Ps. You Are My Happiness

5. The Haunting Halls

If you want to be happy, be

-Leo Tolstoy

~.~

We make it to the nearest room and lock ourselves in it. I thought we would have some rest, but Ivan takes this paper from the wall and lays it on the table in the middle of the room.

"This is the structure of the lab," he says.

He goes through it with serious eyes and explains what he thinks of the structure and what steps he thinks we should take. I find him really talented and experienced in things like this. It makes me want to question if he has always wanted to become a detective or if it happened without a liking. Has he always been this inquisitive and talented?

"Do you know which room we are aiming for?" I ask out of nowhere.

"I am thinking about the storage room where all the files might be. But if we dig deep into situations like this, they might've kept it in a secretive place or a secured one."

"You are right. We'll check the storage room first and go to the other parts." Sasha says.

"The storage room is in the basement. We'll make it through the staircase." Ivan says. He closes the map and leads us to the door that we came from. We walk outside without any infected ones spotting us and make our way toward the stairway. It's the emergency fire exit of the building that we use to go downstairs. As we walk, I look behind at Ivan, who's walking behind me.

"What if it's not there?" I ask him.

"Then we leave to the other parts."

It makes me think, "Where did you guys check during the months you spent here?"

"We went to the main police station, which is miles and miles away, and checked the special force headquarters," Henry replies. "We had no information, so we worked on our assumptions. I am glad you guys showed up. So at least now we are going on the correct route."

Henry opens the door to the basement and walks out first. He cautiously looks around and signs us that the coast is clear. The parking lot is filled with vehicles so that we can use them as shields. We make our way while crouching behind vehicles. After walking a few steps, we hear the growling sounds of the zombies.

"How many are there?" Ivan asks Henry from behind me.

"Six of them. But we can't be sure how many are hiding from our view because of these vehicles."

"Yeah. And most might've come to the basement to hide from the attacks." Sasha agrees.

"So there might be more here than anywhere in the building," I mutter.

We've come so close to the entrance of the storeroom, but the six zombies are blocking the way. I sigh in frustration and casually keep my hand on the door handle of the car next to me. And it opens with one swing. I freeze to make sure no one hears the sound.

"Wow. This is great. We can play bait." Sasha says.

"How?" I ask.

"Someone can play bait and hide in the car while the rest leaves to the storeroom," she replies.

"But what if they break the glass and attack the one inside?" I ask.

"It's too risky." Ivan agrees. He walks past me, brushing against my shoulder and gets into the driver's seat of the vehicle. Then he examines it. "There's something we can do," he says.

He explains how we can pull down the hand brake and push the car so it rolls down to the front. At the same time, the zombies will follow it while we sneak into the room.

"Doesn't sound foolproof, but we've no other choice," Henry says.

"We'll stick to that." I agree.

Ivan gently closes the door of the car, locking himself inside, and I see him pulling down the handbrake with minimum sound. As he's done, he gets down and closes the door with no sound. He nods to us, and we gather behind the car and start pushing it as hard as we can. We try our best to make no sound and successfully make the car roll forward. Just as it starts rolling, we hide behind the nearest walls waiting for the damned infected ones to follow it.

The car rolls forward and hits the one at the front. Just as we assumed, a lot of zombies appear and run toward it. More than we thought. Dozens of zombies.

We take the opportunity and run to the storage room. I pull the handle, but it doesn't budge at all.

"It's locked!" I say to others.

"Move aside." Ivan moves me aside and kicks at the door. The commotion makes the zombies turn toward us.

"QUICK!" Sasha shouts at Ivan, who continuously smashes at the padlock of the door. He smashes it with his baseball bat, and finally, it comes loose. He removes the chains around the door, and we stuff into the room, closing the door quickly. But a zombie beats us to it and enters the room.

My blood turns cold in fear. I take my rifle and hit the zombie's head. It drops to the ground, where I kick it continuously. Ivan pulls me aside and smashes its head with the baseball bat.

We all sigh in relief and take a minute to calm ourselves down.

"It'll be a hell of a mission to get out of here." Sasha says.

"We'll do the search," Eric says to Ivan.

We scatter in the storeroom, which has all kinds of files and written documents. I start looking through a box of files. I look through them for a while, but none of them seems important. They are only old lab reports. I look through the largest bookrack in the room, and Ivan comes to look through it with me.

"Hopefully, we find it here," I say about the reports of the tests the scientists might've run about the virus.

Ivan nods, looking through a file. We searched around the whole storage room for more than two hours for any evidence that would be helpful at the moment. And it is only when I find a file that looks important. I walk to Ivan and show what I found, which he read through.

"This is a security report about the lab. I guess we can find here where they might've done the research," he says.

"Oh."

We look through it together and realise we aren't looking for the evidence in the correct place.

"Now what?" I ask him.

"We've got to get out of here," Ivan says. "We figured out where we should look," he says to the rest of the group. "It's on the third-floor lab, which has good security. It tells here that only a specific number of people are allowed to go there, so hopefully, there won't be many infectees on that floor."

"So we have to get out of here..." Sasha mutters, looking at the door.