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  They knew everything. Nothing need be said.

  A big and tooled-up figure emerged from the stairs. “Oh – hey, Ali. Heard I might find you up here.”

  Ali turned and squinted at him in the dimness. “Savard,” she greeted him back. This was Sergeant First Class Savard, another Charlie team operator – and another former Unit guy. Ali remembered him, most recently, as being at ground-zero in the punch-up at the Hereford mess, the one everyone had thought was an outbreak, the night before Alpha left to cross the Atlantic.

  She of course hadn’t seen him since.

  As he stepped up to her and Fick, he unslung a very large canvas rifle bag from his back. Ali instantly recognized it, without having to open it. It was her Accuracy International Arctic Warfare – her real sniper rifle. She hadn’t taken it to Chicago – nor, necessarily, to any of the places they went after that – because it hadn’t been the right tool for that job. But it was her favorite, and her most natural dance partner. She couldn’t help but smile as she took possession of it.

  “Couldn’t bear to leave it behind when we bugged out of Hereford,” Savard said, returning her smile with a wink. “Since you turn out to still be alive and all, figured I’d better give it back. It always looked better on you.”

  “One door closes,” Ali said. “Another opens.”

  She had her old job back.

  * * *

  “Hey,” Fick said. “Was that guy flirting with you?”

  He and Ali had gotten the hell out of SHQ, and away from the Colonel and his new command, and were crossing the pitch-black ground of the Common in the drizzly rain, heading into the prison to go back up on the walls.

  “Nah,” Ali said, with a shrug. “Admittedly, pretty much everything every man has said to me since I was about fourteen years old can basically be interpreted as, ‘Hey, how about some dick?’ And I’ve gotten plenty of that from soldiers. But Tier-1 guys are pros. It’d be beneath them to pull that shit.”

  “Okay,” Fick said. “I was gonna offer to kick his ass for you.”

  Ali smiled. “You’ve done enough for one night.” As fucked-up as had been his nearly lethal confrontation with the Colonel, his unwavering loyalty to her was nice. “Anyway, he’ll probably be dead by morning.”

  “Yeah, probably. Like the rest of us.”

  Ali looked around, and off into memory. “And just like all those Spetsnaz guys. Even them – despite their badassery.”

  Fick grunted. “Douchebaggery, you mean.”

  As they threaded back through a gate and across the north yard of the prison complex, Ali shook her head as she considered all this. It hit her for the first time that the ZA was probably going to filter out all the men in the world except for the ones like Savard, and the Colonel – and like Fick himself. And that was if they were lucky. If they weren’t, they’d get Misha and Vasily. And in some ways that was as scary as the ZA: a world full of hard men, unrelenting, never backing down. The very attributes that kept them alive might make for a very uncivil society, in whatever world followed this one – if any did.

  All the kind and gentle men would be gone.

  But Ali figured they’d be lucky just to get a chance to deal with that then. She and Fick quickly climbed the dirt ramp that led up to the north walls. At the top, the parapets were still fully manned, but everyone was staying hunkered down and out of sight, whispering when they spoke at all, terrified of drawing the dead back to the walls. Basically, they were just being miserable, squatting in the rain. Waiting. The immediate fight was over. But they all knew it wasn’t done.

  “Why don’t you take it down to fifty percent watch,” Ali said quietly, as they turned right and headed east.

  “Yeah, not a bad idea.” Fick touched his radio and passed the order to Wesley. They all knew they were likely to need everyone fresh later, or at least combat effective.

  This thing was far from over.

  They got a stark reminder of that fact when they reached the guard tower that anchored the right side of the north walls – their designated sniper OP. Inside, they found Homer, along with Baxter and Kate, all of them gearing up again.

  Homer looked up and into Ali’s shining eyes as she entered. Once again, almost everything was communicated nonverbally. They had served together a long time. They were very close. And it was pretty late in the day.

  “You know they’ll be back,” Homer said, checking the silencer on his SIG and re-holstering it.

