We ran so hard I was sure my lungs had actually caught on fire. My legs were so full of lactic acid I thought they were going to burst. I tripped over the last step because I physically couldn’t lift my feet anymore. Kenji picked me up, dragged me forward.

Kim was waiting at the top of the stairs. “What is that noise?”

“They’re here,” Kenji gasped.

We shut the door and I collapsed on the floor. Kenji was doubled over, trying desperately to catch his breath. I tried to stand but my legs were too shaky. It felt like we had just sprinted to the top of a never-ending staircase.

The room began to spin. I crawled over to the kitchen and pulled myself up onto the bench so I could throw up in the sink.

“What the hell happened down there?” Jack asked. “Are we in trouble?”

Kenji seemed to finally get his breath back. “We have to leave.”

Maria looked worried. “What? Right now?”

“Yes. Right now.”

“But we haven’t planned this. We’re not prepared!”

“We don’t have time. They’re going to break through that door down there any second now. And when they do, they’ll be coming right for us.”

They all slowly came to the realization that we had to go. I was worried about Maria. She still looked weak. But she would have to cope. There was no alternative.

“OK, so how do we get out of here?” Kim asked.

“I figured we can take the elevator down to the basement levels,” Kenji said. “Down to the car park, and go from there.”

“What if the elevator doesn’t work?”

“Then we can take the stairs.”

“Are you crazy?” Kim said. “With those things running around? I don’t think so.”

“They haven’t broken through yet. We can take the stairs to a lower floor. Take it as low as we can go. If they break in, we’ll be able to hear it. If they break through, then we get out on whatever floor we’re on.”

“And then what?”

“And then we can make our way to the elevator shaft and climb down the rest of the way. I figure the lower we can get before we start climbing, the better.”

The idea certainly wasn’t perfect, and I really did not want to climb down an elevator shaft, but there were just no other options. I think Kim was mad because no one listened to her earlier when she tried to warn us about coming up here. And now we were trapped.

It was then I noticed the doctor had slipped away. “Hey, where’s Doctor West?” I asked.

But no one answered me because they were all arguing about what to do and where to go. I went looking for him and found him in the master bedroom. He had a phone up to his ear. He hung up when he saw me.

“Phone networks are down,” I said.

“I’m sorry, Rebecca.”

“Sorry? What for? What did you do? Who did you just call?”

The phone in his hand didn’t look like a normal mobile or cell. It was slightly larger. The antenna was definitely larger.

“I had to tell them,” he said.

“Tell who? What did you tell them?”

“Maria is immune. They need her. We can make an anti-virus. We can find a cure.”

“So we’re being rescued?”

He shook his head. “They’re coming for her,” he said. “The rest of us are expendable.”

“You’re joking, right? You’ve been drinking again and you’re acting all weird, right?”

He looked away. He didn’t answer me.

“You could’ve given us a warning! You could’ve given us time!”

“Rebecca, I’m sorry. I haven’t done much right in my life. But this could make it all better. I could save the human race. I could be the savior, the hero. I needed to do this.”

“But they’ll kill us! They’ll kill us on the off chance that we’re infected. They’ll kill us just for being alive and for knowing what we know! They’ll chop us up into little pieces just to make sure we don’t talk.”

“I couldn’t risk you running off out there, trying to get as far west as possible. It’s a suicide mission. She’s too valuable.”

I must admit he had a point. Maria is valuable. Heading west and fighting our way through the outer-suburbs was a suicide mission. But there had to be a better way. Why didn’t he tell us what he was doing? We could’ve figured something out. We would’ve had time. Now we had no time. How long would it take the military to get here? Five minutes? Ten minutes? We were screwed.

I ran back out to the living room. “Guys, we’re in serious trouble.”

But again, no one was listening. No one was listening because just then, the light above the elevator doors lit up. The little light was shaped like an arrow, indicating that someone or something was coming this way.

“Wait a minute, how is that possible?” Maria asked.

“I don’t know,” Kenji said.

“Everyone hide!” Kim shouted.

There was no time. The elevator had arrived. The doors slid open. Kenji dropped to one knee and raised his shotgun. Kim did the same with her handgun. I didn’t know what to expect so I moved as far away from the elevator as possible, making sure Kim and Kenji were between me and the doors. Jack held onto Maria and followed my lead. A few seconds passed but nothing happened. It appeared to be empty.

“What the hell?” Jack said.

I relaxed slightly. Maybe it was just a glitch in the elevator system? Maybe one of us had accidentally pressed the button without realizing? But then something slid along the floor of the big open-plan living room and came to a stop at the edge of the Alpaca throw rug. Before I could see what it was, a loud bang and a bright flash sent me momentarily blind and deaf and I fell flat on my ass. My vision was fuzzy and it was hard to focus but I managed to see two dark figures, two men in black move out of the elevator. They paused for a second and signaled something to each other. One of them threw something further into the room. This was followed by another bang, another flash. And then a gunshot. I could hear Kim screaming in pain and the men in black yelling, “Down! Now! Get down!”

