The Unluckiest Raider in Apocalyptia 2

Story by Procrastinauthor

>Gazelle could have been the luckiest raider in Royal Woods, and also the unluckiest.
>On one hand, he had narrowly avoided a sudden end in the deadzone last week.
>On the other hand, he wasn't brave enough to try to recover the four backpacks and walkie-talkies they lost in the Supermart, along with the rest of the group.
>Of course somehow this was his fault. According to the boss at least.
>At least he wasnt executed for incompetence, his luck held up.
>He was merely sent on a suicide mission.
>His luck held up indeed.
>The boss wanted to know what was on the other side of the deadzone, and Gazelle was "volunteered" to explore the area.
>It was possible, in paper. Efforts to chart the deadzone noted that said zone was more or less circular, centered around the resource-rich area of the markets.
>With some planning and a healthy dose of paranoia, he could stay in the daylight all the way across the deadzone, skimming the edge, and have a look at was what on the other side. Then he would return to the hideout and maybe the Boss would forgive him. Easy peasy.
>Yeah... Gazelle was certain of this.
>He was one hundred percent dead.

>Gazelle wiped the sweat off his brow with a gloved hand, and surveyed the area around him.
>He had left the market area of the city, the end of the deadzone.
>He had made it!, The scrawny man loosened the grip on his shotgun for a brief moment as he allowed himself a deep breath to relax himself. But the moment was gone quickly, and Gazelle steeled himself.
>From here on, it was uncharted territory.
>Well ok, so there were city maps and they could still be useful, but whatever occupied these streets now was a complete mistery,
>Enough distractions. Daylight's burning, and he was in deep enough water as it was without trying to risk the deadzone at night.
>Gazelle walked along the street, close to the buildings but still avoiding their shadows as much as possible, the fear of whatever took Thundercat and the others still fresh on him.
>Then he heard a sound, and froze in his tracks.
>Rythmic thumps, steps. Slow but steady, deliberate, so it was not a zombie. Kinda sounded like the tempo of a dog's walk, four legs?
>It could very well be a stray dog (They were rare, but not impossible, it was uncanny how quickly the canines adapted to the wasteland, avoiding zombies and feeding on the freshest corpses.) But Gazelle had a strict policy on dealing with the unknown: Get The Fuck Out and hopefully dont die.
>He quickly entered the nearest building, thankfully the door was already open so he didn't have to risk making noise accesing the place.
>Turned to be an office building, its purpose lost to time. Hardly anything worth looting in offices, perhaps some duct tape if he was lucky.
>Oh god, the sound is getting closer, the animal must be tracking him now.
>Fight, or flight? what are you, dense? flight is the only choice ever, at least for Gazelle.
>The raider made his way deeper into the building, as silently as he could.
>All the while hoping against hope that the damn building had a way out on its backside.

>The dog or whatever was not letting up
>Gazelle was full on panicking, he was pretty sure that he was being chased now, and he could barely think of anything else with his heart pounding against his ribcage and his muscles tensing to the verge of cramping.
>He just could not handle it anymore. He instinctively knew there was no outrunning this creature, so he chose to hide. Probably a foolish choice if this thing had been this good at trackign him so far.
>And so Gazelle hid under a desk, Hysterically hugging his shotgun in a childish search for reassurance, while the sound came closer and closer.
>Now that it was this close, his other senses started going into overdrive, trying to figure out what manner of predator was tailing him.
>Hard impacts against the floor, intertwined with soft thumps, whatever it was, it only had nails on two of its legs, it seemed.
>There was also a smell, he noticed.. the all too familiar smell of rotten flesh. Was it a zombie dog? or maybe one of the big felines from the zoo? He always wondered what happened to the animals there after the end of the world happened.
>Unfortunately, Gazelle couldnt stay lost in his toughts for long, as a loud smash above him, followed by a horrible couple of stabs happened. The creature was now on top of the desk, and its talons were the biggest ones the man had seen on anything outside jurassic park. They had pierced right trough the desk and were poking under it, teasing him with the promise of excruciating pain in the near future.
>Gazelle was so busy looking up, that he was taken by surprise when he looked in front on him, and noticed that he could see their shadows against the nearby wall...
>It was a monster. A real, honest to god, monster, straight out of a horror movie. That shadow did not belong to a creature under the domain of god.

>A surprisingly small core, with a marge mane of hair framing an unending amount of sharp teeth, and a jaw that seemed to move just as freely forward and back as it did up and down.
>Its rear limbs looked like a mix between a dog's and a raptors, and there was an uncanny flexibile nature to them. Gazelle could swear their joints changed size and location as it suited the creature.
>But perhaps most disturbing of all, its front limbs looked... human. Forearms, elbows, wrists, and fingers, they all looked to be normal, if slightly long and thing, as if they had been elongated from a child's.
>Gazelle was frozen. He tought he knew what fear was, but that was merely the fear of facing deadly things firmly established in reality. A reality that now included zombies yes, but a reality that he had time to acclimate to, none the less.
>But this? this was a nightmare, this was insanity! Perhaps he did die in the supermart and is now experiencing hell.
>Still, he did not dare make a sound. He had stopped breathing a minute ago, and his sphincter could have cracked a nut under its current pressure.
>He watched with feverish fascination, as the creature looked this way and that, and closed and reopened its jaws, making wet sounds. It seemed to him that it was tasting the air, hunting.
>Then the creature took a low pose, and tensed, its hindlegs gathering massive power in them as they made the wood of the desk creack and splinter in protest.
>This is it, end of the line, He was going ot die, and In a way much less mercifull than a slit troath.
>Why couldn't he just have died in the deadzone? why had he had to be such a fool and run away ten seconds after the expected call on his walkie-talkie didn't come? Now he was going to be mauled, at the very least.
>Flayed, possibly.
>Devoured, certainly.
>The entire desk jumped a few inches as the monster jumped, and Gazelle closed his eyes....

>A brutal cacophony of rended flesh and shrill shrieks assaulted Gazelle's ears, and he jumped a little in shock, but he was still unharmed.
>He was still not being attacked, and he wondered why. Daring to open his eyes, he looked at the shadows again, seekign answers.
>The monster was assaulting another person, a couple desks over.
>It was a small comfort, thinking that he had been momentarily spared. The other guy probably had been a juicier target, but that did not matter at the moment. This state of affairs would not last.
>He couldn't presume to udnerstand how the creature thought, and he was not sure if he would be left alone after the other morsel had been finished.
>So Gazelle did was he always defaulted to, and ran away.
>He scrambled desperately from under the ruined desk, and made a screaming getaway from the office, all attempts as stealth abandoned in the sheer effort of exerting even a little more speed form his muscles.

>Lulu merely gazed at the retreating raider uninterestedly, chewing on the chocolate bar she had violently dislodged from the breast pocket of the zombie who was its previous owner, along with most of its torso.