The Collapse
Author: Michael Stephen Fuchs
Date: 2020-08-27 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Zombies; Horror; Military Fiction; Action; Fiction
Description: Two teams of pipe-hitting special-operations Marines, left to die in the fall of North America. One nuclear supercarrier strike group, humanity's last best hope for survival. And seven billion ravening dead guys, rampaging across an overrun planet. Start the blistering new series now, and experience the horrors and glories of two years of Zulu Alpha on the high seas and the fallen world's ports and coasts, for the JFK strike group and its MARSOC guardians. Now, their story will finally be told. Welcome to the Zulu Alpha ARISEN Hope Never Dies.
Publisher: Complete & Total Asskicking Books

ARISEN
Hope Never Dies.

First published 2020 by Complete & Total Asskicking Books
London, UK

Copyright © Michael Stephen Fuchs

The right of Michael Stephen Fuchs to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any other means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the author. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

About the Author

MICHAEL STEPHEN FUCHS is co-author of the first eight books of the bestselling ARISEN series, and solo author of Books Nine through Fourteen (the climax and conclusion of the series), as well as the stand-alone prequels ARISEN : Genesis, ARISEN : Nemesis, ARISEN : Odyssey, and ARISEN : Last Stand, and also the ARISEN : Raiders spin-off miniseries – which have repeatedly been Amazon #1 bestsellers in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction, #1 in Dystopian Science Fiction, #1 in Military Science Fiction, #1 in War Fiction, and #1 in War & Military Action Fiction, as well as Amazon overall Top 100 bestsellers. The series as a whole has sold over a half-million copies. The audiobook editions, performed by R.C. Bray, have generated over $3 million in revenue. He is also author of the D-BOYS series of high-tech special-operations military adventure novels, which include D-Boys, Counter-Assault, and Close Quarters Battle (coming in 2021); as well as the existential cyberthrillers The Manuscript and Pandora’s Sisters, both published worldwide by Macmillan in hardback, paperback and all e-book formats (and in translation). He lives in London and at www.michaelstephenfuchs.com, and blogs at www.michaelfuchs.org/razorsedge. You can follow him on Facebook, Twitter (@michaelstephenf), Instagram, or by e-mail.

About the ARISEN Series

The eighteen books in the bestselling, top-ranked, and fan-favorite ARISEN series have repeatedly been ranked #1 in five different Amazon category bestseller lists, as well as in the Top 100 across all of Amazon. Collectively, they have earned over 5,000 reviews averaging 4.7 stars out of 5.0 (Including a 4.9-star average for each of the last two books in the main series, The Siege and ENDGAME.)
Readers call ARISEN:

“thoroughly engrossing, taking you on a wild ride through utter devastation” … “the best post-apocalyptic military fiction there is” … “Wall to wall adrenaline - edge of your seat unputdownable until the very last page” … “the most amazing and intense battle scenes you've ever experienced” … “rolls along like an out of control freight train” … “They grab you on the first page and kick your ass through the entire series” … “insane propulsive storytelling” … “You feel like the explosions are going off beside your head” … “you never know what the hell is coming at you next” … “Every time I think it cannot get any better, BAM!” … “Blows World War Z out of the water” … “The Game of Thrones of the Zombie Apocalypse” … “Like a Michael Bay movie on steroids” … “like trying to ride a bronco in a tornado” … “roars out of the gate at 200mph and just keeps going” … “If you haven't read these you need to reevaluate your life” … “dials the volume to the point of annihilating the sound system” … “A superb ending to an absolutely mesmerizing and phenomenal series. This was an experience I'll never forget.”

ARISEN : RAIDERS

VOLUME 1 – THE COLLAPSE

MICHAEL STEPHEN FUCHS

For Abbe.

Notoriously Bad Hombres

The USS John F. Kennedy

“The XO’s on his way down,” said the Marine Master Gunnery Sergeant, head of the four-man security detail that brought Alpha team aboard. Handon clocked his insignia as that of the Marine Special Operations Regiment. This caused him to raise an eyebrow, but he kept his comments to himself. Ainsley thanked the man, and the Marine team cleared out smartly.

Handon picked out a bunk in a cabin with Ainsley, Predator, and Juice, tossing his personal gear on a bottom rack before Ainsley scored it. In both the British and American militaries, it had long been not so much “rank hath its privileges” but rather “first in gets dibs.” When Handon turned toward the hatch again, there was a smart-looking naval officer filling it.

“I’m Commander Drake, ship’s XO.”

Ainsley took his hand. “Captain Ainsley, USOC. This is CSM Handon, my team first sergeant.”

Drake, late thirties, angular features, immaculately turned out and squared away in tan service uniform and #1 haircut, squinted at this, and his eyes glinted. “I suppose that’s the advantage of a slimmed down service structure. A lot of guys in jobs they’re overqualified for.”

Handon almost smiled himself. He liked this guy immediately. “What was with the MARSOC security detail?” he asked, referring to the Marine Special Operations Command. “I thought Navy MPs, or at least maybe SEALs, would provide shipboard security.”

Drake nodded. “When the shit started coming down, we had recently disembarked two fifteen-man Marine spec-ops teams – Teams 1 and 2, A Company, 2nd Marine Special Operations Battalion. They radioed for pickup, fought their way to the coastline – then swam out to the boat. After a two-week quarantine, we pretty much put them in charge of all security and combat operations throughout the strike group.”

Handon didn’t have to ask why. MARSOC Marines were drawn from the Marine Corps Force Reconnaissance community – the very best of what’s already a smart, deadly, elite outfit. They were notoriously bad hombres, as cunning as they were lethal. When you had fighters like that…

You let them do your fighting for you.

The Drop

Hindu Kush Mountains, Pakistani Side
On the Slopes of Tirich Mir (25,289ft)
[Two Years Earlier]

Special Amphibious Reconnaissance Corpsman Thomas J. Yaskiewicz squinted into the dazzling glare of sunlight through his Oakley wraps. The sun had just broken over the opposite ridge line. Though no light, never mind warmth, would hit the valley floor below for a good couple of hours.

Yaskiewicz’s view of the whole mountain range was sublime, not least because he was standing on a 300-meter cliff edge, at the end of a plateau which jutted out from the snow-covered slopes. He looked down at the drop directly beneath his boots and whistled. He and his team were way off in the boonies. Though it felt more like they were up on Mt. Olympus.

Also, it wasn’t really his team. He was merely attached.

He turned and saw the eight heavily armed and irregularly clad men standing or kneeling in a wide circle behind him, marking out their HLZ for pickup. They were being extracted in daylight, which was unusual. But it had been an unusual mission – running all night, at absurdly high elevation, but ending in the normal way, with a lot of bodies on the ground. Those bodies had belonged to hard-core ISIS commanders and AQ remnants, meeting so high up in the Hindu Kush they assumed they were safe.

The last flawed assumption they’d ever make.

The team’s intel section didn’t know why enemy command and planning cells were moving out of the cities, and up into the mountains at such a rapid rate. But the cities were getting even weirder and dodgier than they’d been in recent years. And this felt like rats seeking higher ground.

So it was making everyone a little edgy.

Now, the men who had killed these rats – all veteran operators with the Naval Special Warfare Development Group (DEVGRU) – also believed they were safe, despite the light of the cresting sun. And despite being a long way from any ocean. All special operators preferred moving in darkness. But it was usually open water that provided refuge and safety for SEALs, including those from Team Six. Most team guys had spent at least some of their operational time fighting their way back to the water, usually under heavy fire.

But now they were just kicking it, waiting for their ride.

With the mountain glare hammering down through the air, plus bouncing up off the snow, all of them also wore dark sunglasses – wraps with ballistic lenses and tactical frames from Oakley or Wiley X. They all carried heavily customized weapons – assault rifles from Daniel Defense or Heckler & Koch, Glock pistols customized by Taran Tactical, with Magpul furniture and mags, and expensive optics from EOTech or Schmidt & Bender.

As he watched this circle of badasses, Yaskiewicz suddenly realized he could hear the thrum of approaching helos, and heard a voice in his ear: “Hey, Yaz, bring it in.”

He took a last look over the cliff edge down to the valley.

Hell of a drop, he thought, whistling again.

He turned and trotted back toward the others, as the battle-insect shape of an Apache gunship zoomed through the notch in the peaks behind them, so low it whipped snow into the air behind it, then put its nose down and dove toward them. Finally, it broke off and swung into a wide racetrack pattern, circling overhead.

This was their security.

Behind it came their ride – a Bell V-280 Valor, a tilt-rotor aircraft developed for the Army’s Future Vertical Lift (FVL) program. Purpose-built for warfighters, it had over twice the speed and range of previous air-assault aircraft – namely Black Hawk and Little Bird helicopters – and was said to be a whole lot more survivable. DEVGRU wasn’t the first unit to take receipt of one. But, as far as Yaz knew, they were the first to deploy with it, and the first to take it into the fight.

Right now, it came in alarmingly low over the saddle in the ridge line. Both it and the Apache were flying above their rated service ceilings, and both would struggle to stay there, their rotors battling to produce lift against the thin air.

Yaz looked from the Apache to the Valor, its rotors tilting from the front to upward, as it angled down to land – when an evil dart on a long trail of fire whooshed out from the slopes to their north. The Apache overhead spat sixteen brilliant flares from the sides of its fuselage, banked left, and dove out of the sky, down toward the valley.

But it was too late, the range too short – point-blank.

The Apache exploded in a fireball brighter than the sun behind it and fell out of the sky in a rain of tumbling and splintering debris. To his horror, Yaz found he could identify two of the bits of debris – the pilot and gunner. He was also pretty sure he could identify the launch signature of the weapon system that had killed them – a Stinger missile.

This was the nightmare.

The U.S. had flooded Afghanistan with Stingers during the Soviet invasion and occupation. Now, all were believed to have been expended or recovered.

Believed – but not known for sure.

Now, Yaz’s team had just brought two twenty-million-dollar aircraft – plus their crews, whose lives were beyond value – into the jaws of this lethal trap. If the men springing it had another Stinger, the Valor was going down, too.

But they didn’t.

Instead, a barrage of sparking RPGs blasted out from that same spot on the mountain. Yaz guessed there must be a cave or concealed fighting position there, no more 200 meters from their extraction point. Not spotting this beforehand was a horrendous oversight – by their planning cell, the ISR guys, and the team themselves. But the Hindu Kush was immense and trackless, and it was impossible to scour every ridge and slope.

Luckily, the RPGs, unlike the Stinger, were blind, dumb, and notoriously inaccurate against moving targets, or anything beyond about 75 meters. Five went completely wide, exploding with violent but harmless bangs against the slopes above and below the team’s position. But the last one, maybe just due to the law of large numbers, found its target.

The Valor was revving up its engines to an atrocious roar to try to rise again, when the RPG impacted high on its right side, between the engine and rotor housing.

There was nothing like cover out here, so Yaz was already hurling himself at the ground when the rocket-strike took off the Valor’s right engine cowling and launched it at his head. He felt the whoosh and burn of it slicing the air inches away – if he’d still been standing, it would have taken his head off – then saw it land in the snow twenty feet past him. It was smoking, and not just melting but evaporating the snow around it.

Yaz looked back again as the Valor’s engines changed in pitch again, and the aircraft dropped the last fifteen feet to the snow-covered rock, crunching and grinding, sending up a shower of pebbles, stone shards, and snow.

By the time Yaz got up off the ground and took a knee, the SEALs were already up and assaulting into the enemy position. When he raised his rifle and put his eye to his Elcan Spectre 4x sight, the first thing he saw was a robed man already down on the deck, still clutching a Stinger launcher, its distinctive cage sticking up from the tangle of limbs and tube. One of the SEALs had already dropped him.

Before Yaskiewicz even got his weapon up.

Now the team guys were moving at a speed beyond fast, self-organizing, advancing and spreading the flanks on the rocky slope. They moved and shot perfectly, rifles up and braced with their non-shooting hands out on the barrel for stability, a few of them chucking grenades, or popping them off from underslung grenade launchers, the explosions blossoming practically inside the cave ahead.

Yaz shook his head to clear it, and remembered his role in a react-to-contact drill – to cover their six, and provide rear security. He turned and saw again most of their rear consisted of this sheer cliff edge. He tried to ignore the firefight shifting around behind him – the rattle of AKs on full-auto, chugs of suppressed ARs, and the odd grenade crumping off. Another RPG exploded, then another. Each made Yaz flinch as he scanned the cliff edge and the slopes to either side.

And that’s when the fear hit him – cold and bracing as a mountain-river plunge. They’d just lost two aircraft, all in five seconds, and been blindsided by a switched-on enemy in a covered and superior position. Was this Takhur Gar all over again – overconfident SEALs flying blind into the center of a fortified enemy position on a mountaintop?

None of this was supposed to happen to Tier-1 guys. But the thing is, there wasn’t any secret react-to-contact drill that only special operators got taught. It was the same drill all new soldiers learned at Basic. The Tier-1 guys just did it faster, more perfectly, and with more violence of action.

Surprise, Yaz thought. Our op just went conventional.

As the seconds stretched out, and beads of sweat rolled down his face, he stole a look over his shoulder. The assaulting SEALs were a lot farther away now.

And they’d left Yaz here on his own.

Getting his mind back on his job, he faced forward again, and belatedly saw it wasn’t just sheer cliff behind them.

The grade flattened out to either side.

It was still not what you’d call passable. But then again, the Pashtun and Mountain Tajiks who lived up here, and often got recruited by the Taliban, were pretty much half mountain goat themselves. And now a half-dozen of them – armed, robed, military-aged-males – appeared from around the slope on the far side of the cliff. And for some reason Yaz suddenly recalled the meaning of “Hindu Kush” in Pashto:

Killer of the Hindus.

He tensed and took a dozen rapid shots, not acquiring or aiming, just trying to get some lead in the air, put heads down, and buy himself a few seconds of breathing room – time to keep breathing. When he scanned around, there still wasn’t any cover. And he was still on his own back in the rear, the others now just specks in the distance.

The SEALs didn’t have cover, either, but they were advancing under a wall of precision lead – every round either dropping enemy shooters, or hitting edges of the rocks they hid behind, forcing their heads down. It was a sustainable tactic for the eight-man SEAL team. But Yaz couldn’t do this on his own, not caught out in the open, with no cover he could reach.

Check that. There was one position of cover nearby.

Rising up out of his crouch, firing off the remainder of his mag as fast as he could yank the trigger, he hurled his body straight toward the enemy.

But also straight toward that smoking engine cowling.

It was heavier than a dead cow, but Yaz got it up off the ground, the steel burning his hand through his Mechanix glove. Propping it up with his shoulder, he swapped out rifle mags, hot AK rounds clanging off his improvised shield and snapping the air over his head. Slapping at his rifle’s bolt release, he leaned out and sighted in with the ruggedized mini-reflex sight mounted on top of his optical sight.

Because these guys were basically in his lap.

But the first face his red holo-dot fell on belonged to a boy no older than twelve. The kid had just the magazine in his weapon, no spares, and the AK was too big in his hands. He looked like he was struggling just to carry it, after what must have been a murderous ascent. He sure wasn’t firing it.

And basic human decency stopped Yaz from engaging.

Instead he traversed left, trying to acquire a target who might pass basic Geneva Convention standards – but instead all he saw were robed dudes already going down in the dirt, falling like wheat. Same thing to the right.

Only when the AKs fell silent did Yaz hear the quiet chugs and clacking bolts of suppressed shots coming from behind him. He looked over his shoulder and saw two of the SEALs had moved back to support him. They were still a good 75 yards back, but well within their effective range.

But then Yaz’s head spun forward again, and he curled up behind his shield, as another storm of lead rained in on it. Looking up, he saw it was the boy.

The only one still on his feet.

The SEALs had been clearing from the outside in, and the boy was right in the center, hidden by Yaz – and finally shooting. Yaz could feel the steel bucking against him from the pummeling AK fire. Then he felt a round burn his sleeve. And he realized if he didn’t act he could seriously die – right here and right now.

He took the shot.

* * *

In the end, he honestly didn’t know if it was his inferior shooting that saved the kid’s life, or if he had subconsciously shanked the shot. In any case, when he pushed out to check the bodies, every one of the attackers was down, all ex-Taliban now, dropped with multiple headshots.

All except the boy.

He was lying on his side, curled up, and breathing raggedly. Yaz could tell he had a perforated lung, the pulmonary cavity filling with blood. But the boy wouldn’t live long enough to die from it – because the subclavian artery which fed the arm had also been severed, thick pulses of bright red arterial blood pumping out of it and onto the pristine snow.

Yaz swallowed a lump of acid, trying to tell himself he’d had no choice but to take the shot. He unslung the big med ruck from his back, and got it opened up on the ground – but a muddy boot tread crunched down on top of it.

When he looked up, he saw the owner of the boot was one of the SEALs, holding a tomahawk. Above its leather-wrapped handle was a wood-burned Indian head, and the single word: REDMEN. The blade dripped with blood – not on the med kit, but on Yaz himself.

“Christ,” Yaz said. “What the hell?”

The SEAL glared down at him from behind his shades, nodded at the wounded boy, and spoke through a thick beard. “Why don’t you just let Terry Taliban there bleed out, Doc.”

“The hell I will. He’s just a kid.”

Three more SEALs strolled up, back from clearing the cave complex – and one of them was the CMC, or Command Master Chief, for all of Team Six. As such, he wouldn’t ordinarily be on a remote mountain peak getting his extraction helos shot out from under him, then wading into a balls-out gunfight. But this was his last deployment, one final ride, before hanging up his spurs and retiring.

He said, “That kid won’t make it off this mountain alive, no matter what you do. We both know that.”

Yaz looked up and held the man’s gaze. “I took an oath.”

“You take orders, motherfucker.”

“Hey, Dave.” This was another SEAL, trotting up from the rear. “I found both the Apache pilots. They’re gone.”

“Okay,” Dave, the CMC, said. “We’re not gonna hang around policing up bodies. The QRF and CSAR guys can do that. What’s the status of the Valor?”

“Crew chief said they managed to patch up the number-two engine – with bailing twine and paper clips. Thinks if they run it at fifty percent it probably won’t explode.”

“Can she still get off the ground? Up this high?”

“Maybe. If we all take a piss first. Get a haircut.”

Yaz pulled himself to his feet, and looked down. The boy was still wheezing, but quieter and more irregularly now. “Let me treat him,” he said. “We can evac him out with us.”

“Not happening,” the CMC said. “You heard the man. We’re already under-powered. We’re not adding weight.”

The others turned to leave.

Yaz shook his head in disgust, and reached down to zip his med ruck. But now Dave’s boot came down on it.

“In fact, we could probably stand to shave some weight. Why don’t you stay and treat your patient here, Doc. Then you can hop a ride back with the CSAR guys.”

One of other SEALs muttered over his shoulder, “Damn, Dave, that’s cold. Signing that PMC contract has turned you into a motherfucking mercenary already.”

“Hey,” Yaskiewicz said, standing up. “Seriously?”

He couldn’t believe this was happening. However much beef you had with somebody, you didn’t leave them behind. Not even for a few minutes. Not anyone in American uniform. Yaz knew he’d been on the bubble with these guys for a while. But now it looked like he’d gone over the edge.

And he’d been dropped.

The SEAL with the bloody tomahawk turned and walked backward long enough to answer him. “You think we don’t know you put in a change-of-station request? You go when we say you go, motherfucker. And now you go.”

Finally, the CMC shouted back, ducking under the turning rotors of the Valor. “We’ll have your orders back to the fleet cut by the time you get back. And if you’ve got any complaints about us or this mission, well, command won’t give a shit about your version of events. AMF, Doc.”

Through the glare, Yaz watched the aircraft shudder off its landing gear and rise up into the thin mountain air. When he looked down again, the boy had stopped wheezing.

He was on his own.

The Circle

500 Feet Over San Francisco Bay
[Five Days Later]

It looked like the Bay was burning.

Yaz – now Fleet Marine Force Reconnaissance Corpsman Tom Yaskiewicz – sat on the fold-down jump seat behind the flight deck of a CH-53K King Stallion heavy-lift cargo helicopter, and stuck his head out into the wind whipping in through the gunner’s window on the left side.

At 100 feet long and 28 feet high, with a cargo capacity of 35,000 pounds and enough space to hold a Humvee, the King Stallion was the largest and heaviest helicopter in the U.S. military. Right now, the bulbous battering ram of an aircraft, painted dishwater-gray, was fully loaded with supplies, stacked to every corner of its cargo hold, and soaring above the surface of San Francisco Bay.

With Yaz as the only passenger

Below, he could see millions of wave tips, whipped up by the breeze and set ablaze by the falling sun in the west – a great expanse of rippling prairie fire, causing him to squint even through his Oakleys. The clean salt air brought a sense of peace. Or maybe renewal.

But then he looked up and out again.

A kilometer away off their port side, Yaz could see San Francisco laid out vividly below. He could make out the clock tower of the Ferry Terminal at water’s edge, and behind that the channel of Market Street cutting through the heart of the city. There was the dramatic spike of the Transamerica Pyramid anchoring the financial district, the long green rectangle of Golden Gate Park, the grassy hills of the Presidio, and the scruffy patchwork of the Mission District. The whole seven-by-seven-mile grid of the city was visible.

Unlike the Bay itself, it didn’t look to be in flames – yet.

A few thin columns of smoke climbed into the sky, dotted here and there around the city. But even from way up here, it was as clear to Yaz as the northern California sky.

San Francisco was falling.

Jammed up, overturned, or jack-knifed cars and trucks filled the boulevards and cross streets, in all directions. The blinking lights of emergency services vehicles flashed in the distance in eerie silence – ladder trucks and hazmat units, ambulances and critical response vehicles, police cruisers and vans – but none of them were rolling either, all frozen in the matrix of gridlock.

While no traffic moved, tiny human figures swarmed everywhere, climbing over crashed or stalled vehicles, shoving their way in or out of skyscrapers and storefronts, and pouring out of the city in a desperate mass exodus across both bridges – the Golden Gate, toward Marin County in the north, and the Bay Bridge, to Oakland in the east.

San Francisco was auto-evacuating.

Yaz grabbed one of the ICS headsets from the bulkhead, swiveled the chin mic, and said, “Hey, you guys seeing this?”

“Didn’t see a thing, man,” the pilot responded.

“We don’t get paid for rubber-necking,” the co-pilot added. “Plus it holds up traffic.”

Yaz undid his restraint harness and leaned forward, looking out the front cockpit glass between the two pilots, at the two miles of primer-colored Golden Gate Bridge, now racing toward them. He managed to get a quick look down at the deck of the bridge, where cars and trucks filled all six lanes, bumper to bumper, stopped dead and backed up. But then the helo flashed over it all, passing between the bridge’s two 750-foot towers like a perfect field goal kick.

Beyond was open ocean, the one named for peace – the Pacific.

For some reason, Yaz remembered a buddy of his, back in training at the Special Operations Corpsman Program, who’d grown up in the Bay Area. This guy told him the Golden Gate Bridge was the second most popular suicide spot in the world. He also had this personal theory that America had always been about the freedom to reinvent yourself – the chance to start over again, make a fresh start. However bad your failures, whatever your sins or demons, you could always up stakes and head west. But once you reached the Golden Gate Bridge, that was it – the end of the line.

Your last chance.

If things didn’t work out for you there… they probably weren’t going to work out for you anywhere.

And then there was only one place left to go.

But today there was something out beyond the Golden Gate Bridge. And that’s when Yaskiewicz saw her.

The USS John F. Kennedy – that gleaming, 110,000-ton warrior queen of the seas – along with her entire complement of support ships, the JFK carrier strike group. Eight sleek warships lying at anchor in two neat rows, parked a mile outside the mouth of San Francisco Bay. And as the helo began to descend toward the shining knife edge of the carrier’s prow, Yaz could feel it in his bones.

This was his last chance, too.

* * *

From the descending helo, he could see the Kennedy stretched the length of the Empire State Building laid on its side, with six and a half acres of flight deck, and its control tower (“the island”) looming five stories over it all.

“Jesus,” Yaz breathed. It wasn’t the length of the thing, which was similar to the older Nimitz-class carriers, about 1,100 feet. It was the width – and total area. The top of this thing looked like its own county. Or maybe country.

And because she’d rolled out of Newport News Drydock just weeks ago – only the second of the new Ford-class of nuclear supercarriers in existence – she was so clean and shiny she looked like a Marvel CGI rendering, rather than something real.

Parked in perfect rows along the starboard side of the bow deck, and the angle deck that jutted out from stern to the waist, were a dozen F-35s – fifth-generation stealth aircraft, each costing more $100 million to build. The Kennedy boasted an air wing of over 75 combat, reconnaissance, search-and-rescue, and transport aircraft – bigger than 75% of the world’s air forces – with most but not all of them stowed below in the ship’s cavernous hangar deck.

The Kennedy was also fully electric, with twin nuclear reactors that produced 750 megawatts and could power the ship’s systems for 15-20 years at sea – including her two giant onboard desalination plants, capable of turning 600,000 gallons of salt water a day into drinkable fresh water. This made the JFK a nearly totally self-sufficient floating city. She’d cost $13 billion to construct, and was made up of about a trillion individual parts, making her the most complex machine ever built by man.

Toward the end of his two-year training pipeline to become a SARC – a Special Amphibious Reconnaissance Corpsman – Yaz and what remained of his class had a day of duty-assignment selection briefings. It was an opportunity for the units that deployed SARCs – Marine Fleet Anti-terrorism Security Teams (FAST), Marine Special Operations battalions (MARSOC), Naval Special Warfare (SEALs), and other SOCOM and JSOC units – to try to convince newly minted SARCs to come out and play with them.

One of the presenters, an officer from the surface fleet, told the group that any one of the US Navy’s ten carrier strike groups had enough firepower, air power, sustainability, and general fuck-shit-up to singlehandedly win a war against any other nation on Earth.

Now, for the first time, Yaz could see what all the fuss was about. The supercarrier was impressive enough on its own. But she was also guarded by two Ticonderoga-class cruisers, a squadron of four guided-missile destroyers – two of the old Arleigh-Burke class, and two of the new stealth, multi-mission, land-attack Zumwalt-class – as well as a replenishment ship to keep them all in ammunition, fuel, and supplies. Finally, out there somewhere – only the commander of the strike group knew where – was at least one, and possibly two, nuclear-powered Virginia-class fast attack subs.

But it wasn’t the hardware Yaskiewicz was here for.

It was the people. He was here for the circle.

As the King Stallion flared in toward its parking spot, fifty meters ahead of the island near the ship’s waist, he could see a lot of people moving around below – mostly flight-deck crew in their colored jumpsuits, managing flight ops for this giant floating airport. But in the center of that storm, unmoving like stone, stood another group – about thirty men, all facing inward, and wearing fatigues in the distinctive MARPAT desert-tan camo pattern.

They were standing in a circle.

And they were not just men, nor even just Marines – but Marine Raiders, from MARSOC, the Marine Special Operations Command. All were fully kitted up with SCAR assault rifles with expensive optics, tactical vests bulging with magazines, cut-out hockey-style helmets with NVG mounts, and assault packs cinched tight to their backs. Being special operators, they had some latitude about their uniform, weapons, and gear, so didn’t quite look identical. But, being Marines, they were also squared away, ready to move and fight.

One of their number, not tall, but upright and stocky, like a mean fireplug, stood just inside the circle, shouting at the others. Bizarrely, he carried what looked like an old-school M16.

He must have had a hell of a voice, because the others were already hunching over against a storm of rotor wash – not from the incoming King Stallion, but from two helos rising up on the Kennedy’s colossal aircraft elevators, being moved from the hangar deck up to the flight deck. It took Yaz a few seconds to identify these as SB-1 Defiants.

The Defiant was even newer than the Valor tilt-rotor Yaz’s team had in Afghanistan. Two sets of coaxial rotors, spinning in opposite directions, eliminated the need for a tail rotor, making it less vulnerable to ground fire. And a six-bladed pusher-propeller made it twice as fast a conventional helo, with amazing maneuverability. Yaz was surprised to see two of them in an operational setting. But, then again, this was the latest and most high-tech carrier in the world, and bound to have the latest aircraft flying off it.

Both of these already had their rotors turning, even as they came level with the deck on the elevators. Yaz couldn’t imagine that was particularly safe, and guessed whatever mission they were on must be both critical and urgent. He watched as the circle of thirty men split into two groups and loaded up the helos. They were going to war.

Without Yaskiewicz.

* * *

Or maybe they weren’t.

As the King Stallion settled on its rubber tires, its rear ramp groaning down, and a pair of forklift trucks buzzing in to offload cargo, Yaz undid his harness and grabbed the latch of the side crew door. But the damned thing wouldn’t open. It was like child locks or something. He struggled with the handle, feeling like a dipshit, trapped inside.

He only looked up again when someone shouted at him through the window. It was one of the Marines, who had come back for him – an African American man with wide shoulders and a square jaw, his mouth traced with a closely trimmed beard. The rank insignia in the center of his chest showed the three chevrons and two rockers of a gunnery sergeant, and the nametape on his breast read Blane. He stuck his head in the window and shouted over the wind, rotor, and engine noise.

“Hey! You the new SARC?”

“Affirmative!” Yaskiewicz shouted back.

“I’m Gunny Blane! Ops Sergeant, Team Two!” He stuck his hand in and Yaz shook it. Then he reached down and opened the hatch, with no delay or difficulty. Feeling stupid, Yaz climbed out onto the flight deck, his ruck and rifle banging into the lip of the doorway. But before he could straighten up again, Blane had already taken off, back toward the nearest Defiant.

Running to keep up, Yaz asked, “Where we going?” But he immediately regretted the question. In both the Navy and the Marine Corps, you went where senior NCOs told you – you didn’t interrogate them about it. Yaz’s rank was Hospital Corpsman Second Class, or HM2 – the equivalent of E-5, or Sergeant, and fairly senior as enlisted guys went. But Gunnery Sergeants, aside from being E-7s, pretty much ran the Marine Corps. So Yaz just shut up again and followed this one to the hatch of the Defiant. There, Blane stopped and turned back.

And Yaz found himself facing not just him, but thirteen more pairs of unblinking eyes, all checking him out, from the dim interior of the cabin.

“Where are we going?” Blane said. “That’s up to you!” He nodded past Yaz, at a hatch at the base of the island, where more flight ops personnel were crashing in and out. “Back that way is our Team Room, with a comfy couch and hot coffee.” Then he nodded behind him, at the helo, packed full of MARSOC Marines. “This way is the shit.”

Yaz paused and considered. He knew Marines had been going where things were worst ever since the landing at Tripoli in 1805, followed by a forced march across 500 miles of desert to engage an enemy force 10 times their size.

But when he looked over Blane’s shoulder, and into the cabin at the shining eyes of his new teammates, what he actually saw was that circle again. He wondered if this was another one he’d end up on the outside of, standing out at some cliff edge, or in this case maybe the sheer drop at the edge of the carrier’s flight deck. But he also knew there was only way to find out. And he knew he had to try again.

He climbed in.

The helo powered off the deck and into the sky.

Dick In a Sewing Circle

USS John F. Kennedy – Rear Dock

The pair of Defiants screamed over the stern of the flight deck, overflying its rear dock. This sat down at the level of the water, beneath the fantail deck, and was used for launching and recovering small boats.

Right now, a whole formation of small passenger craft was heading straight toward it, strung out in a line from the direction of San Francisco. And the one in front was the only military vessel – a 30-foot single-hulled utility boat, one of the carrier’s launches. It was open-topped, with a pilot’s station at the stern, a minigunner in the prow, and thirty freaked-out sailors in between, jostling up to both gunwales.

And they were freaked out even before two armed sailors on the dock started shooting past and around them.

The second boat in the approaching line was a little 25-foot cabin cruiser, sitting low in the water, heavy with equally freaked out civilian passengers thronging the deck – so many that some had limbs trailing in the water. And as bullets first zipped over their bow, then peppered the surface of the water in their path, it finally started making a tight turn, veering away from the carrier at the last second.

“Check fire, check fire!”

The men on the dock started breathing again and lowered their weapons, standard M4 assault rifles with ACOG sights. Both wore blue-and-gray digital-camo fatigues, as well as black tactical vests – with a patch across the back in all-caps white lettering which read:

U.S. NAVAL SECURITY FORCES

Formerly known as shore patrolmen, they were responsible for law enforcement, anti-terrorism, and force protection across the whole boat – and, by extension, the entire carrier strike group. This did not make what they were being forced to do right now any easier – keeping desperate civilians away from the carrier. But this was what force protection had come to.

Nearly having to fire on unarmed civilians.

“Thank fuck for that,” one of the NSF sailors said, watching the nearest civilian craft turn tail, and the others follow suit.

“Yeah, dude,” the other said, dropping out his magazine with shaking fingers, and checking its contents. “Don’t think I could have brought myself to do it.”

“Me, neither. Thought our job was to protect people.”

“It is. But starting with everyone behind us.” The second sailor nodded up at the two receding Defiant helos, which held the ship’s entire complement of embarked Marines. “With them gone, defense of the Kennedy is on us now.”

“Which is how it should be.”

He stepped forward to grab the ship’s launch as it banged into the dock, while his partner helped passengers out. These were sailors who’d been sent on shore to help quell what at first appeared to be just rioting. Most were armed, all were white-faced, and at least one was lightly wounded.

“Hey, Marlin, man – you’re bleeding.”

“Ain’t my blood, man…”

After the launch was tied up, and the last passengers had gone up the two ladders behind them, the two NSF sailors turned and looked out again – cradling their rifles and staring off toward shore. “That everyone back?”

“Last shore party, yeah.” Out over the water, the tiny specs of the two helos were disappearing into the drifting smoke over San Francisco. “Except those maniacs.”

“Think they’ll come back?”

The other didn’t answer. He just spat off in the sea.

* * *

“Hey, you! Yeah, YOU – with the face.”

Yaz pulled his face back from the porthole in the cargo door, where he’d been watching the carrier fall away below. He’d heard the muted popping of gunfire, and saw what he could swear were armed sailors on the dock engaging a civilian craft. But he couldn’t have seen that right. The sun was also taking a dive for the Pacific in that direction, the west, and the glare half-blinded him.

Now he turned to see he was being shouted at by the fireplug – the same stocky Marine he’d seen addressing the others in the circle out on the flight deck. It had to be the same guy, as he was holding that ancient-ass M16, pointing down between his legs. From closer up, Yaz could also see an underslung 12-gauge Remington shotgun attached to its barrel, and dozens of red shotgun shells in the loops on his vest.

As for the Marine himself, Yaz at first thought he was sitting on one of the two jump-seats behind the flight deck – but it actually proved to be a stack of M72 LAW rockets stowed there. These were as old-school as the M16 – they’d both been around since Vietnam.

For all Yaz knew, this guy had, too.

The rank insignia in the center of his chest showed three chevrons and four rockers, with a bursting bomb in the center, making him a Master Gunnery Sergeant. This meant he had a minimum of thirteen years in, but probably a lot more. Leathery old Marines of his age and rank were like the alpha male lions of the Corps – letting the young pups do most of the hunting, while they hung out, ate their fill, and took a nap. Mainly, they made sure no other predators drove them off the kill.

Because nothing fucks with the king of the jungle.

“Yes, Master Gunnery Sergeant,” Yaz answered, trying to look and sound squared away, but feeling like he had his dick out in a ladies sewing circle.

The grizzled senior enlisted Marine leaned forward, hoary forearms on his knees, squinting to make out the nametape on the SARC’s chest. His thick features twisted up in confusion as he spoke. “Yaz-kye-wishes… Yaz-cue – the fuck?” he finally said, giving up. “Holy shit, Corpsman, what kind of fucked-up third-world Chechnyan goat-fucking Communist dicksuck country are you from, anyway?”

Yaz answered before he could stop himself: “Wisconsin.”

The cabin erupted with laughter.

Yaz honestly couldn’t tell if the Marines were laughing at him, or with him – applauding his huge sack in throwing it back in the Master Guns’ face. But he hadn’t even meant to – he’d just answered straight, without thinking. One of the nearby Marines, one of three without a seat and standing beside him against the hatch, must have read his expression.

“Don’t worry, man,” he said. “We’re not laughing at you – we’re laughing about you!”

This brought more laughter. But as the silence returned, or the regular roar of a combat helo at its max cruising speed anyway, Yaz felt a hand squeezing his bicep. He turned to see it was Gunny Blane.

“Hey, Yaskiewicz,” he said, pronouncing it correctly: Yaz-kuh-witz. “Don’t worry about it, brother. Fick just likes to fuck with new guys. Hell, he likes to fuck with everybody.”

Yaz took a breath. This shouldn’t have been a surprise. He’d been the new guy, the outsider, for almost all of his military career – and even in his life before that. There was always a hazing period before you got accepted.

If you ever did.

He said, “Everyone just calls me Yaz.”

Blane nodded. “Doc Yaz, then. Welcome to Team Two, A Company, Second Marine Raider Battalion.”

“Holy fucking shit, dude.” This was the guy who’d been laughing about him. But he wasn’t laughing now. Instead, he was peering out the porthole glass behind them. Yaz twisted his neck to try to see what he was looking at. And he suddenly wondered what he’d gotten himself into.

All around them, planes were falling out of the sky.

Fuck All This

Flight Deck of the Defiant (“Batcopter Two”)

“Shit,” the Defiant pilot said into his ICS chin mic. “Never heard of commercial flights taking off that quickly.”

“Yeah. No,” said the co-pilot. They looked like toy planes at this distance, but both men could clearly see dozens of commercial jets lined up on the tarmac at San Francisco International Airport (SFO), south of the city on the peninsula, nose to tail in a jumbo-jet conga line. “I don’t think those are scheduled flights.”

“No. Looks like anybody who can crank an engine and get to the foot of the runway at this point.”

One after another, the passenger jets screeched down SFO’s four runways – not waiting for the plane ahead to clear the ground. From their elevated perch in the helo, the pilots had already seen what looked like some close calls in the taxiing and hasty take-offs. But then one of them, a colossal Airbus 380, with Emirates written in huge gold lettering on its side, lumbered off the runway, started hauling its skyscraper-sized bulk up into the sky… and then its nose dropped again, its flight path went squiffy, and it started losing altitude.

Seconds later, illuminated by the low but bright sunlight, it went down again – right in the center of the Bay, making an uncontrolled and violent water entry, which sheared off one wing, and then the other. The fuselage cracked and tore as it rolled over, breaking apart and sinking beneath the waves, all in seconds. The Defiant pilots had a perfect view of the whole air disaster.

And they didn’t see anything like a water evacuation slide.

* * *

The Marines at the port-side cargo-door window stared transfixed at the same sight, and then at the surface of the Bay smoothing itself over, like the world’s largest passenger aircraft and the 500 people on it had never existed.

But even then another plane was lifting off the runway. When it got out over the water, it made a banking left turn, so sharp it had to be unsafe for an aircraft of that size. It disappeared from view, cutting in front of the flight of two military helicopters, and out of the view of the Marines, but presumably screaming in over San Francisco itself.

“How is that possible?” Yaz asked. “After 9/11?” He and Gunny Blane stood with their faces pressed up against the glass, while other guys tried to get looks out around them. “Commercial jets all have impenetrable cockpit doors that stay locked in flight, right?”

Blane didn’t answer, but just frowned and moved off, shoving his way forward to squat down on the deck in front of the grizzled Master Gunnery Sergeant. Then he started shouting in his ear, words Yaz couldn’t make out from across the vibrating cabin. A third man leaned in to talk with them, from the other jump seat behind the flight deck.

Leaning in from his position at the door, Yaz could just see the third man was one of the smaller Marines he’d seen so far. Wide-eyed behind his yellow-tinted shooting glasses, he actually looked like a fifteen-year-old kid dressed up in his dad’s uniform. But he had an ICS headset on, which meant he could communicate with the pilots, and he wore the single bar of a lieutenant. Yaz couldn’t see his nametape from where he stood. But, whatever this guy’s name was, he was the only officer on board, so had to be their Team Leader.

And Yaz’s new commander.

* * *

“Hey,” Gunny Blane shouted to the other two, “what the hell’s going on with our insertion?”

Master Gunnery Sergeant Fick grunted. “Beats the shit out of me.” He turned his head to the right. “LT?”

The young lieutenant leaned in closer and nodded seriously at Fick and Blane. As his Team Chief and Operations Sergeant, they were the two most senior NCOs in the unit, and by proclamation the ones who best knew what they were doing, and generally knew what the fuck was going on. But they didn’t on this one. The LT shouted over the rotor and engine roar to explain.

“Command wants us to recon the city! Make sure it’s safe to put down. We’re doing a circuit around the edge of the Bay.”

Fick just exchanged a look with Blane, which said: And nobody thought to fucking tell us that?

The LT read the look. “It was a last-minute change. They audibled it once we were in the air.”

“Okay, fuck that,” Fick said. “Tell ’em to send a drone, which is kind of what they’re for. We’re here to save our guy. Sir.”

Still frowning, Blane said, “And Chaos isn’t getting any younger down there.”

Fick grunted again. “He wasn’t too fucking young to start with. Anyway, nowhere we go is ever safe. That’s the whole point of us. They should know that.”

The LT checked his watch. “I’ll have a word with the pilots.” He reached to swivel the chin mic of his headset – but then grabbed at the nearest solid surface, as the helo went into a screaming left-hand turn, G-forces pummeling everyone inside.

Those not lucky enough to have a seat tumbled over.

* * *

“Okay,” the pilot said. “Fuck all this.”

It turned out the uncontrolled water entry they’d just witnessed was only a light warm-up to what was turning out to be the worst day for civil aviation in history. Seconds later, that left-turning plane the Marines could no longer see went screaming in over the north part of San Francisco – and sheared off the top of the second-tallest skyscraper in the skyline, the Transamerica Pyramid, with its left wing.

The wing came off in the same instant, tumbling away with the top five stories of building, thousands of tons of metal and stone shattering and tumbling and crashing down onto the streets and smaller buildings of San Francisco’s financial district. Meanwhile, what was left of the plane, one wing and the fuselage, careened and spun like God hurling a boomerang at the Earth, then slammed into the Marina at high speed – taking out two piers and sending up a tsunami of water beyond it. When it finally came to a rest, half its fuselage and the tail were sticking up out of the water, its nose buried in the silt bed of the Bay.

