Sara went to the closed door of the bathroom. She wondered if the closet trick worked on any door. She decided that maybe it wouldn’t work on doors connecting two rooms. There had to be an actual enclosed space behind the door.

On the other hand, she didn’t have any other door, and she had nothing to loose. She needed something she could use as a weapon. If the closet trick gave her an arsenal to draw on, that was just as good as the closet of clothes.

Sara thought of an armory as she reached for the door knob. She needed something to defend herself. She had spent part of her childhood plinking at animals on her parents’ property. She knew which way a gun pointed.

Her mother had sold the place after her father died. She didn’t have the means to pay for the upkeep, and thought living somewhere close to a job would be a bigger help.

She pulled on the door. It opened into a room full of shelves. She stepped inside and looked around. She frowned in disappointment.

Most of the weapons had already been grabbed up. Little markers indicated who had what now. She took a closer look and most of the markers also said the weapons had been dropped on the battlefield, lost by their bearers.

Sara went down the shelves. How much time did she have? What should she grab? Could she take more than one?

She found a familiar looking pistol with a scope wrapped in a holster. She grabbed that and buckled it around her waist, struggling with the hexagon shaped buckle. She checked the pistol out, frowning that it was semiautomatic from the look of things. She didn’t see any way to reload it, or spare magazines or batteries.

Once she went through what was in it, she might be out of ammo.

She grabbed a gauntlet shaped like a cat paw. It held a blade in the back of it. She fitted that on her hand, and made a fist. Tapping it with the fingers of her other hand gave a slight tinking noise.

Sara scanned the shelves for anything else that might be useful. She would need some way to get through doors, and a backup handgun, or better yet some type of rifle.

She found a green ring and put that on her uncovered hand. It did nothing, but it had to be some kind of weapon. She wondered how she made it work.

Sara grabbed a bag of octagonal plaques and tucked them in her gun belt. She needed an outdoor vest for the pockets if she wanted to keep raiding the remains of the arsenal.

Something warned her that she needed to move if she wanted to get out of the hospital. Her time had to be almost up. She grabbed a cylinder with a light on one end and buttons down the side. She put that in her pocket as she jogged to the door. She took a deep breath at the threshold.

Was she doing the right thing? Should she be trying to get her life back and risking being a slave to some nincompoop?

Her kids needed her and that was all that mattered.

Sara opened the vault door. The bathroom had changed while she was inside the arsenal. She wondered if she should step outside. Maybe she should wait inside the secret room until something better came along.

An invisible wall pushed her out into the bathroom. The door shut behind her as she turned. Once you opened the door, you had to leave.

Sara thought about the arsenal and pulled on the door. She frowned at the wrecked bedroom beyond. It looked like the weapons she picked were going to be the only weapons she could get.

She looked around before she stepped into the room. Everything looked like it had aged two hundred years while she was in the vault. She spotted a soiled labcoat on the floor.

Had Doubtless been killed by whatever had ruined the room? She hoped not. He had given her the help she needed unlike the recruiters.

A noise like a small knocking came from the closet. She wondered if there was someone else she could talk to about this. Someone not involved in what she assumed was an ongoing feud might point her to a faster way to get to the tower, and then home.

She pulled the closet door open. A man wearing rags screamed at her. She screamed back at his almost fleshless face. He lunged for her, teeth clacking as his hands clawed at the air. She punched him with the metal cat paw she wore and broke his jaw off as he staggered back from the impact.

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Sara grabbed the pistol she had seized from the armory. She pulled and the holster ejected the pistol so she could point it at her new enemy. She pulled the trigger. A buzzing sound and a rod of light took the zombie in the chest. He dropped back in the closet, trying to get back to his feet. She shot the thing in the head to stop his movements.

Sara looked around. Nothing moved. She shut the closet door on the headless corpse and thought about her next move.

She put the pistol away. She realized that the holster had a quick release built into it when she glanced down at it. It gave her a little more ease so that the pistol would not be hung up as she pulled it.

Sara only had two exits from the room. One was the door, leading out into the rest of the hospital. She could take the stairs or an elevator down to the ground so she could get started toward the tower.

The other way was the window. She would have to break the glass out, then lower herself down the side of the building. She didn’t have any rope to do that.

