Dead Man Walking: Living By Day, Dead By Night
Chapter 61: The Final Battle Part I

Ryan smirked as he cracked the entranceway to the gymnasium open and gazed upon Zane out in the open, holding onto his rifle. The young jock himself had a rifle in his hand, but the idiot hadn't even properly chambered a round. All he had done was insert a magazine into it.

He was not exactly the most adept when it came to using firearms, as until now he had never held a gun before. Zane was the opposite. He had fired more than a few weapons in his time, and knew how to operate most small arms.

As for the rest of Ryan's crew, some of them had figured out to chamber rounds, but those who were supposed to operate the heavy machine guns that Zane had looted from the Marauders hadn't the slightest clue what the hell they were doing.

When Ryan saw Zane out in the open, he called out to him.

"I thought for sure you would have run after seeing your camp burned to the ground. Yet here you are. You really don't care about your life, do you?"

Zane scoffed when he heard this. Behind him, the Undead horde was slowly reacting to their exchange, but Zane didn't care. Instead, he responded to Ryan's taunts with a simple statement.

"I'm already dead, but I'll tell you one thing Ryan, I'm taking you with me!"

After saying this, Zane raised his rifle and fired a shot straight at Ryan. Which hit the gymnasium's door, which he hid behind, penetrating past its meager defenses, and flying straight through into Ryan's sanctuary.

Ryan freaked out when Zane actually shot at him, and tried to return fire, only for his gun to make an audible *click*. When he released the magazine and tried to reinsert it, the same thing happened.

Meanwhile, some of the other boys who played enough first-person shooters to know you're supposed to rack the charging handle returned fire at Zane, who had run away from his open position and towards some cover.

The crackle of gunshots fully awakened the undead to the fact that there were living beings nearby, and they began to sprint towards the gymnasium. All the while, Ryan shouted at his friends to tell him how to properly load his weapon.

"What the hell, this thing is a piece of junk? Why do your guns work and mine don't?"

Jorge, who had previously been intimidated by Ryan into engaging in the act of murder, scoffed at his "fearless leader" and told him how to properly chamber around.

"Did you pull back the charging handle? That's an M16 right? Then it would be at the top, that t-shaped thing at the rear of your rail?"

The rifle wasn't an M16, it was a civilian AR-15, and what the young man was referring to when he said the "rear of your rail" was actually the upper receiver. But gaining half baked firearms knowledge from video games was not exactly the best form of training. And it showed by Jorge's words.

It took a few moments for Ryan to figure out what Jorge was talking about, but when he finally learned to pull back the charging handle, which he did awkwardly, he realized how much of an idiot he was.

His rifle, of course, did not have an optic on it, and because of this, Ryan struggled to figure out how to properly align the sights as he shouldered the rifle while leaning back like an absolute amateur.

Shocked at how loud the weapon was when it fired, Ryan almost dropped it. But Zane, who was actually behind proper cover, returned fire. Shooting several bullets into the door that Jorge was hiding behind and thus hitting the man repeatedly in the torso.

Jorge fell to the ground screaming in pain, as he began to bleed out, shouting at the others, who hadn't the slightest clue on how to perform first aid, let having any combat medic experience.

"Oh, shit… I'm hit! Someone save me!"

Of course, between the screams of the survivors inside who were not engaging in the firefight, and the deafening sounds of gunfire. Nobody heard Jorge's cries for help, and he very quickly bled out and died on the spot.

All the while, Zane used the same tactics to pin down Ryan's goons, who couldn't even hit the broad side of a barn with their weapons, wildly missing Zane's position, to the point where even their combined fire on his approximate location failed to suppress him.

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Ryan had no idea, but the moment the gunfire erupted, Olivia breached the rear entrance by blowing off one of its locks. Nobody seemed to know this though, as she and Elena quickly entered the school gymnasium to replace a bunch of survivors huddled in the center, holding their heads and crying.

The actual armed thugs who supported Ryan were all at the front, firing wildly towards Zane's location, and attracting an undead horde which rapidly rushed towards the building.

Evidently Zane was either too far away from Ryan's gang, or had simply activated the Undead's friendly setting by engaging in hostile action against the other living, but the Undead horde simply ran past Zane and towards the front entrances of the buildings where Ryan's goons shifted their fire towards the oncoming Walkers.

While this was happening, Olivia and Elena stalked through the gymnasium, opening the doors to the side entrances by blasting them off their hinges with 12 gauge slugs. Once Elena and Olivia had opened all of the gymnasium's entrances aside from the ones where Ryan and his goons were firing from, they retreated back where they originally entered from.

But as they approached the rear entrance, someone spotted Elena and immediately recognized her. After all, how could she not recognize her best friend? Lexi quickly chased after Elena, after looking around and realizing that the gymnasium was no longer secure, something that everyone else failed to realize during the heat of combat.

Elena, Olivia, and Lexi made it some ways away from the gymnasium before Lexi called out to her best friend.

"Elena! Wait for me! Take me with you!"

Elena turned around when she realized she was being followed and pointed her rifle towards her former best friend. A girl who, during the first day of the apocalypse, had left Elena to the walkers in an attempt to save herself.

Because of this, Elena rested her finger on the trigger as she shouted a command to the girl who had betrayed her.

"Don't move!"