a/n: had spilled water on laptop so couldn't upload for a while. will update multiple chapters today. while would have preferred to update it all at once, NovelPhoenix has some spamming rule which shadowbans the story in that case.
[Rebecca POV]
Rebecca jerked her eyes downward, carefully maintaining a strict visual perimeter above the absolute equator of the mutated monstrosity's body.
"W-w-what do you want?" she squeaked.
Her voice came out about three octaves higher than she intended, sounding like a malfunctioning cartoon mouse.
The dog just wiggled on its back. It let out another bark, much softer this time, sounding almost cute if you ignored the whole bio-engineered nightmare aspect.
Rebecca stared at the exposed belly. Then she looked at its teeth, which had very recently been buried deep inside Billy Coen's freshly snapped neck. Then she looked down at the Beretta shaking in her own hand.
Is it... is it asking me to touch it?
She legitimately felt like she was having a psychotic break. This was a highly infectious bioweapon. It had literally just murdered a man in front of her. Bioweapons did not want belly rubs.
The tail thumped harder against the floorboards, and the hind leg kicked a few times in the air.
...Does it want belly rubs?
She stared at the weirdly vulnerable underbelly. The creature's mouth hung open in a lolling, completely dopey smile that was ridiculously hard to reconcile with the brutal violence she had witnessed exactly thirty seconds ago.
"Are you... like, wanting me to pet you?" she asked carefully.
She felt completely and utterly absurd talking to the thing.
The dog barked once, lightly, and its whole body vibrated with a massive wiggle.
Okay, so it absolutely wanted that. An infected, mutated monster dog that just snapped a fugitive's neck was begging for belly rubs.
Rebecca sat there on the floor, absolutely coated in slime, cold sweat, blood, plaster dust, and at least three other horrific substances she planned to outright deny under oath. And right in front of her, a mutant corpse dog with bony head-plates was begging for attention like a total fucking kennel puppy from hell.
"I've completely lost my mind," she murmured quietly. "The concussion was way worse than I thought, and, um, I'm actually hallucinating right now."
The dog's tail became a dusty metronome of disgusting, pure joy.
Rebecca kept the Beretta angled toward its head with one trembling hand and shifted her combat knife into a reverse grip with the other. She moved her free hand forward about an inch. She stopped. The creature didn't lunge to bite her face off. She moved another inch. The dog's tongue just lolled even farther out of its mouth.
"This is so totally stupid," she breathed.
Her fingertips cautiously touched the side of its belly. The dog vibrated with sheer happiness.
Rebecca froze completely, fully expecting those massive jaws to instantly close around her wrist and sever her hand. Absolutely nothing happened. She gave one tiny, incredibly cautious scratch against the patchy, weird fur over its ribs.
The dog's hind leg kicked in the air.
Rebecca just stared at the leg.
It's doing the leg thing!
It was literally acting exactly like a golden retriever at the neighborhood vet.
She scratched again, a little firmer this time. The leg kicked much faster. A nervous, bubbling laugh escaped her lips before she could stop it. It was half-hysterical and way too close to a full-blown mental breakdown sob for comfort, so she quickly swallowed the rest of it.
"You are literally the ugliest dog I have ever seen," she whispered.
The dog barked once, sounding incredibly pleased with the compliment.
Rebecca's fingers shifted lower. She was just trying to find a safer patch of fur to scratch that wasn't so dangerously close to the exposed, gross muscle and wet sinew along its underbelly. Her knuckles brushed against something warm and soft and unmistakably fleshy.
WHAT THE FUCK—
The dog's entire body violently twitched. A massive, full-body spasm ran all the way from its rotting snout straight down to the tip of its fully exposed tailbone.
Rebecca recoiled as if she had just grabbed a live electrical wire.
"Oh—gross, heck no! That was a total accident! I wasn't—that wasn't on purpose!"
Her face burned so intensely hot she was honestly surprised the flickering emergency lights didn't spark out in response. The dog rolled its heavy head to the side with an expression that looked horribly and unfortunately like genuine confusion.
"That was totally your fault," she babbled, pointing the combat knife directly at its chest.
