>>6138060>>6141185You drifted back and forth for days, usually unresponsive, hallucinating. You screamed out in your sleep, and the others grew weary of caring for you. They took to leaving you in the ambulance, tied locked inside, and searching in a trio.
Andy and Ray had played the scavenging game for the last three years as a duo. In their way they could be considered rich. It was not lost on anyone the large outlay of ammunition they were willing to invest on every venture, and yet they always wound up with more than they began. The stash of quality arms made it easier for them to switch calibers from one journey to the next. Ray was a fan of semiautomatic rifles, good for human and zomvie alike, these had the reach and stopping power to kill or cripple whatever he found, and didn't require him to spend too much time focusing on hitting the brain.
Andy was methodical about shooting, and his choice of a small caliber let him shoot for hours without tiring. He had been a hunter before, and always used small calibers. Light weight, and leaving no room for error, he forced himself to hone precision and consistency, standing sitting laying prone, or walking about in the woods. He also favour the .22lr due to it's cheapness. In the years before the plague, he could find it anywhere, and even during hyperinflation it always trailed the price of centerfire cartridges.
The Slav fit in well with these two, and would typically draw away the ghouls in groups and then chop their heads open with a machete. Meanwhile you sweated in the truck, and dreamed of fire and a city with no sunshine, and the time a month into the outbreak when you witnessed a company of soldiers use a quarantine camp for a butchershop.
They'd kept the radio broadcast going for a while, and drawn in people to rob and consume, until someone fought back and burned their camp down.
Since you got out of that, you'd been leary of anyone offering help. Nothing was free, and anyone offering something free was probably looking at you and your possessions as their communal property. You'd met plenty of communists since this began, though, mercifully, they never lived long without being massacred by the civilian populations they tried to control. The only survivors now were indominable, though not precisely ruthless.
You dreamed that men were made of cardboard.
You dreamed that the word had been filled with sharks and alligators and that you lived in a hotel on the coast where everyone pretended not to notice the violent animals lingering in the hallways and the lobby, feasting on the other guests.
Mostly you dreamed of walking around in the dark, not sure where your family had gone off to. Knowing completely what had happened to the world around you, and not having shoes on your feet. You always dreamed that the streets were slick with rain, but you never dreamed about thunder or lightning.
[Continued]
