Chapter 6:
While looking over his shoulder, Clark looked back to the pile of bronze tickets that he had and the two extras he got as soon as he and Carley left the parking lot.
[Bronze Ticket Acquired.]
|Allergic Reaction — You have become enemies with a main cast!|
Again, Clark clenched his teeth in annoyance, his lottery power treating all of this as some show or game, but he didn't curse it off. Mainly because these things were his ticket- pun unintended- to survival.
[Bronze Ticket Acquired.]
|Destination — You have reached-|
Clark ignored it, counting seven bronze tickets now. After letting go of Carley, he planned to use them all in a quiet place.
"What's your plan after this?" The woman asked as they sneaked away from the motel, making sure no ghouls saw them.
Clark thought to keep quiet, but he yearned to speak his mind a little. And who else but the woman who nursed him for a day and night? At least, that's what he told himself.
"Go south of Macon, search my families'-"
"Your parents?" She cut him off, silencing Clark for a moment at the bad memory, but shook his head, leading Carley instead of the other way around. He wanted to ask when their position changes.
"My uncles and aunts…" He whispered, looking behind them to see two shadows dodge behind a corner. "They live close to each other."
"I see… I'm sorry for your loss." Carley told him, and he gave her a sad smile, "Thanks." Again, he led them away in silence. "We could help you." She offered.
Clark wanted to accept it; he really did. But remembering the state their group was in, the lack of leadership and support amongst each other, even in front of a stranger… The group would collapse no matter what. It was only a matter of time.
And that's exactly what Clark told Carley, word for word. "It's best you take whoever you really care about and get out of there."
"You don't know us-" She tried, but Clark shrugged. "I don't have to. I've seen plenty of dynamics in groups. Yours is simply dysfunctional."
"When the time comes for you to face real problems, most- if not all of you will die," Clark warned her, remembering the ten-year-old boy in the RV in the arms of his mother.
"Bandits, a horde of roaming corpses, or even new survivors wanting to join you-" Clark listed one after another, "If you face any of them, your group will collapse."
Carley was quiet for a long moment.
Not the quiet of someone who had nothing to say. The quiet of someone turning something over and not liking the shape of it once they did. "How old are you?" She finally asked a question out of left field that surprised Clark.
After rounding another corner and seeing the figures- familiar faces following them, he stopped after taking a few steps. The alleyway seemed clear enough, and this was as far as he would go with her.
"Why?"
"Humor me, please?" She asked, and Clark sighed, enjoying the act of talking with someone who wasn't dying or wasn't trying to kill him.
"Seventeen." He saw her nod in bitterness for a moment.
"How many people have you killed?" She finally asked, and Clark exhaled in sadness. "Directly, no more than five."
"Indirectly?"
…
"... I once led a horde of ghouls into a group of twenty. And did it at least three times more." He told her, seeing her eyes widen in surprise, and then was alarmed when she figured she was alone with that kind of man.
"They were bandits. All of them." He helpfully explained and then nodded off. "This is where we part ways."
Clark lowered the Glock fully and holstered it.
She let out a breath she didn't know she was holding.
"Thank you," he said, for the second time to her, and it came out just as stripped as the first. He was starting to think that was just what gratitude sounded like when you'd spent weeks alone. Raw and a little graceless.
Carley didn't move immediately.
She stood in the mouth of the alley and looked at him the way she'd looked at him at the motel room.
"You're going to die out there," she said. Not in a cruel manner. Just factual, the way she'd said everything else, or the way someone would say the sky's blue.
"Probably." He adjusted the strap of his hiking backpack. "But it's all I have."
She made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh. Somewhere between tired and something else he couldn't name. "We can go back-" she tried, wondering why she was even doing it in the first place. "You can rest to recover. I'll handle Larry-"
"No…" Clark smiled at her, the first gentle smile he's ever given anyone since his parents' blood on his hands. "I can't go back there. You know it. But thank you. Truly. For taking care of me." Her words died in her throat as her fists clenched hard, her insides burning as her blurry eyes stayed on the sunken cheeks and dead eyes of a boy.
A kid.
"Goodbye." He told her, turning to walk away.
A step, then two. The distant sound of something… Movement, shuffling, two streets over at least — made her go still, and when she looked back, she saw Kenny and Lee poorly sneaking towards her. She signed for them to stop, which they obeyed.
