Dr. Jenner's calm pronouncement of their impending fiery end shattered the room's atmosphere like a pane of glass. The concept of a "High-Impulse Thermobaric Fuel-Air Explosive" was horrifyingly clear, even without a scientific background. It meant annihilation.
"What?!" Lori shrieked, clutching Carl who had started to cry. "You can't just, you have to stop it!"
Shane surged towards Jenner, his face a mask of fury. "You crazy son of a bitch! You're going to kill us all?" Rick was right behind him, grabbing Shane's arm before he could reach the doctor.
"There's nothing to stop," Jenner said, his voice still eerily calm, though a flicker of something, pain or perhaps madness, danced in his eyes. "It's an automated protocol. When the generators run out of fuel, the system sanitizes itself. It was designed this way from the beginning to prevent any potential outbreak from this facility. A failsafe."
"How long?" Rick demanded, his voice tight, his eyes boring into Jenner's. "How long until the power fails?"
"Thirty minutes until total primary power failure," Vi's synthesized voice announced coolly from the overhead speakers. "Decontamination sequence will initiate automatically upon cessation of primary power."
Thirty minutes. The words hung in the air like a death sentence. Panic erupted. Jacqui sank to the floor, sobbing. Carol held Sophia close, her own face pale with terror. Glenn and T-Dog looked at each other in disbelief, then started frantically scanning the room, the corridors, anywhere for an escape. Andrea stood frozen for a moment, then her expression hardened into a grim resolve.
"There has to be an override!" Rick yelled at Jenner. "A way to shut it down, or open the doors!"
Jenner shook his head slowly. "Vi controls the lockdown. And she follows protocol. I can't override it. Even if I wanted to." He looked away, a deep sigh escaping him. "Perhaps this is how it's meant to end. Clean."
"Not for us it isn't!" Shane snarled. He, Rick, and Daryl began a desperate search, hammering on sealed blast doors, looking for manual overrides, anything. Dale tried to reason with Jenner, appealing to his humanity, but the doctor seemed lost in his own despair, occasionally murmuring about his wife, Candace, and the futility of it all.
Ethan's mind raced. He knew the main doors were a lost cause. His Enhanced Awareness was on high alert, the tension in the room a palpable force. He remembered the show, the escape. The windows. He moved towards the main atrium area, the one with the towering glass frontage they had seen from outside. "Rick! Shane!" he called out, his voice urgent. "These windows! They're huge. They're not blast doors. If they're just reinforced glass, maybe…"
The others followed his gaze. The massive, multi-story windows of the CDC's main lobby offered a view of the dark, walker-infested world outside. It was their only potential avenue of escape.
"How do we break through that?" Andrea asked, her voice strained. "It'll be incredibly thick."
They tried chairs, a heavy metal stanchion, but the glass, while cracking, refused to yield significantly. The lights in the CDC began to flicker ominously.
"Twenty minutes to primary power failure," Vi announced.
"We need something bigger, something with force," Rick muttered, his mind racing. His eyes fell on the bag of weapons and gear he had carried from the King County Sheriff's Department, the one he'd almost forgotten in the relative safety of the CDC.
Carol, her face a mixture of fear and desperate hope, had been rummaging through some of their consolidated gear nearby. She suddenly pulled something small and heavy from a side pocket of Rick's discarded uniform pants, which lay with the bag. "Rick… what's this?"
It was an M67 fragmentation grenade. Rick stared at it, then at the windows. A desperate, dangerous idea formed. Ethan, seeing the grenade, felt a surge of grim recognition. This was it.
"Everyone get back!" Rick ordered, taking the grenade from a stunned Carol. "As far back as you can!"
"Fifteen minutes to primary power failure," Vi intoned.
As the group scrambled for cover behind sturdy columns and overturned furniture, Jacqui remained seated on the floor, a strange calm on her face. "I'm staying," she said quietly.
Dale rushed to her side. "Jacqui, no! You can't! There's still a chance!"
"A chance for what, Dale?" she asked, her voice gentle. "More running? More hiding? More watching people die? I'm tired. I lost everything. There's nothing left for me out there. Dr. Jenner is right. Maybe this is just… cleaner."
Tears streamed down Dale's face as he pleaded, but Jacqui was resolute. Andrea, her own face a mask of pain, put a hand on Dale's shoulder. "We have to go, Dale. It's her choice."
With a heavy heart, Rick pulled the pin on the grenade. "Cover your ears!" He hurled it with all his might towards the base of the towering windows.
The explosion was deafening within the confined space of the atrium. A massive section of the reinforced glass shattered inwards and outwards, a cascade of sharp, deadly shards. A roaring wind, carrying the sounds of the dead outside, swept into the CDC.
"Ten minutes to primary power failure. Decontamination sequence protocols are being finalized," Vi announced, her voice eerily calm amidst the chaos.
"Go! Now!" Rick screamed.
The survivors surged towards the jagged opening. Daryl went first, crossbow ready, followed by Shane, clearing any immediate walkers near the breach. One by one, they scrambled through the broken window frame, cutting themselves on the remaining shards of glass, dropping onto the concrete walkway outside. Ethan helped Lori guide Carl and Carol shield Sophia, then followed Rick out.
Dale was the last of their escaping group, casting one final, sorrowful look back at Jacqui, who sat unmoving, and Dr. Jenner, who stood watching them, a faint, enigmatic smile on his lips. Then Dale turned and leaped through the opening.
They ran, heedless of their cuts and bruises, away from the looming structure.
"Five minutes to decontamination." Vi's voice was fainter now, carried on the wind.
They didn't look back until they reached their vehicles, a safe distance away. They piled in, engines roaring to life. As Rick slammed the van into gear and sped away, the ground beneath them trembled.
A blinding flash illuminated the pre-dawn sky, followed a split second later by a deafening, rolling explosion that shook the very air they breathed. The CDC erupted in a monumental fireball, a thermobaric inferno that consumed the massive structure, sending debris and smoke hundreds of feet into the air.
The survivors, parked on the roadside, watched in stunned silence as the last bastion of science and hope, their sanctuary and their near-tomb, became a raging pyre against the darkness. The orange glow reflected in their wide, horrified eyes. They were out. They were alive. But they were once again on their own, the echoes of the explosion a final, brutal punctuation mark on the end of a chapter, and the beginning of an even more uncertain road.