1.

Higgins hears the deer approaching. A buck – five-pointer at least. He spent enough time canvassing the Allegheny’s to know the difference between the dainty sound of a doe and the lumbering sound a buck. But he can’t do anything about it, except hope the deer continues on into the shallow woods.

Higgins clears his throat to whisper into the headset, but Whitney’s voice crackles through his ear-piece before he has the chance.

We see him, Whitney says.

The other ten voices positioned along the tree line also confirm visual. They’re taking their attention off their main focus of operation – the nine story office building, the swarm of Z’s at the front entrance, and the supposed mark holed-up on floor seven – to watch a stocky buck poke around Higgins’s cover.

The deer begins to study the odd lump protruding from the dirt and grass. Higgins’s closes his eyes and tries to will the deer on, down the hill, into the woods, back across the clearing, anywhere but here.

But it doesn’t go anywhere.

The deer prods the lump instead, no doubt catching a mixture of his scent, and the Z’s down the hill.

Whitney radios again – Steady, Higgins. Don’t spook it.

Higgins grits his teeth. The deer lowers its head into a tangle of leaves and crab grass, sniffs something, and then sneezes, kicking the camouflage tarpaulin. The ruffling sound startles the deer, and it jumps back, hind hoof coming to rest on the small of Higgins’s back, the freezes. The pressure is horrifying – it feels like his guts are being squeezed through his eyeballs. Higgins’s bladder unfastens. Warmth releases. A trickle, than a wash, flooding his pants and soaking the dirt underneath him. But he knows he still can’t move. He’ll have to sit there soaked in piss until the thing smother him or takes off. But lurking is the thought – my lungs are probably next. So he sucks in as much air as he can and holds it, worried less about suffocation and more about the deer picking up his scent, have it panic even more, and cause a big enough stir to get their attention.

Blue and purple dots swirl behind the lids of Higgins’ tightly shut eyes. Fast, in waves, dancing in and out of focus like a kaleidoscope. That reserved breath is quickly building into a bubble, ready to burst.

Another second, Whitney says. Hang in there one more second…

Control fades. Tingling crawls over his fingers and toes. A hum begins inside Higgins’s ear and buzzes on and off like a table saw. He can feel his soul escaping from his throat. So sorry for the bodies, oh Lord – I killed them for the greater good of mankind…

And just as absolute serenity begins to inundate his brain, his thoughts, and choke his panic, a rolling moan tears up the embankment to where the fire teams are positioned. The deer skitters back, releasing Higgins, and tears off toward the far tree line on the opposite side of the clearing, never thinking twice about its former object of curiosity.

Rapture.

Higgins rolls over and gasps like an old man fumbling for his oxygen, no longer caring if the zombies can hear him. When he’s able to catch his breath, Higgins begins to laugh. He can’t help it. Both Speaker and Moses radio for him to, shut the fuck up, but by then Higgins is hysterical.

He’s spent over two years as a mercenary with EZE squad, fulfilling contracts for the U.S. Government, extracting VIPs from their rapidly weakening strongholds or sometimes eliminating them. He’s spent almost two years having faced thousands upon thousands of Z’s. He’s seen the inception of a plague, the taboo of human sacrifice and mutilations and cannibalism, the brink of a nationwide genocide, but the first time he pisses his pants is because of a fucking white tail deer.

Karma, he says to himself. For all those suckers I had mounted on the wall of my den, this is payback.

Whitney calls back over the radio, Get back on your rifle, Higgins.

Higgins takes a few deep breaths, somewhat composes himself, and then returns focus to the M110 scope, relocating the pack of Z’s below. His site moves past the crispy car shells dotting the parking lot, past the cement plaza, and locks on the entrance of the barricaded office building.

They’re still there.

Forty of them. Maybe more. Pressed up against the office walls and high windows, rotting hands banging and clawing. The collective moan swells again, tracing an invisible line up Higgins’s freshly bruised spine. The humor vanishes. He’ll never get over seeing them like this, in pack mentality, trying every which way to hunt down fresh flesh and devour it.

He’s seen it a million times.

But there’s something off about this particular scene. A pack of Z’s this size, all bunched together in one spot, but no stragglers? And what were they doing keying on a nine-story office building, roughly three miles east of the Hudson River? This part of New York has been all but abandoned over the past eighteen months. It’s been just over three years since the Battle of Manhattan, and the last series of major evacuations of the New York Metro area finished over three months ago. All the “real” military units have been gone since June.

