Shawn looked left and right at the men and women beside him. None of them instilled a lot of confidence in him. He figured that they thought the same thing about him. His companions were mostly city people who’d been lucky enough to escape the carnage of the horde when it moved through the first time. Each of them that he’d had the opportunity to talk to had basically the same story as him. They’d lost loved ones and their friends were dead. Each of them had somehow escaped death and now they were sitting in the cold to fight against those things in order to give others a chance at survival.

  He was cold. The weather was getting positively chilly and the moist wetlands that the defenders sat near didn’t help. “Hey, what is that?” someone to his right yelled.

  A murmur went up and down the line as everyone squinted across the marsh at the solitary figure that emerged from the trees and begun to walk toward them. “Is that a soldier from the first line or is that a zombie?” Maria, the woman next to him, asked.

  He adjusted his glasses and squinted into the early afternoon gloom. “I… I can’t really tell,” he admitted. “Wait, there’s blood all over it.”

  A single rifle shot galvanized the line into action as hundreds of rifles followed suit. The creature stumbled backward and fell into the trees. “Cease fire, Goddammit!” the sergeant yelled through a bullhorn. “Everyone can’t shoot at the same thing or else we’ll run out of ammo. We need to communicate who’s gonna fire or else—”

  He stopped chastising the line when the same creature reappeared from the woods. It moved even more strangely than it had before. Shawn attributed that to all the gunshot wounds, but seeing the thing still upright after that scared the shit out of him.

  “You!” the sergeant yelled.

  Shawn turned his head slowly and saw the man pointing directly at him. “Me?”

  “Yeah. I want you to aim for its head and shoot, just like I told you earlier.”

  “Uh, okay…” he muttered and turned back around to where the creature stumbled into an area containing muddy, ankle-deep water.

  “Nobody else shoot!” the soldier shouted through his bullhorn. “I want you to see how quickly these things drop when you shoot them in the head.”

  Shawn felt hundreds of eyes watching him as he pulled the rifle tight against his shoulder. At the weapons issue point, there had been training aids that showed what the sight picture was supposed to look like when you looked down the rifle. He tried to remember it, but as he looked down the rifle, it became apparent what he was supposed to do. He lined the front sight post up into the middle of the vee and then centered it on the creature’s head. He took a breath and then let it out like he’d been told. Then he pulled the trigger.

  The weapon bucked against his shoulder and he jerked his head up to see if he hit the thing. Nope. He turned to look at the sergeant, “What did I do wrong?”

  “You jerked the trigger,” he said through the bullhorn. “Squeeze it gently. The weapon should surprise you when it goes off. Try it again.”

  Shawn nodded and reacquired his sight picture. He let his breath out and then gently squeezed his finger. The creature staggered as the round impacted it, but continued forward. “Good job! You shot low and hit it in the chest,” the soldier said after he lowered his binoculars. “Adjust your aim a little to shoot higher. We didn’t have time to zero the weapons, so you have to rely on Kentucky Windage to figure out where you need to aim.”

  Shawn gave him a questioning look and once more the soldier brought the bullhorn to his lips. “It means your weapon is shooting low, so you need to aim high in order to make the bullet go where you want it to. Shit,” he pointed out across the field. “Figure it out quick, cause more of ‘em just came through the woods.”

  The sergeant turned away from Shawn and yelled into the bullhorn, “Okay, this is it! We need to make a stand here and allow more time for the evacuation. Remember, aim for the head and gently squeeze the trigger, don’t jerk it!”

  Shawn focused on the zombie that he’d been firing at. It had sunk up to its knee in the marsh and struggled to pull it out. He lined up the shot and then adjusted his aim toward the empty air above the creature. The rifle jumped against the pocket of his shoulder and the zombie fell forward. “I hit it!” he shouted.

  “Good job,” Maria replied beside him.

  He smiled over at her and then took aim across the field again. All along the line, the reports of rifles began to sound as the defenders tried to incorporate the quick lessons that the soldier had imparted to them.

  More and more of the creatures emerged from the woods and the bullhorn sounded once more, “Okay, the marsh is slowing them down and they’ll get caught up in the concertina wire! Save your ammo and let them get closer. The closer they are to us, the easier it will be to hit ‘em.”

  Shawn pulled his cheek away from the rifle once again and watched the creatures bypass the one that he’d killed. They spread out across the boggy terrain like a mass of moving ants, jostling each other in their efforts to make it to the line of defenders. It was maddening watching them get closer to the line, but he understood the logic being the sergeant’s order. In the distance, he could still hear the machine guns on the tanks chattering away. If these are just the ones that got past the tanks, I wonder what they’re seeing over there, he thought.

  His attention was quickly brought back to the situation in front of him. The creatures were about three or four hundred feet away—the distance from home plate to the fence on a baseball field. Shawn told himself that he’d wait until they were half that distance before he started shooting again. A few rifles cracked intermittently around him, but most of the shooters held their fire as well.

  The shooting from the tanks died down and the big vehicles’ engines whined as they began to move. “The tanks are abandoning us!” someone shouted.