  “Yeah, I know,” Ali said.

  “What,” Fick asked, following her in. “What’s happening?”

  Ali sighed. “They’re going outside the wire. To infect the dead – up close and personal.”

  Fick grunted. “Well, I guess somebody’s gotta do it. And better them than me.”

  Ali shook her head, still watching Homer with his two-man team. “Though you guys are like Gordon and Shughart – requesting not once or twice but three times to be inserted into that doomed crash site.”

  “Yep,” Kate said, turning around and chamber-checking her own side-arm. “Absolutely determined to get ourselves killed.”

  Homer just smiled and shrugged. His meaning was clear. That was Gordon and Shughart’s job. This is ours.

  “Absolutely determined to defend the survivors,” Baxter said. His extension of the metaphor was also clear – not just the surviving air crew of the Black Hawk, but all the survivors of the ZA. Everyone left in the world. He checked his own pistol, but seemed to be doing it just because the others had. “Let’s get this zombie plague started.”

  Ali sighed. At least Homer’s team was gung-ho.

  Moreover, she thought, it also wouldn’t be so much of a suicide mission this time. The dead were still out there, in their hundreds of thousands. But they weren’t so riled up. And there was also a buffer – that no-man’s land behind the convoy and meat wall, that they could use to infil through.

  Having apparently done everything else, Homer picked up four grenades from the table and clipped them one after another onto his vest within easy reach – then grabbed a square pouch and looped the strap crosswise over his torso. The grenades were merely flashbangs. But the pouch was a satchel charge.

  “What’s all that?” Fick asked.

  Homer smiled. “Break contact drill.” Standing and taking a breath, he looked at Ali. “Colonel in the JOC?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Guessing he relieved you.”

  “Yep.”

  “No formal handover ceremony?”

  “Yeah, right. This place is like a pirate ship. Whoever holds the wheelhouse gets to be in charge.” Ali paused. “You want to brief him on your mission? Get some support from the ops staff?”

  “No time. Plus I’ve got you.” He hefted his rifle.

  “Also,” Fick grumbled, “I’m sure he’s already very busy setting up operations for his echelon above reality.” That was a term commonly used for higher headquarters where no one had a clue what the hell was really happening on the ground.

  “You guys got a call sign?” Ali asked.

  “Call us Super Six Two.”

  Ali shook her head and tried to laugh. It was the call sign of the Black Hawk that fallen Delta snipers Gary Gordon and Randy Shughart had been flying in over Mogadishu. “Overwatch is Irene, then.” Technically, that had been a code word in the Battle of Mogadishu, not a call sign. But it would work.

  Homer pulled his NVGs down, motioned to Kate and Baxter, who did the same, and led them all out and down.

  This time they were going out the front door.

  Letting Homer Die

  CentCom – North Gate

  Alongside the giant timber-and-steel medieval gate for vehicles was a smaller one for people on foot, more like a pair of grates or portcullises, with a small security station between them. This was all Homer, Kate, and Baxter needed to slip out.

  The area outside the walls to the north was muddy, pitch-black, and carpeted with bodies – if carpets rose to four feet in place
s. There were thousands of destroyed and crushed dead on the ground, in ones and twos, in piles, in compressed mulch underfoot. And there were more than a few that were disabled but not destroyed – their grinding jaws or wiggling fingers looking even creepier in night-vision green-and-black.

  Homer moved like a Tier-1 guy who had been on a thousand night ops – literally a thousand – NVGs down, weapon up, fast, smooth, totally silent, and utterly confident, trusting Kate and Baxter to stay in his back pocket. And to stay quiet, vigilant, and switched on themselves.

  In about a minute they were at the first low meat hill, then over the top of that and out to the abandoned armored vehicles of the convoy. Homer stopped there, crouching down by a tire the size of a Prius, waiting for the other two to tighten up. As they did, he just paused to tune in. Everything was black and still – but no longer quiet. They could now hear the low moaning of thousands of dead, their default non-frenzied noise, migrating in a herd they knew stretched to the horizon.

