In hindsight, Michael probably should have had a plan before he said "I'm going to help you."
A plan would have been nice. Even a bad one. Even just a rough outline scribbled on a napkin. But he had approximately zero seconds between the words leaving his mouth and the three Rotters lurching toward them with the single-minded enthusiasm of things that had nothing left to lose.
So he did the next best thing.
"Run," he said.
The girl stared at him. "That's your plan?"
"Working on part two. Run first."
She ran. He ran. The Rotters, to absolutely nobody's surprise, also ran but in their version of it, which was less running and more falling forward repeatedly with intent but was still fast enough.
Michael's apartment was four doors behind him, which meant going back was not an option unless he wanted to introduce three Rotters to his last safe space, which he did not.
So they had no choice but to go forward. Down the hallway, past the flickering lights, past three closed doors and one that was swinging open on a hinge that squealed like it was personally offended.
"Stairs!" the girl shouted, already ahead of him. She better than him which slightly wounded his pride, she was athletic, sharp with turns and did not waste a single step.
Michael was doing his best.
His best involved nearly tripping over his own feet at the hallway corner, catching himself on the wall with one hand, losing one of the ration packs in the process, and making the executive decision not to go back for it.
'Thirty SP gone, just like that.' Michael thought as a shed of tear welled up his eyes.
The grief was real.
They hit the stairwell door together, she pushed it open and he followed, and then they were on the stairs and could hear the distant sound of things moving somewhere in the floors below that neither of them commented on because acknowledging it would not help.
"Up or down?" she gasped.
"Up." The rooftop was a dead end but so was going down given the sounds from below, and at least going up bought them time.
They took the stairs two at a time. Behind them the stairwell door slammed open the Rotters had made the turn. Michael risked a glance back and immediately regretted it. Three of them were clogging the stairwell, moving faster than anything dead had a right to.
"Faster," he suggested helpfully.
"I am going faster!"
"Faster than that!"
She said something that was probably not very polite and went faster.
Floor seven.
Floor eight.
Floor nine.
Then a door to the hallway, and Michael grabbed the handle without breaking his stride hauling it open.
"In here —"
They spilled into the ninth floor hallway, and Michael pulled the door shut behind them. The Rotters hit it from the other side with a satisfying thud and then began scratching the foot at gap in the door's edge but the latch held.
Michael put his back against the door with his chest heaving.
The ninth floor hallway was the say design as his, it was long, dim, and had a beige carpet that had seen better decades. Most of the doors were closed and there were no signs of zombies on this floor. The girl stood three feet away with her hands on her knees catching her breath, while her dark hair covered her face.
For a moment the only sounds were their breathing and the muffled, frustrated thumping from the stairwell door.
Then she looked up.
She was okay, she was pretty. She had sharp eyes which were dark brown, currently doing a full threat assessment of him that he suspected he was not passing with flying colors.
She almost seemed to be in her mid twenties and had a great torn sleeve, a scrape along her forearm that was recent enough to still be bleeding slightly. She had probably been running for a while before she hit his floor.
"You're the help?" she said.
Michael considered his presentation. He was wearing a slightly wrinkled t-shirt and the same jeans he had had on for three days.
"I'm a help," he said carefully. "Possibly the only one available."
She stared at him for a long moment.
"Great," she said, with a sarcastic tone. "Fantastic. Wonderful."
"How many floors did they chase you before mine?"
"Three."
"Are there more of them?"
"A lot more. There was a horde breach on the second floor about an hour ago. I was in 412 and I —" She stopped. She seemed to have remembered something painful and looked away. "I needed to move."
Michael didn't push. He understood what she meant
"Okay." He straightened up from the door. The thumping behind him was already slowing, Rotters had short attention spans when the stimulus disappeared. Give it a few minutes and they would drift back down the stairs toward whatever else had caught their interest. "We will wait here. Let them lose us. Then we move."
She looked sideways at him. "Move where?"
"To my floor. My apartment." He paused. "It's relatively safe. I've been there for eighteen days."
"Eighteen days alone?"
"Just me and my beans."
