OUTBREAK: A Viral City

Chapter Eleven

Both Riley and Al made a grab for one of my arms, and they both began dragging me through the hallways. 

Riley went down a hallway that went to an emergency elevator, it always works, even during fires since it was fireproof. As far as I know, this elevator was only used during drills. Now it was for real.

“Do you know when the detonation sequence begins?” Al shouted at Riley over the blaring sound of a siren. 

“I say we have about… ten minutes.” Riley seemed unsure when he said it. 

“Riley… why do you sound unsure?” Al had heard it too.

“Because… it can be manipulated…” Riley said. “It can be ten minutes, or two minutes. Hell, it can even be an hour if it’s set up to do it.”

“Great…” I muttered as I forced Al’s and Riley’s hands off my arms. I began running along with them, and soon we were at the elevator. Riley swiped his I.D. in the slot, a green light came on for clearance. The elevator doors opened and we entered, the doors shutting behind us. It began to descend.

“Detonation in four minutes.” the robotic voice stated.

“Or… it could be four minutes…” Riley muttered.

“Can this thing move any faster?” Al shouted angrily as he crossed his arms and began tapping his foot impatiently.

The elevator made a halt, causing me to almost lose my balance, but I had caught myself. Preparing for the worse, I grabbed my gun from my holster and raised it levelly, aiming forward. The doors opened, rather slowly I might add, and I took a deep breath.

A decaying face greeted my own when the door opened. Without hesitation, I pulled the trigger and the bullet hit the zombie between the eyes, straight through the brain.

“No time to lose!” Riley shouted as he pushed me out of the elevator.

We began running through the halls, and I wasn’t entirely sure where we were. Riley knew though, he maneuvered through the halls as if he did this regularly. He most likely knew that we couldn’t go through the front doors because of the beasts that had chased us here.

I looked up as red flashing lights began washing over everything, giving a red tinted look. Riley’s blonde hair looked like a blood red, as did his skin because of the light. Al’s black hair became tinted with a dark red color, almost identical to mine, and his olive skin became flushed looking from the light.

“We’re almost to an emergency exit!” Riley assured as he kicked closed a door that had suddenly opened in front of him.

“Two minutes until detonation.”

Huffing and puffing, Riley made his legs go faster, like he was about to be tackled in football. Uh, I hated when he did that. I had to push myself as well, imagine myself on a basketball court, or even a track… my goal was to win survival.

Soon Riley pushed open a door that had a glowing “EXIT” sign hanging over the door. I followed close behind him, and Al followed close behind me. Without stopping to catch a breath from the running, we continued to run down Rose Ct., getting as far as we possibly could.

A loud explosion erupted behind me, a wave of intense heat soon followed. It seemed that no matter how far we had ran the explosion caught up to us. I felt myself being flung to the ground, from either myself, the explosion, or someone pushing me down. Someone was on top of me, my head being covered and my face down. I managed to look from the corner of my eye to see the Al had thrown himself on top of me, Riley was next to me on the ground with his arms covering his head.

After a scary second of nothing but crashing sounds and intense heat, everything seemed to quiet down. With a shaky breath, I looked up, making Al get off of me, and saw nothing but a pile of debris.

Smoke rose into the sky, the blue sky turning into a sickly gray, patched of orange scattered across it. An awful smell came from the mess as well, smelling a lot like burned flesh and chemicals being burned.

Since we had ran, I panted slightly, but I forced myself not to breath barely because of the stench. My eyes began burning because of the drifting smoke, and I couldn’t help but wipe at my eyes.

“Damn… I can’t believe it… our own father…” Riley muttered his head hanging low. “And… he killed our mother… and I don’t care what he said, she was our mom…”

I had to look back on the horrible scene I had last scene my mother in. The way she was killed… if Dad was telling the truth about that he killed our mom… how did he kill her? Her wounds didn’t look like gun bullets, or even knife wounds. It looked like she was ripped apart by claws…

True form…

Was Dad infected by the virus? If he was, did it mutate and change him?

Questions flooded my mind, my stomach began to ache painfully. 

“We need to get to the church,” Al finally said after silence. “No matter what, we must stop the Ultimate-Virus from spreading worldwide.”

“How?” Riley asked. “We probably have less than five hours now… if we walk there it’ll take a lot of time, time not be wasted.” he pointed out.

Al smiled. “Oh, but you forget, we have our military friends.” he said simply.

“And?” I prompted.

“And… they must have special armored vehicles in the city,” Al said. “They can give us a ride.”

“Brilliant!” I shouted happily. “We can get there quickly, disarm the device, and get the hell out of here!”

Al pulled his communicator out of his pocket and pressed a button. A high pitch sound erupted from it, making me cover my ears. He said it was getting into the soldiers radio frequency, but I still found it unnecessary for me to go death in the process.

A muffled voice came from the communicator, but it was hard for me to understand. Thank goodness that Al understood though, he managed to tell them our coordinates and the current situation perfectly calm. After another muffle, Al said, “See you in a bit,” and hung up.

“They’re on their way, we’ll have to wait twenty minutes.” Al told Riley and I.

Low moans began echoing through the deserted streets. Loud growls filled the air, the beasts no doubt. I felt so exposed no that the BioTech facility as no more than a pile of black mess.

“Can it get any worse…?” I mumbled.

Worse thing to say at a time like this.