There was no discussion of rules of engagement. We’d faced infected like these before. Not the same plague, but the same bioweapon design philosophy. There was no reasoning, no Geneva Convention, no mutual agreement of honorable warfare between us and the hungry dead. Their humanity had been stolen, stripped away from them, leaving them as mindless aggressors. They were no more human than a swarm of wasps, and far deadlier. Lucifer 113 was a serum transfer pathogen. Any bite would be a death sentence. Blood in our noses, eyes, mouths, or in an open wound would be as deadly as a bullet to our hearts. We knew all that.

And yet . . .

These were people. They weren’t dressed in battle dress uniforms. They weren’t extremists acting on a skewed ideology. These were housewives and homeless people, kids and business execs, tourists and conventioneers, vendors and bystanders. None of them had a gun or a rocket launcher.

It was going to break our hearts to pull those triggers. We all knew it. This was going to scar us forever.

We fired anyway.

Top tucked the stock of an M4 CQBR into his shoulder and fired, shifted, fired, shifted. Double-taps to the chest. His eyes were cold, and they didn’t blink, and he never missed. But then he jerked erect as every person he shot recovered from the impacts and kept coming forward.

“Head shots!” screamed Torres. “That’s the only thing that takes them down.”

“Fuck me,” murmured Top. He raised the barrel and put the next round through the forehead of a pretty woman in a torn yellow dress. She puddled down as if a light switch had been thrown. “Fuck me all to hell.”

Bunny has an AA-12 drum-fed shotgun. He calls it Honey Boom-Boom. Bunny has some long-standing issues. He opened up and the heavy gauge buckshot did terrible work at such close quarters. There wasn’t time for the pellets to spread, so they instead hit in clusters that disintegrated snarling faces and blew everything into clouds of red, pink and gray.

I had my old M9 Beretta in a two-hand grip and backed toward the doors, firing as the infected rushed me. They fell one by one.

But then I shot one in the head and he did not fall. He kept coming. It froze the moment for us all because it seemed to change the math. I shot him again as he leaped at me. The second bullet took him below the right eye and blew out a chunk of the back of his skull.

The motherfucker did not die. He tackled me around the legs and I fell.

I twisted as I landed, putting a lot of torque into it so that he landed first. He snapped his head forward and locked his teeth on a corner of my Kevlar chest protector. Before I could swing my gun between us, Torres put the barrel of her Glock against his temple and fired. The blast knocked his head sideways and the tension vanished from him all at once.