The Spears of Laconia

CHAPTER 1 FRANK

“You can’t win.”

He ignored the voice. It had become easier with time, and like everything else about his new existence — this thing he called life after death (Re-life?)—it was about balancing acceptance with resistance, trying to hold onto the past while not neglecting the present. Because the here and now was where the danger lurked; it was also here that the answer to the future was within his grasp.

“You must know that by now. After all you’ve seen, all you’ve learned.”

There was something odd about the voice these last few weeks, a guarded hesitation that hadn’t been there when it first spoke to him in the early days. It wasn’t fear — no, he wouldn’t go that far — but it didn’t sound nearly as certain as it once had been, either.

“She understood. Why did you think she came over? She opened the door, remember?”

Yes, he remembered. Kate had opened the door, dooming them. Almost.

Whatever happened to Kate?

Oh, that’s right. He had killed her, that night outside the gas station. How long ago now? He couldn’t remember at the moment, but it would come to him. It always did, eventually.

“Talk to me.”

It was growing annoyed, the warning tone of a parent cajoling an uncooperative child while at the same time letting him know that it was losing patience. It wanted him to respond, because that was how it would track him. It had taken him a long time to learn how to erect the barrier inside his mind. But he had adapted. He always did.

Letters. An acronym. SE…something.

Memories came and went, sometimes garbled, other times clear as the crystal blue of her eyes, the glint of the sun against her blonde hair.

It helped to think of her. To concentrate on the smoothness of her skin. He longed to touch her again, to press against and taste her lips…

“Whatever it takes,” he had said, “whatever happens, you won’t have to face another night alone.”

He’d said that to her, one of many unkept promises that haunted his nights and terrorized his days. He’d failed her then, but he could make up for it. He could save her; save everyone.

And all they had to do was find him.

Mabry.

He was the key. The beginning and the end. He was the voice in all their heads. In his head.

Mabry was the one constant. He was the eternal. Everywhere, and nowhere.

“I’ll find you,” Mabry said to him now inside his head. “You can’t run forever.”

He focused on the surrounding blackness, on the things that moved and thrived within the endless folds of darkness that he wouldn’t have been able to see before. They were out there, swarms of them, clear as day — even though he had forgotten what day looked like, or the warmth of the sun against his skin.

They had been on his trail for months now, but their pursuit had increased in intensity in just the last few weeks. It was as if Mabry knew what he was trying to do. Was that possible? Were there holes in his barrier that he hadn’t detected? Was Mabry burrowing around inside his mind this very second?

No. He couldn’t afford this right now, because doubt was the enemy. He had to forge ahead, follow the original plan, because there was no victory without a plan…Z?

It came from somewhere in the recesses of his mind, deep, deep down in that place where pieces of his past slumbered, waiting to be resurrected.

Something about plans. Letters. A through Z…

He shook the jumbled thoughts away. It would come to him later.

Back to the present. Back to the now.

He could smell them all the way up here, the stench of their existence carried upward by the breeze that washed across all the rooftops from the ocean beyond the city limits. He could almost taste it, the bitter salt water against the tip of his tongue, sending strange sensations (fear?) through every inch of his body.

Their dark shapes vanished and reappeared out of office buildings, stores, and apartments. They were little more than tiny dots, like insignificant ants against the moonlit night. He had higher ground and could glimpse the entire city from up here. Safe on his perch, though he knew very well he would never be entirely safe. None of them were, so long as he was out there.

Mabry.

He was the key. The everything and the nothing, the beginning and the end; at once nowhere, and everywhere…

A soft click as the man came out of the rooftop access door and moved across the gravel floor toward him. The attempt at stealth was laudable, but he might as well be dropping firecrackers with every footstep. That, and the aroma of medical ointment over old wounds was impossible to ignore.

The rustling of a thick jacket as the man lay down on his stomach next to him and peered off the edge of the rooftop with a pair of night-vision binoculars. Mist formed in front of his partly covered face with every word, the taste of beef jerky still lingering on his lips even though the man probably couldn’t smell it.

But he could smell it just fine, just as he could hear conversations multiple floors below or above him, or feel the rough or smooth texture of things without touching them. Everything was hyper-realized, all his senses razor sharp. They were the gifts that came with the curse, that made him more than what he was, though he would forego them all without hesitation if it meant he could be what he once was.

“Can you see them?” the man asked. “They were supposed to have arrived by now.”

“No,” he hissed.

He hated having to talk, hated the noise that came out with every single word. They were just another reminder of what he was. As a result, he tried to say as little as possible, which was difficult because communication with the man was necessary.

“Can you see that far?” the man asked.

“No.”

“I thought you had super everything. I guess laser beams are out of the question, huh?”

He didn’t bother to answer that one.

“You ever get cold?” the man asked.

“No.”

“I guess you wouldn’t. Being both hot and cold. How does that even work, anyway?”

“I don’t know.”

“You ever think about it?”

“No.”

It was a lie. He often thought about what the transformation had done to him, but it always ended in frustration. He knew that it did things to him at a cellular level, but the details were beyond his understanding. He was a grunt before, and he was one now. Maybe she would know. Maybe he could ask her when he finally saw her again.

The man adjusted his position, his clothes scratching against the rooftop. “Looks like a party down there. How many?”

“Too many.”

“How the hell do they keep finding us?”

“I don’t know.”

“You?”

“Maybe.”

“Or us?”

“Maybe…”

The man pushed himself up into a sitting position, then opened a pouch along his cargo pants and took out an almost empty bag of beef jerky. He pulled out a stick and chewed (too loud) on it for a moment.

The stink of preserved meat made his nostrils twitch and reminded him that he no longer yearned for food as he once had. There was enough blood (Mabry’s) flowing through him that he could survive for months, maybe even years. When he did thirst, it was easily satisfied with animal blood. Two cows in Louisiana, a pair of horses in Texas…

“You thought this through?” the man said after a while. “You’re not who you once were, you know. What’s to stop the Ranger from shooting first and listening to you never?”

“You’ll convince them.”

“I was afraid you’d say that.” A brief pause, with only the man’s soft breathing and calm heartbeat from under his clothes to fill the void. “Did you ever wonder that maybe it’s better for her — for all of them — if they stayed away from Texas?”

“She has to know…”

“So you keep saying, but she’s not the woman you remember.” Another pause. “I’m just saying, this reunion might not work out the way you hope.”

Another stick of jerky, followed by crunching and swallowing.

He looked down at the silhouetted forms racing back and forth below. They were free to roam and explore, to search every hole for him. But, like him, they would soon have to seek shelter, because the sun would be here.

How long had it been since he’d seen the sun? Months. It had been months, even though it felt like centuries.

“You miss it, don’t you?” the man asked.

“Yes.”

“You ever tempted to just say ‘Fuck it,’ and stepping into the light, so to speak?”

Tempted? Yes. It was worse in the early days, like an itch he couldn’t scratch, a siren’s call beckoning him to let it all go, to let her go. But he couldn’t. He had failed to keep his promises, but he could still save her, even if it meant prolonging this miserable existence.

“Whatever it takes,” he had said, “whatever happens, you won’t have to face another night alone.”

“No,” he hissed.

“I don’t believe you,” the man said.

“Believe what you want.”

“Gee, thanks, I’ll do that.”

Another click as the woman came out to join them. He had smelled her when she was still in the stairwell and heard her soft, careful footsteps from five floors down. Her heartbeat accelerated slightly under her winter clothing as she emerged into the open night, but he knew it wasn’t the cold air — it was the sight of him.

It was why he wore the trench coat when he was around them, with the hoodie covering most of his face, only his eyes peering out from under the frayed brim. It seemed to work with the man, but then the man was an odd one. Weeks later, and the woman was still trying to get used to being around him.

“Did they show up yet?” she whispered to the man. He didn’t know why she was whispering. Up here, the black eyes wouldn’t be able to hear them anyway.

“Don’t know,” the man said.

“He can’t see the ocean from here?”

“Apparently he can’t see that far.”

“Hunh.”

“What I said.”

“What about our other friends?”

“I don’t think they’re going anywhere anytime soon, but they’re definitely tracking us.”

“How?”

“Haven’t figured that part out yet.”

“Well, let me know when you do.”

“That might take a while.”

“Goes without saying.”

The man snorted. “Anything going on downstairs?”

“I didn’t hear anything. We locked all the doors, right?”

“I think so.”

“You think so?”

“I’m pretty sure we did.”

“You’re always so comforting, Keo.”

“I try.”

The woman leaned over the edge, her short blonde hair moving against the breeze. “Jesus, look at them. If they find us in here…”

“That’s it, positive thoughts,” the man said.

She sighed. “We should have made a run for the beach. They don’t like the water, right?”

“Definitely not.”

“We should have made a run for the beach,” she repeated.

“Lara and the Trident aren’t here yet. We’d just end up waiting for them down there anyway. At least here we have a lot of floors between us and them.”

The woman glanced over at him, brown eyes focusing as if she could make out his face behind the hoodie. “How many?” she asked.

“Too many,” he hissed.

“Can you be more specific?”

“No.”

“But you can see them down there.”

“Yes.”

“All of them?”

“Yes…”

The man chuckled. “Chatterbox, this guy.”

The man and woman had names, but it was easier to think of them as just the man and the woman. They were somewhere on the twentieth floor above him, their voices reaching down through the vibrations that traveled along the steel and concrete and glass of the building. Though he couldn’t hear every single word they spoke, he could hear just enough.

“…going to get us killed,” the woman was saying.

“Relax,” the man said.

“‘Relax’?” She might have laughed, but that kind of nuance was lost on its way down the stairwell. “We’re inside a building with a blue-eyed ghoul, Keo. And you want me to relax?”

“You don’t have to be here. Tobias—”

“Screw Tobias.”

“I thought you said there was nothing between the two of you?”

Silence. Then, two seconds later, the woman said, “You’re an asshole.”

The man laughed softly. “So that’s a no?”

“I told you, there was never anything between us.”

“All that time…”

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“All that time alone, looking for us. Did you ever…?”

“No.”

“I don’t believe you. Even with that ugly scar, there are still plenty of desperate women out there.”

“Ouch,” he said.

This time he was sure she did laugh. “No offense.”

“Oh sure, why should I take offense to that?”

The woman answered, but he had already gotten up and slipped out of the stairwell and into the darkened lobby before her words reached him. He sat inside the shadows, feeling at home among the forgotten relics of an old world.

A stubborn pool of moonlight managed to filter in through the glass walls across from him, the sidewalks and streets on the other side dull and gray. He wasn’t worried about being exposed, because the black eyes had no special ability or heightened senses. But the creatures did have eyes and some measure of intelligence, enough that they could recognize the disturbances in their surroundings.

Dead, not stupid, someone once called them.

Who had said that? He couldn’t remember, but it would come to him eventually. It always did, usually when he least expected it.

Flickers of movement as a dozen of the creatures emerged out of the darkness and moved up the sidewalk. He expected them to keep going past the building, because surely they hadn’t left any clues to their presence outside, had they? He was sure of it, but then one of the black eyes stopped and cocked its head. He realized it was just glaring at its own reflection in the glass wall.

He was relieved, until the skeletal thing moved forward and grabbed the handle of one of the twin glass doors and tried pulling it instead of continuing on its way. The door didn’t budge. Its black eyes looked confused for a moment, and then it tried pulling a few more times.

If it had stopped, that might have been the end of it, except the damn thing seemed suddenly determined to get inside. Its activity attracted the attention of the others, and a second — then a third — of the ghouls stopped and grabbed the other handle and began pulling at it, too.

But the doors held, just as he knew they would.

Two others clacked their way along the length of the glass wall and peered inside. He didn’t move or react, because he knew they couldn’t see him. Not through the darkness, with just the barest of moonlight to illuminate their search. One smashed a right arm that was little more than a stump into its section of the window, producing a dull thud and little else.

He watched the creatures give up and move on, one by one, until there were just two left behind, still fighting with the doors. They were gaunt things, almost like deformed children with pruned flesh. They abandoned the doors and moved along the walls, angling their bodies in an effort to spy on the darkened corners inside the lobby.

A sudden wave of sadness washed over him, and he wondered if he looked like these twisted and blackened remnants of what once was. Besides the blue eyes, what really made him stand out? There wasn’t very much. The trench coat was just a façade, a vain attempt to hold onto a lie.

“You’re not who you once were, you know,” the man had said earlier on the rooftop. “What’s to stop the Ranger from shooting first and listening to you never?”

The words stung because they were honest and true. He wasn’t the man he once was. He wasn’t a man at all.

He watched the creatures pressing themselves into the glass, smearing sections of it with thick, coagulated fluid that could be anything from blood to drool or pus. This was him now, and no amount of clothing would change that. How did he ever think he could convince her of anything? When they saw him, this was what they would see — a dark, blackened thing that had once been human, but was no longer.

“You’re not who you once were, you know…”

Of course he knew. He’d always known, but he had managed to delude himself anyway, told one lie after another until he believed it, because he wanted so badly to save her, to make up for all the failures of the past. Because Mabry had to be stopped, and he knew how—

It fell from the sky and splattered against the concrete walkway, the loud crunch audible even from inside the lobby. A wave of thick black blood sprayed a nearby section of the glass wall in the aftermath.

Before he could recognize what it was — a black-eyed ghoul falling from above and obliterating itself against the pavement — another, then another, then still another fell like raindrops. They smashed into the sidewalk and road one by one, covering more sections of the outside wall in blood and flesh and pulverized bone—

Ghouls. Falling. From above.

The loud, unmistakable crash of breaking glass, followed by gleaming shards plummeting outside the building.

No, no. They were inside the building. How did they get inside the building?

He raced along the length of the shadowed back wall and slipped into the stairwell, and went up. He was almost floating in the air, his bare feet barely touching the cold concrete steps. He once considered wearing shoes because that would have added to the façade, but shoes were cumbersome and he had come to rely on his speed. More than once, it had been the difference between life and (re)death.

He was rounding the third floor when—

Bang! A gunshot from above, coming from the twentieth floor.

The taste of silver drenched his tongue all the way down here. Silver bullets. Either the man or the woman had fired. It didn’t matter who, because they had just alerted the entire city to their location, and they wouldn’t have done that unless they absolutely had to.

Sixth floor…

A short, startled scream. The woman.

Eighth floor…

The pop-pop-pop of automatic rifle fire began blasting through the building, and his skin rippled from head to toe as more silver was exposed to air.

Tenth floor…

He pushed harder as the shots came faster and louder. Every inch of him wanted to flee in the other direction, the growing proximity to silver nauseating. The metal wouldn’t kill him unless it struck his brain, but it still hurt everywhere else. A lot.

He pushed on.

Fifteenth floor…

The man was shouting, telling the woman to run, run, run.

Sixteenth…

A constant stream of pop-pop-pop now. So much silver that he wanted to retch just to get it out of his system, but he couldn’t remember how.

Twentieth!

A loud bang! as the stairwell door flew open and the woman stumbled into it back-first, fire spitting back into the floor from the barrel of her rifle. She heard him, spun around, the brown of her eyes widening—

Recognition flashed across her face, and she spun back to the open doorway and continued firing into it. “Hurry up!” she shouted. “It’s here!”

“Fuck!” the man said as he stumbled into the stairwell, firing his entire magazine into the floor at full-auto. The man spun around, saw him, and shouted, “We’re fucked, pal!”

“Go,” he hissed.

“Go where?”

“Down.”

“Down?”

“Down!” he shouted, grabbing the man by the jacket collar and jerking him down the steps. It took all of his self-control not to throw the man like a sack of useless flesh, because it would have been so, so easy.

The woman didn’t need any encouragement; she raced down the steps, and they locked eyes for half a heartbeat as she passed him.

“Go,” he hissed.

She went, reloading from a pouch around her waist as she did so.

“Come on!” the man shouted from below.

“Go!” he hissed.

The man gave him a confused look.

“We’ll meet again!” he shouted.

The man might have nodded, but by then he had turned around to face the open door and the twentieth floor beyond.

They had broken through the windows — or, at least, the ones who had survived the climb up the side of the buildings. How many others hadn’t made it up and were still falling, splattering one by one against the sidewalks below? The survivors were now crawling over their dead and toward him.

“There you are,” the familiar voice said inside his head.

He grabbed the first black-eyed ghoul that reached him around the neck and smashed it into the wall, its frail bones crumbling under its skin like twigs. He felt no satisfaction in hearing the crack of its limbs, the snap of its neck. There might have even been some strange surge of sadness, but he passed that off to Mabry invading his mind, trying to slow him down with his words.

“I told you I’d find you again.”

He used the flopping creature as a weapon, hitting one, two, three more of the monsters as he pushed into the floor, leaving the stairwell behind. The taste of silver lingering in the air — still embedded in the twisted bodies of dead ghouls on the floor — threatened to overwhelm him, but he thought of the alternative and kept going.

“There is no safety. No sanctuary.”

He waded through the throng of flesh and bone and squealing things, striking and pushing and punching and kicking what he could. They were like children, grabbing at his legs and trying to cling to his arms. Bony fingers clutched at his elbows and knees and snaked around his throat in an attempt to impede his progress.

“Nowhere that I can’t find you again and again and again.”

They had stopped trying to reach the stairwell behind him, their pursuit of the man and woman forgotten because he was their singular purpose, their goal. Mabry’s voice rushed through his head as it did theirs, because his blood flowed through all their veins. What they saw, he saw. What he commanded, they did.

“Embrace what you are. What you’ve become.”

He grabbed another one by the throat and began using it as a battering ram. He smashed skull into skull, leaping over grasping arms, and snapped limbs as he landed. A chest caved under him and covered him in black liquid from head to toe. His vision began to darken as fluids that weren’t his own splashed his eyes.

“You have so much potential. We could do so much together in the years to come…”

Bony fingers continued scraping against the brick and mortar outside the building, signaling that more of them were coming. Too many. Always too many. Hands appeared out of the darkness and grappled onto the windowsills, pulling up rail-thin creatures with accusing black eyes.

“The decades to come…”

Blood gushed around him, splattering every part of his moving form in thick chunks. Theirs. His. He couldn’t tell the difference anymore.

“…the centuries…”

His vision had all but disappeared, forcing him to glimpse the far wall across the floor through a black fog that was quickly darkening further and further still.

“You can’t save her. You can barely save yourself.”

He wanted to give in, to let Mabry’s voice wash over him. Every ounce of his being longed to embrace the everything, and the nothing. It would be so easy; all he had to do was stop moving, stop snapping the necks of the weak things pushing against him. All he had to do was stop punching his fists through their skulls and caving in their already shrunken chests. They screamed soundless words as he tossed them aside and kicked them across the room.

“Give in,” Mabry said, his voice soothing, comforting.

And still they came, an unrelenting tide of shriveled dark flesh and dead black eyes. They filled the floor, scrambling over cubicles, the stampede of bare feet tap-tap-tapping against the bloodied tiles.

“Come home.”

He dropped the shattered bones he’d been using as weapons and leaped. Outstretched fingers brushed against his legs and arms, every one of them inches from finding purchase, just before he smashed into the top half of one of the windows and burst out into the night air.

The kiss of the wind, cool against his flesh, made him gasp with surprise.

It had been a while since he actually felt the weather; it was always a constant balance of cold and heat, the incongruity fighting for dominance over him. Inside him. Outside him. Everywhere. It was easier not to feel at all.

But it was different this time. Tonight. Because he was flying, and the building across the street appeared, rushing toward him in a blur.

How far?

Close.

How did it get so close?

Then a figure flickered against a long stretch of glass curtain wall, a bright pool of moonlight peeking out from behind the clouds above him at last, highlighting a bony creature of black skin and gleaming blue eyes, the dirty and torn fabrics of a faded brown trench coat fluttering behind it like some kind of cape.

For a second — just a split second — he remembered how to smile, before shattering glass filled his eardrums and pain stabbed through him like a thousand spears.

Pain. Overwhelming, glorious pain.

“Pain lets you know you’re still alive,” someone had once said.

He couldn’t remember who had said it, but it would come to him eventually, like it always did.

CHAPTER 2 GABY

It was pitch dark and she could barely make out Nate’s outline on the bench next to her, though she could hear his soft breathing just fine. And there was his scent, which she had become familiar with over the last few weeks. It would have almost been romantic if they weren’t squeezed into the back of a van parked out in the open along a curb in a Texas town that was, at this very moment, infested with ghouls.

Across from them Danny was whispering, small clouds forming around his outline with every word.

“…he stops at a Wallbys pharmacy and runs up to the counter and says, out of breath, ‘Mister, mister, you got any condoms?’ The pharmacist smiles knowingly and grabs a pack and rings it up. ‘Who’s the lucky girl?’ he asks. ‘Girl?’ the guy says. ‘There’s no girl.’ The pharmacist looks confused, then realizes, ‘Ah! It’s the twenty-first century!’ ‘Lucky guy, I mean,’ the pharmacist corrects himself. To which the guy flashes an embarrassed grin and says, ‘It’s just me, I’m afraid.’ ‘But what do you need the condoms for, then?’ the pharmacist asks. ‘Well, I believe in safe sex,’ the guy answers.”

“I don’t get it,” Nate whispered.

“Because he believes in safe sex,” Danny said.

“I still don’t get it.”

“No?”

Nate shook his head. Or, at least, Gaby saw the shape of his head moving slightly left then right as he did his very best to move as little as possible.

Danny looked over at her, blue eyes barely visible in the suffocating darkness. “You get it?”

Gaby smiled back at him. “I got it.”

“That’s my girl. What say we ditch this buzzkill? He’s really bringing me down.”

“He’ll come around.”

“Yeah, I’ll come around,” Nate said. Then, softly, “As soon as you get funnier.”

“I heard that,” Danny said.

“You were supposed to.”

Nate’s head was turned in her direction, and they exchanged a smile. They were close enough that she was reasonably certain he could see her response. Of course, it was so dark in the back of the van with the grime covering up the front windshield to their right and the two smaller back windows behind them, that it was entirely possible she was wrong. It didn’t help that all three of them had taken up positions in the darkest parts of the vehicle.

A van. They were riding out the night in a van. She would have preferred a stronger hideout. Anything, in fact, but a vehicle in the middle of an open street. Not that they’d had any choice. Fleeing Hellion with daylight running out hadn’t helped; neither had all the movements inside the buildings they’d checked. It seemed as if there was a ghoul inside every single one of them.

So it was a van or nothing. She just hoped it was enough to avoid—

Whump! as something landed on the rooftop above her. That was quickly followed by the tap-tap of bare feet moving from the back of the van toward the front. Slowly, as if it had all the time (night) in the world.

Gaby slowly — oh so slowly — extended one finger and flicked off the safety on the M4 rifle in front of her. The soft click! sounded so much louder inside the close confines of the vehicle, though she passed that off as her imagination playing tricks with her.

Probably.

She slipped her left hand around the pistol grip underneath the carbine’s barrel and tightened it, feeling the leather fingerless gloves constricting against the cold object. Next to her, just a few inches down the bench, Nate’s breathing picked up slightly. Not a lot, but enough that she noticed. She couldn’t tell what Danny was doing across from them, but his head looked slightly tilted up toward the ceiling, so he had heard the creature landing and moving around up there as well.