Carley reached into her camera bag.
"Wait."
Clark's hand moved toward his hip, but he still did as she said and turned. She saw it and kept her motion slow and deliberate, pulling out something small. A cloth-wrapped bundle, barely the size of a fist.
She held it out.
He didn't take it immediately.
"It's food," she said. A beat. "Please, take it."
Clark took it. Unwrapped the corner just enough to confirm- hard cheese, a few crackers, what looked like a strip of dried meat- and wrapped it back up. He tucked it into his front pocket, where he could reach it without opening the bag.
"... I don't know what to say." He whispered, because what else could he say? The words 'thank you' had a limit until they became meaningless.
But she surprised him, "I want you to return to the motel-" He frowned, about to return the gift- "After you've checked up on your family. You can bring them too." Both could hear the words left unsaid. 'If they survived.'
"I can't promise that. But I'll try." He nodded. "That's fine with me." She nodded.
Without waiting for anything else, he distanced himself and walked away from her, intending to walk another three hours at least to reach the neighborhood of his cousins.
He didn't look back.
He'd learned that looking back was a habit that cost you things you couldn't get refunded. Time, mostly. Focus. The particular kind of momentum that kept your legs moving when your body was filing complaints.
He looked back anyway, just once, at the mouth of the alley.
Carley was still standing there. She raised a hand, not quite a wave, but still a wave, as the two familiar men from her group reached her, both looking at him with her.
He turned back around and kept walking.
After half an hour of sneaking around the alleyways and dodging hordes, Clark finally judged that it was time to turn his attention to his lottery power. He climbed a fire escape as quietly as possible until he reached the roof of the building.
Especially at the notification he received of a new feature.
[Auto-Fusion Active.]
|You have accumulated 5 or more tickets of the same rank. 5 Bronze Tickets have been fused into 1 Silver Ticket.|
Clark read it twice, then looked at his mental inventory. Seven bronze had become two bronze and one silver, sitting alongside the silver tickets he'd accumulated before.
Huh.
Efficient, at least. Whatever this system was, it apparently had opinions about hoarding.
[Novice Performance]
|Common Skill|
You know how to put in a performance. You are able to play all musical instruments enough to play basic songs, you can also sing decently, and you can dance without tripping. You would fit right in with a high school band.
He could feel his body and brain and biography change a little as he seemed to learn the skill in a matter of seconds, making him shiver as his instinct warned him that something weird was happening to him.
Clark stared at the notification for a long moment.
Then he looked at his hands. His scarred, ring-wearing, pipe-wielding, ghoul-splitting hands.
"...A high school band." He said it out loud because sometimes things needed to be said out loud to confirm that they were, in fact, real and not a symptom of starvation-induced brain damage.
He sat with that for a second.
The apocalypse had taken his parents, his future, his university acceptance, and approximately fifteen pounds of body weight. In return, it had given him the ability to play basic songs on instruments he didn't own, in a world where electricity was a memory and audiences were either dead or trying to eat him.
He filed it under the Ancient Fruit Wine drawer in his head. The drawer labeled theoretically useful in a world that no longer exists.
"Thanks." He told the system flatly, rolling the second bronze ticket:
[Soylent Green]
|Trash Item|
Soylent Green - A tin of Soylent Green, it is not appetizing, but it is nutritious enough not to let you starve; the taste generally varies from person to person. Restock Timer: 1 Hour
Clark stared at the notification.
He read it once.
Twice.
A third time, the way he'd read the Named notifications that morning- methodically, making sure the words were the words and not something his brain had autocorrected into something more reasonable.
They were the words.
He sat very still on the roof of that building in Macon, the distant sound of ghouls two streets over, the gray morning sky above him, Carley's bundle of hard cheese and crackers sitting in his front pocket, and he just… sat there.
And then something happened to Clark Rogers' face that hadn't happened in two and a half weeks.
He laughed.
Not the quiet, controlled exhale he'd been using as a laugh substitute to avoid drawing attention. Not the sad, tired sound that came out sometimes when the system handed him a wine bottle or a candy that tasted like industrial rust.
A real one. Short and sudden and slightly unhinged, the kind that surprised him on the way out, and he immediately slapped a hand over his mouth and killed it before it could carry.
His shoulders were still shaking.
He looked at the notification again, just to make sure it hadn't changed while he wasn't looking.
