Between stabbing Ricardo in the face, and now, Josh wasn't quite sure what had exactly happened. He knew he'd cycled home as fast as possible, thinking the police had to be after him, and prepared a bag to get out of the city. He was going home, back where he'd be...safe? Who was he kidding. He'd go to jail for this one for sure. No- positive thinking. He'd get back to Detroit, everything would be fine, happy days, happy days, goddammit. He'd fucking killed a man. Yeah, the man wasn't in his right mind (the eyes still haunted him) but that would go down as murder. In the bag were a few changes of socks and underwear, a book, and his freaking awesome hand-powered torch thingy that would get charged by winding a handle. Pretty useful in a dark apartment. He had gotten rid of his blood-soaked clothes, and instead opted for a white t-shirt, dark grey hoodie and his tough, if seriously old winter coat. It was nice and warm though, left over from when he lived in Detroit, seeing as the winters there got pretty damn cold. In New York too, but being smack bang in the middle of town meant he didn't quite feel it as much.
Then, with his bag by the front door, he'd flopped down on his bed and crashed for the night.
In the morning he'd called his mother, telling her that he's coming home. She sounded slightly hysterical, and very insistent on him leaving the city.
'You gotta leave, Joshua,' She'd said. 'There's a hella lot of crazy stuff going on, people getting ill, people dying. You get outta there, you hear?' Well it'd been the first thing Joshua had heard of New York being in the throes of some epidemic, but he assured her he was coming home. Then he grabbed his bike, and was about to make it out of the door when he turned back, and on a whim grabbed the cleaned knife from the kitchen, the same one that he'd killed Ricardo with. Some anxious, niggling voice in the back told him he'd need it.
And here he was, legging it down a road with a pack of angry people behind him, moaning and yelling. It was comical really; he'd run over a pothole, bending the wheel of his bike utterly out of shape. And as he dusted himself off, he suddenly found himself face to face with, well, a crazy thingy, with the same eyes Ricardo had. The crazy thingy seemed to be as surprised to see Josh as Josh was to see it. They were both perfectly still for a split second, like, 'What are you doing here?' And then the shit hit the fan.
Josh had run down away from the crazy thing, yelling at the top of his voice. The crazy thing had roared and was joined by a gang of other crazy things, and then commenced to chase Josh down the road. They were forming a veritable mob, and one knife couldn't stop them all. So he kept running.
And then, to his complete joy, he saw people. People getting into a car that was in a parking lot of a hotel.
'Help me! Help me!'