We were inside some sort of office room. We were crouching down, whispering, trying desperately to make sense of everything that had just happened.

Daniel took off his helmet and threw it on the floor. He ran his hands through his hair. “We need to get out of the city. It’s worse than we thought. The military haven’t reclaimed anything. It’s completely out of control. It’s completely overrun.”

He was talking fast. A tear streaked down his cheek, his voice became angry. “They said they were fixing it!”

Daniel was on the verge of breaking down. He had just lost his team, his friends. The closest thing he had to a family.

But what did he expect? What did I expect? We knew it was going to be dangerous, especially on the streets. We talked about it in the mission briefing. We all saw the footage of the failed rescue mission. We all knew we wouldn’t last long on the streets.

But what were the odds we’d be ambushed? What were the odds of both Ospreys going down?

The scary thing was, the more I thought about it the more I realized that something had attacked those Ospreys. I was sure of it. Something weird was going on, something that none of us could’ve prepared for.

I looked at Daniel. He seemed to be regaining some of his composure. He took a deep breath. “We need to get out of the city,” he said.

“Yeah, we totally need to get out of the city,” I agreed.

Daniel took another deep breath, wiping a tear away from his face.

“But how?” I asked. “There’s no way I’m going back down to the streets. They’re everywhere. And that other thing, that giant thing is down there.”

“We need a vehicle,” he said calmly.

“And do what?”

“Drive the hell out of here.”

“But the streets, they’re choked with abandoned cars and the infected. And that thing is roaming around somewhere. What if there are more of them? The big ones, I mean.”

“We have to try. We can’t stay here.”

“So, we get a car and then we just smash and crash our way through the horde of infected, all the way to safety? Where the hell are we going to get a car from anyways?”

“This is an office building,” Daniel pointed out. “Probably apartments on some of the floors as well. There’s got to be a parking level. I’m guessing in one of the sub basements. We find a sturdy, reliable car and then we make a break for it. But first, we need to get to a higher floor, maybe even to the roof, to see if we can spot a clear path out of the city.”

I nodded my head in agreement but just then I had the worst case of déjà vu. It was happening all over again. I was trapped in the city, surrounded by the infected. I felt like such an idiot. How did I get myself into this mess?

I was terrified at being in this situation again. So I had to keep reminding myself over and over why I was doing this. It was simple. We needed to find Maria. She was the most important thing, the only thing that mattered. To hell with my feelings, to hell with me.

Daniel stood up. “Ready?” he asked

“Wait a second, we can’t just go walking around in here,” I said. “Those things, the infected came out of nowhere. Which means they could be hiding in here. In any one of these rooms.”

“Yeah, you’re right.”

I looked around the room we had dived into. It appeared to be a small office room. There was a desk and a small book case. Not much else. It was actually a pretty depressing room. Even more depressing to think that someone spent eight hours of everyday in here, crunching numbers or paperwork or whatever.

Everything in the room was covered in a thin layer of red dust. It appeared the dust storm had found its way inside.

I wondered how many of these rooms were in this building, or just on this floor alone. The infected could be hiding anywhere. This could be like the casino all over again, I thought. I suddenly felt claustrophobic. The overwhelming sense of fear, of wanting to get as far away from the city as possible was back. The city was the worst place to be. I knew this. I knew this better than anyone. And yet there I was, right back in the thick of it.

“Do you still have the gun I gave you?” Daniel asked.

“Ah, would you be mad if I said no? I dropped it earlier.”

“That’s OK. Just means you have to stick to me like glue. Wherever I move, you move. I want you right behind me, OK?”

I nodded my head. “Let’s get this over with.”

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

We moved over to the wooden door. Daniel opened it, turning the door handle slowly, inch by inch. We waited and listened. There was no sound. No movement.

Daniel switched on the light on his rifle, shining it out into the corridor. The building appeared to be abandoned. Well, at least this floor appeared to be abandoned.

We moved through a labyrinth of corridors and office cubicles. We eventually found the stairwell. Daniel shined his torch up and down, making sure it was empty, and then we made our way for one of the higher floors.

At first I was tripping over the stairs, but after a while I got used to the suit, and we were able to power up maybe forty or fifty flights. I lost count after a while. Daniel had lost count as well. So we decided to get off on the next floor.

We must’ve been close to the top. We exited the stairwell and found ourselves on a floor that had been converted into some sort of exclusive bar. The sign on the wall read, ‘SkyBar’. Normally the bar would’ve had panoramic views of the city and the harbor, but thanks to the dust storm we couldn’t really see much at all.

We moved over to one of the glass walls and looked out at the city.

We could just barely make out the tops of the surrounding buildings. We could also see Sydney Tower. It was only half a block away. The swirling red dust seemed to make parts of the tower disappear and then reappear.

“Pretty amazing building,” I said.

