Wednesday, December 10, 2025, 9:38 AM
Countdown to Extraction: 65 Hours, 03 Minutes Remaining
They'd been driving in the dark for a long time.
Not a metaphorical dark. Real dark.
The morning sun had been entirely eradicated, swallowed whole by the apocalyptic fallout of the military firebombing. The sky above Savannah wasn't a sky anymore; it was a bruised, rotting ceiling of toxic black smoke that pressed down on the city like a suffocating blanket. The ash fell in heavy, greasy clumps, sticking to the Jeep's windshield and smearing under the wiper blades like dirty snow.
It was barely past ten in the morning, but inside the heavy Wrangler, it felt like the dead of night.
There were no headlights. There was no dashboard glow beyond the absolute faintest sliver Ethan allowed just so he could read the speedometer. The Jeep moved like a massive, rolling shadow, coasting strictly through Savannah's back veins instead of its main arteries. They took narrow service roads, shattered residential side streets, and blind alleys that smelled heavily of rotting garbage, saltwater, and something chemically burnt that no one had bothered to put out.
Driving completely blind wasn't just about hiding from the dead.
It was about surviving the living.
They had passed people earlier. The concussive, world-ending boom of the thermobaric bombs had shattered whatever fragile sanity was left in the quarantine zone. Shapes had burst out of the smoke-choked shadows, running frantically alongside the creeping vehicle. They had pounded their bare, bloody fists against the ballistic glass, throwing rocks, bottles, and whatever else they could lift when they realized the Jeep wasn't going to stop.
"You've got room!" a woman had shrieked at Mari's window, her face pressed against the glass, her eyes wide with a madness that made Mari shrink back against the center console. "Please! Please, God, stop!"
One man, missing a shoe and bleeding from a deep scalp laceration, had run alongside them for half a block, slamming his heavy shoulder violently into the passenger door over and over until Ethan swerved the steering wheel just enough to shake him loose into a flooded ditch.
Another group—four men standing shoulder-to-shoulder in the middle of a narrow residential road—had waved heavy, bright halogen flashlights like bait. Ethan had slowed down just enough to see the hard glint of a pump-action shotgun in the lead man's hand. Ethan hadn't hesitated. He cut the wheel hard to the left, hopped the curb, and gunned the diesel engine straight through a ruined, fenced-in front lawn, tearing through a child's swing set to bypass the ambush.
No one in the Jeep had said a single word when that happened.
No one argued. No one told him he should have stopped to help.
The ruthless rules of the new world were already permanently written in the ash. You didn't stop the vehicle unless you planned to die on that stretch of asphalt.
The hours bled together in a grueling, suffocating maze of detours and dead ends. The Jeep rolled on, the heavy V8 engine humming a low, steady rhythm, the thick mud tires whispering over the cracked pavement.
Mechanics drifted through the streets in ones and twos, sometimes more, sometimes none at all. They were grey, twitching figures that turned their heads blindly at the mechanical sound of the engine, but completely failed to register the heavy vehicle without the visual cue of headlights cutting through the smoke.
Ethan kept it that way on purpose.
"They're burning it to the ground," Renee whispered from the back seat, finally breaking a silence that had stretched for nearly two hours. Her voice was hollow, stripped of the furious rage she had carried earlier. She was just staring out the window at the falling ash. "The military. They aren't trying to set up a perimeter anymore. They're cauterizing the city."
Ethan kept his eyes locked on the dark road ahead. "Thermobarics," he said, the word heavy and flat. "That flash we saw… those were fuel-air explosives. They drop a cloud of aerosolized fuel, and a secondary charge ignites it. It creates a massive vacuum."
Tally sat completely rigid in the middle of the back seat, her hands gripped so tightly in her lap her knuckles were white. "A vacuum?"
"It sucks the oxygen right out of the air," Ethan explained grimly, steering the Jeep carefully around a jackknifed delivery truck. "The blast wave levels the buildings, but the fire… the fire suffocates anything left breathing in the grid."
Mari's stomach violently rolled. She pressed her hand flat against her lower abdomen. She was breathing in the pulverized remains of a dying city.
"Justin was down there," Tally whispered, her voice cracking, the cold, defensive armor completely dissolving into the terrified reality of a little sister. "The store… the alley… it was right next to the interchange."
"Don't do that to yourself, Tally," Dot said softly from the corner, reaching out a trembling hand to rest on the girl's knee. "We don't know the exact radius. We don't know."
Tally just turned her face to the window, a single tear cutting a clean track through the soot on her cheek.
