Wednesday, December 10, 2025, 8:00 AM
Countdown to Extraction: 66 Hours, 11 Minutes Remaining
Waiting was a specific, excruciating kind of torture. It wasn't the sharp agony of a gunshot or the adrenaline-soaked terror of running from a horde. Waiting was a slow, methodical flaying of the mind.
Dr. Ellis Leesburg stood near the heavy concrete Jersey barriers at the North Gate, the freezing winter wind biting through his blood-soaked shirt. The primary access road stretching out from the barricade was a desolate, empty vein leading straight into the dying heart of Savannah. The combat engineers had cleared it, using a massive armored bulldozer to shove abandoned sedans into the deep ditches. It was a clear runway.
All the Jeep had to do was show up.
Ellis ran the desperate math in his head over and over, trying to anchor himself to logic.
The military was targeting the highway interchange at the bridge. That was roughly fifteen miles south of this gate. The convenience store where his kids were trapped was ten miles from the base, putting it just five miles north of the drop zone.
Ten miles.
The last time Ellis had seen his son, Justin was sprinting around the back corner of that store, deliberately drawing the horde away from the Wrangler. Then, the traffic feed had cut out to pure static. Ellis didn't know if Justin was dead. He refused to believe it. Justin was fast. He was smart. Ellis clung to the agonizing, fragile hope that the boy had circled back through the alley, climbed into the driver's seat, and was currently barrelling toward them.
Just drive, kid. Beat the clock.
Sharp, overlapping bursts of M4 rifle fire echoed from the eastern perimeter wire, pulling Ellis out of his head. The base wasn't secure. The gunfire was answered by the heavier, rhythmic thud of a .50 caliber machine gun mounted on a Stryker. Even deeper inside the airfield, isolated pops of pistol fire rang out—a grim indicator that the infection was already slipping past the fences, actively hunting among the hangars.
"I can't just stand here," Ellis rasped, wiping a smear of soot and sweat from his forehead.
He turned his back on the empty road and walked right back into the slaughterhouse.
Outside the main canvas tents, the triage overflow had spilled directly onto the freezing tarmac. Exhausted medics were working on their hands and knees, desperately trying to patch up the bleeding civilians and soldiers piled on the asphalt.
Mike followed right on Ellis's heels, his hand resting on the grip of his unholstered sidearm. The seasoned operator was acting as Ellis's shadow, his eyes constantly scanning the terrified crowd for anyone twitching, anyone turning grey, anyone who didn't belong among the living.
"Over here!" a frantic medic shouted, waving a bloody hand from a cluster of cots near a Humvee. "I need a doctor! I can't find the bleeder!"
Ellis jogged over, dropping to his knees on the freezing pavement.
The patient was a young civilian man, his chest covered in a thick, dark layer of coagulating blood. A woman—his wife, judging by the raw, terrified grip she had on his pale hand—was sobbing hysterically beside him, her face smeared with his gore.
"He fell through a glass door at the strip mall," the medic explained rapidly, pressing a stack of ruined gauze against the man's ribs.
Ellis's clinical brain engaged, temporarily overriding his grief. He pulled a pair of heavy trauma shears from the medic's vest and cut away the ruined fabric of the man's shirt, clearing the area to assess the damage.
He wiped away a thick layer of blood from the man's shoulder to check the collarbone.
Underneath the gore, the flesh wasn't sliced by glass. It was torn.
Jagged, unmistakable half-moon indentations broke the skin. Deep, black, necrotic veins were already spiderwebbing rapidly up the man's neck toward his jawline.
Mike saw it at the exact same second.
The operator let out a heavy, exhausted sigh. "Ah, fuck. It's a bite."
Mike didn't hesitate. He didn't ask for permission, and he didn't give a warning. He smoothly leveled his 9mm directly at the bridge of the dying man's nose and pulled the trigger.
BANG.
The gunshot was deafening at point-blank range. The hollow-point bullet shattered the man's skull, instantly terminating the hijacked nervous system before it could fully boot up. The man's head snapped back against the asphalt, leaving a dark spray of matter on the pavement.
The wife shrieked—a high, soul-shattering sound of pure, unadulterated horror. She threw herself over her husband's bleeding body, screaming at Mike, clawing wildly at the operator's tactical vest.
"You killed him! You killed my husband!" she wailed, her face contorting in agony.
The medic froze, staring at the corpse in absolute shock. Bystanders on the nearby cots screamed, scrambling backward in a blind panic, thinking the military had just started executing the wounded.
Ellis didn't flinch. He couldn't afford to.
He grabbed the hysterical woman by the shoulders of her coat, hauling her off Mike and forcing her to look him directly in the eye.
