“You’re all already dead,” Farrah read out the words painted in worn red colours over the façade of her secondary school.
The day was cold and miserable. It wasn’t raining per-se, rather droplets of water seemed to be floating in the air, soaking into Farah’s clothes, and making her shiver despite the warm late-summer air. The clock on the belltower attached to the school’s chapel read seventeen past ten, which seemed right enough. With white clouds a thin mist blocking out the sun, it could have as well been 4 in the afternoon.
Farrah approached the tall brick fence running along the school. She circled it until she reached the metal gates. Traces of black residue – a mixture of blood and guts – led to a nearby metro entrance. It was dry and old; one with the cracking pavement. Yet, Farrah didn’t take any risks.
Scan
- Directional
- Vertical
- Radius
Cost: 1P per 500m radius from focal point.
A map of the neighbourhood appeared in front of her. Uniform rows of houses that she’d once known by heart when she’d walked them twice a day to, and from, her bus stop. A second map, of the sever network appeared next to it, followed by a map of the metro station. The latter wasn’t as much of a map as a long tunnel running from side to side of her scan radius. Fifteen or so yellow dots were present underground. All walkers, Farrah presumed. There were three in the school building, and one lurking on the roof of a house a few streets down. It was nothing she couldn’t handle, but she’d have to go in quietly. Once she’d kill one, the others would smell it, and then who knows how many more would come crawling from the metro.
Farrah dropped her rucksack by the gate, before swiftly scaling it. The bicycle locks someone had used to keep it closed served as good platforms. She vaulted over the decorative spikes on top and landed with a quiet huff.
She tugged on the strap of her automatic, made sure the 9mm on her leg was secured, and unsheathed one of her hatchets before running across the playground, to the main entrance.
She was stopped in her tracks before she could reach the door. A pungent odour of decomposing flesh hit her lungs, and she had to turn away from the scene before her.
A graffiti on this façade of the building read ‘We Ascend’ in uneven letters. It wasn’t as worn as the words on the other side. Below it, over a dozen corpses were blocking the door. They were arranged almost in a perfect line, two or so meters from the wall. Some of their hands were interlocked, rotting flesh fusing together through the relentless work of maggots.
They wore clothes, and most of them had shoes. Farrah hated herself for what she was about to do.
She put on an old facemask and tightened her biker gloves. That hardly constituted protection, but it was the best she’d got. She approached the corpse at the left-most extremity and started patting down its pockets.
Keys. Money. A picture of a dog.
Car keys. Two melted candies. A mostly full pack of tissues. A worn stamp card.
Bank cards. Keys. A pack of cigarettes!
With uncalled-for joy, Farrah carefully picked out the pack, flicking some black insects off it. She pulled off a glove, and with a trembling hand opened the cardboard box. She had to restrain herself from not throwing it aside and shrieking. Whatever disgusting insects had started consuming the pack’s original owner had made this their headquarters. They crawled over her gloved hand, and she shook them aside. She tried her best not to get any of the tiny critters onto her clean hand, but the inevitable did happen when she started checking each individual cigarette.
“Fuck,” She swore under her breath.
There wasn’t a single good one. She wiped her hand as best she could against her tank top, before putting her glove back on and moving on to the next corpse.
Scan
- Directional
- Targeted
Cost: Free.
The zombies inside the building continued to stroll around, unaware and unbothered by Farrah’s scavenging - or rather, failure at. With each consequent corpse, Farrah’s desperation grew.
She’d come here because she knew where the old headmaster kept all the smokes he confiscated from his students. But now that she knew a group had used this as a base, and that they had a smoker among them, her hopes of finding anything were dwindling. This meant that she’d have to head into the city centre, where looting had been hampered by hoards of undead…
After finding nothing of use on the final corpse, she got up and took a few steps to the side to catch a proper breath of air. Then, she nodded to herself and unsheathed a hatchet and headed inside.
----------------------------------------
Getting to the archive room, where a large plastic box held so many prized possessions of so many students turned out to be more of a waiting game than anything. Farrah hid in a classroom, waited for a yellow dot to make its way down the hallway, snuck up to the next floor, hid in the bathroom, and waited for the yellow dot to move away from the office right above her. When about half an hour passed, and it hadn’t moved more than a few centimetres, she decided to just go for it.
She crept up the stairs, making sure to walk along the wall with light, tentative, steps. A dried blood trail led up to this floor, and though the ajar door labelled ‘Andrea Possoz – Headmaster’.
