Wednesday, December 10, 2025, 9:05 AM
Countdown to Extraction: 65 Hours, 06 Minutes Remaining
The ash drifted down over Hunter Army Airfield like dirty, radioactive snow. It coated the blood on the tarmac in a thick, suffocating layer of grey, sticking to the canvas of the triage tents and the boots of the dying.
Dr. Ellis Leesburg was on his knees in the frozen dirt, his forehead pressed against the abrasive asphalt. The guttural, wet sound tearing out of his throat was an involuntary biological misfire. It was the raw, agonizing reflex of a father whose brain had just processed the apocalyptic mathematics of a thermobaric detonation five miles away. The vacuum effect. The concussive shockwave.
His kids were gone.
Dr. Michael Wallace didn't let him stay down.
Mike, his best friend and fellow pathologist, dropped to his knees in the blood and ash. Mike's hands gripped Ellis's heavy shoulders, his fingers digging fiercely into the thick fabric of the winter parka.
"Ellis," Mike snapped, his voice hard, completely stripping away any gentle bedside manner. He violently hauled his massive friend upward. "Hey! Get off the fucking pavement! Look at me!"
Ellis's amber eyes were bloodshot, swimming with a bottomless, paralyzing grief. He choked on a dry, ragged breath, his frame sagging. "They were in the radius, Mike. The fire—"
"You don't know that for a fact," Mike barked, giving Ellis a hard, physical shake to break the trance. "But I know this: Ella Belle is still out there. Sharon is still out there. You check out on me right now, you kill the rest of your family."
The names hit Ellis like a shot of pure, unadulterated adrenaline.
The suffocating grief didn't vanish, but it was violently shoved into a locked, reinforced box at the back of his mind. The cold, sociopathic survivor inside him—the military operator who had spent his youth clearing hostile rooms—violently seized control of the devastated father.
Ellis wiped the blood and soot from his mouth with the back of his hand, his jaw locking into a hard, unforgiving line. His amber eyes hardened to dead, absolute steel.
"Sharon is at Memorial Hospital," Ellis said, his voice dropping into a dark, gravelly register. "It's ground zero, but Sharon can hold her own. She survived a cartel shootout in a tin shack; she can shoot her way out of an ER if she has to."
He looked toward the eastern horizon, his chest heaving. "But Ella Belle is at after-care on Wilmington Island. It's a coastal bottleneck. If the military is firebombing the highway interchanges to contain the spread, the first thing they're going to do to the islands is blow the bridges. She's trapped out there."
"Then we find her," Mike said, his hand resting on the grip of his commandeered M9 pistol. "But we can't do it standing in the ash. Let's go."
They turned away from the gate and moved fast.
The surface of the base was rapidly fracturing. The concussive boom of the thermobaric drop hadn't just destroyed the southside; the catastrophic noise had acted as a dinner bell, drawing thousands of infected directly toward the airfield's perimeter wire. As they pushed past the triage center, a wounded soldier on a stretcher suddenly convulsed, his eyes snapping open—milky and dead. He lunged off the canvas, his teeth sinking directly into the throat of a passing nurse.
Ellis didn't stop. He didn't even flinch when an MP put a three-round burst into the soldier's skull, showering the asphalt in grey matter. Empathy was dead.
They bypassed the elevators, plunging down the emergency stairwell. The heavy steel blast doors boomed shut behind them, sealing away the screaming of the tarmac.
Ellis burst onto the subterranean medical command floor like a man possessed.
The CDC lab smelled of ozone, burnt coffee, and raw, unwashed fear. The massive digital surveillance wall was a chaotic patchwork of static, blue screens, and flashing red error codes. The military and civilian techs were scrambling over their keyboards, shouting overlapping status reports as the city's infrastructure melted down above them.
Ellis marched straight to the center console, completely ignoring the stunned looks from the civilian staff staring at his blood-soaked clothes.
"I need the orbital feeds and DOT cameras!" Ellis roared, slamming his hand flat on the stainless-steel desk. "Pull up Wilmington Island! Give me eyes on the after-care center and the bridge approaches. Now!"
A young, sweat-drenched tech in a wrinkled uniform shook his head frantically, his hands flying across his keyboard. "Dr. Leesburg, the system isn't all the way up! The thermobaric detonation fried the local cell towers, and the EMP offshoot blinded the low-orbit thermal imaging. I'm trying to route through the municipal lines—"
"I don't care how you do it, just do it!" Ellis barked. "Check the traffic feeds on the bridge! Check the arterial roads north of the mall! Find my son's Jeep!"
