"Vaughan!" he screams. "Vaughan, help me!"

Leaning back against a car, he reaches for his carbine, but it is gone. All he has is his nine-millimeter. Gritting his teeth against the pain, he quickly unholsters it and squeezes off several shots into the approaching horde, dropping bodies onto the street.

The Mad Dogs bear down on him, their slavering jaws champing. Knight laughs suddenly, his eyes s.h.i.+ning, feeling lightheaded and weak from the loss of blood.

"I'm not afraid of you," he says, and empties the rest of the clip into their snarling faces.

The infected do not know what fear is.

They rip him into pieces, ignoring his screams, and fight over what is left. They gnaw and bite even at the morsels, trying to infect his dead flesh with living virus.

The rest rush by in their thousands, pressing onward into the cras.h.i.+ng rifles of Alpha's lines.

One last card to play

Bowman watches his new rear guard pop smoke, concealing their retreat as First and Third Platoons head east, hoping to draw Maddy off the main column, now reduced to a pathetic twenty-five troops. Nearby, Kemper is yelling at everybody to clear the net, which has become congested with incomprehensible, screaming voices.

In less than fifteen minutes, his command has been scattered to the wind and is now entangled in a decisive engagement against a superior enemy, facing defeat in detail.

"Vaughan's holding," Kemper tells the CO. "He says they're starting to swing north soon and move towards the extraction point."

"Roger that," Bowman says, trying to feel hopeful.

A Mad Dog runs out of a nearby building, loping with his hands splayed into claws, spittle flying as he snarls. Without thinking, the Captain shoulders his carbine and cuts him down with two rounds.

Killing Maddy has become routine, almost instinctive now, without remorse or regret.

His company is at the edge of the abyss now.

Knight, acting on his own initiative, split their force in the face of the enemy and the b.a.s.t.a.r.d was right. Bowman realizes that if they stuck to his original plan, the column would have been hit in the flank in several places while engaged and destroyed piecemeal. He saw no other alternative at the time. Knight was willing to sacrifice himself and the men as p.a.w.ns in a game; Bowman was not. No wonder the crazy b.a.s.t.a.r.d kept his ideas to himself until the last possible moment.

A mark of a good commander is to roll with the punches in the field. Not only did he decide on the spot to run with Knight's plan, he decided to implement it again when faced with an unwinnable fight against another collection of mobs converging on them. Almost all of First and Third Platoons volunteered to act as a diversionary force and hopefully Ruiz, part of the rear guard, will have the sense to join up with them instead of leading Maddy through the smoky veil that right now is their only real protection.

They are doing a good deed, but there is no need for anybody to sacrifice his life for a cause. Once things get too hot, they can simply melt away into the nearest buildings until danger pa.s.ses, and gradually find their way back to the school.

Their decision was heroic, but also practical. They could all stay together and die valiantly, or break off and stay alive but give up the possibility of extraction.

"Contact left!" Corporal Alvarez calls back from the advance guard.

"Orders, sir?" Kemper says.

Bowman asks about the size of the force, and Alvarez tells him. Christ, how many of these monsters are there?

Roll with the punches.

Another mark of a good commander: Keep one's options open.

The problem is they are almost out of options. Bowman has one last card to play, and decides to play it.

It is his turn to go east.

Contact

Ruiz is no fool. He understands why the Captain popped smoke, and turns the corner to follow First and Third Platoons-already setting up to hit Maddy as he enters the intersection-instead of running through the smoke to rejoin the rest of Second Platoon. The other soldiers cheer as they turn the corner, happy for the extra firepower and to have a pro like Ruiz around. His combat skills are practically a legend in Charlie Company. The man has warrior spirit in his heart and ice water in his veins.

"Who's in charge here?" Ruiz asks Sergeant Floyd, a former corporal whom Bowman promoted to take over the remnants of Third Platoon.

Floyd looks Ruiz up and down, his face pale and his eyes bulging. "You are, Sergeant," he says.

"All right. You're too bunched up. I want these men here to spread out-"

"Contact!"

Ruiz screams: "FIRE!"

The soldiers whoop as the line erupts with a volley. Instantly, the first ranks of the Mad Dogs collapse, their bodies torn and gus.h.i.+ng blood, instantly replaced by fresh ranks. They're all making the turn. For a second time, Maddy has taken the bait, sparing the main column.

"Where do you want my SAW, Sergeant?" McLeod shouts over the din.

"Pick your own ground, Dorothy," Ruiz growls, racking a round into the firing chamber of his shotgun. "We'll be on the move in less than a minute."

McLeod deploys his bipod on the hood of a yellow cab, lines up his sights center ma.s.s on one of the leading Maddies, and fires his first burst. The gun bucks against his shoulder, making his teeth vibrate. He continues firing, empty sh.e.l.l casings and links popping out of the weapon's eject port and clattering onto the hood of the car. The tracer rounds strobe, flas.h.i.+ng and guiding his aim into torsos and faces and limbs and skulls. The stream of hot metal pulverizes everything it comes into contact with.

"Frag out!"

He notices that the Mad Dogs are close and getting closer. Floyd made a mistake: He set up too close to the intersection without giving his first lines any breathing room.

"Reloading!"

Ruiz has already seen the same problem, and is ordering the first line to withdraw. The fire slackens as the boys come off the line.

"Contact!"

"Where?"

"The mothers are behind us!" somebody screams.

At the next intersection, First Platoon has been split in half by a ma.s.sive horde of Mad Dogs converging from the north and south.

In just moments, most of Ruiz's command has become cut off and surrounded.

