“Keep your Goddamn head down!” Cara barked as another shot was fired and the bottom of the sideways minibus got punctured, “You see him?”

“No such luck…” I replied as I pulled out my crowbar and went to work smashing out the windscreen with my non-dominant arm, “When I bust this out, you go around the back of the bus and wait, yeah?”

“Why? So you call out to your sniper friend and have him put me down?”

“No, so you’ll be in cover, jackass.” I growled as I gave up using my left arm and switched to the far more painful one, which cracked and broke through the layered glass with ease, “Hurry up.”

“Don’t you be tellin’ me what to do.” Cara snapped, “Frickin’ sniper shootin’ at me, frickin’ sociopath tellin’ me what to do…”

She muttered something else as she climbed out through the front of the car, but I was more focused on the sniper than what Cara had to say about me.

Another shot was fired, missing me by a good three or four foot, and I used that as my opportunity to sneak out and join Cara.

“Spot any cover?” I asked hopefully as I struggled with the weight of my SVD.

“Yeah, and I thought I’d keep that highly pertinent information to myself.” Cara replied sardonically, “No, I ain’t seen any cover.”

“Lead with that next time.” I said coolly, irritating Cara further, while trying to measure the risks and potential rewards of peeking over the minibus, “You reckon if I look over he’s just gonna shoot me?”

“I would. Hell, I might.” Cara barely half-joked, “What’s the plan?”

“Right now? Don’t get shot.”

“Heh, good one.”

The_Literal_Pube murdered JoJoLoco

-1 Player (200 Players Remaining)

“Oh no…” I trailed off as quiet tone rang over the island, “that’s the last thing we need…”

Outbreak detected!

Outbreak detected!

Zeta-One-Meta-Beta outbreak detected!

“Shit…” Cara muttered, “how’d we get down so low?”

“Same thing that always happens,” I replied after the sniper took a shot at something out of our view, “weak get killed off first, leave the rest of us to deal with events and the monster spawns.”

Cara went to say something else, but stopped as we both spotted something coming out of the woods we’d just left.

“Crap.” I said flatly as, with a haunting sort of swaying and shuffling, the zombies started to come our way, “You think we can-”

Cara didn’t even let me finish my sentence before scrambling to her feet and running toward the hospital, screaming “Serpentine!” as she did so.

Without wasting another second, I followed her lead, with the exception that I went around the opposite side of the minibus to her, and started sprinting toward the hospital in a zig-zag pattern.

The sniper was clearly distracted though, and while I maintained my evasive running technique, he was busy firing at the zombies that I’m guessing had attempted to join him in wherever he was hiding.

At first they were nowhere to be seen, beyond the ones shuffling out of the forest, but before long they seemed to appear at every side.

“Keep up!” Cara shouted back, “We’re almost there!”

She was right, but at the same time, we weren’t alone in our pursuit of the hospital, and it wasn’t long before other players came pouring out of the woodwork and started hoofing toward the front doors.

I had this instinct, this sort of innate and undeniable urge to start firing on the dozen or so players, but I, along with all of them it seemed, rationalized that there would be plenty of time to kill each other once the threat of getting ripped to pieces was no longer present.

“Almost there,” I told myself once we were within a few hundred feet of the hospital’s large double-doors, “almost there…”

“There’s wire fencing!” Cara called back, “What do we do!?”

“Jump it!”

Cara seemed justifiably concerned about the prospect of jumping over barbed wire, but apparently not as concerned as she was about the zombies and players that were fast approaching us.

She leaped over the three-foot high wire with ease, making her the first of the players to make it into the building, with the obvious exception of the sniper.

I tried to pull off the same move, but jumped too soon and managed to hook my shoe with one of the barbs, causing me to crash to the ground in a heap right onto my bad arm.

“What are you doing!?” Cara practically shrieked as she used her AK to suppress the assailants coming our way.

“My shoe is stuck!” I growled past a wince of pain as I rolled onto my back and looked at my trapped foot.

“Then take it off!”

Not going to lie, I felt slightly embarrassed that that simple solution hadn’t occurred to me until after she suggested it, but at the same time was grateful that it worked, leaving me to wriggle free into the hospital’s lobby.

-1 Shoe

“Where to?” Cara asked as we retreated, “Upstairs or..?”

“Yeah, yeah, upstairs.” I replied after Cara let off another burst from her AK, “We’ll use one of the service staircases, safer.”

“Provided our sniper isn’t hiding in one?” Cara chuckled.

“Provided our sniper isn’t hiding in one, yes.” I repeated with a smile before spotting the door that led to one of the emergency exit stairwells, “That’s our way up.”

Cara didn’t respond, instead opting to simply run straight for the door and leaving little opportunity for me to catch up with her.

I went to say something to the effect of ‘Slow down!’ but was cut off as a hail of bullets started raining into the hospital’s lobby.

“Keep up!” Cara barked from where she stood, holding the door open for me.

“I’m trying my best.” I snapped back as I cleared the threshold and started bounding up the stairs two at a time.

“Well, clearly your best isn’t good enough.” Cara replied with a grin, “Now, where to from here? Just up?”

“I reckon we should stop on the third floor from the top, less likely to have someone come barging in on us.” I said as we reached the first landing which was marked ‘Level 1’, “We should be able to find some meds and stuff up there too.”

“And by stuff you mean shoes, right?” Cara joked, the tone in her voice changing to something a lot calmer as we got further away from the gunfire that plagued the lobby, “You end up getting a visual on our sniper’s whereabouts when we were running?”

“No,” I replied as we cleared the third floor landing, “but it wouldn’t surprise me if he’d gone up to the roof and started watching the door like a hawk.”

“Heh, you’re probably right.” Cara scoffed, “Damn campers.”