Symbiosis: At World's End

Dichotomy

The Rippers had been chasing him for an hour now and he was starting to wear out. He knew he should have gone the long way around, but he had noticed a hosted symbiote down that path and knew that he would have a way tougher time getting past that thing as opposed to outrunning a band of Rippers. However, they were making lots of noise. And noise was a bad thing. Very bad indeed.

He vaulted a broken divider and swiftly slid across the hood of a car. He needed to find a decent hiding place that was also easy to escape. He pulled a knife from the pocket of his tattered running shorts just in case, and skidded underneath a shadowed outcropping of concrete. Just as he suspected, there was a large hole underneath it, indicating that there was a stash of goods here. Something to distract them with. He quickly sifted through the things that would be most useful to him, threw the items he didn't need into a large sack and hurled said sack out into the open. He then turned the corner and kept sprinting.

"That should give me five minutes if I'm not lucky. It should get them to stop altogether if I am."

Five minutes was all he needed to get out of the city and into the open plains. The only animal life you were inclined to find out here were rodents and the occasional wild cat. Symbiotes favored areas with lots of shadows and nooks to wait for a potential host to come along unsuspectingly. Even still, occasionally they would transverse the plains to go to a forest, where lots of world runners and Rippers hid caches of supplies. Or they went there to expand a hive. It was very rare to find one roaming the plains.

Merrick stopped for a break. His breaks usually consisted of five minutes of eating stale bread and drinking old water from a dented water bottle. First rule of survival in this world was that you take what you get. He stopped and looked up. On the horizon was the old settlement that protected all that were within. He had mixed feelings about the place. On one hand, it was protecting millions from the horrors of the outside world, but on the other, they never took the risk of letting people from the outside in, due to fear of them unknowingly playing host to a symbiote. He understood their logic, but they forgot that the sonic shield would protect them from that. It was paranoia. A fear that only the guards along the wall lived with. No one else knew of the dangers of the world as those who witnessed it firsthand.

Merrick had been born into a world of fear and chaos. He had been taught from the beginning that to survive the storm, you needed to stay ahead of it. He'd watched people being killed, then eaten and outran hosted symbiotes when occasion called. All of his experiences had molded him into who he was now.

He pushed those thoughts out of his head as he packed his things back into his travel pack. Time to start running once more.

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During the meantime, within the city, a heavy debate was being held in the court. Apparently, a symbiote host had managed to infiltrate the walls and was now hiding amongst them. The room was divided. Half of those in power were dismissing this as a rumor meant to spread hysteria and chaos throughout the city. Others believed this to be true, and demanded that the city be searched to the foundations. These debates were common. The paranoia stemmed from those who were in power and had seen the horrors of the outside during their duties as guards before all this. They believed that the symbiotes were hiding among them as they spoke and occasionally tried to kill someone in the room out of pure terror.

Not that anyone else in the town knew. As far as their knowledge went, the symbiotes were never going to penetrate the defenses of the city. In fact, it had been nicknamed Helm's Deep after J.R.R Tolkien's fictional fortress. Of course, people forgot that the aforementioned fortress had indeed been penetrated, but it had required inside knowledge of the weaknesses of the walls.