Arisen, Book Four - Maximum Violence
Author: Glynn James; Michael Stephen Fuchs
Date: 2014-07-24 16:36:13+00:00
Keywords: techno-thriller; Increment; Zombies; SEAL Team Six; Delta Force; serial fiction; Hereford; supercarrier; high-tech weapons; Horror; SAS; naval adventure; Special Operations; spec-ops; dystopian fictio
Description: Readers can't stop raving about ARISEN: "heart-stopping" ... "Knock Down Drag Out FANTASTIC!!!!!!" ... "left me with my mouth hanging open" ... "scary good" ... "the most original and well-written zombie novels I have ever read" ... "riveting as hell - I cannot recommend this series enough" ... "gets better and better with each book" ... "kick-ass crazy" ... "harrowing, riveting, and authentic" ... "Wow. Just wow. " ... "Fantastic thrill ride into chaos!!! Just amps up the action" ... "one badass unstoppable bullet train ride"Over a half-million ARISEN books sold, with a 4.7/5.0-★ average on o
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

A world fallen – under a plague of 7 billion walking dead
A tiny island nation – the last refuge of the living
One team – of the world’s most elite special operators
The dead, these heroes, humanity’s last hope, all have…

First published 2013 by Glynn James & Michael Stephen Fuchs
London, UK

Copyright © Glynn James & Michael Stephen Fuchs

The right of Glynn James & Michael Stephen Fuchs to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them 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 authors’ imaginations 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 authors. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

About the Authors

GLYNN JAMES, born in Wellingborough, England in 1972, is a bestselling author of dark sci-fi novels. He has an obsession with anything to do with zombies, Cthulhu mythos, and post-apocalyptic and dystopian fiction and films, all of which began when he started reading HP Lovecraft and Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend back when he was eight years old. In addition to co-authoring the bestselling ARISEN books, he is the author of the bestselling DIARY OF THE DISPLACED series. More info on his writing and projects can be found at www.glynnjames.co.uk.

MICHAEL STEPHEN FUCHS, in addition to co-authoring the ARISEN series with Glynn, wrote the bestselling prequel ARISEN : GENESIS. He is also author of the D-BOYS series of high-concept, high-tech special-operations military adventure novels, which include D-BOYS, COUNTER-ASSAULT, and CLOSE QUARTERS BATTLE (coming later in 2013); as well as the acclaimed 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.

Notes from the Authors

Glynn
Since Michael (to follow) addresses questions about nationality and its influence on the books, I figured I may as well approach a different topic – how this all works and how we put it all together. We write online, most of the time, but we don’t usually write on the same page or at the same time. We work on our own chapters, and we butcher each other’s work mercilessly with Michael covering the military aspects and constantly correcting my misuses, whereas I add the horror and chill factor, where needed, and remove military acronyms that I need to use Google for. You have no idea how much I’ve learned writing alongside Michael – whose military knowledge never fails to amaze me. The wonderful thing about writing the books the way we do is that although we do extensive planning and brainstorming, neither of us is frightened of throwing in something completely new just because we decided it was cool and it fitted at the time. It means that even though we are both writing the book, we get to discover things about the Arisen world that neither of us knew.

Michael
I’d just like to take a second to address some speculation about my nationality. I’m American! And, yes, I’m also British. Proudly so on both counts. But I was born American, and naturalized as British, and was the former for a long time before the latter. I probably remain a bit more American in outlook and politics, if not in temperament and style. It’s also worth noting that Glynn and I have consciously decided to use American spelling and usage throughout the books, basically as a nod to the relative sizes of the markets. Military terminology, slang, and kit – excuse me, gear – also tends largely to be of American vintage, with the notable exception of the Royal Marines under Glynn’s command, and a certain flinty Yorkshireman in Alpha. Speaking of Glynn: I think he’s really taken his game to a new level on this book. While I’ve been learning horror, he’s seriously been mastering action – or as I put it in one of our chats, after reading one of his Canterbury chapters: “You’ve clearly been taking yourself to Crazy-Ass Over-the-Top Action School!” And it’s worked. Oh, one of us should also probably mention: yeah, originally Book Four was going to be called Exodus. But what we discovered on the path was that the various Egypts in which our people were stuck were not quite ready to let them go. But you can all look forward to freedom (of a sort) for everyone in Book Five. Lastly, and as always, thanks very, very much indeed to everyone who has bought, read, reviewed, written in, and so generously and enthusiastically supported the series – for spending your time, money, and emotional energy on our characters and their stories.

ARISEN

BOOK FOUR

MAXIMUM VIOLENCE

GLYNN JAMES &
MICHAEL STEPHEN FUCHS

“But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.”
– Revelation 21:8

“Hell is not the place of evil; rather, Hell is the absence of any standards at all.”
– Kenneth Tynan

A Girl I Once Knew

Canterbury

The sound of ten thousand dead feet on concrete.

A city as old as civilization itself, drawing its last breath.

And being devoured by darkness from within.

Deep amidst the chaos, First Lieutenant Jameson – Officer Commanding, One Troop, 42 Royal Marine Commando – popped the magazine from his L85A2 assault rifle and replaced it with another in less than two seconds. Ten seconds later he would do exactly the same again.

Beside him, Staff Sergeant Eli – his troop first sergeant and perennial point man – followed like clockwork, as always. They never reloaded at the same time, never allowing a single instant when neither of their guns was on the enemy. If they did that, if they slipped, it could all fall apart in an eye blink.

Something registered in Jameson’s vision, some movement, to the left, behind a car that was too close to the squad. A blur of something that he couldn’t lock onto.

Fast movement.

Too fast.

A runner.

The creature darted out from the gap in the parked cars, ignoring the debris that littered the road and blocked its path, and closed the distance before any of the squad could bring their rifles to bear. It lunged toward Eli, ravaged and bloodstained hands reaching out, broken and jagged teeth gleaming in the failing light as it closed in— and met Eli’s boot with its face. Even over the roar of gunfire and the moaning of the dead, Jameson heard the crunch as the runner’s jaw smashed. It fell back through open air, carried by the force of that kick, arms flailing and grasping at anything living that might come within reach. But nothing did, and it fell directly beneath Jameson’s weapon. He fired and the creature’s face exploded, a black cloud of blood and bone fragments spraying the street behind him – and splashing the feet of two more zombies that even then heedlessly lumbered forward.

So far, this pair had by freak chance avoided the storm of bullets that lashed the streets – or at any rate their heads had avoided it. Now they went down as Jameson swept his weapon in a tight arc, squeezing off rapid single shots. The assault rifle kicked with each report, a short sharp recoil that he had always found reassuring, a reminder of the deadly intent of the weapon.

“Tighten up,” said Jameson, ignoring the petulant glance from Eli in response. He had a huge amount of respect for the skinny bald guy, but was constantly battling with the man’s ego. Sometimes Jameson wondered who really was in charge of One Troop, and doubted it was him.

He glanced behind him, double-checking the positions of his Marines. They were back together now, all three squads. Elson and Travis, the leaders of One Troop’s second and third squads, had led their men along the streets parallel to the main road, where they ran into heavy opposition – much more than had first squad, with Jameson at its head, on their line of attack. The momentum of the other squads had slowed badly, but finally they had converged at a roundabout, all thirty-six Royal Marines still standing. Though some looked a lot less happy about life than they had a few hours ago.

Jameson wasn’t exactly over the moon himself. He knew this roundabout well, just as he knew all of the streets that surrounded them. But they’d looked a hell of a lot better when last he saw them. Jameson was back in his hometown, where he’d lived as a boy – but under circumstances he couldn’t have imagined even a few hours ago, let alone wished for. And the macabre homecoming was producing a lot of unruly emotions in him that, right now, he needed to get under wraps. Because he had a job to do. And a great many lives hung in the balance.

As the street opened up into the big traffic circle, there was too much ground to cover to double up, so instead Jameson put the entire unit shoulder-to-shoulder in a single rank, like a firing squad, barring the way of the masses of dead that now seemed to spew out of every alley and doorway. They held this line so that those civilians who had managed to keep their doors barricaded, and thus keep the dead out, could now escape to the rear, up the street and away.

Jameson was surprised at how many were still standing, but he knew that not all of them would live out the day. Many would already be infected, and the checkpoint at the outskirts of town would deal with those. They would never leave this place alive. Some might try to sneak past, or to conceal wounds, but the inspection teams were just too damn good at their jobs. They’d been burnt before.

“Fuck me sideways!” shouted Eli as he stepped back into formation. “Where did all these come from?”

Jameson had no answer for this. How so many could be turned so quickly was something else new, another game-changer. Now a steady tide of the dead made their way toward them from the surrounding streets, and the piles of bodies grew so that even the dead needed to climb over them.

Jameson’s focus moved to one of the fallen corpses across the road, one someone else had already put down. It lay twenty feet from a military all-terrain vehicle that sat abandoned at the curb. When the Marines first took the roundabout, Jameson had noticed three dead soldiers near the vehicle, with a large number of fallen zombies surrounding them. But he hadn’t noticed this lone figure laid out on its back, bang in the middle of the road. He couldn’t initially work out what was different about this one, what made it stand out among so many others.

And then it hit him: it was much older. Its clothing, what remained, was shredded and faded, the flesh beneath much more pallid and rotten than the recently turned creatures overrunning the town. Its body was bloated and puffy, like a corpse that had been submerged in water for days, or even months.

Jameson’s eyes widened as he got it.

This was the one that broke out from the Channel Tunnel.

It had to be. None of the others looked like they had been wandering around a sewer – or a flooded underground tunnel – for two years. Every other walking abomination was covered with fresh wounds and still-drying blood.

Jameson continued to fire rhythmically, thirty rounds out, then reload. Repeat. But his mind reeled at the knowledge, or presumption, that he had just gained. The Typhoid Mary of this outbreak had been put down – or at least one of them had. Jameson, and CentCom for that matter, had no idea whether there were others; but they knew for sure that at least one had escaped the net around Folkestone. And here one of them lay. It had evidently been killed by these fallen soldiers, now lying in pieces near their vehicle, before they were overwhelmed by the many offspring the first had spawned.

This was critical intel. Jameson keyed his radio.

“Central, this is One Troop Actual, message over.” He reached to slightly adjust the mic that curled around the side of his helmet.

Gunfire continued to erupt around him, the Marines’ three dozen assault rifles drowning out almost all ambient noise. And still the dead came staggering toward them, drawn by the noise of the battle that echoed across Canterbury louder even than the warning sirens that blared overhead.

“Central, send over,” came the voice, after some delay, at the other end.

Jameson coughed. The air was cold but dry, and he was breathing heavily. “Be advised: suspected Tunnel target located and down. I repeat: Tunnel target is KIA, over.”

“Acknowledged, One Troop. Send mission sitrep, over.” This was the comms officer of the watch, a man who would be sitting in an office somewhere in London and miles away from the danger surging around the troop of Marines.

Jameson sighed and pulled his weapon in tighter to his shoulder, snapping off three rounds in quick succession. The dead seemed to be increasing in number rather than dwindling. How many more survivors would they actually be able to help escape before the hammer came down? Before those in charge decided it was too late to control the outbreak, and the only choice was to flatten it all.

Pretty damned soon, was Jameson’s guess in the matter. And, ultimately, as the man on the ground, it was down to him to advise CentCom – to report that his own hometown was now beyond saving. The people in power, sitting in their clean offices far away, might be the ones that made the final decision to bomb an entire city. But it was still down to him as team leader of the expeditionary force, stuck in the middle of it all, to tell them it was time.

But would he be able to make that call? Yes. He had to.

“Our situation is that we have an escalating outbreak. OOC. I repeat. The outbreak is out of control. Over.” As he said it, his heart felt as if it were sinking.

He took down two more zombies, both of them formerly young people – students judging by their jeans and the rucksacks that still hung on their backs. These two wouldn’t even know what a textbook was now. Around him One Troop continued to drop the enemy, perhaps twenty or thirty falling every minute.

Yet still they came, and the tide was growing.

“One Troop, stand by for op order,” came the cool voice crackling down the line.

“Roger that, standing by,” replied Jameson, and swung his rifle ten degrees to his left, where he clocked a large group of dead surging forward from behind the trees that lined the roundabout. He squeezed his trigger, taking three… four… five of them in succession. He counted himself lucky that virtually all of those they had encountered so far were the slow-movers. That was one nice thing about a fresh outbreak, he supposed.

But as he lowered his rifle, he saw that the last of his targets had staggered back but only been grazed in the head, the shot missing the brainstem. He sighted in again, carefully settling his red-dot sight on the chin point. But then he hesitated, nearly frozen, as the dead thing’s features resolved in his vision… the nose, the auburn hair, and even a tiny scar above the right eye.

It was a face he recognized, and for a few seconds he ceased to function as all he could do was stare into the dead eyes of his cousin Angela. A rush of memories flashed through his mind, of the times they had played together in his uncle’s backyard, when they had been just little kids. Jameson had sworn that he would marry her one day, back when such things seemed uncomplicated, and all that troubled their young minds was how they would spend their Saturday, or if they might miss their favorite TV program.

Jameson’s heart thumped in his chest as he balked at the task that faced him now – that of putting down the remains of what had once been such a wonderful human being.

But then she was gone, taken from this world in an instant as Eli unleashed a volley of full-auto fire across the renewed mass of bodies surging from the treeline.

Jameson snapped back to the present, even though his heart now ached with terrible regret. Now was no time to fall into some nostalgic stupor. He knew that among the swelling ranks of the dead, drawn from all over the city by the noise of their heavy small-arms fire, there might be any number he had once known. Over and over he told himself: They are gone now. They are gone now. These were not the people he remembered. And the best he could do for them now was to help them pass into the next life, help them to escape.

A noise was sounding in his ear, his headset buzzing and hissing. Finally, a voice resolved and spoke to him, but for a few seconds he was too locked into the battle to make it out.

“One Troop, message. One Troop, radio check.”

“One Troop here, send over,” said Jameson, his voice now hoarse.

“Stand by for new target location, over,” said the barely audible voice of the CentCom operator.

New target location?

A thrumming noise now crept in beneath the din of the fight. Something else. Jameson recognized it somehow, but there was too much going on around him for his mind to identify it.

“One Troop, message,” spoke the earpiece, after what seemed like another age. “Your new target is due east of your current grid coords, approx four-zero-zero meters. The building is a tenement high-rise. You should already be visual with it now, over.”

Jameson squinted in that direction. Beyond the legions of dead that lumbered up the street, a tall building stood just within view. Several others were visible beyond it, but only the nearest looked like it might be a block of flats. Of more immediate concern was that the ground between his three squads and the target was heaving with hundreds of dead.

If he were to move his team in that direction, they could quickly find themselves enveloped. Where they currently stood, holding this ground, they had something to their backs. But heading down the street toward the tenement would mean leaving all sides open – and, worse, it would mean abandoning the streets they had fought so hard to clear, most likely to be overrun again. Then again, CentCom was probably even then pulling the plug on the op, based on his own recommendation.

“CentCom, One Troop, what is this target?”

“The building is under siege,” said the operator. “A group of civilians have taken refuge inside. You will proceed to the target, clear and hold its perimeter, and defend the site until evac of your team and the civilians becomes possible.”

Jameson shook his head.

“If we do that we give up all the ground we’ve taken today.”

“That’s acknowledged. But the quarantine border is now in place. Evacuation of the tenement is your new priority. CAS is inbound. I repeat. Close air support inbound.”

Jameson took a deep breath and exhaled it as a sigh. Something in the distance was causing the air, or perhaps the ground, to thrum all around them. Beside him, Eli gave him an inquiring glance.

What kind of air support? Jameson wondered, but then he felt more than heard the thrumming noise increasing. He stepped backward, and the gap where he had stood in the line closed up almost instantly. He turned and looked up to the sky, and saw three dark shapes approaching over the tops of the buildings.

Helicopters. Apaches – fast, deadly, and absurdly heavily armed.

Jameson was just wondering what the hell they were planning to do with those when the first Hellfire missile burst from the foremost helo, zipped into the ground two hundred yards up the road, and impacted with a devastating roar and explosion of flame.

Whether the Marines were ready for it or not… it looked like hell was indeed being unleashed.

A Speck

Lake Michigan

Five dreamers. Asleep upon the sea.

They had started on this journey with eight. But three had gone now. One to find his family. The others in fulfillment of their duty – giving their last full measure, for their brother warriors, and for the extended family that was humankind. All or none of these three might ever been seen again… in this life, or in the next.

Or in the terrible twilight that lay between.

So five dreamers, then. Nor were they really quite dreamers, for they did not really sleep. But the monotone thrum of the boat’s engines, the ever-cresting, never-breaking shush of the surf against the hull, were like the drone of some dream world. And the unbroken black body of the dark sea around them, and the night sky above, were like the womb. This blackness seemed to wrap tightly around them, though it spread out infinite in every direction.

And it had been a long time since any of them had closed their eyes. This mission, which just went on and on, which heaped horror upon misfortune, continued to take from them, giving little respite or quarter. Affording them no rest. Never letting up.

Then again, all of these five had endured terrible storms many times before. And all had been selected for this unit – as well as for their prior units, the elite Tier-1 special operations forces – mainly for the quality of being totally insuperable, in both body and mind. They were able to keep operating at a razor-edge of performance even in the most appalling circumstances. They never gave up, they never gave in, and they never stopped believing they could prevail.

And they were usually right.

So perhaps no other group of people had the stamina to pull off this mission. The fortitude to live through it. And the resolve to see it through to success.

But, right now, the net effect of the extended pummeling they had taken, and the swaddling of the midnight boat ride, was a kind of twilight somnolence. The five operators now slept on their feet, eyes open, or half-lidded, their slack bodies rolling with the gentle but insistent motion of the boat, as it powered them across the smooth surface of the black lake. The boat drove itself – course laid in, engine on autopilot.

And since dreams were most of what was left them, their thoughts became much like dreams. Also half-lidded, nodding, twisting restlessly at formless fantasies, and at night terrors, and at memories of the simple comforts and pleasures of the world they had all lost.

That lost world was always with them, like a sharp pang of grief, like the gnawing of a phantom limb. It was a grief that they had always to push away, in order to survive in this new nightmare world. To survive, and perhaps to succeed.

Sometimes even to dare to hope.

Most were up top on the boat, sprawled out around the deck of the small craft. But the one woman among them, the one known as Ali, had ceased her vigil on the deck and was now sitting down inside the cabin, keeping an eye on their “precious cargo,” the objective of the mission – the scientist Dr. Simon Park. Ali was trying to stay awake to help keep his spirits up. He was a civilian, and very far out of his element. As the exhaustion that follows terror had descended upon him, his light went out as well, and he now lay sprawled out beside her.

And as she looked down upon his troubled sleep, she smiled.

For an untrained civilian, he had shown remarkable resilience. For him to have survived the ZA this long, all on his own, said a lot about the man whom they all instinctively treated like a crystal bottle filled with the only water left in the world. Ali was surprised he hadn’t gone mad, sitting down in his lonely bunker for two years. Sure, he was jittery and perpetually on edge, but he hadn’t broken yet.

Ali wondered how long he could keep that up.

And so she tried to stay awake whether Park did or not. But she was now going on seventy-plus hours with no sleep, and she was all out of stimulants. They’d had more on their resupply pallet, but that had been lost with their first boat, which had foundered on the dead, and sunk out from under them.

And so Ali could no longer hold her eyes open. The curtain finally went down on even her stage. And when the stage lights came up on her private dream theater, starring in the show was… her sister, Amina. Like so much that had been lost to them, Amina was now gone forever. She had surely been among the very first to die in the fall of civilization, back in their native Somalia – where the whole planet-wide nightmare had first begun.

But Amina had been lost to Ali long before that: shuffled into an arranged marriage by their father, and given up to a lifetime of subservience, servitude – and neglect if she were lucky, abuse if not. Ali had learned and read too much by then to accept that fate for herself. So she had fled to the West, where she continued to educate herself, and then took up a life of service in the military. And had finally climbed to the greatest heights in the military world – the U.S. Army’s premier Tier-1 special operations force.

People always reacted with the same stark disbelief when they learned her previous unit of service. “There were no women in Delta,” she heard, over and over again. First of all, that was just wrong – it was a matter of historical record that for years Delta ran something they called “the Funny Platoon”. This was Delta’s classified intel section, which used its female personnel to infiltrate under husband-and-wife cover, or as flight attendants, etc. In the early 80s, they secretly experimented with bringing women in as operators. Four made it through a slightly modified selection and assessment course. And in 2013, the Pentagon officially opened combat roles to women. This included special operations units – and while not many women could hack it there, not many men could either.

And, in any case, what did these people, who had never been in it, think they knew about what Delta did or did not do? It was a black spec-ops unit! It got under her skin a little, or as much as anything did.

And Ali’s situation had been unique, with her being the first woman ever to complete the regular Delta selection – widely believed to be the most brutal and lowest-pass-rate special-forces selection course in the world. She had started her Army career as a helicopter pilot, completing the rigorous training required to fly the Apache helicopter gunship – perhaps the most deadly and complex fighting machine in military history. She was shot down twice, once each in Iraq and Afghanistan, walking away both times. Later, when the Army needed a female Somali speaker for a secret mission in the Horn of Africa, she said she’d do it – if JSOC (the Joint Special Operations Command) guaranteed her a spot in Delta selection.

They agreed, never thinking she’d pass in a million years. But they obviously hadn’t read her service record very carefully.

Ali had never failed at anything.

She’d originally joined up to do something for the world, to give back, after the priceless gifts she’d received as an immigrant to America. But she must have joined up too late, or done too little, because the world didn’t make it, not in the end. And neither did Ali’s sister. In fact, Ali had last seen Amina alive on that final mission back to Somalia, only a few months before the plague started… She had failed to rescue her sister, and she and Zack had evidently failed to save the world, and now she had to bear the guilt of that.

But now… now maybe all of it could be redeemed. They had the scientist, they had his research and preliminary vaccine designs, and they were close, so close, to making it out of there. And as Ali slept, angels and demons battled through her dreams, fighting over the soul of her sister, who was perched on a perilously narrow ledge, as Ali looked on, unable to help, and unable to scream.

Beneath them, the whole world hung in the balance.

* * *

There was one amongst the five survivors of Alpha team who did not let sleep overtake him. Only their leader, Command Sergeant Major Handon, stayed alert. He did it so the others wouldn’t have to battle the weight of their own eyelids. He stood upright, a rock, a statue for a not-yet-fallen soldier, silently monitoring the wide lake ahead as they rolled up its watery miles beneath them.

But by now everything had become very dreamlike to him, too.

So when a dark speck on the horizon grew from nothing, to something, swelling out of the barely perceptible lightness of the coming dawn, Handon simply assumed that was a dream, too. He had been dreaming awake, or perhaps only thinking, of the one team member who had left for his family – and whether he might yet come back to them.

Probably not, had been his pitiless verdict. Most likely Homer would never come home. The odds of him surviving an overland journey across a third of a continent heaving with dead were too slender and diaphanous even to measure – and much too fragile to try to hang any hope on. Deep down, Handon knew that Homer hadn’t gone off to save his family.

He had merely gone to join them.

But what really scraped at Handon’s soul was what this departure said about the fate of the rest of them. Homer had been the most professional, unflappable, and good-natured of all the members of Alpha team – which was already made up of the best special operators who had ever drawn breath. And what this told Handon was that professionalism simply wasn’t enough anymore – not enough to sustain the levels of soul-wracking, year-in-and-out, hopeless battling that was required of them, and all of it against such a terrible and endless tide.

No. This late in the day, it had to be about something deeper, something personal – Handon recognized that now.

It had all become personal for him back on the shores of Lake Michigan, in their time with Sarah Cameron and her family. It was there that Handon had been confronted with feelings he’d never expected to have again. And it was because of those that he’d had his revelation: that it wasn’t enough for them to survive, nor even enough to succeed. Because if they didn’t also safeguard their essential humanity, then there was nothing left for them to even battle back to – and they were as good as dead already.

Would the people on his team have their own revelations? Find their own inner motivations, their personal reasons for going on, so far past the normal limits of human endurance? And could anything Handon might do help them, with what was such a profoundly personal and interior struggle?

He simply didn’t know.

What he did know was this wasn’t a military operation any more. It was no longer about professionalism, or the chain of command, or duty to unit or country or humanity. Now it was, it had to be, personal.

It almost didn’t matter what had come before – all their victories, and medals, and elite unit patches, and spotless service records, from both before and after the end of the world.

Because the dead made no allowances for past achievements. And this cold, dead world would crush them with as little hesitation or remorse as a falling pallet of bricks – or as would the cold, dead universe that had always surrounded and menaced them. It surrounded the rest of us, too – all of us huddling together in our tiny, fragile cocoon of life, which now flickered like a candle in a hurricane.

Alpha’s losses had awoken them to their mortality.

And, eventually, as they all knew, their loss would be total.

But maybe they’d leave something behind.

* * *

When Handon finally decided the swelling speck on the horizon was not a dream, nor an optical illusion, but another vessel, he pulled his broad frame up to its full height, put his hands to the boat’s controls, and began to bring the throttle down. The change in engine pitch brought the others awake by degrees, drifting back in from their dreamworlds – back to this crapsack real one they all shared.

But which at least they shared together.

Ali was first up, instantly crisp, emerging from down below. “What’s up, top?” she asked. “Top” was the traditional term of address for the top-ranking sergeant in an Army company – though Handon was actually the top-ranking enlisted man in any surviving military. He answered in his rich but unemotional baritone, while still staring ahead through narrowed ice-blue eyes.

“Unidentified vessel, eleven o’clock, range about twelve hundred.”

Ali raised her designated marksman rifle in a smooth motion and pulled the night-vision-enhanced scope to her eye. “Got it. Civilian, big cabin cruiser, maybe a hundred and ten feet. Range eleven-twenty.” She lowered her rifle and scope, which had an embedded laser rangefinder in it. “And static. Probably anchored or adrift.”

“Or dead in the water.” Handon continued to bring the throttle down. Their boat, which was called the Three Brothers, slowed to a heavy churn through the otherwise still water of the lake, which was blanketed with thin patches of mist, and which still spread inkily around them, all the way out to the dark horizon.

The unknown vessel continued to grow larger, but more slowly now.

Henno, the sole surviving Brit in Alpha, spoke from over Handon’s shoulder. Handon hadn’t seen him get there, but that was common enough. “And why are we slowing, then? Just give it a wide berth and crack on.” His voice suggested that he didn’t know why he was even having to ask this.

Handon nodded in acknowledgement. He motioned to Ali and took her rifle from her. She always had the best optics. He dialed in and took a look for himself. “Definitely not moving. And I can’t see anyone on deck.” He handed the rifle back.

Henno leaned his head in closer. Handon had the impression he wanted to call him outside for a word. But there was nowhere to go. “Seriously, Sarge?” he asked in a near-whisper. “We’re what? Twenty miles from the island? Then a mile tab overland to our extraction point? We’re nearly shot of this place.”

In the glow of the instrumentation panel, Handon checked the nautical chart Sarah had left him. “Yeah. Looks like this thing’s in one of the recreational boating lanes. And also very nearly in our path.”

Henno didn’t respond to this. They both knew Handon was ignoring his question. Finally, he said, “You know it’s going to be nought but the dead on that boat – at best.”

Of course Henno was right. They had absolutely no business here, poking around in some ghost ship in the middle of Lake Michigan. But still Handon continued to squint into the distance. Something was tugging at him… when he turned it over, he decided it might be Sarah Cameron’s husband, and particularly her son. How he had failed to save them. And how terribly they had died – so close to help and to safety.

Only steps away.

And, deeper down, Handon was torn by something more fundamental. He knew full well that they had a job to do – and that the job was literally saving the world. But coming into conflict with that now was the other mission he’d so recently come to understand: that of saving their own souls.

Handon exhaled into the near-dark. He brought the throttle back up fractionally, and adjusted their heading minutely. “We’ll give it a narrow berth. And just take a quick look.” Then he raised his voice to be heard by the others. “Close target recce. ETI two mikes.” He didn’t need to instruct them further.

Predator and Juice, who both lay draped across the deck nearer the prow, the latter nursing his broken leg, now looked at each other wordlessly. In the glow of the boat’s running lights, and the faint ambient light from the breaking dawn, they swapped weapons – Predator taking Juice’s beloved SIG assault rifle, and handing off the Mossberg Tactical shotgun he’d salvaged from the wreckage of the Cameron family. Then Predator, staying basically where he lay, rolled over onto his belly facing the port side, while Juice pulled a loose tarpaulin over him.

Dr. Park, emerging now from the cabin, watched this operation with perplexity. He guessed maybe they were hiding Predator to keep the wounded man out of danger. But this huge warrior, like a wounded lion, had hardly seemed shy of danger so far. If anything, the injury seemed to make him more dangerous to anyone who got in his way. Park knew there was a lot about these soldiers that would never make sense to him.

And, as he thought that, Ali touched his elbow, and nodded toward the hatch which he’d just come out of. As usual, he thought, I get tucked away for safekeeping. He let her lead him below, and took a seat back on the single bench seat, still clutching his laptop bag. That, at least, was his responsibility, his to keep safe. Something he could participate in.

As Ali came back out, Juice slithered around behind the cockpit on the starboard side, where he crouched down and made himself small. Handon, by contrast, stood and made himself visible as he steered the boat in. He looked over at Ali as she took a position beside him, also visible, but not obviously armed, her rifle resting on the deck and against her leg. Henno sat down heavily on the bench in the cockpit, sighing mournfully, and looked at nothing while tapping his rifle receiver.

Handon brought them in toward the other craft, which they could now see was totally blacked out. As they approached, Handon intending just to do a quick pass on their port side, the name of the boat stenciled on the stern slowly resolved out of the gloom and fog: Diablo. Handon frowned at that, then remembered the name of their own craft: Three Brothers. He paused to hope that didn’t augur any further shrinking of his dwindling band.

As they got really close, inside of twenty meters, Handon could begin to make out a figure on deck, a single shadow shape slowly taking human form.

And then a voice called out to them quietly across the misty expanse of water.

A girl’s voice, pleading.

Ah, shit, Handon thought. He killed the engines.

And they coasted slowly and silently in.

The Mission, the Men

Over America

The inside of a B-17 Flying Fortress in flight was goddamned rackety, and felt to Marine Corps Master Gunnery Sergeant Fick like being in a tin can full of rocks tied to a cat. But he had his Peltor ear protection in – which saved his hearing, already fading with age, from the ravages of close-quarters gunfire, while also piping in traffic from his team radio – so he was feeling pretty damned relaxed just sitting still and watching America go by beneath him.

He sat half inside one of the oval-shaped machine gun “blisters” that stuck out from the waist of the plane. These no longer had 50-cal machine guns in them, but the glass provided one of the very few views out of the rumbling, rattling dinosaur of an aircraft. One of the other such views could be had from the ball turret protruding from the belly of the plane, and would actually have provided a stellar view. But it was a damned tiny space, and it only sat fifteen inches above the runway on take-off and landing, so it required both a smaller and a braver man than Gunny Fick to ride in it.

There wasn’t a hell of a lot of elbow room as it stood, with him and his four-man fire team and all their gear stacked up down the fuselage in the belly of this beast. He didn’t much like to think of what it was going to be like with Alpha team piled in there with them. But he’d been assured that Chuckie – which was what this restored WWII-era heavy bomber was, absurdly, called – would take the weight. Just.

He’d also been told that two of Alpha’s men were already KIA – and God knows how few would be left when they finally made it, if any of them made it, to their extraction point at the civilian airport on Beaver Island.

And all of this was assuming Chuckie and its complement made it there themselves. These B-17s were certainly tough old bastards – many of them had taken atrocious punishment over the Rheinland, and occasionally over the Japanese fleet in the Pacific, and somehow stayed in the air. But this one had seen about two hours of maintenance since the fall of human civilization. And there was little getting around the fact that the damned thing was older than… well, it was even older than ole Gunny Fick.

On the upside, in addition to the two pilots and five Marines, Chuckie had also lifted off with an engineer aboard. Fick thought he was called Stan – short for Stanley, though whether that was his first or last name beat the hell out of Fick. What he did know was that this guy was said to be perhaps the best aircraft maintenance tech, and general engine mechanic, still breathing air. Evidently he used to spend all his days off working on his own light aircraft. Currently he sat perched behind the flight deck, looking over the pilots’ shoulders, watching the aircraft instrumentation like some kind of psychotic hawk for any signs of trouble.

“Beautiful view.” This voice, interrupting Fick’s reverie, came in through his team radio. The voice belonged to one of his guys, Staff Sergeant Brady, who was sitting behind Fick and looking out the other gun blister. Fick cast his eye down toward the thick forests that rolled by far below. Yeah, it was beautiful. With nary a walking corpse to be seen. But America had been like that long before the fall. When he’d met military personnel from other countries who had taken flights over the U.S., they always said the same two things. One: “It’s so fucking big.” And, two: “It still looks totally uninhabited.”

And so it did. Much of America had remained undeveloped, even well into the twenty-first century, leaving millions of hectares of wild space populated only by birds, fish, snakes, and the occasional large mammal that might eat you. Of course, now even the cities were crumbling, skeletal wastelands. And they were home to much more dangerous fauna than bears or bobcats.

Brady spoke again. “It’s a shame the LT isn’t here. He would have loved this.”

Fick grunted and looked away. It was true. The Lieutenant, who had been the team’s commanding officer before he died, would have thought this was fantastic. But then that sonofabitch had always been an unapologetic esthete. He’d studied classics at Princeton, if Fick recalled correctly – then joined the Marine Corps in a bizarre fit of idealism. He’d decided it was either going to be the USMC, or the goddamned Peace Corps. Fick thought he might have been better off going with the other choice. Then again, he would have ended up in pretty much the same place in the end. Fick consoled himself with that. The LT had died badly.

But his death had meaning.

And that was damned well worth something.

Even if the manner of his death haunted Fick, who didn’t much like to think about it.

* * *

As Brady went silent and faced out his window again, Fick let his gaze wander across all four of the Marines riding in this flying steel relic with him. It was a hell of a group of young men, this fire team Fick had hand-picked to go out for this mission. Though not so young anymore, he thought. They were all pushing thirty, and some of them were already on the wrong side of it. There were no new recruits coming up to take their places.

And there was no longer any civilian life for them to return to.

Fick snorted once, quietly, at Brady’s big sloping back and shoulders. Brady was a damned strange one. If the LT had been an overeducated, wide-eyed idealist… well, Brady was an even stranger fit in the Corps. Built like a Greek god, from an upper-middle-class family in Maryland, metrosexual as hell – the sonofabitch actually waxed his chest – he was also a martial arts champion. Everyone in the unit suspected he was gay, from his refined tastes and cheery demeanor – but he could also handily beat the shit out of all of them, singly or in combination, so he was only obliged to take so much ribbing about it. This often came up on scavenging missions, when he would be seen scouting around for coffee beans. He was a major coffee connoisseur and always trying to top up. He said he didn’t think life was worth living without good coffee.

As if they didn’t all have a lot more important shit to worry about.

Or maybe they didn’t. Maybe good coffee was as good as it was going to get.

But Brady’s strange fixation on gastronomical matters, as well as his unashamed sweetness and good humor, strange as it was on someone so deadly, somehow kept everything in perspective for the Marines. Even on the worst days.

These men themselves actually weren’t hand-picked, but their fire team was. Fick wasn’t allowed to have favorites, but he did anyway, and it was this one. And since their survival and mission success depended on the perfection of their training as a team, he definitely wasn’t in the business of breaking up his fire teams. There was only so much, and so realistic, training that could be done on the carrier – the air wing guys kicked up a fuss every time he tried to set up a mock CQB village on the flight deck – and most of their skills were perishable. Fick had also had to do some shuffling after their losses in the mutiny and outbreak aboard the Kennedy. All this had necessarily resulted in some compromises.

For instance, next down the row from Brady was Corporal Chesney, AKA “the Kid” – young, largely unproven, a hardscrabble kid from Missouri, whose mother had raised him alone in the proverbial double-wide. Previously working in a support role, he’d now been put on this fire team, the best one Fick had, to get him trained up, and to balance out his limitations. Unfortunately, his lack of combat experience had become a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. Since he’d had none at the beginning of the ZA, first the LT, and then Fick, had kept him out of heavy fighting. And ever since the world fell apart, it had just never seemed like the time to be training people up. It had seemed like the time to survive – at all costs. But the casualties they took in saving the ship from the Zealots had finally forced Fick’s hand on this.

Full of testosterone, Chesney wanted badly to prove himself. He had the skills. He just didn’t have nearly enough experience.

God grant he’d live long enough to get some.

But if he didn’t, Fick figured, that would at least shut him the hell up about the rap-rock band he used to be in back in Missouri, and the time they opened for Limp Bizkit. Chesney said, enough times that everyone knew the line by heart, “We sucked, but so did they. The difference was they went big, and I went to Afghanistan.”

Just beyond Chesney sat Sergeant Reyes. This was the man Fick had seen gabbing with the Brit in Alpha, the ex-SAS guy, at their joint pre-mission briefing back on the carrier. Reyes used to be a bounty hunter in L.A. – before ending up on the wrong side of a manslaughter verdict, at which point he’d been obliged to choose between the Marine Corps and San Quentin. He picked the former, where his toughness and native intelligence took him through boot camp at Parris Island, selection and training for Force Recon – and finally recruitment by MARSOC, the Marine Special Operations Command. Over the course of these postings, he’d seen action in 2nd Iraq, in Syria, and in a variety of threatened and beleaguered U.S. embassies and military installations around what was even then a fairly fucked-up world. At the time of the fall, he’d been deployed with Fick’s outfit – Team 1, A Company, 2nd Marine Special Operations Battalion (MSOB) – having left his wife and young daughter back in California. He was still here, and they were still there.

Though in what state, no one could know.

Fick figured there were a lot of reasons none of them talked about the old world much.

Finally, at the end of the line, was the one they called Graybeard. He was a grizzled Master Sergeant, impossibly old even by local standards. After a long and distinguished military career, he had left the Corps at the end of the Iraq counter-insurgency, going back to Arkansas to teach high school. This he did for four years. But when he was caught having an affair with a student who was, as he insisted to this day, hours away from turning eighteen, he lost his job and wife in rapid sequence, and promptly re-enlisted to escape all of that. Whatever one thought about his morals, his accumulated combat wisdom was pure gold, and he was totally unflappable no matter how bad things got. The way Graybeard saw it, he should have been killed a dozen times over already, so one more wouldn’t make any difference.

One way or the other.

As Fick knew, each of these men had climbed to the very top of this here United States Marine Corps – which all Marines firmly believed was already the finest fighting force in the history of warfare. They’d also survived two years of scrapping and scavenging in the Zulu Alpha. Whatever waited for them on this island in the middle of Lake Michigan… well, if anyone could take and hold that airfield, it was these guys.

There was the small problem that a four-man fire team was about a tenth of the force one would ordinarily deploy to take down even a modest-sized airfield. But the hell with it, Fick figured. Everybody in the ZA was making do and getting on with it and making it work, and their small numbers just meant there’d be more and better opportunities for them to get some.

And “getting some” was a big deal in the Corps. Whether it meant running up a mountain in full combat load, firing off heavy weapons, braving a lethally dodgy bar in Thailand, or gaining combat experience in the middle of a hostile continent, “Get some!” expressed the emotional and physical exhilaration of confronting extreme challenges.

But it was more of a thing for the younger guys, who didn’t have such heavy responsibilities. Fick put his helmet on his knee, rubbed his hand through his graying crewcut, and stretched his neck out. The two deep scars on the right side of his face looked more severe in the half-light from outside. It was true that he had been cooped up at sea for too long, and could hardly remember when he’d put any brass downrange in an actual fight. So, sure, he needed to stretch his legs. But, on this one, he also needed to personally make sure there were no fuck-ups.

Because it was too important to fail.

He pulled out his map pack of the target area and went over it yet again – making sure he had everything relevant committed to memory, along with much that didn’t seem immediately relevant. Slightly surprisingly, this 13-mile long island actually had two airports: the bigger public one, which was their target; as well as a tiny private one, more of an airstrip, not far away. Fick was glad of this, and studied their relative positions, as well as how to get from one to the other. In special operations, where they were usually poised on the razor’s edge between success and failure, and where the unexpected happened without fail, redundancy was standard procedure.

As their old adage had it: “Two is one; one is none.”

Finally, Fick put his maps away, levered his combat-loaded body up, and tottered down the narrow aisle of the plane. He was going to use the powerful radio on the flight deck and see if they could get Alpha on the horn. With their current altitude, and all the ground they’d already covered, he rated their chances as pretty good.

As for their chances once they hit the ground… well, they’d find that out when they got there.

A Redneck’s Last Words

Lake Michigan

As the Three Brothers slipped through the mists of the endless lake and came alongside the bigger boat, Handon realized: Yeah – that was definitely a girl’s voice. Weak, afraid, and a little too quiet to carry across the twenty meters of open water that separated them. Handon nailed the approach, coasting them into position abreast of the other craft on its starboard side, and their port. He reversed the engine at the last second to bring them to a stop. And with no wind, and no current on the lake, they didn’t need to drop anchor.

Nor did the dark and silent vessel beside them move.

The eastern horizon consisted only of perfectly flat lake surface, so dawn was coming on quickly. The early-morning chill seemed to lift, though this could have been a psychological effect of the light. In the blanching morning air, Handon could now make out the other boat. It went 110 or 120 feet, a pleasure craft – a cabin cruiser like the Three Brothers, but a lot bigger. And a hell of a lot nicer. More of a yacht, really. Whoever sailed this thing had done well for himself back in the world.

Or, more likely, the current owners had simply taken it off someone who had.

Handon’s deep voice carried, where the girl’s had not. “Repeat your last.”

The fragile figure of a young woman or girl came to the railing. Handon could make her out now, not least because the light of dawn was behind him, illuminating the vessel before them, while silhouetting theirs. This was not an accident – Handon had put them there for that exact reason. But everything was still ghost-like and sepulchral in the mist and very faint light. The female was young, thin, and pretty, if a bit feral-looking, with long and somewhat scraggly brown hair with blonde streaks. She wore denim overalls over a baby-doll T-shirt, and a black puffa jacket over that, hiking boots below – some kind of apocalypse waif chic. To Handon’s eye, she also looked afraid, with pleading behind her eyes.

But afraid of who or what?

She cleared her throat weakly. “Who are you?” she repeated, her voice audible now. It was middle-pitched and husky. She might be a smoker; or perhaps had just been yelling a lot lately. “Please, can you help us? We’re floating out here, out of gas… and my sister is hurt.”

Handon took this on board. “What’s her injury?”

The girl shook her head. “Nothing like that. Please, none of us are sick or dead, we’ve been on the water for weeks. I’m scared for my sister. We don’t want to die out here…”

Handon considered this as well. And while he hesitated, another figure appeared on the deck beside her, from down below. It was a man, carrying another young woman or girl in his arms. He wore a side arm, a pistol in a belt-slide holster, as Handon clocked instantly. Solidly built, he had a biker mustache and heavy stubble, and wavy hair that was none too short. He looked like he could handle himself. And he was strong enough to carry the girl and neither tremble nor stumble.

He seemed to look at the other boat in mild amazement, perhaps at seeing other living people, or maybe just seeing them out in the middle of Lake Michigan. Handon nodded to acknowledge him.

“Thank God,” the man said. He gestured at the leg of the girl he carried, which Handon could now see was wrapped in a dark-stained bandage. “Broke her leg in a fall.” The man’s voice was gravelly, definitely a smoker’s, and with a hint of southern accent. To Handon’s ear, it wavered between country welcoming and biker-bar threatening. “Bone broke through the skin. Now we think she’s got a blood infection. Bad fever, tremors. Delirium. Poor girl’s out of her head. Have you got any antibiotics? We’d be in your debt.” He shifted his grip on the girl, who appeared conscious, but didn’t speak.

And with that, a second man appeared on the other side of the deck, way off to Handon’s left, back near the stern. Skinnier, this one wore a tank-top with some kind of biker bar logo on it, despite the cold, as well as jeans and boots. He also had a fair bit of facial hair going on, heavy sideburns, and a single thick tuft just below his lower lip. He also wore a side arm, and a sheathed knife. He smiled across at Handon, looking like he was trying to appear non-threatening.

Handon didn’t react to this. The appearance of the two men certainly changed the tactical situation. But he still knew right where his guns were. And he knew where his people were. Anyway, everybody went armed now. Didn’t they? Handon drew out this pause, to consider further. Yeah, the two men looked a little sinister. But then again – they had every reason to be as wary of Alpha as Alpha was of them. As Sarah Cameron had sagely noted: the living could be a hell of a lot more dangerous than the dead.

For one thing, they can open doors, Handon remembered her saying. A smile pulled at the corner of his mouth as he thought of this.

But then, as he assessed the scene before him, he realized with a jolt of surprise that this was actually a new situation for his team. The operators of Alpha and of USOC (the Unified Special Operations Command, their parent unit) had so far enjoyed the mixed blessing of almost always going into areas overseas, ones that were totally wiped out. They dealt with the menace of the dead every day. But they almost never had to deal with survivors, or civilians – or even with conventional military units.

And things almost always got messier with survivors and civilians.

In a bizarre way, Alpha had led a charmed life – or at least a sheltered one.

So was Handon in any position even to assess these people, or the threat they might pose? It was new territory. Of course, he and his team had fought bad living people, terrorists and insurgents, for many years before the fall. But that had been a long time ago. And now was not the time to fuck up and make a bad call.

They were too close.

* * *

“Please,” the girl said again. “Can you help us?”

With this, the sick girl gave a little groan. “I’ve got to take her below,” the man with the biker ’stache said, half to the other girl, half to the other boat. He turned, still supporting his burden with little evident effort, and both of them disappeared again.

Handon felt a tap on his shoulder. He swiveled his head, taking care not to turn his back to the other boat, and found Henno facing him from a foot away, his head lowered conspiratorially.

“We don’t have time for this, mate,” Henno said, a faint knife-edge in his voice. “We’ve got an extraction to get to. And we’ve got all of humanity to save. You forget?” What Henno left unsaid was that their commander, Captain Ainsley, had given his life for this mission, and for the objective they now had with them down below, and for all humanity. And Henno had already made it clear he intended to see that Ainsley’s sacrifice was not in vain.

