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"Goddamn it!"
Of course. The one and only time he decided - on a slightly more than impulsive whim - to wear the white (which meant, unfortunately, that it was also nearly impossible to clean) suit, his actions conflicted horribly with someone else's sad excuse for plans. He should've seen it coming. Then again, it wasn't too often that the general public did much planning for illness of an apocalyptic nature -- they had the fancy, acronym-labeled organizations looking out for them and their overall health... so why even bother?
Why even bother? Did the fact that he'd been running, running for miles that he'd long ago lost count of, from things he wasn't even sure had the ability to exist make worrying worth his effort? To be honest, he wasn't quite sure he knew what to focus his energy on -- should he be more worried about creating a specific strategy or should he be more worried about why he hadn't already turned into one of those creeps? -- none of it really made sense to him. Sure, he'd have liked to know what was going on, but when it came down to it -- when it really came down to what was most important, and at this point he'd figured that survival qualified as one of those things -- he couldn't be bothered to give half a damn about scientific evidence.
His legs and lungs both burned, but he was far beyond content to continue, never pausing to consider that readjusting his pace might bring him an additional moment or two of comfort. He didn't want to be comfortable, because the moment he felt at ease with his surroundings was the moment he forgot he was in a crisis. And with the way things - zombies, Infected, motherfucking freaks... whatever they were, it wasn't like Nick cared about them enough to be 'politically correct' in their favour - had a tendency to jump out from all kinds of different angles, he couldn't afford to be oblivious to anything.
By the time night fell, however, he knew he had to find shelter. No matter how confident he was in his ability to keep on keepin' on, there was no way he would allow himself to stumble around - completely vulnerable - in the dark. It wasn't that he was afraid... necessarily... it just wasn't a good idea. But finding shelter that met his standards was a completely different story. In his mind, there was no reason he shouldn't be able to find a five star hotel with his name plastered all over it (of course, that may have been a bit of an exaggeration, as he would have been just as open to the idea of an abandoned home that still had running water).
Nick didn't have the patience to continually enter houses and search through them for possible infected, so he settled for what had been closest at the time, circling the house to assess the situation at hand. All the lower-level windows were boarded up, and both the front and back doors appeared to be blocked (he hadn't investigated that any further than attempting to open them). While in the back yard, however, he'd spotted a second floor window that appeared to be propped open, and just underneath it was a rickety bit of latticework. It didn't quite reach the window, and had probably only been meant to be used as a guide for... ivy, or some sort of plant that apparently hadn't been introduced to the dirt just yet. Whatever the reason for its being there, Nick could be sure it made sense in some way he didn't care to understand; he was just interested in using it to his advantage before it broke. Luckily, he was able to claw his way in through the window, probably dirtying his suit all that much more (because really, who actually took the time to clean that sort of stuff) before turning around to close and lock the blasted thing.
It wasn't long before he began searching through the rest of the house. He was determined to get his night's rest, and that certainly wouldn't happen until he knew he was the only one under that particular roof.
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