JJ managed to catch a split-second glimpse of the explosion before the world fell from beneath his body, sending him plunging into the fire and smoke. The initial sights and sounds seemed to imply that their mission had been a success, although his mind only pondered on the fact for the briefest of moments. No sooner had JJ's chest slammed into the cold lab floor than sections of the ceiling began to crash against his head. Dazed and confused, the debris piled against his neck, back, and legs, sucking the air from his lungs. Before he could react to the latest thump against his aching body, another followed, until JJ could barely move a limb.

"Max," he croaked into the darkness, drowned out by the dissolving ceiling and the muffled clicking.

Pressing his lips around the one slim crack of light in front of him, JJ desperately gulped for air, although he could feel his breathing becoming more restricted by the second. Hearing shuffling to his left-hand side, he decided to put everything he had into one last cry for help, pushing up to free his lungs for a split-second.

"Max!"

JJ sank back down to the floor, the scarping beside him growing more intense by the second. While he had long since grown accustomed to the fact that he could likely one day die at the hands of a clicker, being trapped in a confined space, helpless to fight or flee while the undead teeth slowly ate away at him was just about the worst scenario he could think of.

However, as the slither of light grew inch by inch, so did JJ's hope, especially as the familiar features of Max blurred into view.

"Kid?" the older man called. "Kid, can you hear me?"

"I'm here," JJ wheezed, doing his best to shift his body weight towards the exit Max was fighting hard to forge.

"Slow down, JJ," Max urged. "There's a hell of a lot of debris balanced on top of you, just let me dig you out slowly, okay?"

JJ nodded as Max continued to tear away portions of the ceiling piece by piece, stopping occasionally to slide his knife into the temples of any clickers that dared crawl towards him. Fortunately, the collapsing ceiling seemed to have done just as much damage to them.

"The stairs?" JJ muttered, gesturing towards them with his dusty eyes.

"Blown to God damn pieces," Max winked, finally creating a gap large enough to haul JJ through.

Once they were both clear of the wreckage, JJ dusted himself down and stretched out his battered limbs. Sure enough, as he glanced over his shoulder, the staircase had been blown to smithereens. Even the most adept climbers would find it tricky to scale what was left, let alone a bumbling clicker. Better still, the collapse had even penned the surviving clickers in their very own enclosure.

"Time to go?" JJ suggested.

Max nodded in agreement, "Time to go."

As JJ stepped over a particularly large section of rubble, making his way towards the elevator shaft, an undead hand emerged from the debris and wrapped around his ankle, a set of ferociously snapping teeth not far behind. However, no sooner had it appeared than Max's big size 10 boot obliterated through the top of the clicker's skull.

Unfortunately, any motion of thanks from JJ was quickly interrupted as yet another large portion of the ceiling came crashing down to Earth. While the falling metal and concrete was far from where the two of them were standing, it had opened up a rather enticing path for the surviving clickers to filter through back into the main lab.

"Make us a path back to the elevator while I hold them off!" Max ordered as he rushed towards the oncoming undead, keen to cut them off at a bottleneck.

The clickers desperately clambered over each other, determined to be the first to sink their teeth into the flesh of their captor. Armed now only with his trusty knife, Max sank the blade between the eyes of the first and threw the body back into the mix, keen to create as much of a blockade as possible. Unfortunately, the remaining clickers engulfed their fallen comrade like an unrelenting wave.

While JJ could see the very top of the lift doors, the opening itself was inaccessible from their current position. Not only this, but the sole route through that wouldn't take hours to shift looked precarious, to say the least. He would have to move a series of metal pipes and lumps of rubble to create a gap just big enough for them to crawl through. From there, they should then be able to access the elevator from the other side and escape in the same fashion as Lizzie and Rodney. JJ was sure that he could still hear her cries from above but he had to focus on the task at hand or else risk never seeing a single other word leave her mouth.

Max slashed and kicked away at the oncoming clicker conga line, but even his grandest efforts could not prevent them from pushing him back. Before long, the vast majority of the undead had made their way through the bottleneck and into the laboratory.

"How is that exit coming, kid?" Max bellowed as he slit the trachea of the latest clicker.

"Two more minutes!" JJ grunted as he hauled a large sheet of metal.

"I'm not sure we have that long!"