It hadn't.
He wanted to stand up. Every instinct in his body wanted him to get to his feet, wanted his legs to move, wanted him to do something with the energy that had just detonated somewhere behind his sternum, because this- this was…
His legs didn't cooperate.
He tried. He genuinely tried, planting one hand on the rooftop and pushing, and his arms shook with the effort, and his vision swam just slightly at the edges, and he made it approximately six inches off the roof before his body filed a very firm objection.
He sat back down.
His hands were trembling, but not the hollow, starvation-empty tremble from before. This was something different. Something warm.
Clark pressed the back of his wrist against his mouth and stared out at the rooftops of Macon, at the smoke rising somewhere north, at the sky that was the same gray it had been every morning for weeks, and felt something shift in his chest that he didn't have an immediate word for.
He'd figure out the word later and wiped the happy tears off his face.
The tin was filled to the brim with something green and viscous. Not the paste-like, peanut butter consistency he'd half-expected from the label. Liquid. Thin enough to pour, thick enough to coat. It caught the gray morning light in a way that was genuinely unsettling, the surface of it perfectly still, like it was waiting.
Clark stared at it.
It stared back.
He dipped a cracker in experimentally, pulled it out, and watched a thin string of green follow it up before snapping. He put a small piece of hard cheese on top, because at this point he was either committing or he wasn't, and put the whole thing in his mouth.
The cracker was good. Dry and hard in the way that reminded him his jaw still worked, and the cheese was sharp and real and present.
And then the Soylent Green hit the back of his throat.
Clark's entire face moved in a direction faces weren't supposed to move.
It wasn't bad in a simple way. It wasn't rotten or spoiled or the industrial rust of the Scrap Iron Candy. It was the particular, committed awfulness of something that had clearly been engineered by someone who understood nutrition completely and flavor not even a little. Like drinking a salad. Or mixing ketchup, mustard, and someone threw cake in there for giggles.
He swallowed it because his body needed it, and his body didn't care about his opinions.
He sat there for a moment, blinking at the middle distance.
"Hm." He said.
He saved the crackers and cheese and the little bit of meat Carley gave him.
Instead, he chugged the entire tin of Soylent Green.
—-------------------------------
He didn't vomit.
Oh, he really wanted to, but he couldn't afford it. Instead, as noon began, he focused on the last ticket he had-
The role stopped on:
[Charm of Eclipse]
|Rare Item|
Hota - A mystical charm that emits an aura that causes people around the user to suffer from magical interference, reducing their magical capabilities.
"HUH?!" He let out in surprise-
[Reroll due to no existence of magical capabilities.]
His system stopped his panics before he could go on with it. But he pushed through, something that he was seamlessly learning to do before he could overthink his brain. Overthinking was one of the worst things that you could do in a survival situation.
[Novice Cooking]
|Common Skill|
You are a novice in the culinary arts, you can cook most basic meals, and they will taste good. But don't expect to get a job as a chef. You will, however, improve much faster than other people if you choose to train yourself.
'Oh…' He couldn't help but let out a disappointed sigh. The skill, as it was jammed into him, while useful for survival and boosting morale, was useless in his current situation. The food situation was taken care of by simply drinking the Soylent Green every few hours.
Still, he didn't place it as something completely useless.
…
…
…
The neighborhood was quiet in the way that meant it had been quiet for a long time.
Not the held-breath quiet of a place waiting for something to happen, because it seemed that that had happened a long time ago, and Clark was just there to see the aftermath.
Clark stood at the corner of the street where his Uncle David's family lived and looked at it for a long moment before he moved. The houses were the same houses. Same driveways, same mailboxes, same overgrown lawns that he'd seen everywhere after the outbreak.
The oak tree that his cousin Marcus had fallen out of at age nine and broken his wrist- Clark remembered the psychopath laugh instead of cry- was still there. Bigger than he remembered, or maybe he was just smaller the last time he'd stood under it.
He catalogued all of it.
Then he catalogued the other things.
The front door of his uncle's house was hanging open. The car in the driveway has the driver's side window broken from the inside. The shape moving in the front yard, slow and aimless, was wearing what had been a black polo shirt.
Clark stood at the corner and looked at the shape in the black polo shirt for a long time.
It turned, eventually, the way they all did, pulled by some broken compass that didn't point anywhere useful anymore. He saw its face.