Handon wanted to tell him, Yeah, but we’ve also got OUR humanity to save – or, perhaps, Saving humanity starts at home. But he kept his mouth shut, and just considered his decision. For some reason he couldn’t pin down, it vexed him. The tactical and strategic imperatives were obvious: they should just get the hell out of there. But something was telling him not to. Was he losing his powers of leadership? The ability to make the ruthless decisions that command required?

On top of the unfamiliar situation, fatigue also had to be taken into account. Aside from a few hours of semi-downtime at the cabin, Handon and his people had been going pretty much non-stop since the jump into Chicago two nights previous – which was about 60 hours ago. And even in the day or so before the mission, sleep had not been a big priority, even when it had been possible, or at least less likely to prove fatal.

And, as Handon well knew, sleep deprivation can seriously impair good judgement.

So he had to be very careful here.

At the same time… he found it impossible to ignore the lessons he had learned with, and from, Sarah Cameron, their savior back on the lakeshore. Namely that if they didn’t carefully safeguard their humanity, if they lost the ability to feel compassion toward living people, then there was precious little difference between them and the hordes of walking corpses that surrounded them.

In other words, they were as good as dead already.

Henno recognized that look on Handon’s face, and shook his head. “Just think about this for a second, Sarge. And after you’ve thought about it? Think about it again.”

Handon felt another hand, on his other shoulder this time. A voice said: “I’ll go.”

And there was only one person with a feminine voice on this boat. Handon swiveled his head in the other direction to face Ali. “I’ll go,” she repeated. She already held their med ruck in one hand. Handon looked her in the eye – and he saw it right there. Some part of her needed this. This, helping that injured girl, was somehow personal to her. Maybe she wasn’t even consciously aware of it.

But Handon knew it was there.

“Go,” he said. “Do it.” He then turned his head to face the other boat again. “Throw us a line. We’ll pull ourselves in.”

In a few seconds, the two vessels were close enough to leap across the gap.

Ali handed her rifle over to Handon. With something like a gleam in her eye, she said, “You know what a redneck’s last words are, don’t you?”

“No, what?”

“‘Hold my beer.’”

And with that, she winked, turned, and leapt across the gap.

Hold the Fort

Canterbury

Colley slammed his axe down as hard as he could, grunting with effort as pain hammered through his arms and rattled his shoulders. The zombie’s head all but exploded, half of it falling into the gap below, down into the stairwell of the tenement building, splattering the other dead abominations that scrambled over one another as they reached out for him. The big Moroccan was breathing heavily from exertion, his body on the verge of collapse.

Even back in the Channel Tunnel, they had never had to fight like this. Never had there been so many to fend off all at once, and in such a vertical and perilous space. And there were more coming – he could see them through the bay window at the front of the building, hundreds clawing their way over the fence and falling into the courtyard.

He lashed out with his foot, wanting to scream at the top of his lungs, as he kicked the remains of the creature’s head off his axe, then hauled it back and swung again at the next nearest dead thing.

“Fuck you!” he shouted. “Fuck you. Fuck you.” Over and again.

By his side, his friend Randall hammered the head of another one that had crawled high enough to reach for his legs. He wasn’t lucky enough to have an axe, but instead perched on his knees and made short work of those that came too close with the flat end of a heavy carpenter’s hammer. But this meant getting in close, and dead hands pulled at his clothes and scratched the floor all around him, their diseased flesh threatening to turn him into one of them. His heart felt ready to burst with sheer terror.

Another of the tunnel survivors, McHeath, struggled to push the dead away with a garden spade, but they were filling up the stairwell with frightening speed, their grasping hands getting closer. McHeath had just beheaded one, but that had been a sheer fluke. He’d only intended to knock it back, but the shovel had gone clean through, and the absence of expected resistance had nearly pulled him over. He was pale with exertion and fear, and Colley, who kept glancing around, checking on the others, knew McHeath wouldn’t be able to keep this up for long.

None of them would.

“Hackworth!” he shouted, over the nightmare noise of moaning that seemed to be on all sides of them at once. “Are you close? We can’t hold this for much longer.”

The sound of hammering on wood, and the cracking and sawing of old joists and stairs, continued behind them.

“One more minute!” boomed their leader’s big voice.

How many of these things were crammed into the ground-floor entrance now? Fifty? A hundred? Try as he might, Colley couldn’t see how any more could possibly push their way in. But push they did. Every minute, the dead managed to rise higher and fight their way up the stairwell, even with most of the stairs gone. Those underneath pushed forward, forcing those at the top higher up.

Colley took a breath of rank and sickly-smelling air and nearly choked. The stench of death lay everywhere, filling his lungs and making his eyes water. Below them, only feet away, a sea of clawing hands reached up, and desperate eyes burning with uncontrollable hunger stared out of pale, dead faces. One slip and any of the men holding the stairwell would plunge to an excruciating death.

Followed by an even worse life-after-death.

Another of the creatures reached up toward Colley, heaving itself up out of the press of bodies. It flailed a badly broken arm, grasping with a hand that was missing most of its fingers, cutting the air inches from Colley’s shins. With a wide swing of his axe, he liberated the arm from its owner.

The last few hours had been like witnessing hell itself spill out into the world, a nightmare that made their previous experiences underground seem trivial. At first they had watched, quietly, from the windows of the upper floors of the tenement building on the edge of downtown Canterbury. They’d killed the lights, everyone crouching in total silence. Even the little girl, Josie, had been calmed by her mother and slept soundly above them, up on the top floor. Apart from the mother, Amarie, there wasn’t a single pair of eyes not looking from behind curtains out into the streets below, watching as everything went from bad to terrible, and then even worse than that.

At first they’d heard the distant sound of gunfire, a faint pop-popping that echoed through the streets, ramping up as more joined the chorus. The few zombies they had seen earlier began to come out, and come closer, but were still slow and inactive – not a grave threat. To these people who had spent two years living through their own unending nightmare inside the Channel Tunnel, fighting every minute for survival, this new crisis had at first seemed more or less to be under control.

They imagined it to be only a small outbreak, and the gunfire in the distance a sure sign that it was being contained and suppressed. They had expected a flurry of efficient activity as the military swept through the streets and cleaned the place up.

But over the next two hours the streets began to fill with more and more of the shambling dead. Windows were broken, doors caved in. Then the screaming began.

None of that mattered, though. Everyone inside the building had a survival instinct born of those two years underground, and they knew that if they were silent, if they didn’t draw attention, the dead wouldn’t notice them. While living in the tunnel they had learned something that would have been valuable to the military if only anyone had thought to ask them. If you are uninjured, and if you cover your mouth, and if you don’t move, and if you are quiet, you can stand within thirty feet of the dead and they won’t see you. Not even the fast ones. No blood, no movement, no sound – no recognition.

It had worked dozens of times in tight situations in the tunnel, and the survivors figured it would work for them now. With forty feet of cobbled yard between the building and the street, and a high wall surrounding that, they were well out of sensing range. If they managed to avoid attention, they would be fine. They all knew how the dead behaved.

But their downfall was in not being able to account for the behavior of the living.

In the third hour, as the gunfire drew closer and the streets filled with more corpses than could be counted, they looked on helplessly as a man burst from the door of a house fifty meters up the street and ran screaming toward their gate. He shouldered his way through the horde, getting scratched and clawed and pulled at as he rushed forward – without question infected before he made it even halfway. By the time he reached the gates – which had so far stood untroubled by the teeming masses that lumbered and milled on its other side – he was being chased by dozens, and then a hundred, or more.

Somehow he managed to lever himself over the wall and fall to the ground below. Even from many yards away inside the building, Hackworth heard a bone crunch as he landed.

The man cried out, but no answer came. Each survivor in the tenement went through his or her own personal crisis in that moment. And each of them came to the same conclusion: this poor, dumb bastard was dead already. No one could help him.

But then, to the group’s horror, he crawled, inch by inch, foot by foot, toward their front door, leaving a trail of blood behind.

And the dead followed, first pushing at the gate, then climbing atop one another, surmounting as a group what none could surmount alone. As they did so, their moaning grew, and more were drawn to the noise. Within five minutes, the first fell over the wall and into the yard, stood up, and staggered to the man who had finally reached the foot of the stairs.

And in that moment, the tunnelers realized the dead were now too close. And too many.

They were inside the perimeter, and the people on the lower floors hadn’t moved when they should have. They’d left it too late. When the first zombie fell over the wall and began making its way toward the screaming man, they were already too late.

Maybe if they had moved right away, thought Hackworth. If he had called them to act. But he hadn’t expected there to be so many, not enough to breach the wall. Even with dozens, or even hundreds, it should have taken the alignment of an awful lot of dark stars for them to pile up in the right place and get over the barrier.

But all it had taken was one panicking dipshit.

“Go! Up!” Hackworth had shouted finally, shaking these vain thoughts from his head. What good were they now? They had been found, the dead were piling up in the stairwell, and there was nothing to do but fight back.

They had survived before, and they would do so again.

Correction. They were doing it all over again.

Now they were destroying stairwells, floor by floor, and retreating higher and higher up into the building. With their destruction work on this floor finally done, Hackworth held the bottom of the ladder as still as he could, as his people, the ones fighting off the rising tide, one by one broke away and sprinted toward him. McHeath came first, then Randall, and at last Colley, turning away and leaving the clawing mass of undead unchecked. The big man scurried up the ladder surprisingly lightly, and then turned and reached back for his friend.

Hackworth was already halfway up when the first of the dead pulled its way out of the heaving pile below and staggered forward. Hackworth climbed as quickly as he could.

Almost there.

He reached out for Colley’s hand, to be hauled up and out of death’s reach, but as he took his hand from the ladder, the first zombie slammed into it, knocking it out from under him. He tottered for a half second, feeling the solid rungs turning to open air, and then plunged backward, flailing at the air and finally landing on top of the creature that had brought him back to earth.

Hackworth’s head hit the hard floor and the world swam around him. He felt the dead man scrambling beneath him, and his vision cleared enough to see that three other zombies had cleared the edge of the broken stairwell. They now lurched to join the bloodbath that Hackworth knew would be his last conscious experience on this Earth.

Then there was a loud bang as something hit the ground heavily next to him. He felt himself shoved aside violently, his view of the stairwell spinning into darkness as his face hit the ground. Another whack of something heavy hitting the wooden floorboards, and then a shadow flitted past him.

Hackworth shook his head and his senses cleared a little. He was still alive. He wasn’t being eaten. He sat up and saw beside him the headless body of the one that had been about to turn him into an afternoon snack.

“Get the ladder,” shouted a voice. He saw Colley wading through the three others with his axe, beheading the first two, and hitting the third so hard in the chest that it flew back into the arms of the horde that still clawed its way up.

Hackworth felt strong arms lifting him to his feet. For a second, he struggled to function as someone pushed him back up the ladder. Then his mind cleared and he helped haul his own weight upward. A last shove and he lay on the dusty boards of the floor above – sweating, panting, shaken, but still alive.

“You okay, Hack?” It was Colley, shaking him and speaking in his ear.

“Yes. I’m okay,” he replied. “You came back for me.”

Colley nodded. Behind him, Randall and McHeath pulled the ladder up behind their three-man rescue operation.

Hackworth peered down over the edge and straight into the eyes of a dead man, the first to reach the gap below. Another joined it, reaching upward, as more pushed their way out of the crowd.

Then Hackworth looked up.

“How many floors do we have left?”

“Five,” said Colley, heaving and coughing.

“Then we better get smashing those stairs.”

But with this, the ground shook, and the rumble of a massive explosion rocked the building. Windows shattered and plaster dust rained from the ceiling. For a few seconds, the clatter of gunfire in the street stopped, but then quickly resumed.

“What the hell was that?” shouted Hackworth.

“Helicopters,” came a reply from the floor above.

“Helicopters?” Colley said. “What the hell are they doing?”

There was a pause.

“It looks like they’re bombing the whole fucking town!”

Angel of Mercy

Lake Michigan

When Ali leapt the open water between the boats, she didn’t hesitate and she didn’t look back. Even Handon was in awe of her ability to handle herself, not to mention her steel nerves and gigantic sack. But that was precisely why he agreed to let her go. He knew with perfect certainty that everyone on that other boat, anybody who might want to try something, was sure to underestimate her – badly.

As she hit the other deck, Handon and Henno could see the girl there turn to the companionway, then disappear into its dark maw. Ali followed her down, disappearing from view.

And with that, two additional biker-looking dudes, both of them also armed and confident, appeared like pop-up targets at two other points around the big boat, one high and one low. Shit. Handon instantly wondered if he had erred here. But he knew these thoughts were idle. They were committed now. Homer would say it was in God’s hands.

But Handon’s resignation was simpler: Now it would simply go the way it would go.

Even more disturbing than the tripling of the number of men on the deck of the Diablo was what the two newcomers were armed with – not just side arms, but also a Remington shotgun and an M-4 assault rifle (or AR-15, the civilian version). Both weapons could be either police- or military-issue. Or just as easily privately bought and owned.

And Handon didn’t think these guys looked like they were part of any disciplined or uniformed service. If the first two guys had seemed like bikers, these new guys were trending toward Mad Max territory. The one with the shotgun had a couple of facial piercings, more than a couple of visible tattoos, and elaborate custom leathers. The other had some kind of weird fur hat. Handon couldn’t rule out that it was made out of some small animal he’d killed and inexpertly skinned himself. The guy with the shotgun also had his finger inside the trigger guard of his weapon, curled right around the trigger. And the barrel, resting on his shoulder, pointed directly up at the feet of his buddy on the deck above.

Which meant this guy literally didn’t know the first two rules of gun safety.

So no on police or military then, Handon thought. What the hell were all these dodgy sons of bitches doing out in the middle of Lake Michigan in the first place? It didn’t make any sense. Seeming to mirror his observation of their weapons, the pierced shotgun guy looked across and said, “Nice guns you’ve got there. Those military-issue?”

“Thanks,” Handon said across the tiny expanse of water that now separated them. But he stopped there, conspicuously failing either to elaborate or to answer the question. As he broke eye contact, he felt warm breath near his ear. It was Henno again – speaking only loud enough for him to hear.

“Fuck’s sake, Sarge… We need to drop these muppets and go. Or at least go.”

Subtly, invisibly, Handon made a hold signal behind his back. Yeah, these people were increasingly looking like bad news. But they still had an injured female on board. More to the point, they still had Ali down in the bowels of their ship. And while Handon didn’t doubt for a second her ability to blast her way out of there, he was far from resigned that it would go that way. There was still a chance this was simply what it seemed.

The guy with the shotgun, seeing their whispered confab, grunted testily in response – as if he didn’t like the two of them talking. Handon was sure he didn’t give a shit what this guy did or didn’t like. But then the one off to the left started hovering his hand around the weapons on his belt. Handon merely stood with his palms on the railing. As if completely relaxed.

Which maybe he was.

* * *

The darkness below decks swallowed up Ali as quickly as she walked down into it. The steps of the narrow companionway led down and away from what little light there was out on deck. The ship was totally blacked out inside as well as out. She could barely make out the next step in front of her. But she could hear the other girl following behind.

As Ali hit the deck below, she felt more than saw another figure step out from a side passage. She stopped and tuned in, but didn’t otherwise react. She too knew right where her weapons were – a Heckler & Koch USP Tactical .45 pistol with 12-round capacity in a drop-leg holster. Four spare mags in a pouch in the small of her back. And a Gerber LMF II Infantry knife in a boot sheath. None of which she’d necessarily need, or use. Ali was human proof that weapons aren’t dangerous – people are.

Then again, she thought to herself, so are these dubious motherfuckers.

A heavy beat passed in the blackness.

And then the newcomer clicked on a powerful flashlight, blinding Ali for the instant it took her to slam her eyes shut and bring her forearm up. But the figure immediately turned and poured illumination down the passageway ahead, and onto the surfaces of the cramped corridor. The light created deep, impenetrable shadows behind it. And even the lit surfaces seemed to lean in and menace them now, in the tight and harshly lit space. It was like a bad first-person shooter.

Bodies and walls stood too close to Ali on every side. She wasn’t prone to claustrophobia; but this was bullshit. She had very little room to maneuver, or time to react. If they jumped her… well, it was going to be dicey at best.

The flashlight guy, who Ali still couldn’t really make out, finally set off and led them down the passageway. After five meters, he turned right and Ali followed him into an unlit compartment. The flashlight revealed that this was probably the master sleeping cabin, dominated by a queen-size bed surrounded by wall-mounted drawers, shelves, and a desk, shadows nipping at all of it. Another doorway, open but dark, led to what was probably a private toilet compartment. Some bandages and other basic medical supplies littered the desk.

On the bed was the wounded girl. Standing beside her was the biker ’stache dude.

As Ali turned, the older girl entered behind her. The person holding the flashlight now stood in the corner, pointing the light at the bed, where the wounded girl squinted in the glare. Ali paused for one beat, simply clocking all the angles in the room – not to mention the vibe, the cramped space, and the general air of menace. She wasn’t sure what the deal was with these guys.

But she was pretty sure she didn’t want any.

She moved efficiently to the girl’s side, took her pale wrist with her left hand, rotated her wristwatch to where she could see it, and started counting pulse beats and breaths. While doing this, she got her first real look at the girl. She was younger, smaller, and fairer than her sister. The paleness could be due to injury, illness, malnutrition, fear, or simply her natural complexion. Ali figured the “girl” might actually be 18, while her sister was probably more in the ballpark of 20 or 22. Neither seemed to be showing any particular maturity so far.

Even after all that had befallen them…

Ali considered that a lot of other young people had managed to grow up quickly enough.

While Ali gazed down on her, the girl looked fearfully up and across at her older sister, seeking some kind of reassurance. And with that one brief look, Ali suddenly began to feel sympathetic, even tender, toward the younger one. She couldn’t fail to think of her own younger sister. The age difference was about the same.

Though this little sister would grow older, while Ali’s would not.

And there was another similarity that raised Ali’s blood pressure: she’d had to leave her own sister behind, bound into that arranged marriage, powerless and subject to the whims and cruelties of men. Just as it appeared to Ali that these girls were now.

Ruled, or even owned, by men.

But now thirty seconds had gone by, and she returned from her dark reverie to add up the numbers she’d counted without really being aware of doing so. The girl’s respiration and pulse were both in a normal range, so Ali began unwrapping the wound. As she did, she spoke to the girl gently.

“What’s your name?”

“Emily.”

“How old are you, Emily?”

“Eighteen.”

“And what happened to your leg?”

The mustache man spoke from behind her in his deep crackle: “She fell off the upper deck.”

Not turning, Ali said, “Thanks, but I need her answers.”

“Whatever you say, darling,” he said, sounding a lot as if he were humoring her – and at least a little like he was leering. Ali let it go.

For the moment.

* * *

And now there were six: three more military-age males appeared on the deck of the Diablo. Two of these wore no visible weapons. But they stood to the side of and slightly behind some large object sitting on the top deck, and which was covered with a dark tarpaulin. The dude on the right rested his hand casually, a little too casually, on whatever it was.

The third new guy stood on the lower deck, amidships. He wore a white tracksuit under a light body-armor vest. And he carried a crossbow.

Seriously? Handon thought. He clocked all this while trying not to let his expression or posture change.

He heard Henno mutter a single word behind him: “Wanker.”

Facing off against these six, there were now only two in evidence on the Three Brothers – Handon and Henno. Park was still below, Ali had gone off on her mission of mercy, and Predator and Juice were still tucked out of sight. Now, Handon heard a gentle splashing, or maybe just a rustling of the water, from behind him. It came from the starboard, the side facing away from the Diablo. It ended almost as soon as it began. Handon didn’t turn around.

The sun was coming up in earnest now, though hidden behind some low clouds in the east. The deep gloom of early morning had turned into smudgy daylight. A couple of the men on the other boat maneuvered a few steps, tweaking their positions.

“What else you got on board?” asked the pierced shotgun guy, half-grinning, looking like he was trying to be friendly. Complicating this effort, on top of his weapons and piercings, was the dark leather coat he wore, which Handon now saw ill concealed some kind of harness and drop holsters strapped to each thigh. Like he thought he was Neo in The Matrix. “We could do you a trade, maybe. You got ammunition? Long-life food? Or maybe some of your fuel…” The guy seemed to be looking around the sides of Handon and Henno now, scanning the bags and boxes that lay in the cockpit area. As he peered, he spat messily in the water between the boats.

A little landed on the hull of Alpha’s boat.

Behind Handon, Henno screwed up his nose. He felt violated even having the gaze of this muppet upon him. Not to mention by the messy gobbing. Henno was hardly the most mannered or fastidious member of this team. But he figured he’d had just about enough of this shite…

“Why don’t I just hop over and take a look,” the shotgun guy said, as if offering to do them a favor.

Handon shook his head fractionally. “Probably better if you stay where you are.”

The man leaned back again, after half-raising his leg to the railing. “Sure. No problem.” But his eye drifted back to Alpha’s deck. “Looks like maybe… some boxes of rifle bullets? How many of those you got?”

Handon just slit his eyes and nodded. He figured he pretty much had this worked out now. And it was all just going to go the way it would have to go…

And with that two more of them appeared toward the prow, Handon’s right – one high and one low. That made eight on two.

It struck Handon that this was a heck of a lot of survivors – particularly this far from Britain, and particularly this long into the ZA. Though he couldn’t say these were the kind of guys he was happy to see surviving. They were, by all appearances, the kind of people he could frankly do without. The kind who probably made the world even more of a living hell for anyone else lucky enough to still be breathing air, but unlucky enough to cross their path.

And with eight of them, this really was turning into a bad Mad Max sequel. Something like Beyond Thunderdome meets The Expendables – on a Lake, Handon thought mordantly, mentally pitching the movie idea. But of more immediate tactical concern was the fact that all these guys were armed, and half of them were in elevated positions relative to Alpha. And there was very little space between the two groups, and almost no cover. Only open air and water, and damned little of that. If it all kicked off, things were going to happen very, very quickly.

Handon moved his hand very slowly to pick up his radio, to hail Ali and get a sitrep.

But it picked that moment to perk up on its own.

“Mortem One, this is Charles One Zero, how copy?”

As Handon brought the radio to his mouth, he squinted across at the shotgun guy, who spat again, leaning farther forward to do so.

“Charles One Zero, Mortem One, solid copy. That you, Master Gunny?”

“Yeah, ole Gunny Fick here, live and in person. Told you we’d come and get you, you suicide-squad sons of bitches…”

Handon spoke again, while simultaneously monitoring the position and posture of all the armed men standing a handful of feet away from him. He gave a little smile and nod. “Is that our air transport you’re riding? I don’t recognize the engine noise signature.”

“No, well you wouldn’t. But never you mind that. We are inbound Beaver Island airport, ETA approx three-zero mikes. What’s your status?”

“Also approaching Beaver Island. And also about thirty mikes out. But we’ve hit a slight delay.”

Now the crossbowman, also nearly opposite Handon, sort of casually removed a bolt and slid it into the grooved barrel of his weapon. Handon could already see the string was back and the compound cables taut.

Jesus Christ…

“Wait one, Gunny,” he said.

He slowly lowered the radio to the control panel beside him.

* * *

After a only a couple of minutes below, Ali knew several things. First, she knew that the girl’s wound was real – but not new. Someone had already replaced the emerging section of bone and set it, however clumsily. And the blood on the bandages wasn’t fresh either.

Ali had held advanced paramedic qualifications back in the world, and she led the girl through some standard casualty treatment questions – symptoms of the injury, known allergies, any medications she was on, past illnesses, and the history of the incident that caused the wound. Then she moved on to the symptoms of sepsis, or blood poisoning. The girl seemed alternately confused, and like she was reading from a script. But the script didn’t extend as far as Ali’s questions went, and that’s where she got confused.

And the biker ’stache dude, who was actually starting to strike Ali as more of a post-Apocalyptic cowboy, kept trying to answer for her.

Ali was also now pretty sure the girl was scared, and possibly under duress. And if she, and her sister, were here against their wishes… well, Ali didn’t really like to think about what that would be like, or what it entailed. She really disliked these guys. But she would at least be on her way in a few minutes.

These two would be trapped.

Unless she did something about it.

Which could be problematical on about a thousand levels.

As Ali debrided and disinfected the wound – it had never been done properly in the first place – she could feel the man behind her lean in close. “What sort of painkillers you got in your aid kit there? Morphine? Oxycontin?” He reached toward it.

Ali eyed him, but made no move to stop him.

Then again, she amended, maybe it’s ME that’s trapped…

The man leaned in even closer. “How about Percocet? Any Vicodin?”

Ali didn’t pause in her work. She spoke flatly. “I thought you said she needed antibiotics.”

The older girl answered. “My sister’s been in a lot of pain. It’s for that.”

And then Ali heard a dull, indeterminate noise from across the cabin. The doorway to the bathroom was directly across from her, and that’s where it came from. She purposely got up and moved around to the other side of the bed, putting the bathroom to her back. She made a show of carefully wrapping a dressing around the girl’s leg… but her focus was on peripheral vision, where she saw the cowboy make a subtle gesture over her head.

And that’s what she needed to see.

The mystery man with the flashlight was also more or less positioned behind her now too, and a bit to the right. She couldn’t miss him stepping forward, as the light grew closer and brighter. He spoke over Ali’s shoulder. “You look pretty nice bent over like that. A real angel of mercy.” He took another step closer.

Ali kept wrapping the wound. And she kept her posture relaxed and her breathing steady.

The man pressed his body up behind her. Ali could feel his warmth – and then she felt his hand on her hip. For all her cold-blooded professionalism, it was hard work keeping herself from reacting to this, for two reasons. One, because of what it told her about what life here must be like for these girls. And two, because it reminded her again of her sister’s dubious husband, back in Somalia, who had subjected Amina to a life of sexual servitude, and domestic drudgery, and the controlling jealousy of a rough man. Ali thought balefully of man, that fallen creature, who had made the lives of so many women a living hell even before life itself had gone completely to hell…

And now this dude’s hand started to slide up Ali’s hip toward her waist.

And with that, there came another faint sound directly behind her, from the bathroom. And she knew exactly what that was: the slide or bolt of a firearm easing forward over a loaded chamber.

She finished tying off the wound, taking care not to make it too tight.

* * *

Up top, Handon casually shifted the radio to his left hand, still moving very slowly.

And that’s when a blood-chilling holler tore through the early-morning silence. It was loud and vivid enough that it filled the air around both boats, sounding as if it came from everywhere at once, or at least from close by. It carried over the still surface of the lake for hundreds of meters around them. But its source was definitely down in the hold of the Diablo.

And in that moment, on the outside decks of the same boat, sixteen previously squinty eyes went wide. And eighty fingers began to tense and curl.

And then they all froze for an instant as a very tight, very rapid series of muted but heavy gunshots banged out from down below – from below decks in what Handon had originally guessed was, and now knew to be, the pirate vessel.

As one, all the biker dudes up top on the Diablo grabbed for their weapons.

The LT

Over America

Gunny Fick recrossed half the distance of the plane’s vibrating fuselage, tottering in his full combat load, and retook his seat by the gun bubble. He had, thank fuck, been able to get Alpha on the horn. And they were, seriously thank fuck, moving toward their extraction point – even if Handon had hung up on him. With a little luck, Chuckie would only have to kiss the tarmac with three wheels, open the door to onload the free riders, do a U-turn, and take back off again.

In and out, clean and smelling fresh.

But Fick had been doing this long enough to know that things didn’t usually go that easily.

He looked around him now, in wonder, at the unfinished aluminum interior of the B-17, and tried to imagine what dramas, what daring feats of arms, what terrifying close calls, had happened right where he sat. Looking out into the peaceful morning sky, he tried to imagine air-burst shells exploding just off the wing tips, Messerschmitt 109s coming in out of the sun, their dual MG 131 machine guns chattering malice and death. The survival rates of bomber crews over occupied Europe had been atrocious.

These bombers had been flown by some brave sons of bitches.

Fick snorted. At least he and his men didn’t have to worry about flak or fighter interceptors anymore.

But Fick, trained in military schools from an early age, knew that the history of mankind was the history of war. Not for five minutes had human beings stopped trying to tear one another to bits. It was no accident that most technological advancement had happened during wartime. Radar, microwaves, X-rays, jet aircraft, the Internet, GPS, satellites, nuclear fission… if it provided any advantage in war, if it furnished new and better ways to kill the enemy, it got discovered or created. And it got adopted.

No, people had never stopped killing each other. And now they were even doing it from beyond the grave. Human conflict just went on and on. Which was why there would always be a need for warriors like Gunny Fick, and his MARSOC Marines.

He paused in these thoughts to steal a look out the window. If he stuck his head out into the bubble, he thought he could make out a spreading patch of blue up ahead. That would be the second of three Great Lakes they would overfly on their long journey. He switched his radio to the air mission net and hit up the two pilots. “Fick here, can I get an update?”

“Yeah, Gunny, we’re still within mission parameters. Approx twenty-five mikes to target.”

“Copy that.”

Fick clicked off and looked down below them again. Now they were starting to overfly some populated – or, okay, previously populated – areas. He checked his map, and guessed maybe he was looking down at the northern suburbs of Detroit. The Midwest – more places he had never got to, and now almost certainly never would. With all those undead sheep down there, no longer needing his protection…

Fick had long considered himself to be one of the sheepdogs.

This was of a trope that had gained currency among military, police, and other first responders and guardians of civilization during the counter-terror wars of the early twenty-first century. The idea was that the great mass of humanity had no malice in them, and were as incapable of any kind of violence as, well, sheep. There was nothing wrong with being a sheep – most of them were good, honorable, productive citizens, who worked hard and took care of their families. And they would be free to simply go on doing it if not for… the wolves. These were the tiny but powerful subset of humanity who lived to threaten, to terrorize, to rip off, and to hurt and kill the sheep. Criminals, psychos, terrorists, violent men of whatever allegiance, or of none.

And the only thing blocking their culling of the sheep was… the sheepdogs.

And if sheepdogs like Fick actually looked a lot like the wolves – fierce, armed, resolved, and dangerous – it was because they had to be as willing and able to use violence as the wolves were. As a result, the sheep were sometimes nearly as scared of the sheepdogs as they were of the wolves – both because they were strange and violent, and because they reminded them of the unpleasant fact that they lived in a dangerous world with wolves in it. And that they could only go about their lives safely under the watchful eyes and guns of the sheepdogs.

But the difference between the wolves and the sheepdogs was stark: while the wolves had no empathy for anyone, the sheepdogs liked people – had in fact pledged their lives to protect them. Even if they sometimes got little in the way of thanks.

Fick monitored the empty suburban houses and yards scrolling by below. A damned sight fewer of them to tend to now, he thought.

But perhaps that only made the survivors more precious.

And maybe it made the work of Fick and his kennel of sheepdogs all the more indispensable.

In WWI, the German soldiers fighting across from the Marines in Belleau Wood had nicknamed them Teufelshunde, or “dogs from hell.” The nickname “Devil Dogs” had stuck, across a hundred years of wars.

Sheepdogs, Devil Dogs, Fick thought absently, settling back into his spot.

Whatever.

* * *

In another fifteen minutes, he hauled himself up, grabbed his rifle, and shouted down the line: “Get your Kevlars on, charge your weapons! We are five mikes from contact!” He then walked down the narrow space, slapping backs and asses, checking straps, fittings, armor, and radios. Everyone was totally squared away.

His was a damned disciplined unit.

He didn’t like to admit it, but he probably had the LT to thank for a lot of that. Most of the team’s original training had been organized and led by him. But, once again, Fick recoiled from memories of his most recent – and probably last ever – commanding officer in the Marine Corps chain of command.

He now took up a position between the flight deck and the belly hatch they would all use to exit the aircraft – after they landed and piled off to storm the airfield, secure it, and defend it. As he leaned against the vibrating steel of the superstructure, he allowed himself the indulgence of a last few seconds of quiet reflection… before the storm that was probably coming.

He took a deep, happy breath and thought: Hell – we’re the lucky ones. Not only are we still breathing air. But we’re still in the fight. Damned few, and damned lucky. But, then again, Master Gunnery Sergeant Fick didn’t believe in luck. He believed in choice.

And he believed in resolve.

He had chosen to put himself in the line of fire. That was the controlling decision that had dictated the contours of his life. It was a life where he sacrificed much, but where he always had the consolation of being first to fight. These days, in the ZA, everyone sacrificed. But, as before, a few still did the bulk of the fighting. It was that choice, which he and his men had all made, plus Fick’s resolve to keep them all alive, that were to thank for their survival, and their success.

Luck didn’t have too much to do with it.

It was resolve, and it was the choices they had made.

Which was not to say that some of their choices hadn’t been damned painful. Even as he resisted it, Fick’s memory now flashed back to that disastrous scavenging mission in Darwin, Australia, when two catastrophes had overtaken the team almost at once. First, a building had collapsed, cutting off their primary exfiltration route. Then the military barracks, which had been filled with many hundreds of dead (former forward-deployed American military personnel), turned out to be not so sealed off after all. As a result, his team had been cut off, surrounded, and very nearly overrun. In the end, they had faced a nightmarish run across two clicks of difficult terrain, with nearly a thousand zombies swarming in their rear, and more converging on them from both sides.

The only way they were going to cover that ground and get back to the landing boat alive, was if someone performed a rear-guard action at the choke point – laying down a hellacious base of fire, to slow down the horde just enough for the others to scramble out of there.

Now, maybe that man should have been Fick.

But it hadn’t been. It had been the Lieutenant.

The LT had volunteered to do it. And Fick had let him. He hadn’t had to let him – he was older, bigger, and meaner than the young unit commander. And Fick could have grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, shoved him down that gangway, and taken the rear position himself.

But that’s not what he did. Instead, he saluted – and took off running.

What tortured his mind now, and what had assailed him every minute since then, was the question of his motives for doing it. Deep down, some part of him knew he had let the LT die saving the team, instead of taking his place, because… because he believed himself more fit to lead the men than their commander. And he believed that the men who survived that day would be better off with him around, than with the LT. And that it was thus for the greater good.

But Fick could never say that out loud; and he never had, and never would. Because that kind of hubris in a senior non-commissioned officer was very bad news. A platoon sergeant works for the officer who commands the platoon, just as Fick had worked for the LT. But, on that one dark day, when it had really counted… he hadn’t acted like it. He had failed to step forward, and had made a decision that was beneath his honor. Because of this he had lived, and the LT had died, and now Fick had to live with that every day.

And the only thing he could think to do to make the decision a less shameful one was to make its premise more true. Now, and every day, Fick had to prove he’d made the right choice: that he was the best possible leader for the men, better than the LT would have been. He had to keep his men alive – unless completing the mission made that impossible.

And then he had to sell their lives as dearly as fucking possible.

Maybe he would run into the LT again one day, and tell him that his guys were all okay. Given the likely manner of that reunion, though, Fick guessed it was probably better not.

* * *

He checked his watch, then looked out through the cockpit glass at the enormous stretch of blue spread out beneath them. Up ahead, coming up quickly, was a pretty damned big island, in the middle of this big damned lake. The bomber’s propeller pitch changed, and Fick’s ears popped, as Chuckie started descending in earnest.

Within seconds, they had left the lake behind, blasted over nearly five miles of lightly forested island, turned nominally to the west, and lined up on the single long runway that spread out ahead of them. Their landing pattern would take them practically right alongside the single control tower, which now began to rise up on the right. And looking at the runway and area around it, Fick didn’t see a single thing moving. Certainly nothing shambling.

He smiled, figuring maybe at least the first phase of this op, capturing the airstrip, was going to go smoothly.

And then a large shearing hole, about four inches by one, appeared in the aluminum skin of the plane, above Fick’s head and to the right – coming into existence with a pinging metallic sound, admitting both a slash of light and the violent exterior wind. Fick squinted at this hole, perplexed, and then heard a shout from the rear. Looking back down the fuselage, he could see his men scrambling away from the right side of the aircraft – where another slash of light had been admitted.

A third one tore open near it, before his eyes, with another plinking sound.

Fick shouted three words up into the flight deck, which caused both the pilot and co-pilot to swivel their heads and look back at him, completely confused. And then a horrible crunching noise in front snapped their heads back forward – a large, circular, ragged hole had appeared in the “bulletproof” cockpit glass, at the same time as something behind the co-pilot’s head exploded with a shower of sparks.

“I said,” Fick repeated, even louder this time, “‘WE’RE TAKING FIRE!’ Evade, evade!!”

Hot LZ

Over Beaver Island

“What do you mean this thing doesn’t have any goddamned rockets?” Fick thundered at the pilots. “How am I supposed to insert into a denied area in the teeth of accurate ground fire without rockets?”

This outburst came only a few seconds after Fick had bodily pulled Stan the mechanic out of his way, stormed the cramped flight deck – and then instantly had his heavily laden body knocked to the deck as the ancient plane pulled up from its descent and twisted violently away to the left.

As he went down, Fick caught a flash, really just a single frame, of the control tower out of the right-side cockpit glass, before they banked away. He could see nothing but darkness inside of it. But he could also see that the big window glass of the top level had been shot or blown out, which fact he considered pretty goddamned evocative, and maybe relevant to their tactical situation.

He’d already clocked the electrical fire burning high on the back wall of the flight deck, while climbing back to his feet, and calmly unclipped the fire extinguisher from the wall and put it out.

God love whoever remembered to add THAT to the manifest, Fick thought, letting off the dispenser handles and dropping the extinguisher where he stood. Swirling white powder filled the air, but was also quickly sucked out the ragged hole in the plane’s skin, which was still admitting light and whistling from the rushing air outside.

“No rockets!” the co-pilot shouted now over the engine and wind noise. “This is a World War Two bomber, you dumb jarhead! But there’s the twin 50-cal in the tail turret!”

Fick nodded, ignoring the insult. Of course he already knew about the machine gun – but hadn’t quite considered it in the context of suppressing the ground fire they had inexplicably started taking.

His eye followed the chemical powder being sucked out of the plane, and he surveyed the gash in its skin. He couldn’t be sure, but he was starting to develop an opinion about what type of round would make an enormous hole in steel like that. If he was right, there were only a couple of types of weapon that fired it. And there were only a few likely spots to emplace such a weapon below.

Fick noted that the pilot and co-pilot weren’t panicking – they were seasoned naval aviators, and had probably been on the receiving end of ground fire before – but neither were they kicking back and whistling Dixie. He put his hands on their shoulders and stuck his head down close to theirs. Ahead, out the cockpit glass, he could see the world and the horizon coming level again as they came out of their crazy-ass evasion maneuvers. The blue of Lake Michigan spread out beneath them again, as the island receded behind.

He said, “Okay, guys, here’s what I need from you…”

Twenty seconds and one furious argument later, the grimacing pilot grudgingly brought Chuckie around 180 degrees. Within a few seconds he had flown them back to the island, banked around to the right, and now was zooming straight back in over the runway – from the opposite direction as before, and at low altitude. The white pillar of the control tower loomed at them ahead on the left.

They were going to give the tower a low, slow, and provocatively close fly-by, like something at a military air show – with the express purpose of trying to draw fire and thus locate the shooter. Fick could almost hear the pilots gritting their teeth. He clapped the lead pilot on his upper arm. “Hey, don’t worry – B-17s have taken a hell of a lot worse punishment than this! We’ll be fine.”

With that, he turned and exited the flight deck, raced half the length of the plane, bodily pulled the enormous frame of Brady out of the left-side machine gun blister, and took up that position. He didn’t use a rifle scope – it would all be going by too quickly.

The control tower flashed into view, the black maw of its flight control deck yawning.

Crack. There it was. Fick just caught the muzzle flash.

And another gigantic .50 BMG round sheared into the wing inches below where he sat.

Fick stood up again, smiling, and grabbed the team’s youngest guy by a vest strap and hauled him around. “Chesney!” he barked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Get your ass back to the tail gunner turret.”

“Sir?”

“And get your ass in it. I’ll meet you there.”

With that, he left the bewildered Marine behind him as he leapt toward the flight deck again. He knew the Kid was the only one of them who would fit in the turret with all his battle rattle on.

When he hit the flight deck, he had another furious discussion with the pilots, mostly about occupational health and safety. He wasn’t sure if he only won the argument due to being much more heavily armed than them.

But he didn’t give a shit either way.

They were going back in.

* * *

Fick reached down into the turret bubble and clapped Chesney on the shoulder. The poor guy was wedged in there, practically bent over double, his gloved hands gripping the two “spade handle” grips on the back of the twin .50-caliber machine guns, his tan assault boots resting on the control pedals.

“Just relax,” Fick shouted. “Breathe.”

“Will this damned museum piece even fire, Gunny?” the Kid asked, looking back over his own shoulder, wide-eyed.

“It’ll fire,” said Reyes, who was crouching beside Fick. “We cleaned and lubed it before we took off. And we’ve got a lot better lubricants than they did in World War Two.”

“Clear your guns,” Fick instructed him, the term for firing a test burst.

Chesney depressed the V-shaped “butterfly” trigger with both thumbs, and the ancient beast shuddered and issued a mighty roar, lasting a full second. The gun worked.

They’d determined this none too soon. Everyone could feel the plane losing altitude rapidly and slowing – as they dove at the back side of the control tower, its blind side, then skimmed along over the tops of the trees.

“Those were fifty-cal rounds hitting us in mid-air,” Fick said in the last moment. “Now you pay that sonofabitch back!”

And with that, stomachs suddenly tried to fall out of asses, as Chuckie climbed to swoop over the tower – and then just as quickly attempted to climb out of mouths, as they dropped down again on the other side. “Now!” Fick shouted, as the control deck of the tower came into view behind them, the bomber showing its tail as it flew away, straight over the runway at treetop level.

The Kid put the aiming site in the center of the control room and jabbed at the trigger with both thumbs. The gun roared to life, juddering and screaming – and didn’t let off again until the tower was almost completely out of sight, which was nearly eight seconds later. The pilots were following to the letter Fick’s instruction to show the bomber’s ass directly to the target and not to deviate course.

If the sniper in the tower got any more rounds off, nobody in the back of the bomber saw or heard it. The twin jackhammer roar of the dual heavy machine guns shook the very structure of the plane, made teeth vibrate, rattled brains. And it just went on and on. The Marines were pretty sure their teeth were going to come out and their bowel control fail at this rate. The barrels were definitely going to overheat soon.

Hundreds of enormous .50 BMG rounds from the twin guns just poured into the control tower. With the plane vibrating, it wasn’t particularly accurate fire. No doubt, just on the law of averages, an awful lot of them made it into the control deck, but they also struck and penetrated every surface of the west-facing side of the whole structure, especially as the plane got farther away.

And right about at the five-second mark, the top or roof of the entire sonofabitch collapsed straight into the big control room below, in a tremendous whuff of dust and debris. Chesney, Fick, and Reyes all cheered spontaneously, their voices deep and resonant. And it was only when the Kid took his right hand from the gun to pump his fist in the air that Fick noticed that a chunk of his arm was gone.

“You’re hit,” Fick shouted. “You’re bleeding, Chesney.”

Still absolutely jacked on adrenaline, the Kid shouted back: “I ain’t got time to bleed!” And he continued blasting away with a maniacal cackle.

Fucking kids, Fick thought, raised on Hollywood and video games…

“Make time,” he said, grabbing his upper arm roughly, while reaching down to the Kid’s waist pack and digging into the blowout kit there for a thick Israeli bandage. He grudgingly decided it was to the Kid’s credit that he kept shooting while Fick wrapped him up. And Chesney also must have the luck of the Irish. Because that .50 sniper round had only just winged him.

If it had caught his arm square, it would have taken it clean off.

* * *

Fick looked contentedly upon the wreckage of the control tower, as Chuckie came around once again, and in a much more relaxed manner this time. “Now that’s good effect on target,” he said, mainly to himself. Of course, the collapse had almost certainly been due as much to the rotting of the structure as it was to Chesney’s shooting. But, either way, there was no more sign of their bothersome sniper. But then Fick’s smile melted away – because another thing there was no sign of was Alpha team.

But, then again, this air extraction mission, call sign Charles One Zero, was here slightly ahead of schedule – and being early was probably only slightly less bad than being late, depending on how popular a spot this turned out to be. And, anyway, even if Alpha were down there, Fick wouldn’t have expected them to just be sitting on the tarmac with their faces hanging out. They’d be under cover. Much as Fick and his men would not be, not if they had any hope of defending the aircraft and the runway.

Now, as Fick continued to scan the terrain below out of the blister, a couple of little ant-like movements on the ground tugged at his eye. He leaned forward and squinted. There were two, then five, then eight… little human figures running jerkily out of the treeline of the forest, and into the cleared area around the airport. They were making for the control tower. And, while they were human figures, they definitely weren’t human.

Not anymore, at least.

Fick sighed. He decided he’d better get his ass back up to the flight deck and get on the horn to Alpha – and tell them to shake a fucking leg. Because the pilots were already banking around and lining up their approach to the runway. And, as unappealing as hanging around on that tarmac had seemed a few minutes before, it had become even less so now.

Fick couldn’t help but be pleased that they’d successfully suppressed the ground fire.

But they’d also just rung the goddamned dinner bell.

Overwatch

Canterbury Quarantine Border

Major Grews paced the back of his mobile tactical operations truck, cursing under his breath. Four hours was what they had said. Four hours to get the problem under control. But it had already gone way past saving, even before he’d gotten his men on the ground. Now he had four combat teams fighting their way through the area of operations (AO). One Troop, 42 Commando, were smack in the middle of it all – and unless they made it to where those damn tunnel folk were barricaded up, there was zero chance of getting those civilians out.

One Troop were his best, his elite, and after their odyssey across fallen Europe, starting in Germany, these men were more than able to handle being outnumbered by the dead. Hell, they were used to it, it was their speciality, but even they would run out of ammunition soon. Then it would be down to hand-to-hand fighting, and things would get messy, and they would start to fall.

