Zombie City: Episode 1 COMPLETE!!!

Zombie City: Episode 1: Chapter 5

Author's note: Zombie City is an ongoing zombie horror serial.  I'm posting the first episode here on wattpad--one new chapter each Saturday for a total of twenty chapters.  If you'd like to follow the story past the first episode, subsequent episodes are available on Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, iTunes, Kobo, and Smashwords.

Chapter 5

Shane often received notices and reminders of the importance of taking his breaks.  The notes usually reminded cleaning staff that California law required a fifteen minute break for every two hours worked, and a half hour lunch if the work-day was longer than six hours.  Today he’d already been at work for about two hours, but when the elevator doors opened on the ground floor, and he saw all of the disorganized chairs and can-littered tables, he knew he wouldn’t have time to take a break and still stay on schedule.  He frowned, thinking of how often that was the case.

He needed to get this floor clean as soon as possible.  Despite it being barely six a.m. on a Saturday, he’d seen ZapPow! workers show up almost this early on other weekends.  The fuckers really did live to work, as if their jobs were their whole reason for being.

Shane hurried over to the janitor closet, thumbing through the keys on his key ring.  He found his key, stabbed it into the keyhole, twisted it.  He jerked the door open and grabbed a box of trash bin liners from the shelf, dropped the box on the cart.  He pulled the cart out, wheeled it over to the nearest trash can.

And then he heard a loud crash from the third floor, as if someone had tipped over a file cabinet.

Shane froze in place, looking up at the third floor railing, trying to catch a glimpse of what was going on.  But he couldn’t see anything past the rail except for a few emergency lights shining down from the bottom of the next floor up.

“Maybe someone is up there,” he said to himself.  Maybe they fell out of their chair, or knocked a computer off the desk.  Or maybe there was an earthquake, a tiny one, but enough to tip a stack of books off a shelf.

He looked up at the rail.  He still couldn’t see anything.

“Hello!” he called out, aiming his voice at the third level.  “Everything all right up there?”

He listened carefully, but the only sound he heard was the subtle hum of the fluorescent lights.

“Fuck it,” he said.  “Be up there soon enough.  Got to get this main floor cleaned up already.”

He started working on the trash.  There were ten trash bins in the room, and every bin was filled to the brim with empty, red cans of Voodoo.  Shane guessed that at least forty cans would fit in a bin, which meant at least four hundred empty cans all together.  Not to mention the several dozen cans littering the table tops, and down in the cafeteria too.  So, more than 500 cans of Voodoo were drank at last night’s event, which worked out to one for every ZapPow! employee, and second cans for some.  It took Shane three trips to the blue recycling dumpster to dispose of all the bags.

He glanced at a clock on the wall when he’d finally finished with that job, saw that it was already half past six.  He hurried to the janitor’s closet, pulled the vacuum out, attached an extension cord to it, and plugged the cord into the wall socket.  Then he turned it on, and ran it across the room—literally ran it, arm stretched out, feet jogging across the carpet, trying to make up time.

He reached the far end of the room and turned to run back the way he’d come.  But when he turned he noticed something at the upper edge of his vision.  Something up on the third floor.

It startled Shane enough to make him stumble.  He caught himself, stopped and looked up.

Someone was up there, standing at the railing, watching him.