“It’s like we just warped into a fucking Michael Bay movie.”

“Yeah,” the co-pilot agreed, his voice thickening with fear. “Also, roger your last – fuck all this.”

“Batcopter Two to Batcopter Actual,” the pilot said into his chin mic, not having to change channels, as the aircrew on both Defiants were already on the same air mission net.

The pilot of the other bird, and the air mission commander, came back without delay. “Go ahead, Two.”

“Yeah, uh, do we really want to be sharing airspace with whatever the hell’s going on up here? Suggest we shit-can the recon flight, and just fly straight to the X.”

“Copy that.
Sounds like a plan. I’ll inform CIC of our intent.”

“Think they’ll object?”

“Man on the ground, brother. Man on the ground. But I’m also not crazy about overflying half the city to get to the insertion point. Let’s loop back and retrace our original waypoints. Then we can come in over nice safe fucking ocean.”

“Roger and wilco, One. Lead the way, boss.”

The two helos banked around violently, turning on a dime.

Putting the unseated Marines in back on their asses.

* * *

As the helo straightened up again, Yaz picked himself up off the deck. He decided whatever happened to that second plane, he was glad he hadn’t seen it, and didn’t want to know. It felt too much like that second plane on 9/11. The first one could have been an accident. The second meant they were all going to war – for the next two decades.

He said, “What the hell’s going on out there, Gunny?”

Blane had just returned from the leadership meeting up front, and squatted down on the deck beside Yaz, both of them with their sides pressed against the vibrating hatch.

“You’ve been deployed, right?” Blane asked.

Yaz nodded. “Three months in Khost Province.”

“Attached to a DEVGRU element?”

“Yeah.” Yaz tried to keep his words, and tone of voice, neutral. Working with Tier-1 guys was a big deal in the special operations community. And he didn’t want to sound like he was showing off. He also didn’t want to talk about it too much.

“Three months, not five?”

Ah, hell, Yaz thought. As a member of a SOCOM subordinate unit, Blane would know deployments for JSOC units, Tier-1 guys, were almost always five months, in part due to the outrageous operational tempo they maintained. Yaz definitely didn’t want to get too much into why his deployment had been cut short. So he just said, “Yeah. Working out of FOB Chapman.”

Blane nodded, letting it go. “Ass end of the world.”

“Pretty much. And before that I was studying my ass off for eight months, face stuck in a textbook or else in a gutshot goat.”

Before his deployment to Afghanistan, Yaz had been assigned to the 36-week Special Operations Combat Medic Course (SOCM) at Fort Bragg, the last and longest phase of the arduous SARC training pipeline. When not in classroom lectures or practicals, posted to trauma wards in hospital emergency rooms, or studying on his own, he’d had live-tissue trauma training – where a pig or goat would be inflicted with a massive hemorrhage, the most common preventable cause of death for soldiers in combat, and then the students had to save it.

Basically, Yaz hadn’t had time to look at the news in a good couple of years. Though it had been impossible not to hear rumors about this new pandemic. Or at least see the silent news reports playing up on the TV in the DFAC at Chapman.

Blane hadn’t forgotten Yaz’s original question. “I don’t think anybody knows what’s going on. Only it’s not good.”

“Yeah,” Yaz said. “I got that much from the JFK being anchored outside San Francisco Bay. What’s with that?”

“I think the official term is ‘stability and security ops.’ We had just headed out for our first extended sea trials with the whole strike group – then got pushed out to deep water early, when we went to FPCON Delta, the day of 11/11. But then when shit really started coming down in USNORTHCOM, we got called back to try to quell the rioting and civil unrest.”

Yaz took a breath, trying to get his head around all this. The 11/11 terror attacks in Britain has basically brought civil aviation to a halt – just when Yaz had been trying to circle half the globe by air. But it also limited most military flights to service personnel trying to get to operational areas, or fortify vulnerable and increasingly beleaguered overseas bases and embassies – all of this happening in the middle of a pandemic which was raging out of control, and civil unrest gripping the planet.

Basically, the world had gone to shit overnight.

Blane went on. “We took advantage of coming back to shore to hustle you out and fill our medic gap. We’ve been down one SARC, which makes everyone a little edgy.”

“Yeah,” Yaz said. “Thought I’d missed the boat. Literally. And that I’d be cooling my heels for a month or longer.”

“I don’t think cooling your heels is going to be a major feature of your life for a while.”

“Suits me,” Yaz said. “But we’re not on stability and security ops today, are we?”

Blane exhaled. “No. MARSOC doesn’t do humanitarian work. And, anyway, nobody’s doing it now. Everyone’s already been pulled back to the boats.”

Bright and slanting streaks of orange light pulled Yaz’s gaze across the cabin to the window in the opposite side, which looked out over the city toward the Pacific. They were now heading north up the inside edge of the Bay – and the sun was heading for the water on the other side of San Francisco.

The fact that they were going out just as night was falling didn’t do much to soothe Yaz’s nerves, or the general sense of the bizarre that draped over this entire day like a rug. Of course, most of his missions before had been night missions, but those were flying out into the ass end of nowhere. Dropping into the center of a city collapsing into chaos was a whole other matter. Yaz tried to resist the temptation to say the obvious. He failed.

“Everyone’s been pulled back – except us.”

“Yeah,” Blane said. “Semper porro, brother. Always forward.”

The motto of the Marine Raider Regiment.

Sharp Sticks

Batcopter Two – Rear Cabin
500 Feet Above the Bay

“Hell yeah, dude! ’Course everyone went back but us!” Yaz came out of his dark reverie to see a big, lanky, and good-looking staff sergeant, whose nametape read Brady, standing up and looming over him. “No one else is badass enough to go out into shit like this, man!”

Staff Sergeant Brady looked more like a golden surfer boy than a badass – tanned and toned, lean and muscular. As he turned and started pacing the cabin, the others made space for him, as if waiting for a performance at a variety show, or around a campfire.

“I’m ready, man!” Brady said, his voice rising above the rotor, engine, and wind noise. “Check it out! I am the ultimate badass!” The others started hooting and applauding. “State of the badass art! You do not want to fuck with me. Check it out!”

He turned again and leaned over Yaz, putting both hands on the hatch to either side of Yaz’s head, then lowered his voice. “Hey, Ripley, don’t worry. Me and my squad of ultimate badasses will protect you.” Suddenly Yaz got it – and recognized Brady’s entirely decent impression of Private Hudson from Aliens. The lanky Marine straightened up, urging the others on, and they all cheered again.

He slapped the helmet of the Marine pressed up against the hatch with Blane and Yaz – the one who had been laughing about him. Yaz could now see he was a younger guy, a corporal, saddled with a squad machine gun, which Brady now lifted up as an exhibit. It was the latest-model FN MK 48 Mod 2 – developed specifically for USSOCOM to be sleeker, lighter, and better performing than the old SAW. Hefting the weapon, half-choking the corporal on his own sling, Brady said, “Check it out. Independently targeting particle-beam phalanx. Whap! Fry half a city with this puppy.”

He stepped away again. “We got tactical smart missiles, phase plasma pulse rifles, RPGs. We got sonic, electronic ball-breakers! We got nukes, we got knives, sharp sticks… You do not want to fuck with me!”

The team gave one last wild cheer, and as Brady finally moved back to his seat, Master Gunnery Sergeant Fick was revealed sitting behind him. And he not only wasn’t smiling, he was glaring at Yaz, who felt his own laughter draining away. He tried to look somewhere else, but Fick’s glowing-ember eyes burned through him, and the man’s barking voice drew Yaz’s gaze back up.

“Hey, Wisconsin! Who the fuck said you could laugh? You haven’t been here long enough to laugh. I’ll tell you when you can find something fucking funny. Until then, you so much as crack a smile, I swear to Christ I will come to your house and kill your puppy.” He paused, and squinted deep into Yaz’s eyes. “Oh, you don’t have a puppy? In that case, I’ll buy you one, wait ’til you grow fond of it, and then fucking kill it in front of you.”

Yaz had absolutely no idea how seriously to take this. It could be entirely in jest, or he could be in real physical peril. He looked over to Blane for reassurance, but even as he did, the red combat lights came on. Blane hunched over, like he was trying to stay out of sight. But everyone was already looking in that direction.

“Say it, Gunny!” someone said, the chorus going up.

“Yeah – say it man!”

“C’mon!”

“Say it! Say the words!”

Blane looked resigned, annoyed, and tired, all at once. He mimed jamming a wodge of tobacco in his cheek, and when he spoke, his voice went all southern and growly. “Bunch of slack-jawed faggots around here. This stuff will make you a goddamned sexual tyrannosaurus. Just like me.”

Yaz got that one, too. Blaine from Predator.

With this, everyone on the team with anything like a grenade launcher – underslung M203s and EGLMs, Metalstorm launchers, even Fick’s shotgun – hefted them up. In perfect chorus, they shouted: “Strap this on your sore ass, Blane!” The sound of laughter drowned out the helo noise.

This was as tight a team as Yaz had ever seen.

And he wondered once again if he would ever belong.

* * *

“You don’t chew tobacco?” Yaz asked.

“Nah. Disgusting habit. Anyway, enough of this,” Blane said, physically turning Yaz back around toward him, and the hatch. “Ignore these comedians.”

Yaz smiled, but facing the window, his expression darkened again. He couldn’t get out of his mind what he’d just seen out of it, never mind on his flight in. “Any word on what’s happening in the rest of the country?”

“Right now I know exactly two things,” Blane said. “The first is our tasking. You ready for your half-assed in-flight mission brief?”

Yaz nodded. “Go.”

“This an extraction – a rescue op. There’s a VIP, a Cabinet-level official, still trapped down in the city.”

“Trapped where exactly?”

“In the Presidio. At a conference on the future of military special operations.”

“Wait – what Cabinet member would be at…” Yaz trailed off.

“Yeah,” Blane said. “Chaos himself.”

Yaz whistled. “SecDef Mattis. Jesus.”

“Yep. The once and future Defense Secretary.”

Four-star Marine General James Mattis had originally quit the Cabinet on principle – refusing to abandon the Kurds, America’s most steadfast allies in the Middle East – but had been brought back in under the new administration. Before that, he’d commanded the 1st Marine Division in the Iraq War, and then served as commander of CENTCOM. He was known for showing up in front-line fighting holes in the middle of the night, shooting the shit with lance corporals. Mattis was legendary across all the service branches – but in the Corps he was revered.

Blane said, “After everything he’s fought through, we’re not going to let him go down to a disease outbreak in the City of Brotherly Love. It’s us going out for him because we don’t trust anyone else to do the job. And we’re going to bring him home.”

As if on cue, the red lights flashed once. Up front, Fick, the most senior NCO, and thus responsible for getting his Marines ready to go, flashed one finger, and barked over the noise. “One minute, devil dogs! One minute!”

“Hey,” Yaz said. “What’s the second thing?”

“What?” Blane said.

“You said you knew two things.”

“Oh, yeah,” Blane said. “About the sick people.”

“What about them?”

“Whatever happens, do not—”

But Blane got cut off as the helo dropped and accelerated, taking a dive at the ground. Yaz’s stomach took a leap for his throat, as he battled G-Forces, and battled his lunch back down. Blane spun him around again, to get at his radio, the MBITR he wore in a pouch on his back. This left him looking out the window again. Only now they were over the city itself.

And diving down at it, fast.

* * *

“—sten up, Team Two!”

Yaz knew Blane had got him on the local Team net, when he heard the LT in his ear – even as, outside the window, the long shadows in the darkening streets of San Francisco blurred by, looming larger as the Defiant raced down at them.

The LT said, “The PSB element on the ground is strongpointing a group of buildings on the Main Post.”

Below them, Yaz could see there were still no vehicles moving. But the mass migrations of human figures he’d seen earlier had also stopped. Few people were visible – and those he could see moved with less purpose, almost milling around.

“They’ve secured an HLZ for us, and we are going to touch down and push out, with Team One reinforcing their perimeter.”

As the neat gray lines of the boulevards gave way to the green hills of the Presidio, Yaz could suddenly see motion again – human figures, coming up a central hill, surging toward the top from every side. They were moving slowly, but converging. And Yaz pretty quickly worked out what they were converging on, even if he couldn’t quite see it. And now, even over the engine and rotor noise…

He could hear small-arms fire.

“Once they establish security, we move to the SecDef, link in with his protection detail – and get his ass on an aircraft.”

As it spread out below them, Yaz remembered the Presidio had been a fortified location since the 1700s, when Spain built it to gain a foothold over San Francisco Bay. It had then passed to Mexico, which in turn passed it to the U.S. Its status as an active military installation had ended when the Cold War did. But now it looked like its military use was back on – as the Alamo.

“Then we all fall back by squads and dust off.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant Gorman,” Brady said – not on the net, but loud enough for those nearby to hear. “You forgot about laying down suppressing fire with flame units.”

But before anyone could laugh, the Defiant’s landing gear bashed into the grass and dirt at the top of the hill. Somebody hauled the side door open. And then, just by virtue of his position in the cabin, Special Amphibious Reconnaissance Corpsman Tom Yaskiewicz jumped out onto the ground, trusting the others would follow.

Knowing it was time to prove himself.

Chaos

San Francisco, The Presidio – Main Post

“Yeah! Get some!”

The shouting of the Marines as they leapt off the bird spiked Yaz’s adrenaline, but didn’t do anything to calm the chaos he instantly found swirling around them. For starters, there was the brownout from the rotor-storm of the two helos, reducing visibility to less than 50 meters. And in the muffling of the thick haze, slow but steady gunfire was cracking off from what sounded like all directions.

Yaz just looked for MARPAT camo and followed that.

He took a kneeling position between two other Marines, rifle held at low ready, and tried to orient himself to the tactical situation. Grabbing a look over his shoulder, he saw both Defiants behind them, their 90-foot twin rotors still whumping overhead, presumably waiting for imminent dust-off. Still, the air started to clear, as they were on grass and most of the loose dirt had been sucked up into space.

Now Yaz could finally see they were on a parade ground, a large green rectangle surrounded by three-story red-brick buildings to the northwest, and white Spanish colonial ones to the southeast. Behind them and the helicopters, on the short southwest side, it was anchored by the Presidio Officer’s Club and also a hotel, The Inn at the Presidio, or so the signs said. Yaz guessed these were the venue for the conference, from them having landed here, and most of the defenders of the position being out in front.

But defending it from what, exactly?

Rounds still cracked off to either side, and it was a general principle of combat that if everyone else was shooting, you should maybe put out some rounds in the same direction. On the other hand, special operators – which included SARCs – were trained to be judicious, and to target-discriminate. In delicate situations, like counter-insurgency, reckless fire could do more harm than good.

Yaz raised his rifle and took a 4x-magnified look down the field. Panning to either side, he could see dust-obscured figures coming through the gaps in the buildings, on every side of the parade ground. He figured these were the same ones he’d seen from the air, all coming up the hill, from the surrounding neighborhoods. They’d sure as hell come from somewhere.

And they were all still converging – coming straight at them.

Maybe they were looking for shelter or assistance? This was a serious public health emergency going on. Yes, the military forces sent to assist had to keep from getting infected themselves. But that didn’t relieve them of their responsibility to help if they could. Suddenly Yaz became very aware that none of them had been issued protective gear – safety goggles, respiratory masks, coveralls, or overboots. He himself had surgical gloves and masks in his own load-out, but he didn’t want to be the only asshat wearing them.

Now, as he glassed the approaching figures, he could see none were armed. So what the hell were the shooters engaging? As he squinted into the magnified face of a young woman, who he had to admit did not look particularly healthy – a round took her in the head and knocked her over backward.

“Jesus Christ,” Yaz muttered, pulling his eye from the scope. “What the hell did I miss on my way in?”

Only then, when he put his head back down and started panning again, did he realize the woman had joined a carpet of bodies – they littered the ground, some sprawling in the grass, but most lying in piles in the gaps between buildings. Dozens, maybe hundreds, had died up there. As he scanned from one gap to the next, he saw a couple piled so high with corpses they were getting impassable. But that didn’t stop people from trying – climbing, clambering, or simply falling over the bodies, which were stacked like cordwood.

Maybe building a barricade of bodies was the plan.

With all the firing, and motion in so many directions, Yaz couldn’t really work out what the hell was going on. He had enough operational experience to know this was what combat was – chaos. He knew he had to stay switched on, and wired into his teammates, so he turned around to look for the team leaders.

And that’s when he saw him

Four-star Marine General Jim Mattis, a little stouter than he’d been in uniform, now wearing a baggy gray suit – but standing out in front of the front line, holding a pistol with one hand, and giving a subordinate some kind of epic ass-chewing, while guys on the line shot around them. He paused his harangue to look down the field, and make a headshot from 80 yards out, completely unaffected by the chaos all around him.

Which was exactly how he got his call sign.

Hell, Yaz thought. That’s not something you see every day.

He tried to look like he knew what he was doing, put his eye back down to his optic, and acquired a target. Then another. And another. But not one of the staggering figures was armed. None were a threat. No one had briefed him on the rules of engagement, but he seriously doubted they extended to shooting unarmed civilians. As he peered through the scope, traversed his weapon, and laid off his trigger…

A hand slapped down on his back from behind.

* * *

He spun like an electric cat, thankful for the ingrained trigger discipline that kept his finger outside the housing.

“Hey, Doc.” It was Gunny Blane.

“Shit,” Yaz said, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand.

“Take it easy,” Blane said. “You’re fine.” He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. “But Team Two’s that way. Also, we kind of need to keep you alive, so maybe don’t be on the front line.”

Yaz got up and followed Blane to the rear, feeling stupid. In his haste to prove himself to his new team, he’d gotten lost and fucked up already.

They trotted back to join Fick and the LT, huddled up behind the lines. With Blane’s return, this was now most of the Team 2 HQ element – Team Leader, Team Chief, and Operations Sergeant. But the LT was facing away, shouting back and forth with another guy in a suit, wearing Oakley blades, and rocking a new M5 battle rifle.

“Hey,” Blane shouted to Fick. “What’s the holdup?”

“Beats the shit out of me, I just work here.” Looking as relaxed as a Marine who had fought house-to-house in both Battles of Fallujah, Fick nodded toward Mattis, still out in front, running the defense. “Probably Chaos. Having too much fucking fun to leave.”

Now that he was inside the defensive formation, Yaz could make out the shape of it. It was a crescent, pushed out ahead of the Officer’s Club and the hotel, with the two helos parked at its center. Looking back, he could see a 15-foot gap between the two buildings, but could also hear firing from back there.

Which must be their rear security.

Knowing he was at the center of something like a secure position steadied him. Then again, the formation was all-round defense, which meant they were surrounded. Yaz stayed close to the leaders, but faced out and stayed switched on, trying to make himself useful.

Looking at the perimeter from behind it, he could now see it was made up of a couple dozen guys standing, kneeling, or in prone shooting positions. A few also wore suits, and Yaz guessed these were PSB – the Army’s Protective Service Battalion, which provided close protection for the Army Chief of Staff, senior DoD officials, and the Secretary of Defense himself.

They had to be the SecDef’s protection detail.

Most were firing weapons they could conceal, handguns or submachine guns – about half of them the new Brügger & Thomet MP9, which had recently been adopted as the US military’s first new SMG since the grease gun. The rest were H&K MP7s, not quite as shiny and new, but more concealable – elegant little machine pistols with the magazine well in the pistol grip. Though Yaz wasn’t sure their mean little 4.6mm rounds, designed to penetrate body-armor, were really necessary for engaging unarmored civilians.

Along with the suits, there were a few guys in 5.11 Tactical gear, possibly contractors, vendors, or PMCs – private military contractors. Operator wannabes. But there were also a handful of guys who, if you had eyes to see, were obviously members of the special operations community. The beards were kind of a giveaway. Yaz figured they were here for the conference, representing their home units. These dudes probably didn’t go anywhere unarmed.

They sure weren’t now.

Slotted into this were the fifteen Marines of Team One – the two five-man tactical elements out on either side, and their HQ element in the center. Yaz dialed up his situational awareness to try to take in the wider area. Defensive formations were great. But the enemy didn’t always agree to attack you there.

And it was the one you didn’t see coming that got you.

* * *

Yaz actually heard this one before he saw it – a high-pitched keening sound behind him. When he spun around, he had to blink a few times to be sure he was seeing it right.

A little girl was walking alone through the center of the defense, like she’d been there all along. How she’d gotten here, Yaz had no idea. Then again, she was small, no more than seven or eight. Maybe she’d been hiding under the porch of the Officer’s Club. Looking around again, Yaz saw no one else had noticed her.

And she was coming straight at him.

Now he could also see she was injured, strangely dark blood sheeting down her right arm. Against his will, Yaz flashed back to that boy he’d shot in the Hindu Kush, and been unable to help. This girl was even younger, and seemed more vulnerable.

But she could still be saved.

Yaz unslung his med ruck, dropped it on the grass, kneeled down, and hauled on the thick zipper tabs—

When a single gunshot rang out.

A dark hole appeared in the girl’s forehead.

Yaz swallowed a shout of protest as the contents of her brainpan exploded out the back of her head, splashing across the grass as she fell backward into it. Like the blood on her arm, it was more black than red. She collapsed in a pile of willowy limbs.

But which were covered, Yaz belatedly saw, in pale gray skin.

He felt the contents of his stomach coming up again, and this time couldn’t push it back down. He bent over and vomited on the grass. When he looked up, he could see the man who had fired the shot was the one in the suit, talking with the LT. He was still aiming at the girl’s body – but when she didn’t move, he lowered his weapon, and resumed his conversation.

Like nothing had happened.

When Yaz looked up again, he saw Staff Sergeant Brady, trotting over from his position in the rear. He squatted down and said, “Hey, you okay, Doc?”

At first Yaz just nodded, not able to speak. Finally, he nodded at the girl, and said, “What the fuck was that?”

His expression growing concerned, Brady said, “That’s from like the first five minutes of The Walking Dead. Are you totally cut off from pop culture?”

“Yes!” Yaz said, spitting out the last bile, and wiping his mouth with his forearm. “Yeah, I am.” He looked down again at the girl, his features twisting up. “How could he just…”

“You haven’t been out on the ground last few days.”

“No,” Yaz said. “I’ve been in the back of military aircraft, trying to cover 7,500 miles before the Kennedy put to sea.”

“Okay,” Brady said. “So you won’t know. That girl was dead already. And you seriously need to stay clear of the sick people. You get infected, you don’t just get yourself killed – you put all of us at risk, too.”

Yaz’s expression fell, like he’d just fucked up again

“Don’t worry about it,” Brady said. He nodded at the girl, then at the man who’d just shot her. “Better them than you.” Yaz figured he meant both doing the killing, and doing the dying. Brady stood up and patted Yaz on the back, before trotting back to his position. “And that show sucked anyway.”

Despite being cut off, Yaz had heard about the new pandemic. There’d been no way of totally avoiding the news articles forwarded by friends – about delirious victims attacking medical personnel, family, and random passers-by. These usually had some variation of the comment, “Well, looks like the goddamned zombie apocalypse is finally here.”

It wasn’t the first time he’d gotten stuff like that. But now it was starting to look like this time it was for real. Covid had been a wake-up call that mankind wasn’t immune from the plagues that had ravaged them throughout history – and that the worst might be yet to come. But, until now, this one had felt completely abstract. So much so that Yaz hadn’t thought twice about going to the aid of a child in trouble.

As he got his med ruck zipped and slung again, stood back up into the swirling chaos, and took a last look down at the girl’s twisted-up little body, he heard Brady’s voice repeat in his head:

That girl was dead already.

As hard as that was to accept, Yaz realized it was even more important that he get his head around another impossible idea.

That she was a lethal threat.

The Beast

The Presidio – Main Post

Back at the leadership huddle, Blane shouted at Fick, pointing at the guy in the suit, who’d resumed yelling back and forth with the LT. “That the head of Mattis’s security detail?”

Fick grunted, looking bored. “That or the fucking concierge.”

Blane grinned and moved toward the other two – suddenly seeing they were leaning in, shouting, and possibly about to come to blows. Blane grabbed the LT’s elbow, pulled him back, and shouted, “Hey, what’s the holdup, sir? We need to move!”

The LT nodded at the PSB man. “This fucking guy.”

From behind his mirrored shades, the man said, “That’s ‘Fucking Sir’ to you, Lieutenant – my name’s Major Gibb. And, sorry, but you’re not extracting our principal. I don’t fucking know you, man.”

Blane reached over and tapped the Globe and Anchor on the blood-type patch in the center of the LT’s vest. “We’re from the United States Marine Corps! You might have heard of us. We’re a year older than the country you’re standing in.”

The LT said, “We’re also under orders from United States Fleet Forces Command. To get Mattis out of here.”

“Good for you, Ricky Recon.” Major Gibb put his blades up on his head. There definitely wasn’t enough sunlight left to justify them. “But we’re not in your fucking chain of command.”

A round snapped the air overhead, fired from God knew where. With this, Master Gunnery Sergeant Fick shook his head, stepped up, and got right in Gibb’s face. He nodded toward Mattis and said, “And exactly how long do you want to keep Chaos’s face hanging out in this shit storm?”

“Also,” the LT said, “Why in the hell is he up there shooting?”

“You try and stop him,” Gibb said.

Fick grunted. “Good point.”

Gibb shook his head coolly. “We’re moving him our way. Ground transport’s inbound, and we all roll out together.”

Fick gestured at the defensive ring surrounding them. “Where the fuck do you plan on rolling out to? You may have noticed we’re surrounded by nothing but plague victims and water. And last time I checked, we’ve got all the helicopters – and warships.”

“Not a problem. We’ve got the Beast.” Gibb gestured out past their lines, toward the far end of the parade ground.

Something was coming.

* * *

Turning away from the body of the girl, Yaz reoriented himself to the front line. At least now he understood why the others were engaging unarmed civilians.

It was force protection. It was about survival.

Scanning the field ahead, he suddenly heard some type of roaring or growling in the distance, growing audible even over the idling helos behind him. He stood up straight, raised his rifle, and looked out past the front line. Out at the far end of the field, he could see a gleaming black limousine bouncing toward them over open ground.

With a minigunner standing up in a roof turret.

“Wow,” Yaz muttered aloud. “That’s pretty fucking ninja.”

And then the minigunner started firing. Directly at him.

Yaz grabbed dirt, and covered up his head.

* * *

“That’s us,” Major Gibb said, nodding out at the limo.

The LT looked back to Fick and Blane, who both just shrugged. Short of fragging this guy, it wasn’t clear there was anything they could do, if he didn’t want to hand over the SecDef, or let him get on one of the perfectly good helicopters they’d brought for him.

And that’s when the first high-velocity 7.62mm rounds from the minigun cut the air around them – 4,000 per minute, hundreds of hot slugs thwacking into the buildings behind them, the helos, the grass and dirt. They skittered across a wide area, due to originating from a weapons platform bouncing at high speed over rough ground.

“That’s you, huh?” Fick said, as everyone else hit the dirt. He didn’t even duck, but instead just gave the detail leader a withering look, then trotted off toward the helicopters.

Peeking out between the ground and his helmet, Gunny Blane tried to see what the hell was happening.

It didn’t look good.

* * *

Closer to the business end of the minigun, Yaz had a better view. He levered his rifle up off the ground and put his eye to the optic. The limo was still coming dead on, so he was able to steady the view of it in his sight. Through the windshield, he could see the driver didn’t have either hand on the steering wheel, instead reaching around behind him to fend off some blurring shape clawing at him from the back seat.

Yaz panned up, where he could see the minigunner screaming and twisting around, but also still clutching the twin spade-handles of his weapon, obviously with the arming switch up and his thumb jammed on the fire button. So much for trigger discipline, Yaz thought. The gunner was also bouncing around in the turret, but looking and screaming down into the hatch. It looked like he was kicking at something attacking him from below.

Hearing hot rounds still thunking into dirt and cutting the air, and from a lot closer now, Yaz switched to his reflex sight and settled the red holo-dot on the guy’s chest. At least now he was facing an armed threat. Trouble was, the guy was supposed to be on their side. It wasn’t a shot Yaz could take.

But then he didn’t have to.

Because the gunner launched upward, along with the limo around him, all of it rising up on an expanding fireball. Yaz pulled his eye from the sight to see something exploding under the left-front tire. The vehicle must have weighed four tons, and still came off its left wheels, flipped onto its side, and kept on sliding – straight into their perimeter.

Yaz bounced to his feet, turned, and legged it.

Facing backward now, he could see Fick – hopping out the open cargo door of one of the Defiants, and tossing a smoking LAW rocket launcher tube down on the grass.

Yaz kept running until the engine noise stopped chasing him. When he turned again, the limo had slid right into where their front line used to be, defenders still clambering out of the way. It wasn’t obvious what had happened to the turret gunner, but Yaz decided not to go out of his way to find out.

And there was Fick, strolling calmly back to where he’d started, the commanders still down on the deck with Gibb. Fick cupped his crotch, gave it a tug, and said, “I’ve got your beast right here, you dumb-ass G.I. Joe son of a bitch.”

Major Gibb got up off the ground, and got right back in Fick’s face. “Those were my guys, you flaming asshole!”

Fick spat. “Not anymore. Now they’re the enemy. Were.”

Gibb ground his jaw and looked back and forth – unable to decide whether to try to help his men in the crashed limo, or head straight for Mattis to check on his status. But before he could decide, and before the feud between him and Fick could escalate any further, the call sounded.

“Corpsman up!”

And just like that, they were singing Yaz’s tune. He knew it was a Marine singing it, because a soldier, one of the Army PSB guys, would have called for a “medic.” Looking toward the sound, Yaz also quickly worked out who had gotten hit.

Chaos was down.

* * *

Not actually down, but hunched over, his weapon lowered.

“Just got winged,” he was saying as Yaz arrived. “I’m fine.”

There were already two PSB guys, as well as two Marines, trying to get in there to assist him – which was clearly about four more guys than he wanted pawing at him. As Yaz angled in and got close, arriving the same time as Gibb, he saw a red stain spreading across the upper sleeve of Mattis’s suit.

“Make a hole!” Yaz said, pulling apart bodies.

The others finally relented and backed off – all except Gibb, who kept his rifle at low ready and stayed in Mattis’s back pocket. Yaz had already pulled on a pair of surgical gloves, and clamped his hand across the artery above the arm wound.

“Thanks, Corpsman,” Mattis said, seeming to mean it, deep lines around his eyes growing deeper as he smiled. “Too much damned lead flying around.” He cast his puffy eyes over all the non-Marines fighting to protect him, suggesting he found them insufficiently disciplined. Yaz didn’t respond, but just started walking him back toward the Officer’s Club.

As they moved to the rear, Yaz felt a hand on his own arm, and turned to see it was the LT. “Get him stabilized,” he said. “Then we’re all getting out of here.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Yaz said. Obviously the Beast plan was off the table. With a little luck, they’d all be back in the helos in a few minutes. Now, for the first time, before the young commander turned away, Yaz finally got a glimpse of his nametape – and there wasn’t one. On the Velcro mount on his blouse, he instead wore a morale patch. It read:

Dum Vivas Sum Bonum

Yaz had never seen that one before. He’d encountered plenty of Molon Labe patches, along with Tactical Beard Owners Club, Punisher skulls, Embrace the Suck, and even some other Latin: Si Vis Pacem Para Bellum (“If you want peace, prepare for war”). But this one he didn’t know. Even weirder, he realized, was everyone just calling him “the LT” – did he not have a name? Had he not earned one yet? Was he waiting nameless in some kind of junior officer purgatory?

But Yaz didn’t have any more time to ruminate on that, and the LT moved off, so he couldn’t ask him. Instead he got his mind back in the game, turned back to his patient, and got him sat down on the front steps of the building.

“How are you feeling, sir?” Yaz asked. “How’s your breathing? Any dizziness?”

“I’m fine,” Mattis said, rotating his pistol to check the safety. Then he hesitated, like was considering taking a shot.

Yaz reached over, took the weapon, and gently laid it on the deck. “You just got winged – by a minigun. Do me a favor and gear down for a minute, so I can check you out.”

They both knew medics outranked everyone on the battlefield, when it came to treatment of the wounded. In part, this was a matter of morale – grunts needed to know that if they were hit, their medical needs took priority. At the same time, all combat medics had it drilled into them that the best battlefield medicine was fire superiority – first win the fight. But this one was looking pretty one-sided at the moment.

Probably because only one side was armed.

Yaz got his trauma scissors out of his vest and started cutting Mattis’s sleeve off. “Sorry about your suit.”

“Don’t worry about that. I hate wearing these things.”

As Yaz got the wound exposed, he could see there were clean entry and exit wounds, bleeding freely. He got his med ruck open again, got an Israeli bandage out, and started wrapping it around the wound. But then he stopped, and pressed down.

Mattis’s arm spasmed – though he didn’t make a sound.

“You didn’t just get winged. Your humerus bone got cleanly severed – it’s humeri now, sir.”

Mattis laughed. Yaz finished wrapping the wound, then got out a SAM splint, a malleable aluminum strip sandwiched in foam. He shaped it into a C-curve around Mattis’s upper arm, then wrapped it several times with surgical tape.

“At least it’s not my shooting hand,” Mattis said.

“Unfortunately, it’s a displaced fracture – the two ends don’t meet, for the reason that the bullet took a chunk of it into the next county. When we get you out of here, that’s gonna have to be X-rayed, and you’ll probably need surgery to reconnect it.”

“Not sure when that’s gonna be,” Mattis said. With this, he pulled a phone from his pocket with his good hand, tapped twice with his thumb, and put it to his ear.

Yaz stayed focused on what he was doing, taking Mattis’s pulse from the radial artery in his wrist. But he also had to mentally pinch himself. First hour in my new unit – and here I am treating Chaos himself. He was doing the job he was meant to. He had a role, and was filling it. Looking over his shoulder, he spotted Gunny Blane – who gave him a nod of approval.

As he wrote down Mattis’s vitals, he heard Major Gibb, hovering close by, grunt as he rubbed a fist in his right eye.

“You okay?” Yaz asked, looking up.

“Fine. Just debris in my eyes, from your goddamned helos. I should have brought clear shooting lenses.”

“Hang on,” Yaz said, “I’ve got eyewash packets.”

He started digging around for them – but Gibb gestured at the door to the Officer’s Club behind them. “Don’t bother. There’s a bathroom on the ground floor. I’ll use the sink.” He looked at Mattis and said, “Stay put for me, okay, sir?” Then he turned and opened the front door.

Writhing bodies fell out of it, dragging him to the deck.

Gigantic Hairy Nutsack

Presidio – Front Porch of the Officer’s Club

Yaz leapt to his feet and got between Mattis and the melee. Holding his rifle with one hand, he pushed the SecDef behind him with the other, pressing him against the porch railing.

Ahead of them, down on the deck, Gibb managed to get his forearms up in front of his face, elbows bent, fending off attacks from multiple assailants. He rolled from side to side with them on top of him, his rifle tangled up with limbs. There were three people on him to start, but two more followed, stumbling out the open doorway, and falling onto the flesh pile.

Yaz leveled his rifle, but didn’t fire. He honestly didn’t know whether it was out of concern for hitting the detail leader, or just lingering hesitation about shooting unarmed civilians. But as he agonized, Gibb got his pistol clear and started triggering off. One, two, three heads got perforated at point-blank range, black gunk splashing across the porch and building front. As Gibb shoved bodies off him, the last two attackers got knocked away, banging into the wall.

Yaz now had a clean shot, and took aim.

But before he could engage, incoming fire zipped into them – right in center of mass, heart and lungs. The high-velocity 5.56mm rounds went straight through their soft bodies and thunked into the building, leaving their vital organs shredded.

But neither of them fell.

The pair didn’t react in any way – except to stagger back to their feet, and start coming again.

Yaz’s chin went slack, going for his boots.

Then his head darted left, where Fick was advancing, rifle to shoulder. Once he mounted the steps, he stopped and shifted his grip on his weapon. The underslung shotgun boomed – and the head of the guy in his sights dissolved entirely, becoming a mist of gray matter, black gunk, and white skull fragments embedding themselves in the wall of the building, leaving vile goop dripping out of the indentations the shotgun pellets made.

Fick pumped the slide, pivoted, and fired again. Same result.

“Well, fuck me,” Mattis said, moving around from behind Yaz, still holding his phone to his ear.

“Roger that, sir,” Fick said, stepping up onto the porch, as he pumped the shotgun slide again. “Fuck you and me both.” He pulled two shells from his vest and slid them into the shotgun’s loading port, never taking his aim off the open doorway.

“Thanks,” Yaz said to Fick.

“Don’t mention it. Think how fucked we are if you go down.”

Yaz looked down at Major Gibb, still sliding around in black slime and battling to get back to his feet. After he did so, he started wiping his eyes again. But this time, it wasn’t dust – but foul-smelling viscous black gunk dripping into them.

Sounding ill, he said, “I’ll… take that eyewash kit now.”

Fick laughed. “Damn, Major. Looks like a big can of fuck blew up all over your nice suit there.”

Yaz shook his head, trying not to laugh, as he dug out the eyewash pods. Approaching the detail leader, he said, “Just tilt your head back for me—”

But Gibb took a step back, and said, “I’ll do it.”

Yaz nodded and handed the pods over – carefully. He watched as the guy irrigated one eye, then the other, with the fluid. The spillover also washed his face clean. Once he could see again, he started rubbing his forearms.

“What happened there?” Yaz asked.

Seeming to ignore the question, like he was talking to himself, Gibb kept rubbing and said, “This is slash-proof fabric. We had these suits cut for everybody on the team.” Then he sat down on the wicker couch beside the door.

Yaz leaned in and saw indentations in the fabric, each about 10mm long. When Gibb rolled up the sleeve, there were also indentations in the flesh of his forearm. They were red and bruised, but the skin hadn’t broken. The suit had done its job.

Yaz took a step back. Also seeming to speak to himself, he said, “Brady told me not to get close to the sick people. I figured they’d maybe cough on me. Not try to eat me.”

Fick spat off to the side. “Yeah. Sick people my gigantic hairy nutsack. These fucking guys are obviously zo—”

“Everyone okay?” the LT asked in a loud voice, leaping up the stairs with Blane in tow, both pulling up short at the heap of dead bodies on the porch, then circling around it.

“Mother of God,” Blane said.

“Okay, enough of this,” the LT said, shaking his head. He walked up, pulled the phone away from Mattis’s ear, and said, “Sir – we’ve got one job here. It’s time to get you out.” He nodded at the helos. “And we need to go now.”

Mattis yanked his arm with the phone back, surprisingly strong for an old dude. “We can’t extract yet. John Wayne’s still outside the wire. We go when he comes back.”

Yaz squinted at Mattis. Had he been bitten? Was he delirious or something?

Mattis caught his look. “John Wayne Troxell – my CSM.”

Yaz knew the SecDef always had a senior enlisted adviser, a command sergeant major, advising him on enlisted personnel across all service branches. “That’s his actual name?”

But Mattis had already turned away, pacing down the porch.

“Dammit,” the LT said. He turned to Gibb, who was still sitting, and said, “Major, you’ve got to convince your principal to extract with us. It’s not safe here. Obviously.”

Gibb shook his head, looking suddenly and deeply tired. “Would you bug out with one of your people unaccounted for?” He pointed to Fick. “Leave without your own senior NCO? However much of an asshole he is?”

“Hey,” Fick said.

Ignoring this, Gibb reached under his jacket and pulled out a Motorola digital radio. “This is DoD encrypted. CSM Troxell has one of my guys with him. I haven’t been able to raise them, but the radio spectrum is as jammed up as the cell networks.” He handed the radio to Blane. “Maybe if you try from the roof. The channel’s already set, and their call sign is ‘Stryker’.”

“Like the Army’s APC,” the LT said, reaching for the radio.

“Nope,” Fick said, snatching it first. “John Wayne’s character, Sergeant Stryker, in Sands of Iwo Jima.”

“Bonus points for the Master Guns,” Gibb said, but then leaned forward and put his face in his hands.

Turning toward the door, Fick said, “Gunny, you and the LT hold the fort, and try to keep Chaos alive. We’ll be right back.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” Blane asked – but Fick had already grabbed Yaz, and started shoving him toward the doorway.

Blane said, “Hold up. Let me send Two-One with you. You need more Marines to clear the building.”

“Nah,” Fick said. “Me and Wisconsin have got it.”

Blane grabbed Yaz to hold him in place, and spoke to Fick. “I know you enjoy a good room-clearing drill. But this is what we have E-4s and 5s for. Not E-9s – never mind SARCs who’ve been in theater for ten minutes.”

Fick looked blasé. “Hey, this whole mission’s like banging a fat transvestite chick in an elevator – wrong on so many levels. But the real threat’s out there.” He nodded out at the end of the parade ground, where despite the reinforcement of the Marines, more attackers were getting in, and pressing closer. “Keep our guys on the ground, shooting. We’ll be back in five minutes.”

Fick pushed Yaz inside. “C’mon, Doc. You kicked the hornet’s nest. Now we gotta go in and kill all the fucking hornets.”

Yaz felt a chill run through his body – and considered pointing out that it was the Army guy, not him, who had kicked the hornet’s nest. But he knew that wouldn’t wash. Mainly, he knew that, just as his path into this circle had led through the open hatch of that Defiant on the flight deck, now it led through the open doorway of this building.

He paused and turned to the detail leader, who was still sitting there, looking worse by the minute. “Hey, Major. You want to protect Mattis? Stay the hell away from him.”

Then he raised his weapon and followed Fick inside.

* * *

It was a two-man room-clearing drill, basic close-quarters battle, or CQB. Yaz had trained for these scenarios in shoot houses many times. What he didn’t understand was why it was just the two of them doing it, when they’d brought thirty guys to the fight. True, sometimes less was more. Too many in an enclosed structure risked getting jammed up and slowed down – or, worse, shooting each other through thin drywall. And Fick had claimed he wanted their shooters out on the ground.

But Yaz knew that wasn’t it.

No, it was really two things. One, was Fick’s gigantic nutsack. He just wanted to do this, probably because it was his idea of fun. But, two, he wanted to check out the new guy, up close and personal, in a combat situation. Where nothing Yaz said would matter. Only what he did, the tactical skills he did or did not possess, and his commitment to having his teammate’s back. If Fick came out of this building alive…

He’d know something about Yaskiewicz.

