Wednesday, December 10, 2025, 8:45 AM
Countdown to Extraction: 65 Hours, 56 Minutes Remaining
Sharon stared blankly at the digital clock on the side table. The red numbers burned themselves into her exhausted retinas, mocking her with how little time had actually passed.
Her mind was a million miles away, desperately searching the burning ruins of Savannah for her three children. She didn't know where Justin was. She didn't know if he had managed to grab Tally and Anna Belle. She had absolutely no idea where any of them were, or if they were even still breathing. But the apocalypse didn't care about a mother's grief. The world was actively ending, and it afforded her absolutely zero time to mourn. She couldn't fall apart. If she broke down now, the fifty people sitting outside that wooden door would die.
"Sharon?"
The voice was thin. Reedy. Barely more than a whisper of air.
Sharon instantly snapped out of the dark void of her own thoughts, her clinical instincts violently overriding her maternal terror. She looked down at the beige vinyl sofa.
Minh's eyes were wide open, staring at the ceiling, but they weren't tracking anything. Her pupils were suddenly blown wide, dilating aggressively in the dim amber light. A thin sheen of fresh, icy sweat had completely coated her grey skin, plastering her dark hair to her forehead.
"I'm right here, Minh," Sharon said, leaning in closely. Her heart kicked into a sudden, frantic overdrive. "What is it? What's wrong?"
"I feel... funny," Minh breathed. Her chest rose in quick, shallow hitches against the heavy nylon restraint strap pinning her to the cushions. "Something's not right. The light is too loud. Do you smell that?"
Patel stepped forward instantly, pulling a penlight from his scrub pocket. "Smell what, Minh? What do you smell?"
"Pennies," Minh whispered, her jaw suddenly going rigid. "It tastes like hot metal. Sharon... I can't... I can't feel my tongue."
It was an aura. A massive, screaming neurological warning bell.
"She's crashing!" Sharon shouted, her hands flying to Minh's shoulders just as the younger doctor's entire body violently seized.
It was an immediate, catastrophic grand mal seizure.
Minh's back violently arced off the sofa cushions, lifting completely off the vinyl, held down only by the heavy canvas straps locked across her chest and ankles. Every single muscle in her body locked into a state of absolute, rigid tension for a terrifying second before the rapid, violent convulsions began.
Her head whipped back and forth against the armrest with bone-jarring force. Her jaw clamped completely shut, her teeth grinding together so loudly the sickening, chalky sound filled the small consultation room.
"Turn her on her side!" Patel barked, throwing his entire body weight over the thrashing woman. "If she vomits, she's going to aspirate! Protect her airway!"
"I can't turn her, the chest strap is pinning her flat!" Sharon yelled, fighting desperately to get her hands under Minh's violently jerking shoulders. "Elena! Get the Lorazepam from the crash kit! Now!"
Reyes was completely frozen. Her back was pressed hard against the door, her eyes wide with unadulterated horror. She was watching her friend shake herself to pieces, entirely convinced that the fungal virus had just crossed the blood-brain barrier and was currently taking over her mind.
"Elena, move your goddamn feet!" Sharon roared. The sheer, unfiltered command in her voice physically broke the younger doctor's paralysis.
Reyes jumped, scrambling frantically toward the medical supply cabinet mounted on the wall. She ripped open a sterile drawer, her hands shaking so violently she dropped two plastic syringes onto the linoleum before finally managing to grip a pre-loaded vial of the powerful anti-convulsant.
On the sofa, the seizure was escalating. Minh's right arm, heavily bandaged and missing its index finger, thrashed wildly against the wooden armrest. The cauterized stump slammed repeatedly against the hard wood.
A fresh, bright red bloom of human blood immediately soaked through the stark white combat gauze. The cauterization had cracked under the blunt-force kinetic trauma.
"She's bleeding through the bandage!" Patel yelled, his forearms bearing down heavily on Minh's shoulders to keep her from breaking her own collarbone against the heavy nylon straps.
"Give me the syringe!" Sharon reached out, snatching the plastic tube from Reyes's trembling hands.
Sharon didn't have the time or the luxury to find a delicate vein or set a sterile IV drip. She popped the plastic cap off the needle with her thumb, completely ignoring the blood spraying from Minh's thrashing hand. She grabbed the fabric of Minh's scrub pants, exposed her left thigh, and drove the needle straight into the thickest part of the muscle, depressing the plunger instantly.
"Four milligrams pushed!" Sharon shouted, pulling the empty needle out and tossing it onto the floor. "Hold her steady! Wait for it to cycle!"
