After ensuring that his last foe would not be getting up anymore, Danny swiftly turned sideways to face the stairs leading down, preparing himself to receive his next opponent.

However, as time came and went, new enemies had yet to appear. No new challenger presented itself to challenge Danny’s bloodied hammer.

‘Did I finish them all?’

Danny kept his guard up even as he questioned in his mind whether this battle had already reached its conclusion.

Contrary to his speculation however, Danny could still hear groaning and shuffling coming from down the stairs, meaning that, even if he could not spot his enemy, it was too soon to celebrate his victory yet.

As more and more seconds went by without change, Danny started to wonder if he was hearing things.

‘No. That can’t be it. I am sure that I am hearing it right. There is definitely something down there still…’

If the groaning coming from down below had not been conjured by his own imagination, then why the remaining undead did not show up after all that commotion? Danny doubted that whatever enemies left had failed to notice the fight going on upstairs.

‘Maybe they are stuck?’ He ventured a guess in his mind.

No matter how much time he stood there, tensely waiting for a new enemy to crop-up or for a nasty surprise to be sprung onto him, time kept trickling by at its own pace, without care for Danny’s circumstances or doubts.

With no other recourse other than to go see for himself what was holding the remaining undead in the stairwell back, Danny steeled his resolve and started making his way down to check what awaited him below.

He walked down the steps slowly and cautiously, making sure to always light his path forward and to check every corner to avoid being ambushed.

No matter how strong the person or how intelligent, carelessness was the silent killer capable of claiming anyone’s life, and Danny would do his utmost to avoid such a fate.

He knew he was far, far, far away from being the smartest or strongest person around. He was not fool-proof, so the least he could do was take things seriously and try to always keep a sober mind, never underestimating any danger or shying away from difficulties.

‘Balance in all things…’ As his mother use to say to him. He should neither be arrogant nor craven.

As he got closer and closer to the ground floor, the groaning kept growing more distinct in his ears. It seemed that there was only one zombie remaining instead of the few he had initially imagined.

A couple of instants later, Danny finally found out why this particular zombie had failed to reach him during the previous fight upstairs.

It appeared that its legs had been completely chewed off. Almost nothing of them remained other than broken thigh bones of different lengths in each leg.

The overweight zombie was fruitlessly trying to drag its body up the steps of the stairwell, but no matter how many it managed to climb at a time, eventually its body unavoidably fell all the way down, nulling any previous progress.

Its fingers were a complete mess. Their nails and skin at the tips were long gone and traces of stale blood could be seen at the steps where the impaired zombie had tried to drag itself upward. Lines drawn in blood by the mangled remains of its fingers,

Releasing some of the tension from his tense muscles, Danny ended the short zombie’s misery with a swift swing of his hammer, finally putting an end to the battle at the stairs and emerging as the sole winner.

Still, even if he had somewhat cleared out the location, it would be a stretch to call this area of the building secure.

Though the fireproof doors at each floor made sure that little noise escaped the stairwell, hiding Danny’s presence within, the area suffered from the same security issue as the roof.

It simply was too easy for zombies to get inside.

While the panic bars that opened the emergency exit doors at each floor were a great mechanism to control access in cases of disaster in modern society, nowadays, they were a terrible choice. After all, they offered little protection against the undead hordes, given that even something as dumb as a zombie could end up opening them by accident.

Thus, while Danny remained largely concealed from the rest of his enemies at the moment, he could not count on his stealth lasting. He had to keep moving and make the most out of the element of surprise while he still had it on his side.

Danny climbed up the stairs back to the second floor, stepping lightly on the concrete floor and trying to keep the commotion to a minimum.

Just because he had been mixed up in a rowdy fight mere moments ago, it did not mean that Danny would dismiss stealth entirely. Not being detected by the zombies outside the stairwell so far, did not imply that he would remain unnoticed no matter how loud he was.

Inconspicuousness and caution were still the name of the game.

Upon reaching the second floor of the stairwell, Danny walked to the side of the zombie with a broken neck and looked down at it. He had not forgotten that he had left this one alive… kind of.

With a single swing of his hammer, Danny put the sixth and final creature that inhabited the stairwell to its eternal rest.

Afterwards, Danny walked over the whole place, pushing the corpses of his enemies to one side of the stairs in order to create a clear path of retreat in case he needed it.

