August, or Auggie, as he was usually called, sat quietly in his little cubical that his shop was set up in. The fact that it had been so very easy to get  this job worried him. Sure, it was on one of the lower floors of the building, but there was plenty of space bnetween him and the dead that boiled like an angry sea below them in their tall building. Auggie helped to take inventory of the items that were brought in by scavvers and kept some of the more choice items, ones that weren’t earmarked for the better shops near the top at least, and put them into his tiny shop.

Being a shop owner wasn’t exactly hard work, but being down on the lower floors did have its difficulties. Usually, instead of well-dressed and well-mannered rich people, you had people that were more rough around the edges and drunk on anything that could be scavved or made in an old toilet. At least Auggie thought it would be a toilet. 

He was relatively young when the virus happened. He barely remembered anything. All that would come to him were flashes. Flashes of people running around in a panic, flashes of his mother holding him as tight as she could while running, flashes of sleeping in cars during the night, and flashes of the group of kids that were about his age that had turmed eating her alive. They had found her when she had gone into an elementary school to find supplies and maybe a book or two for Auggie so that he would have something to do. He watched through the window of the classroom horrified as the little monsters took huge chunks of flesh out of his mother with their gap-toothed grins. Then there were flashes of him running until he met the family that basically adopted him. It wasn’t like the adopting that he read about in books. They simply just started referring to him as their son, and Auggie was not bothered by it. It had felt nice to be looked after.

Every so often, he would hear the shrieks of those damned children and all of those flashes would come right back to him. He hated those flashes and wished they would stop. There were a few times that he considered buying some of whatever alcohol they made down on the lower levels just to get some sleep away from the dreams. Though he didn’t think that he could stomach it. 

Auggie stretched out on his cot and atared up at the ceiling tiles, starting to count them. He had estimated home many their were and he was determined to figure out the exact number, but he always fell asleep before he could–

A great, shattering, clamouring crash sounded from below him. Screams erruoted from the bottom floors and the wails of the dead soon joined in with them. The dead had gotten into their sanctuary. 

Auggie threw off his blankets and stuffed his feet into his boots and ran to the back stairwell. His feet pounded up the stairs, and he managed to get into one of the elevators right before it closed. It would take him up to the restaurant which was a place of last resort. They would probably all die there, but you had to have the elevator to get up there and it could be shut down.

Starving to death was better than being bitten to Auggie.