There was a clicking sound in her right ear, followed by Danny’s voice, whispering through the earbud connected to the radio clipped to her hip. “Just one. We’ll sit still as mice and let them pass us by. No muss, no fuss, you can keep your virgin daughters, Gus.”

She uncurled her fingers from around the pistol grip and moved it a bit to the left, found the Push-To-Talk switch, and clicked it with as much deliberate speed as she could muster. “Roger that.”

She glanced over at one of the two back windows — one-by-one foot glass panes covered in a thick film of dirt and time and the elements. Without anything brighter than the moon outside, there was no chance of seeing out, and vice versa. She flexed her fingers to keep the blood circulating, because the last thing she needed right now was to go numb—

Whump! as the creature leaped off the roof and there was just the silence again.

Close one.

They waited to hear more sounds of ghouls outside. The creatures traveled in groups, and where there was one, there were usually more. Sometimes a lot more.

One minute became two, then three…

…five…

Click, then Danny’s voice in her right ear. “Well, that was a close one. Now, as I was saying, why don’t we dump the Natester here? He’s just dragging us down, what with his inability to understand a perfectly serviceable joke and that stupid haircut.”

“Hey,” Nate said.

“No thanks, I already ate,” Danny said. “Also, I’m not a horse, though I’ve been confused with an ass once or twice…”

Wilden, Texas, was 240 square miles of unincorporated land and sat peacefully under the morning sun. To look at it from a distance, as they had while rushing by it on State Highway 105, thankful to just be alive after the mess in Hellion, she hadn’t thought there was anything worth salvaging. The hour or so they had spent looking had proven her correct. Not that they’d actually gone into most of the buildings; there were plenty of signs that they were occupied, and had been for the better part of a year.

The town was dead in more ways than one, but there was nothing wrong with the embracing warmth of morning. She spent a moment basking in the rays of sunlight, thankful to be in Texas. The state was never known for its cold winters, but the temperature dropped enough at night that she was glad for the extra thermal clothing they had on under their vests, and there was enough of a constant breeze in the daylight that she remained comfortable without having to add or remove layers.

Last night’s impromptu refuge was parked on the curb of FM 163, a long stretch of two-lane road (with a very generous middle) flanked by the occasional houses, and surrounded by vast farmland. In another few years, the grass would overtake the man-made structures and there wouldn’t be much of Wilden left for passersby to see. In time this place would be forgotten, and maybe them with it.

That’s it, happy thoughts in the morning. Way to go, girl.

The van creaked up and down behind her as Danny climbed out. He stretched, making way too much noise, then rubbed his eyes before taking a long drink of water from a refilled bottle.

“Are we there yet?” he asked.

Gaby pulled a map out of one of the pockets along her stripped-down assault vest and held it up to the sunlight. “We should be there within the day. You said the road gets bumpy when we’re closer?”

“Sure, bumpy, as long as your definition of ‘bumpy’ is ‘potholes from hell.’ Then yup, it definitely gets a little bumpy.”

“I guess we should add better suspension to the list of things to look out for,” Nate said, appearing from the front of the van. The sight of his absurd Mohawk never failed to make her smile, and a part of her thought that was why he insisted on keeping it.

Nate wore the same rig as Danny and her — vest over long-sleeve thermal clothing, loose cargo pants to hold more than just the essentials, and all-purpose boots. They had brought along pump-action shotguns to complement their M4s, with the rest of their load devoted to ammo, though they had less now than when they had started off. She hoped they wouldn’t need the remaining rounds, but someone once told her to always hope for the best and prepare for the worst, a mantra she’d found immensely useful these days.

Danny reached back into the van, pulled out his tactical pack, and swung it on. “Sounds about right. Start looking around for Grave Digger, kids.”

“Grave Digger?” Gaby said.

“The monster truck?”

She shook her head.

“It’s famous,” Danny said. “Like, world famous and shit. It crushes cars and opponents’ spirits. Like me.”

Gaby and Nate exchanged a blank look.

“Ugh, kids,” Danny grunted. “Get off my lawn.”

“How much of the sweet stuff we got left, kid?” Danny asked as he climbed out of the Dodge.

He had spent the last ten or so minutes inside, talking on the ham radio with the Trident, letting them know the three of them were still in one piece and that the “expedition,” as Lara called it, was still on track.

Gaby stood up in the truck bed, where she had been counting the remaining red fuel cans hidden underneath a heavy tarp. “Six left, five gallons per. So thirty in all. Should get us to Starch, but I don’t know about getting back.” She made a face. “Your math was off, Danny. We spent way too much fuel getting just this far.”

“Miss Candy always did say I sucked at math. It probably didn’t help we got bogged down in Hell Town.”

“Hellion.”

“Same difference.”

“So how are we getting back?”

“We’ll find a way. Ranger motto: ‘Always be prepared.’”

“Isn’t that the Boy Scouts’ motto?”

“That’s just what we let them think.” Danny put his hands on his hips and glanced around at their surroundings. “Could have definitely picked a better place. This must be what they mean when they say two-horse town. Minus the horses.”

“Could be worse.”

“How’s that?”

“We could be dead.”

“Sure, there’s that.”

She smirked. “What did Lara say?”

“They had to detour south temporarily, but they’ll be back in time to pick us up when we’re ready. In the meantime, we’re to proceed as planned.”

“Why are they heading south?”

“Keo.”

She smiled. “Good to know he’s still kicking around out there.”

“The guy’s like a cockroach. When you least expect it, he pops up and poops on your food.”

“Ugh. Thanks for the visual.”

“You’re welcome.”

“How’s everyone else?”

“They’re on a luxury yacht, kid. Don’t waste your time worrying about them. Spend it worrying about me. And your boyfriend with the funky haircut.”

She jumped down from the Dodge and looked around at the vehicles inside the parking lot of Wilden Middle School. Mostly trucks, and they had been sitting in the sun for the last year. All the evidence pointed to the town’s residents converging here when The Purge hit — not that it had saved them. Even though they hadn’t gone into the building, Gaby already knew what they would find if they did.

Leaving the Dodge here, half a mile from the van where they had spent the night, was a calculated move. Mixed in with the old cars it was easy to miss, unless the ghouls spent a lot of time counting vehicles. Could they even count? The creatures weren’t stupid or mindless; far from it, even if they appeared to be at times — especially when there were so many of them that they looked like a singular entity coming at you. There was a basic, almost primal intelligence to them that had allowed them to survive and thrive. They were “dead, not stupid,” as Will liked to say. Not stupid, no, but they could be fooled.

“Where’d your boyfriend run off to?” Danny asked.

“Looking for our ride.”

“Still?”

“It’s only been thirty minutes, Danny.”

“Feels like thirty-one.”

“What about these vehicles?”

Danny shook his head, then pointed. “That one’s too small, that one’s too big, and that one’s way too pink. Why would you paint your car pink in Hickstown, USA?”

“To be daring?”

“Stupid is more like it.”

She sighed. “We should have stayed clear of Hellion, Danny. Then the truck would still be in one piece and we wouldn’t need to look for a replacement.”

“We should have done a lot of things. For instance, dating a guy without a Mohawk. Personally, that would have been at the top of my list.”

“Nate has his moments.”

“Is one of them the Mohawk?”

“One of many,” she smiled.

Her (and Danny’s) right ear clicked, and they heard Nate’s voice. “Found one.”

“Speak of the devil, and he shall radio in,” Danny said.

Gaby ignored him and pressed her Push-to-Talk switch, said into her throat mic, “Where are you?”

“About a mile from your spot,” Nate said. “Past the VFW building. Got a couple of hogs here, too, in case you’re interested.”

“Yum,” Danny said.

“Not those kinds of hogs. Motorcycles.”

“Well, that’s disappointing.”

“What’s the replacement truck look like?” Gaby asked.

“Burnt orange, large tires, and a gun rack in the back,” Nate said.

“I think I’m in love,” Danny said. “Stay there; we’ll come to you.”

“Roger that.”

Danny grinned wryly at her. “I guess he’s not useless, after all.”

“Told you.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

She circled around the truck, passing a pair of bullet holes in the side, a broken taillight, and craters in the tailgate that hadn’t been there when they had found the Dodge back at Port Arthur. All of the damage had occurred as they passed a town called Hellion about thirty miles down the state highway.

Definitely should have steered clear of the place. Even the name sounds like trouble.

She tried to think of the bright side — they had made it out of there alive, for one — as she climbed into the driver seat, the door creaking badly as she pulled it closed. Danny slid in next to her, his boots crunching broken glass on the floor. Most of those shards came from his shattered door window, though plenty had fallen loose from the spiderwebbed front windshield.

Gaby turned the key and the ten-year-old Dodge struggled to turn over, and for a brief moment she envisioned the two of them carrying the six remaining five-gallon cans over to Nate’s position. And of course they’d have to take the car battery with them. All of that, while walking under the morning sun—

Vroom! as the car finally turned over.

“We’re on our way now,” Danny said, his voice echoing inside her ear and inside the cab. “You said burnt orange?”

“Yup,” Nate answered. “My dad had something like it back in Louisiana. Except his was white.”

“That’s all very fascinating, Natepoleon, but I didn’t ask for your life story,” Danny said.

“Cut him a break, Danny,” Gaby said.

“Oh, relax. I’m just busting his balls so you can ride in and massage them for him.”

“Ugh,” she said.

“Yeah, I think I just threw up a little bit in my mouth, too,” Danny sighed.

Nate had found a Ford F-150 truck in the parking lot of a feed store further up FM 163. The morning was crisp and cool enough that Gaby was glad she couldn’t smell whatever was being stored in a pair of red barns behind the main building. If there was anything in there besides ghouls, anyway.

The truck still looked relatively new and Nate was sitting on the hood, shotgun slung over his back and M4 in his lap, waiting for them. He was beaming as she pulled off the road, turned around, and then backed up until she was parked parallel to the Ford.

“What do you think?” Nate asked, hopping down.

“Not bad, for an idiot with a Mohawk,” Danny said.

“Lay off the hair. Chicks dig it.” He smiled at her. “Right?”

“Eh,” Gaby said, climbing into the back of their truck.

Danny began transporting their equipment from the Dodge over to the Ford, including switching the battery over, while she lowered one of the gas cans down to Nate, who poured it into the F-150’s gas tank. It took thirty minutes before they could pile into the new truck, ready to leave Wilden behind.

Gaby settled in behind the wheel and adjusted her driver-side mirror, then rolled down the window. She put the car in gear and maneuvered out of the parking lot and back onto the road, heading west. Danny occupied the front passenger seat, while Nate sat in the back with their supplies. They had brought enough to get to Starch and back, and a little bit more just in case they ran into trouble.

Another one of your lessons, Will. ‘Just in case.’

“Starch?” she asked.

“Starch,” Danny nodded.

He unfolded a map in his lap, though she didn’t know why. From here, it was as simple as locating the state highway and driving until they ran into US 59, after which it was a straight shot up to Starch. She had eyeballed her own map so many times she was sure she could reach their destination by memory.

“Are we still sure it’s going to be there when we show up?” Nate asked from the backseat.

“It’s an underground bunker,” Danny said. “It’s not going to dig itself up and fly off.”

“I’m more concerned about what’s inside it. Who’s to say someone else didn’t stumble across it after you left? It’s been, what, a year since you guys abandoned it?”

“Give or take.”

“Yeah, so, what if all of this is for nothing?”

Danny folded the map back up and put it away. “Then you’ve just been on the best field trip of your life. You’re welcome.”

Nate grunted, and Gaby smiled.

“Should have brought marshmallows,” Nate said.

“That’s the spirit,” Danny said. He leaned around in his seat and smiled back at Nate. “Wanna hear a joke?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Old man is sitting in the park one day,” Danny said, as if Nate hadn’t said anything, “waiting for someone to play chess with him. This super hot woman in a red dress walks by and the old coot shouts at her, ‘Hey, hot thing, you wanna play chess?’ The woman stops and looks at him, puts her hands on her hips, and says—”

Danny stopped in mid-sentence.

“What?” Nate said. “What did the woman say?”

“Shhh,” Danny said, holding up his hand.

Nate went quiet.

“Stop the car,” Danny snapped.

Gaby stepped on the brake, but Danny had already unbuckled his seat belt and jumped out of the F-150 before she had come to a complete stop. She glanced back at Nate and saw him looking after Danny’s figure as he raced from the front to the back.

Nate turned back to her. “What the hell?”

She shook her head and threw open her car door, Nate doing the same behind her. She hadn’t taken a complete step out of the truck when she heard it. Or maybe she felt it first. It could have very well been both simultaneously.

The country road actually seemed to be vibrating as it appeared, and it was impossible to miss its gray belly against the clear morning sky.

A plane.

Not just any plane, but a warplane.

It blasted overhead, the sound unlike anything she remembered — until she realized it had been almost a year since she’d seen a plane in the sky, much less been close enough that her teeth chattered slightly as it went by. By the time she had turned her head, it was already behind her and getting smaller. If the pilot had seen her or Nate, or Danny at the back of the F-150, it hadn’t shown it by stopping or turning.

She unslung her rifle on instinct and flicked off the safety, belatedly realizing how dumb the move was. What exactly did she think she was going to do against that? Shoot it?

The plane was fast, but her perception of its initial speed was off because it had been such a long time since she had seen planes in the air. All this time, they had wondered what had happened to the U.S. Air Force. Or the Army. Hell, all those weeks on the ocean without a single sign of the U.S. Navy had been disheartening for everyone, so much so that they simply stopped talking about it one day because the conversation always became so depressing.

And she was definitely looking at some kind of military plane. Even a civilian like her, who had never been anywhere close to a warplane, could make out the very distinctive shapes of bombs under the craft’s fixed wings. Or were those missiles of some type?

“Shit,” Nate said. “Is that what I think it is?”

“Warthog,” Danny said, walking back to them.

“I’ve never seen one of those live before.”

“Warthog?” Gaby said.

“A-10 Thunderbolt,” Danny said. “I haven’t seen one since Afghanistan. Word of advice: If you hear something that sounds like Godzilla blowing a massive fart, run and hide while you still can, though the chances are it’s already too late.”

The plane had kept going until she could barely make out its shape in the distance. Gaby wasn’t entirely sure what she was feeling at the moment. Maybe elation at the sight of the aircraft, quickly followed by massive disappointment that it had kept going as if she, Nate, and Danny didn’t exist at all.

“You think it saw us?” she asked.

“Definitely,” Danny said. “We’re the only things moving down here for miles. The pilot’d have to be blind not to see us, and last time I checked, Uncle Sam doesn’t let blind folks fly his warplanes.”

“Uncle Sam,” Nate said, looking at Danny. “You don’t think…?”

“That the U.S. government’s back in play?” Danny shrugged. “I’ll be honest with you kids. I don’t know if I want that to be true or not.”

“Why not?” Gaby asked.

“Because it’s been a year since everything went tits up, and the Uncle Sam that shows up now isn’t going to be the one I remembered. Or necessarily want.”

Gaby pulled out her map and laid it on the truck’s warm hood, the engine still churning underneath the paper. She glanced down at it, then in the direction the plane had gone.

“Where’s it headed?” Nate asked. “Starch?”

“If it keeps going in that direction and turns right,” Gaby said. “But why would it be headed there? No one knows we’re out here.” She looked back at Danny. “Right?”

He nodded. “Last time I checked.”

“So what’s it doing out here?” Nate asked, looking in the direction of the plane.

Danny opened his mouth to answer, but he hadn’t gotten a word out when they heard something that sounded like a mechanical roar in the distance. It was a long string of noises, so distinctive and loud that even though it had clearly originated miles away, they could still hear it as if it were right in front of them.

Brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt!

“Danny,” Gaby said, breathless. “What the hell is that?”

“The Warthog,” Danny said, looking off into the distance. “That thing I said about Godzilla farting? That wasn’t a joke. That’s it right there. That’s the sound of an A-10 raining death and destruction with 30mm Gatling guns.”

The pavement under her trembled as another long string of brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt! filled the sky, like the bellowing of a great beast that had finally awakened after a long slumber.

CHAPTER 3 LARA

“Lara.”

Will was back. Finally. After all the days and weeks of fearing the worst and almost giving up, he was finally here and calling her name, just as she knew he would if she waited long enough. It was all about faith, after all; not so much in things working out, but in Will keeping his promise because she knew he would if there was even an ounce of strength left in his body.

Thank God you’re back. You had me worried there for a moment.

“Lara, you there?”

No. It wasn’t Will. It was familiar, but it wasn’t Will.

She opened her eyes and blinked against the bright sunlight pouring through an open window. She had rolled into the rays’ path, somehow moving from one side of the bed to the other during the night without realizing it.

“Lara.”

She glanced at the two-way portable radio sitting atop the nightstand.

“Lara,” Blaine’s familiar gruff voice said through the radio. “You awake yet? There’s something you need to see.”

She leaned over, picking up the radio and pressing the transmit lever. “What is it?”

“It’s a body.”

“Did you say a body?”

“Yeah. Showed up along with this morning’s currents.”

“I’ll be right there.”

She threw the covers off and stumbled out of bed with the radio in one hand. A cool breeze from the window kept her from (mostly) having to smell yesterday’s clothing, still clinging to her. Falling asleep fully dressed was nothing new; if anyone ever noticed, no one said anything.

“Has Keo made contact yet?” she said into the radio while standing between the bed and the small bathroom on the other side of the captain’s cabin.

“Haven’t heard a peep from him since yesterday,” Blaine said. “Bad sign?”

“It’s still early.”

In the bathroom, she splashed her face with cold water from the sink, then gave herself a quick glance in the mirror. Puffy eyes. Dry hair. Pale and slightly cracked lips to complement dangerously tanned skin. Even the blue of her eyes looked duller than usual.

The boat was quiet around her, like it always was early in the morning. Even more so these days with Danny, Gaby, and Nate gone.

Because I sent them out there. Would you have done the same thing, Will?

She wiped her face with a towel and left the cabin. She found Blaine at his post inside the bridge, standing behind the helm even though the Trident was anchored in place.

Lara shivered a bit despite her thermal clothing, the December air ventilating from the open sky roof much chillier than the breeze inside her cabin. Fortunately there was always plenty of sun up here in this part of the boat. Blaine, who practically lived on the Upper Deck these days, didn’t seem to mind or even feel the lower temperature.

“Showed up a few hours ago,” Blaine said. “I wasn’t sure what it was at first, but the waves kept bringing it closer.”

Lara picked up a pair of binoculars from the dashboard and peered through it. She had to take a couple of steps to one side to see past the holes that dotted the windshield, the result of stray buckshot. One of these days they’d get around to replacing the glass, but that day was still far off.

“See it?” Blaine asked.

It was hard to miss even from a distance, because it was the only black thing in the clear blue Gulf of Mexico waters for miles around. The body was wearing some kind of black uniform. Now where had she seen that before?

“Collaborator?” she asked. “I can’t make out the pattern of the uniform from here.”

“Could be.”

“Danny said the ones in Texas wear black. That looks black to me.” She lowered the binoculars. “How far are we from the coastline?”

“Still twenty miles out. But it didn’t come from Sunport.”

“Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure. It’s been steadily drifting westward — from the east.”

“Farther out to sea?”

“Uh huh.”

“Could be part of a long-range boat patrol. Maybe it capsized. What was the weather like last night?”

“Like this morning, but just a bit windier.” He paused for a moment, maybe replaying last night’s conditions in his head to be sure. “Even if Mother Nature did that, it doesn’t explain what it’s doing this far out.”

Blaine’s voice was calm, as if seeing a uniformed body floating all the way out here, with no obvious point of origin, happened every day. It didn’t, but after all she—they—had been through, this wasn’t even at the top of their WTF list.

She watched the corpse drift nearer, completely at the mercy of the waves that kept it afloat. If the Trident hadn’t been anchored, it might have washed right past them. It certainly would have last night in the dark. If she had learned one thing since being out here, it was that the vastness of the ocean was not to be underestimated.

“If there was a collaborator boat out here last night, they might have been communicating through the radio,” she said. “Did you hear anything?”

“Not a peep.”

“You were up here all night?”

“Maddie relieved me after midnight.”

She stared at the blackened body in silence for a moment, its presence triggering alarm bells. They had done everything possible to avoid running across civilization since Song Island, opting instead to keep their heads down. Sending Danny, Gaby, and Nate back out there hadn’t been easy. It had cost her a lot of sleepless nights, and she wasn’t the only one suffering.

“Speaking of the radio,” Blaine said, “not a peep from the expedition yet.”

She glanced down at her watch: 7:45 A.M. “They’ll radio in when they’re awake.”

“You think they’re still asleep?”

“Time works differently out there.” She unclipped her radio and pressed the transmit lever. “Maddie.”

“What’s up?” Maddie answered.

“You see it?”

“Hard to miss. That’s a uniform, right?”

“Looks like it. Grab Benny and bring it in.”

“Sweet,” Maddie said. “A can of SPAM for breakfast, and I get to fish a body out of the water. Best morning evah.”

Lara stood at the back of the Lower Deck, bracing against the bite of a hard wind and trying not to catch the cold that Elise and Vera had come down with a few days ago, a condition that kept the girls mostly confined to their rooms on the Main Deck. She watched Maddie deftly maneuver the inflatable boat toward them, with Benny sitting at the stern and the body they had fished out of the water just a black, indistinguishable lump around his legs. The tender was nineteen feet long, and it bounced against the active waves.

“Ah, the smell of rotting corpses in the morning,” a voice said. “Now this is the life.”

“Don’t exaggerate; it’s just one corpse,” Lara said.

“Po-tay-to, po-tah-to,” Carly said, walking up next to her.

Her friend shaded her eyes and peered at the approaching boat. Carly’s hair had turned a darker shade of red since they had begun living on the yacht, and, like everyone else, she had developed a noticeable tan.

“By the way, when was the last time you changed clothes?” Carly asked.

Lara sighed. “Don’t start with me.”

“I’m just saying. As our fearless leader, you should at least comport yourself in a more scent-friendly manner.”

“‘Comport’?”

“What, didn’t I use it correctly?”

“Eh,” she shrugged.

“Give me a break; I didn’t have any fancy educumacallit,” Carly said. Then, “Speaking of illiterate ne’er-do-wells, when are we picking up Keo?”

Lara smiled. “He hasn’t radioed in yet.”

“That’s not good.”

“That seems to be the consensus.”

“But you don’t think so?”

“I don’t want to jump to conclusions. He said they had a good place to stay last night. He could have just run into some trouble making his way to the beach this morning. Maybe a dead battery or something minor like that. The small things have a way of ballooning into big deals these days.”

“I guess he deserves the benefit of the doubt, being that he sort of saved our bacon a few times and all.”

“He said he’s been taking a lot of precautions since Galveston.”

“Undead trouble?”

“Them, too.”

“That’s K-pop for ya. Guy knows how to get himself into trouble, doesn’t he?”

“He’s not the only one.”

