Codebreaker: 2

Codebreaker

2

Parker Ford

            I shivered at the sight in front of me. My head was imploding just thinking about it: it gave me a hell of a headache. Then I remembered everything else, and I got up. I picked up a pistol and shot all of them in the head. What the hell is happening? I felt like I was losing my mind. I turned around when I heard a scream. Someone was being attacked by one of those things. I shot at it, blowing its head to smithereens. Bitch! My eyes were rolling over in my head. I looked down and saw my veins pulsing through my skin. The Codebreaker sat on my wrist, blood red. This is an after-effect, I realized. I couldn't feel anything; I pulled the pistol to my mouth and then.... dropped it. I fell to the ground and passed out.

            What seemed like two hours later, I was back on the top floor. We were seated in the small medical-style area. Carlyle was walking around, although he did it slowly and with a limp, while Ben and I were being treated.  Havard walked around, and then stopped and leaned on his lawnmower for a bit. His special weapon, the "lawnmower", looked like a weed-whacker with metal blades instead of the traditional fishing line and was made to be like a kind of chainsaw.

            Ben had been impaled by one of those things, but the bastard could take much more, as far as I could see. He was already looking around and eating an apple. I was being treated for whatever happened with the codebreaker.

            Havard muttered, "As of now, that floor is completely clean." Ben grinned and said, "I sure hope so! As you can see, I gave up alot to kill those things." I got up and looked around. I don't know why or how, but I had seen someone else in the room.

            "Where is he?" I asked. "Who?" everyone else answered. "The guy who saved Ben." Sudden realization appeared on Havard's face, and he looked at the ground. "Uh, that's, uh, a guy named Mazel. He, uh, lives down there." Nothing else needed to be said.

            I got up and ate an apple. This bothered me: what exactly was the guy doing down there? But whenever I asked anyone, I didn't really get an answer. I ended up just leaving it alone.

            The next day, I went up to the sniper-hole with Ben. He wanted to start up again without hurting himself, so I recommended overwatch. He had liked the job before, so he should be fine. He fitted the rifle through the hole, suppressed it, and scoped the area. "Holy shit," he whispered.

            Ben looked up from the hole in the wall and yelled, "Casey, go get Don!" I ran back down and got him, before running back up. "What the hell is it?" Don asked. Ben pointed at the hole, and Don grabbed the rifle. "Holy shit." he repeated. When Don was done, I took a look. I vaguely remembered us killing a gang-member who had ventured too far up here, but his buddies had been too fast to catch. It seemed that they had come back. They had come back with friends. 

            Ben looked around. He seemed to say what everyone was thinking, "Well, we really don't need the living dead and the living mob coming after us." Don stared at the ground. "How many are there?" I looked out and answered, "Around twenty, but more are coming out." Don went to the case in the corner, pulled out his shotgun, and started loading it. He caught us watching him and said, "I suggest you do the same." He spit his tobacco out the window.

            About an hour later, Don, Ben, and I held a meeting with the others to explain what was going on. An hour after that, all we could do was wait, which wasn't Don's strong suit. He grabbed a piece of paper, which, by the way, was rare, and wrote the following message on it before strapping it to a spare arrow, which was also rare: