We went through the rooms quickly, scanning for anything that would be useful and make camp life easier. But these were mostly offices. No one wanted desks and calculators. Most of the lower floors had been thoroughly looted, too. We chose not to waste much time on leftovers.
On the 37th floor (marked as the 38th, because the building’s owner had superstitiously skipped floor thirteen), I let the group go on ahead of me. It didn’t seem like anyone would notice. The others moved down the hall to another room and I watched the door close behind the last person, who didn’t look back. Clear.
I walked over to the windows and slid one open, not expecting it to be so easy. I crawled out onto the ledge and dropped down to the gargoyle several feet below. They were all so much bigger than they had looked from the street! I walked across the gargoyle’s body, four big steps. I stood on its head, and I looked down to the pavement.
This was not the side of the building we’d come in on. Below was a crowd of lethargic rotters, wading through each other in the hot sun, purposeless. They didn’t look up, just milled about.
The stifling stillness of the heavy, hot aerosphere clung to my body. I’d expected wind this high up, but there was none. Suddenly, my thoughts turned darker: I considered what it would be like to dive into the middle of the putrefying crowd. How quick it would be, falling through the air onto the sticky asphalt.
Impulsively, I decided that before me were two paths: go forward into Nothing or climb back to the group where I didn’t want to be, because I was an outsider. I always would be. Would be in any group. I couldn’t belong. Moving on from them and living out the rest of my life alone held no appeal; I didn’t even consider it an option anymore. I’d tried that enough to know how it would go. Whatever I’d thought was waiting for me would have to make do without me. My choice finalized, I rose up on my toes.
“I, uh, don’t know your name,” came a man’s voice from the window.
Oops. No one was supposed to know about this. I’m used to melting into background noise. It’s something of a prized skill for me. Surprised and feeling a bit of dread, I gave an answer that was barely audible.
“I don’t have one now.”
After a pause, he stated, “Then I’ll call you Kit.”
I turned it over in my head. It was a name bestowed like a gift. I felt like I’d been knighted.
“So, um, Kit…” he started. I still hadn’t turned around, but realized with certainty it was Eric standing there. He’d never addressed me before. I’d never heard him speak except for those angry words after the fight, but this calming voice which carried so well belonged perfectly to him. “Are you coming back up now?”
Was I?
When I looked over my shoulder, he stretched a hand down in my direction.
“You’re making me nervous,” he added.
A third path opened to me and I let the other options go. I ran across the gargoyle’s form without looking down. I jumped up, grabbed the ledge, and took Eric’s proffered hand. He pulled me up more than making me climb, and I marveled at his strength. I felt like a feather floating.
I’ll take the third path, I silently told the man at my side as he handed me a bottle of water.
Eric treated me like we were in a normal situation. As if every day he talked to strangers teetering on the edge of the 37th story and there was nothing odd about it. And this didn’t feel like a put-on. He wasn’t performing an elaborate act, wasn’t affecting social niceties to cover for underlying discomfort. My fondness for him grew as we started after the others.
We were the only ones in the hall, but could hear peoples’ voices coming from behind a conference room door a few feet away. At the end of the shining floor tiles, a few rotters appeared from an open doorway and shuffled in our direction.
“Got this,” I said, producing an eight-pack of throwing knives. Eric reached out reflexively, excited. Then he stopped short, almost like he expected me to slap his wrist for it, and looked at me questioningly. I held the weapons his way and allowed him to pull out a few. We threw knives at the lurching corpses like we were playing a carnival game. We cleaned and stowed the knives afterward.
“Go Team Us!” he exclaimed, triumphantly pulling a skunky bag of pot from a rotter’s pocket. Its smell was a welcome change, something to concentrate on besides decaying flesh.
Eric held his hand up for a high five. I smacked it hard, though my gloved hand muffled the noise. My laughter rang back to us from the sterile walls.
Not long later, Eric pulled something out of his pocket and passed it to me.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Magic pill. Nice time.”
I studied it briefly. Small. Chalky white, with an indigo star imprinted on one side.