Whitney’s crew had pulled off one other operation in this area about nine months earlier, down in Scarsdale, a formerly ritzy suburb of Manhattan. This time, their orders were to rescue the heiress of some pharmaceutical fortune from a compound on outskirts of town. Like many other affluent people during the early stages of the war, she had locked herself inside the maid’s quarters and spent eighteen months rationing cans of olives, peas, corn, and whatever else was left behind. When they received orders from The Radio Man (the government’s resident patsy and filter), the heiress was on the brink of starvation. But Whitney’s crew ran into trouble when a group of unaffiliated mercenaries intercepted the call and tracked her down too. If Whitney had been unable to negotiate a joint credit payout, someone would have put a round in someone else’s face. Higgins remembered the look on the other crew’s faces, and remembered thinking one thing about them – killers of Z’s and man alike.

Back to the front door of the office. The Z’s are riled up. They’ve found something inside. And whatever it is, it’s alive. It’s probably their mark. And they could sit around and let the zombies do the job for them, breach the building, climb the stairwells, crush barricades, but that might take days – weeks even. And every day sat idly by was another dollar gone to another crew.

Higgins didn’t want to know what the mark they were looking for did. He just knew what his job was, and what he was being “paid” to do.

Veach’s voice crackles over his earpiece, Whenever you’re ready, Sugar.

With a quick tinker of the sight, Higgins arbitrarily picks one out of the pack. A young woman, naked from the waist down, legs the color of plums. Her right arm dangles from the socket like a broken turkey wing, the other incessantly bangs on a spider-webbed portion of the reflective glass. Higgins aligns the crosshairs with the nape of her neck, and mock squeezes. Then he rotates left, slightly jerking his finger with the two nearest flanking heads, a tall, dainty man, and a squatty teenage boy missing half his torso.

Female, no pants, front and center, Higgins whispers, and her two buddies, on the right one left.

Always going for the ladies, Speaker says, waiting for a laugh in return. But no one does. No one ever laughs at Speaker’s lame jokes.

A series of hushed callouts follows: I got fatso…I’ll take the little guy…I have the three skeletons on the left end…Walker, you hit Mini-Me…

Whitney waits for the sighting to end. On Higgins’ mark.

The kick of the rifle surprises Higgins, mainly because he rarely uses this particular gun. The echoing shot crackles down the hill and back across the field like a thunder, stirring everything in its path. Birds flutter. A cat skitters out from a bush and disappears under an upturned tow truck lying dead across Route 119. The targeted Z is decapitated before she has a chance to react. Higgins’s other two marks have just enough time to turn and face his general direction, only to have their heads blown apart like a firecracker detonated inside a pumpkin.

Eleven seconds after the first shot is fired, all forty-plus Z’s lie crumpled in the entryway. The headless corpses sit twisted and contorted into unnatural positions; black ooze coating the windows and doors and the closest rusting cars like abstract paint.

Movement? Whitney asks.

There’s a collective no, so the fire teams dig in and wait for a second wave. Z’s stumbling from the woods, staggering down the highway, flooding from a nearby sub-division. It always happens. You think you’re done, you think the area is safe, and then BAM, out comes some starved fuckers with no eyes and no jaws but a sense of smell that could put the Cheverny Hounds to shame.

But still, nothing.

The moaning is gone. No more banging or wailing or tinkling glass. The shallow valley is quiet. All that’s left to fill the void is cackling from the crows, the wind, and the last of the summer cicadas.

Ok boys, we’re breaking for the day, Whitney says. We’re losing the sun, and I don’t want anyone going in there without natural light. So go ahead and set up camp. We’ll finish this up in the AM.

Higgins wipes a hand over his brow and stands up, waiting for catcalls from the guys about the dark stain on his baggy fatigues. But he doesn’t care, really. He’s happy to be alive. Happy the deer got spooked by Z, and happy the Z’s were so easy to retire.

Speaker walks over to him and pats him on the shoulder. “Gotta get you some diapers next time, my man,” he says with a laugh.

Higgins feigns a smile. He’s over the embarrassment, but still unable to shake what’s bothering him. He just can’t place it.

Fifty yards north of Higgins, Captain Whitney watches as the Veach, Walker, and Moses remove themselves from their cover and go and retrieve the vehicles from over the ridge. The other men strip off their extra gear, check their ammunition, and wait.

