The morning was a fragile equilibrium of routine and repressed panic. Jax sat at her small kitchen table, her fingers tracing the rim of a lukewarm mug of chamomile tea and a half eaten biscuit. On the television, a news anchor discussed a "bizarre flu strain" causing localized lockdowns in the Midwest.
"Symptoms include extreme lethargy followed by heightened aggression, We urge you to stay away from these Individuals, if you see one please contact your local law enforcement." the anchor said. Jax quickly switched the channel to a cartoon.
"Thea-Thea- Ththea- that's all folks!" A well dressed animated pig waved on screen followed by tinny orchestral music.
She couldn't handle "aggression" before her first spreadsheet. It made for a depressing day, As she reached for her bag, she instinctively pulled her cardigan tighter, ensuring the thick wool covered the colorful ink snaking down her forearms.
She'd spent years perfecting this "plain Jane" armor—studs replaced with clear glass retainers, tattoos buried under high collars. In a world that already judged her for her shaky hands and darting eyes, she didn't need to give them the "rebellious" label to use against her, too.
The commute was aggressively ordinary, yet the air in the office felt heavy, thick with the scent of burnt popcorn and toner.
10:30 AM: She avoided the communal fruit bowl; the news report was a splinter in her mind. Made herself a coffee. Black,three spoons of sugar, as she listened to her coworkers share morning banter around the water cooler, and lounge area, and walked to her cubicle and put on her headphones. The energetic Japanese intro of My Chemical Romance's Planetary GO! played and drown out the office.
12:15 PM: She ate her sandwich in silence, her inner monologue a constant stream of Just stay small. Don't be noticed. Jason her boss walked past and complained about the new interns.
1:45 PM: She noticed Marcus, the sales lead, sitting with his head in his hands. He looked horrible—a dull, ashen color that spoke of illness or a hangover, he was doubled over, and I could see him starting to sweat. I wonder if he went to the bar down the street, what was it called? The 19th Hole,or something like that, an Old golf club that was outsourced for the property for some reason or another.
Jax winced and looked back at her monitor. She hated confrontation and loathed sickness. She told herself she was being "sensitive" again.If she just hit her deadlines, she could go home and lock the world away and sleep for two days.
The afternoon stretched on with a sickening, slow-motion quality. Jax kept her head down, her cardigan sleeves pulled so far over her knuckles they were starting to fray. Her inner monologue was a frantic loop: Just three more hours. Then you can go home, bolt the door, and take out the piercings. Just be normal, watch a old movie. Perhaps Vincent Price's The Last Man On Earth, or maybe Young Frankenstein, it has been a while.
But "normal" was decaying.
By 3:15 PM, the internet cut out. The office didn't erupt; it just sighed. People wandered to the windows, peering down at the street where traffic had come to a grinding, honking halt. Jax stayed in her seat. She didn't want to see the gridlock. She focused on the hidden weight of her industrial bar in her ear, the metal cold against her skin—a secret rebellion she was too terrified to ever actually show. "Fuck, how could I forget that one?" She thought as she nervously scratched her neck. "I have three bars but I can't text anyone is anyone else having this problem?" Harry, a mail courier asks.
By 4:00 PM, the screaming started outside. It was distant, filtered through triple-paned glass, sounding more like a pack of seagulls than people. Jim from Accounting laughed nervously. "Check out the crazy lady on the sidewalk. Is she... is she biting that dog?"
Jax felt a cold sweat prickle her scalp. She didn't look. She couldn't, as Janice and Harry walked to the window and gasped.
The office grew deathly quiet when the power started to flicker and died. The hum of the HVAC system gasped its last breath, leaving a silence so heavy Jax could hear her own frantic heartbeat. Most of her coworkers had gathered by the elevators, whispering about "evacuation protocols."
Jax, paralyzed by the thought of being trapped in a metal box with forty panicked strangers, retreated to the one place she felt safe: the supply closet in the back corner of the floor.
She was inside, clutching a box of printer paper for comfort, when the heavy lobby doors downstairs must have given way.
It was the sound of dozens of feet hitting the stairs at a dead sprint—wet, heavy, frantic thuds moving with a terrifying, predatory speed.
A blood-curdling shriek erupted from the elevator bank. Jax pressed her eye to the narrow slit of the closet door.
The elevators hadn't arrived. Instead, the stairwell door had burst open.
Marcus—poor, grey Marcus—was the first to go. He wasn't bitten; he was tackled. A woman in a torn, bloody business suit, moving with the jagged, twitching speed of a frantic insect, slammed into him at full tilt. The force cracked his skull against the marble floor with a sound like a dropped melon.
Jax watched, her breath hitching in a silent sob, as the "woman" didn't just bite Marcus. She tore. With a strength that defied physics, she hooked her fingers into Marcus's jaw and pulled. The sound was visceral—the wet snap of tendons, the grinding of the hinge, followed by a spray of hot, arterial red that painted the white cubicle walls in a jagged arc.
Marcus didn't scream for long. His throat was gone in the next heartbeat, ripped out in a single, ravenous gulp. Harry let out a panicked cry and the woman looked at him and opened her mouth and shrieked, lunging at him from the floor like a wild animal, as the rest of the group were forced to run or be cornered.
More of them flooded in. They weren't walking; they were lunging, sliding over desks, their limbs snapping back into place with sickening pops as they collided with furniture. They moved with a twitchy, high-octane aggression that made them look like a film being played at double speed. Some had open wounds that showed muscle and arteries, some looked as if they were uninjured, all of them shared the same jerky gait and movements.
One of them, a man whose face was a raw mask of missing skin,his teeth gnashing with a quiet clicking sound stopped just five feet from Jax's closet.
He didn't moan. He hissed, a wet, rattling sound, as he sniffed the air. His eyes were blown wide, the pupils vanished into a sea of ruptured blood vessels.
Jax huddled behind the paper boxes, her hands over her mouth, her body shaking so hard she feared the piercings in her ears would rattle against the shelving.
She was the timid girl, the girl who hid her ink, the girl who was afraid of a missed deadline and confrontation. And she was currently three inches of plywood away from a monster that could easily disembowel her before she could even scream.
Jax squeezed her eyes shut, pressing her spine so hard against the metal shelving that the edge of a shelf bracket dug into the tattoo on her shoulder blade. She didn't dare breathe. Through the thin slit in the door, the office was a nightmare of wet, rhythmic tearing and the frantic scuff-scuff-scuff of dress shoes on blood-slicked linoleum and a wet rattling wheezing sound.
She couldn't call them monsters. Not yet. That was Marcus—the man who always offered her his extra staples. That was Sarah from HR, whose floral perfume now mingled with the copper stench of an open slaughterhouse. They were just… wrong. They were people she had shared coffee with, people who had shown her kindness now moving with a twitching, predatory grace that defied biology.
Stay small. Stay invisible, her mind hissed. But the thing outside the door—the man who used to be a courier—wasn't leaving. He was huffing, a wet, desperate sound like a dog scenting a rabbit. A frantic scratch started at the base of the door.
Skritch. Skritch.
Panic, cold and sharp, pierced her lethargy. Jax began to move her hands with agonizing slowness, scanning the dark shelves of the supply closet.
Top Shelf: Reams of 20lb bond paper. Too heavy, too clumsy. " What am I gonna do paper cut him to death?"
Middle Shelf: Boxes of plastic folders and a heavy-duty stapler. "Also useless."
Bottom Shelf: A gallon jug of industrial floor cleaner and a long, stainless steel paper trimmer—the old-fashioned kind with the heavy, curved blade.
Her fingers brushed the cold handle of the paper trimmer. It was designed to slice through a hundred sheets of cardstock at once. It was a guillotine on a wooden base. "Well I've seen movies that had worse weapons and I don't really have a choice." She looked at the trimmer
A sudden, violent thud shook the door. The courier wasn't scratching anymore; he was throwing his shoulder into the wood. THWACK The hinges groaned. Jax felt a sob catch in her throat, a hot bubble of terror. THWACK She grabbed the trimmer, her hands shaking so violently she nearly dropped it.
She fumbled with the locking pin, her hidden piercings throbbing in time with her pulse.THUD Think, Jax. Think. She unscrewed the bolt holding the blade to the base. It was awkward, her fingers slick with sweat, but the heavy metal arm finally came free. THUD It was eighteen inches of sharpened steel, heavy and cold.
The door cracked. A hand—fingernails torn to the quick, grey skin stretched tight over knuckles, and mangled flesh,covered in blood—thrust through the splintered gap. It groped blindly, catching the fabric of Jax's oversized cardigan.
"Please," she whispered, the word a tiny, pathetic ghost of a sound and pushed her back against the shelves.
The thing on the other side didn't respond with words. It slammed its face against the gap, a freshly ruptured eye peering through the wood, rolling wildly until it locked onto hers. It let out a high-pitched, vibrating shriek that echoed off the closet walls.
