It's definitely real
The last couple of hours were completely uneventful, but that didn’t make her any less on edge as she watched the sun move slowly over the horizon, tinging the skyline shades of pink and orange. The glow crept over the apartment with a deceptive innocence that she was still wary of, but gave her the greenlight to leave the apartment. She wasn’t going to stay with the dead body any longer than she absolutely had to. Carefully opening her front door, she was faced with the small hallway that opened onto the stairs and the lift. She chose the stairs without a second thought. Knowing her luck in the past 24 hours, she would get trapped in the lift. That decision did, unfortunately, mean that she was faced with hundreds of stairs, but she barely noticed due to the adrenaline that shot through her system as she descended floor after floor of the eerily empty building. Maybe everyone was just asleep, she hoped, but something told her that was unlikely.
Her grip on her gun tightened as she reached the stairwell at the bottom, walking towards and then slowly opening the door to the foyer of the hotel that was on the lower floors of the block. It seemed clear, so she stepped out into the open space when she immediately heard the groans coming from the shadowed space round the corner. She had so been hoping this could be written off to her overactive imagination, she sighed, holding the gun out in front of her and shooting each zombie once in the head. Was she better at shooting than she probably ought to be? Without a doubt, but if she was going to do something, she was going to excel at it. Honestly, she was now very grateful for the time she put into learning back when she first started screenwriting and figured it was something every self respecting dystopian writer ought to know. Her heart was racing a little when she walked over to the two bodies. Sure enough, in exactly the same condition as the ones last night, lying in a bloody mess on the carpet. She was so focused on the sinking feeling chest that she didn’t hear a third one come up behind her, so when she felt the cold flesh of its hand through her shirt she panicked and spun around, hitting it right on the nose with the edge of her gun, backing away, then putting a bullet through its head to be certain. Careful to stand with her back to a solid wall this time, she scanned her surroundings, taking in the three bodies and the abandoned hotel foyer. On closer inspection, the clothing on the bodies looked alarmingly like the uniform the staff around there usually wore, which sent a chill through her. These were real people. She knew that: of course she did. It was her job to be an expert on pretty much anything ‘zombie’ related, but a part of her was still clinging onto the fact that this was real life, and not one of her movies. Taking note of the internal doors which she planned on searching, she looked to the revolving door and the front window, a sight that made her blood run cold. The street was abandoned, dystopian almost. Littered with bodies, and blood, and abandoned cars. This was real. Far too real, and now she had to figure out what to do. She just stood there, fingers turning white around the grip of her gun as she took in what was happening. Maybe this hadn’t spread, maybe she could make it to one of her apartments in America and it would be safe, but that wasn’t how the movies told it. The movies said it would take out Paris, then become an epidemic, then it would slowly claw its way across continents until there was nothing left but rubble. Statistical chance said she wouldn’t even make it that far. It would be foolish to consider herself the main character when so many people would die without mention. She wasn’t sure she even wanted to be the main character: the last one standing. To die alone of starvation, or to bleed out wondering why everything had to change. The extras that died in the beginning were the luckiest in that regard, she had always considered. They never had to know what happened next, and never had to anticipate their own demise. But she was already beyond that point. Her only solution was to make it as far as she could in this game of life or death.
She almost shot instantly when she heard the creak of a door in the corner of the foyer, pulling her from her thoughts, but a voice made her stop.
“Please,” a woman said urgently. “Don’t shoot. I’m not one of them.”
She looked up, caught off guard, to see a woman standing there. Not torn flesh or wounds or blood. Just smooth skin, and satin brown hair. She may be biased given everything she had seen in the last day had been rotting, but the woman in front of her was nothing short of gorgeous, making her pause for a minute, running her eyes down the woman’s athletic figure, her lips parting slightly.
“Who are you?” she asked warily, finally finding her words.
“Who are you?” the other woman asked, equally untrusting.
“I live here,” she replied carefully. Enough information to gain some in return but not so much as to unbalance the playing field.
The other woman raised an eyebrow as if that told her something, then answered in kind. “I was staying here when chaos broke out. Locked myself in my room immediately and didn’t come out until now. Honestly you seem more in the loop,” the woman pointed out, looking at Agatha’s gun and then slowly bringing her gaze up to make eye-contact. Interesting. “Rio Vidal,” the woman eventually offered up, probably figuring one of them had to take the next step if they were going to get anywhere.
“Agatha,” she introduced in return, withholding her last name because of the information that went with it. “Don’t get your hopes up, you probably know about as much as I do”.
“Okay Agatha no-last name. What do you know?”
“Well, we appear to be in the middle of some kind of zombie apocalypse for one.”
“No shit,” Rio replied. “How long did it take you to figure that one out?” she deadpanned.
“I have a pretty overactive imagination…it wasn’t a stretch that I was hallucinating or something.”
Rio mumbled something that she didn’t hear*. “So you thought there was a slim chance that you were just walking around shooting people in a hallucination.”
“It was a possibility,” Agatha answered honestly, realising how concerning that sounded. “Though if I was hallucinating the zombies I was probably hallucinating the gun as well,” she mused.
Do you daydream about zombies often?” the other woman joked.
“You have no idea,” Agatha replied with a light chuckle. Her life would probably be considered very weird to most people.
“Anything else?” Rio asked, clearly hoping for some more useful information.
“They die pretty easily, seem to follow the standard rules of how zombies operate but I haven’t been able to figure out how it spreads to verify that completely.”
“That’s more than I know,” Rio replied honestly, clearly grateful for any details she could get. “If you live here, how come you left your apartment?” Rio asked curiously.
“Look, there is a dead guy in my living room and it's not like I keep more than a few snacks worth of food around anyway. Better here than pent up there waiting this out.”
“What kind of person doesn’t keep food in their house?” Rio asked, exasperated.
“Last time I tried to make popcorn it burst into flames,” she replied, completely seriously. “I go out to eat.”
“Oh so you’re rich rich,” Rio asked, looking over Agatha, finally noting what she was wearing, her cheeks flushing faintly pink. She cataloged that information for later.
“Look Rio, we could do this now, or we could do this once we’ve found somewhere safe to be”, she replied, frustratedly. Of course she had a right to be curious, anyone would be, but now was really not the time.
“You make it sound like there’s something to know,” Rio noted, clearly intrigued.
“Maybe there is,” she said, the corner of her mouth twitching up, “If we make it through this, I’ll explain in detail, deal?”
“Deal,” Rio agreed, grinning. “So what's the plan?”
“I think, we need to try and find my friend, Wanda.”