Kevin Scott dived across the counter in an abandoned department store. Stacked boxes of men's ties were scattered in all directions when he struck them in passing. Rolling back to his feet on the other side, he kept running.

Despite his heavily muscled 6'5" frame, Kevin was remarkably agile and quick. He needed every bit of it to survive today's encounter. This expedition had started out with Kevin being the hunter, but the roles had suddenly reversed.

Movement to his right caught his attention, and he turned quickly, bringing up his shotgun only to discover his own reflection staring back at him from a mirror.

Kevin had a slightly rounded face. His black hair matched his skin tone in color and was cut very short. He wore the black, white, and gray of urban camouflage on his pants and short sleeved shirt. Both had received splatters of mud and blood, and numerous holes had been either caused by excessive wear or damage from enemy weapons.

Kevin still carried a police badge on his belt. He knew it didn't mean much to anyone out there in the world, but he didn't wear it for them. He carried his badge to remind himself of who he was inside. Even with the world collapsing around him, Kevin stood for honor and justice. If he ever forgot it, letting himself be consumed by self-serving thoughts of survival at the expense of others, he'd become as mindless as the zombies.

He left the menswear section of the store and paused by the doorway into the next area. Filled with lawn chairs, picnic tables, and other items for summertime, the seasonal section looked untouched.

Hearing the rapid footsteps closing in on his position, he knew why no one had bothered the items stored here. Entering cities was always an insane risk. Those not overrun by zombies were populated by something far worse, and Kevin had found one of the ones that was worse.

Putting his back up against the far side of the doorway, Kevin waited for his pursuers. As the first came sprinting into the room, Kevin swung his shotgun and clotheslined the man in the face, dropping him onto his back. Flipping around his weapon, Kevin leveled it toward the trailing two men and fired, and one of the two kicked over backwards as the close range blast ended him.

The empty shell ejected, spiraling away on a thin trail of smoke as Kevin pumped his shotgun to chamber the next round. The final attacker came rushing at him, screaming incoherently. The gun thundered in Kevin's hands as he put him down.

"Scavengers," Kevin practically spit the name of his defeated opponents.

Dressed in piecemeal portions of tattered clothing, the dead scavengers resembled a primitive tribe. Two of them wore long strands of gold between various piercings on their faces and ears. Their hair had either been shaved or spiked. Tattoos and burns from branding irons marked the three men, covering the exposed skin of their arms in ritualized designs unique to their particular scavenger band. Bones from vanquished opponents also served as decoration for their ragged attire.

The scavengers started out as gangs and looters when civilization began falling apart. The more police were called to combat the undead threat, the less attention the criminals received. This allowed them free reign to do anything. As the years passed, they became more and more like animals, fighting and killing anyone they found and taking whatever they could lay their hands on. Some groups had even been reported as being cannibals, but since no one had survived a visit to a scavenger camp, the reports were unsubstantiated.

Kevin had been around for the initial outbreak of the zombie infestation. Still a police officer back then, he'd witnessed the growing threat of the gangs, but his orders had prevented him from actively doing anything about it since headquarters felt the undead were the primary threat.

One night, after clearing some zombies from a cemetery, Kevin had returned to the precinct to find it had been wiped out. Every useful weapon and piece of body armor had been taken. The prisoners in the cells had been killed along with the cops, despite not being a threat in any way; they'd been murdered simply because the gang had wanted to do it. Their bloodthirsty attitudes had only gotten worse over time.

Kevin had known it was stupid to enter the city, but so many of the small towns and suburban areas had already been picked clean of anything useful. If he was going to keep alive and on the move, he needed the supplies and had been forced to risk it.

Scavengers were worse than zombies in many ways. Zombies didn't carry guns, moved much slower, and had virtually no intelligence. Although the animalistic qualities of the scavengers did limit their intelligence, they were still smarter than a walking corpse, deploying traps, ambushes, and bait to snare their prey.

It was unfortunate scavengers were so violent as their massed collection of weapons gave them a tremendous arsenal to use against the undead. They were probably the most heavily armed groups active in the broken remnants of the world.

Kevin knelt down and began picking through their pockets with haste. If any more of the scavengers were around, it wouldn't take them long to descend upon him with their full fury. In addition to being nearly completely feral, they defended their territory with an almost fanatical intensity. Kevin needed to make his visit short.

He collected all the ammunition he could find on his opponents before turning his attention to the store itself. He found the sporting goods section and took a golf bag, slinging it diagonally across his back. Appropriating several titanium clubs and a metal baseball bat, he added them to the bag.

He was about to leave the store when he found something so incredible, he couldn't believe the scavengers hadn't already taken it. Picking up the folding bow, Kevin shook it once in his fist, and the spring loaded arms expanded and snapped into position for firing, pulling the bowstring tight.

The scavenger he'd originally knocked out regained consciousness and started sprinting for the exit. Kevin grabbed an arrow from a bundle at the end of the display counter. He pulled back on the bowstring and raised the bow into a firing position with the same movement. Kevin exhaled slowly before releasing the shot. The arrow whistled as it streaked across the store and dropped the scavenger permanently back to the floor.

Working at full speed, Kevin strapped a specially designed quiver to the outside of each leg before filling them to capacity with arrows.