The tech typed frantically. "The island grid is dark, sir. The cameras at the bridge are dead. I have absolutely no visual on Wilmington."
Ellis gripped the edge of the console, his knuckles turning bone-white.
What followed was a specific, excruciating kind of psychological torture. For nearly an hour, the lab was a purgatory of dead air and static. Ellis paced behind the consoles like a caged predator. Every tick of the atomic clock on the wall felt like glass grinding in his joints. They watched corrupted data streams flicker and die. They watched thermal images of Savannah burning down to the foundation. Every minute that passed without a signal was another minute his children were bleeding out in the dark.
"Keep searching," Ellis growled, his voice a low, mechanical threat every time a tech paused to breathe. "Do not stop."
It was 10:04 AM when a female tech on the far side of the room suddenly shot out of her chair.
"Doctor Leesburg!" she shouted, her voice spiking with adrenaline. "I set an RFID tracker on the municipal toll readers like you asked yesterday! I've got a ping!"
Ellis's head snapped over. He crossed the room in three massive strides. "Show me!"
"It's an automated traffic camera down near Armstrong," the tech said rapidly, her fingers aggressively typing to pull the image to the main wall. "The camera is damaged, updating at one frame every few seconds, but the RFID matched the plate."
The center monitor flickered violently. The static broke.
An image rendered on the screen.
It was grainy. The sky in the background was choked with thick, orange smoke. The four-lane road was a graveyard of abandoned, wrecked vehicles. But weaving methodically through the twisted metal, entirely covered in ash and streaks of dark blood, was a massive, black, lifted Wrangler.
"It's moving," the tech breathed, leaning closer to her monitor. "They aren't going fast. Maybe fifteen to twenty miles per hour. The traffic and the dead are too dense to push it any harder. But they're heading north. Toward us."
Ellis let out a harsh, jagged exhale, bracing his weight against the console.
They were alive.
Against absolutely impossible odds, against a military firebombing and a horde of thousands, his kids had made it out of the blast radius. His son had done exactly what he had trained him to do. He had survived. The sheer, blinding euphoria that crashed over Ellis was a massive, pure shot of adrenaline that instantly erased the exhaustion from his bones.
Mike stood next to him, letting out a long breath, a grim smile finally cracking his exhausted face. "I told you. The kid is a survivor."
"Track their trajectory," Ellis ordered, his clinical, tactical focus snapping right back into place. "Keep a lock on that vehicle. I want a constant ETA to the North Gate."
"Doctor," a comms officer interrupted, pressing his hand against his headset. His face was completely drained of color. "You need to hear this."
The officer reached out and flicked a heavy toggle switch on the primary communications board.
The clean, quiet hum of the lab was instantly shattered by the deafening, frantic screaming of a military radio transmission on the open frequency.
"—taking heavy casualties! I repeat, Gate Three is completely falling back!" a terrified infantry commander screamed over the radio. The background audio was a horrifying cacophony of overlapping automatic gunfire, the wet tearing of metal, and the unmistakable, guttural shrieks of the infected. "They're over the wire! Oh God, they're inside the wire!"
A wet, tearing sound echoed through the speakers, followed by a man screaming as he was physically ripped apart.
Ellis's blood turned to ice.
"North Gate is taking critical pressure!" another voice cut in, completely losing their military composure. "We have a massive civilian surge at the barricades! The infected are mixing with the crowd! They're tearing people apart against the Jersey barriers! We can't hold the line!"
"Command, this is North Gate Actual," a deeply panicked, breathless voice roared into the comms. "If we do not get heavy armor support up here right fucking now, we are going to be overrun! The wire is buckling!"
A calm, sterile voice from high command replied over the chaotic static.
"North Gate Actual, armor is deployed to the flight line to protect priority assets. You are on your own. If you cannot hold the civilian surge, you are authorized to initiate Protocol Omega. Drop the heavy barricades. Cease all processing. Seal the gates permanently. No more entries."
"Copy that, Command. Preparing to seal the North Gate. God help us."
The transmission clicked off.
The lab went dead silent.
Ellis stared at the radio console.
Seal the gates permanently. No more entries.
His kids were in that Jeep. They were pushing fifteen miles an hour through a burning city, fighting tooth and nail to reach the only safe haven left in Savannah.
And the military was about to lock the door in their faces.
Something deep, dark, and fundamentally ruthless inside Ellis Leesburg took over. The oath to do no harm evaporated. The respect for military authority vanished.
