NEST VIII

Before The Event, Nest VIII was like a Florida retirement community. Pleasant climate, stores, meeting people in open spaces to talk, sports clubs, shuffling about, and at night each retreated to a little box containing little more than a bed, closet, and old TV set. After The Event, it still had that Florida vibe. Now it was the swamps, however. Warm, dark, stagnant. No alligators, but plenty of other predators.

Advertisement spoke of a strangely retro city of tomorrow. Neatly manicured with each person in their place, easy commutes and modern conveniences. Reality was a bit more like a cross between a shopping mall and a prison. Turn out from bed, eat in a cafeteria, walk to work, relax in common area, back to little cell for the night. No parole. The apartment you reserved was generally the one you kept no matter the changes. Overbooked even before construction finished, space to move was lacking.

Not even the dead rising could lessen the crowding. Many apartments now were unowned, but not necessarily unoccupied. If anything, space constraints became tighter with refugees from locked off floors.

Most of the systems that kept the spaces habitable for so many shut down in short order. The great condensers that maintained temperature, the gargantuan banks of lights, and the grand Moloch incinerators that purified organic waste - all silent now.

Residents can't even walk about the floors normally. The once neat layout is in shambles from the haphazard pattern of closed passages. It is a maze of halls and shuttered security doors that separate the dark warrens from the overrun apartment blocks. No one is quite sure how the reanimates remain alive, much less occasionally active even after five years of being locked away. The living inhabitants have set up aquaculture in the fountains and farms in the atrium, but what have the many neighbors been up to?