Chapter 2
It had been a month since Ellie had started her mission to kill every single infected. It was slow going, but it was definitely going. She hadn’t expected this much progress in just a month.
Pushing out from the area around Jackson, Ellie had thinned the population out as best she could, but she was always caught in her tracks by the spores. They spread out from the walls, the fungus coating everything in sight. She couldn’t exactly shoot it. She was stuck.
Until she raided the fire station.
She had burst into the fire station after marking back where the local runners had been coming from. Jackson patrols had taken most of the supplies. The infected were still swarming, runners and clickers patrolling the upper floors while a bloater hid in the basement, festering in itself.
The fight had been arduous. The bloater was hearty, and hard to nail down. Ellie sighed from behind her cover, tasting the foul burn of the spores in the room as she loaded a handful of incendiary shells into her shotgun. Vaulting over her cover, she blasted the bloater, feeling the searing heat press out from the barrel of her gun and find its mark in the infected monster; one blast burned into the fleshy growth of its stomach, and the second reaved its way through the monster’s head.
Ellie felt a pang of satisfaction, stepping back as the bloater stumbled backwards and slammed into the coated wall behind it with a heavy cracking. Mushrooms all over the wall split open, the wall’s protruding outer coat of infection crashing inwards a bit as shards of fungus scattered across the ground.
Ellie reached into her backpack with tired arms, ready to mark the location off of her map, when a metallic “thunk” rang out from in front of her. She peered over the tip of the map.
A flamethrower. There had been a flamethrower trapped in the fungus.
She stowed the map messily, scrambling to grab the weapon as if she had to fight a crowd for it. It was fully intact. She popped out the fuel canister and gave it a gentle shake. Still had quite a bit of fuel left.
Ellie got back to her feet slowly, almost reverently, as she let the gun ease into her grip. She gave the trigger a hesitant pull, and fuel immediately started gushing out of the nozzle, a spark setting the fuel aflame midair as it utterly engulfed the fungal growth on the walls. The flame spread, hungry, burning the walls to charred ash. Ellie just sat back and watched as the spores slowly cleared from the air. She watched the fireworks go off, reaching into a nearby locker and pulling out the heavy suit of a firefighter. Hefty. Not easy to tear through. Definitely protects her from all the burning she’s going to be doing. Sitting underneath that, a mask. The respirator end had been ripped to pieces. She took it anyway. The respirator wasn’t the important part.
Ellie left the basement, stepping into the sunlight with her new attire fastened tightly on and the building behind her consumed by flame. She reached into her backpack with a gloved hand, pulling out her map and heading for the next infected spot.
Before long, word began to spread across the west coast of the mythic firefighter. Some claimed to have seen it. Most wouldn’t believe them, but nobody could deny its handiwork. Buildings scarred with the remnants of raging flames spread across the country, green slowly starting to spring up after the area had been removed of infection. It was almost as if nature were dancing on its grave. The story went that the firefighter was a person, not even a very big person, decked head to toe in a firefighter’s outfit. Their face was obscured by a mask, their head protected by a helmet, two limp empty fingers on the glove of their left hand.They would avoid settlements of any kind, but work their way through nearby buildings and purge them completely of any infected and spores, leaving a burned husk of a building.
Ellie heard the stories sometimes. Mostly when she ran into survivors while working for one reason or another. She couldn’t bring herself to care. She asked them for infected hotspots, and went on her way.
Ellie was beginning to forget what everyone back in Jackson looked like. She couldn’t remember how long it had been. She stopped counting after the first month. She couldn’t remember Cat’s eye color. The town doctor, she forgot her name. It wasn’t important anymore. She was beginning to lose all of them. All of them but Joel, beaten and bloodied, his eyes swollen shut. And Dina. She could never forget Dina.
She had spent hours just looking at her, sketching her when they were together. She found herself thinking about the wisps of dark hair that would sneak their way past her ears. The cute bun she kept her hair in. The freckles that danced across her face. It was all painfully clear. She found herself wishing she could forget her sometimes. Wishing she didn’t stay up at night, wondering what the girl whose life she ruined was up to. Those were the nights she would let her underused voice croak out into the forest sky, singing the song that would be burned into her mind for the rest of her life.
“If I ever were to lose you, I’d surely lose myself…”
She missed being able to play the guitar on those nights. The phantom pain at her missing digits always acted up as she tried to finger out the chords in the crisp night air.
“...Everything I have found here, I’ve not found myself…”
Those were the nights when she felt like Ellie again, and not the firefighter. She didn’t like it.
It hurt to be Ellie.