  And all of them were just on the other side of this armored colossus – and the bigger ring-wall of meat beyond it. Homer paused for another beat, looking back and up toward the guard tower on the far end of the walls – Ali’s sniper OP. Nothing betrayed her presence, not even the glinting of an optic.

  But he knew she was up there. Watching over them.

  He broke squelch twice to let her know they were going in – going over the top, really – then rose out of his crouch and swung around the nose of the truck, rifle barrel coming up smoothly again.

  And he started climbing the meat.

  * * *

  Ali didn’t bother squelching in response. She wasn’t up there to trade squelches, do tactical C&C, or provide moral support.

  Instead she mechanically scanned the area to the front through her Schmidt & Bender 5-20x50 optic with front-mounted night-vision device. These were both mounted on her Accuracy International Arctic Warfare sniper rifle, in the prodigious .338 Lapua Magnum cartridge, with custom Brügger & Thomet suppressor. And as both it and she were emplaced in an elevated position with excellent fields of fire, she was in an outstanding position to provide much more practical help.

  Specifically, she could take heads off, with surgical precision, out to well over a thousand yards.

  She didn’t take her eye from her scope as she felt a hand on her shoulder. This would be Fick, the only other person left in the guard tower with her. She realized he’d been whispering into his radio on some other channel, but had zoned that out. Now he leaned in close and whispered in her ear.

  “Reports of dead in the Common. Gotta di-di.”

  Ali smiled. That was Vietnamese for “scram.” Fick really was damned old – perhaps even old enough to have served with some Vietnam veterans. She felt him withdraw, then heard his boots scuff faintly on the stairs as he muttered, “En route, hold your damned horses.” He was heading back to his QRF.

  All alone now, Ali stopped panning and settled her scope on one spot, at the top of the meat hill that screened the base against the whole north. Because that was the spot Homer and his two charges appeared on, silhouetted and slightly backlit by the glow coming from London.

  And then she ground her jaw, remembering that both practical help and removing heads with surgical precision were line-of-sight operations, as Homer and the other two crested the top of the hill – and then disappeared down the other side of it. They too were now completely screened by the meat.

  And Ali couldn’t protect them if she couldn’t see them.

  * * *

  Well, Baxter thought, adjusting his grip on the MP7. Guess this is what I was saving this weapon for.

  The silencer on his M4 was good, but he had left the rifle back in the guard tower. Now he was carrying the MP7 he had inherited from Jake – which, with its custom-made suppressor, didn’t even whisper when fired. It was a machine-pistol, but with its extensible stock, vertical foregrip, and single-shot mode, Baxter was basically using it like a compact rifle, or carbine. Even better, the IR laser mounted on its rail blazed through the dark in his NVGs, like the glowing green finger of God. All he had to do was point and squeeze – and the first time he did so, he wasn’t even sure he had the safety off. Not only did it make no sound when it fired, but it was virtually recoil-free, as well.

  Thank you, Master Sergeant Redding, he thought.

  That first shot was on a Zulu that had randomly stumbled halfway up the far side of the meat pile, then must have caught a whiff of Homer, gotten interested, and angled in their direction as they reached the top. And Baxter knew what his assignment was, which Homer had given him back in the OP, and which was simplicity itself:

  Keep the Zulus and Romeos off him.

  While he found a Foxtrot to infect.

  Kate had the same job. Security was good. Security was something Baxter could do. He liked protecting people. The stakes were high, but the rules were simple, and there weren’t too many ways to screw this up. It didn’t require complex or critical thinking. Baxter wasn’t sure why that appealed to him so much – his old day job as a CIA analyst had been nothing but complex and critical thinking.

  Maybe that was why this appealed to him. Work was whatever you had to do all day. This wasn’t. This was fun.

  He pushed out to keep up with Homer and cover his right side, Kate on the left, as they all crested the meat hill. He was having to take care and watch his feet, both to avoid stumbling – piles of bodies didn’t make as stable a climbing surface as you might think – and also to avoid getting grabbed or chomped by a not-quite-dead dead guy buried in the pile. That was a more unusual hazard.

