UFSW Hunger Games/Issue 3

This is a preview Issue 3 of the UFSW Hunger Games. It is written by KnowledgeProspector.

Issue 3 (Preview)
“Now let the games begin.” Cole echoes the last line of the note throughout the small, concrete room. He was sitting against one of the walls, his legs folded to his chest. The ache on his forehead discouraged him from standing up.

He looks to the two other people in the room; Billie Starr, who was looking at him with a troubled look of her own, and Adam Dugall, who was looking at the floor, deep in thought.

“Forty-eight people…” Adam said. “… and one survivor?” All eyes were transferred to him.

“No, no…” Billie paces the room. “Th-this doesn’t make sense. Someone’s playing with us.”

Adam walks over to Cole and offers him a hand; Cole gladly receives it, and Adam pulls him up.

“Whatever the fuck it is, I don’t have time for this.” Cole crunches the note into a ball, and exchanges looks between Adam and Billie. “We’ve gotta get back to the Hyatt. God knows what could be happening to that place right now.”

Cole does a quick scan of the room and sees two entryways; one sealed by a dusty door with a missing knob, and one without a door at all. He looks at the balled-up piece of paper and is about to drop it, but quickly decides against it.

“Let’s head over there,” he says to the pair, pointing to the doorway behind Billie.

Billie goes out first, surveying the area around her; it was a narrow hallway with two ends. The one to her left had a noticeable dim, white lighting.

“Here—” Cole pats Adam on his shoulder, showing him the balled-up piece of paper. “Might understand it better than me.” Adam takes it and unravels it, as they both follow Billie toward the hallway.

“… each and every one of you… only one can live…” Adam mutters the lines of the conspicuous note to himself. Billie has already found the front door leading them out of the place; she opens the door and scurries outside.

“… to be eliminated…” Adam mutters, pausing at that line. He looks up and finds himself alone. “Cole? Billie?”

“Right here,” Cole calls from behind him. He turns around and sees him brandishing a screwdriver. “Might come in handy.”

Adam nods once, and looks toward the opened entrance. “Where the hell is Billie…?”

They both step out of the doors, into the short set of stairs leading into the sidewalk. Distant figures of what looked like infected could be seen to their left and right.

“What’s that?” Cole asks Billie, who was standing to their left, looking at a newspaper; she must have gotten it from the dusty bin of newspapers in front of her.

Cole stands beside her and tries to read along, while Adam stands to her other side. There was nothing out of the ordinary from the newspaper, aside for its decaying color and faded text.

Headlines, words of the dead terrorizing the streets were displayed. He tries to read some of it, but Billie starts shuffling through the pages.

“Virginia…” She shuffles through two more pages. “Busch Garden… White House… Fairfax…” She glances her surroundings as she continuously read through the names that stood out.

“Are we in D.C.?” Adam suddenly asks; Billie turns to him, giving him a distressed look as if he confirmed her thoughts.

“No. No, we can’t fucking be in D.C.—” Cole snatches the paper from Billie, disbelief slowly consuming him.

Billie steps into the street and looks at the names on the traffic signs. She pauses, and turns to the pair, her expression almost similar to Cole’s.

After a desperate search, Rick and Nina finally find their possible exit; a shaft of the collapsed elevator with a ladder leading all the way down. Half of the door was open enough for them to use it.

“Hurry the hell up—” Rick warns, exchanging looks between Nina, who was gingerly trying to reach the ladder, and the hallway to his opposite side, where the walkers will come from.

“Trying—” Nina complains; she was standing on top of the shaky elevator that was barely hanging on from the cables.

Rick, squatting on one knee, keenly waits for their impending threat; the scratches and bangs of the only door separating them from the walkers were nerve-wracking. “Any day now lil’ girl—”

Nina held onto whatever she could with her right hand while she tries to reach salvation in the form of a red ladder, placed at the left edge of the elevator door; why it was placed there was beyond her.