“Will make things… surreal,” he added. “It’ll slow you down a bit, but it won’t be a problem.” He spoke with easy confidence, and the message seemed to be, Don’t worry, I’ll look out for you.
I put the pill in my mouth and dry-swallowed it. Why not? I’d already put my life in his hands once.
Ten minutes later, the pill took hold. I was sitting on the floor, enjoying the tiles’ coolness, and I noticed how noise had changed in quality. Everything sounded slower, deeper, fuller. It sort of reminded me of how sound changed before I was anesthetized for my operations. Noise shimmered around me. I’d never noticed this tendency to interpret my world in terms of aural awareness, but now the thought filled my brain and blossomed into something wondrously interesting.
“Hrrowwarryewwdewwing?” Eric’s voice stretched out like taffy. He grinned like the Cheshire Cat.
“Fine, just fine,” I said, hoping it sounded clearer to his ears than mine. I got up from the floor with effort, leaning against the wall to keep from keeling to the side. “Quite a just-fine indeed!”
“Hrrarraughhrragaghraharggah!” he laughed. “Yewwarrseww-fackedtawp!”
“Yeah. Pretty nice!” I tried to say, but the words sounded all wrong. I meant it, and wanted him to know it, so I was relieved to see he seemed to understand me. This was delightful!
The others’ voices grew louder, and I straightened up, trying to look… not high. I stepped away from the wall, but my usual rock-solid balance hadn’t yet returned, so I leaned back in what I hoped was a nonchalant way. I would’ve liked to slide down, to return to the floor, but we still had work to do. The rest of the group obliviously marched past and we rejoined them a few minutes later, once the floor stopped dancing and I could walk steadily again.
The next few floors were fairly uneventful, rotter-wise, but they’re the ones that took the longest. In almost every desk now, we found candy. Office workers sure do love their candy. Someone found a cache of lighters in a drawer. Perhaps their former owner was a bit of a pyro. In another office, we found a revolver and a flask of something I couldn’t identify. Its sharp alcoholic tang was strong, but the smell didn’t register in my databank. I don’t know vodka from whiskey from scotch from tequila, not by smell.
After an hour, the pill wore off in stages. Sound began to normalize, but my limbs remained heavy and slow. I felt like my blood must be made of lead. As it pulsed through my veins, the world took on its heavy rhythm. This was more pleasant than it probably sounds. It was such a different feeling from normal, and I reveled in the novelty of it.
I mumbled something about finding a restroom and headed down the hall. “Got this,” I muttered, waving Eric away.
He backed off, but I felt him watching and assessing as I walked down the corridor. He apparently agreed I didn’t need a babysitter any longer, and he moved on with the others.
The bathroom was pitch black. My small flashlight beam cut into it like I was brandishing a sword. I made sure the room was clear before anything else. Check and recheck. Can’t check too much. Sleep tugged pleasantly at my sleeves and I drowsily attempted to flush the toilet and wash my hands. Old habits die hard. I used some hand sanitizer from my backpack instead, and pulled food from the
front zippered section. I shoved the flashlight back in my pocket and headed for the door, gnawing on a protein bar in the quiet darkness and feeling a bit more energized. Back in the hall, there was silence. Everyone else had moved on to the next floor.
A moment later, all hell broke loose.
I heard someone yelling as I opened the door to the stairwell. Forcing myself to hustle up the treads, I pulled out a knife for one hand and my gun for the other. Shots sounded from the top floor. Just before I got there, three members of my group burst into the stairway. I froze against the wall of the stairs.
“Run!” hollered some woman whose name is still a mystery. Some nameless woman who didn’t make it.
“Get out of the building!” yelled Patrick on his way by.
There was no need to run. No rotters were in the stairwell. They couldn’t open doors.
Then an explosion shook the building, ripping the heavy, metal door off its hinges and crushing the nameless woman’s skull.
Someone had a grenade? I stood there, unmoved and feeling immovable.
“That floor is full of them!” shouted Rob as he entered the stairwell.
Then why did he blow the damn door open?
He grabbed my wrist and dragged me down. Everyone was double-timing it down the stairs. Everyone but Nameless Woman. Everyone but Eric.
“Where’s Eric?” I asked, trying to slow our descent and unprepared for the strength Rob’s fear had endowed him with. “WHERE IS HE?” I demanded.
“Up top, pinned in. We can’t get to him. We can’t go back!” Rob panted.
Can’t go back? Was he insane? How could we not go back?
Rob tried to pull me around a corner and I resisted. He swung me around it so hard there was a loud crack as my head hit the glossy cinder block wall. I struggled furiously, clinging to the handrail, and finally broke free of him. (Well, that’s one way to put it. In any case, he did let go.) Rob looked at me with shock all over his face. Then he turned and ran.
Below, Patrick’s air horn blasted. Above me, rotters spilled out of the smoking maw. They tumbled down the stairs in a pile. The air horns sounded a muffled concert to each other.
I slipped through a door marked “39” and made my way toward the far stairwell. My vision had become an alteration of normal, stretching out, then filling with spots of black, then flashing black. I was surprised to realize I was on the verge of losing consciousness. I was going to pass out for the first time ever. I’d never had a serious head injury before. I felt stupefied at the difference between it and my previous wounds.
I entered a small, empty office. I closed the door behind me, sat down, and scooted my chair against it. Darkness took hold.
Who knows how long that heavy oblivion lasted? When I awoke, my head was pounding, my throat was sore and dry, and my fury was bitter and all-consuming. Not only had the others fled, they’d left Eric behind.
Rob, infuriatingly, had caused me to lose my favorite knife and my gun, which had been the farmer’s wife’s. When he grabbed my wrist, it hurt so bad I dropped them. No going back for them now.
I was angriest at Jeff, though. It didn’t make sense, but I held him accountable for this predicament.
The air horns had triggered a wave of rotters to move to what had been the van’s side of the building. The crowd was now too thick to run through without getting bitten. I looked out the window at them all and could envision Jeff hurrying people into the van, then the van leaving as rotters filled the space where it had been. Leaving us behind. I wondered how long it had been since they’d left.
I was so angry, I didn’t even notice my arm right away. When Rob smacked me into the wall, the damage wasn’t limited to my head. My right shoulder was dislocated and my arm hung uselessly at my side.
Keep marching, I advised the voice in my head which asked, “What to do? What to do now?”
Eric. I had to find him.
A few rotters stood spitting and drooling at the office door. They were easy enough to deal with, even in my condition.
Idiots! I thought. If the group members had just kept their wits about them, Eric and I wouldn’t be in this mess.
I finished putting the rotters down and moved along. Through the hall, up a different set of stairs… my head swam. Gotta stay awake. Up, up… 45.
The top floor of this building was mostly open—an event hall. And someone had been hosting some sort of convention when Rottermania hit. The number of bodies on the top floor was staggering in spite of how many rotters had been in the other stairwell (which was now clogged with them, no doubt). How many hundreds of people had been crammed in here for whatever they’d convened about? Many gnawed-on bodies lay motionless now. Inanimate, not moved by life or undeath. Many more were still on their feet, though. When I walked through the door, they saw me and began shuffling my way, but they’d been packed together at the southern side of the building around a door labeled “ROOFTOP.” That had to be where Eric was.
I crawled onto a counter, pulled a chair up behind me, and stepped on it. I pushed a ceiling tile aside and awkwardly climbed in, kicking the chair away and hitting the nearest rotter with it. That bought me enough time to get up into the ceiling, even with my dead arm.
The first thing I noticed about the crawlspace was evidence of rodents. Their droppings, the smell of their urine, the sounds they made in the distance. It was a scrabbling, a scratching as they scurried around. My skin crawled at the thought of being a meal for them. It felt like a very real danger, but they’d been feeding on the dead. They weren’t interested in me. It wasn’t much of a comfort.
