Primal Fear

My team and I are on the road again, or we will be in a few minutes as we pack up camp. We left Black Mesa last night and put as much distance between us and it as possible. Call it a hundred and fifty miles. We were the last ones to leave, not long after the last caravan went through the gates. Whatever happens to those kids and their teachers now is in god's hands. I hope he's gentle with them.

Reports are being shared among every survivor who can get them about the widening spread of the new strain of zombie mutation. From what I've read, it looks like the second generation of the mutations have all mixed together into one. People in Sparta report that tagged zombies, ones they marked with spray paint to observe, have been infected by the new strain. Worse, they have infected others, and the transmission rate is...total. The tagged zombies have passed on the improved intelligence, toughness, and the rest to every other they've come in contact with.

The good news is that for now, the zombie population is thinning itself, and aren't attacking us in large numbers. Us as in human beings, by the way. The bad news is that the ones eating the others are getting crazy strong and better fed than they've been pretty much ever, which means we're potentially fucked to a degree the English language doesn't have a scale for.

Still, my team and I had some fun with the zombies at Black Mesa before we left.

We made sure the fuckers could see my team. They learned their lesson about attacking high ground with a large number of people on it, but when it was just the six of us, they decided we were easy prey. God knows we tried to make it obvious enough. They might be smart and are probably getting smarter, but the undead have yet to learn to be properly suspicious of human beings. We're grudge-bearing assholes toward things that kill us.

There we were, sitting around a camp fire. Pretty much every structure and piece of equipment was gone except our truck and trailer, broken down for parts and taken with the caravans. Black Mesa's gate was still up, but left ever so slightly open.

The six people on my team, including me, sat around the fire in our heavy armor. It took about half an hour for the zombies to come for us. That whole thing where they work together meant that more than a hundred of them eventually walked through the front gate to get us, one huge mass to tear us apart. They surrounded us as we watched them, staying back about thirty feet until they completed their circle.

That was when Steve very casually threw a bunch of magnesium dust into the fire. The flare of light blinded the undead, and we piled into the back of the truck as Will jumped in the cab. Good thing he'd already started it. We plowed through them, heading toward the gate.

Just as we went through it, as the horde began to sweep closer to us, Mason made a call on my cell phone. Our portable cell transmitter was running.

The phone he called was wired up to ten gallons of propane and a stick of dynamite. Wrapped up in about a hundred pounds of gravel.

Boom.

The explosion leveled the zombies our truck hadn't yet pulverized, and set off the low piles of alcohol-soaked wood and fabric we'd left around the edge of the plateau. Rachel noted as she was blowing up the logs the other day that even smart zombies still have a deep aversion to fire. They're still terrified of it. The flaming ring on the plateau drove the few remaining undead toward us, and we didn't give them a fair fight as we stopped the truck. Becky hit the fleeing zombies as they bunched up at the gate with the last few sticks of dynamite.

We may not have killed all of them. We're okay with that. If this new breed can learn things, then I think the experience has given them a new piece of information to assimilate.

Human beings are just as dangerous as fire.