[ Three years ago, the world ended, and no one saw it coming. No one expected it to be this bad. One outbreak should have been easily containable, but two? Society splintered as infrastructure crumbled, and in the end, the population fell to a fate literally worse than death. In the aftermath of that fall, nature began to reclaim what humanity took from it, while the infected roamed the earth, hunting what's left of the living.
In short, this is hell, but it's no less than she deserves.
She'd tried. She'd failed. It's her fault that the cities are filled with the shambling dead, survivors scattered and clinging to what scraps of life they can find, everyone trying to simply make it from one day to the next. It doesn't matter that years have passed since all of this started, since the Hive and Umbrella's failed attempts at controlling the T-virus, since the Red Queen failed to stop the outbreak. It doesn't matter that Umbrella is truly at fault for everything that happened. Alice carries the weight of her own failure with her every day, the burden of it just as heavy as her hatred of Umbrella, because she knows she could have prevented all of this if she'd been a little more careful, a little faster, a little stronger. She is crushed by the guilt of every person she's lost and the responsibility for all the thousands of lives still out there.
(She wants to hope it's more than just thousands, but hope left her a long time ago, right around the third month of traveling alone when she's come across another school full of infected children. Those nightmares still linger with her, the children's faces inevitably morphing into Angie's.)
Saving people becomes the only way she can keep going. The only way to alleviate that gnawing guilt. One life, two. Twelve, on a good day. She protects them, sees them to shelter, and moves on. Days pass without her seeing another living soul, sometimes weeks, and the only thing to break up the hours bleeding into each other are the satellite tracking alerts that help her stay off the grid.
(A small part of her clings to the possibility that Umbrella has fallen just like everything else, but until she knows for certain, she just can't risk it.)
But for all the time she's spent roaming like a nomad since the world ended, she's stayed where it's safe. The wandering dead are what she knows, and even the occasional escaped experiment is simple enough to deal with or avoid, but there's more out there in the world. There are patches where she can almost feel the overlap, where there are hints of something else out there, the other infection that helped destroy the world. Where the T-virus had spread, the cordyceps outbreak happened near-simultaneously, with cities around the world falling practically overnight. For three years, she's steered clear of the areas where cordyceps reigns — but nature doesn't follow clear boundaries and the lines keep moving on her. As carefully as she tries to keep track on the dozen maps stuffed in her pack, things change in the months between.
It's what she faces now, a thing she doesn't understand and doesn't know how to fight. She'd followed the road, weaving her bike through small town after small town, avoiding any sizeable city as usual unless her radio picked up a distress call. But night was setting in, and it was too dangerous to travel in the dark, so as the sky began to shift into shades of red and orange, she'd pulled into a tiny town where she can barely sense any infection. Maybe it was cleared recently, or maybe the dead have just wandered off in search of better feeding grounds. Holing up in a house was always an option, or a store if there was somewhere left with supplies, but the vines on the fifth house stop her in her tracks.
Are they vines? They look like veins, spreading out along the door and up across the windows, spilling out onto the porch. She's seen them before and gone the other way, but there are more across the street, and further down they pile up toward a roof. Stopping the bike, she shuts off the engine and listens, though for what she's not entirely sure. ]
( Three years is simultaneously a whole other lifetime and hardly any time at all.
Everything's changed. Every single thing. There's Before and Now, and the Before feels like looking back on some alien planet. Earth is something else, something that's only proceeded to crumble further and further these past three years. Nothing's gotten better — initial attempts to save what's left, to find cures, to rescue humanity.... none of it's done a goddamn thing. Everything's gotten worse and worse, and people have gotten worse right along with it.
Joel's found his own ways to keep going, but only by the skin of his teeth. Only with certain things carried with him forever, never letting him forget. (There's a scar on his temple from the graze of a bullet, and he's only alive now because his hands shuddered at the wrong moment when he held the gun to his head. There's a watch strapped to his wrist, its face busted, its hands forever frozen in time. He carries these things with him wherever he goes.)
And he's got his younger brother. It's enough to hold onto. It's enough to keep Joel fighting day after day after day to stay alive — and oh, he fights. He fights like hell. It's funny how quickly concepts like morals and ethics and fairness and basic human empathy go down the drain when one's life is perpetually on the line. Joel fights, and he kills, and he does worse things than that to people, to get what he needs or to protect what's left to protect. People crumble exceptionally fast when you hurt them enough, tell you what you need to know, do what you want. Pain's an amazing motivator, and one he's learned how to utilise lately. He has to.
And yet.... memory stays so fresh in his mind that some days it feels like it all just happened yesterday, and three years feels like hardly anything. Joel remembers exactly what it was like when the world ended, precisely how his daughter felt, shuddering under his hands. He can count each soft, pained gasp. The way her voice sounded as she spoke her final words and bled out against his chest wakes him up most nights, as though Sarah's right there whispering against the shell of his ear. It's getting harder and harder these days to find things to melt against your tongue or gulp down into your gut to silence the ghosts with.