The trucks rumble across the clearing – one stripped Humvee, one Jeep, and one Econoline painted olive drab, the letters EZE painted in red on the side, and the roof custom-fitted with a makeshift perch and a .50 caliber machine gun. The men call it the “A-Team” van, and Whitney gets a chuckle out of it every time.

Everything should be copasetic – the men begin unloading tents and cots and food, Walker is canvassing the shallow woods for kindling – but Whitney can’t shake this uneasy feeling, a feeling he unknowingly shares with Higgins. Something about the place and the appearance of the zombies isn’t sitting right. It may be anxiety. But it may be intuition causing that anxiety. Either way, he strokes the stringy beard covering his chin until he notices Hobbs standing next to him, clearing his throat loudly, trying for Whitney’s attention.

“Sorry,” Whitney says, sheepishly. “Thinking about next steps.”

Hobbs nods. “The Radio Man is calling,” Hobbs says. “Asking me how far along we are.”

Whitney nods. “Tell him everything is progressing nicely. Should have the subject free and clear by tomorrow morning, 0800.”

Hobbs nods and turns to leave, but Whitney stops him. “Oh, and tell him no more of these suburban operations, or I’m taking up the stakes and heading West.”

Hobbs tells him okay, and trots off.

Whitney returns to his beard, and watches Hobbs jog across camp. They’ve known each other a long time, twelve years or so, came up through boot camp together, were stationed at Camp Lejeune for years. But lately, he’s sense detachment from Hobbs – the man seems to be losing his focus, his rigidness. He wonders if Hobbs has lost the cold blood that used to pump through his veins.

Killing can wear on a man, Whitney should know.

Whitney starts to call for Hobbs, but realizes his throat is parched, rough as sandpaper. As he reaches down to grab his canteen, he catches Higgins’s gaze. It’s troubling. But Higgins looks away quickly, embarrassed, and returns to setting up wire along the perimeter.

Whitney imagines the concerned look on Higgins’s face could be the mirror image of his own.

*

Ten of the twelve men sit around the low fire smoking, playing cards, or lying in the cool grass watching the last of the sun leave streaks along the horizon. Two are on watch, patrolling the perimeter and keeping an eye on the flickering candles inside the office building. There’s some low chatter on the CB from The Radio Man, but largely, the evening is peaceful. Soothing almost.

Captain Whitney sits in the driver’s seat of the Jeep, peeling off his shirt and utility harness, letting the cool breeze wash over his sticky skin. He chews a mangled cigar and watches the other men absently, his hesitation from earlier still lingering. He’s only thirty-four years old, but his face looks a decade older. Crow’s feet slither from the corner of his eyes, frown marks grove their way into his face, from his nose to the edge of his beard, and scars cover the majority of his neck, shoulders and torso. He’s been on contract for over three years, heading up EZE Squad for the majority of that time, saving countless VIPs, eliminating others, and breaking tough men who bucked former leaders. But the questions he asked himself earlier about Hobbs, he now associated with himself, because after all, time was taking its toll. He felt tired constantly, on the brink of exhaustion even. Since paper money was now as coveted as old newspaper, he’d been working for a third party via Washington (or were we calling it Honolulu now?) mostly for nothing more than IOU’s, and grandeur promises of a bright, postwar future. Every kill/extraction equaled another bip point, another boost in his post war docket. And even though he knew his wife was being treated like gold for what he was doing, and he knew these people he was “handling” really did need “handling,” still, something felt hollow. Although Whitney preferred the term, Soldier of Fortune, it didn’t change what Whitney and EZE did to ensure theirs, and their family’s comfortable future.

“Cap,” a voice calls, cutting Whitney’s chain of thought. “Mind if I sit?”

Whitney turns around and sees Higgins standing beside the Jeep. In one hand, Higgins holds a bottle of chrome polish, in the other his Desert Eagle. Whitney nods his head and Higgins drops into the passenger’s seat. He begins to polish the siding with the tender rub of someone washing a baby. The two men spend a few moments sitting quietly, staring out over the valley, watching the office building, the littered parking lot, and the road running alongside it.

“How’s your back?” Whitney asks.

Higgins stares blankly at Whitney for a second, as if missing the point of the question, but then he shifts and winces. “Oh yeah, my back. I guess it’s all right. That was a big goddamn deer, huh?”

