The halls were dead silent which was abnormal for this type of setting. An office building was never quiet, especially during a Zombie outbreak. The dumb ones always wandered the halls, usually trapped within the building. But there was no sign of them, other than the blood that stained the floor. The man, no older than twenty-five, walked these quiet, blood-stained halls cautiously for he knew the silence was strange. He held a flashlight in his left hand, lighting the area ahead of him, in his right was a worn-out bat and his only form of defense. He listened for any noise in the quiet building, but there was none.
He had been separated from his group when he got sidetracked by an odd report. It was a journal entry. Most likely from one of the employees, but that wasn't the odd part. The odd part was the date. It was dated almost three months after the outbreak had happened, but the pages seemed to contain relatively normal reports that had been glued into the book. The reports stated that the other persons had not responded for well over two months and that sales had dropped to almost zero. It's as if whoever wrote this wasn't even aware of the pandemic going on outside.
It was chilly in the building, and the man shivered. The cold winter months were approaching. The winter was always annoying and hard to get around during. The Zombies stayed in larger groups and stayed in places for a long time as if to conserve heat. It was well past midnight and the man grew drowsy. He tried his best to stay alert, but he had been awake for over thirty hours already and was due for some sleep.
The walls were riddled with cracks, not because the building was old it had only been build just before the outbreak, but because of the recklessness of people just trying not to die. It opened about two months prior to the outbreak and people lined up for jobs here, that's why there should be tones of Zombies here, but still, none roamed the halls. Even before he was separated from his group they only ran into a few Zombies. The man continued down the hall when he heard a sound come from up ahead. Something rolled out into the beam of light, an open can. The man set down his light so that the beam was still cast in front of him and clenched his bat with both of his hands.
He slowly approached the can staying close to the wall, waiting for a Zombie to emerge from around the corner. The sound of a door being slammed against a wall came from behind him and a figure blocked most of the beam of light. As he turned around swinging his bat, just hoping to hit it before it got to him, he didn't connect with anything. He knew it was over. Yet it somehow wasn't. Instead, another figure tackled the Zombie mid-air, latching onto it. The man quickly scrambled to pick up his light and directed it to where they landed. The figure had a hold of the Sneaker from behind, their arms wrapped around its chest and their legs around its legs. He ran towards them but stopped when he heard a loud cracking sound. His stomachs churned. The figure was bending the Zombie back and he guessed that the cracking noise was the sound of its spine breaking.
The figure let go of the Sneaker, now immobile but not dead, and stood up. The man looked at the figure, their long blond hair was caked in dried blood and fell over their face to past their knees. Their clothes were tattered and shredded, barely together. They had wide shoulders and arms that weren't exactly muscular. Their chest was flat and could be partly seen through the holes in their shirt. But what concerned him the most wasn't the state of them, what caught his attention were his eyes. He had blood-red eyes all the way down to the pupil, only one thing had eyes like those, a Zombie. The man took a step back and prepared to defend himself, and the Zombie ran towards him at amazing speed, he didn't even have time to swing, he barely registered that it started to move. But it went past him and attacked something behind him. Another Zombie. Probably the one who kicked the open can earlier he guessed. The blond Zombie bit into the other Zombie, tearing out chunks of flesh until it stopped moving entirely. Then it took off around the corner.
The man stood there shocked. He had just run into a Zombie, and not only did it not attack him, but it killed the other Zombies that had tried to attack him. The Zombie... saved him? While the man did not know why the blond-haired Zombie behaved as it did, he knew that he still needed to find his group. He continued down the hall to the stairs and debated whether to keep going up or to go back down and hope he survives long enough that his group packs up and leaves the building if they hadn't already. As he thought about what he should do, he heard a jingling sound from upstairs. The sound was familiar, though he couldn't place why. Deciding to follow the sound he went up the stairs. The sound stopped after he climbed the first staircase, but there was no sign of the cause.
'Floor 15'
He took a mental note so he knew where to continue looking for his group, and he kept climbing the stairs. He paused between the 18th and 19th floor when he hit something with his foot, making a jingling sound. A slinky. The sound must have been it going down the steps, but who set it off? The door to the 19th floor opened briefly, then closed again. He continued up the stairs, but he stopped once again when he got to the 19th floor. The floor was almost completely covered in blood, bones were scattered around too as if something picked them clean. Stepping over the bones he got to the door of the 19th floor. He looked at the stairs, shining the light in the direction of the top of the next flight of stairs, but there was a significant decrease in blood on the stairs. Something lived on the 19th floor, and it wasn't like the other Zombies, it finishes its meals.
He went through the door. The floor here was quite clean, with no blood staining it or garbage scattered around it. The office doors were closed and the walls were less cracked. It was actually clean. It was strange. The sound of footsteps leading away snapped him out of his thoughts. Something was running up ahead, but it was getting farther. He started walking but picked up the pace when the footsteps were getting too far away. He ran all the way to the other side of the building. When he came to the last hall the footsteps stopped, and a door was swung open. Carefully he approached the open door with his bat ready, he walked into the room only to be blinded by lights. He lifted his arms to protect his eyes.
"What the-"
"Mikaela!"
A female voice exclaimed, not quite yelling. The lights were taken off his face, and he could see. It was his group, they had made camp on the nineteenth floor. But someone was missing.
"Tori! I almost thought you left me here!"
"You know we would never do that unless you died. Then we'd have to kill you again before we left."
Said Norman, the only other guy in the room.
"Do you really trust us that little?"
Asked the other girl, Natasha.
"Of course not, but you had me scared for a while there. I stopped for two minutes and you guys were gone."
"We only noticed after we got three floors higher, you're always behind the group looking through stuff so we thought you were just a little behind. Then this Sneaker came out of one of the offices and chased us all the way up here. It wouldn't even get close to us one we got to this floor so we decided this was the best place to set up camp."
Norman explained.
"I ran into a Sneaker on the way here too. It was probably the same one, it was hiding in one of the offices. I almost died from it... by the way, where's Danny?"
"He went to look for you. You mean you didn't run into him?"
Natasha questioned.
"No. There weren't even many other Zombies - except that different one."
Then something flew through the door and slammed against the floor, skidding back. It shot up breathing heavily.
"Danny!"
Natasha yelled, running towards him.
"You didn't get bit, did you? Did you?"
His eyes were wide with fear. He took a moment to respond.
"N-no. I didn't."
He stared into the darkness outside the office. Mikaela looked into the hall before closing the door and crouched down next to him.
"What happened to you?"
"I-I don't know. I-I was looking for you a few floors down when this Zombie appeared down the hall from me... It was so fast I barely noticed it before it grabbed me... I dropped my light and machete and it carried me all the way up here. Then it threw me... what the hell just happened...?"
Everyone listened to the story, not fully believing the truth in it, or not wanting to. Norman spoke first.
"You guys don't think... that it's trying to, you know, like, gather us up to eat later... do you?"
Mikaela couldn't deny that it was possible, but his gut told him otherwise.
'if it plans to eat us, why didn't it carry us all here. Or block our escape route... maybe it did.'
Mikaela opened the door and shunned the light down the hall, it was empty still. He went back in.
"We should just go to sleep. We're all just tired and it's driving us a little crazy. We'll feel better in the morning. I'll even take first watch."
Mikaela crouched down and grabbed his bat before heading out the door. No one got much sleep, they were all scared that they would be eaten during the night, being the first pick of this strange new Zombie. That night was the quietest one of any of their trips, no one dared to make any noise.