Grews knew their time was up and the birds were already in the air. Minutes were all he had left. The operations order from the top was that the people from the tunnel – currently holed up in the temporary housing they’d been given until they could be moved to London – were to be saved at all costs. They would go in and get them, an airlift most probably, but what about his team? They were already rocketing the damn streets with the squadron of Apaches that had been moved in and cleared hot. This terrifically multiplied the chaos that his men were already battling through.

“‘Fucking media nightmare’,” he hissed to himself, and slammed his fist on the inside panel of the vehicle. That’s all Central really cared about? Keeping the tunnelers alive – for “general morale”? What about a whole damn city going down – and barely sixty miles from the capital? What about the people who could still be stuck inside buildings there, and who would soon have those buildings collapsing in on them?

“You have to get the tunnel survivors out of there safely,” Colonel Mayes had said to him. “At all costs. If they die, a few days after we managed to rescue them from that damned tunnel, we are going to have a media nightmare on our hands. I mean a nightmare.”

“Isn’t it a little more important that right now we’re facing the first major urban outbreak in nearly two years?” Grews had asked. “Can’t we just seal the whole town off and airlift them out?”

“Airlift? Yes, of course.” Colonel Mayes had sounded distant. “But we won’t have the capability to lift them out for another couple of hours, which is too close to the cuff. Send your men in. Quell what you can, and if they can get them out of there on foot, that’s even better. If they can’t, then they need to hold that building until the bombing is over and we can get them out safely. Look, I’ve got a detachment from 656 Squadron, Army Air Corps, on their way to you now. Apaches, very formidable, they can provide you with air support as required. They’ll clear the way to the building and then run top cover for your men until the bombing starts.”

“And if they can’t get to the building and hold it?”

“They have to.”

Four hours ago that had all seemed possible. One Troop had gone in, along with three other teams at different locations, and at first the streets had been relatively quiet. But then the evacuations had begun, and doors started opening, and that was when the problems started. How many people had rushed home and hidden themselves away after their brief scare with a fast-moving zombie that hadn’t tried to eat them? Dozens? Hundreds? How many had never woken up… alive? That’s when the attacks began all over the city. And the dead went from hundreds to thousands in less than two hours.

Truly a fucking nightmare.

Grews looked to his operations officer. “Did we get the supply drop in the air to One Troop?”

“Affirmative, sir,” replied the junior officer, who sat on a bench in the back of the truck. “Supply drop is inbound. ETA five minutes.”

“Good,” said the Major. Let’s just hope it reaches them, he thought.

But then Grews frowned. Something was bothering him. As he listened to the chatter of the various radio channels, all buzzing with activity from his troops in contact on the ground, something really began to itch at the back of his mind. How many dead were in the city now? Two thousand? Five thousand? It was spiraling by the minute. They had evacuated close to ten thousand people before the inner city became hopeless and they sealed it off. Most of the refugees had come from the outskirts of town.

Grews cursed. How many people were in the damn town to start with? The reports from the Apaches were that most of the inner city was now overwhelmed. There were a few pockets of resistance, but those small islands were falling rapidly as the sheer numbers of the dead swamped them.

Then it hit him. What the hell was going to happen when the only living targets were sitting around the outskirts of town? The quarantine personnel, and the refugees? What would the dead do when there was no longer anybody alive inside the town to keep them there?

He looked across at his Ops Officer.

“How many checkpoints do we have? What’s our border coverage?”

The man blinked, considered, then tried to answer. “We have all the main roads held with roadblocks in place, sir. Each is manned by a platoon of infantry, with vehicle-mounted heavy weapons. We also have the Folkestone Harbour garrison handling the refugee situation. They’re at Harbledown, sir.”

“Roadblocks. We only have roadblocks. Harbledown is what, about a mile from Canterbury?”

“Yes, sir.”

A mile. Just a mile. That was too damned close.

Ten thousand refugees milling around in a field, some of them injured, all making a lot of noise – and probably within sniffing range of the multiplying horde.

“Get me Brooks from Harbour garrison, now.”

Inbound

Canterbury

The thunder of missile strikes just kept coming. Jameson and his men had been hunkered down for over two minutes, after receiving zero warning of the imminent bombardment, as they waited out the blasts that shook the ground and ravaged the streets ahead. And they had now kept their heads down as long as they dared, as the dead nearby started getting too close. Bombs falling from the sky didn’t bother the dead in the least; they didn’t even notice them.

Now One Troop uncovered and opened fire again, knocking down the nearest of the incoming threats. They held their positions, not daring to move into the street opposite. The rain of deadly missiles was moving farther away now, blasting great holes in the fronts of shops and other buildings, leaving craters big enough to dump a truck into, and rending the dead into small pieces, which were then scattered across the road.

Then, without warning, the three helicopters ceased firing, banked right, and roared away, heading out of the city, after passing almost directly over the tenement building.

Jameson stood up, his back tingling with shock from the missile impacts that had been so close, far too close, to him and his men. He pressed the talk button on his radio.

“CentCom, One Troop. What the hell was that? How about alerting troops in contact before a danger-close strike?” he bellowed.

Around him, his men had begun to stand up, some of them staggering, but still they regrouped, reformed, and made ready. No one was lost or combat ineffective – yet. But everyone had limits.

“One Troop, CentCom. You are now clear to move to your target. Be advised that Hammerdown protocol is now in place. Inbound ten minutes. Safety zone is within fifty meters of the target building. Over.”

“Clear, my arse—” But Jameson cut himself off, knowing he would only earn himself a ticking off if he spoke further. The rage was burning inside him, and he was already forming words he would regret. But he managed to hold his tongue for the moment.

He looked across the battlefield, judging his team’s next move, and flipped his radio from the command to the troop net. They needed to move fast. No, they needed to move like it was their last day, because if they didn’t, it probably would be.

“First squad, move up! Eli, you’re on point. Get to those traffic lights. Clear and hold.”

A shout of acknowledgement came back, penetrating Jameson’s still-ringing ears. Twelve men, Eli at the fore, broke from their positions and rushed the intersection, leaping the bodies of the dead, rifles raised and ready, checking every corpse as they passed. A handful of shots rang out as still-moving zombies were dropped, the Marines speeding past them without slowing.

“Second squad, patrol forward. Third squad, secure the rear. Hold formation, keep it together. Watch your feet, but keep moving. We have a whole shedload of dead in bits down there, and we have to make it to that tenement building in the the next ten minutes or we are all fucked.”

They moved out by squads, covering the ground of the roundabout in less than thirty seconds. Sporadic shots rang out as still-feisty dead were spotted and dealt with. Ahead, further down the road, first squad was already opening up on the remaining dead coming out of nearby buildings. A grocery store on the left, with its windows smashed, produced perhaps a dozen, maybe more, stumbling over each other to get out – to get their teeth and claws into the Marines. Eli leapt on top of a dented car and barked orders, repositioning his squad like some mad general, and watching over them.

As far as he was concerned, they couldn’t afford to lose a single man.

Jameson hopped over a pile of debris from the missile strikes, which included a severed leg. He didn’t slow, and he tried to keep his mind off what exactly lay scattered on the street around them. He told himself that even though these had been living people a day ago, they were dead already when the missiles hit. They wouldn’t have felt a thing.

Gore was everywhere. A few feet away one of his men sidestepped, lifted his rifle and fired a single shot into a pile of bodies that the explosions had ripped apart, leaving a mangled patchwork of limbs, some of which were still moving. That movement stopped now.

Jameson scanned the ground ahead, up the street and to either side, as they crossed broken pavement littered with debris from destroyed building fronts. Not a single square meter of ground was clear. Glass, splinters of painted wood and plastic, and chunks of brick and masonry lay scattered across the road and the shattered sidewalk as though some giant had thrown it there.

“Keep your eyes peeled for crawlers,” he said into his chin mic, remembering those hands reaching up from the watery darkness of the Channel Tunnel. Even half a zombie in the wrong place, crushed under a car but still able to reach out and bite, could mean death to someone not paying attention.

He caught up with Eli and his first squad, consolidated, and they moved out again, heading up the street and taking ground as quickly as they could. The tenement building loomed closer now – three hundred yards, then two hundred. It seemed that every other structure they passed spewed a dozen or more of the dead, which his men would quickly gun down.

“Jameson,” called a voice in his ear. It was Grews and he sounded agitated. “Jameson, answer me, you bastard.”

“Jameson here. What’s the problem, boss?”

There was a hissing of static and the channel broke up for a few seconds.

“There’s a supply drop coming. Ammo. Are you close to the tenement yet? Are you at the fucking exclusion zone?”

Jameson continued to jog forward, aiming his rifle ahead, making his shots count. So far the Marines had kept the still-walking undead at bay, and they were closing on the tenement now. But in the background, over the snap of assault rifles, a distant and deep humming noise had begun to grow.

“Affirmative, fifty meters to target.”

The street was nearly empty here. Even though the blacktop was largely free of missile impact craters, there were still strangely few of the enemy.

And finally they were outside the gate of the tenement. One of the men got to work on the lock with a heavy set of bolt cutters. Eli and First Squad moved up to the wall – behind which they could see a large concentration of the dead, all trying to fight their way in to the target building. Second and third squads took up supporting positions outside the gate.

“Jameson, the drop will be at your location in sixty seconds. You should see it by now.”

Jameson scanned the skies for another helo, but there was nothing.

“Negative, I am not visual with resupply bird…”

And then he did see it – but it wasn’t airborne. Racing down the street they had just come up, bouncing over rubble from the missile strikes, was a 4x4. It barreled toward their position, and Jameson wondered if it was even planning to stop.

“Is it a ground vehicle, sir?”

“No, Jameson. It’s a Lynx, flying with the Apaches. It should be there by now. You’ve got about two minutes to get in that yard. Do you hear me?”

The 4x4 was thirty yards out now, and still accelerating. Inside it, Jameson could now see the wide, terror-stricken eyes of the driver. And he could also see the dogged figures of the dead that hung on all sides of the vehicle. One of them pounded at the driver’s-side window with bloody, broken hands, as others clung to the roof rack and running-boards.

Finally, without warning, the window spiderwebbed and caved, and the zombie lunged in at the driver, its legs kicking at the air as it flailed and bit. The 4x4 swerved violently, turning toward the wall in front of the tenement – which also meant it was speeding directly toward the Marines. Jameson’s eyes went wide as he realized this freakish roadshow was not just going to pass them by.

“Sir, we’re looking at heavy opposition in the ya—” came Eli’s voice over the net, but Jameson interrupted him.

“Everybody out the way! Clear the gate! Now!”

The out-of-control vehicle blasted toward them, moving toward the wall, over which Eli and first squad were already making shots on the mass of dead behind it.

Now everything in Jameson’s vision seemed to go into vivid slow motion…

The massive 4x4 thundering up over the sidewalk, totally out of control, roaring along at sixty miles per hour, clipping the curb and launching into the air…

Eli turning – just before the vehicle slammed into the top of the wall – then diving forward and disappearing beneath it as it went airborne…

The crushing noise as the 4x4 collided with the wall, its entire front collapsing as the back of the car surged upward and over, flipping in a somersault once, then twice, as it careered forward across the yard, completely airborne…

The driver, as well as the zombie that had been attached to him by the mouth, both launched out of the vehicle, flying through the air in a tangle of limbs and crashing into the ground-floor exterior of the building. The zombie pancaked into a mass of black gunk, but the man carried on through one of the ground-floor windows, as one of his legs was torn from his body.

The outer wall had exploded with the initial impact. Old, cracked, and weak brickwork scattered across the yard in massive chunks as the oversized truck smashed through it. Eli had hit the ground beneath it, barely dodging the tons of deadly steel that passed over his head – but smashed his chin against the tarmac, losing consciousness instantly. But his wound was minor compared to the two Marines who hadn’t jumped clear in time. Neither of them even turned, and they were swept up by the 4x4 and driven through the wall.

Jameson looked on, battling shock, as one of the dead men’s helmets rocketed all the way across the yard and bounced off the building, finally rolling back across the hard ground and coming to rest at his feet. He realized with a jolt of horror that most of the man’s head was still inside it, staring up at him with a look of utter shock on his face. The other casualty was almost unrecognizable as a human being, having been crushed between the wall and dragged across the yard until the vehicle finally crashed up against the building. As it impacted, windows shattered on the first two floors, spraying what remained of their glass outward in showers of sparkling crystals.

Jameson reeled. Two men down in an instant, men who had marched across undead Europe and come out the other side smiling. The first casualties his team had taken since their long journey back to Fortress Britain. And they had died being run over by an out-of-control truck – killed by some idiot who thought he could drive away and escape the dead even while they were clinging to his face.

An idiot, or a man in sheer panic. Or both.

And now the full mass of dead in the stairwell of the building couldn’t fail to notice the Marines, as well as the gore that now littered the yard. They grew animated, turned, and the nearest in the mass pile-up pulled themselves free and began staggering toward the battered Marines.

“All-around defense!” shouted Jameson, realizing they were now the center of attraction for not only all the dead stumbling around the city, but also the hundreds crammed into the target building – the ones trying to get to the very people the Marines were there to save. Was anyone even still alive inside? Or was there a hellish banquet taking place on the upper floors even at that moment?

“Move up, into the yard!” he shouted. “Secure this position!”

Into the exclusion zone, he thought, the spot that would not be hit as the carpet-bombing began – at least, they dared hope it would not.

And that bombardment would be starting any second now.

Jameson noticed a downdraft from above. Looking up, he belatedly saw the Lynx utility helicopter hovering fifty feet above them. He felt his ragged nerves twitch as its shadow blocked out the sun. For a moment he’d thought the whole damned world was collapsing in on them, or at least the building coming down. But then he saw the net full of rucksacks, at the end of a steel cable, heading rapidly down toward them.

Supply drop. Ammunition and water.

Jameson held his position in the line, firing into the horde, and slowly moving toward the collapsed wall, until he finally spotted Eli – who was still not moving. Jameson let his rifle fall to his side and grabbed his friend under the arm, hauling him up over the rubble and into the yard, then laid him down on the ground. He knelt next to him, aimed his rifle into the heaving mass, switched to full-auto, and depressed his trigger. And he didn’t let go again until the magazine was empty.

He didn’t hear the rumble of the heavy bombers in the distance, even though they were approaching rapidly. Nor did he hear the first whistling sounds, as high above them the first of the bombs was released.

It did catch his attention when the skyline of buildings to the north lit up, and the world began to explode all around them.

Have Fun Storming the Castle

Beaver Island

Fick hefted the not insignificant weight of his rifle and grunted with satisfaction as he felt the bomber’s tires impact the tarmac, and the plane settle and begin to slow. He put his hand on the hatch handle below and before him. He wouldn’t wait for the plane to reach a full stop before getting it open and getting out. He adjusted his grip on his weapon.

All the men on Fick’s team, stacked up behind him down the middle of the bomber, carried SCARs – the SOF Combat Assault Rifle, upon which the Marine Special Operations Command had finally standardized, only a couple of years before the fall. These were lightweight, modular, reliable-as-hell tan assault rifles with adjustable shoulder stocks and ACOG optical gunsights. Two of the men, designated as grenadiers, also had Underslung Grenade Launcher Modules (UGLM) which could pump out high-explosive 40mm grenades when things got hairy.

All of the men on his team had them… but not ole Master Gunny Fick himself. He toted a positively ancient M16A2, underslung with a good ole Remington 12-gauge shotgun. It even had the full, fixed, plastic stock. Sure, it was a relic of Vietnam. But it made him happy. And, okay, some guys complained that it jammed a lot – but those were the same shitheads who didn’t clean and maintain their weapons to an exacting standard. And if it was good enough for the poor bastards in the Ia Drang Valley in 1965, then it was good enough for him.

And in little elastic loops across the front of his tactical harness there nestled row after row of red 12-gauge buckshot shells, for the underslung shotgun. The red was kind of bright and, yeah, maybe it was like a flag to a bull with the Zulus. But it also helped him to stay visible to his men. He kept a few on his back as well. Because that was the side of him his men were most often going to see.

Fick led from the front.

As the plane braked and slowed, Fick tersely parceled out assignments. Everyone more or less already knew what they were doing. Direct action against an airfield was a pretty standard mission profile.

“Reyes and Chesney – you’re on me. We’re going to take down that control tower. Brady and Graybeard – secure the landing strip, and strongpoint the aircraft. If we get in trouble, we’ll call you up. If you get in trouble… well, you’re on your own for a few minutes. Just shit your pants, jump in, and swim.”

“Aye aye, sir.” The refrain went four times. The Marines’ roots were as an amphibious force, sailing upon the seas to fight on foreign beaches. Hence their name. And they still not infrequently talked like sailors.

Fick nodded and grunted and gave the hatch a heavy yank and pulled it clear. Hanging his weight with one hand, he dropped out onto the runway, and took off at a run. He knew the men would be behind him.

Or they’d miss all the fun.

* * *

He held his weapon to his shoulder – every Marine is a rifleman first and last – and fired careful, aimed, but rapid single shots, as he ran toward the looming tower.

He was hitting Romeos in their heads, dropping them around the perimeter of the clearing. You had to have nearly perfect training to hit runners while moving yourself. But it was a rush when it worked.

It was intuitive that the fast ones would get there first. But it still wasn’t particularly helpful. And, behind them, there could be little doubt that a lot more of the slower Zulus were waiting in the wings. Or, rather, were shambling their way to Beaver Island Airport even as the Marines assaulted it.

Fick hit the side of the control tower at a run, the momentum of his loaded frame slamming him into it. Only then could he see that Reyes and the Kid were a half dozen steps behind him. Back beyond them, Graybeard and Brady were setting up a two-man perimeter around the aircraft, which had finally rolled to a stop, its propellers spinning down. Both of them fired steadily toward various points around the treeline.

There wasn’t heavy opposition – yet. And the Marines were methodically cutting down what there was.

Fick had aimed for the only visible door on the ground level of the tower, and now he simply tried the handle. No go. He reached to his vest, pulled out one of the few blue shells, a breaching round, loaded it into the shotgun under his M16, pumped it into the chamber, then followed it with a second one. While he did so, the other two stacked up behind him, ready to hit the building.

BOOM! the first 12-gauge round took off the top hinges. BOOM! and the lower ones went. Fick pulled the door clear, put his weapon to his shoulder, and hit the ground floor. He swung fearlessly into the dimness, going left. He knew Reyes would be taking the right side – and the Kid clearing the stairwell ahead. Room-clearing and CQB (close-quarters battle) were definitely a part of MARSOC training – though, because of their heritage in the recon community, it tended to take a back seat to long-range recon, patrolling, amphibious insertion…

The ground floor was clear, and they proceeded to clear the rest of the structure one level at a time. Below the top floor, the control room, it was mostly office space, and mostly empty. But when they hit the second level from the top, they found what looked like an improvised living space – and a storehouse. There were stacked pallets of bottled water, MREs, canned food, and bags of what looked like roots and tubers scavenged in the forest. Finally, there was cured meat – skinned and trimmed animal carcasses hanging by hooks.

Some kind of hunter lived in this place.

Which Fick figured jibed with their experience of the place so far – getting sniped.

Finally, only the top level remained. The three spec-ops Marines formed another door stack at the top of the stairs. This door was already hanging from its hinges, so Fick tossed in a flash-bang grenade, waited for it to go off, then blasted inside, the others fanning out behind him.

Almost the whole top level, the flight control deck, was covered in rubble.

The roof was still there in some places, mainly the back; but the front section, previously glass-fronted, had collapsed, leaving it open to the air. Fick pivoted and stepped forward, sweeping his weapon across the corners and piles of crap and debris. Something scraped and bumped audibly. Fick turned toward it and started to advance – but, nearly instantly, several rifle rounds triggered off, presumably in response to the noise, to Fick’s right. It was Chesney shooting.

And in the same instant, something exploded on Fick’s chest, knocking him backward, then down to one knee. His neck and chin burned from it and he smelled cordite and scorched nylon.

He brought his weapon back up to his shoulder, ignoring the pain. Over his sight, he could see Reyes advancing toward the spot where the initial sound came from – while the Kid, looking panicked, raced over to help Fick. He waved him off. “Support the fucking assault,” he said. Someone was evidently still shooting at them; casualties could be dealt with later.

And anyway, he still had the rest of his sector to clear. Fick let his eyes tear and run, climbed to his feet, and started moving again. Within a few seconds he had cleared the remaining corners of that level. It was basically one big room anyway.

And a second after that he realized: no one, in fact, had been shooting at them.

A glance down his own front told him that one of the shotgun shells on his vest had gone off, nearly exploding in his face. And a look around at the remaining walls of the control room, which were all steel, told him what had happened: a ricochet from the Kid’s reckless burst of fire had bounced back at him, and set off the shotgun shell.

Goddamned fucking fire discipline, Fick thought as he circled back around to the other two. But there was no time for that lecture now. While the Kid covered him, Reyes slung his rifle and started shifting debris from one specific pile of it. He threw big hunks of drywall, ceiling panel, insulation, and God knows what else behind him. Fick shrugged and pitched in.

Within a few seconds, they had unearthed a human figure.

The man wasn’t really moving, pretty much out cold. He was covered in white dust, but could be seen to wear a military field uniform. Fick brushed off the shoulder patch. It read: Princess Patricia’s Light Infantry. Reyes pulled a flexicuff from his vest – basically a big garbage-bag tie, but tougher, and which tightened but didn’t loosen – and secured the prisoner, while Fick fanned out a few meters, and the Kid continued to cover them.

It didn’t take Fick much digging around to find it – a McMillan Tac 50 sniper rifle buried in the debris a few feet from its owner. This was a gigantic, long-range anti-materiel/anti-personnel weapon, some serious hardware. The rifle’s owner also wore a side arm, a 9mm Browning, which Reyes relieved him of.

As Reyes dragged the secured soldier over to one of the remaining upright walls, the man slowly started to return to consciousness. His head lolled, finally banging back on the wall, at which his eyes began to flutter open. The three Marines stood in a loose circle around him.

Chesney’s boyish features bloomed into a big smile.

“Holy shit!” he said. “It’s Robert fucking Neville! In the flesh! Big fan. Thrilled to meet you.”

Gunny Fick spat some blood off into a corner, gave the Kid a shove, and told him to get his ass back down to ground level – and get the SSR from the goddamned plane and hump it back up here. Because if this elevated firing position had been good enough for the guy sniping at them… well, the Marines were definitely going to need it to hold off whatever number of dead bastards had been attracted by all the racket.

And God only knew how long they were going to have to hold it.

Robert Neville

Beaver Island

Robert Neville was the name the MARSOC Marines had always used for solitary long-term survivors, holed up somewhere with a lot of firepower – and very accustomed to shooting first and asking questions never. It came from I Am Legend, the protagonist of which had New York all to himself after the Apocalypse. Alpha tended to call these guys LaMOEs – the Last Man on Earth. Until recently, the two teams had been living their own private ZAs, so it was no surprise their lingo didn’t match up perfectly.

On the other hand, both groups had independently hit upon designating the dead as “Zulus.” With the military mania for phonetic alphabet slang, and “Tangos” meaning terrorists in the last war, that they all landed on this was probably inevitable.

A look at the name patch on the blouse of the Marines’ new prisoner, however, revealed to Fick that this man was not named Robert – but Bo, Bo Longfoot. And Longfoot was a Master Corporal – a rank pretty much unique to the Canadian Forces.

“I know this man,” Fick said quietly, squatting down before him in the destroyed air traffic control room and looking into his still swimming eyes. Fick glanced behind him, where Reyes was cocking an eyebrow, looking vaguely bored. Reyes usually seemed pretty blasé about whatever was going on – including furious combat. “Well, I know the name, not the man,” Fick said. “This dude used to hold the world record for longest confirmed sniper kill. In Afghanistan, on a Taliban fighter – at twenty-six-hundred yards, if memory serves.”

“Twenty-six-fifty-seven.” The man’s voice was raspy, but otherwise audible enough. Fick pulled the bite tube from his Camelbak, and stuck it in Longfoot’s mouth. The dazed man took a long suck, swirled and spat – probably a lot of chalk dust in that mouth after the roof collapse – then drank for a full five seconds. He took a deep breath and shook his head, as if to clear it. Underneath all the white powder, he was a good-looking but now nearly middle-aged man, still in good shape.

“Cheers,” he said.

“Fuck you,” Fick said, yanking his hydration tube back. “Why the hell did you light us up?” Gunny Fick did not enjoy being shot at with extremely large-caliber weapons. Being in a plane that was trying to land at the time didn’t make it any better.

The man smiled. Really, he kind of leered. It was the smile of a madman. Fick’s frown deepened in response. Longfoot finally answered, sounding like he thought he was pretty cagey: “Figured maybe the dead had gotten smart. Learned to fly World War Two-era heavy bombers.” He nodded his head once, looking like he might actually wink. “Or else it was the ANA, coming back for one last green-on-blue attack.”

Fick blinked once. “Afghan National Army? What the hell are you even talking about?”

The man’s very dirty head lolled on his neck. “Or it could have been the Nazis, back from South America… yeah, Nazi zombies…”

Fick shook his head. This poor bastard was clearly batshit crazy. Living on his own for two years, probably after watching his entire unit and all his friends get eaten, had rotted his brain. Fick didn’t have time for this and rose to leave. But as he did so, Longfoot’s expression seemed to clear somewhat. In a calmer, quieter, and colder voice, he said:

“In any case, it sure wasn’t the Canadian Air Force, was it? The hell with ’em.”

* * *

Interview over or not, they were interrupted by the sound of the Kid coming back up the stairs toting their SSR – the Sniper Support Rifle they had stowed on the plane, along with a lot of other equipment in case of heavy weather. It was an accurized version of the SCAR everyone else carried, but chambered in the heavier 7.62mm round. It had an adjustable stock, folding bipod, extended barrel, and Nightforce 2.5-10x scope, and was incredibly accurate out to a thousand yards. In addition to the rifle in its case, the Kid had a backpack full of 20-round box magazines – basically one shit ton of ammo, enough to keep the rifle fed all day.

“Up here,” Fick barked at Chesney, who dashed over and met him at a big slab of concrete, previously the roof of the tower, which now canted up at an angle from the edge of the half-destroyed flight deck, and overlooked the whole airport. While the Kid got the case opened and the weapon assembled, Fick surveyed the scene. The field of fire from this spot would be excellent – it was basically the same view as the air traffic controllers had, overlooking the east end of the runway, with a view straight down it all the way to the western end.

The one place he wouldn’t be able to cover was back to the east – which is actually where Fick figured the bulk of any Zulus would be coming from. But the Kid could keep the runway clear, covering the team’s six, while the ground shooters faced forward. Perfect.

Fick leaned out and looked over. Nearly directly below, he could see Chuckie the B-17, with Brady and Graybeard defending it, both of them firing slowly but steadily toward the treeline – sure enough, mainly back toward the east. As the airport was nearly on the west coast of the island, this made sense. And it meant Fick’s tactical plan so far was sound. He also noted that their mechanic was out of the plane and on the ground, digging into one of the plane’s wings. He wasn’t sure whether to be reassured or alarmed by this.

As the Kid snapped the rifle’s bipod out, lay down beside it, and slapped in a mag, Fick knelt down and put his hand on his shoulder. “You understand your sector?”

“A-ffirm, Master Gunnery Sergeant. The team’s six – from four o’clock to eight o’clock. Anything that moves in our rear.”

“Outstanding,” Fick said. Another thing that was tactically sound was putting the Kid up here on overwatch. Fick knew Chesney could shoot well – almost nobody makes it into MARSOC without shooting expert in the Marine Rifle Qualification Course. At their level, they could pretty much afford to weed out anybody for anything, because they were only going to accept such a tiny percentage in the end anyway.

But what Fick kept to himself was that he put Chesney up here in large part to keep him safe – and to be used in a role where his inexperience would have less impact. Of course he’d been through the rigorous MARSOC selection process like everyone else – as well as the grueling seven-month individual training course for CSOs (Critical Skills Operators, which was the title all MARSOC Marines officially held.) But, while sniping from an overwatch position was one thing, ground fighting in heavy contact needed nerves that had been burnished to a hard sheen in battle. The Kid would get there in time. But he’d be staying out of the shit for today.

And, this early in the day, there was no telling for sure how shitty things might get down there.

* * *

As the Kid dialed in and started making shots, Fick’s radio went.

“Gunny, it’s Brady.”

“Brady, Fick, go.”

“Yeah, we’ve got an aircraft problem. The mechanic dude needs to talk to you.”

“Copy that. Down in one.” He clicked off and turned to Reyes. “Hey, tie that crazy sumbitch to something. Then you’re with me.” In ten seconds, the Canadian’s bound hands were tied to an exposed length of pipe in the wall, and Fick was bounding down the stairs as Reyes, twelve years his junior, tried to keep up. Fick hit the ground, went out the destroyed door and jogged toward the aircraft through the growing sounds of battle – cracking rifles, rounds snapping by in collapsing air pockets, and aggressive moaning and snorting. Most of the latter was to his rear, coming in from around the tower. He ignored it, and let his men do their jobs.

As he ran, he also remembered a personal rule from back in the old wars, the ones against living people: in a combat zone, never run too fast from one place to another. This was because you had to show your contempt for danger – both to the enemy, and especially to your own men. But, of course, that had been back in the world that was – when there were incoming bullets and bombs to be contemptuous of. Now it mattered much less.

And the dead certainly didn’t give a shit.

Fick trotted up to the hulking bomber, which the pilots had already gotten turned around, so it was now backed up to the tower – and facing down the full stretch of the runway to the east, ready to blast off on a dime, no taxiing required. Less reassuring was that Stan the mechanic had a big panel off the top of one of the wings and down on the ground. Fick could already see it had an ugly-ass bullet hole in it. His nose also wrinkled at the sharp tang of aviation fuel, and he gave the mechanic a look like he’d just been offered a shit sandwich on a plate with turd garnishes.

The mechanic wore dull coveralls beneath a body-armor vest and helmet, and actually held a huge wrench in one hand. He didn’t dance around the topic. “The good news is that this tank is totally empty, so I can spot-weld it without having to drain it, or else blowing up the plane.”

“And the bad news?”

“It’s the engine-number-one wing tank that got hit, and it was nearly full – which means we’ve got over 400 gallons on the ground. That’s from a total of 2780, about 40% of which we burned getting here.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning we just lost a quarter of our remaining fuel. With what’s left, we’ll never make it all the way back to the JFK. Kind of close. But, then again, not all that close.”

Fick cursed under his breath – an unusual place for him to do it. “I thought these bomber tanks were self-sealing when they got hit?”

“Yeah, they are,” Stan said. “But how old’s the sealant in there? And it’s a big-ass hole – fifty caliber, sheared right across the front edge of the tank.”

Fick surveyed the damage, and realized it was almost certainly the shot they had taken on their air-show flyby of the tower – the one that almost hit him. Better perhaps if it had. And, anyway, that’s what he got for intentionally trying to draw fire.

“I can strip some tin from the ass of the plane and spot-weld this, no problem.” Stan nodded to a hard case that lay open on the ground, and contained an acetylene hand torch. “But then it’s going to come down to whether there’s any avgas to be had in this place.”

Fick arched his eyebrows. “What does this antique even burn?”

“During the war, they fed it 130/140 avgas. But due to differences in refining, not to mention in measuring octane, it was remarkably similar to today’s 100LL. And given this place obviously serviced small civilian aircraft, that’s what they’ll probably have. If they have anything.”

As the bullets flew, and the dead ran forward, got shot, and hit the ground, Fick thought that he might have preferred a shorter lecture on the history of aviation fuel.

Stan said, “Can you get one of your guys over there scoping out the tanks and pumps, while I patch this hole?” He seemed pretty contemptuous of danger himself. You had to like a guy who could weld under fire.

Fick took a look around and grimaced. They were already holding this place with a skeleton force, and were short-handed enough, without having to staff some half-assed full-service airport gas station. “Yeah, fuck it, I’ve got it,” he finally said. At the moment, the shooter he could most spare was himself. “Reyes, you help strongpoint the plane. And keep the dead off Mr. Goodwrench here.”

“Wait, you may need this.” The mechanic offered Fick a crowbar, but then didn’t let it go when Fick grabbed it. “While you’re over there, we’re also going to need either some long-ass sections of aircraft fuel hose – or a shitload of jerry cans. Because I’m guessing you won’t want to move this aircraft off the tarmac if we can avoid it.”

Fick thought he wasn’t wrong. If they took the plane off the runway, they might not ever get it back on, or at least not by the exact minute they needed to take the hell off. Fick grunted, yanked free the crowbar, and took off east a bit north, just to the left of the tower and toward the small cluster of buildings that squatted in its shadow. The other bad news was that since the fueling station was to their east, making use of it was probably going to mean pushing their perimeter out further in that direction.

Oh, well, we’ll screw that goat when we get to it…

Within thirty seconds, he’d found what looked like a really old pump from a redneck gas station in the middle of nowhere – and not looking any better after two years of neglect. Fick pulled the nozzle – but quickly realized that of course it wouldn’t work without power. While keeping one eye on the treeline, and the edges of the nearby buildings, he located the steel door in the ground that presumably covered the underground tank. It was pretty flush with the tarmac, and he hefted the crowbar and put it to use. Smart wrench monkey… he thought. With a stab and a heave, one of the doors swung up and out with an angry squeak.

Fick slung his rifle, pulled his pistol and a tactical light, took a last look around, and dropped down inside. Landing beside the bulbous fuel tank, he pivoted, shining the light one direction and the other. It was tight and dark down here. But he seemed to be alone. Quickly he found the single-needle fuel gauge: it claimed to be two-thirds full, with about 2,400 gallons. More than enough to get their asses home – assuming the gauge read true. Fick heard increasing firing up top now, and climbed his ass out of this hole in the ground.

Basically ignoring incoming threats, which his men had under control, or better have, Fick made a beeline for the nearest structure, which was a corrugated tin shed. After breaking the padlock with the crowbar, he yanked open the door and waded in. Then, after knocking a few crates and machine parts out of the way, he found everything he needed: a hand-pump for the fuel tank, four big spools of fueling hose hanging on the wall, and a whole shelf of 5- and 10-gallon jerry cans.

He paused and took a look around outside before exiting again. It looked clear. As he stepped out, a guy in a seriously rumpled pinstripe suit lunged at him from around the corner of the shed. Fick smacked him in the head with the crowbar, knocking him back, then reversed his grip and stabbed him through the mouth with it. When two of the guy’s dead buddies rounded the corner right behind him, Fick dropped the crowbar, brought his rifle up, and fired four times. One of them was a woman in a moldy and tattered skirt suit, her jawbone hanging loose below a wide gaping maw. None of them, come to notice it, looked like fishermen or tourists. Fick leaned over the bodies to take a closer look…

And two hands gripped his shoulders from behind as splintered teeth came down on the shoulder of his assault vest. With the rotten face four inches from his own, the stench was fantastic. Fick let go of his rifle, grabbed the head with both hands, leaned forward, and attempted to flip his attacker over his shoulder.

Only the head came.

But the body did let go, and crumpled to the ground.

Fick tossed the head, far away in any direction, and tried to wipe the foul-smelling gunk off his shoulder. He had to weigh his priorities here: on the one hand, it was clearly getting hairy at this position. Then again, he was no help to anybody if he was dead – and he’d be a positive menace if he got undead. Ducking back into the shed, he found a full fuel can – and rinsed himself off with it. The aviation fuel burned like hell on his exposed skin, and he’d want to stay away from tracer rounds and flare guns for a while. But it was better than turning into a flesh-eating freak and devouring his own Marines.

As he jogged back toward the bomber, a lot more alert this time, he used his radio to hail the Kid up top. “Chesney, Fick, how we looking up there? Say something.”

“We’ve got customers, Gunny. A whole bunch of hungry-looking meat-lovers are coming through the door, from the north, south, and east. And we’re the all-you-can-eat buffet.”

Fick paused to remember the Kid had worked at Pizza Hut before joining the Corps. He also considered that they were now nearly surrounded. And, with a grin, he recalled the famous quote from legendary Marine Chesty Puller in Korea: “We’re surrounded. That simplifies our problem of getting to these people and killing them.” Unfortunately, in this case, the people surrounding them were already dead.

He made it back to the bomber alive. “It’s all there,” he reported, half-breathless, to Stan the mechanic. “Fuel, hand pump, hoses, jerry cans. Now what?”

“Now I go oversee the refueling.” Stan was leaning over the hard case with the torch, and Fick thought he was just getting started with the welding. But it turned out he was already done. “Give me an extra set of hands and twenty minutes, and I’ll top this tank.”

But before Fick could answer him, a huge volume of fire drowned out the whole conversation. Graybeard and Brady had pivoted to their left – where a big knot of flesh-gobbling bastards had appeared from the woods to the north. The two seasoned Marines were lighting this group up, and cutting them down as quickly as they poured in. But this was a whole new flank, and Fick wasn’t sure how they were going to hold it.

He knew in that moment that what he needed was more and better battlespace intel.

And, as always, there was no knowledge like local knowledge.

He turned, craned his neck, and looked back up to the top of the tower.

Maximum Violence, Instantly

Lake Michigan

Well, Handon thought, as the men on the Diablo drew their weapons and the threatened gunfight across the water blasted up instantly to full volume, so much for regarding people’s essential humanity. They’d just have to feel compassion toward these living people after they fucking killed them.

Alpha’s response to the armed conflict was nearly inevitable, and Henno knew it as the old rule for winning pub brawls: don’t bluff, don’t threaten, definitely don’t shove or escalate. But when you know it’s going to kick off, you just turn the knob all the way to the right – the pint glass to the face, the knee to the groin, the headbutt that crushes the nose.

Maximum violence, instantly.

The ones on the lower deck of the Diablo fell first. This was because Predator, flat on the deck and tucked up under his tarp with Juice’s outstanding assault rifle, couldn’t easily elevate his barrel. So he shot low, dropping the first two with headshots, while smoothly tracking from left to right, then settling for center-of-mass hits on the next two. The last guy went down hollering – obviously only wounded, though perhaps mortally.

Handon knew with perfect assurance what Pred would be aiming at. There had been no need to parcel out fields of fire – each man could work it out for himself, confident that the others would reach the same conclusions. So when Handon’s side arm went from holster to hand in a blur too fast to track, his aim went high. His first shot was basically indistinguishable from the draw – all one lightning, perfect, utterly practiced motion. Handon, like most of the rest of them, had been doing quick-draw instinctive snap-fire shooting, both in training and operationally, for the better part of two decades. Now it was all muscle memory, a blur on rails, and his first double-tap nearly took the head off the rightmost guy. The second double-tap, more conservative, was to the chest of the guy next to him.

The range to all his targets was inside of twenty yards, which was nothing to him. For the pirates, it was like being in a toe-to-toe slugging match in the corner of the ring – but with a much more dominant fighter. Or, as a fighter pilot once described close-air combat, “like a knife fight in a phone booth – quick, brutal, and no room for error.” Handon’s heavy .45 ACP rounds had knock-down power like God’s own donkey kick, and the two men in the upper right rocketed out of sight as if physically evicted by God, disappearing down behind the gunwale.

Neither ever managed to raise a weapon.

Everything had already started to go movie slow-mo and razor-vivid for Handon – the classic time dilation and heightened senses of combat. He could see the clogged pores on the nose of the first man he shot, then see every detail as his head split apart like a melon. He could see the fillings in the teeth of the next guy as his mouth went wide, and hear the slow rolling thump as he hit the deck. He could count the individual droplets of blood that arced gracefully through the air.

But he also had another classic symptom of combat: tunnel vision. Everything within a narrow cone directly ahead of him was like 3D HD, but it wasn’t widescreen – everything outside that cone quickly blurred and faded to an indistinct gray. And so Handon only realized something had gone wrong when he looked over and saw the two men on the upper left were still standing.

Henno’s targets – they hadn’t been engaged.

And then Handon sort of retrospectively heard the twang, the thwack, and the grunt, all of which had happened underneath, and simultaneous with, all the shooting. He mentally played back the tape from the last half second, and then he got it. It was the crossbowman. That guy had never had time to bring his weapon up – not intentionally, at least. But when Predator’s pair of 5.56 rounds to his center of mass pitched him over backward, he’d brought the crossbow along for the ride, swinging it up and over his head. Along the way, his already dead finger convulsed on the trigger.

And it happened with the very worst timing and luck in the world. His bolt, by total random chance, had flown straight and true – directly at Henno. It was more proof that in combat anything can happen. And that being supremely skilled and capable was absolutely no guarantee of anything. Not even survival.

Handon heard the splash now. He twisted at the waist, and saw Henno toppling backward over the side of the boat, a thinly feathered bolt protruding from the upper left of his chest, and crashing into the water behind them.

FUCK…

Something tugged at Handon’s consciousness. Beneath the visceral, primal reaction to one of his people getting hit, there was something he still needed to attend to… Right, it was the two men still standing on the left side of the upper deck. He spun forward again while dropping into a crouch… at the same time as Predator rose up from under his tarp into a crouch… and both of them elevated their weapons and traversed to the left to lock on and engage.

But by now, the two men beside the covered object were already ducking around behind it. Handon tagged one of them across the shoulder as the guy flung himself out of view, and two more of his .45 rounds pinged off the big thing, whatever it was. From the sound of the ricochets, it was definitely something steel under that tarp.

Handon’s empty mag slid out with a shick and hit the deck, a new one already on its way up to replace it. During his half-second reload, he methodically scanned every hatch, porthole, and shadow of the vessel opposite. He needed to not miss anything else. But nothing moved. Nor was there any more screaming or gunshots from below.

For a second, silence reigned.

They could hear the water of the lake gently lapping against the hull.

And then Handon heard splashing and spluttering behind him. He turned, not having to tell Predator to cover them. Both of Henno’s arms scrabbled at the gunwale, as he struggled to drag himself back on board. Handon moved his gun to his left hand, and clasped Henno’s right hand with his own. Both of their biceps swelling, Handon braced himself to haul his man back in – and then Predator called to him by name, which didn’t happen too often.

“Handonnn…”

Keeping his iron grip on Henno, Handon swiveled his head around behind him. There was motion again from the upper deck of the Diablo. It was that tarpaulin, sliding backward now, pulled by unseen hands. Handon trained his weapon on it, left-handed, his mind taking a good second to work out what his senses were now telling him was underneath it.

It sat on a steel carriage, with ancient olive paint peeling off it in flecks, rust showing underneath. It was supported by four big knobby tires. In the center were four enormous barrels, long and slim and flaring outward conically at the ends. Two fat steel ammo boxes straddled it on either side. And then there was a heavy steel ratcheting sound as all four barrels traversed and depressed, straight down toward the deck of the Three Brothers, and right at Handon, Henno, and Pred – and, given the size and destructive power of this weapon, effectively also at Park in the inside cabin.

And Handon realized, feeling like a complete idiot, that he now had to decide whether to haul Henno back in – or else jump in after him. And he didn’t have too damned long to decide. He stood for an instant frozen like this, drawn taut between the weight of the wounded Henno on one side, and the gigantic Russian ZPU anti-aircraft gun on the other.

And then there was a sound like frost giants ripping the sky in half as all four barrels of the gun began to fire – and a brutal, concussive hammering as the giant 14.5mm rounds came slamming and tearing through the cowling of the Three Brothers, like a killer hailstorm.

* * *

The man hollering down below, the one who until a second ago had been leaning over Ali from behind and feeling her up, proved upon closer examination to be even shittier and dumpier than she’d imagined him. Facial tattoo. Couple of silver teeth. Hair styled in a greasy mullet.

Your basic post-Apocalyptic shitbird.

Ali had a second to examine him as she slowly broke his wrist by bending his hand backward, after having removed it from her hip. While she twisted and looked into the agonized face of the screaming man – Whatever else, she thought, the dude had some lungs on him – she also rapid-fired her pistol, which she had already drawn in a flash with her right hand and pointed behind her, putting seven no-look shots into the opening to the bathroom, and then another half-dozen in a staggered pattern through the thin bulkhead behind which the bathroom lay. She was rewarded with another yelp of pain, beneath all the hollering, and a thunk, as whoever had been hiding in there fell to the deck.

While he was screaming, the shitbird still held the flashlight in his free right hand – or, rather, he was waving it around spasmodically, flailing at nothing. The bright beam swept across the walls, ceiling, floor, and the other people in the cabin. It picked out the face of the older girl, who stood frozen in place on the other side of the room, her lips parted in terror. It swept past the younger girl, who was trying to crab-crawl away and burrow into the corner of the bed. And it strobe-lit the motion of the cowboy, on the other side of the bed, who was slightly belatedly drawing his side arm and going into a firing stance. To his credit, as Ali instantly noted, he held the weapon in close to his body – good tactics in tight quarters. You didn’t want your gun grabbed or taken off you.

But Ali didn’t want his gun – she wanted him. Lunging across the bed, pulling the broken-wristed man behind her, she jabbed the barrel of her now-empty pistol straight into the cowboy’s face – smashing his nose, launching a gout of blood, and causing him to drop his gun as he brought both hands up to his face.

In peripheral, Ali clocked more motion, or rather light – it was the shitbird, belatedly working out that his right hand was still free, and bringing it around to try to hit Ali in the head with the flashlight. She simply wrenched his left arm into a steeper angle, making it impossible for him to reach her – not to mention causing enough pain to make him forget the whole plan. The beam flicked across the ceiling like a searchlight on speed. She then punched him in the throat with her gun barrel and let him go.

He dropped the light, brought both hands to his neck, and fell to his knees.

The fallen flashlight rolled across the floor and finally came to rest pointed toward the door. In its penumbra, Ali saw the cowboy struggle back to some kind of composure, or at least operational effectiveness, and then draw a knife from his boot. In the half-light, standing perfectly upright, and despite her best intentions and the seriousness of the situation, Ali looked at the man, snarling beneath the blood that covered his face and shirt front – and she laughed out loud.

This was too much for the older girl, who ran for it, bolting between the two of them and out the open hatch.

* * *

Wood splinters and fiberglass from the superstructure of the Three Brothers filled the air with a haze of destruction, adding to the nightmare unreality of the anti-aircraft gun roaring only a few yards away. The enormous rounds, full-metal jacketed with tungsten-carbide cores, and spitting from all four barrels, began chewing through Alpha’s little cabin cruiser. It would only take seconds for it to finish the job.