She owed Keo. They all did, but her in particular. In the first few weeks after Song Island, there were times when she hadn’t thought she would be able to keep it together, keep everyone together. Danny’s condition, Will’s absence, and the chaos of the gun battle had all made her doubt every decision she made. If Keo hadn’t been there…

You would have liked him, Will.

“You think it’s a good idea bringing it onboard?” Carly asked, squinting her eyes at the tender as it drew closer to the Trident’s aft. “What if it has diseases or something? The kids are already sick.”

“We’ll keep it away from the others, find out what we can, then toss it back into the ocean when we’re done.”

“Tough boat,” Carly chuckled. Then, turning around, “You kids have fun. I’m going to the bridge to wait for Danny to call in.”

“That’s a shark,” Zoe said, pointing at what was left of the man’s right leg — a stump that ended at the knee. “The missing fingers are fish nibbles. And these two—” she pointed first at the man’s cheek, then his neck “—are your department.”

“Gunshot wounds,” Lara said, looking down at the two small holes barely visible against the rest of the man’s bloated flesh, which was pretty much every part of him that wasn’t covered up by clothing.

The man wore some kind of urban assault vest, and water still drained from his empty ammo pouches long after they brought him on deck. A tactical gun belt with an empty holster sagged against his waist and thigh, the Velcro starting to lose its effectiveness after being drowned in the ocean for so long. There were two hollow slits where his eyes used to be, though he still had most of his left ear and the bridge part of his nose. There was a knee guard on his remaining leg and his black cargo pants were shredded, the tears revealing glistening pale skin on the other side.

“He’s not dressed like a collaborator,” Maddie said. “No patches or name tags.”

“Looks like a commando or something,” Benny said.

Maddie and Benny had deposited the body on the slick swimming pool area at the back of the yacht. Zoe was crouched next to it now, holding a rag against her mouth and nose. Lara wished she had been that forward thinking. The body was bloated and had been in the water long enough that the face was deformed and fleshy and looked as if it would melt off if she so much as touched it. Zoe did all of her prodding with a pair of surgical gloves.

“How long do you think it’s been in the water, doc?” Maddie asked.

Zoe stood up, pulled the rag back, and took a breath of fresh air. “Hard to tell. The cold water probably kept it together longer than normal, and there’s still gas in the body, which resulted in floating, so if I had to guess…” She thought about it for a moment. “Anywhere from a few days to a week?”

“Why didn’t the sharks finish it off?” Benny asked.

“Contrary to what you see on TV, humans aren’t very high on a shark’s menu. There are a lot more manageable and easier-to-digest prey in the ocean. Imagine trying to eat a whole cow when there are burgers all around you.”

“Which still leaves us with a lot of questions,” Maddie said. “What happened to the poor sap, who was he, and where did he come from?”

“Well, Sunport’s the closest city,” Benny said.

“It didn’t come from Sunport,” Maddie said. “Blaine said it was moving with the currents from farther out.”

“It couldn’t have come from very far,” Zoe said. “When he was shot, he sank, then the gas raised him back up to the surface and the waves finally brought him to us.”

“A ship, maybe?” Maddie said. “We always wondered who else was out here besides us. I mean, it’s a big ocean. There’s got to be more people, right? Before us, there was Gage and his friends.”

“Maybe it’s the Navy,” Benny said. He sounded almost hopeful. “He really does look like some kind of commando. Maybe the U.S. Navy is still out there somewhere.”

“For some reason, he doesn’t look military to me,” Maddie said.

“Then maybe he’s from those Bengal Islands that Keo talked about. He said there were a lot of people there.”

“The clothes he’s wearing, the gunshots…” Maddie shook her head. “It had to have been one hell of a gunfight.”

“I still think it’s the military,” Benny said. “Blaine and I talked about it a lot, about what happened to all the Navy ships that were caught out here when everything went down. The aircraft carriers, battleships and destroyers, all those guys. They had to have gone somewhere.”

“It’s been a year,” Maddie said. “If they’re still out there, we would have heard from them by now, don’t you think?”

“What about the one in Colorado?” Zoe asked. “Carly said there was a colonel hiding in a mountain somewhere.”

“Beecher,” Maddie nodded. “We made contact with him on the radio.”

“What did he say about the rest of the military?”

“He knew as much as we did. Which wasn’t very much.”

There was a moment of silence until the others looked over at her. Maybe they finally realized she hadn’t said anything in a while.

“What’s the next play, boss?” Maddie asked. “It might be worth it to find out where this guy came from.”

“Maybe not,” Zoe said. “People with guns, wearing combat gear, running around out here shooting each other?” The doctor shook her head. “I’m not sure those are the kinds of people we’d necessarily want to cross paths with. Not now. Not after Song Island.”

“Doc’s got a good point,” Benny said.

They were still looking at her, waiting for her to say something.

What would Will do?

“Can you learn anything else from him?” she finally asked Zoe.

The older woman shook her head. “I don’t see the point. We know how he died. GSWs. Anything else he can tell us would be in his pockets.”

“Already went through them,” Maddie said. “Empty.”

“All right,” Lara said. “Throw him back into the ocean. Wherever he came from, however he got here, or what happened to him, let the Gulf keep his secrets. We have other things to worry about.”

She was in the captain’s cabin, looking at the same old heavily annotated map of the Gulf of Mexico spread out on a table, that she had been using since they boarded the Trident back on Song Island. She had circled Sunport, twenty miles in front of them at the moment, and Port Arthur, where Danny, Gaby, and Nate had made land a few days ago. If it hadn’t been Keo who had called, she would never have strayed far from Port Arthur. Just the idea of leaving the expedition behind to come south made her feel sick to her stomach.

This better be important, Keo.

If he was even still alive out there. The last time she had talked to him, he had given her the impression he and his companions were barely a step ahead of their pursuers. What if they had finally run out of luck?

She glanced at her watch. She didn’t know what she was expecting, but the silence from Keo nagged at her. Unlike Danny, who had already radioed in from some town called Wilden an hour ago, it was all quiet from the Keo front. The man was unpredictable and prone to rash decisions, but then again a lot of those questionable choices he’d made had been in her favor, so maybe she should be grateful—

A knock on the cabin door interrupted her thoughts.

“Come in,” she said.

Bonnie stepped inside in loose-fitting cargo pants and an olive thermal sweater, looking more like a soldier than even Benny or Blaine. Lara was still amazed by the transformation Bonnie had gone through since they first met on Song Island. Then again, she could probably say the same thing about all of them, including herself, though the others didn’t quite look at home with an M4 slung over their backs and a gun belt hanging off their hips. Bonnie did, and even managed to pull off the short haircut.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“I heard Keo still hasn’t called yet,” Bonnie said.

“Not yet.”

“You think he’s okay?”

“I don’t know.”

Bonnie walked over and leaned against the table, then stared down at the map even though Lara could tell it wasn’t her chicken scratch notes that were on the ex-model’s mind at the moment.

“What is it, Bonnie?” she asked.

“Carrie’s worried about him,” Bonnie said.

“Keo can handle himself. I’m more worried about the others.”

“The — what do you call it?”

“Expedition.”

“Right. The expedition. Are they okay?”

“Alive and well. I talked to Danny earlier.”

“Good. That’s good.”

“How’s everyone doing? I know I haven’t been moving through the decks as much as before.”

“Everyone’s good, doing their part. Don’t worry about us. You already have a lot on your mind.”

“So no secret meetings about overthrowing my rule?”

Bonnie chuckled. “Not since two weeks ago. You’re safe for at least another few days.”

“Good to hear.” She walked over to her small fridge in the corner and came back with two cold water bottles, handing one to Bonnie. “So why did you really come here?”

“That obvious, huh?”

Lara shrugged.

“It’s Gage,” Bonnie said.

Of course it would be Gage. She knew the man would come back to haunt her eventually. She had been dreading it, but at the same time knowing it was inevitable, that the sooner she dealt with it the easier she would be able to sleep at night.

Or, at least, that’s what she told herself.

“What about him?” Lara asked.

“After Carrie asked me to come see you about Keo, she told me that when she took Gage his breakfast this morning, she left his room with a bad feeling.”

“What did she say exactly?”

Bonnie paused for a moment. Then, “She couldn’t put it into words, just that he didn’t seem right. Like he was waiting for her to make a mistake. She left as soon as she could, but she hasn’t been able to shake it.”

She sighed.

Gage. The Trident’s former captain.

What would Will do?

“He’s been down there for a while,” Bonnie continued. “Long enough that I think he’s figured out by now we don’t need him to run the yacht anymore.”

She nodded, remembering the look on the man’s face when she took him off the bridge and gave the helm to Blaine. He knows, she remembered thinking at the time. His usefulness has come to an end, and he knows.

“What are you doing to do?” Bonnie asked. There was a slight wavering in her voice, as if she was afraid to hear the answer.

“I’ll take care of it,” Lara said.

CHAPTER 4 KEO

Another fine mess you’ve got yourself into. Shoulda taken the easy way out when you had the chance, pal. And you had a lot of chances, didn’t you?

Live and learn…maybe.

He expected ghouls in the shadows, but the floor was empty when he took his first tentative step outside the janitor’s closet at the end of the hallway, silver bullet-loaded M4 in front of him and one eye fixed behind the weapon’s red dot sight. The trigger felt good against his finger, and the warmth of morning sunlight was like a comforting embrace. The pain in his leg — the result of a bullet hole — had resurfaced thanks to last night’s mad dash; running for your life, apparently, didn’t contribute to the healing process.

Jordan moved quietly behind him, watching his six. They weren’t quite moving in stacking formation, but he could feel the fabric of her sweaty clothes every time she turned too quickly to sweep an open door or one of the (too many) hallways to their left and right. He was doing the same, watching and listening for signs of something to shoot, watching for things that didn’t belong, and doing his very best to shut out her persistent haggard breathing.

It took much longer to reach the stairwell than he would have liked. Either the floor had widened sometime last night, or they were moving very, very slowly. The feel of sunlight through the (Still intact, so that’s a good sign) windows to their right made him breathe just a little bit easier with every step.

The tiled floor showed signs of the dirt they had tracked in here last night and the cubicles they had run past still looked in one piece this morning. More importantly, he couldn’t smell them in the air. Even a floor this large wouldn’t have been able to hide the creatures’ stench, especially if there was more than one of them around, and there had definitely been more than one of them around last night.

So far, so good.

Keo couldn’t help it and grinned to himself.

Famous last words there, pal.

They remained silent (or at least they didn’t talk, but it was hard to stay completely quiet; their boots’ soles squeaked every so often against the dust-caked floor) during the trek until they finally arrived at the stairwell door.

Keo glanced back at Jordan, standing behind him pulling security. She looked over her shoulder, saw him, and nodded. Just a week of running around out here with her and they were already working like an (almost) well-oiled machine. In another month, he’d probably know what her sweat tasted like.

He turned back and pressed one ear against the warm stairwell door.

Five seconds…

Ten…

Nothing.

There was just stillness on the other side.

He looked back at Jordan, and she mouthed, “Anything?”

He shook his head before turning back around to the door. This time he put one hand on the doorknob, finding courage in the streams of sunlight splashing all the way across the floor and over half the door. It was surprisingly warm inside the building at the moment, but that could have just been thanks to his thick winter clothing.

“Go,” Ol’ Blue Eyes had hissed at him last night inside the stairwell.

“Go where?” Keo had responded.

“Down!” he had shouted.

And that was where he and Jordan had gone. They went down the stairs, expecting ghouls to appear from below at any moment. He kept waiting and waiting, but black eyes and the terrifying noise of stampeding bare feet never filled the enclosed space around them. There were only his and Jordan’s labored breathing and their pounding boots all the way down to—

The third floor. He didn’t know why he had chosen it. Maybe he didn’t trust his luck to last for thirty more feet. Or maybe he instinctively knew there wasn’t anything good waiting for them in the lobby. Certainly no escape from the building. If there were already ghouls inside, then there would be even more outside. A hell of a lot more. Every single creature that had been sniffing their trail for the last week ever since Santa Marie Island would be converging on the single building as soon as Jordan fired that first shot.

“We’ll meet again!” the blue-eyed ghoul had shouted. Or hissed. Though Keo sometimes thought the creature was making an effort to sound more human—

A nervous tap on his shoulder.

He glanced back at Jordan, who gave him a quizzical look.

“Ready?” he mouthed.

She retreated a few steps to give him room, then aimed her M4 at the door. Finally, she nodded. Keo took a long, solid breath, then made sure the sun was still splashing across the door. You could never be too careful when it came to sunlight these days.

Now.

He pulled the door open and swung it all the way to the side while he took three quick steps backward.

In the five seconds it took the door to fully open, hit the spring doorstop on the wall, and swing back in the other direction, a dozen ghouls piled inside the enclosed space in front of him had untangled their elongated limbs. He wasn’t sure if he saw surprise in their black eyes or heard squeals of delight, but he definitely smelled the acidic burn of vaporizing flesh as the sun hit them.

He fired into the door anyway — it was mostly just instinct, the need to shoot when presented with a target — and put a three-round burst into the center mass of the writhing blob of flesh. A round hit bone and ricocheted into another creature trying to come unglued from the mass around it. Ghouls shrieked as spilt black blood turn gray, then white, and limbs clattered to the hard concrete landing. The frontal half of a head vanished before his eyes—

The door closed back up with a solid click!

“Jesus Christ,” Jordan breathed next to him.

“Yeah,” Keo said. He wrinkled his nose at the stinging smell in the air and began breathing through his mouth. “I guess we’re not going in there.”

“Our supplies, they’re on the twentieth floor, Keo.”

“Uh huh.”

“The radio’s up there, too.”

“I know.”

“It took us forever to find that thing.”

“Don’t remind me.”

“Goddammit,” Jordan said, and pursed her lips in frustration.

They took another couple of steps back from the door, just far enough to escape the gagging stench in the air, but still close enough to hear the movements from the other side. The sudden shift from deathly stillness to frantic activity seemed to be coming not just from in front of them, but also from below and above them, as if the entire building had come alive.

Despite the comforting feel of the sun against his back, Keo shivered unwittingly anyway. He never liked being this close to the undead things, and he didn’t think he would ever get used to it. He hoped he never got used to it, because the day that happened would also mean he was no longer operating at full readiness, and that was dangerous.

“Come on,” he said, and led her away.

They walked silently through two rows of cubicles, drawn irresistibly to the sunlight pouring in through the glass curtain wall on the other side of the floor.

“I guess it was too much to expect them to all follow Frank out of the building,” Keo said.

“‘Frank’?” Jordan said.

“Ol’ Blue Eyes.”

“You gave him a name? When did that happen?”

“Guy saved my life twice. The least I could do was call him something other than ‘it’.”

“Why Frank?”

“You know, because of what he is…was.”

Jordan looked blankly at him.

“Mary Shelley?” Keo said.

“Oh.” Then, “Not quite human anymore, but not quite…the other thing, either.” She flashed him an approving smile. “Clever. I didn’t know you had it in you.”

He shrugged. “It comes and goes.”

“Frank,” Jordan repeated. “I could think of worse names, I guess. It’s definitely better than Keo.”

“Now you’re just trying to hurt my feelings.”

“You’re a tough guy, you can take it.”

“Still, everyone’s got their limits, Jordan.”

She snorted, then glanced up at the ceiling. “What did he say to you last night? When we were on the twentieth floor?”

“‘We’ll meet again.’”

“‘We’ll meet again’?”

“Uh huh.”

“That sounds…” She shivered instead of finishing.

“Yeah,” Keo said. “Still freaks me out a little, thinking about that promise.”

They finally reached the other side of the floor, where the windows were still in place, the creatures having somehow climbed all the way up to the twentieth floor while bypassing the rest. He guessed the brick-and-mortar walls outside had just enough handholds for things that didn’t care about falling. He remembered the surreal sight of them last night, plummeting out of the sky, arms and legs flailing, as he and Jordan raced through the floor in search of someplace to hide.

“You think he’s dead?” Jordan asked.

“I don’t know. He’s survived before. T18, the island…”

“There were a hell of a lot more of them here last night, Keo.”

“He has a knack for surviving. It wouldn’t surprise me if he found a way out of here while we were hiding in the janitor’s closet.”

Keo pressed against a section of the dust-covered window and peered down at the sidewalks and streets below. Downtown Sunport was as quiet and still this morning as when they had reached its city limits yesterday evening.

He could see bones on the ground below — arms and legs, most of them still attached to the skeletal remains of ghouls that hadn’t been able to crawl their way out of the path of the rising sun after free-falling down the side of the building last night. The fall might not have killed them, but it had pulverized and shattered limbs, making escape difficult.

Jordan was staring back at the stairwell door across the floor. “How are we getting down?”

“We’ll improvise,” he said, and began backpedaling.

“What—” Jordan said, before realizing what he was doing, and hurried backward after him. “Geez, would it kill you to give me a heads up?”

“Heads up,” he said.

She smirked. “Jackass.”

Keo stopped about ten meters from the wall and stitched one of the windows with a three-round burst. He stopped firing and they listened to glass falling and shattering against the sidewalk below, the sound echoing across the city for a few seconds afterward. Cold wind flooded inside through the newly made hole, and Keo welcomed the fresh air into his lungs.

“Now what?” Jordan asked.

“Ladies first,” he said.

Three floors were better than twenty and were easily manageable once they pulled apart curtains from some of the offices and tied them together into a makeshift rope. He lowered Jordan down first, then followed.

The sidewalk was covered in bones, and the still-strong smell of vaporized blood and flesh stung his nostrils while he was coming down. It was worse once he reached the pavement, and he had to pull his shirt over his nose to stave off most of the stench. Jordan had already done likewise while waiting for him.

“How would we know if he made it or not?” she asked, her voice muffled through her shirt.

Keo walked into the middle of the street, maneuvering around a pair of stalled vehicles, including one with a caved-in roof from when a creature had fallen down on top of it, and looked up. He found the twentieth floor easily enough, thanks to the line of broken windows stretching from one end of the building to the other.

He tried to put himself in Frank’s shoes (bare feet?). Frank wasn’t limited by what a human body could do. Keo had seen that for himself three times now. The guy could take a beating, and the things he did defied the laws of physics. Hell, it defied the laws of nature.

The last time Keo had seen him, Frank was on the twentieth floor. Keo hadn’t understood what he was doing until he was squeezed into the janitor’s closet with Jordan, listening and waiting for an attack that never came.

It was Frank; it had always been Frank. They wanted him and Frank knew that, which was why he hadn’t followed them down. He gave the creatures what they wanted instead of leading them to Keo and Jordan. Himself.

That’s three times now you’ve saved my life.

Dammit. How do you even begin to repay someone who has saved your life not one, two, but three times? Keo wasn’t entirely sure he was looking forward to finding out the answer to that question.

“What are you looking at?” Jordan said behind him.

Keo eyeballed the twentieth floor, then turned and looked at the building facing it from across the street. The opposite structure was almost entirely all black marble but shorter at just fifteen stories.

Then he saw it and couldn’t help but grin.

“What?” Jordan said. “What are you grinning at like an idiot?”

“He fell short,” Keo said.

“Who?”

“Frank.” Keo pointed at a lone broken window on the fourteenth floor of the black marble building. “He was aiming for the rooftop but he had too far of a jump, and his trajectory dipped before he reached it. He’s fast — and shit, can he jump — but apparently even he has his limitations.”

Jordan stared at the single broken window on the fourteenth floor of the building across the street. “Are you saying he leapt from our building to that one? Keo, that’s—”

“Impossible?” Keo smiled. “Jordan, we’ve been walking around with a blue-eyed ghoul for the last week, trying to stay one step ahead of collaborators and undead things. ‘Impossible’ shouldn’t even be in our vocabulary anymore.”

Keo wasn’t surprised to find ghouls inside the lobby of the marble building. He could see them moving around in the shadowed parts through the windows, and he spent just as much time wondering how many were inside as he did ignoring the lingering smell of dead things in the streets around him.

“So I guess that’s out of the question,” Jordan said, standing next to him.

“Guess so.”

“What now?”

“How are you for ammo?”

She tapped the ammo pouches around her waist, then sighed.

“That much, huh?” he said.

“One more for the M4, and two for the Glock. You?”

“Same.”

She sneaked a look over her shoulder, back at the taller building they’d just climbed down from. “Our supplies are still up there, along with the radio.”

“The operative phrase being ‘up there.’”

“Maybe we can climb. Those things did.”

“And a lot of them went splat.”

“Good point.” She returned her gaze to the lobby in front of them. “You think he’s in there somewhere?”

“I don’t know. He had all night to fight his way out. He might not even be in the city anymore.”

“You really believe that?”

He didn’t answer right away.

“Keo?”

“I don’t know,” he finally said. “How many were at Santa Marie Island? Two hundred tops? Last night was an entire city’s worth. That’s…a lot.”

“This thing, the one he calls Mabry,” Jordan said quietly, as if afraid the creature might hear her if she said the name too loudly. “It’s behind this. It wants him.”

Keo nodded. He didn’t like saying the name any more than she did. Hell, he didn’t even want to think it. The fact that Frank was uncomfortable saying the name out loud said it all.

If it can scare him…

He looked down the street, past the stalled vehicles and year-old trash left unattended by a city that had once been crowded with people. He could almost sniff the ocean water from here.

“They might be out there,” Jordan said. “Your friends.”

“Only one way to find out.”

“Maybe we’ll get lucky and find a working vehicle, so we won’t have to walk the entire way.”

Keo chuckled as they started up the street.

“What?” Jordan said. “One of us has to stay positive.”

“You’re doing a good job of it.”

“Oh, shut up. It’s your fault I’m here in the first place.”

“Hey, you didn’t have to tag along.”

“Right, like I had much of a choice after T18 and Santa Marie Island.”

“There was always Tobias.”

She sighed. “You’re right. I should have left with Tobias…”

Sunport, Texas, was an oil-based industry town, which meant groupings of oil refineries dotted the landscape as Keo and Jordan left the downtown area behind and took FM 1495 toward the beach. They had been walking ever since Santa Marie Island, picking their way south along the coastline. It had been a real pain in the ass with his gimpy leg, but eventually the wound became numbed enough on day three (or was it day four?) that he could walk without grimacing.

The sight (and sounds) of so many collaborators along the roads had slowed their progress, and traveling by night hadn’t been a good idea since the world ended. But just because he was used to walking didn’t mean he wouldn’t trade it all for a working vehicle at the first opportunity.

Once past the Sunport city limits, they found themselves flanked by heavy industry to their left and almost entirely undeveloped land to their right, with small streams snaking around wetlands. Although they’d passed plenty of homes and subdivisions on their way into town, there was very little of that out here. It took a while, but eventually Keo managed to steal glimpses of sunlight dancing off the surface of water in the distance.

The Gulf of Mexico awaited. And, if he was lucky, the Trident was anchored somewhere out there, close enough that they would be able to see him. Because, of course, he’d been very lucky these last few days.

Riiiiiight.

The highway gave way to small roads and the occasional motels, while palm trees replaced power poles. They slowed when they reached a two-story blue building advertising seafood and beach rental supplies that had a couple of trucks in the parking lot. They checked both vehicles but came up empty.

