Leave without them

You shoot one last contemptuous look back at Regina before you step into the dim stairwell, the wooden door slamming shut behind you. Not trusting Regina or her **** friends an inch you head upwards rather than down, if they do try to follow you they should head the wrong way. The door to the fifth floor is ajar and you step out into a near identical hall, a quick glance around the empty hall shows an open apartment door beside you, ducking inside you close the door quietly behind you.

From the disarray and debris inside, the apartment had been likely been ransacked some time earlier; you quickly search through the bag you had stolen from downstairs, removing each item one at a time. Soon enough you have the contents on the floor before you; you’ve separated the objects into two piles, Useful and Useless and it did not take a genius to see the Useless pile was by far the larger of the two. A frustrated sigh comes from your mouth as you stare down at the slim pickings; the stolen hunting knife, a pair of sandals, a coil of thick twine, two bags of beef jerky, a box of instant porridge and an empty metal canteen.

“Oh my god” you mutter staring at yourself in the mirror “I look like a pregnant hooker or something”. Although the thick fur coat falls to just below your knees it barely closes over your swollen stomach and thus it leaves most of your large breasts exposed to casual view, and of course underneath the coat you are still clad only in the dark blue panties you had woken in and your new sandals.

Leaving the apartment, you head back down the stair case with as much speed as possible in the uncertain lighting, anxious to get away from this place and its inhabitants as quickly as you can. Reaching the bottom, you cautiously crack open the door and peer out into the ground floor hallway; this hallway is very much the same as the one you had seen on the stories above, with dark hardwood flooring and pale cream walls broken by apartment doors and the occasional cheap painting.

You remain there, cautiously peering through the door for a long minute; you can see nothing moving in either direction and the heavy silence is broken only by your own breathing, at last you shove open the door and step out. The hallway to your right is blocked by a crude wall of stacked furniture however to your left there is an emergency exit at the far end of the hall and you head down the corridor towards it, pack bumping against your back with every step.

Shoving open the door you step out into the eerily quiet street; once this place had been awash with motion and sound, from business men walking, children playing, women walking with their strollers and toddlers, the sounds of cars honking, police sirens blaring and the voices of the thousands of people who had filled it. Now however, there is nothing, in every direction the city is motionless as far as the eye can see and the air is silent save for the thin whistle of a light wind.

As you peer around the empty streets, you notice that the sun has inched a little lower on the horizon sunset after all then, huh you think, squinting in the brilliant sunlight. As any one direction is much the same as the rest when you have no idea where you are, you arbitrarily decide to head towards the sun; turning towards the slowly sinking orb you start walking, the sunlight warm on your face.

Many of the streets are either entirely or partially blocked by abandoned cars or debris, this made your progress slow and two hours later when dusk fell you have traveled barely three kilometers through the seemingly abandoned city. Nibbling a piece of jerky, you study the area around you in the failing light; to your left ran a long series of nearly identical 2 story brownstone houses, to your right are a squat glass sided building labelled ‘Public Library #97’ and a small public park, across the park you can make out the silhouettes of other buildings but you cannot tell what they are at this distance, not in this failing light.