Handon, surprised that he hadn’t been cut down in the first volley, let go of Henno and coiled himself into a crouch, ready to drive himself out of it with his leg muscles, powering his body into a dive overboard.

His destination: anywhere but here.

But he aborted the dive at the last second, instead maintaining his tight crouch.

Because the explosive firing stopped almost as soon as it began. It had blasted on full-auto for about one second, admittedly triggering off forty rounds in that time – but then it went quiet. Handon trained his .45 on the ZSU and waited. He didn’t have to wait long. A limp, and most likely dead, body flopped out from behind the carriage. Then a second one, clearly alive, got frog-marched out into view in front of it.

Behind this one stood Juice, holding the second guy’s flexicuffed arms, and visibly dripping water from his hair, beard, and clothes.

To Handon’s left, Predator brought his huge frame up to a standing position, rifle still at his shoulder. Small bits of insulation continued to float down around him and onto the deck. He angled his head upward at Juice and said, “Well, that took you long enough.”

Juice spat into the water from the top deck. “Hey, this thing displaces like three hundred tons. You try holding your breath long enough to swim under it, then climb all the way up the other side. All without making any noise.” He spat again. Handon noted the spit was brown and viscous. Somewhere along the line, he’d had time to put in a wad of chewing tobacco.

Or, hell, Handon thought, knowing Juice, he probably swam over with it in.

Another voice sounded now, in an unmistakeably English accent. “Yeah, and I reckon you just look right graceful in the water…” Handon turned. It was Henno, clinging to the gunwale, holding himself high enough to clear the bolt that was still sticking out of his chest. Red-tinted water pooled and sloshed on the deck before him. Handon moved to help him climb back in.

Predator stood where he was, and lowered his rifle casually. He nodded up at his friend Juice. “Don’t listen to the Limey, man. I bet you’re a regular goddamned mermaid.”

An external foe always brought these two together – in this case, British Army vs. U.S. Army. But as Predator reached for the line to pull the two boats closer together, he remembered the depressing principle he’d learned from his Pashtun friends in Afghanistan:

“I against my brother, my brothers and I against my cousins, my cousins and I against the world.”

Though he didn’t know where the hell that left all of them now.

* * *

Silence also reigned down in the master sleeping cabin on the Diablo. There was a little wheezing from the guy Ali had throat-punched, as he rolled around the floor at the foot of the bed. But all the firing from up top had stopped. The muted sound of the gunfight had been punctuated with the roar of something absolutely enormous and large-caliber – it sounded like something crew-served to Ali – but she let it go, not least because it had been silenced.

And also because she couldn’t do anything about it from down there.

Now she faced down the last man standing, from across the bed. Really, Ali considered, looking at him now, he did look more like a cowboy than a biker, ’stache notwithstanding. He had kind of a rugged, lanky Marlboro Man thing going on. Though that sort of fell apart with the broken nose, and the blood all down his front.

And just as he had known how to conduct a gunfight in a tight place, now he showed he knew his way around a blade. With minimal theatrics, he got his knife out and held it close in to his right hip, left hand extended out to protect it. He’d only be putting the blade out there when he had an open avenue to strike. Also smart.

Ali figured this might even be a guy who had been in a real knife fight before.

From the moment of the girl Emily’s first terrified look to her big sister, Ali knew something was going to go down here. But, then again, she had pretty much known it all along. Any of a thousand contextual clues told the story. At least she’d given them every chance first, the benefit of every doubt. Which was probably a lot more than these guys ever gave other people. Ali thought again about the two girls, stuck on this boat with this terrifying group, and how they got there – and what it might be like to live that way.

And that reminded her of her own sister again. Whom she’d failed to help escape from her bad situation, back in the world that was. And who it was far too late to help now.

Ali was normally the consummate professional – never one to indulge in vengeance or theatrics, or bring a knife to a gunfight. She knew that unit survivability and mission accomplishment were everything; and that the only dirty fight is the one you lose. Basically, she was a pro. And she knew she ought to just gun this guy down quickly and safely. Still… there was just something about these guys that flipped her damned switch.

She convinced herself, not totally implausibly, that the time she spent reloading the pistol would make her vulnerable to his knife in such close quarters. She wasn’t wrong – at very close range, a knife is more dangerous than a gun. So she dropped her HK in mid-air and pulled her Gerber LMF II Infantry knife from her boot, all without ever taking her eyes off her opponent.

The Gerber was jet black from its wicked tip down to the sharp end of the pommel, which could be used to shatter windshield glass. It went ten and a half inches long, nearly half of that tempered steel blade. It even had lashing holes to turn it into a spear – just add a stick. It was an awesome survival knife, and a better Apocalypse one. And it made it very clear that Ali wasn’t fucking around.

Y chromosome or no.

She squinted into the eyes of the big, muscular man across from her. For a second, she thought just maybe he was going to leg it. But before he could decide either way…

The overhead cabin lights came on in a flood of illumination, causing both of them to squint. Then the whole structure around them, but particularly the deck flooring below, began to hum, vibrate, and shake. It’s the engines starting, Ali thought. Yeah, this thing is about as dead in the water as my nutsack…

And then the whole room lurched powerfully around them, sending Ali and the cowboy both stumbling into the bulkhead on opposite sides of the bed.

Someone up top had put the throttle down, and sent the big boat blasting off at high speed from a standing start. And this thing had some serious horsepower. Wherever they were going now… well, it wasn’t going to be very close to where they started. Ali pulled herself upright and got her feet under her.

And she got ready to conduct a knife fight on a theme-park boat ride.

Boating for Beginners

Lake Michigan

Handon clocked more movement up top on the Diablo – in the wheelhouse this time. He holstered his custom Kimber .45 in a blur and snatched up his rifle from the deck, putting the red holographic dot of the EOTech sight on the window of the piloting room. Behind two panes of glass, one close and one far, he saw the older girl come into view, walking quickly. Handon eased off his trigger, just before she disappeared again.

Suddenly, there was a throaty roar and a burble from the rear of the big boat – Handon stole a glance to his left at Pred, who frowned. They had both heard it right – it was the Diablo’s engines starting up. Handon pulled his rifle into his shoulder again. Now he could make out a man behind the window, one they hadn’t seen before, at the very front of the wheelhouse – presumably at the pilot controls. Handon put a couple of pounds of pressure on his curved trigger, then hesitated.

Like Ali, he had a funny feeling the girls on that boat were innocent, or at least coerced. Could there be an innocent man? It was possible.

But damned unlikely. Handon squeezed his trigger.

The Diablo lurched, its huge bulk lunging forward in a surge of wave and spray.

Handon’s shot went wide – through the glass but behind the man’s head.

The rope line mooring the two boats together ripped out the cleat it had been secured to, then took off flapping in the air behind the bigger boat as it roared off.

“Fuck!” Handon spat, as he leapt back into the cockpit, started up the engines, and peeled The Three Brothers around in a tight U-turn, sending a tall crescent of spray surging up behind them. He then gunned the engines, sending them blasting off after the Diablo. Handon was squinting at the back of escaping craft ahead when a voice thundered behind him.

“Oi! You daft bastard!”

Handon looked over his shoulder as the acceleration of the boat pulled at him and tried to yank him from the controls. And there was Henno, still clinging to the edge of the gunwale, half in and half out of the water, crossbow bolt still sticking out of him, legs now kicking wildly in the churning water. Oh, shit… Handon thought.

But Predator was already clambering across the cockpit and into the stern. With one frost-giant hand on Henno’s assault suit, he hauled him back in.

Handon jammed the throttle into the console, all the while eating spray.

* * *

Down in the suddenly illuminated lower deck of the Diablo, and for some reason that was obscure to Ali, the cowboy seemed to like his chances better with the boat rocking.

As it finished accelerating, but still blasted forward and bounced around, he got offensive, circling the bed, advancing aggressively on her. And just like that, Ali had a solid bulkhead to her back, which she didn’t like one bit. Room to retreat was damned helpful in knife fights.

Oh, well, she thought. Adapt and overcome.

So she leapt up onto the bed and kicked the twisted blankets through the air at her opponent. It was only when they flew off and revealed the girl underneath, squealing, that Ali remembered – she was still in the bed! Emily rolled away and off the opposite edge, disappearing into the small space between bed and wall, still squealing.

Ali followed up her ballistic blanket kick with an underhand knife swing, right up at the cowboy’s chin. If it landed, it ended the fight. But he caught the blanket in his free hand and wrapped it around Ali’s advancing arm and blade. He was faster than he looked. Then he yanked, pulling Ali down and toward him, as his knife flashed out at her midsection.

Losing her balance and footing on the bed, she instead went with the motion and powered forward. She lashed out with her left hand, pushing the man’s advancing blade aside with her forearm. The assault suit that covered her body was no longer optimized to protect from bullets and blasts, but from bites – which made it pretty decent against blades. She definitely felt the edge through the high-tech material, and would find an ugly welt later, if she lived. But it deflected the strike. She let the guy pull her into him, putting her own weight and momentum into it.

They both crashed to the wall, then to the floor, one atop the other in the narrow space beside the bed. Limbs, knives, blanket, and curses rolled and pistoned in the tiny space. It was substantially smaller than a phone booth. And with less room for error.

And, in a ground grapple, the man’s greater upper-body strength might be decisive.

Ali punched, kicked, twisted, and mustered herself for one big effort to lever herself out of there, before he pinned her to the ground – probably in two different senses, one more lethal than the other…

* * *

Up on the top deck, beside the anti-aircraft gun, the blasting acceleration of the boat nearly took Juice off his feet. He stumbled, legs buckling, but stopped himself in time – and quickly saw that his flexicuffed prisoner, formerly one half of the anti-aircraft gun crew, was not doing so well. The young guy slammed into the railing – and his momentum and high center of gravity took him over, legs flying up and out.

Juice flashed out with his left hand and caught him by the belt. The guy’s weight, now hanging over and free, pulled Juice up against the railing. But he had him. The dangling man looked up, and Juice almost smiled down at him. Up close, what Juice had thought before was now obvious: he was a kid, no more than fourteen or fifteen. His face was covered with long but sparse peach fuzz, and it occurred to Juice that he may never have shaved. The ZA had pre-empted his whole transition into manhood. And his eyes still had some pleading innocence in them, which was damned rare this far along into the Apocalypse.

Juice shook his head fractionally, spat off to the side to avoid dribbling on him, and braced himself to haul the kid back over. But the boy’s eyes went wide, looking over Juice’s shoulder.

Before Juice could turn, he felt a heavy impact – and his vision went black as his legs noodled out from under him. The wheel blocks on the anti-aircraft gun had come loose – and the whole gun carriage had rolled forward, one of the big barrels striking Juice brutally across the back of the head.

As the grip on his belt suddenly relaxed, the kid fell free through the air.

And Juice collapsed to the deck like a really big sack of elite, bearded commando.

* * *

Predator saw Juice go down from the pursuing boat. After roughly hauling Henno back in, he had hobbled back up to the very tip of the prow, and put his rifle sight on the stern of the Diablo. The Three Brothers was slowly, agonizingly gaining on it. Standing erect, leaning forward, rifle extended, Pred looked like a particularly menacing figurehead on the prow of a British man-o’-war, or maybe on a Viking raider.

In this picturesque stance, he saw Juice stumble, saw the kid go over – and then saw Juice rescue him. Then he saw Juice get hit by the ZSU barrel and drop to the deck. And despite Pred’s mental exhortations, Juice didn’t get up again. Predator looked back at Handon and bellowed in his T-Rex voice:

“MUST… GO… FASTER!”

Handon gritted his teeth. The Three Brothers was already maxed out. It looked like it had a slight speed edge on the Diablo, but it was going to take them a while to make up the distance after the latter’s head start. And every second it took them to do so was another second Juice was MIA – and Predator powerless to go and help his friend.

Pred clenched his jaw in frustration, then put his eye back to his sight, scanning for targets of opportunity. Just as he looked ahead, Dr. Park popped up from the cabin below, obviously wondering what the hell was going on. Emerging into the open air, he looked at Handon, then Pred, and then around in wonder. He spotted the Diablo up ahead – and gave Handon a look like, We’re CHASING the guys who just shot us to shit?

It occurred to Handon the guy had a point. He saw that Park was still clutching his laptop bag to his chest. And suddenly Handon remembered that was the only thing that really mattered – it was what they were doing all this for in the first place. And, for some reason, Handon was now sailing both the scientist and the research back into danger.

Over the roar of the engine and the sea spray, Handon heard his radio go again. He guessed it was Fick, calling for another sitrep. He snatched up the radio and shouted, “Mortem, Charles, repeat your last, over!”

“Yeah, I said, ‘Where the hell are you stupid sons of bitches?’”

Handon blinked heavily and checked the compass on the console. They were, in fact, now heading nearly due south – directly away from Beaver Island, and at high speed.

Fick came on again: “Because we are now on station at your extraction point… And for reasons I don’t want to get into right now are none too fucking excited about hanging around waiting for you assholes.”

Suddenly, Handon realized with perfect clarity what he needed to do. He needed to turn the boat around. Simply, the fate of humanity’s last fifty million survivors was there with them, in the form of Park and his research and vaccine designs. Weighed against that, the lives of two of Handon’s team members were nothing. They were as dust, as lint.

Plus Handon knew that Juice and Ali were big kids, and could take care of themselves. They would make their way home somehow, escaping and evading. Hell, their whole job was to operate independently, and show individual initiative. Handon simply couldn’t let force protection get in the way of mission accomplishment. And he definitely couldn’t let personal attachments, concern for his own people, sink their whole mission.

He loosened his grip on the throttle, preparing to bring it down; and gripped the wheel at the top with his other hand, getting ready to bring them around ninety degrees. And to head back toward their extraction point.

But with only three members of the original eight-man team.

“Oi! Handon!”

Handon looked over his shoulder again. It was Henno, sitting on the deck with his back up against the stern, legs stretched out before him, pointing the same direction as the protruding crossbow bolt. But, more to the point, he was sitting in water up to his lap, which was sloshing over it, in fact. He gestured at the huge ragged holes that had been shot in various places around the deck and superstructure. Water was pouring in from many of them, and none too slowly.

Fuck. They’d been scuppered, by the ravages of that anti-aircraft gun. Not right this second. But they were definitely taking on water. And soon they would be under it.

In that instant, the line from Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations flashed into Handon’s head: “Soon, earth will cover us all.”

Not all of us, Handon thought with a grimace.

He abandoned his plan to reverse course, tightened his grip on the throttle, and tried to estimate their time of intercept with the Diablo – as measured against their imminent rendezvous with the wrong side of the lake surface.

Because there was only one seaworthy craft in sight on this lake.

And they had damned well better get to it. Fast.

Hive

On Board the JFK, Coast of Virginia

Commander Drake, executive officer and acting commander of the USS John F. Kennedy, the world’s last surviving nuclear supercarrier, leaned forward and put his head in his hands. In the few blessed seconds of blackness and solitude this brought, he thought to himself:

Being in charge is bullshit.

He swore to himself that, if he somehow got out of this job alive, he would never again aspire to be in charge of anything. And being acting commander was a lot like being awarded the prize of a pie for winning a pie-eating contest. He’d honestly give just about anything if all the problems that were now his could become somebody else’s. But it wasn’t going to happen, and the job was simply too important for him to abandon it.

Though others have abandoned it before me, he thought mordantly…

Right this minute he had many more problems than he could realistically stay on top of. He had too few people to delegate tasks to, and way too few resources to support them. He was running out of time. And, perhaps most dire of all, he was running out of faith.

Scratch that, he thought to himself, finally raising his head and opening his eyes to the little officer’s room, just off the flag bridge, where he’d now been camped out for nearly two days, dealing with shit. In truth, his faith had long ago abandoned him.

What he was losing now was: the all-important ability to fake it.

He hadn’t believed, not for a long time, that things were really going to turn out okay. He wouldn’t have wagered a horsecock sandwich for humanity’s chances, never mind that of the carrier strike group and its surviving crew. But bitter fatalism is a terrible characteristic for a military commander.

So he’d had to carry on, not in hope – but as if in hope.

Admittedly, Drake’s hope had perked up slightly when, against all odds and expectations, he had regained contact with Alpha team in Chicago, most of them still alive, and in possession of their all-important mission objective – the scientist and his research. His hope had necessarily flared up a little when his Marines and sailors had put down the mutiny of religious Zealots, controlled the zombie outbreak below decks that came out of nowhere like a biblical plague – and then managed to shut down the nuclear reactors just in time to keep the ship from crashing into shore at high speed and sinking.

But life wasn’t like in the movies, with a “happily ever after” that followed the big climax, when the credits roll and victory is frozen in time. That very phrase, the very concept of happiness, seemed like a cruel taunt here in the ZA. Aside from the world and humanity being generally fucked, Commander Drake now had great sprawling rafts of smaller and more immediate problems to deal with, many of them seemingly insoluble, and all tormenting his every waking minute and thought.

These included repairs – not least, of the great gaping hole that had been blown in the port side, across the Gallery and 02 decks, by the explosion of the Sparrow missile magazine during the mutiny. It also included getting the vessel off the shoals and refloated – which was, at the least, going to require restarting one or both of the nuclear reactors. Which he also couldn’t do since he had lost the vast majority of his senior engineering ratings, not to mention almost all the nuke guys.

And hovering horribly above all these other problems was the big one: the surging storm of dead, miles deep and wide, with perhaps as many as ten million ravening, leaping, gamboling corpses, which was even then bearing down on them straight across the Atlantic seaboard.

Drake exhaled heavily, and decided to take himself downstairs to CIC and get some updates. Mainly, what he wanted was some air. A break. But he didn’t even make it out the door before they came for him again. This time it was in the form of a junior officer, who said, “Sir. We’ve got Fick and his team on the horn.”

This was a call he had to take.

* * *

Stepping out onto the flag bridge and picking up a radio headset got Drake a major change of atmosphere – all the way out to the pitched battle on Beaver Island, thousands of miles away in the northern reaches of Lake Michigan.

“We’ve been trying to hail you for the past two hours,” he said into the desk mic he held up in front of him, as he huddled out of the flurry of activity around him.

“Yeah, I’m up in an air traffic control tower,” Fick said, his voice slightly stretched and flattened by static. “Good for reception.” He sounded a little frantic himself.

“Listen,” Drake said emphatically. “You’ve gotta get back here. Now. Seriously.”

“Love to. But no fucking Alpha yet, so no extraction.”

Drake swallowed his frustration. He already knew it was unlikely Fick’s team could make it back in time to get in under the storm. So it was really all just subtle gradations of catastrophe from there. “At least give me some kind of an ETA.”

“Once again: love to. It’ll either be two and a half hours after Alpha arrives, if we’re still alive at that point. Otherwise, never. Alpha keeps assuring us they’ll be here any second.”

“You’ve got comms with them?”

“Affirmative. Intermittent, though.”

“Okay, Fick. You be advised. That storm is still incoming our location, and it looks like hitting us dead on.”

“Copy that.”

“Now listen carefully. If the Kennedy falls, you’re going to have to jump out of that silly-ass museum-piece bomber, land in the ocean, and try to get recovered by the Michael Murphy. You can then sail back to England on her. The Murph’s search and rescue helos and divers are on alert. Do you copy?”

Fick didn’t respond for just a second. Drake could almost see him mouthing, If the JFK falls…? But he didn’t say it. “Charles Zero-One copies all. Gotta go. I’m in a fight right now. Out.”

Drake put the mic back down on the desk. He wondered to himself whether Fick was really as unflappable as he sounded. Or if he just didn’t have time to freak out about the storm because he already had too many things to freak about right under his own nose.

Drake made a move for the outside hatch, in a second bid to get that air. Once again, he was intercepted on the way. Another junior officer cut him off.

“Sir. The CIC watch commander requests the pleasure of your company.”

Drake snorted bitterly at that. It had been a long time since his company had been a pleasure. Even to himself.

Oh well – he’d just have to keep faking it a little longer.

* * *

Swinging into the big, dim, high-tech room, Drake immediately spotted the officer of the watch, Lieutenant Campbell, standing over one of the radar displays, and its operator.

“Good news?” he asked, striding up, trying on something like a smile. Though a handsome, fit, clean-cut officer in his mid-thirties, he felt positively ghoulish right now. He couldn’t even remember whether it had been longer since he slept, or showered. He certainly hadn’t changed his uniform recently enough. It stuck to him like a shroud.

“What was the last good news we had? Sir.” Campbell moved to the side to let Drake see the console. One display showed a wide radar view, and the other one live drone footage from an aerial platform flying over the storm. After losing a manned aircraft and pilot to the leaping, roiling herd, this time they had sent out their X-47A Pegasus, a last-model stealth flying-wing drone. It was a $15-million-dollar asset – not that money meant anything anymore – and Drake winced when he saw its evident low altitude.

“Goddamnit, LT, can we not lose any more aircraft, please?”

“Yes, sir.” She reached for a control and zoomed out the powerful camera on the nose of the drone. With this, it became obvious the aircraft was actually at pretty high altitude. Drake shook his head, but didn’t bother cursing himself, or apologizing. He merely noted that both his temper and his judgement were starting to go. And neither he, nor the JFK, could do without them.

Taking a breath, focusing on keeping his voice level, he said, “What’s its status?”

LT Campbell nodded. “Now moving faster than we measured it before.”

“ETA?”

“We now estimate the edge will hit us in four and a quarter hours.”

Drake shook his head. Jesus.

“There’s something else,” Campbell said.

“Yeah?”

“It’s, um, demonstrating some unusual behavior.”

“Such as?”

“Well… particularly when we zoom out to a high-level view, and when it passes through towns, neighborhoods, any previously populated areas… well, the movements of the herd take on certain patterns. These shapes emerge, then collapse. Like a dance, or a moving collage. It’s almost like they’re dividing up the buildings and areas, and methodically clearing them – something like a really big special ops team might do.”

Drake looked across at her. He tried to decide how clichéd to make his next comment. Fuck it, he thought. I’m too tired to be original. “That’s impossible. How can they possibly coordinate? They’re dead. Their brains are off. All they do is shamble around and eat people.”

The LT held his gaze. “Yes, sir, that was pretty much my take on it. But I brought Lieutenant Commander Roberts up here.” LCDR Roberts was the ship’s Senior Medical Officer – and, in the absence of any genuine experts, their local authority on all things undead. “He said it looked like… like hive behavior. Like the individuals were following very simple rules, based on terrain, and what the one next to them was doing… but which then in aggregate produced surprisingly complex behavior. Like an ant hive, or bee swarm, or flight of birds.”

Drake watched the video for a few more seconds. He could now see many thousands of churning bodies, with fractal levels of individual detail… but all together making up enormous aggregate shapes and flows and waves… all seeming to move with purpose, with resolution – and with implacable hatred and malevolence.

It did seem something like an organism. A supremely evil one.

Drake spoke quietly through parted lips.

“We’ve got to get the hell out of here.”

The Gathering Storm

Naval Air Station Oceana

Second Lieutenant Wesley, former security guard of the Channel Tunnel entrance, and now a million miles from his home country, stood looking out the window of the observation tower and wondered what the hell they were still doing there. He had an aching throb behind his eyes that he knew was down to lack of sleep and nerves, and a week’s growth of beard that itched. The day so far had passed very slowly for him, as he wished like hell that he actually had something useful to do, instead of just standing around watching other people lugging gear from the warehouse. That had been constant until an hour ago, when Commander Drake had pulled the plug on the scavenging op. Endless crates and pallets of equipment still lay stacked on the dusty concrete floor of the building, and Wesley wondered how long they would sit there before human eyes saw them again.

Years perhaps, or maybe never.

At least up on the top of the observation tower, looking out through the binoculars he’d found among the overturned tables and piles of discarded reports of the lower offices, he could feel like he was doing something. Even if that something was staring west over the sprawling urban emptiness that surrounded the base, and even if he knew that wasn’t really helping at all. Scanning out across the buildings and the golf parks, into the distance where the dark line had appeared, he tried to calculate how much time they had left.

He’d noticed it almost immediately, even without the binoculars, and thought it was just his eyesight or the headache that had been pounding at him ever since the bomber, with that comedy name of Chuckie, had taken off. A dull thump thump just around his eye sockets made him feel as if he were slowly being punched in the face.

The dark line out there was everything he had feared.

The binoculars were very powerful and allowed him to see right into the midst of what was slowly, inexorably approaching them: a wall of stumbling, writhing, clawing bodies that stretched across the entire western horizon. Or at least the whole horizon that he could see. And they didn’t just stumble along, pushing and shoving each other; they were actually climbing over one another, three or four high in some places, and at a distance it looked like a swarm of flies, or grubs – or locusts. Wesley supposed that in some way that is what they were.

For some obscure reason this sea of the dead continued to surge across the landscape, lapping ever closer. It would take a while for it to reach the naval air station, but that would still be too soon – much too soon for Fick’s Marines and Alpha team to make it back and land. And when the storm finally reached the water’s edge, surely not a single living thing would be left in its wake. It would be like the denuded landscape left after a plague of locusts had passed.

Wesley hoped like hell they were a long way away by then.

We should go, he thought, knowing the decision was still in his hands, for now. It was only his stubbornness that kept them there after everyone else had evacuated, but he still believed there was a chance, however slight, he’d hear that Alpha were in the air and on their way. If it meant waiting until the last possible moment to leave, then surely it would be worth it.

He handed the binoculars back to Derwin, his second-in-command, who took them, rubbed at the lens with his sleeve, then looked through them. Wesley’s small team of shore patrolmen (or Naval Security Forces, as they were evidently called these days) had spent the last half an hour taking it in turns to monitor the slow doom as it approached. Two of Wesley’s other subordinates, Melvin and Anderson, refused to look again after their first viewing. Melvin just didn’t want to see, and Anderson was too damn scared to even think about it.

“How many do you think there are?” asked Derwin.

Wesley shrugged. “No idea. All of them, I’d say. Bloody millions, probably.”

There was simply no way to even estimate something that size. The terse reports they’d received from the JFK were that this thing – this storm – was tens of miles wide. Wesley couldn’t even fathom how many dead it would take to fill that much space. The number was off the scale.

“It just doesn’t make sense,” said Derwin. “Why are they all together? And what the fuck is driving them to move? I thought they were supposed to stand still or wander around aimlessly until they catch wind of something.” He looked towards the dark line. “That’s not fucking aimless.”

“Dunno, mate,” said Wesley. “Maybe it’s just momentum, or something like that. But I did hear one rumor making the rounds on the carrier.”

“And that is?”

“That it’s because we crashed a 110,000-ton warship into the edge of the continent.”

“Jesus. You think that’s it?”

“Who knows.”

Derwin shook his head. “This is bad. Christ, how do they know to stay together in the first place? To move together?”

“Maybe they’re following something we don’t even know about.”

Derwin frowned, not liking the sound of that. “Well, whatever it is, I wish it would go somewhere else and take them the hell with it.”

“Tell me about it.” Wesley sighed.

Derwin scanned the terrain between the approaching storm and the base. He saw a large river that split the land in two. It was six or seven miles away, another dark line on the landscape, but one that was a lot less worrying. He wondered if it might slow the storm down, maybe give their team another half-hour longer than expected while the dead filled up the river, maybe crossing it on the bodies of their pals, like ants. But it wasn’t going to help. There just wasn’t enough time.

“You know Chuckie isn’t going to get here in time, don’t you?” Derwin said, lowering the binoculars and turning to Wesley. The Englishman didn’t look pleased.

“They could still make it if they left now,” said Wesley, with a strange resolution in his voice.

“But they’re not even on the plane. That’s what Drake said.”

“That was half an hour ago. We need to stay. Just in case. We’ve got to be here for them.”

“But if they don’t make it?”

Wesley thought about that. He really didn’t like being asked for answers when he had none.

“I was told they’ll all parachute into the sea and get fished out. And we will get the hell out of here. But I can’t risk there being no one to lift them to the carrier if they do land.”

“It’s your call, boss,” said Derwin.

“It’s not just about us, though, is it? That scientist has what we came for, what all this is about in the first place. Everything depends on it.”

“I still say we should get out,” said Anderson, speaking for the first time in a while. “That’s a million deaders heading this way.”

“We will,” said Wesley. “When Alpha and this Park bloke are back. Or when it’s definitely too late for them to make it.”

“Drake ordered us to evacuate,” said Anderson, and Wesley could hear the accusation in his voice. This is your fault, it said.

But it was Melvin that countered him. “Actually, the Big D ordered the logistics crew and all unnecessary personnel out, but not us. He suggested we abandon the base, but he didn’t order anything.”

Anderson was about to contradict him, but he glanced at Derwin, who had been acting team leader before Wesley turned up. The expression on the man’s face said, Shut up if you know what’s good for you.

“We’re staying until we know for sure,” said Wesley, trying to ignore Anderson by scanning the streets around the base.

Another twenty minutes passed in silence and Wesley couldn’t help constantly touching his radio, hoping it would burst into life, but nothing came. They have parachutes, he thought. They can land in the sea. He was almost, almost about to pack it in and order the evacuation.

“What the fuck?” said Derwin. He stood up, eyes wide, almost knocking over the chair he was leaning on.

“What?” said Wesley.

“Look for yourself.”

Wesley took the binoculars.

“Out there. Near the blue building with the radio stack on top.”

Wesley looked, but all he could see were empty, trash-strewn roads.

“What blue building?”

“Nearer to us,” said Derwin.

Wesley scanned in closer until he spotted it – some sort of office complex.

“What am I loo—”

But then there they were, plain as day. About a mile away, Wesley saw a dozen figures, maybe more, moving quickly across a main road. They were moving fast, and kept vanishing into cover behind buildings. At that distance all he could make out was dark figures in the bright sunlight.

“Runners? Or those faster ones Alpha reported?” asked Derwin. Wesley could hear the nerves in the man’s voice. “They must have got out ahead of the storm. Shit, we could already have a heap of them nearby.”

“I’m not sure,” said Wesley. He altered the zoom on the binoculars, trying to get a focus on the group, but they were moving too quickly and were too far away to make out any details. Every time he managed to focus on one of the figures, it moved out of sight or the focus blurred. He had to admit that they did look like fast-moving zombies, runners.

Except they weren’t, and Wesley’s heart leapt as he noticed it. One of the figures was carrying something, another, smaller person – a child? Also, two of the smaller figures were holding hands with the taller ones, being pulled along.

And zombies sure as hell didn’t shepherd their young.

“Fucking hell,” said Wesley. “Survivors.”

“No way,” said Derwin, grabbing the binoculars back and peering at the stragglers at the back of the group. As he watched, one of them turned, faced the road behind him for about ten seconds, and then moved on.

“They’re alive,” said Wesley. “And they have kids with them.”

Then, just as he was about to make for the door, Derwin spotted something else. “Wait,” he said.

There was more movement, faster, to the right of the group. Three figures ran into view, racing at full speed toward the others.

“Oh, shit,” said Derwin. “Those are runners! They’re being chased!”

“Let me see,” said Wesley, snatching the binoculars and quickly dialing in. As he watched, the three new figures disappeared behind a building and then emerged on the other side, seconds later. Their movement was very distinct from that of the humans. And they were clearly chasing them. Wesley panned left, to the group still running away, and saw two stop and turn, as if ready to fight.

“We need to do something,” Wesley said, but as the words came out, the distant thump of gunfire sounded, and he could see two of the running dead fall to the ground. The third kept going and was only feet from the closest of the survivor group when another volley of gunfire cut it down.

“Come on,” said Wesley, lowering the binoculars and heading for the stairwell. “Let’s go help them.”

Under The Hammer

Canterbury

Colley held onto the jutting stump of wooden joist and waited for his head to clear. The noise around them was tremendous and almost overpowering now. The moans below had reached a crescendo as the dead had once again managed to push up to the floor the survivors were on – Colley had forgotten which floor that was or even how many more they had left.

He could hear the rattle of gunfire right outside the building now, but what that horrendous crashing noise had been, he had no idea. It sounded like some giant had picked up a forty-ton truck and hurled it across the street, making snapping and screeching sounds as the metal collapsed in upon itself, or was torn apart. And the impact of it had rocked the building and shattered even more windows.

Dust and broken masonry rained down on the men still fighting in the stairwell. Hackworth was struggling to his feet, having fallen on his face when the impact hit. Colley was afraid the knock to his friend’s head had done some damage.

“Everyone okay?” came a voice from above them.

“Yeah,” said Hackworth, his words slurred. “Yeah, I’m…” He looked around at the others. “Yeah, we’re okay.”

”What the hell was that?” shouted Colley. “Did you see? Can anyone see outside?”

“A car or something,” said the same voice from above. Colley thought it might be Dolby, an old man from the south of France who had barely survived their time in the tunnel. He had often been sick, coughing and wheezing constantly – an asthma sufferer. He said, “It hit the bottom of the building. God, it’s on fire. There’s so many soldiers out there now. And zombies. So many of them.”

Colley looked down into the stairwell. He still had his axe hefted over his shoulder, poised and ready to swing. The others were ready too, but no one was fighting now. Then he realized that most of the dead were no longer reaching for them; and only a few still tried to crawl upward. And the nearest was somehow lower than it had been a few moments ago.

“Hackworth,” Colley said, turning to see the older man rubbing his eyes, looking dazed. “I think they’re leaving.”

Hackworth stopped rubbing his eyes and opened them wide, disbelieving. “What do you mean?” He stepped away from the stairwell he had been chopping down, and leaned out over the hole below them.

Sure enough: the tide was ebbing.

Hackworth turned and crossed the remains of the hallway, with Colley close behind. They pulled heavy, dusty, and tattered drapes away from the window and looked out through the jagged frame of broken glass. Across the yard below now stood a line of soldiers – ones he somehow thought he recognized. Maybe it was the uniform, or… no, the helmets? Then he saw one in particular, looking straight up at them – it was the lead officer, and Hackworth recognized him immediately.

He had thanked the man again and again, and would never forget his eyes, his face, or the triple scar that ran down it. Even from halfway up the building he could see those red lines. The man was kneeling, helmet off, next to another soldier, who wore a black bandana underneath his helmet. They all did.

“The Marines who came for us in the tunnels,” Hackworth said. “It’s them.”

Down in the yard, the Marines’ firing line now unleashed rolling volleys of fire into what Hackworth thought must be the whole ground floor. And he also realized that the zombies must be going for the Marines now, instead of for them. Even with all those guns roaring away – and there had to be what, thirty of them down there? – the zombies still pushed forward, spilling out of the building and into the yard. Dozens of them stumbled forward, staggering over those that fell at the front of the press of rotting bodies.

“We’re gonna be okay!” shouted Colley, over the roar of guns and moaning, and… something else. Hackworth could hear something new over the top of all the noise, a booming and thudding that was somehow rhythmic. It was far off, he thought, not here yet, but approaching rapidly.

Something big was on its way in.

* * *

“Wake up, matey,” shouted Jameson, nudging Eli with his knee. The man stirred but his eyes didn’t open.

“Elson,” he said into his radio, hoping his other team leader would hear even with the noise around them.

“Sir,” came the reply.

“The supply rucks. Can you get to them?”

“On it.”

Five seconds later, Elson and two other men from his team broke away from their main position. Those rifles flanking them on the line turned and concentrated fire to clear the area around the pile of bags. They were only a few meters away, but it was nearer to the horde flooding out of the building than it was the Marines’ perimeter. The three men put their heads down, Elson at the front, and legged it.

Jameson looked down again at Eli, who was still barely conscious, and then he tried to gauge the larger tactical picture around him, as well as the unit’s disposition. They were still barely inside the yard, and mostly standing on the crumbled remains of the outer wall the 4x4 had left behind – smashing the hell out of what might have been a damn good defensive structure. He knew he had to move them further in now, but the sheer volume of dead flooding out of the building was making it impossible. It was almost as if someone had pulled a plug inside the building, but instead of water flooding down the drainpipe, it was the dead.

Was that building full up with the damned things? Jameson tried to focus on the upper floors, scanning across the windows, hoping to see some sign of movement, of life, up there. But so far there had been nothing.

And then – there it was. Curtains pulled back on the fourth floor from the top, two dust-covered and shell-shocked faces staring down at him.

Someone was still alive up there.

“Move forward!” shouted Jameson. “Ten meters. Get off this damned rubble.” He grabbed Eli under the arm, and pulled him along as the three squads pushed further into the yard, still firing constantly toward the endless stream of dead pouring out of the building, heedless of the deadly fire.

Finally, the Marines’ advancing line enveloped Elson and the other two who were dragging the supplies back toward them. Elson got busy emptying bags, pulling out fistfuls of magazines and dishing them out. Men stuffed their empty pouches, and then their pockets. Seconds bled away as the distant sound of heavy ordnance exploding slowly approached, dark shapes high in the sky raining down destruction on the streets.

Eli finally stirred, at Jameson’s feet.

“What the bloody—”

“Easy, mate,” said Jameson. “Just stay down for now. You took a hell of a knock.”

“The car…”

“Yeah,” said Jameson. “It got Briars and Lewis.”

“What’s that noise?”

“Hammer.”

“We’re in it?”

“Not yet. It’s inbound.”

Eli was silent for a moment.

“Shit.”

And then, as though someone had turned off the tap, the dead stopped coming out of the building and the rifles of One Troop fell silent. Out on the street, behind them, the area was already clear for at least a hundred yards. Beyond that, the dead still roamed the town, distant figures moving with murderous, mindless intent. The sound of gunfire and the smashing of windows still drifted into the yard, but it didn’t seem to be coming any closer.

Every man in One Troop stood or knelt now, breathing heavily, just taking a second – each of them wondering how they had managed to survive the last twenty minutes.

“Let’s get this done,” said Jameson. “We need to clear that building. Third squad strongpoint the perimeter. Anything comes near us, take the bastards down. Everyone else, I hope you’ve got your gloves with you.”

But then a row of shops a hundred meters away vanished in a flash of blinding light.

One Troop hit the ground a second later, knocked from their feet by the shockwave that swept through the yard and up the street. Jameson fell hard against the rubble he had been trying to step over while dragging Eli into the yard.

Far above them, a tunneler named Anders, who had been standing on the top floor, looking out the back of the building, suddenly found himself fifteen feet outside of it and plummeting toward the ground. He had the briefest of moments to wonder what the hell was going on, as behind him every remaining window spat out a shower of glass and debris – just as it had spat him out – before the hard concrete rushing toward him took everything away.

Two floors below, McHeath and Randall stumbled backwards from the force of the concussion and tumbled down the yawning stairwell – all the way down into the dead mass at its bottom. It was a long fall now that most of the dead had left the building, but the mess at the bottom of the stairwell had not stopped writhing. McHeath screamed, hitting his head on one of the jutting floorboards of the second floor, breaking his neck instantly. Randall fell straight into the pile of bodies, the force of his fall sending him deep into the roiling mass. Hands reached out, clutching and grasping, as teeth began to tear into him.

He started screaming, and kept on for too long.

And then the storm of rubble and debris from the nearby bomb impact hit the street out front, and the tenement yard, and the building itself – flying missiles that had once been the structures down the street, hurtling up, out, and down. Those Marines hunkered against the inside of the wall were saved from the worst of it, but that didn’t include the majority of them. Chunks of brick bounced on the ground, ricocheting upward, knocking men down like bowling pins. Clouds of wooden splinters and deadly shards of glass hailed down.

And then a second thundering impact resounded even closer to them, and then another.

Jameson clung to the pile of rubble beneath him, dazed, and nearly lost consciousness himself. What a fucking mess, was all he could think. What a fucking mess. Exclusion zone… what Exclusion zone?

His vision faded in and out as he glanced skyward, watching dark shapes drone across the sky – leaving trails of smaller shapes that fell in long whistling formations.

There was a buzzing noise somewhere, or was it in his head? Jameson blinked rapidly, trying to clear both his vision and his thoughts. Was it a voice? It was the radio.

“Come in,” said the voice, distant and fuzzy.

Or was it his hearing? Had the impact deafened him?

“Come in, Jameson. This is Grews. Come in. What the hell happened?”

What the hell HAD happened? he thought.

The Hammer had happened.

“Grews, Jameson. Exclusion zone has been hit by friendly fire. Repeat. One Troop has multiple blue-on-blue casualties. Over.”

There was no reply for a moment.

“What’s the damage?” asked Grews.

Even with his head swimming, Jameson could make out the cold concern in the man’s voice. He shook his head again, trying to focus. Around him, the barking of assault rifles had resumed as yet more dead made their way out of the nearby buildings, those that hadn’t been flattened as the bombing run passed over the area. Jameson could see prone bodies of his Marines on the ground, but not quite well enough to count them.

But it looked like at least a dozen of his men were down.

“Thirty percent casualties. No confirmation on how many are KIA. Over.”

“What about the refugees?”

“The building is still standing and I can see movement inside. Stand by for an update. Out.”

In less than five minutes, the center of the ancient city of Canterbury had been flattened nearly in its entirety, and in the few minutes the bombs had rained down, on the one place Jameson had been told would be safe, he may have lost a third of his men.

But at least the tenement building was still standing.

It was little enough.

* * *

On the top floor of the building, Amarie leaned against the wall, eyes wide, holding her sobbing child, Josie, tightly to her side and brushing splinters of glass from her hair. Cement crumbled and dust cascaded from cracks in the walls, and a massive split had opened in the old wooden panelling that ran the length of the room. The door, which until two minutes ago had been intact, now hung from its hinges.

The whole world was falling apart around her.

Every one of the windows had gone in the instant of the first impact, and now the floor was littered with millions of tiny shards of glass. They penetrated everywhere, and Amarie could taste blood on her lips.

She knelt down and lifted Josie’s perfect little face, checking that the child hadn’t been hurt, and she felt a flush of relief as she saw just one small cut on the child’s forehead. That was all.

That single cut was a kind of miracle.

She lifted the little girl up and went to the window, her heart jumping at the sight below. There were soldiers everywhere! But many of them also lay in the yard of the building, injured or dead.

“It’s okay, my sweet, the soldiers are here now,” she said in a hushed tone that only Josie could hear. Everything that she cared for in the whole world was in the tiny girl that she held tightly to her. “They will get rid of the bad things.”

She glanced over at her backpack, checking that it still sat propped by the door, and was ready to go. She was prepared if need be to leave at a moment’s notice. And if it came to that, she would put that pack on, grab Josie, and run until her legs gave out. And then she would run some more. But the gunfire in the yard was ticking down, and the moans of the dead settling to a low murmur, all of it many floors below them. The soldiers were here now and they would be safe.

If the bombs didn’t flatten the building before they could get out.

Amarie prayed to God to protect her darling.

It’s Coming Down

Canterbury

“Yes, sir. We’re evacuating the building now,” said Jameson over the open channel to Grews, one hand on his chin mic, the other resting on his rifle. He looked across the yard, back to the tenement. Half the refugees were already down in the yard and huddled in a group, waiting for the others to climb down the metal ladder that hung off the bottom of the fire escape.

Jameson had lost six Marines, not twelve, and that included the two that had been taken out by the crazy driver of the 4x4. Four more died during the bombings, killed by flying debris; others had been injured, but would live. And, almost more important, they could all walk. The bombing had seemed to go on forever, but in reality had only lasted two minutes, and only four impacts had been close enough to endanger them.

But those four had been enough.

The bodies of his fallen men now lay in a row along the wall, with nothing to cover them. But One Troop was still holding together, maintaining a perimeter as the undead slowly zeroed in on them once more. There were a fair few wandering around even after the horrific bombing run. Yes, they mostly had limbs or other large chunks missing, but their brainstems had made it, and they were still kicking – as well as crawling out of buildings and searching for the next living thing to infect or devour.

“The road you came in by should be clear,” said Grews’ voice in his ear. “I’ve got the Apaches inbound your location to run top cover for you while you maneuver.”

“Copy that. But isn’t the plan to evac the survivors by air?”

“That was the plan, but we can’t do it. No air transport available. Sorry, Lieutenant, you’re going to have to walk them out.”

“You’re fucking kidding me.”

“No, I’m not. Look, I know. Okay? I know. Let’s just do what needs to be done, and follow orders.”

Jameson pressed his lips together. “Roger that, sir.”

“And keep me updated. Good luck.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. One Troop out.”

He looked over to where Eli stood at the bottom of the ladder with two of the other uninjured Marines, helping the refugees climb down. Some of the tunnelers had sustained minor injuries, but all were still physically able, and Eli even managed a smile as he helped a little girl and her mother out into the yard. Jameson recognized both the girl and the mother, from the newsflashes, as well as from in person during their evacuation of the tunnel. Her name was Marie, or something like that. The little girl, he knew, had been born underground, deep beneath the Channel. Jameson wondered what she thought of the outside world after knowing nothing but darkness for the first year and a half of her life.

Amarie moved swiftly away from the building, relieved that her feet were finally on solid ground and no longer trapped in the heavily damaged and perilous structure. She held tightly to Josie’s hand as she set the child on her feet and looked around them. Beyond the wall she saw the ruins of what had just a few minutes before been a modern city. Now it seemed there wasn’t a single building, apart from the tenement, still standing.

A few yards behind her, Eli was now helping a thin, gangly old man descend, when he heard the noise. A cracking sound, it came from somewhere close by. He turned in the direction of the nearest window, trying to peer through the darkness within.

There it was again. Another loud crack.

Eli let go of the old man’s shoulder, hefted his rifle, and aimed it into the window, flipping on his weapon-mounted light and sweeping the room. Nothing. The room was empty, apart from a few twice-dead zombies that lay inert on the ground. None of those was getting back up again.

He caught a very slight movement in the corner of his vision. He turned toward it, ready to fire, but it wasn’t the motion of a zombie, or even of a human. This was something else, something much more urgent and worrying. From a large crack in the ceiling a stream of dust and powdered cement began cascading to the ground, throwing up a cloud that started to blow out the windows on the opposite side. But this wasn’t a small wafting of dust. This was a cascade.

Something above was coming apart. Eli was the first to hear the beginning of the tenement’s death rattle, as the foundations of the building started to fail, fatally damaged by the massive tremors that the bombs had caused.

“LT, we have got a big problem,” he said.

Footfalls approached as Jameson ran across the yard.

“What’s up?” he asked, also peering inside as he made the same visual sweep, looking for targets and not seeing the real problem at all.