She’s half expected to see the man himself, in his formal two-piece suit and one of his ugly orange ties. And sure enough, Mr. Possoz was there, sat in his chair, staring at the ceiling above him. Farrah immediately hid behind the doorframe, before the creature could see her. Walkers weren’t the smartest bunch, but once they got a line of sight, they would pursue.
The archives had two entrances, one directly from the headmaster’s office, the other further down the hall. Farrah quickly glanced back into the room. A thin wooden door stood ajar to the right of the bureau. There was no way she could get to it without the Mr Possoz noticing. She shook her head, taking cover again.
She couldn’t afford to be calling that thing ‘Mr. Possoz’. Judging by its skin, and pristine condition of its clothes, he’d died in that very chair during the first wave. Most people his age had. He’d had too many dreams and goals, too many quests that he could not complete under the System’s drastic rules. There was talk in the early days of curing people like him. After all, all his limbs were intact, and his skin was smooth and unruptured with insects, albeit discoloured.
That was … strange. The people outside had used this school as a base. Did they simply barricade the headmaster in his office? Maybe they didn’t know what risk he posed, that his kin could smell him, and would have swarmed the building at the stench of even the smallest droplets of his blood. A metal cabinet a bit further down the hall did look displaced…
Whatever it was, whatever had happened here these past months, was not Farrah’s problem. She made her way down the hallway and turned the door handle. It screeched in protest and didn’t budge. Farrah gripped her hatchet tighter, instinctively scanning the building again. Mr Possoz got up from his chair and started slowly moving towards the noise. The one downstairs stopped in its tracks, alert, before continuing his aimless strolling.
Farrah ducked into a neighbouring classroom, leaving the door ajar. The second the headmaster would stop in front of the archival door, she’d leap out, dispose of him, and get to the archives through his office.
He took several excruciatingly long minutes to get to the door.
Long enough for memories of years spent in these hallways to flood Farrah’s mind. She could remember his low voice, and his ever-present mainland accent as he called out to her and Anna from his doorway, telling them to stop loitering by the fire escape. She remembered his yearly speeches at the chapel about the greater mission of their school. Farrah fidgeted with her cross, thinking back to how back then they could never figure out if he was a man of faith himself. Perhaps it was for the best if he wasn’t. If that body was just an empty, soul-less husk, then destroying it would do the long-gone Mr. Possoz no harm.
The empty soul-less husk fiddled with the doorknob.
Farrah lept out of the classroom and hacked at the zombie’s right leg. It snapped toward her, groaning like a hungry toddler.
Silencer
Fully removes the noise produced by a bullet being fired, and the noise it makes on entry and exit. *Requires individual attunement to each new weapon*
Expert
Cost: Weapon-dependant. Current: 1P per bullet. 1P per 10 meters travelled after the first 10m.
Domain benefit
- 85.5% chance of skill being free.
The headmaster collapsed to the ground, its right knee exploding. It started crawling towards Farrah at a much more vigorous rate. She hit its elbows with the hatchet, slowing it down, before running into the office.
Scan
- Directional
- Targeted
Cost: Free.
Sure enough, the one downstairs was making its way up. There wasn’t much use keeping it down anymore. Farrah slammed the headmaster’s door behind her and burst into the archive room. She didn’t have time to dwell over how little damage the elements had done to it over the past two years. She darted towards the familiar plastic box, that was hidden two rows in, on a bottom shelf.
The thing was larger than she remembered, and emptier. But she didn’t have time to figure out who’d come here before her. A scratching sound came from the door, followed by a loud groan. A pause. Then the sound of a dead mass ramming into the door.
Farrah briefly considered her options. There could have been supplies in there that others would need. Medicine, drugs, memorabilia. But she didn’t have time to look through it properly either. She grabbed the box, barely managing to wrap her arm around it, and silently shot the other door.
It was in times like these that she wished the System would tell her if she’d used Power, and if so, how much.
She kicked down the door, ran past the mingled and still crawling corpse of her headmaster, completely ignored the other walker, and ran down the stairs. She lept down handfuls of steps at a time, loosing her balance more than once, but catching herself on the ramp just in time every time. When she reached the first floor, she looked up at the two storeys above her. She could hear the walker groaning as it approached the stairway. She didn’t even need to scan for that.
In a split-second decision, she opened the plastic lid and threw the box down the central pit of the stairway.
