Chapter Sixty-Six

Crisfield, Maryland / Wednesday, July 1; 3:34 A.M.

“ALPHA TEAM! ON me!”

Grace sprinted toward the hole that had been blown in the side of the building. The agents of Alpha Team followed her into what looked like an industrial shower, but the grime-streaked walls were cracked from the blast and one row of metal lockers was torn off the walls. There was no sign of life.

“Redman,” she snapped, and the explosives tech was at her side in a second. “This hallway looks like the only exit. Rig it with C4. If backup hasn’t arrived and anything comes this way that doesn’t look friendly, blow this whole side of the building down. Repeat my orders.”

He did so.

“Major!” called Allenson from a few yards up the hall. He knelt over the body of a man wearing a white lab coat and plastic cuffs. “Got a prisoner down. Neck’s broken. Blast must have smashed him against the wall.”

“Worry about it later.” She shone her flashlight down the hall. Every door along the long corridor stood ajar. “Two-by-two cover formation,” she ordered. The agents moved past her, covering each other as they pulled the doors wide and shone lights and pointed guns into each of the rooms. Four of them were empty, but they stank of human waste, sweat, and misery. In the corners there were indefinable lumps that might have been bodies. Or parts of bodies.

Forty yards up the hallway was evidence of another explosion—probably the one they’d heard from outside. The walls had been torn outward and the hall was heaped with debris. A cursory glance inside revealed the high-end mainframe sequencing computers Joe had reported. Most of them were melted or torn to pieces, but a few appeared to have withstood the blast.

“Major!” cried Allenson. “My God!”

Grace stepped out of the computer room and her heart froze in her chest. What she had taken for mounds of debris from the blast was something else entirely. The team’s unflinching flashlight beams revealed a mound of corpses. Debris and brick dust covered most of it but as Grace played her own flash over the mound she saw that there were dozens of corpses.

“Bloody hell,” Grace breathed. “This isn’t from the blast.” The floor was littered with shell casings and the air was a cordite pall.

There was one more room to check before they would have to climb over the dead to continue down the corridor. Two agents flanked the door and then one went inside.

“Major! In here.”

Grace stepped through the doorway. There were seven corpses sprawled on the floor, all of them dropped by multiple head shots. And in the corner, huddled down, shivering with shock and cold despite the terrible heat, was a man. His clothes were torn, his face streaked with blood, his eyes wild. The floor around him was littered with shell casings and he held a pistol in his trembling hands.

“Gun!” Allenson yelled and instantly the man’s chest was flickering with red laser sights.

“Don’t shoot!” he cried and quickly lowered his pistol. “Please . . . don’t shoot!”

Grace Courtland shone her light in his face.

It was Skip. Grace moved forward and took his gun away from him, passing it back to Allenson. “Chief Tyler . . . are you injured? Tyler, have you been bitten?” she snapped.

“No,” he gasped, then shook his head. He looked at the blood on his clothes. “No . . . this isn’t mine. It’s . . . it’s . . .”

“Steady on, sailor,” she soothed. “Where’s Echo Team? Where are your men?” And though she didn’t mean to say it, she asked, “Where is Captain Ledger?”

Skip shook his head. “I don’t know. Something happened . . . I blacked out and woke up here . . . and those things were everywhere!” He rubbed at his neck and Grace shone her light on it.

“Looks like a burn,” Allenson said, then speculated, “Liquid Taser?”

Grace signaled to one of her agents. “Beth, go back to the exit and apprise backup of the situation. Tell them to come find us and be bloody quick about it. We’ll proceed and try and locate Echo Team.”

Beth looked from her to the mound of the dead that blocked the hall. “My God . . . you really want to crawl over that?”

“As the saying goes, life’s a bitch.” It was a bad joke and as soon as she said it Grace was sorry she’d opened her mouth. The second part of that catchphrase was: “And then you die.” The unspoken words hung in the air like a jinx.

The climb over the corpses was horrific.

Don’t think about it, don’t think about it, she told herself as she crawled to the top of the heaped dead. Don’t think about it. She scrambled down the far side and jumped onto the concrete as soon as she could, happy to feel hard reality under her boots rather than the yielding madness of the flesh and bone over which she’d come. As her team followed her she saw that each of them were shock-faced and white, their mouths tight, eyes glistening. Some of them looked furious, some hurt. In silence they hurried down the rest of the hall, checking the last few doors but finding nothing alive.

At the T-junction she stopped. With Beth, Redman, and the shooter back at the entrance she was down to nine, with her making ten. She sent Allenson with four agents down the left corridor and she took the right.