At that moment, as though waiting for perfect timing, the joists that held up the floor above broke under the weight. One moment the two Marines were looking at a dusty room littered with dead and the next the entire floor above came down. Wooden boards, carpets, furniture, bricks – everything crashed ten feet straight onto the ground floor, shooting dust out of the windows so fast and heavy that both men breathed in a lungful of crap before they could stop themselves.

Then they felt the ground move. Was it the ground?

Jameson stepped backward and stared at the side of the building. Cracks were beginning to appear, spidering across the brickwork and along the cement seams, as scattered bits of brick fell away and hit the ground.

“The fucking building is coming down,” said Eli.

Then chaos.

“Move move move!”

Jameson shouted for the few refugees still climbing down the fire escape to get off it. Marines grabbed civilians and dragged them out of the yard and into the street. Eli ran across the uneven rubble, bodily carrying a frail man who seemed unable to scramble away quickly enough. Gunfire erupted now as the flood of people rushing away from the building met a few staggering zombies that had somehow survived the collapse of the buildings on the opposite side of the street and now clawed their way out of the rubble.

The building groaned, dust and bricks falling away as a huge mouth-like gap opened on the fourth floor. Splintered wood spewed out of it and debris began to fall through the air and hit the ground.

Two of the men still on the fire escape jumped the rail and fell into the yard; Jameson winced as he saw the second man, short with a graying beard, land hard on a chunk of masonry that had already claimed the life of one of his men. The man’s leg bent backward and he collapsed, screaming. One of the Marines who had been helping people from the building grabbed him under the arms and dragged him away.

But there were still a handful of people rushing to get down and off the fire escape.

Amarie, now ten yards from the building, snatched up Josie and ran. She didn’t care if there were undead closing in on them; all she cared about was getting Josie out of the way of the dying building. She ran ten more yards before the roaring sound climaxed behind her, and instinctively she pushed the child to the ground, knelt down and wrapped her arms around her, covering Josie with her body.

And, once again, she prayed that God was watching.

Then the building was coming down, but not toward them. Hundred of tons of brick and masonry collapsed into the street on the opposite side. The outer wall on the yard side, merely feet from Jameson as he tried to help a man down from the ladder, retreated inward as the whole building shifted and then fell. The stairwell pulled loose from its concrete footings and lurched away, pulled by the weight of the dying building. One moment Jameson was holding onto the man’s arm and the next he was gone, hurtling away from him.

Jameson still stood in the same spot when the terrible noise of the collapse finally faded. A cloud of acrid, throat-burning dust filled the air for a hundred yards around him and reduced visibility to nearly nothing, but he still hadn’t moved. He could hear people coughing all around, and the groans of those who were injured. And still gunfire resounded as the undead moved in on them, and the Marines struggled to fend them off, amid the unfolding catastrophe.

“Jameson. Come in,” snapped Grews’ voice in his ear.

Not now, he thought. Just. Not. Now.

“Jameson. Come in.”

“What a fucking shit day this is!” Jameson said aloud.

Zulu Jihadi

Beaver Island

“Two extra sets of hands,” Fick corrected the mechanic, as the two of them hunkered down near the tail of the bomber, and in the eye of their own coalescing storm of the dead. “You’re also gonna need security, while you do the refueling. Hang on.”

Fick ducked under the wing of the plane, went down further under the fuselage, stuck his torso up the belly hatch, and hauled himself inside. Ten seconds later, he had the co-pilot out and on the deck. The man carried his flight helmet – which he hastily put back on as soon as he heard all the gunfire and saw the dead running around in the middle distance.

“Captain,” Fick said, addressing the co-pilot by rank. “You’ll know your ass from your elbow in an airport refueling depot, right? Good. Kindly assist Stan here. Reyes – you pull security.”

“Roger that,” the big Marine answered.

“What about Bill?” the co-pilot asked – referring to the lead pilot, and presumably his buddy. He looked like he wanted the company and moral support.

“Negative,” Fick said. “He stays buttoned up inside. Somebody who knows how to fly this bird has got to stay alive, or none of us are ever getting off this crapsack island.”

The co-pilot started to mumble something about not really considering himself expendable, but Fick didn’t wait around to entertain further objections. Instead, he turned and ran back toward the control tower, checking his watch on the way. The chaos was growing all around them – thicker volleys of gunshots, shouts from Graybeard and Brady as they coordinated fires, the dead coming in heavier and from more directions.

Fick didn’t understand this, and he needed to. The whole point of putting Alpha’s rendezvous point (RVP) here was that the island wasn’t supposed to be occupied by very many dead. Their pre-mission intel work-up had the permanent population of the entire island at six-hundred and something. If that was so, they’d already seen a quarter of them, just in their first twenty minutes on the ground.

It made no sense.

Fick leapt powerfully up the stairs of the tower, belying his forty-two years and sixty pounds of combat load, and reached the top level panting slightly. He stalked across the wreckage of the room, knelt down, and stuck his face in the Canadian prisoner’s.

“Okay,” he said. “Who the hell are you? And what’s the story with this goddamned island?”

* * *

Over at the fueling point, using his seemingly all-purpose adjustable wrench, Stan got the hand pump rigged up to the main line coming from the underground fuel tank. While he did so, the co-pilot, following instructions, had started connecting lengths of fueling hose, while trying to stay as close to the others as possible. Reyes watched the whole operation from over his rifle optic, occasionally taking single shots, or small groupings, at lurching figures coming around the various buildings or out of the treeline. Some of them were close enough that the work team could smell their stench. And the bodies were starting to pile up, evenly dotting the landscape.

“These ends don’t match,” the co-pilot said to Stan, holding up two articulated hose joints, like a child with Legos that didn’t fit.

Hardly even looking up from his work, completely deadpan and professional, the mechanic replied, “Get yourself some gaffer tape and jerry-rig a seal. If there’s not any in the shed behind you, you’ll find a couple rolls with my gear in the front of the plane.”

Reyes glanced over at this exchange with an approving grin. This mechanic guy was unflappable – and particularly fearless for a non-infantry type. But he was like some of the combat engineers Reyes had known – guys who could meticulously pour level concrete, or wire up a junction box, with mortars exploding twenty meters away and rounds snapping over their heads. Reyes immediately liked this dude.

The two of them were alike – slightly bored by danger, and more than capable of doing their jobs in the face of chaos.

* * *

“You’re right that the population of the island used to be tiny.” This was the Canadian sniper, MCpl Lightfoot, speaking in answer to Fick’s interrogation. He still looked about as crazed as before, but less like he’d just had a roof dropped on his head. “But then it became a shelter of last resort.”

“Who for?” Fick kept his face right up in the guy’s. He needed answers, quickly.

“For Duchemin-Perrout.”

“Who the fuck is Douche— who the fuck is that?”

“The Prime Minister. Francine Duchemin-Perrout. The Canadian PM and her whole cabinet. And half the national government.”

Fick racked his brain, but didn’t recognize the name. If he’d ever known who ran things in their neighbor to the north, two years of much worse shit to worry about had overwritten it. But then his brow crinkled. “Wait a minute. Why the fuck was the Canadian government taking refuge on an American island?”

Now Longfoot’s half-crazed smile faded. Suddenly he looked to Fick like someone had just fucked his cat. “We were scrambling. It was desperation. The primary refuge for the PM and Cabinet was an underground bunker about a hundred miles north of Ottawa. But that facility suffered an outbreak almost as soon as the first wave of people went down into it. Thank God, the PM stayed at her desk until the end, and was still on her way. We turned the helo back around in mid-air.”

Fick tried to imagine an outbreak in a high-security underground bunker. Longfoot correctly interpreted his horrified look. “Yeah. You know that scene in 28 Weeks Later, when they’re all locked in an underground car park, and the virus rages through the crowd? Like that. Or so I heard.”

Fick squinted. “Who’d you hear it from?”

“One of the two survivors. A colleague of mine in RCMP – Protective Police.”

Fick’s eyes flicked to the man’s uniform. “You don’t look like a close protection officer.”

“Does this look like an assassination attempt? Everybody was totally tooled up by the end.”

Fick blinked heavily. All of this was fascinating. But he didn’t have time for it. “Why here? Where are they? And how many?”

Longfoot’s chin sagged toward his chest. He looked extremely tired suddenly. “Thousands,” he said. “It started with the cabinet and ministers, then senior civil servants. We worked our way down from there. Plus multiple military and civilian protection details. We just started ferrying them out here in waves. Mostly to St. James township, on the north edge of the island. Some dotted around the coast in the smaller settlements.”

Fink squinted. “Why here?”

The man swallowed heavily and paused long before answering. “It was all my idea. I used to take fishing holidays on the island. It was so empty, so isolated… I thought it would be safe. And it was for a while. But then we lost control of the flights and ferries coming in, lost control of everything. It all went to shit, so quickly. But there was nowhere else left to go…”

Fick gave him a shake by his collar to snap him out of it. It didn’t work. The guy kept rambling, as if stumbling around lost in a haze of bad memories.

“Most of my team were dead by then – died in the bunker, or on the island, defending the PM… The last handful of us managed to get her back here in the Land Rover… While we held the runway, her jet took off again. We thought she was safe, at least for a few more minutes. I don’t know where we thought she was going to go. But at least she was out of here… But, then… we saw the plane go down again, almost as soon as it took off. Just out over the water.”

Fick ground his jaw. What he really needed was actionable intel. Something that would help his team. “How did you survive here on your own? For two years?”

“I got back in the truck. Drove to the coast, to see if I could… but there was nothing, no one to save. So I just buried myself in the sand, rifle pointing back inland, and lay there for two sunsets and two sunrises. When nothing came for me, I got up, drove back here… and moved into the tower. Been here since. Hunting. Scavenging. Watching the dead come and go. Not a single other living person… until today.”

Fick nodded. “Wait – you drove back?”

“Yeah. The truck’s parked in the near hangar.”

Fick allowed himself the tiniest twinge of compassion for this poor sonofabitch. He had failed in his duty, or been defeated at any rate, not to mention watched all his friends get eaten. Then been totally on his own for two years. That would turn anybody’s head into a den of spiders. But just as Fick allowed his expression to soften slightly, Longfoot went mental again.

“It was the Americans who sold us out,” he muttered. “And the Afghans. God, we lost so many men in Afghanistan – shot and blown up by the people we were trying to help train… and all for Karzai’s rigged elections. For nothing! And that old bomber! Obviously sold to them by the Americans. Just another green-on-blue… But our suicide bombers will get them, oh yes…”

Fick rose, disgusted. At least now he knew which direction the bulk of the attackers would be coming from, and could adjust their defenses accordingly. He stepped out to the open ledge to get a God’s-eye view of the battlespace. Then he got on the squad net to tell the team they were going to have to pivot north; and that he’d be down to organize it in a minute.

And, after that, while he was still elevated and the reception good, he figured he’d try to get Alpha on the horn again, and get their goddamned updated status. Because where the hell were those sons of bitches already? Fick’s team had been on this island twenty-five minutes, which was about twenty-five minutes too long in the opinion of this senior enlisted Marine.

* * *

While Reyes kept the meat-lovers off, Stan the mechanic now helped the co-pilot drag the compound length of fueling hose back to the bomber on the runway. After what felt like an especially endless couple of minutes, they had it tied in to the newly patched fuel tank. Stan double-checked the articulations between sections, particularly the taped-up ones, as the two of them jogged back alongside it to the pumping station.

Reyes had pushed out a one-man perimeter 20 meters past the refueling station to the east, but was now edging north. As he wheeled and fired, he shouted, “Get a move on, Senores Tortugas… I’m gonna to have to make an ammo run in a minute.” He let an empty mag fall out of his weapon and hit the ground, slammed another one home, and resumed firing.

Stan got on the hand pump and started working the lever. After a few seconds, he could see the hose stiffen as it filled with fuel – and this straightening jigged and jerked down the length of hose until it climbed up the bomber wing and into the tank. Stan allowed himself a smile. Eyeballing it, plus based on having done similar stuff before, he guessed they could move about twenty gallons per minute with this set-up. That meant they’d have the 400 gallons they needed in about 20 minutes.

Outstanding.

* * *

From up above, Fick could see Brady single-handedly defending the runway while Graybeard disappeared into the bomber, then reappeared with a double armload of magazines. The two of them were just tearing through a tremendous quantity of ammo. Luckily, they’d brought a shitload along with them. To Fick’s right, with him up top, the Kid was still firing regularly, taking out leakers in ones and twos in their rear – but also depressing his muzzle to shoot closer in. Evidently his shot-up arm wasn’t interfering with him putting out effective fire. He was also increasingly shooting to the north, where more and more of the dead, both shamblers and sprinters, were breaking through the treeline.

It was all turning into a goddamned dead-guy goat rodeo.

Fick pulled his rifle’s magnifying sight to his eye to get a closer look at the enemy. He immediately spotted more dead in tattered suits and skirts which, yeah, now that he had the backstory, looked like politicians or civil servants. There was also a scattering of people in overalls and waders, which Fick figured represented the fishermen and farmers that made up the bulk of the permanent population. As always, there were some in their PJs, those who’d died in bed; and, also as usual, more than a few naked-ass ones, who had turned in the shower or, more likely, just had their clothes rot off them after two years of mud, rain showers, and open-air drying.

Of particular interest to him was the significant number of dead guys in uniform. Whatever the size and disposition of the Canadian force that had been defending their political leaders on this island… well, they had all gone down and, save this one half-crazed dude hog-tied up here, now swelled the ranks of the enemy. Fick had certainly seen his share of military dead before – more than his share, with all their scavenging of military bases over the past two years.

His radio perked up. “Fick, Graybeard.”

He keyed his mic without taking his eye from the scope. “Send it.”

“Yeah, you know it’s not like me to complain, Gunny. But it’s getting pretty damned thick down here. And we’re burning through a shedload of ammo. What would you think about rolling the bird away down the runway to the east, progressively displacing, and defending at the other end? It’s the one side we’re not heavy on.”

“Yeah, great fucking idea – we’ll build a carpet of dead guys all the way down the runway, which we then won’t be able to take off over. Negative. We stay at this end, and hold this position.” He checked his watch. “You hold that line. But I’ll come down in a minute and we’ll get some bigger guns in the fight. Out.”

He turned on his heel to start leaping down those stairs yet again. But as he crossed the big open-air room, he realized that Longfoot, tied to the wall, was still mumbling to no one, as if in delirium. Fick had already written this guy off as several cocks short of a circle-jerk. But something he said now gave Fick pause. He wasn’t sure why, and he didn’t have time for it, but he slowed and listened.

“Our suicide bombers’ll get ’em, bombers still out there, they’ll bomb the bomber…”

Predicting he’d regret this, Fick went back, kneeled down, and lifted up the muttering man’s chin. “Okay, I’ll bite,” Fick said. “What the hell do you mean about suicide bombers?”

Longfoot’s eyes cleared and steadied slightly, as lucidity seemed to return to him for a moment. “We had some guys who’d already lost their families, who had lost everyone. They volunteered for it. It was their decision…”

“Who?” Fick barked, shaking Longfoot by the lapel. “Volunteered for what?”

As soon as Longfoot told him, Fick got on the squad net again – while simultaneously leaping down the stairs even faster than before, a full landing at a time.

* * *

Stan the mechanic was starting to feel the strain of the work. He wasn’t getting any younger and, while he generally preferred to be hands-on, he had a lot of youthful guys and gals working for him on the carrier – energetic kids who were happy to run around, pick up heavy things, and push on stuck ones. But Stan carried on working the pump handle even as sweat soaked his jumpsuit.

Also, he figured they were now getting in the ballpark of having the tank topped – and he was slightly concerned about knowing when they did, though he figured the pump would stop working at that point. He raised his head, intending to give the co-pilot a turn, so he could go back and check on the bomber end.

But as he looked up, he saw the bulbous-helmeted aviator already coming toward him, walking unsteadily backward, half stumbling actually – and scrabbling at his belt holster for his side arm. Stan looked beyond him… and saw a knot of lurching dead, runners, maybe five or six, tear-assing in from around those buildings to the north.

Stan didn’t panic, but merely flicked his eyes to the right. Their security detachment, Reyes, had one hand to his radio earpiece, face screwed up in concentration, as if trying to make out a transmission. And though he’d been pivoting north, he was still pushed out pretty far to their east – out of position to defend against the new threat. Looking forward again, Stan saw the co-pilot finally get his pistol clear of leather. And in that frozen instant, something else caught his eye: the dead guy out at the front of the group wore a tattered military uniform, his chest criss-crossed with two bandoliers – every visible inch of which held hand grenades. He also wore two fat satchels, one slung over each shoulder, and bulging from either side of his waist.

Now Stan heard the co-pilot firing his service pistol – Bang! bang! bang! bang! – from only a few feet away. Underneath this racket, he heard a shout. Looking over his shoulder, he saw Reyes running toward them, rifle in one hand, the other one outstretched, his mouth wide. He was saying,

“Dude, NO! Hold your fi—”

Stan looked forward one last time and orange flame blossomed through the pinhole of his retina, which then turned his whole visual field pure white. Some kind of wind seemed to lift him up off the ground. He heard a sound like a train going by at full speed a foot in front of his face, which lasted for only a fraction of a second.

But which stretched out to eternity.

* * *

The blast wave hit Fick after he’d taken only two steps outside the base of the tower. It tore at his skin and uniform edges and crushed his eardrums as it picked him up and slammed him to the ground on his side like a rag doll.

When he levered his eyes apart and looked up again… the fueling station, the tin shed nearby, the two buildings closest to that – not to mention the mechanic, the co-pilot, and Reyes, were all gone. Just absent. In their place was a giant blackened blast crater in the ground, a whole lot of drifting smoke, and dozens of little flaming puddles of aviation fuel dotting the landscape for a hundred meters in every direction. Fick’s eye was caught by the hose, which had been blown clear of the fueling station and half the distance back to the plane, but which was still tied in to the bomber at the other end.

And as Fick lay there and watched, still stunned and deafened, a tongue of flame from one of the burning puddles of fuel snaked forward into the end of the hose – and the whole tube flamed and twisted and started burning away from that endpoint, blackened plastic curling into the air as the fire raced forward, like a giant fuse.

And the bomb it was attached to was… the bomber.

Fick willed his deadened nerves to prod his tenderized meat into action. He rose to his knees, then launched forward as if out of a sprinter’s crouch. He got to the wing of the bomber at the same time as the flame, yanked the hose free, and threw it anywhere. Flaming aviation fuel sprayed into the air and splashed down across Fick’s helmet, face, shoulder, and arm. As he dropped to the ground again, he kept his eye on the plane.

It didn’t explode.

But then a body came crashing down on him, and his rolling around on the tarmac became a lot more vigorous. It was Graybeard, beating him with his arms, and kneading him into the ground.

Trying to put him out.

Only the Good Die Young

Lake Michigan

Juice’s prisoner, the boy, didn’t really see the barrel of the anti-aircraft gun swinging toward them, but he did see it conk his captor, the big bearded dude, on the head. He then squirmed and shouted as the man’s grip on his belt lapsed and he fell flailing over the railing and through open air.

To no one’s greater surprise than his own, his flailing arms – flexicuffed in front of him, thank God – caught at the railing on the lower deck as he fell by it. He grabbed and scrabbled for dear life, to keep from going into the drink, which was now going by below him at an alarming rate. Gulping air, blinking, spitting out the spray frothing up at him, and mustering his pulsing strength, he hauled himself over and onto the heaving deck.

Pulling himself to his feet, he looked up and down the outer walkway of the lower deck. Oh, my God… there were bodies, three of them – three of the guys, and by no means the least badass of the group, all sprawled out in awkward poses, blood and viscera and brain matter splashed around them. That was what all the firing had been. Every man on the lower deck had been cut down.

Turning and facing toward the water now, hands still bound before him, the boy saw motion behind the Diablo. It was the other boat, the one with the astonishingly deadly commandos on it, giving chase. It wasn’t coming up fast, but it was coming. And now he saw that an enormous man stood on the prow, pointing a rifle directly at him! He ducked his head as shots rang out, and swung into the interior companionway, hearing the snap of bullets going through the air behind him, and the thunks of others as they smacked into the hull.

He launched himself into the stairwell and then headed up, just to pick a direction. As he climbed, he rationalized his decision after the fact: the man who had captured him was down now. And he would be vulnerable.

He emerged into the open air of the top deck. Sure enough, there was the big bearded man, lying on his back with his arms outstretched, head lolling with the motion of the boat. Water from his hair, beard, and clothing still dripped and pooled around him.

The boy approached carefully, keeping his head low. He found a large knife on the man’s belt, undid the clasp, and slid it out. He then managed to grip it overhand and saw through the plastic tie that bound his wrists.

Taking the knife on the deck, he leaned over the unconscious man again, slowly, carefully… and removed the handgun from his chest rig. He knew how to check for a round in the chamber by pulling the slide back an inch, and how to get the safety off. As he pointed it at the man’s head, he thought with a rush of terror, and then one of anger, of all the guys, the ones who had taken him in and kept him alive all this time, now lying dead on the deck below.

But as he drew back the hammer to cock it… he remembered something else. First, how the bearded man had killed John, his partner in manning the ZPU. But then when he himself had turned and put his hands up, how the bearded one had immediately eased off, spared him – and taken him prisoner. He hadn’t had to do that. And maybe it made him different from the ones who had killed everyone on the lower deck. He didn’t know, really, it was all so fucked up…

But as he pointed the gun with trembling hands, putting the sights on the unconscious man’s forehead, he hesitated long, his finger caressing the trigger. The boat continued to roll around him, and he could hear the engine of the other vessel getting closer now.

* * *

Ali didn’t actually have them herself, despite what everyone said about her. But she knew right where balls lived and, as usual, a quick sharp knee strike there did wonders. As the convulsing figure of the cowboy doubled up, Ali rolled on top of him, got her knees and elbows set, and straddled him. In a flash, she went into the classic mount from Brazilian ju-jitsu, sliding her knees up into his armpits, forcing her arms under his while spreading them out and up, and became, for a second, total dead weight on his chest.

Yeah, that would work.

Until it didn’t. The boat, already thrumming and bouncing, suddenly rocked sharply, as if something had collided with it. This bounced Ali’s weight, of which there was not all that much to start with, up off the cowboy. In addition to breaking her hold on him, it twisted the vertebrae she had wrenched in the fall after her parachute landing, sending shrieking pain up her back – and then she came back down partially on the arm she had speared in the same fall, which now threatened to collapse under her. She tried to recover, but the cowboy used the temporary space between them to slam his head forward and into her nose – which crunched and smarted, as her eyes stung and teared up.

Fair play, she figured. She’d smashed the hell out of his schnozz. Hell, she’d used the business end of a gun barrel.

So now she just had to dodge his knife for the eternity it took her to coil and spring away from him, and out of that terrible embrace in close quarters.

* * *

The Three Brothers, already so badly torn up from large-caliber gunfire, crashed now into the hull of the Diablo. Handon’s second attempt to bring them in alongside wasn’t as smooth or successful as the first. But that one hadn’t been so desperate, or conducted at such high speed.

The two hulls crunched and bounced off each other in a spray of churning water, the much smaller boat doing most of the rebounding. Handon battled the controls to straighten them up and run a parallel course, and to get them in close. But then he immediately realized he had a problem. Predator, who was out on the prow and in a perfect position to jump across to the other boat, was in absolutely no shape to do so, with his gimpy leg. And Handon, who could jump, was back in the cockpit driving the damned boat. And of course Henno was the man down, sitting slumped in the back and skewered by that crossbow bolt.

Handon shouted forward over the wind and engine noise to Pred: “Get back here and take the wheel!”

Pred swiveled his head from over his gunsight. “What?”

Before Handon could shout again, he heard a voice behind him. “Oh, fuck’s sake, there’s no time…” And with that Henno brushed by him – and with two quick, powerful steps launched himself up onto the gunwale and off into the gap between the hurtling boats.

As Henno took off, Handon realized he had briefly forgotten that down was by no means the same as out. And that it generally took more than a little skewering to take one of his people out of the fight.

* * *

Ali failed to dodge the cowboy’s knife on her way out of their clinch. As she sprang away and back onto the bed, it flashed out and scored her deeply across the top of her hand.

Yeah, that one was gonna bleed.

And it had to be the same goddamned arm that had a big hole through the bicep from her near-fatal airborne insertion into Chicago… If this kept up, she was going to start to feel seriously dinged up here.

The cowboy smiled at her as she darted away, and as he began to climb to his feet. “Hey, don’t go so soon,” the smug son of a bitch said.

Ali actually wasn’t totally sure whether it was the knife wound, or the fucking comment, but something really pissed her off now.

Okay, enough of this bullshit, she thought.

Upon breaking contact, instead of resetting, defending, or circling around, she simply flew straight back in at him, all fury. As her feet hit the bed, she pushed off with her full leg strength, and drove her body back into the man as he lumbered to his feet from the floor. He wasn’t looking for this, and his eyes went wide as Ali slammed into him – knife first.

Her full weight followed behind it, driving the wicked, half-serrated blade deep into his sternum. He tried to wiggle away, but she had him pinned. His own knife waved around to the side, but she was in too close to him now, pressing against his body. Smelling his breath – most likely his last one – she looked emotionlessly into his cruel green eyes.

“Whatever you say – darling.” She gave the knife a mean twist before pulling it free.

The cowboy slumped to the deck, off now for that great Marlboro ad in the sky.

* * *

Henno’s arms didn’t windmill as he flew across the gap – they just swung from back to front, both to increase his momentum and to break his fall when he landed.

But somewhere between the leap and the landing, the Diablo bounced on the water, tilting and angling away. For an instant, Handon thought this was just the natural motion of the boat, and bad luck. But as he stole a look at the wheelhouse, he could see the pilot was cutting the wheel. Handon quick-drew his .45, but the angling motion instantly took the pilot out of view again.

Twisting the wheel to follow their target, he helplessly watched Henno’s legs kick at open air.

And Henno quickly found himself in the same position as the kid from a few seconds earlier: instead of clearing the railing, he landed on the outside of it, madly scrabbling at the rail to keep from going into the drink. The other news was also bad news – unlike earlier, when the bolt sticking out of him had cleared the gunwale of the smaller boat, now it slammed straight into the side of the bigger one, jamming it even further into the muscle just below his clavicle.

He bellowed in pain as his right hand let go of the railing and he swung out and down, his back to the hull, and his full weight hanging by the fingers of his left hand alone. The Diablo rocketed and bounced along, as if trying to shake him loose, and the churning water frothed around his dangling legs.

Seeing all this, Handon struggled to bring the boat back in beside him – and fast. As he did so, Pred took a step and leaned out to pull Henno back in. The two of them locked eyes, barely two feet away now, on different speeding boats.

“Gimme your hand!” Pred shouted.

“Fuck off!” Henno shouted back, gritting his teeth, as the two boats bounced on the water less than a meter apart. He then flexed his big left bicep, swung himself back around to face the Diablo, grabbed on with his right hand – and then did an overhand pull-up on the rail, high enough to lift his eyes over it.

Looking left and right for enemy and not seeing any, he hauled himself over the railing with one mighty heave, hit the deck in a crouch, and efficiently drew his SIG-Sauer P220 Combat, which was two-tone with a tan frame and black slide. Not hesitating, he brought the handgun up in front of him and padded forward to one of the bodies on the deck. It was the crossbow dude. Scarcely looking down, he unslotted one of the spare bolts from the crossbow with his free hand, then moved off into the companionway.

And then, both his SIG and the bolt sticking out of him pointing the way, he made for the wheelhouse.

* * *

Ali reached to her vest, pulled out a flexicuff, and bound the wrists of the wheezing, throat-punched shitbird where he lay on the deck. Then she did the same to the stabbed and presumably dead cowboy, as well as the dead dude she’d shot in the bathroom. Seeing how much of her own blood she was spilling on the corpses, she pulled a long bandage from her aid kit, wound it around the deep slash on the top of her hand, then tied it off with her teeth. Finally, she scooped her handgun up from the bed and reloaded it, smoothly replacing the mag with one from the rig on her back. She trained the gun just to the side of the young girl as she rounded the bed on her.

“You okay?” she asked.

The girl, Emily, who was folded up into the corner in terror, knees by her chin, red eyes limned with tears, nodded twice.

Ali touched her left fingertips to her last flexicuff. Procedure in room-clearing – boat-clearing, any kind of structure-clearing – was that you didn’t leave unrestrained people behind you. Even if they were pretty obviously hostages or innocents, even if you’d already killed them, you cuffed everyone. Otherwise the area behind you wasn’t clear at all.

Screw it, Ali thought. An awful lot of previously ironclad procedures had fallen by the wayside when civilization fell. And this girl had been through enough already.

“Stay put,” she said, then darted out the door and down the hall, also making a beeline for the wheelhouse – and the controls of this stupid boat.

* * *

Henno kicked in the wheelhouse door. It wasn’t that sturdy.

As he flew in after it, gun first, he got a sight picture he hadn’t expected. The older girl was now driving the boat, and the pilot was kneeling with his gun pointing at the door – right at Henno. But the unexpected was no problem – he put a lightning double-tap into the man’s chest before he could react.

But what was a problem was the pointy projectile stuck into Henno’s flesh – even deeper now, after his collision with the gunwale. The recoil of his SIG, felt mostly through his right arm, produced a searing pain across the right side of his upper body, which nearly caused him to double up. And the shock of this ruined his follow-up shots.

The pilot slid backward on the floor on his ass from the force of the first two rounds. But, as Henno could already see, the guy was wearing body armor – something sufficient to stop a .45 round. And the guy was already triggering off his own weapon now, bullets snapping all around Henno’s head and plunking into the surfaces around him.

As electric pain rocketed across his torso, he withdrew and swung out of view of the door. More measured, but no less deadly, rounds continued to come through the open hatch. Henno counted a couple of beats as the crippling pain ebbed away.

* * *

Ali heard the gunfire from the direction of what, presumably, was the pilothouse.

When she saw Henno hunched outside of it, she knew he was on top of that situation – so she dynamically changed her sector to clear outside on the top deck.

But as she darted by the open hatch, she saw a gunman inside rising to his feet, so she squeezed off a double-tap into his chest as she flashed past. The guy went down again.

“Cheers,” Henno said.

“No worries,” Ali said over her shoulder as she kicked the outside hatch open and blasted out into open air.

* * *

Henno rolled straight around the corner and back into the wheelhouse – just as the pilot was hitting the deck again from the force of Ali’s two additional rounds into his vest.

In a flash Henno stood over him and kicked the guy’s gun away. It skittered across the wheelhouse into the wall – nearly hitting the feet of the older girl, who was retreating from the controls toward the corner. She screamed, pointlessly.

Standing over him, staring down, it occurred to Henno that this was the muppet who’d steered the boat away just as he was leaping across to it, and thus almost put him in the drink – not to mention caused that cursed bolt to get rammed that bit further into his tender hide. Henno holstered his pistol, and smiled down at the guy – basically daring him to have a go, if he thought he was hard enough.

The guy actually did seem game, pulling a big hunting knife from his belt and thrusting upward with it. Basically ignoring this attack, Henno produced the second crossbow bolt in his left hand and mercilessly impaled the guy through his right shoulder, just outside the edge of his body armor.

The guy screamed, the hunting knife clattered to the deck, and Henno kicked that away, too. He leaned further over and looked the guy in the eye – in that special way that only a crazed, half-drunk Yorkshireman can, usually just before a bar brawl breaks out.

“You done?” he said.

Grimacing with pain, the guy nodded. “Yeah. I’m done.”

Henno nodded once himself, contentedly – and then brutally yanked the bolt free again, which resulted in the guy screaming even louder, writhing, and slapping his hand to the bleeding hole in his shoulder. Henno put his boot on him to hold him still. And then he checked the tip of the bolt.

Sure enough – no barbs. Came right out, smooth as silk.

He now flipped the guy over roughly and flexicuffed his wrists behind his back. Then, while warily eyeing the older girl in the corner, who didn’t budge, he stepped up to the controls and hastily killed the engine. He also scanned forward out the porthole glass, making sure they weren’t about to run aground on anything.

He’d had enough of that shit.

As the boat slowed and powered down, he pulled a pressure bandage from the blowout kit in his thigh pouch, placed it on the console, then steadied the bolt sticking out of him with one hand – and pulled it free with the other. As he did so, he gritted his teeth and breathed raggedly through flaring nostrils, but made no other sound. He then slapped the pressure bandage over the puncture wound, tamped it down around the edges, and nodded to himself contentedly.

Good to go.

But while he’d been stopping this runaway train, and patching himself up, his back had been to the girl. By the time he turned around again, stalked over, and roughly flexicuffed her as well… he didn’t notice that the pistol that had slid into the corner was now gone.

* * *

Swinging out onto the upper deck, the sea spray still blowing all the way up here as the boat blasted forward, Ali came across the following scene: the young pirate standing over the prone form of Juice on the deck, pointing Juice’s own gun down at him, and mouthing something to himself.

That’s not good, she thought.

Once again, Ali should have shot him, but something stopped her. She told herself it was the risk of the guy pulling his trigger as he died – she could see the hammer of the handgun was back, and had to presume the safety was off. Also it was only one long step from the door to the pair of them, so she took it in a flash, grabbed the weapon from the top by the slide, instantly twisting it to face in a safe direction, then relieved him of it.

The kid turned to face her in alarm – just in time to catch a brutal forearm shove, Heisman style, right in his shallow chest. His feet tangled up and he went over backward, banged into the gun carriage, and fell down around its wheels in a tangle of limbs.

Already turning and kneeling before Juice, she said: “Do yourself a favor – stay down.” Her voice also said she wasn’t fucking around.

The kid nodded vigorously, and stayed where he was, hands in plain view. Ali tossed her last flexicuffs over to him, where they landed in his lap.

And he put them on himself this time, tightening the loose end with his teeth.

Six Angry Men

Lake Michigan

“Dude, you’ve seriously gotta stop falling asleep.”

Juice levered his eyes open. They seemed to weigh a ton. Blocking out the watery sun overhead was a head so big it could only belong to one man. Predator was offering him an open pouch of chewing tobacco. Juice realized he’d either spit his out or, more likely, swallowed it. He took a pinch in three fingers and stuck it inside his left cheek.

Then he sat up.

“Yeah, man. No naps.” This was Ali, kneeling beside him, and wrapping their med kit back up. Juice put his hand to the top of his head. There was a thick gauze pad at the back, secured with a triangular bandage wrapped around like a bandana, or do-rag. He figured that probably looked cool. Though he guessed it was too late to ask her to use his Harley “Live to Ride” bandana from his ruck.

Juice rubbed his swaddled head, and wondered how long he’d been out. “Eh, not again,” he said, recalling how he’d been knocked cold on the mission immediately prior to this one – when half a pharmaceutical company had collapsed on his head.

Handon laughed. He remembered hefting the big man on his shoulder as the dead swarmed them and overran their lines. Seeing now that Juice was okay, he turned and headed back inside. His assault boots squished as he walked – he and Pred, not to mention Park, had been thigh-high in lake water at the end, as the Three Brothers had flooded and slowed to a crawl. Henno’d had to bring the bigger boat around, once they controlled it, to retrieve them. Happily, all these maneuvers had left them finally facing the right damned direction – north.

Now, Handon ducked into the wheelhouse to check on their heading and progress. He’d already had Henno kick it into overdrive, within seconds of climbing aboard. They seriously had to get moving toward their extraction point. Anything else that needed to be done could be done on the way.

Now, behind them, the Three Brothers slowly slipped beneath the waves in the Diablo’s wake, as Alpha sped away. It had been a pretty good boat. But it hadn’t quite gotten them where they needed to go.

* * *

“Do I even have to say I feckin’ told you so?”

It was an unemotional monotone which Henno directed at Handon. They had a moment there alone in the pilothouse. The older girl and the impaled, slightly shot, flexicuffed pilot had been herded outside – where they were being corralled with the other survivors of the pirate vessel, as well as with the younger girl.

Handon and Henno stood in silence for a second, both of them basically just catching their breath, as they watched the lake scroll out ahead of them. Handon exhaled and put his ass down on the second captain’s chair. He swiveled to face Henno, who was still staring ahead.

“No,” he said tiredly. “You don’t have to say it.” In his head, but not out loud, he added: What the hell WAS I thinking?

Henno snorted contentedly. “First sensible thing you’ve said all day.”

Handon wondered if he’d read his mind. He then looked over at the broad bloodstain around Henno’s wound – about which the stoic Brit pointedly wasn’t saying anything. It would sound like “whinging” as Henno termed it. He’d tell Handon in a second when he thought they were fucking up. But it would never be personal, and it would never be about his own safety or comfort.

Handon mentally cursed himself. Pulling over to help a stranded boat? On their way to extraction for their most important mission ever? What the hell was that? It was a bad enough idea in conception. But in execution, given how very badly it had gone…

And yet it could have gone much worse still.

He sighed. He’d thought his time with Sarah, his reawakening to the importance of safeguarding their humanity, had been a good thing. But maybe allowing himself to be touched by these human emotions was actually goddamned stupid. With all his responsibilities, with everything they had on the line… how did he think he could afford such luxuries as human compassion?

But he couldn’t bring himself to totally repudiate it, either. No matter the risk, no matter how badly things had gone, or might have gone, he couldn’t drive the idea totally out of his head. He knew he still had to get this right.

And he also remembered that they’d rescued the two girls, who Ali seemed to think were innocent victims in all this. That had to be worth something – it certainly seemed to be worth something to Ali.

Maybe that was enough.

“Landfall in twenty mikes,” Henno said. He didn’t say anything else. He figured he’d gotten the message across.

Handon stood, clapped Henno on the shoulder – the unperforated one – and went back outside. He still had to figure out what the hell to do with their new pirate collection.

* * *

“Where the hell did they get this beast? Benghazi? Paktia Province? Je-sus…”

Ali was walking a circle around the Russian ZSU anti-aircraft gun, admiring it, if that was the right word. She’d only first laid eyes on it when emerging on the top deck a few minutes earlier – and only really seen it now, as she had been occupied before making sure Juice was still breathing. Earlier, she’d only heard its bludgeoning report through two decks of yacht.

She straightened up when Handon emerged again, marching purposefully toward their prisoner pen – the back end of the upper deck. In one corner sat Henno’s pilot, with the puncture wound in his shoulder; the young kid with only bruised ego; another guy they’d found alive on the lower deck, with a pair of grievous gunshot wounds to his upper torso – Pred’s handiwork; plus two other guys they’d discovered cowering down in the storeroom. These last had carried weapons, but surrendered quickly enough to live. In the other corner were the two girls, cowering close to each other, the older smoothing the younger’s hair.

Handon surveyed them. The guy with the sucking chest wound probably wasn’t going to last much longer, so that would be one problem solved. But several remained.

“So,” Handon said, scanning the group with his frosty blue eyes. “What do we do with you?”

Juice and Ali came up from behind, moving to stand on either side of him. Pred was sprawled out on a bench to the side, his leg extended as usual. Whether they knew it or not, whether they liked it or not… this was a jury.

“These guys are predators,” Ali said softly, in an aside to Handon. Turning aside to Pred, she added, “No offense.”

“None taken,” he rumbled.

Ali edged slightly closer to Handon. “There’s a lot of stuff below – dry goods, food, bottled water, ammo. And a lot of clothing, too. Piles of boots. Fucking creepy.”

Predator said, “Maybe they just took it off the dead. Scavenging like the rest of us.”

Handon didn’t take his gaze off the prisoners. “We know what they’ll say about it.”

Juice shuffled slightly, looking uncomfortable. “There’s something else. When I was diving underneath this thing. I saw wrecks below. The lake’s not that deep here. And there were two or three vessels sunk on the lakebed.”

“Scuttled?” Ali asked.

Juice shrugged.

Ali shook her head. “So these assholes have just been sitting here, like a spider at the center of a web. Waiting for victims to sail by.”

Handon pondered that. They were in fact at a nexus of the main sailing lines. Maybe the other victims were people trying to escape from the mainland to the island. Or just staying alive on the water, going into shore only for scavenging runs. It had worked for the Kennedy. And being in the water was an excellent way to self-quarantine – until, as Alpha discovered when they drifted into shore, it wasn’t. Either way, it seemed to suggest there were more survivors on this continent than they had guessed.

But in the end it was just one more mystery – one they weren’t going to have time to explore or get to the bottom of. Handon tossed his head at the girls. “What about them?”

Ali said, “My gut? They’re not here by choice. They’re prisoners, or at least coerced.”

Handon looked at the two girls. “Well?”

“Yes,” the older girl said. “Please. They made us do it. Everything.”

Handon looked to Ali, who nodded.

It was good enough for him. “Okay,” he said. “You two over here.” They both scurried away from the group of prisoners, and Ali drew her knife and cut the cuffs off the older one.

Handon exhaled. “We don’t have time for a lot of deliberation. Landfall in eighteen.”

“We can’t let them go,” said Ali. “You put these guys back out there, they’re just going to do this shit again. Think of the next people they come across – who won’t be as able to defend themselves. There’ll be more killing, more looting… and more galley slaves.”

Juice said, “I don’t wanna be an executioner. Hell, we’ve already killed most of them. Maybe the rest have learned their lesson.”

Predator said, “Just put them out on the lifeboat.” He gestured over the back rail. Down below, on the fantail, a small Zodiac motorboat hung by ropes from a joist.

Juice grunted. “Without weapons or supplies, it’s the same as killing them.”

Ali started to step forward. “Fuck it,” she said. “I’ll be the executioner.” But she was halted by a new voice.

“Same as killing who?” It was Dr. Park, climbing up from below, and now squinting into the sunlight through his rectangular glasses. And clutching, as always, his laptop.

For a few beats, the others just regarded him in silence.

Verdict

Lake Michigan

In the corner of the upper deck, the older girl sat with her arm around her sister, and stroked her hair. She also carefully controlled her expression – trying to look innocent, and maybe a little traumatized. Nothing was so important now as to play the victim. To try and generate some sympathy.

Miraculously, neither she nor her sister had been hurt in the terrifying gunfight. And the British guy hadn’t seen her going for the loose gun in the pilothouse and pocketing it. That move had been a little crazy, and even she thought maybe her impulsiveness might have taken her too far. But she hadn’t kept the two of them alive this long by being timid or afraid. And she had definitely picked up some tricks from the guys along the way – becoming cagier, perhaps even more of a badass, than she’d been before she started this ride.

Now the weight of the pistol deep in the pocket of her jacket reassured her – because it gave her options. It gave her and her sister a better shot, whatever happened to the others now. For once, she thought, Logan and the rest of the guys had bit off more than they could chew. She wasn’t that surprised. Bullies and tough guys always met someone tougher eventually. She listened to the soldiers debating the fate of the Diablo’s men – those few that remained. She felt bad for them, she really did.

But she and Emily came first, every time.

The only exception might be William, the boy. He was a sweet kid, and had always treated them with gawky kindness, following them around like a lovesick puppy. Now that he might be killed or, just as bad, cast off onto the lake with no supplies, it roused in the older girl a righteous, and rather adolescent, anger. She didn’t have much loyalty beyond Emily. But she guessed it extended to William. He was certainly the best of a bad lot.

And, in any case, she’d take the worst of the outlaws before these humorless military law-and-order types. They reminded her of the big smug cops who used to hassle her, and occasionally grope her, back in their tiny hometown in upstate Wisconsin. All she had been trying to do was survive growing up in a small rural town – where there was nothing to do but drink, smoke weed, and fool around. Just as she was trying to survive now, and to keep her sister safe. Emily could be pretty damned humorless herself, and very straight-edge. But she was still her sister.

And they were all they had left.

She was briefly confused when the Asian guy, unarmed and bespectacled, appeared on deck. She hadn’t seen him before, and he was clearly not the same breed as the others. But she listened very attentively when he spoke – and most especially when the others spoke to and about him… because anything she could learn might help her, and Emily, to stay alive.

And she knew by now that it required all of her wits and resources to keep the two of them one step ahead of the dead – and two ahead of the living.

* * *

After Park asked his deck-silencing question, Predator took the radical step of lumbering to his feet, stick-walking down the deck, and taking the scientist by his arm. He said, “You need to go back below, dude.”

Park resisted him. “Wait a minute,” he said, looking across at the row of prisoners and slowly getting the picture. “Jesus, what about a trial? Or at least some kind of mercy. Why is this okay?” None of the others spoke for a moment, the only noise the wind over the top deck as the boat zoomed forward.

Predator knew that, like most temptations, getting pulled into a debate on this issue ought to be resisted. But nevertheless he said, “Unfortunately, this is the state of nature we’re in now, doc. There are no courts out here. There’s no one but us.”

“And who put you in charge? Gave you the power over life and death?”

Predator sighed. “The sheep did. When they delegated to us the job of protecting them.”

Park squinted. “Wait. Who are the sheep?”

Predator sighed a second time. “Everyone – everyone who’s not a wolf or a sheepdog. But that’s a lecture for another day. With any luck, we’ll have the whole rest of the Apocalypse to shoot the shit…”

Park resisted Predator’s pull on his elbow. And though he wasn’t going to be able to resist it for long, still Ali turned and stepped toward him, looking deeply unamused. When she spoke, her voice was definitely devoid of humor.

“You see that drumstick Pred is hobbling on? You see that bandage on Juice’s head, or the arrow that was sticking out of Henno, or this?” She held her bloody and bandaged left hand and arm in the air. “And you see the two members of this team who aren’t here at all? We suffered these losses going into harm’s way to rescue you, and to keep you safe. You understand that? All for you. And the last thing we need now is a bunch of half-reformed pirates running around loose on the same boat you’re on.”

This was about as agitated as Park had ever seen Ali get. Her negative feelings on things almost always manifested as mordant snorts, head shakes, and general fatalistic amusement. Black humor. She virtually never let the lid come off – or even let it rattle.

But maybe she’d had enough for one day.

Pred looked down at Park kindly. “It’s okay, doc. We just need to keep you safe, buddy. You’re the point of this whole exercise. Plus, you’re not gonna want to see this…”

They’d made their point. On this one, the mission was the man.

And the older girl heard all of it, and followed Park with her eyes as he went below.

