ERICA:

I’ve hit the buttons next to the elevator so hard that Cody feared I’d broken them.

“Press them once! Once!” I ignored him, continuing to hammer at the buttons until I heard the telltale ‘ding’. I ripped the door open and dragged Logan and Cody in behind me, although I didn’t care much if they followed me or not.

“What the hell is going on?”

I couldn’t bring myself to answer the newbie, he could work it out for himself. We clung onto the support bar as the elevator itself shook. Logan turned green at this as he pressed himself back into a corner for stability, although that would be where he would feel the vibration the most. I stuck it out, my jaw clenched as I willed for the elevator almost to go faster.

When we started our descent it felt as if the ground had fallen out beneath us as we plummeted through the ground. Coupled with the rigorous shaking the refused to cease, it truly felt as if we were heading for our deaths.

“The facility…it’s not an earthquake, something is happening in the facility.” Cody panted, panic starting to take over him. He squeezed his eyes shut, biting his lip so hard he drew blood as he curled up in the floor against the wall, willing for the moment to pass.

“But, no one passed us. No one could have got in!”

“That means that a mole was already there, dumb ass.” I snapped. “Castaneda has a man on the inside and now that’s come to bite us, can you just be quiet so I can concentrate for a minute.”

The facility has security measures, parts of it can be isolated and quarantined if needed. As the ground shook, I was almost certain that that meant the walls were moving, cordoning off a part of the facility. The real question was what? Why? What had happened with the half an hour that we had been up top?

It certainly didn’t help that we were unsteady on our feet, although the events brought us back to our sobering reality. If Castaneda knew where the facility was the whole time and was able to get a man on the inside, or had perhaps managed to turn one of our own, then why was he choosing now to strike?

I stared at Logan for any sign of weakness. All this started the minute that he turned up. He was the only one that I hadn’t known for years, he was the last person to be in contact with Castaneda, to our knowledge. It was completely viable that he was the snake who had brought us on our home, and if he was…

Logan was going to wish that he had taken the opportunity to escape when he had it.

Cody stared at me as I was thinking all of this through and was able to manage a discrete nod as he hyperventilated. I scoffed, crossing my arms over my chest. Of course, he’d never believe that Logan could be responsible for all of this, despite only having known him for forty-eight hours.

“Are you going to be okay?” Logan asked him, shimmying out of the corner as he knelt against the wall with Cody.

“He’s having a panic attack, I doubt he can hear you. He’s claustrophobic.” I explained, wanting to kick his skull in with my boot. I didn’t appreciate his fake sympathy; it was only giving Cody false hope and leading him to a bigger let down later.

Logan nodded, his jaw clenched as he too was struggling with our descent. Still, he kept bumping Cody with his shoulder to check up on him, whispering words that I couldn’t hear. Cody laughed, wiping at his face, as his breathing slowed down to a regular rate.

'…Huh.'

I would have thought the constant pestering would have made the attack worse but for Cody, it appeared that it made it almost…bearable.

The elevator finally slowed and came to a stop and unlike the other pair, I kept my praises silent. I pushed the sliding door open and stepped out into the facility, looking both ways up and down the corridor as I tried to find where all of the mayhem was coming from. The ground shook again and Logan fell backward back into the elevator, landing on his back and winding himself. I helped him to his feet as he coughed before I ran down the corridor to the left.

Screams pierced the air as we grew closer to the chaos and I slipped a knife out of the waistband of my jeans, unwrapping the cotton from the blade. I was unsure of what we were about to stumble across, but damn did I want to be prepared.

“Why do you have that?” Cody stared wide-eyed at the weapon.

'Do you really want to know the answer?'

Logan took the cloth from my hand and wrapped it around the knuckles of his right hand as I protested. It was a smart idea, but it was all for nothing if he decided to go ‘Human Torch’ on us. Cody lagged behind, unable to keep up with our pace as we ran through the corridors.

Dread filled my stomach as we ran up a flight of steps and grew closer and closer to where my apartment was. Clary filled my thoughts as we continued on and I only hoped that she had been able to get out before this all began.

We turned another corner and I smashed my nose into glass, falling backward onto the floor as blood gushed from my face. Cody grabbed my hand and helped me to my feet as I brought the cuff of my jumper down over my hand, wiping the blood from my face but more gushed out. My eyes watered from the impact as I stared, bleary-eyed, through the glass that had stopped me.

