"Four!" Max cried, backing his way through the door into the hospital wing with Saunders' in his arms and the coil of rope he had taken from JJ over his shoulder.

He placed the Doctor down carefully and asked one of the guards to take over while he desperately searched for the elevator shaft. After a moment or two, he found it and wrenched the doors open just as he had a few floors above. He praised his own counting ability as the dirty metal of the base of the lift appeared a yard or so above his head.

"This just might work," he whispered to himself.

Max looped the rope through a bar at the bottom of the lift and pulled enough slack through to tie a few simple knots. He was ashamed to say that his years in the Scouts as a kid hadn't left him with ay more than the knowhow to tie a simple loop, but it would have to do.

"Come and put him down here! Then go and check the stairwell, make sure we won't be getting any unwanted guests anytime soon," Max ordered, with the two guards obediently obliging.

Max took the loop and lifted Saunders' legs through it one by one, before shuffling the rope further and further up his heavy legs.

"Give me a hand here would you, Herbert?" Max puffed as he attempted to lift the Doctor just enough to hoist the rope around his waist.

After 30 seconds of heaving and wriggling, the loop was in place and tightened, with Max carefully easing Doctor Saunders over towards the edge of the elevator shaft.

"What the hell have you got planned here, Max?" Herbert muttered nervously.

A thundering explosion interrupted Max's reply, or lack thereof, before he could even begin to explain it. He was glad. It would surely sound far crazier out loud.

Another second passed and another explosion carved through the air, followed by another, and another. Good old Rodney, Max thought. No matter whether Max and Herbert were able to save the Doctor or not, it would all be in vain if those on the roof couldn't stop the horde from storming the hospital. The more explosions, the more dead clickers, and hopefully the bigger the pile of rubble by the entrance blocking more from entering.

Just as Max clambered back to his feet to fetch the guards again, they came bursting through the doors of their own accord.

"We have a problem..."

"How close?" Max asked bluntly.

"Two floors at most," the guard replied, nervously checking the ammo clip of his gun. "What are we going to do?"

Max hurried back over to the rope and gave it one half-hearted tug in a desperate attempt to fill himself with enough confidence to try what came next.

"Luckily for us," Max gulped. "We're going down anyway."

"What do you mean by us?" Herbert stuttered, peering down the dark and gloomy elevator shaft. "I'm not sure my old bones are up to that, Max."

Max hated asking people to do things that would more than likely get them killed. He hated putting people on the chopping block to become sacrifices while he still walked the Earth relatively unharmed. At times, he felt like the puppet-master for his friends' demises. Unfortunately, Herbert's weary old body was needed at the bottom of that elevator shaft and there was only one feasible way of getting it there in one piece.

"Trust me," Max spoke softly through the least convincing smile of his life.

"We need to go!" the guard nearest the door cried as he tore it open and fired an entire clip into the stairwell. "They're here!"

Max leapt over to the door and prised the gun from the guard's sweaty palms, before urging the second guard to hand his over too.

"I need one of you on lowering duty and one of you to go down with the Doctor to make sure he doesn't fall off or get eaten at the bottom or some shit," Max barked, popping a bullet into the skull of the nearest clicker as he did so.

"How do we decide who does what?"

"Draw fucking straws, what do I care?!" Max yelled as he grabbed another undead body by the scruff of the neck, planted his knife into its temple, and laid its lifeless body across the doorway like a clicker draught excluder.

The guards ambled their way over to the makeshift pulley system and got into position, clearly deciding that the smaller of the two should be the one to make the descent.

"Herbert, up here with me. Do you know how to handle a gun?" Max asked, sending a clicker tumbling back down the stairs with a bullet to the chest before he could even say 'flesh'.

"Two tours as an army medic, sir," Herbert replied, taking the assault rifle from Max's extended hand and taking a moment to familiarise himself with it. It had been a while, but the point and shoot element always remained the same.

Herbert pulled open the right side of the double door and fired a few shots, only two of which found their mark, thumping into the rotten flesh of a clicker's thigh. The rest harmlessly scattered across the back wall of the stairwell, prompting a few nervous curse words.

"Let them get as close as you can, then give them hell," Max said. "Maximise the damage we can do with this ammo, okay?"

They just needed to buy the others enough time to get Doctor Saunders down to the lab, then it would be up to Max to man the fort while Herbert was lowered down to treat him. The odds of everything going as planned seemed to be slashing by the second.

