Ch. 6 Progress and Finish Line in Sight

AN:

First warning of the Fanfic! There is a touchy subject so you have been warned.

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Lucas opens the door and looks inside. He immediately wants to slam the door shut but knows he needs to kill the 4 walkers inside.

He sees what used to be a female and 3 males. But what made him want to close the door and walk away was the fact that the woman walker was naked and her arm was broken.

Lucas didn't want to jump to conclusions but the fact that the males had their pants below their ankles made one theory stick out. He didn't want to say it was rape, but it was kinda hard to say otherwise. He sees that the woman's face is slightly bashed in and broken. And that one man's hand has a bite mark. Another one has a big chunk missing from his neck. And the last male has some missing fingers.

As the walkers shuffle towards him he sees that this room is bigger than he expected and looks to be the filing and supply room.

The walker with less finger is the closest, so Lucas waits until it gets to the door to limit how many can attack him at once. It's better to be cautious even if he can kill them relatively easily.

The walkers funnel through the doorway, but not nicely. The walker with a chunk of neck missing tries to pass the other and they both end up coming through.

Lucas steps back and throws his knife and it goes through the eye of the walker with less fingers. And when it falls to the ground the knife is driven even deeper.

He then takes out a longer knife to replace the one he threw and holds it in a reverse grip in his right hand.

Lucas brings the knife in his right hand up above his head and brings it down on the top of the walkers head that has a chunk of his neck missing.

As the walker slumps to the ground it falls off the knife.

Now with the bodies on the ground, Lucas has to be careful. It'd be bad if he trips and falls.

The female walker stumbles through the doorway with one heel broken. Lucas pushes through his thoughts and forces his body to bring the knife in his left hand through her temple. No, its temple.

The walker falls to the floor and Lucas has to bring his left leg out of its path towards the ground.

The final walker is right in front of Lucas.

Lucas brings his left foot forward and kicks its kneecap in. A sickening crack and pop sound comes from the knee of the walker.

It groans and tries to grab at him as it falls towards him but mostly to the side since it can't stand.

Lucas brings the knife in his left hand up like he's uppercutting and catches the skull of the walker on the blade. He slowly drops the body to the ground and takes his blade from the skull of the walker. He then wipes his blades clean on the clothing of one of the previous walker's clothes since the newly dead walkers had few clothes on.

Lucas tried to ignore the nearly naked corpses and moves to the second room.

It looks to be part office with chairs and desks with filing cabinets along the walls to the left while the right has some shelves that are locked with a glass window to allow view of the medications but not the ability to just grab them.

He taps them and knows that they are reinforced plexiglass. It won't shatter and the hinges are on the inside. And the material of the shelves and case are also a pain to break. It seems this place had problems with people stealing medications in the past because this is some heavy duty security.

Lucas takes his pack off and pulls out his lockpicking toolkit. It's a bunch of metal tools that are thin and have various tips. Kinda like the tools dentists use to clean teeth but even skinnier. But still strong enough not to break in the lock.

He inspects the metal locks on each of the shelves. Hopefully each one uses the same key so he can quickly make his way through them instead of picking over 25 unique locks.

Because while he was decent, he still wasn't as good as Holly. She was the person in his original unit that could pick a lock by just blowing on it a certain way. While a bit exaggerated, she could make quick work of any lock even with a bobby pin and screwdriver or similar items. Funny thing is that she had this skill before she joined the unit so she was able to spend her training time to learn stealth techniques and etiquette, as well as infiltration tactics. Which she also taught the others as part of their agreement to pool their learnings together.

Lucas considers snooping through the filing cabinets but decides against it. While he likes his fair share of poking his nose where it doesn't belong, he doesn't have the time for that. Mainly because he has all this medicine and medical supplies to transport.

He gets to work on fiddling with the locks after he made sure that he was safe. There were three more doors but he guesses they just lead to the halls further in the building.

Lucas just focuses on unlocking the shelves instead of unlocking one, shoving the goodies in a bag, and then moving to the next one.

Luckily it seemed that the locks didn't vary much. So he was able to unlock all of them fairly quickly within a half hour. Which considering the number of locks, it was a feat he is proud of.

Lucas considers just taking these things and start making trips to his truck and back, but he considers clearing this place first. Mainly because the supply storage for this place would be great. There should be plenty of cleaning supplies, toilet paper, regular paper, and other things one would overlook when looting a medical facility. It's not just a good place to find medicine but also other things.

