Snippet #1435117

A red light beat resoundingly against the outside of two eyelids. They parted slowly, then slammed back shut as the blinking red overwhelmed them. Cliff covered his face with his hand and sat up. Gradually, he unshielded his pupils and let them adjust. Outside the window, a streetlight at a four-way intersection was stuck on red. It's blinking was supposed to signify that the lights were malfunctioning, but due to the circumstances, Cliff highly doubted there would be much traffic.
Cliff stretched as he stood, and then walked into the kitchen of his apartment. He opened the fridge and studied its contents. His food supply was unoptimistically low.
"Shit," he muttered under his breath.
It had come as quite a surprise to Cliff that barricading himself in his apartment would prove the best survival mechanism against the rage-infected. But about a week after the outbreak had started, the infected had abandoned most residences and taken to the streets. Cliff had managed to remain quiet enough to stay undetected so far; however, with nothing left to feed him, his options seemed slim.
Still, Cliff did not wish to immediately abandon his home on a whim. He sat down and smoked a cigarette, flipping through an old Playboy he'd read about a dozen times since the incident had started. After growing bored with the James Franco interview article, Cliff retired the magazine to the pile it had been laying in and opened the bottom left-hand drawer on his coffee table. From the drawer he withdrew a blood stained two-way radio that he had recovered off the body of a dead soldier in the one time he'd been brave enough to venture downstairs.
"Maybe today's forecast will be more promising," Cliff said to himself while figuring it to be untrue.
He clicked the dial at the top of the radio and sat it down on the table, kicking his feet up after doing so. A repeating layer of unbroken static emitted for the next ten minutes. Cliff leaned forward and, sighing, he shut the radio off and returned it to the drawer.
"Or, maybe not..."
He stood once more. A slight pain spread across his stomach as it growled. Cliff realized that the average person could go a few days without food, but he also realized that a potential rescue would most likely take more than a few days. Moving towards the coat rack, Cliff slid each arm into the respective sleeve of his dads green Marine Corps jacket, and then placed his cigarettes and lighter into one of the pockets.
He had no weapon. If he was to reach the grocery store or a gas station, he would have to be as stealthy as possible against the feral minded rage-infected. Slowly, he unbarricaded the door item by item and then unbolted the latch. Heading down the stairs, he made his way passed a few disfigured, decomposing corpses and out the door of his apartment complex onto the streets.