Chapter 60: The Thing Upstairs

"Do you know what it is?"

The old man studied Zarek for a moment before continuing.

"I can’t tell you exactly what it is anymore. It stays on the fortieth floor, and plant-like tentacles have spread out from its body. They reach into the surrounding rooms and corridors. Anyone caught by them gets pulled in and devoured. Even a small scratch can be fatal."

Mara’s expression changed. She knew how dangerous the building had become, but this was the first she had heard of something like that.

"Have you actually seen it kill someone?" she asked.

"I have," the old man replied. "Once those things touch you, there isn’t much time to do anything about it."

"Then why hasn’t it spread to the floors below?" Ayesha asked.

"If those tentacles can reach into the corridors, what’s stopping them from coming farther down?"

"That is something I haven’t been able to figure out." He shook his head.

"It has never come down to our floors. I don’t know whether it’s unable to leave that place or simply doesn’t need to. I’m not going to pretend I understand its behavior."

Zarek listened without interrupting. The creature interested him. If the old man was telling the truth, the fortieth floor was effectively occupied by something that could kill a person without giving them a chance to fight back.

"And you stayed in this building despite knowing it was up there," he said.

"Where else was I supposed to go?"

The old man didn’t sound defensive. He had asked himself that question often enough already.

"The lower floors weren’t safe, and going outside wasn’t necessarily an improvement. We had people here, supplies, and a place we could defend. For a while, we believed we could hold on."

He paused, then added, "Most of those people are gone now."

"Most?" Elsa asked.

"The situation on these floors turned into a massacre. As that thing spread its tentacles, people were killed before they could escape. Those who tried to fight back stood little chance, while those who ran weren’t necessarily any safer. Panic took hold, and with danger closing in from every direction, more and more people died. Eventually, only my son and I remained alive between the thirtieth and forty-second floors."

He lowered his eyes briefly.

"But my son is dead now. I’m the only one left."

The room settled into a short silence.

"What happened to him?"

"An experiment he conducted on himself."

Ayesha looked at the old man. "He experimented on himself?"

"My son was a scientist. After surviving the massacre on these floors, he started examining the dead and studying the changes happening around us. He believed that if he could understand what was happening to people’s bodies, he might find a way to use those changes to help the living."

The old man spoke with more care now, choosing his words as though he had repeated this story to himself many times but rarely shared it with anyone else.

"He became particularly interested in the roots growing from some of the plants. He believed they contained something capable of changing the human body. At first, he didn’t know what those changes would be, so he studied the bodies and tried to work out which parts of the plants were responsible."

"Did he find something useful?" Zarek asked.

"He did. At least, he believed he had." The old man looked up.

"He discovered that the roots could grant a person extraordinary strength if prepared in the correct proportion. The difficulty was that getting the mixture right didn’t guarantee survival. People who tried it could die, and there was no reliable way to know beforehand who would make it through."

"Your son tested it on himself," Zarek said.

The old man nodded.

"He thought he had found the right proportion. He wanted to confirm his results, so he tried the mixture himself. I was there when he took it." His fingers tightened against the table.

"His body began changing almost immediately. He screamed in pain, and I could only watch. By the time I understood that something had gone wrong, it was too late to save him."

For the first time since they had entered the room, he looked genuinely old. The composed man who commanded armed guards and spoke confidently about the building’s dangers seemed to have little left to say about that particular memory.

Zarek had no particular interest in offering condolences. The old man’s loss didn’t change what he needed to know, and the answer to his next question might prove far more useful.

"After your son died, Then did anyone tried that mixture again?"

"Yes. I used what he had prepared."

"And you survived."

"By luck, perhaps." The old man gave a faint, bitter laugh.

"Others tried the same mixture after my son died. None of them survived. I did, but I still don’t know why. My son believed he had found the right proportion, yet even that wasn’t enough to guarantee anyone’s survival."

"Did it work as he expected?"

"It made me stronger. There’s no question about that." He flexed his hand, looking at it for a moment.

"But I couldn’t tell you whether the mixture was perfect or whether I simply happened to survive despite its flaws. My son never got the chance to finish his research."

Zarek studied the man more closely. His age was obvious, but he carried himself with a steadiness that didn’t quite match his appearance. The mixture had strengthened him without giving him the massive build of the man Zarek had killed.

"What did you do after that?"

"I couldn’t stay there doing nothing." The old man glanced down at his hands.

"My son had spent so much time searching for answers, and in the end, his own research killed him. I was angry, and I wanted to find something that might explain what he had been working on. So I went upstairs and searched the floors above us."

"Up to the fortieth floor?"

"Not all the way to the creature. I was searching for the plants and anything else that might be useful. That’s when I found the fruits."

Zarek leaned forward slightly.

"What fruits?"

"The fruits growing from those same unnatural plants. I found a large number of them upstairs and brought them back. At the time, I thought they might offer another way for people to survive. I had already seen what the roots could do, even if using them was dangerous. The fruits seemed to have different effects."

Zarek leaned back, considering the distinction. The roots required careful preparation, and even the correct proportion couldn’t guarantee survival.

Yet the old man had brought back a large supply of fruits and decided to distribute them to the survivors. Zarek wanted to know what made those fruits different.

"And once I brought them back," the old man continued, "I began giving them to the survivors."