"Let's do it," Michelin said.

They were on the move.

Chapter Twenty.

Inside the comm-center bay, Jen Jacoby was screaming hysterically with her fists tight against her bosom. She had lost all communication with the president's staff in New DC, so she wasn't sure if her message had gotten through.

. . . Bang . . . Bang . . . Bang . . .

The edges along the door were starting to bend, and a hinge finally gave against the pounding force as one side of the door began to hang drunkenly on the remaining two hinges.

"Please," she cried. "Please don't."

Once the steel edge folded back from the doorjamb, a hand reached inside and groped the air for purchase of something beyond the door. Then its head appeared, and it looked at her from eyes that were completely filmed over, but not quite enough to cover the outline of pupils hiding beneath them.

"Coooooome tooo meeeee," it said, each word trailing like a serpent's hiss. Then it began to beckon her with its hand. "Coooooome tooo meeeee."

When Jen Jacoby screamed, the thing in the doorway laughed with malicious amusement as its lips skinned back to reveal blackened teeth.

"Coooooome."

More hands reached around the bent edges of the door, and more heads appeared. All trying to catch a glimpse of the prize inside the room.

Moans and whispers sounded off, calls for support.

Then the pounding began.

. . . Bang . . . Bang . . . Bang . . .

The two remaining hinges began to give, the bolts that held them firm were beginning to weaken. The screw heads were now extending from the hinges and getting ready to fly.

. . . Bang . . . Bang . . . Bang . . .

When the second hinge gave and the door hung at a precariously odd angle, Jen barked a cry and looked desperately about the tight quarters for a weapon, a tool, anything to provide her with something to defend herself with.

She rummaged through Jim Schott's toolbox and found a wrench that was as long as her forearm. She picked it up, hefted it. It felt good in the grips of her hands; she wielded it like a bat and cut the air with arcs and swings.

. . . Bang . . . Bang . . . Bang . . .

The third and final hinge was beginning to let go, and the door hardly resembled a door at all, it looked more like a mass of folded and twisted metal.

"LEAVE ME ALONE!"

"Coooooome tooo meeeee."

Then the door gave, exploding away from the doorjamb with such force that it cartwheeled through space and dented the pipes across the room upon impact.

Hissing and moaning, with arms and hands extending, the dead spoke in chorus. "Coooooome tooo meeeee."

Jen was sobbing hysterically while swinging the wrench feebly back and forth to keep them at bay. "No!"

Shapes and forms began to spill into the room, a mixture of entangled limbs that came at her with the sharp tips of their fingertips protracted like talons, getting ready to rake them across her flesh.

"Pleeeaaase! No!"

Suddenly a hand went up with fingers splayed wide, the creature showcasing its deadly-long digits, and brought it down in a diagonal sweep, its fingertips cutting through the flesh and bone with surgical precision.

Jen stood there going numb, seeing pops of light going off at the periphery of her vision. She raised the weapon, but the weapon was gone, and so was her hand. Both lying on the floor with the wrench still clutched within the grasp of her severed hand.

Tears spilled from her eyes, and her chin began to quiver gelatinously. As she raised her hand to examine the stump, she dazedly noted the precise cut with no ragged edges, no tattered flesh.

Suddenly the nerve endings erupted with white-hot pain, the agony sweeping down along her arm and to her shoulder, driving a scream from her throat.

And that's when they attacked.

They were quick and efficient, leaping with the speed and agility of monkeys as they took her to the floor, and began to rip her limbs free.

Blood jettisoned across the room, striping walls in macabre displays.

When there was nothing left to feed from, they exited for the deepest corners to devour their portions. All that remained of Jennifer Jacoby was her hand, a partial wrist, and the wrench that was still within its grasp.

Chapter Twenty-One.

The Oval Office. The White House.

New DC.

Vice President William Schaffer sat inside the Oval Office assuming the lead role as the interim president for the Federation of the Fields of Elysium, the FFE. He was surrounded by his Critical Incident Team, the Attorney General, the Secretary of State, and two Field Generals, Utley Moore and Denzelle Connors.

"The origin of the call has been verified, Mr. Vice President," Secretary of State Janet Wayland stated. "It came from the comm center of Mausoleum Twenty Sixty-Nine. So far no one's responded to our calls. Not even the pilot of Air Force Six, which may mean that the shuttlecraft is no longer serviceable."

"Is there any record of a launch from within the Fields, or from the Old cities?" asked Schaffer. "Anything that can give us a clue as to who is up there or how they got onboard, despite the ongoing protocols?"

"We . . . have . . . nothing, Mr. Vice President." Field General Moore was an aged man who served his fieldwork by repelling waves of savages when they outnumbered FFE soldiers hundreds to one. After his ability to tirelessly resist attacks and deplete their numbers to the point where the Wasteland savages believed that further assaults would be futile and slithered off into the desert to set roots, he became a military god by bringing safety to every walled city that was part of the Fields of Elysium. The price for being anointed, however, was a lost arm for his efforts. "How they got there, whoever they are, we don't know," he added. "What we do know is this: someone, somehow, breached the interior of that mausoleum, and the president's life is in jeopardy. He may even be dead, Mr. Vice President."

"Advice, General Moore."

