Resident evil (Oh, yes. Get over it!) (this is the eqivelent of 10 pages but I don't know how the story progresses as far as chapters.) He simply had to keep moving. As long as he ran he could escape from the nightmarish terror that stalked him. He could outrun disease, hunger, pain, and time. He was Jack Woods, captain of the track team. It’s all a dream he insisted, blinking back tears as he stopped. The dull ache in his side could be denied no longer, he needed to rest or he’d pass out. He doubled over, gasping with newly found breath. He spat out a thick strand of spit. He gazed stupidly at the translucent white bubbles that clung to the spider silk string dangling from his chin. He wiped his face with his hand. Jack hadn’t bothered to notice the growing darkness of the wooded landscape around him. Keep running for all you’re worth. A knot of pain clenched at his stomach and he groaned loudly. While he was trying to join his chest to his knees he saw It. It was a dog. It had dully-glimmering teeth, coated in blood and muddy brown fur. It stank and It was growling at him. “Fuck…” He stood shakily to his feet and stared at the dastardly dog. He flicked open his pocketknife, not that it’d do any good. It barked menacingly and he heard a thin crunch of leaves behind him. It lunged. It sank its undoubtedly infected jaws into his shoulder. It ripped and shook its head; flinging red spittle off onto the ancient, dry bark of the surrounding trees. Jack wobbled and dug his hands into the dog’s fur. There was no need for the knife now. He tore it off and flung it away. The beast stood and snarled once more, its body tense to jump on him again. He stood as ready as he could be; his knees buckling and a darkness encroaching on his vision. With his last bit of strength Jack lifted his hands to protect his face. * “He’s going to die.” A simple answer from a drastically simple man. Simple in the sense that anything radical was beyond him. Maria stared at the man on the cot. He grumbled incoherently in his sleep. A cold sweat bathed his dimly lighted features. He was handsome, she thought. Much better looking that the doughy, pale, balding, coke-bottle-wearing lab technical she was stuck in here with. His eyes fluttered once and she caught a glimpse of his spectacularly grey orbs. She moved one of the controlled claw hands to swipe a sweat-drenched hair away from his face. His eyes flung open and he gripped at the mechanical claw, his eyes rolling and feverish. He didn’t have much fight though and so he was subdued with a slight smack from the pinchers. “He’s not going to die, and if he does we’ll bring him back.” “He’s got nothing to offer the corporation. Why are we wasting all of this on him?” “He’s special,” Maria directed the technician’s snub nose to the high-tech monitors; they recorded everything from heartbeat to advanced brain functions. There also was a display of his cellular structure. The display changed color rapidly form red (the normally perceived color) to a bile green color. (infected) “Interesting.” He said with a low note of something close to excitement. “We’ve never seen anything like this.” She whispered. “Besides that,” He eyed the green screen. “There’s nothing going on with him.” “Well, not yet. Give him a day or two… Maybe we should help it along a little, increase the injections.” * Jack awoke as a sharp pain flared through him limbs, shooting down his spine and out through his extremities. He felt paralyzed above the knees but he saw his legs flailing in front of him, the toes curling each time he took a ragged breath. Jack wanted to scream but he couldn’t do anything but stare at his spasming legs. As he lay there a noise alerted him, he heard something liquidy. He managed to lift his eyes and saw tubes of stuff feeding down into his shoulder. It looked like three catheters or something, one filled with blue, one dripping green, and one spewing a yellowy clear liquid down into him. He was terrified but he knew he had to look down. His vision blurred suddenly upon seeing his shoulder and he thought he might just puke. The wound looked horribly infected, a deep blackish green at the center either from a bruise, which he hoped, or it was gangrenous. The area immediately surrounding that was ripped open, exposing red muscle and something slick and white, he assumed it was bone. It looked absolutely gross, a deep inflamed red with striations of purple. The longer Jack stared the more aware of it he became, it burned furiously and he felt something moving beneath the skin. “Oh God.” He breathed. “Please don’t let me die. Please…” Suddenly that internal blackness he had come to know engulfed him again and he spiraled off into a dreamless sleep. * “God, Cass, what’re we doing here?” Asked the unusually quiet girl. “Don’t worry. There’s no one in here anymore. It’s safe. Besides…” Her voice trailed off and with a quick swipe she nudged a scrap of wood away from the hardly noticed back exit. The black-haired silent girl watched Cass with quiet admiration. Cass was a small but extremely proud woman with rust red hair and bold, noble features. She wore a thick woolen jacket and boot cut jeans, only one shoe though. The other foot was made of metal and clunked loudly. Cass walked slap, THUMP, slap, THUMP, slap, all the way up nine flights of stairs. * He sat up suddenly, his arm convulsing violently. He bent forward, holding the arm to his chest. When it calmed down enough and he could breath again, he got up. The movement he made caused the tubes feeding