They cautiously entered the building — a combo restaurant and general store — and checked every shadowy corner and crevice, and under every table and counter. There was no familiar smell of ghoul occupancy, but you couldn’t always count on that kind of tell. They found rotting food in the kitchen but struck gold with a 12-count case of unopened water bottles in a back closet. Keo scrounged up a faded gym bag from one of the pantries that he then stuffed with eight of the bottles while Jordan found plastic bags and carried the remaining four in them.

Assured they weren’t going to die of thirst — which would have sucked, with all that undrinkable ocean saltwater mocking them — they continued to the beach. It took another two hours before Keo finally saw welcoming white sand. He was surprised to see cars parked on the dunes, but otherwise no signs of another living soul for miles. Keo ended up wasting about half a minute watching a crab navigating around the points of his boots.

“Food,” Jordan smiled.

“Give him a break; the guy’s just trying to get home.”

“When did you get so soft?”

He sighed. “I’ve been asking myself that question for a while now.”

When the crab was finally on its way, Keo slumped down on the sand and sighed with relief. The long walk from Sunport hadn’t done his healing wounds any favors, but he was an old hand at pushing through lingering pain. He unlaced his boots, pulled off his socks and stuck both feet into the warm, mushy beach floor. There were no palm trees in any direction, which was odd because they had passed rows of them on the road over.

Jordan sat down next to him and began massaging her toes. She opened one of the warm water bottles and finished it off before flinging it toward a trash barrel nearby, but the wind caught it before it even had a chance to hit its mark.

“Don’t mess with Texas,” Keo said.

“Huh?” she said.

“Isn’t that the state motto?”

“Texas can sue me.”

“I hear tort reform’s a big thing down here.”

The beach stretched for miles to both sides of them, with the only buildings he could see sprinkled in the distance to his left. Their right was almost entirely barren except for a couple of abandoned vehicles parked dangerously close to the water. If he just stared forward, he could almost fool himself into thinking that civilization didn’t exist at all out here.

Keo leaned back on his elbows and soaked in the sun, watching the endless waves of ocean foam attempting to reach up the beach about thirty meters in front of him. Blue skies hovered over the Gulf of Mexico, and there were few clouds to obscure the scenery. It was a hell of a sight, and he wouldn’t have minded a house out here for summer vacations.

“What do you think those trucks were doing out here?” Jordan said after a while.

“Sightseeing?”

“You think it’s worth taking the time to search them?”

“Be my guest.”

“Maybe later.”

Keo closed his eyes and listened to her breathing softly next to him. Jordan was sticky with sweat, but he thought she smelled just fine against the fresh ocean breeze.

“I can’t help but notice that I don’t see a luxury yacht anchored anywhere out there,” Jordan said. “How about you? You see a boat out there, Keo? Maybe it’s me. My parents had cataracts. Maybe I’m getting them, too.”

He smiled to himself. “I don’t see them.”

“So we’re screwed.”

“Even if they’re out there, we couldn’t see them anyway. We agreed they’d anchor twenty miles out to stay out of view. I was supposed to radio them when we reached the beach so they could swing by and pick us up.”

“Ah,” she said, almost wistfully, “the best-laid plans and blah blah blah.”

“It’s not all bad.”

“No?”

“We’re the only two souls on a beach, staring at a glorious sky and listening to waves crashing. I could think of worse places to be right now.”

“I can’t tell if you’re serious.”

“I am.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why are you serious? This last week could have been for nothing, especially if Frank’s dead.”

Keo sat up and brushed sand off his elbows. “Jordan…”

“What?”

He reached into the gym bag and took out two bottles of water, opening them and handing one to her. “Salute,” he said, holding up his.

She rolled her eyes but smiled anyway and bumped his bottle with hers. “A tall glass and some ice would be nice.”

“How about a bottle of red wine while we’re at it?”

“Cabernet?”

“Of course.”

“Now you’re talking.”

He took a long drink before lying back down. He buried the bottle halfway into the sand next to him, then closed his eyes again. The warmth of the sun against his face was like a soothing pair of massaging hands, and Keo let himself embrace it. If he was going to die out here, right now, he could think of worse ways to go.

“Hey,” Jordan said after a while.

He didn’t open his eyes, but said, “Hmm?”

“What do you think Gillian’s doing right now, back in T18?”

Fucking Jay, he thought, and said, “I don’t know. Why?”

“I was just wondering.”

“Jordan…”

“What?”

“Shut up and enjoy the beach,” he said, letting his body sink deeper into the soft sand underneath him.

After a while, all he could hear was the sloshing waves in front of him and the soft, comforting sound of Jordan’s breathing next to him.

CHAPTER 5 GABY

It was a small town on the outskirts of Cleveland, Texas, hidden away from prying eyes, or anyone who might have been traveling along US59. Once upon a time it’d had a name, but it had since been given a letter and a number and been resettled with survivors — men, women, and children who had accepted that the world was no longer a safe place, that surviving was better than fighting.

The A-10, or Warthog, as Danny called it, had been thorough. If it had left survivors behind, she couldn’t see them from the hillside where she was crouched alongside Danny and Nate. The buildings that once lined an unnamed main street had been reduced to rubble, the result of the 30mm cannon she had heard belching out something that sounded like a creature from a monster movie. What the plane’s Gatling gun hadn’t obliterated, the air-to-surface missiles underneath its wings had taken care of. There were four large craters spread across the length of the resettlement from south to north, and thick plumes of smoke hovered above it like storm clouds.

Gaby thought about those old World War II documentaries her dad used to love watching, remembered marveling at the unreal sight of cities buried under the remains of buildings that once stood so proud. Despite all that property damage, she never saw the bodies, or the real carnage. Maybe her dad never allowed her to see the grisly footage or it had been edited out. The raw details had always remained hidden, but she couldn’t ignore them now.

She could see the bodies from the hillside — or, at least, parts of them. The arms and legs of victims jutting unceremoniously out of rubble as shredded clothing clung to jagged piles of brick and mortar. Skeletal shells of what used to be buildings somehow managed to remain upright, though it was difficult to tell what they used to be. Pockets of fire dotted the landscape, as if marking where the town began and ended. The air was thick with sulfur and she found herself breathing through her mouth to keep from gagging, despite the fact she was still far enough away that she shouldn’t have been affected by the smell.

Next to her, Nate and Danny had gone very quiet and still. Except for the occasional wind howling through the carcass of buildings below them, there was almost no other noise except for her shallow breathing and slightly accelerated heartbeat.

“We should go,” Nate said. He sounded almost breathless. “We shouldn’t be here. We shouldn’t be seeing this.”

“He’s got a point,” Danny said. “That hog might come back. Or it might have friends.”

“Christ, how much armament does one of those things carry, anyway?”

“Depends on its objective. There’s a reason it was so goddamn effective in the Stan.”

Gaby stood up. She didn’t know what she was going to do until it was already too late to stop. Her joints popped as she moved, but she ignored them and gripped the M4 tightly in front of her.

“Gaby, wait,” Nate said.

“There might be survivors,” she said, and hurried down the hill.

“There’s nothing down there, Gaby. Not anymore.”

She kept going, her boots fighting for purchase against the sloping hillside, until Nate’s voice was lost against the scraping noises. Or maybe she had just effectively shut him out as she hopped the last few feet; it helped that her heartbeat had gone from slightly raised to hammering out of control against her chest.

“There might be survivors,” she had said, knowing what a terrible lie that was even as the words tumbled out of her mouth.

Reaching the beginning of the town just confirmed it. Nothing could have survived what she was looking at. The gun runs, as Danny called them, had been incredibly efficient. The Warthogs were effective at their jobs, he said, which was why they were so good at providing close-quarter air support. That was their specialty, after all.

She stepped around the craters that pockmarked the main street that ran through town, the curvatures of the unnatural holes still darkened with wet blood. The 30mm rounds that hadn’t landed on the buildings had instead dug gaping holes in the pavements and reduced the sidewalks into disorganized slabs. A sea of broken glass and small concrete chunks crunched under her boots with every step. Gaby held a handkerchief over her mouth to keep out the choking sting of smoke and blood.

The bodies were almost all hidden under the remains of buildings, charred wooden frames, and structural steel beams. The sight of an exposed belly, the pregnant mother’s head missing, inside what used to be a bakery, almost made her retch. She kept moving, pushing on, resisting the urge to look back at the body, telling herself the woman (and the child inside her) would still be dead if she looked a second or third time.

Her eyes stung and she fought back tears, too afraid of what would come out if she failed to suppress the emotions. The prospect of Danny and Nate seeing her break down was enough, and she pushed on. She couldn’t allow the men to see her be reduced to the Gaby from a year ago, the little girl who had to rely on Matt and Josh to keep her safe. That girl was long, long gone.

“Gaby.” Nate’s voice from behind her. “Wait up.”

She started to turn back when something emerged from behind a dead horse in front of her. Gaby tensed, raising the M4. She stopped when she saw bristling brown and white hair as a cat darted across the street. Its coat of fur was singed black, and there were parts of the animal that had been burned off, exposing flaring red skin underneath.

“What the hell was that?” Nate said.

“Cat,” she said.

“Jesus, I thought it was a giant rat or something.”

Gaby looked after the animal for a moment before turning back to the horse. Or at the figure trapped underneath it…still moving.

“I got a live one!” she shouted, before jogging forward with her carbine at the ready.

The earbud in her right ear clicked, and she heard Nate’s voice: “Danny, we got survivors.”

“How many?” Danny asked through the earbud.

“Just one so far,” Nate said.

“Be careful. It could be a trap.”

“Will do.”

But it wasn’t a trap, Gaby found, when she stopped next to the horse and its rider, a woman in a North Face jacket open to reveal a black uniform underneath. There was a patch of Texas on the jacket’s right shoulder and a name tag that read “Morris.” One half of her face was covered in blood, the wetness matting short black hair to her skin, and she was busy trying to push the horse off her. Even if the dead animal were still alive to obey — there was a hole from a large caliber round in the belly of Morris’s mount — Gaby doubted the woman would have found freedom to her liking: There was a large pool of blood under her, which she might not even have noticed yet.

The soldier finally gave up and instead locked eyes with Gaby. Then she sighed and lay back, letting both hands drop to her sides. She hadn’t tried reaching for her holstered weapon, which was the only reason Gaby hadn’t shot her yet. Pieces of an M4 rifle were sprinkled liberally among what looked like the remains of a wooden toy train set.

The air around them was thick with a red, black, and white cloud coming from a nearby apartment building. Gaby was glad for the handkerchief over her mouth, something the soldier didn’t have. Then again, choking on pulverized concrete and brick was the least of the injured woman’s concerns at the moment.

“Gaby?” Nate said as he jogged over to her.

“She’s injured,” Gaby said.

Nate peered down at Morris, holding his own piece of cloth to his mouth.

“What are you looking at?” the woman said.

Nate pulled back. “She’s not going to make it.”

“Says you,” Morris said.

“I got her,” Gaby said. “Keep looking for other survivors.”

Nate nodded and walked off.

“Mohawk boy’s not wrong; I can’t move,” Morris said, turning dull brown eyes back to Gaby. She sounded surprisingly nonchalant, as if they were old friends wasting away a lazy Sunday. “I think my legs are broken. I can’t feel anything down there.”

“What happened?” Gaby asked.

Morris blinked up at her, trying to see through blood that had covered up a part of her right eye. “You don’t know?”

Gaby shook her head. “Why did it attack you?”

“I would tell you if I knew, but I don’t. Did I mention my legs are probably broken?”

Gaby nodded. She waited for the woman to continue, but Morris looked like she had lost interest in the conversation. She let her head loll to one side and stared down the street at nothing in particular. The only sound, other than Gaby’s still quickening heartbeat, was Nate’s boots moving among the ruins on the other side of the street.

“Four hundred people,” Morris said quietly.

“Four hundred?” Gaby repeated.

Morris nodded. Or tilted her head slightly up, then down, in something that resembled a nodding motion.

“Here?” Gaby said. “In this place?”

“Four hundred people,” Morris said again. Her lips quivered, as if she was going to say something else, but instead she just closed her eyes…and stopped breathing.

Gaby stared at the woman in silence for a moment. A part of her thought Morris might be playacting, but that wasn’t true because ten, then fifteen seconds later, and Morris’s chest still hadn’t moved again.

“What did she say?” Nate asked, coming back over.

“Four hundred,” Gaby said.

“Four hundred?”

Gaby slung her rifle and looked around them at the toppled buildings, at the visible body parts. “They were inside when the plane hit.”

“Someone probably ordered them into the buildings,” Nate said. “They would have been able to hear it coming for miles.” He shook his head. “They would have been better off making a run for it; they were sitting ducks inside those buildings.” He wiped at some soot underneath his chin. “She said 400?”

Gaby nodded.

“Christ,” Nate said. “This isn’t right. Whoever did this — whoever ordered this…” He shook his head again. “This isn’t right.”

She didn’t know how to reply, didn’t know if anything she said would be even remotely enough, so she turned around and maneuvered past Morris and her mount instead.

“Come on,” she said, “there might be more survivors up the street.”

Nate followed, their boots crunching broken glass and concrete chunks as they stepped through puddles of blood.

And they hadn’t even hit the halfway mark through town yet…

“When it finished with the town, it did an extra gun run along a country road that runs parallel to a creek,” Danny said. “There are more bodies out there.”

“Survivors?” Nate asked.

“Maybe a half dozen vehicles made it through.”

“Thank God.”

Danny glanced down at his watch. “We should avoid the state highway from now on. Skip around using the smaller roads until we hit US59, then pick our way north to Starch. It’ll take longer, but better late than dead.”

“How many?” Gaby asked.

“How many what?”

“How many got caught out there? That didn’t get away?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Yes, it does.”

Danny didn’t answer her.

“How many, Danny?” she pressed.

“It doesn’t matter, Gaby,” he said again. For a brief moment, he reminded her so much of Will, who could end a conversation with just a few words and the right inflection in his voice. “Let’s get going,” Danny continued. “I want to be in Starch by noon. Nate, it’s your turn at the reins.”

Nate nodded and slipped into the truck behind the steering wheel while she took a moment to look back one last time at the town. The clouds of black and gray smoke still loitered above it, as if they would never leave. From a distance, the carnage looked almost poetic, but she knew better; there was nothing artful about the bloodbath below those dull colors.

“Gaby,” Danny said behind her. “We gotta go.”

She turned around and climbed into the backseat as Nate fired up the engine, then maneuvered across the empty lanes toward the feeder road exit to get them off the highway. Danny was right: What had earlier been clear sailing to Starch — there was no such thing as traffic out here, far from the nearest big city — was now a wide-open potential kill zone.

Gaby leaned back against her seat, feeling impossibly drained by the long walk from one end of the destroyed town to the other. She closed her eyes and placed her cheek against the door, the interior of the truck swamped by the cold weather. In front of her, Nate’s Mohawk battled against the breeze, a sight that made her smile despite everything she had seen the last few hours.

“They don’t miss,” Danny had said as they approached the town, all the while listening to the series of chaotic explosions that were so loud even the road had trembled under their truck. “The Avengers are straight-on Gatling guns; they’re right in front of the cockpit so the pilots have to see exactly what they’re shooting at. And they hardly ever miss.”

“Four hundred…”

Gaby replayed Morris’s words in her head, heard again the anger and something that sounded almost like disbelief in the woman’s voice. She saw again the sadness and regret in Morris’s eyes as she stared off, as if she could see something down the street that wasn’t just ruins and body parts and blood. Four hundred people, except for however many had been in those “half dozen” vehicles that had managed to escape along the creek.

She opened her eyes when Nate said from the front seat, “What are we dealing with here?”

“I don’t have a clue,” Danny said.

“That Warthog. Where would something like that come from?”

“There are three Air Force bases in Texas that I know of for certain, probably more I haven’t heard of or been to. That A-10 could have come from any number of places. It’s not like Uncle Sam’s still around to keep them under lock and key. Frankly, I’m surprised this is the first time we’ve seen one of those things since Happy Times went bye-bye.”

“So why didn’t you and Will ever go looking for one? Or hell, maybe something more up-to-date, like an Apache?”

“Can you fly an Apache, kid?”

“Well, no…”

“Yeah, neither could we. There could be a fleet of AC-130s sitting around just waiting for us, and we wouldn’t be able to do a damn thing with them ’cause we don’t know our cockpits from our cockheads. Why do you think a commercial pilot makes more money than the guy who digs ditches?”

“Sorry, stupid question.”

“There are no stupid questions, just stupid people that ask them.”

Nate grunted before slowing down the F-150 and turning, taking them even further away from the highway. They were headed north now and soon would have to turn back west so they wouldn’t pass Starch by completely. The longer route, but the safer one, especially with that Warthog still up there, somewhere…

“Those people back there,” Nate was saying. “They didn’t deserve that. Even if they were collaborating with the ghouls.”

“No one deserves that,” Danny said.

“What are you going to tell Lara?”

“Hell if I know.”

“Are you going to tell her?”

Danny didn’t answer right away. Gaby found herself waiting anxiously for the answer, too.

“I don’t know,” Danny finally said. “I’ll decide when we contact them again, hopefully from the warmth and comfort of Harold Campbell’s facility this time.”

Gaby didn’t have the strength to join their conversation, and instead closed her eyes again and leaned tighter against the door. Winter was already here, but in Texas it was sometimes difficult to tell. Christmas was somewhere over the horizon, and with it another New Year’s Eve where no one would be celebrating, or singing Auld Lang Syne. Maybe the cold would help wash away the smell of smoke and blood that still clung to her hair and skin and every inch of her clothing. God, she needed a bath in the worst—

“Fuck, shit!” Danny shouted from the front seat.

Her eyes flew open and she sat up straight, was about to say something when she saw it — sunlight reflecting off the gray of its wings as it streaked toward them from the other side of the small feeder road.

“Out!” Danny shouted. “Get the fuck out and find cover now!”

She wasn’t even certain if the truck was still moving or if it had stopped when Danny threw open his passenger side door and leaped out. She reached for her own door handle with one hand, the other grabbing her rifle leaning against the seat. The door was opening and she was almost out when she remembered her pack and all the equipment—

“Gaby!” Danny’s voice, from the other side of the vehicle, booming in her ears. “Move your ass!”

She moved her ass, flinging the door wide open and throwing the rest of her out, one hand clutching her rifle.

Never lose your rifle. Never lose your rifle!

She stumbled and fell, saw the highway floor rushing up at a million miles an hour, and had to stick out both hands to stop her fall. She lost her grip on the M4 in the process and cursed herself (What would Will say?) when the road began trembling as if it was getting ready to split open.

She couldn’t help herself and turned her head and looked up, wondering idly if the Warthog streaking toward them right now was the same one that had laid waste to Morris’s town—

“Gaby!” Nate’s voice, piercing through her idiotic thoughts, as he snatched her up from the road with one strong hand.

Gaby fumbled with her footing, groping the air for her carbine lying just out of her reach on the road.

No, no, no! Never lose your rifle! Never lose your rifle!

Before she could break free from Nate’s grip to retrieve her weapon — he was much stronger than she remembered, his arms clutching to her in a viselike grip — they were both falling backward off the road and into a ditch.

She was flailing through empty air, trying to get her bearings, when she heard the terrible brooooooooooorrrrttttttttt of the A-10 as its primary weapon, the 30mm cannon, started spinning—

She landed in the bottom of the ditch, eating a mouthful of grass and dirt as she did so. Before she could spit out the earthly contents, the road behind her came apart and her bones shook violently. The Warthog swooped over them and she looked up, somehow seeing past the blades of grass covering her face.

The sight was almost magnificent — a gray metal eagle, its fixed wings spread wide and proud, flying much lower than any plane should. She expected to see bombs or missiles, but there weren’t any. Then she remembered: Of course it wasn’t carrying any spare armaments, because it had spent everything on the town. On those poor people.

“Four hundred…”

“Gaby, move it!” Nate shouted, pulling her up from the ditch floor.

She struggled to do just that, hating herself for reverting back to the eighteen-year-old girl she thought she had buried a year ago under Will and Danny’s tutelage. The refined Gaby, who had survived Dunbar and the farmhouse and the assault on Song Island, was nowhere to be found as she stumbled into the cold side of the ditch to keep herself upright.

Standing now, she could see the remains of the F-150 in front of her. It was a flaming wreck in the middle of the cratered road, its twisted metal frame little more than a barely recognizable shell of its former self.

No, no, she thought, because everything was in there. The gas cans, the supplies, the boxes of silver ammo…

Crack! as a piece of dirt and grass spit into the air less than a foot in front of her face as a bullet chopped into the ground.

Gaby looked up the road as sunlight gleamed off the hood of a black truck racing toward them. Erratic figures clung to the back, one of them aiming at her behind a rifle resting on the roof of the cab.

No, not one truck. Two.

Then the ground began shaking again as the Warthog swooped over them one more time, the wake of its passing nearly throwing her off her already wobbly feet. Nate, next to her, had to grab onto the ditch wall to keep upright. Her first instincts were to duck, as if that would save her from the plane’s weapons.

The A-10 hadn’t gone very far before it started turning. The sight of it, getting ready to come back for yet another pass, did something unexplainable to her. Gaby felt rising anger at the plane’s presence, the arrogance of the man — and she thought it had to be a man — inside the cockpit at this very moment.

She reached down and drew her Glock.

“Don’t!” Nate said, grabbing her wrist.

“What?” It was the only thing she could think of to say, just before he snatched the gun out of her hand and threw it up to the burning road.

Nate did the same thing to his sidearm before throwing both arms into the air, shouting, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” He looked over at her, saw the flash of anger on her face, and said, “Trust me, you gotta trust me.”

She did trust him, but she was also angry. Not just with him, but with everything that had happened. The town, the bodies, Morris, and that goddamn plane as it swooped by over them one more time.

But he was right. Nate was right. The Warthog. The two trucks. The men with assault rifles in the back of them.

Slowly, very slowly, the anger fizzled, and she turned around and mimicked Nate, raising both arms into the air just as the first truck — a dirt-caked GMC — stopped above them. The second vehicle — a slightly more beat-up white Silverado — squealed to a stop next to it. Men in tan military-style uniforms leaped out and swarmed them, rifles bouncing dangerously in their hands.

“Get up here!” one of the men shouted.

“Keep your hands up!” another one said, spittle flying out of his lips. “Keep them fucking up!”

Gaby and Nate climbed up, keeping their hands raised as high as they could make them. It was difficult to navigate the sloping side of the ditch without the use of their hands, but they both managed it anyway, though she had to use her elbows for leverage.

When she and Nate were back on the road, the men circled them, weapons pointed at their faces. They looked wild, almost out of control, and she realized at that moment just how close she had come to being killed if Nate hadn’t wrestled the gun from her.

She looked back at the men, searching for all the things she was used to seeing on collaborators, like Morris back in town. Instead, she saw bright red collars with a white circle in the middle, surrounded by sharp lines that were clearly supposed to represent sun rays. The emblem stood out against the pale drab of their fatigues, as did the all-white patch of the state of Texas over their right breasts with their names stenciled in the center.

