Two of the three defenders were down, sprawled, screaming as the dead fell on them. I hacked the killers away and then hurried over to where the Arab was fighting. He wore the remnants of old National Guard battle dress trousers and jacket, but instead of military-issue boots he had a fairly new pair of Doc Martens. Hockey and kickboxing pads covered most of his body—as it did with the others—but he had a bad bite on the side of his elbow, where the pad was the thinnest. It doesn’t take much of a bite. The Lucifer 113 pathogen was designed to be an ultra-aggressive serum transfer bioweapon. It only takes a drop of blood or spit in an open wound.

I performed a vicious lateral cut with the katana and took off the arm and shoulder of the hand that had the guy by the throat. The zombie staggered, lost balance, and before it could recover, the soldier hit him with what I discovered was the lower third of a long-handled spade. The blade was bent from repeated impacts, but the soldier put some heart into it, catching the zombie just above and behind the ear. The dead body suddenly dropped, proof that the blow had damaged the brain stem.

I pivoted to put my back to his, and we met the rush of more of the dead. I’d counted nine, but now some of the soldier’s friends were getting up and attacking. Baskerville snarled and growled like a timber wolf as he ran interference for us. I used my shoulder and hip to turn the soldier so that I took the brunt of the attack, and after a while we had a rhythm. Baskerville crippled them, they fell toward me and I cut heads. When I couldn’t do better than taking off an arm, the soldier crouched and used his shovel—crushing skulls with the metal end or stabbing through the temple or eye-socket with the jagged end of the broken handle. It was brutal work. The screams of the other two soldiers faded and were gone, and then they got up and came at us, too. I heard the soldier sobbing as we killed his friends.

Maybe I did, too.

The fight seemed to go on and on, devouring the whole day, but when the last body fell I doubt more than two minutes had passed. I sent Baskerville out to run the perimeter and when he barked I ran and killed whatever he found. Five more zombies, three of them in uniform.

When it was over there was another of those haunted silences.

I relaxed, one rigid muscle at a time, and turned to the soldier. He had his last name embroidered on his jacket. Al-Harti. He was about twenty, with corporal stripes on his sleeves. A good-looking young guy who had laugh lines around his eyes.

I stuck out my hand. “Joe Ledger.”