As they swept through the first floor, Fick going right into each room and Yaz left, the gunfire and helo noise outside started to fade, leaving only the sound of their boot soles on hardwood – and their breathing, which Yaz battled to keep under control. Even without his big deployment ruck, which he’d left in the Defiant, he was still wearing 40 pounds of combat gear – weapons, ammo, armor, and medical gear. He was having to walk smoothly, heel to toe, with his weapon up and level.

And he had to be ready to react.

* * *

“Well?” Blane asked the LT, as he came back from the end of the porch, where Mattis was still on his phone, joined by two aides and another PSB guy. Gibb was still sitting down, and looked like he couldn’t catch his breath.

The LT just gave him a dark look, then pulled the front door shut. It was probably safer that way, with Mattis right outside. But Blane didn’t like the additional delay between them and being able to go to the aid of their Marines.

When the LT turned again, he pulled up short at the pile of bodies, looking down at the jumbled scene of carnage. In all the drama and shooting, no one had really a chance to regard these people as anything other than attackers, and then casualties. Now there was time to notice three of them wore blue uniforms, housekeeping or other staff of the club. One was in business casual, probably a conference goer.

But the last was a rangy man with a lush beard, faded jeans, etched cowboy boots, and a t-shirt underneath a technical fleece with the Arc’teryx label on it, which probably cost $150. The LT squatted down beside him.

“Easy,” Blane said, circling around, raising his weapon.

The Last To Go

Presidio – Officer’s Club, Ground Floor

The silence inside the building was starting to unnerve Yaz. He could still hear the sound of gunfire and men shouting outside – but muted by the stone and wood of the structure, and growing fainter as they got farther inside.

With each room they entered, Yaz’s index finger twitched on his trigger guard, sweat rolling down his face and stinging his eyes. He needed to clear his throat, but didn’t want to make the noise. Ahead of him, Fick – who was at least ten years older than him, and probably fifteen – showed none of the strain. He moved at a fast walking pace, never lowering his weapon, nor wavering with muscle fatigue.

And he definitely wasn’t sweating.

Yaz watched Fick push through a double set of swinging doors, then followed him into an industrial kitchen. No one was home. And this was the last room on the ground floor. Yaz lowered his weapon, and wiped the sweat from his eyes, then nodded back in the direction of the front door. “Maybe they were all already trying to get out.”

“Huh,” Fick grunted. He nodded upward. “Maybe. But then again this is just the first floor, Bucky Badger.” He moved back out, heading for the stairwell, which they’d both seen on the way in.

As Fick led them up it, he said, “Lemme guess. You were raised on a dairy farm, your brain underdeveloped because they fed you cheese and Miller High Life from a young age.”

Yaz just grimaced, kept his mouth shut, and did his job – and stayed in Fick’s back pocket.

* * *

Blane kept circling until he could see what the LT was looking at, squatting down by the ex-operator. The dead man’s fleece had come up on one side, revealing a belt-slide holster, with a nickel-finish auto-loading handgun in it, its skeletonized hammer and high-ride beavertail grip safety visible.

The LT whistled. “Custom Kimber 1911.” He reached toward it – but Blane’s boot came down on the pistol.

“Not worth it, LT.”

The young officer shook his head. “Of course. Shame, though. That thing probably cost two thousand dollars.”

“Let’s stipulate your life’s worth more than that, sir.”

Blane looked up and around. Wind still whipped through the porch from the blades of the idling helos, as the light faded around them, the sun now below the building tops. And rounds were not only still cranking off on their perimeter, but increasing in frequency and thickness. It felt like whatever was coming for them was closer, and coming faster.

When Blane looked down again, the LT was rolling up the sleeve of the dead man’s fleece, revealing a gauze bandage taped down on the inside of his forearm. Blood had leaked through it in a pattern – dashed lines, in two arcs.

“LT,” Blane said.

The LT looked up. “Somebody tried to eat this guy.”

Blane looked over at the detail leader, Gibb, who wasn’t looking too great himself, despite not having been bitten. His face was paler, and he was sweating visibly.

“Ah, hell,” Blane said. He moved between the stricken man and Mattis, who was farther down the porch, still holding the phone to his ear, but also talking with his aides. Mattis then pocketed the phone, stood up, and headed for the stairs.

“Where are you going?” the LT asked.

Mattis nodded out at the limousine, still lying on its side in the center of their front line, where it had come to rest. “Gonna try to reach John Wayne on the set radio in the Beast.” Before the LT could try to stop him, he was down off the porch and moving back toward the front. Blane looked to the LT, who just shrugged. This was not going well.

“Stay here,” Blane said. “I’ll watch him.”

“Hey,” the LT shouted after him. Blane looked back to see the young officer jabbing his thumb behind him. “If we’ve got a more powerful radio down here, couldn’t we have just shut the damned door, instead of going inside and fighting up to the top of the building? I don’t think they can open doors.”

“Yeah.” Blane exhaled mournfully, turning and taking off after their runaway general. “Not really Fick’s style.”

* * *

When the second floor did not prove to be empty, Fick tried out his M16 again – but headshots this time. They worked, putting his targets down, but it took a few rounds.

“Huh,” he grunted, pushing into an upstairs room, stepping over the two dead bodies he’d created in the doorway. “That kind of does the trick.” He was either talking to Yaz, or to himself, or to no one. No way to tell.

Yaz followed him into a bedroom, probably lodging for visiting officers, trying not to get any of the black shit on his boots. He wasn’t sure how infectious it was, but wasn’t in a big hurry to find out. Looking down and checking out the greenish-gray skin of the two bodies, and the wide-open rheumy eyes, he said, “I thought this was going to be another coronavirus mutation. More contagious and lethal, maybe…”

“Sure,” Fick said. “If it had mutated from producing flu-like symptoms to causing rampant zombiism.”

Yaz tried to pull his eyes from the two bodies, a middle-aged couple, now ravaged and transformed by a pathogen no one understood, then mutilated by a Marine rifleman. As Fick swept the room and Yaz held the doorway, something banged from the other side of the room.

Yaz raised his weapon and traversed his aim.

But Fick held his hand up, then moved toward the source of the noise, a closet, and put his hand on the knob.

“Careful,” Yaz said.

Fick just grunted again, weapon hanging down by his side. He turned the handle and pulled the door open. An adolescent male with shaggy hair and a wispy pre-beard on his chin lurched out at him, wheezing. Fick didn’t go for his rifle, but instead raised his size-11 boot and kicked the kid back into the closet, squinting into the darkness after him.

Yaz stepped closer, rifle up. “Hey, seriously, be careful.”

The young man struggled to his feet, and Fick kicked him back in again. “Just want to test out a pet theory.” He raised his rifle, took aim, and fired a pair of 5.56 rounds low into the kid’s torso, each of which perforated a lung.

No effect – the wheezing just got wheezier. As he tried to climb to his feet again, Fick put two in his heart. Also nothing.

“Yeah,” Fick said. “Definitely not sick – fucking dead.”

As the young dead man started to rise up again, Fick put a single round into the middle of his chin pubes. The boy collapsed back into the closet, instantly turned off.

Fick grunted a final time, and closed the door.

“What’s your theory?” Yaz asked, lowering his weapon, and stealing a look over his shoulder at the entryway behind them.

“That a shot to the brainstem turns them off.”

“Okay, I could see that,” Yaz said. “Site of cardiac and respiratory control, heart rate and breathing. Guaranteed one-shot kill.”

“Nah, not that so much. Just with them all mindless and stumbling around, I was guessing maybe the reptilian brain’s the last to go.” He shrugged. “More importantly, it’s conveniently located right behind the chin-point. For easy aiming.”

He looked down one last time before turning to go.

“This dude’s uglier than a jar of pickled assholes. C’mon.”

* * *

The rest of the upper level was clear. Fick finally betrayed his advancing years by lowering his weapon, leaning against a wall, and pulling out an old-school canteen.

Yaz got out his Nalgene bottle, like a modern operator.

He also took advantage of the pause to try to orient himself to the social space of his new unit, rather than the tactical one, which had dominated his attention so far. “Hey, Master Guns,” he said, keeping his voice low. “As Team Chief, what’s your read on the Team Leader?”

Fick lowered his canteen. “The LT? Beats the shit out of me. He got here about five minutes before you did.”

Yaz hadn’t known that. But it made sense. “Guess he needs some time to get his feet under him, new team and all.”

Fick shrugged. “It’s also his first MARSOC billet.”

“Before that?”

“Platoon leader in Fifth Marines. One deployment.”

“How did he get put in charge of an MSOT as a lieutenant?”

Fick shrugged. “I guess we must just have ourselves an asshole shortage. But he is on the promotion list for captain.”

“He must have done something right to get picked for A&S.” That was the absurdly competitive two-phase MARSOC Assessment & Selection Course, which decided who had the qualities to successfully become Marine Raiders.

Fick spat on the floor. “They could have given him a goddamned ice cream cone.”

Yaz tried not to laugh. “Well, hopefully he’ll be smart enough to listen to his Team Chief.” Yaz had been around long enough to know smart junior officers allowed their senior NCOs to mold them into good leaders. Anyway, they did if they wanted to stay alive long enough to become smart senior officers.

“Not holding my breath,” Fick said. His expression said he’d seen a lot of young officers, both smart and otherwise, come and go. “Luckily, the Skipper has been around the block a few dozen times.”

“Wait, what Skipper?”

“Captain Day. Commander of Team One. Which makes him senior officer for both teams, as long as we’re all embarked together. He’s also on the promotion list – for major.”

Yaz got it. Whoever was in charge of any station or outfit, in both the Navy and its subsidiary branch, the Marine Corps, was traditionally referred to as the Skipper. “He’s solid?”

“As my morning dump. Four deployments to the sandbox with the MSOBs, and four more before that with First Recon.”

Yaz nodded, impressed. If their senior officer had spent that much of his career in the recon community, even before being snapped up by MARSOC, he was without question a hard-charger, a pipe-hitter, and a Recon Marine to his core.

Fick just scowled and rolled one shoulder. “C’mon – too much talking and fucking around. Not enough killing… whatever the fuck it is we’re killing in here.”

Yaz breathed a little easier, reassured by Fick’s presence. The officers, even experienced ones, would know not to fuck with him. Because, in a pinch, the men would probably follow him – knowing they were more likely to survive that way. Yaz had already picked that up in body language from the others. Everyone deferred to the Master Guns.

“Rooftop?” Yaz asked.

“Nah,” Fick said, reaching around Yaz and opening another door. Behind it was a dark and narrow stairwell. “We’ve still gotta clear the attic. C’mon, cheese boy.”

Yaz swallowed and tried to look gung-ho.

Leeeeeee–roooyyyyyyyyyy…… JEN-kiiinnsss…

The Presidio, Main Post – Defensive Perimeter

Captain Day stood behind the front line, surveyed his team’s posture, and considered committing his HQ element.

He’d positioned both his five-man tactical elements out on the far left and right flanks, at the base of the crescent-shaped formation. Because the parade ground was a long rectangle, the dead coming in from the sides had a lot less ground to cover to get to them. Day had worked that out in about two seconds.

It had taken even less time for him to understand these rampaging people were not sick – but dead. They weren’t civilians in need of rescue. They were living dead monstrosities who needed to be put out of everyone’s misery. Before they posed a threat to any of Captain Day’s Marines.

He continued to walk his lines, kept his eye on the tactical situation, and considered contingencies – oblivious to the nonstop gunfire, shouts, moaning, spinning helo blades, and general mayhem swirling around him. He’d more than once been under attack by hundreds of hard-core ISIS fighters, just him and fourteen other Marines fighting balls-out with their backs to the wall, while danger-close air strikes dropped practically on their heads.

He wasn’t going to be fazed by a few dead guys.

Of course, he’d received and read all the intel summaries from the Kennedy’s Combat Information Center (CIC), based on reports of officers who’d come back from the ill-fated shore missions of the last 36 hours. But now he’d seen it with his own eyes. And unlike Yaz, he had not been cut off from pop culture. As impossible as it was, when facts were in front of his face, it didn’t do any good to deny them.

Global pandemic, spreading like wildfire – check. Sick people attacking, biting, and infecting the healthy – check. And, finally, the infected shrugging off catastrophic wounds and going down only from headshots – check. Yep…

The goddamned zombie apocalypse was definitely here.

So any reluctance Day felt about shooting unarmed civilians bled away in those first few minutes on the ground. He’d already expressed this sentiment in no uncertain terms to all his Marines. And not only did they have their own eyes to see with, and first-rate minds to work out their own conclusions…

They trusted and followed Captain Day without hesitation.

The reason he was now considering committing his HQ element – his Team Chief, Ops Sergeant, Assistant Ops Sergeant, and even his RTO – was the threat was intensifying. Not only were the non-Marine shooters on the line running out of ammo, switching to secondary weapons, or running back to vehicles or buildings hunting for more. But for every lurching body the defenders put down, three more appeared to take its place, stumbling over the body piles in the gaps between buildings – or just walking right down the parade ground from the wide-open northeast end.

Barely 300 meters beyond that was the edge of the Bay, so it wasn’t the main vector of enemy approach. No, the floodgates, if they were going to open, would be on their right flank – the southernmost corner of the parade ground, closest to the outer edge of the Presidio itself – and with most of San Francisco out beyond that. That was the direction they were going to get overrun from.

And it would happen about two seconds after everyone ran out of ammo.

Day was still keeping both of his Mk 48 machine-gunners in reserve. Some said it was pointless having one guy in each fire team hump the heavier weapon, along with 800 belted rounds, especially in special operations teams, who usually had tricky insertions, often on dodgy terrain. If the mission went well, the big gun would never even be deployed.

But that’s exactly what it was for – when everything went to shit. Then those 800 rounds, plus another 200 on each man in the machine-gunner’s squad, became a full-auto wall of lead, maybe the only thing allowing the team to get out alive. So Day didn’t want his machine-gunners shooting – yet. What he wanted was to get them all the hell out of Dodge.

He turned his radio to the command net and hailed Team 2.

* * *

Deep inside the Officer’s Club, at the top of that dark stairwell, was a rough door – and a ladder. Fick nodded at the door, then up at the ladder. “You clear the attic, while I secure the rooftop.” He rested his rifle on its sling and pulled an old-school, totally non-customized Colt 1911 from belt leather, then grabbed the first rung of the ladder.

Yaz put his hand on Fick’s arm. “Hey – are you sure you want to divide up? All two of us?”

Fick eyeballed him, not looking pleased. “Hey, did you come all the way from Wisconsin just to piss me off?”

“No, Master Guns. You were pissed off when I got here.”

Fick’s mean look morphed into something like respect. “Okay. That’s fair enough.” But then he looked back up and pulled his body into the gloom with one free hand and one gun hand. As he disappeared, he said, “Just take the goddamned attic. We’re not drowning in time. Anyway, you’ll be fine – all that fancy training, you get hit, you can just patch yourself up.”

Yaz refrained from pointing out that getting hit in this engagement probably meant catching a lethal and incurable disease. But he could also kind of see the logic – they needed to get this done, and get the hell out. Though, as before, he had his suspicions about Fick’s real motives.

He just didn’t have a choice.

He raised his rifle with one hand, then turned the handle of the attic door with the other, easing it open. The area beyond was unlit, but there was some natural illumination coming from the far end. Directly ahead was a narrow corridor, long, maybe forty meters.

The attic looked only partially finished, with exposed beams on the right side, 2x4s and plywood with insulation, as well as snaking pipes and bundles of electrical wiring. To the left was unpainted drywall, with exposed nail-heads, the drywall panels nailed to more two-by-fours behind it.

Peering over his rifle, Yaz pushed down the cramped hall.

There was no sound, no motion – just dimness and silence. The only illumination was still directly ahead, so he was looking into equal parts gloom and glare. After another few steps, he came to a plywood door on the left, crudely mounted on exposed 2x4s. It had a hinged hasp, with a padlock. Yaz took his left hand from his barrel rail and reached for the lock—

Motion drew his eye forward, and both hands to his rifle.

* * *

“Reamer One Actual to Reamer Two, how copy?”

“Two to One Actual, send it.” This was Team 2’s RTO, Chesney, answering Captain Day’s hail. That it was him doing so suggested everyone else in the command element was busy. But Day appreciated him dropping the full unit call sign.

He had originally told both teams they’d be going out as “Raider One” and “Raider Two” for the duration of their deployment to the Kennedy, due to being the only Marine Raider units in theater. But then Fick muttered, not quite enough under his breath, “More like Reamer One and Two.” Of course, the men insisted on sticking with his version.

Day said, “I need an updated estimate for TOT, over.” Their planned time-on-target has expired about five minutes ago. And Day needed to know when Team One was going to secure the package, so they could get the hell out of there.

“Solid copy, One. Stand by for TOT.”

Day exhaled. The trouble with talking to the RTO was he was always the most junior guy, and didn’t know anything. Ideally, he’d be two feet from his Team Leader at all times, but combat often had its own ideas about where people should stand – or take cover, or lie prone while bleeding out. Day reached for his channel selector and spun it to his own team net, but before he could speak, he heard the voice of Sergeant Lovell, Assistant Leader of their Tactical Element 1, more commonly known as 1/1.

“One Actual from One-One.”

“Send it,” Day replied.

“Hey, Captain, I’ve got a really batshit-crazy idea.”

“Go ahead.”

“You see that big-ass eucalyptus tree two-five meters southeast of our position?”

Day looked off in that direction. “Assuming you mean the one all the dead are coming around, that’s affirmative.”

“Yeah, well, I’m thinking it would look a lot better lying flat in the gap between those two buildings, instead of standing up.”

Day smiled. “The breaching saw in the Defiant.”

“Yep. Requesting permission to send Jenkins to do the honors, with Commiskey and Witek for security.”

“Do it. Maintain visual contact with your Marines.”

“Roger, and wilco.”

Day kept smiling as he watched his team’s youngest Marine, Lance Corporal Jenkins, haul ass back from the line like a man with his ass on fire, dash into one of the helos, and come out with their Broco mini breaching saw – a 60-volt, battery-powered, handheld circular saw. Normally used for forced entry, cutting through chains, window bars, steel, or concrete, it would have an easy day out against a eucalyptus tree.

Day hit his radio. “Nice thinking, Sergeant.”

“Just basic crowd control. A big enough barrier does the hard work for you. One-One out.”

And then Day remembered Lovell used to be a cop.

* * *

By the time Blane caught up with Mattis, he was already leaning inside the limo through where the windshield used to be, and coming out with a radio handset.

Slightly panicked, sprinting the last stretch, Blane squatted down and got his weapon pointed inside. But nothing in there was moving, either alive or… undead. There were about five headshot bodies, and a lot of empty bullet casings lying around. Someone on the PSB team must have taken care of it.

“PACAREA Ops Center,” Mattis said into the hand mic, raising his voice over the crack of gunfire from the front line. “How copy? Any call signs receiving on this channel, over.”

For Blane’s money, the SecDef was still way too close to the horrible shit inside that vehicle, not to mention too close to the front. But Gibb, the detail leader, who probably knew Mattis pretty well by now, had put it best: “You try to stop him.”

So Blane just stood his post and kept a sharp eye out. Almost immediately, an electric whine caught his ear, underneath the gunfire and moaning. When he turned and squinted out at their right flank, he saw a stream of wood chips and sawdust flying into the air.

Then he heard groaning and cracking, as the big bushy-ass tree in that sector fell away from the defenders underneath it. Thinking maybe he could find out what the hell that was about, Blane flipped his radio to Team 1’s net.

And it was going manic – Marines shouting about being cut off, pinned down, and trapped.

Hell, he thought. Just when everything was going so well.

* * *

Lance Corporal Jenkins was having more fun than libbo in a Thai whorehouse on payday with Jaeger bombs. The breaching saw was a fun toy at any time – but getting to vandalize a legendary Army base by sawing down a 200-year-old tree? That was a blast. Buzzing away, smiling from underneath the goggles he’d grabbed along with the saw, Jenkins thought:

Who says the end of the world can’t be fun?

At the same time, he did have a job to do. Sergeant Lovell had given him specific instructions about where and how to place the cut, to make sure the tree dropped where they needed it – and so it plugged the gap between the two buildings on their heaviest side, the southeast.

He stole a quick look at his security – Commiskey and Witek, who had both taken knees twenty meters ahead of him in the gap, and were now shooting like crazy sons of bitches, basically holding Team 1’s sector by themselves. Bodies were piling up thick and heavy in the far end of the gap between buildings. This was horrifying, but Jenkins didn’t have a lot of time to think about it.

He needed to get these cuts right, and he needed to do it with the power in the two batteries that came in the case with the saw. He seriously doubted he was going to get a chance to recharge them any time soon. But, within seconds, a smile spread across his face as the trunk of the tree made a cracking sound so loud it drowned out the gunfire. As he stepped to the side, he saw his cuts had been perfect – the trunk of the tree exactly lined up and falling into the gap between the buildings.

Unable to resist, he cupped his hands around his mouth, and bellowed, “Leeeeeee–roooyyyyyyyyyy……. JEN-kiiinnsss…”

And then with a cold shock of horror he realized where he’d gone wrong. Standing beside the narrow trunk, he could simply step out of the way – but Commiskey and Witek were in the shadow of the falling crown, up in the gap, with the great body of leaves and branches coming down right on their heads. And they could only run forward to get the hell out from under it. When the tree hit the ground, it completely blocked the gap.

The dead were trapped on the other side.

And so were Commiskey and Witek, along with them.

Shit, Jenkins thought. He got on his radio.

* * *

That motion which grabbed Yaz’s attention had moved from left to right, down at the far end of the corridor. His CQB training told him never to leave an uncleared area behind him. But, keeping his rifle trained down the hall, he reached over and gave the padlock a tug. It was locked, and couldn’t be opened from the inside.

Fuck it, he thought. We’ll call that secure.

He resumed pushing down the corridor, rifle aiming ahead. He was still looking into glare and shadows, and as he approached the end of hallway, he could see the light was coming through a big semi-circular window, with wrought iron woven throughout. Beyond that was some kind of landing or patio, with what looked like planter boxes.

When he finally exited the corridor, the space beyond opened up around him and he could see the room held stacked-up piles of furniture – tables, chairs, mattresses, boxes and random crap, clearly just storage. His eyes darted left, but he swung right, where he’d seen the movement go.

Now it was down on the deck – a human figure crouching over another one. Doing something, moving and grunting.

“Hey,” Yaz said.

The kneeling figure twisted at the waist and looked up at him. His chin was slick with blood as he worked his jaw, chewing. He also had two handfuls of what looked like organ meat. He hissed, revealing blood-stained teeth with so much gristle between them it looked like he hadn’t flossed in a decade. Finally, whatever lingering reluctance Yaz felt about engaging unarmed civilians bled away, right down that red chin.

He fired twice into the hissing mouth.

Easy Day

Presidio – Defensive Line, Right Flank

Only two Marines from 1/1 remained on the line, and Captain Day got to them at the same time as his Team Chief, Master Sergeant Saunders, both skidding in at a run.

It only took them a few seconds to reach this position, which was good, because in another few, Staff Sergeant O’Bannon, the 1/1 Element Leader, would have been gone. As it was, his Assistant Leader, Lovell, was physically restraining him from running to the aid of their two cut-off Marines.

Day put his hand on Lovell’s shoulder and scanned the scene. “Is that what it looks like?” Up ahead, Jenkins was running around pulling at branches trying to find a way through to the cut-off men.

“Yeah, pretty much,” Lovell answered.

Unfortunately, Jenkins had done his job too perfectly – the gap was well and truly blocked. Out from behind it floated the sounds of gunfire, shouts, and heavy moaning. O’Bannon was still trying to hail the trapped men on his team radio.

“You and me?” Master Sergeant Saunders asked.

“No,” Captain Day said, sweeping his rifle’s safety with his thumb. “I got it. Be right back.” He took off, ahead and left.

“Hey, sir, you sure about that?” Saunders shouted after him.

“Easy day,” Day shouted back over his shoulder. “Just make sure nobody shoots me in the ass.” In a few seconds he’d reached the front door to the building to the left of the gap, opened it up, and disappeared inside.

* * *

The blood-covered man Yaz shot in the mouth collapsed, falling over on the body beneath him. Keeping his weapon trained on both, stepping forward slowly, Yaz used his boot to shove the top body off the one beneath. It was damned gloomy up there, so he flicked on the white light under his rifle’s barrel rail.

What it showed was like a scene from a butcher’s shop.

It was the body of a young woman, Hispanic, wearing the uniform of the club. But most of that had been ripped away. Worse, most of the flesh underneath had been torn or gnawed away. Both biceps were stripped down to the bone, as were the thighs. Her midsection had been ripped open, and what was left there was mostly just abdominal cavity.

Yaz’s stomach lurched again, and he was suddenly grateful it had emptied out earlier. He was also glad he’d been exposed to his share of cadavers in medical training.

He’d just never seen one half-eaten before.

Needing to get away from this horror show and get some air, he took a last look down at the young woman. He could tell she’d been pretty, even with the blood splashed across the lower half of her face. Whoever she’d been, Yaz was glad she was at peace now. He exhaled and started to turn away—

When both her eyelids fluttered opened.

Her eyes, so rheumy they looked like cataract surgery was the least she needed, locked onto Yaz’s.

He stumbled over backward and crab-crawled away.

Even from down on the deck, he could see the half-eaten body wiggling, squirming, and trying to get up. But there wasn’t enough muscle tissue left intact. She started hissing, blood-flecked spittle spraying from her wet lips…

And then she started moaning.

Her body was a broken machine, but her lungs must have been intact, because she had some pipes on her. She moaned like a ship’s foghorn, like she had lost the most precious thing in the world to her. Or as if she was longing or aching for something.

Yaz suddenly got the horrible sensation it was him.

Trying to maintain situational awareness, he climbed to his feet, raised his rifle, and trained it on the squirming, moaning mass of ruined human before him. He forced himself to take a couple of steps closer, light trained on her face. She looked right at him and kept on wailing, not blinking or squinting from the brightness – then managed to raise an arm, though it flopped at the elbow. This was all so horrible Yaz couldn’t even bring himself to shoot. And he couldn’t look away, transfixed.

Until he realized she wasn’t the only one moaning.

By the time he recognized it, it was full on – similar in tone, but coming from multiple voices. Yaz’s blood ran cold, and he spun around and aimed back down the corridor.

There was nothing there.

But then he could hear not just moaning, but banging, and something heavy thrashing around. It had to be behind that plywood door. And then the first body crashed through the flimsy drywall, falling out into the narrow corridor. It was followed by a dozen others, bashing through in two other spots, filling the corridor, all of them turning and fast-stumbling forward.

Directly toward Yaz.

* * *

Gunny Blane did a quick 360 in place, as Mattis kept hailing. The LT was no longer watching the front door of the Officer’s Club, as Blane had asked him to. Instead he was running from 2/1 over to 2/2 on the other side.

It was an understandable impulse, to check on his Marines, particularly since things seemed to be going to shit out on the front line, and Team 1 had guys cut off and in trouble. But the Team 2 Marines on the ground were fine. It was the two who’d gone tear-assing off on their own into an uncleared structure that Blane was worried about.

He spun forward when the firing ramped up again.

He could see that, while the right flank was more solid with that big-ass tree blocking the major avenue of attack, the rest of the defense was starting to fall apart. The ranks of the infected were no longer getting put down at the periphery of the parade ground. They were getting closer before they got dropped.

A lot closer.

Blane also realized the moaning had gotten nonstop without him quite noticing – and now it was getting nearer, closing in on them, like some kind of sentient, lethal cloud. The noose was closing. They seriously had to go.

Blane tried tugging on Mattis’s sleeve, but got shrugged off.

As the firing redoubled, Blane considered pulling one of Team 2’s two elements up here to form a ring of Marines around the SecDef. Then he also started to wonder what the ammo situation of the other defenders was at this point. He doubted they’d come to a conference in San Francisco expecting a long siege in the Presidio.

Even as he thought that, Blane heard one of the PSB guys shout, “Hey, anybody got a mag?” Evidently no one did, because he came off the line and trotted over to where Blane and Mattis stood by the overturned Beast. He dropped out his mag, checked it, and slid it into a jacket pocket.

“I’m fucking out,” he said, as if Blane were interested.

“Sorry, can’t help you, buddy,” Blane said, tapping his own mag well. “Five-five-six, ride ’til I die.” Nodding at the guy’s M5 battle rifle, he said, “The world’s awash in five-five-six, the Army alone buys a billion rounds a year… and you guys switch to six-point-five Creedmoor.”

The guy scowled. “Hey, it’s the future – evolve or die.”

“Pretty sure I’ll live longer with inferior something loaded up, rather than future nothing.” But then Blane softened, and pointed to the porch behind them. “Your team leader probably has ammo.”

The guy nodded and took off.

Blane paused to wonder whether he really should have sent anybody to go rifling through Major Gibb’s pockets right now. But then he squinted, trying to make something out – was it firing from inside the Officer’s Club, underneath all the ambient gunfire out here?

Or just his imagination?

* * *

Brady’s smart-ass question notwithstanding, Yaz actually had watched the first few seasons of The Walking Dead.

Now, as he watched the crowd of frenzied dead coming at him down the corridor, he wondered if his last thoughts would be of Rick lying underneath that tank, hands grasping at him from all sides, putting his pistol to his head and telling his family he was sorry. He looked up.

Nope – still no hatch in the ceiling.

So there was nothing to do but start shooting. He doubted it was going to work. He could probably take this many unarmed opponents, in quarters this tight – if they were normal people who died or at least got discouraged by center-of-mass shots. But now he had to make headshots, on multiple swarming opponents, all moving erratically.

The moaning, the darkness, and the smell made it worse – not to mention the fact that he was utterly alone.

He stepped backward as he fired, dropping one, then another, missing, missing again, the distance between them shrinking as he retreated, finally bumping ass-first into the window behind him. Knowing he didn’t have time, but having few options, he turned and grabbed at the glass. Nope, it was a fixed pane, with solid wrought iron throughout, even if he smashed out the glass.

He wasn’t getting out that way.

He spun forward again – and they were on him, six or eight left, all lurching forward. He was going to die – eaten alive, or lethally infected – right here, and right fucking now.

But he could at least go down shooting.

He barely had room to get his barrel up again, but did so and fired into the open mouth of the one right in his face. Its brains sprayed out over the ones behind, and it dropped at his feet, but three more were right behind, covered in black brains, others crowding around either side. He got ready to use his rifle as a barrier to shove the grasping bodies away—

But then the ones to the side dropped, like sacks of shit.

“Doc! Get down!”

* * *

Also operating utterly on his own, but fine with it, Captain Day pushed through the first floor of the building he’d entered, rifle up, head down to his EOTech sight, both eyes open, weapon traversing left and right – shooting perfectly, making headshots on dead before they had time to perk up and lock onto him.

He was leaving a lot of undestroyed ones behind him, but this was like the Iraq invasion: keep hammering forward, too fast for the enemy to react, and don’t worry about your lines of supply. In seconds he’d reached the back door, and went straight back out it.

Pulling the door shut behind him, he scanned the scene. Maybe a hundred of them were backed up, pushing and shoving forward to get into the gap to the right of the building. Somewhere back there were Commiskey and Witek, trapped by the tree on one side, and the dead on the other. Day could hear them shooting, probably just to stay alive another minute.

His current position, elevated on a set of brick stairs, was perfect for what he needed to do next. He pulled two ET-MP (Enhanced Tactical Multi-Purpose) grenades, twisted the selector levers to C (concussion), pulled the pins, popped the spoons – then tossed the first one into the crowd at the opening of the gap, and the second one ten feet back, to his left. He pulled his last two, set them to F (fragmentation), and tossed each another twenty feet back into the crowd.

Not bothering with the radio, he shouted, “Frag out!” – then dropped behind the hard cover of the brick stairs. The rolling explosions shook the ground beneath him.

And meat fell from the sky.

But Did You Die

Presidio, Officer’s Club – Attic

Yaz did as he was told, dropping to the deck as pass-through rounds whizzed through dead bodies, smashing the glass above and behind him, shards and dust showering his helmet and shoulders. Seeing the shadow of bodies falling on him, he scampered to his left, rolled once, and came up shooting, firing back into the crowd.

In two seconds it was over. The attackers had all been dropped, and lay motionless on the deck.

Yaz spun left, then lowered his weapon, seeing four Marines, led by Gunny Blane, who also lowered his weapon and shouted, “Check fire!” The rescuers, one of whom was Staff Sergeant Brady, pivoted to the four corners of the room, to clear and cover it. But there was no remaining threat.

“Thanks,” Yaz said to Blane. “But why’d you come?”

Blane just shrugged. “You were gone too long.”

The muted sound of slow clapping sounded in the silence. Yaz turned to see Fick sitting on one of the planter boxes on the landing behind the shot-up and shattered glass of the window. Whether he hadn’t gotten shot because he wasn’t there five seconds before, or because he was actually bulletproof, was a question Yaz felt too tired to tackle.

Fick said, “I was pretty curious to see how you were going to get out of that one.” He stood up, pointed upward, and said, “Meet me on the roof. Bring those jokers.”

As Yaz and Blane turned, Brady stepped up said, “Don’t be thinking this means we like you, new guy. You live out the day and maybe we’ll start getting attached.”

“Ignore this joker in particular,” Blane said. “Come on.”

Yaz shook his head, and kept his mouth shut. As they moved back out the way they came, he spared a look through the ruptured drywall into the “secure” space he’d left behind him. There were another five headshot bodies on the floor – and the Marines hadn’t shot them. The shell casings scattered around the floor, amid black and dark-red bloodstains, weren’t 5.56. Whatever had gone down in that locked-up room was long over.

And Yaz was glad he missed it.

* * *

Captain Day hadn’t worried about injuring his guys with the concussion grenades he chucked near them – the mass of dead bodies should protect them, and close-quarters was exactly what concussion grenades were for. He was mainly excited about the damage the two frag grenades would do.

When he popped up from behind the stairs, he wasn’t disappointed – a whole lot of dead were down on the ground, as if four bombs had dropped, knocking then over in concentric circles. Most were trying to get back to their feet, and whether they couldn’t do so because of destroyed limbs, or because others were tangled up with them, wasn’t a question Day had time for.

The main thing was he had created a hole.

Thicker crowds of dead were already heading their way, but they seemed to be fixated on where the grenades had gone off. That was worth remembering. Day spent two seconds on this BDA, then brought his rifle up, and started shooting and moving again, right into the gap. There were still a few of them on their feet, and to clear them out Day fired rapid single shots, all on heads, almost all landing perfectly.

As he approached the corner of the building, he could hear firing, which suggested his guys were still on their feet and combat effective. He shouted, “Friendly! Coming in!”

But the two junior Marines didn’t wait, instead hauling ass out of the gap like sped-up Looney Tunes characters. The combination of explosives, and firing from both sides, had cleared their exfil path for them. Both men looked at Captain Day with awed and glowing eyes – and Witek actually ran up and hugged him.

“Yeah, got it,” Day said. And he did – the sight of their commander coming in alone, to rescue their cut-off asses, obviously had an effect. “You’re welcome.”

In seconds, all three hauled ass back through the building, and emerged into friendly lines. When they shut the building doors behind them, the gap was plugged again.

This time with only the dead trapped behind it.

* * *

When they hit the rooftop, Yaz was in the number-one position, mainly because he wanted a word with Fick. Regretting losing his temper even as the words left his mouth, he said, “I wasn’t fucking going to.”

“Going to what?” Fick asked, nonplussed.

Yaz nodded back down toward the attic. “Get out of that.” He was no longer cursing, but still raising his voice to the Team Chief, knowing what a bad idea that was even as he failed to stop himself.

But Fick didn’t look bothered, and definitely didn’t rise to the provocation. “But did you die?” he said.

Yaz just sputtered in response.

“Did. You. Die.”

Deflating, Yaz shook his head, and finally laughed.

But then he dropped to the deck as another airplane, not a jumbo jet this time but some type of commuter job, sleek with twin jet engines, came out of nowhere and screamed so low over their rooftop that Yaz thanked God its landing gear was retracted. It was heading due west, out toward the Pacific, losing altitude, and had only by some miracle cleared the hill, and the buildings of the Presidio.

Blane reached down and offered him a hand up.

“Well, that happened,” said Fick, who never ducked.

As Yaz took Blane’s hand and climbed to his feet, he looked back and saw the jet had cleared the rest of the SF peninsula, which sloped down to their west, but now looked like it was heading for the Pacific. He wasn’t sure he wanted to watch another plane go down today.

“Cheer up,” Fick said. “It’s not like it’s the end of the world.”

Yaz opened his mouth to dispute this, but Fick was already turning away, Major Gibb’s radio held to his head. “This is a Marine QRF element, call sign Reamer Two, hailing PSB element Stryker, how copy…?”

Yaz said, “I still don’t understand how that’s happening – the dead getting through locked cockpit doors. Unless the pilots are already infected when they take off.”

“Dude, didn’t you see World War Z?”

Yaz turned to see this was another of the Marines who’d come in with Blane, a big Hispanic-looking man, whose nametape read Reyes.

Brady nodded and said, “Exactly. Obviously, there are hot one-handed female Israeli soldiers on board, setting off grenades before the dead can rush first class.”

“I thought we were in The Walking Dead,” Yaz said.

“Nah. If this were The Walking Dead, you’d have sprained your ankle down there, and we would have left you.”

“True,” Reyes said, nodding. “Could have been worse.”

“Shut the fuck up.” This was the last Marine, standing behind the other two, a Master Sergeant with unshaven gray whiskers, who looked like he was about fifty. That couldn’t be right, so Yaz figured those were city miles on him or something.

“Listen to Graybeard,” Blane said. Turning back to Yaz, he said, “Meet Two-One – Team Two’s Tactical Element One.”

Fick scowled. “Tactical Element… Jesus. Can’t you just call them a fucking fire team? It was good enough for the poor bastards in the Ia Drang Valley.”

“Fick never changes,” Blane said. “Still calls us MARSOC.”

“As far as I’m concerned, we haven’t earned the name Raiders. The original Raiders in WW2 fought through jungle hells we couldn’t imagine.” But then he turned and moved toward the rooftop edge, pressing the radio to his head.

Blane said, “As SARC, you’ll never see Two-One again.”

“Why’s that?” Yaz said.

“Because they never get hurt. They’re like the immortal golden gods of this unit. You see any Two-One guys down, you start running. Plus praying.”

“Hey!” This was Fick, over at the edge of the rooftop, looking down at the defense of the parade ground, but also listening intently to the radio. He pulled it from his head, twiddled the volume knob, and pointed it at the others. A voice, either tired or rattled or both, fuzzed out of the speaker.

“—’s all received, Reamer Two. But, again, NEGATIVE – we are NOT going to be able to fight our way to your position. Every street is blocked, and the city’s overrun, so moving on foot will either get us killed, or at best take hours. You need to extract Mattis NOW, and get your guys out of there, how copy?”

Fick pressed the transmit bar and said, “Stryker, Reamer Two copies all. Good luck and Godspeed, John Wayne.” He then turned and tossed the radio over the roof edge – but immediately had to step back as rounds thwacked into the building just below his boots. Someone was engaging the structure they were standing on, and also the one next door to it, which were supposed to be their secure rear area.

This did not bode well for the security situation.

Trotting back to the others, Fick said, “We’re out of time for fucking around anyway.” He made a Saddle up motion with his finger and trotted toward the ladder down off the roof. As he passed the others, he explained why.

“We’re about to be overrun.”

* * *

As the five Marines and one SARC descended from roof to attic, then down through the two main floors, it became clear Fick and Yaz’s clearing operation of the building was wasted.

Because it was filling up with dead again.

On the way down, they picked up the two junior members of 2/1, who’d been strongpointing the stairs on the first and second floors. The first, Kemp, looked spooked, and the second had his weapon to his shoulder with smoke curling out of the barrel. This was Flynn, the junior machine-gunner, who’d laughed at Yaz in the helo.

“About time,” he said.

Blane slapped him on the helmet, and then the other guy on the ass. “Nice job, you two.”

The reunited five-man fire team, plus Fick, Blane, and Yaz, moved through the ground floor back to the front door. But their route was not clear. Moving fast, Fick used his shotgun again, probably because he didn’t want to slow down to aim.

“Like to keep that handy for close encounters, eh?” Brady said, fast-walking behind him, rifle panning.

Pumping his slide and turning a corner, Fick said, “I’ve always got this handy, motherfucker. Hicks was a pussy.”

“Yeah,” Reyes said, grinning. “You wouldn’t let a little acid-blood knock you out of the fight.”

“Fuck no,” Fick said, stalking down the last stretch of hallway to the front door, and taking off another head without slowing down. “You should see what I’ve got for blood.”

“Mostly coffee, I expect,” Brady said.

The front door was still closed and secure – but it hardly mattered, as the picture windows in the front room had been smashed out. A stumbling dead guy fell through one of them, doing a face-plant on the floor. Fick blasted him in the back of the head. “Yep. I run on—”

The other Marines finished for him, all together.

“—caffeine and hate.”

“Shit,” Fick said, reloading the weapon with shells from his vest, then reaching for the door handle. He paused and looked back to make sure the others were ready to go. “I hate being predictable.”

“Yeah,” Blane said. “We pretty much know all your immortal Fickisms at this point.”

Fick grunted, turned, and hauled the door open. Behind it was a man in a suit, hands down by his sides, facing away. When he turned, it was Major Gibb. He no longer had his weapon, and looked even worse than when they’d left him. He started to raise his arms toward Fick – who shot him twice in the face, and didn’t wait for the body to hit the deck.

Beyond him, outside, everything was going to shit.

Did That Just Happen

Presidio – Officer’s Club, Front Porch

“Great,” Blane said. “That was probably the only guy who could have convinced Mattis to get on the helicopter.”

Pushing out in the lead, Fick said, “So far that guy hasn’t convinced Mattis to do shit. And I never liked him, anyway.”

Blane slowed to tighten up their formation, as they advanced into the swirling chaos. Ahead of them, the two helos were still idling, but in the near dark now, the sun well and truly down. Even in the low light, it was clear they were being overrun, dead swarming inside their perimeter.

