Stairs were for victims. Stairs were choke points, ambush alleys filled with desperate people holding sharpened toothbrushes.
Standing in the center of his living room, directly above the structural coordinates for Unit 1804, Alex unclipped the Thermal Lance.
"Elevator going down."
Pointing the nozzle at the expensive parquet flooring, he triggered the beam.
VWOOM.
Powered by the jury-rigged Micro-Fusion Cell, the plasma jet turned the wood to ash instantly. It bit into the reinforced concrete slab beneath. Steel rebar didn't cut; it evaporated, showering the room below with molten white sparks.
In ten seconds, a perfect, glowing circle the size of a manhole cover dropped out of the floor.
CRASH.
Gravity took over. Dropping through the hole, Alex landed in the center of the 23rd-floor living room.
Empty. The air here was stale, frozen, and silent. Furniture was gone, burned for warmth weeks ago.
"Next."
Without pausing, Alex stepped onto the spot directly below his previous cut.
VWOOM.
Another circle. Another drop.
Floor 22. A family huddled in the corner screamed as a piece of their ceiling crashed down, followed by a man wielding a beam of concentrated sun. Ignoring them, Alex continued his vertical breach, a force of nature passing through their reality.
VWOOM.
Floor 21.
Floor 20.
THUD.
Impact with a pile of dirty mattresses kicked up a cloud of dust and... the smell of cooked meat.
Not beef. Sweet, cloying, metallic meat.
The 20th-floor common area had been converted into a butcher shop. Carcasses hung from the ceiling fans—human carcasses, stripped of their winter coats, draining into plastic buckets. The blood didn't flow; it formed red stalactites.
Around a burning trash can, five men sat on crates. Muscles pumped from a diet of high-protein "long pig," they stopped chewing as the ceiling debris settled.
Standing up, the largest one wiped grease from his beard. He held a rusted fire axe wrapped in barbed wire. "The Butcher," a former gym trainer who had turned the apocalypse into an all-you-can-eat buffet.
"Delivery?" The Butcher grinned, teeth stained pink. "You look healthy. Good marbling."
The other four cannibals picked up their weapons—pipes, knives, a hammer—fanning out to circle the intruder.
"You made a mistake coming here, little man," The Butcher stepped forward, swinging the axe lazily. "We were just running out of—"
Alex didn't look at him. He looked at the floor.
"You're standing on my exit."
"I'm going to eat your heart!" Roaring, The Butcher raised the axe for a killing blow.
Raising the Thermal Lance, Alex didn't bother to aim. A single, horizontal sweep of the arm was all it took.
Zzzzt.
A thin line of superheated plasma slashed through the air. It passed through the axe handle. It passed through The Butcher's torso. It passed through the steel support pillar behind him.
Silence.
The axe head fell to the floor with a heavy clank.
Then, The Butcher's top half slid slowly off his bottom half.
No blood sprayed. The extreme heat had cauterized the wound instantly, sealing the arteries in a layer of black, smoking char. The torso hit the ground with a heavy, frozen thud. The legs remained standing for a second, then toppled.
The other four cannibals froze. Their primitive brains couldn't process the physics. One second, their leader was a predator; the next, he was dead geometry.
Stepping over the smoking remains, Alex issued a single command.
"Move."
Weapons clattered to the floor. Falling to their knees, the survivors pressed their foreheads into the filthy carpet, worshipping the god of death who wielded lightning.
"Please! Spare us! We'll serve you!" one whimpered.
Pointing the Lance at the floor between the kneeling men, Alex triggered the beam.
VWOOM.
"Don't look down."
Stepping into the void, he vanished from their world as quickly as he had appeared.
CRASH.
Floor 19. Empty.
CRASH.
Floor 18.
The hallway here was different.
The air wasn't just cold; it was charged. The hair on Alex's arms stood up. The smell of clean, electrical ozone replaced the stench of the slaughterhouse above.
Dusting concrete powder from his jacket, Alex scanned the corridor.
Unit 1804 lay at the end of the hall. The door wasn't wood; it had been reinforced with steel plating, welded crudely but effectively.
But the floor caught his eye.
Copper wires ran under the carpet, leading to a series of modified car batteries stacked against the walls. A sentry gun—constructed from a nail gun mounted on a swivel office chair motor—tracked his movement with a laser pointer.
