Pregnant During An Apocalypse [BL]

Chapter 308: Chapter 309 — Abandon the base

The operations room smelled faintly of coffee and metal. Screens lined the walls, rows of data and live feeds scrolling in cold blue. A man sat at the center desk, fingers tapping the armrest in a measured rhythm. He did not look up when the junior officer at his side cleared his throat.

”Sir, it’s been thirty minutes,” the officer reported. ”Our agent should’ve reported back by now. There’s been no contact.”

The man’s tapping slowed. A thin smile brushed his mouth but it did not reach his eyes. ”Compromised,” he said without surprise. His voice was quiet, professional—terrifying in its calm. ”If the asset is compromised, there’s no time to waste. Destroy the test subjects. Gather everything. Pack up and move—now.”

The order left the room like a cold wind. It was the kind of command that closed a throat, hardened faces; the soldiers positioned around the compound received it and began to act with efficient brutality. Rifles were checked, magazines loaded, radios barked confirmations. The men and women on duty around the houses where the test subjects were kept fell into practiced positions; they knew their role and they prepared to carry it out.

Then the fog came.

It rolled in from the low streets first — a rising, unnatural mist that filled the courtyards and licked at the bases of the watch posts. Within seconds it had thickened into a wall. The men on the rooftop towers cursed as visibility dropped to zero. Targets that had been clear on their scopes were now only dim silhouettes. The command to fire was given and then stuttered back; the soldiers hesitated, because a shot in the mist was a blind shot. No one wanted to risk killing nothing but air and then discover what they’d missed.

Something in the fog shifted.

From the satellite feed in the operations room, the scene blurred into static and then, for a heartbeat, a single clear image: a dark vehicle hurtling at impossible speed toward a rooftop watchtower. The camera snatched the shape and lost it. The feed returned — the tower was gone. The car slammed into wood and metal, exploded into flame, and the microphone on a nearby drone picked up the rawest sound of the field: a scream, fractured and sharp.

And then the assault began in earnest.

It was surgical. Flying vehicles—small, armed drones and heavier attack craft—struck other watch houses in rapid succession. The strikes weren’t clean: wood splintered, metal folded, the air filled with a roar and the choking smell of fuel and smoke. Drones tried to keep up, to retake the view, but the fog swallowed their sensors. Their cameras returned only brief blips — a white-haired figure like a moving cloud, then a flash of silver light where an eye should be — before losing acquisition entirely.

Back at command, someone laughed. It was a brittle sound, half triumph and half fury. ”They’ve decided to move,” the man said into his headset. ”Change everything. Evacuate the site. Bring the samples and get out.”

Orders cascaded down fast. Vehicles were loaded, boxes packed and sealed. Technicians strapped small, temperature-controlled cases into armored transports—vials, tissue samples, devices—everything that represented months of clandestine work. The evacuation was unpleasantly efficient; it completed in less than half an hour. Soldiers moved with machine-trained precision, but the machine was running against a flood. The moment the convoy began to withdraw, alarms and shouts rose from the outer perimeter.

Men on the inner ring fought to maintain position as the world outside the compound tore itself apart. They ran for the security fence only to be met by their own separation: the area beyond the barrier swarmed with shambling, snapping forms, lurching bodies that had once been human. The zombies — ranks of them pushed and prodded by the chaos — turned like predators toward the fleeing soldiers. Men who had trained to put a round between the eyes of another human now tried to scratch together a defense against creatures that came without reason.

The first wave broke like a tide. Soldiers were cut down by the suddenness of it: grabbed at ankle and arm, dragged, ripped. Where a door had been there was now a smear of blood and a hole that had not existed an hour before. The organized retreat flatlined into a rout. Where retreating forces had hoped for the safety of vehicles and fences, they found only an outpouring of teeth and guttural hunger.

Inside the targeted houses, the test subjects—who had been little more than numbers on a form in the eyes of the government—stared at windows and listened to the distant carnage with something like stunned gratitude. For them, the attack was not a cruel punch of fate but a narrow window: the watching eyes that had kept them caged were distracted, the people who had kept them under surveillance were being torn to pieces by the very disease they had sought to weaponize. The fog hid them. The explosions shattered the towers that had observed them. The men who had planned their doom scrambled, and in the scramble the truth was exposed in small ways—a camera shattered, a drone burning into the night, a man in black ghosting past a rooftop perch and vanishing.

Outside, over the ruins of a rooftop, someone watched and moved like shadow. White hair stuck to a damp forehead, silver eyes glittering, reflecting half of the scattered flame. He was a silhouette on the edge of a frame before the drone’s feed went black; all the operations room saw was that sudden flash and the last sliver of the man’s face. Even then, in the sterile glow of the control monitors, the man running the show smiled and shrugged as if the loss of one asset validated the plan. ”They made a move,” he said. ”Good. We relocate and we keep the samples. If they escape, we’ll find them again. For now—pack up. Move.”

But the move, for many soldiers, was the prelude to a slaughter. As the convoy tried to crawl away, the perimeter tore open. The compound that had been a cage became an inferno. Men who had loaded specimens into insulated boxes found themselves tested in harsher, bloodier ways. The zombies, unchained by the commotion and the damaged fences, circled and picked off the retreating watchmen. One by one the posts fell silent, punctuated only by the crack of a gun and the wet, desperate noises of men who had been trained for war but not for this.

Within the thick fog, the attackers used every advantage. Flying cars slammed into towers fast enough to topple them before ground forces could respond; low drones attempted to gather footage and were dismantled in a blink. The fog itself seemed to have been conjured or engineered to scramble sensors and blind the usual eyes of military oversight. Below it all, men in black moved like wraiths—efficient, unhurried—performing tasks and vanishing into the haze before the watchful could even call out names.

At the command center the order to relocate came down like salt. ”We move now. Take everything, burn the rest.” They cut comms, set diversions, and their transports lifted into the smoke. The operation had been designed to contain and to control; tonight it had been exposed for what it was—a careless experiment that underestimated the desperation that can be born when people are pushed to the edge. The men who had made the calculations did not weep. They calculated new variables, new contingencies.

By dawn, the compound was ruined. Towers lay flickering in ash, fences were peeled open like tin, and the streets bore the new smell of burning and iron. The soldiers who had survived fled with what they could carry, dragging locked cases toward vehicles and choppers that whined into a sky clouded with dust. The men who had ordered the tests were already routing to backup bases. They had samples, yes, but they had also confirmed something uglier: when pushed, those they had called subjects could become pawns in someone else’s rescue.