He searched the camping supplies and found a treasure trove the scavengers had ignored completely. Vacuum sealed in silver bags, the dehydrated food packages were ideal for long term storage. The only thing he'd need to create full meals in the middle of nowhere was hot water that he could boil at any campfire. Kevin began jamming every last food pouch he could into his golf bag. When he ran out of room, he snatched a backpack from the camping supplies nearby and filled it up as well. The food he'd gathered would serve him well for months, longer if he rationed it by eating fewer meals.

His trip to the city had been highly successful. Kevin darted out of the store and jogged toward the nearest road out of town, reclaiming his fired arrow from the dead scavenger in passing. His gathered supplies wouldn't do him any good of he got killed for lingering too long in scavenger territory.

When Kevin neared the edge of the city, the dilapidated skyscrapers in the distance behind him and the urban slums thinning out into a more rural territory, he heard the sounds of combat coming from ahead of him. Rather than changing directions to avoid the confrontation, he quickened his pace and hurried to see what was going on.

A battle between scavenger groups was hardly his concern, but if they managed to either kill each other off, or reduce their numbers to a significant degree, Kevin could pick off any still standing and help himself to the supplies.

A pair of survivors had been traveling down the main road and were currently pinned down by a scavenger strike force. More heavily armed than most survivors, scavengers fired freely with their guns, peppering the burned out cars the pair of travelers hid behind.

Although he knew nothing about the character of the two people under fire, Kevin did know about the scavengers. His police badge on his belt gleamed in the sunlight as he hopped over a boulder and readied an arrow. He let the arrow fly before he touched the ground, dropping behind a broken support column for a highway overpass that no longer existed.

The deadly projectile whistled through the air before finding its mark, and one of the scavengers pitched over sideways. His five companions looked in the dead man's direction, trying to figure out what had happened and where the attack had originated.

Safely concealed behind the fallen pillar, Kevin waited for them to give up searching and continue the attack. When the gunfire began a moment later, he knew it was safe to emerge. Threading another arrow, he stood up, swinging his aim and pulling back on the bowstring in the same fluid movement. The bowstring snapped forward as he released his second shot. Another scavenger went down, but Kevin was back behind cover before the body hit the dirt.

By now, the scavengers were convinced another party had intruded on their private acquisition of supplies. They split into groups of two. One of the groups stayed focused on the pinned down travelers while the other turned its full attention toward finding the hidden attacker.

Kevin set down his backpack of preserved food and took off the golf bag of weapons. He needed agility for the next attack, and he couldn't afford to be weighed down. He dashed out from his concealed location. Since he was being hunted now, the pillar wouldn't protect him so much as make him a sitting target waiting to be found and killed. As he sprinted into the open, he brought up his weapon, taking careful aim for what would be a decidedly difficult shot.

The two scavengers searching the area noticed him and turned their handguns in his direction. Awaiting the right moment, Kevin released the arrow. It hit one of the two men in the shoulder. Although not lethal, it had a secondary effect. Because the scavenger's gun hand was on the side where the arrow hit, the impact threw off the man's aim and knocked him sideways just as he was about to fire. When the scavenger pulled the trigger, the bullet didn't hit Kevin, but the other scavenger, killing him instantly.

Pulling another arrow from the quiver strapped to the outside of his lower leg, Kevin fired again to finish off the first man before he could readjust his aim.

The tide of battle was shifting against the scavengers, and the remaining two decided against staying and seeing it through to the end. They bolted, sprinting away from the ambush site as fast as they could go. Kevin couldn't leave them free to harm others, so he strung two arrows into his bow and fired them simultaneously. The arrows struck the center of each man's back, dropping both of them in an instant.

Kevin began collecting his arrows, pocketing the guns and other useful items from the dead scavengers in the process. He kept a wary eye on the location where the travelers had taken shelter from the hailstorm of bullets unleashed on them. Just because the scavengers were mindless killers, it didn't make the two travelers honest and trustworthy. They might easily be cannibals or some type of scum who would love nothing better than to murder him the moment he lowered his guard.

When he moved to retrieve the arrows from the final two he'd dropped, Kevin was rather startled to find the arrows were already gone. A slight crunch of gravel caused him to spin around, an arrow pulled back and ready to shoot.

Standing in front of him was an older woman. He estimated her age to be in the mid to high fifties range. Her blonde hair was almost white in the sunlight, but he didn't know if the color was her natural shade or if it had turned due to age. Her attire was fairly standard for those who wandered the world after the collapse of all industries. A tattered shirt of mud brown covered over a second shirt of what had been white before the dust and debris of the desolate city had turned it various darker shades, and her jeans and boots were in a similar worn out condition.

Her simple smile made Kevin think she'd be the perfect stereotype of a friendly grandmother if not for the submachine gun in her hands. Currently, the weapon was pointed at Kevin, and he realized if he shot her, she'd most likely fire an entire burst, and the two of them would die together.

The metallic slide and click of a rifle being readied for firing made Kevin sigh in defeat as the sound had come from behind him. Despite his earlier caution, the two people under attack by scavengers had managed to outflank him, and he was now under the crosshairs from two directions at once.