  “We’re gonna die,” Maria exclaimed and grabbed Shawn’s jacket. “We need to leave!”

  “Maria, calm down, we’ve got time to get away,” he reasoned. “Our families are depending on us to stop these things. My daughter is back there and I’m gonna give her every chance to make it to safety.”

  Her lips thinned as she accepted his answer. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I’ve just never been in a situation like this before.”

  “It’s okay, none of us have. We’ll figure it out and make it out of here alive.”

  She nodded and appraised his thin frame with a quick once-over. “I’m sticking with you when you leave. Don’t forget about me.”

  “Deal,” he replied and turned back toward the field. The damn things had already made it to his arbitrary line; he couldn’t be sure, but it seemed like they were moving faster than they had a minute ago. He lined up a shot just above the head of a young blonde woman with half of her jaw missing and fired.

  A large mass of the things quickly became tangled in the first couple of rows of coiled razor wire that had been stretched across the marsh from edge to edge. Anywhere that the creatures came close to the concertina wire, their clothing became entangled and skin ripped open. Eventually, the pressure from behind was too great on the ones in the front and they fell completely into the wire as their brethren trampled them underfoot in their efforts to reach the defenders.

  The horde moved in that sort of jerky, forward movement across all three lines of wire as the humans fired into their midst. The next hour was a blur as people shot at every type of zombie imaginable. Shawn fought down the revulsion that grew in his stomach. Yesterday or the day before, these things were living, breathing people just like him. Now they were dying by the hundreds as more than five hundred civilians fired into their mass.

  Then the screams began on the far left side of the line. The ground on that side was much more firm near the road, so the creatures hadn’t been as hindered as they had been in the open field in front of Shawn. The defenders who hadn’t already taken off were beginning to get overrun by the creatures as they made their way up the line. “Oh, shit! We have to go!” Maria screamed.

  Shawn looked one final time at the crowd of zombies in front of them and then grabbed the extra magazines full of ammo lying on the ground. He crammed them into the pockets of his coat and struggled to stand holding the long rifle. All along the defensive line, men and women had left their weapons and ammunition as they fled. He shook his head, it would be impossible to replace those once the zombies overtook the area.

  He glanced one more time at the mass of creatures and then followed behind Maria in headlong retreat.

  *****

  15 October, 2248 hrs local

  The Wall

  Near Annapolis, Maryland

  The Followers swarmed over the walls and defeated the hated humans who’d kept them imprisoned in the home city for so long. After that, the Master of the Chosen ordered its forces to destroy the large human settlements along the water. Then the Master ordered them to spread out to attack everywhere at once.

  It was a short fight. The stupid humans hadn’t put up much of a fight outside the walls of the home city since they were trying to stop the Followers that the Leader commanded far away. The creature’s brethren feasted on the bodies of the humans until they turned and then helped to carry on the attack.

  The Master sent its forces outward without controlling them any longer. In the fight to escape the walls another of the Chosen died, so it decided that the best thing would be to overwhelm the humans with hundreds of attacks wherever the Followers struck instead of the large mass that they’d used to destroy the large cities. The last order that the master gave was to send some of the Followers into the water. The water would carry them away where they could continue the attack once it brought them back to the shore.

  FOUR

  16 October, 1312 hrs local

  Asher Hawke’s Residence

  Rocky Mount, North Carolina

  “Okay, I think that’s enough,” Asher told his student. “Go ahead and put the rifle on safe. You’ve got it.”

  “Yeah, those last three magazines felt really good,” Rachel said with a smile over her shoulder at Asher. She hoped that they could go inside soon, she was frozen to the bone, but there wasn’t a chance in hell that she was going to complain. She didn’t want Asher to think that she was weak or would be a burden on him.

  They’d spent a lot of time the past few days going over the basics of pistol and rifle marksmanship and they’d been out in the woods behind Asher and Rachel’s house all morning putting rounds through the chambers of Asher’s weapons, familiarizing her across a broad spectrum of calibers. She was confident that she had a good, working knowledge of all the weapons that Asher owned.

  The next morning they planned to leave in his truck and head southwest down Interstate 95. Asher had suggested that they should try to link up with an old friend of his who lived in Florida, but he’d been unsuccessful contacting him, so they altered their plan accordingly. Once they hit Interstate 20 in South Carolina they would travel west and then figure out where they were going. He confided in her that he didn’t like the uncertainty, but until they could find out more details about how the fight up north was going, it was the best that they could hope for.

  “Ready to knock it off for the day?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I’d love to go inside and get something to eat.”

  “Sure. I’ll show you how to take the weapons apart and then you can clean ‘em while I make a couple of sandwiches.”

  Rachel frowned. She hadn’t wanted to spend the afternoon cleaning the weapons, but she understood the requirement to keep them clean, especially before they took off. “Yeah, okay. Maybe we can make a fire and cuddle up in front of it since it will be the last time we get to do that for a while.”

