Allman glanced over his shoulder and saw his sniper partner, Rico Tag, catching up. Then he refocused on Moon. “I’m good. Just out of shape or worn down, you can pick,” Allman replied. “Tag is coming up. Any sign of Yorgey?”

  Moon shook his head. “I noticed it too late, but as I jumped, all I saw was Will being towed by the plane.”

  “Yorgey was a towed jumper? Son of a bitch, and he was all gimped up about jumping anyways. That’s creepy as shit. Do you believe he’s all right? Any signs of him?”

  “He’s showing on my mapping system a few miles away, so I’m taking a guess that he either cut himself away or the load master did. In either case, he’s on the ground and hopefully trying to make his way to the target location, but his comms are down and his mapping icon is stationary.”

  Allman stared at him in utter disbelief. “I know we can’t⁠—”

  “No, we can’t go find him…at least, not yet. We have to get the sample to the doc as fast as we freaking can. Only after can we entertain the idea of searching for the lost director.” Moon had no sooner finished his sentence when Tag stepped up and took a knee next to him.

  “What’s with the long faces?” Tag asked as he pulled a bottle of water from his pack and drank before offering it to the others.

  A hollow wind whipped around the building they were rallied next to, and goosebumps prickled Moon’s arms. He looked out over the odd display of a collapsed society and thought how life was unfair and that after dropping off the sample and a vial of his own blood, he would take a vote to see who wanted to go find Yorgey. If anyone said no, he would call for an immediate exfil. Even though he knew what Allman and Tag would vote for, he still wanted to give them a voice in the matter.

  Moon locked eyes with Rico Tag. “Yorgey was a towed jumper, and all we know is that either he was cut away or his mapping system made it safely to the ground. Either way, his icon is pinging a few miles west of here.”

  “Well, fuck!” Tag replied. His eyes saddened, but then he looked away, as if hiding his emotions or simply getting back to work, scanning the area for threats.

  Moon added, “He’s a tough old bird, and my gut tells me he’s on the ground and will move to our location. I’ve tried to raise him on comms, to no avail. But right now, we have to move,” Moon explained and stood to lead the men where they needed to go. “We don’t have far to travel. Our pilot put us out on a dime, that’s for sure.”

  Moon stood and began to move out.

  Pushing the dense foliage aside, Moon led Allman and Tag into a patch of Maryland pines and disappeared in the middle of the day. The low-lying area was nestled behind the commercial building of the CDC and obscured the men from view as they moved toward the doctor’s house that was less than a block away.

  Up until now, and aside from the far-off gunfire, the area had been a literal ghost town, and the men found it odd that they hadn’t even seen evidence of people still living.

  Moon thought about his next move and checked his mapping system. They were close, just a few houses away, really, no more than a minute or two to travel. He looked around and listened intently. “Not as much as a bird,” Moon whispered to himself. No animals of any type to be heard, just silence. He found it odd, like the nasty calm before a storm. His gut told him to run, to get his men and make a hasty movement straight for the house. But his experience stopped him. He knew they had to move, but move smartly through the woods, until they reached their target house.

  Then he heard brush beginning to rustle behind them—and instantly he knew it was too heavy to be an animal.

  The three men were on a knee, circled up and all facing outward, when the first Carrier broke through the underbrush and noticed them. It was an older man, maybe in his late sixties, malnourished and half naked, with black ivy veins running along the man’s skeletal arms and black, insidious eyes. The man’s face looked like a cheese grater as dark blood oozed from his mouth.

  Moon was in the middle of a thought as instinctively he raised his M4 and fired. In the past, he had run a suppressed rifle, and what a treat it had been. But now, it was loud and proud as the bullets fired, striking the old man in his neck and forehead.

  Moon could see more trees bending behind the man as additional Carriers fought their way to them. In that moment, Moon knew he should have listened to his gut, and now it was time to run. He lifted his rifle and dumped the rest of his magazine of 5.56 rounds into the trees and thick brush that were moving as if a herd of elephants were coming. Then he yelled, “On me!” and turned to run deeper into the trees.

