Greetings, fellow readers and writers of fanfiction!

Ever since playing GTA 4, I've wanted to do a 'zombie apocalypse' story in the Liberty City setting and with Everyone's Favorite Hitman thrust in the middle of it. I know what you're thinking: Oh, God help me, not another one of these stories!(I'm sure one or two have been done already) Hear me out. Due to the recent rise in zombie popularity, I decided to try something different, something that, hopefully, hasn't been done yet. The apocalypse is still on, but the threat ain't the living dead. It's something worse.

Warnings:

Swearing: There will be an abundant supply of it. This is a GTA story, after all; cussing is like a rule if you're writing one.

Violence: Yeah, another rule. Expect a lot of shooting, stabbing, blood and gore, and death. You know, all the entertaining stuff.

Sex, Drugs, and Possibly Rock 'n Roll: I'm sure this stuff will pop up sooner or later. But not in any graphic detail.

Offense/Sensitive Subjects: Stuff like rape, gay bashing, racism, etc. Keep in mind that these things do NOT reflect on this author's beliefs; I condone none of it.

My writing style: Some writers plan out their entire story before they start writing it. I have a general plot idea, and plan it out as I write. It's more fun that way. Of course, this style has greater risk of story stagnation. Let's hope that doesn't happen here, as I like this idea I have and I think you might enjoy it, too. And, oh, my goodness gracious, is Niko ever fun to write.

Updates: They will be sporadic. Perhaps every other day or once a week, depending on my schedule and if that vile thing known as Writer's Block doesn't get in my way.

Finally! The disclaimer: I don't own shit. Well, except a few original characters. So, don't touch or [insert long-winded, empty threat].

Now off you go! And leave a review before you leave. Writers thrive on constructive criticism(this includes mistakes on grammar and spelling; give it to me Nazi-style, if you want)...and compliments. Compliments are always good. :)

Enjoy.

Chapter One: Nightmare Hospital

Polystyrene ceiling tiles. They were the first thing to grace Niko's vision when he opened his eyes.

He was disoriented, his mind was a labyrinth of confusion; he had no idea where he was and he was in a great amount of pain. His head was pounding like a bass drum, its deepest pulse eminating from the left side, above his temple.

He told his body to move from its supine position, but it refused to cooperate. His muscles were weak and useless and aching; he felt like he'd been hit by a freight train.

Deep hazel eyes scanned the environment; the whitewashed walls hung with serene landscape paintings, the window with its drawn, eggshell-white curtains, and the medical equipment to the right.

Medical equipment...

Panic twisted his gut and deeper confusion bent his brow. So, he was in a hospital. How? Why? What had happened that had landed him here? He couldn't remember, no matter how deep he searched his memory banks. There was a gap, time missing. The last thing he could recall was sitting at a bar, having a drink with his cousin, then nothing. And now this.

Niko glanced down at himself, at the white hospital gown that covered him, at the tube stuck in his arm and the little wires coming out of the right sleeve of the gown, and the hospital bracelet that adorned his left wrist.

What happened to me?

He tried to give voice, to call out to anyone who would hear him, but the sounds were trapped in his throat. He could do nothing but lie there, in all his confusion and pain, and wait until someone came to him with answers and relief.

He listened for life, but there was none; there were no sounds where sounds ought to be. The monitor to his right didn't emit the constant, rhythmic beep of his pulse, and for one horrific moment, Niko thought he might be dead and in some bizarre limbo. Then he realized it wasn't emitting a beep because it wasn't on; the digital screen that would have read out his vitals was black. Another look around, and he saw that no light anywhere in the room was on, either.

No electricity? That wasn't right.

Niko lifted a weak hand to his throbbing head and felt cloth under his fingers. It was a bandage. That explained why he was there and couldn't remember much, but it didn't explain what was going on, why everything in his room had lost power.

He tried sitting up again, summoning all the strength he could muster, but all he could accomplish was a half-rise from his position, a move that speared white-hot pain up his right side and took breath and all that strength from him. He could not do that again to save his life.

With nothing more he could do to get himself to move, to find out what was going on, to find out what had happened to him, he closed his eyes and gave in to sleep.

Consciousness came with the sound of a distant voice.

Niko hoped to not see that hospital room surrounding him when he opened his eyes, hoped it had only been some weird dream before, but those hopes were dashed. He was still there in that sterile, dull room, still confused and in pain.

The voice came again. "Hello? Anyone here?" A woman's voice, one he didn't recognize, not that he had really expected to.