Whitney smiles and nods, then spits some soggy paper onto the grass.

He likes Higgins, because Higgins isn’t like most of the others. His eyes still have some life behind them, they still dance from time to time. He hasn’t acquired that dead, blank thousand yard stare – the shark’s eye – that the others have. And his attitude is still mostly intact, which was important when an operation hits some turmoil. Higgins keeps his wits when others go off the reservation and start pumping bullets into anything with – or without – a pulse. While the other men are busy reenacting glory scenes from old war flicks to satisfy the gap growing in their conscious between sane and something else, Higgins makes plotted moves to correct whatever it is that’s going wrong.

“Can I ask you something, Cap?” Higgins asks, leaning over the console so he can keep his voice down. “Who are we after this time?”

Whitney turns to Higgins and furrows his brow. “Doesn’t matter. Just like the rest of the time.” He replies.

But this does nothing to stop Higgins. “It does. To me, at least. I feel something off. Something ain’t right about all this. That deer gave me a bad feeling.”

“It was just a deer, Pete. Don’t lose sleep over it.”

Higgins sucks on his teeth and gingerly lights a cigarette, cuffing the tip and shielding his eyes from the smoke. “Well, we’ve seen some shit, right?”

Whitney nods. “That’s one way to put it.”

“So we’ve seen some serious shit in our time together, but we ain’t never seen a few dozen Z’s standing in the middle of nowhere, attacking some random door on a whim. So we’re supposed to get this VIP, this writer, or official, or gangster, or whoever, right?

Whitney cuts in. “It’s a scientist.”

This stops Higgins. “A scientist?” It’s rhetorical, but Whitney repeats himself anyway.

“Now why in God’s name would they want us to pop-off a scientist?” Higgins replies.

“This is why I keep the occupations of our targets mostly between Hobbs and myself, because sometimes finding out more about a mark allows a moral conflict to arise.”

Higgins digests this and then nods, as if settling on something. “You’re right. It doesn’t matter. But let’s say he’s here and he’s up there on what, the seventh floor? Now, I know Z’s can track a scent like a bloodhound, but there’s no way they’re smelling a group of five or six shut-ins that high up in a building like that. No goddamn way.”

Whitney lets Higgins’s theory sink in. “The Radio Man says he’s in there. He’s never failed us before.”

“Well how do we know the Radio Man didn’t decide to fail us this time?”

“It doesn’t help anymore to pass along incorrect information, now does it?” Whitney asks. “If we don’t get him, he continues to do whatever he’s doing to piss Washington off. It doesn’t make sense to send us on a wild goose chase.”

Higgins takes one last drag and flicks the butt into the darkness. It arcs through the air and explodes into a starburst of red embers against the grass. Then he leans over to Whitney and says, “Or does it?”

This troubles Whitney, because Higgins’s has a point. It doesn’t make sense for the Radio Man to lie, to pass along bad information, but then again, a lot of things don’t make sense anymore.

Higgins senses Whitney’s pondering thought. “Look, I’m not trying to cause trouble, Cap. It’s just the way I feel.”

Whitney shakes it off, it’s too abstract, too unlikely. “I appreciate the concern, Pete. Hopefully we finish this one tomorrow and the next one will have us following the warm weather south, to Atlanta or Jacksonville.”

Higgins smiles, but it’s about as authentic as nylon. He begins to say something else, but behind them, the radio crackles to life.

Hobbs gingerly removes the damp towel covering his eyes and gets up off his cot to pick up the handheld. His squatty body wades through the crowd, grimacing with each step as if working out the kinks. He picks it up and speaks in a low tone, responding to the voice on the other end monotonously.

The sound of the radio makes Whitney think back to the early days of the War. Before the collapse of local governments, before the mass pullouts and mass migrations west. Before he was plucked from the ranks and asked to do a job not many men were willing to do. Back when he would sit with Ally at their small kitchen table inside their quant house on a quiet street in Severna Park, holding hands, jaws dangling lower and lower with every piece of breaking news coming across the airwaves, unable and unwilling to grasp the severity of the events taking place.

But that was a different person, Whitney says to himself. He closes his eyes, desperately trying to see the face of the man sitting across the table from his wife. But he can’t. The face isn’t his, it’s amorphous. Ripples on a disturbed pond, a smudged glimpse of a life led by someone else.