  Both Allman and Tag fired their AR10s into the same movement rustling the brush, resulting in screams and shrieks that were more animalistic than human. Then they ran.

  Jetting out onto the road, Moon glanced his mapping system as he could hear a massive horde of infected people trampling through the tree line that he and his men had just maneuvered through. The target location was just four houses up on their left, but he couldn’t just lure them all to the home, or could he?

  His mind quickly thought back to a story his dad had told him about the Vietcong stringing up claymore mines in the trees and that it nearly cut his entire platoon apart in ’69. Which gave him an idea of how to break contact with the Carriers.

  “Allman!” he yelled out as he ran. “Claymore, now!”

  Allman slung his rifle and slipped his backpack around to his front, where he pulled out a claymore bag, and kept moving forward.

  Tag saw what was happening and sprinted as hard as he could past Moon and Allman, gaining a ten-yard lead and then quickly dropping to a knee in the grass of the second house on the right side of the road, taking aim at the edge of the wood line they had just exited. Just as Moon and Allman stepped past him, he opened fire.

  With bated breath and steady hands, Allman moved quickly, stabbing the claymore into the ground as he faced the impending charge of Carriers. Then without skipping a beat, as sweat slipped from his brow, he unwound the wire, and with Moon and Tag now taking up cover behind the engine block of an F-150 in the driveway, Allman unspooled the attacked wire as he, too, took cover with his men.

  They would have one shot at Moon’s plan, and even without much communication at all, they had worked together long enough to know what was about to happen.

  Both Moon and Tag began firing as fast as they could, dropping Carriers like flies. They killed more infected people in that few moments of fire than they could accurately count. Then without warning, Josh Allman clacked off the claymore mine. The stampeding horde of Carriers that had made it to within fifteen yards of the claymore nearly evaporated in a mist of ghoulish blood, hot meat, and boney spray. When Allman ignited the explosion, the claymore had pushed hundreds of steel balls through the massed-up Carriers, and it killed every last one of them with prejudice.

  Chapter 9

  Closing In

  Will Yorgey

  Williard Avenue Neighborhood Park

  Chevy Chase, Maryland

  Yorgey was crawling through a four-foot diameter concrete culvert pipe when the ground shook with harsh purpose. He paused, almost instinctively understanding that it must have been his men in heavy contact that caused an explosion to rock the ground under him. He was still over a mile away from the target location, but the park he had just crossed into should lead him in the direction of the gunfire he had heard prior to the blast.

  In his gut, he knew he needed to hurry or be left behind, and even though his radio was gone, he still had his sat phone to call for extraction, but when? A small part of him understood that Moon would lead his men to the target location, deliver the sample, and exit as quickly as possible, which would leave him in a predicament. He wondered if he should just hide until he heard choppers flying overhead to the pick-up point.

  He took a moment to think and breathe. The water beneath him was cold as if it had rained the night before and been trapped inside the pipe away from the warmth of the morning sun. Scenarios flew through his mind as he desperately tried to come up with solid responses to any unforeseen encounters.

  He just had to keep pulling his weight through the dirty, dark water and disappear into the park. It was a solid plan and the only one he had. It was either make his way to the target location or call for immediate exfil…but then his men would be left out on their own. Moving forward was the only option in his mind.

  He pulled himself free of the concrete pipe, his body dragging along the bottom, flushing out gallons of drainage water with him. Soaked, Yorgey pulled himself to his feet as he unslung his rifle and hustled off into the woods along the creek.

  Screams filled the air as he checked his mapping system. He was a lot closer to his target than he was the last time he checked, but still in his mind, he felt he had a long way to go.

  In front of him, he moved through the trickling creek with high-banked walls concealing him. Tactically, it wasn’t the best spot, but not the worst, either. Still, he was walking almost as fast, but with more effort, as he had in the backyards leading him to that culvert. But in the creek, he felt he was hidden, and if he kept quiet, the creek would offer him safety.

