The infected wore the tattered remnants of black tactical gear. It was the sort of mall ninja shit he’d have expected from a batch of rent-a-thugs, so that part, at least, was understandable. What wasn’t was the wrist-thick black cord rising from the ground and ending out of sight somewhere on his back. The cord passed between its feet, ran across the parking lot, and disappeared behind the silhouette of the building.
For some reason, the sight of the cord made him think of Private Olsen, one of the men he’d lost in California. He frowned, flipping up the magnification on his scope and wondering why that was when the Marine had died in the crash of their Little Bird gunship—ah. Of course.
He’d assigned Olsen and Hansen to drive an armored Desert Patrol Vehicle, a glorified dune buggy mounting a stereo amplifier and massive speakers, designed to draw zulu hordes away while being fast and nimble enough to run. Only the men had planted the DPV in a ditch, forcing them to abandon the vehicle. While on the run, they’d encountered the first sign that things out in California had made a decided turn for the worse. How had the private described it? “There was something, I don’t know, not alive, hanging on the tower, sir. Like a robot octopus, maybe. It grabbed Erik and killed him.”
Pete cursed.
“What is it?” Guglik asked.
He glanced over. She had a spotting scope nestled in the crook of one arm. He didn’t know how well she could manage it with one good hand, but he suspected she was doing fine. “Over toward their motor pool, by the Humvee with the whip antennas. Take a close look at the zulu in black.”
She studied it quietly, then replied, “What’s the wire?”
“A ‘robot octopus’ unless I miss my guess.” His tone was grim.
Darnell took that moment to pop around the corner of the small shed at the top of the tower. “Antenna’s up—I’ve got a faint signal, but they’re receiving me.”
“Give them our location and see when they can get an evac bird on the way,” Pete ordered. He gave Guglik a look when she cleared her throat.
“What’s your plan, Major? Hansen didn’t have too good a time with his octopus if that’s what it is.”
Pete tried not to shake his head. “I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.” He shouldered the Savage. He’d been an excellent long-range shot before Z-Day, but years of practice from his own personal shooting platform had made it so that he didn’t even have to consciously think about his shots, anymore. The breeze was dying down, but would move the bullet just so, at five hundred yards the drop would be a bit more than four feet, and—the stock slammed into his shoulder as he felt the sweet spot and pulled the trigger.
He missed, but it was a matter of inches. Rather than hitting his target at the base of the throat, he was up and a bit to the right. Not that it mattered—the body had dried out enough that the tissues were barely holding on, and the skull flopped awkwardly to one side to reveal the fresh bullet hole in the hood of the Humvee where it had gone through the infected.
Pete waited a beat for the thing to collapse, as so many others had for him over the years, but this one didn’t cooperate. It took a wobbling step forward, but the second smoothed out, and by the third, it strode with something he might have called a calm assurance if it had been a living being. If the skull flopping loosely on its chest bothered it, it didn’t let on.
“Shit,” Guglik drew out. “That’s not good.”
You think? Pete clicked his radio. “Byers, you there?”
“Read you loud and clear, Major. Was that your shot?”
“Testing the waters, Sergeant. We may have a problem. We’ve got an infected down there missing most of its head, but it doesn’t seem to give much of a damn. There’s some sort of umbilical cord attached to it. We ran into something similar out west, so I’d recommend firing up the, well, tentacles with the flamethrowers.” He scanned the area again. The infected he’d shot was still the only one in view, but now that he checked again, Pete could make out at least a half-dozen of the tentacles running across the ground of the camp. He supposed that answered the question about who’d fired the Stingers at them. Spears were bad enough—hopefully, zulu hadn’t progressed to guns, else things were bound to get mighty interesting.
Byers came back. “Molly says to tell you, ‘I told you so.’”
Pete snorted. “Yeah, well, send her and the kid up here when you move out. I want them safe, not getting in your way.”
Byers hesitated—passing the instructions along, Pete assumed. When he came back over the radio, he sounded amused. “She’s good with that but the kid wants to come with us.”
“Whatever,” Pete muttered to himself. “Who the hell am I to try to run the show, right?” He keyed the radio. “Whatever you’re comfortable with and no more, Sergeant.”
“I figure he’s probably pig-headed enough to follow us, Major. I’d rather have him where I can keep an eye on him.” Byers laughed. “Besides, the kid’s immune, right? He’s got the best chance of us all. Moving in on your call, sir.”
“Go for it. I’ve got eyes in the sky.”
“We’re going in.”
October 18, 2026
Taum Sauk Mountain, eastern Missouri
Z-Day + 3,287
The leaves had turned but hadn’t begun to fall. This was of little comfort to Miles as they eased between the trees, straining toward the top of the mountain.
To their surprise, Hatch had taken the lead, making the climb in sure-footed fits and starts. He paused periodically, looking back and waiting for them to struggle along after the route he’d described. The boy didn’t say anything, but Miles detected a very obvious sense of annoyance from the kid.
“Trade you for your spear so you can hump some of this shit, you little punk,” he muttered under his breath. Sandy was close enough to hear, and the other man offered a brief chuckle of agreement.