She stared for a moment then her mouth curved into a warm smile.
"I'm Sera," she said.
"Michael."
She looked at his knife then at the ration packs tucked under his arm.
"Michael," she repeated. "You don't look like a survivalist."
"I'm not."
"You don't look like a fighter either."
"Also correct."
"So what are you?"
"I'm figuring it out," he said honestly.
---
They waited for about twelve minutes.
Michael counted because he had nothing else to do and counting felt productive.
Sera spent the twelve minutes doing a controlled sweep of the hallway, she quietly and efficiently checked each door like something she had been doing
She came back with a fire extinguisher she had pulled from the wall mount near the elevator bay.
"Better than a kitchen knife," she said, not unkindly.
Michael looked at his knife. "It's gotten me this far."
"You killed one zombie."
"One zombie and I have eighty —" He caught himself. "I've been managing."
She almost smiled again.
"The stairwell's clear," he said, more to redirect himself than anything else. "We go down slow. It should be simple"
"Simple," she echoed, like the word tasted faintly absurd given the context.
"I'm an optimist."
"You're something," she said, and headed for the stairwell door.
---
Going down was nothing like going up.
Going up had been panic and adrenaline and the very immediate motivation of three things trying to eat them. Going down was much more different.
Floor eight was clear.
Floor seven — a single Rotter in the stairwell, back turned, shuffling in a directionless circle. Sera looked at Michael. Michael looked at Sera. Michael looked at the Rotter. He did a quick mental calculation involving his knife, the noise of a struggle, and the probable contents of the floors below.
He gestured to move around it which seemed like the smartest thing to do in this situation, and they pressed against the wall, moving in slow inches past the thing, close enough that he could hear the wet, irregular sound of its breathing. Close enough to smell it, which was an experience he was adding to the permanent list of things he would rather not think about.
They hit the floor six door and slipped through like smoke.
---
His apartment was exactly as he had left it, the furniture was against the door, the bin bag was by the windows and empty cans in the corner. It was small and dark and smelled of solitary survival and it was, without question, the most beautiful sight Michael had laid eyes on since the world ended.
He got the door locked put t the furniture back in place then turned around.
Sera was standing in the middle of his living room, holding a fire extinguisher and taking it all in.
Her eyes landed on the empty bean can on the counter.
"Eighteen days," she said.
"Eighteen days."
She set the fire extinguisher down. Looked at him. "You made it eighteen days alone in this apartment."
"More or less."
"In this city."
"It's a good building."
"Thank you," she said quietly. "For the hallway."
Michael shrugged. "The system gave me the quest fuck you."
She blinked. "What?"
"Nothing." He cleared his throat. "You're welcome. Are you hurt? Your arm —"
"It's just a scrape. I'm fine." She looked at the ration packs still tucked under his arm. "Is there any chance —"
He was already holding one out before she finished the sentence.
She took it. Their fingers didn't quite touch but he was not thinking about that.
[Ding! Rescue Quest Complete: Save The Survivor]
[+150 SP awarded.]
[+1 Bond Point awarded — Sera.]
[Bond Store updated.]
Michael blinked at the notification.
He pulled up the Bond Store, curious, and found a new entry sitting at the top.
[Shared Sense — Sera (1 BP): Briefly synchronize perception with Sera. See what she sees. Hear what she hears. Duration: 60 seconds.]
He stared at that for a moment longer than was probably appropriate.
[New Bond Store item unlocked at 5 BP — Resonance Shield.]
He closed the store and found Sera watching him with the mildly suspicious expression of someone who kept catching him staring at nothing.
"You okay?" she asked.
"I'm fine. Good. Completely normal." He sat down on the floor and leaned back against the cabinet. After a beat, Sera sat across from him in a cross-legged postion opening a ration pack in her lap
Outside, somewhere distant, something that wasn't quite human made a sound that rolled through the city like a wave and faded.
Neither of them commented on it.
"So," Sera said, between bites. "What's the plan?"
Michael looked around his small, barricaded, bin-bag-windowed apartment.
"Build," he said.
She raised an eyebrow. "Build what?"
"Something worth staying in."