A New Type of Realism

(13) Live In A Hole

"Oh"

........................

"So, however it happened, and whatever the reasoning was, Kyle went to look for Dile out there, in the infecteds' playground?" Maggie tried to change the subject as she stood up and brushed herself down.

"Basically." Cooper replied after a moment's hesitation.

.......................

Needless to say, my encounter with a whole horde of infected had sobered me right up. At first I'd stood still as I'd stared in the thing's eyes. Then, as any sane man would do, I said a few choice words, and ran for my life.

If I hadn't been about to die, the sight must have looked comical to any onlooker; one man with toilet paper shoved up his nose, running away from vast numbers of blood stained carcasses.

Luckily, I'd found a small building with graphic and frankly, vulgar graffiti stains covering both the outer and inner walls. Above the two doors was a sign that had obviously previously been able to light up when it was dark, though now, with it being as smashed up as it was, it was no longer capable of doing this.

Blue glass from the sign lay scattered all around the entrances, and a large blood stain spread from the railings one or two metres away, to the wall in between the two doors. However, I had been in way too much of a hurry to notice, or to even consider the implications.

On one of the doors was a small stick man, again, doodle over with disgustingly sick graffiti. I had gathered from this little sign, that the building was originally intended to have been a public toilet facility. What it was doing on a minor gravelled pathway with virtually no other buildings near to it was beyond me, but, again, I had had no time to think about it.

Being the gender I am, I had predictably run through the door marked with the other gender's stick figure. Aren't we all curious to see what the other gender toilets look like?

So, now, I sat with my knees pulled into my chest in one of the cubicles with a working door, on the toilet with the lid drawn down. The smell was beyond unbearable, as I demonstrated by holding the fabric of my top over my nose and mouth. It seemed that, even after the apocalypse, people had still used this as a 'plop-and-go' station, regardless of the fact that the national grid water supply had stopped working, and the flush mechanism on the toilets didn't work.

I'd looked in one of the cubicles without a door as I'd passed it. I'd honestly thought that the ladies' would have been the neat ones. I had had absolutely no idea how the aim had been so shockingly bad, that it had gone up the walls and splattered the ceilings. Why anyone would smear the word 'warning' on the walls with their own waste is beyond me. Surely the body and the couple of litres of blood on the floor outside of the cubicle was enough to warn anyone off?

If this was what the ladies' was like, I dreaded to think what the men's' would be like. I had no intention of finding out.

My breath hitched as I'd forgotten to block the entrance door with something. Was it too late to get out of the cubicle? I sat on the toilet for several minutes as I tried to decide what to do. With each second that passed, my decision became harder and harder, until I eventually decided that I'd waited long enough.

I quickly stood up and unlocked the cubicle door. Groaning at the body on the floor in front of me, I side stepped the blood, not wanting to slip, and looked for something to block the door with. After a quick glance around the room, I cursed myself for not hiding in a room with at least something to use to bar the entrance with.

In my scan of the room, I'd spotted a broken mirror that was still mostly intact, unlike the other mirrors that lined one of the walls, and walked over to it.