Lucas goes back to the front sliding doors and closes them quietly. Then he makes his way through the building. He kills a few walkers along the way, some were in rooms. And others were wandering the hall. He'd rather go to them than get swarmed by making them come to him.

It was tedious, but he was able to kill all the walkers, or at least what he thinks is all the walkers. He also went back and got his knife he left in the eye socket of a walker.

When he was finished clearing this floor he went back to the lobby and sat in a clean seat. He took his lunch out from his backpack and began eating. He wasn't hungry, and the smell in this place certainly didn't help his appetite. But he was burning calories and was able to keep the food down. It wasn't fancy. A fruit cup, pb&j sandwich, and a small bag of chips he found, and some water.

After his meal Lucas decided that it was time to start shoving things in bags. He first went to the unlocked shelves of medicine and other things they had locked up in that room. He still didn't bother opening the filing cabinets.

He put the full bags over by the entrance and then went through the various rooms. These rooms were just places for the patients to sit in and wait until they get patched up. So there were various things and tools. Such as bandages, cotton swabs, bandaids, rubbing alcohol, and other things that would be of use.

After he cleared the rooms he goes to the storage room and cleans it. Not literally, he just takes all the things that could have cleaned it.

Lucas looks at the many bags and scratches his head. "How the fuck am I gonna get these out of the city?"

Lucas can carry 3 over his shoulder. With only three he would allow still have an open hand and could still run without a hinderance depending on the contents of the bags he is carrying.

But instead of taking them right now he chooses to go to his parent's apartment. The supplies could wait, and he was much closer than he had expected to get for his first time. He was only 4 blocks away.

Lucas exits the urgent care and continues onwards towards his goal. He stealthily makes his way through alleys and across a few roofs when the streets were absolutely swarmed.

Yeah, hundreds of walkers were grouped up at some parts. It made Lucas feel kinda….. hopeless. But he pushed that to the side where all the other feelings he didn't want to feel are. He would have swept them under the carpet, but that wasn't an option a long time ago. He wouldn't be able to even cover them with any carpet, so to the corner they go.

He looks at the street below and sees a decent number of walkers. It was more than he could handle even if he wanted to, which he didn't. Maybe 50 walkers that he could see.

Lucas takes an empty bottle he picked up off the street previously and brings his arm back. He shuffles forward and throws the glass bottle as hard as he could down the street.

This would confirm his theory or it would prove it wrong. But he was 90% confident that the walkers would leave towards the sound.

The bottle goes soaring through the air. Lucas doesn't waste any time and runs towards the fire escape of the building he is on. He begins making his way down and skips some steps to quicken his pace. But he makes sure to be quiet, well, as quiet as a person could be as he runs down the metal stairs.

About a quarter of the way down he hears the bottle shatter, or he thinks so. It was decently far away so it could have been something else. But he looks down below him and sees about 5 walkers looking up at him. He can deal with these much easier than the 50 in the street.

When he makes it down to the alley he swiftly takes care of the walkers. Lucas puts his back against the building his parents and brother might be inside and peeks around the corner of it.

The street wasn't clear but the walkers were making their way away from him towards where the bottle was thrown.

Lucas gets ready. And then he takes off running towards the doors to the apartment complex. He manages to get to the doors and opens them. He looks inside and doesn't see anything, which is a decent sign.

He gets inside and closes the doors. Lucas takes a chain and wraps it around the handles and locks it. It wasn't the quietest, but it was fast enough enough to not matter. At least with the walkers outside…

Lucas could hear groaning and the raspy breathing of walkers inside now. But they were muffled, like they were far away and possibly behind a door.

He sees the mailboxes for the apartments along the left wall and to the right there is an empty desk. Going straight he sees a sort of lounge area for the building. To the right there are the bathrooms and stairs, but to the left there are more stairs and some elevators.

"Here we go" Lucas begins walking forward. When he enter the lounge he looks around but doesn't see any walkers. He can still hear the, but now they sound like they're coming from the bathrooms and the elevators.

He can see that the elevator is broken and won't fully open or fully close. Some fingers can be seen trying to escape it.

"Guess I wasn't as quiet as I had hoped" Lucas mutters. He goes to the bathrooms and pulls out a knife. As he tries to push the door open he. Prices it's been tied to the other bathroom door to keep both shut and not be able to open.