He'd known.
He'd known before he turned the corner, probably.
He'd known since Atlanta, if he was being honest with himself, and he'd been choosing not to be honest with himself because he'd needed something to walk toward.
His jaw set.
He looked away from the yard and down the street, doing the inventory automatically, the way his brain had learned to do it, tallying shapes and movements and threat levels without him having to ask it to.
Three more in the street. One on a porch who belonged to his favorite aunt, as the body remained unanimated. Two bodies smaller than his that had gotten tangled in a neighbor's fence and hadn't worked out how to get free, and had apparently stopped trying.
His cousin Marcus wasn't in the yard.
He checked the windows and tapped.
Nothing moved behind them.
He didn't go inside.
Because it hurt…
It hurt so bad.
There was nothing inside that he could do anything about, and he knew that, and he stood at the corner of the street for another thirty seconds, making absolutely sure he knew that before he drew his pipe, swinging it at his uncle David, then at her wife, and their twin daughters. He wasn't done with them yet, but he needed to check on others.
One thing Clark never gave up on was hope.
Clark was begging for the rest of them to be alive. For Marcus to be alive.
Please…
…
…
…
Uncle Raymond's family was two streets down. He found them faster than he'd found the first, which was not an improvement.
The scene there was simpler and worse. No open doors, no movement. Just three figures on the pavement outside the house, long still, with the particular stillness that meant they'd been put down rather than wandered off. Someone had done that. Someone with a bat or a pipe or something heavy and desperate, and then that someone was also on the pavement a few feet further down, and Clark didn't look at the face.
He looked at it anyway.
He stood over it for a moment and said nothing because there was nothing to say, and then he kept walking.
…
…
…
His Aunt Patricia's house was at the end of a cul-de-sac, and he almost walked past the door before he saw the writing.
Someone had used a marker on a piece of cardboard and taped it to the front door at eye level, the letters large and deliberate for strangers or looters wanting to take or trade resources:
DO NOT GO DOWNSTAIRS. WE ARE BITTEN. WE ARE TURNING. DON'T COME IN.
Clark read it once.
He sat down on the front step.
He didn't mean to. His legs just stopped cooperating, the same way they had on the rooftop when he'd tried to stand up after the Soylent Green, except this time there was nothing warm behind it. He sat on the front step of his aunt's house with the cardboard sign at his eye level and his pipe across his knees, and he read it again.
The handwriting was his aunt's. He recognized the way she looped her y's, the particular slant of her capital letters, from birthday cards and grocery lists stuck to refrigerators and the inside covers of books she'd given him for birthdays.
He read it a third time.
Birthdays… Wasn't today his birthday…?
He stayed on the step for a long time. Long enough that the light shifted, gray to grayer, and a ghoul somewhere on the next street made a sound that his body flagged automatically and his brain ignored.
He was very tired.
Not the physical tiredness, although that was present as well. The other kind. The kind that had been accumulating since the outbreak, and the two minutes he had to hurriedly spend with his parents before the gun was placed in his hand and forced to make a decision.
He'd been moving too fast to feel properly, that had apparently decided that the front step of his aunt's house was a reasonable place to stop ignoring him. For a moment, he wished to have been bitten at the same time as his dad or mom.
His hands were in his lap. The rings caught what little light there was.
He let his head fall to the wall behind him and closed his eyes, tears marking his cheeks. He ignored the ghoul coming towards him now.
It didn't matter.
Nothing mattered anymore.
Everything he did, everything he went through.
He thought about his dad, the memories flashing one after another, teaching him how to ride a bike, sneaking to the theater from his mom, and it settled on the last time he saw him, the crystal clear look in his eyes. Not a trace of doubt or pain or hurt as he coughed out black blood.
The growling from the ghoul had gotten closer, but Clark moved through his memory, as he thought of his mom, with his mind pushing flashes of events that were too fast to track. But some of them were more important. Her cheering for him to do well at their new school after the move, how she'd wake him up when he was younger for school, and the food she used to make.
None of which he'd ever experience again as the ghoul grabbed his arm and shoulder, a bite on his shoulder-
'I am and will always be proud of you. I love you.'
'Promise me… Promise me that you'll take care of yourself!'
