Licker

The shutter opens up, light from the main hall slowly seeping into east hallway. She steps into the hallway, her footsteps echoing through the seemingly empty hallway. The light from the main hall is unable to break through the dark, forcing her to use her flashlight. Every footstep breaks the dead silence as she makes her way to the doors leading to the east office. She lowers a hand by the doorknob, slowly gripping it. She holds her breath as she quietly turns the knob, and opens up the door.

Her eyes quickly dart around the room, looking for any zombies. The lights in the office buzz and crackle, bathing the room in a dim glow, just barely illuminating everything. A cop's corpse rests on the floor, left of the desks it's the same one that had almost gotten her when she got the fuse. The air suddenly becomes dense, and heavy.

Is it, asleep, or playing dead?

Claire tip-toes her way to the right side of the desks, looking around for the valve, spotting another corpse laying underneath a window. No valve. She goes around to the other side. When she gets near the corpse, she leans to the side instead of walking forward. Still nothing. As she looks around, she spots something red in a small room, that's probably the office for the leader. As she makes her way around, she suddenly freezes upon seeing something moving outside the window. The darkness just makes it a silhouette. It looks human, but she knows it's not.

Once the figure passes by the window, she resumes her walk to the main office. Entering the office, a weight is lifted off her chest as she sees a red valve, sitting on top of the desk. As she grabs it, her hand bumps a nearby pen, which rolls off the desk. The pen falls off, landing on the ground with a loud thud. It bounces once, then continues to roll until it slams into the wall. Claire stands still, slowly turning her upper body to look out the doorway to see if the zombie wakes up. She can hear her heart beating through her chest. The zombie stays on the ground, unmoving.

Claire waits a few more second just to be safe before she walks out of the office, having to keep herself from just sprinting. She enters the main hall, and quickly pulls down the lever, the shutter going back down once more.

"Alright, time to find out where you went Chris," Claire mutters to herself as she holds up the valve. She makes her way to the door leading to the west office, and goes through. She goes through and enters the hallway, making her way to the stairwell. As she walks up to the stairs, a zombie lunges its arms through the barricade, trying to grab her. With lots of space between her and the arms, she gets up the stairs coming across another zombie laying on some of the steps. She carefully steps around it, having to step between its head and arms in order to make it up the stairs.

Finally reaching the second floor, she heads for the locker room. Walking through the door, the steam hisses at her. She places the valve onto a small bolt sticking out, and turns it. The steam slowly dies off little by little with each turn until the pipe is completely closed, the path through now clear. On the other side of the showers, in a much smaller locker room, a figure sits slouched on a bench. Claire draws her gun, slowly making her way through the showers, standing on the far side away from the shower stalls. She checks each shower for zombies, keeping one eye on the person at the end. They don't move at all. Her footsteps echo off the tile flooring, and droplets of water fall onto the floor. The sounds are coming from the very last shower, the curtains are drawn over it.

Every other shower is empty. She walks up to the shower, checking the bottom to see if there's any space under the curtains to peek under. There isn't. She looks over at the bench to make sure the person hasn't moved. They haven't. Taking a deep breath, and tighting her grip on her gun, she pulls back the shower curtain. It's empty, the handle being just barely out enough to let some water get through. Claire pushes the handle in, the water ceasing to drip from the shower head and she leaves the showers. Entering the small locker room, she sees the person's face is mangled, exposed gums, and muscle.

How they died and ended up in a slouched position, is beyond her. She walks past the body, and heads for the door leading back out into the hall. As she places her hand on the door, she hears a thud behind her.

She quickly turns around to see the body has fallen to the floor, luckily it doesn't try to get up. She turns back around and opens the door to the hallway. Several zombie corpses litter the hall, all of them having several gash marks in them. Some have holes going right through them.

What the hell could have done this?

Looking down the dark hallway, she spots a window, the glass shattered, and rain pouring into the hall, the wind howling through the hole. Claire slowly makes her way down the hall, and sees a door a few meters away to the left. A star is engraved in the door, with the word S.T.A.R.S underneath it. As she heads for the door, a nearby corpse gets up, letting out a loud groan as it rises to its feet. Before she can bring up her gun or try to run for the door, a high-pitched screech suddenly rings throughout the hall.