Jax looked at the blade in her hand. She looked at the thing that used to be a person. She realized that being the "quiet girl" was over. If she stayed quiet now, she would die quiet.
The courier's fingers hooked into the wool of her sleeve, tattered nails dragging against the skin of her wrist. Jax didn't scream; she couldn't. Her throat was a desert of dry terror. Instead, she threw her weight backward, the fabric of her cardigan tearing with a sharp rip that exposed the dark, intricate ink of a moth on her forearm.
She scrambled over a pile of fallen envelopes, her eyes darting upward in the dim light. There, nestled between the top shelf and the ceiling, was a rusted HVAC grate.
The door splintered again. A shoulder shoved through, the wood groaning in protest. The thing that had been a courier hissed, its teeth clicking together in a rapid, frantic rhythm, it's arm flailing frantically.
Jax didn't think. She acted on a primal, jittery instinct she didn't know she possessed. She shoved the heavy-duty stapler into the gap of the door to jam the hinge, giving her seconds—maybe less. She scrambled up the metal shelving, the sharp edges cutting into her palms and forearms. She shoved the paper trimmer blade into her waistband, the cold steel biting into her hip and thigh, and punched at the vent.
The grate gave way with a metallic clatter that sounded like a gunshot in the small space. She hauled herself up, her muscles screaming, just as the closet door burst off its top hinge. The thing lunged, its fingers snapping shut on the air where her ankle had been a heartbeat before snapping its teeth in frustration and letting out a wet wheeze before turning to face a wall.
Jax crawled through the galvanized steel tunnel, the scent of dust and old grease filling her lungs. Below her, the office was a symphony of slaughter—the wet thud of bodies hitting desks, the frantic, high-speed sprinting of those things, and the fading cries of people who had been her friends. She covered her ears and slowly crawled forward.
She moved toward a sliver of light a few yards down, her heart a frantic drum against the metal floor of the duct. She kicked out another grate and dropped into the small, windowless records room.
It was empty.
Jax collapsed against a filing cabinet, gasping for air. She reached up, her fingers trembling as they fumbled with the industrial bar in her ear, checking to see if it was still there—a tactile tether to who she was. She looked down at her arm. The moth tattoo was smeared with dust and a single drop of the couriers blood.
She couldn't stay here. The records room had no lock and multiple glass panes as a wall. Jax gripped the heavy trimmer blade, her knuckles white. She crept to the door and eased it open an inch.
The hallway was a smear of red and black. The "Infected" moved in sudden, violent bursts—one moment standing perfectly still, the next sprinting at a wall or a closed door with bone-breaking force.
"Is... is anyone there?" she breathed, the sound so soft it barely left her lips.
From a darkened office across the hall, she heard a soft, rhythmic tapping. Not the frantic scratching of the things, but a deliberate, human cadence.
Tap. Tap-tap. Tap.
Jax's pulse spiked. Someone was alive. But to get to them, she had to cross ten feet of open hallway, and she could hear the heavy, wet breathing of one of those things just around the corner, trying to determine where the tapping was coming from.
Jax pressed her back against the cold drywall, her breath hitching in her throat. She gripped the paper trimmer blade until the metal handle bit into her palm. Just around the corner of the doorframe, it stood there—or rather, it leaned.
It had been Mr. Henderson from the mailroom. Jax recognized the remains of his blue vest, adorned with multiple pins and tags,now soaked so dark it looked black. But the thing wearing his clothes was a vision pulled from the deepest pits of a nightmarish fever dream.
His left leg was snapped at the femur, the limb twisted 180 degrees so that his foot pointed directly backward, the jagged white of the bone occasionally peeking through the shredded slacks. Yet, he stood on it, the ruined limb supporting his weight with a sickening, wet creak every time he shifted.
His face was horrific. It wasn't just bitten; it looked as though it had been put through a woodchipper. The skin of his right cheek had been entirely clawed away, hanging in a limp, grey flap over his collarbone and neck. Without the cheek to hold it in, his jaw hung skewed, exposing a row of teeth and raw, pulsing gums and muscle. One eye was gone, replaced by a jagged, hollow socket that leaked a thick, yellowish fluid, while the other remained—a milky, hyper-focused red-rimmed orb that twitched with manic speed.
