Chapter 71 Third Floor

Magnus Vane returned to the warden’s office and finally gave the room a proper inspection. A heavy walnut desk faced the door and looked almost untouched since the collapse, while a glass coffee table and black leather couch occupied the open space in front of it. Three steel filing cabinets lined the side wall beneath a thick layer of dust, and a miniature putting set had been abandoned in the middle of the room with golf balls scattered across the carpet and several clubs sticking awkwardly out of a black bag. Compared with the chaos downstairs, the office looked strangely preserved.

Magnus stepped over the golf balls and walked around the desk. A framed photograph stood near one corner, and when he picked it up, one eyebrow rose immediately. The picture showed a woman wearing a Georgia Department of Corrections-style uniform similar to those worn by the dead officers they had encountered outside, though the insignia on her shirt and shoulders marked her as senior staff. She appeared to be somewhere around thirty, with tanned skin, dark hair, and a broad smile aimed directly at the camera.

Magnus looked at the photograph.

Then at the one-way mirror facing the deputy warden’s office.

Then back at the photograph.

“Huh.”

The theory he had formed a minute earlier suddenly changed direction.

He gave the mirror another long look before a crooked smile appeared. “Well, somebody around here definitely had interesting workplace policies.”

Magnus set the photograph down and dropped into the thick leather chair behind the desk. The cushion was so soft that he sank several inches into it, and for one glorious second he almost considered claiming the office immediately and taking the rest of the morning off. He had barely started leaning back when something moved beneath the desk.

Magnus froze.

A cold sensation shot straight up his spine.

“Holy—!”

He launched himself out of the chair so violently that Strength Lv10 nearly sent him over the coffee table. His boots landed on the glass surface instead, shotgun already halfway up before his brain fully processed what had happened. Magnus instinctively clamped one hand over the front of his pants and took two fast steps backward.

Something crawled out from under the desk.

A female walker.

She wore what had once been purple lingerie, badly deteriorated from months of decay, along with torn black stockings and one surviving high heel. Her skin had turned corpse-pale and leathery, while her jaw snapped eagerly at the exact place Magnus had been sitting only seconds earlier. The rotten woman twisted free of the desk and stumbled toward him.

Magnus stared.

Then stared harder.

“This isn’t the woman in the picture.”

The walker was younger than the photographed warden and had completely different features.

Magnus slowly looked toward the one-way mirror again.

Then back toward the corpse.

A terrible possibility entered his mind.

“If she was hiding under the warden’s desk…”

He stopped.

His eyebrows rose.

“Oh, come on.”

The office suddenly made far more sense than Magnus wanted it to.

He looked once more at the mirror connecting the warden’s office to the deputy’s.

Then at the lingerie-clad walker.

“You people really knew how to make a government job complicated.”

The walker lunged.

Magnus’s expression immediately turned furious.

She had almost bitten him somewhere that his armor barely protected. His Athlete’s Attire covered his core well, and the wooden leg guards defended his lower legs, but there were certain areas no sane person wanted to test against walker teeth. Infection wasn’t even the first concern that flashed through his mind.

Magnus shuddered.

He still had system Antibiotics.

That didn’t mean they could replace missing anatomy.

“Absolutely not.”

The thought alone made his scalp crawl.

The second Blood Moon had thrown dozens of Berserkers at him, broken his arm, buried him beneath bodies, and nearly killed him inside a church. Somehow, none of that had produced the same immediate terror as realizing a walker had nearly crawled under a desk and bitten him between the legs. Magnus tightened his grip on the Remington with offended intensity.

“You picked the wrong damn target.”

The walker opened her mouth.

Magnus stepped forward.

“Go ahead.”

He shoved the shotgun barrel between her teeth.

“Open wider.”

The corpse obediently bit down.

Magnus pulled the trigger.

BANG!

The blast threw her backward, and she collapsed beside the desk.

Magnus stared at the body.

His anger remained.

So he fired again.

BANG!

Then once more.

BANG!

Silence returned to the office.

Magnus lowered the Remington and wiped cold sweat from his forehead with one hand. “There. Much better.”

He looked toward the ceiling suspiciously.

