stairwell with had caught fire on a lower level and it was already burning up here.
Thinking quickly, she went to the elevator, which had not worked since a couple of days after the event and she'd not have even tried to use it once everything started for fear that she would get stuck. There was a body one floor down, which had been holding the doors open until the power had died.
She slid the knife through the crack in the outer doors and turned it a little, pushing them open about a half inch. Then she stuck her fingers in there, returned the knife to her belt, and with both hands she forced the door open.
"Jesus!" she cried, looking down, as she could see through the cracks in the escape hatch below that the floor below her was in flames. There was no doubt in her mind now. Her time in this building was severely limited. On the back side of the elevator shaft, however, was a metal ladder. It would, no doubt, get her to the roof.
Without thinking, she jumped down onto the roof of the elevator. Almost as soon as she landed with a grunt and her hand hit the metal, she wished she hadn't. The metal singed her hand through the leather of her glove and her feet slipped a little as it began to melt the soles of her shoes. She quickly jumped to the ladder, which was also burning through the gloves this close to the fire, and began to ascend as quickly as she could.
In seconds, her shoes stopped sticking to the rungs and the heat died down as well. She was moving away from the fire. Some pessimistic part of her said that when she got to the top floor, she would find it in flames, but she told herself that this was not the case. How could it be? Her floor had not been reached yet. How could the ones above her be burning?
At the top, she realized her mistake. She could not go back down and she didn’t dare try and make the leap across the shaft. There was only a tiny bit of landing inside the doors. She supposed that she might be able to jump onto and hold on to the cables in the center and pry the door open, but it would be difficult to hold on properly with one arm while she did that and she had never been good at rope climbing. That and the treads of her running shoes had just been melted about halfway through, so any grip they may have supplied to help her in that endeavor, was probably gone.
As she stood there, thinking of how thin the soles of her shoes now were, she realized how bad things truly were. Her arms were getting tired from holding on to the metal rungs of the ladder with the full weight of the backpack, and she knew that it was just a matter of time before parts of the building started to collapse around her or the fire moved upwards to the floor she needed to get onto.
It was then that she noticed the small hatch at the top. Just to the left of the wheel and cables and started climbing towards that. What other choice did she have at the moment?
Through the hatch, there was a small room where the motor and some electronics were for the elevator. Beyond that was a metal door.
She didn’t imagine that her luck would be that good, but she carefully pulled herself up and into the small room. After a few seconds, though the pessimist in her had known how it would turn out, she walked the few steps to the door and tried the handle.
It was, of course, locked.
Frustrated and close to panic, trapped in a room slightly smaller than the actual elevator and with no other way out, she began rapidly beating it with the pipe she’d taken as a weapon from below her kitchen sink.
It gave after about ten or eleven hits and the door moved a little. The lock was still holding slightly, but the handle was nearly destroyed. Blood was pumping through her body at an alarming rate and between the rush of adrenalin, heart pumping loud in her ears and her own heavy breathing; she didn’t hear anything from outside. Not that it would have made any difference.
Vicky reared back and gave it a hard kick and the lock finally gave way with a metallic click and “pang” sound.
The bright light from outside hurt her eyes at first, but it was quickly dampened by movement and a shadow fell over her.
With not much strength left, she stepped back, raising the pipe and was not surprised to be rushed by two of the infected.
The first one was missing half of its face. Whitish and clear fluid was dripping from the gaping hole where her left cheek had been, boils had broken out all over the rest of this woman’s face, who couldn’t have been over 35 when she had been infected. The next was a man in a janitor’s outfit and her eye quickly caught what looked to be a machete dangling from his belt.
She swung as hard as she could and the woman fell back a few steps, but was immediately replaced by the undead janitor. Vicky swung again, hitting him right in the temple and he went down with a groan. She quickly added two more hits and his skull gave way with a thick liquid crack. Her upper half was splattered with thick black blood and other fluids in those last two hits, but she was unaware of it currently.
The woman was at her once more and Vicky swung on her yet again, blood and that thick viscous fluid splattered her this time but she didn’t think that it could infect her through the mask.
She swung again and the woman went down.
While she had a second, Vicky went for the machete on the janitor’s belt, and she pulled it from its sheath as quickly as possible.
It snagged for a moment as the half rotted undead woman got to her feet and Vicky thought for a second that she would have to let it go, but it came free in the last instant and she stood, swinging it at the creature that had probably once been her neighbor over and over, even after she fell dead and twitching to the roof.
She realized after about twenty seconds or so that she had been screaming incoherently the whole while.
Finally she fell back into a sitting position and tried to slow her breathing. Inside the mask, with the filters restricting air-flow, she felt as though she was going to suffocate.
There was no time to mess around, however.
Just across the roof was the top of a fire escape that would, of course, scale the side of the building.
She got to her feet and ran to it, gripping the machete tight. No way was she losing that baby. She could do some damage with that.
She tried to slow her pace unsuccessfully from a run to a fast walk as she made her way across the roof. The hot tar beneath her seemed soft and she had no idea how old the building was or how strong the roof would be. She didn’t want to end up in someone’s apartment with a broken leg.
The air almost went out of her as she reached the edge of the roof.
The fire escape had been removed below the top level. In fact, given how it looked currently, she thanked whatever higher beings existed that she hadn’t blindly ran out onto it, as it didn’t really look strong enough to hold anyone.
She searched frantically with her eyes for another few seconds and realized that this roof was connected to the next building over in both directions. The one to her right, however, was also connected to another one which had an intact fire escape and was another building closer to the gun shop.
The building shook suddenly and seemed to sway. A sick feeling ripped through Vicky’s gut, akin to what she may have felt on a roller-coaster and her skin grew cold. Her heart felt as though it had lurched to a stop in her chest. A moment later, she broke her paralysis out of sheer necessity and ran across the rooftop toward the adjacent building.
The entire structure shook again, this time with the sound of cracking concrete and some sort of tearing sound. It actually swayed hard for a moment and she saw the gap between buildings grow at least a couple of inches to her rising horror.
She reached the edge milliseconds later, though her fear-addled mind made it seem to stretch into minutes.
And then something gave way beneath her and she made a panicked leap across as a large part of her building collapsed in on itself.
She almost didn’t make it. What had only been a couple of inches before became two feet, and with the residual force of her building moving away, pulling her body that way, her forward momentum was nearly stopped and she hardly moved at all. Her right
sneaker hit the edge, slipped and she fell. Her arms shot forward, her breasts hit the edge at an awkward angle, and her lungs were compacted by the full weight of her body coming down hard.
She scrambled for a grip, almost lost it, and then was pulling herself up.
An explosion behind her caused the building to slam back against the one she was now laying on a split second later and then the whole thing was crumbling. Black smoke rose from what had been her home, and she could hear more levels collapsing. She knew if she’d been just a second late in getting over the ledge, she would be dead, or without legs right now.
She readjusted the mask which had been knocked to the side slightly by her recent struggle, and lay there on her back trying to catch her breath and waiting for her breast, arms and stomach to stop aching. There would be a great deal of bruising, of that she was certain.
The current building shook as another explosion rang out from next door and she realized that this one was really not much safer than the last. What was happening to her old building was probably weakening the structural integrity of this one.
She had to keep moving.
‘Of course, I have to keep moving,’ she thought, ‘no rest for the wicked.’
She dragged herself, with much effort, to her feet and began across the building toward the fire escape.
Three more buildings down and one over and she’d be around