Ellis stepped away from the main console. He bypassed the terrified huddles of civilian neuroscientists and walked directly toward a blank section of the reinforced drywall near the primary airlock.
He pressed his palm flat against a hidden biometric scanner embedded flush with the paint.
The wall clicked. A heavy, hidden seam hissed open, revealing the recessed weapons locker that the civilian staff had spent their careers pretending didn't exist.
Ellis didn't hesitate.
He reached into the dark steel cavity and pulled out a matte-black M4 carbine. The weapon came out smooth, heavy, and infinitely familiar. He checked the chamber with a sharp, practiced pull of the charging handle, thumbed the selector switch from safe to semi-auto, and slung the tactical strap across his chest. He grabbed three spare magazines, shoving them into the bloody pockets of his cargo pants, and finally seated a customized Glock 19 into his drop-leg holster.
Mike watched him, racking the slide on his own M9. "The operator is back in the building."
Ellis turned around, the M4 resting comfortably against his chest. His amber eyes were entirely dead, stripped of all humanity.
"I am going back to the North Gate," Ellis said, his voice vibrating with a dark, ruthless promise that chilled the entire room. "And I am going to keep it open."
A heavy, metallic click sounded from the decontamination airlock.
Colonel Margaret Hayes stepped into the lab. She was flanked by four elite Military Police operators. Their rifles were raised, sweeping the room before lowering slightly at her command.
Hayes looked at the open armory in the wall. She looked at the heavily armed scientist standing in front of it. She looked at the terrifying, uncompromising madness in Ellis's eyes. She had read his redacted file. She knew exactly what he was capable of doing to a room full of people.
"Put the rifle down, Doctor," Hayes said, her voice entirely devoid of emotion.
Ellis didn't move an inch. His hand rested lightly near the trigger guard. "No."
Hayes studied him for a long, heavily pregnant moment.
"Doctor Leesburg," Hayes said carefully. "Command just authorized Protocol Omega. They are locking the base down. If you walk out there and point that weapon at my infantry, they will put you in the ground."
"I don't give a damn about this base, Colonel," Ellis spat. He looked up toward the ceiling, directly addressing the hidden security cameras and the brass sitting in secure bunkers somewhere in Washington.
"Do you hear me?" Ellis roared at the lens, his voice echoing off the tile. "You want your miracle cure? You want your biological countermeasure? I have exactly sixty-four hours left on your goddamn clock before that Black Hawk pulls me out of here. The only reason I am staying in this hellhole is to give my family time to reach the wire."
He pointed the barrel of the M4 at the floor, but his body language promised absolute violence.
"My kids are in that truck. If that gate closes before they get inside, I will take this rifle to every centrifuge, every sample, and every hard drive in this bunker. I will burn your cure to the ground. The asset dies today unless that gate stays open."
The lab was dead silent. The MPs flanking Hayes shifted nervously, their fingers hovering over their triggers.
Hayes calculated the cold mathematics of survival. She needed his brain to save the human race. And right now, the cost of keeping that brain intact was holding a single gate open for a black Jeep.
"Stand down, Doctor," Hayes ordered calmly. She turned her head slightly to the lead operator beside her. "Take Alpha Squad. You are escorting Dr. Leesburg to the North Gate. You will reinforce the barricade. You will hold the line open until the designated civilian vehicle crosses the wire."
The lead operator nodded once. "Yes, ma'am."
Hayes turned her sharp, unyielding eyes back to Ellis. "But you stay behind the line, Ellis. You are the priority asset. Let my men do the shooting. You stay in the background, or I will have them put a bullet in your leg and physically drag you back down to this bunker. Do we have an understanding?"
Ellis didn't lower his weapon. He stared at the Commander, his chest heaving, the sheer, volatile anger finally boiling completely over the edge.
"You keep the goddamn gate open, Margaret," Ellis snarled, his voice vibrating with absolute, unhinged malice. "If that steel drops before my kids cross the wire, I'm going to kill every single person in this fucking bunker. That's our understanding."
Mike stepped up beside his best friend, his M9 ready. "I'm coming too."
Ellis didn't wait for permission. He gripped his rifle, spun on his heel, and marched back into the dark stairwell, flanked by the heavily armed squad, ready to slaughter absolutely anyone who tried to lock his family out in the dark.
Wednesday, December 10, 2025, 10:15 AM
Countdown to Extraction: 63 Hours, 56 Minutes Remaining