Theodore Roy || APOCALYPSE

The Scraps were on the move for a couple days by now. They were close to the US border for a long time, but these zombies seemingly liked it cold, because with time they moved further and further into Canada, where they'd been based in some forest for a while.

Now they had been hiking north, for about 2 days and 3 nights. They hadn't come across any zombies, but with the unpredictability of them, he always had to be careful. Watchful. He was kind of glad now they had Esco with them. The short-hair German Shepherd hadn't been Theo's favorite since Jeremiah found him, but now he was immensely grateful for the dog.

He often smelled Trickers before the sneaky bastards could get them from behind, and would growl instead of bark, as if he knew too much noise would attract unwanted attention. He probably did, anyway. Esco was clever, almost more clever than the Scraps themselves.

The forests got denser as they walked, the hills steeper. Even with the sun dappling through the pine trees, the mist hung around them like smoke. "This is giving me the creeps, man", Jeremiah sighed as he tightened his bandana around his head. "Couldn't we just go into the States instead of bum-fuck nowhere, Canada?"

Mila laughed, loudly, making Theo wince. "Please", she scoffed. "As if we'd have a snowball's chance in Hell if we went into the States. Entire nation's crawling with the undead freaks." She slung an arm around Felice's shoulder, who leaned back against her. "And where would we even go? Fucking...Seattle?"

"Sure!" Jeremiah exclaimed, throwing his hands up. "Anywhere but this place. It's like, frozen here 24/7! Where I'm from, the sun actually provided warmth."

"Guys", Cairo tapped Theo's arm to snag his attention, and his gaze followed to where he was pointing. A large, dark-oak wooden cabin, two floors, lights out. "Should we go check it out?" he asked. He was turned to the group in its entirety, but the question was clearly aimed towards Theodore.

He nodded and grabbed his shotgun off his back. "Let's do it", he decided as he checked and confirmed it was fully loaded. Theodore lead, with Mila right in tow, spinning her spiked bat around.

"We know the drill", Theo spoke as he pulled his black neck gaiter over his mouth. "We clear it, then empty the place of every little thing that could be valuable. Do this in that order, not at the same time. That's to you, Jere."

Jeremiah scoffed, but held up his hands in mock surrender. "Yeah, I got you."

The door was unlocked. No windows open, but still. The hallway completely empty save for a single cabinet with one pair of beat-up sneakers on them. Wasn't all that rare, in abandoned houses pieces of clothing were left behind all the time.

"Living room clear!" Felice shouted from Theo's right. "Upstairs bathroom clear!" Cairo yelled, followed by Jeremiah: "Upstairs bedroom's too!"

Theodore slowly walked into the left door, crossing the dining room into the kitchen. Silence. Absolute, deafening silence. Until he looked over the kitchen counter, and found a young man sat in the corner, his knees huddled up to his chest and a knife in his right hand.

"Guys!" Theodore called out, the shotgun pointed at the man's forehead. "Got a stray!"

In a matter of moments, all Scraps were around him, Felice's eyes wide like saucers. Even Cairo looked pretty inquisitive about the matter. "Hey, man, what's your name?" Jeremiah asked with a grin, trying to pry the shotgun's barrel away from his face. "Don't mind Theo, he's a skeptical guy."

"Oh no, mind Theo", Theodore insisted as he gently shoved Jere aside with his shoulder. "And I'll do you one better: who are you, how long have you been alone, and is there any way you could be infected?"

This was just a regular recon mission. The kind Theo had done a thousand times before, maybe even more. His little group, The Scraps, were still back at the farmhouse at the edge of the woods somewhere along the U.S.-Canada border.

Theo had been wandering off in said woods for a few weeks now, on his own. Despite being a capable group leader and a formidable zombie killer, he still preferred to keep doing things like these, exploring, on his own. So far it'd always paid off. It was easy clearing out half-rotten houses for food and ammo and shivving down Scampers in the woods when he was alone. If he wasn't, Jeremiah would ruin things with his conversational chatter or at times useless banter. And if not him, Felice would get scared and scream in a way that caught an entire horde's attention. Theo cringed at the memory of that exact scenario already having happened twice.

