With barely part of a harebrained scheme built up in my head, I came bursting out of the elevator with my knife ready to take on a horde of zombies that, to my grand surprise, weren’t there.

That scared the absolute crap out of me.

“Please don’t be zombie dogs,” I muttered as I slowly made my way through the blood-soaked lobby, “please don’t be zombie dogs…”

By all rights that bottom floor should have at least been filled with zombies that had had their legs taken off, or maybe even just a lucky player with some kind of HMG, but no, the place was completely barren of life and… unlife?

My point is that the lobby was empty.

With more caution than I’d had in the hallway upstairs, I crept my way out the front door, over the bloodied barbed wire and looked around to see the abandoned bike, molded to the point where it was completely unrecognizable among the bodies that were wrapped around its bent body.

I started anxiously flipping the knife around in my hand as I slowly inched my way further away from the hospital, “Easy,” I whispered to myself, “just take it nice and easy…”

Now, I’m not exactly a jumpy person, especially not when it came to playing KillStreak, but there wasn’t so much as a second’s delay between the snarl that practically crawled up my back and me bolting toward the small town at full pelt.

“Just keep running man…” I heaved as I ran, desperately trying to block out the sound of the zombies behind me, “Run, run, run…”

I still have no idea how they got the jump on me, all I could think about at that moment was the fact that Stan wasn’t covering me as I bolted, but then I realized it kind of looked like I was abandoning him and Cara.

Still though, I really could’ve used the cover fire.

In an act of complete stupidity, I snuck a look behind me and saw four very angry zombies sprinting right up my ass, the one at the front of the pack taking a desperate swipe for my lower back as I accidently slowed down.

I wasn’t given the benefit of sight for long though.

Warning!

Warning!

Severe weather warning!

Warning!

Warning!

High-density fog!

Warning!

Warning!

Severe weather warning!

The earth-bound cloud didn’t fade in, nor did it drift down from the sky, it was just sort of there all of a sudden, absolutely killing my visibility.

I decided to make the best of a bad situation though and turned my head so I was looking ahead again, and that’s when I lost my footing, the sudden change in visibility and the terrain having caught me off-guard as my blood-slicked shoes failed to find traction on the grass.

I swear I was falling for at least a full ten seconds as I tried to catch myself while at the same time preparing to avoid my knife, before finally collapsing in a heap and rolling a good five or six feet.

“Shit-shit-shit…” I muttered as if it was all one word, my lungs struggling to fill back up as I tried and failed to stand a good three of four times before finally succeeding and turning back toward the still snarling zombies.

My knife-wielding hand wouldn’t stop shaking, but I wasn’t about to let that stop me from getting into a combat-ready stance, my left hand up by the side of my face while my other stayed at about shoulder height with the back of the blade practically kissing my forearm.

“C’mon…” I breathed as I tried to make out anything in the fog, “Just one… C’mon, just gimme one…”

The gamer gods apparently heard my nearly silent prayer, sending one of the zombies sprinting toward me from the left, giving me barely enough time to catch it up under the chin with my forearm before driving my blade through the hole where I’m sure a nose had once been.

Killed Z.O.M.B. Mutation 3

+7 Points (164 Points)

It was a stupid decision catching it like that, and left me far too open for a bite, but it had paid off and left me free to take on the zombie that had just run up behind me, my long, sharp blade slicing through its neck with ease as I spun around and swung like I was punching a target just in front of it.

Killed Z.O.M.B. Mutation 3

+7 Points (171 Points)

“One more,” I said, pretending I wasn’t having difficulty breathing for no one’s benefit but my own, “one more and we run.”

That last one was being cautious though, circling around me like a shark, occasionally stepping an inch too close and revealing its location to me before disappearing back into the fog.

Now, I know I was running low on ammo, but the fact of the matter was that I’d reached the point where I was scared, confused, and completely lost as to where I stood in relation to… well, everything, so when I say that I threw caution to the wind, pulled the AR-15 off my back, and started firing in a semi-blind circle, know that it came from a place of desperation.

I was sure I was going to burn through the remainder of my ammo, but was instead quickly greeted with the pained squeal of a dying zombie after barely two seconds.

Killed Z.O.M.B. Mutation 3

+7 Points (178 Points)

As I walked away in what I hoped was the right direction, I discovered that it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows, and that my brief, foolish, and outright wasteful burst of fire had gotten me down to roughly a dozen rounds.

“Shit.” I cursed under my breath with a dejected sort of disappointment, “That is not how that was supposed to go…”