Chapter 5

Chapter 5 takes out over to Glenold, North Carolina to meet our last batch of characters before we start picking them off :)

Yuri felt bad for Daniel, but he was also disappointed in him.

Just about a year ago, Daniel’s mother and father had been killed in a terrible pile-up on the freeway outside of Glenold. It had been a ten-car pile-up, and his parents had been caught in the middle.

They had been killed instantly, pulverized into their seats like they were part of the car.

In some ways Yuri understood why Daniel had become a drunken mess. It was a horrible tragedy, and Yuri could hardly bear to imagine the same thing happening to his own parents, but he felt there would have been a better way to deal with the pain other than turning to alcohol.

Yuri worried about what his best friend had become. Daniel stayed out all night at the clubs, drinking and swapping spit with girls he’d never met before, and he thought it was all great fun.

If his parents knew what had happened to him after their death, they would have frowned upon him, and no doubt reprimanded him for the awful behavior.

Daniel wouldn’t listen to Yuri when he said he was killing himself. All he knew was that the alcohol made him forget.

All Yuri could do was follow what was left of his best friend and make sure he didn’t hurt himself, or get into any trouble he couldn’t handle by himself. It was hard for Yuri, though. Since becoming an alcoholic, Daniel’s old friends had left him, and he had replaced them with other sickly alcoholics that always seemed to be watching Yuri like they were planning something.

They knew Yuri didn’t drink, so they didn’t understand why he hung out with Daniel all the time, and they obviously didn’t like it. All too often they would try to separate the two friends, but Yuri would never let them. He couldn’t let Daniel be pulled fully into the alcoholic abyss. They been friends too long; it would be far too devastating.

Besides that, he’d have to move back in with his parents. He and Daniel split the rent of their shared apartment, and without Daniel’s drug-dealing income, Yuri couldn’t afford a place by himself.

He just didn’t know what to do. There didn’t seem to be any way to get Daniel sober. At this rate, he was going to die, and Yuri couldn’t do a thing about it.

Or his town’s impending doom.

***

Ray loved this town. It was perfect. It was like a mini San Francisco, complete with large population of drunken b******s that would have no idea what hit them.

It was like the perfect storm. No one would ever believe the stupid drunkards when they said they’d been attacked by a monster.

He smiled as he swigged his drink. The bar he now sat at was filled with noisy alcohol abusers, just asking for him to attack.

But he couldn’t yet. He had to wait until he couldn’t any longer. Wolf’s orders. He had to stay low, at least until the first infected attacked.

He couldn’t wait until the trucks come, though. It would be so…exciting.

Wolf had planned to release a single infected into each town a couple days after the Bloodthieves arrived, just to stir things up a bit; make people nervous, keep ‘em on their toes. Then the trucks would come and pour out the infected like a faucet.

That would be fun.

The best part would be that no one would ever realize how bad the situation was, or what it was coming to. After the Bloodthieves knocked out the power to their towns, the poor citizens would have no connections to the outside world. A week after the power outage, Wolf planned for Driftwood to drop his Necrosis Bombs across the largest cities of the world, sinking the world into a state of chaos and death.

With the majority of defensive forces turned to undead, mindless, creatures (what pop culture seemed to call ‘zombies’), and the infection spreading like water from a broken dam, the world would surely crumble, along with the populations sanity.

Thinking about the chaos made him fill to the brim with enthusiasm. He ordered another drink.

***

Yuri leaned up against the bar, quiet and depressed.

“You need a drink?” asked the bartender. Yuri shook his head, otherwise not answering. The bartender left him alone and moved on to a happy couple down at the end.

Ray looked over and saw the distressed boy. “What’s the matter, there, kid? Too much to drink or not enough?”

Yuri didn’t like talking to strangers. Not because of those old sayings, but because he wasn’t much of the social type since he’d started worrying about Daniel.

When he didn’t answer, the man kept talking.

“Not enough, obviously. Hey, bartender, get this kid a drink. I’ll pick it up.”

Yuri glared at the pushy man, finally speaking up. “Man, didn’t you just see that I didn’t want a drink?” He was annoyed now.

“Well you need one.”

The bartender arrived with a glass of beer, setting it down next to Yuri’s arm.

“I don’t want it,” Yuri told the bartender, who in turn looked over at Ray.

“Just leave it,” Ray said to him, dismissing the bartender.

“What do you want man?” Yuri asked, peeved.

“Nothing. You just looked like you needed a friend.”

“I don’t need one, especially in you.”

Ray was taken aback by the harshness in the young mans voice. The guy must have been having a terrible day.

Likewise, Yuri had never sounded so rude to someone before, but he didn’t care this time. The guy was a creep, and he wasn’t having a good day.

“Easy there, kid, I’m only looking to help you.”

It didn’t seem appropriate for this guy to be calling Yuri a kid. He must have been only in his twenties, himself.

“I don’t need any help.”

“I think that’s a lie.”

Yuri was getting hardcore pissed off now. “Alright, you wanna know what my problem is?” he growled. “My best friend’s parents died and now he’s a disgusting drunk who spends all his time with terrible people that he thinks are his friends and he doesn’t even listen to his real friends anymore, and I miss him. That’s my problem.”

“Alright, I see.”

“No, you don’t. I don’t see you having to follow your best friend around constantly just to make sure he doesn’t throw up on himself or end up in the garbage bin.”

The kid had a point; Ray had never had an alcoholic friend before.

Maybe he could help this ‘Daniel’ out of his misery.