Chapter Sixty-Five.

Crisfield, Maryland / Wednesday, July 1; 3:33 A.M.

"WHAT HAPPENED?" I asked Ollie.

He shook his head like a dog shaking off fleas. "I don't know. I was blindsided. Maybe Tasered. I remember a whole lot of pain and then it all went black. Next thing I know I'm duct-taped to a chair and some a.s.shole is smacking me in the face and yelling in Arabic."

Top gave him a quick once-over and found a wet burn mark on his neck just above the collar and the back of his shirt was soaked. "Looks like you got hit with a liquid Taser, boy."

"d.a.m.n. I didn't think those things worked that well."

"Little dab'll do ya," Top said from where he knelt by the scientist I'd shot, applying compresses to the wounds.

Bullets were still whanging off the door, but so far they didn't seem to be able to get in, and eventually they stopped firing. I don't know if Bunny, Ollie, or Top thought that was strange, but I sure as h.e.l.l did. There was a keycard station outside. How come n.o.body was trying to use a keycard? I almost said something to the others, but decided to keep it to myself for the moment. As the saying goes, "just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean you aren't being followed." There were too many things in this place that didn't add up.

"The troops should be arriving any second," I said. I looked up at the shuttered windows set high in the wall. "Bet you a dime they'll come through those, so be smart when they enter. If they ask you to lay down your arms you do it. Remember, the first thing they're going to be thinking is that we've been killed or infected. Let's not give anyone a reason to get trigger happy."

"I'm with you on that, boss," said Bunny.

"Hey," Ollie said as he got groggily to his feet, "where's Skip?"

Bunny glanced at me. "Unknown," I said. "He went missing around the same time you did." Ollie looked like he was about to ask a question, but I turned away and looked down at the dying scientist. "How's he doing, Top?"

"This guy's circling the drain. You want to ask him a question now would be the time."

I squatted on my heels. "You're dying," I said in Farsi. "You have a chance to do some good, turn things around before you die. Tell me, what is Seif al Din?"

He sneered at me. "The infidels will all drown in rivers of blood."

"Yeah, yeah, whatever. I want you to tell me about the Sword of the Faithful."

He laughed. "You've already seen its power. It will consume your entire country," he said, nodding with fierce joy, delighted at the thought.

"If this thing is a plague, friend, then it's going to consume your people, too."

He barked a laugh and blood flecked his lips. "Allah will protect His people." He mumbled something else but all I caught were the words "generation twelve," and I had no idea what it meant.

I leaned close. "Right now about two hundred Special Forces soldiers are descending on this place. None of your infected subjects are going to get out of here. Not one. Everything you've worked for is going to stop right here, right now."

He tried to spit at me, but he lacked the power. He was fading fast. I glanced at Top who shook his head.

"You have stopped nothing," whispered the dying man, then repeated the word, savoring it. "Nothing."

"Is there another lab, another cell?"

"It is past that time," he said with a b.l.o.o.d.y smile. "El Mujahid is coming. He wields the Sword of the Faithful. You are all too late. Soon all of Islam will be free of you."

Then he threw his head back and screamed out the name of G.o.d with such force that it tore the last bits of life out of him. He sank back against Top and his head lolled to one side.

Chapter Sixty-Six.

Crisfield, Maryland / Wednesday, July 1; 3:34 A.M.

"ALPHA TEAM! ON me!"

Grace sprinted toward the hole that had been blown in the side of the building. The agents of Alpha Team followed her into what looked like an industrial shower, but the grime-streaked walls were cracked from the blast and one row of metal lockers was torn off the walls. There was no sign of life.

"Redman," she snapped, and the explosives tech was at her side in a second. "This hallway looks like the only exit. Rig it with C4. If backup hasn't arrived and anything comes this way that doesn't look friendly, blow this whole side of the building down. Repeat my orders."

He did so.

"Major!" called Allenson from a few yards up the hall. He knelt over the body of a man wearing a white lab coat and plastic cuffs. "Got a prisoner down. Neck's broken. Blast must have smashed him against the wall."

"Worry about it later." She shone her flashlight down the hall. Every door along the long corridor stood ajar. "Two-by-two cover formation," she ordered. The agents moved past her, covering each other as they pulled the doors wide and shone lights and pointed guns into each of the rooms. Four of them were empty, but they stank of human waste, sweat, and misery. In the corners there were indefinable lumps that might have been bodies. Or parts of bodies.

Forty yards up the hallway was evidence of another explosion-probably the one they'd heard from outside. The walls had been torn outward and the hall was heaped with debris. A cursory glance inside revealed the high-end mainframe sequencing computers Joe had reported. Most of them were melted or torn to pieces, but a few appeared to have withstood the blast.

"Major!" cried Allenson. "My G.o.d!"

Grace stepped out of the computer room and her heart froze in her chest. What she had taken for mounds of debris from the blast was something else entirely. The team's unflinching flashlight beams revealed a mound of corpses. Debris and brick dust covered most of it but as Grace played her own flash over the mound she saw that there were dozens of corpses.

