Survival - a Hat Films fanfiction

1 - Escaping Bristol

A/N: Hat Films finally appear!

A piercing scream rings out in the distance, and you flinch as you gaze out of the window into the night. No matter how often you hear it, how much blood you see spattered on the streets or on the walls, you'll never get used to it. 

A month it's been, since the outbreak. You've exhausted your supplies much faster than you'd anticipated, but luckily, the last house you stayed at had plenty of tinned food, energy drinks, matches and the like, so you're set to go for at least another fortnight. 

You'd hoped you'd bump into another human on the way - and though every now and then you'll hear muffled voices or see people passing by out of your window, it's always at night, and you can't bring yourself to go out and risk being caught amongst the horde. And as the days pass by, sightings of other humans are becoming less frequent, and it doesn't take a genius to figure out why.

Inhaling deeply, you take a step backwards and collapse onto the mattress, drawing your knees up to your chest. It still hasn't quite sunk in yet - that you might not see your friends ever again, that you could be on the run for the rest of your life, that you could die any second. In fact, at the moment, you're pretty numb to it all; you guess it's your mind's way of coping with it.

You're dreading the moment it hits you.

You wince as you roll over, applying pressure to your arm - it's still healing up from when you cut it on the glass in the department store. You've considered bandaging it up, but decided to 'give it some air', or something along those lines - don't the doctors always say that's the best thing to do? Probably.

Placing a hand on the handle of the knife that lay next to the mattress for some sort of comfort, you close your eyes. Tomorrow you'll pack up your things and head further out of the city towards the countryside, where hopefully there'll be less infected. And then you'll decide where to go from there.

You close your eyes, the exhaustion of having walked for over twelve hours non-stop finally washing over you. God knows you need rest if you're planning to make it out of Bristol by the end of tomorrow.

Your last thought before sleep overcomes you is that there's an odd, sticky feeling on your arm.

______________________________________

You wake with a start for seemingly no reason, and with no watch or clock in the building - your phone had died a while ago, and you're yet to come across a house with a charger - you have no idea how long you've slept. Judging by the lack of daylight, not long.

A sudden crash from downstairs has you out of the covers immediately, knife in hand. They can't have got in, can they? You know from experience that zombies will only try to get into a house if they're sure there's a human inside. And besides, you'd barricaded all the doors before you went upstairs last night.

A human, maybe?

A low, definitely not human groan resounding from downstairs chills you to the bone. Somehow, an infected - maybe more than one - has gotten in.

Hands trembling, you grab your bag, shoving the clothes beside it inside, hoist it over your shoulder and open the bedroom door.

You're immediately greeted by the sound of groans - four, maybe five at least, it sounds like. Your heart sinks. You're not even going to be able to make it to the door.

Stay calm, you tell yourself. You've escaped before. You can do it again.

Except this time, there's five, not two. And this time, you're in a two-floor house, not a department store.