Gaby’s eyes were pulled back to an AK-47 pointed in her face. The man behind it was in his late twenties, tall, and he stared back at her even as his forefinger moved dangerously (nervously?) back and forth against the trigger.

I don’t want to die. God, I don’t want to die.

She heard voices and looked across the road, past the flaming ball that used to be their F-150, and saw Danny, hands raised, being patted down by another soldier while the man’s comrades kept the ex-Ranger under their guns.

Danny must have sensed her, because he looked over and nodded, as if to say, “We’ll be okay.”

She wanted to believe him, even as one of the men grabbed and twisted her arms painfully behind her back. She let out a small grunt as someone else ran his hands over her ribcage, then turned her pockets inside out. Two others were doing the same to Nate next to her. Their captors couldn’t have been rougher if they tried.

Above them, the Warthog swooped low as it passed them by, the rush of icy cold air against her face a stark reminder of what had happened to the town behind them and the hell they had involuntarily walked right into.

We should have stayed out of Texas. God, why did we ever come back?

Will would never have let us come back here…

CHAPTER 6 LARA

“This is bullshit,” Gage said. “I did everything you asked. I even taught the Mexican how to drive the damn boat. I answered every question he and that midget had. I did everything you asked.”

The ‘midget’? Oh, he means Maddie.

She fully expected this reaction from Gage but wasn’t quite prepared for the emotion behind it. If she closed her eyes and didn’t know who he was, or what he had done, she could almost believe he was being unjustly treated. Almost.

But of course she knew exactly who the man was; more importantly, what he had been prepared to do at Song Island if Keo hadn’t boarded the Trident and taken it over. She knew all of that, and yet she couldn’t help but ask herself for the twentieth time since she stepped inside the room:

What would Will do?

The problem with that was she knew exactly what Will would have done, and none of it included locking Gage inside a cabin on the lower decks of the yacht away from the rest of the population. Will also wouldn’t have fed Gage twice a day and let him out to see the sun every other day. Will wouldn’t have done any of those things, because once Gage’s usefulness came to an end, so did the man’s reason for being.

But she wasn’t Will, and she would never be. One of these days she’d know once and for all if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

For now, it was just her inside a slightly too-dark room, trying not to gag on the musky stench that lingered over everything despite the open portside window. The cabin was big enough for two people, with a single cot in a corner and its own small toilet and sink. It probably had better amenities than Gage had given his past victims.

“You know that, right?” Gage was saying. “I did everything you asked of me. You wouldn’t have gotten off Song Island if it wasn’t for me. Who kept this boat running after that? Me, Lara. I did. Me.”

What exactly did he expect her to say? She knew what he had done, which was precisely the problem. She knew what he had done after Song Island, but she also knew, if not all the gory details, of what he had done before they ever met him.

Gage was not a good man. He was a killer, a thief, a liar, and an opportunist. Which was why she couldn’t allow him to mingle with the rest of the crew and wouldn’t let him go near the kids. That was also why he spent his days down here eating alone, watching the ocean from his window, and counting down the hours until either Bonnie or Benny came down to take him up for his hour-long alone time in the sunlight above deck.

“Where’s my reward?” Gage asked. “Where’s the gratitude? I deserve something, don’t I?”

“There is no reward,” she said.

“You promised me.”

“I didn’t promise you anything, except that you’d keep living. And you have.”

She wasn’t sure if that deflated him or if it just made him angrier. Gage stood across the room from her, watching her back with an intensity that probably should have intimidated her. He shouldn’t have wasted his time; she’d faced worse things in her life since The Purge, and she’d survived them all. Gage was, after all, only human.

His eyes eventually fell to her right hand, hanging loosely at her side, next to the holstered Glock. She didn’t have her rifle because she rarely carried it around these days. She should have been hesitant to stand this close to him, with only eight (nine?) feet of space separating them. They were near enough that she could smell the odor emanating from his skin. Bonnie had told her that Gage rarely bathed in the ocean when he was above deck, and they theorized that he was afraid they’d drive off and leave him floating in the ocean. She had to admit, she’d thought about doing just that — or something like it — on more than one occasion.

Bonnie’s heavy, booted footsteps echoed from the open door behind her. The ex-model was somewhere further up the corridor, close enough that Lara knew she could hear everything being said. They always had at least one person outside Gage’s door, just in case.

You taught me that, Will. ‘Just in case…’

“So, what now?” Gage asked. “You’re just going to throw me away? Like trash? I did everything you asked.”

The answer should have come easily. She had spent more than one sleepless night thinking about it, and each time the outcome was the same: She couldn’t trust Gage. The man standing in front of her might be wearing shabby and stained clothes, and smelling slightly of urine and a lot of sweat, but she could see it in his eyes. Gage had been thinking about this moment, too, imagining what he would do when it finally came. She wondered if he ever managed to convince himself things might work out in his favor, or if he always knew this was the inevitable conclusion.

He had to know, didn’t he? Maybe…

“Well?” he said, sounding annoyed by her silence. “What happens to me now, Lara?”

“Now you leave,” she said.

“Leave? Just like that?”

“I’m going to give you one of the inflatable boats and enough fuel to reach land, if you drive straight toward it. What you do when you get there is up to you.”

“A boat and some fuel?” He tilted his head slightly to one side, as if he could divine her true intentions if he found the right angle. “That’s it?”

“And some food and water to last a few days. After that, you’re on your own.”

“What about weapons?”

“No weapons.”

“You can’t do that to me.”

“This isn’t a negotiation. I’m telling you what’s going to happen, and you’re going to accept it because there is no Door B or Door C. There is just this door.” She glanced at her watch. “Your boat will be ready in one hour. Make the most of the time you have left and pack up.”

“I need guns!”

She shook her head, amazed at how calm she was. Her voice hadn’t risen noticeably and her body, along with the hand hovering beside the Glock, remained perfectly steady. She wouldn’t have thought any of this was possible as she walked the length of the boat and climbed down to the lower deck, then moved through the engine room and toward his cabin. She remembered the look on Bonnie’s face as she walked past the other woman, who could barely look her in the eyes. Like everyone, Bonnie had been dreading this moment, too.

But for whatever reason, Lara didn’t feel the sudden surge of adrenaline or pangs of guilt. There was just…calmness, because she knew exactly why she was doing this and why there were no other options. It just had to be done.

“No guns,” she said. “At least not from us. What you find out there is up to you. All I’m giving you is a boat, fuel, and some food and water.”

“You can’t do this…”

“It’s happening.”

“No…”

“You don’t have a choice.”

“Don’t I?” he said, peering at her, his head still cocked at an odd angle.

“No,” she said. “You can take what I give you and make the best of it, or you can take your chances.” She finally moved her hand, placing her palm over the butt of her sidearm. “It’s up to you.”

He didn’t say anything and simply glared at her for a few seconds. He didn’t move, though she thought he wanted to. Desperately wanted to.

But he didn’t move.

“I’ll send Bonnie back down here to get you in one hour,” she said. “Be ready.”

She turned to leave.

“Lara,” he said.

She ignored him and continued walking to the door. “One hour.”

“Lara!” he shouted, the sound of her name like a knife.

That time she stopped and turned back around just in time to see him lunging at her.

Oh, goddammit, she thought, realizing just how badly she had read the situation. She wasn’t prepared for this. Not when she thought it was all over.

Gage had lost a lot of weight since she first met him, and although he still limped noticeably on one leg despite the brace, it didn’t seem to slow him down one bit at the moment. She wasn’t ready for his speed or the bloodshot eyes coming right at her. He didn’t so much as cross the small space between them as he launched himself, his body like a living spring that had been coiled, waiting to explode in this one single moment.

And there was something else — a streak of sunlight shining through the open window, reflecting across the flat surface of an object, long and sharp, in his right hand, his fingers gripped tightly around its cloth-covered base. Some kind of knife, maybe a piece of metal he had pried loose somewhere. Whatever it was, he had been hiding it on him when she entered, but he was showing it to her now as he streaked across the room right at her.

Lara lifted her left arm instinctively, not even realizing what she was doing until the shiv sliced into her flesh. There should have been pain — a lot of it, given how forceful Gage had struck, the blow’s impact magnified by his forward momentum — except there was just a stinging sensation, as if her body didn’t truly grasp what was happening and her mind couldn’t interpret the true meaning behind the stream of blood arcing through the air.

She lost her balance even as she was backpedaling and stumbled out the open door and into the hallway beyond. He was still coming, face contorted into an expression that was part anger and part triumph. He didn’t so much as follow her out as he stalked after her, (her) blood flitting off the object in his right hand with his every step.

She was still off balance and stumbling blindly backward, trying desperately to exert some control over her legs, when her back slammed into the smooth metal wall of the hallway outside the room. There was pain that time, but also surprise at how much distance she had covered in such a short time between when Gage struck and now. The breath rushed out of her as she stabbed her right hand down to her hip, found the familiar grip of the Glock, and jerked the weapon up just as Gage raised his right hand and brought it back down a heartbeat later, aiming from right to left—

Bang!

The gunshot was like an explosion inside the close confines of steel and concrete that made up the lower deck. The Trident’s engine was still shut off, so there was nothing to dampen the noise; it was still echoing in her head like a jackhammer seconds later.

Gage seemed to take one, then two, hesitant steps backward, his slashing right hand frozen in the air as if he had simply forgotten how or why it was up there in the first place. His fingers were so tightly clenched around the knife’s handle that they were almost as white as his paling face. Blood gushed from his stomach as he attempted to stanch it with his left hand, sticky wetness slipping through his fingers.

“You—” he said, looking back at her.

She shot him again, this time in the chest, before he could finish what he was about to say. The second gunshot sounded curiously softer than the first, which didn’t make a lot of sense, but then maybe her racing heartbeat, so loud that both her ears seemed to be thrumming, had something to do with that.

Gage fell back through the open cabin door and slammed into the floor with a heavy thump!, followed a split second later by the clattering of the knife at his booted feet.

The heavy pounding of footsteps came from another part of the boat, then someone was shouting her name.

She was still trying to figure out what was happening, or how she had ended up sitting in a pool of blood, when a voice gasped, “Jesus, Lara, Jesus,” followed by a sharp squawking noise and someone shouting Zoe’s name.

“So that was your brilliant plan?” Carly asked. “You were going to West him? Girl, you should have talked to me about it first. I would have advised you to just shoot the fucker and throw him overboard. No muss, no fuss.”

Lara looked up quizzically at her friend. She found it hard to focus on her face for some reason, so had to settle for Carly’s bright red hair as a marker.

“What?” Carly said.

“‘West him’?” Lara said, her voice hoarse. “What does that even mean?”

“You remember West, don’t you? Yee-haw? You smashed his head in with a radio when he snuck into your room with a gun back at the hotel?”

“Oh.”

West. Jesus, she had forgotten all about West. He had come to Song Island with Bonnie and the others. There had been another man with him, but for the life of her, Lara couldn’t recall his name at the moment.

“You really did forget,” Carly was saying. “Is this one of Danny and Will’s famous compartmentalization thingies?”

“No, I just forgot about him.”

“Really.”

She nodded.

“I wonder what happened to him,” Carly said. “You think he ever made it after you and Danny sent him out into the world with just his boxers and a pair of socks?”

“I don’t know. I don’t really care, either.”

“Fair enough. He and his buddy did try to gut Blaine.”

She glanced around the room. She was glad to see harsh sunlight coming in through a window to one side (Still daylight). Considering the unspectacular decorations along the walls and the slightly hard bed she was lying on at the moment, they had taken her back to her cabin.

“He used a piece of his cot, in case you were wondering,” Carly said. “One of the frames, according to Maddie. He must have spent days sharpening that thing. I guess when you’re down there with just that hole to look out of, you need to find ways to fill your time. Like making shanks. What an asshole.”

Lara looked down at her left hand, then lifted it as much as she could. It was covered in gauze, and the complete absence of pain was a surprise. In fact, she didn’t feel much of anything at all. A combination of painkillers and…something.

“What did Zoe give me?” she asked.

Carly shrugged. “Beats the hell out of me. You’re the third-year medical student; you tell me.”

“That was a long time ago. Feels like another lifetime…”

“Anyway, you bled all over the place. Freaked all of us out. Imagine what we’d do without you to boss us around.”

Lara managed a weak smile. “You would have gotten by.”

“I don’t know about that.”

There was something on Carly’s face, a seriousness that Lara rarely saw, and it made her wonder just how close to death’s door she had been outside of Gage’s cabin. She remembered pain, a lot of screaming, and wetness…

“I’m okay,” Lara said.

“No, you’re not,” Carly said, “but you will be. We’ll see to that. So you need to get some rest and we’ll do our best to keep this floating barge running in the meantime. I know it’s hard to believe, but we’re not all dopes. Well, not completely.”

“Danny?”

“Still nothing from that idiot. But he’s got four more hours until nightfall, so I’m delaying panic time until then.”

“What about Keo?”

“Also nada.” She frowned. “That’s worrying, right? It’s noon, Lara. He should have radioed in by now. We did come all the way down here just to pick his sorry ass up.”

She nodded. Or thought she did. Maybe a slight up and down motion.

“Blaine wants to go look for him,” Carly continued. “Or at least go closer to the coast, in case he lost his radio but is waiting for us on the beach or something.”

“No,” she said.

“Why not?”

“If we’re close enough to the beach to see him, then someone can see us, too.”

“Oh. Good point. I guess that’s why you get paid the big bucks.”

“Something like that. Besides, Keo can take care of himself.” She forced herself to focus on Carly’s face. “Tell Blaine not to expose us unnecessarily, understand?”

Carly nodded. “You’re the boss, boss.”

Lara saw something else on her friend’s face. It was something that had been there for a long time now, and that she had seen on the others’ faces as well. She knew this moment would come — had, in fact, expected it much earlier.

“What’s on your mind?” she asked.

Carly looked hesitant, like someone preparing to pick her way through a minefield. “Maybe it’s time we finally talk about why we’re still hanging around the Gulf of Mexico, why you keep delaying going to the Bengal Islands.”

Will…

“We need to talk about it sooner or later,” Carly continued.

Will… I waited for you. I waited days and weeks for you.

Goddamn you. You promised me. You promised me.

“But it can wait until you’re better,” Carly said. “Zoe and I will look in on you through the day, make sure you don’t try to sneak off on us. I don’t think we can afford to lose you, too.”

The way we lost Will…

Carly turned to go.

“Carly…” she said when Carly was at the door. “When Danny and the others come back, we’ll go.”

“Are you sure?” Carly asked.

She nodded. Or tried to.

Carly pursed her lips into a sympathetic smile. “I’ll let the others know.”

“What about Gage?” she asked.

“We tossed him overboard. Gage being a piece of shit human being and all, we thought it was about time he contributed to the world by feeding the fishes.”

“Good,” she said, closing her eyes.

Will’s voice echoing inside her head, the way it had ever since that last night on Song Island:

“Whatever happens, keep moving forward. Don’t stop to look back. Keep moving forward, because that’s how we survive.”

It was dark outside her window when she opened her eyes a second time. Alarm bells immediately went off and didn’t stop until she could hear the low howl of the wind outside, the gentle slapping of water against the Trident’s hull.

Safe. Still safe.

There was a wall clock, but she didn’t bother looking for it in the semidarkness. There was enough moonlight that she could make out the foot of her bed and a small figure huddled in the corner under a blanket.

It took her a moment to piece together Elise’s round face, the girl’s head resting against the armchair, long hair draped across her oval-shaped face. She thought about calling to Elise, telling the girl to go back to the room she shared with Vera, where she wouldn’t have to twist herself into a pretzel to fit into a chair. But she saw the way Elise was sleeping, as peaceful as she had ever seen the girl, and decided against it.

Lara was already on her back, so she didn’t have to do very much to look up at the shadows dancing across the ceiling. Instead of making her nervous, they soothed her nerves, and she didn’t move for the longest time. The drugs Zoe had given her prevented her from fully concentrating on any one thing, including all the rambling thoughts inside her head, for which she was grateful for.

A soft thoom from somewhere in the distance made her glance toward the door. She only heard it because everything else was so quiet. If she thought the nights on Song Island could be deathly still, out here among the waves it was even more pronounced.

There it was again: thoom.

A low rumbling, almost like thunder, coming from a distance. Except there were no hints of raindrops pelting the roof above her. The Trident had had to move through two rainstorms in the last month, and she knew what rain sounded and felt like; this wasn’t it.

She climbed out of bed, relieved Zoe hadn’t connected her to any of the field equipment she had set up to take care of their walking wounded. Danny had been Zoe’s first and (Thank God) only customer so far. Someone had put her into one of her cotton jogging pants and sweatshirts, which explained why her body was so warm despite the open window.

Lara padded across the room, thankful her injury was confined to her left arm. How long had she been asleep? It was hard to gauge time by the darkness, especially with her head still swimming around in a medication-infused fog.

She passed Elise’s sleeping form, the girl completely oblivious—

Thoom.

Definitely not thunder. Or rain. It wasn’t loud or ferocious enough to be gunshots on the boat. Or nearby, which would have meant a second boat. And they were still out in the ocean. Or were they? Had Blaine moved them closer to shore?

“Blaine wants to go look for him,” Carly had said, referring to Keo.

The door opened before she even reached for it, and Bonnie’s tall frame blocked her path into the hallway. The other woman looked shocked to see Lara standing there, her left arm bent at the elbow, held tight against her chest.

“You heard it, too?” Bonnie asked.

Lara nodded. “What was it?”

“Explosions.”

“Explosions?”

“From the beach. From Sunport.”

Keo.

“Where’s everyone?” she asked.

Bonnie held up her radio. “On the bridge.”

They turned right and went up the darkened hallway. Why was it so dark? Usually there were one or two LED lights set on dim along the corridors.

Next to her, Bonnie looked like she wanted to wrap an arm around Lara’s waist to keep her upright, but Lara was moving just fine. That was the good news. The bad news was that she was starting to feel a slight tingle coming from her left arm, a clear indication the pain meds were losing their effectiveness.

“Can you walk okay?” Bonnie asked.

“I’m fine. What happened to the lights?”

“Blaine switched them off.”

“Why?”

“He didn’t say.”

Lara could hear voices — Blaine’s and someone else’s — from the other side of the open bridge door in front of them.

“Did Keo radio in yet?” she asked.

“I don’t think so,” Bonnie said. “But you’ll have to ask Blaine. That’s his and Carly’s department.”

The other voice belonged to Carly, and she was standing with Blaine in front of the console, looking out the wraparound windshield. They stood in complete darkness, with only streams of moonlight and the occasional blinking dashboard buttons to see with. Blaine was peering behind a pair of binoculars, and though she couldn’t actually make out the Texas coastline outside, she couldn’t shake the feeling they were much closer than they had been earlier today.

Carly glanced over her shoulder. “Hey, what are you doing up?”

“We’ve moved,” Lara said.

“I moved us closer to shore,” Blaine said. “Don’t worry; I switched off the lights before I got close enough to be spotted.”

She nodded, relieved. “What’s going on?”

“I’m betting my nonexistent week’s salary on World War III,” Carly said.

There was another thoom! in the distance, and like the previous ones, this came from the Texas shoreline, exactly where Sunport would be. As she peered out the windshield at the darkened world, a stream of red and orange flames appeared as if from a dragon’s mouth and slashed from left to right, before seeming to diffuse and disappear, leaving behind small pockets of fire that seemed to be…moving around?

There was another thoom! This one was so loud, she swore she could feel the impact causing the boat to shake slightly under her bare feet, but that couldn’t have been possible given their distance…could it?

“You need to see this,” Blaine said, and handed her his binoculars.

She stepped closer toward the windshield and looked through the lens.

The binocular had night vision, which allowed her to see further than she could have with the naked eye. They were still too far away for her to make out every single detail, but she had no problems picking up the objects moving around in the fields beyond the beach. They looked to be on fire.

There was another thoom! and for just a split second, the explosion lit up what looked like a vehicle surrounded by hordes of ghouls.

“Is that…?” she said.

“It’s a tank,” Blaine said, barely able to contain his excitement. “It’s a fucking U.S. Army tank.”

CHAPTER 7 GABY

It seemed to take forever to get to wherever they were going, with Gaby blindfolded and lying in the back of a moving truck the entire time. Her legs were bound at the ankles, her arms twisted painfully behind her back. Nate and Danny were somewhere to her right, their familiar scents a welcome distraction from the constant bumps in the road. At least they hadn’t gagged her, thank God.

She could also sniff the other two in the back of the truck with them.

Soldiers. More soldiers.

But not the same ones from Louisiana or the ones in black uniforms they had encountered in Hellion when they first made their way inland a few days ago. No, these were different men. Different loyalties. And different agendas.

“What happened?” she had asked Morris.

“You don’t know?” Morris had replied, blinking up at her through a layer of blood.

No, she didn’t know, and neither had Morris. Because these men weren’t collaborators, and neither was the pilot that had laid waste to Morris’s town. These men were something else completely. Something more…dangerous.

Her captors hadn’t said a word since she, Danny, and Nate were unceremoniously tossed into the back of the truck, and every now and then she could hear the Warthog in the background. Or, at least, she thought it was the same warplane that had destroyed their vehicle. The possibility that there could be more than one of them out there made her shiver involuntarily.

Every now and then, voices managed to rise over the clatter of the moving truck. Muffled sounds, men talking through radios.

One of the soldiers said into the wind, “Three, all still kicking.”

“Collaborators?” a male voice asked.

“Doesn’t look like it,” the man said. He was somewhere to her right, probably sitting on the wheel housing.

“What do they look like?” the voice asked.

“I dunno. Civilians. No uniforms, but they were packing serious heat. Probably had more in the truck before Cole wasted it. We haven’t asked them any questions yet.”

“Okay, make sure they’re still breathing when you get back.”

“Roger that,” the man said.

Gaby waited to hear more, but there was just the continuous thump-thump of the truck’s tires going up and down the unpaved road under them. Each time they hit a hole or had to go over a bump, Gaby’s head lifted slightly, only to slam back down against the cold (and dirty) truck bed. She tried to time the rise and falls but could never get it right and gave up after half a dozen failed attempts.

They must have been moving through a wooded area, because the temperature dropped noticeably despite the combined sweating of her, Nate, Danny, and their two guards. High tree canopies, enough to block out the sun in this part of the countryside, embraced her in cool shadows.

She did her best to keep track of time, but it was difficult without her eyes. Besides, her ears were filled with nothing but the thump-thump of the tires. It could have been a few hours or less than that since they were captured. The warmth of the sun against one side of her face kept her calm, the usual dread of incoming nightfall staved off momentarily. She hadn’t realized how much living on the Trident this last month had dulled her survival instincts until she set foot back on land earlier this week. That mess in Hellion was proof of that.

We got soft…and this is what happens when you get soft.

She was angry at herself, at how she had handled the ambush on the road, and how close to dying she had been in that ditch if it hadn’t been for Nate’s fast thinking. She despised the feeling of helplessness, something she had tried to beat out of her ever since losing Josh to the collaborators and realized the only person she could afford to depend on was herself.

You would have been so disappointed in me, Will. At least you weren’t here to see me screw up so badly.

