So I'm having a pretty great playthrough this time.
Justin Williams was a security guard in West Point, KY, back when the world hadn't gone to hell. In his late 40s, with salt & pepper hair and beard, his friends described him as burly. The kind of guy that doesn't wear a shirt if he can help it.
The day of the outbreak he woke up and saw what was going on in the streets. After grabbing a few supplies he made a break for a nearby house. As he was loading up on supplies the doors began to shake and moans filled the air. Filling his hiking backpack as full as he could, he bolted from the house and into the arms of the undead. Slashing furiously with his knife, he slew several until the blade snapped off, lodged deep in the eye socket of a zed. With the dead closing around him, he readied a frying pan and fled into the forest. Darkness began to fall as he rummaged through the thick undergrowth. Moans chased him through the night, the undead made invisible by the darkness and foliage. Panicked, he kept stumbling north until he reached the river. In the dim light, he could make out a few of the dead stumbling around the river bank, but few enough he thought he could slip through. Tired though he was, he spent the night inching along the river's edge. As dawn broke, he began to doubt the wisdom of following the river, and made for the nearest road he could see.
Fate smiled on him as he drew near to a house. The area was free of the dead and he made swift, silent entry through a window. The house was stocked full of supplies, and Justin decided it was a decent enough place to hole up. As he rummaged through the drawers and pantries he found, to his amazement, a pistol! But there wasn't a single round of ammunition to be found anywhere. Still, grateful for the reprieve he collapsed into a deep sleep.
The next day he had begun to settle in when he began to hear the dreaded, rhythmic thump of fists against the wall of the house. Pulling aside a curtain near the front door, he came face to face with one of the dead, its fists leaving bloody smears on the window's glass. Behind it he could see others, shambling and roaming the streets. He paused for just a moment, and then opened the window.
The zombie flopped through the window in an unceremonious pile and Justin crushed its skull with his frying pan. Stepping over the corpse, he shut the window and was relieved to see none of the other zombies had been drawn to the fight. But the pounding had not stopped, now it came from the back kitchen door of the house. Without thinking, Justin stepped through the back door. From his left a bloodied woman lurched at him. In a panic he turned and swung, slamming her head into the window next to the door. The glass shattered and another few of the undead in the backyard turned his way and began moving. Justin stepped back into the house and squared his shoulders as the woman followed in behind him. He bludgeoned her to the ground and kept swinging until she stopped moving. The other zombies shambled into the house and he kept them back with a flurry of swings, until they too were ruined messes on the floor.
Nerves frayed with tension and exhaustion, he slumped into bed.
The next day he resolved to get the window boarded up. Besides, he was already starting to feel stir crazy, couped up inside with all the shades drawn. With a hammer he'd found he began dismantling all the non-essentials doors in the house for wooden planks. But there weren't enough and he was already beginning to worry about his food reserves. With another house just next door he decided the risk was worth it.
The risk, however, was more than he'd anticipated. Getting to the house was easy enough. It was free of the dead for the most part. But upon entering the house, every room he entered had a decaying, moaning occupant. There was even one in the closet, staring blankly at a wall. Justin pondered whether this was once a family, but quickly dismissed the line of thought as irrelevant and macabre. With the house clean he began knocking doors off their hinges and splitting wood. The shed in back of the house afforded him some nails and glue, but little else, much to his disappointment.
And then there was the bacon. At the sight of it in the fridge Justin's mind was filled with the phantom aroma and sound of sizzling fat. With his pack loaded he struggled back to base. After a few short minutes of boarding up the broken window and hanging extra sheets for curtain, he turned to the bacon.
Now, Justin had never really been much of a cook. The life of security guard is often at odds with home cooked meals. So as he fried the bacon in the oven, his impatience got the better of him and he scarfed the scorching yet half cooked bacon down.
While hordes of the undead had failed to slow down Justin Williams, this one piece of undercooked bacon had. His mouth was horribly burned, the pain rising throughout the day. It became so intense he began to sweat, nervously pacing and wondering if he'd done permanent damage to himself and what that might mean. He drank mouthful after mouthful of water from the faucet, vainly trying to quench his burning mouth and throat. As night drew in, he sat in the darkness in pain, his anxiety slowly mounting. Without anything to do, he turned to sleep, which he only found fitfully.
The next morning he awoke feeling terrible. His mouth still ached and his stomach roiled and turned. His anxiety had only deepened. As though the world were reflecting his health, the sky was darkened. Thunder shook the house and lightning cast ghostly shadows through his shadowy living room. In no shape to do anything Justin flopped down into a chair in the dim light of his hideout. With nothing to observe but the corpses on the floor and the bloodstains on the wall, his mind began to turn in on itself. Desperate for something, anything, to take his mind off his body, he began reading old newspapers he'd found in some of the houses he'd visited. Minutes turned into hours. He sipped water when he could, and smoked when he shouldn't have. By nightful his nausea had become more intense and he began to feel feverish. Had one of the small scratches he'd taken become infected? Was he doomed to end, and restart, his life here in this house?
As he wasted away the hours he began to contemplate the unthinkable. Justin Williams had never laid down for anything in his life, and he wasn't going to in what little of one he had left. Better to die torn apart by the undead than to walk alongside them. He resolved to meet his fate on the morrow.
But the morning brought something very different. The pain in his mouth was mostly gone. His fever had broken. His stomach had settled and he felt the pangs of real hunger. He awoke feeling like a new man. He laughed (after carefully peeking out the curtains to see what was out in the yard) like a man given a second chance at life. He ate well and made a supply run to the nearby house for the rest of the wooden planks he'd left behind. He began to think of the future, deciding he'd build some barrels to catch rain water.
