[Austin and Sylvia]
“Fine. We’ll do it your way. Tie the door shut, and go downstairs to see if zombies need to be held off. Sound good?” Austin asks.
“Yay, we don’t kill innocent people. And I thought you said earlier that it was too risky to go downstairs ‘cause it was dark,” Sylvia responds
“I’m still going to send someone into that room eventually you know. But anyways, even if it’s dark, it's dark for everyone else too. If we forgo the flashlight and just try to see what we can, I bet you we’d be better off than you think.”
“But we don’t know how the zombies perceive us, whether it’s sight, sound, smell, or a combination of the three,” Sylvia retorts.
“We should find out then.” Austin argues.
She sighs, “If you really want to… I guess.” Still would prefer hiding in the room. Bleh.
“Do you have any rope? Or any ideas on how we can force his apartment shut?” Austin asks. “We don’t even know if he’s still in there, so we should hurry.” He adds.
“Yeah I have some, I’ll go get it,” Sylvia rushes to get some. Hopefully that guy never left his apartment.
[iI suppose it’s best to be vigilant.[/i] Austin crouches in front of their own door and shuts off his flashlight, letting his eyes adjust to the dark until he was satisfied. He suddenly swings the door back. An empty hallway stares back at him. Looks safe. He peeks out each side to check. All clear. Austin closes the door and switches his light back on. “Got the ropes yet?”
Sylvia saunters over and holds out the ropes for Austin to take, “Yup. And some air freshener too.”
“Great, then let’s go. Hang on, actually can you take it? I want my hands free just in case.”
“Sure,” Sylvia complies, “I’d get screwed if a zombie jumps on me anyways so..yeah.”
Sylvia suddenly freezes once she hears footsteps outside. The sound seems even and unhurried. Also doesn’t sound very heavy, probably one of my lightweight neighbors, Sue or Lydia. The sound of a door closing nearby resonates afterwards. Yup. That’s her.
“Who was that? Sue or Lydia maybe?” Austin asks quietly.
“Yeah, should be,” Sylvia confirmed.
“We should check up on her later, see if she knows anything, and if she’s infected.”
“Yeah, but first let’s deal with the crazy would-be-killer-had-I-not-stopped-you of two completely innocent students.”
“Ugh let’s.”
The pair leave and head down to the 4th floor with no encounters, taking the necessary precautions of stealth, and alertness.
Austin checks the floor below as he heads down, but doesn’t see anything out of the ordinary. However, they can both hear panicked clamoring and possible zombie moaning emanating from the stairwell that wasn’t there before.
Creeping carefully to the door they were at before, Austin holds the door as tightly shut as he can and gestures for Sylvia to begin typing the rope. He was at least confident that he could hold the door closed by force. Once Sylvia had finished a few satisfactory knots, as directed by himself, he keeps pressure on the rope, feeding it back slowly until he can loop it around the base of the railing on the opposite side. Once it was looped a few times, Austin was confident the occupant wouldn’t be able to easily open the door. He leads the rope to the left and right ends of the railing to ensure force on the rope would be resisted by the entire railing, then ties it off firmly. He got creative with the knots, but it was decent enough to not go anywhere.
“All done.” Austin finishes.
“How well do you think this will hold?” Sylvia queries.
“Gotta hope its enough. Anyways, to the stairs!” Austin whispers fake-loudly.
“We’d best not throw caution to the wind, the people themselves might be dangerous too. What are you planning to do when you get there? Hope that it’ll all fall into place? Your luck isn’t good enough for that,” Sylvia cautions.
“Make a decision once we see what’s actually happening. As you would say, we don’t have enough information to come to a conclusion.” Austin counters.
“We know that there are people coming up too.”
“We hear voices is all. They could be in the middle of fighting.”
Having taken too long to make a decision, the people fleeing from the zombies ran up the stairs, some of the them dispersing into their apartments. Others simply continued to run to a higher floor, lacking an apartment to stay within.
“We were too late. Some of them might have been infected.” Austin says helplessly.
“We should start purging from the rooftop garden. Since there are zombies coming up from the lobby, it would be crucial to make sure we’re not fighting a war on two fronts,” Sylvia remarks.
Sylvia and Austin follow the stragglers up to the top floor, where the people that didn’t actually live in the apartment, or lived on much lower floors, were cowering.
vanovick