into his shoulder to pull painfully. He grimaced and tugged the catheters out one at a time. He looked around the dimly lit room, there was his metal bed, and a stand by the sink. He glanced around until he saw the door. Apparently the steel sliding door was the only way out. It was obviously locked and there was a keypad. He turned around the room, anger boiling up in him. Jack spotted the camera, a dull red light winked at him. He directed his distress at it. “This is a fucking hospital isn’t it? ISN’T IT? Where are all the fucking doctors? Let me out!” He hurled insults at it until he collapsed spent against the steel door. When he drifted back in he heard someone calling from outside. “Are you a doctor?” He asked, standing up. “Will you let me out?” “I don’t know how.” Was the answer from outside. “You don’t know? Don’t you tell me you don’t know! Open the door! OPEN THE DOOR!” He screamed. How long had it been since he’d eaten? How long since he last saw the sun? He pounded against the door with his good fist, then with his wounded arm. Waves of pain flared though his arm from fingers to the shoulder socket, he rode it out and pulled back when he heard a loud creak. The steel had dented. He pulled his arm up and examined it closely. The steel had dented! Both women screamed and jumped back form the door when three large dents in the metal appeared. Each one was roughly six inches around in an irregular shape. “It’s a monster. It’s one of them.” The dark haired one said, ducking back behind Cass. “It’s not. Didn’t you listen? It was a man. He’s obviously ramming something against the door. Poor guy.” She looked around for something to pry the door open with. While she was searching and he was pounding, Heather The Quiet moved to the keypad on their side of the door. She stared at it, her gaze blindly sweeping across the buttons. With a hesitant finger she pressed the nine-digit access code in and pressed enter. The door slid open slowly, with a long groan of protest. The man ducked back into the gloom of the room and stared out at them. Heather and Cass watched the feverishly luminescent grey eyes watching them. “Hi.” Cass offered. “You’re not doctors.” He stepped partially out, his exposed upper body glistened with sweat. His dark hair was partially matted to his head, the rest hung messily over his forehead. “No, we’re not.” They both agreed. He stepped farther out, showing himself completely. “Then neither of you would know what to do about this.” He gestured towards his arm. They couldn’t make out more than a vague shape beneath the red cloth it was bound in. He drew in a hiss of breath between his clenched teeth and swooned, falling against the jamb of the sliding door. Jack stared out at the foggy sky, his gaze traveled to a faint star that glimmered weakly against the lightening grey of the sky. It was a quickly fading wink of distant brilliance. A heavy residue of frost clung to his window. The cold air chilled and the sight of the resilient frost made him feel even colder. He would have sworn it wasn’t winter a week ago; there were a lot of things he swore could not have been a week ago. Jack sat up, smoothing back his black hair with his good hand. He was used to primarily using his left arm, the right was a mangled monstrosity. He went down the hall and came unexpectedly to the stairs. He fell down all twelve and looked up dazed from the floor. The banister and dull grey stairs tumbled in his vision with a nauseating effect. His stomach knotted and he ran into the hall bathroom to purge his stomach. “Gross.” He groaned, running his hands over the snow coated grass. He felt like a freak shoveling fistfuls of snow into his mouth and letting it heat up enough to swallow. They were all desperate for water because everything had stopped working. It was a very different life now. “So, this is what we’re reduced to. Eating grass like cattle.” Cass said. Without even turning jack gave her the finger. “Don’t make me shove my metal foot up your ass.” He got up and held his grotesque arm out to her. He tore at the bandages exposing fresh tendrils of pink scar tissue. As if by command the swollen, grubby claw-fingers he had developed stretched out at her. He waved his appendage at her. Cass backed up a step. “Gross! Put it away.” He wrapped it back up and grinned at her. “I’m still trying to convince you to cut it off.” He said, now completely serous. She leaned against the door, equally serious. “I can’t. I’m not a doctor; there are NO doctors. If you didn’t die of blood loss you’d surely die of a secondary infection.” “Yeah.” He bowed his head and pretended to fix the clips that held the gauze on. “You look better though.” She said as he turned to look across the completely barren lawn. “This is a degenerative disease. There is no getting better. Everything dies, or worse…” He let his thoughts trail off and he stood in silence. She made a move to put her hand on his shoulder. Jack shrugged her off and brushed past her to get inside “We need to keep moving.” ** “Heather? We need to leave! Pack up your stuff, let’s go.” He yelled. There was no response from upstairs. As a matter of fact, the whole house was completely silent. Jack made his way upstairs, rapping his knuckles on the walls as he approached her room. He peaked in after promising to respect her dignity. There was no one in there. Her Hello Kitty backpack laid on he bed, it was partially unzipped and something frilly stuck out. He didn’t want to handle her things but he gently pushed the undergarment