LZR-1143: Infection Read Online Free Page B

blood-soaked sneakers were making on the well-polished tile floors.
    Definitely voices; real, live voices too. Not moaning or shrieking or an imbecile humming television theme songs. Sounded like two people having a conversation. I moved to the outside of the room and looked through the observation glass in the door. Sure enough, two men, seated in chairs facing a television, were tuned to the cable news. An anchor was interviewing a disheveled older gentleman in a uniform of some sort. The volume was up high enough to carry into the hallway.
    The door was closed and latched, but unlocked, and moved easily enough when I depressed the latch that I could push it open with a toe and step in without calling attention to myself. Against the wall to the right, a chair lay overturned, and a remote control lay broken on the ground, having apparently fractured when it hit the floor.
    Suddenly, a thought that should have come much earlier: Where had Conan come from? And why had he stayed when everyone else had fled?
    I instinctively stepped backward, and my foot caught the leg of the overturned chair, slamming the back of the chair against the wall. The two men jerked, as if a noose around their necks had been pulled abruptly back, the spell of the television broken; their heads turned toward me, almost in unison.
    He hadn’t stayed, I realized too late. He had been left. Along with these two.
    I backpedaled too fast and tripped, sprawling on my back in the hallway. I scrambled to my feet, as the creature on the left rose from his chair and shambled to the doorway, and his companion simply crawled over the back of his chair, sending he and the chair to the ground in the process. They each bore hand-cuffs that at some point been attached to the wooden chairs, but which now hung loose from their graying wrists. I caught the name on the breast pocket of the guy on the left: it was Mr. Hickman.
    I sprinted, or did my best to sprint, down the hall, passing the rec room on the right, where Conan’s body still lay inert, but A-team’s had struggled slowly into a seated position, legs twitching. Vacant eyes tracked my stumbling, clumsy progress past the open door, and the sound of his struggling to get up reached my ears, even as I fled.
    I shook my head and sped up, now convinced that this whole thing was some sort of mind-fuck, but not willing to slow down and find out.
    The stairwell, my only option, was at the end of the hallway. I stumbled to a hasty walk as I reached it in order to navigate the narrow flight. The walls on either side of the narrow passageway were peeling, the bone-white top layer of paint revealing a light green underlayment the color of brackish ocean water. A chain link divider separated the stairwells from one another, and as I reached the bottom, two floors down, I met an iron door.
    I had struggled to reach the end of the hall, muscles unused to activity and shoes slick with blood, so I had failed to outdistance those things by much, despite their slow movement. Low-pitched groaning and a putrid smell announced their proximity, as they reached the door to the stairwell and shuffled through. As I reached for the handle to the door I realized I had dropped my fire extinguisher in my haste to leave the party upstairs.
    Not as much of a badass as you thought, eh McKnight?
    The handle moved easily but the hinges squeaked something terrible. The pursuit from above quickened, if that was possible, and through the chain link barrier, I saw the shuffling feet descending the flight directly above me. I flew into the open doorway, nearly splitting my head on the low-hanging door frame, and slammed the heavy iron door shut behind me. I felt for some sort of locking mechanism, and found a rusty latch that I threw into place just as the first body slammed against the thick metal.
    I was breathing harder than I thought possible. They let us exercise, but we got very little in the way of cardio training. The anti-psychotics