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  Timbo didn’t immediately reply. His gasping breaths crackled across the comm channel as he scrambled away.

  “What the fuck did you see?” Beckham asked.

  “I…I…” The shock in Timbo’s voice gave Beckham pause. He’d never heard the man so terrified.

  Beckham inched closer to the ledge with Chow as a shadow. Together they crouched and looked over the side. A moment passed, a second frozen in time. The image his eyes relayed to his brain went unprocessed. It had to be a trick of the light, a mirage. An illusion fired off by his over-tired brain. Or at least, that’s what he wanted it to be.

  But this was no illusion.

  This was real.

  A half dozen other tunnels dumped into a central chamber, feeding a pool of sewage below. The walls and ceiling of the massive room were covered with hundreds of human prisoners, their bodies plastered to the walls with thick vines of webbing that crisscrossed their flesh like bloated veins. Some were mutilated beyond recognition. Others were missing limbs.

  Variants crawled across the walls, their backs hunched, clinging to the bricks with talons and the hair-like fibers Kate’s team had discovered. One of them clawed its way through the sticky film covering an unconscious man. His eyes shot open when the creature clamped down on his stomach and ripped into his flesh. He screamed, but his voice was quickly lost in the roar of the waterfall.

  “Let’s go,” Chow whispered.

  Beckham swallowed, unable to formulate a response. He backed away from the ledge only to see a woman attached to the wall on his right. Her eyes met his and she reached out with a trembling hand.

  “Please. Please help me,” she whispered, her lips trembling.

  Beckham brought a finger to his mouth, but it was already too late. Their whispers had attracted the nearest creature. It let out a high-pitched roar that made Beckham’s heart kick. The clicking of joints and the scratching of claws followed as the sleeping Variants stirred and searched the darkness.

  “We need to move,” Chow said. “Now, man.”

  Footsteps pounded the platforms as the team retreated, but Beckham hesitated. His eyes shifted from the prisoner to the Variants racing across the ceiling.

  “Please,” the woman cried. “Please don’t leave me.”

  Beckham threw a glance over his shoulder. The other men were halfway down the hall. Only Chow remained.

  “Come on,” he said, waving frantically.

  “No,” Beckham said. “Help me.” He wasn’t going to leave someone behind. Not when she was in arm’s reach.

  Chow hustled over without further hesitation. “You’re fucking crazy.”

  “Hold my belt,” Beckham said. He drew his knife and crouched, using the blade to cut away the sticky vines across the woman’s feet and legs. When those were free, he slit through the webbing across her stomach and chest. Her body sagged forward, but Chow grabbed her before she plummeted into the water below. He pulled her to safety and she collapsed to the ground in a CBR suit. Beckham bent down to help her when he saw the deep gashes on her legs beneath the torn suit.

  “You’re going to be okay,” Beckham assured her, hoping it wasn’t a lie. He caught a glimpse of the pack charging across the ceiling and walls. They were close now. Seconds away.

  “Beckham, Chow, where the hell are you?” Jensen said over the comm.

  “On our way,” Beckham replied. He grabbed the two grenades off Chow’s vest and considered what he was about to do. The decision only took a split second. If he couldn’t save the mutilated captives, he was going to make sure they didn’t suffer any longer.

  “Get her out of here,” Beckham said. “I’m right behind you.”

  Chow looked at him and nodded. The woman moaned in agony as he bent down and scooped her up.

  Beckham cradled the grenades in one arm and fired off a flurry of well-aimed shots with the .45 to buy him a few seconds. When the Variants scattered, he jammed the pistol into his belt and plucked the pin off one of the grenades with his teeth. He launched it into the air with his good arm and watched it stick to the webbing of a prisoner. Then he pulled the pin off the second grenade and tossed it over his shoulder as he ran, like so many times before, away from the monsters.

  Steam surrounded Dr. Kate Lovato in the shower stall.

  “It’s hot,” Jenny whimpered in the adjacent stall.

  “Do you girls need help?” Kate asked.

