Head pounding, heart thumping and heavy breaths in his own ear, Evan ran. In glimpses behind him, gunfire and mounted lights from the four-man squad lit up a dark wave of ravenous zombies in flashes. A few shamblers fell but more replaced them - ever more surrounded the survivors’ vicinity from every direction he could see like an enclosing trap. He kept near the forefront of the group headed towards the carpark and positioned himself within a protective buffer of soldiers that took down zombies who got too close. A girl screamed to his diagonal right - he spared a turnaround glance - the young girl screamed as she was dragged to the ground from the side like a stray fawn.

[i]I can’t save her,[/i] he told himself. [i]I can’t save anybody. Run. Keep running.[/i]

Evan jumped and easily pulled himself up the concrete wall; landed and without waiting to help anyone else, he ran and vaulted over the SUV to follow their saviour. The black man led them up a level, presumably to the top floor for air evacuation by the Japanese military; he didn’t care why a foreign nation would send in help at this junction, as long as he could be let in. Evan took the precious distance they had secured from the zombies to unsling and fumble in his bag for a headlamp. 

The band was tight and pressed painfully into his wound but the steady white light shone on his path meant he could see where he was going without depending on someone else’s frantic beams. He looked around the concrete environment. There were plenty of cars still parked in rows, which could be useful to escape in a maze-like tactic. The upper levels stayed quiet while hollow noises from the swamp of shamblers at the bottom travelled up the spiral ramp. It wouldn’t be long before the dead forced their retreat to be stuck on the roof. “Is a helicopter coming? Did you radio them? Are they close?” he asked a barrage of questions, out of fear, at the soldiers. 

He couldn’t trust help would arrive in the nick of time and it was too risky to be caught on the roof with no way out. They needed plan B to get away from a sudden onslaught of zombies they might meet or to buy themselves time to reach another rooftop for a definite clear landing, so he asked the stranger about the exit signs on the ceilings. “Where does this carpark lead to? An office? A mall?”