This means that somebody is alive and had trapped the walkers inside. Or somebody had a really shot day with a prank gone wrong right as the apocalypse was going down.

He looks at the rope that has the door handles tied together. It wasn't worth trying to salvage it. But he'd rather not have an unknown number of walkers pour out from the public bathrooms to attack him.

There weren't a lot of options to stop them from opening. He doesn't know why they even bothered with handles, it was a push to open door and didn't even have a latch to slide shit into.

Lucas decides to just open it. Walkers haven't proven to be smart enough to open doors anyway. He hasn't studied them like he could have, but from what he's seen they are basic bitches that are like toddlers.

He uses his knife to cut through the rope and it the now two separate parts go slack towards the ground.

Lucas tries to push the male door open but is met with something blocking it. He can sort of push it, but the things inside push back.

"FBI Open Up" Lucas loudly says, he always wanted to say that, even if it wasn't his specialty. He did raid a few places, but it was serious and he wasn't allowed to make jokes like that.

He kicks the door open and the door flings open, knocking whatever was holding it up over with a thud and a metal clanging sound.

Inside the bathroom on the tiled floor there were three walkers and a metal trash in that was moved near the door for some reason.

It was just a teenager and two kids. Lucas recognized the kid. He has forgotten his name, but he was friends with his brother. And the two kids were probably 5 or 6. And they looked like the teenager.

Well, the teenager looks like he was feasted upon. His thighs and stomach were torn open and the ground was covered in dried blood. And the kids looked like they enjoyed the flesh and blood as it was hanging from their disgusting mouths that were stained red and had pieces of flesh hanging from between their teeth.

They snarl and snap their jaws at Lucas as they crawl and try to get to their feet to get to Lucas. The kids looked ghastly as they reached forwards and opened and closed their hands. The teenager walker attempted to stand and somewhat succeeded, but it shuffled and stumbled significantly slower than the average walker and it nearly trips on its intestines and other internal organs that have been turned into outernal organs.

Lucas remembers a time when his unit was deployed over seas to help rescue some captured kids. Their parents already killed by a terrorist organization. His unit got there and was able to free the kids, but they were so skinny, and bruised... the ones that lived anyway…..

Lucas takes a step back and composes himself as he comes back to the moment as the kid walkers exit the bathroom and continue towards him.

Lucas plants his left foot into the one on the left and kicks it back. It falls into the teenagers mess of a thigh and a snap and crunch sound rings out as the femur is broken of the right leg.

The kid that wasn't kicked tries to grab his leg and revert back to an ankle biter but Lucas puts an end to it. He feels the knife hit the skull and then break through it. Then he feels it slide in past the skull and stab the brain of the unfortunate kid.

Lucas doesn't wait and takes his knife out of the skull and runs into the bathroom.

He pins the kid down with his left hand and stabs the knife in his right hand into its skull through its eye. Then he brings the blade up as he holds it's left arm to the side. He is practically straddling the teenager walker and stabs the side of its head and kills it. He stands up and backs away.

Just as he's about to back out of the bathroom he gets a feeling something is about to grab him.

Trusting his instincts he does a high round house kick. And when his foot makes contact with something it's the head of a female teenager walker.

The walker is knocked off balance and is sent through a ceramic sink that shatters due to the force.

Lucas places his foot back on the ground and sees that the ceramic sink had shattered into shards and chunks that scattered across the tiled and bloodied floor.

The young female walker tries to get up but it seems disoriented. It looks up at Lucas and it's tongue hangs out of its mouth. It's forehead is dented and collapsed in as blood begins trickling out from the wound. It's voice even sounds confused as it shakily reaches its right hand out at Lucas as it mindlessly tries to get to him.

Lucas just steps on her hand and then digs his heel into the already collapsed skull and finishes the job with a squish and crunch sound.

Lucas doesn't get time to recover from what he had just done as a girl walks into the room. She is around 12 years old, like Sophia.

He blinks twice and then lunges forward in stabs the walker through the top of its head.

Lucas frowns as he cautiously exits the bathroom. He sees the elevator hasn't changed, the hands still trying to open the stick doors. He then looks to his right and sees the female bathroom has been opened. He can tell because even if the door closes on its own, the rope was moved and is keeping it partially open.

"What in the actual fuck"