Though he was not exactly sure how he would proceed from this point on, there were no drawbacks in keeping his path free from obstacles.

‘Better safe than sorry.’

It would be easy to trip over the dead bodies if he had to run up or down the stairs, particularly considering the all-consuming darkness that covered this section of the building still, only diminished by his single flashlight. It was only prudent to clear his away in advance.

After doing that, Danny climbed the stairs once more, returning to the third floor – the topmost one, not considering the rooftop.

Logically speaking, starting with the highest floor made the most sense in his head when considering his overall goal.

The third floor probably had the least number of undead considering how clumsy the zombies actually were. After all, it was way easier to fall down then it was to climb up for them.

Danny was not privy to the building’s layout. He could not be sure whether there were any other ways to move from one floor to another then the stairwell he was currently in or not.

At the very least, Danny expected to find elevators in a building of this size. However, they would most certainly not be working given the abandoned state of the factory.

Whereas there were alternative routes the zombies could make use of to roam in between floors was anyone’s guess at this point.

That said, Danny had to start his exploration somewhere anyway, so he did not waste too much time speculating what he might or might not find on the third floor at the other side of the emergency doorway.

Any plan he could come up with right now would be based on assumptions, so best to not overcomplicate things too much. He would just have to adapt to circumstances on the fly.

Taking a deep breath, Danny once more raised his hammer above his head in preparation before cracking the emergency door slightly open and taking a glimpse on the other side.

Differently from the stairwell itself, the third floor of the building was not completely dark. The windows placed at regular intervals on the walls allowed some light to enter the building, so it was not as difficult to see in there, given that there was still plenty of daylight remaining.

Granted, the area was not well lit by any stretch of the imagination.

The width of the building made it harder for the light coming from the outside to reach every corner of the area. While the sections closer to the far walls and windows was decently lit, the centermost portion of the floor was much less so.

The contrast between both areas – both the well and poorly illuminated sections - projected shadows everywhere, creating dark corners and turns where it would be easy to hide in and ambush any unsuspecting passersby.

Even with all its difficulties and shortcomings, the visibility here was still hundreds of times better than it was at the stairwell. The difference was like night and day… no pun intended.

The emergency door from where Danny spied the area stood at the end of a stretching corridor that crossed the whole length of the building and ended up at another staircase.

‘Well, that solves the question of whether the zombies can walk among floors. Fuck my luck.’ Danny thought while grimacing.

The fact that there was another way to switch in between floors – one that was much easier to make use of for the undead, since it was not barred by doors like the emergency stairwell – made Danny’s life harder, and his goals that much more difficult to achieve.

If the levels of the building had been isolated from one another, Danny would be able to clear them one by one without worrying about any more enemies coming in as reinforcement.

That plan had just flown out of the window, however. He would have to work around the issue.

‘No use crying over spilt milk. Let’s see what I can find…’

Slipping into the floor proper and closing the emergency door silently behind him, Danny crouched down and slowly made his way into the place. He kept the flashlight mounted on his shoulder and turned on to better illuminate the area.

He did not know if the zombies would react to the light he projected if they did not see him. However, it was best to risk being discovered earlier than to be ambushed by a zombie he missed because he could not see it hiding in the dark.

In any case, there were no zombies patrolling the long corridor as far as he could see, which allowed Danny to advance with ease and without fear of being spotted.

That was not to say that the floor was empty of threats however, as there were many other corridors crossing perpendicularly the one he was currently at. Not to mention the numerous closed and opened doors to the various rooms there.

With calculated firm steps, Danny slowly progressed deeper into the corridor, closing any opened doors he came across, no matter if there were zombies inside them or not. He would come back to inspect and clear each one of them once he finished scouting the whole floor.

Soon, Danny arrived at the first corridor intersection. There were three crossings such as this along his way.

If one looked at the building Danny was inside of from the skies, it would have the shape of a rectangle. The corridors on the third floor split the rectangle in eight smaller pieces.

Whilst the corridor that Danny travelled in – which appeared to be the main one – was the longest and divided the floor right in the middle, the other three corridors were somewhat equally spaced from one another and had shorter lengths, the middle one wider than the ones closer to each of the stairs.

Though it was harder to hide himself at those intersections, for Danny to completely scour the floor, he had to cross them. There was no two ways about it.

Keeping his body close to one of the walls and crouching down to remain as discreet as possible, Danny slowly made his way forward and closer to the corridor intersection.