With just one knife to hold back so many clickers, Max was quite literally fighting a losing battle. As soon as he sliced down an encroaching body to his right, another flanked on his left, then a third rushed him head-on. There were simply too many of them. However, he knew that once the clickers made their way past him and towards JJ, any hope of survival was over. There was no way that they could kill so many in such a tight space and without a route out, they would perish within minutes.

As Max dropped his shoulder to avoid a charging clicker to his left, simultaneously slamming the knife down into the skull of another to his right, the blood-soaked blade slipped from his grasp, tumbling back into the sea of limbs still impaled within the lifeless head.

He snapped a split-second glance towards JJ, praying that he would see a shining route to safety, but the teenager was still not ready. There was nothing left for Max to do but physically hold them back.

Taking his last step back, Max threw a vicious punch into the throat of an onrushing clicker before hammering the heel of his boot into its knee cap, shattering the brittle bone. Grabbing another by the scruff of the shirt, Max hurled the body like a bowling ball back into the masses. Alas, for all his kicking and screaming, they continued to push him back until his right thigh brushed against the arm of JJ.

A flanking clicker on the right made a hail Mary lunge for JJ's arm, with Max only just able to throw a forearm across its neck and force it back. With two extended arms forming a last-ditch barrier, Max gritted his teeth as the clickers gorged on his flesh from all angles. If he couldn't fight them off, he could, at the very least, distract them from JJ.

Max screamed at the top of his lungs as the undead mouths tore chunks of flesh from both arms, knowing in his heart that he could only keep it up for seconds longer. Just as he felt his body and mind about to fall flat, Max jumped up, wrapped his bloody hand around a metal pipe above his head and pulled with all his might.

The teetering ceiling didn't ask for a second invitation as it collapsed down upon the swarm of clickers, crushing them beneath a mountain of wood, rubble, and metal. As Max too succumbed to the force of the avalanche, his legs were pinned down by a heavy panel of metal framing, his arms unable to even reach, let alone lift him free.

"Max?!" JJ screamed, rubbing his eyes to clear the dust as he desperately clambered to lift his friend free.

However, no matter how hard he tried, the debris simply wouldn't budge. Frantically shifting the rubble piece by piece in order to lighten the load, JJ glanced up to see what was left of the ceiling shaking and creaking directly above his head.

"You have to go!" Max urged, clamping his hand around JJ's wrist and staring intensely into his eyes. "You HAVE to go!"

"But what about you?" JJ stuttered, shaking his head. "I can't just leave you here!"

"Kid, the fucking ceiling is coming down. Do you want to be trapped down here with me?" Max pleaded, his eyes watering uncontrollably.

"But... what if I could just-"

"JJ," Max said, this time far more calmly. "Look at me, man. Look at my legs, look at my arms... I'm done."

JJ glanced at his friend's legs, which were both clearly broken, before glancing at the exposed bone on his left arm for as long as he dared. He was right. It killed him inside to admit it, but Max was right.

"I'm sorry," were the only words he could think to say.

Max slid his hand into his pocket and retrieved a blood-stained scrap of paper, before placing it into JJ's palm and looking up at him with a warm and peaceful smile.

"Look after her," he said. "And look after yourself. I love you both."

Screaming with every centimetre of movement Max shuffled his torso around and slid his right arm between the small exit JJ had forged. Flexing whatever muscles hadn't already been torn from his body, he lifted with all his might in order to create a space large enough for JJ to crawl through.

"Now fuck off, kid!"

It took every fibre of JJ's mental strength to squeeze himself through the gap, his eyes glued to Max's straining face throughout. The one shining light that hauled him towards the exit like a magnet was the thought of Lizzie's face, the knowledge that he would never see it again unless he left. JJ stuffed the note into his side pocket and burst through the opening on the other side, finally clear of the debris.

However, as he turned around to bid one final farewell to his beloved friend, the tunnel forged by Max's final droplets of life slammed shut. The reverberations echoed around the room and the ceiling began to creak once more, the last chunks of debris finally falling from their perches like mortar shells exploding around him engulfing half of the lab.

Max was out of view. He was silent.

Max was gone.

Taking solace in the peace he had witnessed within his friend's eyes at the very end, peace he had rarely seen since their first meeting, JJ ducked into the elevator shaft, leaving the rubble to fall upon Max's body. Perhaps it was the grand burial that he deserved, or at least the one he had always seen coming.

"JJ!" a voice roared from above as Rodney peered down from the summit. "Grab the rope!"

It was time to go.