Snippet #1915527

"Wake up...Wake up...WAKE. UP."

It could have been the distant gunshots that finally brought him out of the blackout - or, it could've been his subconscious screaming signals of panic through his nervous system to force him awake. It could have been anything.
All he knew, was that when he finally opened his eyes, he was lying on his face, and his head was pounding.

"Nngh~" Everything hurt; most of all, his head. It took nearly a full minute to finally roll himself over, just to realize that he was lying some metres under the bottom platform of the fire escape, "What the hell?"
Instinctively, he pressed his palm to his forehead as he groggily worked himself up to sit to try to curb the sharp aching throb pounding through his skull, but that just made it worse. It was only then, he realized, his palm was suddenly sticky and wet. Peeling his hand away from his head, he forced his blurry eyes into focus, and almost immediately wished he hadn't.

"Blood," He gulped, staring dumbly at the dark red smear on his palm. Still blinking the grey out of his swimming vision, he glanced around, trying to make sense of things. How long had he been out? The stuffed gym bag lying frumped in the alley not more than an arm's reach away made everything click almost instantly, and the fleeting instant where he'd lost his footing trying to leap from the railing of one fire escape to the next platform and caught a vending machine with his face on the way down shoved its way into his aching head.
"Christ," He swore at himself, shaking his head as he tried to rub the last bits of blur out of his eyes and wiped his bloody hand off on his brown fatigue pants, "Fall could've fucking killed me. Gotta be more fucking careful," It was an empty vow on borrowed time, he knew, because "careful" was a very relative term these days. Hell, when dead people got up again and started eating everyone, words like "safety" and "refuge" just seemed like a bad joke.
And that just raised questions in his head about why he wasn't infected yet. Surely, he couldn't be that lucky. He'd seen enough zombie movies to figure that once bitten, death and reanimation was almost a guarantee, and that wasn't even taking the other possible mediums of transmission into account: air; water; plant life, animalia; the concept was terrifying in every sense of the word.

But he had a plan, at least; which he figured was a lot more than what could be said about most people. Considering the seemingly endless hordes of walking dead, he figured it was safe to make that assumption. The thing that he still couldn't put a finger on though, was the different types he'd come across - or in some cases, had come across him. His best guess was at some kind of caste system, but how a virus identified something like that almost to the point of executive selection, he could only fathom wild hypotheses. Most of the walkers he'd come across were just that: walkers; slow, shambling; the typical zombie that he'd seen in almost every single mainstream zombie flick he could think of. But then there were some that screeched so hideously through their shredded, rotting vocal cords that he would've pegged the bird-like monsters for demons before anything - and that wasn't even the bad part. The bad part was the packs that they invariably seemed to attract - packs that didn't just shamble, but sprinted in a full-on chase.
Ironically, he didn't count that nearly as bad as the ones that he would've sworn were stalking him like some kind of animal...like some kind of undead predator.
He'd seen them move before - only in glimpses, but it was more than enough to unnerve him. They didn't walk - they prowled on all fours like a feral animal, and much the way he parkoured, they leapt around with such ease and pounced with such incredible range, that it was nothing short of a miracle that he'd survived those close scrapes when the bastards practically ambushed from an entire block away.

"Gotta get moving," He mumbled to himself as he painfully willed his limbs to move and shakily worked his way to his feet, scooping that bag up on the way. Dusting off his black shirt, black hood, and the drab green field jacket he wore over them, he was up and moving again; and it was no sooner than he'd slung the heavy pack over his shoulder and dabbed a bit at his forehead that a few shamblers up toward the mouth of the alley noticed movement and turned their milky, unblinking eyes on him.
"Fuck," He muttered, chewing his lip; wondering to himself how many Screamers were out there with them - or god forbid, Hunters. It was enough to make him instinctively check the pistol strapped to his thigh, "Good. Still there."
It wasn't a moment after, that one of those horrid, awful things somewhere in the lurching crowd opened its mouth and began to screech; that long, haunting scream that crescendoed to an almost deafening sound like a shrieking bird over nails on a chalkboard. In that very instant, every muscle in his body went tense, and his ears went back. He could see it, now. That demonic, bird-like monster was staring right at him - through him - with those horrible, sunken eye sockets; viscous, tar-like gouts of blood gushing from its slackened, broken maw.

"Oh, fuck."