  But as they reached the summit, Baxter realized this team as a whole was on a very unusual mission. On the one hand, they had to keep the dead guys from perking up and swarming them. On the other hand, they had to attract just the right dead guy to them. It wasn’t totally unlike their crusade to recover Patient Zero back in Somalia.

  One again, the Zulu was the mission.

  Moreover, as they crested the top of the pile, Baxter had to fight to push his heart back down out of his throat. Laid out below them, perfectly visible through his outstanding four-barrel NVGs, he could see all the dead that were, for the moment, flowing around the sides of CentCom.

  There were tens or maybe hundreds of thousands of them.

  They stretched to the horizon in every direction. And Homer was already descending the pile on their side.

  Leading them directly down into the horde.

  * * *

  Kate took a knee ten meters to Homer’s left and slightly behind him. Getting all the way down off the meat pile, it turned out, was a non-starter. It was only the wall that was keeping the entire fucking ZA from walking right up on everyone in CentCom. Very quickly she, like Baxter, found they were in the weird, and even more dangerous, position of having to fight the nearest dead, while somehow not drawing the attention of the thousands behind them.

  The superb suppressors helped a great deal with this. Kate’s was almost as good as Baxter’s – glancing over at him, nothing but the bodies piling up at his feet betrayed the fact that he was shooting at all – but she definitely didn’t need the optic or accuracy of her SCAR sniper support rifle, and now wished that gray-haired Spetsnaz asshat hadn’t broken her M4 over his knee. Because she was shooting guys in the face, from a few feet away. The only way this was working – fighting the closest dead while hiding from the rest – was to put them down the instant they perked up or locked on.

  The instant they started moaning, the game would be up.

  Everyone who looked even remotely in Kate’s direction got a 7.62mm face job. Still, this couldn’t go on forever – hell, it wasn’t even going to last long. Her first mag change was a crisis, and now she also envied Baxter those 40-round mags for the MP7, which meant having to reload half as often.

  She stole a glance at Homer in the center of their three-man line. He was no longer slightly out ahead of them, but slightly behind – he’d r
etreated a few feet back up the meat hill, probably for a better view, scanning over the heads of the herd. She knew he’d be looking for that very special fast-moving dead guy to infect – a Foxtrot.

  The question was how he was going to get to it.

  But then it became clear he wasn’t going to have to – instead, he was going to get it to come to them. She could already see his green IR aiming laser through her own NVGs, scanning out into the horde. But then his red visible laser flipped on, and he waved it around in the crowd.

  Was he trying to get something’s attention?

  If he was, it didn’t work. And he knew it.

  Because then he flipped on the white tactical light underneath his barrel.

  Oh, shit, Kate thought.

  Now they were in it. Because all the nearby dead saw that. And suddenly what looked like half the horde was coming for them. She returned her full attention to the fight, started stepping slowly backward up the hill…

  And shot for absolutely everything she was worth.

  * * *

  Homer figured that, despite trying to flash it only at the Foxtrot he’d seen thirty meters out, the white light was probably going to make the three of them pretty popular. But it had to be done. If they fell getting the zombie plague started, then they fell. The mission was all that mattered. Then again, they had to stay on their feet long enough to get it done.

  And suddenly that was in doubt.

  Homer didn’t have to order the other two to retreat. Despite shooting at full speed and with outstanding accuracy, all three were instantly forced to start backing up the meat wall just to stay ahead of the tide, which was perking up in little waves rippling out into the greater sea of dead.

  And this was indeed a very strange tasking. Homer was basically trying to knock down dozens of Zulus and Romeos to let one damned Foxtrot get through. Luckily, not only was he shooting perfectly, but Foxtrots could be counted on to be both fast and single-minded. In seconds this one burst from the falling ranks of the larger mob around it, a crazed dead woman having a really bad hair day.