Skye was in a dark place with a deep, tolling bell. With every
clang
came a burst of pain that made her head feel as if it would split down the middle. The migraines had returned. She wasn’t immune after all, and this was what it was like to die and turn. Pain. Her body was being shoved at, pounded. Something was probably devouring her as she changed, and when she rose she would be maimed like all the others.
Then the darkness grew lighter, charcoal to haze and then brighter still. The bell became a thudding in time with her heart, and this was a small measure of relief. Zombies didn’t have heartbeats.
There was pressure, a firm weight on her chest. Was she having a heart attack? No, she was too young, too fit. There was pressure between her legs too, and that made no sense either. The gray turned into a yellow curtain of fog, and it slowly parted at the center. She was on her back, her head a throb of agony, dizzy, feeling like she had to vomit. Her body rubbed against the steel floor, and she saw someone atop her, large, covered in paintings.
No,
her mind said,
those are tattoos.
He was pinning her with one hand in the center of her chest, grunting and thrusting himself forward. His thrusts were hurting.
She knew him, but couldn’t remember his name.
And then she did.
And realized that she was being raped.
“Don’t . . .” Skye muttered, her voice thick, eyelids fluttering as she tried to swing at him.
TC batted her feeble arm away and slapped her hard across the face, then hit her again, rocking her head back to the left. “Shut up!” he yelled. In his other hand he held her boot knife, and he pressed it against her throat. “You’re just a girl!”
The blows sent Skye sliding back toward the darkness, and she was glad to go. Maybe she could stay there. But just before she slipped away, she saw a man standing behind TC, half of his face and one side of his clothing red with blood. He was gripping the enormous crescent wrench TC had used on her.
It was Carney.
• • •
S
an Quentin had saved Bill “Carney” Carnes from TC’s wrench. The blow split his scalp, damaged his ear, and gave him a concussion, but most of it landed against his dense shoulder and back muscle, which absorbed the impact and prevented the wrench from crushing his skull. The Q’s weight equipment and pull-up bars in the yard had built that muscle.
His cellmate had aimed poorly. Carney would not.
Perhaps it was the squeak of a boot on the bloody floor, a subtle change in the air pressure, or just a predator’s natural perception for danger; whatever the reason, TC reacted a half second before the wrench landed, flinging his naked body forward over the unconscious girl. His own powerful muscles took the hit across his meaty upper back. It hurt, made him cough out a whimper as a pair of ribs snapped, but he twisted as quick as a rattler. TC crouched and then launched at his cellmate before Carney had the chance to strike again.
TC slashed the boot knife in a wide arc at Carney’s face, the blade catching the older man at the corner of his mouth and slitting it and four inches of his cheek, speckling the wall with red. Carney swung the wrench and TC leaped back, barely escaping having his ribs caved in. He feinted with the knife and drove, but Carney caught his knife hand by the wrist and locked down with a powerful grip. TC grabbed Carney’s wrench wrist and twisted, and they came together, faces transformed into primal, snarling things capable of greater savagery than any of the walking dead.
They were chest to chest when they head-butted one another at the same time. There was a thud, a spray of blood, and the men reared back, dazed like a pair of rutting rams. Neither loosened his grip.
Carney saw the fresh bites on TC’s chest and arms, but they barely registered.
TC heaved his weight into his cellmate, throwing the older man into an access panel with a hollow
bang
, and then it was Carney’s turn, pushing off and slamming TC into the opposite wall.
There were no words, no threats, only growls as they began to spin, fighting to break each other’s wrist, hammering each other into the walls as they moved down the narrow corridor, locked in a violent waltz. Then came the litter of corpses, the stairs, and they were tumbling, falling down a wet, padded carpet of the dead. They landed in a tangle at the bottom and instantly sprang to their feet. The knife was lost, the wrench was gone, but true killers are never unarmed, and their powerful hands locked on one another again, clawing for a throat, an eye.
TC jammed his palm under Carney’s chin, shoving the man’s head back, driving with the fingers of his other hand to blind, to gouge. Carney caught the wrist under his chin and bent it savagely. TC screamed and the pressure came off as he jerked his hand away. Then Carney was hammering at him, and as TC answered with blows of his own, the space was filled with their roars and rage.