But he can still see Ally. Perfectly. Oh, what he wouldn’t give to feel the small of her back, right where he spine met her butt, the smooth skin that felt like brushing your palm over the surface of water. Her smile, her sweet words of wisdom. And he can still see the look of horror on her face when he explained what he had to do. What he had to do for them. She never came out said what she wanted to say, but Whitney knew what she wanted to say.

But what mattered was he knew she was safe somewhere, halfway across the country, near Park City or Carson City or Salt Lake City, holed up in one of the military compounds. But Whitney also knew the dangers of the war, how things went from stable to mass chaos in the blink of an eye. How safe could anyone really be, anyway?

“Cap…Cap…Cap!” Hobbs yells. “You need to take this.”

“Tell the Radio Man to calm down,” Whitney replies. “I already told him that we’re waiting for first light.”

Hobbs still has the phone extended toward his old friend. “Cap,” he says, in such a hushed tone that it’s almost a whisper. “It’s not the Radio Man. It’s HQ, Cap.”

Whitney feels the saliva dry up in his mouth. He slowly walks over to the handheld and grabs the oversized CB. He takes a deep breath and does his best to clear all alarm from his voice. “Captain Whitney here.”

All eyes are on Whitney and his slowly nodding head. No more cards, no more books, no more guns being meticulously cleaned. All eleven men watch intensely like Doberman’s watching a dropped piece of steak.

“Yes sir. Yes sir. That makes sense, sir. Yes sir. We’ll move on it ASAP. Thank you, sir.”

Whitney hands the dead receiver back to Hobbs, who’s staring at Whitney like a man waiting to hear a punch line.

Higgins leans over the backseat of the Jeep, his eyes heavy with sleep and concern. “So?”

“We have to move now. As in, five minutes ago.”

Hobbs shakes his head. “No way, it’s too late. Look at the sky. We have about an hour of daylight left. Didn’t you explain to them that it’s too late?”

Whitney nods. “I did. But they said the urgency is no longer up to our discretion. That if we don’t move now, we don’t get anything.”

Hobbs’s face goes from conflicted to angry. He didn’t spend three days trekking and then a day-and-a-half prepping in some rotted-out fucking town trying to pop some dipshit just to be bent over a chair at the eleventh hour.

“Fuck that,” Hobbs says shaking his head wildly. “Fuck them. Why don’t we begin preliminary ops, and then start the siege in the morning?”

Whitney looks past Hobbs, past the other men, toward the building. “We can’t. They want visual confirmation by midnight. Otherwise, like I said before, nothing.”

Hobbs folds his arms and turns away. “Well, if you’re taking a poll I’m against this move. A rush job never does anyone any good. All it does is end up getting someone killed. Remember Robio? That kid could kill a Grizzly Bear with his bare hands, but the Radio Man rushed us into that goddamn burning Victorian, he got clamped and ended up dead all because we had a schedule to keep…”

“Enough,” Whitney barks, his voice now guttural and hard. “I remember Robio, and I remember that fuck-up. But this isn’t up to just me. Or you.”

“Okay. Then we vote.” Hobbs replies.

Whitney nods his head. Because technically, yes, the men are under his command, but only because they all assumed a contract. The only punishment they face if they decide to not follow through on an order is they don’t receive bips. At worst, they’re disbanded. But most of these guys would pick up with another crew, a rogue crew even, the ones Whitney tries so hard not to tangle with. When you broke out the crazy scale and compared his craziest guy with a rogue’s most sane, the gap was as wide as the Grand Canyon.

The men crowd around Hobbs and Whitney, most of them kneeling, looking up at him like football players waiting for half time pep-talk. Whitney runs through the mission change, and leaves it up to a vote tally as to whether or not they finish what they started. He promises a pass to anyone unwilling to go forward tonight, because it wasn’t part of the original itinerary. But he hopes the majority votes to get it over with. He doesn’t want to scrap all the effort he’s already invested. It would be foolish to do so. And he knows Hobbs, deep down, knows this.

The vote. Eight for moving forward – three against moving forward. Only Hobbs, Youngman, and Higgins voted to abandon the objective, and request a new one. But all three agreed to advance once they were outvoted.

“We have until 1900 hours to get ready for the dance. I’ll let you know how the fire teams are going to play out as soon as I decide how were heading in. Try not to stress too much about the dim and the urgency. There’s a reason they call on this team to carry out the dirty ones.”

