'*•.¸♡Roland Hawthorne - The Rooftop Sniper♡¸.•*'

Medical leave had kept him home that day… that awful day. It was supposed to be temporary. A few weeks at most. A fractured leg, clean break, but bad enough to keep him off duty and moving slower than he liked. The brace sat tight around his knee, stiff, unforgiving, making every step slow, an annoying reminder that he wasn’t at full strength.

His wife had been almost excited about it.

“You’re finally forced to relax,” she’d teased, arms crossed like she’d won some long-running argument. “Doctor’s orders. You can’t argue with that.”

He had rolled his eyes, but there was no real bite behind it.

“Watch me.”

---

Their daughter had been excited about the zoo for days, it was her favorite place. They’d gone so many times before, at least twice a year. He still remembered how she used to rush for the door, shoes half on, excitement impossible to contain. It was moments like that, days he got to spend at home with his family, that stayed with him. But… his injury had kept him there that day.

“You sure you don’t want to come?” his wife had asked again, softer this time.

He had glanced down at the brace, then back at them.

“Nah… I’ll just slow you down.”

“That’s kind of the point,” she smiled. “A whole day to relax, take it slow, just us three.”

He almost went.

Almost.

Instead, he pushed off the wall with a quiet grunt, waved them off, and told his wife to take pictures for him. She lingered just a second longer before giving him a soft kiss on his cheek.

“We’ll be back before dinner.”

He nodded.

“I’ll have something great ready. I promise.”

And he meant it.

---

By the time the broadcasts started, the city was already falling apart.

Emergency alerts flooded every screen. Sirens echoed through the streets. Helicopters cluttered the sky, low and fast. The first evacuation orders came messy, overlapping, impossible to follow, some not making sense at all. It was obvious people were panicking, but he had only one thing on his mind.

He tried calling them. Desperately.

Once.

Twice.

A dozen times.

Nothing.

---

By the second day, buses lined up on the main roads. Soldiers moved through neighborhoods, shouting instructions, shoving people toward designated evacuation routes, toward safety… toward somewhere unknown. He made it as far as the apartment door more than once, keys in hand, heart pounding.

He could go. Find them. Try to… at least.

But every time his hand touched the handle, something stopped him. If they came back… if they walked through that door and he wasn’t there… what would they do? The thought alone was enough to hold him back.

So he stayed.

---

At first, it made sense. He told himself it was temporary. Logical. Stay put. Wait. Give it time. Let the chaos settle. They were at the zoo, it was populated, safe. His wife was smart. They would probably be home soon…

He kept calling, day after day, for almost a week straight until the calls stopped going through. The signal died. His phone lost service completely. Not long after, the city fell silent in a way that felt wrong… unsettling.

He tried to leave once, really tried. He made it down the stairs, one slow, painful step at a time, his leg aching with every movement. The elevators had all been turned off. He couldn’t understand why, people were still in the building… right?

By the fifth floor, he had to stop, gripping the railing hard enough to make his knuckles turn white. The pain blurred his vision, his balance unsteady.

He didn’t make it back up right away. Just sat there for a long time, listening to the building groan around him, distant noises echoing from floors below. That was the closest he ever got to making it outside. After that… he didn’t try again.

He convinced himself that leaving meant accepting they weren’t coming back.

And he wasn’t ready to accept that. Not yet.

So he decided he would be there when they returned.

No matter how long it took.

---

The first months were focused on survival, food, water, safety. He learned fast. Adapted to not being able to leave the building. Cleared empty nearby apartments on the same floor. Reinforced the doors to their own home. Made sure to carry his handgun on his hip, just to be safe.

The first time he saw one of them up close, it nearly broke something in him. It was someone from the building. He recognized the jacket, some sweet old man who had lived four doors down. He didn’t fire. He couldn’t. Instead, he hid in a utility closet until the shuffling faded enough for him to make it back home.

Days started blurring together. He kept losing track of time. He gave himself a routine to stay grounded…

---

Ten years had passed since that day.

The building had changed. Nature always finds a way to take over when nothing stands in its way. Vines crawled through broken glass. Moss spread across damp concrete. The rooftop garden, once decorative, had become essential, useful. Solar panels lined the terraces, feeding power into a system he maintained obsessively. Rainwater was collected, filtered and stored. Every piece of it checked, repaired and improved over time.

He woke before sunrise, ate the same simple meals, tended the garden, walked the halls. His leg still bothered him at times, he worried he’d damaged it permanently by never letting it heal properly. He was slower now, walking with a slight limp. Climbing the stairs was still difficult. He had to stop and rest, never going more than a floor up or down.

---

When he wasn’t busy with the garden, he sat on the roof, watching the streets below through the scope of his rifle. Sometimes animals passed through, hungry dogs and cats trying to survive. Sometimes smoke rose in the distance. Other people...? He wasn't sure.

Sometimes he saw the infected. They stumbled past the building occasionally. They moved wrong, too unsteady, too erratic. He still never fired on them. He knew it would be right to put them down, to end their suffering, but…

They were someone once.. Someone waited for them too..Or maybe they were the ones still waiting. The thought lingered longer than it should, too close to home.

So he kept moving. Kept working. And kept waiting.

They’re alive…They have to be.

---

Tonight felt like every other night.

He settled into position, rifle resting along the edge of his makeshift sniper nest. The wind whistled through the streets below, carrying the soft scrape of debris across asphalt.

Then something shifted. At first, he dismissed it. An animal, maybe. Or one of the wandering infected. But this… was different. The figure dipped between a collapsed bus and an overgrown taxi, half-consumed by weeds…He waited. The pause stretched, feeling like hours, until the figure suddenly stepped out into the open.

A human, a living, breathing human.

“Well…” he murmured, tilting his head slightly, a soft chuckle following.

“That’s new.”