He tried to move from his supine state again, and found some success this time. As Niko pushed himself up on trembling arms, grimacing at the pain in his side, the room whirled and took his stomach. He leaned over the right side of his bed, certain he was going to vomit. Nothing came up. He stayed in that position for a few moments, waiting for the vertigo to subside and his stomach to settle, and he heard the woman's voice again, closer.

"Is anyone here?"

He swallowed and found his mouth and throat as dry as the Sahara, but he tried to give voice nonetheless, "In here." It was a weak whisper he could hardly hear himself, so he tried again, louder and slower, "In here."

There was no response. Maybe there wasn't a woman; maybe he was hearing things, a symptom of his head injury.

Niko pulled himself up into a sitting position again and moved his legs over the side of the bed, the tile floor like ice under his bare feet. He bowed his head, pressing the heels of his palms into his temples as the vertigo took him for a spin again.

When the dizziness faded enough, Niko pulled off the electrodes attached to him, yanked out the IV needle and tube from his arm, then tried to stand from the bed. No sooner had he put weight on his legs, and they gave out under him. He groped for the edge of the bed to keep from falling, missed, and hit the hard, cold floor with a groan. How the hell he was going to get up now, he didn't know. He was still too frail. Perhaps he should've remained abed until he had the strength.

He lie there on the floor for some moments, staring up at the ceiling. The sight of those ugly white tiles was starting to disgust him. He heard the door to his room open and turned his head to look across the empty space under his bed. A pair of bare feet stood in the threshold.

So he wasn't hearing things. Well, he supposed that was a good sign.

"Anyone in here?"

"Down here," Niko replied, his voice hoarse and strained.

The feet moved forward, then a face appeared above him. A woman's pretty but exhausted and concerned face, surrounded by a scraggly mess of auburn hair. She was a patient, as she was dressed in a hospital gown and had a similar injury to his own; there was a white bandage wrapped across her forehead.

"Are you okay?" she asked.

Do I look okay? he thought, but kept it to himself. "Not really."

The woman moved to stand in front of him, then leaned over, extending her hand to help him up.

Niko took whatever help he could get. Her hand was small and cold and callused in his as she tried to get him to his feet. Since they were both in bad condition, it took a lot of tries and effort, but eventually, and with the aid of the bed, Niko was able to get upright. He sat on the edge of the mattress to recover while the woman studied him for a moment.

"I thought I was the only one left," she said.

Niko gave her a weird look. "What do you mean?"

The woman looked around the room, as if in that instant she had no idea where she was, then she looked back at him, her eyes wide. He noticed they were greyish green, and full of fear and confusion.

"There's no one," she told him. "No one left alive."

His brow furrowed. "What?"

"I don't know. There's bodies..a few of them, in the hallways..." She shook her head, swallowing hard. "Ripped apart. I've..I've never seen anything like that. And there's no one else around. No doctors or nurses. A few patients were moved into one room, but they're dead in their beds. It looks and smells like they've been dead for a while, but they weren't torn apart."

"Show me." He demanded it, because at the moment, he thought she was nuts; he would only believe what she was saying when he saw it for himself.

Niko stood from the bed, keeping a hand on the edge for a moment to steady himself. The woman moved to help him, but he brushed her away. She was in no condition to support him and he particularly didn't want them both to end up on the floor.

Staggering, he made his way toward the door, the woman trailing behind him.

The moment Niko opened it, his senses came under assault. There was a horrible, sour odor of death and blood that he could almost taste and about fifty feet from his room, there was a headless body laying on the floor of the corridor in a pool of dark blood. It wore a doctor's white coat. The head was further down the hallway, and it seemed it wasn't the only thing the expired doctor had lost. The right arm was gone, too. The appendage lay near a wall splattered with blood, as if the arm had been thrown against it.

"What the fuck?" said Niko, hearing his own words as if they had come from someone else.

"It gets worse," the woman said from behind him, her tone grim. "Much worse."

They moved up the silent, empty hall, Niko keeping close to the wall for support. They came to a T-section and the woman pointed to the corridor that led off to the left. "There."

When they turned the corner, Niko's stomach was taken from him for a second time and he had to fight off an urge to gag. Of all the horrible shit he'd seen in life, this easily made the top five.

It looked like a grenade had gone off. In the midst of the corridor, the walls and floor were painted in gore, and there were numerous bodies and body parts strewn about. Every last one of them, every body he saw was eviscerated and dismembered.

"My God," he breathed, leaning against the wall. "Who could've done this?"

"Who, or what?" the woman said.

Niko looked at her and she shrugged, her eyes moving to the gory mess. "They look like they were ripped apart by animals."

