I examined the woman with the shopping cart. She was obviously homeless. We’re all homeless now. She stood there, looking off into space, gnawing on a blackened fingernail.
Crawler #7,450 “Agatha.”
Level 2.
Race: Human.
Class: Not yet assigned.
“Anyway,” Brandon said. “We had to evacuate the building, all 250 residents out into the freezing cold right when it happened.”
I looked at the group, counting for the first time. There were a total of 38 people here, including the four workers and Agatha.
“There were 250 of you?” I asked, looking the group over.
“Yeah,” Brandon said, more quietly. “Not everyone came down here. And not everyone who did is still with us.”
He went on to explain what happened next.
The fire started and quickly engulfed the outside of their building. Luckily, the fire had been on the side of the cafeteria, in an alley area where Agatha had been camped out. Nobody had been hurt by the blaze itself, but evacuations at elder facilities were always an especially dangerous affair. It was no simple task to get everyone out.
The local police and fire department had arrived by the dozens. Firefighters assisted with the fire and with handing out blankets to the freezing residents and workers of the facility. They’d been in the process of getting the keys to a nearby elementary school to get everyone out of the cold.
“But how did you get them down the stairs?” I asked.
Brandon looked, again, at Agatha. “The entrance appeared right in the street, literally in the middle of the group. A bunch of folks fell in. There were stairs just like you said. But then Agatha over there pushed her cart right onto the stairs like she was… well I don’t know what the hell she was doing. But the stairs transformed into a ramp. It wanted her to come on down. A long, easy ramp. Agatha was the first to voluntarily go down there, cackling like she always does. Hollerin’ she’d saved all our lives. The folks who fell in when it opened, we never saw them again.” He shuddered. “They weren’t there when we got to the bottom.”
“Did you go because of the cold?” I asked.
He eyed my naked legs. “We didn’t mean to go all the way in, but it was warm in there, you know what I mean? So I pushed a few residents right into the entrance where the ramp wasn’t so steep, so that hot air was blasting up on them. I figured we could wait there until we knew what we were going to do. Only a few of the cops and paramedics remained after the collapse. They just took off running in all sorts of directions, like they had some place better to go. But some stayed, and they helped me bring the residents into the warmth. It let me do it. We moved several over, but then, after we’d moved about half the residents into the warmth, it just stopped letting me leave. My foot was trapped. My brother wasn’t even in the hole, but when he grabbed my hand, it wouldn’t let him move, either. And it started hurting after a minute. It only stopped when we moved down the ramp. When we got that twenty minute warning, when it said anyone lurking in the stairwell wouldn’t get out? We just went in. We didn’t have a choice.”
“What about the cops and paramedics?”
“We had about twenty guys with us, including a couple firemen and cops who decided to go in. Most didn’t. We all helped getting the residents inside the hall.” He pointed over his shoulder, indicating the artery that led to this quarter of the circle. “It was right there, just around that corner where we came in. Most of these folks haven’t moved hardly at all since we got here. We’ve been bringing them food from a safe room that’s about a mile away.”
“Where are the cops and firefighters now?” I asked.
He nodded at the circle. “Most went in there when we first found this place. The gates closed, then about five minutes later, the gates opened up again, and those guys were just gone. Our tutorial guide lady, Mistress Tiatha, she said all borough and city bosses will have stairwells for the first four or five levels. But there will be a bunch of other stairs in random places, too. A couple of us went out searching for them, hoping we could find a stairwell that’s easier to get to than this one. This was just a while back.” Brandon cast a nervous glance at the elderly patients. He leaned in and whispered, “They’re all dead. You can see when they die on the party menu. They all got picked off by something that’d been hunting them one by one. Even Doctor Gracie, and she was a damn MMA fighter. Us four? We’re the last of the non-residents left. Us and Agatha.”
I turned to regard the large group of elderly patients. Looking upon them gave me a terrible, sinking feeling. They shouldn't be here. This wasn’t going to end well.
Agatha had pulled a blue IKEA bag from her shopping cart. She produced a can of metallic silver spray paint from the bag. She hobbled over to the wall and sprayed a giant circle, then turned it into a happy face. Then she leaned in and sniffed the wall, muttering something to herself the whole time.
“Don’t waste the spray paint, Agatha,” Brandon called.
“It’s mine!” Agatha said, clutching the IKEA bag to herself. “You stole it from me.”
“And you stole it from Stan’s,” Brandon said. “Just… Just don’t waste it, okay?”
“Have you thought about moving all these folks to the safe room?” I asked. “It has to be more comfortable than the hallway.”
“It’s already full,” Brandon said. “It’s a damn Waffle House from Alabama. Can you believe that? The place has a capacity of 30 people, and my brother Chris has been helping the more coherent, more mobile ones get over there. There’s this gnome thing in there that’s cooking them food and singing. They all love it.” He smiled sadly. “Those folks at the Waffle House. They made a vote, and they decided they’re not coming out. They’re treating it like a giant party.”
“He doesn't talk much, does he?” I asked, indicating Brandon's brother, Chris.
Brandon shook his head while Chis looked at me impassively.
“He's not exactly mute,” Brandon said. “But he don't say too much. Growing up, our mom thought he was slow. They put him in a special school because he never spoke. But he's not dumb. He does talk. Think of him as Silent Bob. If he says something, you better listen.”
Brandon nodded sagely.
I hesitated. “And her?” I asked, indicating Imani. I watched as she helped a woman to a nearby door. A bathroom. She made the woman open the door herself. The floor outside the bathroom was stained red. I shuddered, remembering the exploding “bug” from the announcements. After the woman was safely delivered to the bathroom, Imani turned and helped a man in a wheelchair take a sip of water. Yolanda also moved amongst the others, talking softly.
Brandon shook his head. “We got attacked once, right after we found that tutorial place. I… I don’t really want to talk about it, man. But Imani, she had that sword, and several of the residents, we were taking them in groups to Mistress Tiatha. They can’t move so quick. It was for the better. Letting those things burn them, that’d been much worse.”
I nodded. I had questions, but I knew some things were best left unasked. It wasn’t lost on me that her high level was probably a direct result of her having to kill 12 of her former patients. And she’d probably gained a loot box or two.
“These people still can’t walk? So the dungeon’s fast healing and all those healing spells and such don’t work?”
“Oh, it’s amazing,” Brandon said. “But it’s a curse, too. All of these folks have been cured of hundreds of their little ailments. Not a one of them brought any of their medications with them down here, and it’s been okay. But at the same time, they ain’t getting any younger. Or stronger. And those who’ve lost memories or cognitive function, that hasn’t been fixed. It’s like it cured anything that’s going to kill them, but it didn’t make them better than they were, either.”