies to suffer, and she is willing to die for that to happen.
The second man, she notices, isn't dead when she reaches him, albeit just barely. Less than a meter behind him, she can hear his desperate gasps for breath.
Not wanting to waste any more time than she already has, she embeds her knife deeply into the back of his skull. Victoria almost regrets not letting him suffer more—almost.
After relieving the two hunters of their weapons and ammo, she heads home at a quickened pace, not wanting to get caught out after dark. Because she killed two Grizzlies, her mood is rather lifted and she's filled with a sense of satisfaction.
She has made one more step towards her goal, one more step towards avenging her sister.