The next forty-five seconds felt like an eternity of absolute hell.
They physically held their friend down, riding out the violent, terrifying electrical storm short-circuiting her brain. Sharon watched Minh's face, utterly terrified that the moment the seizure broke, those dark eyes would snap open, milky and dead, and her jaw would start snapping for meat.
Slowly, agonizingly, the heavy chemical dose of the Lorazepam hit her central nervous system.
The violent thrashing began to subside, turning into harsh, spastic tremors, and then, finally, into complete, heavy stillness.
Minh went entirely slack against the cushions. Her head rolled to the side. A thick string of normal, white saliva—not the pink, acidic foam of the infected—slid from the corner of her slack mouth. She was pulling deep, ragged, snoring breaths into her lungs.
"Postictal state," Patel diagnosed, checking her pulse with two shaking fingers against her carotid artery. "Her heart rate is through the roof, but the rhythm is steadying. The seizure is broken."
"Was it the virus?" Reyes whispered, wrapping her arms tightly around her own stomach, openly weeping. "Did the fungus hit her brain?"
"No," Sharon said, her chest heaving as she ripped open a fresh roll of gauze to reinforce the bleeding stump. "If the virus had taken the brainstem, the Lorazepam wouldn't have done a damn thing. Chemical sedatives don't stop the dead. It was the physical trauma. She just went through a localized amputation with zero anesthesia, followed by a massive adrenaline dump. Her body just short-circuited from the sheer physiological stress."
Before they could even take a collective breath of relief, the heavy brass deadbolt on the consultation room door violently rattled.
Someone was pounding on the wood from the hallway.
"Doc! Doc, open the door!"
It was Officer Daniels. He wasn't just knocking; he was actively throwing his shoulder against the wood.
Sharon spun around, unlocking the deadbolt and ripping the door open.
Daniels nearly fell into the room. His face was flushed, his eyes wild with a completely different kind of panic.
"What is it?" Sharon demanded, stepping into the doorway to block the hallway's view of Minh's unconscious, bloody body. "Did the fire doors give way?"
"No," Daniels gasped, pointing a thick finger down the corridor. "It's Kimmie. Barlow's wife. She's going into labor."
"She's only thirty-two weeks," Reyes said immediately, her obstetrician instincts instantly overriding her terror, pulling her forward. "She's not due for two months."
"Well, the baby doesn't care about the calendar!" Daniels barked, the stress completely fracturing his professional demeanor. "Her water just broke all over the floor, and Troy is completely losing his mind out there. He's screaming his head off, Doc. You need to get out there right now."
Sharon didn't hesitate. "Patel, stay with Minh. Keep strict pressure on that stump and monitor her airway. Elena, with me."
Sharon sprinted out of the room, Reyes hot on her heels.
The amber-lit hallway was in an absolute uproar. The fragile, tentative order Daniels had managed to establish earlier had completely evaporated into thin air.
Troy Barlow was pacing in tight, erratic circles in the center of the corridor, his hands gripping his own hair, his face twisted in pure, unadulterated panic. His wife, Kimmie, was collapsed on the vinyl waiting bench, her knees pulled wide, clutching her swollen belly as she rode out a massive, agonizing contraction. A dark puddle of amniotic fluid was rapidly spreading across the linoleum beneath her bare feet.
"It's too soon!" Troy was screaming at the top of his lungs, his voice echoing violently off the cinderblock walls. "She's only thirty-two weeks! We need a real doctor! We need an operating room! Where the hell are the incubators?!"
"Troy, you have to lower your voice!" a terrified father hissed from across the hall, physically shielding his own two toddlers.
"Don't you tell me to shut up!" Troy roared back, spinning on the man, his eyes entirely manic. "My wife is having our baby on a filthy floor in a hallway! Somebody do something!"
The noise was entirely too much. It was sharp, it was frantic, and it was incredibly loud.
And at the far end of the maternity wing, the horde heard it.
The relative quiet at the barricade was instantly shattered. The hijacked, mindless husks of the infected responded immediately to the localized panic of the living.
BANG. BANG. BANG.
The horrific, collective weight of the dead slammed violently against the reinforced fire doors. The metal hinges squealed in absolute agony. The heavy hospital beds wedged against the barricade physically groaned, the rubber casters sliding a fraction of an inch backward across the tile.
The civilians in the hallway screamed, scrambling backward away from the doors.
"Shut up!" another man yelled at Troy, absolute terror making him reckless. "They hear you! You're gonna get every single one of us killed!"
"I don't care!" Troy shrieked back, completely blinded by his wife's agony. "Help her!"