MASTER SERGEANT MARK Allenson was thirty years old and had been Marine Force Recon for four years and a DMS agent for fourteen months. He was sharp, intelligent, and had been Major Courtland’s first choice as her second in command. She trusted his judgment and relied on the skills and abilities he’d demonstrated in seven separate DMS-related firefights. The team liked him, and Grace was aware that he was more popular with the troops than she was, which was as it should be. It was always better to have a more human number two; it allowed the commander to maintain the necessary aloofness.

Allenson ran along the corridor, his rifle following his line of sight. They reached another junction and Allenson held up his hand to stop the team. The floor was littered with strange debris. Clothes, personal belongings, toys. He measured the amount of it against the number of corpses they’d seen in the hall and the math came out fuzzy. There were a lot of bodies there, but the debris here looked like it belonged to twice that many people. Maybe three times that many.

He crept forward through rusty water to the junction and peered around. There was a steel door fixed in place by a heavy chain. A chill passed through him. He saw the chocolaty-brown smears on the walls and put it all together into a picture that didn’t fit comfortably in his head.

“Oh Christ,” he whispered as he backed away from it.

To his left an emergency light mounted on the wall suddenly flared and burst, shooting sparks out into the hall that fell onto a large heap of old newspapers and torn clothes overflowing from a trash can. The paper caught instantly and fire leaped up bright and hot. Allenson backed another step away, but a piece of burning paper fell from the can and landed on another heap of rags. Allenson caught a faint chemical whiff just as the rags ignited.

“Sarge,” called one of his men, “there’s a fire extinguisher right here.” He reached to grab the unit.

Allenson spun around, his mouth opening to shout, “No!”

But the world exploded before the word was out of his mouth. He and his team were vaporized in a heartbeat.

GRACE FELT THE blast before she heard it and even as she turned toward the sound the shock wave picked her up and flung her against the wall. She rebounded and fell to her knees. The impact knocked the breath out of her and as she fought for breath a cloud of smoke rolled over her, filling her lungs and twisting her into a paroxysm of painful coughing. Concrete dust stung her eyes. Nearby she could hear her remaining team members gagging and groaning, but the sound was strangely muted and it took her a moment before she realized that she was half-deafened by the blast.

The blast.

“Allenson . . .” she gasped. “My God . . .”

Grace felt blindly for her gun, found it half buried in debris and pulled it to her, using the stock like a crutch to get to her feet. The smoke was thinning, but only enough to see a gray and blurred world. Grace pulled the collar of her T-shirt up through the opening of her Kevlar vest and used it as a filter. Her lungs protested, wanting to cough, but Grace fought the reflexes, struggling for physical calm. When she could trust her voice, she croaked, “Alpha Team—count off!”

A few voices responded. Only a few, and as she called them together she saw that all she had left of her original team were four agents, all of them bloody and bruised. She staggered back to the T-junction, clutching to the smallest of hopes that one or two others had survived. But there was no one. The corridor walls had been obliterated and there was a huge crater in the floor. She saw some debris. Part of a gun. A hand. Not much else.

In front of her, past the smoking crater torn into the hallway where the heavy steel doors had been, there was movement. Figures, pale as the smoke in which they stood, began moving toward her. Grace raised her flashlight and shone it into the cavernous room. She could see at least a dozen corpses, their bodies torn by the blast; but beyond them, filling the room nearly wall to wall, were walkers. Hundreds of them. Some of them, the ones nearest to the door, were torn apart, missing arms and chunks of flesh; the others farther back were still whole. All of them were staring at the gaping hole in the wall. They saw the light and followed the beam to its source, and their eyes locked on Grace. A mass of shambling dead things, all with black eyes and red mouths that gaped and worked as if practicing for a grisly feast; and as one they set up a dreadful howl of unnatural need and began moving toward her.

“No . . . God, no . . .” someone breathed beside her. Jackson, her only remaining sergeant. Grace knew that to stand and fight was suicide. “Fall back!” she cried, but as she moved backward the walkers shuffled forward over the bodies of their own dead.

Then, around the bend in the corridor, she heard the distant staccato rattle of automatic weapons fire. Even half-deafened, Grace recognized the chatter of AK-47s.

“Joe . . .” she said to herself, then louder, “Joe!” She whirled and pelted down the hallway in the direction of the gunfire. Jackson, Skip, and the remaining Alphas followed. This, at least, was something they could fight; this was something they could understand.