Chapter 114: The Weight of Knowing

Chapter 114: Chapter 114: The Weight of Knowing

The stairwell door had barely closed behind them when Kai muttered, "Twelve down. However many left to go."

"Don’t count," Erik said. "It doesn’t help."

They moved back onto the twelfth floor landing — the one they’d started on, the one Penelope realized they hadn’t actually finished clearing before the stairwell had forced their hand. A door down the corridor stood ajar, light spilling out into the hallway in a thin yellow line.

Killian noticed it first. He didn’t slow down, just angled toward it, one hand raised to keep the others behind him.

Inside, a man crouched near an overturned bookshelf, gripping a fireplace poker in both hands like it might suddenly explain itself to him. He flinched hard when the door creaked wider.

"Don’t—" he started.

"We’re not infected," Erik said flatly, stepping into the doorway just enough to be seen. "Neither are you, from the look of it."

The man’s chest heaved. "There was screaming. I heard screaming and then it stopped and I didn’t know if that meant—"

"It stopped because we killed them," Kai said, appearing behind Erik’s shoulder. "Not because they got quieter about eating someone."

The bluntness seemed to steady the man more than comfort would have. He lowered the poker an inch.

"What’s happening? Really happening. Not the news version."

"There is no news version," Penelope said. "The dead get back up. They don’t stop unless the brain’s destroyed. They hunt by sound. That’s the whole of it."

"That’s not possible."

"It’s been possible for three days," Killian said. "You just weren’t awake for it."

The man’s eyes moved past them, toward the hallway, toward the bodies none of them had bothered to hide. "Are you — are you here to get people out? Evacuate the building?"

"No," Erik said.

The word landed harder than the man seemed to expect.

"Then what are you doing?"

"Telling you what you need to know so you don’t die stupid," Kai said. "After that, you’re on your own. Same as us."

The man’s grip on the poker tightened again, this time out of something closer to anger than fear. "That’s it? You just — walk through, tell us the world ended, and leave?"

"We’re not your rescue team," Penelope said. "We don’t know you. We’re not going to pretend otherwise just because it’d feel better."

"So what am I supposed to do?"

"Barricade this door," Erik said. "Stack whatever’s heavy against it. Stay quiet. If you hear something moving out there, don’t investigate — you’re not equipped and neither is anyone else on this floor. Find water now, while the pipes still run. Find food before your neighbors realize theirs is running out."

"And if someone needs help? If I hear someone screaming?"

Kai looked at him for a long moment. "Then you get to decide how much your life is worth risking for a stranger’s. Nobody else gets to make that call for you. We didn’t make it for you either."

The man said nothing. Whatever he’d wanted to hear, it clearly hadn’t been that.

Killian was already turning away. "Lock it behind us."

They didn’t wait to see if he did.

Two doors down, the hallway held a family — a woman with two children pressed behind her, a man standing in front of them with a golf club raised like it might do more than delay the inevitable by half a second. The moment they saw the weapons, the group’s weapons, the man’s expression flickered between relief and fresh terror.

"Are you with the building? Security?"

"No," Erik said.

"Then who—"

"Residents," Penelope said. "Same as you. We’ve had a two-day head start, that’s all."

The woman’s eyes dropped to her children, then back up. "Is it — is it true what we’re hearing? That people are turning into those things?"

"If they die and their brain’s still intact, yes," Ben said, speaking for the first time since the door had opened. His voice was quieter than the others, but no less final. "Doesn’t matter how they die. Bitten, sick, hit by a car. If the brain’s whole, they come back."

"How long does it take?"

"Depends," Ben said. "Minutes to hours."

The man lowered the golf club slightly, not from safety but from the sheer weight of processing it. "So if one of us gets hurt—"

"You’ll know," Kai said. "And you’ll have a decision to make that nobody’s going to make easier for you by lying about it."

The woman pulled her children closer. "This can’t be real."

"It’s real enough that we’ve killed six of them since this morning," Erik said. "It’ll keep being real whether you believe it or not."

Nobody offered to stay. Nobody offered supplies, or a place upstairs, or reassurance that things would get better. Penelope watched the family’s faces shift as that reality set in — not that monsters existed, but that the five strangers standing in their doorway weren’t going to fix any of it for them.

"Lock your door," Erik said again, already stepping back into the hall. "Don’t trust anyone who isn’t already inside your apartment right now. That includes neighbors. People get desperate fast."

"You mean they’ll steal from us?"

"I mean they’ll do worse than that, eventually," Killian said. "Right now it’s mostly fear making people stupid. Give it a week without food and it’ll be something colder than fear."

The man’s jaw tightened. "You’re serious."

"We wouldn’t waste breath on it if we weren’t," Kai said.

They left the door standing open behind them just long enough to hear it slam shut, followed by the scrape of furniture being dragged across tile.

Further down the corridor, a growl rose from behind a closed maintenance door — low, wet, patient in the mindless way that none of them had gotten used to yet.

Ben stopped in front of it. "One in there."

"Locked in or locked out?" Kai asked.

"Doesn’t matter." Erik nodded toward the door. "Quick. Before it draws attention we don’t need."

Ben set the crowbar’s flat edge against the frame near the lock and drove his weight into it once. The door gave with a crack loud enough that everyone froze, weapons up, waiting to see what it summoned.

Nothing came. Not yet.

The zombie inside — what had been, judging by the uniform, one of the maintenance staff — lurched through the broken doorway with its jaw hanging slack. Ben didn’t wait for it to fully clear the frame. The crowbar came down once, hard, and the thing folded where it stood.

Silence again. The kind that never lasted as long as any of them wanted it to.

"That’s the last of this floor," Erik said, checking the corridor one final time. "Whoever’s still behind their doors either heard enough to survive or they didn’t. Not our problem now."

Kai wiped the axe blade against his pant leg, grimacing. "You say that like it gets easier the more times you say it."

"It doesn’t," Erik said. "You just stop expecting it to."

They moved toward the stairwell without looking back at the doors they’d left standing shut behind them — some locked, some barricaded, all of them belonging to people who now knew exactly as much as they were ever going to be told.

Below them, the eleventh floor waited, its own noise already beginning to rise.