inside the bag and closed it. He shouldered the pack and had to once again wonder why a girl nearly his age was acting like a kid. In most respects him and Cass both thought of her as a child. She was undoubtedly a woman however, and seemed to have reverted back to a somewhat younger state of mind after something traumatic happened. He called out to her softly again and again while he searched the entire house. He looked up and saw a silhouette behind the curtain. The window was open. “Heather! Don’t you dare jump!” he screamed leaping over the bed and grabbing for her through the curtain. She made a noise and hissed at him when he grabbed her roughly round the waist. “I wasn’t gonna jump. I was just watching them.” The way she said them sent a shiver down his spine and he was coming to a bad conclusion about them when he heard Cass calling from outside. “They’re here. We need to get moving before they get to our block. Let’s move!” * They walked in a line, Jack up front with a baseball bat they’d altered by hammering nails into it, followed by Heather who clutched a large blue teddy bear defensively, and Cass with a shotgun brought up the rear. They moved quickly but not nearly as fast as jack wanted to go. He was haunted by the sights and smells of a nightmare he’d been plagued by since the first day he ran. He wanted to run now. The zombies followed them diligently, never resting, never stopping. It was horrible. If only they could reach a monstrous state of immortality. They still needed to eat and rest. Them, that faceless, nameless them was always drawing closer. The three people moved quickly, jumping fences and doing whatever possible to put distance or at least obstacles between them and their pursuers. They stopped at dusk when they could barely see in front of them and a harsh wind began to whip at their clothes. They busted down the door of a small house of the outskirts of town. It was a cottage structure with few doors leading to the outside. The two extra they found they boarded up with pieces of wood and sheltered themselves inside. “I hope we don’t have a blizzard.” Cass whispered, setting down her flashlight on the small dining room table. Jack nodded as he rifled through the cabinets, taking stock of what perishables they could use and what they could take from the house when they left. Heather looked around for things to insulate the windows with and blankets to use. It was frightfully cold, even inside because there was no heat. They laid down a thick nest of blankets and huddled close to each other behind most of the furniture in the living room. “Turn off the light!” Jack hissed. “Why?” “If it’s the only light in the whole city than they’ll probably be drawn to it even if it’s faint.” With a sigh Cass switched off the light. She hated how they could bicker and fight over trivial things like a flashlight and yet have to curl up together to survive the night. The wind howled against the house, windows shook in their frames; they hoped it wasn’t a blizzard. Heather was the first up, she ran to the window and stared out. There was cold white snow piled up against the window; it was probably a drift. She couldn’t even approximate the height of the rest of the yard because the white, atop white, against white didn’t allow for depth perception. She was hungry. With as little clatter as possible she started a meal in the kitchen. She had been lucky enough to find a small power generator in the basement, if you cranked it a lot you could make electricity and heat for the house. With a whisper the heaters began to vent hot air into the room and the lights flickered on, Jack awoke to light. He grumbled and got up reluctantly from the warm nest of blankets and pillows they had created. The lights were on? He got up quickly and moved upstairs where he had heard steps and some other noises. With the nailed bat raised above his head he ran up the stairs and halted before Heather. “What the hell did you do?” She blinked at him. “There’s a power-generator in the basement.” She gestured around the upstairs hallway. The lights here had been turned off. “I was just moving downstairs to get them off, too.” “Oh, okay.” He helped her turn off the lights and she showed him her progress in the kitchen. There was a box of powdered milk and a large bowl of snow that she had placed over an electric burner. She melted the snow and added it to a glass filled with the powder and she made milk. It didn’t taste quite the same as real milk, but it was good. When Cass awoke they offered her some bacon. The blizzard passed eventually, and near the end they got quite irritable, but with electricity they could heat food and water and with heat they would survive. ** Jack and Cass sat across from each other at the table. “There’s some serious things we need to consider Serious realities.” “Like what?” “What if we’re the last ones? I mean, like on the planet.” “Highly unlikely.” “Think about it.” Jack said, giving her a stern look. She smiled and grabbed one of his hands, “If you wanted to have sex with me you could have just asked.” Jack’s face grew red and he looked embarrassed and upset. He slammed one fist on the table. “This is serious!” He yelled. “No, it’s not.” She retorted. “Besides, if it came to survival of the species, you’d be the last woman I’d ever pick.” “Oh, Jack. You hurt my feelings.” Her tone belied amusement but he was serious. “If it came to survival of the species, you’d need some genetic differences. You’d need us both. We would need other people.”