  “No,” Tasha, Jenny’s protective older sister, said. “We’re okay.”

  Kate took in a breath and stepped under the showerhead. Bringing a hand to her face, she wiped away the sticky blood caked on her skin. For a moment the water turned scarlet at her feet as it swirled around the shower drain.

  The horror of the past three weeks surfaced under the warm flow of water. Everything she’d lost. Everyone she’d lost. It all came crashing down. Guilt ate at her as she stood there, numb—yet deep down, also relieved. She was still breathing, still alive. And a part of her believed Beckham was still alive, too.

  Kate had to believe it. Hope was the only thing that would keep her working. The survivors of Plum Island thought she was a miracle worker, but Kate knew better, especially now. After an hour of listening to radio transmissions trickling in from around the world, she knew nothing short of a real miracle would save the human race.

  Her first bioweapon had eradicated all but a small percentage of those infected with the Hemorrhage virus. Convinced that the surviving Variants couldn’t be treated, her focus was now on designing another weapon that would exterminate them all before it was too late. Millions more would surely die before it was all over. In the end, she could only hope that humans came out on top.

  Kate twisted the faucet off, grabbed a towel and stepped out of the shower. Tasha and Jenny were already sitting on a bench, wrapped in towels. She reached for the duffel bag she’d retrieved from her quarters. Kate pulled out a clean set of clothes for each of them and turned away to slip on her own clothes.

  “We need to hurry,” she said once she was dressed. “Your dad is on his way back.”

  Both girls’ eyes lit up at that. Even after all the horrors they’d seen, there was still light there. Like Kate, they still had hope.

  She grabbed the girls by the hand and led them into the hallway. The stink of fresh death hung in the air. Crimson stains covered the carpet where so many of her colleagues had died. Kate froze, remembering her fellow researcher Cindy’s final moments. They had never liked each other much, and in the end Cindy had chosen to hide instead of coming with Kate and the others. The decision had cost the woman her life.

  Kate swallowed and continued on, navigating around a pair of bloody shoes and a small pile of bullet casings.

  “Just keep walking,” she said to the girls. “Don’t look down, okay?”

  “Doctor,” said a Medical Corps guard waiting for her at the end of the hallway. For a moment his youthful features reminded her of Jackson, the Marine who had saved their lives just a few hours ago—and lost his in the process.

  “Wait up!” said another voice from behind them.

  Ellis hurried down the corridor, his jet-black hair slicked back and glistening under the LEDs. “You weren’t going to leave without me, were you?”

  Kate shook her head. “No, but we need to hurry.”

  “Let’s go,” the soldier said. He opened the door with one hand and raised his rifle with the other, sliding the muzzle into moonlight. “Stay close,” he ordered.

  “I thought the island was cleared,” Kate said, gripping the girls’ hands a bit tighter.

  “It was, ma’am, but Major Smith isn’t taking any chances.”

  Silhouetted guards manned a heavy caliber machine gun, and an industrial spotlight was set up behind a wall of sandbags in the center of the hexagon-shaped base. The beam swept across the path and then arched over the horizon, illuminating plumes of smoke rising from the smoldering wreckage of the Chinook helicopter on the tarmac. Kate stared at the flayed metal c
arcass as they walked, wondering exactly how the Variants it had been carrying had escaped. She’d been against bringing live test subjects to the island, but she took no pleasure in being proved right.

  For weeks Plum Island had been spared from the horrors surging across the globe. Now the base looked like a warzone. Overhead, two blinking red dots worked across the darkness, and Kate heard the distant thump of helicopter blades.

  Static broke from the radio on the vest of their soldier escort. “Echo 2 and 3 incoming. All medical crews report to tarmac,” said a female operator.

  The guard continued on as if he hadn’t heard the transmission at all, but Kate paused. She crouched in front of the girls and pointed at the sky.

  “You ready to see your dad?” she asked.

  “Is Daddy in one of those?” Jenny said, her voice hardly a whisper.

  “Yup, he’s coming home.”

  “Is Reed coming home, too?” Tasha asked.