  Asher grinned, leaning down to give her a peck on the cheek and then jerked back quickly. “Holy shit. You’re freezing!” he exclaimed.

  “I’m okay,” she lied.

  “Come on. Let’s go inside. I bet Boomer is going crazy anyways.”

  They walked back through the yard and the Boxer shot through the door the moment Asher opened it. She barely made it three feet off the porch before she squatted down to do her business. “Guess she really needed to go,” Rachel commented while she watched the dog.

  “She’ll probably go back to the fence to figure out what we were doing back there for so long.”

  The retired operator set her up with a cleaning kit at the kitchen table and broke down the SCAR first. He cautioned her to clean only one weapon at a time so parts didn’t get mixed up and flipped on the television news before heading into the kitchen.

  Rachel sighed at the news. It was more of the same thing: America was fucked. The government instructed everyone in the northeast to move west, but turn back if they encountered any of the creatures. The television coverage had just been awful, nonstop blood and gore. It got to the point that she really didn’t want to see anymore, but Asher was adamant that they keep it on, even if they didn’t watch it.

  Another series of beeps from the television drew her attention from the bolt that she scrubbed with a toothbrush. “What’s new?” Asher asked as he drifted in with two plates.

  “I don’t know. They just had an alert, but it didn’t say what for.”

  “Hmm, wait, what’s that say along the bottom?”

  She squinted to read the scrolling message. Her eyesight wasn’t as weak as Asher’s seemed to be, but it was hard to see the words from the dining room. “Huh, it says the president is going to have a news conference in a few minutes.”

  “Here, let me put that back together,” Asher said as he reached for the parts she held. Rachel gratefully handed them over to him and went into the kitchen to wash the gunpowder off of her hands.

  When she returned, the SCAR was completely assembled and sitting on the table, but Asher was standing behind the couch in the living room. “Hey, the press conference is getting ready to start,” he stated when she wrapped her arms around his muscled waist.

  “I guess you want to watch it, huh?”

  He glanced over at her and nodded silently. “Okay, sit down,” she said with a gentle push against his back toward the couch. “I’ll get your sandwich.”

  Rachel picked up the plates and brought them both to where Asher sat on the couch. He accepted the meal with a quiet word of thanks. He was totally engrossed with the broadcast. She bit tentatively into the sandwich and glanced over at her… what? Her boyfriend? Her friend? Apocalypse survival partner? What the hell were they? Sure, they kissed—a lot, which was amazing—but that was about it. She wanted the relationship to move forward, she needed it to move forward physically or else she was going to go crazy, but she wasn’t sure if they were mentally ready for the next step.

  She’d already figured out that there was a lot of shit going on up in Asher’s head. Rachel wasn’t sure that she was prepared to delve into his mind if he opened up one night after they took the plunge and finally had sex. That left her with staying in the pseudo-friend zone until the time was right. But she also had reservations about waiting. What if they didn’t get ahead of the zombies like Asher said they would and ended up getting killed?

  Asher tapped her knee and asked, “Aren’t you hungry?”

  “What? Oh… yeah. I was just thinking,” she admitted.

  He gestured toward the TV. “Yeah this is some shit, isn’t it? I think we have to leave tomorrow, any later and we risk getting trapped.”

  She peeled the crust off one of the pieces of bread to stall before she said, “Are we too late? Did we spend too much time here?”

  “I don’t think so. I mean, the infection map overlay shows very little southern movement from DC; it’s all north and west. Plus, I think it’s better that we got as prepared as possible before taking off. You can shoot now, so I’m much more confident that you can watch my back if we get into a scrap somewhere or need to scavenge for food.”

  “Okay,” she replied. She had to trust him; she was so far out of her element that she didn’t have any other choice.

  The television interrupted their conversation with the announcement that the president was prepared to give his speech from Denver. Asher rested a possessive hand on her thigh and turned to watch what the man had to say.

  “My fellow Americans, tonight I come before you to report on the disaster in the northeast part of our nation. It is with a heavy heart that I report that the entire East Coast, north of Washington, is firmly under the control of our enemies and the military force that we had stationed along The Wall has been defeated.

  “These enemies are unthinking, uncaring and do not respond to any type of requests for peace. Those infected with the A-Coll virus truly are zombie-like creatures, no longer the men and women that they used to be. The Wall controlled the scourge for more than five years as we tried to develop a vaccine or a cure. But, the zombies have escaped and now we must stop them—this includes the recently infected. There is no cure after the initial infection takes hold. They must be killed in order to stop the spread of their disease.

  “Our European partners have abandoned us to our fate, going so far as to shoot down planes and sink ships that approach their coast from the Americas. We assume that this trend will continue and the United States and Canada will remain alone to fight this threat. We can no longer expect help from our southern partners either.

  “The President of Mexico called me this morning. They have mobilized every police officer and their considerable military to their northern borders. President Arnesto has assured me that if any zombie is foolish enough to wander that far south, they will break against the wall of Mexican forces. He has also offered safe haven for any American willing to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Mexicans and defend their border.