Silence fell over the cabin again, thick and oppressive.
"My sister..." Renee's voice cut through the dark a few minutes later. It was brittle, frayed at the absolute edges. "Kimmie is practically a kid herself, Ethan. And she's only seven and a half months pregnant. If the panic and the stress put her into early labor..."
Ethan glanced at her in the rearview mirror, his jaw tightening.
"And Troy," Renee swallowed hard, a bitter edge of pure venom bleeding into her voice. "Her useless husband. He was a golf pro until he blew out his shoulder two years ago. Got a prescription, and never stopped taking them. He's a functioning pill addict on a good day. If things have gone to hell, Troy is going to be looking for his next fix, not protecting my pregnant sister."
"We'll get her," Mari said quietly from the front seat.
"I just need her to be smart," Renee whispered, rubbing her face with trembling hands. "Just for once in her reckless life, I need her to stay put and wait for me."
Under half a tank.
The illuminated needle on the dashboard had slipped past the halfway mark quietly. Ethan noticed anyway. They had been driving for nearly four hours, forced to move at fifteen miles an hour to avoid debris, hordes, and collapsed infrastructure.
"Coming up," Renee said at last, leaning forward, pointing a shaking finger through the windshield. "This is the area."
Ethan eased off the accelerator, letting the heavy truck coast.
The building loomed ahead in the dark silhouette of the ash. It was an old hotel conversion—two stories of exterior concrete walkways, rusted iron railings, and faded paint. It was a layout that screamed cheap and temporary even before the world ended.
The single streetlight nearest to the parking lot flickered on and off, buzzing with a sick electrical whine, like it couldn't decide whether it wanted to exist anymore.
A group of mechanics were clustered near the entrance.
One stood directly at the base of the concrete stairs. Its jaw was entirely slack, hanging open at a broken, unnatural angle that made Mari gag. Another dragged a ruined, twisted leg behind it as it wandered aimlessly through the parking lot, bumping mindlessly into abandoned cars with dull, hollow thuds. A third sat slumped on the curb, rocking back and forth slowly, its bloody hands scraping rhythmically against the concrete.
And that was just what they could see under the flickering bulb.
Ethan didn't stop.
He rolled the Jeep slowly past the entrance, his dark eyes flicking everywhere at once. No headlights. No sudden movements. The heavy Wrangler felt exactly like a predator holding its breath.
"Too many," Tally whispered, her breath fogging the cold glass.
"Enough," Ethan corrected, his grip tightening on the steering wheel.
They circled the block, the Jeep slipping through the darkness like it didn't belong to the world anymore. When they came back around to the entrance, two more shapes had wandered in from the side street, drawn by nothing more than habit and bad luck.
Ethan parked anyway.
He angled the Jeep perfectly for a rapid escape, leaving the engine idling low.
"No talking," Ethan murmured, unholstering his heavy combat knife. "No yelling. We move fast, and we don't trip over each other."
Renee nodded, her knuckles white as her fingers clenched around a brass key. "Second floor. End unit."
They piled out one by one. Their shoes hit the pavement entirely too loud, every tiny sound amplified tenfold by their fear. Mari's heart slammed against her ribs so violently she thought for sure the dead could hear the erratic drumming.
They crouched instinctively, keeping their bodies low, their shadows stretched thin and distorted by the dying streetlight.
The mechanic at the stairs suddenly lifted its head.
It sniffed the air.
A low, wet, guttural rattle crawled out of its throat.
Ethan froze, his knife raised.
Everyone froze.
For one endless, agonizing second, nothing happened. The ash drifted down between them.
Then, the thing lurched forward.
"Move," Ethan hissed.
They ran.
They didn't sprint—sprinting made too much noise—but they moved fast enough that sheer, blinding panic chased their heels. Gravel crunched loudly under their boots. A discarded glass bottle shattered violently under Dot's foot.
The mechanic at the stairs lunged, its rotting arms flailing blindly. It missed Dot by inches as she darted past, the creature's blackened fingernails scraping against the heavy fabric of her coat.
Another mechanic turned aggressively at the sound of the shattering glass and charged toward them, moving significantly faster than a rotting corpse had any biological right to move.
They hit the metal stairs hard.
The rusted iron shrieked under their combined weight. The metal railing rattled violently against the concrete. The infected below grabbed frantically at Renee's ankle, its bloody fingers grazing her bare skin—
Ethan drew his pistol and fired once.
BANG.
