A Sticky Situation [Cover in the works]

Chapter 1

You've been doing this for a while now. Looting, surviving, the whole shtick. You've even gotten pretty good at it, too. You're probably the only person alive who knows how to speed-pack a can of beans into a duffle bag, or how to use said beans as a weapon.

...

Come to think of it, you're probably the only person alive. Or at the very least one of them. You think the last time you've seen anyone was probably a year ago: a silhouette in a window.

Now it's just the corpses.

Which corpses are nice, don't get yourself wrong: corpses mean loot, and loot means survival. Plus the lack of people around means you get to do really cool things, without anyone telling you to not be cool. I mean, who wants that?

It's definitely not tearing you apart or anything.

...

You should focus on the task at hand - not falling through this damn floor. Every step you take causes the dilapidated house's attic to creak and shift in a way that just solidifies the fact that modern architecture - Chef's kiss. It's great that a standard house can't last a measly five years without stable upkeep.

Suddenly, your foot plunges through the floor with a kercrash, leaving you with half of your shin buried in the floor.

Yep, Just great. Loooove modern architecture.

Giving a tug on your leg leaves you wobbling precariously, threatening to smash your face into the very same floor that just ate your foot, without actually freeing your leg. You decide to solve this issue by pulling harder.

Your leg shoots out of the hole with a breathtaking soar, sending you stumbling backwards and splinters through the air. You cry out obscenities as you fall on your back, on the fluffy part of attics that parents always told you never to step onto. Unfortunately, the dilapidation does not help at all, and you fall through, landing on the floor below unceremoniously in a heap, a terrifying crack coming from your duffel bag that leaves you terrified to check what broke in there.

"Ow."

That's all you can manage to get out right now, seeing as your lungs have just been robbed of all the air inside via pure blunt force trauma. You take one minute. Then two. Then five. Then two more.

Then, you get up, give yourself a medical check - your ribs hurt, but you're more concerned with your stuff - readjust your handy mask-thingy that people with airbrushes use - you couldn't be bothered to learn the name - and open your bag with an agonizingly slow ziiiiiiiip.

Wincing, you take a look inside.

... Well, last you checked, you didn't leave your stuff covered in jambalaya.

God dammit.

You grab the broken can of jambalaya and toss it to the side, gather the items from your bag, and assess the jambalaya induced damage.

Luckily, your journal and pens are pretty untouched, and your medical equipment is only partially doused. Unluckily, your filters for your mask and just about all the loot you've gathered today are covered, not to mention the bag is in bad shape.

"Tch." You click your tongue. It makes you look cool.

Well, that wraps up this looting trip. You check your watch - 6:33 PM - and start gathering all of your stuff together in the messy duffel bag.

Right now, it looks like you are in a master bedroom of sorts. A nice, humongo bed sits to your right, only dissuading you due to the blood stains on it. You shudder, thankful that whoever died here was kind enough to hide themselves somewhere else, and hastily leave the room, taking the stairs by twos and bounding out the door.