It had to be the infection. That was the only explanation. The integrity of the bunker had been compromised and the germ or whatever it was that had done all the damage outside had been let in. His mind began to work overtime. If the rest of the soldiers are infected, he thought, then I have to get out of here. Christ, he'd seen for himself what the dead hordes were capable of when they'd forced the military back and entered the hanger almost seventy days ago. And now he found himself trapped on the wrong side of the bunker doors with, potentially, anything up to a hundred of the bloody things. He had to get out. He had to get out right now. He didn't know where he was going to go, but he had to try and make a run for it. He was going to die soon, that much was inevitable, but he wasn't about to let himself be torn apart at the hands of his former friends and colleagues. As weak and tired and frightened as he was, he wasn't prepared to end his days like that. One last burst of energy...
Carlton stepped out into the corridor. The body of the soldier continued to trip away to his right. It must have heard him but it didn't react. To his left the passageway was clear. Leaving the safety of the shadows he limped further down the corridor, passing the door from which the body had emerged and eventually reaching a T-junction. Left or right? All the corridors in this damn place looked the same � white-grey and disappointingly featureless. Carlton was disorientated and in pain and he couldn't remember the way to the control room. If he could reach the control room he was sure he'd be able to then find the communications room. Once he'd managed to reach the communications room he knew he'd be able to find his way back through the maze of tunnels to the decontamination chambers. That had to be the area he aimed for. If he could reach the chambers then, providing there wasn't still a flood of rotting bodies trying to force their way inside, he'd have a chance, albeit a very slight one, of getting out of the base alive. What happened after that, however, was anyone's guess.
He turned left. Damn, the door to a ransacked equipment store and a dead end. He turned back again and began to move down the corridor in the other direction. Movement was gradually becoming easier and his joints were feeling less stiff. Now all that he had to do was... Shit, another one of those creatures right in front of him. He looked at it and wondered if he could see who it used to be. To keep moving in the right direction he knew he had no option but to try and pass it. For a moment he stood helpless in the middle of the corridor, completely still and completely useless, unable to decide what to do. He watched the shabby figure as it tripped towards him and he poised himself for its attack. Three meters between them and he held up his pistol.
`Stop,' he commanded. `Stop or I'll blow your fucking head off.'
The body continued its lethargic advance. He had no option but to shoot. He closed his eyes and squeezed the trigger and winced as the deafening sound of the gunshot echoed throughout the whole of the underground complex. When he dared to look again he saw that the soldier's corpse had crumbled to the ground in front of him. The back of its head and the contents of its skull dripped red from the grey corridor walls. Carlton was so preoccupied with the bloody fate of the first body that he failed to notice another two approaching until they had almost reached the cadaver on the floor. Without stopping to consider his actions he lifted his pistol again and fired another two shots at close range.
Control room. He'd found it. Carlton weaved around the empty desks and past dusty, lifeless heaps of long-since redundant computer equipment on his way through the room. Another body staggered towards him but, rather than waste precious time fighting it, he instead simply stepped out of its way. The stupid thing blundered past. It hadn't even seen him.
Out of the control room. Another left turn, down the corridor and then right. Jesus Christ, yet another body. He shot this one in the face � the corridor was too narrow to risk taking any chances. He stepped over the fallen corpse and pushed through the door into the communications room. And then he stopped. Another couple of hundred meters or so of corridor and he'd be outside the decontamination chambers. Did he really want to do this? Could he do it? More to the point, did he have any choice? Carlton's ever-decreasing alternatives were continuing to rapidly deplete. His final choices were now appallingly grim � stay underground with a hundred dead soldiers for company, or try and get up to the surface and have to face the possibility of having to deal with many, many more bodies up there. The thought of escaping from the relentlessly grey and enclosed confines of the bunker was the deciding factor. Okay, so it might not be any better (it might be much worse) above ground, but at least he'd be out in the open, if only for a few minutes. The choice was made.
Carlton paused for a second longer to catch his breath, and then pushed through the door out of the communications room. He ran headlong into a crowd of seven bodies, all struggling to make progress down a corridor which was only wide enough for two. Instinctively he began kicking and punching at them, smashing them out of the way and knocking them to the ground. They offered no resistance as he angrily battered his way through them.
The corridor ahead was clear. He could see the doors to the decontamination chambers. Just a few meters further now... Yet more bodies. In the doorway to the main chamber lay a pile of fallen corpses, blood-soaked and riddled with bullet holes. Bloody hell, the creature at the very bottom of the gory heap was still moving... In the room itself more corpses staggered around aimlessly. Doing his best to ignore their disarmingly insistent, clumsy movements, he looked past them and out towards the open decontamination chamber doors, ready now to face the onslaught of endless thousands of savage, decaying figures baying angrily for his flesh.
Where he had expected to see frantic, angry activity he instead saw nothing. No movement. Relative calm.
In disbelief Carlton pushed away the dumb bodies still tripping around the chamber and stood at the final door which separated the interior of the bunker from the rest of the diseased world outside. He could see that the huge hanger doors were still open and the vast cavern was filled with harsh but beautiful sunlight. After months underground it took a while before he was able to open his eyes fully and look around the hanger properly. As the bright stinging in his eyes faded away he looked around at an utterly unbelievable scene.