chapter 9
959 Words
**Chapter 9: The Last Spark**
The storm broke just after nightfall.
Rain sheeted down in icy curtains, turning the riverbank to sludge as Elena dragged Noah beneath the skeletal remains of an old highway overpass. Jake slumped against the concrete pillar next to them, his breath ragged as he pressed a torn strip of fabric to his bleeding arm. The gash was deep—too deep. Already, his skin had taken on a sickly pallor in the dim light.
Noah shivered violently, his teeth chattering. Elena pulled him closer, rubbing warmth into his arms. "We need to get dry," she muttered, scanning the darkness beyond their makeshift shelter. "And we need to move before they pick up our trail again."
Jake grimaced as he tried to flex his fingers. "We're not going to make it to the quarantine zone like this."
"Then we don't go to the zone." Elena's voice was steel.
Noah looked up at her, rainwater dripping from his lashes. "Where do we go?"
Elena met Jake's gaze over the boy's head. "Back to The Flicker."
---
The plan was insanity.
That's what Jake said, at least, when Elena laid it out in hushed tones as Noah dozed fitfully against her shoulder.
"You saw what those things are becoming," Jake hissed, gesturing to his ruined arm. "And you want to walk *back* into the lion's den?"
Elena's fingers brushed the photo in her pocket—Liam's smile, Noah's tiny hand. All she had left. "They'll never stop hunting him. You *know* that. Voss would burn the world to the ground to get what's in Noah's blood."
"So what? You're just going to *surrender*?"
"No." Elena's eyes burned with something fiercer than fear. "I'm going to burn it first."
---
Dawn found them crouched in the ruins of an old gas station, overlooking The Flicker's outer fences. The storm had washed away their tracks, but it had also turned the roads to rivers, slowing their progress to a miserable slog.
Jake's condition had worsened. His skin was fever-hot, his pupils dilated too wide. When he thought Elena wasn't looking, he'd begun whispering to himself—numbers, coordinates, snippets of half-remembered lab protocols.
The infection was in him.
He knew it. She knew it.
Noah, mercifully, did not.
"Here." Jake pressed a crumpled schematic into Elena's hand—a rough sketch of The Flicker's layout, scrawled in his own shaky handwriting. "Main lab's here. That's where they'll be synthesizing the samples. If you're really doing this—"
"When," Elena corrected.
Jake swallowed hard. "When you do this... blow the east wall first. That's where they keep the fuel cells."
Noah tugged at Elena's sleeve. "What about Jake?"
Jake forced a smile. "I'll be right behind you, kid."
The lie hung heavy between them.
---
Getting back in was easier than it should have been.
The Flicker's perimeter was in chaos—soldiers scrambled to contain a breach on the north side, their shouts swallowed by the howl of the storm. Elena counted twelve infected bodies on the fence line before she found the gap—a section of chain link torn open from the *inside.*
The new variants had been here.
And they'd gotten *in.*
Noah's hand was clammy in hers as they slipped through the c*****e. The compound was eerily quiet, the only light coming from flickering emergency lamps. The air reeked of gunpowder and something sweetly rotten—the scent of the evolved infected.
Jake's map led them to a service tunnel. The door hissed open to reveal a hallway littered with bodies—some in lab coats, some in tactical gear. All torn apart.
Noah gagged. Elena pulled him past without a word.
Then—voices.
Elena pressed them into an alcove just as two soldiers rounded the corner, their rifles sweeping the blood-slicked floor.
"—contained in Sector 7," one muttered. "But Voss wants the kid *alive.*"
"Good luck with that," the other scoffed. "You saw what those things did to—"
Elena didn't hear the rest.
Because Noah sneezed.
---
The fight was short and brutal.
Elena took the first soldier down with a scalpel snatched from a fallen medic's kit, driving the blade up under his jaw. The second got a shot off—it grazed her thigh before Jake tackled him, his infected strength sending them both crashing through a glass partition.
Noah screamed.
Elena whirled to see a third operative—one she'd missed—dragging the boy backward by his hair.
"Mom!"
She moved without thought. The soldier's neck snapped cleanly in her hands.
Jake staggered to his feet, his right arm hanging limp, his eyes glassy with fever. "Lab's... just ahead," he panted. "Go."
Elena hesitated.
"*Go!*" Jake roared.
Then the lights went out.
---
The lab was a nightmare.
Emergency power cast the room in ghastly red, illuminating rows of containment cells—each holding something that had once been human. Voss stood at the central console, his back to them, typing frantically.
"Ah. The prodigal son returns." He didn't turn. "And you brought my prize."
Noah shrank behind Elena.
Jake swayed in the doorway, his breathing ragged. "It's over, Voss. The mutations... they're out of your control."
Voss finally faced them, his glasses cracked, his lab coat stained with blood. "Control was never the point, Jacob. *Evolution* was." His gaze locked onto Noah. "And this boy... he's the missing link."
Elena stepped forward, her stolen sidearm raised. "You don't touch him."
Voss smiled. "I don't have to."
A shriek echoed from the vents above.
The evolved infected dropped from the ceiling like a spider, its too-long limbs splayed, its needle teeth bared.
Noah screamed.
Jake lunged.
And the world exploded.
**End of Chapter 9**
- Writer