She does the best stretch she can, slowly inching toward the edge of the elevator. The echoing heaves of the metal above her was starting to make her uncomfortable.

“Oh, shit—” Rick hears the door break down, slamming onto the linoleum floor. Nina does one more stretch and finally touches a piece of the ladder.

“Jump! Jump now!” Rick warns, and Nina gives him a distressed look. He turns to see at least two walkers visible from his other end. “They’re fuckin’ gonna get ‘ere so if you don’t reach that shit—”

Nina heeds his warning and leaps onto the ladder; once she feels something to step on, her nervousness lapses.

“Shit, shit, shit—” Rick stands up from his position and steps back, checking on Nina if she’s finally reached it. He holds on to one edge of the elevator’s doorway and lets his left foot find something to step on.

“Just—keep goin’ down—” he tells her, while he hoists himself down easily, without trouble. “See? That ain’t so hard—” He looks at Nina with a smirk, and she returns it with a half-blank, half-annoyed look.

They both traverse the shaft’s ladder, hoping for it to end soon. “When the fuck is this gonna end—” Rick exclaims; he needed to talk to calm himself down.

Nina looks down below her. “Not far—eek!” She gasps at the sight of a body falling from where they came from. She looks away, as she speeds up her pace.

Two more bodies fall once they reach the ground. Nina tries her best to not look at the corpses while she waits for Rick. “Where—the fuck are we—” He hops down to the floor and brushes the dust away from his pants. “—exiting?” Nina points at a slightly-elevated elevator door, already opened for them by a metal bar placed in between.

“Lucky fuckin’ day—” Rick hops up onto the entrance and crouches inside, with Nina just right behind him.

He does yet another brush on his pants while he looks for their next route; the hallway seemed to look empty.

“Over here—” Rick points, looking at Nina. Her abrupt change in expression from distressed to fearful makes him turn to his front. “Oh, fuck this—” He groans.

Walkers start to pour in in front of them. He looks to his left, then to his right, and finds a door.

“Quick!” He puts his shoulder against the door and holds the knob tightly, bracing himself if he needs to push it open. Once Nina stands to his side, he pushes the door open with no trouble and exits.

“Fuck—” he says, upon stepping outside with no trouble; he thought was going to have to open that door again without assistance.

“Let’s go.” They found themselves in an alleyway, in the form of a path. A few walkers stood in their way, but they were no threat. He taps his waist for the one and only weapon he’s got.

“Gotta be fuckin’—” It seems he’s forgotten about it nine floors ago.

“Alright, alright…” He looks at Nina, then to the walkers, who still haven’t sensed them. “Just run as fast as you can—” Nina gives him a quick glance and doesn’t hesitate, zooming through the path. “Well alright,” he mutters to himself, and he shortly follows her.

Nina’s light movement helped her pass through a few walkers. Rick could barely catch up. “Slow the fuck down!” he calls, but it was no use.

He tries to speed up his pace, hoping to find Nina; after taking a few zig-zags and dodges, he soon finds her waiting right next to a door, into yet another building. A walker was on the ground nearby her, halfway through standing up.

He runs past the walker and stops right in front of the door, trying to catch his breath. “You—okay?” he asks, in between breaths. She nods with a troubled look on her face, and opens the door.

They both zoom inside, Nina closing it right behind her. Rick retires to the nearest seat he sees. “Jesus H. Christ—” He continues to breathe heavily as he wipes the sweat from his forehead. “What—what the fuck do we do now?—”

The loud, piercing groans of the walkers from the other side could only tell him one thing. “Oh, y’gotta be shittin’ me…” He wants to stand up, but the chair is the only relief he wants to hang onto right now.

“Rick,” Nina calls, her voice slightly hoarse. He was still distracted by the sounds. “Rick!”

He turns to her without a word.

She puts her left arm up, in plain view.

“W-what—…”

“I got bit.” An oval-shaped wound with splotches of ruby-red blood was starting to become more visible in his eyes.

Deaths
TBA