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Dead.
All dead.
Sam had seen the Browning in action, had fired one himself. He could easily—too easily—visualize the moment of slaughter as the living dead shambled into the storm of lead.
But what puzzled Sam was how the soldiers lost this fight.
The Stryker was abandoned here in the rain, the gun silent.
How many of the dead had the Guardsmen faced? Had it been overwhelming odds? Had they run out of ammunition? Or had they been caught in one of those terrifying moments when a gun jams or reloading takes one second too long?
He would probably never know, but looking at the scene sent a chill up Sam’s spine. It felt like the icy breath exhaled against trembling flesh during a moment of precognition. Or, perhaps it was an icy touch not of revelation but of realization as he saw, here on this battleground street, what was coming. Soldiers were more than a match for the dead in any kind of fair fight. Even five to one, ten to one.
But there were at very least seven thousand infected in Stebbins, and possibly many more.
When a crowd attacks, the front ranks take the bullets so the ranks behind them can advance. Given sufficient numbers the defenders simply run out of time or ammunition or both, and the wave passes over them. It was something used on battlefields ever since armies went to war. The foot soldiers of Alexander and Napoleon knew it, the riders of Genghis Khan and Santa Ana, and the marching lines of the Romans and the Confederate boys in butternut brown. Cannon fodder. A forlorn hope.
Only here it was no more planned or orchestrated than the thousands of worker ants that die when the entire nest goes to war, or the millions that fall when locusts swarm. In the end, all that matters is that the main host survives. The hive.
This was what Sam was seeing, he was positive. This was the real terror of this infection. The parasitic impulse to procreate through infection and to sustain itself through feeding was matched with a ferocious aggression that had no parallel in nature because it was not natural. Volker had made this, building it on the bones of Cold War bioweapons madness.
He heard the shallow breathing of the rest of his team, but realized he was holding his own breath. Sam let it out slowly.
“We are so fucked,” said Moonshiner.
No one disputed him.
They heard the crunch of glass and they all wheeled around at the same time, bringing their guns up. Across the street was a diner with a gaping hole where a big picture window should be. The entire frame, and all of the building, was covered by so many bullet holes that it looked like polka dots, except there was nothing fun or festive here. The rifle-mounted flashlights of the five soldiers painted the front of the store in pale yellow light.
A figure moved in the gloom just inside the diner.
“Inside the store,” called Sam. “United States Special Forces. I need you to step out of the building with your hands raised. If you have a weapon I need to you drop it now.”
The figure came out of the shadows and into the glare of the overlapping flashlight beams.
It was a man.
He wore only ragged boxer shorts. The rest of his clothes were gone. Much of his flesh was as well.
He raised his hands toward the five people standing near the Humvee.
It tried to moan, but there was not enough of its face left for that. No jaw, no tongue. Just a gaping red horror below the stumps of its broken upper teeth.
“I got this,” said Shortstop and he fired a single round, the report crisp in the wet air. The zombie’s head snapped back and it fell into the store. But then it seemed to hover there, not quite hitting the ground, and for a bizarre moment Sam thought that it was somehow fighting for its balance even though it was bent so far backward. Then the body shuddered and tumbled to one side as something else came into view.
Another of the infected.
This one was crawling, and its humped body was what kept the first one from hitting the floor. The dead thing’s face was smeared with red and its mouth still worked, still chewed on some piece of something that dangled from between its lips.
The creature looked at them and bared its teeth.
Sam heard Boxer gag.
Not because of the horrible thing on the floor or what it was clearly eating.
He gagged because the zombie was dressed in the woodland camouflage of the Pennsylvania National Guard.
It was a soldier.
