Day 17.
The Factory Floor (Level 1).
Sauget, Illinois.
02:00 Hours.
The dump truck we had shoved into the Eastern Wall breach groaned.
It wasn't the engine. It was the steel chassis buckling under the pressure of a thousand tons of dead meat pushing from the other side. The metal shrieked, a high-pitched keen that vibrated through the concrete floor and into the soles of my boots.
I stood on the Level 2 catwalk, gripping the railing until my knuckles turned white. The air in the factory was cold, dead, and silent, except for the groaning metal and the terrified, ragged breathing of the crew huddled behind the blast doors of the Lung.
"It's not going to hold," Boyd whispered.
He was standing at the emergency fire control panel, his hands hovering over the manual valves. He was shaking so hard his teeth chattered. His Technomancer eyes were wide, fixed on the darkness below. "The structural stress is off the charts, Jack. The frame is twisting."
"It's not supposed to hold," I said, my voice flat. "It's a funnel."
I activated Decay Sight. The world turned into a wireframe of grey steel and red threats. The truck glowed with stress-fracture warnings.
`[OBSTACLE INTEGRITY: 5%.]`
`[PRESSURE: CRITICAL (1,200 PSI).]`
`[THREAT DETECTED: TIER 3 AMALGAMATION.]`
"They're merging," Yana said from the shadows behind me. She was sharpening her knife, the skritch-skritch sound echoing in the silence. "I can hear the bones breaking. It sounds like... like wet branches snapping."
Outside, in the mud of the courtyard, the System was running a new compilation code. The zombies weren't just piling up against the truck; they were fusing. The biomass was liquefying and reforming, stitching Shamblers together into something heavy enough to punch through steel.
CRUNCH.
The dump truck slid six inches across the concrete floor. Sparks flew as the rims ground against the foundation. The tires blew out with sounds like shotgun blasts—POP. POP.
"Paige!" I barked.
She was down there, on the floor level, holding a mop bucket. I had put her on sanitation duty—cleaning the blood from the mutiny off the concrete. She looked up, her face pale and hollow, eyes rimmed with red.
"Get to the ladder," I ordered. "Now. Leave the bucket."
She didn't argue. She dropped the mop and sprinted for the catwalk ladder, her boots skidding on the slick floor.
SCREEECH-CLANG.
The truck didn't just slide this time. It tipped.
Something massive shoved the multi-ton vehicle aside like a child's toy. The truck rolled onto its roof, crashing into the assembly line machinery with a deafening roar of tearing metal and shattering glass.
The breach was open.
And the Fuser stepped through.
It was a nightmare of geometry. A biological impossibility.
It stood eight feet tall and six feet wide. It was formed from five or six bodies fused together at the torso, their limbs twisting out at impossible angles to form a crab-like chassis of human meat. The skin was stretched translucent over the amalgamation, wet with slime.
But it was the heads that stopped my heart.
Seven heads writhed on the central mass. They weren't dead; they were aware. Their jaws were unhinged, hanging loose against their chests.
They screamed in a discordant, multi-tonal chorus.
"MEAT!"
`[TARGET: FUSER (TIER 3).]`
`[ABILITY: BIOMASS ABSORPTION.]`
`[HP: 3000/3000.]`
"Oh god," Boyd gagged, turning away. "I can see... I can see their faces. That one is wearing a hard hat."
One of the heads on the creature's shoulder was indeed wearing a yellow construction helmet. It was wailing, a high, thin sound of eternal pain that cut through the deeper roaring of the central mass.
The Fuser lumbered into the factory floor. It moved with a jerky, spider-like speed, its many limbs coordinating in a sickening rhythm.
Behind it, a tide of Runners poured through the gap. They screeched and skittered over the machinery, a swarm of vermin trailing the beast.
"Wait for it," I said, my hand drifting to the radio. "Let them get deep."
The Fuser smashed a chemical vat aside. It was looking for us. It sensed the heat of the living on the upper levels.
It grabbed a Runner that got too close to its legs.
The Runner shrieked as the Fuser pulled it into its central mass. Ribs cracked. Flesh melded. The Runner didn't fight; it dissolved. It was absorbed instantly, adding its mass to the abomination. A new arm sprouted from the Fuser's back, wet and red.
`[EVOLUTION OBSERVED: RAPID GROWTH.]`
"It's eating them," Yana whispered. "It's cannibalizing the swarm."
"It's gathering fuel," I said. "Travis. Now."
On the floor below, a shadow detached itself from a support pillar.
Travis stepped out.
He was the bait.
He stood in the center of the kill zone, directly under the main sprinkler array. He was shirtless, his skin grey and rock-hard, the orange veins pulsing with the steady rhythm of a reactor core. He held his sledgehammer loose in one hand.