*

Within the hour the crew is regrouped, reloaded, reenergized, locked and loaded. Guns, gear, ammo, Kevlar, and night vision. It’s a scramble, but it’s controlled, because now everyone is anxious to get moving, get this over with, and leave the valley and all the bad omens that have come with it.

They lineup for briefing, not formal, but in a neat rows, their all-but-abandoned military habits still shining through, occasionally, especially during briefings.

Whitney begins to tick off who’s going in, and who’s hanging back, and who will be on reconnaissance.

“Walker, Speaker, Higgins – you’re team 1. Alonzo, Hollander, and Brown, you’re team 2. I want you two in first. Both teams use the lobby for entry and then team 2 will use the north fire escape at the back of the lobby. Team 1, you use the south stairwell, the one closest to the entrance.”

“Veach, Moses, and Cavaretta, you’re in reserve. If anything happens, do not hesitate to enter and relieve teams 1 or 2. Hobbs and Youngman, you two stick to the M110’s and stay up here on the hill with me. We’re going to keep an eye out on the perimeter and make sure there are no surprises.”

Whitney asks if there are questions, receives none, and tells teams 1 and 2 to be ready in fifteen minutes for departure.

*

We’re live, Walker says, sliding back the hammer. He sends Higgins out on point, waits a second, and then has Speaker cover the rear. Right behind them is Team 2, fanning out wide and stuttering their progress to make sure they don’t bunch up with the first fire team.

The six men slowly make their way down the steep hill that funnels into the parking lot, crouching, scanning the landscape for stragglers. In quick succession they move across the lot, heads on a swivel, radioing back up the hill about any sort of stirring. Team 2 hangs back behind a cavalcade of overturned SUVs, as team 1 lines up next to the main door.

Breach, Walker says. Speaker moves up to the entrance and uses a small handheld ram to batter open the barricade doors. The glass webs and then shatters, but the heavy oak desk propped against it from the inside cracks and shifts enough for Speaker to get leverage. Then the three men shoulder it out of the way.

Holy…, Walker says, entering the lobby. Looks like a damn pig slaughter.

The carnage in the lobby is worse than the mess outside. Rotting and shriveled body parts – everywhere. Black palm prints on every surface like macabre cave drawings. A pile of stacked bodies fill the empty fountain basin. At the front desk is the corpse of the security guard, face down on the desk, body at least eighteen months into the decomposition process. But his hat still rests on his head. Stuck in his bony grip is a walkie-talkie with springs and wires popping from the cracked seams like broken springs from a couch.

Then shit really gets strange.

Near the back of the lobby, lying in a neat row, are three dead men in white lab coats. The crowns of their heads face south toward the entrance. What stops Team 1 is the freshness of the blood. It’s still sticky and red, not black. And the corpses aren’t bloated. The men’s faces look serene, not twisted or bulging with gases. Lying at their sides, the men’s limbs are still limp, not yet affected at all by rigor mortis. The three dead men are the complete opposite of the dozens of other corpses littering the lobby.

Poor bastards, Speaker says.

Higgins taps Walker’s shoulder. “This doesn’t look right,” he says.

“These guys haven’t been dead more than a couple of hours.”

Walker lets the words marinate then radioes back to Whitney and explains the situation.

Check for wallets, Whitney says. And then check for a Michael Lewis Montgomery. If you find identification that has that name on it, we ID the body and we move out of here.

Speaker begins rolling the bodies and fishing for wallets. He tosses three wallets on the granite floor. Ya’ll check them for the name. I need a breather.

Higgins scans through the wallets. A Harrington, a Florence, and a Tanner. No Montgomery. That’s a negative, he says into the headset.

Walker taps his shoulder and directs him toward the stairwell near the rear of the lobby. “Let’s go.”

Higgins hesitates. He wants out. It’s a growing fear, a fear that comes from somewhere deep, because he’s starting to think if it fully materializes, he will not be able to control it. Walker senses something and says, “We’re ready for anything. You remember this.”

And so they go. But Higgins feels a piece of him stuck behind on the cold granite floor, something he’ll regret ever leaving.

The three men move slowly up the stairwell, which is surprisingly clear, aside from the errant broken piece of office furniture. Team 2 reports the same sort of blockage in the north stairwell.

Anything is better than the lobby, Hollander mumbles.

Veach, Moses, and Cavaretta radio in from the cement plaza, waiting for instructions.