* * *

Ali turned back to face the prisoners, as Park and Pred disappeared inside. Her eye went straight to the tattooed, silver-toothed meth-head-looking dude – the flashlight guy, who had bent over her from behind. “Like I said…” she intoned, moving forward like a hammer falling, her palm settling on her holstered pistol.

“Hold on a second,” Handon said, grabbing her arm in turn as she tried to pass him. He scanned the faces of the vanquished pirates. In particular, he was drawn to the face of the very young one, the one Juice had captured. He was obviously just a kid, with unkempt peach fuzz stubble, dirty-blond (as well as just dirty) hair, which lay matted on his forehead. The kid held his gaze for a second, then his eyes crept back to his feet.

“What’s your name?” Handon asked him.

“William,” he answered softly.

Handon looked across at Juice now. Juice’s mission in swimming over to the back side of the Diablo had been, technically, kill-or-capture. Maybe he’d gone with the latter option for a reason. But, in any case, they were out of time for discussing it.

“We’re not slowing the boat,” he said. “Throw the lifeboat out. And throw them after it.” He looked at the girls. “These two can exfil with us. Assuming they want to, and as long as they move fast.” With that, he turned and marched back toward the wheelhouse.

Juice called after him. “Hey, what about the wounded guy? He definitely can’t swim.”

Handon didn’t slow as he answered over his shoulder. “Put him in the boat before you throw it out.” And then he was gone.

And it was done.

Off the Island

Beaver Island

There was way too much for the Marines on Beaver Island to do now. And not nearly enough men left standing to do it all.

But as soon as Gunny Fick stopped being on fire, he climbed to his feet and began trying to formulate a plan. As his hearing slowly dialed back up after the pummeling of the explosion, he realized someone was shouting at him. Shaking his head, he scanned the field. Graybeard was standing in front of him, feeling him up for injuries – but not speaking. Beyond and behind him, he could see Brady’s big, powerful back as he leaned into his weapon – firing both the assault rifle, and 40mm grenades out of the underslung launcher.

He was defending the airfield alone.

Finally, Fick realized the voice he was hearing was in his head. It was Chesney, the Kid, shouting over the squad net. He’d seen the explosion, and was now audibly panicking. Fick pressed his radio transmit button. “Break, break! Clear the goddamned channel.” The voice went silent. But now Graybeard spoke in front of him. His voice was totally calm. But he said,

“The Kid does have a point. What’s the plan now, Gunny?”

Fick didn’t allow himself any more time for head-clearing. There was no time. He said, “When you have to eat a shit sandwich, bite the corner where it’s mostly bread.” Graybeard gave him a big smile in return – a happy warrior.

They were probably all about to die here.

But they were having fun.

* * *

Fick sent Graybeard back into the fight alongside Brady, defending the bomber and runway, then went alone back to the blast site. As he jogged, he weaved like a punch-drunk boxer. That would fade – he hoped.

As he reached the crater, it was obvious their tank of aviation fuel had been chemically transformed into heat and light, and was now lost to them. And just when they were so damned close… Nearby, he found enough of Stan the mechanic to know he wasn’t going to find the rest. There wasn’t even a trace of the co-pilot. But he found Reyes, farther away, lying on his back – and, at first glance, all his parts still seemed attached. He’d been farthest from the explosion, and it looked like his body armor and helmet had saved him. But he had burns on his exposed skin surfaces, and the rest of him was peppered with puncture wounds from shrapnel.

Fick knelt down and, after checking his breathing, got some QuickClot Combat Gauze pads out of Reyes’ blowout kit, and started patching the leakiest holes. While he was doing so, Reyes regained consciousness.

“That’s it,” Fick said, still bandaging. “We’re voting you off the island.”

“Hey, it wasn’t me,” Reyes said weakly. “The co-pilot did it. Vote him off.”

“He’s already gone. Can you walk?”

Reyes grunted in pain as he tried to move his legs. “Not sure.”

“Can you shoot?”

He wiggled his arm and fingers, on the right side only.

“A-ffirm, Gunny. No problem.”

“Good,” Fick said, ungently patting down the last bandage with a fist bump. “Because we’re out of shooters.”

He grabbed an arm and a leg and pulled Reyes up into a fireman’s carry – which was a damned impressive thing to do with a man who outclassed him by thirty pounds and four inches. Reyes swallowed a scream of pain into a throaty groan. And as Fick staggered back toward the plane, he saw Graybeard pivot and begin firing around him, to one side then the other. They were obviously being pursued. But Fick didn’t have time to deal with it.

Getting Reyes into the plane and all the way back to the tail section almost killed them both. But after Fick shoved his pummeled body into the tail turret, and heard those twin 50-cal machine guns start up, he knew it was all worth it. It was like beautiful music. Fick even imagined he could hear the dead screaming and coming apart, though that might have been his fevered imagination.

And he wasn’t done ratcheting up their firepower, either. When he got from the tail back to the midsection, he tore into one of the supply crates stowed against the bulkhead. Inside it were XM29 prototype assault rifles, hundreds of which they had stumbled upon in the hangar at Naval Air Base Oceana in Virginia. It was a dual weapon – a 20mm smart grenade launcher up top, with a full-auto 5.56mm carbine beneath. It also had a computer-assisted sighting system with integrated laser rangefinder, thermal vision, and night vision capabilities.

And Fick had brought three of them.

He hadn’t issued these to his team, because you couldn’t rely on any weapon you hadn’t trained with, and you didn’t change the equipment of meticulously trained men right before a battle. But he had brought them along for the pilot, co-pilot, and mechanic – who weren’t trained at all, and thus might as well have something that made a really big bang. All just in case things went so far to shit that they needed everyone on the ground shooting.

Obviously, things had really, totally gone to shit.

Fick decided he didn’t mind some really big bangs himself. As the aircraft vibrated around him from the roar of the twin 50s in the back, he unclipped his trusty M16, and clipped in one of the XM29s in its place. He then refilled his mag pouches – the new rifle took the same 5.56mm STANAG magazines as the old one – then also jammed in a bunch of five-round magazines of the 20mm grenades this beast also took. Then he shoved a bunch more in a bag, grabbed a second rifle, and went forward to the command section of the plane.

And he hauled out the pilot. Once he got him outside, he had him check the fuel level of the number-one wing tank. The pilot said he thought it was at about seventy-five percent.

It wasn’t enough.

* * *

Graybeard didn’t pause firing, but he did look back over his shoulder as Fick emerged with the pilot. He was only a few feet from the tail of the bomber, from which the badly wounded Reyes was nonetheless mowing the grass out front with the dual 50s. Graybeard shouted to Fick, “Hey, what happened to keeping one pilot safe?”

Fick spat on the tarmac. “If we’re all dead, it doesn’t matter whether anybody can fly the damned plane.” He turned back to the increasingly alarmed pilot and gave him a 15-second course of instruction on operating the XM-29. He then hung the bag of ammo over the guy’s shoulder and positioned him where he was least likely to blow up anything important, or anyone still alive, with the grenades. Then he grabbed Graybeard.

“On me.”

Graybeard nodded and fell in behind, continuing to fire steadily toward the northern flank. But with Brady still in the fight and unwounded, the Kid up top – plus now Reyes on the twin 50 and the co-pilot also piling in – their position at the bomber looked like holding a while longer. The putrid dead bastards were really piling up now, forming a flesh fence that the new arrivals had to climb or fall over to get to them.

But climb over it they did, and Fick saw heavy opposition ahead as he jogged forward. Hearing the pilot popping off 20mm explosive rounds behind him, he figured he’d give that a spin himself. He pulled the hulking sci-fi-looking rifle tight into his shoulder, powered up the active sight – then pulled his eye away again, to check out the buttons on the outer edge of the trigger guard. These controlled which weapon the single trigger fired. He punched the one labeled ‘HE’, sighted in again – and triggered off five of the little airburst grenades in a flat trajectory toward the line of dead heading toward them.

When the explosive projectiles detonated, it was more like one big rolling explosion than five little ones. When the dust settled, the front rank of dead had simply been atomized. While dropping out the thick magazine, situated way back in the stock, and slapping in a new one, Fick ran straight through the lingering smoke, Graybeard close behind.

As he ran, he looked around until he spotted something colorful on the ground ahead, some detritus from the explosion. Reaching it, he picked it up and turned it over. Bingo – it was one of the ten-gallon jerrycans from the destroyed shed. It looked intact. Another one lay partially underneath a sheet of corrugated tin nearby. Fick gripped the handles of both of them in his left hand, and perched his rifle on that arm.

Moving forward again, scanning the buildings ahead, he rounded one of them – and stopped cold as he ran into a handful of confused dead bastards, just milling around. These must have been the ones too stupid to find the fight, Fick thought. As the group turned and locked onto him, he jabbed the “XE” button on the trigger housing, then flicked the fire selector to full-auto. He sighted in on the leftmost head, depressed his trigger, then panned the weapon smoothly to the right. The big compound rifle was so heavy that even on full-auto the muzzle-rise was negligible. In 2.25 seconds the smaller forward magazine was empty.

And all those Zulus were either headless, or else had canoes for heads.

Their bodies caught up with current events and crumpled to the ground.

Fick ran forward, stepping over and around all the meat, dropped the 5.56 mag out and replaced that. A few meters beyond, he saw a few more of the jerrycans scattered around. The first two he checked had at least one hole in them, but he finally found two more that were intact. “Take these,” he said to Graybeard, then moved out, not waiting long nor looking back.

Fick spotted the hangar he thought he needed, angled toward its door, then shot the handle and lock housing off. He kicked it down and followed it into the semi-darkness inside. The big high-tech sight on his XM-29 glowed and caught his eye – it was in thermal mode, and Fick flashed a grin as he swept it across the room.

Then he remembered Zulus don’t have body heat. That means they won’t show up on thermal particularly well. Or, in fact, at all.

Shit.

If there was a visible light on this weapon, Fick didn’t know where it was or how to use it. Luckily Graybeard followed him in and clicked on his weapon-mounted Surefire tactical light. The room looked clear as he swept the beam across it.

And there sat the Land Rover Longfoot had told him about. Now they just had to hope it would start.

Fick fast-walked over to it, opened the rear door, and tossed in his two jerrycans. He turned, took Graybeard’s, and threw those in after. In the reflected light from the weapon-mounted light, Fick could see Graybeard’s lined, serene, granite-like face. One thing the old guy sure had was patience. Fick pulled open the driver’s-side door now, leaned in, and nudged the gear shift into neutral. He then found the keys in the ignition by touch, turned the engine over, and emerged again.

“Okay,” Graybeard said. “I’ll bite. Where are we going?”

“Not we. You.” Fick pulled out a single map sheet from under plastic on his thigh and unfolded it. “There’s another airstrip, a little private one, about six clicks northeast of here. Here’s your route.” He pulled a felt-tip pen from his tactical vest and drew out a stair-stepping line on the map. He looked up again, his expression grim. “We need at least another 40 gallons of avgas – and 80 would be better. Go get it. Come back. Don’t dawdle. If Alpha and the scientist get here before you get back, we take off without you.”

Graybeard wanted to ask what they’d do when they ran out of fuel in mid-air in that case. But he figured he already knew the answer: they’d deal with that problem if and when they survived all the other ones stacked up in front of it.

But instead he only said, “No problem.”

And now he was just waiting for Fick to get the hell out of the way so he could mount up the truck.

Alamo

Beaver Island

On his run from the hangar back to the runway, Gunny Fick had cause to entertain a thought that he had never before let into his head, not once in a 25-year military career:

I’m getting too old for this shit.

The pilot started hailing him while he was still 20 meters out. “Fick! We need to take off – while we still can!” Fick did see his point. They were by no means safe from being overrun where they were. And if that happened, it would be too late to load up the aircraft and get it rolling down the runway, never mind back into the air.

But none of that mattered. It was impossible for them to take off before Alpha arrived. That was the whole point of the exercise. And everything depended on it.

He shook his head. “Negative. We’re not leaving. And we don’t have the fuel to circle and land again. So man your goddamned sector.”

“This is some Black Hawk Down shit right here,” the pilot muttered, “when the pilot’s on the ground and balls-deep in the firefight…”

Fick ignored this, instead darting over to each position and tweaking their defensive posture. On the upside, they were now consolidated in one area, which consisted of the eastern end of the runway and the control tower beside it. They had essentially collapsed their salient to the east, where the fueling station used to be. Though, in fairness, they’d had their salient collapsed for them by means of a devastating explosion.

On the downside, it was now down to him, Brady, and the pilot out on the ground; a badly wounded Reyes in the tail turret; and the Kid up top. And that was it. And facing their dwindling numbers, a shocking number of Zulus were pouring in from the south now, as well as from the east, and heavier every minute from the north. The Marines were engaged on three sides – and, hell, who was Fick kidding? It was really four sides. It was just that the Kid was keeping the western approach clear enough that they could pretend it was safe there.

But even that comforting illusion wasn’t going to last a whole hell of a lot longer.

Fick took a knee, facing south, and made himself semi-comfortable.

Win or lose, stand or fall… this was going to be their Alamo.

* * *

Staff Sergeant Brady continued to hold the position he’d been holding all day – out on their north flank. And, hell, who was he kidding? He was their north flank. But he spent almost no time or energy bemoaning this fact – nor wondering if this was going to be their last battle together. He had a job to do. And he was going to do it down to his last round and his last breath.

But, as long as he did that, he figured things were pretty likely to work out.

He hadn’t gotten to the very top of the military world, and before that the martial arts world, by complaining, second-guessing, or worrying about the future. He just did what was required of him, in the situation he was in. Plus, he was totally prepared for this moment – at a razor-edge of fitness, with awesome muscle tone and definition, and hardly an ounce of body fat on him. He looked cool in his ballistic Oakleys. His gear was all battle-tested and right where he could get at it.

He’d even shaved that morning.

And when they did finally get out of this particular shit-pile alive, well, he had a kettle, cafetière, grinder, and beans in his ruck back in the plane. The prospect of fresh coffee alone made it worth surviving all this, and would also be there for anyone left alive at the end.

They just had to hold a little longer.

Brady had been having a slightly easier time of it since Reyes came back – because the twin 50’s field of fire, while predominantly to the east, partially overlapped with his. But now he heard the clattering machine guns go silent. A glance over his shoulder showed Reyes contorted around in the turret bubble, reaching back into the plane, trying to pull down fresh belts of 50-cal and get them loaded up. Brady wished he could help. But he didn’t have one second to leave his gun. If he did, the levee would break.

Another thing Brady was glad of was that he had hauled two full crates of magazines and grenades out from the aircraft cabin. That was earlier in the battle, when he’d had two spare seconds to rub together. Now that they were too heavily engaged for him to leave his position, he at least didn’t have to go more than two feet to top up.

The dead were getting closer with each massed attack. Brady could see the semi-translucent ulcers in the eyes of some of them before they went down. And it was getting harder to hit the runners in their heads. It required a level of focus and control that was hard to maintain; never mind that his hands and arms had started to go numb and buzzing from the non-stop firing.

For a while, he had so many targets he’d gone full-auto. But he found himself burning through ammo too quickly. And he had no idea how long they were going to be out on the ground. So he’d gone back to single shot, albeit non-stop rapid single shots. Every time he got a little breathing room he’d either heave a hand grenade toward the treeline, or fire one off from the launcher under his rifle. But less and less did he even have time to take his finger off the trigger.

Soon, at this rate, the dead would be in their lines. And they’d have to go hand-to-hand.

From behind him, he heard Fick bellow, “Marines! Fix bayonets!”

Brady laughed at that one. First of all, there was only him to do it. Reyes was in the plane, the Kid was up top, the pilot didn’t have one – and Gunny himself was rocking that absurd space-gun, which wouldn’t take a bayonet. Secondly, it was just funny. Bayonets had fallen so far out of favor in the wars of the early 21st century that nobody had ever manufactured a bayonet lug for their SCAR assault rifles. But, in the ZA, they had made a comeback. Brady remembered Fick commissioning a bunch of them, based on his own design, from the JFK’s engineering workshop.

This was another way the ZA was more like WWII than the high-tech terror wars: bloody, in the trenches, sometimes hand-to-hand, having to kill the enemy right to their faces. That was a very different proposition from doing it from a thousand yards out with a Nightforce scope, or painting your target with a laser and having an Apache or Reaper UAV drop a Hellfire on it.

Behind him, he heard the pilot call out again to Fick: “Seriously, dude, we’ve got to roll back! We’re burning through all the ammo. We can’t hold off this many!”

Brady could almost hear Fick’s response before he shouted it: “You hold this motherfucking line or I will shoot you myself!” Brady wondered whether that might go down in the pantheon of belligerent Marine quotations. Like, “Come on, you sons of bitches! Do you want to live forever?” from Belleau Wood or, “You’ll never get a Purple Heart hiding in a foxhole! Follow me!” from Guadalcanal. Though it occurred to Brady that somebody would have to survive this engagement for Fick’s line to attain immortality.

“Hold this line!” Fick repeated. “Do not give one inch! Just give me thirty seconds more…”

Dropping out and replacing yet another mag, Brady idly wondered:

What happens in thirty seconds?

* * *

Fick stole another look at his watch during a two-second micro-lull in the Zulu onslaught. And he cursed the lack of a bayonet lug on the XM-29. He’d never really had any other melee weapon. The samurai-sword craze of the USOC operators had never caught on with his Marines – which was a little ironic because the Marine Corps officers saber was something of a trademark. And Fick still had the LT’s sword, stowed back in his quarters on the carrier.

But he definitely didn’t feel entitled to use it. Even if he’d known how.

Watching the legions of corpses pour in from the forest, he simply couldn’t believe their numbers. It looked like every one of the several thousand the batshit Canadian had described were now coming in on them. Now that Fick thought about it, the island was small enough, 13 miles long, between 3 and 6 miles wide, that they could easily end up with every dead guy on the island all right there. The ones close to the airport had been drawn by the initial duel with the control tower, then their moans drew ones further out, and on like that – until they could have a local singularity, with every Zulu on the island in one big pile.

On the other hand, Fick thought, the island was at least a closed system, so there were only so many. And at some point they’d all be dead.

It was just looking likely that the Marines would all be dead first.

Now, for the first time, a couple of sprinting dead bastards, both of them in rotting Canadian Forces uniform, made it right up to Fick while he was empty and starting his reload. He dropped the rifle and came up with his secondary weapon, a MARSOC M45 Close Quarter Battle Pistol (CQBP). This was the latest, and most likely last, evolution of the iconic Colt M1911 frame – dating from, well, 1911. It was the past and future all rolled up in one perfect package. He fired point blank into the half-decayed face that hissed and lunged the last few inches at him. A pair of fat .45 ACP rounds entered its mouth and blew out the back of its head, and it collapsed at Fick’s feet, its momentum sending it crashing into his shins and desert boots, and taking his legs out from under him.

As Fick went down, the second one dove on his exposed back. He stuck the .45 over his shoulder and fired blind, emptying the mag. The grasping, writhing monster on his back went limp. Looking up, Fick could see another pair racing at him. But both went into the dirt from high-angle head shots. That would be the Kid up top, watching his back. An angel on his shoulders.

The Kid was damned cherubic, come to picture him.

Fick reloaded the pistol as he scrambled to his feet – he’d get dead fast if he stayed on the ground. He started emptying the next mag into the ones following those first four in. There was simply no gap or pause in the attack, no time for him to gain any breathing room or push them back.

But, exactly as his seventh and last round cracked off, the whole treeline to the south went up in a rippling, rolling, billowing, oxygen-sucking series of massive explosions. The running corpses nearly on top of him were still nearly on top of him. But the hundreds lined up behind them were suddenly being cooked on their feet and served up as Zulu Flambé. Fick stole a look over his shoulder, and saw that the treeline to the north was getting a similar incendiary shellacking.

And one second later, first one, then the other, of a pair of F-35 Lightning II 5th-generation multi-role stealth fighters blasted overhead at Mach 1.6, or 1,200 mph, leaving a series of powerful sonic booms echoing behind them.

About goddamned time, Fick thought. Naval aviators – bunch of precious Top Gun wannabes…

He recovered his rifle and finished his reload.

* * *

“What the fuck was that?” the bomber pilot shouted over his shoulder, while simultaneously staring with disbelief at the utter carnage and inferno that now surrounded the airport on three sides.

Fick grunted. “Our close air support.”

Now that the shooters on the ground had cleaned up the front ranks of attackers, they finally had a little breathing room – because the dozen ranks behind had been taken out by a combination of GBU-39 precision-guided glide bombs and Brimstone air-launched ground attack missiles. The F-35s expended all of their ordnance in three blistering passes. They’d had plenty of targets. When they were done, a cheer went up from the surviving Marines.

“Yeah, get some!” Brady yelled, pumping his fist toward the planes. He then pointed a finger at the legions of burning and collapsing dead guys. “Come over here and get a mouthful of dick!”

“Holy shit,” the pilot said, lowering his weapon for the first time in what seemed like hours. “Why didn’t we have some of that earlier?”

Fick sighed and tried to decide whether to answer him. “Because, after flying here and back from the carrier, the F35s have got exactly six minutes of linger time. And with six minutes, I needed them here exactly when shit was worst. Also, they go four times the speed of Chuckie here, so they only took off a half-hour ago…”

It had basically been a feat of logistics and timing, but Fick left it at that. Right now he needed everyone to get back on their guns. While the air strikes had salvaged their position, pulling them back from the brink of catastrophe, they were still under heavy attack. And, before long, they were going to be right back in the deep shit they’d just paddled themselves temporarily out of.

And now much of the forest around them was also burning.

Especially at the far end of the runway, to the east.

Where the hell was Alpha?

Left Behind

Virginia Beach

Dust spewed behind the commandeered truck as it barreled through the streets, passing rows of run-down buildings that hadn’t been inhabited for two years. To Wesley they looked as though they’d been empty much longer. In just that short time, the wood had started to crack and fall away, windows got covered in grime so that he couldn’t even see inside most of them, and doors had rotted off their hinges. He thought that perhaps most of the damage had been done during the early days of the ZA, when people were still alive and battling the dead.

But then, maybe not.

Wesley remembered the shed that his grandfather built – a stout, square, wooden structure that sat in the corner of their garden for most of his childhood. It had always looked pristine, ageless. Yes, it had changed color over the years. Wesley could remember how it faded a tiny bit every summer, though it was still obviously the same box, and the same wood. That was until his grandfather passed away.

After that, how long had it taken? Two years? Three at most. It didn’t change much that first summer or the next, but nearly collapsed when they emptied it out on the day they took his grandmother to the care home. And the grime on the windows had been the same oily film that covered those of the buildings they passed now. When left alone and uncared for, things managed to fall apart pretty damned quickly, all by themselves.

In the driver’s seat, Anderson gunned the engine and took the next corner, which Wesley hoped was their last, too quickly. The tires screeched as he battled the wheel and the truck lurched, skidded up to the edge of the sidewalk on the opposite side, then shot forward again, barely slowing.

“Is this where we saw them?” shouted Wesley over the roar of the engine and the wind. With one hand, he held tightly to the handle of the passenger-side door, and with the other gripped his handgun, the knuckles of both whitening.

“Just over there!” answered Melvin, through the smashed-out back window. Both he and Derwin stood in the flatbed of the truck, holding on to the rail that ran across the rear window. They had their assault rifles ready, but Wesley wondered how the hell they intended to fire the damn things and still hang on. At the very rear, Scott and Browning – who had run over from the main hangar after Wesley bellowed for them through the radio – sat with their backs to each other, rifles pointed outward, scoping buildings as they blasted by them.

They had sped past a dozen massive warehouses, an auto yard that still had rows of cars lined up in the waiting bay, and a gray, unmarked, prefab building with half a dozen stretch limousines out front. They were parked haphazardly around the lot with their doors open, as though they had been abandoned in a hurry. Finally, Wesley saw the blue-roofed building in the distance, but he couldn’t spot the radio tower.

“Slow down,” he said now, and Anderson eased off the accelerator. The truck slowed and rolled forward, and they all tensed up, eyes sweeping the area for any sign of the fleeing group.

“There!” said Browning, pointing up the road. Wesley turned to see at least some of the group heading toward them on the opposite side, running alongside a building and using an overgrown row of shrubs as cover.

But Wesley also saw what they had failed to see. Slithering swiftly across the roof of that same building were a dozen dark figures. They seemed to cling to one another, moving together as a pack, clawing over the half-collapsed landscape up there and through the debris, scrambling purposefully. Wesley guessed that the runners could sense the survivors, but had not yet spotted them. And he knew that when the group broke cover at the end of the building the runners would fall upon them.

How they got up there in the first place was not a question Wesley cared to entertain.

“On the roof!” he shouted, pointing.

But Derwin had already spotted them and leapt from the back of the truck. “On me!” he said, moving forward. Browning and Scott spread out just behind, flanking him to either side, and Melvin brought up the rear.

Wesley climbed out of the passenger seat, gripping his handgun with sweating fingers. He moved to the side of the road just as the frontmost survivor saw the tight knot of sailors advancing and stopped, spreading his arms out to halt his own group. Wesley could see the look of fear in the man’s eyes as his people backed away, toward the side of the building. He reached slowly to his hip, to a handgun holstered there, but then he frowned… and turned to look above and behind him. He had finally worked out that Derwin and the others weren’t aiming at them, but up toward the roof, and Wesley figured he had also guessed what they were probably aiming at.

Anderson alone watched from inside the truck as the chaos unfolded. He flushed with a cold sweat and felt feverish with fear. He didn’t like the doors of the truck being open, and he didn’t like sitting there on an open road in the middle of dead man’s land, waiting for the wide-eyed Englishman and his toy soldiers to try and rescue a bunch of nobodies. He could feel the panic building in him, a strange tightening ache in his stomach that felt like someone had reached inside him and was squeezing his guts. His foot hovered over the accelerator.

And then, in an instant, the tension erupted into bedlam – screaming, gunfire, and the hissing of the dead. As the pack emerged at the edge of the roof, still moving fast, they leapt from the rooftop into open air, and Derwin and the other shore patrolmen opened fire.

Four of the runners were out of the fight before they even hit the ground.

The flailing corpses rained down from the roof of the building, their gray, torn, barely clothed shapes ravaged by the disease, their bodies thin, skin taut and stretched across their bones, with raging, hungry eyes, bright white and bulging from blackened sockets. But their decrepit physical state didn’t seem to limit their energy or strength. They may have looked as though one punch would send them to pieces; but most of them survived the impact of a two-story fall and didn’t even slow down.

Four full-auto assault rifles rattled with fury as the pack swept off the roof, onto the ground, and hurtled toward the team. There were ten in total, and the six that weren’t cut to pieces in mid-air hit the ground, bounced back up, and carried on, leaving their fallen fellows as a mess of blackened meat on the blacktop. Five ran in the direction of the sailors, their rotted minds now focused on these new targets – but the last had landed nearer to the survivor group. It wheeled, hissed, bared its teeth, and lurched at the man in front. He now drew the gun from his belt, and as the creature raced to within ten feet of him he leveled it, aimed, and fired.

Meanwhile, Derwin took down one of the runners just as it stood up, shooting out its legs from under it. It buckled and fell, arms flailing. Derwin knew this wouldn’t kill it, but it would sure as shit slow it down – and right now they had too many other targets, and time was not on their side.

Melvin dropped another, aiming high and peppering the creature in the neck and head. It fell backwards, hit the pavement with a sickening crunch, and lay still.

Browning, the best shot in the team, killed another two with well-placed headshots. But the fifth ran forward, closing in on Scott before he could bring his weapon around. He got off a shot, but it went astray and the runner leapt at him, arms outstretched and claw-like hands grasping. He stumbled backward, trying to level his rifle at the creature, but it was all over him, knocking him to the ground and lunging, teeth bared.

Scott smelled the rank odor of rotted flesh and fetid breath as the thing stretched out its neck and snapped at him. He tried to shove it away using his rifle, which was now jammed against his chest, as leverage, the snapping teeth inches from his face. He was shocked at how strong the thing was – almost as strong as he, and much more desperate. He pushed with every bit of his remaining strength.

But just as his arms screamed surrender, a single shot rang out.

Wesley, standing apart from the team, lowered his handgun.

He had initially seen the runner charging Scott, raised his handgun and aimed, but it had been too fast and he couldn’t track. It wasn’t until they collided and both went sprawling to the ground, that it stayed still long enough for Wesley to line up his shot. They had been so close, and Wesley knew he was no great shot. He’d half-expected to see Scott take the bullet, but instead the runner’s head exploded in a cloud of black mush, spraying the tarmac. The headless body lost animation and fell away from the struggling sailor, rolling over onto its back, twitching.

Scott lay still for a moment, stunned and catching his breath, hardly able to believe he was still alive. In the prior moment, he had felt sure that this was his time to die, and had all but accepted it. The zombie had been too strong, and in another second his strength would have failed. Yet the runner was destroyed and he was still in one piece.

He climbed to his feet and scanned the scene, lifting his rifle with shaking hands.

Wesley sighed with relief, which was a welcome change from panic. He looked now toward the group of survivors, huddled against the side of the building, after the one out front had gunned down their runner. It had fallen at his feet, but then started to rise again. The leader – or Wesley presumed he was the leader – stepped forward, aimed calmly at the runner’s head, and fired again.

The man looked up at Wesley and smiled, and Wesley thought he was about to speak. But then the color drained from the man’s face and he stepped backward, his expression darkening. A sinking feeling pulled at Wesley’s stomach as he turned around to follow the man’s gaze.

Anderson watched from the driver’s seat of the truck, in horror, as another group of runners – a much bigger group, twenty or more – broke through the row of bushes and ran across the road, right between the truck and the team. He stared, numb, unable to open his mouth and shout any warning, as the dead mob raced toward the others. His hand gripped the wheel even tighter and his heart thumped. He knew he had to warn them, but he couldn’t act. Fear and panic had undone him.

I’ve got to get out of here, he thought. I’ve got to get out of here.

And then he slammed his foot on the accelerator and twisted the wheel. The tires of the truck screeched in protest, but the truck leapt forward, swinging round in a semicircle, before taking off down the road, back in the direction they had come.

Anderson dared to look up into the rear-view mirror as the dead flooded the road behind him. He watched tight-lipped as a group of them leapt onto Scott, who had only just got to his feet. And he watched as more of them swarmed toward the Englishman.

He tried to shut his mind down, limiting it to only one thought: They’re already dead, he told himself. They’re all already dead.

Anderson put the pedal into the floorboards and the truck gained speed, racing away from a scene he refused to let himself even imagine.

Plan B

On board the JFK

If Commander Drake had been asleep on his feet after the last two days… well, the news that the storm of dead was accelerating, and still coming straight at them, was a hell of a wake-up call. Now everything hung on them getting the carrier the hell out of the way.

The demise of the flat-top wouldn’t quite be the end of the world. If Alpha made it back, but the JFK went down, the survivors could still sail back with the scientist on the escort ship, the Michael Murphy. That was why they’d spent all the fuel to bring it along – for redundancy. As the spec-ops guys always put it: two is one, one is none.

But Drake for one didn’t much relish the prospect of the supercarrier going down, or what its loss would mean for humanity’s already slim chances. He certainly didn’t much like the idea of his whole crew being buried under a million slavering dead bastards.

And he especially wasn’t keen on going down with the ship.

Descending the island, the hulking five-story tower that glowered over the entire flight deck from its starboard edge, he darted down the last bit of ladder (which was what they called the steep, narrow stairwells on board), with a flustered aide in tow. He pushed open a steel hatch, emerging onto the carrier’s five sprawling acres of flight deck. All across it he could see mini-scenes of frantic activity: sailors shoving bodies and debris into the water, others rolling pallets of equipment and supplies from one place to another, and, mainly, people conducting desperate repairs.

It was this last that most concerned Drake.

He bypassed all the little sideshows and instead made a beeline for the main event: the repair of the enormous gash in the hull on the port side, from the explosion of the Sparrow missile launchers. He stalked intently over, beneath the mixed cloud cover that was still a hell of a lot brighter than the windowless room that had been his home for the last two days. He quickly spotted the man he needed – the best surviving engineer and construction rating on the boat, name of Shields, and who Drake had put in charge of this most critical project.

“Sitrep,” Drake said. He was awake and all business now. And there was no time for niceties.

“Sir,” Shields said, saluting. He was a grizzled old Master Chief, with twenty-five years in, most of it spent patching together rusty buckets from one side of the world’s oceans to the other. “We’re making it happen. We’ve developed a schematic and work plan that I believe will go. I’ve got half my guys down on the flight deck cutting out big sections of unused steel bulkhead, to use to cover the hole. And the rest are up here, welding, hammering, and sanding – getting the edges ready to take the welds.”

“When?”

“It’s hard to estimate accurately. Never done anything quite like it. And I don’t nearly have the men or materials I’d like for the job.”

“Okay,” Drake said. “I’ll tell you when, then. You’ve got exactly four hours. And not one second longer.”

Shields only hesitated a half a beat. “Aye, aye, sir.”

Drake pinned him with his eye. “Do you fully understand the importance of this job, Chief?”

“I think so, sir.”

“I’ll bottom-line it for you: there are going to be ten million dead arriving here in four hours. And if we’re still stuck on this goddamned sandbar, then our only hope is going to be to batten down the hatches and try to weather the storm. But if there’s a huge gaping hole in the hull, then it’s going to be Alpha Mike Foxtrot to the boat and everyone on it. Do you copy that?”

“Lima Charlie, sir.”

“Four hours and zero-point-zero seconds.”

Chief Shields saluted. But Drake was already stalking off.

If they could shore up the ship, then maybe they could ride out the storm. But that was definitely Plan B, and not an enormously attractive one. Drake moved smartly toward his next stop: the nuclear reactor section below.

* * *

As soon as it had become clear that they no longer had the skills and experience needed to safely restart and run their nuclear reactors, the first thing he’d done was ring up CentCom in London. And he’d told them to rustle up every surviving maritime nuclear engineer in the Royal Navy – or anywhere on the island, actually – and put them all on the fastest plane that could make the trip and land on the flat-top.

Now, as he fast-walked across the open deck, he had CIC patch him through to Britain, on his cell. The call went through.

“This is Drake, XO on the Kennedy. Are my nuclear engineers in the air?”

“Um, yes, well. Actually, about that…”

Drake energetically cursed the fucking roundaboutness of the English. By the time he got to the hatch that led down into the deeper bowels of the ship, he’d finally gotten the gist out of them.

There were no surviving maritime nuclear engineers in the Royal Navy.

And the closest they’d been able to find, and could spare, were a handful of civilian nuclear engineers from thermal power stations, still being rounded up.

Whom they’d get in the air in an hour at the soonest.

Which meant they weren’t going to make it in time.

Drake punched the end call button, tossed the phone to his aide, and yanked open the hatch. Even before his eyes adjusted to the dimness, he’d begun leaping down the ladder. Four decks later, he pushed through another hatch and stalked off down a cramped and dim corridor, trusting the aide would follow. After almost a hundred meters, he made a left into what was a cavernous room by shipboard standards – the reactor control room.

Inside it was another Englishman.

“Captain Martin,” Drake said loudly, wading in.

“Sir,” Martin said, turning to face him. Slick with sweat and haggard – he’d spent the last two days giving himself a crash course in the operation of nuclear fission reactors – still he seemed mentally sharp. It was all still there, behind the eyes.

And so far, Martin had been a lot less roundabout, and quicker to get to business, than most of the people Drake had served with – American or British. It was probably down to his fifteen years in the Royal Corps of Engineers, where bullshit wouldn’t get the job done – only skill and hard work would. How he’d ended up as acting chief engineer on a U.S. Navy nuclear supercarrier was a long and strange story, one he’d enjoy telling one day, should any of them live.

“Sitrep,” Drake said.

“We’re not there,” Martin said simply. “I’m making good progress through the reactor documentation and operations manuals. And these two gentlemen certainly have a lot of value to add.” He gestured at two serious-looking young ensigns also in the room. Drake thought maybe these guys had run IT for the engineering section, or swept the floors, or some damned thing.

“When?” Drake said. This was getting repetitive. But the point bore stressing.

“It’s something of a continuum,” Martin said. “At this point, I’d say I’ve got my head around the broad outlines of how these systems work and interrelate, as well as the essential physical processes underlying them. And, in theory, I understand the reactor start-up procedure. The question is where along this continuum it becomes safe to actually try it.”

“And?”

“How safe is safe? Totally safe? Probably never. Reasonably safe? Sooner.”

“When.”

“I’d estimate that, on current trends, and still ruling out sleep or breaks, I’d be modestly confident of being able to start one of the reactors and not cause a meltdown that sends the ship to the bottom in an uncontrolled fission reaction that devours us all, in… twenty-four to thirty-six hours.”

“That’s too late,” Drake said. “You’ve got three and a half.”

Martin’s eyes widened slightly. “I’m telling you it’s not safe.”

“I’ll tell you what’s not safe: having the ship overrun by ten million walking corpses.”

“I see your point.”

“You have got to try it – and you’ve got to do so in three-point-five hours. And if we melt down, we melt down.”

“Roger that. Sir.”

Drake began the long climb back to daylight, aide in tow.

When he got out into the open air of the deck again, he breathed deeply and savored both the fresh air and the light. He might not get another chance to do so.

There was a storm coming in.

Time to Leave

Canterbury

The Royal Marines, their tunnel-survivor charges in tow, moved swiftly through the streets now, barely stopping to dispatch the few wandering zombies that still occupied the now mostly deserted city center. Most of the buildings were collapsed into rubble, burying any hope that this ancient town would be used again for many years to come.

Trundling forward amidst the crowd of tunnel refugees, Amarie breathed heavily, her heart thumping in her chest, as she struggled to keep up the pace. Others had offered to carry Josie, but she wouldn’t let them; not a chance in hell of that. She didn’t care if they all damn well had to slow down; she was not putting the life of her child into the hands of anyone, not even a soldier or a friend.

Her back ached, though Josie wasn’t very heavy. The child was still very small, and easy enough to carry. Her tiny hands clung to her mother’s neck, and even if Amarie had let go, Josie would have hung there.

No, the ache was the handiwork of the damned building – one of its bricks, a piece of flying debris from halfway up the front face. As the building had shuddered and collapsed, miraculously falling away from the survivors huddling in the yard, splintered wood and shattered stonework had showered down on them. And a chunk of brick had hit her square in the back. Amarie knew that if she hadn’t been wearing the rucksack, and if it hadn’t held a large metal thermos inside, she could well have been crippled, or worse. She also knew that, had her body not been covering her, the brick would have hit her little girl.

She guessed now that maybe God had been watching them after all.

Much further up, at the front of the column, Lieutenant Jameson trudged along and glanced numbly around at the place that had been his childhood home. Most of the crumbling ruins they passed held some form of memory that he couldn’t shake – didn’t want to shake. Places he had visited with his parents, the homes of playmates from two decades past, shops, a cinema, a playground. Everything had been destroyed now, falling into dust and ruin.

The area of devastation was much larger than Jameson had expected. Just the town center, the op order had said. But plans must have changed, because the town center was now three hundred yards behind them, and the buildings lining this street were still completely bombed out, and the ground covered with debris.

And it was quiet. Crushingly so. Where had all the dead gone? What the Marines had already faced in the town showed that the bombing hadn’t been as effective as they’d hoped, so why had it worked here? They’d passed the roundabout five minutes ago and were heading out of town as quickly as the wounded could be carried or dragged. The man with the broken leg had been strapped to a chunk of fencing and was now held aloft by four of the other tunnelers. Some of the other injured hobbled along assisted by their friends, but Jameson couldn’t spare Marines to help them. He needed every one of his men who could hold a gun to keep it in the fight.

They were managing, though. There were enough of the tunnelers left on their feet to cope. Jameson’s only regret was having to leave his own dead, the men who had fallen, back in the yard. They would come back for them, but right now they simply couldn’t carry them out. It had pained him badly, but Grews had commanded that they leave them, that they get the hell out of the town and up to the quarantine zone in the north – where a large contingent of the task force was dealing with thousands of terrified refugees.

Eli was up and moving again, seemingly recovered from his knock on the head. The man was a machine, and Jameson was grateful for it. He also knew that without him, the morale of the team would plummet. Eli wasn’t just his troop sergeant – he was solid tempered steel.

They were now halfway along Rheim’s Way, and just passing the Victoria Memorial ground, when they saw the first vehicle, and the first sign of the trouble that was to come. Lying on its side was a Viking tracked personnel carrier, the same sort that had brought One Troop in earlier that day. Except this one was not going to be used again any time soon.

As they got within twenty meters, Jameson stopped the column of Marines and refugees with a hand in the air. He thought there was movement, in the dark interior at the back. The seating which lined either side of the truck had been ripped out – and also lying on the ground a few feet from the back were bodies dressed in torn uniforms, covered in dried blood. At a distance, Jameson had thought it was one victim, but closer in he saw that multiple bodies had been intertwined – as though someone had torn three regular soldiers to pieces and then tried to put them all back together into one giant one.

A rush of movement came toward them, rocketing out of the back of the truck – a runner. There was a flash of muzzles, and fire from three different rifles took the creature down before Jameson could even raise his weapon. Blood and black liquid sprayed backwards as the inhuman figure, albeit in familiar military uniform, was torn apart. It fell to the ground, rolling a couple of feet before it came to a halt, twitched once, and then lay still.

Jameson stepped forward and looked down at the corpse, while his men checked the area.

There were a total of six dead soldiers in various places around the overturned vehicle. Aside from the three on the ground at the back, one lay a full twenty meters further up the road, a second was splayed over the dashboard up front – torn into so many pieces he could barely be recognized as human – and the last still lay in the back of the vehicle.

That one was still bleeding. Dead, but still bleeding.

“So this was just in the last few minutes,” said Eli. “How the hell did a runner turn so quickly?”

They’d been fighting zombies all day, but almost all had been slow ones, the regular Zulus, and all recently turned. Which partially explained why the small team had been able to stay on their feet and keep fighting in the middle of thousands of dead.

Jameson shook his head. “No idea. It’s not right is it?”

“No. They don’t turn into runners for months.”

“That’s not strictly true,” said a voice from behind them.

The two Marines turned to face a short, middle-aged, balding man. It was Hackworth, the tunnelers’ unelected leader. He pointed at the downed runner.

“When we were underground, they started showing up about a year in, and you’re right to some degree. They tended to be only the older ones – those that were most dead, if I can put it that way. But later on that changed. We had… an incident.”

Behind Hackworth stood the tall Moroccan named Colley. He hadn’t spoken since they escaped from the falling building, perhaps because of shock, but now he took over while his leader poked at the dead runner with his toe.

“A few weeks before we got out. One of our folks got bit and ran off. Well, we didn’t see him alive again, but a few days before we escaped, he came at us, running at the breaker… the barricade we put up. And he was one of those, running full out. He was a fresh dead but had turned into one of the fast ones in only a few days.”

“So we’re not talking about older zombies evolving anymore?” asked Jameson.

Hackworth broke free of his reverie, looked up and spoke again, his voice solemn. “I think the virus, or whatever it is, the disease, is changing. I think we’re going to see a lot more of the fast ones.”

“Brilliant,” said Eli, spitting on the ground.

Jameson suddenly became aware that his radio was silent, and had been for the last few minutes – no traffic whatsoever. What the hell was going on?

“CentCom, One Troop, message, over.”

Ten seconds passed with no answer.

“CentCom, One Troop, radio check, over.”

“Sir!” shouted one of his Marines. Jameson turned toward the voice, which came from the man standing at the edge of the road, who now pointed out across the memorial ground. “Out there.”

Jameson scanned the grounds, looking for what his Marine could see that he couldn’t. And then he did spot it, way out across the open grassland at the other side of the grounds. Movement.

Hundreds of heaving figures, heading out of town. Most were staggering – but some were running.

“Refugees?” asked Eli, stepping around to get a look.

Jameson lifted his rifle and stared through the scope.

“No. It’s them.”

And it was – the undead, masses of them, all moving out and heading north.

The bombing had failed.

“CentCom, come in. Any call signs, acknowledge.”

There was no reply.

Enemy at the Gates

The Quarantine Border, Canterbury

Private Alex Reece sat atop the Bulldog Armored Carrier, keeping his L2 heavy machine gun pointed across the road. He watched the stream of refugees from Canterbury trudging by them, and toward the field behind Harbledown. Beside him, Faulkner – another private and a man whom Reece had become friends with over the last two years, even if their initial meeting hadn’t gone so well – sat with his legs hanging over the edge of the vehicle’s roof, alternately cursing and marveling at the mass exodus of people.

“For fuck’s sake,” said Faulkner, an east Londoner who had always professed to hate the countryside – especially the English countryside. “How many are there? I ain’t seen this many people since we did those evacuations in Romford last year.”

Reece wasn’t best pleased with the position of the vehicle and neither was Reynolds – the lance corporal commanding the two vehicles providing the bottleneck on the field entrance. Reece could see down the road far enough, but just fifteen feet away, along the edge of the lane, rose a thicket so high even those on top of the vehicle couldn’t see over it, let alone through it. But nothing could be done now. They were committed.

Two hours earlier they had been patrolling the streets of Croydon in south London, with not much more to worry them than a few looters. But the last couple of hours had turned chaotic as they joined a gathering fleet of transport and armored vehicles rushing south to Canterbury. Reece wondered how many looters were now taking to the streets of London, unchecked.

“Thousands,” said Reece. “Sloan says they were told to be ready to process twenty thousand refugees.”

Faulkner whistled at that. “Shit me. That many? And they ain’t got more than two dozen trucks moving them. That field’s going to be a proper mess by tomorrow.”

They had seen the planes go over, and heard the bombs fall almost as though they had been sitting in the middle of it – which, considering that the bombs had landed less than a mile away, they almost were. Even Faulkner, who nearly never shut up, fell silent as the blasts thundered. There were already hundreds of people on the roads then, pushing and jostling, frantically trying to get into the quarantine staging area – and hopefully on a truck to London. But even the crowd had cooled it when the noise of the bombing began.

Most had crouched down, covering their heads and thinking the noise so loud that they couldn’t be a safe distance from it. But others had turned back to look upon the destruction of the town they had called home. And they watched in horror as thick plumes of black smoke rose up all around. First one, then a dozen, and then hundreds of them, as the center of the city was flattened to almost nothing.