"Listen to me!" Ellis yelled over the ringing in their ears, his voice harsh and brutally unforgiving. "He was already gone!"
"He was breathing!" she sobbed, fighting against his grip.
"He was incubating!" Ellis roared, shaking her once to break through the hysteria. "Bites are death sentences! Do you understand me? There is no coming back from them!"
He shoved her gently but firmly back toward the medic, standing up and addressing the terrified crowd of survivors staring at him from the tarmac.
"The second that virus hits the brainstem, they are not your family anymore!" Ellis shouted, the grim, apocalyptic reality stripping away the last of his bedside manner. "They are monsters, and they will tear your throat out! You have to shoot them in the head, or they will eat you!"
He turned away from the weeping widow, his chest heaving, the brutal toll of his own words turning his stomach to lead. He looked at Mike, giving the operator a grim, silent nod of approval, and walked back toward the concrete barrier at the gate.
The sky to the south was turning a bruised, sickly purple.
The minutes bled away, heavy and cruel. Ellis kept his eyes locked on the empty road, silently praying.
Then, the radio on Mike's chest clicked twice.
"Valkyrie One-One, payload is hot. Target acquired. Dropping in three, two, one."
Ellis stopped breathing. His boots froze to the pavement.
The entire world went perfectly, utterly still.
The southern horizon simply ceased to exist.
Before the sound could even travel the fifteen miles to the base, the flash hit. It was a blinding, apocalyptic arc of white-hot light that turned the dreary winter clouds into a searing, agonizing midday glare. It washed out the dark smoke, lighting up the sky like a second sun had just detonated on the earth.
A fraction of a second later, the ground violently heaved.
The asphalt beneath Ellis's boots rolled like a liquid wave. The shockwave hit the base, a physical wall of displaced air that flattened the empty tents near the perimeter, shattered the glass in the guard shacks, and rattled the teeth in his skull.
And then the sound arrived.
It was a catastrophic, world-ending thunderclap that bypassed his eardrums and detonated straight in his chest.
Ellis stumbled forward, grabbing the cold concrete of the Jersey barrier to keep from falling. He threw his chest over the top of the barricade, staring blindly down the empty road leading toward the city.
The sky over the southside was gone.
A towering, churning pillar of absolute hellfire and black, oily smoke was punching its way into the stratosphere. The massive mushroom cloud expanded outward, swallowing the entire horizon in an unrelenting curtain of total destruction.
They hadn't just bombed the bridge. The sheer scale of the thermobaric explosion meant the fire was actively sucking the oxygen out of the surrounding grid.
And the convenience store was only five miles from that blast center.
Ellis stared at the wall of fire. He waited for the black Jeep to tear out of the smoke. He waited for the heavy diesel engine to roar down the long, empty stretch of cracked asphalt. He waited for his son to beat the math.
The road remained perfectly, brutally empty.
"No," Ellis whispered.
The word fell out of his mouth like a physical weight.
"No. No. No."
The clinical detachment, the ruthless logic, the brilliant viral pathologist—it all completely dissolved.
His legs gave out.
Ellis collapsed heavily onto the freezing asphalt, his knees slamming into the pavement. He didn't try to catch himself. He fell forward, his hands slapping the dirt, his forehead pressing directly against the frozen, blood-stained road.
A sound tore out of his throat that didn't belong in the human register. It was a guttural, devastating, soul-shattering wail of pure heartbreak. It was the sound of a father physically feeling his children being wiped from the face of the earth.
He screamed Justin's name into the asphalt, then Tally's, the sound bubbling with thick saliva and grief. He slammed his closed fists violently against the pavement, over and over, shattering the skin on his knuckles, desperate to feel a physical pain that could match the catastrophic void opening in his chest.
"They're gone," Ellis sobbed, his broad shoulders heaving so hard it looked like he was having a seizure. He scratched at the asphalt, his fingernails breaking against the tiny rocks, entirely unable to pull oxygen into his burning lungs. "My babies. My kids burned. They burned."
Mike dropped to one knee beside him. The heavy operator didn't say a word. There were no words left to say. He simply wrapped his massive arms around the broken scientist, pinning Ellis's bleeding hands to his chest to stop him from breaking his own bones against the ground.
Ellis thrashed against the hold, wailing, fighting the soldier with everything he had, screaming for his children until his vocal cords tore and the sound devolved into a raw, wet, agonizing wheeze.
He wept into the dirt, surrounded by the gunfire of a failing military base, as the ashes of his family began to drift slowly over the wire.
Wednesday, December 10, 2025, 9:05 AM
Countdown to Extraction: 65 Hours, 06 Minutes Remaining