Free Operation Honshu Wolf by Addison Gunn

call buttons lit up, and the elevator panels accepted the master key, at least.
    Miller hammered on the call button again, but the elevators refused to arrive.
    “ Who are you? ”
    “What?” Miller looked round, trying to find the source of the voice. “We’re corporate-board-level security, who are you?”
    “Over here,” Doyle said, pointing at a panel on the wall. An intercom with a tiny screen, just barely lit.
    The man on the display was shirtless, sweaty, his hair at all angles. Eyes wild. “Y ou’re not them? The Infected? ” he demanded. “ You’re employees like us? ”
    “Yes, we are.” Miller leaned in, pulling up his ID card from its clip on his chest to show the panel.
    “ Oh... Okay. I’ll go free the elevator and come down for you. Just, wait there. Okay? Wait there... ” He vanished from the screen, but the panel continued to display a wall.
    “At least they’re not infected,” Morland said.
    “Don’t know about that,” Miller muttered, clutching his M27 tighter.
    The floor-number display above one of the elevator doors began slowly counting down.
    The elevator pinged after a tense wait, and the shirtless man from the intercom—and his stink —emerged from within. He looked around nervously, chewing at his fingernails. “There aren’t any Infected with you, are there?”
    “No,” Miller said, kindly as he could. “We’re here to protect you from them. I’m Alex.”
    The man didn’t answer at first, his eyes shuddering over each of their faces like a drug addict’s, unable to focus on any particular feature without his eyes leaping away. For a moment Miller was afraid the poor guy was having a seizure, but he retreated into the elevator, pressing himself against the wall. “I-I’m George. Are you sure you’re an employee like me?”
    “Yes.”
    George didn’t seem to believe him, shrinking into that corner of the elevator. “O-okay. You can come upstairs.”
    The elevator wasn’t that tight a fit with five people, but it was uncomfortable. Dark. The buttons and display provided the only light, until Doyle flipped on his chest-rig flashlight. George flinched away from the light, looking a little ghoulish in the blue-tinged glow.
    “Alright?” Doyle asked, thinly.
    George huddled back, wretched and dishevelled. “It’s fine. Just bright. Light hurts sometimes.”
    “Is that why the lights are out?”
    George nodded, but didn’t offer any further information. When they reached the fifth floor, he scurried out into the half-lit corridor—a little sunlight snaking through the building’s corridors from the windows, catching dancing motes of dust and fairy-like gnats in the sunbeams—and pulled a piece of board through the elevator’s doors, blocking them. All the elevators had been treated similarly—in one lay an overturned filing cabinet, in another a pair of office chairs.
    Pointing, Miller asked, “Why?”
    “To keep us safe,” George said, breathlessly turning the board over so as best to catch the door. “None of the locks work. They’re all... all broken. When the Infected came, the doors opened for them. We blocked the elevators and barricaded the stairs, so they can’t come back.”
    “The Infected were here?” Miller asked, wiping his eye. One of the gnats had flown into it, making his eye tear up.
    “They bit us,” George said, lifting his arm, displaying a recent crescent-shaped scab, before stopping nervously in the middle of the hall. “It’s, it’s all right now. The others were going to send us out, because we’d been bitten, but it’s alright, we all like each other now...”
    They were infected. They were all damn well infected.
    Bit by bit they got the story out of George, how the building’s security systems had failed during the riots. The building did have shelter supplies, and everything had locked up the way it was supposed to, up until the mob arrived, shortly after Jimmy Swift’s broadcasts. Then the doors spilled open,