He'd been marching alone that goddamn road for the last two weeks, and God help him, his feet were killing him.
Cole adjusted his bandana on his neck and spat a little chunk of phlegm out of his mouth, shouldering his FN SCAR and continuing his trek down the blisteringly hot Alabama backroad. His worn, slightly patched fatigues weighed on him like lead, despite only weighing a couple of pounds, at most; the British Union Jack stuck out proudly on his shoulders. He muttered angrily under his breath.
"Bloody Alabama, with its bloody stupid heat and its bloody stupid moisture and its BLOODY FUCKING STUPID UNPAVED BULLSHIT ROADS!"
He kicked the dirt next to him as he screamed, exposing a leering skull in the dirt. He shouted in dismay and fell over, tripping over the carbine at his hip and landing in the grass. Getting up again, he looked it over. Bleached bone greeted his questing eyes, tainted with the infection of time and the elements. "Fuck," he whispered to himself.
He glared around the environment, and enterred a quick, bitter revery.
"Look at yourself, mate," he thought. "You're thousands of miles from home, in some fuckin' Yank HELL-HOLE!,with nothing more than a bloody rifle with two extra mags and a pair of bloody pistols for protection. Oh, and the SWORD." He snorted derisively at his own sarcasm, and laughed: the old basket-hilt claymore, a clan heirloom, had come in handy dozens of times so far. "Some way to start your service in the bloody Royal Marines, eh?"
He took a moment to check his supplies, and realized just how much he might need to rely on it from now on. His original estimate for his SCAR ammo was right on the money: one mag already set, with two more as backup; in other words, 150 rounds. He had only two shots left for the underslung grenade launcher, and maybe eight shells for his flare gun. He had half a dozen regular grenades left.
He was more fortunate than most, in that he managed to find two pistols. One of them was a good, old-fashioned Smith and Wesson revolver, capable of carrying 6 .357 rounds; he had roughly 42 rounds. His other pistol was a Bren Ten automatic, with a 12-round capacity; each round hit with almost as much force as a magnum. He had managed to wrangle up fifteen magazines for it, somehow, making it his primary weapon.
A strange crackling near his macabre friend in the grass drew his attention. He crawled over and found a box: no, not just any box, a radio.
A way to find home again.
He eagerly snatched it up, and flipped through the channels: his radio had been irrevocably damaged during the parachute drop into the danger zone. Despite only finding static, he was overjoyed, and tucked it into his sack: who knows when such a thing could come in handy?
His moment of joy froze when he saw the first one coming. A large Arabic man, possibly a body-builder in life. Behind him was a fat Caucasian man in a sheriff's uniform, as well as thirteen others. He calmly backed away and took a look at the tactical disposition of the staggering forms.
"Mob formation, relatively loose," He whispered to himself. "At least ten meters between each target." He unsheathed the sword and grinned ferally. "Looks like I won't need the guns."
His first slash sawed the top of the sheriff's head off, with his hat flying off and landing perfectly on a pole nearby. His second slash hacked a ragged line across the Arab man's neck, the still-snapping head sailing harmlessly over his shoulders, and lead perfectly into a follow-up move which hacked a zombie's arm from its body. He finished it off, and quickly butchered the rest.
He heard something new on the radio as he rested from his exploits, and quizzically picked it up and looked at it. Over one frequency he heard a young woman's voice, whispering is a terrified voice, "Hello? Is anyone alive out there? My name is Lizzie Chapui, and I'm a cheerleader at Alabama State. I-I got this radio off of a dead cop. I've got his... I've got his gun, but its magazine is short one round... He-he wasn't... Wasn't fully dead when we got there. He was... One of them. I'm currently in the university library, with my little sister and one of the football players. He's boarding up the windows and trying to check all the support strucures and stuff, he's got, like, a major in architecture, or something... He's got a shotgun, with a couple dozen shells, too... I'm taking chemistry and stuff, and I know how to work a radio, so I'm sending out this broadcast, and trying to make some sort of weapon..." The voice began to make choked sounds. "If someone's out there... Dear God, I'm so scared... They ate half my class right in front of me!.... God, if someone, ANYONE is out there, please come! We-we have enough food to last a group of a dozen at least a month, and we're more than willing to share- just please help us!"
Cole stood up, and slowly tucked the radio into his pack, pulling out his map instead. He bent over the map, studying it fastidiously, muttering to himself. "So, I'm somewhere around coordinates sixtythree-nineteen, and Alabama State's at about seventytwo-twentyfour," he mused, "So it'll take.... about two weeks, at best." He patted his pack. "Not a problem."
He tucked away the map, checked his weapons. He asked himself one final question before he set down the road, whistling "Scotland the Brave" 'neath his breath: "I wonder if this Yank girl's hot?"