She was still trying to come to terms with her failures when the vehicle began to noticeably slow down. A little later, the sharp squeal and slightly burning aroma of well-worn tires braking wafted into her realm of smell.

Footsteps as the two men in the back maneuvered around her, Danny, and Nate on their way to the back. The loud clank! of the tailgate being unlatched, followed by the bang! as it slammed down. A stream of voices, vehicles in motion, the extra body odor of a lot of people perspiring in the sun despite the cool air, and the clicks and clacks of…what was that? Metal? Trinkets?

Bullets. She was listening to the sound of bullets being moved around in crates. Not just that, but they were making them, too. The evidence was in the thick taste of smelting metal in the air. The question was: Were they making silver bullets?

Rough hands grabbed her by the shoulders and spun her around before they began dragging her backward like a slab of meat. Then there was just empty air and for a moment she thought she was going to fall, but the same pair of hands maintained their grip and turned her around again.

“Feet down,” a gruff voice said. Not the same man she had heard earlier on the radio.

Gaby lowered her feet, touching nothing for the longest time until — there, solid ground. Dirt, not concrete.

The same pair of hands pulled her slightly forward, off the open tailgate, and stood her up. “Don’t move and you won’t fall,” the man said.

She stood still and listened to more clinking and clacking going on all around her. There were a lot of people squeezed into a small area, and every single one of them seemed to be in constant motion.

A man next to her grunted, then a familiar voice said, “Are we there yet?”

Danny.

She almost smiled, but didn’t. There was no telling who was watching and how they would react.

“Where are we?” someone else said. Nate.

“Shut up,” the voice from the radio said. “You’ll speak when spoken to. Got it?”

“Can you run that by me again?” Danny said.

The whump! of something hitting flesh.

Danny’s voice again, but this time sounding like he had his teeth clenched in pain, “So that’s a no?”

“Smartass,” the gruff voice said. Then, “Where does he want them?”

“He’s in the hangar,” another voice said. “Take them over.”

“On foot?”

“We need the truck for transportation. Besides, you need to lose some weight anyway. The walk’ll do you good.”

“Fuck you.”

The other voice laughed.

A hand grabbed Gaby’s right arm and held her steady as someone else cut the zip tie around her ankles. The same hand then pushed her forward. She took that as a sign they wanted her to walk, so she did. Hopefully she didn’t run into something, like one of the many vehicles moving around her.

Her escort walked slightly behind her. A woman. Gaby could tell even with blindfolds on, because there was no mistaking the sudden difference in bodily smell between the guys who had brought her here and the one who taken over.

“This would be easier if I could see,” Gaby said, picking her way over uneven dirt floor, the rising heat of the sun beating down on her.

“No talking,” her escort said. Gaby was right; it was a woman.

“You have a name?” she asked anyway.

There was no response.

“Are we at an airport?” Gaby asked.

Still no response.

“Not the most talkative bunch,” Danny said somewhere to her right.

“You okay?” Nate said from her left.

“I’m fine, dear; don’t worry about me,” Danny said.

“Gaby,” Nate said.

She smiled before realizing he couldn’t see through his own blindfold. “I’m okay. You?”

“Trying not to trip. And a little sore all over.”

“That’s what she said,” Danny said.

“Shut up and keep walking straight,” Gaby’s female escort snapped. She was sure the woman wasn’t alone, though her companions were keeping their distance.

After about thirty seconds of walking silently across what felt like an open field, the woman finally said, “How did you know?” just as Gaby felt the ground under her switch from soft dirt to hard concrete.

“Know what?” Gaby said.

“That we’re at an airfield.”

“Someone said to take us to the hangar.”

“Ah.”

“What’s going on? Are you guys making bullets?”

The woman didn’t answer.

“I thought we were talking,” Gaby said.

“You thought wrong,” the woman said.

“That’s what they used to call me in college,” Danny chimed in. “Thought Wrong Danny. Wanna know why?”

“No,” the woman said.

“Sure you do.”

“I have a gun that says I don’t.”

“Well, since it’s my personal motto that the gun is always right, I’ll save the explanation for later.”

“You do that,” their guard said.

They walked on for another five minutes, until the loud chatter of people, machines, and vehicles began to fade behind them. She wasn’t sure how far the paved ground went, but it seemed to stretch on endlessly. She was trying to remember how far they had walked when the ground began to vibrate and a loud rush of air hit her with such surprising force she started to fall over, and would have, if a pair of hands didn’t grab her from behind first.

“Easy there,” the woman said.

Gaby found her footing again and turned her head in a vain attempt to follow the object’s trajectory. “What was that?”

“One of the Warthogs coming in for a landing. It’s on the other side of the runway, but they pack quite a punch.”

Jesus, did she just say ‘one of the Warthogs’? Gaby thought, before saying out loud, trying to keep her voice as steady as possible, “How many of them do you have?”

“Need to know, Erin,” a familiar male gruff voice said from behind them.

“I’m not an idiot, Louis,” the woman, Erin, said. Then, with a push against Gaby’s back that seemed to indicate the friendly chatter was over, “We’re almost there. Keep straight.”

Bright sunlight flooded the wide hangar through a series of high windows along all four sides. The arched roof looked overly tall, though the fact she’d just had her blindfolds removed for the first time in a long time might have had a little something to do with her inability to properly judge dimensions at the moment.

Catwalks extended from the bottom of the structure all the way to the windows, ending in platforms that looked big enough for a dozen or so men to keep an eye out on the surrounding area. There were metal bars over the windows, which, like the walkways, appeared to have been tacked on very recently. They definitely didn’t look as if they were part of the building’s original blueprints.

The floor was coated in some kind of shiny material that reflected her face, along with everyone else standing around her, including Danny to her right and Nate to her left. She didn’t know if they were flanking her on purpose, or if that was just how they had been escorted inside. Not that she minded. She liked having them there at her sides, though she would never say it out loud.

They had been led across an airfield and into a hangar, but there were no planes inside. Instead, the cavernous space had been converted into some kind of storage warehouse, with a small army of people in tan uniforms loading a pair of green Army trucks with plastic moving boxes, wooden crates, and metal containers. A woman with a long ponytail (That’s definitely not Army regulation) handed luggage over to a man crouched at the back of one of the trucks, and Gaby heard more of the clicks and clacks of loose items moving around inside.

There were just as many sneakers as there were combat boots squeaking against the glossy floor as the flurry of people went about their business. More boxes, along with garbage bags and just about anything that could have been used as containers, lined the far wall of the building, waiting to be loaded. Duct tape, ropes, and strips of cloth hid the contents, though one of the boxes was slightly see-through, and Gaby was trying to peek at the objects on the other side—

A loud crash! made her look away.

One of the soldiers in the trucks had missed a handoff, and a gray plastic box had broken against the floor. Candleholders, pens, and silverware were rolling around. They were all silver. Every single one of them.

They’re making silver bullets, which means they know about the silver.

There was no panic — no angry voices or barking orders — and people got to work gathering up the spilled items and putting them back into other containers. More than a few of them, she noticed, looked too young to be wearing military uniforms of any sort.

A boy who couldn’t have been more than fifteen, his tan pants hanging loosely off a slim waist, picked up a crate from the far wall and grunted his way over to a truck. The teenager’s shirt collar was green and featured the same white sun emblem that was on the collars of the men who had captured her on the road. Those men, she remembered, had red collars. Like the other workers inside the warehouse at the moment, the boy wasn’t armed.

When one of the trucks had filled up, someone slammed the tailgate closed. The truck roared to life, then drove out of the hangar. As soon as it was out, another Army truck began backing into position.

Gaby took the opportunity to look behind her at a steady stream of vehicles moving like busy bees around the airfield. She couldn’t see the entirety of the place from her angle, but what she could see told her she was dealing with a very organized group of people who clearly knew what they were doing.

The presence of the sun eased her mind a bit, but she badly wished she knew the exact time. Besides taking their weapons, radios, and gun belts, their captors had also taken their watches. She hated not knowing how many hours she had before nightfall, especially out here. Things were so much simpler back on the Trident, where nightfall didn’t arrive with the same kind of crawling dread.

She turned back around when a voice said, “Did you find any uniforms on them?”

A lone figure broke off from the group of people in front of her. He had been there this entire time, she realized, with his back to them as he shuffled items between the back of the building and the trucks. The man pulled off work gloves and wiped sweat from his face with the back of his hand as he walked over. He wore the same tan uniform as the others, along with the Texas patch over his right breast, and the only thing that stood out about him was the black collar with the white sun emblem in the center.

Red, green, and now black.

The man was in his late fifties and stood eye-to-eye with Danny, but there was something imposing about him that had nothing to do with his height or size. It was in the way he carried himself, the stern, almost paternal look in his eyes. His name tag read: “Mercer.”

“No, sir,” the gruff voice answered from somewhere behind her. “We searched the truck. Or what was left of it. Cole got a little trigger-happy and blasted the thing before we could take them into custody.”

Mercer nodded, then looked at all three of them one at a time. He casually put his gloves into his back pocket before finally asking, “Who’s in charge?”

“I guess that would be me,” Danny said.

“What’s your name, son?”

“Danny, but my mother calls me Daniel. You can call me that, too, but I’ll have to insist on at least fifteen years of child-rearing first.”

The older man trained soft brown eyes on Danny. Anyone else might have turned weak in the knees under that gaze, but most people weren’t Danny, who had survived too many things the last few months — and the years before the world ended — to be affected. Even so, Gaby thought Danny might have actually just…stood a bit straighter?

Mercer finally turned those same calm eyes on her before moving on to Nate a few seconds later. He must not have found anything interesting about them, because he ended up back on Danny. “What unit were you in, son?”

“Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment, Third Battalion out of Fort Benning,” Danny said.

“Fort Benning is an excellent producer of Rangers.”

“They did the best they could with what they had.”

“And your friends?”

“She’s Gaby, and he’s Nathaniel.”

“Just Nate,” Nate said.

Mercer didn’t acknowledge either her or Nate. He saw them, but he didn’t see them. She didn’t know whether she should feel a little annoyed, or glad. Did she really want Mercer to “see” her? Maybe not…

Around them, the activity continued, even as another truck backed inside, the beep-beep-beep of its warning signal loud in the confines of the hangar. The piles of items at the back wall were already much smaller than the last time she looked.

“You were at T29,” Mercer was saying.

“T29?” Danny said.

“The town we attacked earlier today. What were you doing there?”

“Four hundred…” Morris had said. Gaby thought she could still taste the smoke and blood on the tip of her tongue.

“Saw your hog swooping in for the kill and decided to go see what all the fuss was about,” Danny said. “That’s the full extent of us being there.”

“You killed them,” Gaby said. She didn’t realize she had spoken until the words blurted out, drawing Mercer’s eyes to her. There was something about those eyes that made her want to take a step back, and it took all of her willpower to remain perfectly still. Maybe the rising anger and the still-fresh memories of Morris’s town helped. “There were 400 people in that town. Men, women, and children.”

“And pregnant women,” Nate said. “You murdered pregnant women, for God’s sake.”

“It’s war,” Mercer said. “People die in wars.”

“There were pregnant women in that town!” Nate shouted, his words booming in the hangar, so loud that they even managed to pierce through the beep-beep-beep of another Army truck backing inside.

The soldiers working behind Mercer stopped and looked over. A few of them even glanced at Mercer for some kind of response.

Mercer didn’t respond right away, and instead stared back at Nate as if waiting for his fury to burn out. Gaby thought he was going to have a long wait, because she had never seen Nate so angry before — his face was almost red and his nostrils flared, and suddenly that Mohawk looked threatening instead of funny.

“Collateral damage,” Mercer said finally.

“That’s it?” Nate said. “That’s all you have to say?”

“That’s all that needs to be said.” And just like that, he dismissed Nate and focused on Danny. “Let’s talk, soldier.”

“Why not? Not like I have a hot date or anything,” Danny said.

The older man walked off and Danny turned and followed, but not before giving her a slight nod that she would have missed entirely if she hadn’t been looking for it.

“Be cool,” that nod said.

Mercer had climbed into the front passenger seat of a Jeep waiting outside the hangar. Danny took a seat in the back as the vehicle drove off through some kind of private airfield with a small cluster of administrative buildings all the way on the other side. That was also where most of the vehicles and people not in the hangar were congregated, and where, she guessed, they had been dropped off earlier.

“Sonofabitch,” Nate said next to her, gritting his teeth.

Gaby took his hand and squeezed. He looked over and pursed his lips, but she could still see the anger on his face. It was the very first time she had ever seen him so angry and though it probably shouldn’t have, it made her like him even more.

“Come on,” Erin said, turning and leading them through the hangar.

While blindfolded, Gaby had thought Erin was in her thirties based entirely on her voice, but she was actually younger — late twenties, and tall. Gaby was used to being one of the taller girls in most rooms, but Erin towered over her at about five-ten, with long dark hair in a ponytail and light hazel eyes. She had a slightly Eurasian look about her, but her accent was all Texan.

The soldier with the gruff voice, Louis, followed behind them. He was in his thirties, balding, and squat. He had a rifle slung over his back and always kept a good distance, as if afraid she or Nate would try something. Maybe she might have done exactly that before she saw all the manpower Mercer had assembled around them.

They were led to an office in the back right corner. It was the only room in the entire structure and two more soldiers stood guard with M4 rifles. Like Erin and Louis, they had red collars on top of their uniforms. That, she realized, was what distinguished them from the worker bees in the place.

Red collars for the warriors and green for support? Was that how it worked? Then what were the ones with black collars, like Mercer? Maybe those were the commanders, the ones who called the shots. That would also make them the ones who were, ultimately, the most responsible for butchering the 400 people in Morris’s town.

Erin walked on ahead of them to one of the two open windows, looked in, and said, “All the way to the back.” She waited for whoever was inside to obey, then walked to the door and opened it. There was no lock, but Gaby guessed they didn’t really need it with the two guards outside.

“What happens now?” Gaby asked.

“Once he decides what to do with you, you’ll be the first to know,” Erin said. “Until then, you’re to sit tight.”

“Once who decides?” Nate asked.

“Mercer,” Erin said.

“Is he your commanding officer?”

“Something like that.”

“Need to know, Erin, shit,” Louis said.

Erin took out a box cutter from her pocket and sliced the zip ties from around Gaby’s and Nate’s wrists.

“Thanks,” Gaby said.

Erin ignored her, said, “Inside.”

Nate locked eyes with Gaby, and though most of his anger had diffused during the walk over here, she could still see the spark of fury in his eyes. For a moment she thought he was going to do something stupid, just like she had almost done back on the road. She wanted to tell him not to, because even if they could get by Erin and Louis and the two guards, there was still Danny somewhere out there with Mercer, not to mention the literal army of soldiers between them.

But Nate didn’t try anything, and Gaby gratefully gave him a pursed smile as they entered the office together, side by side. Erin closed the door behind them, and one of the soldiers standing guard appeared on the other side of the closest window and glanced in. He didn’t look especially threatening, but the M4 in his hands was another matter.

It took a few seconds to notice the stink of too many people jammed into one room, though the smell would have probably been ten times worse if the windows weren’t open. There were five of them and they were huddled against the back wall a second ago, but were now spreading out again in order to give themselves — and each other — some leg room. There used to be furniture inside the office, including a large desk in the center, but they had all been removed, leaving behind just dust outlines.

“Fresh meat,” a voice chuckled from across the room.

Gaby tracked the source to a short man sitting in a corner, legs splayed in front of him as if he owned the space. He had black hair and dark eyes, and there was absolutely nothing trustworthy about him that she could find in the second or two their eyes locked. The man, like his companions, wore identical black uniforms with a patch of the state of Texas on their shoulders.

Collaborators.

The short man eyeballed Gaby up and down before breaking out into a grin. “And here I thought I’d seen the last of you. Small world.”

He looked familiar, even underneath the grime and speckles of dry blood that clung to his face, but she couldn’t quite place him.

She focused on his name tag instead.

It said: “Mason.”

CHAPTER 8 KEO

After two hours of sitting and lying on the sand, drinking warm water, and looking out at the endless expanse of ocean while waiting for something to show up, Jordan finally said, “I don’t think they’re out there.”

“The problem is, they could be here already,” Keo said, “and we wouldn’t know it. They won’t risk coming this close to shore in the daytime. Lara’s too smart for that.”

“We should have gone up for the radio.”

“We should have done a lot of things. Story of my life.”

“Sounds like a fun life.”

“It has its moments.” He blinked up at the sun. “I’m hungry.”

“Ditto.”

They got up, brushed the sand off their clothes, and headed up the beach in the direction of the row of houses they’d seen from a distance. Closer, they found a half dozen homes clustered around the same general area, partitioned off from the beach by rickety four-foot fences that wouldn’t have kept out the family of crabs Keo’d had to walk around while licking his lips at the prospect of crab meat later that night.

Finally, something good to look forward to.

He expected to find luxury beachfront properties, but the houses were old and covered in peeling paint, and he had a difficult time imagining them looking any better just a year ago when there were still owners around to maintain them. The buildings had no uniform designs but did share tall foundation stilts and wooden stairs that snaked up to second floors. In case the beach flooded, he guessed, though the idea of being trapped in one of these when the Gulf of Mexico decided to come ashore left him a little nervous.

Sun-bleached grass covered a wide field on the other side of the fence, the weeds going all the way up to their knees as they moved through them. A mangy dog that had been sleeping in the shade heard them coming and jogged off, looking annoyed by the human presence.

“Must be your smell,” Jordan said.

“Must be,” he said, “because we both know you smell like lilacs and roses.”

“You sweet talker, you.”

“Either that, or my nose is all stuffy.”

“Then you had to go and ruin it.”

“It’s what I do.”

“Try to do a little less of it.”

“And suppress my natural charms? Perish the thought.”

She smirked. “Try anyway.”

They checked out a wide squat house with a gray roof, accessing the second floor by creaking wooden stairs along its side. Keo was afraid the staircase might break under him as they ascended, but it remained improbably in one piece all the way to the unlocked front door.

He peeked inside at the empty living room. The windows were sans curtains, leaving a healthy amount of sunlight to splash across the dust-covered furniture. Everything was bright and gray and brown, and he didn’t have to sniff the air to know there wasn’t anything worth finding inside, including anything of the undead variety.

“Maybe check the kitchen just in case?” Jordan said.

“Sure, why not. Maybe we’ll find a carton of ice cream inside the fridge, too.”

“Wouldn’t that be nice?”

They went inside and checked the kitchen and found it just as empty as he had expected. He opened the fridge only after pinching his nose and sucking in a large breath, and closed the door exactly three seconds later after giving it a cursory look.

“Anything?” Jordan asked, coming out of a back hallway.

He shook his head and sucked in a fresh breath of air. “You?”

“I don’t think they were home when it happened. I didn’t see any traces of blood or signs of a struggle.”

“Told you. Waste of time.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said, and headed back to the door.

They walked a short distance from the house with the gray roof to one next door with orange paint. This one looked more promising, with newer construction, and the steps up to the second floor didn’t creak nearly as much. The door, when he tried it, was locked, which was a good sign. A quick glance at the closed windows to his right got him an eyeful of cotton curtains.

“Looks good,” he said.

“Remember, I get first stab at the carton of ice cream,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

He slung his M4 and drew his Glock, then looked over at Jordan. She had kept her M4 in front of her and was already in position to assault the door before he had ever said anything.

He must have smiled to himself, because Jordan said, “What are you looking all goofy for?”

“Goofy?”

“It must be those ugly scars on your face. Reminds me of this guy I used to know in middle school. Goofy Larry.”

“Sounds like a great guy.”

“He was, if it wasn’t for the smell.

Keo sniffed himself. “I’ll take a bath in the ocean later.”

“Promises, promises,” she said. Then, “Open the door, Romeo, and let’s get this show on the road before I die of old age.”

He took a step back and gave the doorknob a hard look. It wasn’t anything elaborate, just a round metallic silver (But not real silver, natch) knob with a keyhole in the center.

“Maybe we should try knocking first?” Jordan said. “You know, in case there’s someone already inside.”

“You think?”

“It’d be the right thing to—”

Crash! as Keo kicked the door at the spot just underneath the doorknob before she could finish.

The door swung open, the doorknob and lock hanging off the doorframe.

Jordan sighed. “Dick.”

He grinned, then took a step forward and inside, raising the Glock to chest level. He swept left, then right, before forward again. Jordan followed, leaving just enough room for him to turn, if necessary. The house had been sealed off for so long that the lack of ventilation hit Keo first. It would have been stuffy and hot if the outside weather weren’t so chilly, especially this close to the ocean.

He moved through the living room, passing leather brown furniture, and maneuvered around a glass coffee table with old copies of Sports Illustrated and Cosmopolitan in two separate stacks. His and hers, he presumed. The interior looked more inviting than its exterior, a chandelier dangling from the ceiling and framed photos all around of a couple, but no kids. Fishing poles lined one wall, and an array of sports caps took up space on another. A generous layer of dust covered everything, and Keo fought back a sneeze as he made a beeline for the kitchen in the back.

Jordan had positioned herself in front of the back hallway to his right and was aiming her M4 into the darkness. He was thankful their weapons were loaded with silver ammo, even more grateful he had convinced Jordan to waste a couple of days to raid homes and hammer out some silver bullets along the way. Too bad everything, including all that hard-to-find bullet-making material, was lost somewhere in downtown Sunport at the moment.

If it wasn’t for shitty luck…

“Let’s clear the hallway first,” he said.

He moved in front of her, and Jordan slung her rifle and drew her Glock. Keo took out a small Maglite from his pocket and flicked it on, then proceeded into the darkened hallway, the bright LED beam moving from wall to floor to ceiling and back again.

“I don’t smell anything,” Jordan said from behind him.

He nodded. She didn’t mean she couldn’t smell “anything,” because they could smell plenty. What she meant was she couldn’t smell them, because the creatures always gave off an identifiable stench when they were inside a place, especially one that was this lacking in proper ventilation.

There were three doors in the back of the hallway, leading to two bedrooms and a bathroom at the end, but none of them had anything worth finding. Like the first house, there were no obvious signs of a struggle or old, browning blood. Which begged the question: Where the hell were Sunport’s beachside residents when The Purge hit?

When they finished clearing the closets and anything else with a door, Keo left Jordan in the house to look for something useful while he went back outside and made his way down to the first floor. The building rested on stilts like all the other homes, but unlike the gray house next door or the white one on the other side, this one had something that looked like a storage shack underneath it. There was a door in front with a large padlock, but it was wood, and Keo easily got around it by prying the hasp free with his Ka-Bar.

Inside, he found an old couch underneath a heavy blue tarp and camping equipment scattered along a shelf in the back. More promising were three five-gallon water bottles and unmarked brown boxes on the higher shelves, probably in case the room flooded. A dirt-covered bag contained a pile of old, size-small T-shirts. Keo took down and opened one of the boxes and smiled at the unmarked silver cans inside. He held one can up and shook it, heard water sloshing around inside. Canned goods. His luck was finally looking up.

He grabbed one of the boxes and turned to leave when he heard a creak underneath him. It was very slight, and he might have not even triggered it if he hadn’t been holding the extra weight.

