Zombie City: Episode 1 COMPLETE!!!

Zombie City: Episode 1: Chapter 6

Chapter 6

Shane stepped back, startled.  The thought of the drunk yuppie he’d seen on 13th came rushing back.  The noob’s eyes were just as raw and red, just as glazed and lifeless.

But the yuppie had been drunk.  Or at least, he’d smelled like booze, and he’d been covered in crusted vomit.

The noob didn’t smell like booze.  He didn’t smell like a rose, either—his stink was closer to a mix of pickles and B.O.—but there was no hint of alcohol in it.

Shane stood there for a moment, looking at the guy’s hunched back, his drooping shoulders and hanging head.  He looked like he’d fallen asleep sitting up.  Maybe the guy was tired enough to sleep with his eyes open?

Suddenly the noob’s shoulders lifted slightly, his head raised up a few inches as he filled his chest with a deep breath.  He sighed it back out, body folding forward as if he were deflating, and his head came to rest on his keyboard.

Shane stepped backwards, carefully exiting the cubicle.  He shook his head.

“They might earn five times more than me,” he said to himself, quietly, “but they’re selling their souls for their jobs.  I’d never pull an all-nighter without serious compensation, but these salary-earning bastards are doing it so often that they’re turning into vegetables.”

He made his way across the floor, collecting cans as he went.  The second bag filled up, and he tied it and left it in the walkway between the cubicles and the rows of desks.  He opened a third bag, kept moving toward the opposite wall.

Tech start-ups were famous for being “unorthodox” work-places.  Usually that meant, in practical terms, that a ping-pong table or a dartboard found its way in amongst the cubicles and desks.  For Team Noob it was a pool table, tucked away in a corner near the far wall.  But the eight ball had gone missing just a few weeks after the table appeared, and the cue ball had followed just a few days after that.  Neither had ever been replaced, and Shane figured the missing balls meant Team Noob was more interested in the pool table as a symbol than as something they actually wanted to use.

He made his way to the table now, saw that a few cans of Voodoo had found their way amongst the colored balls littering the green felt.  One of the sticks had been laid across the table, another was on the floor beneath.  He snatched up the Voodoo cans, threw them in his garbage bag.  And then he kneeled, reaching for the fallen cue stick.

As Shane’s fingers closed over the stick, he heard a low, throaty moan from somewhere back behind him.  He straightened up quickly, cracking his head on the edge of the table.  “Fuck!” he said, clutching at his head with his other hand, eyes squeezed shut from the pain.

The moan repeated, long and low.  Shane got to his feet, one hand still holding the stick, his other hand holding the back of his head.  He opened his eyes and looked toward the sound.

It was still dark in the building, the illumination on this floor coming primarily from the emergency lights mounted in the ceiling, and from the dim glow of the power buttons on the computers and other electrical equipment.  He’d been so wrapped up in his work that he’d failed to take note of that.  Normally enough workers had shown up by this time that someone had turned on the regular lights.  It was past seven now, and no new ZapPow! workers had come in yet that morning, as far as Shane knew.

He looked back across the darkened floor, wondering if he’d imagined the sound.  There was no obvious movement anywhere he could see, except for the flickering lights coming from one computer screen.

And then he realized which screen it was: the screen in the center of the floor, where the noob with the black hoodie had been sleeping with his face on his keyboard.  The screen must have been showing that same loop of the cat swinging the chainsaw, but now the light flickered against an empty chair, shoved back from the table.  The sleeping noob was gone.