An excerpt from "The Fifth Floor"

After two weeks we’ve already secured and renovated the fifth floor. We took the liberty of getting as much supplies that we can stock into unit 504. Good thing that the mall was only a block away. It only took us two days to completely stuff as much food, toiletries and other necessities into the other unit. The task of taking out the corpses in the floor was too taxing for Melody both physically and psychologically. For some strange reason, the power was still on, so I took the liberty of taking the bodies, seven at a time down the elevator to the basement where the furnace was located. The stench of the decaying bodies was starting to be unbearable and outright hazardous so it was a relief for the both of us to have the fourth, fifth and sixth floors to be corpse-free.

Every time that I threw a body into the furnace, it felt like a part of my soul went in with it. Hearing fat and decomp juice pop and boil made my heart ache, it gave me nightmares. I couldn't stop thinking about them, the people that I burned to ashes. Would they do the same thing to my body if the roles were reversed? Better them than us I guess. I still couldn't discern the reason why I'm still alive. Why we're still alive when millions of people died after the plague swept across the globe. I couldn't understand why were we spared from death when everyone else wasn't. Or were we chosen to experience true suffering? As I stare out the window into the dark and lifeless sky, I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that if there is a God, he doesn't have any remorse for those who are still living.