Skin draped from the ceiling that spanned the descending stairs like the roof of a mouth after a bowl of Captain Crunch. Johnny Grey noticed a slab of epidermis that somehow made it onto his shoulder and peeled it off, slapping it against the wall where it made a slurpy thud. Blood and bile freshly coated the area with the occasional kidney or hunk of stomach lining. It was unsettling, but Johnny kept his shotgun poised and trigger-ready at a slight angle off Carson's back and moved at a step-per-step basis as the squad leader. The floor leveled back out when the stairs ended and Carson armed the corner. Off to the right, Johnny noticed a "Watch for Slippery Floor" custodial cone and found it inwardly amusing.


Johnny Grey wasn't really a "jumper." He never winced and it was hard to startle the guy. Even in the moment of tranquil concentration as he analyzed the card slot, the gunfire down the hall that ripped apart utter silence still fell short of phasing Johnny. A backpack of assorted gadgets slumped against the wall between his legs and he probed the slot like a gynecologist with chop sticks. As he fiddled, numbers on a screen changed. The more he fiddled, the more he seemed to like the sequence of numbers. Finally, he apparently settled on a string of numbers he approved of and stepped back from his work, taking something from the card slot and slipping it into one of his own gadgets.

"We've got access." Nonchalance. An LED on a display turned green and the door slid quietly open. Johnny cracked key code access to one of the highest securities this building could muster under two minutes and he couldn't even crack a smile. The small device in Johnny's hand printed out four flawless keycards and he fanned them out to Carson like a winning poker hand. "And now we've got access to the whole floor."