A middle-aged man stepped forward nervously from the group of survivors, his voice cracking with emotion. He was overweight, balding, wearing a rumpled business suit that suggested he'd been traveling for work. His face was red and blotchy from crying.
His wife was among the bitten.
She sat in one of the leather chairs, her head lolling to the side, her eyes already beginning to cloud over. A massive bite wound on her shoulder continued to seep blood, staining her blouse dark red.
"They'll be okay… right?" the man continued, his words tumbling out in a desperate rush. "Maybe it's just shock. Maybe they need a doctor. There has to be doctors somewhere in the airport. Medical staff. They can help her. They have to—"
Jack exhaled heavily, the sound carrying the weight of hard truths that needed to be spoken.
"Sir," he said quietly, his voice gentle but firm. "You've seen it yourself."
He gestured toward the arrivals hall below, where the sounds of screaming and moaning still echoed.
"They're infected. Whatever that thing is—virus, bacteria, hell if I know—it's changing them. Rewriting their biology from the inside out." Jack's voice was steady, matter-of-fact, the tone of someone delivering bad news they wished they didn't have to deliver. "They'll turn soon. Maybe minutes. Maybe an hour. But they will turn."
"No… No, that can't be true!"
The man's voice rose to a shout, his face contorting with anguish and denial.
"She's still alive! She's still breathing! Look at her—she's still my wife! You can't just—you can't give up on her!"
He took a half-step forward, his body moving on instinct toward the woman he'd promised to love in sickness and in health.
But then he froze.
His foot stopped mid-step, his body locking up as if invisible chains had suddenly wrapped around him.
Because he'd seen what happened when the infected turned. He'd watched it in the arrivals hall—watched people he'd been standing next to suddenly transform into monsters that attacked without hesitation, without recognition, without mercy.
His fear chained him in place more effectively than any physical restraint could have.
Jack's voice hardened, taking on the commanding tone of someone who needed people to obey for their own survival.
"Sir, please step back. For your safety—and everyone else's. We have to isolate them before they—"
"Please!" The man's voice broke completely, tears streaming down his face. "You can't do this! Help her! Please, someone help her!"
His pleas echoed through the lounge, bouncing off the walls and windows.
But no one stepped in.
No one moved to help.
Everyone had seen what the infected turned into. The mindless aggression. The unstoppable hunger. The complete absence of humanity in those dead eyes.
Nobody wanted to risk being next.
The silence that followed the man's pleas was somehow worse than the screaming had been. It was the silence of people choosing survival over compassion. The silence of humanity failing under pressure.
Jack clenched his jaw, a muscle jumping in his cheek.
"I'm sorry," he said, and he genuinely meant it. "I can't take that risk. Not with everyone else here."
He turned to his remaining security officers, his expression hardening into the mask of command.
"Set up the barriers. Now. Separate the infected from the main group."
His men moved immediately, grateful to have clear orders to follow. They didn't have to think about the moral implications—they just had to obey.
Tables from the lounge were dragged across the floor, their legs scraping loudly. Luggage racks were repositioned. Seats were moved to create a physical barrier between the infected corner and the rest of the survivors.
It wasn't much—just furniture and metal poles—but it was something.
A line in the sand.
A last desperate attempt to maintain control and order in a world that had lost both.
The air was thick with despair as they worked. The infected moaned softly, their sounds growing less and less human with each passing minute. The survivors watched with hollow eyes, knowing that any one of them could be sitting in that corner tomorrow.
Emily watched silently from her position near the railing, her sharp eyes analyzing Jack's every move.
He's cautious, she noted. Disciplined. Makes hard decisions quickly without second-guessing himself. Definitely ex-military—probably saw combat. Marines, most likely.
A man like that could keep a small group alive in the early chaos of an outbreak.
And that was exactly why she'd spoken up earlier—to build trust, to establish herself as someone useful, to secure a position in whatever survivor base was forming here on the third floor.
Emily wasn't naive. She knew that in a world like this—a world where civilization had collapsed in less than an hour—alliances meant survival.
Lone wolves died. Groups survived.
And she needed to be part of the right group.
Jack Reynolds seemed like he could be that leader. Competent. Strong. Willing to make the hard calls. Those were the qualities that mattered now.
I need to make myself valuable to him, Emily thought clinically, already planning her next moves. Show that I can contribute. That keeping me alive benefits the group.
But before she could think further about long-term survival strategies—
"Watch out!"
Emily's voice cut through the air like a knife, sharp and urgent.
One of the bitten—a teenage boy, maybe sixteen or seventeen, wearing a high school letterman jacket—suddenly convulsed violently. His body arched backward at an unnatural angle, his spine bending in ways that shouldn't have been possible.
And then he lunged upward with a guttural roar that echoed through the lounge.
"GRAAAAAHHHHH!"
His eyes had turned completely gray, the pupils blown so wide they'd consumed all the color. His mouth gaped open impossibly wide, revealing teeth that seemed sharper than they should have been, stained with blood and foam.
He moved with terrifying speed—faster than the zombies downstairs, faster than the newly turned should have been able to move.
A nearby security guard who was moving a stool—a young man, probably mid-twenties, new to the job—froze in shock as the infected teenager launched himself forward.