“Shit, that happened fast,” Yaz said, moving up beside Blane, raising his rifle to acquire targets.

“Yeah. Stay close.”

Yaz was happy to comply. Whatever chaos kept him from understanding what was going on before, it was worse now. Guys were shooting in all directions, including to their rear, Marines and others firing into both buildings behind them, but especially the one to the left, the Inn. Its front door was shut, but maybe the dead weren’t totally brain-dead, because they were simply crashing and tumbling out of the windows instead.

Marines, surviving PSB shooters, and random others scrambled and self-organized into some kind of a hasty skirmish line in their rear. Yaz just stayed in Blane’s back pocket as the eight of them pushed out around the helos, then toward the fat limo beached like a whale on their front line. The LT ran up to meet them before they reached it.

“Oh, good,” Fick said. “You’re alive.”

“None of us are gonna be for long. Mattis still won’t leave.”

“What? Why the fuck not?” As the LT ran off toward the helos, Fick strode up to the general, who was still holding the radio mic from the vehicle. “Hey, Mad Dog,” Fick said. He knew Mattis hated that nickname, but as usual didn’t give a shit. “This place is going down. You need to get your ass on one of these fine freedom birds we brought for you.”

Mattis turned to the helos, shouting over gunfire. “Will they hold me and my team? With aides and security, it’s ten total.”

Fick ground his jaw. “Negative. We’ve got room for you, the thirty Marines we brought with us – and my enormous fucking testicles. Though those might hang out the side. Sir.”

“Then we’ll have to remove your balls, Master Guns. My team goes too, or no one goes at all.”

“Jesus.” This was Blane, who now leaned in. “Sir, that may be, but I’m not real interested in having my guys stay here and get killed protecting your guys. It’s you we came for.” He didn’t point out that Mattis’s team were Army and civilian DoD – while Blane’s guys, and Mattis himself, were Marines.

He didn’t have to.

“Settle down, Gunny,” Mattis said. “I’ve got two Jayhawks from PACAREA, inbound on short final now.” PACAREA was the Coast Guard’s Pacific Area & Defense Forces West, headquartered just across the Bay. And Jayhawks were MH-60s, the Coast Guard’s medium-lift helo, based on the Navy’s Seahawk, and the Army’s Black Hawk.

“Ah,” Fick said, pointing over the rooftops. “That them?”

Two 64-foot helos, painted the Coast Guard’s trademark orange-and-white, appeared over the city to the east, smudged but still visible in the dusk. They grew bigger and more visible as they descended toward the Presidio’s hilltop parade ground.

And then – and the Marines watching this had to pinch themselves to believe it, despite it happening nearly overhead and in plain sight – two human bodies, twisted up and grappling, tumbled out of the right side cargo door of the first helo, and plummeted to Earth. And then one of the cockpit doors flew open, and a third figure simply leapt out of it, into open air. The nose of the bird slumped, and the helicopter fell out of the sky – its nose pointed down at such a steep angle nobody had to guess what happened next.

The other Jayhawk reversed course, did a quick circuit over the crash site – and then simply turned tail and winged it, flying back the way it came.

“Well, shit,” Mattis said. “Plan C, I guess…”

* * *

The LT ran to the helos because he’d spotted one of the pilots outside them, looking up at the engine cowling of Batcopter 1, below the rotors on the right side. Out on the ground, in the middle of a fight, wasn’t a fantastic place for pilots to be.

“What’s up?” the LT shouted when he got there.

“Yeah,” the pilot said. “Just a little worried about that.”

The LT followed his gaze up to a dozen indentations on the armored cowling over the engine. These had been made by the incoming fire from the minigun, when the crew of the limo was eaten alive at high speed. The dented cowling wasn’t a problem – except in one spot where it looked like several rounds had impacted in the same place, and torn a ragged hole in the steel. Now reddish fluid stained the cowling underneath, and every few seconds a wisp of smoke curled out of it.

“I thought the armor on these things was undefeatable?”

The pilot snorted. “You ever meet anything that was undefeatable? If it were, the critical systems wouldn’t be triple redundant. Anyway, we’ll get her checked out once we’re tucked up nice and safe back in the Hanger Deck.”

“Anything we can do about it now?”

The pilot shook his head. “Got any rosary beads?”

“Do me a favor and get back in your cockpit, okay?”

“Wilco, LT.” But as he turned to go, the pilot called after him again. “Hey! Almost forgot! CIC on the JFK radioed – they’re raising anchor and moving the strike group farther offshore, for security. Too many refugees in sea kayaks.”

“Great. How much farther?”

“Another two miles, for three total.” The LT must have looked worried, because he added, “Don’t worry, team dad – that’s less than a minute flight time for us. Have you home in no time.”

The LT decided to believe that.

* * *

“Hey, did that just happen?” Yaz asked Blane, about the Jayhawks.

Blane didn’t answer, but moved around past him. He grabbed Flynn, the junior machine-gunner, and said, “Hey, Corporal, how’d you feel about emplacing up there?” He pointed toward the big armored limo, still lying on its side.

“What, on top of it?” Flynn asked, looking bewildered.

“Only higher local terrain is there,” Blane said, pointing at the spinning rotor discs of the two helos. “If you prefer it.”

“Fuck no, Gunny,” Flynn said, and two of the other 2/1 guys, Brady and Reyes, laced their fingers together to boost him up. Once on top, Flynn got down on his belly, facing down the length of the vehicle, looking out over the parade ground, then popped the bipod from underneath his MG.

He paused as he saw how many staggering figures filled the field now. They were still being dropped in ones and twos – but there were hundreds coming now through the dark.

“Shit,” he breathed.

“Get some, Beast-rider!” Reyes shouted up at him.

Flynn burned a second dry-humping the limo under him.

And then he opened up – and started burning through a 100-round ammo pouch (or “nutsack”) in controlled 5- and 7-round bursts, as he was trained to do, with only short pauses between. The chattering of his weapon was joined in chorus by two identical Mk 48s, one out to either flank, where Captain Day had finally put his own machine-gunners to work.

The effect of this three-pronged base of fire was immediate – the field ahead turned from endless waving undead wheat, to harvest time, a whole lot of bodies hitting the ground. Those closest fell first, but the inhuman wave rolled all the way out to the edges of the parade ground. Some were turned off by headshots, others just too dismembered to locomote. The mob was still coming – but being knocked back.

This allowed Team 2 to get in the fight to control the rear.

They started dropping the ones stumbling around inside their perimeter, and pouring out of the windows of the buildings. It wasn’t clear if there’d always been more inside, or if somebody had left a back door open and they were coming in that way. But for the moment, their rear was getting cleared up.

Lowering their weapons, Brady and Reyes sauntered back to watch Flynn’s MG show up on the limo. Brady shouted up at him, sounding positively relaxed now. “Hey, Flynn – didn’t H&S get you a swing-arm for that smart-gun of yours yet, like Frost and Vasquez had?”

Flynn’s weapon picked that moment to go dry, 100 rounds hurled downrange, and he flipped open the feed tray on top and started his reload. “Not yet, Sergeant! But it’d be a hell of a lot easier to shoot and move with this thing if they did.”

“Yeah,” Reyes said. “And then we wouldn’t have to keep putting you in vulnerable static positions on your own. You could actually keep up with everyone else for a change.”

The noise of shouting, suddenly urgent, drew their eyes back and to the right, toward the helos. And the shouts of warning gave them a quarter-second to dive out of the way – everyone but Flynn, who was still up riding his Beast – as a shrieking rocket zipped into their position…

And exploded on the undercarriage of the limo.

* * *

Looking around, Blane realized he was the only one to see two random guys, definitely not Marines, approach the cargo door of their helo. He lowered his weapon and shouted, “Hey!”

Either they didn’t hear him over the battle, or didn’t care. One climbed inside, while the other sat down on the ground, his back against the tire of the right-front landing gear.

“Goddammit,” Blane muttered to himself. Trying to oversee his team’s role in this fight, he didn’t have the bandwidth for this. Still, they couldn’t have random people just lounging around in their helicopters. He started trotting in that direction – but even as he did, the first guy climbed back out the hatch.

With one of their goddamned LAW rockets.

Blane pointed and shouted, “Hey! Asshole!”

This guy must have seen Fick go in there to get one of these earlier. He’d also evidently been trained on the weapon system – because he removed the pull pin, lowered the rear cover, then extended the launcher, which popped the front sight. He put it on his shoulder and pointed it downrange. And then his buddy, slumped against the landing gear, grabbed him around both legs and sunk his teeth into the flesh of his calf.

The man screamed, kicked – and began to twist and fall.

Ah, shit, Blane thought – then shouted a warning at the top of his lungs, while turning and running the opposite direction.

Of course the guy triggered off the rocket while falling over. This was just not a banner day for trigger discipline. If it had hit the ground at his feet, everyone would have been fine, as it wouldn’t have had time to arm itself yet.

Instead it zipped 50 feet over, into the bottom of the limo.

And it wasn’t just its warhead that exploded, but also the fuel tank. Flame and expanding gasses rushed outward, as the Beast rolled over on its roof, and then slid a good twenty-five feet back. And from up on what used to be the top…

Corporal Flynn went airborne, Mk 48 and all.

Rub Some Dirt On It

Presidio – Inside Defensive Perimeter

Yaz’s breath was knocked out of him by a series of gut punches to his abdomen and chest, and he tumbled over on his back, trying to breathe.

It took him a second to work out it wasn’t the exploding rocket or gas tank that got him. It was somebody turning and running from the explosion, having shrapnel slam into his back – and then firing a full-auto or maybe just three-shot burst directly into Yaz’s chest, where his plate carrier stopped and dispersed the force of the rounds.

But Yaz’s body still absorbed all the energy.

He felt like the limo had fallen on his chest – and was still there. He tore at his plate carrier, fighting like hell to breathe, but no air was getting in. He knew he should be patting himself down for other wounds – it would be a miracle if every one of those rounds hit the insert, like an accidental full-auto bulls-eye. But as a medic he knew it was impossible to focus on anything else when you can’t breathe.

As his vision shrunk down to pinholes surrounded by swelling blackness, some part of his mind that remained rational understood it was from the oxygen deprivation. He’d been running a big O2 deficit before this, hauling ass around in all his gear, fighting, being afraid – and now he’d just been completely winded. In that last pinhole of light, he saw two blue hands reach down and tilt his chin back.

Someone else here was gloved up, and treating him – speaking to him, but the voice too muffled to understand.

And the chin-tilt opened his airway enough for him to get his breath back, blessed oxygen rushing in. As his visual field widened again, Yaz quickly wished it hadn’t – all around him, men ran in every direction, at least a couple actually on fire, some chasing others. Yaz saw somebody tackle somebody else, both of them rolling out of sight again.

“Easy,” the voice said. “I got you, Shipmate.”

Yaz looked straight up again. Leaning over him was another man dressed exactly the same as him, with a morale patch on his vest – one Yaz had seen more than a few times before. Black with silver, it showed a winged skull and crossed swords over a six-pointed Star of Life – the symbol of emergency services worldwide. Across the top, it read: “Rub Some Dirt On It” – and, below: “Everything Stops Bleeding Eventually.”

This could only be another SARC – Yaz’s twin on Team 1.

* * *

Blane got to Flynn first. He was lying tangled up with his weapon a good 40 feet from the flipped-over limo. Luckily, he was still inside what was left of their perimeter – but this mattered less every second, as their position got overrun all over again, with the collapse of the front line from the exploding Beast. Before Blane could even see to Flynn, he had to take a knee and tear off a dozen shots on lurching figures coming right at them, or else just coming too close.

While Blane engaged targets, the LT arrived and started checking Flynn out. The young man was unresponsive, but breathing – and then his eyes opened in a flash.

“Am I dead?” he asked, looking up the darkening sky.

“You wish,” the LT said. “Where you hit?”

Flynn started patting himself down. “Nowhere. Everywhere.” He sat up. “I think I’m okay, actually.”

“Good for you.” This was Fick, dashing up, weapon to shoulder, panning in all directions. “Now get your damned MG back online, or I swear to God I will tear your face off and wear it to the next formation.” Not lowering his rifle, he spared a look down at the stunned young Marine. “Shit, Corporal, you look like someone set you on fire and put you out with a wet chain.”

The others didn’t know whether to shit themselves laughing or panicking, but the LT’s smile melted as he patted Flynn’s chest. “Hey – where’s your ESAPI plate?”

He meant the Enhanced Small Arms Protective Insert, a ceramic plate that should have been in Flynn’s Modular Tactical Vest. Flynn just raised his weapon and gave the LT a look, which clearly meant: With the weight of a medium machine gun plus 800 rounds, the last thing he needed was another six pounds on him, for ballistic protection from high-velocity rounds – when they weren’t going near anyone with an AK. He obviously thought the soft Kevlar inserts were enough.

The LT frowned. “Wear your plates next time.” Even as he reached down to haul Flynn to his feet, they all turned back as the regular cadence of ambient gunfire was cut by stuttering chain bursts, which sounded more like fireworks than gunfire. Behind them, the Beast was now completely engulfed in flames, which climbed up into the darkening sky. The fireworks noise was coming from the interior, zipping rounds plinking into the bodywork – but also shooting out the missing windshield.

“Ah, fuck,” Fick said. “The minigun ammo is cooking off.”

“Dammit,” The LT said, looking over at the two Defiants, as he heard some of the cooked-off rounds fleck off their armored skin. He stood up, hauling Flynn up with him. “We’ve got to go.”

“Ya think?” Fick said, finally ducking as rounds snapped by.

* * *

“Well, I’ll be fucked,” Yaz said, clasping the other SARC’s hand, not in a position to turn down help getting back up to his feet. “Every one of those rounds landed on my front plate. Whoever shot me must be a hell of a three-gun competitor.”

“No doubt. How’s it feel to be a steel target?”

Yaz couldn’t resist patting his arms and thighs again, still amazed there weren’t any holes in them.

The other SARC clapped his arm. “You might want to get those ribs X-rayed on the carrier. Otherwise, you’re good to go.”

Yaz nodded. “Tom Yaskiewicz. Yaz. Team Two’s new SARC.”

“Yeah, I know. Why do you think I checked on you first? I can’t do this shit alone. Chuck Milam, Team One. Welcome to the dope show, man.”

Corpsman Milam had a not-quite-full-enough mustache, and a desert-camo bandana peeking out from under his helmet. “C’mon,” he said. “Playtime’s over.”

Yaz got moving, following Milam back toward the burning vehicle. There were burn, blast, and gunshot victims lying in various places behind the line, most of them close to the limo. This had become a mass casualty event – and also an existential event for their defense of the Presidio.

As far as Yaz could see, none of the wounded were Marines. Maybe Captain Day had known what he was doing putting his men out on the flanks. Ditto the LT, keeping his behind the line. Either way, the rampaging Beast that rode in from their twelve, and exploded in their faces, had left the Marines out of its rampage of destruction.

Yaz had a duty of care to all the wounded, but his first obligation was to his own team. Something tickled his brain – Corporal Flynn. He’d been up on top of the limo, which had rolled over on its roof, plus wasn’t where it had started. It was only as Yaz’s hearing dialed back up that he clocked some large cache of ammo cooking off inside it.

And Milam was running straight toward it.

Yaz had no problem getting killed following him. But then he also saw Flynn, off to the left, being hauled off the ground by the LT, Fick nearby, and Blane shooting to cover them. So he angled in that direction, hoping he wasn’t about to get shot again. When he reached the group, he grabbed Flynn and shouted, “Hey, are you injured?” But he could already see – aside from being smudged with soot, and looking a little ropey, the kid seemed fine.

“Told you,” Blane said. “Two-One’s unkillable.”

A shout tore the air, and they turned to see a guy on the line hunched over – he’d just gotten tagged by one of the cooked-off rounds from the limo. Worse, most of the defenders had shifted the hell away from it, opening a huge gap in the line. As the wounded man clutched his shoulder, and someone ran up to do buddy aid, a figure lurched around the flaming limo, walking through the penumbra of fire without evident pain or fear, and fell on both of them, which turned into a flaming wrestling match on the ground.

“Hey,” Flynn said. “Can we fucking go now?”

Blane, having cleared their immediate area, lowered his weapon and turned to the others. “We still don’t have our damned mission objective.” He looked toward the flaming, chain-firing Beast. “Where the hell is he, anyway?”

“There,” Fick said, pointing across all the self-immolating madness. SecDef Mattis now stood back by the porch of the Officer’s Club, his diminishing team of close-protection guys circling round him. “Come on,” Fick said.

“Where we going?” Blane asked.

“We’re gonna have to kidnap Chaos.”

* * *

“Listen up,” Mattis shouted at the remains of his team. “The Coast Guard has shit the bed on air evac, so we’re ju—”

He grunted and wheezed as Fick jabbed a rifle butt in his abdomen – then wheeled his arms and fell over as Blane put his boot into the back of his knee. Once Mattis was on the ground, Flynn and the LT grabbed his legs and started hauling him across the grass toward the helos.

It wasn’t even that it happened so fast – it was just too fucking weird for Mattis’s security detail to react to. But they didn’t have to – Mattis was fine on his own. He kicked Flynn in the groin and twisted his leg free, which allowed him to roll on his side and give the same treatment to the LT, who also let go. Fick fell across Mattis’s chest, getting him into a grappling hold. But the wounded 70-year-old Marine bucked his hips, throwing Fick off – then climbed to his feet and kicked him in the gut, causing the slightly less old Marine to double up on the ground.

“Nice try, Master Guns,” Mattis said. “Guess you’re just too slow with those giant testicles of yours.” With that, he took off back toward his team. Even as he disappeared, dead started to flood in behind him, cutting off the two groups.

“Goddammit,” Fick said, letting Blane and Flynn haul him up.

* * *

Yaz took a look around, and saw Milam on his knees beside a man lying in the recovery position. But Milam wasn’t working on him. He was wrapping up his own bare hand with his gloved one. Yaz sprinted over, keeping his head on a swivel for threats.

“You okay?” he said. Blood soaked Milam’s sleeve, from some kind of hand wound, which he’d wrapped up.

“I’m good,” Milam said, nodding at the flaming limo. “Son of a bitch tagged me.” His total disregard for his own safety was impressive. Yaz remembered one of the team guys telling him once that special-operations commanders were basically looking for guys who understood that all stress is self-induced – even when bombs are exploding and bullets whizzing by your head. Milam had that in spades. Then again, he’d just gotten shot.

“Lemme look at it,” Yaz said.

“I’m good,” Milam repeated, tying off the bandage with his teeth. “Step off.”

Yaz nodded, getting it. Barring urgent medical need, SARCs – spec-ops medics, all combat medics really – were trained not to clump up. The last thing the other men needed was both their medics getting turned to smoky barbecue by a single incoming mortar round. But even as Yaz turned away, he could see Mattis giving the others the slip. Their mission objective was slipping away.

And the defense was collapsing.

* * *

As Mattis disappeared into the vortex of bodies, Fick, Blane, and the LT looked around to see the front line collapsing all around them. The legions of dead marching across the field had reached them, and were largely unopposed now. They were also still coming in the back way, from inside and in between the two buildings that were supposed to anchor the defense.

Yaz dashed back up to the commanders and got in close, remembering how even a quick roll around with the dead had doomed Major Gibbs. Their enemy was unarmed – but they were lethally dangerous. Proximity could kill. And something very primal in him recoiled at the approach of diseased people – never mind ones that wanted to eat him.

The LT paused, like he still wanted to go after Mattis.

But Blane grabbed him by his vest and pulled him along with the others, as they retreated back toward the helos. Fick was on his radio, and more Marines were turning up, firing outward to defend themselves but collapsing inward, all reuniting in the last bit of ground they still held. The LT allowed himself to be pulled along, but also shouted, “We don’t leave Marines behind!”

Blane shouted back, “He’s not a Marine today, LT – he’s picked his team, and it’s not us! We can either go now, or stay and die with him!”

Brady, walking backwards, firing both his rifle and underslung grenade launcher, shouted, “Ma-rines! We are lea-ving!” Yaz saw a staggering figure lurch toward Brady’s eight o’clock, so he raised his rifle and triggered off, not stopping until it went down. As he put his last round two feet behind Brady’s head, he remembered another reason having enemy in your lines was terrifying – the risk of fratricide.

Team 2 had to fight around to the right-side hatch on their bird, which still faced out toward the parade ground – and which now looked like the field in front of the main stage at a goth-metal music festival. And in the last smudged light, it was ten times more terrifying, a great staggering and shifting mass, moving inexorably forward in the dark.

Blane shouted, “Two-One – security positions!”

Led by Graybeard, the five Marines of 2/1 formed an arc in front of the outer helo, as 2/2 and the HQ element loaded up. At the same time, Team 1 filed in between the two birds from either flank, loading up through the right-side door, which only faced the other helo. This left the other side of their bird facing back toward the overrun buildings, undefended.

But it didn’t matter now.

The engines of both aircraft wound up to a soul-crushing roar, and in seconds both lifted off the overrun ground. The Marines were getting out alive. Without their mission objective.

But with all of their teammates on board.

Between Corporal Flynn getting launched 40 feet through the air like an overcooked Pop-Tart, Yaz getting gunned down with a perfect three-round burst, Milam being shot in the hand, and two guys nearly having a large tree fall on them, they’d gotten stupidly lucky, and dodged a lot of bullets. But now they were finally getting the hell out of Dodge.

And they were all headed home.

Gross Overload

Batcopter Two – 50 Feet Above the Presidio

Yaz was back in his original spot, wedged in against the hatch, probably due to being the new guy, and not rating one of the limited seats. He shared the space with Flynn, too junior to get one; and Blane, too concerned with the welfare of his Marines to take one. This also meant Yaz got his window view back, and used it to take a last look down at the fall of the Presidio.

And the last stand of its defenders.

The last thing he saw in the fading light on the receding ground was SecDef Mattis, Chaos himself – still on his feet and firing a handgun into the undead masses swarming them from all around. And then even he disappeared from sight. Yaz wouldn’t count Mattis out. But he was on his own now.

Rather, he was with the team he had chosen.

* * *

The pilot of Batcopter 2 flipped his visor down, as their increasing altitude put them in the path of the last slashing sunlight, the sun disappearing into the Pacific. They were still over San Francisco, but not for long. Soon they’d be feet wet, winging it out over nice safe ocean. And three miles beyond that was home – the JFK.

They’d made it.

Both pilot and co-pilot felt their breathing and heart rates drop back to resting levels – though, even on the overrun LZ, they’d not climbed all that high in the first place.

Then the radio perked up. “Batcopter Two from One.”

“Send it,” the pilot said, as his co-pilot stole a look out the window to get visual with the other bird, which was flying just behind them off their port side. It was technically the lead aircraft of the flight, but had been slower getting off the ground, and fallen into the number-two position.

“Yeah, we, uh, took some small-arms fire on our starboard engine housing in that funhouse back there. Now I’m feeling a little shudder in the cyclic, and some odd flight characteristics. Can you get visual on my rotor mast and, you know, make sure both sets of blades are still attached? Over.”

“Copy that, One. Wilco.” The pilot proceeded to bleed off airspeed, while also gaining altitude, to get a closer look.

“Hey, boss,” his co-pilot said.

The pilot looked over. “Shit. That doesn’t look good.” He hit his radio again. “Yeah, One, I think we’ve identified the source of those flight anomalies. You’ve got stowaways, brother.”

* * *

“Hey, clip in!” the LT shouted, pressing an ICS headset to his ear to listen to the pilot’s instructions, moving across the cabin to the right-side cargo-hatch. Even as he did, the helo rose dramatically, then lurched to the left, as it climbed up over the other bird to get on its other side.

“Clip in who?” Blane asked.

“Whoever you can!” The LT meant the safety harness hanging above the door frame, for use by door gunners, or any other maniacs who wanted to hang their asses out the open hatch of a fast-moving aircraft.

Blane retrieved the line and clipped the carabiner onto the drag strap on the back off Flynn’s vest, then pulled the slack out of the line. Yaz didn’t have to ask why he’d picked Flynn. Leaders took care of their junior guys first.

And then the LT hauled open the hatch, making them all flinch as the slipstream slapped them in the face. And, just like that, they all had ring-side seats to an airborne freak-show, 25 meters down and across from them, on the outside of the other helo.

No fewer than five human figures were clinging to the port-side wing. This was the side that had been left undefended, facing back toward the buildings, while both teams loaded up.

The design of the Defiant had two big horizontal stabilizers out at the end of the tail boom. Each of these had smaller vertical stabilizers at their own ends. Together they largely enclosed the pusher-propeller at the end of the tail. All this was normal. What wasn’t normal was the five bodies clinging to the horizontal stabilizer on the left side.

“Who are those fucking guys?” Flynn shouted over the wind.

Blane shook his head. “I guess nothing’s shocking today.”

Yaz squinted down and across at the clinging bodies. Having been up close and personal with the dead, he was pretty sure they didn’t have the physical agility or mental focus to hang on to the outside of a helicopter in flight. But as he ogled the scene, he realized they didn’t have to. Because what they were actually hanging onto was the living.

There were three living men clinging to that stabilizer – guys who presumably hadn’t wanted to be left behind as the Presidio fell, and decided hitching a ride on the outside of a helo was a better deal than the certain death of staying behind. Unfortunately for them, two dead guys had decided they didn’t want their lunch to get away either, and had hitched a ride on them.

So now it was three healthy guys belly-down, clinging to the front edge of the stabilizer with outstretched arms – and two dead guys with their arms wrapped around the legs and waists of two of the living ones. And, as the living tried to fight them off without falling to their deaths…

The dead were trying to eat their asses.

* * *

“What do you want us to do?” the pilot of Batcopter Two asked, holding position above their counterpart. He’d already told the Marine commander to get ready. Now he needed the go-ahead.

The pilot of Batcopter One came back, voice still steady. “You’re visual on this shit-show, I’m not. What’s your call?”

“I don’t know, brother. We’re so close to home, I think it’s gotta be safer just to leave ’em where they are, than risk shooting them off. That could really go sideways.”

“Copy that. Interrogative: are they healthy? Or infected?”

The pilot squinted over at the wing-top melee again. “Bit of both. At least two of them aren’t looking so good.”

“Copy that. Then we’re not going back. Not like this. We can’t risk bringing those things back to the flat-top. An outbreak belowdecks would make the fall of San Fran look like a super-soaker battle. And if you thought defending the Presidio was fun, just wait for our last stand in the JFK’s island.”

The pilot exhaled. “Yeah, you got me there. Okay. Suggest we maintain position while I figure out if the Marines think they’d actually be able to – ah, shit, stand by…”

One of the living guys had just gotten a pistol clear – and, while hanging on with one hand, was attempting to fire it over his shoulder at the undead guy tearing into his lower half. Most of his rounds missed and went through the pusher-propeller behind him. You could tell because of the showers of sparks.

The other pilot was obviously aware something was going even more wrong. “Hey, is that a gunfight out on my airframe? Because I just got a warning light for the tail. Whatever your guys are gonna do, how about you go ahead and do it?”

“Roger that. Wait out.”

* * *

“Lemme do it!” Flynn shouted.

“Shut the hell up!” the LT said, propping his rifle on the shoulder of the young Marine standing before him in the open hatch. “And stop moving!”

Obviously, the machine-gunner was the last person they wanted plinking at targets on the outside of the other helo. But Flynn wouldn’t let it go. “I can do it! Range is two-five max. Even if I miss, that thing’s armored to hell and back!”

“Nah, you’re good where you are,” the LT said. “The perfect bench-rest. If you’d just shut the hell up and stop moving.” Without waiting for an answer, he took a shot – no visible effect. He had the torso of the man with the pistol directly in his sights. It must have been the motion of both aircraft, plus the blasting wind.

He fired again. Once again, nothing.

At this point, the guy firing the pistol on the wing must have gone empty – because he hurled his weapon at the thing trying to climb up his back. It bounced off the dead guy’s head – and then went straight through the pusher-propeller…

In a shriek of deforming metal and showers of sparks.

* * *

“Hey, One,” the pilot said. “You just lost your tail prop.”

“Yeah, roger that. We know.”

The good news was a helo with twin coaxial rotors could fly just fine without the tail rotor – which wasn’t for stability, but speed. Of course now they were losing speed.

“We’re bringing our airspeed down to match yours.”

“Thanks.”

“How’s she feel?” the pilot asked.

“Gross overload, trim characteristics all shot to hell.”

The pilot and co-pilot of Batcopter 2 shared a confused look – which then turned to smiles. “Like trying to fly a freight train?”

The dialogue was from Saving Private Ryan – the pilot of the crashed glider – and typical of naval aviators to bust out with movie quotes when they were all about to crash and die.

But the pilot of the other Defiant quit joking around pretty quickly. Air disasters were almost always the result of a cascade of several unlikely events. And Batcopter One had just got its third: first the minigun damage, then the weight of five guys hanging on one side – and finally the heavy metal pistol through the tail rotor.

Now their pilot said, “Listen, you gotta clear those motherfuckers off my aircraft. Or this is gonna be a flight of one before we make it back home.”

“Well, at least then we won’t have the infection risk.”

“Yeah. There’s that.”

* * *

“Okay, you win!” the LT said, clapping Flynn’s shoulder. “Do it!”

The kid looked back with wide eyes, hesitating.

“Hey!” Yaz shouted. “Three of those guys aren’t dead!”

“Doesn’t matter!” the LT yelled back. “They’re gonna bring that bird down, and kill every Marine on Team One!” He slapped Flynn on the shoulder again. “Discharge your weapon!”

Flynn looked forward again, raised his Mk 48 to his shoulder, and triggered off a crisp seven-round burst. All or most of the rounds landed on the guy who’d thrown the handgun, and also his attached attacker. Both bodies slid off the back of the helo, flipped through open air, and disappeared. Flynn took a bead on the second pair, then lit them up, too.

They both fell away.

The fifth and last man clinging to the stabilizer saw all of this happening right beside him. Now he looked across the small amount of open air that separated the two helos, and locked eyes with Flynn – whose finger froze on his trigger. Flynn looked back at the LT again, clearly conflicted about gunning down this last man, who was not an obvious threat.

“Do it!” the LT said. “You have to take the shot!”

Flynn faced forward, finger tightening on his trigger. But before he could fire, his target produced an H&K MP7, probably from a sling under his coat. He leveled it at them. And he poured nearly an entire 40-round mag of armor-piercing rounds straight into the open hatch of Batcopter 2.

All in two seconds.

* * *

“Breaking left!” the pilot barked, as warning lights and klaxons went batshit all over the flight deck. Batcopter 2 veered away from the brutal close-quarters attack from the other helo, even as it was already over, too late to respond.

The co-pilot unstrapped himself and stuck his head in back to see what the fuck was going on, and how bad it was. The cramped space was filled with showers of sparks, scalding hydraulic fluid sluicing across the deck, and the contents of one of their halon fire extinguishers powdering the air.

Which also masked a lot of shouting and shot-up Marines.

He took a half-second just to wonder how the fuck this had happened. The superb armor on the outside of the Defiant would have laughed off small-arms fire – even armor-piercing rounds wouldn’t have made a dent. But they never had to. Because the flesh-and-blood humans had made the mistake of pulling the door wide open for them.

And inviting all those rounds right inside.

* * *

As 950 rounds per minute of 4.6mm peppered them at close range, the LT dove away from the hatch to the left, and Blane right.

But Flynn was suspended right in the middle, unable to move because of the safety harness. As he hung there, completely exposed, he got hammered by most of the incoming rounds, the rest zipping around him into the cabin, slapping into bulkheads, electronics – and Marines, most also strapped into seats, and unable to get out of the way.

Yaz also remained in the hatch – but down on the deck, where he’d dropped electrically at the first incoming fire. He took no pride in this. Hitting the deck just seemed like the safest thing to do. Nonetheless, since he was lying there, facing out, plus combat effective and everything – and the only one in position to protect his teammates – he brought his rifle up, put the red dot of his reflex sight on the shooter’s face, and fired a single round, which caught him in the forehead.

He tumbled off the wing, firing his last few rounds into heaven.

It was little enough. But it was something.

Now, as Yaz lay there on the cool steel of the deck, letting the wind caress his face, all he could think was the man he’d just shot had only been trying to survive, and get the hell out, just like the rest of them.

And all he’d done wrong was try to defend himself.

So now, in the space of an hour, Yaz had killed his first plague victims, and also his first healthy survivor. If this really was the fall of human civilization, then it wasn’t looking too good for them banding together for survival, as opposed to tearing each other to pieces. For some reason, he remembered that the title of The Walking Dead didn’t refer to the zombies – but to the survivors.

It was never about what the disaster did to the world. It was about what it did to the human soul.

And what they then did to each other.

Explode Together

Batcopter Two, Flight Deck

“Goddamn,” the co-pilot said, flipping off warning lights and shutting down alarms, so they could hear themselves think, and maybe try to fly the aircraft. “It was One that had the shot-up engine and the zombie-versus-mercenary gun battle out on the wing. And now we’re going down?”

“Yeah,” the pilot said, battling the shuddering controls, trying to bring them around in something like a controlled turn, even as they lost altitude in a fairly uncontrolled way. “Doesn’t life have a sick sense of humor?”

“What’s our status?” This was the Marine Team Leader, the LT, sticking his head up into the flight deck.

The pilot snorted. “Our status is this advanced joint multi-role helicopter is about to become a static monument to naval aviation.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means we’re going down.”

The LT squinted out the front screens. “I can fucking see the JFK from here!” But even as he said it, this stopped being true – the helo banking left, and their view out to sea, and the matrix of warships in the distance, spinning out of view to the right.

“Not anymore,” the pilot said. “Anyway, aside from the fact that I’m not gonna crash-land on the carrier’s flight deck and endanger the whole boat and everyone on it…” He paused as he brought them out of the bank, the dark city leveling out in front of them. “I seriously doubt we’d make it that far. Hey, Bull, you want to pull those PCLs offline or what?”

“Doing it,” the co-pilot said, hauling a double lever overhead.

“So what the hell actually got damaged?” the LT asked.

Both the pilot and co-pilot laughed out loud. “Beats me, man,” the co-pilot said. “I just work here.”

“Hey,” the pilot said, “if you wanna go back there and figure out exactly which electric and hydraulic lines got turned into spicy gunpowder sausage, be my guest. Right now I’ve got a very unhappy aircraft to try to get on the ground. Without killing everyone inside it.”

The LT gritted his teeth, trying to drag his mind into this new reality. Two minutes ago they were all two minutes from home – and now they were going down, right back into what was left of the overrun city. Scanning the coast ahead, nearly below them already, he said, “At least go for the high ground.”

“Got it,” the pilot said, trying to milk altitude out of the falling bird, angling them toward a big green hilltop, south and east of the Presidio, nearly on the coast. At the crown of the hill they could see a big, white, classical structure – white enough to still be visible in the near dark. This was the Legion of Honor – a fine-arts museum with a view out over the Golden Gate Bridge – though none of the men hurtling toward it knew that, or were in any position to care.

Stealing a look over his shoulder, the pilot saw the LT still standing there, peering out ahead. “Get your guys strapped in.”

The LT squinted. “This going to be a controlled crash?”

“Nah. Probably more just like a good old regular crash.”

* * *

When Yaz’s hearing dialed up again, and he heard the shouting and cries behind him, he realized he was out of time for thinking about man’s inhumanity to man.

He had to go to work – to try to patch up the outcome.

He climbed up off the deck, surprised at how easy it was, due to the aircraft falling out of the sky around him. Upright and turned around, he immediately saw Flynn down on the deck. And he was all fucked up.

Blane and Fick were already cutting his vest away from him. Not that it had done him much good. The soft Kevlar had been shredded to goose down by the long burst of armor-piercing rounds. It had probably stopped a few, but others obviously got through.

Kneeling down beside his casualty, Yaz could see he was still breathing, but it was shallow and irregular. And he’d already lost so much blood he looked like he’d been hit with a bucket of it by anti-fur protestors. Steeling himself, Yaz looked up and did a quick visual triage of the others in the cabin, most of whom were still strapped in their seats. As his eyes darted and scanned, it looked like their wounds were non-critical – in any case, everyone else who’d been hit was both conscious and breathing, and no one appeared to have a catastrophic bleed.

That made Flynn the priority.

In the last second he had while he got his med ruck open, Yaz thought how he really wasn’t superstitious – but maybe he shouldn’t have thought the words “mass casualty event” earlier.

Because now he’d got one of his own – good and hard.

* * *

“Strap the fuck in!” the LT shouted, over the wind, the scream of the falling aircraft, and the moaning of the wounded, as he turned back to the cabin.

But nobody had time to strap in.

The safest place in a crashing helo was always flat on the deck, so that’s where Fick, Blane, and Yaz threw themselves. Two seconds later, the aircraft impacted the top of the coastal hill, bounced fifteen feet back in the air, and then travelled another hundred forward before it crunched to a stop again. The airframe tilted over so far forward on the slope that for a second it looked like they might all be slaloming.

But they came to a stop.

Back in the overrun and fallen city.

Except now night had fallen.

* * *

“This aircraft’s not safe, Doc. We gotta move him.”

This was Blane, hand on Yaz’s shoulder. Yaz was hunched over, inserting a 14-gauge needle into the side of Flynn’s chest, just above his third rib, to deal with a traumatic pneumothorax – the total collapse of one lung. He’d already sealed up the worst bleeders, with a combination of clamping, bandaging, and stuffing them with Kerlix, plus gotten a unit of plasma going, through another thick needle in the young man’s arm.

But his patient was not nearly stable yet.

Combat medicine dictated that if they were under fire, Yaz would absolutely need to move his patient to safety first, treat him second. But not only were they not under fire, they were in something like a secure position. Everyone else on Team 2 had exited the aircraft, set up a casualty collection point (CCP) for their other injured Marines, and then set security by putting all the healthy shooters into a perimeter out at 25 meters.

But they were already shooting to defend the position.

Yaz had no idea whether the dead had already been climbing all over this hill to start with, or were just drawn by the noise of the helo crash. Also he didn’t care. He didn’t even care much that he and his patient were at the center of a secure perimeter. What he cared about was that Flynn was still on the knife edge between living and dying.

And moving him now could push him over it.

Blane caught Yaz’s look, and his iron refusal to relent. He tried one more time, gesturing at the sparking and smoky interior of the cabin, and the ravaged aircraft around it. He said, “It’s not him, Doc. We can’t afford to lose you.”

Yaz just nodded over his shoulder – to where the other SARC, Doc Milam, was treating the other casualties in the CCP. The earlier chaos in the cabin had made it seem worse, but actually only three other Marines had been hit by the MP7 fire. All of their gunshot wounds were on extremities, and none life-threatening. Still, they needed to be treated.

And Blane got Yaz’s meaning – they had another SARC, and actually could afford to lose Yaz. “Okay,” Blane said, finally giving in. And then he climbed inside the helo with the two of them, his own meaning clear: if the helo exploded, they’d all explode together. “Show me how to help.”

Yaz nodded, exhaled, and got back to work.

* * *

Outside, the security perimeter soon had to push out – to make room for Batcopter One, which was already flaring in, setting down 50 feet from the half-burnt ruins of Batcopter Two. With the return of Team 1, clearly no one was leaving anyone else behind. The good news was this gave them 15 more shooters to defend the position.

The bad news was they were all trapped there together.

As the Team 1 Marines spilled out and got slotted into the defense, the pilot and co-pilot of Batcopter Two ran up to the cockpit of the surviving helo. Both windows opened up, flight helmets came off, and the four Defiant pilots started shouting over the whumping blades overhead.

They were also having to shout over the gunfire. In the smudged darkness of the hillside around them, indistinct figures lurched into sight, made horrible hissing noises – then get shot and dropped down again.

The co-pilot of Batcopter One shook his head, gesturing at the wrecked bird ahead of them. “The most high-tech rotary-wing aircraft in world history – coax blades, no tail rotor, composite armor. And it’s exactly like you flew back into Mogadishu in 1993.”

“Nah,” the co-pilot of Batcopter Two said. “We would have totally survived RPG strikes.”

“Enough,” said the pilot of One, the air mission commander, pressing his headset cup to his ear, obviously trying to hear a radio transmission.

As he did, the two Marine team leaders, Captain Day and the LT, trotted up, along with their team chiefs, Fick and Master Sergeant Saunders. Day shouted, “What’s our status?”

The pilot of Two answered, “We’re short one helicopter.”

The pilot of One said, “I said shut the fuck up.” He listened for another couple of seconds, then looked up. “I’m trying to get the Kennedy to send us a new bird to extract all your guys.”

“And?” Day asked.

“It’s a no-go right now.”

“What?” the LT asked. “What the hell?”

The pilot blinked. “They lost two of their four Seahawks today – trying to pull other VIPs out of this shit-show.”

“Then tell them to send the other fucking two,” Day said.

“Those aircraft are currently tasked.”

Fick leaned in and said, “With something more important than saving our precious asses? Which they’re definitely going to need, to save their even more precious asses later on?”

“Evidently.”

The LT said, “There are two Seahawks on the Michael Murphy.” This was one of the Kennedy’s escort destroyers.

“Yeah,” the pilot said. “They’re not sending them.”

“Why the fuck not?”

“Because they’re the last two. And they can’t risk them.”

There was a beat of stunned silence all around. They weren’t going to be pulled out of there.

Not all of them, anyway.

* * *

Captain Day started to ask for the radio handset from the flight deck of Batcopter One, so he could scream at command himself. But then he realized the Kennedy was only five klicks out – and from this elevated hill, they were actually line-of-sight with the island on the carrier. So instead he stalked around cursing into his team radio at them.

The others stayed where they were. The LT said the obvious: “We can’t get everyone out on one bird, can we?”

The pilot of Two answered on behalf of the others. “Not even if we stack your Marines like cordwood. It won’t lift.”

This answer just floated out there amid the firing and moaning, until Day stalked back up, looking like he wanted to hurl his radio on the ground.

“They won’t even send the goddamned launch back for us.” He met the shining eyes of the others, and answered the question before they asked. “Evidently there are thousands of people wading into the surf trying to escape the city. The launch would be swamped with civilians before it got within twenty meters of shore.”