  Kate fought the growing dread rising inside of her and said, “Not yet, honey. Not yet.”

  -2-

  General Richard Kennor hustled through an underground tunnel on his way to Central Command. The sun wouldn’t rise for hours, but most of his staff was already awake. Judging by their exhausted looks, some of them hadn’t slept at all. He fell into the same category, and it showed. His movements were sluggish and his eyes were swollen with fatigue. The caffeine had worn off hours ago, and he was operating on pure adrenaline. Sleep during wartime was like the first months of having a child: it came in short intervals, if at all.

  An entourage trailed the four-star general as he continued down the crowded hallway. The bunker, buried deep beneath Offutt Air Force Base, was the same location former President George W. Bush had been taken after the September 11 attacks. Now it was the temporary home of more than two hundred people from every corner of the nation, ranging from congressmen to Navy Seals. There was even an anchor from CNN who had managed to sneak in with a senator’s political staff. When the evacuations began weeks ago, chaos and pure luck had ensured that these few had lived.

  Kennor watched the flow of human traffic as he walked. In most cases these were important people—people the government had believed should survive an apocalyptic event. Kennor, however, could have done without two-thirds of them. He needed military personnel, men and women who knew how to fight a war. Fortunately, President Mitchell had given him a blank check to wage the war against the Variants as soon as he had been sworn into office.

  He didn’t like the new POTUS, and not just because of his political affiliation. The former President pro tempore of the Senate was weak. That was the biggest flaw in a leader, to Kennor’s mind. The chaotic first few weeks of the outbreak had proven Mitchell’s time in congress hadn’t qualified him to lead a country, especially during a time of war. His only redeeming quality was the fact he stayed inside his bunker at Cheyenne Mountain and kept his mouth shut while Kennor handled the heavy lifting.

  “Sir,” came a voice that distracted Kennor from his thoughts.

  A pair of guards opened the double doors to the command center, and Kennor hurried inside. He took the first left into a small conference room. His personal staff—his three closest confidantes—were already inside. They rose from their seats around the war table and stood at attention as he entered. Their grave looks served as a powerful reminder that the human race was losing the war. Operation Liberty had failed on a massive level.

  “At ease,” Kennor said as he took a seat. Most of them had been with him the better part of a decade fighting the war on terror. To his left was Colonel Harris, a man with slicked-back white hair and a mustache to match. Across the table sat Marsha Kramer, a middle-aged lieutenant colonel with crimson hair and a pair of dimples that rarely got any use. Kennor’s oldest friend, General George Johnson, was on the right, his bald head shining under the bank of lights overhead.

  His hand shook as he reached for the folder marked Confidential. Breaking the seal, he pulled out a briefing and took a moment to scan his staff.

  “Let’s get started. Harris,” Kennor said.

  The colonel stood and stiffened. “In front of you, General, is the initial report from Operation Liberty. We suffered heavy losses in every major city. The Variants overran almost every single FOB established. New York is lost. So is Chicago. Minneapolis. St. Louis. Nashville. Atlanta. It’s a mess, sir.”

  Kennor shook his head. He’d been caught with his pants down. Thousands of soldiers from every branch of the military were dead because he had ignored the advice of Lieutenant Colonel Jensen and Dr. Kate Lovato. The cities he had so desperately wanted to protect were now in ruins because he’d made the wrong call.

  “The good news is that the Air Force pounded the Variants hard with firebombs. The troops drew them out of their holes, and the flyboys turned them to ash. Preliminary reports indicate we killed a significant number.”

  “Do we have any idea how many are left?”

  “Several recon teams have been deployed, and satellite imagery is being monitored as we speak,” Harris said.

  “I want numbers,” Kennor snapped. “Solid numbers.”

  “Yes, sir,” Harris said and made a note on his pad.

  “How about survivors? Do we know how many people are left out there?” Kramer asked.

  Harris’s slight hesitation was all Kennor needed to know it wasn’t good.

  “I’m afraid we don’t have solid numbers there either,” Harris said.