"Move!" Jack's voice boomed across the lounge, carrying the unmistakable tone of battlefield command.
But the guard couldn't move. His body had locked up, his mind unable to process the horror rushing toward him. His eyes were wide, his mouth open in a silent scream.
The infected boy's hands reached out, fingers hooked into claws.
He was going to make contact. Going to bite. Going to spread the infection to one more person.
But Jack was faster.
Years of combat experience meant he reacted while others were still processing. His body moved on trained instinct, his muscles remembering what his conscious mind hadn't yet decided.
He grabbed a hard-shell suitcase from the ground—someone's abandoned luggage—and hurled it with all his considerable strength.
The suitcase flew through the air like a missile and smashed straight into the infected boy's skull with a sound like a sledgehammer hitting a watermelon.
CRACK!
The impact was brutal, devastating. The zombie's head snapped to the side, and his body followed, crashing sideways into the wall with enough force to leave a dent in the drywall.
He collapsed in a heap, twitching.
But he wasn't dead.
Wasn't even close to dead.
He was already trying to get up again, his movements jerky and uncoordinated but relentless.
"Take it down!" Jack shouted to his team. "Don't let it get back up!"
The nearby guards—snapping out of their momentary panic—surged forward with whatever weapons they could grab.
A metal chair leg, torn from its base.
A broken pipe someone had found in a maintenance closet.
Even a fire extinguisher, hefty and red and capable of crushing bone.
The blows rained down mercilessly, one after another after another.
THUD! CRACK! CRUNCH!
Metal met flesh met bone.
Blood splattered across the pristine floor tiles of the United lounge, painting abstract patterns in crimson and gray.
The infected boy thrashed and snarled, trying to fight back, trying to bite, trying to infect.
But there were too many of them. Too many weapons. Too much fear-driven adrenaline making them hit harder than they normally could.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity but was probably less than thirty seconds, the thing stopped moving.
Completely stopped.
The guards stepped back, breathing hard, their improvised weapons dripping with gore.
But the nightmare wasn't over.
The others who'd been bitten—the ones still sitting in their chairs, still clinging to the last moments of their humanity—began convulsing violently, one after another after another.
It was like watching dominoes fall.
The businessman's wife jerked upright, her eyes snapping open to reveal milky white orbs.
An elderly woman in a cardigan started seizing, her body thrashing.
A young man in a college sweatshirt lurched to his feet, moving with the jerky, puppet-like motions of the newly infected.
Within seconds, four more of them had transformed, their human consciousness extinguished like candles in a hurricane.
They shrieked—horrible, inhuman sounds that barely resembled anything that should come from a human throat—and lunged toward the group of survivors.
Chaos erupted again.
People screamed and scrambled backward, pressing against walls, trying to put distance between themselves and the attacking infected.
Jack and his security team fought desperately, forming a defensive line between the zombies and the civilians.
A wooden stool shattered against a zombie's head, splinters flying everywhere.
A guard screamed as an infected woman bit down on his forearm, her teeth sinking deep into muscle. Blood sprayed across the tiles in an arterial arc.
Emily ducked behind the counter of the lounge's bar area, her heart pounding so hard she could hear it in her ears. She clutched a metal bar she'd found—part of a bar stool's frame—gripping it so tightly her knuckles turned white.
Her breath came in quick, sharp gasps. Her analytical mind was still working, still processing, but it was fighting against the primal fear that threatened to overwhelm her.
Stay calm. Observe. Survive.
The fight was brief but brutal—a matter of minutes that felt like hours.
Jack moved like a man half his age, his military training evident in every precise strike, every tactical positioning. He crushed skulls with a metal pipe he'd armed himself with, his movements efficient and merciless.
His team followed his lead, fighting with the desperation of people who knew they were fighting for their lives.
When it was finally over—when the last infected body stopped twitching—silence returned to the third floor.
But it was a different kind of silence now.
Heavier. Darker. Filled with the weight of what they'd just done and what they'd lost.
Five people had turned. Four were put down, their bodies lying motionless in pools of spreading blood.
One guard hadn't been so lucky.
The same young man who'd been warned first—the one who'd frozen when the teenage boy lunged—had managed to dodge that initial attack.
But in the chaos that followed, when four more infected transformed simultaneously, he'd been dragged down by three of them working together.
Now he lay on the floor, his throat torn out, his eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling.
Dead before he could turn.
Maybe that was a mercy.
Emily slowly emerged from behind the bar counter, her legs shaking slightly as the adrenaline began to fade. She exhaled shakily, her breath coming out in a long, trembling sigh.
Her eyes found Jack, who stood motionless in the center of the carnage.
He was gripping his improvised baton—a metal pipe wrapped with duct tape for better grip—and his hands were covered in blood. His uniform was splattered with gore. His face was unreadable, locked in that thousand-yard stare that soldiers got when they'd seen too much death.
This is just the beginning, Emily thought grimly, her analytical mind already racing ahead to what would come next.
The infection spreads fast. Twenty minutes from bite to transformation. That means containment is nearly impossible. Quarantine won't work. This is going to spread globally within days, maybe hours.
If I'm going to survive… I'll need people like him on my side.
She straightened her posture, smoothed down her red dress as best she could despite the circumstances, and began walking toward Jack Reynolds.
It was time to make herself indispensable.