  Then he heard the noises.

  The familiar, grunting sounds of Carriers nearby.

  That was when Yorgey turned the bend and noticed the bodies in the creek, as if they had been tossed out like trash. Men and women, of which he counted four, all sprawled out and naked. Most of them had been eviscerated, with their intestines protruding from their abdomens, and all of them had been partially eaten. In his mind, maybe they were the discarded trash of a Carrier feast.

  The grunting was getting closer.

  He had to think fast. Carriers were coming and he either had to fight or hide. Then one of the bodies seemed to bob like a cork on top of pond water, and it gave him an idea.

  Yorgey sloshed over to the first two bodies, a male and female that smelled of feces and bloated, spoiled death. He pushed them to the edge of the bank and then turned to grab a third. The last one, he grabbed by the female’s right arm, and it ripped completely out of socket. “For fuck’s sake…how’d this happen to me? It was that shitty parachute. I could never get lucky enough to win the lottery. Oh, but I sure as hell am lucky enough to have the faulty parachute tossed on my back, aren’t I?” he griped softly to himself with pissed-off rage. First dropping the arm, Yorgey picked up her other hand, grabbing it by the wrist, and this time, the body moved across the watery rocks and stopped alongside the other bodies. That was when he heard the trees and underbrush above him violently rustle, along with guttural screams. They were on top of him, almost literally.

  Yorgey slid himself next to the stacked bodies and then pulled a small-framed and frail female on top of him with hopes of hiding in plain sight. Her matted hair slipped over his, and he sank his weight as deep into the soft, muddy bank as he could. To his left, his M4 was nestled against his leg, and he kept his right hand on his holstered pistol, just in case.

  No more than two feet above him, small grains of dirty soil and gray sand began to slip down the bank, landing in his hair as a trio of Carriers stumbled around the ledge.

  Yorgey wondered if he had done enough to hide. Would decomposing bodies be enough to throw the Carriers off his trail? His grip tightened around his pistol as he wished he would have used more of the entrails to obscure his living scent, the same scent he felt the Carriers could, in fact, detect.

  He held his breath now, and his stomach lurched as he waited and prayed. He was just under a mile from his teammates, and all he wanted to do was get the hell out of that town. He knew jumping was a bad idea and should have listened to his own gut.

  The grunting seemed to increase, and as he internally debated if the Carriers were getting closer, two of them stumbled the two feet down the bank and fell into the creek right next to him. Water splashed up, showering over Yorgey as he didn’t move an inch, not even to breathe.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck! Have they found me? Or are the bodies attracting them? Then he realized the bodies he had found dead and bloated in the creek weren’t infected after all. They were normal people who had met a dreadful end, and the two Carriers in the rocky water with him had just figured that out. He had made a fatal mistake.

  One Carrier remained on top of the bank, and Yorgey could hear him sniffing the air as the two in the creek stepped over and, at first, leaned down, then collapsed on top of the female who covered him and began to eat.

  Yorgey knew he couldn’t stay there any longer. As soon as they ate enough of the girl, they would eventually find him. Yet he remained frozen, not from fear, but from a tactical decision to briefly make a mental note of how many threats were upon him and how to best put a bullet in their brains.

  Just as the third and final Carrier stumbled down the soft, muddy bank, landing face first on a pile of smooth rocks, his grunts bubbling up to the surface of the water, Yorgey made his move.

  Two of the Carriers were hovering over him as he drew his Glock 17. The pistol grip was wet but firm in his hand as he brought the black polymer-framed firearm to the temple of the first man. With a contact shot, he blew the brains of the first Carrier into the face of the second one. Then, before the second infected man could react, Yorgey had pushed the pistol over by about four inches and contact shot him as well, dispatching bone and bloody gore across the slick rocks as the third Carrier began pushing itself up.

