“Sounds like a plan.”

Cole turned to them and grinned. “And make sure you give me plenty of room to swing.”

Eric eyed the massive bar mace in the gunner’s thick hands. “I’ll be sure to do that.”

When they were in position, lined up along the horde’s right flank roughly thirty meters away, Thompson held up a hand. “Hold position and wait for my order.”

Caleb gripped his spear, hands tightening on the familiar texture of the hickory shaft. The handle was short, only three and a half feet long, tipped with a heavy ten-inch blade. The blade was triangular in shape with a narrow profile and a thick spine in the middle, making it perfect for ramming through nasal cavities and soft palates. Caleb remembered all the times his father had taken him hunting for wild pigs on horseback armed only with boar spears, and all the times they had sparred with rubber training spears. His father had always gotten the best of him until he was about fifteen and accidentally broke Caleb’s spear in a sparring match. His father kept attacking anyway, loudly reminding him that in a real fight, his opponent wouldn’t stop to let him carve a new one. To his surprise, he found he could handle the weapon much better with the shorter handle. That day marked the first time he ever beat his father in a training match.

A glint of sunlight flashed from his spear’s point, reminding him of the gleam in his father’s eye when he batted aside a thrust aimed at his chest, closed the distance, and pressed the rubber tip of his training weapon to his father’s throat.

“Good,” the old man had said, smiling. “Very good, son.”

He smiled at the memory, feeling the familiar anticipation of hand-to-hand combat building in his gut. It was a good feeling, a release of worry and doubt, a strange sort of catharsis. In battle, Caleb could forget who he was, forget all he had lost, forget the pain and regret and worry for the future, and lose himself in the red mist of the melee.

“All squads are in position,” Thompson said, pointing his rifle toward the horde. “Advance.”

TEN

Caleb’s team approached, Cole out front, the rest of the squad formed up and advancing on their right. Thompson brought up the rear, rifle in hand, the only one still armed with an M-4. As squad leader, it was Thompson’s job to hang back, direct the fight, and use his carbine to assist anyone who got in trouble. The rest of the squad—Caleb included—had to engage the enemy with hand weapons. It was not an ideal way to fight the undead, but with the Army’s resources stretched as thin as they were, conserving ammunition was critical.

He watched Cole wade into the press with his usual glee, bar mace moving in a steady figure-eight pattern, an infected skull crushed like a melon with every downswing. To Cole’s right, Eric went to work with his Y-shaped stick and long, elegant sword. The sword had no edges, just a wickedly sharp tip. Eric dispatched walkers by holding the stick under his arm like a jouster’s lance, catching a ghoul by the throat with its Y-shaped end, and stabbing it in the brain through the eye socket.

When Eric had first described his method to Caleb, he had doubted Eric’s claims of how well it worked.

Then he had seen it in action.

Eric could kill walkers twice as fast as anyone Caleb had ever met, himself included. Lieutenant Jonas had even recorded Eric’s tactics on a digital camera and sent it back to Central Command for review, recommending that the folks at AARDCOM (Army Anti-Revenant Defense Command) find a way to adapt the method for use by regular infantry.

Caleb’s thoughts were interrupted as a walker stumbled away from one of Cole’s backswings, but did not go down. He stepped forward, spear cocked back at shoulder level in a two-handed grip, and thrust forward. The needle-sharp point crunched through the ghoul’s nasal cavity and pierced its brain with such force that two inches of blade protruded from the back of its skull before Caleb yanked his weapon free.

Beside him, Holland’s twin tomahawks flashed in the sunlight as he began frenetically attacking the ghouls coming at them from the left. A second-degree black belt in tae kwon do, Holland utilized hard kicks to knock walkers to the ground, then dispatched them with precise chops to the brain stem. When his kicks failed to knock a ghoul over, he moved in and slashed at their knees and ankle tendons, then backed off to let other walkers trip over them, making for easy kills.

Caleb stayed busy, utilizing front kicks to keep walkers at distance and thrusting his arms like twin pistons, every stab claiming another ghoul. The fight raged around him, the howls of the undead mixing with battle cries and grunts of effort from his fellow soldiers. One of the men in his squad shouted for help somewhere to his right, followed by the crack of Thompson’s rifle.

A ghoul appeared in front of Caleb, mouth gaping, black tongue rolling in its putrid mouth. It moaned at him, the stench of its breath threatening to gag him through his scarf. Before he could bring his spear to bear, the corpse grabbed his shoulders and lunged at him. He caught it by the throat with one hand and pushed it away, its teeth snapping inches from his face.

Knowing his strength would not last long against the unnatural power of the ghoul, he thrust his spear into the ground next to him and drew his Beretta. After a quick glance to make sure no soldiers were in the line of fire, he pressed the barrel to its infected forehead and pulled the trigger. The pressure on his arms released immediately as the ghoul fell, but there were three more hot on its heels.

Caleb re-aimed his pistol and fired twice in rapid succession, dropping two of them. The falling ghouls tripped the third one on the way down, giving him time to holster his pistol and retrieve his spear.

“Hicks, you okay?” Thompson shouted.

“I’m good,” Caleb said through clenched teeth as he rammed the blade of his spear upward through a walker’s soft palate and then kicked it away. The fight continued a few more minutes before the press of walkers began to thin and he could see Alpha and Bravo squads fighting their way toward him. The walkers paid no heed to their impending doom, focused solely on the gnawing hunger driving them onward.

Caleb watched one of the last infected’s eyes as he killed it. The mindless, enraged half-light burning within winked out of existence. He let it slide from his blade and stood panting, eyes searching for the next target, but saw only other soldiers in gore-spattered uniforms. All four squad leaders pressed fingers to their ears at the same time, receiving instructions from Sgt. Ashman.

Sergeant Kelly, the most senior squad leader, was the first to speak up. “All right, we got the all clear from Sergeant Ashman. Squad leaders, form your men up and rally back at the trail. We need to decon ASAP and get back on the road.”

Caleb turned to his staff sergeant, along with the rest of the squad. “You heard him,” Thompson said. “Let’s go pick up our gear.”

There was no cheering. The men removed their armored gloves, checked each other for bites, and walked wearily back to where they had left their belongings. From their backpacks, they removed green aerosol cans with DECON AGENT stenciled on the labels. It was one of the Army’s many new innovations: a disinfectant spray that could kill just about anything. From what Caleb understood, it was essentially just a more caustic version of Lysol. While no one fully understood how the Reanimation Bacteriophage worked, it was well known that outside its host, the Phage was as vulnerable to disinfectants as any other pathogen.

The men sprayed each other down, taking care to scrape off dead tissue and soak any area of cloth that had come into contact with infected flesh or blood. When all squads were finished, and the squad leaders had reported in, Ashman gave the order to march.