“Yeah, it’s over three hundred meters or a thousand feet tall. The steel rope, the wires that support the tower, are over a meter thick. There are fifty-six wires in total, each about two hundred meters long.”

“How do you know all that?” I asked.

“I studied the city’s buildings before we came in. Needed to know where we could land if needed.”

The wire supports travelled the length of the actual tower in a criss-crossing pattern.

I looked over at Daniel. Another tear streaked down his face.

“Ethan was like a father to me,” he said. “He came for me, recruited me when I was training to become a Navy Seal. It was at the end of ‘Hell Week’. During the week, we’d only been allowed to sleep a total of three hours. It was torture. Ethan came for me in the middle of the night. He snuck into the barracks. I don’t know how he did it. And I don’t know why he chose me. Maybe it was because he knew my father. Maybe because he thought I was a talented soldier. He told me that if I came with him, that I could make a difference, that I would be part of a team that operated outside of the normal realms of government policies. He told me he could challenge me more than I’d ever been challenged. Make me a better soldier. A warrior. He told me that I would be rewarded for my efforts. Valued. I was sleep deprived. I thought I was dreaming. I don’t know why I agreed to go with him. Maybe because I was delusional at the time. Or maybe it was because I really believed his speech about making a difference.” He wiped the tear from his face. “But I guess none of that really matters now.”

I was looking at Daniel’s reflection in the window. His head was lowered. He was looking down at the intersection where his team had met their end. “It does matter,” I said. “Of course it matters. He believed in you. And he did challenge you. I mean, you’re only nineteen years of age and you’re already a highly trained soldier, a pilot, a hero. It matters because now it’s up to you and me to finish this mission, to save Maria.”

I don’t know if my speech had any great effect on him but he did seem to lift a little.

“Come on,” he said after a while. “We can’t see the roads from up here. Let’s go check the sub-basement levels for a getaway car.”

We were just about to head back for the stairwell, when one of the support wires on the Sydney Tower broke away and started whipping through the air.

More and more support wires began to snap free. There was an audible crack as each one broke away from the tower. Then the wires started smashing into the surrounding buildings, shattering windows, tearing and slicing through reinforced concrete.

About ten or so wires sliced into the building right next to the tower. It was a huge skyscraper that was nearly as tall as the tower itself. A split second after the wires had sliced through, it started to sway. Only a little at first, but then more and more violently. And then like a house of cards, it started to come down, almost in slow motion.

As it was collapsing, the building we were in started to shake, like we were in the middle of an earthquake. The demolition stirred up the dust and a few seconds later everything was completely obscured. It was a complete red out.

A few more seconds after that, we heard glass smashing.

“Oh no,” Daniel said.

We backed away from the window. Daniel grabbed me and we dove for the floor as a giant steel wire smashed right through the window we had just been looking out. The steel wire seemed to have a mind of its own. After it smashed through the window, it smashed through the far wall and simply kept going. Who knows how far it went? It could’ve gone right through to the other side of the building. Nothing was stopping it. Not reinforced glass or steel or concrete. Nothing.

Outside we could hear the crack of the steel whips and it sounded like another building was coming down. Our building started to shake again.

The wire that had smashed through the window seemed to be slithering through the building when all of a sudden it started coming back. Slowly at first, but then it started moving faster and faster. And then it was gone, back through the glass wall it had smashed through.

“Jesus, we need to get out of here,” Daniel said. “The building could come down any second now!”

We scrambled to our feet and headed back towards the stairwell. We needed to hurry. If the building came down, there would be no surviving it. We’d be crushed. Vaporized.

As we ran for the stairs, I couldn’t help but wonder what the hell was going on. It was strange and terrifying. There was no way we could’ve prepared for this. I mean, the wires, they just snapped free. Was it the tension? Had they been damaged? Or was it something else? I know it sounds crazy, but it looked like they were alive.

There was no time to analyze it. We just had to run. We actually ran right through the hole the wire had created when it smashed through the building. Luckily, it led straight to the emergency stairwell.

We started running down the stairs and then jumping down each flight, the suit absorbing the impact of each leap.

But after maybe five flights, the light from above disappeared and the darkness swallowed us whole. We stopped. We were breathing hard, we were scared, confused, terrified. Daniel fumbled with his rifle for a second, trying to turn on the torch. He finally found the switch. The small light illuminated the stairwell.

Fortunately, the shaking and the rumbling had stopped. We could only assume that the wire supports from the tower had stopped flailing around, stopped slicing through and destroying the surrounding buildings.

We held our breath for a few minutes as we listened and waited for the rumbling and the shaking to start back up. But it never did. The stairwell was silent.

“We need to find a car,” Daniel whispered. “Preferably a big one. Something with a bull bar. I’ve got a feeling it’s going to be a bumpy ride.”