of one walker and I could tell that he was unnerved when the monster just shook it off. Years of training condition us to fight even the most aggressive person, but none of us had trained to fight the dead, to fight things that could not be hurt, that could barely be stopped.
I started in his direction, but Top waved me off. “I got it!”
Bullets burned the air around me and I turned to see a pair of guards using an overturned table as a shooting blind. Dumbasses. The table was aluminum. I put four rounds through the thin metal, two sets of two, and both men fell back with sucking chest wounds.
A blur of movement made me turn again and a little boy of about seven wrapped his arms around my left thigh and clung to me, screaming, his face streaked with tears. A walker came loping across the floor, red teeth bared in a hungry grimace. I shot him in the chest and head and then shot a guard. The clinging child let go and I turned to see him falling to the floor. One side of his face was streaked with blood from a terrible bite. The walker had gotten him before he’d run to me for help. The child’s body twitched and thrashed, and lay still.
God Almighty.
Across the room I saw Skip and Ollie moving along the fringes of the room with a line of children between them, killing every adult they encountered.
A guard nearly clipped me with a short burst from his AK-47, but I saw the movement of the barrel and beat him to the trigger pull. Behind him I saw that there were still some children in the cage. The door was closed but unlocked and the children had fingers hooked through the chicken wire trying to hold the door closed as six walkers fought to pull it open. Only the walkers’ lack of coordination had kept the children safe this long, but inch by inch the door was opening. I tore across the room.
Gunfire made me dodge to the left and a line of bullets chased me along a lab table, shattering glass and filling the air with a spray of jagged shards. I dodged around a lab tech so that he was chopped apart by the gunfire. A guard was at the end of the table drawing a bead on Skip. There were too many children around, so I bashed down on his wrist with my gun barrel and chopped him across the throat with my left hand. He pitched back out of my way. I brought the gun up and shot three of the walkers, using two shots for each, concentrating on the ones farthest away from the children. They collapsed down and then I plowed into the remaining three undead. I used my last two bullets to kill one of them point-blank, and as his body sagged I front-kicked his corpse into the zombie next to him. The two of them crashed down and I spun to take the last creature standing, a man in jeans and a Hellboy T-shirt. I slammed into his chest with my forearms so that his weight crashed the cage door shut. He lunged his head over my arm and caught the strap of my Kevlar vest in his teeth. I tried boxing his ears with cupped palms, but that did no good, so I grabbed him by the hair and the back of the belt and rammed him headfirst into the wall. His skull collapsed on the first impact; the bones in his neck splintered on the third. I dropped him as the zombie who’d fallen under the one I’d kicked came crawling out from under, scuttling toward me on hands and knees. I axe-kicked the back of his neck and he dropped, twitching for a moment, and then lay still.
I put my back to the cage as I switched magazines. My last one. The room was still in turmoil, but now each of my men had set up defensive stations. Top and Bunny had at least ten kids behind them and they were standing shoulder to shoulder, taking careful aim to bring down walkers, techs, and guards. Across the room, Skip Tyler had six kids tucked into a niche made from a collapsed table and a line of blue cases. There were bodies heaped in front of him. Ollie was by the entrance, and as the last few guards tried to race past him to escape he coldly shot them down.
In the center of the room there were still half a dozen walkers, a few guards, and some kids. Everyone was covered with blood and I could see why none of my guys had gone to rescue those children. It was impossible to tell if they were infected or not.
I had twelve rounds left and there were still six kids out there. I had to try.
I rushed in, firing as I ran, dropping guards and walkers alike. One of the kids ran toward me and I knelt down, waving him on even as I aimed past him, but when he was ten feet away I saw that his eyes were empty and his mouth was open, teeth bared. It was the little kid who had clung to me for safety.
“God,” I whispered through a throat filled with hot ash. I shot the child.
For one moment there was a lull in the gunfire as the child pitched backward from the point of impact and slid to a stop on the floor. I could feel every set of eyes in the room on me, burning me with their stares. The children huddled behind my men cringed and cried out in renewed terror.
Then one of the other children in the center of the room snarled with unnatural hunger and rushed at Skip’s group.
The gunfire began again.
When it stopped nothing moved in the center of the room except a pall of gun smoke and white fog that was now polluted with red.
I stood on the fringes of the carnage, my pistol held out in front of me, one bullet left. The thunder I heard in my ears may have been the echo of the gunfire, or it may have been my own heart pounding out like the drums of damnation.
Slowly, filled with fear and horror at what we had all just done, I lowered my gun.
Chapter Forty-Four
Claymont, Delaware / Tuesday, June 30; 6:35 P.M.
I CALLED IT in.
There was an overturned table behind me and I leaned against it while I surveyed the room. A pall of acrid gun smoke hung like a blue veil in the humid air, and the kids kept crying. Each of my men looked stricken. Except for Ollie Brown, whose face showed nothing at all. He could give Church a run for his money. Skip looked sick; Bunny’s and Top’s faces were rigid with fury.
I wondered what expression was on my face. Maybe shock, probably fear; but if my features truly reflected what I felt then my expression would be mingled horror at what had been about to happen to these poor kids and a dead sickness for what I had just done. That I’d been forced to do it made no difference to me at all. I felt unclean.
Five minutes ago there had been dozens of people in this room. Now most of them were dead. I’d killed at least a quarter of them myself. I’d killed so many people that I’d lost count. The realization hit my brain like a fist. I’d killed before, but this was worse. Ten times worse than the task force raid. And part of the guilt I felt was a secret shame because deep inside my soul the warrior part of me was beating his chest and yelling in exultant triumph even while the more civilized parts of me cringed.
I took a step toward Top’s group but the children behind him shrieked and pulled back, terrified of me. They’d seen me gun down at least two other children. They were too young to understand about the infection. They couldn’t know I wasn’t a monster, too. Top gathered a few of them in his arms, shushing them, murmuring quiet words as Bunny stood by, awkward and helpless. I stayed where I was.
There was a noise and I looked up to see Alpha Team flooding into the room, weapons up and out. Major Courtland was in front with her pistol in her hands, Gus Dietrich was on her flank. They skidded to a stop and stared at the scene of total carnage.
“Bloody hell ” gasped Courtland, and her words could not have been more aptly chosen.
Dietrich stared openmouthed, and the agents of Alpha Team looked from the heaps of corpses to the crowds of weeping children to the bloodied members of Echo Team.
Courtland recovered first. She keyed her radio. “Alpha One to base. We need full medical teams double-quick. We have multiple civilian victims requiring immediate medical attention and evac.” She paused as she did a quick head count. “Civilians are all children. Repeat, civilians are children times seventeen. Send all available medical units.”
I pushed off from the table and walked over to her, my eyes stinging from the smoke.
She opened her mouth to say something, then caught herself, paused, and finally said, “Are you all right, Captain?”
I very nearly bit her head off. It was such a stupid and clumsy question, but I buried that reaction. What else could she say?
“I’ll live,” I said. “Tell your people there are zero infected among the children. All of the bite victims are ” I