He raised the hammer and banged it against a steel beam.
CLANG. CLANG. CLANG.
The sound rang like a church bell in hell.
"Hey! Ugly!" Travis roared. His voice was deep, tectonic. "Over here!"
The Fuser stopped. All seven heads snapped toward the sound. Seven pairs of milky eyes locked onto the Tank.
"MEAT!" the heads screamed.
It charged.
The ground shook. The Fuser tore through a conveyor belt, shredding steel like paper. It moved faster than something that size had any right to move.
"Run, Travis!" I screamed. "Get clear!"
Travis turned and sprinted for the heavy blast doors of the Level 2 stairwell. He moved with surprising speed for a man of his density, his heavy boots pounding the concrete.
The Fuser chased him. The Runners followed, a wave of grey bodies flooding the floor.
They were all inside. The entire floor was carpeted in rot.
"Boyd," I said. "Flush."
Boyd grabbed the red wheel on the fire suppression system. It was labeled EMERGENCY WATER.
But there was no water in the tank. We had drained it two days ago. We had refilled it with the contents of the Red Faction's fuel truck, mixed with the chemical runoff from the bleach tanks and every drop of solvent we could find in the maintenance closets.
Boyd spun the wheel. It squealed, rusted and stiff.
CLUNK-HISS.
The overhead sprinkler system groaned. The pipes hammered as the pressure spike hit them.
Then, it rained.
It wasn't a mist. It was a deluge. A thick, amber sludge poured from the high-volume nozzles. High-octane gasoline mixed with industrial cleaning solvents.
It drenched the factory floor. It coated the machinery. It soaked the Fuser.
The beast stopped, skidding on the slick concrete. It wiped the sludge from its many eyes. It tasted the fuel.
It roared in confusion, thrashing its limbs.
"Travis!" I yelled into the comms. "Light it!"
Travis was standing safe behind the blast door threshold. He turned back. He pulled a road flare from his belt.
He cracked the cap.
HISSS.
Red fire sputtered to life, casting long, dancing shadows against the blast door.
"Burn," Travis grunted.
He tossed the flare onto the factory floor.
It tumbled through the air, a spinning red star. It hit a puddle of gasoline.
WHOOM.
The air itself seemed to ignite.
The factory floor vanished inside a wall of orange and black fire. The concussion hit us on the catwalk, knocking the wind out of me. The heat was instantaneous and blistering—a physical blow that singed my eyebrows.
"Back!" I shouted, dragging Boyd away from the railing.
The sound was indescribable. It wasn't just the roar of the fire. It was the sound of hundreds of zombies screaming at once as their fluids boiled inside their skins.
The Fuser shrieked—a multi-voiced cacophony of absolute agony.
I looked over the railing, shielding my eyes against the glare.
The monster was thrashing in the center of the inferno. The gasoline had soaked into the crevices between the fused bodies. It was burning from the inside out.
The limbs fell off, wet slaps against the concrete. The heads popped like blisters in a microwave. The central mass collapsed, melting into a heap of burning grease and bone.
`[CRITICAL HIT: INCINERATION.]`
`[BIOMASS YIELD: 0.]`
`[THREAT NEUTRALIZED.]`
The heat was intense. The paint on the catwalk railing blistered and peeled. The smell of burning hair and rendered fat was thick enough to chew.
"Vents!" I coughed, pulling my shirt over my nose to filter the smoke. "Open the vents! Suck the smoke out!"
Boyd scrambled to the control panel and hit the fans. The giant industrial turbines in the ceiling roared to life, sucking the black smoke upward, out into the night.
I looked down at the devastation.
Level 1 was gone. The assembly lines were slag. The chemical vats were ruptured. The floor was a lake of fire that would burn for hours.
But the Silo stood. The upper levels were secure.
I looked at Paige. She was huddled on the grating, staring into the fire. Her eyes reflected the destruction, wide and terrified.
"We burned it down," she whispered. "We burned everything."
"We sanitized it," I said. The Cruelty trait kept my pulse steady. I felt cold inside, despite the heat. "Fire is clean."
I checked the map on my HUD.
The blue static of the Enclave blockade was still there, watching from two miles out. They would see the fire. They would see the smoke rising into the sky like a signal flare.
"Let them watch," I said to the empty air. "Let them see what happens when you try to enter my house."
FOUNDRY PROTOCOL - DAY 17
SECTOR 1 (JACK MONROE) █████░░░░░ 5/10 Nodes
LEVEL 1: INCINERATED (Unusable)
Threat: Fuser (Destroyed)
Defense: Fire Trap (Expended)
Sanity: 76%
Next Event: The Enclave Retaliation / Siege End