Three hours. The measurement of time had become a raw, physical thing, counted not in minutes but in the heft of spent brass, the deepening shadows of excavation pits, and the mounting pile of still forms laid out behind the berm, covered with tarps that did nothing to hide their shapes.
In the relative, claustrophobic safety of a sealed decontamination truck, Michael finally allowed the mask to slip. The moment the heavy door hissed shut behind him, he was clawing at the seals of his hazard suit. The upper half peeled away with a sound like tearing Velcro, revealing a torso and head that looked as if they'd been dunked in a lake. His hair was plastered to his skull, sweat tracing clean rivers through the grime on his face and neck. The air inside the truck was stale and metallic, but to his burning lungs, it was ambrosia.
He grabbed a two-liter bottle of water, the plastic cool and slick in his trembling hands. He didn't drink so much as pour it into himself, gulping down great, cold swallows until his stomach ached and protested. Half the bottle was gone before he came up for air, water dripping from his chin. Then, with a ragged sigh, he upended the rest over his head.
The shock of it was breathtaking. Icy trails snaked through his hair, cascaded over his scalp, and streamed down his neck and chest. For a few precious seconds, the frantic, feverish hammering inside his skull receded, drowned out by simple, shocking cold. He stood there, dripping, shoulders slumped, the water puddling around his boots on the steel floor.
He wiped a hand across his face, scraping away water and exhaustion. Then, to the empty, echoing compartment, he whispered the words that had been circling in his mind like vultures for the last hour.
"Bloody hell. We're in the deep end now."
The solitude was a necessary deception. A leader couldn't show this—this bone-deep chill of doubt that had nothing to do with the water. The last three hours had been a lesson in sustained, grinding terror.
At the dig site, the machines had become monstrous, tireless moles. They had gouged a wound in the earth over a thousand cubic meters in size. The deepest pit now yawned over fifteen meters into the ground, a dark, vertical mouth hungry for secrets. And it had yielded nothing. No smooth, unyielding surface of reinforced concrete, no sealed hatch, not even a single twisted piece of rebar that hinted at a man-made structure beneath. Just more dirt, more rubble, and the occasional, pathetic fragment of a lost world—a child's plastic toy, shattered ceramic, bone that could have been from anything.
Meanwhile, the city had awakened. The thunder of the excavator, the diesel roar, the staccato symphony of gunfire—it was a dinner bell ringing through the silent canyons. The infected came not in trickles, but in a steady, sinister stream. They boiled from side streets, scrambled over mountains of debris, and hurled themselves with mindless fury at the perimeter. The defensive line, once a confident barrier, was now a straining, bloody dam. The "cannon fodder" volunteers, the men he had steeled himself to sacrifice, were being chewed up at an alarming rate. Over thirty casualties. Fifteen percent of their frontline force, gone in an afternoon. Each scream cut short by gunfire, each tarp-draped form added to the row, was a weight on his soul. He had told himself they were expendable, a necessary buffer. Facing the raw arithmetic of it, the justification tasted like ash.
And the worst thought, the one that slithered cold and venomous in the back of his mind: What if we're wrong?What if Dr. Paul Josef's keycard was just a tragic coincidence, dropped by a fleeing scientist miles from his workplace? To give voice to that fear would be to unleash a madness worse than the infected. It was the unthinkable, and so it remained unspoken, a silent specter haunting his every order.
He took a few more deep, steadying breaths, the air still tasting of sweat and rust. A commander's face, a leader's certainty, was the final weapon in his arsenal. He could not show the cracks. With a grimace, he pulled the damp, clammy suit back on, the material clinging unpleasantly to his skin. He pounded a fist on the heavy door.
It swung open, and a wave of noise and heat assaulted him—the snarl of engines, distant gunfire, shouted orders. A queue of a dozen grimy, exhausted men nearly fell into the truck, already fumbling with their suit zippers before the door was even shut again. They were the rotating shifts from the perimeter, each granted twenty precious minutes to shed their mobile ovens, gulp down rations, and try to remember what it was to not be afraid.
Stepping out, Michael squared his shoulders. His voice, when it crackled over the radio network, was flat, hard, stripped of doubt. "Zak! My position is secure. Your post is now the forward berm. The main approach. Nothing gets through. Nothing."
From beside a troop truck, a shape uncoiled. Zak, the Ogre Master, had long since outgrown any pretense of protective gear. His only concession to the poisoned air was a filtration mask that looked like a child's toy strapped to his fearsome face. His evolution had rendered him resistant, if not immune, to the ambient radiation. "A few days won't kill me," he'd grunted. Now, he stood revealed in all his terrible glory. A crude breastplate of hammered steel, a full inch thick, covered his torso, sculpted by his own brute strength. In his left hand, he hefted a door-sized shield, a monstrosity of layered timber and steel plate. In his right, he now carried not the old flywheel, but a section of industrial drive shaft from some colossal, forgotten machine—a solid bar of metal thicker than a man's thigh and nearly as long as he was tall.
