"Man, people are stupid." Rainbow murmured through a mouthful of popcorn. "They could just get up and run away!"
"They don't even need to run." Sunset pointed out, picking apart a chocolate bar. "They could just speedwalk away, zombies are so slow to begin with!"
Twilight felt the need to add onto the never ending comments. "Really makes you wonder how the military is always failing to quarantine the outbreak," The nerdy girl tilted her head and watched as several soldiers in the movie retreated from a small group of undead, despite apparently having the upper hand in terms of firepower. "This movie just came out not three months ago! And I'm not too big an expert on Equestrian military technology, but even I know that they could have kept that outbreak contained."
"Like, seriously!" Pinkie flailed from her seat. "Look at those guys! They got all kinds of guns and stuff!"
"It's all a plot convenience," Sunset shrugged and leaned back. "How else would they have the world end? Realistically, we'd have the upper hand against them, they're slow and they shamble, have no coordination whatsoever, they're dumb! It's frustrating in these kind of movies."
Rainbow nodded along to it all. It was honestly silly, with all of the movies they watched that the military, despite being overwhelming in power, with thousands of soldiers and metric tons of advanced equipment at their disposal, they alongside millions of citizens are either killed or overrun by slow moving corpses with an easy enough weakness to exploit, and turned into the undead themselves.
"Man, if this happened in real life, we'd beat them, easy!" Rainbow snickered and tossed a few popcorn kernels at the screen. "They're slower than Tank for crying out loud!"
"That would be silly, Dashie!" Pinkie giggled and wobbled in her chair. "A zombie outbreak in real life? Pffft!"
"Even if that did happen," AJ looked over, "My family and I could hold them off on the farm," her voice was smug and absolute, a smirk growing on her face.
Everyone had a laugh about the idea. The undead becoming reality?
It was so silly of an idea...
It would never happen, right?
Right?
Everything going on outside told her otherwise.
Rainbow sat huddled up inside of the apartment building, her thoughts interrupted by the gunfire and screeching outside in the streets of Manehattan. Peeking out of the window of the room she took shelter in, she found the streets to still be in utter and rampant chaos, fires burned down other buildings and helicopters flew over attempting to pick up stray survivors on the rooftops, only to either be brought down by the monsters, or retreating due to the roofs being overrun before they could get there in time.
She clutched the handgun she had tightly, taking deep breaths to calm herself.
Manehattan was a mistake, she didn't know what she was thinking coming here.
"Damn it." The radio on her belt crackled with the messy sounds of a military channel being lit up with dozens of people contacting their superiors, reporting in barricades failing from too many infected, quarantines falling apart from similarly large numbers and too few staff, and unit positions being overrun completely. It wasn't reassuring, especially considering the local police precincts had already fallen...
It was both a good thing and a bad thing that the police had fallen as quickly as they did, she managed to get her hands on some equipment to help her make it this far. The handgun she scored was strange to get used to again, after so many years, but she adapted quickly for the sake of survival. The backpack was something from school, and held up pretty good so far; a MOLLE backpack that could be outfitted with an assortment of different addons. And the radio, which continued to crackle, her only means of keeping contact with any soul still alive in the city of Manehattan at the moment.
She wasn't sure where anyone had gone, the whole week had been chaotic for her and her friends and she still found it difficult to grasp onto the reality of the situation. Her hands trembled, and she peered out into the city streets from the fifth floor apartment she had hidden in.
The streets were a mess of construction equipment left behind, hastily constructed military and civilian barricades to stem the tide, and vehicles both crashed and stopped with few gaps to allow for quick travel. A helicopter passed overhead, and she heard the rumble from a couple of blocks down.
She steeled her nerves, and soon enough they came in one massive wave of flailing and screaming bodies. The air was deafened by the sound of so many voices, the ground shook from hundreds of stampeding feet tearing through the somehow narrow four lane street. Vehicles were crushed underfoot, and anything not bolted down or incredibly heavy was knocked aside or trampled by all of them. They flooded the road as they gave chase after the aircraft.
Rainbow couldn't stop herself from holding a hand over her mouth and staring in horror at the horde.
The honest to god zombies.
It was just a silly afterthought, the undead being real? How on earth could that even happen?! It was so unrealistic! And yet, right here, right in front of her, she was hiding in a room and watching through boarded up windows as a massive horde of bodies stormed through the street, creating such a deafening sound that caused every single nerve in her body to freeze up.
She honestly wanted to ball up and cry, and tell herself this was a horrible nightmare.
But she had already done that earlier in the week, when she got separated from her friends and was thrust into the worst time of her life. She had no choice but to abandon the search and hide, if only to get her bearings and try to figure out some kind of plan.
Rainbow was still working on that, if she was being honest with herself.
She pulled the magazine out of her handgun and looked it over again, and noted the full fifteen rounds she had to use. She took another look outside, at the hundreds if not thousands of undead stampeding through the street still, before disappearing a few blocks down in their hunt for human flesh.
More ammunition was required for survival.
