Day 309

It had been nearly sixty years since they sealed the main exits with concrete.
Poured it thick until it began to drip past the doors.
Sealed over two hundred people in.
Called us The Last.

It had been set up quite cleverly, down to the last detail.
Twenty storeys high and around twenty bedrooms per floor.
Every other floor was dedicated to food (growing, preparing and eating).
It was enough to make one wonder how long they'd been planning this.

The general consensus said longer than the Grey Hand disease had been around.
The entire skyscraper was completely self contained and seemingly invulnerable.
Nothing opened to the outside world, not even the windows and all vents were heavily filtered.
The population was out of harm's way, bottled into this prisonhaven.

Though the outside had been attacked many times during its sixty year reign, they remained safe.
Not once had any disease come to them, not once had any great tragedy occurred.
All was in order, and that order was Good.
It was never questioned.

They thought they were invincible, untouchable in their fortress.
Everything had been planned for, all the supplies were easy to obtain within the walls.
But some things can't be predicted, some people are bound to break the set order.
In this instance they didn't even mean to.

It's only a window, they thought, It's so stuffy in here all the time.
How bad could it be when we never even see any diseased? they wondered, smashing the glass.
Education within the walls was... uncoordinated at best.
Nobody realised that the contagion was airborne.

It had been so long since anyone had been outside that they quickly forgot the symptoms.
Their only memory of the Grey Hand was a distorted urban legend that personified it.
They never saw it coming, never stood a chance.
One by one they became Grey.

Their skin dying and separating from their bodies, hanging loosely as a grey sack of rotting flesh.
The prisonhaven wasn't equipped to handle it, no-one thought their seal would be broken.
The tower was thrown into chaos in a matter of days.
There were no uninfected left.

Months passed and nobody ate any more.
They had no need to.
The food floors became ridden with mould and toxic spores from decomposing labfood.
Grey Hand began to alter, the dead skin growing an impenetrable layer of fungal stems.

They reacted badly to light and dug a vast labyrinth of tunnels in their disease-addled state.
They didn't even realise what they were doing, they only knew that Dark was the new Good.
As they spread out underground their new strain spread through contact with underground streams.
All the while the mould seeped and oozed through the building, leaking out of the shattered window.

It created new breaks through the plaster walls, the vents - even the ceiling tiles.
Soon the entire building, all twenty storeys, was a dripping mass of fungal contagion.
The one who started all of this was now unaware, a shambling mass of spores like the rest.
Nothing in the world was prepared for this new monster.