Alright, that's the last mag loaded. Time to see if I can't make it to my fucking destination this time.
Although pretty aggravated by the constant hindrances he has been facing since he left the rooftop, he was intent on reaching that safe house whether this world wanted it to happen or not. Driven to reach his goal, John placed one foot in front of the other while doing his best to avoid all the obstacles his fights with infected produced.
Sadly, there were just far too many corpses to avoid, so after charting a path over the ground that was literally covered in corpses, he made it past it all and was back out on the street that was remarkably barren, minus a handful of stragglers who had yet to notice his presence.
There was no need to rush this whole venture, so as that helicopter flew over again telling all survivors left alive to go to the Mercy Hospital for evacuation, he took his time and scanned the streets and the surrounding buildings. What he saw was the same old police car he had spotted from the apartment's roof top previously with its silently flashing lights, plus a number of wrecked cars that had smashed windows and bloodstains all over the vehicles themselves and around it.
Those brutal signs didn't take much imagination to envision what unspeakable horrors befell their operators and who else may have been riding aboard. But aside from scenes like that, he found many boarded up entrances to people's homes and local stores with various writings on them ranging from, this building has been quarantined, do not enter, to random religious ramblings saying, God has unleashed his wrath upon the sinners of this world, and crap like that.
If I didn't know any better, I'd probably believe these words, but this world is the work of man not God… Well, on second thought maybe it is because man wouldn't have been able to rip me out of my previous world and place me in a fictional world so…
John wasn't exactly in the safest of places to be exploring those sorts of deep thoughts, nor would it lead him anywhere since it's not like the system would answer him or let him know why, who, or what made all this possible. So he put those unnecessary thoughts out of his mind and focused on what was important, which was making it to the safe room and finding a map before nightfall.
Eager to reach his destination, he decided to take things quietly for now. John had dealt with enough hordes for one day and didn't wish to stir them up anymore than he had; hence, he slung his drum-loaded AK on his back, unsheathed his machete, and approached the nearest infected.
He moved quietly under the crying dark sky, and the moment he was upon the unattentive undead, he ruthlessly brought his sharp blade down and hacked into the zed's skull, dispatching the zombie then and there. It would've made a bit of noise when it hit the pavement, but he was smart enough to prevent that, so he caught the corpse and laid it on the ground silently.
That shouldn't have alerted a single infected.
Although he was confident his kill wouldn't have drawn any unwanted attention from the local undead populace, he wasn't careless, so he still checked his surroundings just to be sure, and low and behold, none had spotted his actions. Seeing his first kill success, John quietly crept up from one zed to another and took them out with none the wiser under the increasingly darker sky. And all whilst he was constantly scanning the area for special infected since those were the ones that would send him off to an early grave.
Fortunately for him, not a single special infected was encountered during his trip through the streets, and this luckily continued when he rounded the corner at the end of the city blocks he covered. The coast was clear from what he could tell so he kept advancing in the direction he presumed the first safe house would be located, and not too long later he encountered several collapsed electric poles that still had live wires and a few bombed-out buildings that had been collapsed obviously by either aerial strikes or artillery.
Shit, this area got hit hard.
As John was getting the lay of the new street, he spotted the thing he had been looking for, a metro entrance and a sign above it that read Subway Red Line.
Found ya.
Excited to have finally found where the safe room should be, he hastily ran across the street whilst keeping an eye and ear out for any dangerous elements. Thankfully, it looked like his luck had changed, because all he came across was a few zeds on the street, which he dispatched with growing efficiency, and dozens of bodies presumably dispatched by the four survivors. But the moment he passed a burning wreck and arrived at the entrance to the metro, he once again heard the distinct gurgling of a Boomer.
Of fucking course, things couldn't go smoothly.
John was aggravated to say the least, but he wasn't one to let his poor mood affect his judgement, thus he sheathed the blade he'd been using to cut down the local zed population, moved his slung assault rifle from his back to his front, and swapped his FMJ loaded drum out for a 30 rounder loaded with subsonic ammunition. He had played around with the infected hordes enough for one day and wasn't going to stir them up again if he could help it, especially after going through the effort of making it here unnoticed.
As soon as he clicked that smaller cap mag in, he shined his light down the set of stairs and swept it side to side. Sadly, all his light source revealed was a smoldering car wreck, which was blocking the way down to the metro tunnels... But not the big gaping hole, that presumably led to the safe room, and surrounding all them were a number of dead infected that were shot to shit.