There’s a pile of dead ones out here, too, Veach says. Neatly stacked against the wall of a janitors exit.

Whitney reminds both teams to announce their presence should there be contact. If you decide to pull the trigger, make sure our guys aren’t on the other side of a Z, waiting to swallow whatever bullets miss.

When Higgins, Walker, and Speaker reach the seventh floor, Higgins peaks inside to survey the hallway. The only illumination comes from the red emergency lights above the exit signs, so the hallway is lit with a crimson haze. It smells like smoke, cigarettes or tobacco. Someone’s been out in the hallway recently, Higgins says to himself.

Then something moves. Slow and staggering.

Higgins comes back into the hallway and quietly shuts the door.

I have a visual on a Z, north end of the hall, Higgins says, quickly strapping on his night vision for a better view of what’s out there in the darkness.

Hollander, come in, Higgins calls into his headset. This time his voice is excited. Can you confirm a visual?

Higgins opens the door slowly and sticks his head inside. He watches as the Z turns around and paces back toward the south stairwell. As it’s body shift, he sees two more zombies behind it, following suit.

Hollander, come in. There are two more Z’s approaching from the north end.

Walker says to no one specifically, This is going to shit. Going to shit quick, man. I don’t like this one bit.

Whitney’s voice cuts over the radio. Hollander, if you can’t talk then please click your radio so we know you’re receiving transmission.

Silence.

So the three other teams wait and pretend like it’s just an electronic malfunction.

Higgins returns for another look down the hall. Three more Z’s turn the corner. Behind them are another two. Suddenly, the hallway is filled with moaning. The metal railing rattles. Higgins looks at Speaker, but before he can tell him to go down to floor six and see what he can see in that hallway, Speaker is already skipping down to the next landing.

Hollander. Alonzo. Brown. Come in, over, Whitney’s voice again crackles over the radio. Higgins senses a touch of panic in Whitney’s voice, and feels fear begin to build inside his own gut.

Walker taps Higgins, covers his mic and says, “I think we need to get the fuck out of here right now. Like fucking thirty seconds ago, dude.”

Walker’s eyes are swimming. They are filled with a glaze that says more than just, abandon ship. The glaze is bordering on saying, every man for himself from here on out.

But Higgins agrees, because he’s right. Something is wrong. Something is very, very wrong. Higgins’s slings his M-4 over his shoulder, and removes the Desert Eagle from his shoulder holster, then cocks the hammer.

Walker pulls his own pistol from his ankle holster and then turns to tell Speaker the plan. But he looks down just in time to see the door to the sixth floor door burst open. But instead of Z’s swarming in tearing the three men to shreds, instead of the smell of decomposing flesh and blood, the stairwell fills with the smell of burnt gunpowder.

Speaker’s torso explodes. Six, seven, eight bullets rip into him, with so much force he tumbles over the railing, and begins a violent descent down the shaft, bouncing from one banister to the other. Into the stairwell rush three men holding compact carbines, their faces covered with gas masks, their fatigues neat and government issued. They first swing their weapons down the shaft toward Speaker’s now silent body, which is what gives Higgins and Walker enough time to escape. They both know they have a better shot against the Z’s than they do the men with masks.

As Higgins shoulders the stairwell door open, bullets rattle and ricochet off the landing they just escaped, a spectacular shower of sparks lights up the darkness.

The door bangs into a Z, and Higgins rolls to the floor taking aim at whatever else is behind him. He sees the rush coming. Ten Z’s, maybe more now. Their arms stretched as far as possible, ligaments bulging, emaciated muscles twitching, reaching for a piece of cloth, skin, a shoelace to grab hold of. But Higgins unloads three perfectly placed bullets from the Eagle, and falls three of them. They drop like sand bags onto the carpet, not only stopped, but also acting as a plug for the Z’s behind them. Walker sidesteps into the hallway and unloads with his M-4 at point-blank range, tearing the faces off four more of them. Black ooze explodes over both men, but they have no time to panic, because more Z’s turn the corner. Higgins gets to his feet and lines up three headshots, and takes them. All are executed perfectly. The two men finish off the remaining Z’s, then do their best to block the stairwell door from opening.

They tear off down the side hallway, keeping low, searching for the north stairwell, hoping Alonzo and company couldn’t respond because of the other masked gunmen.