Fick spat into the darkness. “So what’s their goddamned recommendation? We just hunker down here, sticking out like dicks on a wedding cake? And wait for the end of the world?”

Day took a breath. “Their recommendation is we move overland to the Marina District, and commandeer a boat there.”

The LT already had a digital map pack out, displayed on a hardened handheld. He pinched to reverse zoom, then said, “That’s six miles – right through the heart of the city.”

Fick said, “And what makes them think there’ll even be a goddamned boat left when we get there? Everyone who can locomote has already dee-deed the fuck out of here.”

Day said, “ISR shows there are still boats.” He paused heavily. “They’re overrun. We’d have to clear one.”

The LT shook his head. “I honestly don’t think we’d even make it that far. We’d get bogged down fighting through the city.” Every operator of their generation had an institutional memory of desperate urban battles gone horribly wrong. The Battle of Mogadishu, the Black Hawk Down incident, wasn’t the only one. But it was enough. The LT looked up. “But I’ve got another idea.”

“Is it batshit crazy?” Fick asked.

“It’s totally batshit crazy.”

“Great. Then I’m in.”

You Stay, We Stay

Legion of Honor – Marine Hilltop Position

“Listen up!” Day bellowed, loud enough to be heard by patients and medics in the CCP, as well as the other team leaders and the rest of Team 2, who’d been pulled back to the center. But he was also transmitting on his team net, so the Team 1 guys manning their perimeter got the briefing. “We’ve got two MSOTs. But only one helo. So we’re gonna use it to exfil the wounded, plus eleven others.”

The firing on the perimeter ramped up again. Whatever they were going to do, they needed to do it fast. This hill, much like the last one, was trying to eat them. And it had eight million reinforcements from the surrounding Bay Area, who weren’t going to stop coming. They were going to have to break out of there – get the fuck out while the getting the fuck out was good.

Louder, Day shouted, “Here’s the op order! We get the wounded loaded up – then both tac elements from Team Two, plus their RTO, jump on. Team One and both HQ elements hold the LZ while you dust off.”

This left the question of what was going to happen to Team 1, plus the combined HQ elements. But nobody asked. Day was thankful for that, as he didn’t relish trying to keep a straight face while briefing his Marines on the batshit-crazy plan the LT came up with for their exfil. It also didn’t matter. Because this plan fell apart, with virtually all the Marines disobeying the operation order, before the op even began.

Team 2 wouldn’t get on the helicopter. And neither would half the wounded.

They wouldn’t leave the others behind.

* * *

“That’s your ride right there,” Milam said to Yaz, nodding at the whumping bird. But Yaz didn’t move. Milam gave him a mean look. “Flynn needs care and monitoring in the air. Now get your new-guy ass on the fucking helicopter, new guy.”

The two of them had just got Flynn moved from the crashed helo to the working one. Now the grievously wounded young Marine lay on the deck between rows of seats, IV hanging above him. Yaz looked inside and saw Graves, from 2/2, sitting beside him, holding the plasma bag. He was the only other wounded Marine who’d agreed to go back. And only because he’d been shot in the leg, and could barely walk, let alone run.

Speaking of wounds, Yaz reached out and held up Milam’s right hand, the one that had been shot. The bandage around had soaked through again, probably due to the aid he’d done on the others. It was also his shooting hand.

“Don’t worry about me,” Milam said. “I’m all squared away.”

“Listen to him, Doc.” This was Blane, trotting over from the leadership circle. “After what you’ve fought through in your first two hours in this unit, you’ve got nothing to prove. No one will judge you.”

Yaz looked around in the dark, taking in the sound of firing around them, as the night itself seemed to be closing in. “No thanks, Gunny. If it’s all the same to you, I’ll stay. Milam’s combat ineffective. He can take the medevac job.”

Milam set his jaw, stepped forward, and gave Yaz a shove, hard – with his bad hand, which left a bloody patch on Yaz’s vest. “You do realize this might be the last evac bird out of the city? Or the United States, for that matter? And anyone who doesn’t get on it might not be coming back?”

“C’mon, Yaz,” Blane said. “Help me out. I need you to look after our guys for me.” He nodded at the wounded on board.

But Yaz was looking in the opposite direction – out past Blane, at the other Marines. And what he was really seeing was that damaged Valor lifting off without him on that Afghan mountaintop. This was just like then, but he was absolutely determined it would end differently. In this case, the team was staying on the mountaintop.

And he wasn’t getting left behind.

He looked back to Blane. “Yeah, well, all but two of our guys are going to be out here on the ground. I’ll look after them here, thanks.” And he didn’t say it out loud, but thought, very forcefully:

It’s where I belong.

* * *

“You stay, we stay.”

This was the LT, back in the leadership circle, still defying the Captain, who was just shaking his head in frustration. He’d already had it explained to him that everybody on Team 2 would have to be tackled and wrestled onto the helo, because there was no way they were leaving Team 1 to fight overland alone.

Fick shrugged. “Hey, it’s probably my fault, Captain. I told the LT he could try ordering the men to go. But it might not be a test of his authority he wanted to put to the test right now.”

Day spat on the ground. “Well I seriously fucking suggest you recalibrate and tell him again, Master Guns.” Day shot a glance at the LT – who in his view hadn’t been here long enough to start deciding which fucking orders to follow. “The JFK might not get two teams back, but it’s damn well going to get one. You two chuckleheads are leaders for a reason. Now figure out how to do it, but convince your team to get back to the fucking boat.”

Fick exhaled and rocked back on his heels. “You know what, thinking about it, I guess I’m actually with the LT on this one. We all get out together. Or none of us do. Sorry.” He left a really long pause, before adding: “Sir.”

Day shook his head. It appeared he didn’t have to like this.

Because, either way, they were doing it.

* * *

“Motherfucker, didn’t you ever hear, ‘In the event of a water landing, do not take any personal belongings with you’?”

This was Fick, running along at the back of Team 2, playing Tailgunner Charlie, which was his privilege as Team Chief. That had him directly behind Yaz – who was now wearing his deployment ruck with all his shit in it, which he’d retrieved from the crashed helo, and which was now bouncing in Fick’s face, and pissing him off.

Yaz said, “Did you ever actually plan to comply with that?”

The two teams had held their perimeter long enough to strip ammo, grenades, and radio batteries from the wounded, the four pilots, and Milam – and for Yaz to get an extra bag of plasma off the latter – then for Batcopter One to dust off with them all aboard. Then the 27 men left behind concentrated their fire to the north, the sector with the fewest dead, as the coast was that way. It was also the direction they intended to move.

Displacing by elements off the open hillside, they finally merged into a single column as they moved into the treeline. They were still being followed, but because the dead moved so slowly, the leaders counted this as breaking contact.

Now they bounced down a narrow forest trail, dark as a walk-in closet, threading their way down the hillside toward the coast. If the LT’s map-reading was right, they’d emerge at the NW corner of the San Francisco peninsula, within sight of the Golden Gate Bridge, to the northeast.

So far, they’d encountered no dead in the woods. They’d gone from firing flat out, to zero contact – and near total silence, except of the sound of breathing in the dark. It was spooky as hell, and more so in the tunnel-vision green-and-black of Yaz’s NVGs, which he’d just had time to dig out of his ruck, back at the crash site. The Marines had all produced their own from various places, mostly assault packs. Ever since Mogadishu, nobody went out without them, however guaranteed it was to be a daylight mission.

And now they felt safe enough that Fick and Yaz continued hissing at each other in the rear. “Great,” Fick whispered, still annoyed by Yaz’s ruck in his face. “Now you’re gonna be slower than a monkey trying to fuck its way to the center of a coconut. Plus we’re starting to like you, so we can’t leave you behind.”

Yaz laughed, looking over his shoulder. “Hey, you’re the one with two LAW rockets bouncing on your back.”

“Hey!” Fick said. “That’s different. I’m humping ordnance. You’ve probably got a ruck full of dip, Ripped Fuel, porn mags, and dirty-ass jerk-off letters from Suzy Rottencrotch.”

“Those might come in handy. Hopefully we won’t need the heavy ordnance.”

“Yeah, well, sometimes you just gotta rocket a motherfucker.” Fick paused, either to get his breath, or to emphasize this next line, which Yaz guessed he’d been saving up: “And somebody around here has to be ready to lay down the LAW.”

Yaz laughed, but also heard Fick’s labored breathing around his speech. “Anyway, I can hump my jerk-off letters because I’m probably in better shape than the rest of you.”

And he probably was. SARCs were held to the highest standards, both for combat medicine, and combat itself. This included an obsessive commitment to physical fitness. Though it wasn’t being put to the test yet. They’d only been running a few minutes, plus it was all downhill so far.

But then they ran out of hill.

Yaz and Fick emerged from the black cocoon of trees out into the open, 20 meters from the cliffside, which was illuminated by ambient moon and starlight. Beyond the edge, scree and boulders descended, too steep to negotiate, down to the black water. Out beyond that was the greater blackness of the Bay, glinting. Only the distant, serene strobe of a single lighthouse revealed there was land to the north.

As they stepped into the open, Captain Day said, “One-One – set security.” He was standing at the cliff edge, turned back to face the others. “Everyone else, huddle up.” But instead of addressing them, he turned away, getting back on a whispered radio call.

As the silence came back, a gentle breeze blew in from offshore, and the whole setting struck Yaz as both kind of magical, and deeply eerie. It also felt like they were hidden away. As if they had found some little corner of the fallen city where they were safe.

But of course they weren’t remotely safe.

Yaz was torn from his reverie, plus jumped six inches, when he felt a hand on his shoulder from behind. Once again, it was Blane. “How you doing, Doc?”

Yaz nodded, caught his breath, and looked around, belatedly remembering his job here – patching people up. He found Corporal Meyer, a junior guy from 2-2, and one of the two walking wounded who’d declined to be evacuated, and who had been creased in the forearm. Yaz stepped up to him and whispered, “How’s that wound?”

Meyer shrugged and smiled, as Yaz checked the tightness of the bandage. It was secure, and wasn’t seeping. He grabbed Meyer’s wrist, put two fingers over the radial artery, and started counting. While he did, he looked into the young Marine’s face. Meyer was the only black guy other than Blane on either team. For poorly understood reasons, African Americans were under-represented in special operations.

“How’s your pain?” Yaz asked. “One to ten.”

“Two,” Meyer whispered, but Yaz didn’t believe him. He popped two Tramadol from a packet he kept in a thigh pocket, and pressed them into Meyer’s hand. The young Marine dry-swallowed them. Yaz patted him on the shoulder, then turned forward as he heard Captain Day speaking again.

“Okay,” he said, no louder than necessary to reach everyone in the tight huddle. “We’ve now got a nice safe ocean to our left flank. And we’re going to keep it there.”

Yaz wondered where they were going, but kept silent.

Day pointed diagonally across the water behind him. “That’s our march objective.” There was nothing in that direction but the Golden Gate Bridge. “Yeah. The bridge. But we’re not crossing the whole thing. We just need to get out to the middle span.”

Pretty much everyone was thinking, And then what? But nobody said it. Until Fick did. “Oh, yeah? And what then?”

Day almost smiled. “Then we drop down off it.”

“Onto anything special? Or is this just mass suicide, sir?”

Day turned and pointed directly out to sea. They all knew the Kennedy strike group was anchored out there somewhere – just blacked out, to avoid the attention of desperate and possibly infected survivors. But they couldn’t see anything.

And then, as if on cue, an infrared signal lamp started flashing in the distance – perfectly visible to those who still had their NVGs down. The pattern of the flashes was long-short-long-short… then a pause… then short-long-long-short. It repeated just one time. And that was it.

Most of those who caught it worked out this was Morse code for “CP.” Which was also the international maritime signal code for: “I am proceeding to your assistance.”

And the IR lamp had flashed just long enough to show the direction of travel of the vessel beneath it – heading for the entrance to the Bay.

And the underside of the Golden Gate Bridge.

I Will Defend

USS Michael Monsoor – Bridge

The CO and the XO of the boat sat side-by-side at the front of the small and dimly lit bridge, and watched the great hulking shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge rise up ahead of them.

The ship they commanded, the USS Michael Monsoor, was a latest-generation, Zumwalt-class, stealth, multi-mission, land-attack destroyer. It looked like what Batman would have designed if he needed a large and deadly warship.

And she was deadly almost beyond imagining.

She mounted 20 vertical missile cells, with Sea Sparrow (anti-air), Tomahawk (ground attack), and the amusingly named ASROC (anti-submarine) missiles, all ready to rock and roll. She had twin 155mm deck guns, which rose up from recessed cavities in the deck, ready to provide naval gunfire support from a 920-round magazine. On top of that, she mounted twin 30mm Bushmaster cannons on deck, plus three Fire Scout helicopter UAVs in her enclosed hangar behind the rear flight deck, two of them armed with laser-guided rockets.

She was one of the deadliest warships to ever put to sea. And tonight she was being used as a water taxi service.

The Captain exhaled mournfully as he checked their heading against the piers of the approaching bridge. Looking over at his XO, he said, “Well, looks like its only the two Mikes until there’s a dumb-ass mission. Then it’s just one Mike.”

“Copy that, sir. Definitely dumb-ass.”

The joke was that the Michael Monsoor had been assigned to be the lead ship in the destroyer squadron for the Kennedy strike group. But another ship already in that squadron was the USS Michael Murphy – an older Arleigh Burke-class destroyer. Each had been named for fallen SEALs, who had been awarded the Medal of Honor – posthumously.

Navy SEAL Lieutenant Michael Murphy died exposing himself to enemy fire to try to save his four-man team, which was engaged in a running, tumbling mountainside firefight with 150 Taleban fighters, in the Lone Survivor incident in Afghanistan. Team 3 SEAL Michael Monsoor threw himself on a grenade to save the lives of his teammates on a rooftop in Ramadi, Iraq, in the worst moments of the insurgency.

No one had ever more deserved the honor of having US Navy warships named after them. But, at some point, somebody with a lot of gold bars on his sleeves had decided it would be special to throw these boats together in the same strike group. Ever since, most sailors and Marines had been referring to them as: the Mikes.

But tonight, the Michael Monsoor operated alone.

The Captain regarded the black ocean spooling out under their prow, as they crawled forward at one-third engine speed.

They were blacked out and running silent.

It was the Monsoor’s stealth capabilities that had earned her this assignment. Despite being 40% larger than the Arleigh Burke-class, her radar cross-section was more like a fishing boat than a warship, and her acoustic signature comparable to Los Angeles-class submarines. Her stealth features were meant to thwart hypersonic maneuvering anti-ship missiles and swarm drone attacks. But, tonight, Commander Drake had decided the most advanced stealth warship ever floated, at a unit cost of $7.5 billion, was perfect for keeping civilian refugees from sailing up to her impenetrable hull in fishing boats and tiny pleasure craft.

“Sir, I’ve got CIC on the Kennedy.”

This was the radioman, sitting at one of the stations behind the Captain and XO, who stood up at the front screens. These screens were smaller than on other large warships, to minimize the radar signature. They also looked out from the ground floor of the wheelhouse, level with the deck outside, for the same reason, and also to increase survivability of the bridge.

“Update on the lost Marines?” the Captain asked.

“Aye, sir. New ETA to their extraction point.”

The Captain nodded. “Can you show me their exfil route?”

A high-res color map of the San Francisco peninsula appeared on one of their big overhead displays. It showed a blue dotted line, starting at the Legion of Honor, then snaking around the coast, ending at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge.

The XO said, “Two-point-seven miles. Not so bad.”

“Maybe,” the Captain said. “Except they may be the last non-infected people in the whole city. At least they’re moving along the coast. That should make things a little less hairy for them.” He paused to check their own position. “Hey, let’s try to hit their extraction point when they do. I don’t want us sitting with our asses hanging out that close to shore, never mind underneath that damned bridge. We don’t know who else might try their luck dropping off it.”

“Aye aye, sir,” the helmsman answered.

“Hey, I assume Kennedy CIC already has drone coverage up? Pull the feed for me.”

After a short delay, a night-vision green-and-black view of the same terrain appeared, on the next display – except this one was live. And it definitely wasn’t as static as the map view. It was… undulating.

“Those the Marines in the center?”

“Yes, sir, I believe so.”

“Can you zoom in – then pan ahead of them?”

The tactical officer complied – able to control their view of the video without also controlling the camera on the drone. Now they could see what lay ahead of the men on the ground.

Which the men on the ground could not.

No one on the bridge spoke. The Captain unsnapped the flap over his side arm, which he’d taken out of a drawer in his cabin when they’d been called back to San Francisco. This was the closest the crew had been to action in the short operational history of the boat. “I take back what I said.”

The XO said, “What, about this being a dumb-ass mission?”

“Yeah. I mean, okay, it is stupid. But we’re also pulling out thirty of our Marines in heavy contact – ones who got cut off and left behind. This is the kind of tasking that should bounce us out of bed in the morning, and make everyone stand to.”

The XO nodded. “You’re right, sir.”

The Captain took a breath. “Those are our people. And we will get them out of there.” Finally, he realized he’d somehow forgotten the motto of the ship he commanded:

I Will Defend.

The sleek dark warship slipped toward its rendezvous.

Pretending He's Not Excited

San Francisco – Above China Beach

Fick was still back there somewhere, riding herd on his flock, but now Yaz ran alongside Blane. Since they could move two abreast, the ops sergeant was keeping Yaz close, aware he’d been thrown in the deep end his first day on the job.

The combined teams moved faster now, heading west along a wider cliffside trail, the ocean to their left. They were still out of contact, but not out of the shit. Despite the danger, Yaz couldn’t resist digging around for more intel about the social space of the tribe he’d just joined. Deep down, he knew he was still trying to figure out if this was a place he could fit in. And he wondered if he’d doubt that, wherever he was, until the day he died.

Voice low, he said, “Fick says the Captain’s a pipe-hitter.”

“Oh, yeah,” Blane answered, his voice also quiet, his dark skin glistening with a sheen of sweat in the glowing night, limbs pumping smoothly. “First to any fight, always goes where the bullets are thickest.”

Yaz nodded. An outstanding quality in a combat leader.

“They tried to promote him to major, and company commander, three times. Kept turning it down. Finally they had to promote him anyway, letting him stay as Team Leader.”

Yaz didn’t have to ask why. Captain was generally the highest rank where they still let you kill people to their faces, and get personally shot at. But as leader of an MSOT, he definitely would. These facts were also reassuring. While their own Team Leader, the LT, was Day’s understudy, they had a firewall against any truly disastrous operational decisions getting made. Combat was a zero-sum game – and sometimes your first bad call was the only one you got.

Yaz nodded, sucking wind. “Lucky for the LT. He can benefit from Day’s guidance and experience.”

“Yeah, but only if he lives long enough.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not his lack of experience, but lack of confidence. Hesitation will get you killed every time.”

“He seems pretty confident to me so far.”

Blane smiled. “He’s faking it. Which is not a bad strategy until you make it. And also when you can’t appear indecisive to your men in a new command.”

“Well, he’s lived this long,” Yaz said.

“Yeah. Anyway, the Captain’s pretty much unkillable.”

“He’s also never been in an engagement like this before.”

“Ha. I honestly think he’s been waiting for it. He’s literally got one of those t-shirts that says, ‘The hardest thing about the zombie apocalypse will be pretending I’m not excited’.”

Yaz laughed out loud – but swallowed it fast, as firing erupted to their front. Through his NVGs, he could see they were all out of coastal trail up ahead, the path merging with a stretch of paved road. Also within sight were structures on either side. As they were to learn, where there were buildings, there had been people.

And where there’d been people, now the dead ruled.

Raising his weapon and scanning his sector, Yaz couldn’t quite tell, but he was pretty sure it was Captain Day at the head of the column, doing most of the shooting. Yaz’s system was flooding with adrenaline. But with Day ahead, Fick behind, and Blane beside him…

His heart also surged with hope.

Maybe they were going to make it out of here.

* * *

This coastal neighborhood, unlike the urban grid of the city, wasn’t blocked with traffic, only a handful of abandoned vehicles littering the road in the dark. But many sat at odd angles, some with twisting skid marks behind, others with their doors thrown open. Yaz tried not to think about what had happened inside.

But he was forced to think about it, when Sergeant Reyes peered inside one and said, “Hey, why walk when we can ride?” As he reached for the keys in the ignition, Yaz saw the driver’s seat was splashed with gore, thick enough and recent enough not to have dried. He yanked Reyes back by his drag strap.

“Can I help you?” Reyes said.

“Yeah,” Yaz said. “Help us both by not getting infected.” He nodded at the gore.

Reyes deflated. “You’re right. Gracias, doctor.”

What this coastal area lacked in vehicles, it made up for in walking dead – clumped in ones, twos, and small groups, coming out of the green-and-black darkness. Now, running down an endless road dodging and shooting them was reminding Yaz yet again of The Walking Dead, where they evidently never got tired of walking down roads. This similarity grew stronger when they finally ran up against a huge group, a hundred or more, taking up the full width of the road plus the shoulders – and moving straight toward them in a single swaying mass.

It was too many to take down.

On the move, without support, the Marines were limited to the ammo they could carry. And despite the minor top-up on the helos, they were starting to get depleted. The original plan had been for them to be on the ground less than 30 minutes.

But that had been the plan in Black Hawk Down, too.

Now here they were, fighting on their own all night. And, once again, the mission had changed from extracting a single individual, to simple survival for the team.

The LT put out the call out on their team net, passed down from Captain Day. “Team One, we are getting off the road, down to the beach. Make the next left, toward the water.”

Neither Yaz nor the others at the rear needed to be told – they just kept packs and asses ahead of them, and followed the sound of firing. They weren’t having to do much shooting themselves. The head of the snake was biting off everything in its path before it could threaten those in the tail.

The beach had actually never been far away, just screened by expensive houses. Suddenly, it opened up to their left, including another panoramic view of the Golden Gate Bridge, closer now. Still keeping a fast pace, they followed a series of switchbacks down to sea level, finally spilling off a concrete boat ramp.

The herd was left behind, above and behind them.

But then, as they hung a right onto the strand, slowing as they ran on soft sand in boots, it turned out they were not the only ones spilling onto that beach, trying to escape the dead.

Ahead, in night-vision green-and-black, hundreds of bodies slid or tumbled down the slopes and cliffs, raced across the strand, and splashed out into the surf. Some ran, shouting in alarm and terror. Others stumbled, moaning. All moved perpendicular to the Marines’ path.

And all of them blocked their new exfil route.

* * *

“Mary, Joseph, and the shepherds finger-fucking on a pogo stick,” Fick said, causing Yaz to nearly lose it, despite the peril facing them. It was a weird fact of combat that mortal terror, and helpless giggling, could happily coexist. Stress laughter.

It didn’t help when Brady added, “Seriously – what kind of fucked-up cross-wise beach-landing bullshit is this?”

Yaz got it. They were going to have to advance across a hostile beach, but from one side to the other, while the enemy swept into their path in waves from the dunes.

But they didn’t have to do it yet.

Instead, they hung out at the southern edge of the beach while the commanders up ahead made a decision, about whether to climb their asses back up to the coast road and fight through the herd of dead – or take their chances on the beach, trying to stay on their feet in the flood tide of bodies.

“Yep,” Brady said, scanning the scene. “It’s like if the Germans turned the Allies back, then jumped out of their pillboxes and chased them into the sea—”

Reyes finished the thought: “To eat them.”

“Yeah,” Brady said. “Just like that.”

“Nazi zombies,” Fick said, then grunted and spat in the sand. “I hate Nazi zombies.”

The Marines up front were now having to take shots on dead who’d been chasing civilians, but instead locked on to them. This resulted in the formation tightening up, as the shooters backed in toward each other, engaging outward.

Backing up, covering his sector, Yaz spotted the command huddle up front – and predicted they’d pick the beach route, rather than the steep climb back up to the road. Marines assaulting hills in Korea and Vietnam had always walked up them. Even the prolonged exposure to machine-gun and mortar fire was better than being too winded to fight when they got to the top. Running up hills was just an exhausting form of suicide.

If these modern-day Marine Raiders became combat ineffective from fatigue, that put everyone at risk. And if one of them couldn’t go on, none of them would.

Word got passed down. And Yaz was right.

They were going forward.

* * *

The minute they waded into the maelstrom, shit got serious.

Near the rear, Yaz focused on keeping himself upright and moving, as the formation still moved like a snake, twisting across the dark sand, the column bashing into the riptide of bodies ahead. Marines fired ahead and right – but also twisted and juked, trying to stay in line while dodging or fending off the onslaught from the dunes.

The black ocean stretched off to infinity on the left – but the first 20 meters of surf was like a spin cycle of the damned, in some forgotten level of Dante’s Hell. Many of the refugees were trying to swim out, despite being overloaded with belongings or improvised weapons. Others just tried to get the dead off them, so they could attempt to swim.

Those ones were probably infected, and dead already.

Off to the right were the dark dunes, sheer cliffs looming above them. These were alive, too, with bodies sliding or hurtling off the cliffs – in ones, twos, and larger groups – and then piling up in the dunes below. Those too injured by the fall to walk got eaten by the dead, who didn’t seem to notice injuries, and the rest ran like hell for the water, more dead following right behind them.

And all of them piling straight into the Marine column.

As Yaz hauled ass, trying not to let his feet get bogged down in the sand, he honestly didn’t know whether he should have trained for this in the shoot house – or playing football with the SEALs, dodging tacklers and trying to make an end-zone run.

And unlike CQB in the shoot house, no area was ever secure. By the time Blane, Yaz, and Fick reached areas Team 1 had shot their way through, it was like they’d never been there at all. Wave after wave of bodies kept falling off the cliff, staggering through the dunes, and tear-assing at them from their three o’clock.

At first, dodging the dead was manageable, because they were locked onto the living they chased. But then, probably inevitably, Yaz let too much space open up between him and Blane, and some kind of hipster in a goatee broke through in an uncontrolled panic. As Yaz closed the gap, the dead man chasing behind locked on to him, reaching out and hissing with lips that looked blue even in the all-green NVGs. Yaz spun, fired, missed, juked out of the way, spun and fired again, hitting it somewhere – but then had to start moving again, finally just running the hell away from it.

He was too freaked out to laugh when Fick said, “Christ, Wisconsin, you couldn’t hit a barn from the inside.”

But then a new person locked onto Yaz – a living one.

Big Fuck-Off Truck

San Francisco – Baker Beach

Yaz knew the last stage of the plague was some kind of living death. But how infectious were infected people before that?

This was going to become a critical question, as panicked living people approached and begged for help. Everything was already complete chaos, but it became complete ethical vertigo, too, as the shooters had to face shoot/no-shoot decisions every few seconds, with living and dead pop-up targets blurring in front of their faces.

Yaz’s first such decision was a woman wearing a yoga outfit, smeared with blood, dirt, and God only knew what else. Seeing his uniform and rifle, she ran straight at him, crying, “Thank God, please help us, please,” the words running together, “please, I beg you, I absolutely beg you…”

The closer she got, the worse she looked.

Yaz backpedaled, trying to cut around her, but she was in great shape, plus a lot less loaded than him, wearing a skimpy outfit and carrying nothing, and he simply wasn’t getting away. Backpedaling again, he raised his rifle and shouted, “Stay back, please. Get back! Seriously!”

When she reached him, his first thought was to barrel-strike her, which he’d learned to do from the SEALs, part of their Close Quarters Defense system, which allowed them to ratchet force up or down as much as necessary. But he knew he couldn’t inflict that level of violence on an innocent woman, and the next level down was hand strikes and grappling holds, which were a no-go.

But then his dilemma went away, along with his problem, as the woman got tackled from behind, a wide mouth with black teeth chomping down into her neck at the juncture of her shoulder, spraying blood across the sand, but luckily not on Yaz, who danced and twisted away, trying to breathe.

After that, he started taking more shots, leaving the ethical hand-wringing for a later date, if he lived to see one. The Marines around him were making the same decisions, but Yaz was running too headlong through the maelstrom to really see what the others were doing, or follow their lead. He only knew that most were firing, and all were dodging, though he couldn’t spare the attention to track it.

He hadn’t done a lot of shooting so far today, but soon even he started to worry about his ammo situation. And what terrified him in his core was the thought of these infected bodies falling on him, grabbing him, hugging him and taking him down. He’d been trained that ammo conservation was great, but you had also be alive later to use the ammo you’d conserved.

It wasn’t much help if you got killed holding onto it.

On the upside, every one of the Marines had Surefire rapid-attach suppressors, which reduced the sound signature somewhat, from a bang to a sort of loud metallic clack – but completely hid their muzzle flashes, preventing them from whiting out the NVGs of the others. This also kept them from providing something bright and flashy for the dead to lock onto.

Nonetheless, the column was starting to get jammed up – there were just too many bodies flooding across the beach. One bad decision in combat was all it took. Maybe their move down off the road had been one. If they lost their mobility, they were all going to die, right here on this strand of the damned. And as the spectre of that grew more real…

Yaz felt his nerve failing.

He battled to shove the panic back down in his chest. But he was starting to think maybe they weren’t going to get out of this, after all. The beach just seemed to stretch on forever. And there was no end to its besiegers. Surely the Marines were going to start going down – if some weren’t infected already.

Maybe this was how it ended.

* * *

But 2/1 didn’t see it that way.

“Okay, fuck this happy horseshit,” Graybeard said.

“You got a better plan, I’m all ears,” Fick shouted back.

“Yeah, I do,” Graybeard said – and pointed with his rifle, into the teeth of the human waves rushing them. But they were no longer tumbling off a cliff edge, or even down hills – instead just running across open ground. Everyone had been so absorbed running, shooting, and staying on their feet, they hadn’t noticed the area to their right had opened up. It was no longer bluff and cliffs. It was a big-ass parking lot.

Beach parking. With a scattering of vehicles still in it.

“Do it!” Fick said, rushing forward to grab the LT and brief him, while putting it out on the radio as he ran and shot.

Graybeard said, “Two-One on me!” He slapped Brady, Reyes, and Kemp on their asses as they filed past. He was expecting one more. But Flynn wasn’t there.

Speaking of casualties, Yaz remembered saving Reyes from the gore in that vehicle earlier – and now regretted not warning the others. There hadn’t been time, and he hadn’t thought it would come up again. Now it was coming up, and there still wasn’t time – the 2-1 guys already out of earshot, fighting their way across the top of the beach to the parking lot.

But that was why God invented radios.

He hit his and said, “Two-One – vehicles are a no-go! All the ones we’ve seen had sick or dead people in them. They’re infection death zones.” Even as he transmitted, he instinctively moved up to where Fick was huddled up with Blane and the LT.

Hearing Yaz’s voice in his ear, and seeing him appear, Fick yelled, “You’re the doc, Doc – so go, keep ’em healthy!”

Yaz suddenly realized there was a potential downside to having bright ideas. Looking around, he could see the rest of Team 2, and all of Team 1, stopped on the beach now. The whole column had halted, shifting into static defense in an exposed position, which was probably just suicide on the layaway plan. Whether this was because the Team 2 leaders had told them to hold up and wait for 2-1, or because they were jammed up and couldn’t go forward anymore, Yaz couldn’t even tell, and definitely didn’t have time to investigate.

Instead he took off, Gunny Blane following him.

First they found themselves running through a fairly clear area – behind 2/1, who were rolling like an armored column through RPG alley, firing nonstop, every rifle on full-auto, chucking grenades, lighting up everything ahead of them and to either side in a 180-degree free-fire zone. This had a gratifying effect on the bodies of the dead – they burst apart, bodily fluids splashing over asphalt, or else on the dead behind them.

Yaz figured they couldn’t have been dead too long, not long enough to rot, but already splashed around more than a living person would if stitched up with a burst of rifle rounds. Yaz thought of Major Gibb, who’d gotten infected and turned after just a little gunk got in his eyes. One splash like the ones coming out of these exploding dead guys, and the Marines would be joining him in the half-afterlife.

But within seconds, Blane and Yaz were off the beach and onto the sandy parking lot, and catching the others.

“Did you receive my last?” Yaz shouted. “What’s your plan?”

Now 2/1 was still shooting, but using more discrimination, as they pushed toward the nearest parked car, not wanting to destroy it. Yelling over his shoulder, Brady said, “We’re gonna grab a couple of vehicles – then go joyriding, baby!”

Blane said, “Enough to hold both teams?”

“No,” Graybeard answered. “Just enough to drive a hole through that beach crowd, and screen us from it.”

The logic was sound. There were maybe six cars total in the lot. Even if they managed to get them all started, they’d never hold the 27 operators. But one or two would make a decent battering ram – or maybe beach Zamboni, smoothing down people rather than sand.

When they reached the first car, the others pulled security while Reyes moved to the driver’s side and started to put his elbow through the glass – but then Kemp started shouting and pointing to get everyone’s attention.

“Whoah-ho,” Reyes said, looking up and smiling.

Kemp was stabbing his finger at the back corner of the lot. When Yaz looked that way, at first all he saw was a single-story structure, like a maintenance building, or construction office. But it wasn’t the building Kemp was pointing at. It was a dark orange rectangle of iron, tilted at a 45-degree angle, just visible sticking up behind it.

It was a big fuck-off dump truck.

* * *

It was impossible not to admire as they got close up. Even unloaded, it must weighed 20,000 pounds.

It was wedged into an open area between the building and a vertical dirt wall behind it. Judging by the sheer precipice above it, it looked like the whole parking lot had been carved out of the hills and cliffs. Also carved out had been an access road for the parking lot, which switched back several times climbing out of there, like the one they’d come down farther up the beach.

But the state of the access road explained why there were still vehicles here – it looked like the morning after a demolition derby, at least a dozen cars wedged onto it between the trees on either side, or between the sheer wall on one side, and the cliff edge on the other.

Whoever had driven out of here, no one was following them.

Before Yaz could wonder why the hell the dump truck was here – municipal employees surfing on their lunch hour maybe? – he saw an eight-foot pile of sand under the tilted-up bed and its swinging gate. This thing’s job must have been to move pieces of beach around to more eroded spots.

As they reached it, Brady and Graybeard took up security positions at the front, which faced out toward the parking lot and beach. Blane and Kemp moved to the rear, while Reyes leapt up on the right running board of the cab to break in. Yaz followed him up, to cover him – but, as he did, he happened to see Blane stick Kemp between the back-right tire and the cliff, where he was tucked away and safe. Yaz wondered if it was because of Flynn getting hit on the helo. Probably Blane always did this, trying to keep the junior guys safe.

It was just how he was wired.

Yaz turned to see Reyes trying the handle, which gave him a second to get a light on and look inside. Other than a little sand in the wells, it was pristine. If anyone had gotten sick or died in there, they hadn’t left any gunk or gore behind. But then they were out of time for health and safety inspections.

Reyes pulled his elbow back to smash the glass – but Yaz caught it. “We might be glad to have a window to roll up.”

“You really gonna make me get out my slim jim?”

“You deploy with a slim jim?”

“Fuck, yeah, ese,” Reyes said, unslinging his assault pack to dig it out. “I used to be a bounty hunter in LA, man. Never know when you’re going to need a coche…”

The lock popped on the first try, and Reyes smiled and pulled open the door. But then his smile melted away instantly, as he raised his rifle and elevated his aim. Yaz also raised his weapon as he spun and looked up.

Dead guys were falling out of the sky.

Meat Surfing

Baker Beach, San Francisco – Parking Lot

They were actually just sliding down the hill, then dropping over the 15-foot cliff behind the truck. And it was only two or three, but it was still jarring as hell to have the enemy drop on their heads in the center of a secure perimeter.

As the bodies slid over the edge, Yaz remembered the Marines firing full auto, and causing all those dead bodies to splash fluid across a wide area. Then he remembered Kemp’s position at the back, between truck and cliff. Yaz had seen Blane stick him in there – but Reyes hadn’t.

And then, bizarrely, he thought of Aliens again – when Vasquez fired to protect Drake, but instead splashed acid-blood across the side of his face, killing him. Now Kemp was about to get the same treatment – except with infectious gunk rather than acid. He was seriously about to die.

There was no time to yell a warning, so Yaz just bent his knees and launched his body backward, slamming it into Reyes, knocking him and his rifle up and away, even as it discharged, a full-auto burst tearing into the dirt cliffside.

This left the three dead guys landing between the truck and the dirt wall – but they quickly got destroyed by Kemp at one side, Blane at the other, each shooting perfectly enough to avoid killing each other at either end.

Yaz remembered everyone in MARSOC had scored Expert on the rifle range, or they wouldn’t be there. Which they probably wished they weren’t right now. Or maybe they wouldn’t have been anywhere else.

As long as they were all in it together.

* * *

The truck’s 300 horsepower engine turned over on the first try. Once it was rumbling, Reyes pulled the lever to bring down the truck bed, and the other four Marines climbed in. In seconds, they were rolling with impunity through the parking lot, Yaz riding shotgun while Reyes drove, the truck’s huge mass picking up momentum as they barreled toward the beach.

But they found their teammates no longer huddled up in all-round defense out on the sand. Instead, they’d captured an artillery emplacement – one of the old coastal defense batteries. Now they formed an arc around the back of the stopped-up cannon, which had an eight-foot concrete wall in front, providing security on the beach side.

Much to Fick’s annoyance, Reyes honked the horn when he pulled up, rolling down the window and shouting, “Somebody call for an Uber XL, motherfuckers?”

Groups of Marines loaded up the steel bed while others covered them. The leaders conferred and decided not to leave anyone outside on the running boards for security. This was not only unnecessary, but potentially lethal, and definitely stupid. In a normal shooting war, tucking up inside a vehicle just turned it into an RPG magnet, and usually got everyone inside killed. But this was a totally different kind of war, and the sides of the dump truck were solid and high.

And Marines were learning creatures.

Climbing in, Fick looked up and said, “Unless these dead bastards learn to jump ten feet all of a sudden, we’ll be fine.”

“Yeah,” Brady said, making room as the others piled in. “We got lucky and got good ole George Romero clumsy-ass zombies. Can you imagine being chased down that beach by 28 Days Later fast zombies? Dude, that would have sucked.”

“Small blessings,” Fick grunted, slumping down against the cold steel wall beside Graybeard, two old warriors taking a load off. Soon everyone had loaded up, and Reyes got them rolling again, rumbling the big truck out onto the beach.

Not only were they invulnerable now, but the truck tires were made for loose sand, so there was no danger of getting stuck. But Brady decided he was missing all the fun, so he climbed over the top, then into the cab through the passenger-side door, shoving Yaz over on the bench seat.

“Hola, hermano,” Reyes said.

“Hey,” Brady said. “Jesus, look at this shit.” Now that he could look out the front, he could see the sea of stumbling figures they were smashing through. It was like they were a heavy ship on a tide of bodies, cutting through the waves. Meat surfing. It was all going by too fast to tell if the bodies they destroyed were living or dead.

Brady looked over and saw Yaz’s troubled expression. “Don’t worry, Doc. Anyone down there not dead is already infected. Hell, we’re probably the last healthy people in town.”

Yaz looked over at Brady’s expression in turn. He seemed to think smashing through all these bodies was cool.

“Hey,” Brady said. “Let me drive.”

“Fuck off.” Reyes didn’t even look over, upshifting and accelerating, then putting both hands back on the wheel.

“I wanna drive!” Brady said.

“I’m not stopping here to switch drivers, motherfucker. You can drive next time.”

Brady pouted, looking like a cranky kid on a long family road trip. But then his expression brightened again. “Hey, can you imagine if we had an MRAP? With one of those cattle catchers in front, and a V-shaped hull? That would kick ass.”

Reyes shook his head sadly. “What kind of asshole would let you drive an MRAP through a crowd?”

Brady looked hurt again. “Somebody might…”

* * *

And then, suddenly, they were all out of beach. Reyes drove under NVGs rather than headlights, to avoid attracting more dead than necessary. But even the NVG view clearly showed what lay ahead: solid rock, cliffs, and boulders, piled across the end of beach, all the way down to the water. Unless this was an amphibious dump truck, or a flying one, that was it.

Their joy ride was over.

The good news was this stretch looked clear of living and dead both, the terrain ahead and above probably too rough for them to negotiate. The other good news was they were even closer to the Golden Gate Bridge – Yaz could see it lit up, stretching across the water ahead, above, and to their left.

But the bad news everything else.

They were closer to the bridge – but way down below it. And getting up there meant a hard climb over murderous terrain. Yaz hopped out and pulled security while the Marines in the dumpster bed climbed out and formed up.

“Listen up,” Captain Day said. “We’re gonna move up to the foot of the bridge. Then we get ourselves out to the center span.” He paused to look over his shoulder. “Where our ride will be waiting for us.”

Yaz did a double-take, following Day’s gaze. Even through his high-spec NVGs, he had to squint to make out the sleek shape of a Zumwalt-class destroyer, floating a thousand yards offshore, out in the strait. It was pointed toward the bridge, but not moving. Just waiting for them.

But these giant piles of boulder weren’t going to climb themselves. Yaz waited until Team 1 had started up, then half of Team 2. Finally he fell in with Blane, Fick, and the profoundly strange operators of Team 2, Tactical Element 1.

Climbing up out of the beach holiday from hell.

* * *

It was a crushing ascent, even dangerous in sections, but at least they didn’t have to fight off the dead, or fend off the living. The views and vistas were also pretty great, even in the dark.

Twice, from local summits, Yaz could see a four-story brick structure squatting under the base of the bridge – big and old-looking, but intact. The arches of the first span of bridge curved over the top of it, supporting the bridge deck, while gargantuan concrete pilings rose up on either side, one from out in the water, the other from the base of the same cliffs the Marines were climbing up.

Yaz felt like his Bay Area buddy had mentioned this thing, and after wracking his brain, mainly to distract himself from the climb, finally remembered it was Fort Point, another decommissioned coast fortification, built before the Civil War.

After their adventures in the Presidio, he figured the last thing any of them were interested in was another military base turned tourist attraction. But they were close to the top now, and when they finally emerged, it was into another old gun battery.

Yaz hopped over the wall, breathing hard, and looked around. This was now an overlook point for tourists, with a panoramic view down onto the bridge. As the Marines hauled themselves over the stone wall, Fick last again, those already up top caught their breath, sipped from water bottles, and set security around the perimeter.