So far, this mission had been wholly uneventful. Not a single Scamper shuffling about the evergreen pine trees, no Trickers attempting to sneak up on him since he'd left. In fact, it was almost eerie, the absolute silence in the humid, misty forest. The only moving things were his breath, fogging in the air like a small cloud, and flies buzzing around a half-eaten deer carcass right in front of him.

Behind the deer, a trail of shuffled feet marking the ground lead further and further, until they stopped at the porch a dark, shabby-looking wooden cabin in the middle of the trees. Hadn't he noticed it before? It wasn't that small, so he was sure he would've, had he paid attention. Maybe he'd been slacking off lately. The thought made something in his jaw tense.

He checked to see if his shotgun was loaded and grabbed his knife with the other hand. From outside the windows, he couldn't see much, except that the lights were all off and the furniture seemed...in tact. What worried him though, was that he couldn't actually see the Tricker he was convinced was in there either. Trickers were large, so it'd be easy to spot it if it were in the living room or the kitchen. Then again, that'd be too easy.

If The Scraps hadn't been low on painkillers, he'd probably have left the entire cabin to be. It was too much of a risk to take just for extra supplies. But Cairo had recently injured himself, and that worried him enough to make him take it anyway. Cairo was their medic, and couldn't be useful for shit if he was injured himself.

Theodore winced as the heavy oak door's hinges creaked loudly, the sound echoing through the narrow entry hall. To the left, there was the door to the living room. To the right, a flight of slightly splintered stairs, a barely-there trail of dirt leading upward.

Figuring he'd best take the Tricker out before clearing out the rest of the house and picking it clean, he slowly crept up the stairs. It was useless to check the door under the stairwell, as it was closed and there was no way a Tricker could've opened it all on its own and closed it neatly behind its back again.

Only one door on the first floor was open. And from where Theodore was standing on the second-to-the-top stair, he could clearly make out a Tricker, slightly hunched over, but characteristically still chirping and cooing like they did. He instantly lifted his shotgun and aimed at the back of its antennae-adorned head. His untouched right-hand index finger wrapped around the trigger, a familiar, almost comforting feeling. But before he could actually pull it over and shoot, a wet squelch froze him.

Whimpering and screeching, a noise that grated on Theo's ear, the Tricker slumped over and eventually fell to the ground. In the space that now became free to his sight, a single figure stood still, holding a fixed knife in his hand. The stranger's gaze eventually found his, and the two of them just...stared, for a bit.

"Who are you?" Theodore eventually asked after recomposing himself, raising the shotgun once more and climbing up the final stair. "Is this your place?" He asked, more urgent, as he entered the room and stepped over the Tricker's corpse to press the barrel of his gun into the man's chest. Theodore wasn't cruel, but he'd play dirty for some decent medicine, food, and that knife the guy was clutching.

Theo wasn't a big fan of cities. Well, he liked them enough before they started crawling with undead, flesh-eating fuckers. But now, they were merely a necessary nuisance to scavenge through for resources. Jeremiah had steered the Scraps toward this one a couple days ago, which had led them over the border into the United States. Theo was vehemently against the whole ordeal, as he preferred to stay in the Canadian forests were the cold often got too harsh even for infected. The other Scraps had argued that they were running low on the basics like ammo and first-aid. Stubborn as he was, Theo couldn't counter against hard fact. So, reluctantly, he'd let Jeremiah take them to Seattle. At first they tried Vancouver, but the entire city was a complete ruin, overtaken by greenery and probably crawling with zombies. Seattle, on the other hand, was relatively clear. Most buildings hosted at least a cluster of Scampers or the occasional Tricker in darker, more secluded areas. Unlike most cities, however, the streets were practically empty at all times. To Theo, that all was fishy. It meant someone—or a group—recently came through.