He stepped back and looked down at an old rug with fraying edges. At one point it had been covered in green, red, and brown patterns, but it was mostly just brown now. Keo put the box down and pulled back the fabric, then peered through the flurry of erupted dust at a wooden door. There was no lock, but he did spot a small rectangular hole near one end, just big enough for a couple of fingers to slip through.

Keo took out the Maglite and shined it through the hole, spying dirt sprinkled across a floor on the other end, but no signs of obsidian eyes or black flesh. Even so, he leaned forward and sniffed the air around the rectangular opening just to be sure.

Nothing. Well, just dirt, but nothing undead.

He drew his Glock anyway (Just in case, as the folks on the Trident would say), then put the flashlight between his teeth and bit down to keep it in place. He slipped the fingers of his left hand into the opening and yanked as hard as he could.

The door swung open, revealing a rectangular shaped gray underground space; the parts of the four walls that weren’t covered in clumps of damp earth looked like cinderblocks. Some kind of extra underground (hidden?) storage area, though it resembled more of a coffin when viewed from above. At the moment it was empty, and he wondered how tight a fit it would be for, say, two people.

Keo holstered the Glock, kicked the trapdoor closed, and picked up the box and left.

“If the Trident doesn’t show up, I know where we’re staying tonight,” Keo said, dumping the box of canned goods on the kitchen counter.

Jordan was standing next to the sink, pouring warm water over her head to wash off the dirt and sand she’d accumulated. Her short hair had grown out noticeably since T18, but it would still be a while before she had the long ponytail he remembered from their time at Earl’s cabin. She had made a pretty big mess, but then it wasn’t like the owners would be complaining anytime soon.

“Downstairs?” Jordan said, running a towel she’d found in the bathroom through her wet hair.

“Uh huh. Looks pretty comfortable.”

She flashed him a disbelieving look while water poured down her face and onto the sink.

“Mostly,” he added.

“How big is it?”

“Big enough for two people to be cozy.”

“Cozy, huh?”

“You don’t like cozy?”

“I didn’t know we were at the cozy stage.”

“No?”

She gave him a long look, as if she was seriously considering his question. Finally, she shrugged. “What’s in the box?”

“Food.”

“Sweet.”

He took out one of the cans and tossed it to her. “Enjoy.”

“You shouldn’t have,” she said, and tied the towel around her head like a bun, then opened one of the drawers and rummaged around before producing a spoon. “Can’t find a can opener. You still have your Swiss spork, or did you lose everything with your pack, too?”

“That’s why you should always keep the essentials on your person at all times, Jordan.”

“Thanks, Dad. Do you still have it or not?”

He fished out his combo spork/can opener. The utensil was just over six inches long, made of strong titanium, with a spork at the front and can opener teeth at the end. A scork, officially, but the name bothered him for some reason he couldn’t explain, so he stuck with ‘spork.’

He took out another can and opened it, then showed the contents to her.

Jordan wrinkled her nose at the smell. “Disgusting.”

“Really? How long were you running around out there in the woods with Tobias?”

“Not long enough to think kidney beans are even remotely good eatin’.”

Keo finished prying off the lid, then tossed the utensil to her. Jordan had a little more trouble opening hers, but when she finally managed to cut open half the lid, she peered in at the contents and beamed across the kitchen at him.

“Good?” he asked.

“SpaghettiOs. Beats kidney beans.”

“You do know kidney beans aren’t actually beans made of kidneys, right?”

“I’m not an idiot.”

He laughed. “Just wanted to make sure.” He pulled out another can. “Let’s see what else is in here.”

“I call dibs on the first fruit.”

“I don’t think that’s how this works.”

“I got the spork,” she smiled, holding it up.

Keo was hoping for some variety, but they had to settle for two more cans of kidney beans and SpaghettiOs. They left the rest unopened so they wouldn’t waste them, even though there were still a dozen more inside, and those extra boxes downstairs. As much as she had favored the SpaghettiOs at first, Jordan asked him to switch cans halfway through their second helping.

They sat on the floor next to the couch in the living room as they ate. The position allowed them to see the front door and the windows to their left but not be seen in return by anyone peering in. Keo had closed the door, and though he couldn’t use the lock anymore, an armchair pushed against it solved that problem.

He was looking at a framed photo of the home’s owners, a man in his forties with a bushy beard and a woman the same age, though about fifty pounds lighter. They appeared happy, but then he had seen a lot of photos since the end of the world, and without fail they all seemed happy. Smiling at the camera was a façade from back when things still made sense; there wasn’t a whole lot to smile about these days.

After a while, he glanced down at his watch: 3:19 P.M. Less than two hours before sundown, because it got dark early in Texas in the winter.

“You think they’re really out there?” Jordan asked between spoonfuls of beans. Unlike earlier, when her stomach was growling as she ate, she was mostly just going through the motions now, filling up her belly because her body demanded the nutrients, and because the open cans would just be wasted if they didn’t eat them now.

“Who?” he said.

“Your friends on the yacht.”

“I hope so.”

“But you don’t know for sure.”

“Nope.”

“That’s not very encouraging.”

“Nope.”

“Have you tried calling them on your cell?”

“I did, but their line’s always busy, keeps going to voice mail. Plus, I think I’m out of my roaming zone.”

“That’s how they getcha. Roaming charges.”

“Tell me about it.”

She forced down another spoonful of beans. “You guys slept together?”

The question caught him by surprise, and it took Keo a few seconds to process it. Jordan, meanwhile, looked amused by his reaction.

“Who? Me and Lara?” he finally said.

“No, you and the Queen of England.”

He shook his head. “No.”

“Never?”

“Never.”

“What is she, ugly or something?”

He chuckled. “No.”

“Fat?”

“No, nothing like that. She’s actually very attractive. And, um, thin, I guess.”

“You’re not sure.”

“I mean, she’s reasonably attractive physically.”

“Well, reasonably attractive is good.” He sighed and she chuckled. “I’m just busting your balls, Keo.”

“The reason it never happened was…it just never happened, that’s all.”

“You guys were on that boat together for more than a month, and nothing ever happened?”

“We weren’t the only ones onboard.”

“Still…”

“It never occurred to me to sleep with her. Besides, she was vulnerable back then, after Song Island.”

“Waiting for her boyfriend…”

“Yeah.” He paused for a moment, then said, “I can’t decide if you think so highly of me that you think everyone I’m around will immediately want to jump my bones, or if you think so little of me that I’d go after a woman who just lost her boyfriend.”

Jordan grinned to herself, clearly still amused. “Can’t it be both?”

“I don’t see how.”

“Okay, it’s probably a little more of the former.”

“Ah.”

“Or is it a little more of the latter?” She shrugged. “I’ll let you know when I figure it out.”

“Very kind of you.”

She went back to forcing herself to scoop up another spoonful of beans and swallow them down. After a while, she said, “Have I told you how much I enjoy these heart-to-heart moments of ours?”

“Is that right?”

“Not really, no.”

“Ah,” he said.

The plan was to stay on the second floor and then move to the storage building downstairs when it got dark, but they didn’t get that far, because around 4:30 P.M., Keo felt the floor under him trembling. It was very slight, and he might not have even noticed it if both he and Jordan hadn’t stopped eating and talking and were just sitting quietly and listening to the soft buzz of insects outside the house.

“What the hell was that?” Jordan said, springing to her feet and snatching up her rifle.

Keo did the same thing, looking toward the window. “Stay here.”

“The hell I am.”

“Jordan—”

“What do I look like, a damsel in distress?”

He didn’t bother arguing with her (after a week on the road with Jordan, he knew better), and hurried across the room to the window and peeked out from behind the curtains. The front of the house faced the beach, which of course was the point of owning real estate out here. Right now the beach was just as empty as when he had checked it thirty minutes ago, with the only sound coming from the waves crashing against the sand. The Gulf of Mexico was serene, with a warm orange glow creeping across the horizon.

Jordan looked out the other window next to his for a moment, then said, “Anything?”

He shook his head. “You?”

“Bupkis.”

Keo put his hand against the wall and held his breath.

There, the same vibration he had felt earlier, as if a large machine was slowly cranking up but still far from reaching its full potential. It was a familiar sensation, but he couldn’t quite place it at the moment.

“What is it?” Jordan asked.

He shook his head, then went to the door and pushed the armchair out of the way. He opened it a crack and looked out. He took a second to eyeball the house with the gray roof next door, then the one with the white paint. No movements came from either building, but now instead of just feeling the vibrations, he thought he could hear it, too.

Whatever it was, it was getting closer.

He slipped outside and crouched his way to the banister that overlooked the vast field of grass behind the house. More homes on stilts, each one as old and weathered as the one he was hiding behind at the moment. Beyond that, in the industrial area of Sunport, were large domed structures blinking in the distance like marbles.

Keo hugged the exterior wall, using it as a shield, and leaned out and looked to his left, back toward the road he and Jordan had taken earlier to reach the beach. Rays of sunlight glinted off the top of a vehicle as it rumbled up the highway in their direction, and Keo only had to see it for a second to know what it was.

Fuck me.

It was tan colored and moving on fourteen wheels (seven on each side) housed inside caterpillar tracks and was still about 200 meters up the road. He would have felt that sixty-ton monster moving from miles away. It helped, of course, that there wasn’t anything except the waves of the ocean behind him to steal its thunder.

Keo recognized the vehicle even without the benefit of binoculars. The turret on top was turning slowly, and there was something odd about the machine gun mounts, but he was too far away to know for sure.

Footsteps behind him, just before Jordan whispered, breathless, “Jesus, is that a tank?”

He nodded. “It’s an M1 Abrams.”

“Fuck me.”

“What I said.”

There was writing along the armor tiles above the wheels of the tank as well as across the long cannon jutting out of the front like a baseball bat. He had absolutely no chance of reading what those letters spelled out from his position. That, and the angle was all wrong, which he guessed was a good thing. That meant the tank’s occupants probably couldn’t see him, either.

“Where is it going?” Jordan asked.

“Looks like the beach.”

“What’s at the beach?”

“Sun and sand.”

“Wiseass.”

He smiled to himself.

“You don’t think…?” she started to say.

“What?”

“That the U.S. Army is up and running again?”

She sounded almost hopeful, and he felt bad when he said, “Soldiers aren’t really soldiers anymore, remember? There’s nothing to stop another Steve or Jack from adding a tank to their arsenal. God knows they don’t seem to have any problems finding gasoline.”

“But where would you find something like that?”

“There must be hundreds of war machines sitting unattended on all the Army bases around the country. Texas alone probably has two or three of them. Guns, ammo…and tanks.”

She nodded reluctantly, and he felt oddly guilty about being the one to dash her hopes, especially since there was so little of it around these days to begin with.

“Doesn’t mean I’m right,” he added. “Who knows what’s been going on out there? Even a lumbering, inefficient dinosaur like the U.S. government could have finally gotten its shit together after a year, right?”

“What are you, North Korea’s spokesman?”

“There’s no leader quite like the Dear Leader.”

The growing rumble of the tank’s tracks and the increased vibrations along the house drew their attention back to the road.

The Abrams was deceptively swift for a vehicle of its size and was capable of forty-five miles per hour on smooth pavement, and wherever it had come from, it was pretty clear the crew had fuel to burn…just like every other collaborator he had ever run across.

“Come on,” Keo said, and turned around.

Jordan followed him down the stairs and they moved around the first floor, sticking to the walls of the storage shack. Down here, with the shade of the second floor above them and the overgrown grass all around, they were less exposed.

“This changes everything, doesn’t it?” Jordan said.

“Maybe.”

“You don’t think so?”

“It depends on who they are.”

“Any ideas?”

“A few.”

“Any of them good for us?”

“Nope.”

She sighed. “Figures.”

They leaned around a corner to watch the tank as it halted about twenty meters from where the road and beach met. The turret moved again, this time in a full 360-degrees — slowly, taking in the entire area around it as if it had all the time in the world. And maybe it did, especially inside its armored shell.

Apparently satisfied there was no ambush waiting for them, there was a loud clang! as a hatch opened, and a head wearing a sports cap poked outside just before a man in a sweat-drenched wife beater and cargo pants climbed out.

“How many people does something like that hold?” Jordan asked.

“You just really need a driver, but Abrams are designed for a four-man crew. Theoretically, you could put in a few more, but it’d be a tight squeeze.”

“You know a lot about tanks.”

“Just enough to know not to be standing on the wrong side of one.”

“Sounds like a good policy for any vehicle,” she said.

The man jumped off the vehicle and landed on the road, then began stretching while a second figure appeared out of the same hatch behind him. The second man hopped down, too. He was wearing some kind of tan-colored military uniform with the shirt buttons undone. Keo glimpsed red collars around his neck and some kind of round white emblem on them. The man poured water over his head and whipped it back and forth, spraying the guy in the wife beater, who shouted out a curse and jumped away.

A third figure appeared above the first two, but he remained on top of the turret, scanning the surrounding area with binoculars.

Keo dropped to the ground and was about to tell Jordan to do the same, but she was already flat on her stomach next to him. Her chin was pressed against the dirt, head slightly tilted, and both palms in the dirt. He couldn’t help but smile.

“Can he see us?” she whispered.

“I think the high grass will cover us.”

“What if they decide to search the houses?”

“Then I guess we’ll have to kill them.”

“They have a tank.”

“They can’t search a house while inside the tank.”

Keo turned over onto his back and laid the M4 next to him, then put his hands on his chest and stared up at the sky.

Sunlight was fading. The orange glow he had seen in the horizon earlier had reached them and was now spreading across Sunport. It was so quiet, with only the nearby waves and Jordan’s soft breathing next to him, that he thought about closing his eyes and catching a nap.

He wouldn’t have minded staying here forever, if he could. If he conserved his supplies, the canned goods and bottled waters could be stretched out, and who knows what were in the other houses? Even if Lara never showed up, and if Frank’s mortality proved to be more human than blue-eyed ghoul, he could see himself wasting the next few months of his life out here, on this long stretch of beach. And there were those fishing poles in the house above him. Fish for lunch, crab for dinner. Why not?

No, it wouldn’t be such a bad life at all. Why keep fighting if he didn’t have to? Maybe all those people in T18 and the other towns had the right idea. Gillian understood. She had chosen predictability over running around out here, constantly afraid for her life.

Gillian.

Dammit. He still remembered the feel of her belly, the shock of discovering she was pregnant, that he had been too late. Then there was Jay. The asshole had to be a good guy, too. Not an asshole, as it turned out.

If it wasn’t for shitty luck…

“Again?” Jordan whispered next to him.

“Hmm?”

“You’re thinking about her again.”

“Who?”

“You know who.”

“How do you know?”

“You’re like a book, Keo. Don’t ever play poker with me.”

“Thanks for the warning.”

She looked back in the direction of the tank. “Any more thoughts on what they’re doing down here?”

“Lots,” he lied. “But most of them are probably wrong.”

“So what do you suggest we do in the meantime?”

“Lie back and see what happens.”

“Really. That’s your big plan?”

“For now.” He glanced down at his watch. “It’ll be night soon.”

“It’s always night soon,” Jordan said. “Remember when you were afraid of the dark, but then you grew up and realized there was nothing to be afraid of? The good ol’ days.”

“Yeah,” he said.

The good ol’ days. Oh, he remembered them, all right. Back when his biggest goal in life was to see the world and make a few bucks, even if he had to kill a few people along the way for the privilege.

The good ol’ days. Like when he thought Gillian was still waiting for him.

If it wasn’t for shitty luck…

CHAPTER 9 GABY

“Small world,” Mason said.

Gaby didn’t have to go very far in her memory banks to remember the last time she had seen the man. L15. The collaborator town in Louisiana where Josh had taken her after the pawnshop. Mason had been there, in charge while Josh was away.

“You know this guy?” Nate asked.

They sat shoulder-to-shoulder on the floor, with the door to their right and the windows to their left. She had no desire to mix with the collaborators in the room; as a result, they sat staring across at each other.

“L15,” Gaby said. “He was there at the same time as me.”

She stared forward, holding Mason’s brooding dark beady eyes, and at the same time ignoring the other four men in the room with them. It might have been two against five, but she was going to let them know — all of them, but especially Mason — that there were no cowering damsels in distress among them at the moment.

“The one with Josh?” Nate said.

She nodded.

“Sorry about your boyfriend,” Mason said. “Never made it off the island, from what I heard. Kid had a lot of potential, but he bit off more than he could chew. I tried to warn him, but he got it into his head he was something special. That’s when you know a fall’s coming — when they think they’re too big. You can never be too big, especially these days.”

She didn’t reply. If Mason thought talking about Josh was going to elicit some kind of emotion from her, he was mistaken. She hadn’t erased Josh from her memory — she couldn’t, even if she wanted to, which she didn’t because he was a part of her and would always be — but she had learned to push him into the background and focus on what was still important, like Lara, the girls on the Trident, her job, and Nate.

“Do yourself a favor and shut the hell up,” Nate said to Mason.

“Just trying to be friendly,” Mason said.

“You can stop now.”

“You the new guy, huh?” He looked back at Gaby. “Tsk tsk. The kid isn’t even cold yet, and you’ve already moved on? Where’s the loyalty?”

“Hey, asshole,” Nate said. When Mason glanced back at him, “Keep talking, and we’re going to find out if my fist can fit down your throat.”

Mason chuckled. “I’m shaking.”

“You should be.”

“What’s with the Mohawk?”

“What’s with the blood on your face? You make a habit of getting your ass kicked? Keep it up, and it’s going to happen again.”

Mason smirked, then exchanged a brief look with the other collaborators in the room, as if to say, “Listen to this guy.” But he didn’t say anything again, which told her he wasn’t taking Nate’s threats nearly as lightly as he had made it seem.

With seven people stuffed inside what was essentially an enclosed space of about fifteen-by-fifteen feet, it should have been uncomfortable, except it wasn’t, thanks to the two open windows. There was enough light inside the hangar to see with, and the sounds of Mercer’s people working and engines coming and going made for a constant soundtrack behind them.

Now that Mason wasn’t running his mouth, she spent the next few seconds observing the collaborators in front of her. Mason’s hair was damp with sweat and his clothes were dirty, with spots of dried blood stretching all the way down to one side of his neck. There might have been blood on his clothes, too, but the fabric was too dark for her to be sure. The others looked as disheveled and beaten as Mason, and apparently even more tired, because none of them had said a word.

Then, just when she thought she was going to be able to enjoy the peace and quiet, Mason said, “Like what you see?”

“Keep it up,” Nate said. “You just keep it up, shorty.”

Mason ignored him and focused on her. “We’ve been looking for you, you know. After Song Island. They had us searching every building along the coast. What do you think I’m doing back in Texas? It ain’t because I miss it.”

Gaby didn’t answer him, but she stared back, almost daring him to keep talking. Will had drilled it into her during all those months of training: the importance of intel. Here was Mason, volunteering information she didn’t have but that might come in handy one day — or maybe sooner. She remained silent and let him keep talking.

“I liked him, the kid,” Mason was saying. “He could be a little annoying at times, but smart as a whip. Hated to hear what happened to him. Were you there? Did the kid go down like a champ?”

Josh died to save me, and I’ll always love him for it, she thought, but didn’t say it out loud, because this man didn’t deserve to know about Josh’s fate.

“I bet he did,” Mason said anyway. “He talked about you all the time. Gaby this, Gaby that. Hell, after the first month, I think I could have written a book about the life and times of Gaby. Little Miss Perfect. Personally, I don’t see what the big fuss is about. Mind you, not that I’d kick you out of bed.”

“Mister,” Nate said, his voice rising noticeably, “I’m going to tell you one more time—”

“Or you’ll do what?” Mason said.

Nate started to get up, but Gaby grabbed his arm. “He’s not worth it.”

“That’s right; listen to blondie,” Mason snorted before miming a whip snapping in the air.

A couple of the men sitting around him chuckled, but the rest remained quiet. Mason might have been “whipping” for Nate’s benefit, but it was his men that looked as if they’d had all the fight whipped out of them. The blood on Mason was old, and they were clearly still wearing the same (smelly) uniforms since their capture. How long had they been here? A day? A week? Longer? If Mercer’s red-collared soldiers had treated her, Nate, and Danny like pieces of meat when they were captured, she couldn’t imagine what they had done to these collaborators, who as far as she knew, were the real targets.

Like Morris. Like the people back in T29.

Gaby fixed Mason with a hard stare. “Did you ever think this was how it would all end?”

“How’s that?” Mason said.

“Here, in this small room, wearing that uniform you thought would be your salvation.”

The man seemed to actually put some thought into her question. She had no doubts that Mason was every bit the opportunist she’d always seen him as: a conniving asshole who did whatever was necessary to get by, even if it meant selling out the human race. And for a while, it had worked out very well for him. Mercer’s people had changed that. They had changed everything, for everyone.

Finally, Mason shrugged. “It could have been worse. I could have spent the last year running for my life like the two of you. If this is it, you won’t get any complaints from me.”

“I don’t believe that,” Gaby said.

“No?”

“I think you’ll complain to the very end. Guys like you always do.”

“‘Guys like me’? Sweetheart, you don’t know anything about guys like me.”

“I know everything there is to know. You think you’re complicated?” She gave him a pitying smile. “You’re so simple, it’s embarrassing.”

“Is that right? Why don’t you share this great insight with the rest of the class.”

“I would, but I’d just be wasting my breath. Maybe one day, if you’re really nice, I might tell you.”

“Hope springs eternal, they say.”

“Not for you.”

Mason might have had a clever comeback, but before he could offer it, a voice from one of the open windows said, “Move to the back, now.”

She glanced up at Erin’s familiar face looking in at them.

Gaby and Nate stood up. Mason, across from her, stretched up next to a collaborator who towered over him like a giant. The sight was absurd, but Gaby didn’t have time to enjoy it before she had to move to the back of the room with everyone else.

The door opened behind them and Danny stepped inside. “Miss me?”

“You okay?” she asked.

“Hey, that’s my line.”

“Sorry.”

“I’ll let it go just this time, but only because of the clearly shitty company you’ve been keeping while I was away.”

Erin closed the door behind him, and Gaby and Nate walked back over to the other side and they sat down together.

Three against five now. I like those odds.

“Is it just me, or is Erin kind of hot?” Danny said.

“She’s okay,” Nate said, then sneaked a look in Gaby’s direction for some reason.

Men, she thought.

“You kids been getting into trouble while I was away?” Danny asked.

“Nothing we couldn’t handle,” Nate said.

“Glad to hear it.” He held up one of his wrists. “Got my watch back.”

“Aren’t you special,” Gaby said.

“I know, right?”

“Why’d they give it back to you?” Nate asked.

“I told you, I’m special. Pay attention.”

“Did you find out where we are exactly?” Gaby asked.

“Some podunk town called Larkin.”

“We’re way off course.”

“Would appear so.”

“What did he want to talk to you about?” Nate asked. “Mercer?”

“Mostly, our differing approaches to fighting the ghouls,” Danny said. “His is to strike, while I lean more toward hiding. Like every other officer I’ve ever met, Mercer doesn’t seem to have any problems sending other people’s boys and girls to go die for him.”

