I may need to fix that title.
…Fifteen. Fifteen stupid minutes. I don’t know which side had more idiots shooting us up, but they must have split the supply between them. Our workstations were slag by the time the All Clear finally went off, and we could unfold ourselves from our hidey-holes. Mine in particular looked and smelled like somebody had been burning nylon all over it. Oh, and there was a dead body slumped over the top of my desk, too.
I know it’s going to sound like I’m a sociopath or something by just shoving the corpse to the floor. In my defense, there was a chance that the corpse had blocked the laser fire or whatever before it could fry my desktop computer. Even if it hadn’t, I still wanted to sit while I worked. The corpse was in the way, and Custodial would be there soon enough to grab the bodies. Crunch time waits for no man, or cleanup crew. Besides: it wasn’t my corpse. I had nothing to do with it being there.
Only the corpse started groaning, and that made me start swearing. A survivor was absolutely not something I wanted to deal with right now. It would scramble the schedule six ways to hell.