To Be A Hero

Chapter 55: One Of Us

The roof caves in. Chunks of it crash onto the stairs. I hold onto Janine for dear life, squeezing my eyes shut as we attempt to stay hidden under the staircase. The walls quake and the floor cracks beneath us. This floor is going to cave in soon.

"Janine! Runner Five!" Jody yells, bounding up the stairs. She searches for us, and we both shakily leave the safety of the staircase. She rushes over to us when she sees us. "What the heck just happened?"

"That recording makes it clear that the Minister ordered Five's helicopter shot down-as I have suspected for some time-which means that she was behind the plan to swap Runner Five for that double who we later met as a zombie," Janine answers calmly, and we quickly start heading down the stairs. "And it makes sense that she was therefore the one who tried to snatch the baby! I didn't think she'd admit it. I didn't have enough pieces even with this recording, but she admitted it! I'll contact General Bakari. We'll arrange a court martial."

"How did you know this recoding would be here?"

"Tom's a lot less insane than he appears, and he's been responding well to me. To quiet discussions with me, and a little help from that Comansys truth drug. From the messages Tom had heard here, the station was clearly hoarding every message that had passed through it. I had suspicions. I had hopes. They proved correct."

"So that's what you've been doing!" She says with wide eyes. "Honestly, I thought you'd gone mad, because of messing up with the baby."

"Oh, I'm only mad when the wind's south-southwest. At all other times, I simply do my duty. Now what's happened to Mr. Yao? Runner Five, try all the frequencies."

I nod, adjusting my headset, listening to the static as I flip from one frequency to another.
I do find a stable one, with a stable voice, but it's not Sam, unfortunately.

"Looking good there, guys."

Janine frowns. "Amelia Spens."

"I think the Minister's jammed Sam's signal. I can see from here that the station is filling up with zombies, and Steve's about to blow both the bridges. You'll be trapped there unless you can reach them in time."

With that being said we run, heading down the steps and down into the lower levels. There are zombies already inside the building, but I grab my axe, and Janine grabs her gun, and Jody grabs the bolt cutters from my backpack. Bullets fly with a loud pop, and my axe slices through air and flesh, slicing at those coming for us up the stairs. It's enough to clear a path for us, but we still have two more stories to go before we reach the first level.

We push ourselves, hearts pounding in our chest, breath gasping. The stench of death and decay is growing stronger, I notice, which means more and more zombies are getting into the building. I have a pistol of my own that I can give to Janine after she runs out of bullets, but I want to wait. We're going to have to fight our way out of here, so we can't waste all our resources on the first couple of zombies we see.

The blade of my axe cuts deep into a zom's neck, and Jody bashes its head in with the bolt cutters to finish it off. The sound of the moans around us are almost deafening, and I grit my teeth as I rip my axe out of the now deceased zombie, using my momentum to swing it around into another one.

Sweat pours down my face, but I keep pushing. We're running out of time. Those bridges are gonna go any minute and if we're not across them...

"Five, duck!" Janine yells, and I crouch down just in time to see a bullet fly over my head and hit a zombie that had been reaching for my shoulder. I give her a nod of thanks as we keep descending the stairs.

Once we reach the ground floor, I can see where some of the zombies are stumbling in. Most of them aren't coming in, but instead going around the sides of the building, which is good for us since we're going to have to fight these guys off.