They were dancing again, hands catching at throats and squeezing, whirling through a dark compartment in the ship. TC relaxed his elbows and the two men suddenly came together, TC head-butting again, his broad forehead breaking Carney’s nose. Their backs were against a pipe railing and they stumbled over the dead before pitching down more stairs. There was a grunt, a crack of bone, then only falling.
Chief Liebs was leading them, a gang of heavily armed refugees and hollow-eyed, bearded sailors, gunning down the dead. Liebs was armed with his favorite weapon, the wood-stocked, 7.62-millimeter M14, Carney’s choice as well. He was lethal with the rifle as the high-powered round not only destroyed the brain, but blew out large sections of skull. Everyone was firing, the group pressing steadily forward down passageways, clearing side hatches and intersections. Gun smoke filled the air, and anything that moved, died.
“Up,” ordered the chief as they came upon a stairwell. “Up to the hangar bay. It’s open space, and we can do more damage.”
The group hustled up the metal risers, Evan now in the lead with a Mossberg 500 combat shotgun. As he reached the top he heard gunfire to the left.
And screaming.
And children.
It sounded like a hollow recording of some wartime atrocity echoing down the steel corridor. Calvin and Liebs joined him a moment later.
“Those are our people,” said Calvin. “Where does that go?”
Chief Liebs hadn’t even finished uttering the word
fantail
before Evan was sprinting down the poorly lit passage. Calvin was after him at once, and then Stone and Mercy blew past. The chief collected the others and followed.
• • •
T
he hatch was right there, Big Jerry’s bulk disappearing inside, and Maya dodged a dead sailor coming around a jet engine resting in a maintenance cradle. She went to leap over another corpse lying in her path, saw it moving, reaching.
Michael. Her ten-year-old brother, the youngest. Her heart cried out, but then in a second she realized he wasn’t one of the undead. His left foot had become twisted in a bundle of cables and he had fallen, trapped.
“Maya!” he mouthed at her.
Maya nearly went down herself as she tried to stop, skidding on the deck, turning as the dead sailor lunged. With a silent howl she buried the ice pick in its head, jerking it free as the body crumpled. She crouched and tried to free her brother’s foot, hoping the ankle wasn’t broken, afraid that it was. She wanted to scream at him, demand to know why he wasn’t with the others, wanted to cry for joy that he was still alive, cry for fear at what was coming down on the two of them. She couldn’t make a sound.
She saw Michael throw his arms over his head and duck, and she spun on her knees, the pick already swinging. A female sailor—little more than a severed upper torso—was dragging herself at Michael, mouth open and drooling fluids, about to bite. The pick sank into her ear all the way to the shaft.
Michael and Maya tugged together, trying to loosen his foot. She felt a vibration in her body that she knew to be a scream, but she did not pause, pulling hard.
The foot popped free.
The zombie that had been Margaret Chu landed on Maya’s back, snapping at her ear.
Maya rolled to the side, throwing the woman’s weight off even as the dead Asian woman locked her hands in Maya’s hair. Three more drifters galloped in from different directions, encircling her. Maya’s neck muscles strained to keep Margaret from dragging her by the hair to Margaret’s deadly teeth, and she actually screamed, the sound coming out like a ragged wheeze.
One of the charging corpses was blown off its feet, and another’s head disintegrated from the jaw up. Another caught a load of buckshot that turned its face into a red sponge, and as it fell, Michael was loose and on his knees with Maya’s pick, swinging, spiking Margaret Chu through the top of the head. Gray fingers went limp in Maya’s hair as she tore herself free.
Big Jerry was braced against the wall beside the hatch, jacking another shell into the breech of his shotgun, bellowing something Maya couldn’t hear but understood. She grabbed Michael and the pick and they fled for the hatch. Jerry was firing, turning, firing, his normally round, friendly face a visage of rage, eyes narrowed as he cut down the dead. Shapes came in from all sides, too many, and then the two of them were inside, bouncing off a wall and careening into a cluster of terrified people.
They were in a small room that was storage for parts and tools.
No exits.
Jerry stumbled over the knee knocker, dropped his shotgun, and grabbed the hatch handle, throwing his weight behind it as he hauled it closed.
Dead hands caught the edges, a dozen or more, and tore the hatch from his grip.
