For several long, agonizing minutes, the only sounds were the grunts of straining men, the sharp, protesting squeal of tortured metal, and the rhythmic, shouted count. "One! Two! THREE! Heave!"
Seven or eight of the burliest survivors, their faces streaked with soot and sweat, had jammed thick, rust-pitted rebar rods into the narrow gap of the 'Demon-Slayer's' chest plate. They leaned their collective weight into the bars, muscles corded and veins standing out on their necks, performing a bizarre, post-battle cesarean section on the dormant metal giant. The advanced combat armor, for all its black-box technology, had anticipated catastrophic system failure. There was, theoretically, a manual external release. Someone had found the hidden panel, pressed the button. The hatch had groaned open a mere inch before seizing completely, jammed by the internal damage wrought by the suited man's vibrational assaults. Now, it was a matter of brute force and leverage.
Inside the dark, cramped cockpit, Michael could hear the world outside as if from the bottom of a well—muffled cries, the crackle of distant fires, the guttural chants of the men trying to free him. The air was thick with the smells of ozone, hot metal, and his own panic. He sat strapped in, useless, a prince trapped in a toppled iron castle, waiting for his subjects to break down the door.
Finally, with a shriek of shearing metal, the hatch gave way. Cool, foul air washed over him, carrying the unmistakable copper-iron scent of fresh blood and the deeper, more revolting stench of voided bowels. He fumbled with the harness release, his fingers numb and clumsy, and half-fell, half-crawled out of the stricken machine.
The scene that greeted him as he stumbled to his feet, clutching the warm metal of the mechanical armor for support, stole the breath from his lungs and any words from his tongue.
It was a charnel house. The grand, defiant stand of mere hours ago had been reduced to a landscape of grotesque still-lifes. Where nearly three hundred souls had labored, fought, and hoped, now less than half that number moved, and many of those movements were the slow, pained drag of the wounded. The rest were still. They lay in tangled, awful intimacy with the things they had fought—human and Infected locked in final, fatal embraces, their blood mingling in dark, sticky pools on the churned earth. Many faces, frozen in the rictus of death, still held expressions of snarling fury or wide-eyed terror, a gallery of final moments that would haunt Michael's dreams for years to come.
His eyes, gritty with fatigue and dust, swept the perimeter. At the epicenter of the defense, the story was told in metal and misery. One of the bulldozers lay on its side like a felled beast, its cab crushed. Through the shattered glass, Michael could see the driver, his neck bent at an angle no living spine could manage. The other dozer hadn't rolled, but it listed grievously, two of its massive tires blown into shredded ribbons. The driver inside was slumped over the steering wheel, unmoving. And with a irony so bitter it tasted like ash, from its speakers, a cheerful, pre-recorded female voice continued to loop with oblivious persistence: "Please mind the vehicle is reversing. Vehicle reversing. Please mind…"
Then his gaze found his pride and joy, the most expensive single item he'd ever 'acquired'—the brand-new, bright-yellow Sany excavator. It stood, a monument to ruination. It wasn't overturned, but its massive digging arm hung limp, several thick hydraulic hoses on its wrist severed and dripping their vital fluid onto the ground in dark, oily puddles. The reinforced cab, upon which he'd spent so much effort, was now a crumpled tin can, twisted and compressed by immense force. The shapes within were no longer recognizable as human.
The loss was not just material; it was a physical blow to the community's spirit, a bone-deep wound. They had survived, but they were crippled.
"John! John!" Michael finally found his voice, the name tearing from a raw throat. He needed to rally, to assess, to dosomething—anything—to staunch the bleeding, both literal and figurative. His call was meant to summon his stalwart lieutenant, the rock upon which much of this endeavor had been built.
It was not the minotaur who answered, but the hulking form of Onyile, his dark face grim beneath a layer of grime. The big man's approach was heavy, his shoulders slumped. A cold dread, colder than the Detroit night, settled in Michael's stomach. He braced himself for the words, the solemn pronouncement: He fought bravely, boss. He's gone.