Apparently, the head trauma had officially promoted her to arguing with undead, mutated animals about their personal anatomy.
"You're the one just lying there with... with all of your business just hanging out in the open!"
The dog's tail wagged happily.
"I am absolutely not discussing this with you."
Then something happened that made Rebecca's already overloaded, wildly traumatized brain stall out completely.
The pale bony ridges on the dog's giant head literally began to recede.
She blinked rapidly, figuring it was just a stupid trick of the flickering emergency lights playing hell with her vision. But no, she could actually see the calcified growths slowly retracting straight back into the skull. The leathery skin was closing right over them like water filling a hole in the sand. Within a few short seconds, they were gone entirely, leaving behind only faint ridgelines in the patchy fur where they had just been.
The dog shook its head once, exactly as if it was bothered by a stray itch. The motion was so casually and ordinarily dog-like that Rebecca nearly burst into that hysterical laughter all over again.
She had never seen the infected do anything remotely like that. The zombie dogs in the forest certainly didn't have anything like that, and the one on the train didn't either. She had no earthly idea what kind of mutation let a creature grow and ungrow bone plates on command.
She filed the horrifying observation away with the rapidly growing list of things about tonight that made zero biological sense, placing it right next to "mystery goo" and "giant dog that plays fetch."
The dog rolled back onto its stomach and sat up nicely. Rebecca immediately brought the Beretta back to a steady, ready position, but the giant beast only cocked its head at her. Without the bony ridges protruding everywhere, its skull looked slightly more normal. It was still heavily scarred and half-rotted, but it looked a little less like a fucking deep-sea nightmare.
It casually glanced to Rebecca's left. Then it looked back at her. Then it looked to the left again.
Rebecca reluctantly followed its gaze. A chunky piece of broken concrete lay resting near a torn, bloody seat cushion.
The dog barked happily.
Rebecca looked at the heavy concrete. Then she looked back at the dog.
"Huh?"
Bark.
"You cannot be serious right now."
The tail wagged furiously.
"You... you want me to throw that rock?"
The dog bounced once on its massive front paws.
Rebecca stared at it in stunned silence for another long, agonizing second. Then she slowly reached out toward the concrete while keeping the Beretta firmly trained on the beast as best she could with just one hand. Her trembling fingers closed around the dusty chunk.
The dog's entire body tensed up with overwhelming, unbearable excitement.
"If this is some kind of sick trick," Rebecca stammered out, "it is literally the strangest trick any infected creature has ever tried to pull."
The dog made a raspy, adorable little whining sound.
Rebecca chucked the concrete across the ruined cargo pocket of the room.
The dog launched itself after the rock immediately. Rebecca's gun tracked its movement on pure survival instinct, but the creature just bounded effortlessly over a broken wooden crate. It skidded wildly around a twisted metal railing and forcefully shoved its massive head beneath a torn metal floor panel. Its huge claws scraped frantically against the floor with unbridled enthusiasm.
For three heavily blessed seconds, Rebecca seriously considered getting up and sprinting away as fast as her legs could carry her.
Then she just watched the monster drag the concrete chunk out with incredibly great care, clamping it delicately between the exact same teeth that had just violently snapped Billy's neck.
It trotted right back to her.
It literally trotted. Like the biological nightmare had just joined a fancy suburban dog park on a sunny Tuesday afternoon.
The creature dropped the heavy chunk right at her boots and sat down nicely. Its tail wagged so incredibly hard that its entire rear half swayed back and forth.
Rebecca looked at the slimy concrete. She looked at the happy dog. She looked at Billy Coen's crumpled corpse resting just behind it. Then she looked at the Beretta clutched in her sweaty hand.
She picked up the concrete chunk, mostly because her traumatized brain had completely stopped offering any better suggestions for survival.
"Good... um, good dog?"
The reaction was instantly explosive. The dog's tail practically blurred from the speed, its front paws tap-danced excitedly against the floor, and its rotting mouth opened into something that might have genuinely been a smile.
At least, it looked like a smile if it was being viewed by someone with a severe, untreated head injury and a wildly generous heart.
Rebecca was fairly damn sure she currently qualified on both of those counts.
