What a gruesome place this chernarus is

[Xandariel 14]

I wake up, my head hurts. It feels like I have once again been drinking too much. Very close, I hear waves of water hitting the shoreline, one by one. It is dark, very dark and I dont know where I am. My stomach grumbles, but I dont have food on me. Where am I? How did I get here? What is going on? So many questions inside of my head. But no time to think about them for too long now. I need to find food first. In the distance I see a city. "Maybe someone over there can tell me more and help me" I think. And so I grab my flashlight and start my journey towards what I will get to know to be Chernogorsk. After a while of running, I see a person stumbling around on the street. Maybe he can tell me where I am. As I get closer to the man, I notice that something is not right with this man. He turns around and as he spots me, he starts running towards me. "Are you alright?" I yell at him, in a friendly manner. His reaction, a fearsome moaning makes my bones chill. I am scared. I cant move. He gets closer and closer to me. By now I know that whatever he is doing, I sure dont want to stick around to see what is wrong with him. I get to my senses and run. The man keeps following me for a while, as I get closer and closer to the city. 

 

A few minutes later, I managed to lose him in between some houses. By now I am in the middle of the big city that was my destination. He seemed like he was trying to kill me. Why? What did I, of all people, do to him? As I come to my senses and the adrenaline slowly fades, I notice that something is not right with this town. It looks abandoned. No lights. Open doors left and right. Just where in gods name am I? I am very thirsty and hungry. My body is shaking and I am slowly feeling my consciousness fading. I decide to look for food. As I wander around the streets, I end up infront of a big church. There it is again. This moaning. Did the man from earlier follow me? Did he find me again? I can feel the adrenaline go through my body as I hear more and more moaning coming from all directions? I feel desperate and for a moment I think I am going to die in this godforsaken place. "Psst" I hear it coming from behind the church "Get off the street". I follow the voice and eventually I see a man with a spade and a gas mask cower in a corner. Carefully I walk towards him, still remembering what happened the list time I tried to get close to a stranger.

 

"What the hell is going on here?" I ask him. He tells me to follow him and that I will get my answers very soon if I stick close and do what he says. We end up at a grocery store that seems to have been abandoned. The stranger and I sit down in the back. He shares his food and drink with me and tells me where I am, what is going on and what to do. I dont know what to think. His story sounds like it comes directly out of a bad written novel. But I cannot deny what I have seen, so I decide to believe him. As we talk further I get to know the strangers name - Tom. He says that he has friends that he wants to meet at an airfield very close to this city and asks me if I want to accompany him. I dont think about it for long and agree to follow. Anything to get out of this hellish place. 

 

As we grab some scarce food and drinks, left in the story, he tells me more about his plans. He wants to go north. Far north. But our only hope to make it there is the airfield, as we dont have a map and supplies are very short. Maybe we will find a vehicle, maybe even something to fly with. I am starting to have hope that I will make it out of this country alive. We turn our flashlights off and go east. Far east. As we get closer to the airfield, we see lights flickering through the forest that we are in. Interested we go further and eventually we arrive by the airfield. The lights have stopped. What I see, it terrifies me. Bodies. Everywhere. Dead bodies left and right. We search for supplies in the radio tower but find nothing useful. Tom says his friends should be already here. He seems worried. As we go into one of the hangars we see someone sitting in a corner. It is one of Toms friends. He is bleeding. Next to him, the other friend. He is dead. "What do we do?" I ask. We dont have medical supplies. Tom pulls out some rags to stop the bleeding. And there we go, it worked. His friend explains what happened. They were looking for supplies when they got attacked by zombies. We sit in the dark and talk for a while. Shortly after, his friend fell unconscious. 

 

"We have to leave him" Tom says. "What? Why?" I ask. "Because we have no medical supplies and we cant hope to find any close to here" Tom answers. I feel uncomfortable, I am scared and desperate. There are no vehicles. Toms friends died and we have almost no supplies left. Am I going to die after all? In the distance, we see large appartment buildings on a hill, just on the other side of a forest. Tom says that they are our only hope for now. As we leave, we dont look back. By now I realized that I wont make it out of here without Tom and his knowledge of the area. We talk more, on the way. Tom tells me about his story. He too found himself close to the shore, a while before I did. He met his friends, that are dead now, while he was running through a forest, trying to get away from a zombie. They helped him and showed him around. We arrive at the appartments.

 

"Wow, this place looks abandoned" I say to him as we enter one of the enormous buildings. The staircase is destroyed. Our only way up is through an elevator shaft with a rusty ladder. My stomach tells me not to do it, but what chance do we have? I grab onto the ladder and start climbing up. Not once, I look down. Too great the fear of falling. As we finally get out of the elevator shaft we find a couple of open doors. "Someone has been here before" Tom says to me. We decide to look for loot nonetheless. We are about to starve after all. Tom says its better if we split up. This way we can look for food faster. I agree and we part ways for now. After a while of searching, all we had found was a rotten banana. I took it. Didnt care if it was rotten or not. It was food and that was all that mattered. We decided to check the other buildings aswell. As we come to the last building, this it has gotten to be a routine way of searching. I take the lower floors, tom takes the upper ones. No words needed. After I was done and have been sitting around waiting for a while, I decided to go upstairs. Something was not right. Tom never took that long. I search through the upper appartments but no sign of Tom. I climb up on the roof - and again, nothing. Did he leave me without saying anything? That didnt seem like him. I waited a bit longer and eventually, I decided to go. I had to.

 

As I reached bottom floor I saw him, dead. It looked like he fell all the way from the roof. Was it an accident? Did he jump? Why would that matter to me now. I am lost. He was my only hope and now I am on my own again. What do I do now? I feel desperate. Was this all for nothing? Did I go through all of that, just to die here now, on my own? I dont know what do to. After sitting around for a while I decide to try my luck. If I will die on the way, fine. I dont have better chances at surviving if I stick around here for any longer. Too many zombies around. I grab Toms stuff - what was left of it at least and go. North. Maybe I will be able to make it through the vast lands and forests and find a way out of this place. Thanks to tom I got a good amount of supplies now at least. As I start my journey I think of what might be lying ahead of me now. But that, I dont know. Only the future will tell.