Here, Higgins yells, and pulls the other stairwell open, rushing instead with his Eagle extended. But he halts in his tracks like he’s been hit by a bus. And everything inside him collectively sinks – his throat, his heart, his stomach. On the landing lie the riddled bodies of Brown, Alonzo, and Hollander, bent over one another in awkward fashion like the Z’s they dropped hours before. The bullet wounds smoke and blood pours over the edge of the stairs and leaking seventy feet to the bottom.

Walker turns and vomits, only to be met by a series of bullets. He falls forward onto his chest, one arm protecting the gaping wound slashed across his abdominal muscles, the other clawing at the carpet, trying to pull himself along.

Higgins pulls the stairwell door shut, and leans up against it. He closes his eyes and tries to ignore the volley of bullets that litter Walker on the other side of the door. A flashlight hits his eyes. And he’s no longer scared, only resigned to his fate. He places himself back in the mountains, away from all this, and seems to be at peace when the men aim their guns at his head and shoot him dead.

*

Up on the hill, Whitney knows it’s all over even before he feels the cold barrel of the pistol touch his temple. Only seconds earlier, through the scope of his rifle, he watched as Caveretta, Veach, and Moses were forced up against the wall by seven men in shiny boots and clean uniforms and gas masks, and then executed.

He radios to Hobbs, the wars over, good buddy. I’m sorry about this one.

Then the gun touches his head. Whitney thinks about running. He thinks about escape. But he can’t leave the sinking ship. Because this is Little Big Horn, the Alamo, his last stand.

“On the floor,” the voice says.

Another one flanks Whitney to his right.

The first man repeats himself when Whitney balks, and then pistol-whips him across the temple.

“Does it look like we’re fucking playing around, Captain Whitney?” The man yells.

But what the man with the gun doesn’t know is Hobbs is twenty yards behind them, no doubt watching the scene unfold. So when Whitney hears the air cut by the bullet, and hears the short, strangled cough of impact, and then feels the blood splatter his face and neck, he knows Hobbs isn’t planning to go down without a fight. Two bodies drop, he runs east as fast as he can, with Hobbs right behind him.

I don’t hold it against you, Hobbs says between gasps, I just want to say ‘I told you so.’

This brings a smile to his face. This is the way it should be in the end – Whitney and Hobbs, the last of the Mohicans, sprinting through the woods, parallel to the office building, which is now engulfed in flames. There are dogs barking, voices shouting, gunshots from small firearms whizzing past them, sawing off chunks of wood that explode like wooden flack. But they continue on. The hunted. Whitney wants to process everything, but can’t, his lungs are on fire and his head is pounding. Both men are shedding gear as the hurdle logs and skip over puddles. Pistols, ammunition, packs and stashed rations. And neither of them are on the lookout for Z’s. That’s all over with now.

A helicopter soars overhead, the spotlight stabbing the darkness, searching for their moving position. Both their radios crackle. They hear the nasally voice of the Radio Man. He sounds panicked, but this is fabricated panic, because they know he was the one who set them up for extinction. In just a few minutes, EZE squad will be nothing more than a legend, source material for conspiracy theorists everywhere.

They stagger up an embankment, across tall grass and back into woods, hitting a swamp. Two men pop out of the weeds dripping black muck, like the earth just came alive, and fire at Whitney and Hobbs. Whitney hears the gurgle as Hobbs’s throat tears off, and then the splash as his body tumbles into the murky water. But can’t stop. He’s numb, head to toe, like he’s already a corpse.

The gunshots fade. But the spotlight gets closer, like it can sense Whitney’s body heat, the growing rage in his gut. It’s probing around him, a step too slow…ten yards to the right…But the margin is shrinking each time it juts off and then returns. Whitney knows his ultimate fate is inevitable – his immediate, more likely – but he continues to run regardless.

In spite of his burning calves and hamstrings and lungs, he runs as fast as his body will allow him, ignoring the potential for a collision, the hazards the come along with running in the dark and through the woods. Instead of the impossibility of what’s going on, he puts his mind elsewhere. Instead of the trailing footsteps and the whomp-whoomp-whoomp of the helicopter blades above, Whitney thinks of Ally. He thinks of their quiet Saltbox Colonial and their lazy weekends on the porch with the newspaper. He begs her to forgive him for doing what he’s done. But he continues to run, because as long as he can run, there is a chance that he can ask her for forgiveness himself. As long as he’s running, he’s still the last one left.