She threw the concrete again. The dog enthusiastically chased it down, snatched it aggressively from beneath a torn window curtain, and returned even faster than before. It dropped the rock directly into her lap this time.
A massive, thick smear of viscous saliva stretched like a gross bridge between the concrete and her thigh.
"Ughhh, gosh, more fluids. Just what I always wanted..."
The dog huffed happily at her.
She picked up the disgusting chunk using only two fingers.
"This is officially the worst game of fetch ever played in the history of the world."
The dog barked in agreement.
Rebecca threw it for a third time. The creature bounded playfully after it, pounced on the rock, skidded wildly, and crashed shoulder-first into a broken passenger seat. It recovered immediately and came trotting back carrying the concrete like it had just won a prestigious gold medal.
Despite the absolute horror of everything, Rebecca's mouth twitched into a tiny smirk.
Then the dog pounced.
"W-w-wait—!"
Two unbelievably massive paws slammed heavily against her shoulders. The force shoved her backward onto the floor before she could even decide whether to shoot it, stab it, or just file a formal complaint with whoever the heck managed reality. Her back met the hard concrete floor with a heavy grunt.
The Beretta stayed firmly in her hand, but the barrel angled completely uselessly toward the ceiling as two hundred-plus pounds of undead dog enthusiasm thoroughly pinned her down.
"Hey! Hey, golly, no—!"
A huge, wildly textured tongue swept completely across her entire face.
Schlorp.
Rebecca made a horrified, guttural noise that no highly trained S.T.A.R.S. officer should ever have recorded on their permanent record. Warm, impossibly thick slime completely covered her cheek, her nose, her lips, and one of her eyes in a single, utterly devastating pass.
"Get off!"
The dog's tail thumped against the floorboards like a furious heavy metal drum solo.
She was so damn warm and soft. She smelled exactly like sour fear-sweat mixed with cheap floral shampoo, and that combination was doing completely unhinged things to his monstrous brain that he absolutely refused to examine right now.
Another massive lick dragged forcefully from her chin all the way up to her forehead. The wet tongue plastered her bangs straight back with thick saliva
"Stop! Please stop licking me!"
The dog happily licked her again. This one caught her directly and perfectly across the mouth.
"Mmmpfh!"
Rebecca violently shoved both of her hands against its broad chest. She desperately tried not to think about the horrifying texture squishing under her palms. The sparse fur was incredibly damp. The muscle bundled beneath it was way too solid and far too dense.
The leathery skin was so much warmer than she expected in some places and completely freezing cold in others, which was somehow vastly worse than either temperature just committing to a damn side.
The taste, man. The TASTE. She's got that lavender and sweat combo and apparently my own handiwork from earlier is still on her face and I am NOT supposed to be thinking about that. Good boy mode. GOOD BOY MODE. Maximum good boy. Do NOT think about how she's pinned underneath you right now. Do NOT—
"Off! Off, you disgusting—ugh, why on earth is there so much tongue?"
The dog planted its heavy paws even more firmly around her and gave her yet another wildly enthusiastic pass from her jaw right up to her temple. Its incredibly rough tongue dragged mercilessly over every single inch of her face with the sheer dedication of a creature that had finally found its true life's purpose.
Rebecca violently twisted her face away, sputtering and spitting.
"Enough! Darn it, enough! Bad dog! You are a bad, horrifying, biohazard dog!"
The stern words finally seemed to register in its mutated skull, or maybe her sharp elbow firmly pressing into its thick throat made the point for her. The creature hopped backward obediently, landing a few feet away with a loud scrape of heavy claws on the concrete.
Rebecca sat up incredibly fast, frantically wiping her ruined face with her uniform sleeve.
This obviously made everything so much worse.
Her face was currently doing about six different disgusted expressions all at once.
The giant dog just sat there right in front of her. Its massive tongue hung happily out of its mouth, and its tail wagged at full, unbridled speed.
Rebecca fiercely glared at the beast through one totally clean eye and one eye that was now partially glued shut by thick monster slobber.
Her hands were shaking uncontrollably. Her chest still felt way too incredibly tight, and somewhere deep in the back of her throat, there was a terrified, hysterical sound desperately trying to claw its way out.