The hallway of the building was very narrow. To his right stood a wall that reached up to his chest. From there, if someone peeked their head out, they could see the stairs and the floors below, where Adam noticed the presence of more zombies.
The wall also allowed him to see the building across the street, a gigantic block of more than a hundred apartments, where at that moment several people were fighting for their lives.
One of those people was overtaken by a pair of zombies and Adam looked away as they began to devour him. He crouched down and sat in the hallway, trying to forget the scene while wishing it wasn't someone he knew.
As he crouched, a strange glow attracted his attention. It was a small glowing red crystal that looked like a jewel. He soon discovered that there was one next to each dead zombie. Adam reached over and picked one up from the ground.
[Common red crystal: basic currency].
As he tried to forget what he had witnessed, he picked up all the crystals and then sat down to rest. However, his rest turned out to be short-lived. A group of zombies began banging on Emma's apartment door from inside. Adam stood up, tired from the constant combat, and prepared to greet his new guests. As he waited for them to break down the door or open a hole big enough to set it on fire, he caught his breath and tried to calm himself. He couldn't help but constantly check the stairs, hoping that no zombies were coming up.
Finally, the zombies opened a hole in Emma's apartment door, so Adam took the opportunity to fire a flare. Multiple screams of pain told him he had hit the target. After all was quiet again, he entered the apartment. As he surveyed the place for his neighbor's fate, he extinguished the fire.
He scanned his surroundings nervously. He expected to find enemies hiding everywhere, as the system did not send him any messages about hostile elimination.
He continued investigating until he discovered the corpse of Mrs. Emma in the kitchen. Above her, a zombie with elongated limbs was feeding on the remains with abominable gluttony.
[Zombie Brawler].
Adam stepped back and held back his nausea and the disgust he felt. After calming down a bit, he moved closer and fired the flamethrower.
The zombie screamed in agony as it was covered in flames. Everything seemed to have gone well, but suddenly, it ran towards Adam at an alarming speed. This took him by surprise, so he panicked and ran into the room with the zombie right behind him. Alarmed by the heat of the fire behind him, he decided to jump to the side and drop to the ground.
The zombie, unable to stop, continued to run until it crashed into a wall of the apartment and opened a gigantic hole. Luckily for Adam, the Brawler was stunned, a moment he took advantage of to get up and run in the opposite direction. He had to buy time so the flamethrower could be used again.
Adam entered what must have been Emma's room and closed the door. He found on the bed an open package much like the one he had received. Apparently all the items were there. The zombie's angry scream startled him and reminded him that he was in the middle of a fight. He gathered his courage and set out to finish off his enemy. To his amazement, he realized that he was excited.
However, the zombie didn't give him time to think about it, as it kicked down the door to the room with one blow. The monster's skin was scorched and the fire was already out, but beyond that, it didn't seem to have taken much internal damage. Adam fired the flamethrower and the zombie caught fire again.
This time the attack seemed much more effective, the zombie brought its hands to its face and screamed in pain. Adam took that moment to reach over and hit one of the zombie's knees with the nozzle of the flamethrower, but, before falling to the floor, the monster hit Adam hard and sent him flying.
Adam hit the wall hard. The world around him began to spin, so he struggled to keep from being knocked unconscious. Meanwhile, the zombie slowly got up and approached him step by step. This time, the fire had disintegrated the surface skin and consumed part of the muscles, so the Brawler could barely move.
Still dazed from the blow, Adam got up, rescued his weapon and tried to get around the zombie and out of the room, but the space was narrow and the monster blocked his path. Adam backed up to the wall and counted the seconds. The Brawler continued to approach, but just as it was in front of Adam, the flamethrower fired again and the zombie ended up dead.
Adam absorbed the fire as usual and then dropped to the ground; not even the terrible smell of scorched flesh could ruin the relief he felt at being alive. A single blow had been enough to leave him in critical condition. The flamethrower, though powerful, was not a weapon well suited for fighting alone.
[You have killed the owner of the single apartment, so now the property belongs to you. The services...].
Adam ignored the message when the system repeated the same thing about limited services. The first part piqued his curiosity, though. The zombie he had just killed looked like it owned the property. Plus, it was a Brawler, much more powerful than the Stalkers. If he was right, then the zombie had evolved by killing Emma.
The conclusion was obvious: Adam and the other survivors were in a race against time. If they didn't finish off all the zombies lurking around, the zombies would evolve and kill them. Luckily, he thought, the building was only four stories and wasn't like the superblock across the street with hundreds of apartments.
When he felt ready, he stood up and remembered Emma's packet, so he walked over to see what was in it.
[Healer's Starter Pack. Unique items designed with Emma Maso's abilities and expertise].
Emma had been a nurse, so it made sense that she had chosen the Healer Class, though Adam didn't understand what combat potential a healer might have to take on zombies.
The package contained four health potions and three antidotes, some books on some magical diseases Adam had never heard of, a well-equipped first aid kit, several blueprints for the production of a medical kit, and some recipes for the preparation of antidotes and medicines.
The most important things in the short term are potions and antidotes, Adam thought.
[Simple health potion].
[Antidote].
In addition, Adam found, next to the brawler's corpse, a handful of red crystals and some blueprints with instructions on how to build a mechanical excavator.
Adam gathered everything together and took it to his own house, where he checked that the crystals were the same as the ones he had already collected. He then set about moving the zombie bodies into Emma's apartment and leaving his own clean.
When he felt ready to continue, he set out to check the third and last apartment on that floor. First he killed a zombie trying to climb the stairs and then prepared to go inside.
Adam was under the impression that the zombies somehow sensed living people. When he waited outside Emma's apartment for quite a while, the zombies tried to come out to kill him. He tried the same with the Marriz family's apartment, but after a long wait no zombies appeared. This gave him hope that his neighbors had managed to survive.
It wasn't that he liked the Marriz very much, especially Tracel. Only Tarin, the youngest son, was to his liking. But in this case, he hoped they had all survived.
He carefully approached the door and knocked with all his might as he shouted:
"Is anyone there?"
Then he stepped back and stood in front of the door, prepared in case it was zombies welcoming him. A few minutes later, just as he was thinking about breaking down the door and entering, Tarin opened it and looked sideways.
"Adam, is that really you?"
Tarin was a skinny boy of fifteen, with tousled hair and a somewhat wild look, yet he was a rather shy boy.
"Yes, it's me. How's your family? Mrs. Emma didn't make it..."
"We're fine, my brother and I took care of the zombies" Tarin seemed to hesitate, so Adam waited patiently. "My mom is hysterical and we can't leave her alone, besides, we're waiting for dad to come home from work."
Adam wanted to reassure the boy, but he felt that anything he said would only make him feel worse. Luckily, Tarin continued speaking.
"Mrs. Emma is dead?"
"Yes... a zombie devoured her. Worse, it evolved in doing so."
"What? "
"They're getting stronger. We need to kill them before it's too late. I need your help."
Tarin turned pale, he hadn't taken the news very well. The invitation to clean the building didn't sit well with him at all.
"Good luck with that, Adam, I don't think it's a good idea to abandon my family at this time. See you around."
Tarin closed the door so fast that Adam only cursed and turned away, facing the stairs. However, despite the rejection, he was in a good mood. After finding Emma, he believed for a moment that he had been the only survivor in the building. Besides, if the Marriz had survived, then there was a good chance of finding more help on the other floors.