Chapter 10: Escape
The doors might as well have been welded shut for all the good conventional methods were doing. Rick had put three rounds from his Python into the nearest exit's lock mechanism, the bullets sparking off reinforced steel without even leaving significant dents. Shane was attacking another door with a fire axe he'd found, each blow ringing like a funeral bell but accomplishing nothing more than chipping paint.
Twenty-two minutes.
Jake watched the futile efforts with growing desperation. He could feel the building's systems humming around them, automated protocols preparing for thermal sterilization with mechanical indifference. Jenner had designed this place well—every safeguard, every redundancy, every possible escape route had been planned for and sealed off.
Except Jenner hadn't planned for alchemy.
"Move!" Jake shouted, pushing past a confused Glenn to reach the nearest door. The others stared at him in bewilderment—what could the medical student accomplish that Rick's gun and Shane's axe couldn't?
Jake placed his bleeding hands flat against the lock mechanism, feeling for the metal beneath the surface paneling. His power reached out, probing, analyzing, understanding the molecular structure of steel and copper and whatever electronic components controlled the deadbolt.
"Make it brittle. Change the crystalline structure. Turn hardened steel into something fragile enough to shatter."
The transmutation felt like trying to push a boulder uphill with his mind. This wasn't simple matter manipulation—this was forcing a fundamental change in molecular bonds, convincing atoms to rearrange themselves in defiance of their natural inclinations. Jake gritted his teeth and pushed harder.
The lock mechanism began to smoke.
Sparks erupted from the electronic components as Jake's will imposed itself on resistant matter. The steel became something else—still recognizably metal but wrong, brittle, ready to fail under the slightest pressure. Blood poured from his nose as the effort tore through his consciousness like shrapnel.
The lock shattered with a sound like breaking glass.
"How did you—" Rick started, but Jake was already moving.
"GO! JUST GO!" Jake's voice was raw, desperate. He sprinted toward the next door, his legs wobbling from the psychic backlash but functioning well enough to carry him forward.
The second transmutation was easier—his power had learned the lock's structure, could reproduce the effect with less trial and error. But the cumulative strain was building, each use of his alchemy extracting a higher price from his overtaxed nervous system.
Door two shattered. Then door three.
By the fourth door, Jake's hands were shaking so violently he could barely maintain contact with the metal. His vision swam with black spots, and he could taste copper in the back of his throat. But the group was moving now, flowing through the breaches he'd created like water through a dam.
Fifteen minutes.
The fifth door nearly killed him.
Jake's palms pressed against the lock mechanism, and he reached out with his power only to find... nothing. The well was dry. His alchemy simply wasn't there, burned out by overuse and neural feedback. He strained harder, desperately trying to force the transmutation, and felt something fundamental tear loose inside his head.
The lock sparked, smoked, began to change—and then Jake's hands split open like overripe fruit.
Blood erupted from the cracks in his skin, painting the door crimson. The pain was indescribable, like having molten metal poured into his nerve endings. Jake opened his mouth to scream and only managed a strangled gasp before his knees buckled.
The lock shattered anyway, his final desperate effort succeeding even as his body failed completely.
Strong arms caught him before he hit the floor—Daryl, his crossbow slung across his back, pale eyes bright with something that might have been admiration or fear.
"I got you, brother," the tracker said, hauling Jake upright with surprising gentleness. "We're getting out of here."
Jake tried to speak, to tell Daryl he could walk, but his vocal cords had apparently decided to stop functioning. Blood ran from his split hands, from his nose, from the corners of his eyes where burst capillaries painted red tears across his cheeks.
"How much damage have I done to myself? How much of this can my body take before it just... stops?"
But those were questions for later. If there was a later.
Daryl half-carried, half-dragged him toward the emergency stairs, the rest of the group streaming ahead of them in a desperate exodus. Behind them, the building's voice counted down with mechanical precision: "Decontamination in eight minutes, forty-seven seconds."
