Sometimes, Nat wondered about all the people she’d left behind. Her friends from high school and college, women she'd bunked with in prison, what they were doing now and if everything in their lives was alright. It wasn’t that she regretted her choice to cast them aside. Memory was a scab she picked at when she wanted to slink back into old alleyways, when she wanted to bleed herself a new, imagined past in which she didn’t run away.
“Don’t worry, I’m a fast driver.” Nat pushed the handgrip all the way down and gunned them forward at what must have been 90 miles per hour. The air stank of hot trash as they sped onward, the reek of rot and burning rubber on the wind that buffeted her nose. It was fucked up to see so many bodies, so much utter aloneness and carnage. All these miles and not a single sign of life.
She screeched the bike to a halt by the parking garage, nearly bucking the two of them off as she only just managed to avoid hitting the curb. Val’s parking pass did surprisingly work to pop up the gate—which meant the system had to have an emergency battery installed—and Nat guided the motorcycle into a parking spot inside. “See? I'm good at this," she said. "Also, it might be a good idea to grab that battery on the way out. With that much charge, it could power a few systems in a pinch.” She pulled her motorcycle helmet off and shook her hair out, her ears alert for signs of danger. Robbing a police station had always been an action item on her bucket list and to be doing it now with no repercussions was kind of awesome. Petty as it was, it felt like sweet revenge for how inhumanely they'd treated her.
A dull thud from inside the station door snapped her out of her thoughts, and Nat drew her sword, her gaze registering three zombies in police uniforms behind the glass. “Do you know these guys?” She asked, raising an eyebrow. “Because they seem kind of excited to see you.” No sooner than the words left her mouth did a cracking sound vibrate through the air. The glass spiderwebbed. Then something lower, monstrous, guttural. A wave of pain from her medication withdrawal shot through her head just as a clawed hand broke through the full-body glass window, and suddenly, a deformed creature was on top of her, its flesh translucent and sticking against her with a thin, mucus-thick film. Jeez, what a time to glitch out.
By all intents and purposes, Nat was probably going to die.
A maniacal laugh trickled out of her throat but it sounded more like a wheeze with the zombie’s weight on her. She’d somehow managed to keep her elbow between the creature and her neck, its jaw dislocated beyond that of a normal human’s as it snapped at her. At the last second, she kicked against the zombie's dripping body with both feet and raised her sword, a set of motions that sent the creature up a foot before it threw itself fully at her, its neck falling onto the sword as if a stake. She used the momentum of the fall to slice its head clean off and jumped back to her feet as the other two monsters set their eyes out for Val.