“I knew it. The system didn’t suddenly learn manners. It was just waiting for me to sit down.”

From a certain perspective, the walker had been perfectly hidden. Magnus had inspected the visible portions of the office and even tested the doorway before stepping inside, but he had never looked beneath the massive desk. The whole thing felt exactly like something pulled from 7 Days to Die, where a perfectly innocent room could contain a corpse stuffed into the least reasonable location imaginable.

Then another thought occurred to him.

Magnus frowned.

“Wait.”

If the woman under the desk wasn’t the warden…

Where was the warden?

Magnus slowly returned to the desk with the Remington held ready. Rather than crouching, he studied reflections in the dark glass of the bookcase and framed items behind it, looking for movement from angles that wouldn’t expose him. A faint shape shifted beneath the far side.

Magnus closed his eyes.

Then laughed.

“You have got to be kidding me.”

He tapped the side of the desk with the Remington’s stock.

“Come on out.”

Nothing happened.

Magnus tapped harder.

“You were apparently brave enough to turn this office into whatever the hell was going on here, so don’t get shy now.”

A head finally lifted from beneath the desk.

It was the woman from the photograph.

The former warden.

Magnus immediately grabbed a fistful of her hair and dragged her into the open before she could properly stand. With Strength Lv10, the walker might as well have weighed nothing; she scraped across the carpet like a broken mannequin while snapping uselessly at the air. Magnus didn’t even bother wasting another shotgun shell.

He hauled her into the hallway.

Then toward the stairs.

“Down you go.”

Magnus planted a boot against her back and kicked.

The walker tumbled down the steps.

Magnus followed.

He jumped several stairs at once and landed heavily on the landing just as the former warden tried to rise. One boot came down on her head with a hard crunch.

He stomped again.

And once more for certainty.

Magnus finally exhaled.

“That’s better.”

For several seconds he stood there with an almost peaceful expression, as though he had just completed a deeply satisfying meditation exercise rather than thrown the former prison warden down a staircase. Then he turned around and went back upstairs to continue searching the office. If the system had hidden one walker beneath a desk and another behind it, Magnus wasn’t giving it a third chance.

He kicked the filing cabinets.

Checked behind the couch.

Looked beneath the coffee table.

Inspected the closet.

Only when he was completely certain nothing else was waiting to bite any vulnerable part of him did he finally lower the Remington.

“Clear.”

Magnus returned to the warden’s desk and pulled on the top drawer.

Click.

Locked.

He pulled harder.

CLICK!

The drawer sprang open.

Magnus looked inside.

Then stared.

A collection of colorful personal items filled the top layer.

He nudged several aside with the shotgun barrel, unwilling to touch anything unnecessarily. “You ran an entire prison and still needed this much entertainment in your desk?”

He shook his head.

Then paused.

“Well.”

Magnus glanced toward the dead warden downstairs.

“I guess nobody’s filing an HR complaint now.”

Beneath the miscellaneous items, something darker caught his eye.

A handgun.

Magnus moved the clutter aside and pulled out a compact pistol small enough to disappear easily inside a purse or jacket pocket. It wasn’t particularly impressive compared with the weapons already stored in his system inventory, but it was light and manageable. Carol immediately came to mind.

“She could use this.”

Magnus checked the weapon, made it safe, then tucked it away for later.

The rest of the office produced a few additional supplies. He found several unopened food items long past their printed dates, two boxes of coffee capsules, and a magnetic access card marked for the warden. The card was far more interesting than the food; certain secure sections of the prison had likely used electronic locks before the power failed, and even if the system was currently dead, restoring electricity later could make that credential extremely useful.

Magnus pocketed it carefully.

Then something near the entrance caught his attention.

A large facility diagram was mounted on the wall.

He walked over.

The map showed the prison from above, including the administration building, secured yards, cell blocks, service corridors, staff sections, and multiple connecting routes that had never been clearly shown in the television series. For Magnus, who had previously been navigating mostly from partial memories and whatever the system map revealed through exploration, this was far more valuable than anything else he had found upstairs.

Magnus rested one hand against his chin.

His eyes slowly traced the layout.

“So that’s how this place is connected…”