The stairwell was a concrete-and-steel throat that seemed to go on forever, each flight a small eternity of pounding feet and ragged breathing. Jake's consciousness flickered in and out like a faulty bulb—one moment he was aware of Daryl's strong arm around his waist, the next he was floating in a gray void where voices echoed like whispers in a cathedral.
"How many more floors?" Shane's voice, tight with exhaustion and stress.
"Three," Rick answered. "Maybe four."
"Jake's bleeding all over the place," Carol said, her voice thick with worry. "We need to get him to a hospital."
Jake wanted to laugh at the irony. A hospital. In a world where hospitals were graveyards and medical care meant cleaning wounds with dirty water and hoping for the best. But laughter required conscious control of his respiratory system, and that seemed to be beyond him at the moment.
"Six minutes, twelve seconds," VI announced helpfully.
The ground floor materialized around them like a mirage becoming real—polished tiles, glass doors, and beyond them the blessed sight of open air and empty parking lot. Freedom, purchased with Jake's blood and whatever was left of his sanity.
The group stumbled through the exit in a ragged line, weapons forgotten, dignity abandoned, driven by nothing more than the animal imperative to put distance between themselves and the approaching fire. Jake felt pavement under his feet, felt Daryl's grip steady him as his legs remembered how to function.
"Vehicles!" Rick shouted. "Everyone pick a vehicle and GO!"
The convoy scattered like startled birds, engines roaring to life with desperate urgency. Jake found himself in the back seat of Daryl's battered Cherokee, his head lolling against the window as consciousness continued its flickering dance. Carol was beside him, pressing what looked like her own shirt against his bleeding hands while Sophia watched with wide, frightened eyes from the front passenger seat.
"Drive," Jake managed to whisper, the word scraping his throat raw. "Fast."
Daryl didn't need to be told twice. The Cherokee roared away from the CDC with enough acceleration to press Jake back into his seat, the building shrinking in the rear window like a bad dream dissolving in the morning light.
They were maybe half a mile away when the sky caught fire.
The explosion was silent at first—a white-hot flash that turned night into day for one impossible instant. Then the sound hit them, a rolling thunderclap that shook the Cherokee's windows and sent car alarms shrieking across Atlanta. Behind them, the CDC ceased to exist in any meaningful sense, consumed by the same thermal protocols that had once protected it.
Jake watched the mushroom cloud rise into the night sky and felt something settle in his chest that might have been peace. He'd done it. Saved them all, against impossible odds and despite his own limitations. The speech block had tried to silence him, but actions spoke louder than words.
"Whatever I am, whatever I'm becoming, at least I can still save people. At least my power can serve something greater than itself."
In the driver's seat, Daryl caught his eye in the rearview mirror. "You saved us back there. Whatever the hell you did, however you did it—you saved us all."
Rick's voice crackled over the radio from the lead vehicle: "Jake? You still with us?"
Jake tried to reach for the handset, but his damaged hands wouldn't cooperate. Carol took it instead, her voice steady despite the tears streaming down her face.
"He's alive. Hurt, but alive."
"Good," Rick said, and Jake could hear something in the sheriff's voice that hadn't been there before. Respect. Trust. The recognition of a debt that could never be fully repaid. "Whatever he is, he saved us. All of us."
Shane's voice cut in, darker and more suspicious: "Question is, what else can he do? And why the hell didn't he tell us about it sooner?"
Jake closed his eyes and let unconsciousness take him, his last thought a bitter recognition that his troubles were just beginning. He'd revealed his alchemy to save their lives, but secrets once exposed had a tendency to multiply and spread.
The speech block might keep him from explaining his foreknowledge, but it couldn't hide what he'd become. The questions would come, demanding answers he couldn't give, trust he couldn't fully earn.
But that was a problem for tomorrow. Tonight, they were all alive, and sometimes that was enough.
The Cherokee rolled through the Georgia darkness, carrying its cargo of survivors toward an uncertain future while Atlanta burned behind them like a funeral pyre for the world that was.
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