Onyile stopped before him, cleared his throat, and in a voice hoarse with thirst and exhaustion, said, "Boss. Saw John and Zak slip into the back of a truck to get some water. Slammed the door shut. Probably can't hear a damn thing over their own guzzling. To be honest, I'd join 'em. My throat's drier than a bone in the sun."
A wave of such profound, irrational relief and fury washed over Michael that he swayed on his feet. "May you all die of thirst, you inconsiderate bastards!" he roared, the curse more a release of tension than genuine malice.
The Swearing was automatic, a reflex. The truth beneath it was a fragile, burgeoning hope. His key people were alive. In this slaughterhouse, that was a miracle.
Order, or a ragged semblance of it, began to reassert itself from the chaos. A skeleton crew, eyes wide and jumpy, was posted on the perimeter, their weapons never lowering as they scanned the oppressive darkness for any sign of the horde's return. The rest of those who could still walk, their movements stiff with shock and adrenaline crash, began the grim task of battlefield triage and salvage. The dead were separated from the Infected—a grisly, necessary sorting. Weapons were collected, ammunition counted with a new, desperate frugality.
Meanwhile, Michael, with a select group of a dozen of his most capable—those still standing and able to hold a weapon—approached the jagged, smoking hole in the earth. The crater left by the Sherman's cataclysmic demise was a raw wound in the ground. At its bottom yawned the black, silent maw of the revealed entrance. Hope, a timid and bruised thing, flickered in Michael's chest. Let this be it, he thought, the plea a silent mantra. After all this, let it be here. Or I might just sit down and never get up again.
They prepared with a caution born of brutal experience. A torch, fashioned from an oily rag wrapped around a piece of rebar, was lit. It flared, casting wild, dancing shadows. With a swing, it was tossed down into the blackness. It fell for a surprisingly long time—ten meters, maybe more—before hitting with a clatter and a shower of sparks. The flame didn't gutter and die; it settled, burning steadily on what looked like a concrete floor. The air below was stagnant, cold, and ancient, but it was breathable. It was not a tomb. Not yet.
John, the minotaur, went first. He needed no rope, simply leaping down the sheer side of the crater, his hooves finding purchase on the rough stone and earth. He landed with a heavy thud, the pale, silvery glow of his Level Three Battle Aura flickering to life around him, illuminating the immediate area like a walking lantern. The practical magic of it never ceased to amaze Michael—a flashlight that ran on willpower and canned peaches.
Next went Zhang Tiezhu, the grim-faced veteran from Base 0005, and the young, wide-eyed Li Hao. They slid down a knotted rope, their descent swift and silent. Of the two dozen souls who had followed Zhang from their fallen home, only these two remained fully combat-ready. The rest were gone or broken. The rope saw a few more descend—a careful, tactical insertion.
They waited, a tense silence hanging over the crater's edge. Then, from the gloom below, John's large, shadowy hand appeared, waving an all-clear.
Only then did Michael follow, his worn boots scraping against the earth as he rappelled down. It wasn't cowardice; it was the bleak arithmetic of leadership. He was the lynchpin. If this was a trap, the crippled remnant above had a better chance if he wasn't the first one speared on it.
His boots hit solid, dusty concrete. The air was markedly colder, carrying the scent of long-settled dust, damp stone, and the faint, sweet smell of old, rotting wood. He straightened up, his hand going to the heavy flashlight on his belt. Before he could even flick it on, his eyes sought out Zhang Tiezhu, who stood a dozen feet away, utterly still.
"Well?" Michael's voice echoed in the vast, dark space. "Is this it? The lab? Did you find the thawing solution?"
Zhang didn't turn. His shoulders, usually squared with a soldier's bearing, were slumped in defeat. "See for yourself," he said, the words flat and hollow.
Dread, colder than the subterranean air, coiled in Michael's gut. He thumbed the switch on his flashlight. The powerful beam cut through the darkness, revealing not the sterile, stainless-steel tables and neat rows of glass vials he had desperately imagined.