I’d fallen behind the white leather couch and they hadn’t seen me yet. Jack and Maria were crouched there with me. “Oh my god,” I whispered. “I think they just shot Kim.”

“Where are the others?” one of the men in black said. “Check the rooms. We’re out of here in ninety seconds.”

They were good. They were disciplined. Coordinated. Each move was executed like clockwork. They showed the same ruthless precision they displayed yesterday when they blew up the bridge and the tunnel and all those people.

I was lying on the floor with a face full of Alpaca fur. I could hear Kim crying out in pain. She had definitely been shot. I could see under the couch that she was holding her arm. The blood from her wound was splattered across the expensive throw rug. Kenji was nowhere to be seen.

“What about her?” one of the men asked.

“Bring her with us.”

The men in black were wearing gas masks so you couldn’t tell them apart. They kind of looked like aliens.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Kenji. He stepped out from behind the kitchen bench. He raised his shotgun in one fluid motion. I closed my eyes because I did not want to watch what came next. The blast from the shotgun sounded like a cannon going off. He must have caught them both with the one shot because two bodies dropped to the ground with a thud.

“Guy’s, let’s go,” Kenji said calmly. “There’ll be more here soon.”

Jack moved over to Kim to help her up.

“I’m all right,” she said with a surprisingly steady voice. “It’s just my arm. Nothing serious.”

I looked at her arm. It was bleeding heavily. She was taking deep, deep breaths. She was definitely not all right.

“So where do we go?” Maria asked. “Should we try the elevator?”

“No, they’ll have reinforcements down there,” Kenji said. “We could try taking the stairs but that’s risky as well.”

“We have to pick one or the other!” I screamed.

A voice spoke from one of the dead soldier’s radios. “Delta one, report.”

“Oh god,” Maria said. “They know something is wrong.”

“Come in, Delta one.”

“We have to try the stairs,” Jack said.

Kenji agreed. “OK, let’s do it,” he said as he relieved the dead soldiers of their guns and ammunition. “We go down as low as possible,” he continued. “If anyone or anything gets in that stairwell with us, we get out on the floor that we’re on. If we run into any soldiers we’ll need to take cover behind something solid.”

Kenji went to hand Jack a rifle, but Jack was helping Kim stand up, so he handed it to me. “Just like we practiced, remember?”

I nodded my head even though after my last effort in the morgue I was still unsure of myself.

Kenji moved over to the door to the emergency stairwell. This was definitely an emergency, I thought. He opened the door and as soon as he did we could hear the relentless bashing from the infected all the way down on the ground floor.

“Wait,” Maria said. “What about Doctor West?”

“Forget him,” I said.

“We can’t just leave him here!”

Maria turned to go and get him. She took maybe two steps before something, a grenade, a rocket, blew open the front door to the penthouse. The whole door was blown off its hinges and we were all knocked off our feet. Jack and Kim fell into the stairwell and Maria had been thrown almost to the other side of the room.

For a heartbeat I thought she’d been blown to bits. But through all the dust and smoke I could just see Maria rubbing her head and coughing. She was one tough girl. She was immune to killer viruses and miniature explosions.

Before I could breathe a sigh of relief, another man in black stepped into the penthouse through the front doorway. He walked over to Maria, pointing his gun directly at her.

“Stay down!” he shouted.

Another soldier joined him. “She matches the description. Hold your fire.”

Kenji pulled me into the stairwell with the others. The men in black hadn’t seen us yet.

“There’s too many of them,” he whispered. “We have to go.”

We knew we had to leave right then and there but no one moved. We couldn’t just leave Maria. I could see the anguish on Jack’s face. There was no way he was leaving, not unless someone physically pushed him down the stairs.

Luckily, Kenji has this amazing ability to think clearly in life or death situations. Like I said before, it simplifies matters for him. Basically, our options were to leave now and at least have a chance of surviving. Or stay and try and rescue Maria, where we would be outnumbered and butchered and left to rot.

Kenji slammed the door shut as loud as he could to get the soldier’s attention. The noise scared the hell out of us and forced us to move.

“But what about Maria!?” Jack shouted.

“They won’t kill her,” I said. “They know she’s immune. They need her alive.”

Kenji was pushing us down the stairs. Jack reluctantly began to move, helping his sister who was looking worse and worse by the minute. Her arm was still bleeding heavily and it looked like she was about to faint. Despite this, she kept telling us she was fine, that it was just a flesh wound. She was putting on a brave face so we wouldn’t panic. Kenji told us to keep going as fast as we could. He paused near the top of the stairs. He crouched and aimed his gun directly at the door he had just slammed shut. He waited.

He didn’t have to wait long. Maybe the soldier on the other side of the door didn’t realize we were armed. Or maybe he didn’t realize he was going up against another trained soldier. Whatever the reason, I don’t think he expected to get shot, and I don’t think he expected to get shot through the door. As soon as the door handle began to move, I covered my ears and shut my eyes and Kenji pulled the trigger.

When I opened my eyes, I saw three bullet holes in the wooden door and blood seeping underneath on to the concrete stairs.

“That should buy us some time,” Kenji said. “Let’s go.”