A heavy thumping came at the door. Jumping with a start, Lucas froze in place before his laptop's computer screen, his nerves paralyzed. Before going downstairs again, he had been trying to gather as much information about the infection as he could. If he was going to try studying the zombie downstairs, he wanted to at least have a clue about what might be useful. Luckily, he saw no warnings that smell was a transmission vector. Only bites.
Now with the unexpected noise, Lucas had nervously wondered if he had locked the deadbolt to his door. If a zombie somehow managed to get into the hallway, it would have him trapped in here. And he knew they could open doors. They might follow the sound if he made the slightest noise.
The pounding returned, this time punctuated by a familiar voice. "Lucas! You in there?"
Exhaling a breath he didn't realize was held, Lucas rose from his chair and proceeded to the doorway. He kicked an old pizza box into a pile of graded paperwork in one corner. "Geeze, what's wrong?" He called through the door, hesitating a moment with the locking deadbolt. Sliding it into the unlocked position, he swung the door open. "What the hell?" Lucas exclaimed as he backed away.
"No time to talk. Rob is sick!" Evan spoke uncharacteristically bluntly as he rushed inside and proceeded towards his backpack. He hurriedly knelt to pick it up.
"Who is Rob?" Lucas felt overcome with a fresh sense of dread. There was no way to know if someone inside the dorm was a zombie. And there were a lot of people in the dorm. For all he knew, an infected could be in one of the rooms right now and there would be no way to know it until they opened the door and came out into the hallway to attack. For some reason, the thought had never ocurred to him before then. Lucas tried to ignore the concern as unlikely.
"The guy we let in." Evan hefted the backpack over his shoulder and returned to the door as quickly as he arrived, leaving without a look back and dashing down the hallway.
Lucas shut the door and slid the bolt with a click. Idly tracing his hands against the smooth wooden surface, he carefully listened for sounds within the hallway. Once he had a bit of time for his heart's pace to steady, he began to consider that his earlier thoughts were just paranoia brought on by being startled. Zombification after being bitten was certain in all known cases so far, but as far as he knew, the building had been secured immediately at the initial news of the outbreak,.
That meant that until they had let Rob inside, the dorm was still likely free of infection. The fact that it wasn't free of an infected now didn't concern Lucas that much. Trusting Evan would be capable of handling anything that might happen, Lucas concluded that he did not need to show up just to watch somene die. Besides, he didn't know where Evan had gone.
Despite his unease, Lucas felt a compelling morbid fascination with the ongoing phenomenon. Drawing a deep breath of air he gathered his nerves and the supplies to take notes, tossing clean papers and a clipboard into his pack. The unknown could be scary, even deadly for some. But it could be fascinating as well.
Sometimes, that was the unfortunate price for knowledge.