It whirred, the barrel locking onto his chest.
From a speaker mounted above the door, a synthesized, distortion-heavy voice cut through the silence.
"Step back," the woman's voice was ice cold, devoid of fear. "Or become ash."
Alex didn't step back. He leaned forward.
The improvised sentry gun—a pneumatic framing nailer wired to a servo motor—buzzed angrily. The laser dot danced on his chest, right over his heart. At this range, a three-inch steel nail would punch through his ribs and shred his lungs.
"Cute," Alex said, voice calm.
Copper wiring snaked across the floor, stripped from the building's walls to form a complex parallel circuit connecting six heavy-duty truck batteries.
"Capacitive discharge triggers," Alex analyzed aloud, ignoring the laser. "Step on the carpet, complete the circuit, get hit with 12,000 volts. Nasty. But your batteries are cold."
Tapping his temple, Perception 3.0 isolated the faint, dying whine of the chemical cells.
"At -65°C, lead-acid output drops by 80%. You have maybe one lethal discharge left. If you miss, you're defenseless."
"I don't miss," the woman's voice crackled through the speaker. It was tight, stressed, but controlled. "And I have three more nail guns behind the door."
Alex smiled. She was bluffing about the extra guns—drone scans confirmed otherwise—but the attitude was perfect. The Butcher upstairs was a savage; this woman was an architect.
"I'm not here for your food, Mouse."
"How do you know that name?" The laser jittered.
"I know a lot of things. I know you're shielding your apartment with a Faraday cage made of aluminum foil and chicken wire. I know you're running a server rack off a daisy-chained mess of dying batteries."
Reaching into his pocket, Alex watched the sentry gun whir, servo motors locking tight.
"Don't move!"
"Relax. I'm paying the toll."
He pulled out one of the Micro-Fusion Cells looted from the Captain. It glowed with a soft, steady blue light, pulsating with infinite, clean energy. In the dim hallway, it looked like a star.
"Do you know what this is?" holding it up.
Silence from the speaker. The laser dot didn't move, but the breathing on the other end of the line hitched. Any tech-head would recognize the signature. Not chemical. Nuclear.
"That's a Class III Fusion Core," her voice lost its edge, replaced by raw, hungry awe. "Frost-Line tech. Where... where did you get that?"
"I took it from a Captain I just killed." Alex tossed the cell.
Tumbling through the air, the device cleared the electrified carpet and landed with a distinct clink at the base of the steel-reinforced door.
"Open the door, Mouse. Upgrade your setup. Or stay in there and watch your car batteries die one by one until the cold gets you."
The hallway remained silent for ten seconds.
The sentry gun tracked Alex, then the cell, then Alex again.
Clack.
The laser cut out. The whirring of the floor trap died down as the circuit was severed from the inside.
Click-thunk. Click-thunk. Click-thunk.
Three heavy deadbolts retracted. The steel door creaked open, revealing a slice of warm, yellow light. Stepping over the copper wires, Alex pushed the door wide.
Unit 1804 wasn't an apartment anymore. It was the inside of a computer.
Walls lined with monitors displayed feeds from the building's security cameras. Cables hung from the ceiling like frozen vines. In the center, surrounded by a fortress of servers and cannibalized electronics, sat a woman in a wheelchair.
Small, pale, with messy dark hair tied back with a zip-tie, her fingers were stained with grease and solder. She held a tablet in one hand and a remote detonator in the other.
She looked at Alex—at the Thermal Lance on his belt, the ice in his blue eyes, and the lack of sweat on his skin.
"You're the one from the Penthouse," she whispered. "The anomaly."
Alex walked over to the fusion cell he had thrown, picked it up, and placed it on her desk next to a dying lead-acid battery.
"I'm the landlord," Alex corrected. "And I'm evicting the cold."
Leaning over her workstation, he pointed to the schematic on her screen. It was a blueprint of the Frost-Line power armor. She had been trying to hack it remotely for days.
"Can you crack the biometric lock?"
Mouse looked at the fusion cell, then up at Alex. Fear vanished, replaced by the calculating look of an engineer who just found an unlimited budget.
"With that battery?" She smirked, a jagged, nervous expression. "I can crack God."
"Good," Alex said. "Pack your gear. We're moving upstairs."