Deacon's boots squelched softly atop the soaked carpet that he'd found and tossed onto the floor. Walking through the door frame that led to his camp that he'd claimed hours prior, he took in the acrid scent of burnt moss and the pleasant scent of charred wood. Compared to the upper floors, it smelled heavenly.
He let out a long, tired sigh as he rolled his shoulders slowly, grimacing as bruises bloomed across his arms beneath the armor. Note to self: always assume that there are four mutant rats inside a bathroom cabinet.
First things first.
He pulled out the Poncho of the Radiation Walker from a pouch on his hip. The once sleek, clean, black fabric was now soaked with sweat, blood, both his and not.
Unfurling it, Deacon carefully draped it over a rusted-out folding chair near the cold campfire to dry. The faint shimmer of its enchantments was still visible in the low light.
He tugged the cookbook free from his belt, where it had been awkwardly poking at him since the moment he took it.
Deacon cracked it open once more and started flipping through a 363-page fantasy cookbook. A grin tugged at the corner of his mouth as he read through its contents and the ingredients required with them.
"Cave Carrot and Mole Stew. Tree Roots and Troll Brain Casserole. Whiskey and Cyclops Eye… on the rocks?" He shook his head slowly. "Can't wait to try them when or if I find the ingredients."
He had only made it four pages in, and it felt like he was reading something that was written by someone who had Bonehead's insanity, Esmerelda's imagination, and the balls of a dwarf to even attempt cooking with half of the ingredients mentioned in the book.
Gently placing down the laptop a few feet away from the campfire and atop a weathered square table. He let out an annoyed sigh – he'd yet to learn the password for it.
And as if that wasn't bad enough, it only had 53% charge left.
However, there was a light at the end of this tunnel.
Pulling out a free a faded pink sticky note; its edges were curled, worn, and the adhesive was long gone. Squinting at the faded print, he read: "Call Terri and ask her to call the IT Department and have them send me a new laptop at the latest by 2 pm."
Beneath it, in tinier handwriting was:
"Don't mix popping candy and coffee. It's shit. Don't listen to your cravings."
Deacon stared at the note for a long moment. Then, slowly, he chuckled. I guess I know how the "E" key and spacebar got all sticky.
Deacon moved to sit near the faintly glowing laptop, flipping the pink sticky note between his fingers, still mildly amused. But his grin faded as he glanced once more at the login screen, the little, blue blinking field still mocking him with its: "Wrong Password."
"No IT department upstairs, which means it's downstairs," he muttered to himself, before quickly taking a quick swig of his water tin.
"No other working laptops either," he mused while glancing out the window at the end of the room, and noticing that the sky was still covered with dark yellow thunderstorm clouds.
He sighed. "Well, since up's a dead end, that means down is where I'll find the IT Department."
Stretching as he stood, Deacon turned toward the stairwell he'd barricaded hours earlier and began dismantling it piece by piece once he'd reached it.
He pulled the drawers down first, stacking them quietly to the side before scooting them away with his right foot and away from the barricade before repeating the process about three more times.
Then, with a grunt, he pulled it out of the frame and dragged it a couple of feet away from where it previously stood..
Finally, he grabbed the rusted chair leg wedged between the door frame and handle and twisted it free with a groaning pop. The door creaked open an inch.
"I better find that damn department," he muttered under his breath, unsheathing both of his short swords and stepping into the stairwell, blinking as sunlight finally began to pour in through the shattered window panes that went down the wall of the stairwell.
At least now he could save some mana.
Deacon eased open the stairwell door just enough for him to be able to slip through.
He'd just reached the 37th floor, two floors below where he set up his own temporary base of operations.
He inched forward, slow and low, eyes scanning the 37th floor and the dozens of shapes scattered through the remains of an office floor — slumped against walls, curled beneath desks, some just standing there, swaying, twitching.
More mutated humans.
…But not the loud, aggressive ones he'd fought before.
These ones looked and acted differently. Their spines twisted and hunched, joints either bent too far in or not far enough out, and their skin sagged around their stomachs.
Some stared blankly at the wall and the floor, while others twitched and moved around. One of them gnawed on its own fingers for some reason, and another crawled atop a table while making wet clicking noises.
As Deacon was just about to turn on his heel and go down to the next floor, he saw it, through a gap in a scorched divider: a flickering sign above a sunken doorway: "IT DEPARTMENT" and just beside said doorway were even more mutated humans.
[Mutated Human Lv 6]
…
[Mutated Human Lv 9]
Deacon closed his eyes, tilted his head upwards for a moment, and let the realization of how fucked he was settle within him. He could practically hear a choir faintly singing in the back of his mind.
"Fuck it," Deacon murmured, letting out a deep exhale before he backed into the shadow of a tilted support beam and slid behind what used to be a reception desk, now half-swallowed by mold and debris. The whole floor felt like a mutant nest of some sort – with the amount of them on this floor, the vines that were everywhere, the fungi that covered almost everything, and the horrid smell.