All things considered, his load out could have been a lot worse. Miles toted the AA-12 in his arms and had his carbine slung alongside an assault ruck. The massive drum magazines for the shotgun were both bulky and heavy, and he’d only managed to fit one in the pack. Once he’d expended those shells, he was down to the heavy subsonics of his custom carbine and a single magazine of .45 ACP hollowpoints for his ever-present Springfield XDM. With the round in the chamber, he had fourteen rounds. Things had gotten desperate enough to go to the pistol on the roof of the GenPharm tower in Cincinnati. If it happened here and now, he suspected he’d best save the last round for himself. No Marine gunships blasting Ride of the Valkyries from external speakers were coming.
Burton and Byers also had AA-12s, though they carried more ammunition than Miles and depended on sidearms for their secondary weapons. The other three Marines carried the field-expedient flamethrowers some of the whiz kids back at Galveston had cooked up.
The US military removed flamethrowers from their arsenal way back in 1978, but that was no challenge to anyone with access to some basic knowledge and simple machine tools. A modified SCUBA tank held the fuel, while a smaller secondary tank held pressurized CO2. They’d initially tried to use pressure washer wands for sprayers, but testing had shown that the plastic wasn’t sturdy enough to hold up under long-term use. The new iron pipe versions R&D had whipped up weren’t as aesthetically pleasing, but they were more than robust enough to stand up to rough handling.
As they neared the edge of the clearing, Byers raised a hand to draw them up short. “Behind us, kid,” he murmured to Hatch. The kid looked mulish for a moment, but in the end, he didn’t argue. He passed through the front lines and took up position behind Miles and Sandy. The spear he leaned on still held too many bad memories for Miles, but at least the business end wasn’t made of bone. The blade seemed to have been re-purposed from a fighting knife like a Ka-Bar, the handle knocked off and the tang lashed to the pole with leather thongs. It was impossible to say how long the kid had carried, but every bit of the weapon showed the grime and wear of age except the blade itself.
“Literally,” McDermid smirked.
“Stow that shit, Marine,” Byers replied. The intensity of his words was unmistakable even sotto voce. “Let’s get this done.”
They cleared the tree line, and the sudden crunch of gravel made Miles wince. On flat ground in the face of danger, the sheer mass of the AA-12 turned from an impediment to a security blanket—except for the fact that no opposition appeared to confront them as they advanced into the camp.
Pete had poked the hornet’s nest. There should have been something, but zulu was nowhere in sight, nor were any of the so-called tentacles.
“Keep tight,” Byers muttered. “Swing left around the wreckage.”
Approaching from the north, the block wall of the building in the center of the camp was smooth and unbroken, though tongues of flame had kissed it here and there with black stripes of soot. The rusting, burnt-out frame of a fuel tanker sat on bare rims in the center of the generator wreckage. Based on the persistent evidence of the long-ago fire, he guessed it had been pretty close to full when Molly pulled off her diversion.
Housing trailers, tents, and the motor pool occupied the west side of the camp, and Miles breathed a sigh of relief that Byers had directed them elsewhere. Out in the open, at least, they could see what was coming at them—if it ever did.
“Where the hell are they?” Sandy whispered.
Miles shook his head. “Close. Keep your eyes open.”
The figure that lurched around the corner of the building shouldn’t have been able to see them. Its head held on for dear life by a strand of withered flesh no thicker than Miles’ thumb. In spite of that handicap, it raised its arms and increased speed.
Two steps later, lines of flame intersected on the zombie’s torso, splashing it from head to toe and saturating the parking lot around it with puddles of flaming gasoline. Ablaze, it jerked and twitched as though suffering a seizure, and Miles had a mental image of millions of miniature machines wilting and popping in the heat. After seeing the effectiveness of napalm and incendiaries in their testing over the past months, he’d fallen into a bit of a funk. How many more might have survived if they’d only known how effective it was? With every gunshot, they’d expended valuable resources and created noise to draw even more attention to themselves. In a way, it was fitting. Fire was mankind’s oldest weapon, and they were using it now to reclaim the world for their own.
The headless zulu crumpled to the ground. Through the smoke Miles could barely make out a long black line, wriggling as an unknown force drew it away from the fire. The blazing end of the thing glowed dully with heat before it retreated around the corner of the building. “Did anyone see—” he started to ask before Pete’s barked command over their earpieces stopped him in his tracks.
“Check six! Check six! Zulu in the tree line!”
Miles turned, and if the sudden presence was a surprise, it was at least something he was familiar with. This ragged troop of zulus showed the signs of long years—shredded clothing, exposed bone, and leprous scalps. If those signs prompted him to take the threat less seriously, the shafts of the spears each carried easily in one hand warned him to the actual threat.
He shouldered the AA-12 even as a single thought flashed through his head. Enhanced infected don’t usually look so rough. Are they learning to blend in with the others?
It had taken him plenty of practice, but he’d learned how to ride the shotgun’s trigger to keep its full-automatic cyclic rate down. The weapon had only two modes, safe and fire, and while a twenty-round burst of high-explosive shells might have made for an impressive sight, it would have put them all in danger as he fumbled to reload.