Scan
- Focused
- Seek: [cigarettes]
Cost: 1P per 5m2.
Three packs. She’d hit gold.
The green glow that overlayed her vision to highlight the packs hadn’t fully worn off, and she wasn’t even halfway down to the ground floor when something large fell down the stairway pit.
“Shit,” she swore under her breath.
She didn’t want to fight that thing. Its creepy buddies were already on their way, having smelled the blood of the headmaster, but they’d come running the second she’d killed this one. Yet, for a handful of cigarettes, the choice was quickly made.
She threw her hatchet at the things’ head, hoping to take it down from above. However, the metal weapon hit the tiled floor next to it, as it slowly got up.
This one was in much worse shape than Mr. Possoz. And not just because of the fall.
Its nose and a good half of its face were caved in, from the impact. Its right arm bended backwards; pulled out from its shoulder socket and fractured at both major bones. Its chest was bare, and covered in large clean lacerations. As it charged at Farrah, yelling in its distorted language, she noticed that its front teeth were missing.
It fell to her feet, slain by a silent shot.
On its back, letters had been carved into its flesh. The wound hadn’t had the time to heal before it’d turned, but enough of its skin was missing, or deformed by the fractured ribs below it to make out anything other than a ‘T’ and a janky ‘O’.
Scan
- Directional
- Vertical
- Radius
Cost: 1P per 500m radius from focal point.
The group that’d been hiding in the metro were on their way. They’d smelled the spilled rotten brains of their brother and were on a crusade to avenge him. If she hadn’t left her rucksack by the main gate, Farrah would have gone back upstairs to send the headmaster to a better place. Unfortunately, all she had time for was to grab the cig packs, quickly check that they were free of insects, and run outside.
----------------------------------------
It was only after getting to the bus stop several blocks away from the school that Farrah allowed herself to catch her breath and count her loot. 35 cigarettes. 35 days, if she rationed. She smirked and lit one up. She wasn’t going to ration.
She scanned the area, and sat on the bench, cross-legged, as she took a long, well-deserved drag.
Stats
Skills
Goals
Other
Power
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
Luck
Conditions
Goals not fulfilled
Addiction
She watched as her ‘Addiction’ bar went down in real-time. Then, she took another deep drag. It’d been two days since she’d last had a smoke. Two whole luck points lost because she’d wasted time trying to trigger a good domain quest at the Aireshire automobile industrial complex.
She made the screen pop up once again and sighed at how untidy it looked. She couldn’t imagine someone with dyslexia or dyscalculia trying to make sense of the rows upon rows of Power and Luck points. Perhaps those people didn’t become Collectors and didn’t have to deal with this nonsense. It was at times like these that Farrah wondered what, if any, logic governed the System.
She finished her cigarette and lit another.
Stats
Skills
Goals
Other
Map
Obelisk
Domains
Zombies
Misc
Fag locations
· Chain stores –
o Wesco Local empty.
o Torrysons empty.
o Mansburrys empty.
· Corner stores – hit or miss. But mostly empty
· The old school – hit. Now empty.
· Small town stores – tbe
· Houses – tbe, chances low. Power sink.
· Make them somehow ?? Grow tobacco?
Unique quests
Collectors
Conditions list
Food locations and recipes
Steyr AUG A3
…
On reflex, she pulled out a third cig, and was about to light it, when she realised she probably should ration at least a little. Technically one a day is all she needed for the System to not try and kill her. But the line between not being killed by the System and enjoying this twisted version of life was quite thick for Farrah.
Nonetheless, with a nostalgic sigh, she put the cigarette into her tin and transferred as much as she could from the cardboard packs. Perhaps one of the embassies of the mainland nations would hold some more information about her quest. It couldn’t have been later than midday, so she’d have enough time to check and leave the city before nightfall.
Hands in the pockets of her leather jacket, Farrah set out south, towards the historic district. She walked down the middle of the road, among the rusting cars, spamming her scan Skill every few meters. This was riskier, but better than navigating among the rotten corpses lining the sidewalks. Although, Farrah reckoned that most of those would have been taken by the creatures or eaten by the animals by now.
The derelict city stood quiet. It welcomed the woman as a passing guest, and reminded her with cold humid breezes and an uncharacteristic smell of wet leaves that her kind was no longer welcomed here; among the concrete headstones that it’d built, and the metal car carcasses that outnumbered the rotted flesh ones three to one.