The most visceral part was his arm. From the elbow down, the muscle had been stripped clean, leaving a terrifying length of radius and ulna bone that ended in a hand still clutching a stack of blood-stained envelopes. He was a marionette made of meat and splinters, vibrating with a frantic, twitchy energy that suggested at any moment he could burst into a dead sprint.
Jax felt the bile rise in her throat. Her inner monologue, usually a roar of anxiety, went deathly silent. That's not Mr. Henderson. That's a carcass on a wire.
She had to get around him. The tapping was coming from the office directly behind this nightmare.
She began to shuffle, her socks sliding over the linoleum with agonizing slowness. She watched the thing's one good eye. It was darting, scanning the air, looking for a heartbeat. As Jax reached the midpoint of the hallway, the creature's head snapped toward her with a sound like a dry branch breaking. It didn't have a nose anymore—just a raw, red hole—but it sniffed the air, a wet, rattling whistle echoing through its exposed sinus cavity.
Jax froze. Her cardigan caught on a protruding piece of metal trim from a cubicle. A single, tiny clink echoed in the silent hall.
The thing's head tilted further, its jaw unhinging even more as it prepared to shriek.
The thing's head jerked, the milky eye locking onto Jax with a terrifying, predatory focus. A wet, rattling hiss began to build in its throat—the sound of air rushing through a shredded windpipe.
Before the shriek could erupt and call the rest of the pack, Jax's survival instinct finally overrode her anxiety.
Instead, she lunged forward, planting her boots and shoving the flat of her hand against the creature's chest with every ounce of her adrenaline-fueled terror.
The thing was surprisingly light, its density seemingly leached away by whatever was consuming it. It stumbled back on its reversed leg, the bone grinding audibly against the floor. It hit the waist-high decorative railing of the atrium with a dull thud.
For a second, it teetered. The mangled arm—the one that was mostly bare, glistening bone—flailed wildly, trying to hook into Jax's cardigan. She saw the yellowish fluid leaking from its eye socket splash onto the floor. Then, with a final, wet grunt, it flipped over the edge.
Jax scrambled to the railing, her breath coming in ragged gasps. She watched the shape fall three stories, hitting the marble fountain in the lobby with a sickening, heavy crunch.
She expected it to be over. She expected it to stay down.
Instead, the shape in the fountain stirred. The impact had snapped its spine in another place, its torso now twisted at a right angle to its hips. One arm was pinned underneath it, likely pulverized. Yet, the thing pushed itself up with its one remaining skeletal limb. It dragged itself out of the water, its head lolling uselessly to one side, and began a frantic, lopsided crawl toward the front doors, its broken parts clicking and snapping with every movement. It wasn't dead; it was just... recalibrating.
Jax backed away from the railing, her stomach doing a violent somersault. "Oh god," she whimpered, her voice cracking. She raised her hand to her mouth and tried to stifle the need to vomit.
The tapping from the office across the hall started again—faster now, more urgent.
Tap-tap-tap. Tap-tap-tap.
Jax turned toward the sound. She didn't look like the timid girl from the morning anymore. Her cardigan was shredded, her moth tattoo was exposed and smeared with grime, and her eyes were wide and bloodshot. She gripped the paper trimmer blade and moved toward the door.
"I'm here," she whispered, her hand trembling as she reached for the handle. "Please, be someone I know."
Jax turned the handle, her heart hammering a frantic rhythm against her ribs. The door was heavy, reinforced by someone having shoved a filing cabinet against it.
"Please," she hissed, her voice cracking. "It's Jax. From data entry. Open up!"
The cabinet scraped across the floor with a groan-inducing shriek, and the door opened just wide enough for a hand to reach out and yank her inside.
Jax stumbled, the smell of copper and sweat hitting her like a physical wall.
The room was the executive conference suite—soundproofed glass and heavy oak. There were four of them.
David from Legal: He was pacing, his silk tie undone and hanging like a noose around his neck. He held a heavy glass award like a club.
Deborah the IT Lead: She was huddled over a tablet, her face pale, the blue light reflecting off her glasses.
The Intern, Leo: He was the one who had been tapping. He looked barely twenty, his face a mask of tear-streaked soot.
Ms. Gable: The CFO. She is an older woman with grey hair. She was sitting in a leather chair, her pristine white suit jacket stained with a spray of crimson across the shoulder.
"You're bleeding," David snapped, his eyes darting to the blood on Jax's arm. He raised the glass award, his knuckles white.
"It's not mine," Jax rasped, stepping back and holding up the paper trimmer blade as a warning. The timid girl was still there, but the "rebellion" she usually kept tucked under her sleeves was now her only currency.
