O-Day + 571
Breaking Out

Eliot lowered the binoculars, the slump in his shoulders having nothing to do with the the 700 miles of wastelands they'd just driven through. Hardison grabbed them from him, and surveyed the area himself.

"This is really weird, man," said Hardison. "I mean, there are four ways out of this place, right? And it's specifically built to be able to maintain communication with the outside world, no matter what. With the VIPs here for the forum, there would have been security everywhere. Even if there was an outbreak, they should have been able to get out. At the very least we should still be in contact. So what the hell?"

"The broadcast tower is down," Eliot pointed out, then lapsed back into a bleak silence.

"Yeah, but still..." Hardison shook his head. "At this range, the smaller antennas should be more than enough."

Parker, sitting dutifully behind the wheel of Lucille, fidgeted. "Well?" she asked in piercing whisper.

"If we can't contact them somehow..." Eliot's pause was so long, Hardison began trying to think of ways to finish the sentence, too. Finally Eliot managed to say it. "... I don't know if we can risk it."

Hardison's jaw tightened, and he kept scanning the scene in front of them, as though that might hold the answer. Then he did a double-take and peered more attentively. "Is that ... Eliot, am I dreaming, or is that the Italian?"

"What?" Eliot pulled the binoculars out of Hardison's hands. "Where?"

Hardison pointed. "Down, right, right – near the entrance."

Eliot focused, finding the figure among the pack, its long limbs moving with the toxic gangling quickness that was now instantly identifiable. "Huh... Did we know she was going to be at the forum?"

Hardison shook his head. "Nope. But whatever happened here, I'll bet my showering ration for a month that she had something to do with it."

Eliot watched the figure with a maliciously satisfied slant to his mouth, and didn't argue with Hardison's hunch.

"The sun is going to be up soon," Parker reminded them. "We've got to make some decisions, here, people."

Hardison shot a look at the two taciturn strangers standing with them, also assessing the situation. They'd barely said a word since the rendezvous outside of town. "I don't suppose you two have anything helpful to add," he said, with hope and sarcasm mixed. There was something about their silent watchfulness that was unnerving. As was the way two heads turned with one gesture, and the way two pairs of eyes fixed on him with one look. "Yeah, okay. You probably think we're crazy."

There was a pause, in which the one who was freakishly tall cocked his head to the side and the one who was simply tall raised his eyebrows. Then the latter asked, "That's family in there, right?" He didn't even need their nods. "No. We don't think you're crazy." He looked at Eliot. "What do you need?"

"Hopefully just backup. A diversion so we can get our people out. But until we know their status, lay low. You okay to stay out of trouble in the open for now?"

The two men shared an amused look. "We'll manage," the taller one said drily.

Eliot didn't question it. He turned to the others. "Let's go see what the access shaft can give us. And hope there's no one around it."

It took until mid-morning to approach the shaft, set higher in the backwoods, avoiding the crowd of zombies clogging the building and main entrances to the bunker. Between the stealthy quietness of Lucille's refitted electric motor, and the weird waxy goop the strangers had smeared on the sides of the van to camouflage scent, nothing seemed to pick up their trail.

"You sure about this, man?" Hardison asked, doubtfully rubbing some of the goop on his jacket and neck. "You sure about them?"

Eliot swiped some on Parker's back, then wiped his fingers off on his sleeve, and shrugged. "Singer sent them."

Hardison didn't find this phlegmatic answer as reassuring as Eliot intended. "Oh, sure. Great. And ... Singer is who, exactly?"

Eliot took a look at Hardison's face, and didn't snap back at him. "A guy I know. Look, Singer vouches for them, and that's good enough for me." He put his hand on the younger man's shoulder, and added gently, "Which should be good enough for you. No one's taking risks with Nate and Sophie's lives, here. Okay?"

After a second, Hardison nodded. "Yeah, man. I know. I'm just ... what if..."

