No.7249
actually hell I'll do my current Zomboid character first.
The MP3 played a jaunty christmas tune in defiance of the harsh winter wind, an echo of a society only a few weeks gone and yet so distant from my mind. It was all just background noise, something to focus on to ignore the cold, and the task at hand. While the infection at the outset was containable, before long the incompetent police force and the underfunded medical centers of Kentucky could contain it no longer, and before long those few who dodged the disease found themselves surrounded by the dead and dying, then the dead, and before long the undead. The quarantine prevented anyone from leaving. Figures, there was more money going into the military keeping us in than the local response trying to keep us alive. Maybe they realized it was a lost cause before we were willing to accept the fact…
Rebecca picked up another corpse, stiff and lifeless from rigor mortis and the frigid winds of winter. She crouched her body and heaved the corpse into the truck, a dull metal thud echoing in he air as the frozen body hit its mark. It was one of many that were getting moved, one of the many that Rebecca had cleared out the day prior. In the heat of combat she could clear her mind of all distractions, but in the aftermath she had to remind herself to not look to their faces, not try to remember who these people were before it all happened. Too many people she knew would be in here, too many faces she couldn't handle seeing warped and contorted in pain and fear. They all knew in their dying moments what would happen to them, and their petrified faces were the last thing she needed to see today. She was already reaching her limits, the windchill stealing the heat from her very bones and the labor of moving the frozen corpses making all of her muscles burn and ache. How many was it? Yesterday was all a blur of combat, screaming and smashing and bleeding…
With one last thud she looked at her handiwork. 20 odd corpses packed as neatly as they could be packed, piled on top of each other. The wind began to pick up again, drowning out the mp3 player with its wailing, turning the snow into vicious frozen projectiles and rattling anything not nailed to the floor. Rebecca opened the door of the shipping van and climbed into the drivers seat, finding reprise from the winters' wrath. She started up the van, and as the van roared to life she shifted it into reverse. Before she'd sooner ram through a wall than go in reverse, with how loud the backup beepers were she'd draw in every undead fiend in a country mile. But now, she doubted there would even be any left to hear it. And besides, if there was, it'd be less work for her. They'd be lured straight to the pile. As the van got into place, she lingered for a moment to try and win back some body heat before heading out. Looking at her watch, it had been nearly 10 hours of labor, 10 hours of hurling corpses in the back of a van, driving the van a couple of feet away, and dropping off all the cargo in the spot. Sighing, she braced herself for the wind and got out of the van, waling to the back to unload the corpses. As she climbed up into the back of the van and slid the icy corpses out of the van and into the pile, the snow began to pick up. By the time she threw out the last corpse, the snow had cut off her vision to nearly 20 feet. But still, this work had to be done sooner rather than later. Who knows what kind of diseases these corpses would let off when they thawed…
The next few hours were hazy. Blurs of movement, winter's sympathy, mechanical groans as even the van seemed to get tired of the routine. But before long, 50 corpses were moved. Then 100. Then 200. Then she didn't care to count anymore, but it kept going for longer, maybe twice as long as it took to get to 200. She had to probe the earth with a snow shovel, hoping for the cheap plastic of the shovel to collide with the now-stonelike skin of the frozen corpses. Like the reaper's assistant, she would help along those unfortunate many who had met their end towards finding a final peace, lest they might rise again. Finally, as her body was too tired and ragged with work to even express how much pain it was in, she gazed upon the pile. The snow, perhaps as an act of pittance, draped over their features and left them as anonymous human masses, nameless and unrecognizable to Rebecca. Only now could she appreciate the scale of it, standing taller than her and longer than the truck. Rebecca felt disgusted, she felt angry, and she couldn't help but laugh. What absurdity! Spending your Christmas moving the corpses of your entire neighborhood by hand into a pyre. Did she even want to be alive anymore, beholding this macabre Christmas tree? Jewelry and watches and icicles glistened against the dim light of the obscured sun, as the mp3 player choked and whined as the battery started to die. She rested against the side of the van as the emotions began to overtake her, the true nature of the situation began to dawn on her. Until this point she had been surviving and fighting, never a moment to really think on what had happened. But now, with none but God as her witness, here she stood. Both the last survivor of her community, and its slayer. She was too tired for tears, too exhausted to even dry heave from the nausea overtaking her. The wind began to calm, and the snow softened into naught more but a gentle blanket being laid over the barren earth. The sun was going down, and the orange rays turned the snow golden under its purview.
Grabbing hold of the handle on the side of the van, Rebbeca righted herself and stepped forwards, having let the emotions wash over her and recess for a quarter of an hour. The mp3 player finally died as she lifted the gas mask from her face and let her skin feel the cool winter air. She undid her greasy and blood-clumped hair from its ponytail and let it messily rest on her neck. Reaching in the van, she produced a jerry can full of gasoline siphoned from the pile up just down the road, a number of people trying to escape from the infestation now forever entombed at ground zero, trapped in their crumpled vehicles as forever crippled undead. She had tried to give mercy to those she could find, but she could still hear the wailing of some buried beneath the mountain of steel, maybe still human enough to know their situation. But with the gasoline she procured from the wrecks, she could give one final sendoff to her old life. She unscrewed the cap and began sprinkling the gasoline on the corpses, making sure that some got between their limbs and soaked further down inside the pile. She emptied one canister, and then another, and one final one, until the air reeked of fuel. She stepped back, lighting a cigarette and savoring its heat and flavor. She took a few puffs as the snow began to blanket her on her head and shoulders, building herself up for the moment she would have to say goodbye. She knew the smell would drive her away, so she took the time to make peace with what she had done while there was still a testament to it. With a last puff and a sigh, she glanced once to the cig and then to the pile. With a flick, all of her work went up in flames.
She walked away from it as it burned, leaving beyond her old life with it. Her mind was far from any holiday cheer, but she still had "festivities" to attend to. She would need a Christmas meal fit for a king for all the labor she had done for one, and unwrapping herself a present of copious amounts of alcohol for two. But before anything else she wanted to clean herself off from all the filth that she had accumulated from all the fighting and surviving. She laid her clothing out across the table by the entryway, soaked in blood and mud and long turned near solid from her sweat freezing. Her very skin felt grimy, and her muscles ached for the feeling of warm water giving them some relief. Lucky for her the power had not yet gone out and the water heater for the building worked well enough. She had taken to living in an old shipping warehouse, made of stone and thus well-insulated from the cold. She had long made her "nest" in the rafters and catwalks of the second story, sleeping soundly knowing that if any zombies got in, she would see or hear them before they did her. Amenities were scare here, but she had used the van to move a number of odds and ends out of people's former homes and into her new abode. A shower was not one such luxury, but there was still a small chemical shower on the bottom level of the warehouse. No doubt for the workers in case some hazardous material had spilled upon them, it would now have to clean the grime and blood accumulated from the constant battle that was surviving in this new world. Rebecca sighed as the warm water washed over her and gave her aching body some blessed relief from its ordeals, washing away grime and pain in equal measure. She'd never appreciated a shower this much before, how much just feeling clean could raise your mood. As she basked in the water, she made a short near year's resolution to herself: survive.