A large creature crawls into view from around the corner at the end of the hall. It's body lacks any skin, all of its blood-soaked muscles and bones exposed. The only way you can tell it was once ever human, is it's large brain that's swelled up and covered its face. The thing crawls along the ceiling with ease thanks to the three massive claws in its feet. As the zombie tries to reach Claire, the creature opens its mouth, a long tongue jutting out and stabbing through the zombie with ease. The tongue suddenly wraps around the zombie, and pulls it up towards it.

The thing proceeds to start eating away at the zombie's corpse. Claire slowly inches her way to the door, standing against the wall. She feels along the wall for the door handle, unable to take her eyes off whatever the hell the thing is. Feeling a round, smooth, cold piece of metal, she turns it and quickly slips into the office, closing the door behind her. Hopefully it doesn't know how to open doors. As she distances herself away from the door, she jumps when Leon's voice suddenly comes from her radio.

"Hey, Claire?" She grabs the radio as she starts looking around the room, starting with the main office. A name plate on the desk reads, Albert Wekser.

"Y-Yeah?" She asks, her voice a bit shaky.

"I found the C-4 detonator, but, it has no battery,"

"Uh," Claire spots a 9-volt battery sitting on the desk, "What kind of battery does it need?"

"A 9-volt,"

"Well, I just, happened to find one in the STARS office,"

"Really? Great!"

"Yeah, but uh, I still need to look for anything my brother might have left,"

"Oh, right, of course. I'll, meet you in main hall?"

"Yeah…" She glances at the doorway leading to the hall, where that thing is most likely waiting for her. Claire puts her radio back on her belt and starts exploring the room. Her brother's desk is by the wall opposite of the door leading to the hall. His bike jacket hangs on the wall next to it. She digs through all the drawers and the piles of papers on his desk, and finds nothing but reports on cases. A couple catch her eye however.

They're reports from back in July, all talking about describing people living in the Arklay Mountains being eaten by what could only be described as by wild animals. They all mention a belief that the mysterious murders were the cause of cannibalism and that a few crazed people that looked like they were rotting had been encountered and shot on sight.

Chris never mentioned anything like this…

She looks around some more, unable to find anything else. At the left side of the room is a smaller room where a tmp and magnum are hanging up. They're locked behind a sturdy metal bars. A computer is hooked up to the lock mechanism for the door. She goes over to it, and tries to unlock it, but there's an error, talking about a missing usb.

"There's always something, isn't there," Claire says as she backs away from the computer, putting her hands on her hips. As she glares at the computer, she notices something in the corner of her eyes. A map of the second floor of the station. Looking at it, she sees that just around the corner leads to the room where the unicorn statue is. If the zombies went back to sleep or whatever, maybe she can just meet Leon there and they can head to the woman statue from there. She grabs her radio.

"Hey, Leon, I think I found a shortcut to the library, why don't we meet there?"

"Is that such a good idea? Last I remember there were zombies in there,"

"Well, maybe they went to sleep," She replies, realizing how crazy she must sound saying that, "But, if they're not, you could just blast them with your shotgun, right?" She quickly adds.

"Yeah, we should get there asap anyways, Marvin's getting worse by the second. I'll see ya there,"

Claire puts the radio back on the belt and walks up to the door, trying to think of what to do. She puts her gun in its holster and pulls the grenade launcher from off her back.

"Let's see how it likes fire," She says as she holds the launcher firmly in her hands. She gently places her hand on the door before slowly opening it. Peeking her head out, she looks around, only to find the thing is on the ceiling directly above the door, sitting almost completely still. Claire nudges the door open little by little until she has enough room to pull her the grenade launcher. She takes aim, and pulls the trigger. The grenade flies out of the gun, flying up at the creature and exploding into a ball of flames.

Claire quickly retreats back into the room before the flames can fall down onto her. The things high-pitched screams of agony can be heard clearly through the door, shortly followed by a loud thud. She reloads the grenade launcher as the screams die down. Once they're gone, she opens up the door again, but something is in the way. She peeks through the small crack in the door. The creature's charred body lays in front of the door, blocking it.

Claire puts the grenade launcher back on her back and pushes on the door with both arms, slowly shoving the thing out of the way and opening the door. She steps over the thing and heads down the hall towards the library.