Yaz emplaced his rifle on the wall, and saw Fort Point was no longer visible, hidden by the bridge itself, with them nearly at the foot of it. Looking down the bridge itself, he saw all six lanes were still blocked with nose-to-tail traffic – just as when he first saw it, flying over and heading for the JFK.

Which now seemed like several lifetimes ago.

But the bridge was no longer crawling with living and dead, as it had been before. There were still a few figures visible, heading down the pedestrian walkways to either side. But most were moving purposely, like the living, not staggering like the dead. These were probably survivors who’d waited for night to try sneaking out of the city. No doubt there were more dead trapped in the vehicles.

But trapped was the perfect place for them.

Yaz turned away, flipping his NVGs up onto his helmet and wiping sweat from his forehead. And he looked at the team, his mind ranging back. After the crazy-ass, helo-crashing, foot-racing, dumptruck-meat-surfing, rock-climbing epic that had brought him to this place… once again it looked like he might get out of this alive.

They were all going to, together.

And then… a rumbling growling noise, followed by an exploding crashing one, spun him back around to face the bridge. And he suddenly realized that, in commandeering that dump truck, smashing through waves of rushing bodies, and clearing themselves a path over the beach…

He and the Marines were strictly amateurs.

Some stone-cold motherfucker was wiping the bridge.

Modern Warfare

Golden Gate Bridge Overlook

“Holy fucking shit, dude,” Brady said, stepping up to the wall beside Yaz. Looking around, he saw the others in 2/1, plus Fick and Blane, joining them – all of them gawking.

The gleaming eighteen-wheeled tanker truck had rolled up on the 101, the highway that fed the Golden Gate Bridge, below the overlook to their right. At first it had just been rumbling noise and blurring motion.

As he watched, Yaz had to blink to convince himself he wasn’t back in the SEALs’ rec room, watching a Terminator marathon. But he wasn’t. And whoever was at that wheel of that truck had clearly decided being stuck in traffic, in a city overrun with the dead, was strictly optional for him. Somehow, using the emergency lane maybe, he managed to hit the first span of bridge at full speed, at least 60mph, accelerating from there.

Yaz and the others watched slack-jawed as 80,000 pounds of tanker truck tore-ass straight down the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge, and right through six lanes of stopped bumper-to-bumper traffic.

Everything from Smart Cars and Priuses to Escalades and Hummers began flipping and jack-knifing into the air, the mass and momentum of the cab and its engine block sweeping away all before it. Many of the smaller vehicles went airborne entirely and soared over the sides of the bridge, arcing down to the water below, impacting amid geysers that rose a hundred feet in the air.

Yaz’s eyes flashed down and to the left, trying to make out the destroyer in the strait. He found it – and thank God it was out of range of hurled Priuses, at least for the moment. Maybe its captain and crew had been worried about infected survivors or dead dropping on their deck, and kept their distance, waiting for the Marines to get out on the bridge.

They looked pretty smart right now.

Even more destructive than the airborne light vehicles were the heavier ones, which simply got smashed aside, bulldozing and crushing others, all of them shoved out onto the pedestrian walkways to either side. Yaz could just make out the civilians there getting crushed to death by skidding and tumbling cars and trucks, as the tanker blasted them aside.

For most of them, the ravaging of the steel car and truck bodies ended with free fall, the primal horror of being pushed over the side into open air, then falling 200 feet to the water below. Finally, the tumbling vehicles landed on them, sending more towering geysers skyward, and taking the former survivors straight to the bottom of the Bay.

Fick unsnapped and removed his helmet, in a gesture of respect. He said, “That’s the most fucked-up thing I’ve ever seen in my life. And I’ve been to a Rammstein concert.”

All of it was happening in the glow of the lights on the deck of the bridge – though these were going out in sequence as the poles they were mounted on got taken out by flying Teslas and tumbling Chevy Tahoes. It was impossible to believe, even as the Marines stared right at it. It was like watching a Michael Bay movie gone horribly wrong.

But then Yaz thought, no – not that. You couldn’t film shit like this, and you definitely couldn’t replicate the experience of living through it in a movie theater. The closest comparison Yaz could muster was Modern Warfare – playing one of its over-the-top, breath-stealing, escape-at-the-last-second action sequences, with you in the middle. Except this was real.

But at least it was happening to someone else.

Finally, just when it looked like nothing could stop it, the tanker truck met its Waterloo – a solid steel municipal sanitation truck, stopped and turned at an angle. Slamming into it with a detonation that had to be audible in space, the tanker pushed the garbage truck forward 50 feet as it decelerated. But the trailer behind still had all its momentum.

And it started coming off the ground.

The 45 feet of gleaming steel tank flipped up into the air, its front anchored by the stopped cab, its rear end swinging up and to the left in a 90-degree arc…

“Ah, shit,” Brady said. “Do not let that be liquid nitrogen…”

And it wasn’t, unfortunately. The tank collided with the first of the two towers of the bridge, perfectly aligned with it. On impact, it split like a water balloon, or a gutted piñata.

And the whole thing went up in flames.

It definitely wasn’t liquid nitrogen inside – it was gasoline or diesel, at least 30,000 liters of it, which splashed up the face of the 750-foot tower, even more spilling around past it, flooding down the length of the bridge onto its center span. In less than a second, a good third the Golden Gate Bridge was fucking on fire. And not in a low-key way. It was blazing away like a portal to Hell opened on Earth.

And then Yaz’s stunned brain recalled an old principle: if you can see the explosion, the explosion can see you. And a big enough one can throw shrapnel for miles. Pieces of metal from trucks, cars, and bridge began to smack into the stone wall in front of them, and cut the air around their heads, even as Yaz and the others dropped behind hard cover.

After the storm of shrapnel, a blast of super-heated air whooshed in over their heads, singeing their faces.

When Yaz dared to stand up again, he could see a third of the bridge was still a flaming purgatory – and half the south tower was a literal towering inferno, like Mount Doom on a really bad day. And then, when it finally looked like the show was over, cars and trucks on the bridge’s center span started bouncing into the air like popcorn, their fuel tanks exploding from the super-heated hellfire around them. After that, the whole flaming holocaust started burning out, fast. There’s a reason people use gas to start fires, but not fuel them.

And the underlying steel of the bridge was not flammable.

What didn’t stop happening though, and what would never fade from Yaz’s memory, was the dozens of flailing figures, alight from head to toe with licking flame, staggering and tumbling off both sides of the bridge. And he could no longer tell the two types of movement apart, the living from the dead. They were all just brilliant human torches, chasing, being chased, fleeing, trying to get down to the water to extinguish themselves, not knowing that the fall would kill them.

Or else counting on it to.

* * *

“Listen up!” Captain Day shouted again, as before with one fire team facing out on security, the others huddled up closer in. “Nothing changes. We’re going out on that bridge. And then we’re going to drop down to the deck of the Monsoor.”

Fick said, “Oh yeah? What kind of fucked-up retar—”

But Day anticipated his objection and cut it off. “I know. The top of the deckhouse is only eighty-four feet above the waterline. And the bridge is two hundred and twenty feet up. They’re going to launch us two lines with their rescue rope launcher. Hope you’ve got your gloves, because these will not be fast-ropes – and they’re gonna burn like hell if you lose control and descend too quickly. Speaking of which, the bridge is also going to be hot. Just don’t touch anything, and we should be okay.”

“Yeah,” Fick said. “Until our goddamned boot soles melt.”

“That should incentivize you to keep moving.”

Blane said, “Is the bridge going to be stable? With all that weight on it? And after the tanker rampage, and fire?”

“It’ll hold,” said one of the Team 1 Marines, a big Staff Sergeant Yaz hadn’t met yet. “Civil engineers take into account multiple accidents at once.”

Standing behind Yaz, Blane whispered, “Blaylock used to be the senior Charlie in an ODA.” While moving between spec-ops units in different service branches wasn’t unheard of, Yaz figured he needed to hear how an Army Special Forces Engineer Sergeant became a Marine Raider. But he’d have to hear the story another time, if they lived.

Blaylock said, “When bridges collapse, it’s like plane crashes – a combination of unlikely things all going wrong at once. Like too much traffic, plus high winds, plus a car or boat hitting a support post or something. Usually it’s something big, like a container ship, ramming the pylons or towers.”

“Oh, well that’s a fucking relief,” Fick said. He gestured at the smoking disaster site of the bridge, with hundreds of overturned and smashed vehicles, and the skeleton of the tanker truck at the base of the blackened and burnt tower. “Because hardly anything’s going wrong today.”

“Enough,” Day said. “This is the plan, and it stays the plan.” He gestured at the highway below, which fed the bridge. “And we’re out of time to discuss it, or make another one.”

Below them, they could all see the road filling up with thick crowds of shuffling figures. Not hundreds of them.

But thousands.

All pouring out of the city, a flood of dead, probably a significant chunk of the former population of San Francisco. They must have been drawn by the cataclysmic noise of the explosions and the 750-foot bonfire. And if they got out onto the bridge before the Marines did…

None of them were getting out of there. Ever.

This Is Gonna Suck

San Francisco – Foot of the Golden Gate Bridge

“How you guys doing?” Fick shouted, firing down to the bottom of his M16 mag, then banging off all four 12-gauge shells in the shotgun. “This is gonna suck!”

To the surprise of no one, he was strongpointing the juncture where coast trail met the foot of the bridge. Faced with having to climb a chain link fence to get onto the outside pedestrian walkway, they’d decided it was quicker and safer just to knock it the fuck down. And while they did beat most of the dead out onto the bridge, it was still the biggest herd they’d seen yet, or would see for a long time to come, and it was heading directly their way, about zero feet behind them.

Team 1, blasting out in the lead, had to clear the bridge.

But Fick had to hold the line. And at first he held it alone. But as he stepped backward, swapping out rifle mags, then pulling shotgun shells from his vest and shoving them into the tube mag, supporting fire erupted to either side of him.

It was Blane, to his left – and Yaz to his right.

Yaz knew he probably only had a few seconds before Blane told him to get his ass off the firing line. But it was all happening fast, and no one had spotted him yet.

For now, he held a static position, in a textbook shooting posture, with the dead coming straight at him, so it was basically a fish/barrel situation. They just kept walking straight into his rounds, and he kept dropping them with headshots, one after another. Maybe it was due to not being in a cramped attic, getting swarmed by a crowd of them, with nowhere to retreat to.

Maybe it was that he wasn’t alone.

But this time he got into a nice rhythm, dropping them farther and farther back, increasing their breathing room. He had his NVGs down, and used the IR laser pointer mounted on his barrel rail. At this range, with this rifle, and the laser and night vision, he basically couldn’t miss.

Tactically, he was finally hitting his stride.

“That’s everyone out!” Graybeard shouted, and Yaz stole a look over his shoulder to see 2/1’s asses disappearing down the walkway, last ones out onto the bridge.

Last except for Yaz, Blane, and Fick.

Keeping their formation, moving together by instinct, they backed up, still taking shots – then finally turned and hauled ass, leaning into a headlong run down the walkway.

With half of undead San Francisco chasing them.

* * *

The bridge was longer than it looked, nearly two miles. But it turned out they didn’t have to get to the center span after all, but only halfway out the first side span. From the abutment or foot of the bridge, a 1,200-foot section of approach viaduct led to that side span, which itself was about the same length.

So they only had 1,800 feet to cover.

On the other hand, they’d been fighting all night, were already exhausted, and were now being chased by an army of the dead. It didn’t help that the bridge curved, rising up at the center, nearly 50 feet higher than at the ends, meaning their entire run was uphill.

Last but not least, the outside pedestrian walkway was not in a state anyone would call safe or even passable. In five places, both the inner and outer railings had been ripped away by vehicles bashing through and going over the side, carrying the occupants and anyone caught in their path to a watery grave in the Pacific beyond.

Yaz couldn’t forget about this, due to all the smears of rich wet blood, or else black undead gunk, which he couldn’t even really tell apart in the NVGs. And it wasn’t just fluids, but also piles of what looked like road kill, or some kind of human meat pudding.

All this had been courtesy of the rampaging tanker truck.

And that wasn’t the only damage it did. As Yaz hauled ass by the vertical suspender cables to his left, which connected the bridge deck to the giant curving main cables above, he saw a set of four hanging loose – severed. They must have been snapped by a car getting hurled through it. These cables were braided steel, an inch thick, and the severed ones had a halo of smaller cables blooming from their ends. Yaz gave thanks only one set was severed, that he saw, while hundreds remained intact. They were at wide enough intervals that most of the flying cars must have passed right through the gaps.

But then he slowed as the Marines ahead had to climb over a pile of vehicles, including SUVs and light trucks, that had been shoved out onto the walkway but not over the edge. Most were up on their roofs, or sides, or wedged at weird angles, all charred and singed, windows blasted out. These were now lethal environmental hazards that they had to negotiate, climbing over steel auto bodies, trying not to get cut, or fall, or have one tilt over and crush them.

Almost as soon as Yaz got past the first one, another appeared out of the darkness, this one even bigger – a demolition derby pile. Going over the top of it, Yaz discovered he’d missed a serious threat, when he raised one leg up to climb higher – and the other didn’t follow. Twisting at the waist to look back, half-falling, and also trying to crawl out of his skin, he saw two hands, covered in third-degree burns, latched on to the collar of his boot. Before he could react to defend himself, or even freak out, a head – hairless and singed black with bloody cracks showing through, like a pig carcass thrown on a bonfire – lurched upward. It opened a mouth with no lips, revealing blackened teeth, and bit down.

Into the heel of Yaz’s boot.

Hanging onto the car ahead, Yaz couldn’t get his rifle around even if he wanted to, and he didn’t want to – he didn’t want to spend the time, nor turn the fluids in this guy’s brainpan into a lethal aerosol by ventilating its head. Instead, he brought his other boot around and smashed it down on the top of the head, which collapsed like a rotten melon, both hands letting him go. Now he had lethally infectious gunk on both boots, but he also had more urgent problems right now.

Thank fuck, beyond that second vehicle pile the way was clear, and in another thirty seconds of panicked hurtling down the dark walkway, he caught up with the others. As soon as he did, he turned to pull rear security, badly winded from exertion and raw animal terror, but still on his feet.

This time Blane did see him, and pulled him off the line. “Come on,” he said. “Two-One’s got our six. Why don’t you come be the health and safety observer for the roping portion of today’s field exercise.”

As they moved forward past the others, there were a fair number of bodies to step over, most put down with clean headshots. In his mind’s eye, Yaz could see Captain Day at the front of the attack, leading the charge out onto the bridge, and doing most of the shooting.

That was just how he was wired.

They quickly reached the front of the column, which was stopped a little past the middle of the first side span, about 400 feet shy of the first tower. This wasn’t that far from where the tanker exploded, and Yaz could feel his boots sticking to the platform – either the blacktop was sticky from the heat, or his rubber boot soles were actually melting.

Keeping his feet moving, he stole a look up the soot-black tower, and checked the suspender cables, and the main cable above it. All were scorched, but looked intact. He remembered what Blaylock, the former Engineer Sergeant, had said, and tried to tell himself another disaster in the same place, on the same night was unlikely – not least since they would probably, finally be the hell out of there in a few minutes.

Farther on, Yaz could see three Team 1 guys facing away down the bridge, shoulder to shoulder, firing slowly but steadily. Evidently dead were not just chasing them out onto the bridge, but also coming back from farther out it. Closer in, two more Marines faced the center, firing over the railing that separated them from the road. It was a pretty flimsy barrier – three thin horizontal wires beneath a thicker top one, held up by vertical posts at 20-foot intervals. And there were definitely dead still on the road, amid the charred remains of crashed vehicles.

Most of them were charred remains themselves. Yaz’s mouth hung open as he watched what looked like a platter of overcooked ribs trying to pull itself across the tarmac to get at him. He fired into what looked most like a head, until it stopped moving. When he didn’t see any other threats, he looked back over his shoulder, at the outside railing, which was more solid, probably to deter jumpers.

He stepped over to it, and looked down.

And down there he saw the most amazing thing – the USS Michael Monsoor, a 16,000-ton, 610-foot warship, crammed with the most advanced tools of war ever made, and costing $5 billion to build. And it had sailed right underneath the Golden Gate Bridge, its prow disappearing beneath the span, which left its wheelhouse directly below, 120 feet down.

All of this to bring the two teams of Raiders home.

“Jesus,” Yaz said, looking left and seeing how close they still were to shore. He didn’t know what the draft of the destroyer was, but the water must be deeper than it looked. Leaning out, he could also see the pylons that straddled Fort Point underneath the approach viaduct – though he couldn’t see the Fort itself, recessed slightly beneath the bridge on the seaward side. Looking up again, he saw Captain Day coordinating their extraction.

Down on the flight deck at the stern of the destroyer, sailors had rolled out a pneumatic grapnel launcher – and now used it to fire two grapnel hooks, each trailing rope lines. Both went home on the first try, clanging one after the other onto the bridge behind the Marines. Day and the others reeled them in and got them hooked onto the outside railing, while sailors below secured the other ends.

And just like that, the whole set-up was ready to rock.

Day turned to Yaz, and said, “Okay, new guy. You can go first – and see if it holds.” He held out the rope.

Yaz’s initial impulse was to obey his commander’s direct instruction. But then he hesitated, and said, “Thanks, Skipper, but I’m the only corpsman left for both teams. I’d like to stay – until everyone’s out of harm’s way.”

Day smiled, and clapped his shoulder. “Good man.”

The sky above them turned to screaming and flame.

Screaming and Flame

Golden Gate Bridge – South Side Span

From the center of the whirlwind at first it was impossible to understand what the hell was actually happening. But when he finally did, Yaz realized he’d spoken too soon about another disaster being unlikely. Planes had been falling out of the sky all goddamned day.

It had been naive to think they’d seen the end of them.

This one wasn’t a jetliner, but another mid-size executive jet – maybe some financial executive or tech start-up founder who’d waited until nightfall to get to the plane, and try his luck. But his luck hadn’t been good. Either somebody in his party had been infected, or one of the crew maybe. Or else it was mechanical failure, or no air traffic control, or pilot error.

It didn’t matter, and now no one would ever know.

The Marines on the bridge only knew hellfire was raining down on their heads. Not long after the initial impact, Yaz worked out the plane had gone right through the vertical suspender cables that came down from the bridge’s huge and curving main cables on both sides, and together made something like a cage – which the aircraft crashed straight through, but not without tearing itself to pieces in the process.

Now flaming chunks of wreckage fell from the sky, illuminating the scene in shifting light and shadows, like some hellish diorama with dramatic lighting effects. The only reason anyone below survived at all was that the plane’s momentum, over 150mph, carried most of it in pieces out over the ocean.

Yaz dropped to the deck, covering up his head with his gloved hands, feeling Blane covering him with his own body. As Yaz peered up from under his helmet, he could see Captain Day. The commander was still up on his feet, crouching but not cowering, and still holding a length of rescue line in one hand – and his weapon in the other.

He was upright, switched on, and scanning the scene, even as it went to hell all around him – ready to decide and act. Operationally effective.

That’s quality, Yaz thought.

Steel and fire rained down all around them. And then Yaz heard the first human noise in all this – a scream.

Followed by someone yelling: “Corpsman up!”

* * *

It was the LT hollering for him. And it was someone from 2/2 who got hit, its assistant element leader, Sergeant Coulson – who Yaz had seen around during the mission, but not met.

Now he found Coulson had an external peripheral hemorrhage, somewhere between severe and catastrophic. It was on his left leg, high up enough that Yaz worried about being able to control the bleeding. The big Marine NCO was down on the deck, where two of his teammates leaned in and tried to apply direct pressure to the wound. Yaz shoved them both aside, and got in there to expose the wound.

And he started to breathe again.

He could already tell it was the external iliac artery, not the femoral. This was still extremely serious, but less immediately fatal – he wouldn’t bleed out in 90 seconds, but without treatment he’d probably be dead in five minutes. Probing around, Yaz determined that whatever foreign object had caused the injury was no longer present. And the wound was just low enough that he could get a tourniquet in place above it, which he wasted no more time getting done.

As he twisted the windlass, Coulson gritted his teeth – then shouted in agony, causing his teammates to grab him, and keep him from bucking and spasming up off the deck. The pain of a tourniquet could be worse than the wound that made it necessary. But in this case it was absolutely necessary to save his life.

Seeing he had reduced the gush of blood to a trickle, Yaz straightened up and took a look around. The bridge was on fire again, here and there – and so were at least a few Marines, rolling on the deck, being rolled around by their buddies, or just slapping at their bodies with gloved hands to put themselves out.

The plane must have dropped its load of fuel – ignited.

As always, getting hit with something unexpected and catastrophic, like an IED strike, and having to deal with the casualties, didn’t mean you could call a timeout, or that the enemy would stop shooting at you. More often, the IED signaled the start of the shooting, as ambushers moved in. You not only had to fight back, in spite of the chaos.

You had to dominate the fight.

Looking around, following the sound of rifle fire, Yaz saw 2/1 back on their feet, holding the line behind them, as the undead army moved in. All the time the Marines had spent static, securing the rappelling lines, had been enough for the front edge of the herd to catch up to them. And the attraction of the exploding plane overhead had reignited their enthusiasm for the pursuit.

Brady, Reyes, Graybeard, and Kemp stood shoulder to shoulder, facing back toward the base of the bridge, weapons to shoulders, firing nonstop. And they were starting to build a wall of bodies across the walkway – but the dead just stumbled into it, fell over the top, struggled to their feet, and got shot down again, becoming the base of a thicker wall.

Yaz looked down and saw the LT still kneeling over Coulson, putting pressure on the wound. Yaz pulled out a thick gauze pad from a thigh pocket and jammed it in there to help stop the oozing the tourniquet hadn’t stopped. His next task was going to be getting some plasma into Coulson, and then wrapping the wound up better. But as he unslung his ruck, the LT looked up, and they locked eyes over their casualty. The young officer looked pretty freaked out, but like he was trying to stay effective, and to help his wounded Marine.

As Yaz nodded, trying to reassure him, he felt a shadow fall on him from behind. He looked up when a calm voice said, “Hey, what’s his status, Doc?”

It was Captain Day. Yaz took his first deep breath in a while, and felt some of the adrenaline bleed off. Day was such a badass, and so unflappable, that his presence instantly reassured everyone around him.

“Cat-B, urgent surgical,” Yaz said, loud enough to be heard over the rifle fire and moaning. “He’s stable for now, and the bleeding’s controlled. But he’s got a tear in the wall of a major artery, and every minute the tourniquet stays on puts his leg at risk. We need to get him to Level II care at least, ideally Level III, with a vascular surgeon. And we need to do it in the next hour.”

“Got it,” Day said. He leaned over Coulson, whose skin was already pale from the blood loss. But Day just smiled down and said, “Hey, Ice Cube, you’re really living up to your white-rapper nickname tonight.” He turned back to Yaz. “We’ll get a litter up here from the destroyer, then rig it so we can lower him down. Give me five minutes.”

And that was the last thing Captain Day ever said.

Cracking explosions, loud enough to drown out perception and thought, boomed overhead. The deck shifted beneath their feet. After the raging fire, the demolition derby, and the small plane flying through, the remaining sets of suspender cables that held up the bridge were starting to snap, one set of four at a time, their ends flicking off into the black night over the water.

Already, the far edge of this span, which ended at the tower, was dropping, tilting away from them, and falling in slow motion down toward the water. Yaz grabbed on to his patient as the LT did the same, both also grabbing the inside railing. Doing this to keep them all from sliding away wasn’t necessary yet. But the ground shifting under your feet was pretty damned unsettling either way.

Yaz looked up to see Day reach for the outside railing with his left hand, his right still on his weapon, head up and scanning. His bright eyes followed the sequence of cables as they snapped, one after another down the line. Each was nearly an inch in diameter, and it took 250 of them to hold up the half a million tons of bridge. Each one that failed and snapped sounded like a 2,000-pound JDAM landing just outside their lines, walking in closer with each impact.

And then, with no time to react, one set snapped out of sequence – the four right in front of Day’s face. Almost too fast to see, the ends whipped out and around and smashed him in the chest and face, knocking him backward over the railing behind him. Flying through the air and rotating at high speed, he bounced off an overturned car, and finally hit the deck face down, the top half of his torso hidden behind the front of an overturned truck.

And he wasn’t moving.

* * *

Holy fucking shit, Yaz thought.

He looked down to check on Coulson, then up at the wide-eyed LT, then ahead down the bridge – where the sequence of exploding cables was still heading toward them. The bridge continued to shift underfoot, and when he looked back, 2/1 was still firing flat out, retreating from the incoming undead army behind them.

When he looked over at Day’s prone form, steeling himself to vault the railing and go to his aid, Yaz saw he was moving again. A rush of relief started to wash over him – and then he realized the Marine commander wasn’t moving under his own power. It was something behind the truck, which Yaz couldn’t see, which was moving him around. Yaz stood up, raised his rifle, and side-stepped, fast, tweaking the angles to see what the fuck was happening, while trying to tune out the chaos.

When he rounded the nose of the truck, and saw one or possibly two figures hunching over Day’s head and torso, he leapt the railing then raised his rifle again. But before he could sight in, Day came alive, definitely moving under his own power now, twisting and scrabbling, grabbing at a face latched onto his neck.

While trying to push himself up off the deck onto all fours, he also got his pistol clear, and rapid-fired point-blank into the head still buried in his neck, weapon discharging inches from his own face. As that one dropped off, he fired four times into the one tearing into his left arm. Finally, pushing the destroyed bodies away, he rolled onto his back, and tried to sit up.

Stepping forward into this scene of carnage, Yaz raised his weapon to high-ready, and scanned for more threats through, past, and around the wrecked vehicles on either side of them. Then he had to reach out and grab onto one, when the deck bucked and shifted again, also flinching against the cables exploding closer behind.

There was no possible combat medic training that could prepare Yaz for this. But he was still a combat medic.

Squatting down by Day, who was sitting up now, the two of them alone at the center of this maelstrom, he did a fast visual assessment. Day was holding his left hand to the right side of his neck, blood still pumping through his fingers. He also had a chunk missing from his left upper arm – bitten out. And the whipping cables must have severed his chin strap and knocked his helmet off, and also broke and lacerated his jaw.

Basically, he was seriously fucked up.

Yaz reached into a thigh pocket for a gauze pad, ripped it open, then moved to get it on the worst bleeder, the neck wound. After that, he was going to have to apply enough pressure to stop a carotid-artery hemorrhage without cutting off the patient’s airway, a tricky maneuver at the best of times. But he never got a chance to try.

Before he could even get in there, Day stopped him – by holding out his gun hand, palm out, barrel pointing up.

Yaz stopped, but said, “Captain! Gear the fuck down.”

Day shook his head slowly, left hand still to the side of his neck, weapon still in his right hand. His face was growing paler by the second, his expression somewhere between blank and serene. It didn’t look like he could speak, from the broken jaw. When Yaz tried to push the gun hand away and go around it, Day lowered the barrel – pointing it right at him.

“Captain!”

Keeping his weapon trained on Yaz, Day looked down, checking out the gaping wound on his left arm, then at the bits of skull and brain matter on his vest, along with all the dripping black fluid which covered him, due to having shot two half-rotted heads actually pressed against him.

He shook his head again at Yaz – but then smiled.

And he took his hand away from his neck wound. Bright red arterial blood sprayed out onto the car beside him, and kept on pumping. But Day somehow kept his gun-hand up and trained on Yaz, who squatted there, frozen.

Until the Captain finally slumped down amid the bodies and blood. His weapon was the last to fall.

Yaz blinked heavily, his breath ragged.

In ten seconds, their unkillable commander was gone.

With more screaming and groaning, the deck under their feet tilted farther. In another few seconds, everyone was having to hold on to keep from sliding down it and into the water below. While, from above and behind them, on the other side…

The dead were sliding down it – right at them.

Just Gotta Get Organized

Golden Gate Bridge – South Side Span

Amid the groaning of dying steel, frenzied moaning of rampaging dead, shouting of scrambling Marines, explosions of more steel cables snapping, as well as other jumbled chaos and mayhem, and also probably trying to distract himself from what he’d just had to see, Yaz said a silent prayer to the designers of the Golden Gate Bridge – who’d built the deck in sections.

Maybe that was the only way to construct something this mammoth, but even the short side span they were on was composed of four separate sections, each 300 feet long. And the only reason Yaz or any of the others were still alive to appreciate this fact was these were not failing and collapsing all together – but one after another, in sequence.

The first cables had snapped adjacent to the tower, so that section, the fourth, started to go down first. However, they were all connected by jigsawing in the underlying steel and the tarmac surface, so they remained connected even as the fourth fell. But it quickly started to pull the third one down with it, which pulled the next, all of them bending at the joints, each canting at a less steep angle than the one before, all forming into a jagged arc.

The Marines were on the second section of four, which tilted only about 20 degrees – for now.

Yaz, having leapt back over the railing from his forlorn mission to save Captain Day, crouched over Coulson again – trying to keep his feet underneath him, and protect his surviving patient. Close to the back, he also had a ring-side seat to their rear security element collapsing in on them, still firing nonstop into the undead army, which now had gravity on its side. Yaz took another look around at the state of play.

Most of the masses of dead were actually coming down the road in the middle of the bridge, which had been largely cleared out by the tanker truck. That apocalyptic apotheosis of road rage also shoved a lot of vehicles to the side, which now somewhat screened the Marines on the outside walkway from the undead in the road. And the two big vehicle piles on the walkway limited the number of dead coming at them that way. On the other hand, shoved vehicles had also knocked out large sections of railing, before going over the side.

And the dead could just stroll through those gaps, when they locked onto Marines there, particularly ones firing. Hell, they could just flop over the railing, as it was barely waist height. Some of them were doing exactly that, the walkway growing less secure by the second. And as the span tilted farther down, the dead came faster – falling over and sliding, or else sort of running despite themselves.

And 2/1 definitely couldn’t stop them all.

Having threat-assessed, which did nothing soothe his mind, Yaz looked down to verify Coulson’s bleeding was still under control, and he was still breathing. He was, but he’d lost consciousness, his pale and peaceful face looking up toward the heavens. But the peace was a delusion, a dream the wounded warrior had escaped into. When Yaz looked up again, he saw their rear security, the four remaining Marines of 2/1, were basically on top of them, Kemp’s ass in his face.

They were going to have to retreat – but looking back, Yaz could see Marines on that side also heading their way, retreating to escape the falling sections of platform. Soon, they were all crammed together in the middle of the second section, as the 1,200-foot side span cracked and broke apart.

The fourth section, adjacent to the tower, had now dropped out of sight entirely, its end probably down in the water. And the third section was tilted steep enough that vehicles were starting to slide away. This was also the fate that awaited the Marines, sliding down to their deaths.

Trapped between the devil and the deep blue sea.

They were already back-to-back, and out of room either to flee the collapsing bridge, or retreat from the rampaging dead. To Yaz, his mind scrambling, this left only one direction they could possibly go and survive.

Up.

Because those piles of vehicles were not only cover. They were also elevated terrain. They might be the hills the Marines chose to die on. But at least they wouldn’t all die in the next minute.

“We gotta go up!” Yaz shouted. “Help me with Coulson!”

The LT looked up with gigantic eyes, freaked-out and hyper-ventilating, as most all of them were. Unlike the others, though, he was no longer functioning.

He had frozen.

So Yaz bent down and got his arm underneath Coulson’s shoulder. But the Marine Sergeant outweighed him by a good 40 pounds, and Yaz knew there was no way he could drag him all the way up a car by himself. “Goddammit.” he muttered.

“Hey, watch your fucking language,” a voice barked behind him. It was Fick. He nodded at the LT. “There are goddamned children present.” As he spoke, he was already grabbing Coulson’s legs. But the half-dead Marine stirred and his eyes fluttered open.

“Where we goin’?” he asked.

“Up!” Yaz said.

“Good plan,” Fick said. “Let’s take that hill!”

“No problem,” Coulson said, now helping to get his own limp body upright. “Just gotta… get myself organized…”

Yaz and Fick grabbed him by his arms, and got him up onto one foot, Yaz keeping an eye on the tourniquet. Luckily, the nearest pile of vehicles was only a few meters away. In seconds, the two healthy operators helped the grievously wounded one up it, the LT following. From up there, the four of them were visible to everyone else in both teams – who all followed suit, climbing up on the nearest vehicles or pile-ups, as the dead flowed in around their feet. From up here, they could all see each other, as if on the masts of ships run aground, in a fast-rising sea.

They could also all see the seemingly infinite ranks of dead coming out onto the collapsing bridge toward them, not caring in the least how that was going to work out for them. Then, from his elevated position, Yaz looked back to gauge the rate of collapse, and try to figure out how much time they had. And he found he could now see what that first section had collapsed onto. It wasn’t water.

It was the USS Michael Monsoor.

The gargantuan weight of the side span had landed on the destroyer’s wheelhouse, pinning the boat in place, shoving it down in the water, and making it list badly to the starboard side. Most of the flight deck in the stern, which normally sat low to the water, was now underneath it. In any ordinary apocalypse, a bridge crashing onto a Navy warship was probably the worst thing that could happen. But in this one, there were also dead tumbling down the collapsing span…

And swarming onto the destroyer’s deck.

The Only Possible Call

USS John F. Kennedy – Bridge

“Captain! Please!”

“He heard you the first time, Lieutenant.”

Commander Drake, ship’s XO, was answering on behalf of the Captain of the boat – who was also de facto commanding officer of the strike group. Just running a nuclear supercarrier was more than a full-time job, so the Captain was usually allowed to focus on that, while a rear admiral sat one level down on the Flag Bridge, commanding the whole flotilla.

Right now, though, nobody was down below them – the strike group commander had flown off the deck that morning with his staff, claiming he was needed at the Pentagon, though it was widely suspected he was really going back to his family in Arlington. So now the whole show was theirs – including the drones overflying the ill-fated effort to extract their Marines, video of which was being piped from CIC up onto the Bridge.

Which the XO and Captain were currently staring it.

Unfortunately, for everyone, the Captain had completely frozen, like he was staring through the screen, rather than at it. It was as if he were seeing something beyond the images in the video – or maybe it was just too horrible, too impossible to believe, to focus on.

“Captain,” Drake said quietly. “The LT has a good point.” The Bridge’s tactical officer had just been urging the Captain to get the carrier underway, or at least send one of their support ships. The Michael Monsoor was in the middle of an unthinkable maritime disaster, and she needed aid, urgently.

“Captain,” the radio officer said, phone to ear. “I’ve still got the XO of the Monsoor for you.”

The Captain didn’t even look over.

“Tell him to stand by,” Drake said to her. Then he straightened up, and the compassion went out of his voice. “Captain,” he said, crisply. “What are your orders?”

“My orders?” The Captain looked up into Drake’s face, his lips parted, his eyes still weirdly blank.

Drake steeled himself. He knew people sometimes froze in combat, especially in crisis situations, even veterans or senior officers. There was no way to know how anyone was going to react when the shit really came down. And when leaders folded due to combat stress, it was emphatically the job of their subordinates to take over, and carry on. As the Marines put it, you were always “one bullet away” – from death, but also from promotion.

“Captain,” the radio officer repeated.

Drake looked over at her, then grabbed the handset at the Captain’s station, which already had an open channel to CIC downstairs. “CIC, Bridge,” Drake said – making a mental note to figure out how to get the intra-station telephones piped to the speakers and mics. That was kind of what the shake-out cruise was supposed to be for.

“Bridge, Combat, send it.” The voice on the other end belonged to the officer of the watch there, Lieutenant Campbell. And in contrast to the Captain’s stunned and confused muttering, her voice was rocks. LT Campbell herself was rocks.

Drake said, “I need you to zoom our optics onto the Monsoor’s deck.” He made another mental note to get tactical control of UAVs, or at least their cameras, up on the bridge.

“It’s done,” Campbell said.

Drake looked up, and with the enlarged view, he could see the catastrophic damage the falling section of bridge had done to the superstructure of the previously pristine stealth destroyer. But, much worse, he could also see what was pouring down that section of bridge, right onto their deck.

Bodies. Not live ones. But animated.

He looked up and out the front screens, where he could see the lights on the bridge going out in sequence, as sections dropped toward the water. A collapsing bridge was a severe maritime hazard, to say the least, to any ship that got anywhere in the vicinity. But what was happening on the deck of the Monsoor was worse – an appalling health and safety hazard. Maybe some of the sailors on that boat would survive the destruction of their ship. Maybe some could even do so without getting infected.

But they were going to have to do it on their own.

And now Drake had to make the most difficult decision ever faced by any combat commander. He had to abandon the few, letting them face their fate alone, to safeguard the many.

Under ordinary circumstances, he might have asked for volunteers, or even ordered men to their deaths, to try to save the men and women on the Monsoor. But, as it was, for all he knew, the remaining sailors and officers in this strike group might be the last survivors in the entire world. Even more critically, he had a strange feeling they might turn out to be the last hope for the survival of humanity itself.

Drake was looking ahead – way ahead.

All he really knew for sure was every one of them was precious now. And the infection of any could be the death of all.

This was the only possible call he could make.

He straightened up, looked around, then raised his voice, both so that it could be heard across the bridge, and also projected unshakable confidence. “We can’t endanger the other vessels in the strike group, or the men and women serving on them.”

He took a breath and put his hand on the Captain’s shoulder, then locked eyes with the tactical officer, and then the helmsman.

“Hold station,” he said.

* * *

“They’re not coming.” The XO put down the handset.

The Captain of the Michael Monsoor stepped away from his front screens, as the weight of the collapsed bridge section caused the bulletproof, blast-proof, and shatter-proof windows to crack and spider-web. Another great reason to move back was the growing crowd of swarming bodies, gamboling around out on their deck.

“Do we have accountability?” The Captain asked. He meant, did they know where all their people were.

“Negative,” the XO said. “All stations have reported in. But there were thirteen men out on deck to support the retrieval of the Marines. Only two have reported back.”

“Did the others go overboard?”

“Maybe. Or else they’re fighting for their lives out there.”

“Fuck.” The Captain pressed his palms on the panel.

They couldn’t move the ship. It was the first thing they’d tried, reversing the engines, then trying to steam forward. Neither had the slightest effect. They were totally pinned there by the weight of the bridge – which meant their only hope of survival was to button up inside. The dead were lethal, but last time the Captain checked, they still couldn’t open hatches.

There were two problems with this plan.

The first was they still had people on the outside of the boat, out on deck, up on the hull, or maybe down in the water alongside. And the second was the boat might soon be underwater. It was sleek and high-tech, but it wasn’t a damned submarine. There was also the real possibility the wheelhouse could be crushed by the weight pressing down on it.

The Captain eyed the handset at his station, mentally rehearsing the unthinkable act of ordering all hands to abandon ship. It was impossible to imagine it would come to that—

He dropped to the deck and covered up, along with everyone else on the bridge, as the five screens on the starboard side groaned, shrieked, warped – and then launched themselves, one after the other, out into the night. The pressure of the bending superstructure had squeezed them free from their housings. Their high-speed discharge knocked away the bodies directly in front of them.

But there were plenty more bodies behind those ones.

Now the bridge’s position at the bottom of the wheelhouse, the same level as the deck, did not increase its survivability. No, with the screens gone, now you could walk right up and stare into the bridge.

Or climb into it.

As the Captain hauled himself to his feet, flinching from the noise of groaning steel and small-arms fire, a lacerated face appeared out of the darkness, one eyeball hanging down its cheek by a bundle of blood vessels and nerves, followed by two hands, reaching inside, fingers grasping. Beside and behind it were dozens more.

Trying to remember to breathe, wondering if it was too late to order the crew to abandon ship, the Captain stepped backward, drawing his M17 from its belt holster.

Thumbing the safety and bringing the weapon up, he realized that in his final moments, he at least had one last chance to live up to the ship’s motto, on behalf of his doomed crew.

I Will Defend.

Jenkins Rides Again

Golden Gate Bridge – South Side Span

“Well, that’s great. That’s just fucking great, man.”

This was the unmistakable voice of Brady, or rather Hudson, on the team net. It told Yaz that the others, all up on vehicles now, had also gotten a look at the destroyer, their only chance for extraction, simultaneously being crushed by the falling bridge and overrun by the dead.

“Now what the fuck are we supposed to do? We’re in some real pretty shit now, man! Game over, man – game over!”

After a heavy beat of silence on the channel, Graybeard came on, sounding as annoyed and resigned as Blane had, when he’d had to recite his line in the helo. “You finished?”

Yaz couldn’t help but laugh – a combination of combat giddiness, plus amazement the 2/1 guys could joke about how they were all completely fucked and about to die… when they actually were all completely fucked and about to die.

“Well,” Fick said, “at least it wasn’t a goddamned container ship ramming the bridge – so we don’t have to listen to fucking Blaylock telling us he told us so the rest of the damned mission…”

Fick got all that out while simultaneously firing, whirling, reloading, firing some more, singlehandedly keeping the dead from climbing up their vehicle pile. Yaz had no idea how he managed keep his balance while pirouetting on the undercarriage of an overturned Suburban, their current position, along with the LT and Coulson.

Even Coulson laughed, wincing with pain, lying with his head propped on the muffler. It was probably impossible not to.

But Yaz’s amusement bled away fast, as he considered their situation. They weren’t finished yet – but the end was in sight. They couldn’t go forward, down the steeper and less stable spans of bridge, which were collapsing first and fastest. They definitely couldn’t rope down to the destroyer, which was being destroyed and overrun in slow motion. And they couldn’t go back, bashing into the teeth of the undead army.

They also couldn’t stay there and live – not long, anyway.

All they could do was put off the end.

Yaz grabbed at an upturned tire as the bridge lurched and dropped out from under them again. He figured the only thing keeping them from going straight into the water was the few surviving suspender cables behind them, the jigsaw connections between the sections of platform, and the buoyancy of the destroyer below, holding the first section up out of the water, and keeping it from dropping straight to the ocean bed.

But none of those were going to last long.

The other worst news was that, as the far sections of span progressively collapsed, they pulled the closer ones down into a steeper incline – and, eventually, even cars parked sideways, or lying on their roofs, would slide or tumble away, down into the water.

So they couldn’t go forward, couldn’t go back, and couldn’t stay. Yaz scanned the hellish scene again, trying to gauge degrees of impossible. Yes, the entire former population of San Francisco was shoving its way out toward them.