Eliot stopped him. "Look, I know. We're all ... worried. But it's going to be okay. We're gonna find them," Eliot said, doing an excellent job of looking utterly certain. "Ignore the 'what if' crap and hold it together, got it? I need you 100% here and on your game. They need you 100% here."

Hardison took a breath, but his nod was interrupted by a sharp, "Guys!"

They both looked at Parker, startled.

Her eyes were blazing with frustration. "Can we stop talking about our feelings and just go rescue them, now?"

Eliot and Hardison exchanged a look. "Uh – yeah." Eliot grabbed their bag and slid Lucille's door shut. "Let's go."

It didn't take long to find the shaft, or rather what was left of it. The gasps of shock from Hardison and Parker only made Eliot's grim lack of surprise more obvious.

Parker crouched next to the depression of cement debris and twisted steel sheet. "This is recent. A couple of days at most. It looks like someone just dropped explosives down the shaft."

Eliot hunkered down next to her and nodded. "Effective enough. They'll have sealed off the east and west entrance points, too, if they know what they're doing. And leave the inside entrance clogged with zombies to finish it off. Make it look like just another outbreak."

Hardison had started examining the mangled antenna, pulling out his toolkit. "You're saying someone trapped them in there?"

There was no other rational conclusion. "Yeah." Eliot shook his head grimly at the myriad of questions this raised, then looked over to Hardison.

"You getting anything?" Eliot asked with more skepticism than hope.

"Maybe. The line itself is pretty well protected, so it might only be the antenna that's busted. If the line is intact, and there's enough power, I can connect with the bunker's own communication system and use our piggyback for the earbuds. That is, assuming the system is even still functional," he explained, while the others helped him clear rubble from the base of the antenna. "Otherwise, the range is going to be limited, for us too when we're in there... Ah, here we go. Yeah, baby. This looks promising..."

There was a crackle on their coms, and a choppy but instantly recognizable voice. "~...dison? ~~ –ou? Can y– ~ –r m–~"

"Nate!" Parker looked ready to dig right down through the rubble with her bare hands.

"Make it better," Eliot ordered Hardison. "Nate? We're here. Nate, do you read?"

Hardison rolled his eyes, but intensified his efforts. After a few minutes of work and erratic bursts of uncommunicative syllables, his frown was as deep as it could get. He finally shook his head. "Sorry. I think there's some power down there, but nothing like what they should have ... and it looks like the computer network has been totally fried. I can't do anything about the signal."

Eliot pulled out the map they'd sketched out between them. "Okay, then. If we were Nate, where would we hole up?"

"If I had to guess, the level of power I'm picking up right now is a patch job. If the power plant was sabotaged, then the whole place is dark. They'd be on their way to suffocating by now."

Elliot nodded. "So if Nate couldn't get out, he'd have rigged up enough power for air."

Parker pointed on the map. "If they could keep these rooms around the power plant secure, this is the place to stay."

The three looked at each other, nodded an immediate consensus, and turned back to the van. Eliot got on the radio to inform their allies of the situation, and received assurance that the decoy was ready as soon as they needed it. Within half an hour a sleek black '67 Impala growled along the front access road, flirting with top zombie pursuing speed. From their vantage point, they could just make out the arm of whoever was riding shotgun, holding up out of the window what the shorter one had happily termed "chum in the water".

"Wow. That was effective," said Hardison as the ragged crowd converged and trailed after the car. He sniffed the goop on his jacket. "I guess they really do know what they're doing."

They waited until the freak parade had disappeared over the ridge before breaking cover. They approached the building's entrance warily, but everything looked clear. "Let's hope that was the bulk of the zombies," muttered Eliot, unsheathing his well-worn machete and leaving the shotgun slung. "Stay close. Parker, that means you."

An impatient huff answered him, but told him that she'd obey. He eye-checked them both for emphasis, then squared his shoulders and ducked through the front door.

