After (#3)

Chapter Thirty-Six

JJ managed to catch a split-second glimpse of the explosion before the world fell from beneath his body, sending him plunging into the fire and smoke. The initial sights and sounds seemed to imply that their mission had been a success, although his mind only pondered on the fact for the briefest of moments. No sooner had JJ's chest slammed into the cold lab floor than sections of the ceiling began to crash against his head. Dazed and confused, the debris piled against his neck, back, and legs, sucking the air from his lungs. Before he could react to the latest thump against his aching body, another followed, until JJ could barely move a limb.

"Max," he croaked into the darkness, drowned out by the dissolving ceiling and the muffled clicking.

Pressing his lips around the one slim crack of light in front of him, JJ desperately gulped for air, although he could feel his breathing becoming more restricted by the second. Hearing shuffling to his left-hand side, he decided to put everything he had into one last cry for help, pushing up to free his lungs for a split-second.

"Max!"

JJ sank back down to the floor, the scarping beside him growing more intense by the second. While he had long since grown accustomed to the fact that he could likely one day die at the hands of a clicker, being trapped in a confined space, helpless to fight or flee while the undead teeth slowly ate away at him was just about the worst scenario he could think of.

However, as the slither of light grew inch by inch, so did JJ's hope, especially as the familiar features of Max blurred into view.

"Kid?" the older man called. "Kid, can you hear me?"

"I'm here," JJ wheezed, doing his best to shift his body weight towards the exit Max was fighting hard to forge.

"Slow down, JJ," Max urged. "There's a hell of a lot of debris balanced on top of you, just let me dig you out slowly, okay?"

JJ nodded as Max continued to tear away portions of the ceiling piece by piece, stopping occasionally to slide his knife into the temples of any clickers that dared crawl towards him. Fortunately, the collapsing ceiling seemed to have done just as much damage to them.

"The stairs?" JJ muttered, gesturing towards them with his dusty eyes.

"Blown to God damn pieces," Max winked, finally creating a gap large enough to haul JJ through.

Once they were both clear of the wreckage, JJ dusted himself down and stretched out his battered limbs. Sure enough, as he glanced over his shoulder, the staircase had been blown to smithereens. Even the most adept climbers would find it tricky to scale what was left, let alone a bumbling clicker. Better still, the collapse had even penned the surviving clickers in their very own enclosure.

"Time to go?" JJ suggested.

Max nodded in agreement, "Time to go."

As JJ stepped over a particularly large section of rubble, making his way towards the elevator shaft, an undead hand emerged from the debris and wrapped around his ankle, a set of ferociously snapping teeth not far behind. However, no sooner had it appeared than Max's big size 10 boot obliterated through the top of the clicker's skull.

Unfortunately, any motion of thanks from JJ was quickly interrupted as yet another large portion of the ceiling came crashing down to Earth. While the falling metal and concrete was far from where the two of them were standing, it had opened up a rather enticing path for the surviving clickers to filter through back into the main lab.

"Make us a path back to the elevator while I hold them off!" Max ordered as he rushed towards the oncoming undead, keen to cut them off at a bottleneck.