He kept moving, keeping low behind flipped tables and drawer cabinets – only crawling when he had to. A mutant shifted suddenly in his direction, causing him to roll himself under a partially collapsed table just as the thing dragged itself to exactly where he stood.
Its joints clicked like loose nails in a bucket as it looked around, twitching and gurgling.
He held his breath.
And only when he saw it head in the opposite direction of where he was heading did he move again, almost having crapped his pants. He found a cluster of broken drawers and slipped behind them.
From there, he got a better look.
They were just loitering around. Whatever for, he honestly didn't want to wait and find out.
As he quietly and carefully ran his hands around him, he managed to grab hold of a shard of glass that belonged to a broken desk lamp, and with a flick of his wrist, he sent it sailing across the room and into a cubicle at the far end of the room.
Crash!
The response was instantaneous.
Three of them shrieked and bolted toward the sound, with another following just behind them, clawing at the air as it stumbled after them.
Deacon slipped out from cover and moved fast, hugging the far wall, using scattered file cabinets and a row of overturned tables as cover. He tossed a dented metal thermos next, this time toward a shadowed hallway on the opposite end.
More of them followed.
By the time he reached the door, only two mutated humans still lingered in his path. Both swayed near an overturned water cooler, faces slack, and backs twisted into a spiral.
He reached for a broken desk leg that lay beside his head and tossed it hard to his left. It dinged off a pipe and rolled into the dark, to which the two mutated humans staggered after the sound.
Deacon bolted forward, ducking under a loose and flickering track light, and reached the slightly ajar IT Department door and slipped through the gap, dragging it closed behind him.
Click.
He locked it, then leaned back against the door and exhaled, sweat dripping down the side of his face. "This had to have been the dumbest thing I've ever… no, I take that back. I turned down an offer to watch the entirety of Breaking Sugar when it came out two years ago, and I had to wait a whole ass year until I was able to watch it again… That truly was the dumbest thing I've ever done."
Deacon crouched low, letting his eyes adjust. Faint light flickered in from a high, grimy window covered in dried moss. The room was cluttered with rows of desks, tangled cords, overturned and broken swivel chairs, and ancient server racks that were out of power.
And then he saw them, two mutant humans. "For fuck's sake," he whispered softly.
One stood half-hunched with its head twitching erratically near a shelf stacked with routers coated in dust and various monitors with varying labels on them. The other mutant human was seated in the far corner of the room with its elbows propped atop its knees, while drooling out of its slackened jaw, mouthing something silently to itself. Neither moved.
Deacon slid deeper into the IT department room, keeping his footsteps as silent as they could be with all the rotten wood and glass coating the floor. Nearing the closest laptop, he reached slightly over his head from where he crouched and lifted it from atop the counter and brought it to where he crouched.
A sticky note was still stuck to it:
User: M.Richards
Pass: doughnutcat_42
He flipped the lid open carefully – no power.
"Shit," He exhaled and kept moving.
The seated mutant twitched. Deacon froze, his left hand shot toward the hilt of his left short sword. However, it didn't snap its head in his direction. Just groaned low and leaned back like a drunk swaying in sleep.
He moved again, carefully, toward the one near the routers. From the floor, he spotted another laptop, half-buried beneath a pile of plastic keyboard covers, and with a bright green sticky note that clung to it:
User: N_Palmer
Pass: tysQWE&123
The power indicator blinked faintly. Battery at 68%.
Deacon reached slowly, fingers grazing the edge.
A sudden groan.
The standing mutant had turned slightly, revealing to Deacon its fungi-covered eyes and its atrophied limbs dragging it forward.
Deacon didn't waste a second. He shot forward in silence, his blade flashing in a tight arc as it sank into the mutated human's neck, severing the spine with a muted crunch. His other arm shot forward to grab it by its fungal-covered shirt and slowly lowered it down to the floor.
"That was a fucking close one," Deacon breathed, returning to the laptop. I almost shit myself from that…
The screen flickered to life when he tapped the spacebar. It whined quietly – old fan, old OS. Still running.
He typed the password carefully. tysQWE&123.
Login success.
Battery: 68%.
His lips curled into a half-smile. "Finally."
He sifted through a few folders cluttering the homepage - most of it useless junk. Company memos, something called drivers that needed updating, and a reminder about "Mandatory HR Self-Evaluation Week." But one file caught his attention: an electrical schematic for the city. Now that, was some good news.
Before he left, he gave the room one more look and noticed a few things:
Three more laptops sat in a cart near the server racks. He flipped one open – dead. Another – cracked screen. Third… 6% battery. And a sticky note on the back of the door that said: "Not sure why the city hall is shutting down the electrical grid for a supposed mandatory checkup when we had one last Monday. – Josh"
"Whelp, I guess I know where I'll be going next," he muttered, as he stuffed N_Palmer's laptop under his arm and slipped out of the IT Department room and into the mutant human-infested area that stood between him and the stairwell back up to his temporary camp.