Human Nature (Book 4): Human Nature IV by Borthwick, Finlay (book recommendations website .TXT) 📗

“Hear what?” Gwen, presumably still tending to Adela in the hotel, answered back.

“I don’t know—It sounded like a gunshot.” Rob was evidently close enough by for him to have heard Marianne’s assassination of her own friend.

“I’m still in the watchtower,” Annabelle called in, “I didn’t see nor hear anything. Where are you, Rob?”

“Michelle and I were just checking out this old school in the rough part of the safe zone,” As he said this, Marianne quickly panicked, for it turned out that people were much closer by than she had anticipated.

After quickly switching her radio off, and taking a few deep breaths to keep her composure, she grabbed Emile’s corpse by the legs and dragged him into the restaurant behind her.

Mere minutes later, Michelle and Rob came trundling down the street where the murder had recently happened; though they had stopped only a quarter of the way in, which was quite far from the pizza restaurant.

“Crikey, that gives me the creeps.” Rob remarked as he looked down the street; it was even more decaying and dilapidated than the rest of the untreated areas within the safe zone.

“Let’s try this way,” Michelle nodded towards the perpendicular street, “Come on.”

As the two of them cluelessly ran off, they would never know that they were just ten seconds away from a large pool of blood that stretched out into a trail that led inside the seemingly innocent yet eerie-looking pizza place…

Interlude

Every survivor has a tale to tell.

For some of them, it’s a dark secret from their past. For others, it’s how desperate they became to stay alive in the depths of the apocalypse. For a few, it’s the conflict that arose after the exposal of several home truths.

Now, we take a look at what exactly these tales are some of our struggling survivors…

Chapter 21: Left Behind

EUROPE

OCTOBER 2029

“Dad! Taylor!” Natalie cried out in desperation; along with several others who had initially stayed behind at the refugee camp, she had decided to moved out in search of any sign of what had happened to Xavier and Taylor.

“Over here!” One of the survivors cried out, having made a rather unfortunate discovery.

“Oh please, please don’t be.” Natalie’s eyes were wide in fear and anticipation as she ran towards where the voice was calling out from.

There were three or four other survivors huddle around whatever their distressed ally had found.

“Move! Please!” Natalie barged them out of the way as she fought towards the front of the small crowd.

Then, her wide and frightful eyes quickly produced tears, the rest of her face depressing into remorse as they did so.

“I’m—Natalie, I’m so sorry.” A fellow survivor from the camp rubbed her back to comfort her as he expressed his condolences.

“Dad…” Natalie was absolutely heartbroken to see the decaying corpses of both her father, Xavier, and her friend, Taylor, decaying on the roadside with flies hovering around their rotten flesh.

“It appears there was a struggle,” the man comforting Natalie informed her, “They certainly didn’t go down without a fight, if that makes you feel any better.” He clearly did not understand sympathy, as this was of no consolation to Natalie whatsoever.

As she continued to stare at the bodies, she noticed that both of them had several stab wounds with dried out blood riddled up and down their torsos.

“Who would—Who would do—Such a thing?” Natalie stammered as her lips quivered with grief.

The survivor shrugged, “Somebody without a heart, I should imagine.”

But little did either of them know that the people responsible for these deaths were the same robed cultists that had erected the crucifixes outside of the refugee camp…

OCTOBER 2030

It had been a year since Elliot rallied a blood-thirsty group and left for Prague with nothing but vengeance on their minds; the same mission that resulted in the death of her father and her best friend.

In the year that had passed, poor Natalie had been left all alone.

The few survivors that were left at the refugee camp had all soon departed, feeling too sickened and depressed by the memories of the six crucifixes.

Not long after everybody else had taken their leave, however, Natalie herself had packed up and left the refugee camp behind; headed in the opposite direction from Prague, vowing to leave her old life behind instead.

Currently, she found herself making a long and perilous trek through the dead and desolate woods of Germany and on her way towards France.

Occasionally, when the overgrowth was too much, she would have to use the roads to make progress with her journey. However, she tried to avoid doing this as much as she could, for every time she saw a roadside, she would remember the rotten corpse of her father lying down in front of her.

Natalie had spent the past year of her lonesome journey thinking, dreaming, and daydreaming about the same thing: What happened to everyone who headed for Prague? She had assumed the worst for all of them after the discovery of Xavier and Taylor’s bodies, but had also quickly gone back on this assumption, as no more of her allies had shown up dead in her path since that fateful day.

A part of her wondered if, perhaps, Elliot’s vendetta was actually successful, and the reason why he and the others never came back was because they, like Natalie, wanted to move on from the past.

Another part of her thought the opposite to be true; that Elliot’s vendetta had failed, and everybody had been killed, which seemed far more likely to her, though she refused to let his thought control her mind as best as she could.

There was even a small part of her that thought it possible her father was not actually dead, but rather, in her desperation to find him, her mind had just hallucinated