The Inevitable Zombie Uprising (3)

//still chapter 1
One the way down the stairs, a voice small voice remarked “So this is how it happens.” She desperately wanted someone to ask “How what happens?” so she could respond “the inevitable zombie uprising!” My horoscope today said it would happen, and this must be it!
 Fortunately for the present opinion of her sanity, no one asked. Truthfully, no one noticed the goth. She was not a regular mall employee, not one of them. Probably a temp for the holidays. Ursula had long ago accepted that she often went unnoticed. 
The door above them opened an closed once more, admitting what sounded like a dozen dancing elephants in the close concrete room. “This is crazy, Joseph. There's no reason to get all freaked out about it – the siren's got to be malfunctioning. Who ever heard of a tornado in November?” The voice was feminine and shrill and worried, but managed to be indignant at the same time.
“Jan, you know that siren isn't lying. You can feel it, and so can I. And if its not a tornado, then there's only one thing they use those things for. And its better to be down here when it happens.”
Naturally, the younger members of the group were unaware what Joe referred to, as it wasn't something they'd ever seriously considered. But drills for nuclear war – largely consisting of curling up or hiding in rooms that would provide no significant protection – had once been a fact of life.  
The skeptics underground were silenced for a moment by a sudden thunder. This was no tornado, and even down here they concussion had force. The skeptics above ground, who had been slow to respond to the warning, would not be given the chance to reconsider.  

The Viktorberg mall overlooked the interstate. In the past, it had brought them business when times were slow and counted them among sell-outs when the county (through whose capital the fabled route 66 passed) met and discussed “revitalization.” It had never really brought trouble. But now, if one was standing at a window looking out of the interstate they would have seen a great, white semi with no markings begin to pass under a major road. They might have noted that the semi was covered with small bullet holes, as though there had been a great fight around it. They might have even seen that the semi's tires had taken a great deal of punishment and surmised, given time enough to think about it, that someone had been trying to stop it quite forcefully. And they would then understand that the someones who intended to stop it were quite as desperate to halt the truck as its driver was to keep it moving.
If this hypothetical observer realized this before the truck neared the overpass, he might have concluded that continuing to watch might be hazardous. He would have been right.
With a noise like the world was tearing itself in two, massive charges blew the overpass away from the road above. It promptly collapsed, crumbing in places, but remaining largely intact, on to the road below. The unmarked white semi immediately tried to break. Its tires belched fire and threw smoke, but they had already seen far better days and were not up to the task of stopping the monster. The great vehicle collided with its concrete adversary like an ancient Mediterranean warship intent upon destroying its foe with an iron ram. In this case, the trireme could not budge its stone enemy. What the observer could not have predicted was the next event. Not only did the truck crumple as it smashed with the unexpected wall, but it exploded. Not with the force of a action-movie petroleum tanker whose safety measures are somehow completely ineffective, but with a force normally reserved for the militaryi. The trailer was vaporized. The cab was vaporized. The other travelers' vehicles gave tiny explosions as the immense heat cooked them and the fuel they carried. The concrete wall in front of the semi vanished and sent rubble flying great distances. The shock wave, if our observer saw it coming, would have looked like an expanding hurricane eyewall – all wind and force and flying bits of civilization that could be distinguished from each other only by a skilled anthropologist with too much time on his hands. The mall in which out observer stands would disintegrate around him. Glass would go first. The walls themselves would withstand the blast in some places. In others, they would give way. Huge chucks of them would become airborne. Entire cars from the parking lot turned into projectiles, doing damage like the shell from some landlocked battleship. Anything flammable would catch fire. Small articles, weighing less than several tons, would either disintegrate and become shrapnel. Our observer, no matter how stoic he might have been, would surely have been quite unable to follow this destruction further. But it did spread out – damaging buildings in the town and returning the fortunate to dust.
Several miles away, Vincent and his truck felt the blast.  
In the basement of the Victorsberg mall, they felt the blast too. Rather more closely than the distant drivers, and without quite as much explanation. The concrete above them held, and the great steel door – closed and locked with quick precision by the owner of a certain smoke-and-military-surplus shop named Joseph, held fast.