Only seconds after the bombardment ceased, the crowd of desperate refugees remembered themselves and pushed forward even faster, more frantic than ever to escape. Zombies were one thing – and most of these people were running because of the sirens, not knowing how many of the dead were in the city – but a blitz? Reece was surprised it hadn’t turned into a panicked stampede. And that was what went through his mind now when he heard the first cries.

They were distant, farther down the road than he could see. And they were followed by the rattle of gunfire. Corporal Reynolds stopped pacing his line and stood in the middle of the road, in front of the two vehicles, staring into the crowd. Then he began talking into his hand-held radio and shaking his head.

More gunfire.

“Heads up, lads,” said Reynolds, as he jumped up onto the armored vehicle and took a position further back. “We’ve got sightings east of here on the memorial ground, and to the south in the streets.”

“But I thought they bombed them all?” said Faulkner. “Caught them in the town.”

“Dunno. All I know is what I’ve just been told. They’re following the refugees, and they’re close.”

“Oh shit,” said Faulkner, lifting his rifle and sighting down the street through the crowd.

Reece gripped the mounted machine gun with sweating hands. There was a noise in the distance, and he glanced to his right. More vehicles, all armored personnel carriers, were bumping down the road. Thirty seconds later, the first pulled up next to them, bumper to bumper. The roof gunner nodded at Reece in acknowledgment. It was Jonesy, another man from his platoon, one he knew well. But he had been posted to guard the A2 exit point. What the hell were they doing here?

Reece was about to ask him how it was going with the evac when the first of the proper screams came from up the road.

In an instant, the stream of refugees turned from a bustling queue of polite English people into a stampede of terrified animals. They pushed and shoved at one another, forcing their way through the gaps between vehicles rather than going through the bigger gap that had been established as the entrance to the field.

A man jumped up onto the front of Reece’s vehicle, straight into the sights of his L2, and blocked his lane of fire.

“Get the hell off the vehicle!” shouted Reynolds, at which the man hesitated for a second and then leapt off and back into the crowd. Immediately, two others started to climb up, desperate to get past.

“I said off!” shouted Reynolds. This time he drew his side arm, which he hoped would indicate his seriousness. He brandished the gun like he meant it, but the men weren’t stopping. The pair pushed forward, ignoring the various weapons now trained on them, and rushed at Reynolds. His handgun went off, but too late. He was knocked sideways as both refugees blasted past and jumped off the back of the vehicle and into the field.

“What the hell?” shouted Faulkner, raising his rifle and aiming down at the crowd. “Stay on the fucking ground.”

But there were too many trying to get through the gap, and too few defending the rest of the perimeter.

“We need to back up,” said Reece, as Reynolds clambered over to him.

“We can’t,” said the lance corporal. “We’re penned in.”

A dozen armored vehicles now lined the road behind them, all with weapons at the ready, and refugees were pushing their way around them – or just climbing over them. At the other end of the convoy another gunshot sounded. This one was followed by screams.

And that was when the dead began to appear, breaking through the bushes that lined the road. At first it was only a few that managed to claw their way through the dense thicket. But by the time Reece saw the first one, it was already in among the flood of refugees and attacking a man in a tweed suit. Blood splattered those around him, and more screaming and panic followed as the creature latched onto the man’s face and began to bite and tear. The man flailed his arms at it, but only managed to lose his balance and tumble to the ground, the creature falling on him.

More burst from the bushes now, pushing through the gaps left by the first few, until there were dozens, and then hundreds, all pouring into the road – and flowing like a poisoned tributary into the river of refugees.

“Open fire! Take them down!” shouted Reynolds. He raised his pistol in a two-handed grip and started putting out rounds over the top of the crowd. Reece swung the L2 toward the line of bushes, and depressed his trigger. The heavy machine gun bucked and juddered as its enormous half-inch slugs filled the air.

“They’re in the crowd!” shouted Faulkner. Reece could see his friend in the corner of his vision, aiming his SA-80 rifle, but not firing, then aiming again, but not firing. “I can’t get a shot! There’s too many people!”

All around him the panic was rising. Faulkner aimed into the crowd, still trying to acquire a target, and sighted in on one tearing into an old woman. He squeezed his trigger, certain that his aim was good, but just as he fired the creature lurched sideways, dragging the woman to the ground. The round struck another civilian, a young woman who had been running past in panic, and a swath of red lashed the crowd as she fell, disappearing from view.

FUCK, he thought, his heart sinking into his boots.

Then he heard noise above, as a helicopter cast its shadow across them. Faulkner looked up and could see a man staring down at them from out of the chin bubble, taking in the whole scene – an officer, but not one he recognized.

“Yes, sir,” shouted a voice next to him. It was Reynolds, now holding his radio to his ear while still pointing his gun at anyone who tried to get up on top of the vehicle. Then the young lance corporal’s face drained of all color.

A dozen more zombies dropped from the rolling thunder of the L2. He wasn’t making a lot of headshots, but he didn’t have to – the huge 50-caliber rounds were tearing dead bodies to non-ambulatory pieces. Reece was aiming above the crowd and into the bushes, where the enemy still poured down into the street faster than he, or anyone, could target them. But the L2 put down a hellacious base of fire, and he was making life very dangerous for the dead coming their way.

“Fire on the crowd.”

Gun still bucking, Reece didn’t register what Reynolds said for a few seconds, as he continued to pour an endless torrent of fire at the bush line. But now even he saw that there were nearly as many zombies in the crowd as living humans. The street leading up to the vehicle cordon was awash with blood and it was all Reece could do not to look down there.

“I said fire on the crowd,” shouted Reynolds. Standing right next to Reece’s position, he raised and aimed his handgun toward the nearest moving civilian… and fired.

Reece left off shooting the bushes, and now depressed his L2, lowering its barrel toward the throng of people still trying to fight their way through the heaving masses of mixed living and dead. He looked through the sights for the briefest of moments, and swallowed hard, his throat too dry for it… and finally squeezed the trigger.

The crowd began to fall.

Reece had in his entire life never felt so wretched and low as he watched over his iron sights and saw the people on the street, running for their lives, taken down by his fire. His vision blurred and his stomach threatened to retch.

And that was the moment when one of the runners, who had slashed through the crowd like a lightning strike, leapt onto the side of the vehicle and barreled into him.

And it wasn’t alone.

Reece hadn’t noticed the guns of the other armored vehicles up the road fall silent one by one, as a wave of more than two dozen runners swept over them.

He didn’t even have time to cry out.

* * *

“Take us out of here,” said Grews from his seat in the helicopter. And as they banked left and away from the wretched scene below, he watched as the last of the armored vehicles succumbed to the swarm of runners. He could also see what the men and women on the ground could not. Beyond the line of bushes, the teeming dead were gathering and moving in greater numbers. Many hundreds of them, inexplicably still standing after the bombing, were heading across the fields toward the thousands of survivors in the quarantine area.

Grews could see through his binoculars that a lot of the undead were missing limbs or stricken with massive wounds that would kill a living human just with the shock and blood loss. But zombies ignored shock, and didn’t need blood, so there they stood, still on their feet, good to go.

How in the name of hell had this happened? Grews had known there might be pockets of them left after the bombing, particularly as many of the bombs were GPS-guided – and those remaining GPS satellites that hadn’t fallen out of the sky were less reliable all the damned time. The dodgy targeting had to explain at least some of it, especially the errant bombs falling within the exclusion zone. But it was carpet-bombing! How could so many still be left standing after that?

Admittedly, no part of Britain had ever been so badly overrun as to require aerial bombing, so this tactic had no track record in British zombie warfare. But how the hell could anything survive the citywide inferno they created? Surely, even if the bombs didn’t target brainstems, they still ripped bodies into beef jerky, which ought to be just as effective. But, from the aerial reconnaissance Grews had now, it looked to him like many of the dead had taken the explosions, gotten badly ripped up… but then pulled themselves to their feet and just staggered on, or else crawled if they were missing a leg or two.

Grews sighed. These were all questions that the top brass would soon be asking him, and he would have to have answers, even though he wasn’t the one in charge of the damned planes. It probably meant sending men back into the ruins to gather forensics, after the whole mess was over. That was of course assuming the mess ended, and that there were men left to do it afterward.

As the helo blasted over the endlessly repeated scenes of chaos and destruction below, Grews got on the radio again.

“Grews to Evac team, message, over,” he said.

The reply was quick.

“Evac team copies, send, over.” The operator on the other end would at that moment be sitting inside a white van that Grews could already see parked near the main road on the other side of the quarantine zone. Below, stretched out over acres of farmland, was the great mass of refugees.

“Listen to me and listen well,” said Grews, his voice steady and clear. “I need you to instruct all military and medical personnel in the quarantine zone to get the hell out of there, to withdraw right now. We have huge numbers of dead breaking through the border. I repeat. The border is breached, is that understood?”

“Roger that, sir.” The operator’s voice wavered. Nerves? Or worse? “Evac copies all. Where do we withdraw to?”

“Anywhere. Tell everyone to get the hell out in any way they can. Tell them to run.”

“Roger that,” replied the operator. “But what about all the civilians in quarantine? We can’t just leave them unattended.”

Grews stared ahead, his eyes looking hollow and haunted. He’d already ordered troops to fire on those civilians on the road, not that it had helped. But could he really now order the bombing of ten thousand people penned up in a field like cattle? Jesus God... He didn’t think he had it in him. The guilt from such an act might be the weight that pulled him under – not to mention leaving an indelible stain on his service record. But… but the dead weren’t there yet. Maybe there was still time. “Tell them to run, too. Tell them to get out of there.”

“What? Repeat your last.”

“I said tell the civilians to run for it.”

There was a distinct pause on the other end. “These people are in quarantine. You want us to just let them out? Into the countryside?”

“Yes. Do it. Just do it.”

Grews switched channels without signing off. Acrid sweat poured from his head and armpits. His voice caught as he tried to speak again.

“CentCom, Grews, message. Over,” he said, dreading what he was about to request.

“Grews, CentCom, send, over.”

“This is Major Grews of Folkestone requesting a second Hammer run. Over.”

“Please state the designated target location. Over.”

Grews paused for a moment to take a deep breath, before resigning himself to deciding the fate of thousands – and hoping that maybe some would leave now, run for it, and perhaps live.

“Target is the Harbledown quarantine zone. Over.”

“Please reconfirm, over.”

“Target is the Harbledown quarantine zone. Request is complete Hammer package. Over.” He let out a deep sigh.

“Acknowledged, CentCom copies all. Full Hammer package to be delivered to Harbledown quarantine zone. ETI approximately two-zero minutes. We will update you this channel.”

Grews looked down, where the quarantine zone was just now coming into view below them. Many thousands of people, the former residents and survivors of Canterbury, were camped out in the several adjacent fields, maneuvering for space, food, water, and most of all for news – like some music festival gone horribly wrong.

It was all about to go much, much worse.

As the helo blasted over their heads, Grews heard the swelling noise of sirens.

Walk Through Fire

Lake Michigan

After the deed was done, and the previous owner/operators of the Diablo had been evicted, the vibe on the top deck was not what you would call convivial. The older girl had looked on in horror, lips slightly parted, as the one grievously wounded man amongst the original crew had been loaded onto the motorboat – which was then unceremoniously dumped in the Diablo’s wake. It had looked like it might capsize for a moment, but finally stayed upright.

The rest of the survivors were invited to jump after it – at gunpoint.

None of this was pretty, not by anyone’s esthetic sense. Not even the guys perpetrating it. Juice in particular didn’t like the taste it left in his mouth. But even he knew it was necessary. They couldn’t let guys who had just tried to murder them all simply hang out. And there was no time to pull over.

If the older girl stared in horror, the younger one averted her eyes altogether. She appeared to be shutting down, which Ali thought was actually a pretty situation-appropriate reaction. She also noticed when the older girl locked eyes with the boy William, just before he was made to walk the plank. Some type of kindness or tenderness had flashed across her face – which before had struck Ali as looking self-involved, even borderline cruel.

In the end, the psychological weather up there had just sucked, so the two girls were sent forward to get ready for their run across the burning island. Juice, Ali, and Pred stayed where they were, reloading and refitting, mainly from supplies they’d pulled from the Three Brothers before it sank. Getting combat-effective again, and fast.

Because they were all going into the fire again.

And, as usual, they only had a few minutes to prepare. Then again, this was work they had all done so many times that their fingers did it automatically, leaving the rest of them free to think and talk. They talked about something none of them had done in a long time: take a human life. That of a non-dead person. Ali and Juice sat side by side, somehow like brother and sister, at play.

She was slightly worried about him. God knew he’d do what he was told, what had to be done. But there was no mistaking his misgivings during their deliberation. While slipping .45 rounds out of a cardboard box and snapping them into a pistol magazine, she looked across and said, “You okay, big guy? Big teddy bear? Strange bearded thing?”

Juice didn’t look up, but had trouble fighting his smile at that. He was refilling his Camelbak from some water bottles they’d found below. “It was Handon’s call,” he said.

“Not kicking them off. I meant the killing that came before.”

Juice shrugged. “It was necessary.”

Ali slid the full mag back into its pouch behind her, then dropped and double-checked the one in the pistol. “And what about you sparing that kid?”

Juice shrugged again, sliding the water sleeve back into his ruck. “It wasn’t necessary. He gave up.” That’s all he said, but Ali caught the subtext: he was glad it had played out that way. “What about you?” he asked, finishing his work and looking up at her.

Ali shrugged in turn. “I don’t feel bad about the two I slotted. They were some seriously sketchy motherfuckers. And I don’t like to think about what it must have been like to encounter them as a defenseless civilian.”

Juice thought he caught her subtext, and what she didn’t say: defenseless woman. So he simply added, “It’s good we saved the girls.”

“Yeah,” Ali said. “That is definitely one nice thing to come out of this whole shit show.” She looked down at her bandaged hand. But when Juice looked across at her, she seemed to be staring off at something in memory, something far away in space and time. Or at someone, who had been left behind in her past.

Handon stuck his head out the hatch. “Five mikes.”

All three of them could now see the sandy edge of Beaver Island swelling in front of them as the boat blasted toward it. Before it got much closer, the Diablo swung out to the left, circling around the western edge, the side the airport was on. It was going to be a hell of a lot quicker for them to sail up the coast than to hump overland. Unfortunately, they could also see that the approximate location of the airport was marked by a heavy pall of dark gray smoke rising into the air and slowly blowing out to sea. That, and occasional sparks of red tracers arcing up over the forest and into space.

Ali thought the tracers in the smoke looked like storm clouds, circling above them – even as they struggled against the tide.

Predator shook his head as he hauled his bulk to his feet. He said:

“Stand by for shit to get stupid.”

* * *

“Negative, negative!” This was Fick on the open channel to Handon. “We are out of time, come the quick way or don’t come at all…”

Handon had just radioed him to report that the entire fucking western side of Beaver Island appeared to be on fire. It looked to be pretty much the whole half-mile stretch of forest that separated the shore from the airport. Alpha needed to put ashore elsewhere and maneuver around it to Fick’s location.

Handon gritted his teeth and tried again. “It won’t do any good for you to extract a bunch of crispy critters, all dead from smoke inhalation.”

When Fick came back on, Handon could hear heavy small-arms fire on the open channel; plus what sounded like a fifty-cal banging away non-stop, which was a hell of a sound. “Be advised, Mortem – the seaward side of the airfield is THE ONLY APPROACH WE HOLD OPEN. Everything else is swarming with dead. We are surrounded on three sides. So pick your goddamned poison. Die by fire, or die by the dead. Charles out.”

Goddamnit. But Handon looked across to Henno. “Do it.”

Henno cut the wheel sharply to starboard and gunned the engines up to a wild roar before killing them. Their enormous momentum was set to take them to the edge of the island and straight up onto the beach. But as they raced in toward it, they saw something poking out of the water directly in their path – a fin, like some kind of shark… but it quickly resolved as a vertical stabilizer, a tail fin for a plane – and there was a whole fucking aircraft underneath it in the shallows!

Henno kicked the engines up again and frantically cut the wheel, veering off at the last possible second, the keel of the boat sliding across an underwater wing with an evil scraping sound. Their weight pushed the submerged wing down to the bottom and sent the other one levering into the sky to their right, and launching a heavy plume of water up and over the top deck and the wheelhouse. A half-second later, water rolling over the window glass, they were past it and slushing through the wet sand of the shallows, the whole structure finally tipping thirty degrees to the left.

And then they came to rest, the prow just overhanging dry sand.

The Diablo’s work was done.

Handon and Henno hefted their rifles and hauled ass out of the pilothouse, then darted around it to the prow, where the others had already positioned themselves. By the time they got there, Pred and Juice were already down on the sand, each on one knee, rifles scanning the smoky treeline for threats.

They had secured the beachhead.

The two girls went over the side with a hand from Ali, who took care with the younger one’s wounded leg. Ali also helped Dr. Park, then followed him down. Henno leaped over the edge next, and Handon brought up the rear. In addition to the acrid smoke in their nostrils, they could all hear the sounds of a desperate firefight at the airport – sounding strangely muted and peaceful, as these things often did at a distance. They could also feel the heat billowing over their skin in waves from the forest fire.

The trees closest to them weren’t actually burning.

But it was smoky as hell, and damned well wasn’t any kind of safe place to go tear-assing into.

Even as Handon hit the sand, he bellowed, “Everybody get wet! Then get something over your mouths.” As so often, there was no time – but there was also no time to fuck it up. He led the scramble back into the shallows. When he got thigh-deep, he dunked himself and then sloshed back out, passing the others as they filed in. Back on the sand, he pulled out a bandana and wrapped it around his mouth, while gesturing to the others to hurry it the hell up.

He saw Ali move sleekly into the water, once again leading Park by the arm. On their way back out, they passed the two girls, one looking confused, the other steely, the older one helping the younger. Without warning, the older girl pivoted, produced a handgun from out of nowhere – and whacked it into the side of Ali’s head. As Ali recoiled and doubled over, the girl lunged for Park. In a single second, she had her arm around the scientist’s neck, pulled him into a headlock, and put the pistol to his temple. The two were about the same size, and she pulled the wide-eyed man four steps backward into deeper water.

She removed the gun from his head only long enough to fire it once into the air.

The report echoed down the beach, taking several seconds to fade.

Handon calmly pulled the wet bandana down from his mouth. Around him, all the others – aside from Ali, who was bent over, hand to her head – now had their weapons trained on the hostage situation developing in the shallows. There followed a long moment of very tense silence. The forest fire crackled faintly, as did the weapons triggering off in the distance at the airport.

No one spoke.

Handon’s eyes went to the younger girl, who took a limping step away from her sister, then said: “Courtney, what are you doing? These people saved us. Now you’re going to get us both killed!”

The older girl’s eyes flicked over to her. “Shut up, Emily. I know what I’m doing.”

Handon stole a glance over his shoulder, which told him that Predator had his rifle steadied and locked on to the older girl’s forehead – while Juice had turned to cover the treeline again, his back to the water and the team.

A crisis in their rear didn’t mean the front stopped being dangerous.

Looking forward again, Handon saw Ali straighten up, one hand still held to the side of her head. She looked at the older girl, her face showing incomprehension. “What the hell?” she said. “You can’t want to go back to life with the Shitheads of the Caribbean back there? Do you?”

The face of the older girl twisted up unattractively. “What the hell do you know? Those were our friends you shot!”

The younger girl, Emily, put her hands out placatingly toward her sister, even while she backed away. “Courtney, they killed our parents… and they made us go with them… and they kept us there…” As she spoke, she kept stepping slowly away, as if terrified by the whole situation – and perhaps not least by her own sister acting in such a dangerous and unfamiliar way.

“Shut up! They kept us alive, was what they did – and for a hell of a lot longer than anybody else we knew. We ate every day, got to drink every night, and there were drugs to numb the pain. And they protected us. Life was a hell of a lot better with them than it was gonna be anywhere else. And now most of them are dead, thanks to these dicks.” She looked back to Handon. “We’ll take our chances out on the water. It’s better than going off to God knows where with you… squared-away jarhead robots.”

Ali shook her ringing head. How could she have misjudged them so badly? But then she realized – she hadn’t misjudged. She’d just judged one of them, the younger one, while also projecting her own little sister onto her. As for the older girl, well, Ali had pretty much neglected to assess her at all. And she’d given Handon her recommendation, that the girls could be trusted, knowing he’d take it.

And, in so doing, she’d steered them all badly wrong.

Some kind of rustling sounded behind them in the treeline. Handon pretty much knew what it was before he even risked another look over his shoulder. It was because of the noise of the damned shot the stupid girl had taken. Behind them, he could see Juice drawing his knife and calmly mounting it on the end of his rifle as a bayonet.

When the first Zulu emerged from the forest, it was merely smoking – as if it had been in an outdoor hot tub on a cold night and just stepped out of it.

But the two after that were actually on fire.

As Juice stepped forward to engage them, he thought, Well, hey, good old Zulus. They were indeed moving at a slow shambling speed, and Juice was happy for it.

Handon watched the big bearded one thrust his bayonet through the mouth of the first, then withdraw it as the creature fell. It was the age-old tension with them – even with their suppressors, their rifles made noise, and noise drew more. A knife through the head was quiet – but stabbed Zulus can squirt, making for a bad infection risk. The bayonet was a good compromise – quiet, but it kept them at arm’s length. And it didn’t mean slinging a rifle in order to draw and wield a sword.

Plus Juice was a crap swordsman.

He pivoted heavily and took down the next two. They fell and lay in the sand, both still burning. More sounds of thrashing could be heard from deeper in the woods.

Handon turned forward as his radio went again. It was Fick. “Now would be good, you dog-faced dipshits. Though you can pretty much take your pick of now or never…” Massive gunfire squelched out the little radio speaker, a second or two ahead of the fainter live version through the burning forest. Handon moved his hand to twiddle down the volume knob.

He looked up at the older girl again… at Courtney. She had the hammer back on her handgun. And there was no chance the safety was on – the weapon had just been discharged. Handon thought upon this. He looked out of the corner of his eye at Henno, who, like Pred, had his rifle stock pulled in tightly to his cheek, and was also stepping very slowly to the side, tweaking the angles.

The older girl spoke again, her voice trembling now. The sight of the dead had evidently unnerved her, hollowing out her initial brazen confidence. “So, first, we’re going to take your med kit, with whatever drugs are in it. And then we’re gonna take your super-important laptop guy here. And we’re getting back on the boat, and we’re going out on the lake again and we’re going to find our friends, the ones you didn’t kill.”

Handon shook his head. Jesus Christ. Of all the goddamned times for Stockholm Syndrome…

The girl adjusted her grip on Dr. Park. She said, “And when we get a safe distance away, we’ll put your guy in the motorboat and he can come back.”

“You’ll only have the motorboat if you find your people,” Handon said.

“Then we’ll put him in the water and he can swim back.”

Handon grimaced, then spoke in a very level but totally unyielding tone. “Listen to me carefully. You’ve got to put the gun down, and you’ve got to do it right now. There’s no time for anything else.”

“Fuck you,” Courtney said. “You obviously like being in charge. But you’re not in charge of me.” Handon mentally cursed his luck. This girl pretty clearly had some authority issues. Probably some daddy issues, for that matter…

“A little help…” This was Juice again, from behind. Handon stole another look – there were now more than a few smoking and flaming Zulus emerging from the treeline – and at intervals too wide for Juice to sweep them all up. Predator turned, drew his short sword and went to work alongside his battle buddy.

Handon faced forward again. They were really running out of time now – every possible hourglass was draining out. He could see the girl’s face whitening – and also saw her tighten her grip on the pistol, her finger curling around the trigger, which was already most of the way back. This was because the gun was in “Condition 0”: a live round in the chamber, the hammer cocked back, and the safety off. All of which meant she was less than 4.5 pounds of finger pressure from blowing Dr. Simon Park’s brains out on this beach. And, with them, the current best hopes of all humankind.

Courtney looked over at her younger sister. “There’s only us,” she said, almost smiling. “We’re going to get out of here. Together.” She was also thinking, in the privacy of her head, in the safety of her soul, that once they got back out on the water, they were going to find the sweet boy William. And they were going to save him, together…

Handon caught something else in peripheral, and purposely didn’t let his eye go to it. While the younger girl was edging away, Henno had been edging toward her – which left the two of them now only a couple of steps apart. In a brutal flash, he let his rifle drop on its sling and lunged for Emily. In a quarter of a heartbeat, he had his left arm around her slim neck and his own side arm, the terrifying-looking SIG P220 Combat, jammed into her right temple.

Handon had seen it coming. But still he thought, Jesus, Henno… Both he and the pistol looked enormous wrapped around the small, slim girl.

Henno merely stared over the girl’s right shoulder, dead into the eyes of her older sister. And he didn’t breathe a syllable. He just held the older girl’s gaze, his expression cold as a snowman’s heart attack. He didn’t need to speak.

One hundred percent of his meaning was contained in his actions.

The two of them stood motionless now, staring at each other around their hostages. Courtney’s eyes widened with fear, and her breathing grew rapid and shallow – none of which reassured Handon any. She looked to be wrestling with a surge of panic, which threatened to envelop her. Aside from the distant gunfire and the forest fire, the only sound was the cresting moaning of the dead, as they emerged from the forest, and got methodically cut down by Pred and Juice. Each hit the sand with a dry slap, and the burning ones continued to crackle quietly, their dead flesh cooking, skin turning black and curling off them.

Bits of it floated upward in the heating air, rising and falling like undead fireflies in some backyard barbecue in hell.

In the quiet of this bizarre tableau, Ali had risen back to her full height, and smoothly brought her rifle back to her shoulder. She was thinking that if they let this girl go back out and recover the survivors, the pirates were back in play. There were still weapons all over that boat. And they were just going to do it all over again.

Handon clenched his jaw and took stock, probably for the final time. He saw that Ali had her rifle up, trained on the older girl’s head. And he saw she had the best shot of any of them. She flicked her eyes over at Handon. Simply, she was waiting.

Waiting for him to decide.

As the very last grains of sand slid out of this hourglass, Handon racked his brain, trying to come up with some kind of solution – some way, any way, to guarantee Park’s safety without killing the girl. But he could think of nothing. If they lowered their weapons, they had no leverage – absolutely no guarantee the girl wouldn’t slot Park, or else take him away with her, which was nearly as bad. These were the horns of an extremely ornery bull: either risk Park, whose value was incalculable; or kill the girl – the effect of which on Handon’s immortal soul he could not know for sure, not in this moment.

But it didn’t look or feel very good at all.

Handon tiredly closed his eyes.

He heard a single round crack out of Ali’s rifle. He saw it catch the older girl in the point of her chin, traveling through her jaw and severing her brainstem, killing her instantly – but also instantly canceling all nerve signals, including any to her trigger finger. He heard her crumple straight down into the water with a tiny splash. He could hear Park gasp audibly as he staggered away. Finally, he saw Ali lower her rifle, go back down into a squat, and place her head in her hands.

And he felt himself swallow something very dry and heavy in his throat.

Not quite a sob. But something like it.

It wasn’t just the killing. It was that, in order to ensure the girl wouldn’t execute Park by squeezing her trigger as she died, they had to shoot her in the brainstem.

The exact same place they shot the dead.

But when Handon shut his mind’s eye and opened his real ones again, the girl was still alive and on her feet. Park was still trapped in her embrace. And Ali was still standing like David, posture perfect, weapon lethally poised – waiting for Handon to make the call.

He shook his head once, barely perceptibly. Ali saw it, and lowered her rifle.

Handon just couldn’t do it. Putting the pirates out on the water, leaving them to their fates, and probable bad deaths, was one thing. But killing this girl – however much of a drug-addled, rebellious, entitled, Whiskey-Tango pain-in-the-ass she was… well, he couldn’t stomach it. There was no way her life was logically worth more than fifty million others. But he just couldn’t make logic the measure of all things. Not after everything that had come before.

Some things were out of line.

And some lines could only be crossed with no going back.

“Stand down,” he said to the others. “Let the girl go,” he said to Henno, who hesitated. “That’s an order.” So Henno released her – but he kept his pistol pointed at the back of her head.

Finally, looking upon the older girl not unkindly with his tortured blue eyes, Handon said, “Go. Take the med kit. Take whatever you want.” He looked over to Ali.

“The med kit’s still on the fucking boat,” she said. “Top deck.”

Handon shook his head slightly at that, and nearly laughed. “If you reverse the engines full you might even get off this beach. But the scientist stays. That’s your only deal.”

The panic seemed to ebb out of the girl’s eyes. She released her grip on Park, and started to back out into the water – presumably toward the ladder on the stern where she could climb back on board. Ali darted out, grabbed Park, shielded him with her body, and backed them both away. Courtney continued her retreat – but she’d only taken a few steps when she realized her sister wasn’t following.

“Emily. Come on.” She slowed her retreat but didn’t stop. Her panic was returning as she saw more and more of the dead emerging from the trees only a few meters up the beach. The moaning was now reaching a crescendo – and the effect of all of them warbling and croaking together was worse than the sum of them individually. It was becoming a frenzy, and it was terrifying. And however good these soldiers were, surely they’d be overrun soon.

“Can we go now, boss?” Henno asked, not disguising that he’d had enough of this crap.

The younger girl, Emily, was on the verge of tears. She held her sister’s eye. But she didn’t move to follow her. “I don’t want to go back,” she said, voice quavering.

“What?”

“I’m going with them,” she said.

“What? You can’t! You can’t.” Courtney looked disbelieving.

Emily shook her head, tears overrunning her eyes now. “Come with us. Please.”

“Not a chance,” Handon said. “She stays. You can come if you want. But we’re leaving now.” He nodded to Henno, and the whole team slipped into a crescent formation, guns facing outward, with Park at the center. And they began advancing up the beach toward the treeline. Within seconds, they were all firing steadily, suppressed rifles and unsuppressed pistols sounding at even intervals. Loud booms came from Pred’s shotgun, the Mossberg Tactical he had rescued, giving him profound satisfaction – both that it worked, and that he was getting to play with it. But it was damned loud.

And if their presence on this beach had been any kind of secret before, it sure as hell wasn’t now.

Left behind, Emily shifted her feet in place – torn between the pull of her only living family member, of everything she’d ever known… and some unknown future that she sensed would be less horrible than the one she’d been living. The commandos were now disappearing into the treeline, cloths up around their mouths, weapons up and extended, firing methodically. The pop-pop of the gunfire, much closer than the distant gunfight at the airport, thickened and crested. Emily pressed her lips together in terror. She looked one last time at her sister, who pleaded with her eyes.

And she turned and ran into the burning forest.

On the Run

NAS Oceana

The truck skidded to a halt thirty feet from the lone helicopter that waited on the deck. Anderson was already leaping out and running toward the three men in uniform who stood nearby, even before the truck’s engine had finished juddering to a halt. He nearly fell on the ground in front of the nearest Marine.

“We… have to get… out of here,” he said, gasping for air.

The three Marines looked taken aback, and one of them walked toward the truck, a tall black man wearing a stony expression as he cast around.

“Where’s the rest of your team?” he asked. They’d heard the sounds of distant gunfire, and then a few seconds of quiet, and then another, much longer firefight. So they’d already guessed that something had gone wrong – at best.

Anderson bent over double, breathing heavily.

“They’re all dead,” he said, hating himself for the lie even as he spoke it. He knew the others had still been alive when he drove off. But there was no way they could have survived that second wave of runners. No way. There had been too many of them and they had come out of nowhere. Shame burned in his throat, but it was too late now. It was done.

“Runners. Packs of them. We took out one group, but another jumped us. There must have been a hundred of them. I managed to get into the truck and drive away. Everyone’s dead. They were all over the place.”

Anderson straightened up, but he couldn’t look the Marine in the face. “They’re all gone and we need to get the hell out of here. There are packs of runners everywhere.”

Another of the Marines turned away, stepped toward the helicopter, and spoke into his radio. Anderson waited, trying to be cool, but his nerves were ready to explode. He didn’t want to be on this dead continent another second. He didn’t think he could take it. It was all he could do not to bellow at the Marines, beg them to get him out of there.

Then the one with the radio nodded at the pilot, and Anderson heard the helo’s engine firing up.

Two minutes later, they lifted smoothly and powerfully off the ground. It was the last remaining bird, meant for Wesley’s team, and it rose up above the base, turned in a half arc, and headed out to sea.

* * *

Less than two miles away, Wesley was running flat out. In front of him were Melvin, Browning, and the group of civilian survivors – perhaps a dozen of them – and limping alongside was Derwin. Wesley’s heart pounded as he forced himself to keep going. Sweat poured from his head and back, and he could feel his fatigues sticking to him.

The last few minutes had been the longest and most terrifying of his life. He’d thought that staring down a charge of zombies in the streets of Folkestone had been bad, but, no. That was nothing to facing a pack of runners.

As the bedraggled and injured group crossed a wide field, heading toward where Melvin estimated the outer fence of the base would be – and beyond which would be that blessed helicopter – Wesley tried to make sense of those horrible, manic seconds.

The second pack had hit them from the side, one of them charging Wesley full on and knocking him to the ground. Everything after that had been a blur. He knew he had fired his weapon, and that the runner that bowled him over had been shot before it could bite or scratch him. And he remembered seeing a dozen or more swarming over Scott, tearing the man apart in a froth of blood as he screamed for help. But the rest of it he couldn’t call up. There had been a lot of gunfire, and he knew now that the survivors were well armed. He recalled kneeling on the ground at some point, firing in multiple directions as the pack closed on them.

After that, he only remembered running, his head and constricted vision both slowly clearing. Now he felt a heavy throbbing on the side of his face. Had he hit his head when he fell? He didn’t know. All he knew was that he wasn’t dead. They had lost Scott, but everyone else was on their feet, running, still alive.

And there were runners everywhere now. The first two groups had just been the start. Now they appeared in packs all around them, charging out from the sides of buildings and from tree-lined fields. Everywhere Wesley looked, groups of gaunt shapes sped toward them.

As crazy as it was, it all made sense now. The storm was not much more than a mile away. He could hear the thunderous rumble of the moaning masses, overwhelming in its resonance and volume. These runners made up the front edge of the storm, ranging ahead of the main body. And they were now a mortal threat to the last living humans who had remained behind.

Wesley had left it until too late. He should have gotten himself and his men out when he still could. Instead, he had led them off on some stupid, doomed, quixotic rescue mission.

And now none of them were ever going to get out of here alive.

Wesley glanced over at Derwin. The big man was struggling, limping along, but managing to keep up. For now. Wesley saw a red patch spreading across the waist of his field uniform, and his face was growing pale. It was a gunshot wound. Who the hell had fired it would never be known. During that desperate battle, everyone had been blasting in all directions, at runners all around them, inside their lines. Finally, when the last had fallen, Wesley found Derwin lying on his back and groaning, holding onto his side.

But they’d headed out then, and they kept going now, determined to live. Every few seconds one of the survivors or one of the sailors would slow, turn, and lay down covering fire. Wesley was saving his bullets for those that got close, and so far they hadn’t. But it was inevitable. They couldn’t keep these things off long enough to make it to the helo – could they? Every time Wesley looked off to either side, or behind, all he saw were gray figures, many only fifty or a hundred yards away, loping toward them. They just couldn’t widen the distance; they were all exhausted, many were injured, they had children with them now, and the undead were relentless and fast.

The two kids were, ironically, holding up best on the punishing run. But the pressure, the hopeless task of keeping them safe, added to the crushing atmosphere of danger and desperation. And the toddler carried by one of the women had to be slowing her down, though she hadn’t complained yet.

And they hadn’t even begun to deal with the issue of who among them might have been infected in the close-quarters melee. It was too much, and Wesley couldn’t make himself think about it. Perhaps not least since he himself had been knocked down by one of them.

To make matters worse, their route seemed to be all uphill. They had crossed through work yards filled with vehicles and junk, pushed through collapsed fencing, and finally made it into the brush land between the industrial park and the base, but then they had slowed. The ground was overgrown with weeds and grass, and strewn with junk, and debris littered the thin path. Buildings gave way to thin copses of trees and even as they ran Wesley could sense, and sometimes see, movement in the brush around them. The runners were keeping up the pace still, and Wesley didn’t even dare hope they’d let up.

After ten minutes of pushing through the woods, they broke out onto open ground, and the tattered and collapsed ruin of the naval station’s perimeter fence loomed ahead of them, up an even steeper slope.

And Wesley was so damned tired. But he couldn’t stop. Not as long as the others kept going. And not as long as they were depending on him to get them out of there alive. Wesley was brand-new to command. But something in his character intuitively grasped the main principles, the first of which was:

His devotion had first to be to the men under him.

Hearing gunfire to his right, Wesley looked over to see Browning firing into the treeline. Melvin and three of the survivor group joined in, and as Wesley looked ahead again, he saw that Derwin was close to collapse. He stepped toward the man, grabbing him under the arm and raising him up. Behind them, a dozen gaunt, terrible, running figures broke from the bushes. They didn’t move in a pack this time, but spread out, emerging at a flat-out run from different shadowed pockets of the woods.

“Keep going!” shouted Melvin, and Wesley did, hauling Derwin the final ten yards up the slope to a wide gap in the fence. The survivors had already gone through, and some now ran across the flat ground of the naval base beyond.

Derwin grabbed at the fence and held up his own weight.

“We’ve got to go,” Wesley told him. “Can you make it?”

Derwin nodded, but Wesley could see the man’s injury had drained him of nearly all his strength. He was pale and dripping with sweat. Suddenly Wesley had to imagine the possibility of leaving him behind – when he could absolutely go no further. But it was too terrible an eventuality to contemplate. “One second and I’ll be good to go,” Derwin said. He took a couple of heavy breaths, and then pushed himself through the gap.

The next half a mile took the fleeing group beyond exhaustion, as their deadened feet pounded across open ground and down a runway. It couldn’t be much further now, Wesley told himself, and he could see the hangar looming ahead of them. But it still seemed so distant. On the other side of that building, the helicopter would be waiting, just where they had left it. With that thought he forced himself onward, just a little farther.

Wesley hadn’t even been able to estimate how many runners were following them at this point, at least not until they were out on the flat ground of the base. Then, when he looked back, his heart sank and his will began to drain. Hundreds of them poured through the fence, and Wesley knew that if they stopped for even a second, the pack would be on them and they wouldn’t be able to hold them off. He didn’t think they had enough ammunition left.

The survivors ahead rounded the corner of the hangar and stopped. Their leader turned to look back at Wesley with a puzzled and terror-struck expression, and as Wesley caught up with them he discovered why.

There was no helicopter on the deck.

There was nothing, and no one.

Wesley stood there dumbstruck. All there was on the hard tarmac was the oversized truck that Anderson had driven off in.

That fucking coward.

They’d been left behind.

And now they were all going to die.

Melvin ran past, followed by the other men from the survivor group – who were covering the women as they shepherded the children.

“The truck!” Melvin shouted, and carried on running. The Scotsman jumped onto the flatbed, turned, and began firing over their heads at the swarm of runners that even now closed the gap and came into view around the hangar’s edge. Wesley’s heart jumped as a surge of hope swept through him. He ran around the side of the vehicle and jumped into the driver’s seat, jammed his handgun into its holster, turned the key, and nearly screamed for joy when the truck roared to life. The passenger door swung open and Derwin hauled himself in, spilling onto the seat and curling up around his wound, croaking now as much as breathing. Still he tried to get his rifle pointed out the window.

“Get a move on!” bellowed Wesley, though he doubted anyone could hear him over the terrible roar of gunfire in close quarters. Still, the survivors spilled across the concrete and bundled their children onto the flatbed, before climbing on themselves. Finally, Wesley saw a blur of movement as Browning ran from his firing position at the corner of the building and made a leap for the back of the truck.

“Go, go, go!” shouted a voice over the din of gunfire.

Wesley stole a glance in the rear-view and saw that it was fuller than a clown car back there, but they were evidently all in.

“Hang on!” he shouted, and then his foot hit the accelerator and they were speeding down the runway. Behind him the gunfire tailed off, and in the rear-view he could see the mass of what must have been hundreds of runners blessedly receding in the distance as the truck barreled forward.

Wesley looked across the expanse of concrete toward the buildings ahead. All were abandoned. No one living would be here now. He knew they had been the last team onsite, and that meant Alpha’s homecoming wasn’t going to happen here. Wesley had no radio with the range to call the JFK – Anderson had taken that – so he couldn’t even tell them that soon the base would be overrun. There was nothing he could do but try to keep this bedraggled bunch of sailors and survivors alive minute to minute, and try to find some way out for all of them.

He cursed. Damn it, he had wanted to be there when Alpha landed in Chuckie on that runway. Wanted just once to feel like he was doing something bigger than himself, something to help the cause. Ever since being dragged into this crazy expedition he had felt that he was merely a spare part, that everyone around him was a million times more skilled and qualified to be there. He had felt that they expected more out of him than he could give, that they thought him some sort of zombie-fighting expert just because he had been in the battle at Folkestone. But he hadn’t been able to tell them anything they didn’t already know, and he’d felt like an impostor doing it.

He wasn’t sure why these feelings were coming back to him now, only seconds after finishing a nightmare run of the gauntlet, and barely dodging a horrible death. Our minds are funny that way, he figured. Already his mood felt lighter.

“So where to now?” he said aloud, glancing briefly to the fuel gauge. They had half a tank. Thank you, God.

“Virginia Beach,” came a shouted reply from the back of the truck. Wesley recognized the voice of the leader of the survivors, who now stuck his head in the sliding back window. “Just keep going. We’ll pick up Southern Boulevard straight ahead, then Norfolk Avenue and then we can cut south on Pacific. There are a lot of bays of boats down there. We can try Lake Rudee first, and then if that’s empty we go to Lake Wesley. Both have access to the ocean through an inlet. Anyway, that’s where we were headed before we met you. Plenty of boats there. We hope.”

“Lake Wesley?” Wesley shook his head.

Only in the goddamned ZA…

Heavy Metal

On Board the JFK

Commander Drake stared out the porthole glass of the flag bridge, at the very top level of the island. Outside and below, he could see the repair and construction crew maneuvering an absolutely enormous piece of steel plating into place with a three-story crane.

Once fitted, this would be the finger in the dyke – the linchpin sealing the gigantic gash that got blown in the hull when the two dozen Sparrow missiles in the magazine, each with a 50-pound high explosive warhead, had gone up with a blast that shook every corner of the 110,000-ton vessel. This would effectively be the world’s very biggest Band-Aid – and, if they were really lucky, it might even make the carrier once again watertight, and more importantly Zulu-tight. If they couldn’t get off this sandbar, then they could at least put up all the storm shutters and try to weather the damned hurricane.

Drake decided this was a critical enough show that he wanted a better seat.

Leaping down the ladder this time, he went without his aide. There were still tons of preparations that needed to be made. But it really all came down to one of two things now. Either getting this boat back out to sea; or, failing that, patching the enormous hole in the boat so they’d have a chance of sealing the whole thing up and weathering the storm.

So, second things first, he thought tightly to himself, blasting out of the hatch onto the flight deck, and marching purposefully to the construction site.

As he approached, he caught sight of Master Chief Shields – who was actually perched on top of the crane, directing his men from above. Hanging by rappelling harnesses out over the sea and alongside the boat, all around the enormous hanging steel plate, were three different members of the construction crew. They wore masks and held giant arc welders, with fuel tanks strapped to their backs. Drake could see that the big crane had been bolted to the deck and was also counterbalanced by hundreds of barrels of water and bags of sand. Tons of dead weight.

Still, it all looked damned precarious, at least to Drake. That big hunk of steel, which had been carved out of the side of the hangar deck below, was just about the biggest single plate he had ever seen. And God alone knew how much it weighed, dangling by two thick steel cables out alongside and below the deck edge.

Drake could hear Shields barking commands to both the crane operator and the men hanging over the edge – and, he gathered, to others working inside on the decks below. Drake guessed those guys were pulling the plate in and aligning it. He didn’t have time to understand every little thing. And he damned well wasn’t going to interrupt to ask questions. This would be about the worst time in the history of the world for micromanagement. If anyone knew what he was doing, it was the Master Chief.

Drake had a decent look at one of the welders, who was almost level with the flight deck and to the left, nearer the fore. Another was on the opposite side, and a third down below and behind the whole hunk. Fick worked out that they were using smaller pieces of steel to help connect the big one. Again, Drake had to guess that there’d been no time to cut a precision chunk to exactly fit the hole.

The whole thing looked dangerous as hell. But it seemed to be happening.

The welding began in earnest, sparks and glare flying in all directions.

Shields seemed to look on approvingly from above.

And then, less than a minute later, a horrific groan sounded from… well, Drake wasn’t totally sure where from. He saw the crew perk up, and start running around with a purpose. The deck seemed to move, or warp, slightly under their feet.

He heard Chief Shields bellow, “Stand clear! Everyone the fuck out!”

And suddenly it became clear what was happening. Drake could see that the weld between the left edge of the hole, and the replacement steel plate, was holding. But the seams in the next section over were being torn out. That whole section, along with the new plate and everything else attached to it, was ripping right out of the boat. It couldn’t hold its own weight.

And in that horrible frozen second, Drake thought: structural weakening.

And then it was all happening at once. The groaning turned to shrieking. Tons of tempered steel ripped loose and began to swing out and away from the boat. Now the weight of the plate – plus the section welded next to it – was too much for the crane to hold, heavier than the counterweights and stronger than the bolts.

Drake saw Chief Shields leap from the crane as it started to go over.

He saw the welder nearest him push off with his feet and swing out on his rope to the side, trying to get clear of it all.

Drake couldn’t see the one behind and below the plate. But there could be no doubt about what was happening to him. Amid shouts of warning and yelps of panic, the attached hunks of steel screeched loose and all plummeted toward the surface of the water, nearly a hundred feet below. The crash of it hitting the sea was like the sound of Niagara – and the resulting plume of water crested and surpassed the flight deck, much of it crashing down around the scrambling survivors of the work crew.

* * *

Drake went straight from this unmitigated catastrophe down to the nuclear reactor frames. Like the very first responder on a disaster scene, he simply couldn’t get caught up in the details of the rescue effort – helping survivors, doing first aid, or any of the minutiae of recovery. He had to coordinate.