They were in a cavernous, man-made space, the ceiling supported by rows of colossal concrete pillars that vanished into the darkness above. The chamber was enormous, the size of several football fields laid end-to-end. They had entered in one corner, explaining why their surface digging had missed it for so long.
And it was filled, not with scientific apparatus, but with storage. Row upon row, stack upon stack, of large, crate-like containers. They were made of thick timber, now gray and furry with advanced rot, their corners softened by time. They ranged in size from that of a small shipping container down to something resembling a large wardrobe. Inside, glimpsed through splits in the wood, was not equipment, but dense, pristine white packing foam, carefully molded to protect… something. The contents were utterly obscured.
This was no biocontainment lab. It was a warehouse. A tomb for forgotten things.
Zhang Tiezhu's despair made perfect, terrible sense. This was a dead end. A colossal, heartbreaking dead end.
A strange, stubborn part of Michael's mind refused to accept it. He walked forward, his boots crunching on grit, towards the nearest large crate, about the size of a standard shipping container. He didn't need to break it open. Nailed to the disintegrating wood was a small, tarnished but still-legible brass plaque. He wiped a thick layer of dust from it with his thumb and angled his flashlight.
The words, stamped neatly into the metal, seemed to glow in the beam:
ITEM: 1nm Process Lithography System
ORIGIN: TSMC Fab, Arizona
STATUS AT CONSIGNMENT: Operational, 80% Service Life Remaining…
The words seemed to hang in the cold air. 1nm. Lithography. TSMC. Concepts from another world, another time. A ghost from the world before the Collapse.
And then, like a key turning in a long-rusted lock, memory clicked. The name on the keycard. Paul Joseph.The lonely, meticulous researcher from the half-burnt journal. The journal that hadn't just talked about the lab. It had mentioned, almost in passing, the other project. The contingency. The whispered rumors of a government program to preserve the crown jewels of the old world's technology, to bury seeds of knowledge and industry deep, hoping they might one day sprout again in a less insane future. "Site Gamma,"the journal had called it. Not a lab. A cache. A time capsule for a dead civilization.
This was it. Not the prize they sought, but perhaps… a different one. A vault. And if the paranoid, preparation-obsessed old government had stored something as delicate and specific as a 1nm chip fab, what elsemight be buried here, sealed in foam and hope?
He whirled around, the beam of his light swinging wildly. "Stop moping!" he shouted at Zhang Tiezhu, his voice suddenly alive with a new, fierce energy. "This isn't a failure! This is a cache! A pre-Collapse cache! They wouldn't just store machines! They'd store everything! Medical tech, preservation systems—everything! Start looking! Check every label, every manifest! The thawing solution could be here! It hasto be!"
The words were a lifeline thrown to a drowning man. Zhang's head snapped up, a flicker of the old fire returning to his eyes. Without a word, he gestured to Li Hao, and the two began moving along the silent rows of crates, their own flashlights joining Michael's in probing the secrets of the vault.
It was then that John the minotaur lumbered over, his great head bowed slightly in a mix of contrition and eagerness to help. "Boss," he rumbled, his voice still rough. "What can we do? Just give the order."
He was trying to make up for his earlier absence, for choosing a moment of thirst over his leader's immediate predicament. Michael looked at the loyal, simple, brave, and functionally illiterate creature. The hope and zeal in the minotaur's eyes were genuine. In any other task, he would be invaluable.
Michael sighed, the brief flare of discovery tempered by the sheer, overwhelming scale of the task and the practical realities of his team. He clapped a hand on the minotaur's massive, furred arm.
"John," he said, the exhaustion clear in his voice but without real anger. "Unless the order is 'smash that crate open with your head,' I'm not sure you can help with this part. The instructions are all written down."
He gestured vaguely at the sea of crates, at the tiny, inscrutable plaques that held their secrets. "You, my friend, can't read a damn word."