Our mission is twofold: Destroy or capture all enemy ordnance and terminate all infested personnel.
Terminate with extreme prejudice.
Ringer’s on the point; she has the best eyes. We follow her past the stern-faced statue onto the bridge; Flint, Dumbo, Oompa, Poundcake, and Teacup, with me covering our rear. Weaving through the stalled cars that seem to pop through a white curtain, covered in three seasons’ worth of debris. Some have had their windows smashed, decorated with graffiti, looted for any valuables, but what’s valuable anymore? Teacup scurrying along in front of me on baby feet—she’s valuable. There’s my big takeaway from the Arrival. By killing us, they showed us the idiocy of stuff. The guy who owned this BMW? He’s in the same place as the woman who owned that Kia.
We pull up just shy of Patterson Boulevard, at the southern end of the bridge. Hunker down beside the smashed front bumper of an SUV and survey the road ahead. The snow cuts down our visibility to about half a block. This might take a while. I look at my watch. Four hours till pickup back at the park.
A tanker truck has stalled out in the middle of the intersection twenty yards away, blocking our view of the left-hand side of the street. I can’t see it, but I know from the mission briefing there’s a four-story building on that side, a prime sentry point if they wanted to keep an eye on the bridge. I motion for Ringer to keep to the right as we leave the bridge, putting the truck between us and the building.
She pulls up sharply at the truck’s front bumper and drops to the ground. The squad follows her lead, and I belly-scoot forward to join her.
“What do you see?” I whisper.
“Three of them, two o’clock.”
I squint through my eyepiece toward the building on the other side of the street. Through the cottony fuzz of the snow, I see three green blobs of light bobbing along the sidewalk, growing larger as they approach the intersection. My first thought is, Holy crap, these lenses actually work. My second thought: Holy crap, Teds, and they’re coming straight at us.
“Patrol?” I ask Ringer.
She shrugs. “Probably marked the chopper and they’re coming to check it out.” She’s lying on her belly, holding them in her sights, waiting for the order to fire. The green blobs grow larger; they’ve reached the opposite corner. I can barely make out their bodies beneath the green beacons on top of their shoulders. It’s a weird, jarring effect, as if their heads are engulfed in a spinning, iridescent green fire.
Not yet. If they start to cross, give the order.
Beside me, Ringer takes a deep breath, holds it, waits for my order patiently, like she could wait for a thousand years. Snow settles on her shoulders, clings to her dark hair. The tip of her nose is bright red. The moment drags out. What if there’s more than three? If we announce our presence, it could bring a hundred of them down on us from a dozen different hiding places. Engage or wait? I chew on my bottom lip, working through the options.
“I’ve got them,” she says, misreading my hesitation.
Across the street, the green blobs of light are stationary, clustered together as if locked in conversation. I can’t tell if they’re even facing this way, but I’m sure they don’t know we’re here. If they did, they’d rush us, open fire, take cover, do something. We have the element of surprise. And we have Ringer. Even if she misses with the first shot, the follow-ups won’t. It’s an easy call, really.
So what’s stopping me from making it?
Ringer must be wondering the same thing, because she glances over at me and whispers, “Zombie? What’s the call?”
There’s my orders: Terminate all infested personnel. There’s my gut instinct: Don’t rush. Don’t force the issue. Let it play out. And there’s me, squeezed in the middle.
A heartbeat before our ears register the high-powered rifle’s report, the pavement two feet in front of us disintegrates in a spray of dirty snow and pulverized concrete. That resolves my dilemma fast. The words fly out as if snatched from my lungs by the icy wind: “Take them.”
Ringer’s bullet smashes into one of the bobbing green lights, and the light winks out. One light takes off to our right. Ringer swings the barrel toward my face. I duck as she fires again, and the second light winks out. The third seems to shrink as he tears up the street, heading back the way he came.
I jump to my feet. Can’t let him get away to sound the alarm. Ringer grabs my wrist and yanks hard to bring me back down.
“Damn it, Ringer, what are you do—”
“It’s a trap.” She points at the six-inch scar in the concrete. “Didn’t you hear it? It didn’t come from them. It came from over there.” She jerks her head toward the building on the opposite side of the street. “From our left. And judging by the angle, from high up, maybe the roof.”
I shake my head. A fourth infested on the roof? How did he know we were here—and why didn’t he warn the others? We’re hidden behind the truck, which means he must have spotted us on the bridge—spotted us and held his fire until we were blocked from view and there was no way he could hit us. It didn’t make sense.
And Ringer goes, like she’s read my mind, “I guess this is what they meant by ‘the fog of war.’”
I nod. Things are getting way too complicated way too fast.
“How’d he see us cross?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “Night vision, has to be.”
“Then we’re screwed.” Pinned down. Beside several thousands of gallons of gasoline. “He’ll take out the truck.”
Ringer shrugs. “Not with a bullet, he won’t. That only works in the movies, Zombie.” She looks at me. Waiting for my call.