While the bodies piled up in the stairwell, fresh clicker faces seemed to replace them at an impossible rate. It was a war of attrition as they emptied their dwindling ammo into every piece of rotten flesh in sight, but slowly and surely Max and Herbert were being pushed back. The clickers soon reached the top of the stairs, then the double doors, within a minute they were stepping foot into the hospital wing itself.

"Give me some good news back there!" Max snarled as he reached to his pocket for his last clip of ammo.

"He's nearly at the bottom!" The guard replied. "Any second now!"

"Any second is all we've got," Max warned, making one last push to buy them some time.

He shoved the muzzle of his rifle into the nearest clicker's mouth before popping off a single shot, plastering the pristine while walls with red and yellow brains. Shoving the body away, he continued to push forward, firing single shots directly into the skulls of the advancing clickers. Max's last-ditch efforts were to little avail though, as the frail Herbert struggled to hold the clicker forces back, and the undead began to flank around on the right side. Max drew out his pistol and fired simultaneously, relying on his peripheral vision alone in order to ease the burden on the old man, but it was no good. They had held them off as long as they could.

"There!" the guard bellowed. "He's clear! He made it to the bot-"

One stray clicker had managed to break through Herbert's defences on the far right, sinking its teeth into the shoulder of the guard. His natural instinct was to turn around and face his attacker, while clutching his bleeding wound, but the clicker didn't need an invitation for his second bite. As the undead body slammed into his chest, the guard tumbled back into the abyss, clicker in tow. Max heard his cries echo down the elevator shaft until screams turned to silence and silence turned to a sickening crunch as the two bodies slammed into the unforgiving metal below.

"Jesus!" Herbert whimpered, the clickers now surrounding both himself and Max on all angles.

Max fired off his final two shots, before raising his empty rifle to use as a last-ditch barricade, "You're going to need to climb, doctor!"

"I-I-I can't," Herbert whimpered, inching ever closer to the edge of a ten-story plummet.

"It's climb or die, Herbert!"

But, the old man remained rooted to the spot, seemingly resigned to either death by clicker or death by fall. Even if Max wanted to leave him, he doubted he mould make it to the bottom of the lift shaft without an avalanche of clickers taking him with them. And what would he do if he did reach the bottom safely? God knows Max didn't have the skill or medical know-how to help Saunders in the sorry state he was in.

Now pushed up against the very edge of the cliff, Max put all his remaining energy into one last heave, shoving the clickers as far away from him as possible, before slamming the butt of his rifle into whichever got closest to the pair.

"Hit the deck!" a voice screeched from across the room.

Max was slow to react, with another voice following up, "Do it! NOW!"

He didn't need asking a third time, as Max clasped his hands around Herbert's shoulders and dragged him to the ground, their bodies teetering over the precipice. A split-second later, the hospital wing erupted in gunfire, as bullets carved through the air, tore through flesh, embedded into walls, and smashed windows. Max and Herbert were at the eye of the storm, unable to do anything but hang on for dear life as glass, rubble, guts, and brains showered down on them like shrapnel.

Lifeless clicker bodies tumbled down on top of them, as Max did his best to shrug them off over the edge of the elevator shaft. However, as they piled up, he simply didn't have the strength to move them. He could hear body after body cascading over them, slamming into the walls of the shaft as they hurtled down floor after floor. Clickers crashed against the bottom of the shaft like the steady beating of a drum, as Max struggled for breath beneath the mountain of flesh. He could only imagine how much Herbert was struggling. Attempting to speak only resulted in a mouth full of blood and a dismembered finger or two. After what felt like an eternity, the gunfire finally ceased.

It was several more seconds, seconds of pure hell, before the bodies imprisoning Max and Herbert were dragged to one side. Max desperately tried to wipe the thick, congealed blood from his eyes, with his saviours eventually wiping them clear with the edge of their shirts.

"Let's get you away from that ledge," JJ suggested, pulling Max to his feet, while Lizzie delicately chaperoned Herbert clear of danger.

"Thank God you came up with a plan," she snapped at Max with a fierce look of rage and betrayal.

"I thought I told you to keep her safe," Max shot at JJ.

"I tried... she shot the fucking door handle off."

Lizzie smiled sarcastically before flashing her father the finger.