L4D AU: Boss and Minion

6 - Crawl through the vent

Open the door? Really, Kairo? What kind of dumb idea had floated in your head just now? How are you going to defend yourself in a room with no light on and barely any weapons? How do you know it wouldn't take too long to kill the damned thing banging on the door? How do you know that even if you did, it wouldn't attract the rest of them which might have sensitive enough ears to instantly know you're there?

    You argue with yourself as you head over to the rough location of where you had just seen the vent you've been eyeing so much before the lights disappeared, the shank in hand as you try to feel on the wall for the sink that you remember was right underneath it. Aha! There it is. It's more than sturdy enough to hold your very light weight and you know that the vent is just right above it.

You quickly stand up on the sink, and as quickly as you can, try to use the shiv your other half gave you to try and further loosen up the barely tightened screws holding the vent together. It's almost completely dark inside the room, extra time is wasted trying to feel for the screws for you to untighten, and you can hear the beating of the door getting louder. You know it's going to make it inside if you don't hurry up soon. Even with the heavy metal of the door, it's unlocked and the screeches of what was once a single pringle is joined by a hellish cacophany of other creatures who heard the commotion of the one guy trying to get at you in their mission to beat down the door and eat you.

It takes a little time, but you finally manage to loosen the screws enough that even a man with very little strength such as you could tear the cover of the vent open and quickly climb up inside A sigh of relief fills you when you hear the door break down just as you crawl away into the darkness, the screams of the infected piling over themselves trying to find you ringing inside your ears as your heart races with terror.

You feel your way along the cramped metal walls, and your only choice is to go straight. As you go on, you can see through the grates spread out through the floor of the vent. A chill runs down your spine seeing all of the bloodied, mangled zombies either wondering around or aggressively beating down and tearing up an unlucky victim, who you notice is a security guard with completely ruined armor. You move quietly, not wanting them to turn their attention to you as they keep themselves busy wreaking havoc all over the prison. You reach an intersection, and because you have no idea where you're at or where anything goes you decide the best course of action is to travel through one way to see where it takes you, come back and do it to the rest of the others. Lucky you! You discover three useful routes, all of them devoid of zombies or cops.

If you continue to go straight, the left path is an infirmary where you'll probably find supplies if it hasn't been cleaned out just yet. It looks like a mess, and it's completely empty from what you could tell in the vents. You aren't sure if the trip will even be worth it, because even though it doesn't take that long to get there (you estimiate that it took you ten minutes of crawling to reach it and then come back) it looks like it's been raided by either stragglers or the military. Who knows, you might be able to find something useful and maybe even figure out a little bit of what's going on here in the first place. You know that Elijah was also taken to the infirmary for a bite so you'll be able to look through the logs for a little bit to figure out where he went.

Another route is an empty armory on the left path, that you know will be heavily barricaded with an armored door. Your handy shiv is a good tool to have, but as a weapon you aren't too sure what your chances would be getting close to infected, aggressive creatures that managed to break down a heavy metal door just to maybe kill one of them in several hits with a tiny blade. And just by looking at the vent, it's surprisingly not completely cleaned out. You figure that the armed forces here likely perished before they were able to make it in time to this one. Or, maybe they just forgot about this one specifically during the chaos. Either way, you got lucky. You know that if this place is like any other prison, there's multiple armories scattered around the prison and you were lucky enough to find the one that wasn't cleaned out by the police. It's the longest route of the three, taking you over twenty minutes to and back.

Or, you could just go straight outside and find help elsewhere. To your right is a pathway directly connected to an outside vent that only took you maybe a minute to reach. There's no infected in the immediate area and it gives you the ability to move much more freely and find more useful places, maybe even find a car and haul ass from there.

You cannot go through all of them as you cannot re-enter the vent you came out of and the moment you reach your destination you will be noticed by the infected who you only have a limited amount of time to get your affairs in order and evade!

Which route do you choose?

9 ---> Armory

10 ---> Medical station

11 ---> Go straight outside