I tried to determine how Eric had gotten trapped. He must’ve become separated from the group—gone ahead of them to scout, most likely—and his return route was cut off by rotters who had been spurred into action by the sound and sight of the rest of the group. Then Rob had thrown the grenade, complicating things more by filling the stairwell with too many rotters to race past, and further agitating the rotters who remained on the top floor. I could see the scenario plainly in my mind. I couldn’t see anything with my eyes.
I had a lot of difficulty navigating in the darkness. Out on the floors proper, dirty windows let in enough light. Up here, the darkness was absolute. My foot punched through a brittle ceiling tile and a little bit of light reached into the crawlspace. My arm irritatingly dragged on the ceiling supports beneath me.
Dropping from the ceiling to get to the southern door would be risky, and there was no guarantee we’d be able to get back through the door. I turned my flashlight on and directed it to the crawlspace’s ends. No access panels to the roof.
An idea hit. There was heavy-duty electric wiring in the crawlspace. I pulled and cut a decent length, then hooked a coil of it to the outside of my bag. Good. My task was set. So the immediate plan was this: drop through the ceiling and scramble for the door, trying to haul some furniture behind me to block my path. I did just that. When I did, though, my foot folded beneath me. It rolled so unexpectedly that I fell, hard. No time to worry over it. I popped back up and ran for the door, grateful that most of the dumb corpses had been lured to the other side of the room by my entrance. There were only a couple dozen rotters near me. Two of them bit my arm before I could slip through the door. They didn’t get a chance to really latch on, though.
I pushed the door shut behind me before the rotters could follow and leaned against it briefly, breathing hard and squinting in the bright sun. I took off my backpack for a moment, found and struggled into a long-sleeved navy shirt to hide my new bites, and tried to pull myself together. Control your breathing, control yourself. Don’t be a wimp, Kit, I warned. I was pleased to realize the name was already becoming part of my identity. I swapped out my fleece gloves for leather fingerless gloves. They’d provide extra friction for the climb down the electric cable. I slung the backpack over my left shoulder and ascended the grated metal stairs to the rooftop.
This day had gone from uncomfortably hot to unfathomably hot,
and the sunlight was blinding. Or maybe it was the next day? I realized I had no idea which was the case.
Eric sat against a concrete post at the far end of the roof, sunburnt and without supplies. There wasn’t any shadow big enough to provide shelter. He blinked as sweat dripped into his eyes.
“Hey,” I said as I walked to him, hoping I’d veiled my pain enough to keep him from noticing it. I slipped off the backpack, then passed him a warm Sunny Delight from its left outside pocket.
“Kitkat!” Eric looked surprised and pleased and worried. He took a long pull on the disgusting drink, smiling like it tasted great. “Thanks.” A pause. “Your arm!” He hopped up and directed me to brace myself on a post at the edge of the empty helicopter pad. I gritted my teeth, and he reset my arm with the calm assurance of someone who’s done it before, more than once.
“Thanks back atcha.” I rubbed my shoulder. Then I motioned toward the stairs, toward the door. “We don’t want to go back through there.”
Spots of black still swam in my vision. Eric wiped sweat and blood from the side of my head with a rag. I let him. I didn’t offer an explanation, and he didn’t ask.
The world throbbed brightly. I wished I could escape into a dark, cold basement. Or a walk-in refrigerator. Or… no, no good to think about it. Thinking was harder than usual, anyway.
Eric removed the electric wire from my backpack, immediately guessing my plan. He secured the wire to an arch of rebar which extended from a nearby post. I took the hammer out of my backpack; it was going to help us get back into the building. When Eric saw the hammer, he grinned. I wondered what he thought of me for carrying such an item everywhere I went. I thought he might tease me like Renee had, but he didn’t say anything. I slid the hammer into the loop sewn on the side of my carpenter pants, so it would be easy to get to.
“Let’s make this quick,” I said.
Eric peered over the building’s side. “There’s more than enough cable here to get to the 44th floor. Let’s go down, then find transpo and get back to camp.”
Survial Kit Series (Book 1): Survival Kit's Apocalypse Page 5