Haa, I'm gonna have to go down there aren't I… Well, bitching and moaning ain't gonna do shit for me so I'll just have to try to dispatch that Boomer with a headshot since that's the only method I can come up with that even has the remotest of possibilities of stopping it from blowing.
Headshots never prevented that type of zed from blowing in the series, but this isn't a game any longer, so it's worth a try. Though if it still ends up exploding, then I'll just be dealing with the horde of undead it attracts… Hopefully I can land it and see if this works. I mean, it would be nice to have a method to put them down without ringing the dinner bell for all the undead in a given area.
All the sighing in the world wasn't going to solve his issues, so John descended the concrete steps stained crimson with blood and steadily approached the hole in the wall. He tried to be as quiet as he could, and after taking nearly a minute to climb down the many steps, he reached the hole, and when he did, he slowly peaked his hazmat covered head around the corner to get a look of things within.
What he found beyond the broken concrete block walls was another storage room; however, this was a very well-lit one compared to the other he was using earlier to reload his weapons. And within that space were several racks stacked with an assortment of cardboard and wooden boxes and a dozen zeds either standing in place, crouched, or moving about the space listlessly.
Where is that fat bastard? I know I heard it.
John quipped to himself just before he spotted the special infected lingering by a sturdy makeshift armored door, which was dyed mostly red… Probably by zombie blood if he had to guess. Having spotted his target that was distracted by whatever was going on in the safe room, he knew his best move was to get that special infected away from the door so he could avoid getting its stomach bile on his hazmat boots. Hence, he directed his attention to the surrounding infected, rounded the corner some, lined up his AK's irons with the closest zombie and blew its head off with a single well-placed shot.
He had to be quick with it so as that infected corpse was falling over; he whipped to the next closest zed and fired just as his fist expelled brass cartridge hit the stairs. The clatter of that spent casing didn't bother those in the room too much, and neither did the bolt of his assault rifle chambering a new round, but the thud of his first victim sure did. So, not even a moment following that zed hitting the hard concrete floor, they all turned in the direction of the sound and found one of their own dead. However, their severe lack of intelligence couldn't connect the dots for them, so they just began approaching the corpse, including the Boomer.
There was no rush to dispatch them; hence, our ruthless protagonist patiently waited a handful of seconds for the Boomer to lumber over to the midway point of the room. And when it finally reached where he wanted it, he took his chance and fired his gun, which he had preemptively lined up on its head. The next thing he knew, a hole opened up on the fat special infected's forehead, followed by a stream of blood before it too fell over and thankfully without exploding.
I guess that means the Boomer has to either have its stomach punctured or willingly do it itself for it to go boom and send bile and guts in every direction… Well, that's good to know.
That discovery of his although minor in the grand scheme of things would prove very useful in the future but John would find that out later, so for the meantime he let loose on the infected, that heard his gun's bolt when he took out the Boomer. There weren't a ton of them, but there were enough of them to pose a danger, so he cut their numbers down till there were only a few left. He then swapped to his machete when he was confident in handling them up close and personal and dispatched those that remained with a cleave to the dome or a horizontal slice to the neck.
Most would've said engaging the zeds in close combat would be stupid, seeing how he had a perfectly good ranged option to take advantage of. But John knew that getting good at killing the zombies the good old-fashioned way would be a huge advantage throughout the zombie-killing career he'd been forcefully signed up for. I mean, who's to say there won't come a time when he only has his blade and fists to rely upon, so might as well get this practice in where he can.
That's the last of them... Surely.
When he had finally claimed his last kill and collected his few extra coins from those zeds, he stepped past the bodies that accumulated on the hole in the wall, which he had been using wisely as a choke, and looked around the space for any decent supplies. Unfortunately, it appeared he would only find office supplies and stuff for maintenance if he searched through everything here, so he didn't bother wasting his valuable time on this worthless junk and approached the door with his rifle drawn and drum mag loaded.
He didn't know what he would find on the other side, but if the survivors were in there, they probably would've helped him, right… Right? Anyways, he wasn't going to know unless he opened the door, so he examined the heavily reinforced door, that had an assortment of metal plates welded to it, and attempted to figure out how to open it. Luckily for him, it wasn't an overly complicated contraption so the moment he did; he lifted up a metal bar on it, shifted it into the unlocked position, and kicked the door in with his weapon drawn, ready to unload on any hostile elements that may be on the other side.