The ground level seemed to be clear all the way to the lobby containing the only remaining entrance. The concealing panel was hanging brokenly to the side, and behind it the ponderous blast door gaped open. The only light came from behind them, casting their shadows long into the waiting darkness. They paused, listening, but there was no sound, no movement, even of air.

"Parker, flare."

She cracked one and bowled it down the tunnel. They waited while it skittered to the bottom of the incline, its fiery green blush revealing the decontamination room door, standing ajar. They followed its path, Parker lighting another flare and tossing it into the room at Eliot's gesture. Both of them stayed just outside the door after he entered, keeping weapons ready, in a pattern now so ingrained as to be utterly automatic.

A grunt of surprise was the only reaction to the attack. Leaving Parker to guard their six, Hardison slipped just far enough into the room to get a clear sightline, face set and hands steady as he trained his shotgun on the four figures scrambling around Eliot. He waited, motionless, watching Eliot decapitate three of them in short order and ram the head of the fourth into the wall, before coolly lowering his weapon. Eliot glanced at him, wiped at the blood spray on his face and finished checking the room, then gave him a quick thumbs-up.

Hardison reached back and tapped Parker, and they followed Eliot into the bunker proper, where their coms abruptly sizzled into life.

"~ be okay. They're coming, I swear, they'll find us. Just stay with me, okay? Please – Sophie? Sophie!~"

The frozen grip of horror that Nate's words had upon the three was broken by the sound of a hiss, further back in the shadows. Parker immediately lit another flare, flinging it along the hall, catching the crowd of bodies slithering toward them in light.

Eliot didn't hesitate. With a wordless roar, he charged the pack, slowing neither to count those ahead nor take notice of those left headless behind as zombie after zombie fell around him.

"Nate, we're coming!" shouted Hardison, as he and Parker kept pace behind the hitter, firing intermittently when any of the zombies seemed about to get around his furious and unflagging assault. "Where are you?"

"~The medical room. Hurry!~"

"Nate, is Sophie okay? What's wrong?"

"~She was shot, during the initial attack. She's lost blood. A lot of blood. She's been in and out of consciousness – guys, I don't know –~" The desperate uncertainty in their mastermind's voice gave it a fragility that was even more frightening than the words themselves.

Eliot had already mowed his way to the end of the pack, throwing another flare to the end of the corridor and chasing it, and another as he swerved left around the corner. Even in his berserker state, he appeared to have registered enough of the conversation to know where to head to. Hardison and Parker lost no time in racing after him, hopscotching through the zombie bodies and heads and trying to avoid the ice-slick blood.

Past the debris, Hardison caught his footing and his breath. "Hold on. We're coming. Just – hold on!"

Apart from a few zombies who emerged from doors in the wake of his passage, which were promptly shot by Parker or Hardison, Eliot didn't miss a beat or a head in carving their passage clear. By the time they reached the small-scale medical suite, not far from the power plant, nothing was moving except them. Parker hammered on the door while Hardison watched over Eliot's path back from clearing the end of the corridor.

"Nate, it's us! Open up!"

There was the sound of barricades being pulled aside, and the door opened to stranger's faces, pale and gaunt in the dim lamplight of the room. Parker barged past them without a second look. "Sophie!"

The group of strangers didn't receive any more attention from Hardison or Eliot, except for a barked order to re-barricade the door. One look at the head-to-toe decoration of carnage on Eliot produced instant, silent obedience, and again when he yanked together materials for a make-shift stretcher, thrusting them into their hands with a few curt instructions.

"Sink? Water?" he demanded of one of them, pulling his gloves off. They pointed quickly. "This working? Nate?"

Kneeling next to Sophie, seeming unable to attend to anything apart from gripping her hand tight, Nate answered dully, "Yeah. We pulled enough power for that, at least."