Still, it didn't seem like whoever had passed by was a good looter. The Scraps had been in Seattle for only a few days and their supply had already extended enough to last them another month, give or take, with relative comfort. Most buildings, even commercial ones—those were normally deserted from previous scavengers—had a plethora of useful things for their inventory. Hell, they'd even found some old beef jerky to give to Esco when he behaved well.

A fine veil of thin rain harshly limited Theo's vision of what was in front of him. That was already enough to get him on-edge. He'd insisted that morning that he go out on his own to find ammo. Total bullshit. The Scraps had an abundance of bullets lately. He needed to catch his breath, alone. The new environment, of which the quiet was eerie and empty compared to the dense Canadian forests' profound silence, was stressing him out; like it was a physical force pressing down on his shoulders.

Theo smoothly snuck down alleyways and open streets, his back flat against any wall or vertical object he could find. If there was one thing he learned from this god-awful apocalypse, it's to always make sure nothing can sneak up on you from behind. His sharpened metal fingers curled tight around the grip of his hunting rifle, the weight a grounding comfort in his hands as he hopped into the lobby of what seemed to have been some sort of hotel back in the day through a shattered window. Behind the reception he immediately managed to snag a little box of Ibuprofen that happened to lie around in a drawer. As he pocketed the medicine, he could faintly hear the sound of glass shattering, followed by the unmistakable growling of multiple zombies. Theo's jaw tightened. One of them could've just knocked something over.

That, or...

He loaded his rifle as he took the stairs two at a time. The first floor was practically abandoned, with most doors open and their rooms clearly picked clean. On the bed in room 107 was the corpse of a Scamper, its head blown to bits with a shotgun. Theo immediately figured out what the problem was. Shotguns were highly effective, but also very, unnecessarily loud. Even if this building was twenty stories high—which it thankfully wasn't—firing a shot like that would instantly alert every single infected in the entire building. It told Theo one thing: he was dealing with someone very cocky, very stupid, or both.

Figuring he could come back to loot after dealing with whatever was going up higher in the building, he skipped the second and third floors and went straight to the fourth floor, shiv in one hand. With a reluctant sigh, he slung his rifle over his back in favor for his Colt. Shooting rifles in buildings never ended well. He'd learned that the hard way.

The second Theo pushed the stairwell door open, he nearly got bit in the face by a Scamper. Just in time, he managed to thrust his shiv into its rotting temple. The zombie shrieked, and Theo only pulled the knife out when the bastard stopped twitching like crazy. He snuck up on another one from behind, and snapped its neck with a quick, brutal twist of its head. With that zombie gone, he could see clearly into the hallway on both sides. A horde of zombies—around nine or so—had all collectively gathered around a single door at the end of the hall and were scratching and banging on the door. Theo quickly reached into his pouch to check for ammo. Two well-aimed shots per zombie should be okay, he figured, which meant he had just about enough to get through the horde. He loaded up his pistol, and began firing shots at each of the zombies' heads, one at a time. A couple of them—likely ones that had only been turned for a few days, maybe a week—mercifully dropped after a single bullet pierced their brains.

Theo didn't give the rest of them the time to process his presence as he continued firing rounds into whatever still moved. While he was reloading, some cocky fucker tried to get him from behind, but he simply forced his shiv into its throat. One remaining bullet into a pitiful crawling Scamper promptly ended the altercation. Theo carefully stepped over the zombies' corpses, checking to make sure they were all dead before he knocked on the door.

"Yo", he barked out sharply, "zombies are gone, it's clear. Open up."

Silence.

Theo hit his fist against the door again, a little louder. "Either you open the door or I come in by force", he announced. Silence again. With a frustrated exhale through his nose, Theo backed up and lifted his foot to kick the door in. Just as the sole of his shoe was about to make contact with the door, the latch slid out of place and the door was carefully pulled open. Theo—after nearly losing his balance—scowled at the person, some guy, who had opened the door.

"Where are your goddamn manners?" he asked gruffly. "I know you heard me the first time when I told you to open up." Theo lifted his colt under the stranger's chin, and began inspecting him carefully. "You got a name? Are you infected? If so, I hope you understand I gotta put a couple holes in you."

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