AW? Chapter 12 (Patreon)

Third-Person Point of View

Three people ran from a horde of rage-filled zombies. All hell broke loose after they woke up having hidden inside the mall the previous day. None of them believed it was true until the other people inside the mall started to attack them.

The solo female wore a sweater, dress, and glasses giving her a faint Velma from scooby doo vibe. She figured out she could make ice cubes. The jock fought back the zombie horde or the two slower members would have died from getting overrun.

The leader had a very nerdy vibe to him as if he didn’t care much about his appearance and only wore clothes for their practicality. He also wore glasses and would adjust and correct them with the palm of his hand constantly. They hit a dead end and the maintenance door at the end of the hallway was locked. The leader called out. “We need to climb the tree now!”

He held the base of the tree while the Velma-look-alike climbed up it. The jock tried his best to buy time but it was a losing battle with every second he grew more and more overwhelmed. The leader barely made it out of their reach before they killed the jock. The Velma-esk survivor held the leaves to help steady the tree but with so many zombies the leader barely managed to grab the lip of the second floor before they toppled it.

She helped him get his footing as he grabbed higher to the railing, finally pulling himself to safety. They both looked down on the mass of zombies while about half broke off realizing the two had managed to make it safely away. The dead jock's body convulsed and spasmed, they watched with both curiosity and fear.

The rage zombies didn’t look any different from normal humans except for their red eyes. If they weren’t constantly trying to kill the remaining humans they could easily pass as a normal person. The jock's body started to rapidly change though. Into something more than a normal human.

His skin started to change into a more greyish tone and his bones and body shifted. His arms lengthened and his legs shrunk slightly. He shed about fifty pounds of muscle and his hands grew to be much bigger than previously. A chill ran down the leader's spine before he could yell out to run... The zombie woke up.

It let out a heavy screech that put all the feral roars from the other zombies to shame. They both started sprinting away from the enraged jock zombie but the zombie knew instinctively how to use his powers and his body changed to utilize it. With the ease of someone climbing a ladder, he scaled the wall, his previous hobby as a climber manifesting as his ability. In two seconds he was on the same level as the remaining humans in the building.

They ran as fast as they could but the fresh zombie was an athlete and they weren’t. He closed the distance quickly and just before he grabbed the girl to bite into her neck several small miracles happened all at once. The first miracle is the zombie didn’t grab a hold of her instead reaching out with its mouth first. The second is the leader's ability finally activated.

Everything about the person spoke of his intellect. He loved strategy games, puzzles, and solving problems which gave him three unique abilities. The first came into play as he could control a person for a six-second period. Even without really understanding his source power as he didn’t think to use it against any of the other zombies previously it still worked how he wanted it to.

The zombie turned ninety degrees and jumped off the second floor head first snapping its neck. For a few moments, the two stared down at the dead zombie before the leader realized he was the one who caused him to jump. A few zombies come rushing towards them and they run into a clothing store on the second level and block the entrance doors with a mop. They catch their breath as the leader tries to figure out what their next step is going to be. 

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Third-Person Point of View

A nurse walked into a room in the ICU ward of the hospital. She put on a happy smile even though she knew it wouldn’t be reciprocated by the patient. The man in the room watched a small TV pointed towards him. Barely registering the nurse as he moved his head to press the button to change the channel. The nurse spoke up. “Trying to find something to watch Mr. Grady? I’d recommend National Geographic. They’re doing a marathon of Dr.-” The man cut her off. “Like I give a damn!”

The man was a quadriplegic. Herman Grady had been preparing for the Olympics as a runner when one day his body just randomly shut down. The doctors couldn’t tell for certain what had happened to him but the best theory is that one of his vertebrae was injured when he was a child and because of the constant stress he put on it from running it eventually gave out.

There was hope it could be fixed but after a botched surgery that hope was smashed into pieces like his vertebrae. He managed to retain his hope for an entire year before he started to give up. That was over five years ago. She droned on trying to perk him up but he paid no attention to her. Slowly his despair would rub off on her and she’d asked to stop being sent to take care of him as well. She might even quit like some of the others he convinced.

The moment someone new came he’d ask the same question. “Can you please kill me?” They would say no and he would begin mistreating them until they couldn’t stand to be around him. It had happened… More times than he could count now and it was one of the few things he gained satisfaction from. They both passed out and he heard a voice in his head as he looked over at the nurse who was starting to stand up while holding her head.

Blah blah blah. He didn’t care. He was just waiting for her to lean over while she washed him so he could take his chance to spit on her. He waited but a strange feeling shot through him. Pain, how long had it been since he felt pain in his body? Besides the feeling of pain, a happiness spread through him he hadn’t felt in years.

The voice spoke again, something about zombies but once again he was too fixated on the sensations to pay much attention. Alerts triggered but were mentally closed in his absence of senses. He didn’t realize that the nurse was going through the same thing. She managed to survive the first trial. She looked at him with tears in her eyes from the pain she went through as gallbladder stones dissolved in her body. For some reason, he tried to reach out and touch her.

His hand moved on its own and touched her face. Sheer panic spread across it as something happened to her. She felt all of Herman’s hatred for humanity personified with the briefest of contact. She screamed loudly until she needed to catch her breath then screamed again. She continued to do this three times inhaling less and less each time until she fell over either unconscious or dead.

“Well. That’s not good.” He moved to sit up but the sudden reconnecting of his system made him shit all over himself. His body was connected to several different machines all to keep it working. He felt a strange sensation in his penis as well and realized he had a catheter in. He looked at it for longer than he needed to. He grabbed at the end of it and took a deep breath. “Well… This is gonna suck.”