With a ground-shaking bellow of joy that was more animal than man, Zak charged. The earth seemed to tremble with each footfall. He reached the forward berm—the "Number One" defensive line facing the sinister heart of downtown—just as a wounded infected, its skull dented by a hand-axe, scrabbled over the dirt barrier.
The creature saw the massive, heat-radiating form before it and shrieked, launching itself in a final, desperate leap. It impacted Zak's shield with a sound like a sack of wet cement hitting a wall. There was a sickening crunch of its own bones. It staggered back, dazed.
Zak didn't even brace himself. He simply swung the drive shaft in a short, contemptuous arc. The infected's head disappeared in a spray of black and grey. One moment it was a lethal predator; the next, it was a headless puppet with its strings cut, collapsing in a heap.
A ragged cheer went up from the defenders on that section of the wall. Zak's presence was more than one extra fighter; it was a force of nature, a living bulwark that boosted morale as much as it shattered attacks. He freed up two dozen men to rotate out, to breathe, to reload.
Emboldened, Michael keyed his radio again. "Sherman crew. You're mobile. Support the eastern flank. Machine gun suppression only. Do not, repeat, do not expend main gun rounds unless I give the order."
With a belch of black diesel smoke, 'Old Ironsides' clanked to life. The thirty-ton beast ground its way along the inside of the vehicle barricade, its tracks squealing in protest. The .50 caliber machine gun on its turret began to speak, a deep, rhythmic thud-thud-thudthat tore apart anything moving in the gathering twilight on that side. The pressure there immediately eased.
Finally, Michael turned his attention back to the gaping, empty pits. Hope was a dwindling resource. Perhaps they were digging in the wrong spot. "Machines!" he barked into the radio. "Stop digging straight down. Move ten meters to the west. Start a new shaft. Narrow, maybe twelve meters across. If you hit nothing, move again. We're probing, not excavating a mine."
The operators, the three luckiest men in the entire hellscape nestled in their air-conditioned cabs, obeyed instantly. The excavator's massive arm swung around, its bucket biting into a fresh patch of scarred earth.
As dusk began to stain the sky a bruised purple, an unexpected, sinister quiet descended. The machines, for once, were still, not by command but by necessity—their fuel tanks, not full to begin with, were running on fumes. Men with plastic jerry cans scurried forward to refill them, the pungent smell of diesel cutting through the other stenches.
The lull in digging was matched by a lull in the attacks. The frantic waves of infected that had characterized the afternoon had dwindled to the occasional, lone straggler. It was as if the local population had been drawn in and spent, slaughtered against the berms and the unwavering gunfire. The defenders watched the silent ruins with wary eyes, not trusting the peace.
Michael's initial relief was tempered by cold calculation. The cost had been horrific. Casualties approached forty percent. Ammunition reserves were below fifty-five percent. They had held, but they were bleeding out, slowly.
Before true darkness could cloak the ruins, he ordered the generators fired up. A string of harsh, white electric lights sputtered to life along the berm, casting long, grotesque shadows. Four powerful spotlights mounted on truck beds stabbed into the gloom, their beams sweeping across the skeletal landscape. As full night fell, the drones were launched—not the visual-positioning scout, but smaller quadcopters equipped with thermal imaging cameras. They whirred into the black sky, becoming invisible eyes, their feeds glowing on monitors in the command truck.
For an hour, the tense quiet held. The monitors showed a grainy, ghostly world of cooling rubble, with no bright, tell-tale heat signatures of approaching bodies.
Then, at a little past 2100 hours, it happened. One of the drone feeds, which had been panning slowly over a street to the north, flickered violently. The image tilted, spun, and then dissolved into a storm of static before cutting to black.
Silence filled the command truck.
"Signal lost," the operator said, his voice too calm. "Could be interference from the ruins… or…"
He didn't finish. He didn't need to.
Michael felt it then, a physical sensation that had nothing to do with the cool air circulating in his suit. It was a sudden, cold knot tightening in his gut, a primal chill that raced up his spine and made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. It was a feeling he remembered from his old life, walking down a dark alley and knowing, with absolute certainty, that he was not alone.
He stared at the dead screen, then out the viewport at the inky blackness beyond the circle of their electric lights. The relative quiet, the sudden loss of the drone… it wasn't peace.
It was the pause before the storm. The city had been testing them, probing their defenses. Now, it had their measure. And in the deep, ancient part of his brain, the part that understood predators, Michael knew with a dread that was colder than the void of space: the real attack was coming. He could smell it on the wind, a scent of ozone and rot and infinite, mindless hunger. The easy part was over.