"b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l," Grace breathed. "This isn't from the blast." The floor was littered with sh.e.l.l casings and the air was a cordite pall.

There was one more room to check before they would have to climb over the dead to continue down the corridor. Two agents flanked the door and then one went inside.

"Major! In here."

Grace stepped through the doorway. There were seven corpses sprawled on the floor, all of them dropped by multiple head shots. And in the corner, huddled down, shivering with shock and cold despite the terrible heat, was a man. His clothes were torn, his face streaked with blood, his eyes wild. The floor around him was littered with sh.e.l.l casings and he held a pistol in his trembling hands.

"Gun!" Allenson yelled and instantly the man's chest was flickering with red laser sights.

"Don't shoot!" he cried and quickly lowered his pistol. "Please don't shoot!"

Grace Courtland shone her light in his face.

It was Skip. Grace moved forward and took his gun away from him, pa.s.sing it back to Allenson. "Chief Tyler are you injured? Tyler, have you been bitten?" she snapped.

"No," he gasped, then shook his head. He looked at the blood on his clothes. "No this isn't mine. It's it's "

"Steady on, sailor," she soothed. "Where's Echo Team? Where are your men?" And though she didn't mean to say it, she asked, "Where is Captain Ledger?"

Skip shook his head. "I don't know. Something happened I blacked out and woke up here and those things were everywhere!" He rubbed at his neck and Grace shone her light on it.

"Looks like a burn," Allenson said, then speculated, "Liquid Taser?"

Grace signaled to one of her agents. "Beth, go back to the exit and apprise backup of the situation. Tell them to come find us and be b.l.o.o.d.y quick about it. We'll proceed and try and locate Echo Team."

Beth looked from her to the mound of the dead that blocked the hall. "My G.o.d you really want to crawl over that?"

"As the saying goes, life's a b.i.t.c.h." It was a bad joke and as soon as she said it Grace was sorry she'd opened her mouth. The second part of that catchphrase was: "And then you die." The unspoken words hung in the air like a jinx.

The climb over the corpses was horrific.

Don't think about it, don't think about it, she told herself as she crawled to the top of the heaped dead. Don't think about it. She scrambled down the far side and jumped onto the concrete as soon as she could, happy to feel hard reality under her boots rather than the yielding madness of the flesh and bone over which she'd come. As her team followed her she saw that each of them were shock-faced and white, their mouths tight, eyes glistening. Some of them looked furious, some hurt. In silence they hurried down the rest of the hall, checking the last few doors but finding nothing alive.

At the T-junction she stopped. With Beth, Redman, and the shooter back at the entrance she was down to nine, with her making ten. She sent Allenson with four agents down the left corridor and she took the right.

MASTER SERGEANT MARK Allenson was thirty years old and had been Marine Force Recon for four years and a DMS agent for fourteen months. He was sharp, intelligent, and had been Major Courtland's first choice as her second in command. She trusted his judgment and relied on the skills and abilities he'd demonstrated in seven separate DMS-related firefights. The team liked him, and Grace was aware that he was more popular with the troops than she was, which was as it should be. It was always better to have a more human number two; it allowed the commander to maintain the necessary aloofness.

Allenson ran along the corridor, his rifle following his line of sight. They reached another junction and Allenson held up his hand to stop the team. The floor was littered with strange debris. Clothes, personal belongings, toys. He measured the amount of it against the number of corpses they'd seen in the hall and the math came out fuzzy. There were a lot of bodies there, but the debris here looked like it belonged to twice that many people. Maybe three times that many.

He crept forward through rusty water to the junction and peered around. There was a steel door fixed in place by a heavy chain. A chill pa.s.sed through him. He saw the chocolaty-brown smears on the walls and put it all together into a picture that didn't fit comfortably in his head.

"Oh Christ," he whispered as he backed away from it.

To his left an emergency light mounted on the wall suddenly flared and burst, shooting sparks out into the hall that fell onto a large heap of old newspapers and torn clothes overflowing from a trash can. The paper caught instantly and fire leaped up bright and hot. Allenson backed another step away, but a piece of burning paper fell from the can and landed on another heap of rags. Allenson caught a faint chemical whiff just as the rags ignited.

"Sarge," called one of his men, "there's a fire extinguisher right here." He reached to grab the unit.

Allenson spun around, his mouth opening to shout, "No!"

But the world exploded before the word was out of his mouth. He and his team were vaporized in a heartbeat.

GRACE FELT THE blast before she heard it and even as she turned toward the sound the shock wave picked her up and flung her against the wall. She rebounded and fell to her knees. The impact knocked the breath out of her and as she fought for breath a cloud of smoke rolled over her, filling her lungs and twisting her into a paroxysm of painful coughing. Concrete dust stung her eyes. Nearby she could hear her remaining team members gagging and groaning, but the sound was strangely muted and it took her a moment before she realized that she was half-deafened by the blast.