  “Then give me some soft numbers,” Kennor replied.

  Harris raised a brow and in a matter-of-fact tone said, “Extinction, sir. We’re looking at the near annihilation of the human race if we don’t stop the Variants in the next month.”

  “You mean to tell me the Variants have killed the majority of the world’s population in less than a month?” Kennor said.

  “That’s precisely what he’s saying,” Kramer said. “With all due respect, sir, those things aren’t mindless zombies. We have underestimated them every step of the way. If we are going to win this war, we need to change our tactics.”

  Kennor shook his head. “NYC proves these things can be killed. Draw them out and bomb them to kingdom come.”

  “Draw them out with what, sir? More Marines?” Kramer said. There was anger in her challenge. Under normal circumstances, he’d have called her out for insubordination, but things had changed.

  As the Pit Bull of the American Military—a nickname he’d always hated—he had overseen countless missions during the war on terror. The Variants had proved much harder to kill. Now the jihadists were fighting the same enemy he was, and the irony was hard to swallow. The world had changed practically overnight. And like so many times before, circumstance had turned enemies into allies.

  A moment of tension lingered and then passed. Kennor wasn’t ready to admit defeat or retreat, but he was toeing a fine line. The frustration of his staff went beyond fatigue. They were all losing their confidence in his ability to lead. He’d seen other commanders fall victim to the same thing, but he was not going to be one of them. He’d made mistakes, but it wasn’t too late to turn this war around.

  Kennor looked to an uncharacteristically quiet Johnson. The man had always been a voice of reason. He needed that voice now more than ever.

  “What do you think, General?” Kennor asked.

  Johnson exchanged a glance with Kramer and Harris. After a pause he said, “I think we need to carefully consider our next moves. With so much hanging in the balance, we can’t afford another Operation Liberty.”

  Johnson cleared his throat as if he wanted to say more. Kennor scrutinized him, knowing Johnson wasn’t finished. He could see the wheels turning in the general’s head by his mannerisms. First he crossed his thick arms across his chest, then he twisted his mustache to one side, and finally he tightened his jaw. Kennor wasn’t prepared for what came next.

  “It’s time to retreat,” Johnson said sternly. “We need to pull our troops out o
f the cities completely. Leave only a few recon teams behind.”

  “I agree,” Kramer added. “It’s time to give science another chance. Perhaps we need to give Dr. Lovato and her team another opportunity to destroy the Variants.”

  Kennor massaged his wrinkled forehead. “Retreat,” he muttered. “I never thought I would hear anyone on my team say that word.”

  “Sir, our military isn’t just fractured. It’s been shattered,” Harris said. “We’re strained in every area. I’m not sure—”

  A rap on the door interrupted him. The door swung open and a young corporal named Van strode into the room. A bead of sweat trickled from his receding hairline.

  “General Kennor, sir. We just received some urgent news,” he said. Van hesitated, looking at the general’s staff.

  “Go ahead, son,” Kennor said.

  “Raven Rock Mountain Complex.” The corporal paused for a blink and then said, “It’s… it’s been overrun.”

  Kennor shifted in his chair to give Van a better look. “What do you mean, overrun? That’s one of the most secure locations in the country. Hell, it’s the alternate joint command and backup for the Pentagon. There are a couple hundred people hunkered down there, including the UN ambassador and the Secretary of State.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Van said. “The Variants found a way into the tunnel system and overwhelmed the forces there.”

  “My God,” Kramer gasped.

  Silence crowded the small briefing room. The loss of Raven Rock was more than another nail in the coffin; it proved that no location on the planet was safe. Kennor scanned his team. Fatigued and strained, they wore identical looks of defeat.

  “Van, I want you to arrange a search and rescue mission. If anyone is alive in there, get them the hell out.”

  Van nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  Kennor stood, pushed his chair under the table, and looked to Harris. He suddenly felt as weak as President Mitchell, but at least Kennor wasn’t as stupid. His staff had convinced him there was only one option left on the table, and the fall of Raven Rock proved they were right.