In this case, one shell was enough. It took his target in the upper torso, below where he’d intended, and blew the top half of the enhanced infected to pieces.
The fire of the other three shotgunners was just as effective, though he suspected that the hit that took a zulu in the crotch came courtesy of Sandy. But as the saying went—close counted with hand grenades.
The flamethrower men passed through the ragged line they’d formed, sweeping fire through the reduced horde. The underbrush caught, spreading to the trees and the gold and maroon leaves.
Oh, hell, Miles thought. If that spreads, there goes our fall back route.
Right in his ear, Burton screamed a high-pitched squeal that sounded far too high to come from a human throat. Reacting out of sheer instinct, Miles bent over and scrambled forward before trying to turn. When he did so, he had to fight to resist the urge to vomit.
A massive zulu held bloody … chunks … in either hand. One of those pieces was still screaming, even as blood and loops of intestine spilled from its torn-open abdomen.
“Alpha!” Pete screamed over the radio.
Someone else screamed, “Kill it!”
Miles held the trigger for too long, stitching three shells up and across the thing’s barrel chest. A small part of him had thought Pete’s description of a massive beast with fibrous cords of muscle bursting through exposed skin an exaggeration. The thing that discarded each half of Burton and strode forward was like something out of a nightmare. The FRAG-12 rounds armed themselves nine feet out of the barrel, and while the impacts had knocked the monster back on its heels, the shells hadn’t traveled far enough to explode. As far as Miles could tell, they hadn’t even pierced skin.
Lawrence shoved him to one side and jabbed the nozzle of his flamethrower forward. Even as he prayed that the fire would work, Miles’ stomach sank at the implications of sneak attacks in such close proximity.
They’re playing with us.
There was really no other way to look at it, was there? If the mix of attacks from the front and the rear weren’t a zulu rope-a-dope, it was the biggest damn coincidence Miles had seen since Z-Day.
The tongue of flame kissed the alpha. If anything, its reaction was more extreme than the umbilical zulu—it shook as though in the throes of a seizure. Most concerning was the fact that it turned and lunged in Lawrence’s direction, obviously aware that he was the source of the attack. The Marine flinched, and Miles howled as the flame from his flamethrower washed over his left arm. In spite of the wave of agony, he had the presence of mind to realize that burning gasoline was stuck to the heavy leather. He dropped both of his rifles and tore at the zipper as he twisted out of his backpack. He clenched his hands, pulling his Kevlar gloves out through the burning sleeve and tossing the blazing jacket aside. Grimacing at the angry red skin, already blistering, he’d bent down to grab his AA-12 when a hand seized Miles by the collar, yanking him back toward the burning tree line with inches to spare as the alpha swiped at the space the Marine had pulled him out of.
“Get your head out of your ass, kid!” Byers screamed. The sergeant braced his AA-12 against one hip and triggered a round into the alpha’s abdomen. The subdued thump of the explosion belied the impressive effect of mini-grenade blowing the thing’s torso open. Miles got a split-second look at a rib cage surrounded by a mass of writhing black much the consistency of thick mud before fresh tongues of flame reached out and bathed the beast in purifying fire.
The alpha collapsed to its knees. Unsure what to do, Miles took a quick look around. No more fresh arrivals from the rear were forthcoming—for the moment, the burning creature in front of them was the only threat.
“Pour it on!” Byers ordered. After a few tense moments, the pool of fire around the alpha spread into a circle nearly ten feet around, forcing the flamethrower men to cease fire and b
ack off. Miles could scarcely call the thing at the center of the inferno man-shaped. As it attempted to raise something that might have been an arm, chunks and blobs of matter fell away, joined on the ground shortly thereafter by scattered bits of bone. An indeterminate number of years after initial infection, the nanomachines had grown and spread to such an extent as to become literal puppet masters of a human skeleton. The SEAL, Janacek, had called them meat machines, Miles remembered, but this zulu had transcended mere flesh.
If we aren’t able to pull this off, I don’t know how we beat them. His hands shook as he retrieved his guns and bag, and he tried to tell himself that was just the pain of his injured arm.
“I’ve got movement on the opposite side of the clearing. Spear carriers headed your way,” Pete reported. “Engaging.”
“What are we doing, Sergeant?” Wood asked.
“We’re too exposed,” Byers said in a growl. “Kid, where’s the door to the building?”
Hatcher blinked in surprise at the abrupt attention, but he pointed toward the corner of the block building and said, “Other side, right there. Door’s broken.”
“Better than nothing,” Byers said. “Move out—keep it tight.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
October 18, 2026
Taum Sauk Mountain, eastern Missouri
Z-Day + 3,287
“I sure didn’t see all these stumbling freaks on the recon photos,” Pete growled. He slammed the bolt home and found another target to service. They were close enough to the camp that he was still scoring a good amount of hits in spite of the way the enhanced infected tended to randomly bob and weave.
The leading edge of the small horde filtered through the parked Humvees as the rear security element followed the rest of his Marines around the corner of the building and out of sight. He didn’t like not being able to watch over them, but it was what it was. Without the Orca, they were a little limited on high ground.
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