Clementine x Male reader : We Are Monsters

Chapter 16

3rd person Pov :

On the ground, twisted in pain, Bruce Allan Cooper stifles a scream and tries to catch his breath. He hears the cattle and guttural screams of the dozen of biters around him, approaching to fest on him. Inside of his skull, a voice yells at him : Move your ass, you idiot ! Coward ! What the hell are you doing ?

This beefy afro-american, build like an attacker of the NBA, rolls on the ground at the last second, barely moving out of range of a woman with half her face off, who's clacking her teeth and trying to grab him with her swollen and grey fingers.

He manages to make four, maybe eight feet, before a huge pain appears on his side, irradiates into his ribs and paralyzes him. He falls on his back, without dropping his rusty fireman axe. The spike is covered of human hair, and that dark and viscous bile that the survivors are now calling undead juice.   

Momentarily stunned, his ears buzzing, an eye almost closed because of his broken nose starting to inflatate, Bruce is wearing the tattered treillis and the dirty boots of the non-official Woodbury milice. He is seeing over him the low sky of Georgia - an arch composed of grey and drab clouds at the month of April - teasing him :

You're nothing else than some vermin down there, little Bruce, a maggot on the remains of an agonizing world, a parasite who's festing on the rests and ruins of the declining human race.

Suddenly, the clouds disappeared, remplaced by three faces in decomposition, stupidly groaning, titubing, their dead milky eyes wide-open. One of them - a obese man in his early 60's wearing a hospital suit - spills his drool on Bruce's cheek.

- Fucking shiiiiit !

Bruce is suddenly pulled out of his torpor and finds an unsuspected reserve of strength. He raises his axe. The spike goes deeply into the obese biter throat. The lower part of his face comes off and starts hanging, while a piece of rotten flesh and cartilage flys out spinning in the air, before falling with a humid noise on the ground.

Bruce rolls again on the ground, gets on his palms and knees, makes a turn-over - a feat of strength for a colossus suffering the martyrdom - and swings his axe at a woman's neck about to bite in his juicy throat. The head falls on the ground, held back for a couple of seconds by some tendons. The body collapses as the head rolls on the ground, leaving a bloody trail behind it.

Retreating while squeezing his weapon's handle, Bruce tries to distinguish the other biters which are walking towards him. They are too many for him to fight them off with only his axe. He turns on his heels, and falls face-to-face with another guy.

Wearing a thick black leather jacket, black jeans and Doc Martens, the guy is holding a baseball bat spiked with long nails. The first thing that you would notice about him is the eyepatch covering his left eye, even if he seems too young for that kind of injury. Smirking, and a glow of amusement in his only eye, he is intimidating. The fact that all his emotions are visible by only one of his eyes is increasing that, specially when you've known him for quite a while, and noticed that his gaze his mostly blank and emotionless all the time. The Plague has now started since two years, and he passed from 5,4 to 5,10 ft, and builded himself pretty good. 

At only 13 years old, he is a virtuoso of all kinds of weapons, from blades to blunt weapons and firearms. He is fighting in the arena since four months, after having almost beaten to death a guard he was doing guard duty with, who refused to give him a puff out of his cigarette. He learned the hard way how to fight, and is now a monster in hand-to-hand combats. 

A combat - the brawl kind - can take different forms. In Orient, the domain of combat is tied to zen, we study it, we master it, it's a discipline of knowledge and the adversaries are confronting each other with years of training behind them and with a mathematic precipitation. In Asia, the weakest fighter learns to use the strength of the strongest one and the confrontation is quickly settled.