"s.h.i.+t," he says.

"Our father, who art in heaven," McLeod says. He is suddenly unable to remember the rest of the prayer, his mind blank.

"Contact!"

"Man down!"

The Mad Dogs are ripping the boys apart in the intersection and pouring into the side streets, driving everything before them.

"FIRE!" Ruiz roars at anyone in earshot, then turns and blasts his shotgun into the infected coming the other way. "FIRE YOUR WEAPONS!"

Contact.

Some of the soldiers panic and flee to nearby doors, trying to escape into the buildings lining the street. Most of the doors are metal and locked, while others are fronted with gla.s.s and easily broken with rifle b.u.t.ts. The soldiers cry out in fear and rage as they open the doors but find their way inside blocked by furniture stacked into crude barricades by people living in the building to keep out the infected.

There is no escape from this.

At what moment did Custer, seeing all those warriors running up the hill with murder in their eyes, realize that he was toast? McLeod wonders. What did he do about it? Did he just sit down on the gra.s.s and wait to be tomahawked, taking his last precious moments to reflect on his short life, maybe sneak in one last combat jack?

Or did he keep shooting, wasting those moments but doing it anyway just so he could prolong his life by several more seconds?

h.e.l.l, when I die, he tells himself, I want to be doing something fun, not firing a gun.

He wills himself to stop shooting, but his fingers do not obey him.

I guess that solves that mystery, he tells himself. The instinct of self preservation trumps all. Quant.i.ty is better than quality. Now is probably a good time for cyclic fire, then.

He fires the SAW in rock and roll mode, spraying death almost blindly into the crowd.

Look at me, he thinks, I'm G.o.dd.a.m.n Rambo.

"That's the stuff, Private!" Ruiz roars, firing his shotgun and chambering another round, ejecting a smoking empty sh.e.l.l. "Hit him back tenfold!"

"I'm trying!" McLeod answers him.

"Reloading!" somebody calls out.

"I hate this G.o.dd.a.m.n Army," Williams says, struggling to clear a jam in his carbine. An instant later, the Mad Dogs swarm over him, turning his scream into a sickening wet gargle as two pairs of jaws sink into his throat and rip it open.

"Our father who art in heaven!" McLeod rasps, tears streaming down his stubble, mowing down the Mad Dogs still biting frantically at his dead friend's face, tearing away pieces of flesh and spitting them out.

Nearby, Corporal Hicks falls on his a.s.s, one of his arms mangled and bleeding and the other holding his carbine, still shooting while the rest of the soldiers struggle to form a defensive square and fix bayonets.

A grenade flies into a second-story window and instantly detonates with a flash, ejecting glittering hot gla.s.s and flaming debris down onto the street, followed by a drifting veil of smoke and dust.

McLeod staggers and b.u.mps into Ruiz, who is slowly retreating while rapid-firing his M4 Super 90 shotgun. The air is thick with smoke and the stench of infection. As the smoke descends upon the street, he catches glimpses of Hicks and Wheeler being torn into shreds. They reach the defensive square only to find it already gone. Back to back, McLeod and Ruiz create a three-hundred-sixty-degree zone of death for the Maddies.

The SAW grows hot in his hands, and suddenly clicks empty.

"Final protective fire," Ruiz says, then stumbles away, dropping his smoking shotgun. He is clutching his neck, blood running through his fingers.

"Sergeant?" McLeod says, unable to believe his eyes.

Ruiz is indestructible. He can't die.

He was not bitten; a stray bullet caught him.

"Emmanuel!" the man gasps, falling to his knees.

"Man down!" McLeod screams automatically, knowing it is useless to call for help.

He rushes forward to pull the Sergeant to safety but is suddenly shoved to the ground in the swirling melee of soldiers and infected. A Mad Dog trips over him, knocking the wind out of his lungs. Gasping for air, he sees Ruiz on his hands and knees, struggling to stand up, surrounded by Maddies hanging onto him and biting every inch of his body.

"Sergeant!" he calls out.

A knee cracks against the back of his head. The world goes black except for a few colorful sparking stars. By the time his vision clears, Ruiz has already been transformed into road kill, a headless and armless torso crushed and studded with fragments of gla.s.s.

"You motherf.u.c.kers," he says, crying with helpless rage. "You didn't have to do that to him. You didn't have to do that."

A grenade explodes nearby, sending charred and broken bodies collapsing around McLeod and soaking him in blood and smoking sc.r.a.ps of flesh. Another cloud of smoke and dust flows across the crowd. The high-pitched screams of the dying penetrate the loud ringing in his ears. Sobbing hysterically, he crawls between the running legs through the filth and gla.s.s until he is able to pull himself into the yellow cab and curl up shaking in a fetal ball in the backseat. The car rocks and jolts like a boat in the storm as the infected pour around him, finis.h.i.+ng the slaughter of the doomed boys of Third Platoon.

Outside, the screams reach a crescendo.

Our father, who art in heaven The crackle of small arms fire begins to die out. A Mad Dog runs into the side of the cab, smas.h.i.+ng its face against the window and cobwebbing the gla.s.s. The foul-smelling corpse in the driver's seat sways with the impact, its head rolling and grinning.

Our father who art in heaven Our father who art in heaven A final flurry of gunshots, then nothing but the tramp of thousands of feet and a primal, almost triumphant growl from thousands of mouths.

Our father

I had no choice

There were once ten of them. Now there are four heading north through a wasteland, dirty and tired and b.l.o.o.d.y, while infected mobs pound the garbage-strewn alleys and side streets in a never-ending hunt for fresh meat.