  Yorgey wiggled and squirmed, trying desperately to pull himself from under the pile of bloody bodies as the creek ran red with fresh blood. The last Carrier stumbled around and screeched in confusion. Playing dead had worked for Yorgey, but now he had to find a more dominant position and kill this last man before he, too, became a statistic.

  The screaming became a godawful howl, and that was when Yorgey realized the last Carrier was a fast-moving alpha that they referred to as Howlers. His heart raced as he wheeled his pistol to the left and fired at the tall man who was not like the others. The Howler was fit and fresh. His clothing was tattered, as opposed to the other two Carriers, who were mostly naked and skeletal.

  His first round skipped off the Howler’s shoulder, and before Yorgey could get off a second round, the man had leaped the six-foot gap between them and landed on top of the pile of bodies. The impact knocked the wind from Yorgey’s lungs, and his pistol slipped from his wet hand. Even with a grip tape layered on the pistol’s grip, he lost control of it.

  “No!” Yorgey screamed and then reached for the three-inch Dalton fixed blade he kept sheathed behind his holster. In that moment of uncertainty, the Howler had pushed the first body from atop Yorgey, while Yorgey suddenly realized his knife was gone. His eyes and head turned to look for his pistol as he fought to push himself toward the blackness that was now lying beneath the water.

  The Howler reached between the remaining bodies and grabbed Yorgey’s left arm just as Yorgey’s cold right hand had located his pistol. Almost at the same time, the Howler opened its mouth as a black ooze slipped from behind its tongue and bit down on Yorgey’s left forearm, just as Yorgey was able to shoot the Howler in the head.

  But it was too late.

  The damage was already done.

  The Howler had not only sank its teeth deep into Yorgey’s muscular meat, but as the bullet punched through the infected man’s brain, his jaw locked, and the momentum of its body falling off the pile of death caused the man’s jaw to rip a massive chunk of flesh from Yorgey’s arm.

  Yorgey screamed in pain. “No! Not like this!” A thick spray of arterial blood shot from the wound like a sprinkler on a hot Florida morning. Pushing himself completely out from under the bodies, he flipped to his stomach and crawled from the muddy bank into the clear water stream, where he washed the wound.

  He was almost in a panic until he fully understood the gravity of the situation. He was dying, one way or another, and there wasn’t much he could do about it. Instinctively, he pulled a cat tourniquet from his aid pouch but froze in the gentle calm of the water as he then realized that he could indeed stop the bleeding as he had accomplished for his buddy, Chow. But that wouldn’t keep him from turning.

  The realization of his demise set in, and he was at peace. In the back of his mind, he had zero regrets. Yorgey had lived every little boy’s dream. He had traveled the world and killed evil people during most of his deployments. He had fought for liberty and justice, while protecting those who could not protect themselves.

  “No regrets,” he slurred as he continued to watch the blood flow from his arm. He could use the tourniquet but chose instead to drop it to the mud. His actions were intentional and heroic. Yorgey flipped to his back again, flopping against a bolder as he simply watched his life drain away. The water pooling around him had turned a holiday shade of red. In his last moments of life, Director Will Yorgey smiled as he stared to the blue sky above. It wasn’t long before his last breath slipped from his lips as he seemingly fell asleep, forever.

  Chapter 10

  On Target

  Mark Moon

  4704 Falstone Avenue

  Chevy Chase, Maryland

  The smoke cleared, and all that remained was a pile of contorted bodies and chunks of flesh and bone, mingled among severed extremities. Pieces of meat and flesh littered the surrounding trees like satanic Christmas ornaments. Blood and black ooze dripped from leaves like acid, and the smell of hot sulfuric intestines reigned supreme in the air like a sadistic god.

  Time had nearly came to a crawl for Mark Moon until the explosion. Now, as he moved his legs and body, he picked up his rifle and patted his back to make sure his sample was still secure inside his go bag. As Moon shifted his eyes over to Allman and Tag, time began to speed up once again.