Harder to find supplies at all. He and Tommy drift in and out of little groups, never staying in one place for particularly long, dividing up only to come back together, always, and a lack of supplies have driven Joel searching. Usually Tommy'd be with him, but his brother's been off on a supply exchange, there's been a delay in his return, and Joel can't wait. Most cities have been scoured by now as people have been forming various factions these past years, collecting supplies to trade with, but sometimes in the smaller towns you can still find stuff. So Joel heads off on his own to spend a couple nights there, load up what he can.
He's poking carefully through one of the abandoned houses when he hears an engine coming down the road and freezes. Shrinking back into shadow, Joel finds the nearest window facing the street to peer out through dusty blinds, eyes locking onto the source of the sound as it cuts off. It's not so usual to see bikes like that around here; any kind of vehicle is a rarity. There's the threat of what people will do to get their hands on something like that, or the parts that make it up.
But out here where it's quiet is another danger. No people around, but there's other things to worry about. Joel hasn't checked all the houses yet, there's too many to secure them all from the infected, and he wouldn't want to waste the ammo anyway. But the noise from that engine has him tensing, waiting, eyes narrowed as he watches the woman sit there in silence.
Then he hears it. The snarl and wheeze of something coming, something that's no doubt been sitting in that house and now tears itself off of a vine and comes peeling down a staircase to burst through the front door, with so much unchecked force that it sends the thing reeling to the ground.
Joel hisses a soft Shit and quickly lifts the window he's standing at, aims his rifle with a jolt of his heart, tries to lock onto the quick flailing movements (the infected person is a man, young-looking, mouth wide open to expose the sifting tendrils that creep up from his throat. His head's splitting open, the mutation deforming half his face, a fleshy stalk reaching upwards from where one eye should be.) He's getting back up, moving towards the woman.
Joel fires. He's not a bad shot, but he still trembles sometimes. He's learning how not to. The shot misses by a hair or two, and the thing's lunging. Quickly, Joel aims again, fires, and this time it catches the infected in the leg, sends him falling.
Joel feels a staticy buzz in his ears, a sort of detachment, and his hands stop trembling at the edges. (The boy flailing on the ground likely couldn't be more than twenty. This is a fact he processes, cooly. The infected won't stay down long, maybe a second or two.) Joel lines up his shot, squeezes the trigger, and there's a spatter of brain against pavement. The infected boy stops wailing, stops moving, and Joel's heart starts working again with a hard thud. )
You okay?
( He barks down from the window he's standing at, rifle still aimed outwards. He shouldn't care — the woman's a stranger, a stranger he just spent three bullets on, but there's still some part of him that couldn't just stand there. (It's been three years, and he's two men, one who's learned exactly how hard and deep to cut a jugular, and one who remembers the gentleness of his daughter's hand in his own.) )
( The sounds from inside the house are alien to Alice, completely foreign in comparison to the moans and hisses of the infected she's fought for the last three years. There's something alive about it, and that's almost worse than what the T-virus does to the dead. She prepares herself to fight, reasoning that everything she's ever come across can be killed by taking out the brain, so she climbs off the bike and unsheaths her largest knife.
But what comes barrelling out of that house isn't what she'd expected. It hardly looks like a person anymore, changed in ways completely different from the reanimated dead. The mutation, the movement — she can't help her instinctive reaction to stumble backward, fight or flight trying to push her firmly toward the latter. That's why she misses the man appearing in a nearby window, and why the gunshot ringing out makes her flinch, eyes wide in shock as she looks away from the thing moving toward her.
Another shot and she lifts her blade, wishing she hadn't used the last of her ammo the day before but ready to take this creature down with her bare hands if that's what it comes to, and then its brains are sprayed out on the ground as the sound of a third shot nearly echoes in the ensuing quiet.
Her hands are still raised defensively when that voice reaches her, and it takes her a moment to tear her eyes away from the thing laying only a few feet away from her. It had been so fast... )
Yeah, I'm good.
( She projects her voice only as loud as it needs to be to reach him, not wanting to draw even more attention if she can help it. Who knows what might have heard those gunshots? Letting her hands fall but still not relaxing her muscles, she studies the man for just a moment, taking in the rifle and making a snap judgment that he wouldn't have saved her life from the thing just to take it himself. )
Unless you're planning to shoot me next.
( There's a hint of humor in her tone, a joke threaded through the statement because her gut tells her that's not what he's planning. Hell, he probably doesn't even have a plan, but then that'll make two of them. )
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
— timeline.
— scene ideas.
this is my misery —
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Everything's changed. Every single thing. There's Before and Now, and the Before feels like looking back on some alien planet. Earth is something else, something that's only proceeded to crumble further and further these past three years. Nothing's gotten better — initial attempts to save what's left, to find cures, to rescue humanity.... none of it's done a goddamn thing. Everything's gotten worse and worse, and people have gotten worse right along with it.
Joel's found his own ways to keep going, but only by the skin of his teeth. Only with certain things carried with him forever, never letting him forget. (There's a scar on his temple from the graze of a bullet, and he's only alive now because his hands shuddered at the wrong moment when he held the gun to his head. There's a watch strapped to his wrist, its face busted, its hands forever frozen in time. He carries these things with him wherever he goes.)
