Pulling the cart with one hand and holding the axe in another, he could easily drop the rope he was using to pull the cart if combat started.
“Not perfect, but it’s better than I was hoping to get,” Drew said to himself as he surveyed his handiwork. He pulled a bag of chips from his supplies and munched on them while he did another quick raid of the desks, hoping to find more food, or a candle, or something.
He found a few candy bars and lots of nonfunctional electronics that he couldn’t think of a use for. “Lots of metal here; would be nice if I found someone who knew how to make weapons or armor.” He shook his head. The lack of system generated loot meant that, eventually, humanity was going to need to make their own weapons and armor. However, how many people in DC knew how to use a forge, grow crops, or butcher a corpse?
He glanced at the various spider bodies in different stages of burned, melted, frozen, and shocked. He had the three-inch folding blade he had started wearing after he joined the coast guard. The blade had been dulled by years of opening boxes and cutting rope (or line as all the ‘real’ sailors used to call it) when he was on the cutter, but it would probably work for a field dress.
He probably should try to get something from the bodies; poison glands, chitin, and meat were all things he had harvested from spiders in games. But he wasn’t a doctor; he’d never taken an anatomy class, and he had hated dissecting the frog in biology. In truth, he had no idea where to even start butchering soccer ball sized spiders. So, he just left them there, in favor of moving forward and escaping the bunker.
His next stop was the bathrooms. He wasn’t entirely sure how long it had been since the advent-a problem that kept nagging at the back of his mind-but as soon as he saw the stick figures, he realized he needed to use the facilities
“This is where the zombies kill me when I’ve got my pants down…” Drew muttered to himself, as he looked around. The bathrooms seemed clear, no signs of spider webbing. He propped the door open and inspected each of the stalls. Finding that they were empty, he brought the cart into the bathroom and spent a few minutes attending to some bodily functions.
He reached for the bar to flush the toilet out of habit. Nothing happened. “Right. No pumps to make running water a thing.” Human waste management was going to be a big issue, particularly if there were any large groups of humans around. This also meant he couldn’t wash his hands. “No running water; tons of people are gonna die from bad food alone.” He shook his head. “This is gonna suck.” He raided the bathroom for toilet paper, adding it to the cart, and then moved on to the objective at hand.
The next few hallways were uneventful. There were just a few lone spiders that he could handle from a distance with his newly expanded light source. The only things of note were blue boxes informing him that he had attuned major spark and received another level of minor acid dart.
That’s when he got to the stairwell. He left the loud cart and axe behind, opting instead to hold the mop ahead of him while he scouted to make sure it was safe. Opening the door was simple; the electromagnetic locks that had kept it closed were no longer functional. The smell of iron immediately filled his senses.
Looking down, he saw a thick trail of some sort of brown substance on the stairs leading down. Frowning, he leaned down and looked at it more closely, the red glare of the torch casting weird shadows. Then it clicked; the smell, the color.
Blood. It was human blood.
Chapter Five — The Stairs
The stairwell served six double tall floors. It consisted of twelve switchbacks with two concurrent staircases, with a wide gap between them. Drew had never attempted to figure out where the other staircase went; he just knew that he had to go down a flight of stairs here. He was on the second of the six floors. The trail of blood led downwards, the direction he intended to travel.
“Well, shit. If horror movies have taught me anything, it’s that I’m going to get jumped by something big and scary right now,” Drew whispered to nothing, the torchlight reflecting off the concrete and casting orange shadows. He put his back against the wall and then glanced up, having learned his lesson from the first spider.
Nothing loomed above him, “Well at least my life isn’t a penny dreadful.” He glanced back down to the boot prints scuffed through the dried blood. “Please don’t be Lovecraftian. Please don’t be Lovecraftian.”
Holding the mop high, he advanced to the edge of the stairwell. The stairs on the other side didn’t seem to have any blood on them, but as far as he could see on his set of stairs, the red streak marred the floor. He shifted his grip on the mop and looked up again. Then, moving to keep one shoulder near the wall and away from the central chasm of the stairwell, he descended.
In his brain, he mentally prepared himself for the most obvious monsters. “So far, it’s just different kinds of spiders. Probably just mutated versions of the ones that already existed in the building. So, odds are this is either a spider, a centipede, or something similar.” Drew’s habit of talking through his problems out loud was manifesting. His steps reverberated throughout the echoing chamber, a comforting sign to him, since it meant that anything creeping up on him would probably also make some noise.
One landing down and the blood trail continued. He glanced at the doors that were his typical egress but opted to continue to follow the path of blood. Rob (his partner) had been out on his lunch break when the Advent began, and the only other people that could be in this portion of the building during the Advent was one of the security guards. Either way, if there was a chance that the person was still alive, Drew owed it to them to try and help. He wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he didn’t at least find out what had happened to them. He continued down the stairs, a white-knuckled grip on the mop.
The next landing was a grislier tableau; a large pool of dried blood covered the floor. The doors on this level had been bashed in. They were bent and lying broken on the floor, along with hand sized chunks of chitin that looked to have been smashed away from a large beast. A dismembered hand lay among the other viscera. Hardened blue ichor caught the light and threw it in prismatic shadows across the floor, the rainbows adding a disconcerting gaiety to the morbid scene. Drew’s eyes fixated on the hand, his brain going into overload trying to suppress his instinctual reaction to run screaming.
A furred claw swiped at him from behind. A puff of yellow light flashed as mana guard’s energy was spent blocking a single blow. The shield saved his life, but the force sent him flying forward and the mop dropped from his nerveless hands. He tucked his shoulder and rolled past the broken doors, trying to open the distance between him and whatever it was that had attacked him from behind. Dazed, Drew rolled to the side and raised a finger as he tried to get a look at the thing that had attacked him.
It was hard to tell with the limited light, but whatever had attacked him had a bipedal form and looked like it would tower over most humans. He got the vague impression of thick fur that made it look even bigger than it would have otherwise. The creature compressed its lips and growled in Drew’s direction, a low and dangerous sound, its weight shifting into a combat stance. Before he could think to cast a fireball, the beast was gone, jumping back over the railing and out of his sight. Confused by the strange behavior, he turned his head to look behind him.