A hush fell, oddly focused on Eliot's carefully thorough washing of hands, as though in this labyrinth tomb of the dead, undead, and living, his driven will and actions eclipsed everyone else's. Wiping dry, he turned toward Sophie, and for the first time he hesitated. He looked at his hands, then at Parker, clutching Sophie's own free one, and cleared his throat. "Your hands clean?" he asked suddenly. "Any of that filth get on you?"

She shook her head, holding one up to demonstrate its lack of contamination. He looked at Hardison. "You?"

Hardison nodded, dependable, calm. "I'm clean, man. What do you need?"

Eliot held his up, starkly white against the darkening muck of the rest of him. "I don't want to risk it, even with gloves. Be my hands?"

"Yeah. Of course." Hardison snagged the box of medical gloves, gently nudging Nate to the side, and snapped them on. He handed the box to Parker and looked questioningly at Eliot.

Eliot squeezed Nate's shoulder briefly, then leaned in. "Cut away the bandage. Parker, flashlight."

All three sucked in dismayed breaths at the mess of her shoulder, chewed up by a glancing encounter with a shotgun blast. Eliot let his out slowly. "Okay. Yeah. I ... we can't do much here." He glanced at the saline bag snaking into her arm, then around at the infirmary. "You did what you could, but we've got to get her somewhere safe before we clean her up and stitch it all together. So we won't have to move her while she recovers."

Nate finally registered a reaction, locking onto Eliot's eyes. "But ... she will? Recover?"

Eliot held his gaze. "I – don't know. I hope so. If we can find somewhere not too far. But we have to get out of here. Nate, you know this was sabotage, right? The Italian's out there, or was. And if they come back and realize –"

"The Italian?" Nate's face contorted with rage. "She's still out there? I'm going to kill her, I swear to God!"

"Slow down, Papa Wolf." Hardison looked up from where he was gently bandaging fresh gauze around the wound. "The walking dead beat you to it."

"Eaten?"

"Nah, infected."

Nate's mouth twitched. "Good," he said with relish. "That reminds me." He nodded at a briefcase, sitting incongruously in one corner. "We picked up a party favor. The records in that case are from a military R&D lab where this whole thing started."

"What a shock," commented Hardison flatly.

"That's definitely enough reason to bring this place down with y'all inside," added Eliot.

Nate grimaced. "I know. We might be able to not only find the source of the virus, but with the right people and resources even put together an inoculation. Won't do anything for the infected, but we'd be able to keep people from becoming infected."

"Right." Eliot straightened and eyed the room. "You, you and you," he pointed as he spoke, "Grab everything that will hold anything – pillow cases, sheets, whatever – and pack up every last damn medical supply in this place. Nate, you got food in here?"

"Only what's left in those boxes there. We got what we could from the dining room, but we were overrun too quickly. The last group that went out to get more didn't come back."

"It'll do. Where's that stretcher?"

One of the men who'd been working on it stood, mouth belligerent. "Listen, young man, we're grateful for the rescue, of course, but –"

Eliot's tone didn't lose terseness but did gain a layer of testiness as he stared the man down. "Yeah, well, then grab one end of that stretcher and earn it." A half-step of menace was enough to make the man recoil, and the large man beside him bristle. Eliot ignored this, staying locked on the first man, deadly serious. "And if you so much as jostle that woman it's your ass, Mr. President. You got me?"

"Sure thing," the president said quickly.

"That your muscle?" Eliot didn't wait for the answer before handing over his own shotgun and shell belt to the larger man. "Bring up the rear, big guy. Parker, with him, Hardison with me. You and you, take the other corners on the stretcher. Everyone else, load up. Stay together, stay between us. If anything goes down, stay together. Break, and you'll all die, whether by the zombies or by me. Nate, you got her?"

Nate and Hardison settled Sophie on the stretcher and Nate pressed a kiss to her forehead, then hefted his corner while the president, a governor, and senator took the others. "Ready."

