He watched the door as it bent in further and further with every impact. The crashing blows echoed through the room almost in perfect rhythm, once every 5 seconds. Every blow against the door made him jump, his heart leaping into his throat before dropping down so low in his stomach that it gave him a cup check. He started to panic, the terror freezing him in place and preventing him from doing anything, even screaming.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. This couldn’t be happening. That door was 6 inches of solid concrete sandwiched between 3 inches of solid steel on either side. The damn door had to be rolled into position instead of swinging closed on a hinge because it was so heavy. Nothing short of high powered explosives could make a dent in that. And yet the door was bending with each impact on the other side.

Another impact made his heart drop again, but when it returned to somewhere in his chest it also jumpstarted his survival instincts. He ran to the set of computers on the east side and started flipping screens until he got to the security cameras outside. He looked from screen to screen, starting with the devastation outside. The small town was a frontline settlement, one of the areas outside the wall where they tried to make safe and secure places to live. The small town was erected in the remains of a gated community, the walls had been reinforced with metal and concrete, and the only ways into the town had machine guns powerful enough to blow through hordes with simple sweeping motions. How the settlement was penetrated was a complete mystery and something thought impossible, the fact that so many had made it inside was just unsettling.

Another impact made him refocus on the task at hand and switched to the feeds inside his house. As he switched between rooms he now regretted the fact that he had this entire house to himself. Technically he split the place with 1 other guy named Evan who worked the wall and usually crashed in the barracks. Evan essentially only came by the house when he needed a place to crash while off duty, when the food in the barracks was crap, or when he needed some private time with one of the boys that he would take under his wing now and again. They got along well enough, and it was thanks to Evan that he was safe in an armored room and not dead in the den.

He just got to the screen displaying the hall outside the safe room when the impact came again. The loud crashing against the door came courtesy of the fist of a zombie that was monstrously large. It stood at least 8 feet tall, he knew that because the ceilings were 8 ft high and this thing had its head off to one side grinding its face against the popcorn ceiling as it walked. It was probably taller than that but was cramped down due to the limited space. It was also very broad, so wide that it wasn’t able to walk down the hall without turning sideways. It only had one arm but made up for its lack of limbs with the monstrous fist that must have been as big as a man’s chest.

It slammed its fist into the door, pounding it with a backhanded strike drawn from across his entire body. He watched as it slammed the door again, then quickly spun around to look at the door. It was still holding, but it wouldn’t last. He had to act or he would be dead, and he had maybe a minute to do something. He ran to the north side where Evan had built a small weapons cage with a shotgun, a few pistols, and a small rifle that he assumed was an SMG. He knew very little about shooting guns, short of what few things he’d picked up from TV and movies, but having your life at risk was a great incentive to learn. Unfortunately, he didn’t know the code to the cage.

2 minutes of pulling and beating on it with his bare hands did nothing but cause noise. He stepped away from the cage and started looking around for something he could use to break it open or maybe find the code written down. It was during this search that he returned to the computer. He was about to start rummaging through every file he could find to look for the code when he heard the loud cracking bang of The Endgame. The Endgame was Evan’s baby, a fully automatic belt-fed shotgun that Evan loaded with a series of different slugs for more damage.

He looked at the camera feeds to see Evan at the end of the hall and watched as he unloaded on the monster outside the door. Fire, small explosions, and a red mist of blood and viscera obscured the zombie from the sight of the camera, but the moment of relief at seeing that thing get hit with enough destructive force to turn a light vehicle into scrap was short-lived. The cloud of destruction was growing. Too late, he realized that the cloud wasn’t growing, it was just getting closer to the camera, which was at the far end of the hall where Evan was standing. He wanted to scream for Evan to run, but even if there wasn’t a foot of solid material and literal explosions between them, it was just too late.

The fist came out of the cloud and hit Evan head-on, lifting him off his feet and driving him into the back wall where his chest was crushed on impact. Evan’s head, arms, and legs just fell off, sheared off as what was left of his chest was pushed into the wall. He screamed in despair as Evan’s head fell off to one side and bounced off the ground. As the smoke cleared, the creature turned back to the door and started running. He turned to the door as he realized that it was running toward it, just in time to see the door bend toward him from the impact. He pissed himself at that and started panicking again.

