Surviving Malton

It’s been a couple weeks since I last wrote. I’ve been busy during that time. I made it across the middle of town to Nichols Mall in Stanbury Village. There isn’t as many people here as were in the Caiger or Ackland malls, but it’s a hardy bunch.

Nichols is very close to the zombie stronghold of Ridleybank. I may be foolish, but I’ve been making some sporadic forays into Ridleybank and have managed to take out a few zeds on their own turf.

In the meantime, I’ve learned a lot more about Malton. I figured out how to operate the radio transmitters. I’m pretty good a spraying grafitti messages to other survivors. I can build barricades with Malton’s best.

I’ve also been hired by a company called Necrotech. They seem to be shady bunch, and I’m not sure how much I should be trusting them, but they sure do seem interested in the zombie menace.

These are the guys that somehow know to revive zombies — that is, turn them back into humans. It’s a bizzare thing to see. You’ve got to inject a zombie with a big vial of some flourescent green liquid. This kills the zombie, just as if I had blew thier brains out with a shotgun, but they eventually wake up as a human, fully restored to life.

They tell me that even I was revived at least once, back when I first showed up in Malton.

I’m not very comfortable with that thought: Me, a zombie.

In any case, they have some nice gadgets and sensors for me to play with, so it’s either a good thing or a devil’s bargain. I’m not sure which it is just yet.

Lastly, I did something I never thought I would do. I was forced to kill another survivor inside the mall this evening. It turns out that not all revived zombies are glad to be humans again. It’s completely beyond my understanding, but some small percentage of people prefer to be in the undead world. Some of these people will kill themselves by jumping out office buildings.

Others will hide among survivors for a while, gathering information numbers and movements and various tactics before reporting back to a zombie horde somewhere and voluntarily offering themselves up for zombie consumption, and then becoming a zombie again. (Exactly how smart are these zombie hordes??)

These are the zombie spies. I killed one of them tonight in the Nichols Mall and dumped his lifeless body out on the street. Everyone present seemed to understand.

I’m not sure how long I plan to stay here. Nichols seems to have lots of supplies, but it’s a little nervewracking being so close Ridleybank, even if I do choose to cross that border myself. I don’t think I want to be here long-term.

I may stay here a short while before heading further east. There are twenty malls in Malton, and I’ve been to three so far. Listening to radio broadcasts on various frequencies, it seems like there are survivor outposts in almost every mall. Maybe I’ll visit them all eventually. The closest mall from here is Hildebrand Mall in the Roftwood suburb, which borders Stanbury Village immediately to the east.