Within the echoing passages, it didn’t take Rosa long to realize she would never find Father Xavier. He had run off in pursuit of a madman, unarmed and wounded, chasing a killer into a maze. There were too many corridors, too many stairs and hatches. He could be anywhere. There were only two of them now and remaining below would be suicide. The end result would likely be the same wherever they went, so Rosa Escobedo vowed to see the sun one last time before she died.
The medic moved down a hallway with unsteady lights, the M4 to her shoulder and her eye at the sight. She thought about all of the wounded and dying Marines she had treated in the desert who had hunted insurgents the same way. A shape in a hatch caught her eye and she squeezed the trigger a second before she realized it could be her friend the priest. It wasn’t. It had been a rotting petty officer whose brains were now sliding down a steel wall.
She needed a stairway. Finally she found a short one, only four steps to a small landing and a hatch. She and Tommy pulled it open together, sunlight and sea air pouring through, both of them gasping. There was an outside catwalk beyond, and as they exited they saw an overhang that could only be the flight deck over their heads. Another metal stairway led up to it.
Rosa and Tommy emerged from below and stood on the rubberized decking, clothes snapping against them as a sharp wind rushed across the flight deck. She looked around and saw that the aircraft carrier’s superstructure, a steel high-rise bristling with antennae, was on the opposite side of the deck. There were corpses everywhere, all of them down.
There was movement at the superstructure’s hatch, two figures locked together, stumbling out onto the deck. They separated; the bigger one’s arm moved in a quick arc and the other fell.
TC and Carney.
And then Rosa’s attention was snapped away by a metallic screaming and a black shape rushing at the ship from out of the sky.
• • •
V
ladimir fought against physics, against engineering and mathematics and gravity. He gripped the cyclic and collective so hard he thought they might shatter in his hands, as the fuel-starved turbines sucked the last JP-5 from the lines. The pitch of the two engines howled higher and higher toward seizing. Screaming buzzers filled the cockpit with an unholy noise as Vlad willed the chopper to hang in the air for just a few seconds more.
The Russian saw the wall of the carrier rushing at him on a tilted angle. They would impact right at the cockpit. The Black Hawk would crumple against an immovable, metal mass, folding the cockpit and its occupants in an envelope of torn steel. There would be no explosion—there wasn’t enough fuel left to start a campfire—but they would both be dead just the same.
“Ben,” Vladimir said, and in that final instant the child looked up and smiled.
• • •
T
he two men lost their grips and fell apart, panting like two enraged animals hunting one another in a gray light, circling. They hunched low, grappling, arms swinging and teeth bared. There was no punching, for this was no fistfight. It was a battle of grips, and he who seized the other first would live.
It was TC who struck first.
Carney lunged, but he was still dizzy from being hit by the wrench, and he misjudged the distance. TC twisted and locked an arm around Carney’s head, cranking down with his bicep, forcing Carney to bend with his face to the floor. Hands batted weakly at the muscled arm. TC laughed through bloody teeth, one eye purple and swollen, his forehead split and trickling red into his good eye. He hauled Carney toward the open hatch, and the older man was helpless, choking and deprived of air, unable to keep himself from being dragged along.
They had been here before. There were the racks of vests and helmets, rows of clipboards, and the black nylon tool belt. TC snatched a screwdriver out of the pouch and dragged Carney through the hatch, out onto the flight deck.
As they went over the knee knocker, Carney raised a boot and smashed it against the side of TC’s knee. The bigger man let out a cry and sagged away, releasing enough pressure for the older man to pull his head free. A moment later they were locked in another dance, hands gripping wrists, throwing their weight, spinning across the flight deck.
Carney snorted blood and mucus from his shattered nose and hawked it into TC’s face. The younger inmate roared and fell back a foot, but in that brief instant of separation he slashed and plunged with the screwdriver. The flat blade caught Carney across the belly, lodging against meat and slipping from TC’s hand. Carney staggered and fell onto his back, smacking his head on the deck.
Something was screaming in the sunshine, a high, metallic cry accompanied by a thundering heartbeat, a
THUMP-THUMP-THUMP
that filled the air. Carney’s world was spinning, his head ready to detach and float away.
TC dropped onto him, his face red and contorted by a savage lust. The younger inmate ripped the tool out of Carney’s gut. “End of the world, motherfucker!” TC screamed, raising the screwdriver over his head with both hands.