“How do you know he’s an officer?”

“I can smell them from a mile away.”

“But did he actually say he was an officer?” Gaby said. “You know as well as I do that anyone can call themselves anything these days,” she added, looking across the room at Mason.

The short man didn’t respond and pretended to look at one of the open windows to her left instead.

“Oh, he’s a fancy pants, all right,” Danny said. “Or was, anyway. These days, he’s the Everyman leading the charge. We both know it’s bullshit, but as you saw out there, it seems to be working gangbusters with the masses.”

“So what else did he say?”

“The takeaway is that he thinks the only way to beat the ghouls is by destroying their food supply. One way or another.”

Food supply? she thought, but it didn’t take very long for her to understand. Oh.

“The towns,” Nate said.

“Specifically, the people in them, yeah,” Danny nodded.

“You said ‘one way or another.’ What does that mean?”

“He’s keeping that one to himself.”

“There were 400 people in T29, Danny,” Gaby said.

“I mentioned that. He may or may not have gotten a boner when he found out how many people his Warthog killed this morning.”

“Jesus Christ,” Nate said.

“What I said. Minus the whole using the Lord’s name in vain part.”

Gaby didn’t know how to respond to any of this. Nate didn’t, either, and the three of them sat very quietly against the wall and listened to a truck beep-beep-beeping its way into the hangar outside the room. One of the guards standing outside coughed just before a loud clang! as a tailgate slammed open.

“What did he want with you?” Nate asked. “He knew you were a Ranger. I got the feeling my ROTC credentials didn’t measure up, or Gaby’s.”

“He wanted me to enlist,” Danny said. “Told me I had two choices: either get with the program or get out of the way. Or, and I quote, ‘You’re either with us, or you’re against us.’”

“And what did you say?” Gaby asked.

“That I’d think about it. He wants an answer in two hours.”

“That’s why he gave you back your watch,” Nate said.

“You’re sharp, kid. I should call you Sharp Nate from now on.”

“No thanks.”

“Your loss.”

“What happens in two hours?” Gaby asked.

“They’re getting the hell out of Dodge,” Danny said. “I can be on one of those trucks with them when they do, or left behind with the dead weight. That’s what he calls everyone inside this room, by the by.”

“I’ve been called worse,” Nate said.

“I bet you have.”

“So they’re just going to leave us behind when they go?”

Danny glanced over at her and hiked a thumb in Nate’s direction. “Captain Optimism, this guy. Thinks they’re just going to let us walk out of here.”

They stood in front of the windows, watching a small handful of people still loading up the only truck inside the hangar. Mercer’s people had done such a good job clearing out the place that she didn’t realize how large the building was until now. With the drastic drawback of people and vehicles, she could now hear every squeaking footstep and clang from the back of the transport.

“Being the thinker that I am, I’ve pieced together this plan of theirs,” Danny was saying, standing between her and Nate. “Mercer didn’t confirm or deny, on account of him not fully trusting me yet. Or at all.”

“Shocker,” Nate said.

“I know, right? I have a very trustworthy face. Anyway, they’ve been bombing towns around this part of the state all morning and all day. We had the misfortune of running across one of their strafing runs. Before that, they were gathering intelligence. Probably months of preparation, all for the big payoff — which was today. The patience and planning is actually pretty damn impressive, the whole indiscriminately killing civilians part notwithstanding.”

“Earlier, Erin let slip that they had more than one plane,” Gaby said. “Did Mercer say how many?”

“Numbers have nothing to do with it. There are more planes out there than there are guys that can fly them. Mercer only has a few pilots in his stable, which really puts a damper on how far he can extend his areas of operation. That’s why the one we saw take out T29 didn’t buzz very far afterward. Mercer’s using it as his eye in the sky, watching out for a counterattack.”

“The collaborators,” Gaby said.

Danny nodded. “They have no choice. Can’t just sit there taking hit after hit, not when your bloodsucking masters’ food supply is being bled out.” He peeked back at Mason and the others on the other side of the room. “It’s inevitable, and Mercer knows it.”

“He’s drawing them in, isn’t he?” Nate asked.

“Uh huh. I got the impression today’s running just as smoothly as he’d planned,” Danny said, returning his gaze back out the window. “They’ve been here for a while now, quietly setting all this up. Until today, they’ve been raiding the surrounding towns for silver and weapons. That’s what’s in all those boxes they’re transporting. Aunt Sally’s expensive cutlery and Uncle Bailey’s all-silver retirement pen. Mercer’s taking them somewhere else, because this place isn’t going to be very useful after tonight.”

“What’s going to happen tonight?” she asked, almost afraid to know the answer.

“This airfield isn’t designed to keep people out. To keep any thing out.”

She didn’t have to ask him what any “thing” was. She knew, and so did Nate.

They were silent again, watching as a couple of teenagers in tan uniforms dragged a heavy cedar trunk across the hangar floor, then lifted it with a lot of effort into the Army truck. The two leaned against the vehicle for a moment, passing around a single canteen that they both drank from. Neither one of them looked older than sixteen.

“I don’t see where we have any choice,” Nate finally said. “We play along for now, leave this place with them, then figure a way out of it later.”

He looked over at Gaby, as if for confirmation. She nodded, because he was right. There was no other choice. It was either go along with Mercer now or stay here, and she had a feeling their captors weren’t going to give them back their weapons when they said good-bye.

“He’s right, Danny,” she said.

“That’s not going to work, either,” Danny said.

She stared at him. “What aren’t you telling us?”

“Remember Indecent Proposal with Demi Moore?”

Gaby and Nate exchanged a look.

“No?” Danny said.

“I don’t think Nate and I even know who Demi Moore is,” Gaby said.

“Damn, I’m old,” Danny said. Then, “Long story short: He asked me to the prom, but he didn’t say anything about you two tagging along.”

“He just wanted you.”

“I told you. Special.”

“Well, crap,” Nate said.

“Uh huh,” Danny nodded somberly.

Gaby exchanged another look with Nate. This time it was he who nodded back at her, and she couldn’t help but smile. It was amazing how they could know what each other was thinking with just a look. Did she ever use to have this kind of connection with Josh? Or Lara, or any of the others? Maybe this was what it was like to be Danny and Will. One look, and they knew exactly what the other was thinking.

“You should go, Danny,” Gaby said. “There’s no reason for you to stay behind, too. Once you’re able, find a way back home. Nate and I will be right behind you as soon as we can.”

“I figured we might be a day or two late,” Nate nodded, playing along. “But we’ll all be back eating fish together by the end of the week.”

Danny glanced at Nate, then at her.

She nodded and pursed her lips into a smile, hoping it was at least a little bit convincing. “We’ll be fine. Look at this place; nothing’s getting through these walls. We’ll ride out the night, then follow you home.”

“Absolutely,” Nate said. “Who knows? We might even beat you back to Port Arthur. You never know.”

Danny rolled his eyes at them. “Give me a break. I was born at night, but not last night. I’m not going anywhere without you two dummies.”

“Danny, don’t be stupid,” she said.

“Have you been talking to Carly again?”

She sighed and shook her head. “Danny, you have to go. We’ll be on your heels by morning.”

“Not gonna happen, so save your breath. Both Lara and Carly would kick my ass, and that’s not the kind of threesome I had in mind.” He glanced down at his watch. “Besides, if they were going to kill us, they would have done it already. They want to keep us alive.”

“Why?” she asked.

“I guess we’ll find out tonight,” Danny said. He glanced back at Mason and the collaborators again. “You’ve been awfully quiet. Got something to say?”

“You should have taken the deal,” Mason said. “I would have.”

“See, that’s the difference between you and me. I’m not an asshole.”

“I’m a survivor.”

“No, you’re an asshole. If I have to say it a third time, you’re going to find out what a Danny Knuckle Sandwich tastes like. Hint: It’s knuckle-licious.”

Mason snorted but looked away.

“Good boy,” Danny said, and turned back to the window. “Speaking of knuckle sandwiches…”

A Jeep had parked outside the hangar and Erin, in the front passenger seat, climbed out. She walked through the building, past the half dozen people still loading up the final truck, and stopped on the other side of the window to look in at them.

“He wants your answer,” she said to Danny.

“The conditions still stand?” Danny asked.

“I’m afraid so.” Her eyes met Gaby’s gaze for just a moment before returning to Danny. “What should I tell him?”

“We’re like the Three Musketeers,” Danny said. “One cake for all, cake for everyone. Or something. I’m not very good with sayings.”

Erin gave him a confused look.

“Thanks, but no thanks,” Danny said.

The woman nodded. “Good luck,” she said, and turned to leave.

“Erin,” Gaby said.

The older woman stopped and looked back at her.

“Do you know what’s happening out there?” Gaby asked. “What your planes are doing? They’re slaughtering civilians. Men, women, and children. There were pregnant women in those towns. There were over 400 people in T29 alone.”

Gaby was hoping for some kind of sign, an indication that all of this was new to Erin, but it wasn’t there.

She knows. Jesus, she knows.

Erin looked at Danny again. “If you change your mind in the next hour, tell the guards.”

“Not gonna happen,” Danny said.

“How do you live with yourself?” Nate asked her.

Erin ignored him and turned around and walked back to the waiting Jeep. Gaby wasn’t sure, but she thought Erin was walking faster than she really had to.

“She knows,” Nate said quietly.

“They all know,” Danny said. “But they’re committed. Heart, soul, and ammo.”

“What’s going to happen tonight?” Gaby asked.

Danny glanced down at his watch. “I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”

“I was hoping for a better answer.”

“And I was hoping for a cheeseburger and some French fries the size of my wrists,” Danny said, “but we can’t always get what we want, kid.”

CHAPTER 10 FRANK

“Why do you fight?”

It was followed by a laugh, or something that might have been a laugh. It was hard to tell nuance when his mind was filled with so many voices, so many thoughts, like trying to listen to a city of people talking all at once.

“There is no victory waiting for you at the end of this.”

A sigh of frustration, like a father growing impatient with a child. Maybe that wasn’t so far from the truth. He was like a child, at least according to Mabry. They all were; he and the millions and billions out there that flowed from Mabry’s blood.

“They’ll never accept you. She will never accept you. Can you blame her? You’re not the man you once were. You’re not even a man anymore.”

He didn’t answer, because it was a trick. Like all the other times, the voice just wanted him to respond so he would reveal himself. Mabry knew he was connected, listening in, because there was no detaching himself from them. Oh, he could erect walls and build other mental defenses, but he could never, ever become separated. That was the strength of the brood, after all — the oneness.

“You’re just making this difficult on yourself. Why can’t see you see that?”

Push it away, into the back of his mind, where the voice became smaller. He couldn’t shut it out, but he could ignore it to some degree, send it to the outer edges of his consciousness where it was still audible but less demanding. Instead, he focused on the here and now, on remaining perfectly still and quiet, and allowing his body to heal.

He slept just beyond the reach of sunlight, though he could feel the heat even down here. Rays like knives, stabbing down at him, poking and prodding, always looking to connect, to slash and rend until he was just bones. Useless bleach-white bones.

There had been too many hands, too many feet, and too many teeth. They had hurt him, pushed him to the brink, but he had survived their onslaught the only way he knew how — by fighting, by clawing, by willing himself through the drowning sea. He didn’t know any other way but to fight.

It didn’t used to take this long to heal, but then he had never been hurt like this before. These days, the wounds closed a little slower, the breaks mended more deliberately, and the blood took longer to replenish. One of these days, he wouldn’t be able to heal at all, to regenerate all his losses, but that day was still far off.

His eyes snapped open, the dirt like sandpaper against his eyeballs. Something was happening. Something was…approaching.

A foot of earth separated him from sunlight. The heat called to him, even stronger than Mabry’s voice inside his head. As he lay there, resting in a tomb of his own making, the damp soil around him trembled as if coming alive. The walls shook, as did the patch of ground under and over him.

Had they found him? Had one of his defenses failed without him knowing it? Did Mabry know where he was and had sent his forces?

No, that was impossible. It was still daylight. He could feel it, like a lover calling to him. And he wanted to give in, wanted to embrace it like he once had, but knowing he couldn’t because doing so—

No, not ghouls.

Something else. Something…bigger.

It emerged from the city on wheels, close enough to his resting place that he could smell its leaked fluids as it lumbered. But it wasn’t flesh and bone. No. This was an animal made of metal. Hard, grinding metal.

He knew instantly what it was. Sometimes it was difficult to remember details from his past life, but this wasn’t one of those moments. He easily dug out the information from when he still wore a uniform, carried guns, climbed mountains, and took lives.

A tank. It was a tank.

The ground shook, passing from the many particles of dirt that sheathed him. It came from a distance — from where the waves crashed against sand, beyond the city, and where the tank had gone.

Nightfall. He knew without having to see the darkness. The shift in temperature against his skin, the cold that seeped through the earth and folded over him on all sides like a blanket, were evidence enough.

Earlier, he had felt the multiple tremors as they emerged from their nests, growing in intensity as they neared his position. There were hundreds. Thousands. They passed overhead, oblivious to his presence. It wasn’t him they were after. No. It was the machine. The thing that had appeared earlier. The tank.

They were summoned, called forth by the blue eyes. “Take it,” the blue eyes said. “Peel them from their metal skin.”

Another crack of thunder.

No, not thunder. A gun firing.

A cannon.

The tank.

The squeal of black-eyed creatures erupted inside his mind, surging across the connection that bonded him to the brood, to Mabry and the others. Their deaths were like sledgehammers, pounding against the sides of his skull. What he felt, Mabry could surely feel, too. Even more so.

He almost smiled against the dirt at the thought of Mabry hurting, feeling every death, every shriek of pain. If he concentrated enough, he could almost smell the sting of burning flesh as the black eyes vanished against the blast.

And yet they continued climbing out of the darkness and flowed like an unstoppable tide toward the beach. They were wary of the water, but the enemy had stopped just beyond the tides. Even so, the taste of ocean water lingered against their senses, terrorizing them with their possibilities.

“Take it,” the voices said. “They’ve already done too much damage. Stop them now. Here. Show them this world is ours.”

The voices belonged to the blue eyes. The ones leading the charge — directing the attack. They stood back, willing the black eyes forward like every officer he had ever known. Safe from the grinder and brave in their safety. He despised them, but was also cautious around them. They could sense him, just as he could them. He had to walk lightly, skirt around the edge, and never reveal himself.

It had begun while he was asleep, healing the cuts and gashes along his arms and legs and face. His concentration, his mental wall, always slipped when he was at his weakest, like he was at the moment. But Mabry hadn’t found him yet. No, this wasn’t about him. The creatures had not come here for him. They had come for the men inside the tank.

“They did it,” the voices said. “They’re trying to take our food from us. We’ll show them they should have stayed hidden.”

Another boom, followed by more screams of pain inside his head. The tank fired again and again, and each time the ground shook as if threatening to come apart. The continuous howls of black eyes accompanied the smell of singed flesh, and clouds of pulverized bone turned the darkness gray. He saw and sniffed the carnage through the senses of the creatures that were converging on the beach, driven forward by the relentless voices in their heads.

“Forward,” the voices commanded. “Take the machine! Take it now!”

Amid the chaos, he became aware of a new sound. No, not new, but old. A strange noise he hadn’t heard in some time. Music. It was music coming from the tank. From…speakers?

A house came apart, its foundations splintering against a stray cannon round, the smell of burning wood and disintegrating concrete, along with brick and mortar pluming in the air. Black eyes raced through them, unhindered by the wanton destruction.

Then something else. A new smell filling his senses. Not just wood burning, but searing flesh accompanying the cries of pain.

Fire. There was sustained fire among the explosions.

And yet they persisted, assaulting the armored shell of the machine from all sides and flailing against its unyielding skin. They clung onto the moving cannon, hoping to slow it down, their skeletal forms trembling as it let loose and split open another house. The ground shattered as the walls tumbled down and the ceiling collapsed inward, swallowing up a pair of black eyes that had been perched on the roof.

Now was the time, while the black eyes were obsessed with the tank. They were relentless, pouring unlimited numbers against it. He couldn’t see the ground anymore, just a mass of squirming black flesh oozing toward the tan vehicle as it swiveled and fired, swiveled and fired. And all the while, the loud music blared from its speakers, like some unholy noise from the pits of hell designed to drive men mad.

He detached his mind from his body and drifted freely through the layers of soft earth and grabbed the first consciousness that appeared. The creature was weak like all the rest, and he took control of its mind without any effort. They were just husks, vessels for Mabry and the blue eyes to command at will. It had taken him a lot of trial and error, but he was always good at adapting, finding an opening, and exploiting it.

He pushed the creature aside, into the back of its own mind where it could still see and hear and smell but was little more than a voyeur now. Then he moved its legs, from walking to running, then full-on sprinting toward the beach.

Faster. Faster!

There, the war machine. It was still moving, its gun firing, walls of flame stabbing from its armored shell. Black eyes roared as fire engulfed them, eating flesh from bones and vaporizing the precious blood. Mabry’s blood. They fell, disappearing among the fields of scorched grass. Smoke rose from buildings, walls of loose ground filling the air with every thunderous explosion.

He stood under darkness, a lone figure at the edge of the battlefield, and watched the horde of black eyes throwing themselves forward, drawn irresistibly to the squatting thing that refused to fall, or stop, or go silent. All this, while music blared from speakers attached to it, jumbled words filling the night sky, only occasionally broken by the bone-rattling boom of cannon fire.

He remained in the background so the blue eyes wouldn’t sense him. They were preoccupied trying to find some way, some hidden angle or slit, to pry open the mechanical beast. They commanded the swarm to crawl over the spinning turret, howling with frustration and pain as blankets of fire enveloped their soldiers one by one by one…

“Take it!” the voices shouted.

But the machine would not be taken, and it continued to turn even as a few hundred living things clung to it. Its gears grinded on even as the sprockets and crevices became clogged with burnt flesh and bone and spraying blood. They pounded against the metal with balled fists, fingers attempting in vain to pull open heavy doors that wouldn’t budge. The ground groaned under the combined weight, threatening to sink them all.

And the voices screamed: “Tear it apart! Inch by inch! Tear it apart!”

A stream of flames licked across the blackness, torching swaying grass and thickets of flesh in its path. Then the boom of the main cannon, shattering eardrums and destroying everything in its path.

The pointlessness of the scene, the pure carnage and death and destruction, depressed him, but he knew it wasn’t really him, because he didn’t care for these things. The pangs of sadness came from the creature he had shoved aside; its fear and fury were seeping into him. Husk though it may be, the creature still felt, at least inside its own mind.

He backed away from the field as more endless numbers of black eyes streamed past him, charging into the breach, obeying the command of the blue eyes.

“More!” they shouted. “More!” even as another two dozen disappeared in a hail of fire and earth.

He retreated, leaving the battlefield behind, when a brightly lit building flashed across his mind’s eye. It was there and gone before he could fully grasp what he had seen.

A building? Where? Lights? And why were the ghouls moving toward it?

There was something else happening at another place, at the exact same time. The ghouls were busy fighting on two fronts tonight, and the blue eyes were at both places to direct the attacks, their voices slight echoes in the back of his mind because of distance.

He abandoned the vessel he was occupying and let himself float along the stream that joined the brood, finding himself moving further and further away from the beach. Houses, basements, empty cities and rooftops flashed by eyes that didn’t belong to him. Tens of thousands of disjointed voices scrambled through his mind, but he pushed through them and searched for—

There, the same building he had seen earlier.

He focused on it, using the lights emanating from the structure as a beacon. Closer now, he began hiding within the consciousness of random black eyes, jumping between skins, hearing and seeing and feeling what they did, before moving on to the next one, and still the next one. Gathering intelligence, processing what he could, and never staying still for too long.

It had been difficult in the beginning, spying on the brood while remaining unseen. So many trials and errors and near misses. Mabry had almost caught him a half dozen times, but it was the blue eyes that were the most dangerous. There were too many of them, and they knew what he was doing. The black eyes were easier; they were just empty bodies to be taken, the way Mabry had done over the years, the centuries…

But he had learned and adapted, because that was what he did. He adapted and didn’t perish. Was that one of his sayings? Or someone else’s? It didn’t matter. It would come to him eventually. It always did.

He detached himself from another one of the creatures and weaved through the endless pair of eyes and ears, seeing and hearing glimpses of what he needed, but always moving forward, getting closer toward the building with the lights, because it was important. The blue eyes were there for a reason.

“The building,” the voices said inside his mind. “Take the building.”

There, at last.

It was just as brightly lit as when he had first glimpsed it the first time. No longer just a flash of light in the distance, but clear as day. He understood now why the blue eyes were so unsure of themselves.

It shouldn’t be here, and it shouldn’t have been this bright. Not here, not now, surrounded by black eyes watching from within the darkened woods that surrounded the place. Someone had made a mistake. Or had they?

The confusion seeped through every one of the creatures, including the one he was hiding within at the moment.

“Something’s wrong,” the voices said. “Something’s not right…”

He jumped bodies until he finally found a black eye moving across an airfield toward the well-lit building. Men in uniforms with masked faces—collaborators—watched him pass. He could smell fear clinging to their pores.

He wasn’t alone. Far from it. Black eyes streamed out of the trees around him and stampeded through overgrown fields of grass, then across smooth, paved roads. The stinging scent of jet fuel filled his nostrils, along with the lingering sweat of human bodies that had slaved in the area not long ago.

“The building,” the voices said in unison inside his head. “They’re in the building.”

He bounded across open space with his brethren, the hesitation giving way to confidence, their strength swelling with their numbers. It was why Mabry had waited so long, why they took the cities first.

“They’ve miscalculated,” the voices said, the confusion from earlier replaced by resounding confidence. “We’ll take them alive. Learn their locations. Then we’ll show them why they should have stayed hidden.”

Closer now, he spied normal eyes flitting across high windows along the walls of the building. The bright lights continued to pave his way, multiple sirens calling to him and the thousands of others to the left and right and behind him.

He ran faster, willing the skinny legs under him to move faster.

Faster and faster and faster!

“Take it,” the voices shouted. “Take it!”

Then something strange happened. The ground under him quaked, and the trees burst into flames. The screams of black eyes filled his mind, the smell of scorched flesh blanketing the air, and he stumbled and fell and was swallowed by the earth as it was torn asunder—

He retreated through the legion of ghouls, jumping from one to another, seeking safety as the crack of thunder — no, explosions — screamed across the night sky, wild wind threatening to engulf him in their wake. The taste of metal crackled inside the creature’s mouth, what jagged teeth it had left chattering in the aftermath.

There, a lone black-eyed ghoul had somehow managed to reach the outskirts of the blasts. It was almost at the building and was leaping when he forced himself into its mind. The creature struggled for an instant — just an instant — and he peered out through its eyes even as—

He was falling!

He reached out and snatched onto one of the metal bars fastened over a window and hung on. Figures were moving on the other side, scrambling around a metal catwalk.

One of them stopped and turned.

They locked eyes for an instant before the man raised two curious eyebrows, light blue eyes looking back out at him, short and damp sandy blond hair matted to his forehead.

Danny.