Necrocide

Chapter 2

An hour later, Lieutenant Ratliff and his team had explored most of the buildings Longridge had to offer. They raided several abandoned pubs and a public library that still had all of its books in place. They only had to kill nine Deadmen so far, all of which were stuck behind the wooden fence of a ranch like cattle.

After killing a tenth Deadman, Ratliff and his group moved on. They walked down the street past a lonely neighborhood of rustic houses and stopped at an abandoned high school. Its main entrance was replaced with a large hole that looked like the result of a grenade. The rest of the building was still in fine shape and its size was big enough to invade the green space of the open field behind it.

"Are you planning on going in there, Lieutenant?" a female soldier asked.

"Of course, Pryor," he replied. "The DZI could use a spacious fortress like this." He then turned to the rest of the soldiers. "All right, lads! Let's explore!"

Ratliff, Pryor, and everyone else entered the building and journeyed down the hallway. The lights weakly flickered, accompanied by a clicking noise with every flicker. Bloodstains covered the wall, some of which looked like it had been purposely smudged all over it like a psychopath's sick idea of art.

"I thought Deadmen want to eat us, not decorate the walls with our innards," one of the soldiers spoke.

"It could've been a human," Pryor replied. "During the outbreaks, some of the bloodiest incidents were caused by the living."

Ratliff followed the trail of blood even when it turned at a corner. The trail kept thinning after a while, but its conspicuous, fading brown color kept their attention.

The DZI reached an intersection in the corridors. Two doors stood on opposite sides of the wall while the rest of the hall continued to the back of the school. The blood stopped in the middle of the left door, where it was messily splattered all over it like an inkblot.

"Holy hell," one of the soldiers said as he stared at the mess.

"What now, Lieutenant?" Pryor asked Ratliff.

Ratliff pulled out his assault rifle. "We split the squad down half and half. Danziger, you'll be leading the other half."

The other soldiers groaned in discontent.

"That's a terrible idea, Ratliff!" Danziger snapped. "If we split up, that'll make us easy prey, especially if there's an Abnormal around here."

"Bollocks," Ratliff said. "There hasn't been an Abnormal since the Spring-heeled Jack attacked during the reclamation of Chipping two years ago. And we killed the bastard anyway."

"All right then. Our funerals."

Danziger brought out his rifle, as did his half of the group, and they kicked through the doors, revealing the hidden room to be a gymnasium. The room itself was shrouded in darkness, but small beams of light entering from cracks in the ceiling revealed gore and mutilated corpses decorating the area like a Halloween attraction gone too far. Everything was morbidly soaked in red, and the smell of rotting flesh filled the room.

"That's fucking disgusting," he gagged. All of the soldiers covered their faces with their masks as they continued deep into the room.

Ratliff and the rest of his men put on their masks and entered the other room. While it wasn't as gruesome as the gym, it was still proof of the chaos that ensued in the past. All of the windows were shattered and some of the glass shards had bits of dry blood on their tips. Several decaying corpses laid peacefully on the floor, but lucky for the DZI each one had a gun wound in their skulls to prevent them from turning. It didn't help that most of the corpses were probably teenagers; to make things more depressing, two of the bodies were a young couple embracing each other with single gun wounds on their heads.