"We need to send in a strike team immediately. And I mean ASAP." He turned to Field General Denzelle Connors, also a man of valor who earned his stripes by repelling hordes in the north and in the west by crucifying his captives as symbolic scarecrows, then allowing their corpses to rot along the crossbeams as a lesson to those who wished to further any acts of war. The message to the savages: This is your future. "Denzelle, I'm thinking that we need to send in the Force Elite."

Connors concurred. "I agree," he said. "If there's a brigade who can get inside that ship and get the job done, it's Lieutenant Ben Skully and his crew. They're the best of the best."

"Then let's get it done," stated the vice president.

"There's another issue, I'm afraid," the attorney general interrupted.

"And what would that be?" asked the vice president.

"It appears that the mausoleum has broken free from its geospheres. The ship is drifting away from Earth, and soon it'll be beyond reach if we don't get a unit there in a hurry. Problem is, they'll have to dock while the mausoleum is in motion, which is an even bigger problem."

The field generals looked at each other. This was not a problem at all since they believed in the adage that there was a solution for everything. Correcting problems was what they did.

Field General Moore addressed the vice president directly in a tone that was firmly even. "We'll get this done," he told him. "We'll get the Force Elite to go in, kick ass, and bring the president home. We can get it done."

"You sound confident, General, and that boosts my confidence."

"That's because I'm confident in Skully's team."

The vice president nodded. "Do it."

Chapter Twenty-Two.

Due to the handiwork of field generals and members of the Force Elite, genocide of the savages had been the norm over the past two years. The justification behind their actions was simple: to protect those behind the walls of the Fields of Elysium from rising insurgency.

So tens of thousands had been slaughtered, and mass graves dotted the landscape from New DC to New Diego, from New Seattle to New Miami, and areas in between.

Once the microscopic granules from the cosmic dust cloud settled, the land became alive.

Mounds of dirt and sand heaved upward, creating rifts and fissures along the terrain, and vomited the dead to walk once again.

Exhausted-looking bodies wearing the rags of Wasteland savages gathered and moaned, the sounds and pitches a language in itself that correlated with one another. Flesh had been torn and ripped wide either by the bite of high-caliber bullets, or by the sharp edges of a machete, the latter to preserve the waste of ammunition.

There was marginal recognition of loved ones, then the memories were quickly forgotten as the instinctive drive to feed became paramount.

They meandered about until they became a group, the group then becoming a crowd, the crowd becoming a mass, and the mass becoming an army.

There was no leader, no one in command. They had moved as a collective unit with a single thought, a single motive: to kill and feed.

They wandered the Wastelands with purpose, first taking new ground by attacking the Old cities first, places that weren't protected by walls with no places to hide for the inhabitants.

Hordes of the dead wandered across borders protected by the metallic husks of old cars and makeshift fences of barbed wire, finding them easy to scale.

They were quick and fast, taking their prey down with athletic efficiency by leaping and running much quicker than when they were alive. Driving hands with fingers that were long, thin, and as sharp as blades, cut down people with savage slices.

The governing masses of the living created walls of fire as a means to stave off attack, but the dead bounded over the flames only to come down on the loosely trained soldiers with gnashing teeth and sharpened claws, tearing and ripping their souls from their bodies.

They killed.

They fed.

And for those who were bitten but not killed, they simply crawled away into some hole where they eventually 'turned' and became one of the walking dead.

The Old cities, or what was left of them, had burned to their foundations. No one lived. No one survived. And blackened gullets had their fill of flesh.

But it was not enough. It was never enough, as the tribes of the Old cities had become extinct.

But there were the Wastelands.

And there were many still alive.

In search of sustenance, the undead had come across a number of crucifixes where many hung along the crossbeams as scarecrows, only to die an agonizing death, and then reborn still nailed to the cross. They writhed and moaned and attempted to escape their bonds, but their bodies had become too wasted, their flesh so ravaged that showing bones had been bleached by a relentless sun.

Caravans of the dead ignored them since there was no compassion, only a driving hunger. And whereas most hordes scoured the Wastelands for those still alive, many more had gravitated to the high walls of the Fields of Elysium where there was a bounty of food.

Within days of the resurrection, the world would be at war.

Chapter Twenty-Three.

Ben Skully was the leading Lieutenant in New DC's Force Elite, a superior group of warriors trained to stay all insurgencies. But over the past two years they had been delegated as a kill squad to deal with the roaming masses of Wasteland savages.

So a new era of genocide had begun.

And mass graves were dug to bury the secret.

When Skully assumed command, it was when Lieutenant Eriq Wyman surrendered his position by laying down his weapon and refusing to follow orders on the first wave of killings. So when Skully followed through with the execution and was willing to follow through with the agenda without question, he'd been assigned by the president as the new team leader. Wyman immediately lost his command, and he was reassigned to duty considered as punishment that was one step away from banishment. Skully never saw him again after that day.

For two years his team had gone out to the Wastelands and killed with impunity. Men, women, and children died at the hands without prejudice. Mass graves were dug to hide the fact that genocide was in full swing, and it remained a dirty word in the minds of the people, no matter the reason behind the actions.

But today they received a different call.

It appeared that the president's transport of Air Force Six and the Mausoleum it boarded had been compromised by insurrectionists. Despite having his Detail onboard, there was still the highest probability that the president's life was in jeopardy.