Along with the rest of the squad. I glance behind me. Their eyes look back at me, big and bug-eyed in the snowy dark. Teacup is either freezing to death or shaking with complete terror. Flint is scowling, and the only one to speak up and let me know what the rest are thinking: “Trapped. We abort now, right?”
Tempting, but suicidal. If the sniper on the roof doesn’t take us down on the retreat, the reinforcements that must be coming will.
Retreating is not an option. Advancing is not an option. Staying put is not an option. There are no options.
Run = die. Stay = die.
“Speaking of night vision,” Ringer growls, “they might have thought of that before dropping us on a night mission. We’re totally blind out here.”
I stare at her. Totally blind. Bless you, Ringer. I order the squad to close ranks around me and whisper, “Next block, right-hand side, attached to the back side of the office building, there’s a parking garage.” Or at least there should be, according to the map. “Get up to the third floor. Buddy system: Flint with Ringer, Poundcake with Oompa, Dumbo with Teacup.”
“What about you?” Ringer asks. “Where’s your buddy?”
“I don’t need a buddy,” I answer. “I’m a freaking zombie.”
Here comes the smile. Wait for it.
57
I POINT OUT the embankment leading down to the water’s edge. “All the way down to that walking trail,” I say to Ringer. “And don’t wait for me.” She shakes her head, frowning. I lean in, keeping my expression as serious as I can. “I thought I had you with the zombie remark. One of these days, I’m going to get a smile out of you, Private.”
Very much not smiling. “I don’t think so, sir.”
“You have something against smiling?”
“It was the first thing to go.” Then the snow and the dark swallow her. The rest of the squad follows. I can hear Teacup whimpering beneath her breath as Dumbo leads her off, going, “Run hard when it goes, Cup, okay?”
I squat beside the truck’s fuel tank and grab hold of the metal cap, praying one of those counterintuitive prayers that this bad boy is topped off—or better, half-full, since fumes will give us the biggest bang for the buck. I don’t dare ignite the cargo, but the few gallons of diesel contained beneath it should set it off. I hope.
The cap is frozen. I beat on it with the butt of my rifle, wrap both hands around it, and give it everything I’ve got. It pops loose with a very pungent, very satisfying hiss. I’ll have ten seconds. Should I count? Naw, screw it. I pull the pin on the grenade, drop it in the hole, and take off down the hill. The snow whips fitfully in my wake. My toe catches on something and I tumble the rest of the way, landing on my back at the bottom, hitting my head on the asphalt of the paved walking trail. I see snow spinning around my head and I can smell the river, and then I hear a soft wuh-wuumph and the tanker jumps about two feet into the air, followed by a gorgeous blossoming fireball that reflects off the falling snow, a mini universe of tiny suns shimmering, and now I’m up and chugging up the hill, my team nowhere in sight, and I can feel the heat against my left cheek as I come even with the truck, which is still in one piece, the tank intact. Dropping the grenade inside the fuel tank didn’t ignite the cargo. Do I throw another? Do I keep running? Blinded by the explosion, the sniper would rip off his night vision goggles. He won’t be blind for long.
I’m through the intersection and onto the curb when the gasoline ignites. The blast throws me forward, over the body of the first Ted dropped by Ringer, right into the glass doors of the office building. I hear something crack and hope it’s the doors and not some important part of me. Huge jagged shards of metal rain down, pieces of the tank torn apart by the blast hurled a hundred yards in every direction at bullet speeds. I hear someone screaming as I fold my arms over my head and curl myself into the tiniest ball possible. The heat is incredible. It’s like I’ve been swallowed by the sun.
The glass behind me shatters—from a high-caliber bullet, not the explosion. Half a block from the garage—go, Zombie. And I’m going hard until I come across Oompa crumpled on the sidewalk, Poundcake kneeling beside him, tugging on his shoulder, his face twisted in a soundless cry. It was Oompa I heard screaming after the tanker blew, and it takes me only a half second to see why: A piece of metal the size of a Frisbee juts out of his lower back.
I push Poundcake toward the garage—“Go!”—and heave Oompa’s round little body over my shoulder. I hear the report of the rifle this time, two beats after the shooter across the street fires, and a chunk of concrete breaks free of the wall behind me.
The first level of the garage is separated from the sidewalk by a waist-high concrete wall. I ease Oompa over the wall, then hop over and duck down. Ka-thunk: A fist-size chunk of the wall blows back toward me. Kneeling beside Oompa, I look up to see Poundcake hoofing it toward the stairwell. Now, as long as there isn’t another sniper’s nest in this building, and as long as the infested who got away hasn’t taken refuge here, too…
A quick check of Oompa’s injury isn’t encouraging. The sooner I can get him upstairs to Dumbo, the better.
“Private Oompa,” I breathe in his ear. “You do not have permission to die, understood?”
He nods, sucking in the freezing air, blowing it out again, warm from the center of his body. But he’s as white as the snow billowing in the golden light. I throw him back onto my shoulder and trot to the stairs, keeping as low as I can without losing my balance.