She decided to try the easy way first and work her way down to the lobby and outside. She didn’t think of herself as a great climber, and didn’t see a reason to try to improve when she didn’t need it.

If she had to use the window, maybe the paw would help her grip while she was climbing down.

She grabbed the doorknob and opened the bedroom door. She heard shuffling, but didn’t see anything moving. Signs pointed to the elevator and the stairs. She had to pick one, and get started.

The elevator had to be faster than the stairs, but was it safer. She had seen enough zombie horde movies to know if she got into the elevator and it was stopped by a bunch of zombies, she could be overwhelmed.

Her pistol fired single shots. Even if it blew up two, or three, of her enemy, more would be right there. Getting bitten where she was had to be a loss.

The stairs could be just as bad. Being swarmed there meant being on the run until she was cut off.

So out of the two options open to her, either could lead to a second death before she got out of the hospital.

She decided to try for the elevator. If she could get in it and close the doors, that might buy enough time before the zombies could think about what to do to get to her.

She liked that better than being dragged down on the stairs.

She stepped out in the hall and skulked toward the hall where the elevator should be according to the sign. She saw one zombie at the next intersection of halls. She froze. Had it seen her?

The zombie screamed.

Sounds of movement surrounded Sara. She looked around. Zombies popped out of rooms, from behind the nurse’s station to her left, from places along the halls out of sight.

She pulled the blaster and fired at the closest thing to get it out of the way. She had to reach the stairs or the elevator. She ran to the hall the signs pointed down.

Zombies stood in her way. She wouldn’t be able to shoot them all before they dragged her down. She had to retreat.

She needed something that she could use spray the hall. A single shot pistol wasn’t going to do much against the horde she faced. She needed a proton pack.

She backed up, shooting at the zombies as they closed. The pistol put them down in one shot if she hit them high enough in the body. The rotten flesh exploded. The ones she grazed still came after her despite losing a limb.

Sara realized she was surrounded. She couldn’t fight her way back to her room. The press of bodies was too much. She needed a better solution.

She forced her way to a wall so none of the zombies could take her from the back. She worked her way down the wall, firing into the mass. Bunched up as they tried to grab her, one of the red bolts could drop two or three on impact as the energy spilled over in the ranks. She felt a doorknob with her arm. She holstered the blaster just long enough to open the door and dart inside the room. She slammed the door closed and put her back to it.

She had a few seconds to think before the monsters pushed the door open despite what she did. She had a potential bottleneck, but enough of the monsters could still overwhelm her position. She looked around. What did she have?

She had a bed that wouldn’t bar the door because it was set in one place. She had a chair that she could use to buy time if she could reach it and bring it back to the door. She had a window looking out on the gray twilight sky. That could be her secondary exit if she could use the sheets from the bed as a rope.

First she had to get the wooden chair and bring it back to hook under the doorknob. That should get her something.

She pulled the blaster and shot out the window as she crossed the room. She was pleased that worked. A real death trap would have had shatterproof windows. She grabbed the chair and carried it back toward the door.

Zombie hands pushed the door open without her holding it closed with her body. She fired point blank into the mass to get them to clear the threshold of the room. Then she slammed the door closed again. She propped the chair under the handle.

That should buy her a little bit of time. She had to hurry if she wanted to escape the grasping hands and gnashing teeth.

She pulled the blanket and sheets off the bed. She wrapped one end of the blanket around the railing and tied it off. She tied the sheets together, and tied one end to the free end of the blanket. She threw the free end of the blanket out the cleared window.

The door exploded inward as the bodies pressed on it without concern. The zombies started screaming as soon as they sensed Sara’s presence.

She climbed out the window, and started down. She had to get to the end of the makeshift rope before they decided to come after her. The last thing she needed was falling zombies knocking her to the ground below.

She reached the end of the rope and was still five stories above the lot. She looked down. The hospital had a concrete and brick awning in front of the main doors. She hung only three stories above that.

She could drop three stories. It was only thirty feet. The only problem was if she broke a leg, she was a sitting duck for the zombies to take if they could get on the awning.

The sheet rope came undone from its anchor. Sara looked up at the rotten faces of the monsters looking down at her as the sheet slid out over the frame.

She didn’t have time to curse as she fell toward the ground below.