The Dead Come for Us

Chapter 9

The concrete floor squeaked and popped under their boots as the control tower listing was now in inches of agonized movement.

The support pillars were shrieking and tearing under the dead-weight momentum of the swarming infected. A digital death warrant still hummed over their radios from the armored vehicle on the outer perimeter:

"Incendiary containment commencing in T-minus four minutes."

"The stairs are pancakeing!" shouted Mac, gripping a bolted-down routing desk for support as his feet slid on the sloped floor.

"The window!" shouted Isaac in terror, lunging toward the fractured glass that looked out onto the eastern rail line. "We can jump to the roof of that box car!"

"It's twenty-five feet down, Isaac! You'll crack your pelvis!"

Mac intercepted his son's path, grabbing his arm. "Look at the suspension under that car; it's a bad landing. If you break your leg I have to carry you, and then everyone dies."

"Stop calling us everyone!"

Isaac yelled, ripping his arm from Mac's grasp and shoving him away, his eyes wide with a volatile mixture of fear and rage. "We're your family! But that's not important to you, is it? It's just the squad failing inspection!"

"Isaac, stop it!"

Lola hissed, her voice raspy, her knuckles white around the iron crowbar that was digging into the collapsing wall, providing temporary support. Her eyes were burning into Mac's with a lethal anger. "He's right, Mac; you're focused on the logistics of our bodies, not your children. Rose is barely standing and you're calling her a liability!"

"I'm focused on survival!" Mac roared back, the tight facade of tactical composure cracking open, revealing the raw, frayed nerves of a desperate father.

"If I let you think like civilians one second out here, you become meat.

A deafening, metallic CRACK cut through their argument. The main steel staircase outside had completely sheared off the third-story landing, and the entire metal structure began to fall through the reinforced glass of the door and into the dark, writhing mass of infected below.

Dozens died in the cascade, but the family remained trapped in the isolated concrete box.. The concrete floor settled at an inescapable angle of ten degrees. The air grew thick and hot, the scent of ozone and burning fuel heavy in the confined space, while the distant, low thrum of the B-52 circling overhead grew louder, becoming a resonant roar.

Mac forced himself to breathe slowly, his tactical mind assessing their desperate situation. He had one clip left. No primary.

The building was now breached on the side, but the sheer height from the mass of infected below kept them from reaching the open side. It didn't matter; the clock was ticking down to zero. The incendiary was meant to melt a square mile of the train yard to liquid slag.

He turned back to Rose, still curled on the metal bench in her dazed state, her eyes fixed on a crack in the concrete floor. Mac sank to his knees, his movements hampered by the sloping floor. He didn't speak with his normal commanding voice.

"Rose,"

he said quietly, laying his heavy, oil-stained hand on her shoulder.

"Look at me, honey."

Rose didn't respond. A small, rapid click was the only sound from her throat, her breathing shallow and ragged.

"Rose, I need your ears," Mac whispered, his voice breaking slightly. "The big birds are coming.

I need you to tell me where the first one is going to hit. Can you do that for Dad?"

For just a fleeting second, the fog lifted from Rose's dilated pupils. She met Mac's eyes, her lips quivering, her voice a faint whisper above the roar of the infection below.

"It's coming already, Daddy. The air is singing."

Mac's tactical mind took over. He didn't hesitate. He grabbed Rose by the shoulders of her vest and flung himself and her backward, toward the reinforced inner corner of the routing room. "Get down! Corners, now!"

Lola and Isaac immediately dropped to the floor, covering their heads, just as the sky turned a blinding, apocalyptic white.

The military had not used conventional napalm. This was a high-density thermite-gel, fired from its canister with pressurized steam, designed to flash-boil a square mile of infection within seconds. The first shot hit the northern rail line some two hundred yards away.

The seismic blast struck the control tower like a physical blow. Every pane of glass shattered simultaneously in a deadly, synchronized cascade, followed instantly by the heat wave-an incinerating rush of air that raised the temperature in the room by thirty degrees and filled the space with the sickening odor of vaporized concrete and molten metal.

Through the broken window frames they could see the spectacle of the train yard below. The tracks had turned into a literal lake of white-hot fire.

Thousands of infected individuals became screaming pillars of flame, their screams rising in a fever pitch before their muscles turned to molten slag and they fell to the tracks, becoming inert piles of ash.

But the containment was not perfect. A secondary canister, flung from its target by the initial blast, began skittering across the iron rails, its white-hot trail leading directly toward the base of the control tower.

The canister struck the building's main structural support pillars, its chemical fire igniting at over 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit and instantly melting through the reinforced concrete foundation of the building like acid on paper.

The entire concrete structure lurched violently. The floor didn't just tilt; the control tower was now falling.

The walls groaned and cracked open in jagged, dust-spewing fissures as the entire building slid toward the inferno in the eastern tracks. Mac and Rose slid on their knees and boots, being pulled along with the floor as it continued its descent.