And, mainly, he had to save the carrier.

Swinging once again into the reactor control room, he encountered a scene of strangely Zen-like peace. Captain Martin was sitting at the control desk, staring down at his tablet full of reactor operations manuals. The two ensigns, both at their stations, looked like they were meditating. It was either that or total physical paralysis from fear. Drake couldn’t tell.

Martin looked up and spoke calmly. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

Drake nodded, trying to drum up some positivity. “Okay! I’ve got a good feeling about this. Ready to fire one of these bad boys up? Because that’s our only way out of here now. And if we stay where we are… we’re all dead.”

Martin held his gaze serenely. “Yes. But once more and for the record: this is a very bad idea.” But his expression lightened almost at once, and he said, “But we’ll just give it a go and see how we get on.”

Drake immediately sensed some of that famous British stiff spine and good humor in the face of doom – the Blitz, Dunkirk, all that. He asked, “What can I do to help?”

“Just stand clear,” Martin said. “We’ve more or less made all the preparations. Now it’s a question of diving into the deep end head first… and hoping it’s not a pool of molten lava…” He turned to his skeletal two-man team, the two ensigns who were the highest surviving ratings in the nuclear engineering section.

“Okay, lads,” he said, his tone reassuring, or trying to be. “This is a manual start up – remember that we are part of the automatic control loop, right? Direct RRS is going to be our friend.” The two answered one after the other.

“Aye, sir.”

“Roger that.”

Martin glanced down to his tablet – which Drake concluded was basically his cheat sheet for this high-stakes final exam. “Right, then. Now, after a long shutdown, the source is small and power will not rise to the usual levels on start-up – not until the core is very close to critical.” He looked up and pinned the nearer ensign with his eye. “Jakobs. Tell me your job.”

The young man nodded, and glanced at the daunting array of readouts at his station, though mainly at one big LCD. “I watch core criticality like a hawk. And I shout out changes in normalized decay heat power, P over P-Zero.”

“Correct. And?”

“Oh, yeah. And I die at this post if necessary.”

“Good lad. And Safo?” he asked, looking to the other.

“I’m all about the control rods.”

“Succinctly put.” He turned back to Jakobs. “What’s our reactor status now?”

“Core is confirmed subcritical. Repeat, confirmed subcritical.”

As Drake looked on, hand held over mouth in tense worry, Martin turned back to his station and put both hands and several fingers to a complex display on a touch screen. “Okay. First two fuel rods… are going in… now.” They all paused, waiting for something to blow up. Nothing did. “Right, that’s the first hurdle cleared. Safo, begin raising the control rods. Nice and slow.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Jakobs said, “Still subcritical – borderline deeply subcritical. P/P_0 is one-point-oh-seven.”

“Got it,” Martin said, pausing to wipe sweat from his forehead. “Significant reactivity addition now… ion chambers are coming on scale… Jakobs?”

“Sir, core still beneath zone-level subcritical.”

“Okay. There should be a very short prompt jump that we won’t see operationally…” At this point, Martin seemed to be more or less explaining this to himself: “…because all increases are ramp increases…”

Already, a minute in, the tension in the room was beyond belief, and Drake thought it felt at least fifteen degrees hotter than it he knew it was. Or was it actually that hot? God, he hoped not.

Martin said, “Two more rods going in.” He then moved briskly from his station to a whiteboard on the wall, took up a squeaky marker pen, and began manically sketching and solving equations.

Drake couldn’t help himself. “What’s wrong?”

Martin answered without turning, pen still squeaking with abandon. “At every stage, I have to measure the neutron flux in the reactor… and calculate the reactor’s neutron multiplication factor, to determine how close we are to design-predicted critical…” More under his breath, he added, “And I only know how to do the equations by hand…” He kept talking as he wrote: “Observed power equals one over one minus K times power source…”

“Approaching critical,” Jakob said. “One-point-one-nine.”

Martin leapt back to the desk and leaned over the tablet again, then started reading feverishly, the words passing his lips as little more than breath: “Reactivity in the core shall be controlled to limit possible overpower transients… Continuous indication of neutron flux level and rate of change of neutron flux at all times… Below ten to the negative seventh F.P. the ion chamber signal from a steady background of gamma rays is comparable to the neutron flux… Fuck, fuck, fuck…”

“What?” Drake intoned. None of this sounded good.

Martin still read aloud. “Each power doubling is a point-three decade increase…”

Jakobs spoke, sounding much more stressed suddenly. “Definitely cresting critical! P/P_0 passing one-point-two-zero!”

“Right,” Martin said, swiveling from tablet to station. “Right, okay. Preparing to remove the neutron source—”

Jakobs interrupted him. “Criticality spiking! Core is going supercritical, and fucking fast!”

“Shit! I’m pulling the fuel rods. Drop the control rods! Safo!”

“All of them, sir?”

“Yes, all of them! Now, now!”

Drake only realized that several warning lights were on in various places around the control room once they started to wink out. After that, he remembered to start breathing again. He watched Martin furiously flipping through readouts on the touch screen, evidently trying to assess the damage. Drake finally got up the courage to approach him. He put his hand on the rapidly breathing Brit’s shoulder.

“What just happened?”

Martin turned to look him in the eye. “The most wonderful thing. We didn’t have a meltdown. The rods are a wreck, and the core’s in a state I wouldn’t even want to try and assess. But it’s all stable.”

Drake tried to swallow, but his mouth and throat were too dry. He couldn’t do it. “I don’t suppose we can try again.”

“With this reactor? Not for two years, would be my guess. And not with me driving it.”

“And the second reactor?”

“Do you want to risk losing that one semi-permanently, as well?”

The remaining air seemed to leak out of the XO.

“So that’s it, then. We’re not getting out of here.”

* * *

When Drake emerged again from the bowels of the ship, the flight deck was shrieking. Not from the rescue and recovery effort around the construction site – but from the two F35s swooping in for a landing. Their engines belched an unholy roar that you really didn’t want to hear without the big noise-canceling headsets the flight deck crew wore, and their tires screeched and spewed white billows of smoke as they decelerated to the tune of several Gs.

Drake just counted himself lucky there was enough clear flight deck for them to land on. At over $280M per plane, pushing most of their F35s off the flight deck into the Atlantic had been goddamned painful. He was glad to have these two back, and expected Fick and his men had been glad to have them, too.

A jumpsuited flight deck officer approached him at a jog. “Commander! We’ve got no instructions from PriFly. Do you want us to strip and stow these birds?”

Drake exhaled and looked around him. The shallows of the Virginia coast were going to be their home for the duration. Only the weather wasn’t going to stay so nice as it was now.

“No,” he said finally, sounding exhausted. “Refuel, rearm, and refit.” He turned and began to trudge back to the island. As he walked off, he added: “We’re going to need them.”

Back on the flag bridge, amidst a flurry of activity prompted by the two epic failures up top and down below, a junior officer accosted him. And he asked Drake his perennial favorite question: “Should we inform the Captain?”

Drake dropped down in his chair and gave him a bored look.

“Go for it.”

The Price

Beaver Island

Ali was putting instinctive fire into smoking figures at medium or close range, looking over the top of her big sniper optic, moving through the forest too quickly to get a proper sight picture. She was running now – all of the Alpha operators were. “This is great,” she said. “Flaming fucking zombies. Just when you think we’d plumbed the depths of horror…”

Head down to his EOTech sight, which acquired targets a lot more quickly, Henno recited, “‘Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.’”

“What the hell is that?” Predator asked, fast-limping alongside.

“Marlowe. Faustus.”

Great, thought Predator. Smart-ass British special operators, quoting Elizabethan playwrights at me…

But now the smoke was growing thicker, socking them in and reducing visibility to a few meters – and they could also see trees burning in earnest not far ahead of them. Those who hadn’t had wet cloths over their mouths pulled them up now, coughing violently. As Handon put evenly spaced single shots into zombie heads, he mentally cursed Gunny Fick. But then he thought: Hell, why keep it to myself? He hailed him.

“You here yet?” was how Fick answered.

“We must have heard you wrong. I thought you said the western approach was clear.”

“Clear is a relative concept.”

Yeah, Handon guessed, and probably a fluid one, too. He signed off, and focused on moving and shooting well – which were, not coincidentally, the two most important skills for a commando. The third was communicating. With the airport coming into sight through the trees now, Handon called it out, and called the formation and approach.

They were coming in at the far end of the runway, maximally distant from the tower and few small buildings of the airport. And, to Handon’s not inconsiderable disappointment, they were also maximally distant from the aircraft, which he could see parked all the way down at the other end.

The only easy day was yesterday, Handon thought.

And even yesterday had been no goddamned picnic.

* * *

Fick heard Alpha’s firing first, coming out from the trees at the far end of the runway, along with billows of smoke from the blazing forest. In another minute, they were visible – a tight and disciplined formation, moving smartly and putting down effective fire.

It wasn’t like him, and he damned well hadn’t expected it… but Master Gunnery Sergeant Fick suddenly found himself getting emotional at the sight of them – the miraculous lost-and-found-once-again Alpha team. They had all come a really long way, and already sacrificed so much. But now they were finally going to link in together.

And maybe even all get out of there alive.

The very first thing Fick did, while watching Alpha advance up the runway, weapons pointed and chugging off to both sides, was hail the Kid up in his sniper OP. “Chesney. Party’s over – get your ass down from that high-rise mausoleum.”

There was a delay before his response came through. It seemed to be accompanied by a lot of lead coming down from the tower. “Negative, negative – I need to cover Alpha’s approach. I’ve got a perfect vantage for it. And there’s a lot of shit coming their way.”

Fick stabbed at his mic button. “Stow that horseshit, Corporal. Alpha can damned well take care of themselves. Now get your ass down here, while the getting’s good, RFN. And bring the prisoner with you.”

“Roger that, Gunny. Just a couple more targets, gotta clear the runway…”

Fick swallowed a few foul words, but he was out of time to argue. Alpha was nearly there, and he was damned well going to go out and greet them.

And make sure they didn’t get killed on his watch.

* * *

Handon could hear rounds snapping overhead, and figured they were coming from that half-demolished air traffic control tower. That’s where he’d put his overwatch. And whoever was up there was definitely covering their asses, as they fought their way up the exposed tarmac.

At about the halfway point, he realized with a twinge of horror that he could now recognize the silhouette of the aircraft on the tarmac. No fucking way… It couldn’t be, could it? A B-17? Those crazy sons of bitches. But then he realized he could also distinguish one particular figure among the defenders of the ancient WWII bomber – stocky, powerful, covered with blood and soot, looking badly singed, firing non-stop in multiple directions… it could only be Fick. The man rose from a crouch and, still firing to the south, moved out to meet them.

Handon, already on point, pushed out further ahead.

He put up his hand, elbow bent. Gunny Fick did the same. The two men grasped hands that were like vises, both of their biceps bulging under their uniforms. Neither was in their first youth anymore. But both were as strong as armored bulls – Handon a little taller, Fick a little stockier.

“What took you so goddamned long?” Fick said, holding Handon’s steel-blue eye.

“Had to finish our pleasure cruise,” Handon said. Belatedly clocking the black scorches and untreated burn wounds across the Marine leader’s upper half, he wondered what kind of hell these guys had been through taking and holding this airfield.

Looking past Handon at the rest of his people, Fick noticed the wide variety of injuries on those guys – and figured maybe the operators of Alpha really had fought their way across a city of three million dead guys. He also saw the scientist for the first time, and gave him an appraising look. All this for one man…

But he snapped out of his reverie quickly. “If you’d like to fly with us today,” Fick said, “kindly get your asses on board that aircraft.” He nodded toward it, while pulling out his radio. “I’ve got to make a call…”

“Yeah, me, too,” Handon said. And while he herded his team toward the bomber, he hailed Sarah Cameron on their agreed-upon channel. She pretty clearly wasn’t here ahead of them, which meant she almost certainly wasn’t coming. And which also meant she was almost certainly dead – if not already, then probably soon. And if Handon’d had any illusions about being able to wait on the tarmac for her to show up, this chaotic 360-degree battle shattered them. They were going to be lucky to get the hell out of there alive themselves.

Latecomers would not be admitted.

With that, the twin 50-cal in the tail of the plane, which had been silent while Reyes reloaded, started up again – none too soon. The position they were defending was now down to the eastern edge of the main runway, and the control tower. But they were losing the control tower, as dead poured in from the east.

Trotting up to the aircraft, Fick frantically hailed Graybeard, and got him. “Interrogative,” he shouted. “What’s your status and ETA?”

“Got a little bit ambushed, which slowed me up. But I’m finishing filling the gas cans now. I can be back there in about fifteen mikes.”

Fick’s lips parted and his gaze went long. It wasn’t soon enough. It was going to be all they could do to keep the bomber defended while they loaded it up. And they’d be rolling down the runway in only a couple of minutes. There was no way they could risk waiting longer – there was too much at stake for them to all go down now. Fick couldn’t believe it.

Graybeard wasn’t going to make it.

* * *

The pilot came running around the edge of the plane, angling for the belly hatch. “I’m starting the engines!” he shouted at Fick as he ran by. But then he spotted Alpha team, including their weapons, rucks, and other gear – plus the scientist, with his bag, and the random girl they had along as well.

“Ah, shit,” he said.

“What?” Fick asked. “What now?”

The pilot stuck his face in Fick’s to be heard over the battle, which seemed to be building to yet another bloody and perilous climax around them. “We’re supposed to weigh all this crap! And check it against the flight manifest! Or we might not get off the ground. This isn’t the world’s longest fucking runway. It was all supposed to be the mechanic’s job…”

Fick shook his head. “No time! We’ve gotta go! Either we’ll get off the tarmac or we won’t.”

Looking extremely stressed, the pilot turned and resumed running toward the hatch.

“Are we even close?” Fick shouted after him.

Turning one last time before jamming himself inside, the pilot shrugged and shouted. “I don’t know! Start throwing shit out – throw out everything you can…”

The four engines started up in sequence a few seconds later, big-ass propellers churning the air and adding to the racket and chaos. The horde was collapsing on them from all sides. Fick looked back and saw that the Alpha shooters were still shooting, when what he needed was them getting on the goddamned plane. “Go, go, go!” he said, windmilling his arm. “Load up!”

Looking forward again, he could see Brady was still single-handedly holding the desperate northern flank. Fick shouted at his back: “Ma-rines! We are lea-ving!” Brady looked behind him and flashed that nice smile of his, mouthful of perfect teeth. Every jarhead knew that line – and knew that the Colonial Marines in Aliens were “very tough hombres.” Brady nodded, and began a fighting retreat back around the side of the plane, still spraying bullets and grenades.

But then something impossible happened: he fell down, knocked over backward by some invisible force. He hit the deck in a whuff of dust, ruffling the blanket of empty shell casings on the ground, which floated up gracefully around him.

Fick stopped dead, eyes wide. And then he heard it before he saw it: firing, long bursts of full-auto. And it was not from their own lines. It was from out at the treeline.

His first thought was: Fuck me – another demented-ass Canadian, lighting us up?

But, then, in another second he was able to make it out visually. It was in fact a Canadian soldier. But this one wasn’t demented. He was dead – and on fire, flaming from helmet to boot toe. He was also carrying a 5.56mm light machine gun, fed by a 200-round belt from a semi-rigid pouch hanging underneath (fondly referred to by the Marines as a “nutsack”). Like most squad-level machine gunners, he would also have anywhere between two and five more nutsacks of 200 rounds each, loaded onto his belt and load-carrying harness – perhaps a thousand or more rounds in total.

And every single one of them was now trying to cook off from the heat of the flames that danced over every part of his body like a spectral wedding dress.

The rounds in the pouches were firing off in all directions, like the world’s least accurate machine gun battery. Shrieking high-velocity rounds zipped forward, back, left and right, into the ground and up and out into space.

But the belt which fed into the gun was actually being fired out of it – once the first round in the chamber cooked off, it cycled the action, bringing in the rest of the belt behind it and shooting them all off in sequence. The weapon, chattering away, hung loose on the dead soldier’s sling, pointing roughly toward the deck – where the rounds were ricocheting off the tarmac. And, much worse, as sometimes happens, many of them were impacting the smooth tarmac at an angle, but then skittering forward and straight down it, parallel with the ground – and straight toward the team’s feet. Or else they’d finally hit a rough patch and go shooting upward again.

Jesus Nutbusting Christ, Fick thought. What the hell else could go wrong today?

He could hear rounds plinking into the skin of the plane behind him, and others snapping the air over his head. He felt one tug at his sleeve as it missed him by an inch. And now he could also hear Brady hollering, clearly wounded in some way. Fick glanced behind him. The fucking scientist was still out on the tarmac, as the Alpha guys collapsed on the hatch to the plane. “Get the fuck down!” he shouted – but immediately regretted this. Down on the deck was actually a terrible place to be, with rounds skipping along it in all directions…

Fick raised his rifle, took a bead, and cranked off a shot, then another. But as he fired, a round hit the steel toe of his boot – it didn’t penetrate, but stung like all hell. He ground his jaw against the pain, took a steadying breath, exhaled half of it, and took a final bead on the fucking post-human Fourth of July fireworks display still gamboling in on them.

He fired a single round. It impacted the machine gunner’s chin point and took him down.

Unfortunately, the burning sonofabitch hit the ground face first, lying on top of his weapon… with the barrel still pointed at the plane. And now the hundreds of rounds in pouches on the back of his belt were cooking off in all directions, most of them dangerous. And, worst of all, within two seconds he had been overrun by the general mass of other asshole dead guys, making it impossible, or at the very least insanely hazardous, for Fick to try to reach him.

Not that there was any way to turn him off even if he could.

It was all basically going to total shit now, falling apart everywhere. They had to get the hell out – now. “Go, go, go!” Fick shouted, as he pulled himself to his feet, raced forward into fire and death, and hauled Brady to his feet. He couldn’t tell where the big man was hit, but he was definitely still alive. Arms on shoulders, the pair retreated back to the plane, stumbling backward, both now firing their weapons with their free hands, rounds coming back in all around them, and an uncountable dead army surging forward in the midst of it all.

Over his shoulder, Fick could see Alpha finally loading up via the belly hatch. He shouted back to them, “Ditch your gear! Ditch everything you can! We gotta shed weight!” The plane was already rolling on the tarmac, lining up its take-off. Brady, perhaps only half alive, was still shooting, and Fick slapped his ass to get him in the goddamned plane. The twin 50 in the tail was still going crazy, trying to take up the slack. Fick, last on the ground, now took desperate shots in all directions, knocking down the lead dead guys in the implacable assault.

This was it – this was the end. One way or another.

He heard Brady shouting to him from the hatch.

“Now or never, Gunny!”

Fick turned, ran, and pulled himself up into the hatch as the plane began to pick up speed. He hauled his feet inside, then moved down half the length of the cabin, stumbling over a riot of people and gear. He almost started to smile, as the plane accelerated around him.

Maybe they were going to make it after all.

And that’s when it hit him. MotherFUCKER. The Kid – Chesney was still up top in the control tower. And they were now about to leave him behind. Frantically, Fick moved to the blister window, stuck his head out – and saw Zulus swarming in through the demolished front door of the tower as it receded behind them.

“No!” Fick shouted aloud. Jesus Christ – they should have barricaded the door, they should have destroyed the first-floor stairwell…
But there had been no time, and no manpower to do it. And anyway the tower had been part of the position they were holding – until it wasn’t, when the eastern line collapsed, the dead enveloping the position. It had all happened so goddamned quickly… In the stark crisis of the machine-gun assault, and the general assault, Fick had lost track of one of his men – and the one most vulnerable. Sure, he had ordered Chesney to come down. But he’d disobeyed the order, and there’d been no time to hound or chase him.

Now he hailed the Kid on the radio, and got him – but immediately got put on hold: “Wait one!” Chesney said, sounding out of breath. Across the open channel, Fick could hear both moaning and firing. Chesney must be engaged to his six now, dead swarming up and in his rear.

Fuck fuck fuck.

The plane picked up speed rapidly, bouncing violently down the tarmac.

Freezing for one second, Fick pictured Chesney’s ridiculously youthful face. He remembered how damned young the LT had been – only about the same age the Kid was now. And he decided. He determined that he was not going to send another young man to die in his place, covering the team’s withdrawal. Leaving Graybeard was almost too painful to bear. But at least he’d had his time on this hellish, fallen Earth. The Kid was… well, he was just a goddamned kid. And it wasn’t right. Fick couldn’t swallow it.

He just couldn’t lose both of them.

He turned and pushed his way past the sprawl and tangle of people and equipment toward the front.

Standing over the belly hatch, his big arms crossed, was Brady – wounded, but back on his feet and still damned imposing. He said, “All due respect, but sit your ass the fuck down, Master Gunnery Sergeant.” Fick eyed him up. He’d evidently mainly been shot in his Kevlar vest, though he was also bleeding from one arm. He did not by any means look combat ineffective.

Fick leaned in and shoved him hard with both hands in the chest. Brady fell back, but instantly slipped away, came around behind Fick, and put him in a rear chokehold. “Don’t be an asshole, Gunny. The tower’s overrun. There’s no way you can get to him. We gotta go. And this team can’t do without you.” On some level Fick knew Brady was right – that he didn’t have the right to throw his life away. Not just so he could exorcise some goddamned demon from his past.

But he couldn’t stop himself.

He reached up and pulled the release on his helmet chinstrap, which effectively shrunk his head, and allowed him to slip out of Brady’s chokehold. He then kneed the big man in the groin, and as he reached for the hatch handle, the accelerating bomber ramped over a pile of dead Zulus, launching Fick toward the ceiling. Without his helmet on, his jar-shaped head slammed into a steel strut.

His already-dark world went black.

And he collapsed to the deck.

Greater Love

Beaver Island

On the vibrating deck of the hurtling bomber, Fick came foggily awake to the sound of a voice in his head: “…You’re taking off, aren’t you?”

At first he thought he was dreaming. But then he recognized the voice as Graybeard’s. And the source of it was his radio earpiece.

He struggled to lever his eyelids up above half-mast. He could feel the bomber shaking violently all around him, as it accelerated down the runway toward take-off. His bell had really been rung, though, and his guard was down. He keyed his mic and said, simply, “Affirmative. We’re taking off.”

There was a brief pause on the other end. “It’s okay, Gunny. I know you’ve got to go. I’ll see you on the other side, brother. Semper fidelis, semper ferte.”

Before Fick could even think how to respond to this, shouts rose up all around him as the antique heavy bomber, which had been blasting down the runway nearly at take-off speed, now decelerated violently, brakes and tires shrieking, engines powering down and reversing.

Fick hauled himself up to his hands and knees – and then, with a superhuman effort, to his feet. His head pounded, and now that the adrenaline had stopped pumping for a few seconds, the burns on his upper body screamed red hot. He lurched into the cockpit and dropped himself in the co-pilot’s seat. Beside him the pilot was wrestling with the shuddering aircraft, as the end of the runway raced at them through the glass.

“What?” Fick said. “What the fuck now?”

While simultaneously trying to keep them from crashing off the end of the tarmac, the pilot gestured out the right window. “Look for yourself!” Fick could see that the far engine on the right wing was shut down, its propeller still spinning in some crazy-ass, off-kilter way. As it spun down, Fick could see that it had been shot up, with multiple holes and bent and torn edges. Evidently the Zulu machine gunner had gotten in one last jab.

“We’re too heavy!” the pilot yelped. “I can’t get us off the ground! Not with three fucking engines…!” Though they had already slowed radically, the end of the tarmac was nearly upon them, and the pilot twisted the yoke, turning the plane at the last instant, onto the second, shorter runway that met the main one at an angle. The enormous machine tilted and lurched, but made the turn and stayed on all three wheels.

Fick scanned in all directions out the glass. Mainly, what he could see was the dead running at them from everywhere – reorienting on the plane’s new position. They hadn’t gotten off the ground. But they had at least gotten the undead swarm off them, if only for a minute or two.

Fick pulled himself to his feet. “We’ll lighten up,” he said, gritting his teeth. “We’ll ditch more weight. Can we take off on this runway?”

“Negative! This one’s thirty percent shorter, it’s a no go. But I can loop us back around, taxi to where we started, and try again.”

“Make it happen,” Fick said, wading back into the cabin and shouting. “Listen up! It’s a fire sale – everything goes! Ammo, personal rucks, water. Irreplaceable weapons, I don’t give a shit.” He reached the middle of the plane, reversed his rifle, and smashed out the glass of the machine-gun bubble. He then unclipped the XM-29 and hurled it out the hole.

“Great,” Predator muttered, shrugging out of his ruck. “So much for cabin pressure.”

Ali, pulling off hers as well, answered: “You’re as dumb as you are big. These old things don’t pressurize.”

“Oh,” Pred said, shoving his ruck out the window, and then reaching for one of a pile of puffy backpacks on the floor.

“Not those,” said Brady, from where he lay on the deck. “Those are our parachutes.”

“Ah. My bad.”

Fick found his M16 lying where he’d left it, took it over to the belly hatch, opened that up, and started firing out of it. They had the additional problem now of keeping the dead from clumping up either on them or on the main runway, so they could try taking off again. But it was at least complementary with their other problem – that of shucking weight. Fick was getting ammo off the plane and putting it someplace useful – into the enemy.

He vocally urged the others to do the same.

“Get rid of all ammo!” he bellowed. “Shoot it or shove it, I don’t give a shit!”

The sound of the other blister window breaking sounded over the firing of his M16. Other weapons joined the chorus. And the .50 in the tail started up good and heavy again. The bomber started taxiing briskly up the shorter runway, heading for the point where it joined a taxiway that led back to the control tower again, and the eastern end of the main runway – right where they’d started. Describing a loop did have the advantage of leading the dead in a merry chase, most of it off the main runway.

As Fick held his rifle low and out the hatch, blasting away, he briefly let his hopes get up that there might now be another chance to rescue Chesney. But when the control tower came into view, he could see dead bodies still pouring into it. It was totally overrun. More damningly, Fick knew he couldn’t stop the plane, or it would be swarmed and never get going again. He could just jump off on his own – but deep down he knew that would only mean he and the Kid would both be left behind. Still, he was damned tempted.

But when he hailed him again… this time he got no response at all.

* * *

As they made the second turn, onto the taxiway, Fick got an unexpected radio call from their Tailgunner Charlie – Reyes.

“Yo, Gunny!”

Fick paused firing to answer – but, while he talked, he tossed grenades out the hatch. “Go.”

“We’re being followed, Jefe.”

“No shit. Light ’em the fuck up.”

The whole cabin of the plane was now a riot of people shooting, hurling grenades, and throwing shit out onto the tarmac. There weren’t nearly enough holes in the plane to support this – just the hatch and the two broken blister windows. Burly-ass operators were elbowing one another aside to get at them.

“I think maybe I shouldn’t shoot this one,” Reyes said. “He’s driving a Land Rover…”

Fick mouthed Fuck me, dropped his M16 straight out the hatch, turned on his heel and ran the length of the plane. As he did, he tripped on something, which squealed. It was the random girl, trying to cower out of the way. WTF? As Fick recovered his balance and resumed hurtling, a familiar voice came through his earpiece.

“You guys got room for one more?”

“Graybeard! You old-ass son of a bitch!”

With that, Fick reached the tail turret, stuck his head in, and looked out to their rear. Sure enough, there was the Land Rover, ten meters behind and a few to the side, keeping pace with the hurtling bomber. The aborted take-off had given him enough time to make it back, though the plane was now taxiing fast as hell, buzzing and bouncing. Fick could see Graybeard shooting his SCAR one-handed out the passenger window and steering with the other.

He looked down at Reyes, who was putting long, careful, rolling 50-cal bursts into the legions of runners who were doing a pretty decent job of keeping up with the plane themselves. As the guns roared, bodies fell to pieces and scattered to the tarmac in splashes of black gunk, still rolling along with their momentum. Graybeard dodged the bigger chunks, weaving in and out, while shooting non-stop.

Fick hailed the pilot: “Stop the fucking plane!”

“Negative! We stop moving, they’ll be all over us. We’ll never get moving again.”

Fick cursed. Obviously he already knew that. But that was one of his men, right there behind them…

Reyes shouted over the roar. “So go reel his ass in, Gunny!”

Fick realized Reyes was totally fucking crazy – and totally right.

But then he pictured the layout of the plane – the belly hatch was just in front of the goddamned engines and propellers. There was no way to drive the truck up to it.

But when he turned, he saw that Ali and Henno had just pulled open a hatch he hadn’t even known was there, and were now chucking shit out of it. This was only a few feet up from the tail, on the right side – the small rear escape hatch. Fick bodily shoved the two Alpha people to the side, stuck his head out, and looked behind them. He spotted the Land Rover, which was pacing them at about 35mph, and which he hailed again. “Graybeard! We’re gonna have to do a rolling transfer! Roll your old ass up here! You see me?” He waved. Graybeard waved back, with his gun; he then gunned the engine, swung out to clear the wing, and swerved back in.

And suddenly he was bouncing along not two feet away. He instantly started passing over full – and, as it soon became clear, enormously heavy – ten-gallon jerrycans of avgas. Fick took the first one and swung it back to whoever was behind him. As he reached for the second, the Land Rover bounced over a body and swerved. Fick leaned out – too far! – and his center of gravity took him out of the hatch. He hung on with one hand and one boot as he swung around and banged onto the exterior of the plane with his face.

Henno and Ali hauled him back in, fingers clawing at his webbing.

He braced himself better as the truck swerved in close again. He took the second can more carefully, passed it back, then two more after that. Taking a look out and forward, he now saw that they were nearly to the control tower – and thus the junction with the main runway. This was it. He put out his hand for Graybeard – who frowned down at the vehicle controls, trying to work out the cruise control.

“C’mon!” Fick bellowed. “No time!” He pointed to the turn, which was coming up fast.

Graybeard held up his index finger in a “one second” gesture – and finally got the cruise control set. He then tried to hand across his rifle. Fick swatted it away; it tumbled into the space between truck and plane – and then went through the propellers of the near engine.

Oh, God, no – fuck no…! Had he just fragged another engine? Fick watched the rifle get sliced into scrap metal and plastic. But in the end it seemed to leave the propellers no worse for wear. Tough old bitch. But Graybeard looked back, obviously extrapolating the rifle’s journey to his own.

He was now half in and half out of the driver’s seat, holding the wheel steady with his right hand. Fick held out both hands, feeling other strong arms around his waist – Henno and Ali behind him, keeping him from falling out. “C’mon!” Fick yelled. Graybeard looked once more at the enormous whirling propellers only a few feet ahead of him. He then looked beyond those – and saw the turn onto the main runway was upon them.

He leapt across the gap.

Fick grabbed him around the chest as his boots kicked out at nothing, then scrabbled and bounced on the tarmac racing by below. And at that instant, the pilot took the turn – causing inertia to pull at Graybeard’s heavily loaded body and try to pull it free of Fick’s grip. Graybeard’s legs flapped in open air, which did at least get them off the ground. Fick felt himself pulled farther out of the plane, over the blurring tarmac, and also behind the spinning blades, as he hung onto Graybeard with everything he had, and the Alpha guys did the same behind him.

The plane straightened up and immediately accelerated powerfully, all three remaining engines winding up to their ceilings. As the lateral inertia faded, Ali and Henno heaved backward and pulled both Marines inside, where they fell on top of them in an ungainly pile.

From his prone position, Fick keyed his mic and shouted, “FPF! Every bullet left behind!” The sound of firing, already insane, ramped up even further, audible even over the blasting engines. Those who weren’t shooting were still chucking things, tiny ones now, like individual water bottles and flashlights.

Fick tried to stand, but the acceleration of the plane pulled him toward the rear and he couldn’t manage it. They continued to accelerate like a bat not quite out of hell – not yet. Fick figured the pilot was going for broke: either they’d lift off by the end of the runway or they’d crash into the trees there. He felt the nose leave the ground, grudgingly. They continued powering forward like that, with the rear two wheels still on the tarmac, for a terrifyingly long time. Fick leaned forward, from where he lay tangled up with the others, and looked out the open hatch. He saw tarmac beneath them. And then he saw grass and dirt there, as the runway ran out and their smooth take-off turned into a rattle-and-hum nightmare.

And finally, achingly, the plane left the ground…

—and then almost immediately bounced and shuddered as its underside crashed into the tops of the burning trees that began out beyond the end of the runway. And then even that stopped as they cleared the forest canopy and began a 270-degree bank around to the right, to get them on a southeast heading – back toward the ocean, and the JFK.

Heading for home.

But first their loop took them back over the island, and the east end of the airport.

Fick looked below them and onto the half-destroyed top level of the control tower as they passed above it and to the right. And laid out in vivid detail, as if in a toy diorama, he could see all of the following: a carpet of mangled bodies scattered around the room; an improvised barricade in front of the door to the stairwell; the batshit crazy Canadian no longer bound to the wall, but up on his feet, facing the barricade and holding some kind of improvised melee weapon, maybe a length of rebar.

And finally the Kid, Corporal Chesney, back in his overwatch position, his shooting posture perfect, lying on his belly behind his gun, magazines laid out carefully beside him. And firing steadily and effectively down toward the swarming dead on the runway. Fick realized that the runway being clear enough for them to take off had been no coincidence, nor any stroke of luck.

It had been the result of one young man, doing his duty, no matter the personal cost.

But then all of that disappeared behind them, and the great expanse of Lake Michigan spread out below.

And Gunny Fick found that he still couldn’t get to his feet.

He didn’t have the strength.

* * *

But as he continued to occupy his spot on the deck, even as those he was tangled up with extricated themselves from under him, he found he had a good view from there up the entire length of the plane. And he could see the members of the two teams sprawled out together, catching their breath and licking their wounds, gearing down and patching up. Rekindling old acquaintances – or just getting used to the idea that they weren’t all going to die in the next few seconds.

Not everyone was there – both teams, not to mention the aircrew, had suffered terrible losses. But, still, Fick could make out Handon, Henno, Ali, Juice, and Predator, from Alpha team. And Brady, Reyes, and Graybeard from his.

In the middle of it all, looking rattled but as if he were trying to be brave, sat the scientist. The one for whom they had all performed such miracles, and suffered and sacrificed so much.

He’d damn well better be worth the price – he’d better work some miracles himself, Fick thought, his breathing slowly coming back down to normal.

A little farther up, he could see Alpha’s enormous assaulter and medic, Predator, working on Brady, getting his arm wound wrapped up. Fick thought he could hear Brady sniffle – was he crying?

“Jesus, dude,” Predator said. “Man up. You’re gonna be fine.”

“Of course I am,” Brady said. “But… my coffee’s gone. All my coffee-making supplies…”

Jesus Tittyfucking Christ, thought Fick. What were the Alpha guys going to think of them with talk like that?

Looking to his other side, he could see the strange cowering girl, curled up only a few feet away with the arm of Ali, the woman sniper, wrapped protectively around her. From within this embrace, the girl looked up and inexplicably locked eyes with Fick across the dim cabin. He held her gaze for a moment, two people connected by absolutely nothing, as far as Fick could tell. He finally looked away, shaking his head. He didn’t even know what she was all about.

But he figured someone would explain it to him at some point.

He felt the gentle rise and fall of the aircraft around him as it rode the winds, and the cool breeze from outside flitted through the cabin. They were airborne – and they were heading home.

They were going to make it.

As Fick let his head fall back again, looking forward to not going anywhere, or shooting anyone, or being blown up, or running his old ass up and down any stairs for a while, he saw Sergeant Major Handon walking back toward him from the front of the plane. He had been on the flight deck trying to raise the JFK. Fick decided to maintain his current position, which was flat on his back, as Handon arrived to tower over him.

“Well?” Fick said, looking up.

Handon gazed down at him, his face expressionless and inscrutable. “I got Drake.”

“And?”

“He says they’re about to be in some real pretty shit there.”

Fick just shrugged. Whatever this new disaster was, it wasn’t happening here, and it wasn’t happening to them. And Gunny Fick didn’t have to deal with it, at least not right this second. “Did he have orders for us?”

Handon paused before answering. “Yeah. He said, and I quote: ‘You’re going to have to jump for it. But congratulations on your escape from the frying pan. Good luck, and God be with you all.’”

Fick just sighed, and felt around for a helmet to pull down over his eyes. He knew he had at least two hours before further miracles were going to be required of him. Letting the weight of his own eyelids pull them down, he heard Handon walk away.

And he let the beautiful hum of their freedom bird lull him off to sleep.

Stormfront

On Board the JFK

He sat staring dead-eyed into the mirror, as he had almost every day for over a year.

He was trapped there, in his own head, his mind locked up with his memories and his own paranoid thoughts. He didn’t see the gnarled face that stared back at him, its beard grown to nearly six inches, unkempt and straggly. And he didn’t notice the sunken, deep-set, and bloodshot eyes, his gaze stricken and pained.

What the Captain of the JFK saw was ghosts.

He ate sometimes, never questioning where the tray of food outside the door came from, and never really paying much attention to what was on the plate. He would sit and stare at that mirror as his hands auto-piloted the food into his mouth. He drank water from the tap sometimes, leaning forward and sticking his head in the bowl, but he didn’t wash. Somehow his body knew that it needed the food and the water to survive, but all else had long since been forgotten, cast aside as the mind forgot the body.

The room stank of human waste, its occupant having abandoned all thoughts of hygiene long ago. And since the Captain never allowed anyone to enter, the mess wasn’t going to be cleaned up any time soon. Trays of food lay discarded in piles, drying in the dusty air. If the suite of rooms, which had once been as plush as many high-class hotels, hadn’t had its air cycled through a conditioning unit, it would have crawled with flies.

Not that the Captain would have noticed even that.

It seemed a long time since anyone had even knocked on the door or called in to ask if he was okay. Six months, perhaps. Yet the tray of food was there twice a day, set out by someone he never saw or heard.

He thought of home and he thought of his two children and his wife. The mirror revealed their smiling faces, animated as the two small boys ran around a garden that existed only in memory, watched over by the tall and graceful figure of their mother. But over the months and days the faces of those three in the mirror had blurred and become unrecognizable. He couldn’t seem to remember how they looked anymore.

The constant question that echoed around his troubled mind returned. Why hadn’t he just packed up and gone home? He could have done it during that last port call, before the fall. He’d have been gone before anyone even knew. He’d have been home when the whole world shut down, and it wouldn’t have mattered if he died there along with everyone else. With his family.

What had stopped him? Was it duty? Had he become so engrossed in his job as commander of the Kennedy and its strike group that he had forgotten all else?

And what the hell was that noise?

His vision of the two small figures wavered for a moment, and he looked around his imaginary garden, into the distance, at the horizon. There was something wrong with that horizon – a deep, thick smudge of darkness that seemed out of place on a bright and sunny day. He looked at his wife, and saw that her face was pale and she was no longer smiling.

He blinked once, heavily, then rubbed his eyes. His vision cleared and he saw the same old face staring back at him, his own face. He frowned, not even sure who the person looking back at him was anymore.

Was that a rumbling noise? It wasn’t the ship’s engines – he had tuned out that noise a long time ago. There it was again, far in the distance; a deep roaring, or hissing.

He stood up and cast around at the room, for the first time in many months snapping out of the daze that had consumed him. The noise was still there, far at the back of his senses, and very faint, but he could still hear it. He stumbled across the cabin, cursing the mess, then unlocked the outside hatch, grasped the handle, and turned it. He paused there, steeling himself to face the world outside.

The corridor beyond was littered with debris, a stark contrast to how it had been the last time he had looked out. As he walked down the narrow companionway, he gazed with puzzled curiosity at the things that had been abandoned here. Sheets of paper lay crusted with dirt; a pile of empty folders, stacked against a wall and left to gather dust. These things would have been cleared away once, but it seemed no one bothered anymore.

He passed no one on his walk up to the observation deck, and this surprised him more than the discarded crap. The ship should be bustling with activity, yet there was no one. As he made his way up the last flight of stairs to the exit, he thought he heard voices and footsteps in the distance, but then the noise had gone.

He turned the handle of the hatch that led outside, and took a deep breath as the sea air hit him. It was the first time he had felt that breeze in a long time, and he had missed the smell, the feel of it. He closed his eyes, dazzled by the glare. There was no one on the observation deck, but he could see movement out on the flight deck below – a maintenance crew busy at work, but he couldn’t make out what they were working on. He crossed the short distance to the railing and leaned against it, trying to focus his blurred vision, to resolve what they were doing. But as his sight cleared and the world came into focus, he saw something else – something that made his stomach lurch and his heart beat faster.

He turned and peered out silently at the expanse of solid land that lay ahead, out beyond the prow and the front edge of the flight deck. And the dark line that he had seen in his visions in the mirror was there again, right in front of him now, spanning the entire panorama of the horizon. He sidestepped, grabbed at the telescope fixed to the railing, looked through it, and focused in on the dark line.

The horizon was alive with movement. Many thousands or even millions of dark shapes tumbled over one another, subsuming the crumbling buildings before them, structures obscured by the dead as they surged across the landscape, climbing over and on top of one another, pushing forward, thrashing and clawing. He dialed in tighter and saw those in the lead, the faster-moving ones, crossing the last mile of land between the horde and the water, sluicing between the buildings and through the streets. Finally his focus stopped on the beach itself, where a few scattered figures already raced across the sand and plunged into the sea.

And the Captain of the USS John F. Kennedy realized with a sickening certainty exactly where the black storm of undead was going.

It was headed straight for his ship.

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Come back and live through the beginning of the end of the world in
ARISEN : GENESIS, the riveting and bestselling ARISEN prequel.

Thanks and Acknowledgements

Michael

This author wishes to thank Anna Kathleen Brooksbank, (the eternally wise) Mark George “Mr. Pitliv” Pitely, Sara Natalie Fuchs, Richard S. Fuchs, Virginia Ann Sayers-King, Valerie Sayers, Alexander Montgomery Heublein, Amanda Jo Moore, Michael and Jayne Barnard, and the indispensable e (AKA the e-reader).

A nod and debt of gratitude to William C. Martell, and his excellent book, The Secrets Of Action Screenwriting. While I’m at it, thanks to William Hauge for the fantastic Writing Screenplays That Sell – not well-titled, it’s actually the second-best book on story-craft I’ve ever read – and my notes from which I reference before every book I write. And, last and perhaps best, Robert McKee’s Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. These three guys know story. (Screenwriters generally do.)

There are way too many military memoirs and nonfiction accounts to cite them all (see the backs of my D-BOYS books for that bibliography), but since the Marines were so out front in this one, I’m especially indebted to Evan Wright’s amazing Generation Kill (the HBO miniseries rocks, too) and Fred Pushies’ MARSOC: U.S. Marine Corps Special Operations Command. The discerning Gen-Kill fan won’t have failed to notice that I borrowed a number of character traits from the Marines in First Recon, and one or two good lines. Thank you very much indeed, Nate, Fruity Rudy, Espera, Iceman, and Person. God bless you all.

Thanks to Brandon Webb and all the guys at (the also indispensable) sofrep.com.

Thanks to Klayton of Celldweller, for contributing a totally ass-kicking soundtrack for writing this book. Also, I borrowed a couple of lines, without permission, from his awesome Wish Upon a Blackstar album. They just took up residence in my brain, and insisted on migrating to the page.

Special thanks to Daymo, for free consulting support on British Army voice procedure and squaddie speak; plus thanks for his service.

Super extra special thanks to Slayer 155, for his unflagging support, promotion, free mil-tech consulting – and especially for 20+ years of awesome and extremely distinguished service.

Also, every thanks I’ve got to the other men and women of the American and British special operations communities – who train like professional athletes, perform like minor gods, and lay it all on the line every day in the defense of freedom and decency. There are no books without you guys. (Also probably no western civilization to have books in.) I urge readers to support the Special Operations Warrior Foundation, which provides full college scholarships to the children of fallen special operators.

Glynn

In addition to everything he said…

Thanks to all of the James’s – Julia, for your patience and encouragement, and my pipsqueaks, for just being you (mini me).

To my parents and my brother for not being too surprised that I write crazy fiction, and for telling me it’s cool.

To Bill, Sara, Billy, Jim & Jean for taking me seriously and never doubting that I could actually do this, and for demanding signed copies when I thought that whole idea was daft.

To Jacqui, for patience and editing expertise beyond the call.

To everyone who reads the books (my own, Michael’s, and the Arisen series) for being awesome. Without you folks and your encouragement and support, this series wouldn’t exist.

To Neil Gaiman, for reminding me to Make Good Art.

And lastly, thanks to memories, and hopes, and dreams. Don’t forget any of them. Ever.

A world fallen – under a plague of 7 billion walking dead
A tiny island nation – the last refuge of the living
One team – of history’s most elite special operators
The dead, these heroes, humanity’s last hope, all have...

Fans of the bestselling ARISEN series are calling it "a non stop thrill ride", "unputdownable", "the most original and well-written zombie novels I have ever read", "riveting as hell – I cannot recommend this series enough", "the action starts hot and heavy and does NOT let up", "astonishingly well-researched and highly plausible", "non-stop speed rush! All action, all the time – got my heart racing", "A Must Read, this book was a hell of a ride", and "may be the best in its genre."

Alpha team will return in
ARISEN, BOOK FIVE – EXODUS

There is a place where nightmares are real. It is a dark and terrifying place, hidden from the world we know by borders that only the most unfortunate of souls will ever cross.
James Halldon woke up in the dark, alone, without any food or water, without a clue where he was, and with no memory of where he came from.
It only got stranger…

Readers are calling the bestselling DIARY OF THE DISPLACED series "fast-paced, thought-provoking and thoroughly entertaining", "utterly compelling from beginning to end", "a fantastic book – gripping from the very first couple of lines", "ghosts, zombies, London buses and even an evil nemesis. What’s not to love?!", "truly magnificent", "the best book I’ve read in a long time", "one of the finest-written stories you will ever read", "a brilliant series – right up there with Neil Gaiman and Clive Barker", and "simply perfect… absolutely enjoyable from start to finish."

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 2011 (or any year for that matter)", "a riveting, fast paced classic!!", "pure action", "pretty much the definition of a page-turner", and "hi-tech and action in one well-rounded explosive thriller."