I lay on my back for a while, flinching after every bang of the door. Eventually the red thing seems to have left in search of easier prey, or perhaps it is waiting for me to leave the room. Either way I am not leaving the safety of this room for a while.

I sit up and look about.

“Fuck.”

Leaning on the wall directly behind me is a corpse with a gun in her mouth. Blood stains the walls.

“Just another mess.”

I repeat my mantra aloud.

I suppose it’s a quick and painless way to go, as approved to being eaten alive by aliens.

A cursory observation reveals that the blood is fresh too, she must have killed herself within the last hour.

I’ve cleaned up enough ‘messes’ to know how fresh spilt blood is. While I can’t clean up this mess, but I can at least pay some respect to her.

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A check of her clearance card reveals a name, ‘Marlyn Scott’. I remove the gun from Marlyn’s grip and lay her down, then I close her eyelids.

‘I feel a little better after this. I also feel a strong resolve. I will not die down in this fucking pit, like Marlyn. I will not be just another mess, that some poor fucking ‘sanitation technician’ will have to clean up when this is all said and done. No more of this bullshit.’

After a compose myself from emotional outburst I look around, taking in every detail of my surroundings.

The room is quite spartan in appearance. There are four surveillance stations with six unilluminated screens each, along with a single terminal in the center of the room.

In a corner is a water dispenser, and an instant coffee machine. In another corner is a tall healthy houseplant.

Adorning the walls are a few posters, some are posters of what to do in emergency situations, while the majority are landscapes with words of encouragement on them, such as ‘have a nice day!’

I feel a slight bit of jealousy at my surroundings.

‘Why couldn’t I have been a security technician, instead of a fucking janitor. Bullshit.’

They told me I was a natural at cleaning. Whatever, I’ve got bigger things to deal with.

First I search all the drawers, all of them are almost empty aside from documents. The only thing of note that I find a large pair of scissors which I take apart into two blades, they may be useful later.

Then I drink some water because I am really thirsty, I am also starting to get hungry, I will need to go to the break room to pick up some food.

Lastly I try and boot up the surveillance system, but I am a sanitation technician not a technology technician.

I think that whatever caused containment to fail also caused security to fail. Which doesn’t make sense since they are on two different systems, with lots of redundancy.

It isn’t a leap of logic to assume that almost all the other systems compromised too.

It’s clear that there must have been some sort of cyber attack.