But fighting through them was at least conceivable.

And right now it was probably the least impossible it was ever going to be again. There were still vehicles and vehicle piles behind which could serve as cover, or hills to climb up onto if things got too bad down below.

If they were going to use them to escape, it had to be now.

Crouching over Coulson, Yaz took a couple of shots to their rear, while Fick dealt with the main assault from the front. Looking around, he could see small groups of Marines doing the same, defending their little piles of vehicles, as lifeless hands banged on car hoods and reached up toward them. The dead couldn’t climb, but eventually they’d pile up, especially as they poured down the incline.

And that was only if the Marines didn’t slide away first.

Everyone lurched again and grabbed onto something as the bridge beneath them heaved and bucked like the runaway mine-car ride at a zombie-apocalypse no-fun fair.

“LT!” Yaz shouted. “We can fight our way forward, using the vehicles as cover!” But the LT was just staring across at him with huge eyes, still frozen. Yaz kept trying. “But we gotta move now! You’ve got to give the order, sir!”

Yaz couldn’t tell two teams of Marine Raiders what to do, not in the middle of a mission in heavy contact. Not only did he hold no rank, but he’d been with them about five seconds. Somebody in command had to sell them on this idea.

The LT nodded numbly, but still didn’t respond. Fick glanced down and saw this – then hauled Yaz to his feet by his elbow. “Take over,” he said. “I’m empty anyway.”

Yaz straightened up, brought his weapon up, and tried to keep his hands steady enough to make shots. Luckily, the walking dead weren’t even walking now, just thronging the base of their cars, and he was able to nail them with point-blank headshots. But they didn’t even drop, the press of those behind holding them up. And every time he did this, the new body just provided a base for those behind to climb.

While Yaz played king of the hill, Fick squatted down, reloaded his rifle, shotgun, and pistol, all by touch – and started shouting into the LT’s face from six inches away. If Fick was infected, the LT was in trouble, because spittle was landing on his face, like he was getting an ass-chewing from Gunny Hartman in Full Metal Jacket.

“LT!” Fick said. “You be fucking advised! Captain Day is gone! Master Sergeant Saunders has Team One now. But you are most senior – the only fucking United States Marine Corps officer in this fight – so command falls to you.”

Still squatting as he spoke, Fick didn’t look around or away, but just stared into the LT’s face, oblivious to the battle. Like they weren’t all perched on a pile of crashed and overturned cars, besieged by an army of the dead, out in the middle of a two-mile suspension bridge collapsing into the sea.

He said, “You have got twenty-six pipe-hitting MARSOC Marines…” He paused to look up Yaz, who was fumbling a reload. “And also this fucking guy. I guess. Whatever. Anyway, you are now HMFIC – Head Motherfucker In Charge. So it’s down to you to lead – and everyone’s counting on you. You fucking well copy that?”

The LT blinked once. “Roger that, Master Guns.”

“Good,” Fick said.

And then he actually smiled – but clearly no one had ever taught him how to do it properly, because as his lips pulled away from his teeth his face looked like a rubber fright mask.

Standing up, hauling the LT with him, he rolled his shoulder and said, “Because you know what? I woke up today, looked in the mirror, and realized there are two completely bad motherfuckers in this world. And I’m both of them. So let’s fucking do this.”

The LT looked from Fick, back over to Yaz, then gestured at the rampaging mob ahead. “I’m guessing your plan isn’t to fight through all that, off the bridge, then back into San Francisco?”

“Yeah, I’m hoping that, too,” Fick said. “’Cause last time I checked there were about a million fucking hippies in this town. Meaning we’re outnumbered 40,000 to one.”

Yaz leaned in closer to be heard. “We don’t have to fight through all that! We don’t even have to get off the bridge. We just need to get off this span and to the next one!” He pointed ahead at the adjacent section, the approach viaduct.

Directly below which was… the abandoned fort. Fort Point.

The LT reached for his radio, but Yaz grabbed his hand. “But there’s something we’ve gotta do before we go!”

* * *

It was the bad luck of the junior guys in 1/1 – Jenkins, Commiskey, and Witek – to be farthest forward, at the far end of the span, pulling security there when the bridge started to collapse out from under them.

They’d had to scramble like hell off their falling section, to get to the others farther back. This also led to them having a pretty dim view of this whole caper, and the wisdom of the commanders running it.

“It’s not the enemy that’s gonna get us killed,” Witek said, digging in his feet in to avoid sliding away, while defending against half-tumbling dead guys lunging at them from the road. “It’s fucking command.”

They were still farthest forward, so they’d just got the shit duty again: having to fight their way back out onto the third section, to retrieve the two grapnels and ropes, from their scuttled plan to slide down to the destroyer. This also meant they were now facing some straight Indiana Jones shit – having to jump or climb over the hinge between sections. These were still jigsawed together, but coming apart fast, the terrain between mostly cracking tarmac and bending steel – plus yawning gaps with a sheer 200-foot drop beneath them.

Standing there at the edge of oblivion, they could see the ropes and grapnels on the other side, both hooked onto the inner railing. They’d slid down to the next vertical post, which stopped them – for now. But it wasn’t hard to imagine the next drop knocking them loose again, then down into the sea.

The 1/1 guys needed to secure them – now.

Jenkins looked over at his buddies, both already fighting to defend their new position, Witek to the rear, Commiskey on the side facing the road.

Thanks for nothing, you bastards, he thought.

It obviously fell to him to get over the gap and secure the ropes while they pulled security, just like at the tree-felling operation at the Presidio.

Hope you get cut off again, you fuckers, he thought, with a grimace – but quickly realized that if anyone got cut off on this one, it was definitely going to be him. He also knew his odds, and his courage, were never going to get any better than they were right this second.

“Fuck it,” he muttered, then unclipped his rifle, laid it on the deck, jogged back ten steps, limbered up – then turned and got up the best running start of his life, leaping and flying through open air, the shuddering bridge and sheer drop blurring beneath his legs, hollering:

“Leeeeeee–roooyyyyyyyyyy…….”

Sled Pull

Golden Gate Bridge – South Side Span

“Okay!” the LT shouted, finger pressed to ear. “They got the ropes! We’re good to go!” He then put this out on both team nets, and the lonely islands of Marines got ready to move.

Yaz looked around. Their position at the inside edge of the second section meant, after getting across the hazard of the hinge, they only had to fight their way across one more section, about 300 feet, to the next span, the viaduct approach.

Basically one football field.

But one with a shitload of defensive backs. They only had to return one kick-off for a touchdown. But they had to do it from back in their own endzone. And they were not going to get any plays from scrimmage if they got tackled.

Just this one shot.

Yaz figured if they coordinated their fire, climbed down the backs of their vehicle piles, and then consolidated, plus used the vehicles ahead for cover, there was some chance they could make it. Not much of one. But a chance.

“LT!” Fick shouted. “Cover me, motherfucker – uh, sir!”

Yaz looked over – and realized he’d completely forgotten about the LAW rockets Fick humped halfway around the San Francisco peninsula. Because now he had one up on his shoulder, extended the tube, popped the sight – not that he was going to need it – and fired it directly into the faces of the dead bastards coming at them, exactly as close as was remotely safe for the Marines nearby.

The result was supremely gratifying – the rippling orange explosion knocked down dozens, and blew others off the bridge entirely. But even as Fick dropped the spent tube, the area he’d cleared was already filling up again, crowds of dead making a beeline for the impact point of the rocket, their brain-dead attention grabbed by the noise and light of the explosion.

“Son of bitch,” Fick muttered.

But then Yaz grabbed his shoulder and pointed ahead and to the left. That side of the bridge was actually clearing, as all the dead assholes on it shambled over to the rocket-impact side.

“Huh,” Fick grunted. “If the shit fits, wear it. C’mon!”

He and Yaz squatted down to lift Coulson, but he was blocking their arms – with his weapon. The badly wounded Marine rolled onto his stomach, shuddering with pain, but still got curled over his rifle in a perfect prone shooting position, facing back up the bridge.

And he started shooting, putting rounds through heads.

“What the hell are you doing?” Yaz shouted.

Coulson paused and looked up – but just gave them a What the fuck does it look like I’m doing? look.

“Fuck off,” Fick said, reaching down to safety Coulson’s weapon, but got his hand batted away, with surprising strength.

When Coulson finally spoke, it was not to Fick, but to Yaz. “You know I’m not gonna make it, Doc. I’ve lost too much blood. And there’s no way I can walk.” He turned his pale and sweating face to Fick. “I’m going to screen your movement. From an elevated position, I’m the perfect overwatch.” He paused for breath. “You know it’s true, Master Guns.”

Fick’s face sagged. He looked over at Yaz with sad eyes.

“What kind of bullshit is this?” Yaz said, his own eyes tearing up. “We don’t leave Marines behind!”

Fick took a breath. “More Marines than you’ll ever know have died so their brothers would have a chance – going to certain death to try to rescue them, or staying in overrun positions when they could have got out. If Ice Cube can’t make it out of here, and this is how he wants to spend the time he’s got left, I’m not gonna stop him. Hell, I can’t.”

Growing frantic, Yaz looked from Fick, to the LT, and finally back down to Coulson. And suddenly he understood how he got his nickname. Here he was, mortally wounded, with legions of dead rampaging all around, the Golden Gate Bridge falling out from under him, and all his friends about to leave him to die.

And in the heart of this whirlwind, which was about to consume him, he remained utterly calm, focused… and cool.

Yaz looked back to Fick, who said, “It’s combat medicine, Doc, so you outrank us all here. But I wouldn’t take him on.”

Yaz looked back down to Coulson.

And he set his jaw.

* * *

“You crazy-ass squid motherfucker!”

Squid was what Marines called sailors when annoyed.

“That hurts!” Coulson added, as the bridge once again lurched and tried to fall out from under them.

I don’t give a shit, Yaz thought.

But he couldn’t spare the wind to say it, because he was now dragging a 210-pound Marine up an incline – one getting steeper by the minute – in the middle of a 360-degree zombie battle, on a collapsing span of the Golden Gate Bridge.

And that’s why they call it a drag strap, he added.

Digging down, he hauled on the loop on the back of Coulson’s vest for all he was worth. And he suddenly regretted having shot off his mouth about how he was in better shape than the Marines. Now, he not only had to drag Coulson out of there on his own, he had to do it facing backward. Then again, he figured he didn’t really want to see what they were facing up ahead.

He got enough of the picture when he heard Fick shout, “Talk about a fucking uphill battle! Jesus fucking fuck me!”

So this was a fight Yaz was happy to sit out, even if he was still in the middle of it. And if he got killed, at least he wouldn’t have to see it coming.

And soon it was not just animated dead bodies tumbling and sliding toward them – but also vehicles, first sliding then tumbling down the sagging span. Infected flesh-eating bastards were bad enough, but a backflipping Prius could really fuck up your day. Two of them went tumbling by, one to the left, one right. Yaz had no idea what he was going to do if one came straight at them. The Marines still on their feet could run or dive out of the way. But there was no way Coulson could, flat on his back. And Yaz would either have to leave him, or else die with him.

That was if he even saw it coming.

As he bent his knees, leaned back further, and kept hauling, he realized Coulson had gone limper and heavier, and looked down to see he’d passed out. That was probably a good thing. But he also saw Coulson leaving a blood smear on the tarmac as Yaz dragged him up it. And every drop of blood Coulson lost brought him closer to death.

Though death already surrounded them – as Yaz realized when they got contact from their six. A big buff dead guy had been stopped from sliding by the landward side of a truck, and Yaz had pulled Coulson right on by it. Now it shuddered upright and came after them, leaning forward as it climbed the incline. Its moaning also brought a buddy out from under the truck, who’d gotten wedged under there, but now unfolded, rose, and also came at them.

Yaz looked over his shoulder – no one ahead was looking back, for the understandable reason that the threat to their front was bad enough.

Yaz was on his own.

Tightening his grip on Coulson’s drag strap, he brought his rifle up one-handed and fired four rounds, all of which missed – and which also emptied his mag. Now he was about to die because he’d failed to do a tactical reload when he had a hand free for it.

But Coulson hadn’t forgotten to reload, and now he woke up again, probably from Yaz discharging his weapon twelve inches above his head, brought his own rifle up, and took down the pursuing dead with two fast, perfect headshots.

Like some kind of human-sled weapons platform.

Thank God, Yaz thought, as he slung his rifle, got both hands back on the drag strap, dug in, and resumed hauling – also thanking God for the sled-push workouts the SEALs had made him do back in their HIIT sessions.

He was trying not to think about how much farther or longer he was going to have to do this – when he heard someone frantically shouting his name. Looking over his shoulder, he saw they were two feet from falling into an open gap, which dropped 200 feet – not to the sea, but the concrete base of the bridge, down at sea level. They’d gotten to the end of the collapsing side span. And everyone had gotten off it – all but them. Yaz looked up to find a half-dozen strong arms reaching out.

To help carry Coulson across.

* * *

I’ve seen too many damned movies, Yaz thought.

Still, as he grasped the forearms pulling him across the gap, he couldn’t resist looking back – and breathed a sigh of relief as he saw the side span was still there. He faced forward, scrambling up the other side, smiling into the faces of Fick and Blane, who had hauled him over.

But then both of them went wide-eyed in alarm.

Yaz scurried forward, then spun around again – and, sure enough, the entire southern side span of the Golden Gate Bridge, all four sections and 1,200 feet of it, which Yaz had been standing on two seconds earlier, came loose and twisted and tumbled and crashed into the sea below. They all moved back from the edge to stay clear of debris or geysering water.

But they had to move anyway.

The roar and rolling thunderclap of 100,000 tons of bridge hitting the water sped them on their way.

With the time they’d spent getting Coulson across, those in front had secured a bridgehead, attached both grapnel lines to the railing, and Marines were already rappelling down. They’d gone out without rappelling harnesses, but no respectable operator went anywhere without carabiners, and all of them knew how to use them along with the rope itself to improvise a harness and brake.

When Yaz, Blane, and finally Fick slithered inside the security perimeter around the rappelling site, Yaz leaned out and looked over the side, seeing what he’d hoped: nothing. The edge of the fort was recessed under the bridge, which would keep the dead from just following them over and falling down in there with them. Both rope lines sloped inward at an angle, disappearing into the gloom. Presumably Marines had anchored them to the top of the fort’s walls below.

Yaz turned to see only three Marines left holding their tiny and shrinking perimeter, firing nonstop at dark bodies stumbling in at them from 180 degrees – every direction but the railing and sheer drop to their backs. The ones already destroyed had piled up to form a waist-high defensive ring-wall, providing the main obstacle to new ones getting in there at them.

But even as Yaz watched, one of the Marines went empty, switched to secondary, and started engaging with the pistol. Then another did the same. The dead were so close, pistols were probably the better choice – and, anyway, they were out of time, out of ammo, and out of options.

This was all going to be over in seconds.

One way or the other.

Another Grenade

USS John F. Kennedy – Bridge

“God preserve us.”

Commander Drake didn’t even see who said that, and it didn’t matter. Almost everyone on the bridge was muttering, gasping, and staring out the front screens, up at the drone video, or back and forth between the two.

The side span of the Golden Gate Bridge had just broken free and come crashing down – right across the wheelhouse of the Michael Monsoor. The span was 90 feet wide, and the destroyer 600 feet long, and perpendicular to it, so that left a lot of destroyer not crushed outright. Unfortunately, it was the wheelhouse directly underneath – including the bridge, manned by the Captain, the XO, and other senior officers.

Now, the bridge crew of the JFK watched in horror as the Monsoor’s wheelhouse disappeared, swallowed by the sky falling from above and the deep sea yawning below. The pinned and stricken warship bent at the waist, the buoyancy of the aft and stern sections lifting them up out of the water.

Her back had been broken.

The collapse sent up colossal swells of water, like Poseidon in his fury smashing both fists into the sea, briefly obscuring their direct view of the scene. But the drone view from above showed the two halves of the mortally wounded destroyer sink from view faster than any of them imagined a modern warship could go under. Torpedoes, dive bombers, catastrophic chain explosions from ordnance belowdecks, hulls torn open by jihadi motorboats loaded with explosives… any of those would have left the ship on the right side of the water for at least a minute.

Enough time to get the lifeboats out. Or at least for sailors to jump from the decks and get clear.

But not this time.

In seconds, the ship disappeared, heading for the bottom. It was like they’d all just seen a magician make the Statue of Liberty disappear. No one could believe it, and they were all seeing it with their own eyes.

“There could still be survivors.”

This was the tactical officer again, and Drake knew he was right – there could be survivors. He looked down from the video display and over at the Captain, who still sat at his station, staring up at the display, and the calming surface of the water, with wide and shining eyes.

But he wasn’t really there.

And then the first swell from the collapse reached them. The Kennedy displaced 110,000 tons, and had bilge keels to prevent rolling, making her largely immune from rough seas. Nonetheless, this swell was big enough that they felt it up on the Bridge. It was followed by another one, slightly smaller.

“Captain,” Drake said.

But before he could even start to freak out about the Skipper’s ongoing freakout, the tactical officer rose to his feet – and got in their faces. This was unusual, but everything today was pretty bizarre. “We’ve got to go,” he said. “To police up survivors. We have men in the water, right now.”

Drake looked up at the display. If anyone had been able to jump clear of the Monsoor, they weren’t visible on the drone video. And there definitely weren’t any lifeboats. Drake looked back into his mind’s eye – still burnt with the image of the dead pouring off the bridge and onto the destroyer’s deck.

Trying to keep his voice level, Drake said, “Even if some of the crew somehow survived, we have no way of telling who’s infected and who’s not.” Last they’d heard, a test for the virus had been in development. But if any testing kits had rolled out, the JFK hadn’t gotten them.

The tactical officer seemed to ignore this, then tried to go over Drake’s head. “Captain,” he pleaded.

To everyone’s surprise, the Captain stood up. He said, “I need to… talk to the air wing commander. I’ll be in my ready room. No – down in the hangar. You have the deck, XO.” And just like that, he walked out.

Shaking his head, Drake moved from the XO’s station to the CO’s, but didn’t sit down. Wondering if he’d remember this moment in years to come, he scanned all the faces looking up to him now. Raising and steadying his voice, he said, “We can’t endanger the Kennedy with a high-risk open-water rescue. Nor any of the other ships in the strike group. Not now.”

“Why not?” the tactical officer asked, eyes full of tears.

“Because we don’t know how bad things are. Or how bad they’re going to get. For all we know, we might be the only ones to survive. Or the only ones operationally effective.”

“There are 490 ships in this Navy, sir.”

“And I pray to God the captains of those boats are making the same difficult decisions we are.”

Impossible ones, he amended mentally, but didn’t say it.

At last, Drake sat down at his new station, then looked up at the video display, and the patch of water that would now and forever be the burial site of the USS Michael Monsoor. He knew this was the only chance he was going to have to look her 140 officers and enlisted sailors in the face.

Before abandoning them.

Finally, he looked back around at his own bridge crew. “Mike Monsoor just jumped on another grenade for us. We honor the sacrifice, we raise the banner, and we carry on. Resume your duties.”

They all did. And they carried on.

The Alamo

Golden Gate Bridge – Viaduct Approach

Yaz spun again to see Fick and Blane helping Coulson up onto the railing, and onto the rope. The wounded man was grinding his jaw, trying not to scream. Rappelling with a severe arterial bleed was not something Yaz was prepared to recommend, but they never did get a litter from the destroyer, and it was either this or stay behind, which would be worse.

When Blane said, “Any chance of some morphine for him?” Yaz was already digging into his med ruck, crouching down in the tiny patch of ground they still held.

“No,” he said, emerging with an epipen. “And this is gonna make the pain worse.”

Coulson was clipped in and hanging out over the edge. But the pain of climbing up there had passed, and now his eyelids fluttered and his head wobbled, from blood loss.

Yaz popped the cap of the epipen and jammed it into Coulson’s thigh. His eyes shot open wide, and he went ahead and screamed. Yaz said, “But the epinephrine will keep him awake, and keep him from falling off the rope to his death.”

Coulson shook his head. “Let’s get this shit over with!”

He disappeared into the dark over the side.

Yaz heard moaning and hissing, terrifyingly close now – and as he zipped up the ruck, something slammed into his back. It was the ass of one of the last three defenders, Jenkins, who dropped an empty pistol mag on Yaz’s head and said, “Whatever you’re gonna do…”

“Go!” Blane shouted. There was no time even to rig a rope harness or clip in. Yaz just had to climb out over the edge and trust his weight to the rope, trying to get ankles, knees, and gloved hands around a line that was too thin for fast-roping. But he just started sliding, hoping he’d be able to stop himself at the bottom, plus not die of rope burn on the way down.

After a five-second plummet into the darker darkness beneath the bridge, he got reeled in by more strong hands, Brady and Reyes this time. As predicted, they were anchoring the ropes with their bodies, standing behind a parapet on top of the fort’s walls, on what looked like an artillery mount. Yaz stepped off it onto the walkway, where he found Coulson lying on his back, breathing hard and groaning.

It was time for that morphine now. Or almost.

First Yaz had to assess the tactical situation. Looking up and down the wall to either side, he saw Marines pushed out to both corners, north and south. Closer, he saw the LT shouting into his radio. Then he looked up just in time to dodge Blane and Fick, bounding down the ropes side-by-side, and then the 1/1 guys, two on one rope, nearly on top of each other.

Last men out.

Or last living ones. Immediately behind them came a cascade of flailing and grasping bodies, tumbling through open air, just a few feet away, a whole dead-guy waterfall – but they dropped right past the parapet, picking up speed as they passed. Yaz had been right about that, too.

He looked over to see Blane and Fick, who’d unhooked about one second before the 1/1 guys landed in a pile where they’d been, moving over to join the LT.

Finally, Yaz stepped to the metal interior railing, and looked down inside. In their new position, they were three stories up, overlooking a big interior courtyard. The fort was actually mostly cored-out empty space. Yaz could see no one moving down inside it. And none of the Marines up top were firing.

This position was secure.

The fort was theirs.

* * *

The arch over their heads was an elaborate latticework of steel, filling half the space underneath the bridge, down to within 100 feet of the walls, and covering the western half of the fort. It was enough metal to interfere with radio waves.

But by staying behind at the west parapet where they’d landed, the leaders were also in an elevated position at water’s edge, with only a thin sliver of land on that side of the fort. So they had a good vantage on the ships lying off the coast, three miles away. And right now the LT was making the most important radio call of his life – and having to do it with both his Team Chief and Ops Sergeant listening in and looking over his shoulder.

While he waited to be patched through, he looked up at these two, realizing his inheritance of this command probably made Fick his 2IC. The only other candidate would be Master Sergeant Saunders, Chief of Team 1, and now its acting commander. But Saunders was already off overseeing the defense of the fort, and its new garrison. So that was at least one Marine with a decade more experience than the LT who wouldn’t be second-guessing his decisions, and judging his performance.

Which if he fucked it up would get everyone killed.

“This is Seven-Nine Actual.”

The LT exhaled. That call sign told him he was talking to the CO of the JFK (hull number CVN-79). He had spoken to the Captain a couple of times, and this didn’t sound like him. But whoever was officer of the watch on the bridge was acting CO. Why the Captain himself wasn’t on the bridge at a time like this was beyond the LT’s capacity to imagine.

“Seven-Nine Actual, this is Reamer Actual.” The words tasted strange. The LT was now in charge – of everything.

“Good to hear your voice, Reamer. You guys still with us? We’ve got your transponder signal. But ISR lost you.”

The LT looked up at the giant section of bridge arch over their heads, hiding them from eyes in the sky. “Affirmative, Seven-Nine. We’re still kicking. But Captain Day is KIA, and we’ve taken one WIA, urgent surgical.”

There was a brief pause. “That’s received, Reamer.” Condolences were for another time, after everyone got home.

The LT said, “But the grid ref you see from our transponder is accurate. We’ve consolidated at Fort Point, underneath what’s left of the bridge. We’re strongpointing here, dealing with casualties. And we would really appreciate a lift home. How copy?”

There was a longer pause this time.

“Request for extraction received, Reamer. Stand by.”

The LT couldn’t help but notice that wasn’t an answer.

* * *

Yaz looked from the Marines in the leadership huddle, back to the man kneeling with him alongside his casualty – Corporal Meyer, who had been relieved from other duties in 2/2 and sent as their delegate to check on Coulson, and stay with him.

To make sure he wasn’t alone.

He had also helped Yaz get Coulson away from the living dead meat shower raining down a few feet away from the west side of the walls, and over to the south side. But the effort had cost Coulson, who now lay on his back and gritted his teeth, waiting for the morphine to kick in.

Yaz had only given him a small dose – morphine could reduce both heart rate and blood pressure, not ideal for a guy who’d lost a fifth of the blood in his body, and at serious risk for hypovolemic shock. And he’d only just gotten it, having to wait while Yaz satisfied himself their position was secure.

Now, while Meyer assisted, he asked Yaz about this.

“I mean, I understand it in principle,” he said. “‘The best combat medicine is fire superiority.’ But there have gotta be exceptions, right?” Meyer looked down at Coulson, who was squeezing his hand as if trying to destroy it. “Like if someone’s bleeding out, or not breathing. Surely, you’d treat the casualty first, and let your teammates win the firefight?”

Yaz nodded around the 14-gauge needle in his mouth, while pulling out a bag of plasma and laying it on Coulson’s chest. He rolled up the wounded Marine’s sleeve, swabbed the area, and inserted the needle. His mouth finally free, taping the line down, he said, “Okay, suppose someone’s being electrocuted. What’s the first thing you do?”

Without being prompted, Meyer pressed on the plasma bag to get it flowing. “Push him clear, with something non-conductive.”

“Exactly,” Yaz said, getting a sharpie out of his vest, checking the time, and writing it on Coulson’s bare arm. “You get them away from the electricity, the source of the original injury – without electrocuting yourself. What if someone’s drowning?”

“Get them out of the water. Without drowning yourself.”

“Right again,” Yaz said, taking Coulson’s wrist to take his pulse, counting pulse beats for 30 seconds, then breaths for 30. “A firefight’s no different. Your first medical task is always to remove the source of the original injury. In this case, keep the patient from getting shot again, and yourself from getting shot along with him. That means eliminating the threat.”

Yaz wrote down pulse and respiration on Coulson’s arm, then got out a blood pressure cuff, wrapped it around the same arm higher up, inflated it, and slowly bled the air off.

Coulson laughed weakly, resting easy for the first time since getting hit. With his free hand, he gestured at the section of bridge above, and the fallen city it led to. “Hey, Doc,” he said, “you think you can eliminate that threat, more power to you.”

Yaz laughed as he wrote down the blood pressure number, getting Coulson’s point. They were never going to be able to kill all the dead in San Francisco.

But, for now, they had a refuge from them.

* * *

“Sweep done?” Master Sergeant Saunders asked, sounding perfectly at ease as new Team Leader, after 14 years of operational experience, much of it in combat zones.

Lawton and Swett, junior guys in 1/2, had just come back from clearing and sweeping the rest of the building below. Judging from all the wind they were sucking, they’d been running up a lot of stairs, and Saunders figured maybe he should have sent more than two for the job.

“Yes, Sergeant,” Lawton said, chest heaving. “Entire ground floor’s clear, every room – plus the whole courtyard.”

“External doors?

Swett took over, letting Lawton heave. “Big timber bastards, locked with iron bars. Proper medieval siege shit.”

“Outstanding,” Saunders said, a rare word of praise, which he didn’t particularly believe in. Carrots made Marines soft. But sticks never got old. “How about the second and third levels?”

Lawton said, “The level directly below us is also clear.”

“And the second floor?”

The two Marines looked at each other, like neither wanted to take this one. Lawton sucked it up and said, “We didn’t sweep it. But we double-checked the stairwell doors are secure. If there’s anyone on that level, they’re not coming up here.”

“Or getting down to the courtyard,” Swett added. “In case we go out that way.”

Saunders gave them his best Is that what I fucking asked you? look. But at that exact moment, Team 2’s RTO, Chesney, trotted up looking for him. “Master Gunnery Sergeant Fick requests the pleasure of your company.”

“What’s up?” Saunders asked

“The JFK’s on the horn. I think we’re getting extracted.”

Lawton said, “We’ll go and sweep the second floor.”

“No, too fucking late,” Saunders said. “We’re not gonna be here long enough. Just go strongpoint those stairwell doors.”

And then he and Chesney were gone.

The Sentence

Fort Point – South Wall

“How is he?” This was Blane, coming over to check on Coulson.

Yaz stood up and walked them both farther away, to speak out of earshot. “Still stable. But also still urgent surgical. I’ve got one more bag of plasma – after that his blood pressure’s going to start dropping, dangerously.”

“Understood.”

“But there’s another problem. The tourniquet. Every second it’s on makes it more likely Coulson’s going to lose the leg. So – how long are we going to be here?”

“TBD,” Blane said.

Off Yaz’s pained look, Blane nodded toward an enlarged leadership meeting – which now included the LT, Fick, Saunders, and Gunny Blaylock, Team 1’s Ops Sergeant, all huddled up over a map and radios. “We’re trying to figure it out. There are a couple of extraction plans evolving.”

Yaz looked back at Coulson. “If we’re not leaving now or soon, I want to go in and ligate his torn artery.”

“Ligate?”

“Wrap ligature cord around it, then tie it off – tight. To seal it and stop the blood flow. It’s his iliac artery that got cut. But he’s still got a perfectly good femoral artery, and blood flow from that can keep his leg alive. But only if I get the tourniquet off. Which I can only do if I tie off the damaged artery.”

“How long will that take?”

“I don’t know, exactly.” Yaz didn’t add that he’d only attempted this procedure twice, in training – both times on a goat. “It’s minor field surgery. Assuming I can get decent access to the site, maybe only fifteen minutes. But it will buy Coulson a lot more time. And it could save his leg.”

“Okay,” Blane said. “Do it. You need help?”

“Already got it,” Yaz said, looking over at Meyer, who would be more motivated to help his teammate than anyone. Yaz was already turning back to his med ruck, but Blane put his hand on his shoulder.

“Hey,” Blane said. “Nice job.”

Yaz just shrugged. Coulson wasn’t out of the woods yet.

“No,” he said, nodding up at the bridge. “I mean nice job back there. With your idea of roping down here. If it hadn’t been for that, we’d all still be back on that bridge. Or down in the sea. But dead or infected, either way.”

Yaz shrugged again. “Anyone could have thought of it.”

“But it was you who did.”

Yaz figured he’d put that one in storage, to warm him later on, if there was a later on. Right now, he still had a job to do. But as he turned back to it, Coulson added to the pile.

“Hey, Doc,” he whispered through dry lips, half-opening his eyes. “Thanks – for dragging my heavy bleeding ass out of there. For not leaving me behind.”

Yaz smiled. “No problem. Just do me a favor and call in advance next time. You do know our motto, right?”

Coulson laughed, despite the weakness, blood loss, morphine fog, and pain. He actually did know the motto of the Special Amphibious Reconnaissance Corpsman:

The Difficult Anytime. The Impossible by Appointment Only.

“Anyway,” Yaz said, “don’t thank me too soon.”

When he came up out of the med ruck, he had a bottle of chlorhexidine antiseptic, gauze pads, two sets of locking forceps, a length of ligature cord, a skin stapler…

And a scalpel, which gleamed in the moonlight.

* * *

“Yeah,” Brady said, reporting back to the leadership team. “Time is not on our side.” He and Reyes had just conducted a recon around their perimeter, namely the walls of the fort.

“Can you elaborate?” the LT said.

“Sure. Just listen.”

Everyone shut the hell up for a minute. The sound was low and faint, but unmistakable. It was like the night itself was moaning. And it was coming from every side, but louder from the south and east – the direction of the city.

“Undead foot mobiles,” Reyes said. “In battalion strength, and moving into siege positions. On all sides.”

Brady said, “We think they’re following the noise of the bridge collapse, mostly coming down the coast from the east, and the Marina District.” He pointed back toward the far side of the fort. “At first they were just filling up the parking lot on the east side. But now there are so many they’re flowing around the whole joint on both sides. All the way around.”

Blane leaned out and took a look over the parapet, down to the 25 feet of land between the walls and the water on the west side. Virtually every inch was already filled with bodies.

“I hope we’re looking at an air extraction,” Brady said. “And not some kind of Butch-and-Sundance bullshit, busting out on foot. Because the motherfucking Bolivian Army is already here.”

Blane said, “Go keep an eye on it.”

The LT just turned away, finger to his ear.

* * *

Up on the bridge of the JFK, Commander Drake wasn’t given even five minutes to regroup after making the hardest decision of his naval career – to abandon the crew of the destroyer.

Now he was being faced with an even harder one.

He looked at the phone handset beside him – the one with the stranded Marines on the other end of the line. Hating it. Dreading what he was going to have to tell them.

He’d already conferred directly with the Air Boss, who was responsible for all aircraft operations, as well as the air wing commander, and two of the senior helicopter pilots.

And now he had to make a decision.

Actually, he’d already made it. Now he had to deliver the news. With everyone on the Bridge pointedly not looking at him.

Belay that, he thought to himself. Not the news.

I have to deliver the sentence.

* * *

“Oh-point-nine miles? Oh!?
Oh is not a number, motherfucker!” Fick shouted into the LT’s radio, which he’d stolen. “Oh is the sound your sister makes when I stick my dick in her ass!”

Instead of dragging Fick away, Blane just grabbed the radio back, which was easier. Unfortunately, he couldn’t stop Fick listening in on their call with the carrier, as the LT had it playing out of his radio speaker for them all to hear.

“Roger that,” Drake replied, his restraint not so much admirable as God-like. “Correction – that’s ZERO-point-nine miles overland.” Drake did know radio procedure required not just the NATO phonetic alphabet but also phonetic digits – and 0 was “zero” not “oh.” He’d fucked that up.

Looking at Fick with a combination of terror and admiration, the LT said, “Copy that, Seven Nine. But, I say again – we are in a secure and elevated position. The helos never even have to touch down. Just bring them in close enough to drop us a rope ladder and hold hover. We’ll climb ourselves out of here.”

“We understand your tactical situation, Reamer. But landing the birds is not the issue. Your team’s been in close contact, fighting on the ground all night. How do we know none of your Marines are infected?”

The LT had no answer to this. And he couldn’t try to deny it – the drone video would have shown them battling through the dead, down on that beach, up on the bridge, and everywhere else. So he just looked around at the others, their eyes all shining in the dark… as they watched their air extraction evaporate right in front of them.

“I’m truly sorry, LT,” Drake said. “But how many aircraft have we already seen go down today? We lost two Seahawks trying to extract guys who swore up and down they weren’t infected – and then turned out to be not so not infected after all.”

There was also no way the LT could argue with this. The Marines themselves had seen aircraft falling out of the sky all day. And of course a man facing certain death would say anything to survive, including swearing he was healthy.

For the end of this exchange, Drake’s voice softened. “I’m sorry, guys. I’ve had to ask myself what we can least do without after the end of the world – air transport, or Marine Raiders. The honest answer is neither. So do me a favor and get your asses back here safely.”

The LT exhaled, eyeing the others.

“Aye aye, sir. Reamer Actual out.”

The Way Home

Fort Point – South Wall

With Meyer’s help, Yaz got the second and last unit of plasma flowing into Coulson’s arm. Milam, the other SARC, would have had at least one more with him. But he wasn’t here. Only Yaz was. And it was all on him now.

Leaning over the limp body, he said, “Coulson?”

But the big Marine had passed out again – thank God. With the blood loss, they couldn’t afford to give him any more morphine. If he slept through the surgery, that would be ideal. Because it was going to be seriously painful.

The instruments Yaz needed were already laid out, and the wound in Coulson’s upper thigh exposed and swabbed with the reddish-brown chlorhexidine. Now Yaz got out a 600-lumen Surefire tactical light and passed it over to his surgical assistant – Corporal Meyer. They were both already wearing surgical masks, and Yaz talked through his.

“You have got to hold that steady – but then move it around as I do, so the surgical site stays illuminated.” Then he handed Meyer a thick gauze pad on the end of forceps. “I also need you to keep the blood out of where I’m working. The first couple of minutes are critical.”

“Roger that,” Meyer said. He was young – but confident.

Yaz leaned forward to check out his set-up – and realized he was still wearing his helmet, and attached NVGs. He’d been trained to provide tactical combat casualty care in full protective gear, including helmet and plate carrier. But this was proper field surgery, and it was going to be delicate.

He undid the strap on his helmet and placed it on the deck, but decided the vest didn’t impede him too much. Maybe he just didn’t want to risk taking it off – or didn’t want to have to take the time to get it on again if they needed to move out fast. Finally, he got on a fresh pair of nitrile gloves, and splashed them liberally with the remaining chlorhexidine.

Then, trying to keep his hands from shaking, through sheer force of will, he made an incision.

Enlarging the existing wound.

* * *

Reyes nodded at the surging crowd down below them. “What the fuck do all these dead guys want, anyway?”

He and Brady were standing their post, sentries on the east wall, the one that faced down the coast, and back toward the city. Both had their NVGs down, rifles cradled, with their last full mags seated.

They were on fire watch.

Brady looked over to where the bridge, and the Michael Monsoor, used to be. “They can’t still be chasing the noise of the collapse.”

“What then?”

Brady just cocked his head.

Reyes said, “You don’t think…?” The moaning was so nonstop, they’d both stopped noticing it. But it was getting louder, as newcomers joined the chorus of the ones already there. “What, you think they’re just following each other?”

“That’s kind of the vibe I’m getting.”

Reyes shook his head. “So if the first ones here start moaning, and the moaning draws more, and the new ones start moaning, too… when the hell do they stop coming?”

“Exactly,” Brady said. “Maybe it’s like a black hole, with light being sucked into it so fast nothing can ever escape.”

“Yeah. Including us.”

“Good news, Belleau Woodsmen.” The two turned to see Fick approaching, with Blane and the LT in tow. “We’ve got an exfil and extraction plan.”

Brady said, “Haven’t we done enough exfil’ing tonight?”

“Yeah, maybe cut to the second part,” Reyes said.

“Sure, you wise guys,” Fick said. “It’s the same as the original extraction plan. The one we shit-canned.” He pointed out over the parapet. When Brady and Reyes turned and looked, they saw he wasn’t pointing at the dead, who stretched to the horizon – but out past it. Down the coast, but just in sight, they could see the masts of sailboats.

“The fucking Marina?”

“Yep. Plenty of boats just sitting there for the taking.”

“Great. So it’s another over-the-beach battle.”

The five of them just marinated in that for a second, not complaining. It was understood that Marines always got the toughest fights, the shittiest conditions, the fewest and most delayed supplies, and the worst weather and terrain possible. Nobody embraced the suck like Marines did.

It was barely a mile of beach they were going to have to fight their way across. But it was a mile straight into the teeth of the marauding horde, which was already thousands strong, and growing stronger every second. It was anybody’s guess how they were even going to get out of the fort, much less get past the division-sized force besieging it.

But their only way home went through that. They were probably all going to die trying this. But at least they’d die trying.

And they’d die together.

“Semper Penis,” Brady said, coining all-new Marine slang on the spot. The others looked at him like he’d lost it.

Reyes got it instantly, and translated. “Always fucked.”

* * *

“Jesus,” Witek said. “It sucks hard enough they’re not coming for us. But they couldn’t even drop us a fucking litter?”

Jenkins ignored this and just kept carving, trying to get matching notches in two long pieces of wood. He’d drawn the duty of constructing an improvised litter for Coulson due to his well-known whittling habit. Now it kind of kept his mind off everything else. And gave him something useful to do.

He, along with Witek and Commiskey, had pulled the wood from doorways on the level below. This place had about a thousand old wooden doors in it, thick and solid, which at least would do a good job slowing the dead, if they finally did break in. Or, more likely, if someone inside turned out to be infected, and started attacking and devouring the rest.

Jenkins grabbed one of the ropes they’d used to slide down there on, cut a length, and started lashing the two pieces together. He didn’t look up at the schicking sound of Commiskey dropping out his empty rifle mag.

“And maybe a fucking resupply while they were at it? Little ammo? Water top-up?”

Witek shook his head. “We’re radioactive, man. They’re not coming anywhere near us.”

“Or maybe,” Jenkins said, getting to work on the next section of wood, “they just wanted to avoid the racket of the helos. Seems like the dead follow noise.”

Witek just gestured over the parapet with a sarcastic look, his meaning clear. If there were room for one more dead guy down there, Jenkins could be his guest to say where.

Jenkins also didn’t look up when Commiskey asked Witek, “How many pistol rounds you got left?”

“In addition to the one I’m saving for myself?”

“Jesus. Has it come to that already?”

Jenkins finally looked up, and the other two jumped up…

At the sound of screaming from the south wall.

* * *

“Doc,” Blane said. “How much longer?”

“What?” Yaz couldn’t look up, so he didn’t. He was wrist-deep in Coulson’s thigh, prospecting around inside his pelvic cavity. And right now he couldn’t find the goddamned iliac artery. He’d known in theory it lived deep inside the pelvis – a bony, ligament-filled, and sensitive area. But the reality was different. Right now, all he could see was blood.

Coulson’s life pouring out of him.

“We’re going to have to move out,” Blane said, keeping his voice level, and gentle. “If we’re ever going to get out of here, it’s got to be soon. How much more time do you need?”

Yaz ground his teeth like he was trying to eat them. He was already badly freaked out, trying to keep panic at bay. Now his half-assed, under-resourced, and unqualified surgery had been put on a clock. It was the last thing he needed.

Check that, he thought. The second-to-last thing.

Because that was when Coulson woke up.

And started screaming.

* * *

“These fucking dead guys,” Fick said, at the chorus of moaning, “sound worse than an octopus trying to fuck a set of bagpipes.”

The LT was beyond being able to find anything funny. But he never stopped being amazed at the shit that came out of Fick’s mouth. He looked back down at the drone video being piped to his palm-top, sweeping their planned exfil route, which was mostly across another beach.

But they didn’t need the aerial ISR. From the east wall, they could see it with their own eyes. Whereas the first beach fight had been manic and 360, and the fight off the bridge desperate and nose-to-nose, with not a square meter free of advancing dead guys…

Down there now was not an empty square centimeter that they could see, anywhere between them and those boats. It was filled with tens of thousands of dead, jostling nuts to butts, and more migrating than rampaging.