The blast.

"Allenson " she gasped. "My G.o.d "

Grace felt blindly for her gun, found it half buried in debris and pulled it to her, using the stock like a crutch to get to her feet. The smoke was thinning, but only enough to see a gray and blurred world. Grace pulled the collar of her T-shirt up through the opening of her Kevlar vest and used it as a filter. Her lungs protested, wanting to cough, but Grace fought the reflexes, struggling for physical calm. When she could trust her voice, she croaked, "Alpha Team-count off!"

A few voices responded. Only a few, and as she called them together she saw that all she had left of her original team were four agents, all of them b.l.o.o.d.y and bruised. She staggered back to the T-junction, clutching to the smallest of hopes that one or two others had survived. But there was no one. The corridor walls had been obliterated and there was a huge crater in the floor. She saw some debris. Part of a gun. A hand. Not much else.

In front of her, past the smoking crater torn into the hallway where the heavy steel doors had been, there was movement. Figures, pale as the smoke in which they stood, began moving toward her. Grace raised her flashlight and shone it into the cavernous room. She could see at least a dozen corpses, their bodies torn by the blast; but beyond them, filling the room nearly wall to wall, were walkers. Hundreds of them. Some of them, the ones nearest to the door, were torn apart, missing arms and chunks of flesh; the others farther back were still whole. All of them were staring at the gaping hole in the wall. They saw the light and followed the beam to its source, and their eyes locked on Grace. A ma.s.s of shambling dead things, all with black eyes and red mouths that gaped and worked as if practicing for a grisly feast; and as one they set up a dreadful howl of unnatural need and began moving toward her.

"No G.o.d, no " someone breathed beside her. Jackson, her only remaining sergeant. Grace knew that to stand and fight was suicide. "Fall back!" she cried, but as she moved backward the walkers shuffled forward over the bodies of their own dead.

Then, around the bend in the corridor, she heard the distant staccato rattle of automatic weapons fire. Even half-deafened, Grace recognized the chatter of AK-47s.

"Joe " she said to herself, then louder, "Joe!" She whirled and pelted down the hallway in the direction of the gunfire. Jackson, Skip, and the remaining Alphas followed. This, at least, was something they could fight; this was something they could understand.

Chapter Sixty-Seven.

Crisfield, Maryland / Wednesday, July 1; 3:38 A.M.

A SECOND BLAST rocked the whole building, this one ten times louder. Plaster and metal fittings fell from the ceilings and several lights flared white and then exploded in showers of smoky sparks. We all crouched, staring around, waiting for the next shoe to drop, but after a moment the rumblings stopped and the building settled in to an eerie silence.

"The h.e.l.l was that?" Bunny grumbled.

Top spat out some plaster dust. "Still ain't the cavalry, farmboy. Wrong blast signature."

Outside the door the gunfire started up again, but there was no way they were going to shoot their way in. I wondered why they bothered. Then it hit me gunfire doesn't always have to be an attack: it could also be a lure.

"Grace!" I said aloud, and that fast there was a fresh burst of gunfire-definitely MP5s this time. I paused and looked at Bunny, who was grinning.

"Now that," he said, "is the cavalry."

He took a single step toward the door when the wall blew up. I dove left and pushed Ollie out of the way as the whole door careened inward. Top did a neat little sidestep to avoid a big chunk of twisted metal, but a piece of cinderblock the size of a softball caught Bunny on the helmet and knocked him flat.

Figures began moving through the smoke; Top and I darted to either side, hunkering down behind lab tables, guns held straight and level. Two figures leaped into the room brandishing guns and yelling for us to freeze, to lay down our arms. They yelled in English. The loudest voice belonged to a woman.

Grace.

I started to smile and then I saw the blood on her face and the wild, almost inhuman expression in her eyes and my trigger finger twitched at the same moment my heart slammed against the walls of my chest. G.o.d! Is she infected?

"Hold your fire!" I yelled and everybody froze. "Grace! Stand down, stand down!"

She wheeled in my direction, bringing the barrel of her weapon up. Her hair was gray with dust and blood flowed freely from cuts on her forehead and cheek. She was panting-whether from effort, stress, or infection I couldn't tell. Though it hurt my soul to do it I put the deathly red finger of my laser sight on her chest, right over her heart.

"Grace stand down!" I shouted.

"J Joe?" A few other Alpha Team agents cl.u.s.tered around her, all of them bleeding, all of them in torn and dusty uniforms. Their barrels aimed past her toward me. They hadn't seen Top from his place of concealment. Ollie was with me, down behind the table, unarmed. Bunny hadn't moved from where he'd fallen.

"Stand down," I repeated, keeping the edge in my voice. "I won't tell you again."

"Joe are you hurt? The walkers "

"No one in here is infected, Grace. What about you?"

She took a breath, and then shook her head as she lowered her gun. To her team she said, "Stand down."