Rotten ✔️

Chapter 21

           

We had managed to get away from the Rats. We left the woman there, and we have no idea if the Rats kept chasing after us, or if they stopped to eat her. I hope they kept chasing us and fell off the edge of the roof. Rats can't seem to jump, they just keep running forward. Blinded by the urge for flesh.

                Garth hasn't said anything since he killed that man. It's been a day since it happened, and he has just been occupied in his mind once we were all safe. The gunshot brought a lot of Rats to the area. You can look out the window and still see Rats sniffing their way over. I'm sure that the horde heard it. Probably half the town heard it.

                We are hiding out in an office building, on the top floor. We had found an abandoned hide-out and there were some binoculars there, so we snatched them. There seemed to be no Rats in the building, but to take precautions, we made sure there were no Rats on the floor we were staying on, and made sure we would know if someone or something came in.

                The office also had massive floor to ceiling windows, but the cubicles offered some privacy. We had rearranged the cubicles to make a space for us all to sleep in and protect us from anything able to see inside the windows. Even though we were about fifteen stories high, any signs of human life would attract the Rats and other survivors. Even a dim light would make the Rats suspicious of where we were.

                In the days that we stayed at the office building, not a lot happened. We mostly studied the Rats below us. There was still a lot there from the gunshot. They shuffle around when there is nothing else for them to do. If there is nothing around, they will just shuffle, and it's dangerous for us.

                If anyone comes across this group, they would instantly assume that they are all the slow movers. Yes, there are now two types of Rats. The ones who do shuffle around and the ones who can run. The ones who run are usually the freshly turned. They slowly get slower and slower until they are forced into a shuffle. I have no idea why. Sometime a Rat will stay as runner, but most of the time they won't.

                The runner Rats seem to have developed the ability to act. They pretend as if they are the slow Rats, and then when prey gets close enough, they pounce at them. We saw two people, from our little perch, who thought it would be a good idea to run through the slow Rats. They would have been able to make it through if they had all been slow ones, but some were the runners. They didn't make it far before they realised their mistake.

                I have managed to implant the name Rat inside Garth and Lizzie head and now that's what they call them as well. We all have cabin fever and are itching to go outside or to do something active, but we can't do much without drawing attention to ourselves. The door to the roof is alarmed, so if we try to go through, the alarm will go off. Even though the power to the building is out, we still don't want to risk it.

                We have cleared out the top five floors of the building, searching for any supplies that could be handy to us. On each floor we found a vending machine that still had some food in it. We badly wanted to smash in the glass, but we needed to be as quiet as we could. Lizzie had an idea to gently tap in a small hole, then with protected hands, slowly break away the rest of the glass.

                We decided to start on the top floor, considering we would get better and quieter at it the more time we did it. We went to the first vending machine and Lizzie knelt in front of it. She took out her knife and slowly tapped at the glass. It took about fifteen minutes until there was a hole big enough for someone to stick their finger through. We had to keep passing the knife onto someone else, because our arms were getting tired.

                Once the hole was big enough, we covered our hands with some of our clothes and started to pick away at the glass, quietly breaking it away. An hour later, we had successfully given ourselves access to all the food in the first vending machine. We didn't realise how much food, that was still good, was in there. We still had enough room to fit some more in our bags, but we decided that was it for a while.

                We would stay in the office building for another week, watching the Rats until they had dispersed a bit more, and it was reasonably safe for us to go outside and away from all the Rats. It was a long week of watching the Rats, finding more food and just doing nothing while we waited. But it was all necessary.

                We finally decided that it was time to leave a week later. And a long week it had been. We packed all our gear, weapons ready for anything. We decided that Garth would only use the revolver in an emergency, he wouldn't just start shooting Rats here and there. We had taken more food and water yesterday, so we were currently stocked.

                Once we were all ready, we went to the stairs and slowly made our way down. I had an idea a few floors from the ground. I had seen it happen in television shows, and I had no idea if it would work in real life, but there was no harm in trying. We were going to cover ourselves in Rat blood and guts to try to mask our scent and then make our way through the crowd. Hopefully unnoticed.

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A/N: HEYO!!!! I've been really slack with my writing this month, like I've barely written anything, but I will try to write more because I've been posting prewritten stuff that I wrote during NaNoWriMo. I've been getting heaps of ideas for other books as well (though none of them have turned out to be good enough for me to actually get past chapter one XD)

So! What do you think will happen next?!? Will the Rats guts succeed in masking their scent? Poor Garth is going through a rough time. He just killed a person.

I hope you enjoyed this chapter, please vote and comment and all that Jazz!!! WE ARE ALMOST AT 300 reads! WE CAN DOOO ITTTTTTTTT!!!

Happy reading!

-FlatMatesForLife