"Animals?" he replied with a dubiously quirked brow. "In a hospital?"

"I don't know," she admitted. "What I do know is that no human could've done this."

"What the hell is going on here?" Niko demanded of no one in particular.

"I'm not sure I even want to know, but it seems we're the only ones who survived it."

Back at his room, Niko found his medical chart sitting in a clear, plastic box bolted to the door. While there were no answers to what had happened in the hospital, he could at least find out the extent of his injuries and how long he'd been staying there.

He sat on the edge of the bed and looked over the papers on the clipboard. He'd suffered a traumatic head injury and had undergone surgery to relieve swelling in his brain. He also had a few fractured ribs, some minor cuts and bruises, and had apparently just awoken from a coma. Flipping through the rest of the papers, he found when he had been admitted to the hospital and why. On the fourth of November, he had gotten in a car wreck.

He knew the what, the why, and the when. Now Niko needed to find out how long. He had no idea what day it was. Had he been in the hospital a few days? A few weeks? Longer?

The door to the room opened and he looked up as the woman entered. She had gone off to locate a cellphone to inform the authorities about what had happened at the hospital, and it seemed she had succeeded in finding one.

"What day is it?" he asked her.

"Um...this phone says it's November eleventh. And it's 3:47 PM."

"Shit. I've been unconscious for a week."

The woman looked at him, her brow creasing. "What happened to you?"

"According to this chart, head injury and broken ribs; I was in a car accident. I don't remember any of it."

"I'm no doctor, but sometimes there's retrograde amnesia with head injuries. I was shot, once in the shoulder and once in the head," she told him. "I don't remember any of it, either."

Niko stared at her in surprise. "Shot in the head? How the hell are you alive?"

She shrugged as she sat down in a chair by the curtained window. "Luck. I was shot in the forehead. I guess from a good distance because the bullet didn't lodge deep enough to do any major damage. Otherwise, I wouldn't be here. The docs removed it two weeks ago, according to my chart. I've been in a coma since then. Woke up last night."

"Shit." He thought that one word did a good job summing up both their situations.

The woman smiled a little. "My dad warned me about becoming a cop. Maybe I should've listened."

"You're a cop?" Fantastic, he thought. Of all the people in the world for him, a former criminal, to cross paths with like this, it just had to be a damn cop. The universe had never really liked him much.

The woman nodded. "Sex crimes detail, working my way up to detective. The last thing I remember was trying to make an arrest on a known pedophile with a parole violation. I can recall knocking on his front door, then there's nothing."

"Last thing I remember is getting drunk with my cousin. I guess I thought it was a good idea to drive under the influence. Looks like we are both good at making bad decisions."

"You more than I," she said, looking back down at the cellphone in her hand. She frowned. "No service. Tower's probably down or something." She arose from the chair and pushed the window curtains open to look out, and what she saw outside made her scream. She clapped a hand over her mouth and backpedaled, her eyes so wide they almost took up her face.

Niko was on his feet, alarmed. "What is wrong with you?"

The woman pointed a shaky finger at the window, unable to form words. Niko came up behind the startled woman and found it difficult to believe what he was looking at through the window. His mouth dropped open in shock. "Holy fucking God."

They were up on a high floor of the hospital, and this gave him a good view of Algonquin...what was left of it. It was in smoking ruins. Most of the imposing skyscrapers had been resorted to a crumbled waste of steel and stone, others were just jagged remnants, clawing at the sky as if begging God for mercy. Pillars of smoke swirled up out of a few of these, darkening the puffy clouds scuttling overhead. Some of the buildings lower to the ground had either been smashed beyond recognition or had portions of them caved in, likely victims of falling debris from the skyscapers. The snaking form of the elevated subway system was collapsed in places. On the streets surrounding the hospital, Niko saw no movement whatsoever. There were tons of cars, but they were all still, abandoned. There were no people, no signs of life, nothing.

"What happened?" the woman asked, her voice small and strained.

Niko tore his eyes away from the devastation long enough to glance at her where she was now sitting on the bed. Her face was a mask of horror and there were tears in her grey-green eyes.

"What happened?" she asked again, as if he had the answer.

Niko looked back out at the destroyed city. "War," he inferred. He'd experienced enough of it to know its devastation.

The woman was hysterical. For the past twenty minutes she had done nothing but sit there on the edge of his hospital bed, alternating from blubbering incoherently to raving like a lunatic.

