The sound of chaos seems quiet to Deacon in this moment. He stands there, clutching his radio, waiting for the silence to break. A tear trickles down his tense face, washing along a thin line of dust with it, cleaning the skin it crosses over. His breath is shallowed and quick.

Along all that, a sound silent to everyone is the sound loudest to him. The sound of Jane’s voice echoing in his voiding-out heart. The melancholy surrounding him mixes, uglily harmonizing with the sound of the gurgling, groaning, and screaming death that rumbles towards Jane.

He just stands there, powerless, watching the horde come in, and run towards Jane. Out of the corner of his other eye, he spots a figure on the makeshift ATC tower. It’s Stan, watching the horde rip apart every innocent life it crosses. He seems wounded. He limps out of sight.

The horde suddenly sets off a can of fuel and causes it to explode.

Deacon turns around towards Stan. He gets close to the tower without being detected by Stan. “You caused all this, you son of a bitch.” Deacon mutters under his own breath.

And taking his own time, he climbs up, feeling what Stan felt when he lured the horde here. Rage. The need for revenge.

Deacon reaches the top to see Stan in a worse condition than he just saw him in.

He is laying down, gasping for air with several cuts and slashes in his body. Even his left arm has been shot through. “How did I not hear that gunshot?” Deacon wonders.

Most alarmingly, there lies a body next to him. It’s stagnant, pale, and basically lifeless. The veins have gone blue and eyes are partially pushed out of their sockets. Stan must have choked him to death.

It’s Father’s body, with a bruised face, elbows bent backwards, and a foot turned the wrong way. He must have tortured him, then beat him to death.

“H-Hey Deac-Deacon.” Stan hisses out.

“What the hell happened here? Are you okay?” Asks Deacon, wasting no breath.

“No,” he replies, “but you will be.”

Instead of getting bogged down by the confusing “You will be” Deacon just heard, he decides to put together some pieces at the scene.

“You choked him.” Deacon deduces. “Yes, I did.” Stan adds, coldly.

“Why?”

“I had to protect you. After your mom, I knew I couldn’t leave you with him in the same world.” He weakly replies, following it with a sob.

He knew he’d be dying. God is merciful, but he doesn’t give you another life. Life is a game without the save option.

Life is like breath. It comes in one way, and is never the same when it leaves.

“Hey-uh. I’m sorry, kiddo.” Stan says in his last breath.

Though Deacon tries to hold up an angry front, behind the cardboard-cut out of the emotion, he holds back tears. His throat begins aching, trying to supress the crying.

Everything Stan had done for Deacon since the airport, he took for granted. Never paid him back. But strangely, Stan didn’t seem like he expected anything back. He looked content when with Deacon. Perhaps a little protective.

Deacon holds Stan’s hand for one last time, as his last breath leaves. And gently, the sound of breathing comes to an end.

It reminds him of a happier time where he held his father’s hand, never to let go until he got begged to do so.

He lets the melancholic air envelope him, and sits around Stan for a while.

Meanwhile, Jane turns and twists as hard as she can, manoeuvring around the camp-airport, running through every single choke point in the camp. With literal death just about ten feet behind her, chasing her warm, fresh, and runny blood, she tries her best to not panic.

Soon, she gets an idea. She noticed that some of them were workers with steel-made tools in their pockets, and tied to their thighs. “If I can run them through some explosives, all I’d need is to have one of the tools to cause a spark. It'd blow them sky high.” She thinks to herself.

So, she does so. Firstly, she takes them through the bike parking lot. And one by one, bikes’ fuel tanks begin exploding. Shards of metal fly around everywhere, and so do dismembered rotten bodies. After that, she takes them to barrels of fuel. But this time, she tips the barrels over.

The stampede trips over them and piles on one by one, shielding it from the ones with the tools. “Why in the actual fuck didn’t that work?” She thinks to herself, having almost run out of breath.

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She keeps running, and this time, she aims for a more potentially effective explosion. The abandoned trucks filled with aviation fuel. The most volatile sort of fuel.

In order for this to work, all she has to do is slide under the truck and run out the other side. But the tools have to hit the nozzle of the tank. If not, the sparks will be left outside, and hence be ineffective. She needs this to work.

She runs up to the truck and slides under it. She gets up and sprints away, expecting no explosion. But to her surprise, the vapor at the nozzle catches a spark, igniting it. The white-hot flame makes the tank’s nozzle hiss out a straight white-hot streak of flame.

Jane looks back in a state of panic. Suddenly, the air leaves from around her and rushes into the tank. The tank blows up with a big crashing noise. The rocks in the runway are kicked out of the ground. The dust in the crevasses of the ground vibrated into a thin layer of smog. The top of the tank is ripped off. Shards begin flying everywhere. The bodies begin to get ripped to shreds by the heat of the explosion, and the flying shards of twisted metal.

It worked.

Half the horde is gone. Torn to pieces, and reduced to ash.

