The stench of fresh vomit and urine filled the apartment hallway like cheap perfume in an elevator as ancient fluorescent bulbs flickered and crackled overhead. This was going to take longer than she initially thought, perhaps hours instead of minutes in a place so badly lit and overwhelmingly filthy.
Anything could be hiding in these rooms and with so little go work from she would have to search the damned place floor-by-floor until something stood out enough for her to call it in and get the hell away before it kicked off. Nobody could pay her enough for that kind of chaos.
The further in she went, the more telltale signs she found herself catching in the corners of hastily abandoned rooms. If there were any other humans around they'd either be dead or dying, for their sake she hoped for the former but experience taught her to expect the latter.
She wasn't dealing with empathetic beings, she was dealing with living nightmares. Iridescent and fluid, they clung to the reeking underbelly of every great city and gradually melted it down into nothing more than nerve endings and viscera. A living, screaming lake that used to be human.
They were first introduced for their side effects - beautiful hallucinations, a paradise you could purchase. Of course the commercials never mentioned the diet or byproduct of the wretched things or how easily they could escape and reproduce and slowly rot society away until the present day where saps like her made their living tracking them down and marking their nests for extermination.
As the floor beneath her feet turned from stained carpets to stained glass, she knew she was in too deep. Somewhere between her musings and searching she'd made a fatal mistake - she missed the front door and walked right into her demise.
According to all the training pamphlets she'd read, she wouldn't feel anything until they started to feed. Everything before would be sunshine and endorphins til her body overloaded and she ended up as just another paralysed piece of meat, grinning like every Christmas and birthday had come at once.
As the hallway turned into a ballroom, she managed to send out a signal and mark the building for immediate termination. If she was going down, she was going on her own terms and gong long before any nightmare had a chance to feast on her.
With any luck she hoped to be paralysed just as the first missile struck.
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