He ran to the bathroom door, only to realize that it was far less secure than the main room with a simple door that didn't even have a lock. Another door on the far side had the generator behind it, which had kicked on when the power failed. There was nowhere to go. As secure and well-stocked as the place was supposed to be, there was no way out. There was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. At least, there was no place to hide from a person. These things were stupid, so maybe he actually could hide in the one place that would conceal him. The stupidest place in the world to hide from another person, under the bed.

He tried to quietly slide under the bed as the monster continued to slam into the door. He pulled down the pillow and blankets, dragged them under the bed with him, wrapped himself in the blanket, and covered his head. He curled up at the head of the bed so his but was in the corner, his back was against the wall, and his head didn't quite peak out but allowed him to see out into the room. With every slam of the door, he took a sharp breath of fear. He heard the concrete crumble, watched the metal bend and separate, and then it's hand was inside.

It began pushing and pulling at the shredded portions of the door, before finally trying to put its head through. For a moment he thought that it wouldn't fit and would just give up and leave. But it forced its way in, squeezing through the hole it made in the door, shredding most of the skin that hadn't been torn or burned away by the Endgame on the jagged metal.

He watched through a small hole in the blanket as the beast squeezed in and started shambling around. It moved towards the bathroom where the noise of the generator could faintly be heard. It struggled to fit through the door and wound up just smashing up the frame when it failed to get through. After a short minute, the sound of the generator being hit with a wrecking ball signaled that it reached the generator. The second hit destroyed the generator and the lights went out, plunging the room into darkness. There was a little bit of light sneaking in through the hall, giving him just enough light to see the slightly darker shape of the monster as it forced its way back out to the main room.

A few still seconds passed as he watched the beast simply standing in the doorway. It took several moments before he realized that the beast was looking back and forth, searching for him. His heart slammed in his chest when it looked at the bed and fear froze him in place. He should have run while it was destroying the generator, now he was stuck, trapped again. Reason told him that running would have been pointless, where was he even going to go. Maybe he could run from that thing, but there were others outside. It was doubtful that Evan was coming to save him, and if he had he wouldn’t have come alone. He was coming to hide in the shelter because they were screwed up top.

Unable to see him, the beast turned to the gun cage. The lack of light made the slightly tinted glass appear black and slightly reflective. It smashed the cage, punching it repeatedly, the metal bending inwards as it continued to punch through the metal, into the stone wall behind it, and still it kept going. Several minutes passed before it finally stopped, drawing back a bloody and mangled stub of a limb with jagged metal and stone lodged in the raw flesh that used to be a fist. It then turned and began to smash the computer in the same way. He had a fleeting thought of running while it’s back was turned to him, but he was still frozen in fear.

It didn’t destroy the computer with the same vigor as the gun cage, but it still left in thousands of small pieces. It then turned to the bed. It crushed the table next to the bed, smashing it into the ground and leaving an indent in the floor just next to his head. It then grabbed and ripped up the bed, tearing the metal supports straight out of their concrete foundation in the ground, and threw it aside.

Fear completely dominated him to the point that he couldn’t breathe or blink. If he hadn’t skipped breakfast that morning, he would have puked up or shat out anything left in his stomach. It stared down at him, even taking a step forward and reached toward him. He went numb, completely empty of any hope to survive when a scream could be faintly heard coming from outside. It froze, looked towards the door, and started to move when the scream came again. It squeezed back out through the door, leaving large chunks of bloody flesh behind.

The pounding footsteps faded to nothing, leaving a cold silence punctuated by faint screams and distant gunshots from outside. Hours passed, but he was still frozen in terror wrapped up in the blanket. At some point he started shaking, the numbness fading as he returned to some point of sanity and trembled in absolute terror. It was still several more hours, perhaps even more than a full day before he could unwrap himself from the blanket and move.