from the escalators and semicircular wall smattered with sets of balcony doors.
We arrive at a wide swath of carpeted hallway and framed art. At the end of the hallway is the stairwell door, and set into the right wall, where the back of the building will be, is a single door, with no crash bar.
We rush to it. A sign reads STAFF ONLY.
The offices where we can signal. That will lead to the freight elevators.
The staff door is locked.
“No!” Siggy tugs at the handle.
Through the slight gap in the doorframe, I can see that the door is locked with a deadbolt.
“Got anything in that bag for this?” Simon asks me.
“No.”
Cuellar puts his shoulder to the door, but it doesn’t budge.
If the hinges were on our side, we could try taking them off and get in that way, but as it is, the only thing we could try to do is break the wire-thread-webbed narrow window.
Which, if it worked, would still make a huge amount of noise.
“I’m not staying here,” Cuellar says, and we feel it, too. That feeling of being bottled up, in a dead end with our backs to the wall, like in the hamster tube, no way out, nowhere to run.
So, we all act on instinct, fear crawling up our necks, and rush back out to the third-floor balcony lobby where at least we can move in a few different directions.
But in the moment, we simply rush away from the tunnel-trap of the hall.
The curve of the balcony wall sweeps out away from me on the left.
One set of balcony doors yawns open.
I break from formation to ease up to the open doors, while the others either creep forward with Cuellar, to look down the hall that parallels the street and leads to the bathrooms, or stand waiting near the elevator, weapons outstretched.
I put one eye to the hinge-gap at the back of the door.
I’m afraid I’ll see the big cheerleader stuntman, or Linus, dead on the floor, or worse, lurching around aimlessly on the balcony with empty, blood-rimmed eyes.
But there’s nothing, at least not in my narrow eyeline. No zombies, just rust-stained carpet and a few overturned chairs.
I’m easing forward to crane my head around the edge of the door for a better look, when Cuellar yelps.
A zombie man holds Cuellar’s arm, pulling and lowering his mouth to bite.
The zombie was just right there, hiding in plain sight. He looked like part of the barricade, the upended sofa with the loud splashes of color across the back.
Which doesn’t really speak well for this man’s fashion sense when he was a normal human.
For a moment my brain can’t process it, and I wonder if the zombie was waiting to ambush us, getting sneaky.
Impossible.
Is it?
Can they learn?
But the zombie’s moving slow, so slow, was he just . . . tired? Or powered down? Fading from the virus, or whatever?
How long until the virus really kills them?
Maybe the man was too injured or maimed before the virus turned him. Whatever the reason, we weren’t prepared for him, we didn’t see him, and now it’s too late.
Cuellar punches the zombie’s head, but he doesn’t let go, and he’s too close for the ax to swing enough.
He bites, and Cuellar shrieks.
Simon rushes forward, pushing out and back with his vanity stool—lion-tamer moves down now, and efficient.
Simon pops the legs of the stool into the zombie’s chest.
The zombie in the loud shirt falls backward into the barricade, sending the planter sideways, crashing into the shatterproof-glass protective railing at the top of the landing.
“Run!” Cuellar yells, his eyes bulging over Simon’s shoulder, as he sees before the rest of us, the gnashing, slavering group of zombies drawn to the noise.
They’re coming from the long hallway that leads away from the balcony. No zombies are coming from the balcony lobby itself.