People ran to and fro, grabbing at their heads and their faces. Few had collapsed to the floor, convulsing for minutes until they then lay prone, their eyes glassy. All screamed, piercing, harrowing, screams that penetrated through your skull and bounced around until you grasped the true extent of their pain until they suddenly stopped, their lives having been ripped from them.

“Clary!” I banged on the glass with my free hand, searching for the familiar face. “Clary!”

Cody joined in beside me, tears brimming in his eyes as he stared on as our friends died, doing nothing but being able to shout for those who we didn’t see. “Clary!”

Logan stood back before ramming his shoulder up against the glass again and again in an attempt to break it. Sirens ran out above us as he was able to create a crack in the glass, a voice coming out over the intercom;

“Nerve gas has been released within this precinct. Do not engage. Do not break the glass. Outbreak must be contained in this unit.”

“Clary!”

My heart dropped into my stomach as the door to my apartment was thrown open and Clary limped out. One side of her face had dropped, her mouth turned down and her eye unblinking, as she hobbled over to us. Her wrist twitched, her hand tweaking from one side to the other utterly of its own accord. Mascara was smudged down her cheeks from her tears, one side of her bottom lip wobbling as she pressed a hand up to the glass, slumping all of her weight against it.

I blinked furiously, fighting the sting in my eyes and the tears that threatened to come. She was beautiful, she was always beautiful, with a smile so bright it rivaled all of the stars in the sky. Now I feared that I would never be able to see that smile again.

“What happened?”

“There’s-There’s a mole.” Clary slurred out, her eye twitching. “Released a nerve gas, the corridor was cordoned off. We can’t get out, they’re trying to-to siphon off the gas but it’s-it’s not-”

“How the hell do we get in there without breaking the glass?” Logan panted, rubbing his shoulder that I’m sure is going to bruise.

I sighed. “We don’t.” I held my hand up to the glass so that it overlapped Clary’s much smaller one, although it was slowly sliding as she lost the strength to hold herself up. “We can’t let the gas get out of that precinct, if we break the glass and go in it will spread throughout the facility, and we’ll also die. I’m not dying before I find the bastard who did this.”

“There can’t be nothing that we can do!”

“There isn’t anything,” Cody whispered, watching as our friends died with tears glassing over his eyes. “There’s nothing.”

Clary’s shoulder slumped against the glass, the side of her face pushing up against it. The glass squeaked as she slid down to the floor slowly, her leg bent at an awkward angle. Every couple of seconds her body would twitch, the time between each movement growing less and less until she was convulsing on the ground on the other side of the glass, her mouth utterly frozen as she was no longer able to so much as scream.

I rubbed my face with my jumper sleeve, coming away wet with blood and tears. Clary’s face was almost swollen as she stared, unblinking, back at me through the glass. I start banging my fists against the glass, protocol be damned, as I was desperate to get to her on the other side.

“No, no, no, no, no…” I whispered over and over again, on my knees on the glass as I fought to get through to my girlfriend, but she was unresponsive. The more I said it the louder my voice got until I was screaming ‘No!’ at the top of my lungs but no one could hear me.

One after the other, those on the other side of the glass dropped like flies down to the ground, convulsing for a few minutes until they lay still. We watched, one by one as our friends perished before us, their eyes glassy as a china doll’s, until there was not a single heart left beating on the other side of the glass.

It was another house before the facility was sure that they had siphoned the rest of the gas out of the corridor. The three of us sat on the floor in that hour, waiting until we could finally get onto the other side of the glass so that we could help our fallen. Each minute ticked by slowly, as if God himself was trying to make our pain drag out for as long as possible for his own entertainment. It was sick, staring at the bodies of people we had known for as long as we could remember, perhaps who we had even known back in the lab before that.

It had been an hour, the longest sixty minutes of my life, before I was able to hold the body of my girlfriend across my lap, limp and unmoving, eyes staring past me up at the ceiling. It had been three thousand, six hundred seconds before I could clasp her hand in mine, as I sobbed for what felt like an eternity. But none of my wishes, or my tears, were ever going to bring her back.