Remain Human: Changed

Part 6: The thing in the stairwell

3:48 PM

You walked up the dark stairs, hearing the soft crunch of concrete dust and plaster underneath your boots. Your muffled, contained breathing in the gas mask too loud within the enclosed stairway as you walk up at a less than normal pace, breath normal albeit as the sweat from earlier activities has started to stick to your clothes. Not the vest as least. 

Compared to the destroyed upper levels of the hub where the outside light was able to pass through the holes, the stairs were what you'd call a cavern in a deep cave. You didn't feel the need to use your flashlight because after all, its just only one direction: Up. Keeping one wary step after another wary step, you climb up, feeling lactic acid slowly build up in your leg muscles. You keep one hand on the dust-clad stairway railway, the other outstretched into the darkness. A muscle memory action whenever you walked in deep, dark places.  

After some careful climbing with the crunch of concrete and plaster being your only companion, you feel the metal door within the darkness. Feeling around, you find the handle and with a tug, you pull the door with some effort. The rusting hinges sharp squeal far too loud in the enclosed stairway for your liking. Opening it halfway, you squeeze through the door and onto the open 8th floor. 

Blinking rapidly, your eyes gradually adjusted to the sudden exposure in sunlight, stinging them and bathing the world in a bright glare. You pause until the stinging and glare left, then looked to see your surroundings.

The outdoor shipping container storage space that was the 8th floor has all but been utterly collapsed all the way down into the 6th floor. A giant gaping hole now mostly replaces the entire floor. Taking a peek, you gaze down, seeing nothing but jagged slabs of rubble with rebar of various lengths either jutting upwards of sidewards, reminding you of a picture of a jungle spike pit. Fitting, considering this is a concrete jungle being taken over by nature. A rather strong breeze almost knocked you over, your reflexes being fast enough to get a hold of yourself and stagger away from the edge. Note to self, crouch or go prone whenever you're near a ledge.

Some parts of the floor have remained somewhat intact, thin ledges just wide enough for you to sidestep across. There's waist-high parapets after all so getting around this floor should be simple enough. If you wanted to, considering there's nothing noteworthy here to warrant your stay here save for vantage points. Another strong gust of wind. Stronger now. Huh. Considering the sky's been grey for a good while enough, its obvious that rains gonna start hurling down at some point soon. But you've got an entire skyline to see first. 

Leaning down on the parapet, you take off your gasmask and take in your surroundings.

There's a few more warehouse hubs that are taller than the one you're on, blocking the North-East and East Views. However to your East, you can see some of the taller condominium flats jutting out from the other apartments by 15-30 stories a fair distance away. 

Next to them are the various shopping malls, the Heart of the shopping district. Large, encompassing and all interconnected through various walkways, they all appear to either hulk over or dwarf over the others, an invisible competition between them that still persists even till today. These malls make up a good portion of the city skyline and completely block out the low-lying apartments behind them. You've stayed away from these malls during the supply riots and after that since the government made sure to keep the infected and the corpses there ever since the morgues became full. Since there was next to no open space in the city, the government opted to keep the corpses inside the malls because of the large interior space. Sealed it up with tarp, concrete, iron bars and sheets, placed electric wire fences and experimental automated security bots around, tried to help the infected ones far too gone by sweetly smiling at them and left them for dead. Whenever you scavenge near those malls, you always keep swearing you smell the putrid smell of rotting flesh, vomit, improperly disposed faeces and urine and other god-knows-what things in those dark malls whenever the wind blew your direction. More worse than the hospitals there bt still within the branch Worse. All the hospitals and malls in the city are basically charnel houses by now, countless tens of thousands of dead inside them combined. You aren't going there for medical supplies if it meant a guaranteed slow death by the Pale Virus later on.