All she needs to do is to get to another explosive structure. Her eyes lock on to a plane. It’s small. It’s a Cessna 152, but it’s fuel tank could still create an explosion to take out enough, so she can take care of the rest by hand.

Now, she begins running faster. And again, she slides under it and leaves out the other side, sprinting away.

Soon enough, the dead collide with the hull of the plane. Piling over each other, they begin pushing it to the side. As that happens, most of them run around the plane.

“Damn it!” She groans out, as she notices that the dead have shielded the plane from meeting any tools, again. Nowhere else to go, she keeps running with the two hundred soulless bodies following her.

Meanwhile, Deacon sits on the roof, staring at Stan.

To ensure that he does not come back as a corpse, he takes his knife and gently puts it up against the side of his head. Slowly, he pushes it in, and stops when the full blade has gone in.

With not enough courage to pull the blade back out, he closes Stan’s eyes.

As soon as he moves his hands away, he finds that Stan’s face has changed. It blurs into a different face. A familiar face. A face that brings back memories. A face of inducing guilt.

Looking at the face, he realizes exactly who it is. He freezes. Deacon’s face holds a horrified, yet clear look. It is as if he was surprised, but not baffled. The trickling train of tears turns into a flowing current of tears. “What did I do?” He asks himself out loud, looking at his own hands.

It’s David. Deacon’s father. “What did I do-…” Deacon wonders to himself, caught off-guard. But he doesn’t seem confused.

That moment did everything but confuse Deacon. He understood. He understood painfully that Stan was but a mere fantasy. He had ruined his last moment with his mother at the funeral, and used the persona ‘Stanley’ to cover up the father he did not want to face. The husband of the wife he had decimated in front of a crowd that day.

He begins crying over the body, embracing the failure he had made out of himself. “I’m sorry, dad. I ran away from you. From the truth. Yet, you stayed with me. I never deserved you.”

A minute of crying later, a groan of frustration leaves his breath. “What the fuck Deacon?” He says to himself. “Everyone who ever mattered to you has been hurt by you. Why did you ruin their lives? Why did you stay with them, even though you didn’t deserve them? Why were you fucking born?!”

From the vast and dark emptiness, his voice echoes back to him, “Why were you fucking born?!”

That is when he realizes, before he can hurt Jane by trying to help her, he must leave. She will take care of Ellie on her own. But before that, he looks at David. For one last time, he says, “I love you, Dad.”

He musters up the courage to pull out the knife and does so slowly and respectfully. He picks up David and gets down the stairs, to walk away from the camp. Just anywhere but around anyone he can hurt.

“Deacon! Help!” Jane cries out in the distance, having being backed into a corner. The soulless bodies sprint towards her, screaming, and choking on their own blood.

But Deacon walks away, leaving her to fend for herself, knowing it would be somehow worse than death if he decided to help her. He walks out, and stands under a bridge, watching the chaos unfold. Or rather, watching it fold. Maybe him not being there will stop the chaos. Maybe he is a field of bad omens.

But suddenly, in the distance, he spots a bright blue explosion. It rapidly expands to be as big as the airport itself. It started from where Jane was.

As it rumbles and whooshes to become bigger and bigger, it swallows the airport whole. The explosion is so bright, even Deacon himself cannot stare into it. His eyes burn and ache, begging to be scratched out of their sockets. He covers his eyes and presses against them as hard as he can, Dropping his father’s body.

Deacon braces for impact with the loudly expanding bubble of explosion. The ground shakes with it, and the bridge above him cracks.

The flame ignites the fuel left in the backup generators from before the fall, activating the PA system. All the new year’s decoration is swept out from the tents. The campers were hiding it all to surprise Father.

Just before Deacon’s face, the flames from the explosion die. They die to reveal a horrific sight.

The day is empty. The sky has gone deep purple tainted by the smoke, almost the same as black. Bats hang upside-down from the edge of the roof, charred beyond recognition, held in position by the hardened and burnt meat. The bridge is destroyed like a biscuit broken in small chunks. The storm had just happened. A part of the world had just died.

Deacon stands in the mess, barely able to hold himself up, just observing it. Burning posters and confetti from the new year party’s preparation make an effort to brighten up the day. Bodies cover the ground, charred beyond the point of recognition. Their blood boils and bubbles through their skin, in a sickening pink-brown colour.

“Flight EK1011 is now un-boarding. Please leave the highlighted paths near the gates empty and stand behind the yellow fence to ensure a safe and efficient arrival of passengers.” The partially broken speaker buzzes out.

Suddenly, something hits the ground. The shattered glass rattles on the floor, and Deacon feels a burning sensation. Then, the ground begins shaking. Broken cars’ suspensions try to keep up with the vibrations.

It gets increasingly intense. That’s when, a pillar from the bridge above Deacon breaks. The road begins falling slowly. As it sluggishly descends on him, he tries to move, but feels paralyzed. It slowly angles down towards his head.

Only one other person could’ve done this, if not Deacon.

Jane.