The meat locker had become a cathedral of rot.

Cold so deep it cracked the skin on their knuckles. Hooks swayed on rusted chains, each one strung with something that used to scream. Human torsos split from throat to groin, ribs pried open like wings, organs sagging in blackened sacks that still pulsed with leftover nerves. Faces hung upside-down, jaws unhinged, tongues lolling black and swollen while maggots poured from eye sockets in living ropes. A child’s body no bigger than a duffel twisted slowly on its hook, one small hand still clutching a stuffed rabbit now soaked through with liquefied brain.

The door behind them was buckling. Metal screaming. Fingernails and teeth scraping, splintering, until the first fist punched through in a spray of rust and gore. Then the second. Then the flood.

Ghost was already moving, silent as ever, combat knife flashing under the stuttering emergency bulb. He drove the blade up through soft palates, twisting until the skull plates separated with a wet pop and grey sludge ran down his sleeves in thick ropes. Every kill left him shinier, blacker, until the white skull on his mask was just another smear.

Soap had torn a fire axe from the wall and was laughing—a broken, jagged sound that lived in his throat now. He swung like a butcher on a deadline, cleaving through collarbones so cleanly the top halves of bodies dropped straight down while the bottom halves kept walking, intestines uncoiling behind them like party streamers made of shit and meat.

Gaz moved low and fast between the hanging corpses, pistol barking in controlled doubles. Each round punched through foreheads and out the back in red-and-yellow geysers that painted the hanging dead like obscene modern art. His breath fogged the air in short, sharp bursts. Every time that he reloaded, his hands left bloody prints on the magazines.

Price stood anchored at the narrowing gap, shotgun shouldered, pumping round after round into the press of bodies until the barrel glowed. Buckshot turned faces into red porridge, tore arms off at the shoulder, and sent jaws spinning across the floor still snapping. Smoke and cordite mixed with the sweet-sour reek of opened bowels until the air itself felt thick enough to chew.

They fought in a tightening knot, backs brushing, elbows knocking, boots sliding through the growing lake of thawed blood and melted fat. No one spoke. There was only the wet crunch of steel through bone, the slap of severed limbs hitting concrete, and the endless wet chewing sounds from the things still twitching on their hooks as fresh corpses joined them.

The door was gone now. Just a ragged mouth vomiting more dead into the freezer. They were almost out of ammo. Almost out of space. Almost out of time.