She wiped the grime from her arm, revealing the dark ink of the moth. "I'm not like... those things. I saw Henderson. He fell three floors and just... kept going."
"They're all over the building," Deborah whispered, not looking up from her screen. "I'm getting feeds from the lobby security cameras. They're fast. God, they're so fast."
The room fell silent, the sound of the emergency sirens outside finally reaching them through the thick glass. It was a low, mournful wail that signaled the end of the world they knew.
"We can't stay here," Ms. Gable said, her voice surprisingly cold and steady despite the blood on her shoulder. She looked at Jax, then at the makeshift machete in her hand. "The roof is our only shot. There's a helipad for the executives. But the stairwell is a kill-zone."
Jax looked at the group. David was on the verge of a breakdown, Leo was terrified, and Deborah was buried in data. She was the one who had actually seen the meat-grinder outside. She was the one who had pushed a monster over a ledge.
"The vents," Jax said, her own voice sounding foreign to her ears—stronger, sharper. "I got here through the crawlspace. We can bypass the hallway, but we'll have to drop down near the stairwell entrance. It's tight. We'll have to leave the suits and the bags behind."
Suddenly, a massive BOOM rocked the building. The glass in the conference room vibrated violently. Below them, a car had likely hit a gas main, or worse.
From the other side of the oak door, the scratching started. Not one person. Many. The rhythmic, high-speed thump-thump-thump of bodies throwing themselves against the wood with suicidal force.
"The vents are too small," Jax corrected, her eyes darting to David's broad shoulders and then to the heavy oak table. "If one of those things gets in there with us, we're trapped in a tin can. We fight our way out. Now."
The scratching at the door was growing into a frenzied pounding. The wood was beginning to splinter at the frame.
"With what?" David hissed, gesturing to his glass award. "This is a paperweight, Jax!"
"Everything is a weapon if you're desperate enough," Jax snapped. She felt a strange, cold clarity settling over her anxiety, like a fever breaking. She pointed to the heavy-duty rolling chairs. "Break the legs off those. Use the metal stalks as clubs. Deborah, grab the fire extinguisher by the sideboard."
Deborah moved with shaky hands, unhooking the heavy red canister. Leo, the intern, found a letter opener and taped it to the end of a long plastic ruler with packing tape from a desk drawer. It was flimsy, but it gave him reach.
As they worked, the air in the room grew thick with the frantic whispers of their collective trauma.
"I saw Sarah from Accounting," Leo whispered, his voice cracking. "She was... she was eating her own fingers. Just chewing through them like they were pretzels. She didn't even look like she felt it."
"They don't feel anything," Ms. Gable added, stripping off her bloody blazer to reveal a silk blouse. She was sharpening a letter opener against the edge of the marble credenza. "I saw a man get hit by a courier bike. His ribs were caved in, his chest was a soup of red, and he just got up and tackled the cyclist. They're driven by something... neurological. Like a predatory bypass."
"Then we aim for the head," Jax said, her voice steady as she gripped the heavy trimmer blade. "It's the only thing that makes sense. In every movie, every story—if the brain is always what kills anything undead."
David let out a harsh, jagged laugh. "Movies? You're betting our lives on movies, Jax?"
Jax stepped toward him, the moth tattoo on her arm vivid under the flickering lights. She looked at the door, which was now bowing inward under the weight of the things outside. "Do you have a better idea, David? Because we all just listed off some pretty fatal things that humans shouldn't walk away from and they did."
A hand—grey, slick, and missing two fingers—punched through the center of the oak door. It didn't grope; it shredded the wood, pulling back a chunk of splinters. Through the hole, Jax saw a glimpse of a face: a woman with her scalp partially torn back, her remaining eye glowing with a terrifying, wet hunger.
"Headshots," Jax repeated, her knuckles white on the steel blade. "Don't stop until they stop moving."
The oak door didn't just open; it disintegrated. The sheer force of the infected slamming against it turned the wood into a jagged mess of splinters.
"Now! Move!" Jax screamed.
David and Leo, faces purple with exertion, heaved the massive executive conference table-top upward. It was a heavy, polished slab of mahogany that served as a makeshift phalanx. As the first wave of twitching, grey bodies surged into the room, the two men slammed the table forward, pinning three of the infected against the doorframe.
The sound was sickening—the wet crunch of ribs collapsing and the frantic, high-pitched screeching of the things as they were crushed by the weight.