Suffering: Male Reader x TWDG (slow updates)

Chapter 55: Waiting Around To Die

You abandoned the backpack. It had a few holes in it, the straps hurt your shoulders, and worst of all; you had ran out of supplies.

Charlie and Lydia were right. The first town you came upon was completely looted of anything valuable to you and the only places you'd found since then have been mostly looted with few limited supplies to keep you sustained on this long march.

It was all helpless, but you were determined to keep going on. After all, it has been a few days now since your escape from the Whisperer camp so they are guaranteed to know you ran from them. You assume they have sent scouts to try and track you, though that would be stupid; you made sure to cover your tracks as best as you can, even going so far as to use your mask to get past any infected you see so as to not leave any dead bodies lying around which would indicate your presence.

As you stuff your Whisperer mask back into your pocket, you attempt to rub the tiredness out of your eyes. You haven't slept well. It was at first a deliberate attempt to get a head start on the Whisperers, making sure to only sleep for a few hours at a time to make sure you don't allow them to catch up. But now you can't get to sleep because you're too hungry. Your stomach keeps cramping up and causing you huge pain, and what's worse, yesterday you ran out of water so now you have a huge piercing headache to contend with. 

And sure, this could be considered paranoia, but you were pretty sure that just the other night you saw an infected that was walking slightly faster than they usually do. But maybe that was just your mind playing tricks on you? It was quite dark after all.

"Shit," you manage to mutter to yourself, your voice hoarse and barely audible as the realisation dawns upon you that if that was a Whisperer you should've killed them when you had the chance. You just have to hope that they didn't recognise you with your mask on, they may not have even seen you at all. 

As you walk past an abandoned car on the road, you stop and take it in for a moment. Rust had taken over a good amount of the bodywork, with moss covering the windows and the tyres completely deflated. You wished you had a car. It would've made it so much easier to find a place to get some well needed supplies.

You continue on your journey, your head pounding and your mouth dry. You lick them slightly and taste blood. Your lips must be cracked, not that that really matters. To your knowledge the infected don't have that good of a sense of smell; though you had heard stories from the other Rangers talking about how they covered themselves in the blood of the infected to walk through a horde.

Though a Whisperer mask works well enough on its own so you're not going to entertain the thought of covering yourself in the blood of the infected. Wearing the face of one is plenty good enough for you.

You are unsure exactly how many miles you've travelled at this point but with plenty of time to fill you'd done some basic calculations. By looking at the distance markers on road signs you'd passed, you believe you're walking around 15 minutes per mile: divide 60 by that 15 and you get an answer of 4 miles an hour. Giving yourself a generous 5 hours of sleep per 24 hour period, you're left with 19 hours of walking which equates to 76 miles per day.

However, you obviously won't be walking that fast the whole time, especially considering exhaustion has long been setting in by now and you've had to start taking more frequent breaks to rest your feet which are swollen and blistered. You can't stop though, stopping means death.

You're too sleep deprived to even recall how many days you've been walking; could be 3 or 4, maybe even 5. Turns out the supplies from the Whisperer camp didn't last as long as you'd intended them to and with no finishing point in mind for this arduous march, it felt a lot like you were just waiting around to die. But at least if you did, you'd die a free man. If that really means anything.