Alexander was a young man with a lot of great things going for him. He had an excellent job, a nice house, a fancy car, and a beautiful girlfriend. He was living the dream. Now, he was stuck in his office building, living off of the food from vending machines while he waited for the useless government to do their damn job. They said the outbreak would be under control in a few days. So far, it had been a week.

All of his officemates had left, leaving Alexander alone on the fifteenth floor. He was starting to run low on food and he worried about going down to other floors to check their machines. He didn’t want to get into an argument with the other workers of the building. Though soon he was going to have to do it no matter what his wants were. He was going to need food.

Alexander paced the floor in front of the giant windows that looked out over the city. Everything below looked so small and, from this distance, safe. It was amazing how being fifteen floors up made everything seem so insignificant. It was almost like nothing had changed. There were even long lines of cars at a standstill, just like a traffic jam. He guessed it was just like a traffic jam, actually. Those cars had been there since the outbreak started. They would most likely stay there forever just as they were. Alexander didn’t have very much faith in the military getting whatever this was under control.

He had seen the videos on his phone. The things that started to overrun the city were hard to stop. He saw a video of some guy saying that you had to shoot them in the head. It was like some sort of summer blockbuster or something. But looking back on it, Alexander didn’t think that there was any other way to make it. These things were zombies. Real, living zombies. Well, not living he corrected. They were definitely dead. There was no way that these people could be living with the varying degrees of injury some of them had. He saw partially removed jaws, limbs removed, just horrendous injuries that could never be survived without medical intervention. 

Alexander looked at his dwindling supply of food and sighed. He was going to have to go to another floor. The mail cart was next to the elevator where he left it after the mission to get supplies from this floor. He decided to go to the sixteenth floor, where the building had a restaurant. There would be plenty of food there. He didn’t know why he didn’t go there to start with. He guessed  that it was just him believing tha the military could stop it all. 

He took the mail cart up to the sixteenth floor in the elevator, the mechanical whir and soft ding of the bell marking the movement between floors. The doors opened into the lobby of the restaurant. The host stand stood in front of the door and the door to the restaurant was open wide.

They had been open when everything had happened and he wondered what was awaiting him.

As it turned out, things had been cleaned up and it seemed like there was nothing amiss in the bright room. He saw that tables were cleared with rolled flatware and all of the trimmings of a restaurant ready to open sitting there. He guessed that the restaurant closed and they prepared for their next opening before most everyone left for the day since work was over for them.

Alexander was starting to regret staying. He had stayed so that he would be able to leave on time on Friday so he could go on a date. He should have just taken off with everyone else. He was stuck in this damned building now. 

Alexander headed for the back of the restaurant, hoping to find some food that was still edible. There was still power, so it was likely that the food in the fridges and freezers was still just fine. It was about time that he ate something that didn’t come out of a vending machine and cooking was always a fun pastime.