How the Marines would battle through it at all was anybody’s guess. Doing it without every single one of them getting infected in the process would be some kind of miracle. And they were going to have to do it with four more of them combat ineffective due to carrying Coulson on his litter.

“Well,” the LT said, trying to dredge up of the optimism of youth, “you’ve still got that last rocket.”

“Yeah,” Fick said. “Been saving it for myself.” But then he exhaled, and tried to get into the spirit. “Well, who knows, maybe they’ll start clearing out, now that we’ve stopped making so much goddamned noise ourselves.”

He blinked once, as screaming erupted behind them.

* * *

“You’ve got to hold him still!”

Now Yaz was having to perform surgery on a patient bucking in pain and trying to get free, or fly up off the deck entirely. He was also hollering like a banshee, so now Yaz could neither see nor think. He was vaguely aware of Blane also yelling, and within seconds more Marines arrived and draped themselves across Coulson and his flailing limbs.

“The leg! You’ve gotta keep the leg still!”

But even as Yaz said this, Coulson went limp and stopped moving – either he had passed out again, or he was dead, and Yaz didn’t have time to find out which. If he wasn’t already, he was going to be dead soon.

If Yaz didn’t get this done.

His first attempt to clamp the artery had been a disaster, turning a nicked blood vessel into a severed one. He’d tried to clamp it too close to the injury site, and what was left of the arterial wall tore completely – causing the artery to retract, slithering up into Coulson’s pelvis. And if Yaz couldn’t get to it in the next few seconds, the man was dead.

In desperation, he pulled his left hand clear of the wound, ripped the surgical glove off so he’d have some chance of feeling something, then stuck his bare left hand so far inside Coulson’s body he should have gotten consent first.

Deeper… deeper… and there it was.

He had the end of the severed artery between thumb and forefinger, and was just able to pull it into view, in the light over the incision. With his other hand, he applied the clamp. They were all covered in blood now, plus kneeling in a puddle of it.

But the flow had finally stopped.

Yaz had to remember to restart his breathing, before he took the ligature thread and started tying off the end of the artery. When he had it bound it up so tight it wouldn’t pass a subatomic particle, he slowly removed the clamp… and the ligature held. Then he shoved the tied-off artery back inside the wound. Numb, he grabbed the skin stapler, stapled up the gash, and finally got a fresh bandage wrapped around it.

With what strength he had left, he put his finger to Coulson’s neck. And he found a pulse. Weak and fast. But there. Then he leaned back, legs bent underneath him, looking like the death scene of Sergeant Elias in Platoon.

And he started to cry – from relief, plus exhaustion.

“Doc.” It was Blane again. Still speaking gently.

Yaz took a gigantic breath, and mastered himself. “Yeah.”

“How soon can we move him?”

Yaz shook his head. Jesus. “How long have we got?”

Blane’s dark look was not what Yaz was hoping to see.

Container

USS John F. Kennedy – Bridge

In all the tense silence on the Bridge, Commander Drake suddenly realized his radar/sonar operator was weeping. Quietly. But not quietly enough. When Drake looked around, he could see everyone else not looking at her.

That probably meant he’d been last to hear it.

He sighed and exhaled, then took a beat before reacting. It had been a hell of a day, like none they’d ever experienced, and Drake could understand the reaction. Still, he couldn’t allow a complete emotional breakdown of his bridge crew.

“Ensign Cohen,” he said. “Take ten.” He didn’t tell her to pull herself together, but hoped that would be inferred.

She took her headphones off, rose, turned to face him, and opened her mouth, evidently to protest. But in the second it took her to find her voice, Drake cut her off. “If we get engaged by any enemy warships tonight, this will be the unluckiest day in U.S. Naval history. Go. It’s fine.”

She nodded, and exited by the internal ladder.

Drake realized he could use a little air himself. “Conn,” he said. “You have the deck.” Then he got up and stepped to the external hatch, which led out to the little observation platform on the outside of this level of the island. He closed it behind him, and turned to face the ocean, and the night.

He looked left, at the great black curve of the Pacific, and the horizon. He didn’t want to look the other direction – back toward the fallen city, and their stranded Marines. It ravaged his soul to have left them out there on their own.

But he simply couldn’t risk the carrier by bringing back people who might be infected. He sighed and thought:

This isn’t the last time this is going to come up.

They were going to need some way of bringing people back in, when they’d been ashore and there was a risk they’d been exposed to the virus. They couldn’t simply banish and doom everyone. But their method had to be foolproof.

And then he cast his eye over the other ships of the strike group, all blacked out like the Kennedy, but still visible as hulking gray masses floating in the moonlight. He saw the two Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruisers… the three remaining destroyers, two Arleigh-Burkes and the last Zumwalt-class boat… and he also knew the USS Washington, their Los Angeles-class nuclear fast attack sub, was down there under the surface somewhere.

Finally, Drake’s eye fell on the chunky, oil-stained, and refinery-like shape of their humble oiler and supply ship. She was a dinged-up old sea dog, her hull laid down before the first Gulf War, and already scheduled for decommissioning and the scrap yard. But she’d been called out for one last assignment, serving the non-nuclear and less self-sufficient ships of the new Kennedy strike group.

The USS Rainier – a Supply-class fast combat support ship.

“Huh,” Commander Drake said out loud.

* * *

More wearied, more worn out, and with even sorer legs and feet, the same two NSF sailors stood guard on the back dock of the Kennedy in the moonlight.

Everyone in their department had been put on a twelve-hour shift pattern. In part this was because the Marines still hadn’t returned – and, without them, the strike group was less secure. In part it was because everything had gone completely to shit. But, like enlisted personnel everywhere, these two weren’t interested in the reasons for it.

Just annoyed by its effect on them personally.

“Fuuuckk…” the first one said. “We’re like a day into this apocalypse, and already working unpaid overtime.”

“The only easy day was yesterday,” the other said, employing the old SEAL mantra, but sarcastically.

“Yeah. That’s probably permanent now,” the first said. He meant their best days were probably behind them. He started stamping his feet to try to wake them up.

“Good morning, gentlemen.”

One of the two turned back to see who’d said this, but the other stayed facing out and just checked his watch. It was morning – very early morning, ass o’clock. But when his buddy elbowed him, he turned and saw… the Captain.

Both came to attention and saluted.

“As you were, gentlemen,” the Captain said. Then, hands clasped behind his back, he nodded up at the 30-foot utility boat that had been winched up out of the water over their heads, from the fantail deck. “I don’t suppose you know the range of the ship’s launch offhand?”

“I think about a hundred and fifty nautical miles, sir?”

The Captain continued to look up, as if possessed by some sense of longing, or something just eluded his grasp.

“Sir, if you need to go ashore, we can wake up a pilot and gunner for you.”

The Captain turned around again, but didn’t answer. Then he squinted, looking out past both sailors. The two of them stole a look. Nothing behind them but black ocean. Then they looked in at each other – was their CO losing it?

But then the Captain stepped forward, the other two parting to make way for him. Peering out into the blackness, he said, “There’s a vessel out there. Big one.”

When they turned to look, and squinted, they could just make it out – the faint twinkle of navigation lights, way down on the horizon, at the seam between sea and sky, flickering in and out. But growing steadier as they watched.

The Captain exhaled. “And she’s closing fast.”

* * *

Way up above them outside the island, Drake was now squinting in that direction himself, and wondering if he was seeing things. He’d just turned to take himself back inside, when the radioman stepped out and grabbed him.

“Commander, CIC asking for you.”

Drake followed him inside, then picked up a phone. “Bridge.”

“Commander.” It was Lieutenant Campbell again, seemingly eternal officer of the watch in CIC lately. “Your radarman up there IS seeing this, right?”

Drake looked over to the unmanned radar/sonar station, then steeled himself. “Seeing what, exactly?”

“Oh, goddammit, sir…”

Before Drake could flinch, he saw his radar operator stroll back in. He stabbed a finger at her, then down at her station. In three seconds she was back in her seat, headphones on – and shouting out reports.

“Surface contact! Range seven-point-four, north-northwest, absolute bearing twenty-one degrees. Closing fast!”

Goddammit, Drake thought, agreeing with the LT’s assessment – and remembering what he’d said about colossal bad luck when he gave the radar op that time off. He suddenly had a bad feeling that atrociously bad luck was going to be an abiding feature of their post-apocalyptic existence.

“Speed and heading?”

“Heading same as bearing, speed twenty-six knots. She’s cutting big holes in the water, especially something that size.”

“Radioman,” Drake said. “Got an AIS transponder signal?”

“Aye, sir. She’s giving us an IMO number, which shows as the CSCL Exodus. She’s a Panamax-class container ship, sir.”

“Why the hell is a container ship doing twenty-six knots?” Drake shook his head and took a breath. “Never mind, someone just please plot that thing’s course and tell me where the hell she’s going to end up.”

“Stand by, computing now,” Campbell said.

“And please don’t tell me it’s going to come through our anchorage.” The last thing Drake needed to do was to wake up everyone in the strike group and move them out of the way of another imminent and apocalyptic maritime disaster.

While he waited, he did math in his head. At 26 knots, she would cover a mile every two minutes, and was now probably no more than four miles out…

“Sending predicted course up to you now.”

Drake looked up to one of the displays, which lit up with a map of the San Francisco Bay and surrounding ocean. The seven remaining surface ships of the strike group showed as two rows of green rectangles. Out to sea to their northwest was a red triangle – usually the symbol for an enemy surface contact, but Drake figured it was close enough.

And then a line extended from the container ship, across the ocean to the north of the strike group, all the way in to shore. It missed the JFK and her support ships by at least a mile. But where it did impact… Campbell zoomed in the view at that point without having to be prompted. And what the detailed view showed simply beggared belief.

Bad luck didn’t even begin to cover it.

“Ohhh,” Drake muttered. “Just fuck me right in the ear.” Hearing himself say that out loud, he wondered if he’d been spending too much time around Fick. He shook his head and said, “This cannot be happening. Wait – how the hell is that even happening?”

The tactical officer picked that moment to start doing his job. “Sir, I’ve checked the voyage and passage plan filed by the container ship with the IMO… It looks like the south pylon of the Golden Gate Bridge is a common waypoint for container shipping by trans-Pacific routes.”

“What?”

“Then they manually correct course to enter the Bay.”

This was all like a bad fucking dream. Drake looked back to the radioman. “Hail the goddamned container ship.”

“Been doing it for the last minute. No response.”

“Keep trying. Radio, signal lights – and somebody get a semaphore team out on deck, just in case.” He took a breath. “And first things fucking last, hail the shore team. RFN.”

“Aye aye, sir, RFN…”

Drake shook his head.

He thought the news he had to deliver last time was bad.

Last Stand

CSCL Exodus – Bridge

Master Zhang was the son and grandson of mariners, a 30-year veteran of China Shipping Container Lines – and captain of the Exodus, a Panamax-class container ship. This designation meant she was able to pass through the Panama Canal. It also meant she was nearly 1,000 feet long, and could hold up to 120,000 tons of cargo. This was a lot of ship to control.

And now Zhang was finally back in control of it.

“Zuìhòu,” he said out loud. Finally.

He put his back against the sealed hatch. This left him facing the panoramic screens at the front of the bridge, which looked out from the top level of the wheelhouse, 200 feet above the sea they were cutting through at their top speed.

Zhang looked around and saw about a quarter of their crew of 41 up here with him – finally barricaded in a place that was safe, and from which they could control the ship. Not only was this the perfect place for their last stand.

But maybe one wouldn’t even be necessary.

Fighting their way back up here had been a close-run thing. And not everyone had made it. He looked down at the four unmoving bodies on the deck in here – and tried not to think about the original attack that had caused them to flee the bridge and lose control of the ship in the first place.

He nodded at the steward, who assisted the cook in the galley, but who was also the biggest man in the crew. He stood there, his thick chest heaving, holding a wooden belaying pin, an improvised club, which dripped with gore. This caused Zhang to look down at the identical item in his own hand. And then up again at the bosun, who carried a shotgun – the one firearm they went to sea with.

“No more shells?”

The bosun just pumped the slide. Nothing came out.

“It’s okay. We’re safe for now.” Zhang stepped over to the navigation console, and saw how close the port of San Francisco had gotten – and how fast they were closing the distance. Time must have blurred during the fight, and they’d been out of control longer than he thought. Also, part of the Golden Gate Bridge appeared to be missing, but he figured he wasn’t seeing that right. Moving to the helmsman’s station, he said, “I’m going to bring us to a stop, and drop anchor.”

But he found the steward advancing on him, raising his club.

“Out of my way,” Zhang said. “We’re out of time.”

“Please put that down, sir.”

Zhang looked down at the belaying pin in his hand, and then at the hand itself. The skin on it didn’t look the right color. And there was some kind of infected looking lesion forming on his arm. But before he could even say anything in his defense, or try to talk the steward down… the big man screamed and flailed as the bosun fell on him from behind, teeth buried in his neck.

“Mā de,” Zhang muttered, dropping the club.

Oh, shit.

Stand Or Fall

Fort Point – West Wall

“Go, go, go! We gotta move! Now!”

It wasn’t the LT doing the shouting. Getting the men up and moving was the job of senior NCOs. Dealing with higher command was his. Right now he was trying to hear his radio over the shouting. He was also trying to maintain something like calm in the midst of this whirlwind.

“Say again all after ETI!”

“Repeat, Reamer, that ship’s ETI your position is seven mikes! That’s four-two-zero seconds! Seven mikes!”

The LT considered that the JFK had given them an Estimated Time of Impact, rather than Arrival. That probably told him how they should be preparing for it – by getting the fuck out. He looked up to see someone else unaffected by the sudden swirling chaos – Fick, who was already rucked up, weapon in hand, and slapping backs and encouraging the younger, slower Marines to get the fuck moving.

When he had everyone in the vicinity in motion, Fick looked around and muttered, “So it’s a goddamned container ship, after all. Where’s that fucking prophet, Blaylock?” he barked. “Ima kill him. Then Ima skull fuck him.”

“No time, Master Guns,” the LT said, grabbing his own pack and weapon. “You can skull-fuck him later, if any of us live…”

* * *

“Wait, wait, wait!” Yaz shouted to Jenkins, Witek, and Commiskey, who’d just helped him get Coulson loaded onto the litter and strapped down, and were lifting him up at the corners. Yaz looked over to the nearest stairwell, the last Marines disappearing down it, and realized he’d never been inside one. “How narrow are those stairs?”

“Pretty narrow,” said Jenkins.

Yaz looked in the other direction, where Blane was pulling security for them, while they had their rifles slung to carry the wounded, making themselves vulnerable.

“Fuck,” Yaz said. “Hang on.”

“How long?” Witek asked.

It was a decent question. Yaz stole a look over the railing and down into the courtyard, where everyone else was already mustering, and stacking up to blast out the front door. Everyone but the six of them – plus Fick.

Yaz looked up to see the Master Guns standing tall on the west wall, overlooking the front door to the fort and the parking lot beyond – with his last rocket up on his shoulder. Yaz hoped he had some brilliant idea for using it to destroy, disperse, or distract the army of dead outside.

Because Yaz sure didn’t.

“Back in ten seconds,” he said, turning and sprinting to the stairwell door. Getting a light inside, he saw it was worse than he feared. Whatever accessibility guidelines they had when this place was built, the stairs were steep, narrow, and cramped, especially at the landings where they doubled back.

Racing back, he said, “Listen up. We can’t turn those corners with the litter. We’d either have to get Coulson off it, or turn him vertical. Either way he’s going to get the shit jarred out of him – and that’s before running across a mile of overrun beach. His breathing and pulse are marginal now, and I’m afraid it’ll kill him. We have to lower him down.”

He started gathering up lengths of the rescue rope, which had already been scavenged both to make the litter, and lash Coulson to it. He threw two ends over the side. One hit the floor with plenty of slack to spare. The other didn’t.

“Fuck.”

“Whatever you’re gonna do…” Witek said.

Yaz checked his watch, where he’d set a seven-minute timer – two minutes ago. He stood up, looked left, and found he could see shimmering lights to their west, between the parapet and the bridge overhead. It was the container ship.

The one with all their names on it.

He spun like a top when he felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Blane. “Hey,” he said. “Just take a beat, Doc. Breathe.”

Yaz couldn’t imagine they had time for that, but maybe Blane was right. God knew he trusted him.

“Listen to me,” Blane said. “We’re all getting out of here, okay? And we’re going to do it together. Stand or fall, live or die, we finish this day together. All of us. You got me?”

Yaz nodded and tried to get his breathing under control.

Then he got down on the deck, where Jenkins, without being told, was already turning one long length of rope, and one short one, into two medium ones.

Yaz’s hands shook as he tied knots.

* * *

“What’s the holdup?” Swett whispered to Lawton.

All of Team 1 and most of Team 2 were now just standing in the courtyard, in two files by the front door. Aside from the moaning behind it, the place was eerily quiet. Everyone in the military was used to hurry-up-and-wait – but this probably wasn’t the time for it. If reports were accurate, they were all going to be dead if they waited another five minutes.

“Pipe down,” Master Sergeant Saunders said, nodding up at the open night sky above them, and the upper level on the south side. “They’ve got to get Ice Cube down.”

This did shut them up. They all knew no one got left behind. Even if they did all die together in five minutes.

Still wordless, Swett and Lawton turned and looked at each other when they heard something squeak, or groan. Coming from above and left, on the north side, it sounded like a door hinge that badly needed oil.

And it sounded like it was coming from the second floor.

* * *

“Lift on three, two, one.”

Yaz and his stretcher bearers got Coulson up, but even with four of them, and his rifle taken off him, he was still heavy. He also looked paler than ever. The ropes were already tied off, but the hard part would be getting him out over the railing, and his weight onto the ropes.

They rested him on the railing, then wrapped the ropes around their fists and waists, taking the slack out. Again, Yaz said, “On three, two, one…”

And the litter and its payload hung out over open air.

The four of them started lowering, muscles straining.

* * *

“Hey, uh, Sarge…”

Lawton and Swett were already backing away from the north side of the courtyard, raising their rifles toward the second-floor railing on that side. But Saunders was way ahead of them, side-stepping and circling around, his own weapon trained on the empty space of an open doorway up there.

As the vibe of peril spread to the other Marines, they started to get their weapons up, none speaking or making noise. And then, totally casually, like he just wanted to see what was going on, a figure walked out of the blackness of the doorway, and stepped up to the railing. It looked around, head twitching.

Nobody below moved – or even breathed.

And then they all heard moaning – but from behind them. It was Coulson, being lowered down past the third floor. He was waking up.

And then he started freaking the fuck out.

* * *

“Fuck!” Yaz hissed. “Stop!”

Looking over the side and down at Coulson’s trussed-up form, Yaz could see his breathing was rapid and strained. And they could all hear him moaning, and then see and feel him bouncing, trying to tear himself free from the straps on the litter. It was the classic confusion and aggression from hypovolemic shock.

Yaz stole a glance at his watch – 00:04:06 to go. They were out of time for dealing with this, or trying it some other way.

“Fuck it, go, go, go!” he said, and they resumed lowering the bucking litter. They just had to hope Coulson stayed on the damned thing until they got it to the ground.

And that he didn’t end up on the ground before it did.

* * *

As the Marines below continued aiming and not breathing, pivoting from Coulson’s bouncing litter behind them to the second-floor walkway in front…

The corpse on the walkway raised its arms up – out toward Coulson on the opposite side. Leaning forward, bending at the waist, the lone dead guy tumbled over the railing and fell onto its face on the concrete floor below, hitting with a wet smack. Saunders advanced with his rifle aimed at what was left of its head, but gravity and concrete had done the job already.

However, it turned out this guy hadn’t come alone. He was just the ringleader. Two more followed him out that open door onto the walkway, and then also tumbled over the railing, causing every one of the Marines to shuffle backward – and Saunders to start shooting. But the dozens more behind those two didn’t tumble over the railing – they crashed straight through it, turning into a rotting flesh waterfall, cascading down into the open courtyard.

Retreating, shouting, self-organizing, the 22 Marines fanned out into an arc, and everyone started shooting, with what little ammo they had left. But they were almost instantly out of room to retreat, as the undead assault piled up faster than the Marines could put it down. It looked like everyone in the fort or its vicinity had barricaded themselves in on the second floor – and then had an outbreak inside.

The one damned floor they didn’t sweep and clear.

Soon the Marines were backed all they way up to the edge of the courtyard, by the stairwell door they’d just come down.

With Coulson coming down on their heads.

* * *

“Abort, abort, motherfuckers!”

This was Fick, shouting in Yaz’s ear. From where he stood, he could see it best – the courtyard was no longer anything like a secure position. They couldn’t drop a wounded Marine into a smash-mouth melee, with infection risk and close-quarters gunfire.

“Fuck,” Yaz said. “Stop lowering, stop!”

He and his three guys struggled against the weight and burn of the ropes, as they brought Coulson’s descent to a halt.

Now they were going to have to haul him back up. Somehow.

Yaz was glad he couldn’t rotate his left hand, to check the watch on the inside of his wrist. He didn’t want to know. He took a breath, planted his feet, and steeled himself to start hauling, not even sure the four of them could do the job. Then a new set of hands landed just ahead of his on the rope.

It was Blane. He was back.

* * *

One of the things veteran operators learn to do in a fight is resist target lock – seeing only the guy you’re shooting at. If you did that, sooner or later you were going to die – killed by your target’s buddy.

The one you never saw.

So Saunders saw not just the dead falling down and rushing them across the courtyard – but also the ones fast-stumbling around the perimeter of the second-floor walkway. Elevating his aim, he tracked them, but paused before firing, trying to figure out what the hell they were up to. As he pivoted left, following their path, he quickly understood.

They were headed for Coulson.

Who was hanging there, stopped right at the level of the second floor – strapped to his litter.

Shit.

Saunders started firing.

Blackness

Fort Point – Second-Floor Walkway

Blackness. Fog. Terrible pain. Some kind of nightmare urgency.

“Gotta get out. Gotta go, gotta go…”

Something was pinning him down, squeezing him, and he couldn’t breathe. Trapped in some nightmare apparatus, he couldn’t wake up, or get free. And then he heard something.

The pounding of footsteps. And then moaning, wheezing.

Growing louder, and closer.

Sergeant Brandon “Ice Cube” Coulson steeled himself, tightening every sinew of his sculpted body and well-honed mind. Despite the fog that enveloped him, he knew somehow he had to get himself operational again.

And, mainly, he had to keep his cool.

Finally his eyelids levered open, and he sucked in life-giving oxygen. He was hanging in open air, in darkness. And, sure enough, something was squeezing him, and holding him down.

Namely ropes.

He could also hear a chorus of nonstop gunfire from below. But he didn’t have time to figure out he was suspended in midair on a half-assed improvised gurney. Because that’s when the first lurching figures reached him, shoving their way down the external walkway alongside him, arms outstretched, reaching through the railing to grab and devour him.

Where he lay helpless and trussed-up, like a spider’s lunch.

Coulson had no idea where his rifle was, an unthinkable situation for a Marine, so instead he pressed his right arm in close to his body and slid it upward, until his hand touched the M17 in his drop-leg holster.

Thank fuck for that, he thought.

He got it clear, brought it around across his body, and started triggering off. Gray-green heads, with their ravening mouths, black teeth, and gelatinous eyes, loomed so close he couldn’t miss. Also thank fuck, the contents of those heads exploded away from him, splashing chunky brain soup over the walkway, the wall behind it, and the figures in between.

In four seconds, he’d emptied all 21 rounds in the extended mag, but had cleared the immediate area of threats. “Ha,” he said. “Don’t fuck with the Ice Cube, punks. Three words, fo yo face: bitch, I op-er-ate…”

But then he added: “Oh, shit.”

More shambling corpses were already moving in to take the place of the ones he’d shot, looking to make a meal out of him. And with only one hand free, there was no way he was going to be able reload his weapon.

And that’s when he started rising again, hauled up into the air in staggered but strong bursts. Even as he rose past the second level toward the third, he felt hands scrabbling on the bottom of whatever the hell he was strapped to…

And then he blacked out again.

* * *

“Christ, it’s like they set a fucking ambush for us!” Brady yelled, firing his primary weapon dry, then switching to secondary almost without pausing, while still backing up, shoulder-to-shoulder with Reyes, both moving in lockstep.

“How the hell can they set an ambush?” Reyes yelled back. “They’re fucking zombies!”

“Ah, goddammit,” Graybeard said. “Now you’ve done it.”

“Done what?”

“Said the fucking zee-word.”

“The fucking what?”

“Fucking… Zulu. Can we just call ’em Zulus? Please?”

“Sure,” Reyes said, as he also transitioned to secondary. “How can they set an ambush? They’re fucking… Zulus.”

While swapping pistol mags, Brady also swapped voices, to a familiar one. “How can they kill the lights? They’re fucking animals, man!”

“Displace!” the LT yelled over the chaos. “Back up top! Go!”

None of the others needed to be told why.

The courtyard was being overrun.

Their position was lost.

* * *

Yaz and the others had just finished hauling Coulson back up over the railing and got him down on the deck again, when the stairwell door banged open, and the rest of the Marines started spilling back out of it, coming right back to where they’d started.

Swallowing hard, Yaz went ahead and checked the timer on his watch. It now read 00:01:32, the seconds ticking down.

He felt more than saw Blane standing beside him. And when he stood up, and looked out in the same direction as him, through the space between the east parapet, and the bridge above, to the ocean beyond…

The container ship was not just visible, but unmissable.

It was all but on top of them now.

“Big bastard,” Blane said. It was hard not to be in awe of it. Even if it was the white whale about to destroy not their whaler, but the whole building they were standing on top of.

“Hey,” Jenkins said. “Shouldn’t we get on the inland side? Farthest away from the impact point?”

“Nah,” Brady said. “We’ll just get knocked off into the parking lot, where the biggest concentration of dead is.”

Yaz racked his brain for some other solution, some kind of a way out of there. Down in the courtyard, they’d be safe from falling off the walls when they collapsed – but would get infected or eaten by the dead who had the run of the place. If they went inside, down to a lower level, they’d just get crushed to death by falling bricks.

Where they were, they might at least die a little later.

Yaz felt someone else behind him, and turned to see it was Fick – staring in the same direction, but through a pair of NV binoculars. “Jesus,” he said. “Who is this fucking guy?”

Yaz took the binos from him, and looked out. As close as it was now, with the navigation lights on her 150-foot-wide hull, the container ship wasn’t hard to find. With a little adjustment, he located the wheelhouse, and then the bridge at the top, 200 feet above the water. And there was somebody standing at the helm.

He was just dead. Staring out the front screens.

I can’t believe I just saw that, Yaz thought. The face of the dead man who’s about to kill us all.

Unbelievably, it did look like the ship’s prow was pointed right at the middle of the viaduct arch – and the fort which lay beneath it at water’s edge. The ship might seriously take out both bridge and fort at once. It all depended on how far it plowed through before stopping. There was no way to tell.

No one there had ever seen anything like this happen.

No one anywhere had.

Finally, the last of the Marines emerged up top, slamming the door behind them. Now they were all trapped up on this rooftop together, surrounded on all sides by the dead, with absolutely nowhere to go.

And 220,000 tons of container ship coming at them.

* * *

“Give me a hand!”

This was the LT, who’d been last out this time. He was growing into his role – probably just in time to die in it. Now he was gathering up the ropes they’d used to lower Coulson, and tying them off on the outside railing.

“We’re gonna rope down!” he shouted. “Outside!

Other Marines moved to assist him, but Yaz just went to the outside parapet and looked down. On this side, the south one, like the seaward one to the west, there was only a narrow strip of land below, bordered by cliffs rather than the sea. And, like everyplace else, it was filled with the dead.

Maybe they could survive dropping down there, and maybe even fight their way out again by scaling the cliffs. But they weren’t going to have time to get clear before the tanker hit, or even to get everyone down first. Nonetheless, the first pair of Marines got into position to rope down. Yaz wondered if they’d even be willing to leave the others.

They sure hadn’t been before.

He looked around and spotted Blane, helping others, in no hurry himself to get on the ropes. And it looked like he’d been wrong after all. They weren’t going to finish this together. Some of them were going to die down there, others up here. And it wouldn’t be standing, or living – but falling, and dying.

Definitely falling.

With the few seconds he figured he had left in his life, Yaz looked up to the sky – but saw only the elaborate latticework of the arch overhead. They were in the middle of the south wall, so still slightly under the bridge. But when he turned east and looked out and up…

He could see the dazzling dome of the night sky.

And what he felt in that moment was… an enormous sense of peace. He was happy for this beautiful cosmos of light to be the last thing he saw. It looked like he wasn’t going to get out of there alive after all. None of them were.

But it didn’t matter. Not now. Not really.

He looked over and saw Fick had the rocket launcher back up on his shoulder, now pointed down over the edge of walls. The first two ropers were slinging themselves out over the edge, waiting for Fick to clear a tiny area below first.

But then, in the last fifteen seconds before the ship was going to hit, something tickled at Yaz’s awareness. He remembered the binos were still in his hand, so he raised them and took another look out. Then he shouted:

“Stop! Wait!”

Fick looked over, his finger twitching on the trigger of the rocket, obviously relishing an act of wanton destruction as his final scene. Not going out like a punk.

“Go!” the LT shouted at Fick and the ropers, intent on saving anyone he could.

“No, wait,” Blane said, looking over to Yaz.

Yaz pointed at the swelling lights to the west. “The height of the ship’s main deck – it’s nearly the same as the walls of the fort. It’s also going to plow over all the dead on that side.”

“What the hell are you suggesting?” the LT said. “That we fight our way out over the top of the container ship?”

“Huh,” Fick said, squinting. “Wisconsin might have a point. A completely fucked-up one. But a point. It’s definitely the most batshit-crazy idea he’s had since roping down here.”

“Which also saved our asses,” Blane said. “Say we’re able to climb onto the deck of the ship when it hits. What then?”

“Get to the stern,” Yaz said. “Jump off and swim for it.”

“Yeah?” Reyes asked. “What if we don’t know how to swim?”

Fick said, “Then I suggest you hold your breath and run like hell when you get to the bottom. Any other questions?”

“Here she comes!” someone shouted.

It looked like they were doing it Yaz’s way. They were out of time for anything else.

“Fucking hang on!”

“Brace for impact, bitches!”

Everyone got down on the deck, which bounced and shuddered as the hull of the 220,000-ton ship drove through the bank and crashed into the west side of the fort.

Yaz, down on the deck with the others, looked over and saw his helmet. He’d never remembered to put it back on.

He looked up again at the cataclysmic thunder and shriek of the ship’s prow peeling open the west wall of the fort – and right behind it, the stacked-up mountain of containers crashing into the steel latticework of the arch overhead.

The struts bent, warped, and compressed, and Yaz heard the shriek of tearing metal. He was vaguely aware of Marines around him dashing out from under the bridge, into open air to the east – and then he saw something blurring down out of the blackness, coming at his head.

But he stayed where he was – hunched over Coulson, shielding the wounded Marine’s body with his own.

And then… blackness.

Bulldogs on Meth

USS John F. Kennedy – Bridge

“You seeing this shit, Commander?”

Drake realized he was going to have to reel his jaw in to answer. But there was no way he could tear his eyes from the drone video on the screen. “Seeing it. Not believing it.”

No one else on the bridge spoke. Everyone stared.

Drake said, “Those crazy-ass sonofabitching jarheads. I don’t even know whether that’s pure genius, or total madness.”

“Me, neither,” Campbell said from CIC. “But I know one thing. Those Marine Raiders fight like bulldogs on meth.”

Drake shook his head to clear it, and looked to the radioman. “Get me Doc Walker in the hospital. Tell her I’m coming down.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“And tell them to get the ship’s launch prepped for us.”

“Roger that, sir. But – where are you going?”

Drake was already up out of the captain’s chair, and moving across the bridge toward the inside ladder.

“Not far.”

Never Let Go

Pacific Ocean – Two Miles West of the Golden Gate

Blackness. Fog. And terrible pain. But no urgency.

Just peace. And comfort, and care. And no particular hurry. Yaz was happy to stay where he was. It was comfortable. It was safe. And something was soothing him, some kind of gentle motion. And then… a voice.

“Never give up.”

He drew in a deep breath of cool air. It tasted of salt.

“Never give up, Rose.”

He slowly opened his eyes. It was still dark. But he wasn’t in his rack. Whatever he was lying on was hard. And wet.

And then the headache kicked in – like Armageddon. Was he hungover? He had no idea. Then the voice again:

“You must promise me, Rose. That you’ll survive. That you won’t give up. No matter what happens.”

Yaz looked around. For the first time he saw where he was – out on the surface of the ocean. He was lying on something, floating on it. Maybe a wooden door? Reaching down for reserves of strength, he levered his head up, and looked down his body. There was a face between his feet.

Fucking Brady.

“Promise me now, Rose,” he said. “And never let go of the promise.” He paused to spit water through pursed lips. He was holding on to the end of the door, body stretched out behind, kicking. He was propelling them both. “Never let go.”

“Goddammit,” Yaz said, letting his head fall back – which almost caused him to holler in pain. He put his hand to the top of his head, and found it was definitely not the right shape up there. It was like someone had inserted a softball between his scalp and his skull. And the pain, oh God, the pain…

But then he heard other voices rise in a chorus, from all sides of him: “Say it!”

“Say the goddamned words!”

“Say the words!”

Yaz managed to raise his head again, enough to scan the area. All around him, starlight twinkled on the wave tips. And all around him in the water were Marines. Most held onto other pieces of flotsam and kicked, while others just free-swam, doing a combat side stroke. At least two that he could see had life preservers, with the words CSCL Exodus printed on them.

To his left was another floating door.

And on that one was Coulson. With Reyes at the back, kicking them both forward.

Nearby was Blane, just swimming himself along. Looking at him in amazement, Yaz said, “You carried me out of there.”

“Of course we did. I told you all along – we’d finish it together.”

“Say it!”

“Say the goddamned words!”

Yaz lowered his head, gently this time. Finally, he said:

“I will never let go, Jack.”

And then he passed out again. To the sound of wild cheers.

* * *

When he levered his eyes open again, it was no longer pitch black. The air around them glowed with the first light of dawn. No one was cheering now, but he did hear voices.

Including a very angry one – belonging to Fick.

“Oh, yeah? And who the fuck says we can’t?”

“The Master-at-Arms of the boat – on orders from the XO.”

As Yaz’s vision slowly came into focus, he saw some kind of gargantuan presence towering over them. Looking up, he saw it was the soaring stern of a nuclear supercarrier.

It was the USS John F. Kennedy.

They were all floating a few meters off her rear dock.

All except Fick – who was trying to climb up onto it. But two armed sailors were beating him off with rowing oars.

“Sorry, Master Guns. It’s nothing personal.”

“You motherfuckers!” Fick said.

“Copy that,” the first sailor said, hanging on to the oar – while the other pointed his rifle down at the water. “Nonetheless, our orders are to let no one aboard this vessel. If you persist, we will fire on you. But there’s a nice quarantine facility being set up for you right now on the Rainier, including medical facilities for your wounded. Commander Drake and Doc Walker are overseeing it themselves. You’ll find that vessel a mere 300 meters to your north. Swim safe now.”

The second man lowered his weapon. “We’re glad you maniacs made it back. After all.”

“Goddammit,” Fick said, spitting out water.

“Sorry, devil dogs,” the first one said, as Fick pushed off and swam away from the dock. “Shit happens in the Zulu Alpha.”

Graybeard laughed and said, “Well, that caught on fast.”

Brady said, “You’re an influencer, man. Can I get your Instagram?” But as he started kicking again, pushing Yaz ahead, one last stretch to hump after running and gunning all night, he shook his head and said, “Yep. Semper Penis.”

“Definitely,” Reyes said. “Semper Penis.”

Yaz found the energy to lever his head up again – and for the first time noticed all of the Marines had shed their vests, but still had rifle slings around their necks.

With their weapons trailing behind them in the water.

They’d been swimming for their lives and still managed to hang on to their rifles. But then he remembered the Rifleman’s Creed, which all Marines lived by: Without me, my rifle is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless.

Patting around beside him on the door, he found his own weapon. Someone had gotten it out, along with him. And when he spotted Fick, he still had his M-16 with underslung shotgun. Feeling his gaze on him, Fick said, “Well, where the hell do you think I’m gonna find another one of these?”

“Vietnam War Museum, maybe,” Reyes said.

“Very fucking funny,” Fick grunted. “Anyway, I’d sooner leave my gigantic cock behind than my primary weapon.”

Brady said, “I thought that was your primary weapon.”

“Don’t make me beat you to death with it.”

It hurt too much to laugh, so Yaz just lay back again, his eyelids turning to steel shutters, and unconsciousness, or maybe just sleep, reaching up to envelop him. The last thing he saw was the brilliant flash of the first sunlight skittering across the water.

It was finally dawn. They’d made it through the night.

But the long night of the ZA had only just begun.

ARISEN : Raiders, Volume 2 - Tribes

is AVAILABLE NOW

Yes, you read that right: two new ARISEN : Raiders books in a month. Because you readers are (still!) awesome and I love you. Continue the adventure now! - Michael

The Zulu Alpha, and the world’s greatest military ZA adventure, start for real in:

ARISEN, BOOK ONE – FORTRESS BRITAIN.

Love this book? Share the love, support independent authors, and make me your best friend forever by posting a quick review on Amazon.   Thanks!

Want to be alerted when the next ARISEN book is released? Sign up for e-mail alerts at www.zulualpha.co.uk/alerts and we’ll keep you updated. (And we’ll never share your address or use it for anything else.)

You can also interact with other ARISEN readers, plus the author himself, by liking the ARISEN Facebook page – and/or joining the ARISEN Series Fan Community.

And you can follow Michael on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or by e-mail.

Meanwhile, come back and live through the beginning of the end of the world in
ARISEN : Genesis, the pulse-pounding and bestselling first ARISEN prequel.

And then live through it again, except harder and faster, with the SF soldiers of Triple Nickel.
ARISEN : Nemesis.

Salvation. Vengeance. Vanity.
NEMESIS

With ENDGAME, the climax & conclusion of the ARISEN epic, the main series is complete. But…

The story doesn’t end here. Across the entire overrun world, two whole years of ZA remain to be explored, and many of your favorite heroes will return, in forthcoming prequels and spin-off mini-series, including:

ARISEN : Raiders
and
ARISEN : Operators

To be alerted when these adventures are available sign up for e-mail alerts, like the ARISEN Facebook page, and follow @theZuluAlpha on Twitter.

Thanks & Acknowledgements

Huge thanks and a gigantic fist-bump to the amazing Straight 8 Custom Photography for the complete and total asskicking cover image for this one.

Oceans of effusive thanks to J. Wesley Johnson, and especially Rob Griess, as well a few other ARISEN readers, all of whom have served in uniform, for so many of the awesome new Fickisms! You rock. And you are all part of Fick now. :)

Thanks and next shot of Jameson’s on me to Pual Trjeo for the bit about how the first task of combat medicine is always to remove the source of the original injury, plus probably a lot of other fantastic s&^% I’ve forgotten. Stay safe, brother.

Three works of genius that contributed greatly to the production of this work were:

- Craig Mazen’s masterclass on thematic structure, “How to Write a Movie” in ScriptNotes Episode 403;

- William S. Martell’s magisterial (and eerily similar) bluebook
Outlines And The Thematic Method; and

- Medal of Honor recipient Clint Romesha’s life-changingly thrilling Red Platoon: A True Story of American Valor (which I talk about a lot more at the back of ARISEN : Last Stand).

As so often before, a playlist for the music used to write this (and the next) book will be included in the back of the next one. :)

ARISEN
Hope Never Dies.

Fans call the bestselling and top-ranked ARISEN series: “thoroughly engrossing, taking you on a wild ride through utter devastation” … “the best post-apocalyptic military fiction there is” … “Wall to wall adrenaline - edge of your seat unputdownable until the very last page” … “the most amazing and intense battle scenes you've ever experienced” … “rolls along like an out of control freight train” … “They grab you on the first page and kick your ass through the entire series” … “insane propulsive storytelling” … “the most harrowing, sustained action sequences I think I've ever read” … “the wildest and best rollercoaster I've ever been on” … “A one-of-a-kind ZA opus. The indomitable warrior spirit shines through from start to finish” … “You feel like the explosions are going off beside your head” … “you never know what the hell is coming at you next” … “Every time I think it cannot get any better, BAM!” … “Blows World War Z out of the water” … “The Game of Thrones of the Zombie Apocalypse” … “not only the best zombie apocalypse series in print, it's also better than any military classic written by Clancy, Coyle or Poyer” … “the new Gold Standard - by far the most thoughtful and intriguing zombie series ever written” … “Like a Michael Bay movie on steroids” … “by far the best-written most intense series I've encountered” … “like trying to ride a bronco in a tornado” … “roars out of the gate at 200mph and just keeps going” … “I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO SAY ANYMORE!!! I JUST DON’T - This is the best military fiction series ever written! Hands down” … “If you haven't read these you need to reevaluate your life” … “A work of art - a beautiful, smart, tension-filled experience that will leave you both exhausted and grateful, filled with such astonishing richness and depth” … “dials the volume to the point of annihilating the sound system” … “A superb ending to an absolutely mesmerizing and phenomenal series. This was an experience I'll never forget.”

They are the most capable, committed, and indispensable counter-terrorist operators in the world.
They have no rivals for skill, speed, ferocity, intelligence, flexibility, and sheer resolve.
Somewhere in the world, things are going horrifyingly wrong…

Readers call the D-BOYS series “a high-octane adrenaline-fueled action thrill-ride”, “one of the best action thrillers of the year (or any year for that matter)”, “a riveting, fast paced classic!!”, “pure action”, “The Best Techno Military Thriller I have read!”, “Awesome!”, “Gripping”, “Edge of your seat action”, “Kick butt in the most serious of ways and a thrill to read”, “What a wild ride!!! I simply could not put this book down”, “has a real humanity and philosophical side as well”, “a truly fast action, high octane book”, “Up there with Clancy and W.E.B. Griffin”, “one of the best Spec Ops reads I have run into”, and “hi-tech and action in one well-rounded explosive thriller.”