"Remove the barricade." Eliot drew his machete once more, took a breath, listened for a moment, and pulled the door open. A simultaneous swing of his blade removed a slathering head from its shoulders, and he kicked the body out of the way as it fell. He looked both ways and stepped into the corridor. "Okay. Move out."

Their flare-marked path back to the surface was slow, navigating bodies strewn and twisted where they'd fallen, flashlights picking through the wax and wane of green fire like some sickly Hell, alternating too bright and too dim for eyes to adjust properly. Occasional stragglers, drawn to the commotion from other parts of the bunker, dropped before a flicker of sharp steel or a flash of powder and shot. After what seemed like endless bad footing and skidding on things better not thought about, an infinitesimal suffusion of natural light leaked hope into the corridor from ahead. The party picked up speed without any spoken agreement –

And Parker screamed.

Eliot and Hardison wheeled as one, but the group behind them just couldn't let them through fast enough. Two blasts crashed through the space from the back, one on top of the other, deafening, and then somehow through the ringing echoes the big guy at the back was shouting to move, he had her, move, move move!

Stumbling forward, the whole group sprinted through the decontamination room and up the slope, spilling out of the blast door and into a once-lavish lobby. They didn't stop, scurrying through empty hallways, Sophie bouncing on the stretcher and dead to the world, Parker bleeding in the big guy's arms, until they stood panting on the front entrance terrace.

The valley in front of them was completely clear of any human figures except two, leaning in boredom against the side of the black Impala. At the sight of the group bursting through the front doors, they straightened, then raced up the stairs when the shouting started.

"What happened?" Nate had paused only to hand off his corner of Sophie's stretcher before shoving his way to where the big guy was still holding Parker. "What happened?"

"Grabbed me," Parker said faintly. "It's okay –"

"One of the zombies on the ground wasn't dead," the big guy explained further. He indicated her leg, cloth and skin torn and bloody, and his face said everything else.

"No – no –" The words were ripped from someone's throat, but in that moment there was no distinction between thought and sound, no knowing who actually said it.

"Put her down. Now!" Wide shoulders, eyes on level with the big guy's, and a voice full of authority had Parker on the ground before anyone could react. The smaller of the two strangers was already kneeling next to her, slicing away the shredded cloth, cinching a tourniquet above her knee.

There was plenty of reaction now. "Who – what are you doing?" yelled Nate.

The first man loomed over him, unfazed. "When did it happen?"

Eliot put a hand across Nate's chest. "Less than a minute ago."

A lightning-fast look passed between the two strangers, and the one with the tourniquet clamped an iron grip down on her leg. The other knelt and pulled out a silver knife in one swift move, pressing the flat of the blade to the wound. The contact made Parker flinch back hard, but her slim calf remained stock still under the second man's hold.

"Get her head," he snapped harshly, but Hardison was already there. The strangers paused, intent on the effect of silver against her wound. After a long, breathless minute, they shared another look, and then relaxed with the same abrupt, wordless tandem in which they'd done everything else.

The tall one pulled out a compact syringe, uncapped, tapped and cleared the nozzle, then unceremoniously jammed it into her thigh. "Just to be sure." While he sounded almost diffident, the glint in his eye as he continued to watch her was anything but. "It looks like the bite didn't get through. Just the shotgun. She probably won't even lose the leg."

The other one finished a deft field dressing and looked up at Eliot. "Bobby's in Ohio right now. A safehouse, not far, maybe four hours. Your friends can follow with the other wounded. You and her ride with us – in case."

"In case what?" demanded Hardison, then stepped back from the man's stony expression.

"In case we're wrong," he said flatly.

Nate moved forward and plucked the empty syringe out of the tall one's hand. "What is this?"

"Something Bobby cooked up. Slows the toxin long enough to amputate." His shrug was bleak. "Sometimes it works."

Nate looked at the briefcase, and back at them. "Then let's get to this guy's place. I think we're going to have a lot to talk about."