her flashlight down. The light revealed nothing but thirty to forty steps descending into a dark, claustrophobic corridor. I knew going down was a bad idea, but I kept my mouth shut.
Samuel started down, and the rest of us followed, our feet clanging off the metal. The stench of death became more pungent as we descended. We reached the bottom of the steps, and there the odor of death in the cold air was nearly unbearable. The corridor opened up into a room.
“Quiet,” Samuel muttered.
The three flashlight beams shot around the chamber, revealing the vertical metal bars of prison cells. We were in the detention center. This one was much larger than the one in Bunker 108. There were twelve cells, six on either side.
And all of them were piled with corpses.
“We need to turn back,” I said.
The door above slammed shut and locked from the outside. The slamming echo thundered throughout the cells.
“So I was right,” I said.
The bodies stirred, convulsed, and began writhing like worms in their piles. The ones that broke free shambled up and charged for the bars, their white eyes glowing and soulless.
“Hold your fire!” Samuel said. “As long as they’re in there they can’t hurt us.”
His voice was barely audible above the din of groans. The Howlers slammed into the bars and doors like wild animals desperate to be free.
One of the cell doors crashed open. Several Howlers lumbered out, moving as fast as their unsteady legs could carry them toward us. Another door crashed open, flooding more Howlers into the corridor.
“Samuel, we have to do something,” Makara said.
They howled in unison, moving as one toward us. They were closer — just feet away.
“Samuel!”
“Fire.”
He ducked, and we unleashed our bullets into the infected people. They roared in pain as the bullets entered their chests, their necks, their heads. They dropped, one by one, but more were coming out of the cells.
The first to fall were already bloating.
“Back!” Samuel said.
We moved as far from the bodies as we could. The first of them exploded by the time we reached the stairs. We were well out of range of the splash zone, but we were running out of space to retreat into.
“Fire!” Samuel yelled. “They can’t get close to us! They have to fall where they stand!”
We fired. I reloaded my Beretta, and shot again and again. About two dozen bodies lay piled on the floor. Some were beginning to inflate.
“Back again!”
We retreated up the steps, about halfway. The bodies exploded, sending streams of goo sailing for the bottom of the stairs. The smell was like raw sewage, and it was all I could do not to gag.
“I think that’s all of them,” Makara said.
That was when the heavy sound of breathing filled the chamber. It was coming from something big.
“The hell is that?” I asked.
A giant, freakishly large Howler appeared at the bottom of the stairs. He was at least eight feet tall and twice as wide as a normal man. His thick muscles bulged under thin pink skin. His head was hairless, and his eyes burned like white fire.
Samuel charged forward with a yell. He pointed his gun at the giant’s face, unleashing the rest of his bullets into him. Even after several bullets, the thing didn’t slow. Finally it reached Samuel, grabbing him by the neck. It roared in his face, revealing rows of yellow, razor-sharp teeth.
Samuel aimed right into the giant Howler’s mouth, and fired.
The creature groaned, and loosened its grip. It tumbled to the floor, landing at Samuel’s feet with a crash.
I looked behind. There was nowhere left to run.
I watched in horror as the thing inflated, the liquid surging beneath the skin, building pressure.
The coming explosion would turn us all into these horrible monsters.
Chapter 17
“Run!” Makara yelled.
Everyone ran forward, past the giant, past all the bodies that had just exploded. The entire floor was soaked with purple slime. I slipped across the floor, only saved from falling by Anna’s catching hold of me.
The giant Howler behind us exploded. I kept running, the tail end of the slime splattering where my feet had been just a second before.
I slid to a stop in front of the others.
“Did anyone get hit?” Samuel asked.
Everyone shook their heads.
“Let’s go,” Samuel said.”
“Go where?” Lisa asked.
“Forward. The only way there is to go.”
We followed Samuel into the darkness. Why would they have betrayed us like that?
“They had to have been the same Imperials the Wanderer spoke of,” Lisa said. “I bet they are after the same thing we are: the Black Files. Or, at the least, they are after something in Bunker One and don’t want us to have it.”
“So they used us long enough to get the door open?” Makara asked.
“Yes,” Lisa said. “It’s still hundreds of miles to Bunker One. If we hurry, we can catch up.”
“We will,” Samuel said. “I want to teach them a lesson they won’t forget.”
“A bullet in the head will make them forget pretty damn quick,” Makara said.
The corridor ended in another stairwell, spiraling upward. It led to a hatch. Samuel unlatched the door, and pushed it out. We found ourselves in a circular, vertical tunnel. A giant ladder crawled up the side into the darkness above.
“Nowhere to go but up,” Makara said.
“What is it with these Bunkers and really, really tall ladders?” I asked.
No one answered me as Samuel took the lead. Over the next five minutes, we climbed, hundreds upon hundreds of rungs. I tried not to look down. Looking down was like staring into an abyss. It was so dark that I could not tell how high we had climbed.
At last, the group came to a stop. Samuel struggled with the latchwheel at the top — I heard it squeak as he turned it. With a grunt, he forced the hatch open with his powerful shoulders.
Above, the cold wind howled.
We were going back outside.
I was the last one to crawl out of Bunker 40. As I stepped into the cold elements and slammed the hatch shut behind me, the squish of the xenofungus below my boots was not exactly a welcome change.
It was evening, and the skyscraper to the south was blazoned orange by the sunset. Unearthly screams and howls emanated from the distance. The monsters surrounded the building, thinking we were there. I didn’t want to stick around to find out how long it would take for them to figure out we weren’t.
We had nothing but the clothes on our backs, our weapons, and copious amounts of ammunition we no longer necessarily needed. Our Recon and supplies were back at the building, surrounded by monsters that we could never hope to break through.
Our choices were fighting our way through, or going on.