And he's got his younger brother. It's enough to hold onto. It's enough to keep Joel fighting day after day after day to stay alive — and oh, he fights. He fights like hell. It's funny how quickly concepts like morals and ethics and fairness and basic human empathy go down the drain when one's life is perpetually on the line. Joel fights, and he kills, and he does worse things than that to people, to get what he needs or to protect what's left to protect. People crumble exceptionally fast when you hurt them enough, tell you what you need to know, do what you want. Pain's an amazing motivator, and one he's learned how to utilise lately. He has to.
And yet.... memory stays so fresh in his mind that some days it feels like it all just happened yesterday, and three years feels like hardly anything. Joel remembers exactly what it was like when the world ended, precisely how his daughter felt, shuddering under his hands. He can count each soft, pained gasp. The way her voice sounded as she spoke her final words and bled out against his chest wakes him up most nights, as though Sarah's right there whispering against the shell of his ear. It's getting harder and harder these days to find things to melt against your tongue or gulp down into your gut to silence the ghosts with.
Harder to find supplies at all. He and Tommy drift in and out of little groups, never staying in one place for particularly long, dividing up only to come back together, always, and a lack of supplies have driven Joel searching. Usually Tommy'd be with him, but his brother's been off on a supply exchange, there's been a delay in his return, and Joel can't wait. Most cities have been scoured by now as people have been forming various factions these past years, collecting supplies to trade with, but sometimes in the smaller towns you can still find stuff. So Joel heads off on his own to spend a couple nights there, load up what he can.
He's poking carefully through one of the abandoned houses when he hears an engine coming down the road and freezes. Shrinking back into shadow, Joel finds the nearest window facing the street to peer out through dusty blinds, eyes locking onto the source of the sound as it cuts off. It's not so usual to see bikes like that around here; any kind of vehicle is a rarity. There's the threat of what people will do to get their hands on something like that, or the parts that make it up.
But out here where it's quiet is another danger. No people around, but there's other things to worry about. Joel hasn't checked all the houses yet, there's too many to secure them all from the infected, and he wouldn't want to waste the ammo anyway. But the noise from that engine has him tensing, waiting, eyes narrowed as he watches the woman sit there in silence.
Then he hears it. The snarl and wheeze of something coming, something that's no doubt been sitting in that house and now tears itself off of a vine and comes peeling down a staircase to burst through the front door, with so much unchecked force that it sends the thing reeling to the ground.
Joel hisses a soft Shit and quickly lifts the window he's standing at, aims his rifle with a jolt of his heart, tries to lock onto the quick flailing movements (the infected person is a man, young-looking, mouth wide open to expose the sifting tendrils that creep up from his throat. His head's splitting open, the mutation deforming half his face, a fleshy stalk reaching upwards from where one eye should be.) He's getting back up, moving towards the woman.
Joel fires. He's not a bad shot, but he still trembles sometimes. He's learning how not to. The shot misses by a hair or two, and the thing's lunging. Quickly, Joel aims again, fires, and this time it catches the infected in the leg, sends him falling.
Joel feels a staticy buzz in his ears, a sort of detachment, and his hands stop trembling at the edges. (The boy flailing on the ground likely couldn't be more than twenty. This is a fact he processes, cooly. The infected won't stay down long, maybe a second or two.) Joel lines up his shot, squeezes the trigger, and there's a spatter of brain against pavement. The infected boy stops wailing, stops moving, and Joel's heart starts working again with a hard thud. )
You okay?
( He barks down from the window he's standing at, rifle still aimed outwards. He shouldn't care — the woman's a stranger, a stranger he just spent three bullets on, but there's still some part of him that couldn't just stand there. (It's been three years, and he's two men, one who's learned exactly how hard and deep to cut a jugular, and one who remembers the gentleness of his daughter's hand in his own.) )
no subject
But what comes barrelling out of that house isn't what she'd expected. It hardly looks like a person anymore, changed in ways completely different from the reanimated dead. The mutation, the movement — she can't help her instinctive reaction to stumble backward, fight or flight trying to push her firmly toward the latter. That's why she misses the man appearing in a nearby window, and why the gunshot ringing out makes her flinch, eyes wide in shock as she looks away from the thing moving toward her.
Another shot and she lifts her blade, wishing she hadn't used the last of her ammo the day before but ready to take this creature down with her bare hands if that's what it comes to, and then its brains are sprayed out on the ground as the sound of a third shot nearly echoes in the ensuing quiet.
Her hands are still raised defensively when that voice reaches her, and it takes her a moment to tear her eyes away from the thing laying only a few feet away from her. It had been so fast... )
Yeah, I'm good.
( She projects her voice only as loud as it needs to be to reach him, not wanting to draw even more attention if she can help it. Who knows what might have heard those gunshots? Letting her hands fall but still not relaxing her muscles, she studies the man for just a moment, taking in the rifle and making a snap judgment that he wouldn't have saved her life from the thing just to take it himself. )
Unless you're planning to shoot me next.
( There's a hint of humor in her tone, a joke threaded through the statement because her gut tells her that's not what he's planning. Hell, he probably doesn't even have a plan, but then that'll make two of them. )