This is no way for a cop to act, Niko thought. They were supposed to be calm in situations like this. He was certain her mind had snapped, and he wasn't really helping the matter. He dealt with shock on this level in the same way he dealt with most everything else, with blatant anger. So it was no small wonder that when her hysteria began to get on his nerves, he'd yelled at her to shut the fuck up and threatened to shut her up himself if she didn't comply. That only made the woman more hysterical. If he had known anything about medicine, he would've gone off to find a sedative to put her out of her misery for a while.

The woman was now curled up on the bed, blubbering in a manner that didn't annoy him as much. Niko still stood at the window, staring out at the destruction and wondering what all of it meant, why it had happened, who was behind it, and most importantly, where his family was and if they were okay. Roman, Mallorie, and their four-year-old daughter Katie were now living in a nice little house in an upscale Broker neighborhood. Had this happened there, too? Were they still alive? He intended to find out; he had to find out.

He turned and went to the crying woman. "You are not helping yourself by acting like this. Get it together."

"It's all gone..." she muttered through her sobs. "Gone. How? Why?"

Niko grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her up into a sitting position. She looked at him, right in his eyes, and asked in a helpless voice, "Who would do something like this?" Then more sharply, as if she were accusing him for all of it, "Who would do something like this!?"

"Calm down."

"Look out there!" she shouted at him, as if he hadn't already seen the destruction for himself. "Look what's happened! It's all gone! Destroyed! People are likely dead! What're we going to do!?" She grabbed him, shook him hard enough to rattle his previously rattled brains. "Who would do this?!"

Niko slapped her to knock some sense into her and because he didn't appreciate being shaken like a maraca when his head was already pounding like a drum. "Calm the fuck down!"

A hand on her stinging cheek, the woman stared at him with wide eyes that were now glacial rather than near madness. But it seemed some kind of sense had finally gotten through. "You hit me..."

"You needed to be hit."

Her eyes narrowed, then with a voice as polar as Antarctica, she started to say, "If you ever lay your hand on me-

"I don't make a habit of striking women," Niko cut her off. "Unless they give me a reason to. I hardly even touched you."

"Oh, really?" she replied. "I must be imagining all this pain in my face, then."

Her cheek was a bit red when she lowered her hand from it. He hadn't realized he'd slapped her that hard.

Niko sighed. "Fine, I'm sorry. Satisfied?"

"No."

He rolled his eyes. "Wonderful. Look, I'm getting out of this hospital. So, you have two choices, lady. You can come with me or you can stay here."

The woman frowned. "I really don't think that's a good idea in our condition. We don't know if the people or person who did this is still out there, on the streets. If they try to attack us or something, we're hardly in any position to defend ourselves."

Niko shrugged. "I don't really have a choice. My family is out there, too, and I need to find them. Ain't there someone out there you are worried about, too?"

The woman looked away, her expression turning impassive. "I don't...no, there's no one."

"Come on, there must be someone," he pressed, not buying it. "A friend or a colleague, if not family."

Her eyes found his face, winter in their depths. "There isn't anyone, all right? So, drop it!"

"Fine," he snapped back. "You don't have to be a fucking bitch about it."

Niko marched to the door(as much as anyone in his poor physical condition could march) and yanked the door open, casting a smoldering look back at the woman. "Are you coming or not? I'm not going to wait around for you to decide." He almost hoped she would say no; she was likely going to slow him down, yet at the same time, he didn't think he had the heart to leave her there to fend for herself when whomever or whatever might still be loose in the hospital. And there was always a chance a cop might come in handy.

The woman seemed to consider her options, then came to a swift enough decision. Without a word, she stood from the bed and followed him out.

Together they scoured their floor of the hospital for some proper clothing and the supplies they would need when they ventured out into the mass of devastation that had once been Algonquin. With the subway system out of order and with the way the streets looked, it was going to take them a while to get anywhere, and they wouldn't get far without food and water, especially when the shops that provided those things had likely been resorted to rubble.

They'd had some luck finding clothes, but provisions were a different story, though neither had really expected to find nutritional items on their floor.

The search had left them both exhausted to the point of collapse, so the woman suggested they get rest before venturing any further into the hospital. Niko could hardly argue, even though a part of him had wanted to leave right then and there. When they had gone to their respective rooms, he barely made it to his bed. His muscles had gone to jello, his right side was killing him, and he had the headache of all headaches, worse than all the hangovers he'd ever suffered put together. And no painkillers were found in their search yet. It seeemed to not matter. A toll had been taken; pain or no pain, it was lights out for him the moment his head hit the pillow.