So well rested was he that when night began to fall, he wasn't the least tired and filled with the desire to hunt more supplies. Despite knowing night to be the worst time to go scavenging, in his hubris he set off into the dusk, crossing the street to the south. He met a single zombie in the backyard of a home blocking his way, and quickly dispatched her. With night closing in, he slipped through the window of the house and set to looting. Although his hands quickly found supplies where he knew to find them, the darkness slowed him down.
Suddenly he heard a bang on the door and his heart leapt into his mouth. Somehow, they'd heard him. He quickly stumbled into the next room, intent on getting as much as he could out of the house before fleeing, when he heard a window shatter.
He moved as quickly as he could into the main room of the house and in the darkness could make out three zombies coming toward him. Before he could swing they were on him. He shove and pushed and kicked as hard as he could, but all he was doing was tiring himself out as the groping hands clawed at him. He retreated, heading for what he thought was a bedroom with a window. But as he stumbled through the door into the pitch darkness, to his horror he realized he was cornered. There was no window in this room. The undead stumbled in after him.
Cornered, terrified, Justin Williams went berzerk. He flailed his frying pan side to side in the darkness, shouting over the moans and the dull sound of metal striking flesh. He closed his eyes, for there was nothing to see anyways, and poured every inch of his strength into his swings. Hot pain erupted across as his chest as a clawed fingers scraped his flesh and he only screamed louder, and swung harder.
And then his frying pan hit nothing. Panting, he could feel sweat and gore dripping off him and could hear the pounding of his heart. But there was no shuffling, no moaning, no grotesque gurgling. He paused only for a moment before bolting from the room, brushing past something on his way, and out the kitchen window, seen only by the dim moon light.
In pain but deliriously energized, he made his way back to base. Once inside he examined his wound. It was a minor scratch but he grimly observed, that's all it would take. He bandaged the wound and resolved to continue on as though nothing had happened. He'd stared death in the face twice now and he was tired of being scared by it.
The next day he awoke feeling alright. Deciding to take it easy after his harrowing, he opted to try his hand at cooking again. He'd found a nice filet of salmon and realized he hadn't eaten anything hot in days. He body cried out for real nourishment, not just canned beans and potato chips and fruit. Patient and focused this time, he let the salmon cook long and slowly in the oven. He set it out on the table and relished the steam and smell coming off it. Finally, he dug in. The experience was almost orgasmic. Justin had never really liked fish, but the way it melted in his mouth and warmed his belly almost made him cry. It was the best he'd felt since this whole rotten nightmare began.
Fed, happy and safe, he curled up with a book and read until he became drowsy and drifted off to perhaps the best sleep of his life.
The next day he took stock of his supplies and decided to investigate the neighborhood some more. (By daylight this time.) Over the next few days he explored the block of houses near where his harrowing was. He was getting closer to the residentials nearest the river and the density of the undead was steadily increasing. Though he looted a few small homes he came away with very little. Undaunted, he decided to explore to the east of his home, farther than he'd been so far.
It was slow going but by now Justin was becoming quite adept at avoiding the undead. Although a few caught on to his presence he was able to isolate them and dispatch them without alerting the others. As he made his way to a window of an as yet unexplored home, he was almost sickening pleased with himself.
That feeling passed with equally sickening rapidity. Because in the distance he heard a noise. At first he thought it was distant thunder but the sky was clear. The sound quickly resolved into the regularly thupa-thupa-thupa-thupa of a helicopter. Justin froze in the act of crawling through the window of the house. The helicopter came right over head, the man-made sound deafening against the quiet Kentucky countryside. And that's when he saw the zombies.
Their eyes pointed skyward, they moved as a mass, surging across the grass after the helicopter straight towards Justin. Another helicopter cut across the path of the first and around the corner of the house another group of the undead were following it. As he looked around Justin could see countless numbers of them, driven into a frenzy by the helicopters. Without another moment's hesitation he turned and bolted for the woods. He ran past and amongst zombies, some seemingly oblivious to him as they focused on the helicopters. Justin dove deep into the underbrush, pushing through trees and bushes in an effort to lose the zombies the helicopters had put on his trail. From his left, a zombie rose from the ground and charged at him. In the close confines of the forest it almost got to him, but a solid strike from his frying pan dashed its head open against a tree. More zombies, almost unheard over the racket of the helicopters, came from his right.
He kept fighting through the trees, slipping in and out of sight of the zombies, until he broke out into the familiar open yard of a home near his base. Checking to see he hadn't been followed, he raced towards his base, slamming the kitchen door behind him.
He spent the rest of the day peering out the windows, as a veritable fleet of aircraft crossed over West Point. Civilian helicopters, military transports, even a few crop duster airplanes filled the sky. Justin reflected darkly that for all they represented, they were practically his enemies for what they did to the normally docile zombies. Suddenly feeling more alone than he had in a while, Justin slumped into a chair and stared sightlessly at the blank wall in front of him. How long could he keep pressing his luck?
--
Since the last time I played, the game seems a lot easier. I did a sandbox game without changing any stats, and I think this is the longest I've ever gone in my first game of PZ. Zombies seem way easier to sneak by, the large view range helps a lot and the addition of skills means you're just getting better the longer you do things. I don't doubt there's still plenty of "haha FU" moments, but so far surviving to the point you need farming and rain barrels and such actually seems possible now.
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Topic: Zomboid (Read 75908 times)