The Ruins

Chapter 8

Everyone toggled their flashlights on after jumping down to the ground level of the building (they had to jump - the bottom half of the stairs had long since collapsed into a mass of rot). This corridor, as well as containing the long sealed-off street entrance to the apartment, also had an entrance to an industrial laundry that took up the building's bottom and basement levels. Nothing down here worked anymore, of course. Mal wasn't even slightly surprised to see bedding and empty supply boxes that suggested that someone had been squatting down here not that long ago..

Vix set off down the corridor to the rear of the building. "... Wait..." The girl froze at where the corridor turned into the bays where the laundry machines still sat, rusting away. "Hold up! Maybe Infected!"

Mal looked around the corner and bit off a furious curse of her own. The corridor was filled with a dancing miasma of softly-luminescent golden dust. Lalon and Lugh hurriedly fumbled to be beside Mal and Vix and took a moment to check each corner before cautiously setting off down the corridor. "Where the hell this dust have come from?" Lalon complained. "Place was clear the last time!"

"Well, they're coming from somewhere! Stay alert! Kids, stay with Lugh, ok?" Mal said and the response a sharp nod.

As they entered the room with the laundry machines, they were frantically sweeping around them with their flashlights, looking for any sign of movement and any sign of the source of the spores. Wherever it was, it was blocking a primary smuggling route.

Nothing here; Mal first entered into the short tunnel dug through the wall of the abandoned laundry into a former commercial office that was the next step in the path to another Area. She saw it first. "There's our show and tell."

At the mouth of the tunnel a man lay crumpled on the pile of bricks that had been torn from the wall long ago to create the smuggling tunnel. It was an Infected. Infected had grey pale skin, decaying flesh, hair, and nails, limbs falling apart if the Infected has survived a long time and became more mushy and easy to put a stick on its head. Grotesquely, shining black blood in its mouth, boney fingers, the dry, grey and thinning skin being turned into molded bones - decaying bodies - an dead Infected. "See this kids, you already know what they are. Infected. The, used to be, first stage of this infection. The Infected are very slow, dragging their limbs but never stop wondering around. They'll hunt for anything with fresh flesh, nothing dead or decaying. That's why covered in those cavirences made from chemicals and dead material and Infected flesh is a good use. The smell of rotting makes them blind."

She uses her machete to lift it's lips to open. "No one knows what cause this; the infection comes from a bite or scratch, takes about a day or two for the infection to spread, destroying the brain, giving out aggression then you are gone, nothing left. No consciousness. Usually people say when you look them in their milky eyes, you see a reflection of yourselves as an Infected. That's not true but if near death, you do.

"The Infected are not smart so, you can outsmart them, run or walk faster than them, however, they can travel in herds if there's any, and that's where you take your gun and run as fast. You have to think quick fast before every one of them gets you. Now this one lived a long time without anything to eat so it rots, decaying as it becomes nothing but bones and scraps. It can't move and sometimes be dead already but never let your guard down." She pulls out her machete and slices it down towards its head to temple since the only way to kill them is in the brain, everyone knew that. "That's what the Infected are."

"Used to be the first stage," Lalon noted. "But if you get bite from them, you turn into them or a different stage." Mal agreed.

In the far corner of the small store-room was the door out into the main office area, now blocked with some wood and a partly toppled filing cabinet. Mal considered the blockage for a moment. "Hold on, I think we can squeeze through..." Mal shifted one bit of timber and, too late, realised that it was practically the only thing holding together the entire blockage. Bits of plaster wood and concrete tumbled from the ceiling as the small girl backpedalled from the cave-in.