He had no idea how long he slept, but he awoke to the sound of a scream. Niko bolted up, hissing when his broken ribs screamed at him for it, and peered around his room, which was dimly lit by the moonlight spilling in from the window. His head was pounding along with his heart. He listened but heard nothing, and just as he had decided the scream must've been in a dream, it pierced through the dead silence again. The sound quickened his already racing pulse.

It was the woman.

"Fuck," he muttered under his breath as he tossed aside his blanket and hurried out with an unsteady gait.

The hallway was darker than his room had been, but he was still able to find his way around by the faint, silvery moonlight coming in from the opened doors of the other hospital rooms. He moved along the wall for support and stumbled over something. Looking down, he saw the doctor's dismembered arm laying there in a pool of congealed blood, which was now all over his borrowed shoes. With a sound of disgust, Niko kicked the arm away and continued on.

As he approached the woman's room, he heard whimpering. The door was open. It wasn't supposed to be; he had told her to keep it shut in case the person, people or thing that had torn apart the hospital staff they'd came across was still in the building.

Niko stopped just to the side of the door and peered around the frame, his eyes widening at what he saw inside.

There was a tall, dark, hulking humanoid form standing toward the back of the room, cornering the woman there at the wall. Her head was craned up, her face a mask of horror as she stared at the giant in front of her. In her hands was one of those steel I.V. stands. She held it out in front of her to ward off the brute.

Niko looked around for something, anything he might harness as a weapon; she could not handle this leviathan on her own. Down the hall a bit he saw another one of those stands waiting for him outside a room. He quietly hurried past the door, grabbed the stand, then came back to his position. Gripping and lifting his improvised weapon like a baseball bat, Niko crept into the room behind the enormous, muscle-bound man. He stopped only a few feet away, then swung the stand, directing it at the side of the brute's head. Sharp pain knifed through his right side and threw his aim off. Instead of the head, the stand struck the guy in the side. Niko was horrified to see that the blow didn't even budge him; he might as well have hit the guy with a feather.

The man turned to him and Niko's breath quit for an instant. Cold fear froze his spine. The face he found himself looking up at was horrible. The man had a square head, a thick, jutting forehead, deep-set eyes, and a thin, cruel mouth. It might have been the moonlight, but the large man's skin looked corpse-grey, and there was a network of bulging, black veins running beneath it. But his eyes...it was mostly his eyes that stunned Niko. They were glowing a fierce blood-red. He had never seen anything like this in his life and not even to save himself could he have found an explanation for it. It was weird, unnatural, not human.

The brute's mouth twisted in a sneer, then, with hardly any effort, he drew back a large, veined hand and swept away Niko's improvised weapon. The stand flew across the room as if it had been shot from a cannon. It clanged against the wall, pocked a dent in it, and fell to the bed.

"Motherfuck," Niko swore, backing away. He knew a fight he couldn't win when he saw one, and this one was certain to send him straight to the afterlife. Yet to turn tail and run would mean leaving behind a small, innocent woman to fend off this massive animal by herself. Cop or not, she wouldn't last with this guy. He didn't know what to do.

He didn't need to. The woman took matters into her own hands. She lifted the stand in her hands over her head like an ax and bashed it into the back of the brute's skull repeatedly until the large man turned around and batted it away from her. She cringed and backed further into the wall, as if she might melt through it and save herself.

While the brute was distracted again, Niko made a grab for his weapon. Getting a hand on it, he turned just as the huge man let out a roar of rage that sounded as if it had come from the very bowels of hell. Then the giant charged at the woman, his hands out for her throat. She let out a cry of terror, her eyes like saucers as they darted around desperately for a way to defend herself, her hands groping for anything.

Holding the metal stand out in front of him like a jousting lance, Niko barreled on the brute with everything he had. The stand caught the man in the side the moment he tried to turn and propelled him toward the window. His legs met the sill and then he teetered backward, hands flailing for purchase. He found none. The brute went through the window in a shatter of broken glass, falling fifteen stories to his death on the pavement below.

Dropping the stand, Niko went over to the window as the woman dropped her own and slid down the wall to sit on the floor. He leaned out a bit to see the brute laying sprawled and broken in the hospital parking lot. A twisted halo of darkness spread from around his head. Blood.

He drew back from the window and heaved a sigh. "What the fuck was that?"

"His eyes..." the woman whispered. "His face..."

Niko looked at her. She was huddled against the wall, pale and trembling. He moved and knelt down next her, looking her over for any injuries. Aside from being shaken up, she was fine. "You okay?" he asked, nonetheless. He hoped to God she wasn't going to go into hysterics again. He really didn't want to have to smack her around some more.

She didn't get hysterical. She just looked at him, aghast. "His eyes..."