Their final words echoed louder than anything in his life, as a metal pipe was jammed on his cousin Marcus's maw. A twist of arms and body, Marcus was thrown on the drive-through. Clark spotted multiple bite marks on his arms, shoulders, and sides.
But he still moved and stood up to wrestle Clark down and submit him-
"No…" Clark stopped, forcing himself to look, forcing himself to the reality of the world.
There was no use in denying it. His cousin wasn't trying to wrestle him down like usual. Marcus was dead. The thing making his body move was trying to infect him as well.
"I'm sorry." He choked, the ghoul lunging at him. But the pipe swung, splitting and then smashing the head of a loved one.
He stood over Marcus for a long moment.
Then he went inside.
…
…
…
The backdoor was unlocked. His aunt had always left it unlocked, a habit his uncle Raymond used to argue with her about every summer when the family gathered, while her husband had given up on that topic with her, and she'd wave him off with the same hand she used to wave off everything that wasn't worth her energy, which was most things.
Clark pushed it open and stepped into the kitchen.
A memory.
His aunt's hands, flour-dusted, pressing dough flat on the counter, and then swatting at his head for spelling milk on the floor for pouring it hurriedly in his bowl before the cereal.
'What the heck are you doing?!'
…
…
…
The kitchen was dark. Someone had pulled the blinds before the end, or after the beginning, and the room sat in that specific, heavy stillness of a space that had been sealed against something and hadn't been opened since.
He moved through it without turning the lights on. Force of habit at this point.
The hallway was narrow, the same narrow it had always been, but it felt claustrophobic at that moment. The same framed photographs on the wall. He looked at the space between them, at the wallpaper, at the baseboard, at anything that wasn't a face he recognized.
His feet knew the layout. Fourteen years of summers had put it somewhere below conscious memory, in the part of him that knew without deciding.
He moved through the hall until he found their entire family's picture. Except for his mother's side of the family, since they lived in an entirely different country. In the picture, he could still see her puffy eyes from crying at the gathering.
He touched the frame gently before moving downstairs, his pipe in his hand.
When he opened the door, the foul smell hit him hard, but there was no reaction on Clark's face.
He simply walked down the stairs as bodies, two adults, one child, stood up, moaning and groaning.
'Why'd you hit me!'
The pipe was swung-
'You put the cereal before the milk, doofus!'
And the child was the first one to have her head split in two.
'Knock it off, you two!'
Then the woman, who Clark regarded as his second mother.
'Daaad! Clark hit me!'
Then the man, who dotted on both of them.
'Clark, what'd I say about hitting my baby girl?'
He stayed in front of the bodies, tears running down his face as he tried to stop them, but it wouldn't. Why didn't he just die back at the highway?
Just… Why!
'I didn't!'
…
…
…
He pulled the shed door open.
Garden tools. The usual collection of a man who kept meaning to do more with his yard- a rusted trowel, a leaf blower that hadn't worked since the previous owner, and an old push mower with a broken handle.
And a shovel.
Clark took it.
He didn't think about why. He didn't need to. His hands already knew what they were doing, the same way they'd learned to check windows, clear rooms, test floorboards. His body had gotten very good at moving without waiting for his brain to catch up.
He walked back out into the yard and found the first patch of soft earth near the fence where the grass had always grown thinner, his aunt's failed attempt at a garden that had lasted one season. He put the blade to the ground.
He started to dig. Because he had nothing to do.
But bury all his loved ones at their own homes.
—-----------------------------------------
[Gold Ticket Acquired.]
|Everything's Going to Be Okay —- Find something worth surviving for, and survive for it.|
============================
AN: I hope this chapter was gut wrenching to all, if not most of you.
I'm a sensitive guy, so the scenes I had in my head, they made me tear up a little as if I watching a movie.
Hopefully, I am a decent enough writing to show what I envisioned.
Also, I am sorry if its too angst for you. But I had to go there cause you know...
The last ticket there is because i didn't want to ruin the flow of the story or the feel of it. But that's what Clark earned after finding his family after everything. I assigned it gold due to everything that led up to it. His long journey and being able to find them.
As some of you mentioned, II am now using TWD games, Nine sols, Fallout 4, and finally Crush Crush achievements. I don't know much about the other 3 games and still am going through the list of achievements and their titles and descriptions. But I thank you all for helping me out with the feat system.
I can't promise that it's going to be perfect, but I'll try my best to make it decent.