Glass from the windows had turned into a skin searing piece of shrapnel. It wasn’t picky as it seemed to seek out the living running in front of them. They all felt a varying degree of pain in their bodies. Someone would be picking small glass shards from the group for quite some time. The blast from the first ball of fire went away and a second one which shook the ground came over them and they were so unsure if they had jumped or been blown forward from the blast that no one said anything for a second. They could feel heat on their backs and Ellie could only compare it to the absolute worst sunburn she had ever endured.
Joey made the first sound which was more of a moan. Yassa said, “Pete, are you alright?”
Pete, who could barely hear anything over the ringing in his ears, knew it’d be good but when he looked back behind him there was half of the wall missing from where it belonged. The beautiful sight of seeing Turned spread all across, the insides still roasting didn’t hurt his heart. He answered, “I think I’m okay. Is everyone else okay?”
Yassa replied, “A fucking bomb just went off, and it was your fault, god damn it. What in the hell were you thinking? Did you know that was going to be the aftermath?”
“I didn’t think it’d be that powerful but it worked didn’t it? Do you see anything coming for us from there?”
Yassa didn’t have time to answer. Ellie was hyper focused on everything going around and that they had just sent a midnight black smoke signal up into the great yonder. She said, “Oh Christ, we need to go, come on, get up, get up now! You took the entire side of the building off!”
Joey was going to ask what was wrong, but he knew how the Turned behaved and this was perfectly that which would morph into an all-out hell in a very short time. Joey raced around, practically throwing anyone who wasn’t moving fast enough getting to their feet and got them up right with a push behind them to get everyone moving. Pete who should have been smart enough to know this and had he not been sheltering since day one probably would know this, or would be dead, said, “What happened, what’s wrong?”
“You just gave off the biggest dinner bell in the state of Iowa, maybe the world since this started. What the Hell made you think that was a good idea?”
“I was trying to save us, Ellie, I’m sorry I guess?”
“Right, and that was a temporary fix at best, wasn’t it, Pete?” Ellie yelled, as they pushed forward.
Kya looked over her shoulder and then all around. She felt like this dead-on sprint which was going to leave them out of breath was a calm before a very, very violent storm which was on its way towards them she could only assume. She wanted nothing more than being inside of that damn Humvee and to preferably have it going fifty miles per hour, or at least faster than whatever the closest Turned were to their current location. Kya said, “We’re going back to the Humvee, right?”
Joe yelled, “Yes, good God, yes! we are getting the fuck out of here, and doing it now!”
Yassa wasn’t usually all that nervous of a guy but having this many people losing their shit did little to make him feel more comfortable about the current circumstances. He wasn’t super stoked that he’d been recruited into this mission. Being one of the only adults did little to put him in safer spots he thought. The fact that the other guy got to stay at the base only because he was a pilot didn’t make him any happier about having a lack of skills. He figured not changing something that was working was still as good of an idea as any.
They got across the campus seeing that they indeed had rung a bell, but luckily for them they had enough time to get up on the bus and from there just needed to hit the Humvee and get the hell out of there. Everyone felt like the fact they were still alive after such a thing was a miracle for sure. If they could get back to base Ellie thought, then when they got the powder made, they would come back and save those who had saved them and would also put an end to all of the Turned that they saw. The idea of not having to worry about being outnumbered, or going up against them was an intoxicating feeling. She knew it was a little morbid but could walk over the dead for thousands of miles and would feel zero remorse for any of them. The souls that once occupied their bodies were long forgotten.
Yassa didn’t slow down as they made their final stretch to the buses. The steel walls surrounding them would be their savior so long as the Turned were only coming from behind them. Yassa hit the flattened tire with precision, pushing himself up without ever stopping and gripped tightly onto it with both hands. He disappeared over the top and everyone was beginning to feel sick to their stomachs waiting for the rope to come down. Kya, not a patient one, especially when their lives quite literally