The unsuppressed shot was deafening in the enclosed courtyard.
The hollow-point bullet blew the top of the mechanic's skull off. The creature dropped instantly, tumbling into the dirt.
But the noise was catastrophic.
Everything answered.
Moans rose from every single direction at once—drawn out, overlapping, starving wails. Doors banged open somewhere on the first floor of the building. Shapes poured aggressively out of the shadows, converging toward the stairwell like filthy water finding an open drain.
"Go, go, go!" Ethan shouted, abandoning the whisper.
They took the concrete stairs two at a time, their lungs burning, their boots slipping on the ash.
Halfway up, a door on the first-floor walkway burst open, and a woman stumbled out screaming hysterically, blood soaking the entire front of her shirt. Something grey and impossibly fast followed her out the door. It tackled her violently out of sight over the railing in a tangle of flailing limbs and a wet, crunching sound that made Mari physically gag.
They didn't stop to help her. They couldn't.
At the top of the stairs, Renee skidded on the ash, nearly going down hard. She caught herself on the iron railing and bolted for the end unit.
"Please be here," Renee whispered, her hands shaking violently as she jammed the brass key into the deadbolt.
It didn't turn.
Her breath hitched. "No—no—"
Ethan slammed his shoulder into her, violently shoving her aside just as an infected teenager reached the second-floor landing. The kid's hands clawed blindly, his shattered teeth snapping inches from Renee's face.
Ethan fired again.
Then again.
The teenager fell backward, tumbling down the stairs and taking another mechanic with it in a heavy, tumbling mess of limbs and broken bone.
"Now!" Ethan yelled, keeping his weapon trained on the stairwell.
Renee grabbed the key with both hands and forced it.
The heavy lock clicked.
The door opened.
They shoved their way inside the dark apartment in a tangled, panicked heap. Dot pulled Tally by the arm. Mari stumbled blindly over the threshold, scraping her knee on the carpet. Ethan stepped in last, slamming the heavy door shut behind them and violently throwing the deadbolt just as something heavy crashed into the other side, hard enough to rattle the cheap wooden frame.
They shoved the furniture without even thinking.
The heavy sofa tipped, slamming securely into place against the door. A heavy oak dining table was wedged aggressively under the handle. The door bowed inward slightly as bodies hit it from the exterior walkway—hands slapping, nails aggressively scraping, teeth gnashing mindlessly against the wood.
Then—relative silence.
It wasn't a complete stop. But it was distant. Like the mob's attention had suddenly shifted back down to the courtyard, drawn to the screaming woman who had fallen over the railing.
They stood there in the pitch-black apartment, panting, shaking, pressed together in the entryway, surviving by absolute inches.
Renee turned, breathless, the terror evident in her voice. "Kimmie?"
Nothing answered.
"Kimmie?!" she called louder, the sheer panic creeping in.
Mari's stomach dropped heavily. The air in the apartment felt stale. It felt abandoned.
They searched the small unit fast—checking the cramped bathroom, the narrow closet, the dark bedroom.
Empty.
The bed was meticulously made. The refrigerator door was hanging wide open and entirely bare. A duffel bag sat abandoned near the front door, half-packed with canned goods, but missing any baby supplies.
On the small table by the kitchenette sat a folded piece of notebook paper.
Dot picked it up with trembling fingers and unfolded it in the dim light filtering through the blinds.
The older woman's face completely drained of color.
Renee snatched the paper from her hand.
Having bad stomach pains. It's too early for the baby. Troy is taking me to Memorial to get checked. 7:40 AM Tuesday. Love you.
Renee let out a sound that wasn't a scream or a sob. It was something broken, right in the middle.
Tuesday at 7:40 AM.
That was yesterday morning. That was before the sirens started. Before the military blockades went up. Before the city burned to ash.
Memorial Hospital wasn't a sanctuary. It was ground zero for the entire infection, actively swarming with the bitten. Her seven-and-a-half-month pregnant sister and a strung-out pill addict had driven right into the absolute heart of hell, completely oblivious to what was coming behind them.
"No," Renee whispered, her legs giving out as she slid down the wall to the floor. "No, no, no—"
Mari felt incredibly dizzy, the room violently spinning.
Dot swayed.
The older woman's eyes rolled backward, and she collapsed.
She hit the floor hard, entirely unconscious, as the wet, guttural sounds of the dead pressed closer against the barricaded door.
Wednesday, December 10, 2025, 1:45 PM
Countdown to Extraction: 60 Hours, 56 Minutes Remaining