Sharon shoved her way violently through the panicked crowd. She didn't try to reason with him from a distance. She grabbed Troy tightly by the front of his shirt and physically slammed him backward against the drywall.
"Troy, look right at me!" Sharon ordered, her voice a sharp, commanding whip crack that cut perfectly through his hysteria. "You need to shut your mouth right now. They can hear you. You keep screaming, they're going to break that glass and tear her apart before she even pushes. Do you understand me?"
Troy stared at Sharon, his chest heaving, the brutal, graphic reality of her words finally piercing through the panic. The anger drained out of his face, leaving only raw, naked fear. He swallowed hard and gave a single, jerky nod.
"Good," Sharon released his shirt. She dropped to her knees right in the puddle of amniotic fluid in front of Kimmie.
"Kimmie, look at me," Sharon said, her voice instantly dropping into the calm, soothing cadence of a veteran physician. "I know it's early. I know you're scared. But your body knows exactly what to do. Breathe with me."
"It hurts, Dr. Leesburg," Kimmie sobbed, her fingernails digging violently into the vinyl armrests of the bench. Her face was pale, slick with sweat. "It's coming too fast. Something's wrong. It feels like tearing."
"Nothing is wrong," Sharon lied smoothly, glancing up at Reyes over Kimmie's shoulder. "Elena, get Room 402 prepped. Strip the bed, grab the emergency obstetrics kit, and find me clean towels. We need to get her off this floor and behind a locked door immediately."
Reyes nodded, the familiarity of the task anchoring her, and sprinted down the hall.
Sharon turned her attention back to the laboring mother. "Okay, Kimmie. When this contraction passes, Troy is going to help you stand, and we are going to walk twenty feet to a real bed. You can do this."
Then, a new vibration started.
It didn't come from the fire doors at the end of the hall. It didn't come from the dead pressing against the glass.
It came from the sky.
It started as a low, incredibly deep rumble that physically rattled the loose ceiling tiles overhead. The vibration traveled straight down the concrete pillars of the hospital, humming directly through the soles of Sharon's combat boots. It rapidly built into a massive, tearing, deafening roar that completely drowned out the moans of the horde and the terrified chatter of the civilians in the corridor.
"What is that?" Troy asked, looking up at the ceiling. His panic momentarily suspended by complete, utter confusion.
A young man who had been assigned to watch the papered-over exterior windows suddenly peeled back a wide strip of the fetal monitor paper. He pressed his face against the reinforced glass, staring up into the hazy, smoke-filled morning sky.
"Jets!" the young man screamed, turning back to the hallway, his face lighting up with a massive, euphoric smile. "Military jets! Oh my god, they're here! The military is here! We're saved!"
A wave of desperate, immediate hope surged through the trapped civilians. People began to weep with profound relief. Husbands hugged their wives. Several men rushed toward the window, fighting to look out through the narrow gap in the paper.
The roar of the engines grew incredibly loud, shaking the very foundation of the hospital. The sound of American air power. Salvation.
"Wait," one of the nurses yelled, pressing her hands against the cool glass alongside the men, her brow furrowing in deep confusion. "Where are they going? They aren't circling the hospital."
"They're flying right past us," another man noted, the euphoria rapidly draining out of his voice, replaced by cold dread. "They're heading straight for the south side. Toward the highway."
The massive, deafening roar of the jet engines began to fade slightly as the aircraft screamed past the hospital's airspace.
But a new sound instantly replaced it.
It was a high-pitched, tearing whistle.
It sounded exactly like the atmosphere itself was being violently sliced completely in half. It was a mechanical, shrieking hum that cut right under the fading roar of the jets, growing louder, faster, and more aggressive by the millisecond.
The civilians in the hallway looked around, confused. They didn't understand the physics of what was happening above them.
But Sharon knew.
Sharon had spent time deployed in a forward operating trauma unit during her military days. She knew exactly what a low-altitude flyby sounded like, and she knew the terrifying, unmistakable sound of displaced air when a payload was dropped from the sky.
That wasn't the sound of transport helicopters coming to extract them.
That was the sound of heavy, incoming ordnance.
The military wasn't here to save Savannah. They were here to level it.
A cold, absolute terror washed over her, entirely paralyzing her lungs. Her three children were out there somewhere under that sky.
"What is that sound?" Troy asked, his eyes wide as the whistling reached an agonizing, ear-splitting pitch. He looked down at Sharon. "Do y'all hear that?"
Wednesday, December 10, 2025, 8:59 AM
Countdown to Extraction: 65 Hours, 42 Minutes Remaining