Once things had quieted down 'relatively', she stood up and carefully peered out into the streets once again. There were no undead in sight, just a lot of blood, abandoned equipment, gear, vehicles, and so on. She could hear sirens in the distance, automatic gunfire, explosions, and even the scream of the horde that passed her by.
Aside from that, it was eerily silent.
Now was her chance to move if she wanted a chance at getting out of this city alive, and hopefully finding her friends. Rainbow wasn't sure where to even begin looking; Manehattan was a massive city, with an incredibly high population that only fueled the fires for the undead hordes cropping up. Millions of people, each one either getting devoured alive or added to the never ending wave of bodies that threatened the safety of the country.
A deep breath and she moved towards the front door of the apartment. She had to get moving, and hopefully with the radio on her back, she might be able to get some information or even contact some help. She wasn't sure.
The way out was clear once she exited the apartment and out into the hall, no blood, no bodies, no people. She still kept her guard up and started to move, flashlight turned on and handgun ready at her side. The radio was turned down to a more reasonable level, so as to not alert anyone or anything to her position as she moved.
Once Rainbow made it to the stairs, she slowed and aimed her gun.
When she made her escape to this building, there were more than a few bodies down in the lobby below. Perhaps failed attempts to get to safety, or just unlucky residents who were too curious for their own good. The way down was nerve wracking, and the blood stains on the wall and floor didn't help matters any.
The lobby was the same as when she entered, a scene out of a horror novel. The bodies, the blood, the shattered windows and busted down doors. What was once a fairly luxurious lobby for a nice apartment building had been turned into a slaughterhouse for the undead and unlucky souls within. Staff, residents, or just random citizens. She found the handgun in here, on a dead police officer who was kind enough not to lose it in the chaos.
She didn't see anyone or anything moving, no undead munching on the corpses. The smell, however, was still as intense as before, and made her nauseous. Somehow she had started to get used to it, and that made her feel horrible... used to the smell, the sight of pure unabashed carnage. Rainbow did her best not to focus on it, and instead rushed over to the front door and out int other streets.
Immediately she felt exposed, as if a thousand eyes were upon her the instant she set a foot out onto the bloodstained streets of Manehattan. The skyscrapers stood tall all around her, the clouds clouded over by black smoke as in the distance, many buildings burned in a desperate attempt by the military to burn the infected as well as any potential infectees to keep the infection from spreading. It didn't work from what she was seeing, as the entire city itself was in chaos.
Dozens of vehicles all around her had been abandoned, simple trucks and cars, luxury sports cars, police cars and public service vehicles; even some news vans had been set up and the recording equipment, abandoned by their recently deceased owners. Some of the roads had been blocked off by a few burning buses and large trucks, effectively cutting off travel for any survivors.
The undead however, knew no such thing.
Rainbow saw the same scene for several blocks in either direction, endless construction, barricades, abandoned vehicles, and half eaten corpses strewn about everywhere. Fires burned down entire buildings, people were still moving in the distance, and helicopters were flying to and from various points in the city, either evacuating survivors or airdropping in soldiers to try and fight off the infection.
The radio crackled on her shoulder, and she turned up the volume briefly.
"Attention all units! Attention all units! We have been given new orders! Evacuate the city at all costs! Whatever survivors are nearby and able, round them up and transport them to the Manehattan Stadium immediately! I repeat, all surviving military and civilian personal head to the Manehattan Stadium for evacuation! The city is lost!"
Rainbow's body shook at that. The situation was so bad that they had to retreat? She swallowed the iron lump in her throat until it slammed into the bottom of her gut, and she stared northward where the horde had gone. From what she remembered, the Manehattan Stadium was north in the city, near the city's center with all of the highest buildings and most of the city's influential and wealthy people. The stadium was probably the largest in terms of block size, it could hold a fair amount of people inside of it so it didn't surprise her that it'd be used as an evacuation point.
Maybe, if her friends had heard the same broadcast she did, maybe they'd be heading there as well?
She could certainly hope that was the case.
After making sure her handgun was loaded and ready to go, Rainbow steeled her nerves and made her way north, following the carnage left behind by hundreds of bystanders and military officials.
The street was so clogged, it made it difficult to traverse; all of the cars in her way, the bodies piled in body bags or left out from the horde devouring them, the random garbage and junk that added to the clutter. She saw a couple of humvees left behind, heavy machine guns abandoned, blood staining their interiors, wheels bent inward or otherwise disabled somehow during the fighting.
She hadn't run up on a single infected yet, or a survivor despite traveling several blocks. Were some hiding inside the buildings? Were they lurking in the shadows, waiting for the right moment to come out and run for it? She idly wondered how many even heard the broadcast, not many had the radio she did, let alone any period.
This was Manehattan! You didn't need radios to communicate, people had cell phones, but the cell signal had long since been lost over the week; too busy or just outright cut off completely by the infected.
Climbing over a barricade constructed of sandbags piled atop a few cars and cement dividers, Rainbow made her way to the next street and found much of the same carnage that seemed to fill every street. More cars, more bodies, and more fire. The smoke was so thick, it almost made it hard to breath, but she kept moving in order to get to where she needed to go.
Her friends were counting on her to survive... after all.