Extinction Evolution

Book 4: The Extinction Cycle

by Nicholas Sansbury Smith

Genres: Post-Apocalyptic sci-fi; Military Sci-Fi

Synopsis

There’s a storm on the horizon …

Central Command is gone, the military is fractured, and the surviving members of Team Ghost, led by Master Sergeant Reed Beckham, have been pushed to the breaking point. While the strong return to the battlefield, the wounded are forced to stay behind on Plum Island and fight their inner demons.

Betrayed by the country they swore to defend and surrounded by enemies on all sides, Team Ghost has one mission left: protect Dr. Kate Lovato and Dr. Pat Ellis while they develop a weapon to defeat the Variants once and for all. But after a grisly discovery in Atlanta, Kate and Ellis realize their weapon might not be able to stop the evolution of the monsters.

Joined by unexpected allies and facing a new threat none of them saw coming, the survivors are running out of time to save the human race from extinction.

Release date: February 14, 2017

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 320

Sample

Marine Staff Sergeant Jose Garcia flipped his night-vision goggles into position and watched as the half dozen outlines of the George Washington carrier strike group grew distant. That was home now, had been since the hemorrhage virus outbreak started over a month before. The GW was the last intact strike group in the world, with a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, two Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruisers, two Arleigh Burke–class guided-missile destroyers, a submarine, a Lewis and Clark–class dry-cargo ship, and a Pathfinder-class oceanographic survey ship. The strike group was the best and last chance the American military had of stopping the Variants.

Garcia’s six-man Force Recon team cruised over the choppy waters of the Florida Keys in a nimble Zodiac. Somewhere to the east, the USS Florida lurked beneath the waves.

Thin clouds rolled across a jeweled sky of brilliant stars. Out here, he could almost forget the world was gone.

As the green-hued shapes of the GW strike group disappeared on the horizon, thoughts of Garcia’s family worked their way into his mind. His wife, Ashley, his daughter, Leslie: They were gone now, like most of the world, nothing but flakes of ash in the cloud of death that had swept across the landscape.

Shit wasn’t supposed to go down this way. He should be rocking his six-month-old baby girl to sleep on the porch of his country home in North Carolina, listening to the peaceful chirp of crickets at dusk. It was the home he and his wife had always dreamed of, the type of place you could only get to by back roads. Where no one bothered you. He’d been planning to retire there—raise his family, maybe keep some horses.

Garcia gripped his suppressed M4 and ground his teeth together. All he had left of his wife and daughter was the picture taped to the inside of his helmet, leaving him nothing but a shattered dream of what could have been.

Modern warfare had taught him there were lines most men wouldn’t cross. There were international laws against torture, rules that governed war, courtesies that allowed the enemy to clear the injured off a field after a battle. But when was the last time the enemy passed up a chance to kill America’s soldiers? War against the Variants was no different. Garcia had served in the Marine Corps for twenty years and seen some awful things—real-life nightmares. He had faced Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the War on Terror, enemies who lacked all aspects of humanity. He thought he knew what monsters were, until he came face-to-face with the Variants.

This new enemy followed no rules and extended no courtesies. The human race was fighting tooth and nail for its very existence. He knew the value of life and how easily it could be taken away. The only respite in the dread that owned him now was his faith in God. He knew he would see his family again. Until then, his plan was simple: Fight and die well.

Garcia wasn’t the only one suffering. Every man on the Zodiac had lost someone. He flipped up his NVGs to conserve battery and took a moment to scan his team. Their faces were all covered by camouflage and shadow, but Garcia didn’t need to see their features to know they were ready for whatever came next.

Sergeant Rick Thomas and Corporal Jimmy Daniels sat on the port side with their suppressed M4s angled toward the water. Like Garcia, they both had olive skin, short-cropped hair, and dark mustaches. Garcia privately thought they all looked like old-school porn stars. Knowing Thomas and Daniels, he figured they’d probably take it as a compliment.

On the starboard side sat Corporal Steve “Steve-o” Holmes. He was a quiet man with an honest face, Dumbo ears, and an M249 Squad Automatic Weapon with an Advanced Armament Corp. silencer cradled across his chest. In the stern, Lance Corporal Jeff Morgan and Corporal Ryan “Tank” Talon manned the motor. Morgan carried a suppressed MK11. He was thin, fast, and agile—the reasons Garcia had assigned him as point man. Tank, on the other hand, was a hulking African American with lumberjack arms and a barrel chest. The team’s radio operator, he carried a suppressed M4.

These were the marines of the team code-named the Variant Hunters, or VH for short. Some scientist ten times smarter than Garcia had jokingly called them the Monster Squad, but Garcia didn’t like that. Sounded too much like a B movie.

Tonight, their mission wasn’t to exterminate Variants. It was simply to locate and observe the monsters in Key West. Recent intel indicated they were changing, maybe even evolving, at alarming rates. Garcia’s role was to confirm this and document how, scientifically, the beasts were adapting.

Fuck science.

He didn’t give a shit about what mutations the Variants were undergoing or what the lab jockeys were doing to stop it. He had his own cure—a suppressed M4 with a magazine full of 5.56-millimeter rounds. Each engraved with the initials of his daughter and wife.

Waves slapped against the sides of the Zodiac as they shot toward Key West. Garcia’s senses were on full alert, taking in all his surroundings: the salty scent of the warm water on the breeze, the hum of the Zodiac’s motor. The dull buzz of excitement pumped through his veins and made the spray of water on his skin sting.

On the horizon, the islands came into focus in the glow of the moonlight and glistening stars. He held up a hand to motion for Tank to ease up on the engine. They coasted until they were five hundred feet out.

Their final gear prep made little sound over the choppy waves. Garcia dismantled his NVGs and put the optics in a cascade bag. He stuffed it into his main pack and sat on the starboard side of the boat to put on his fins. Before he put on his scuba mask, he said, “Radio discipline when we get shoreside. Keep an eye out for anything on the way in. You all know those freaks can swim.”

There were five nods, then Morgan dropped backward into the water. The others followed, one by one, with Garcia diving last.

As soon as he was submerged, he pulled his blade and finned after the others. The marines broke off into pairs and fell into a modified sidestroke, their heads just above the water.

Garcia couldn’t see shit. There was always a small stab of fear that came with the underwater darkness. As a kid, he’d hated swimming in murky lakes. When he enlisted in the marines, that fear mostly subsided but never totally went away. Knowing the Variants could swim didn’t help.

All it takes is all you got, Marine.

The motto always helped remind him what he was made of. How much he could take. Mental and physical pain were just temporary distractions. He took in a breath every other stroke and glided through the choppy water with ease. Every hundred feet he took a second to sight, scanning the water and island beyond for contacts. They were halfway to Smathers Beach, where the branches of palm trees shifted in a slight breeze.

When they reached the surf, Daniels held security while Garcia retrieved his NVGs, changed into his gear, clipped his fins to his bag, and jammed a magazine into his M4. Then they switched. The other men all did the same. Garcia used the stolen minutes to scope the terrain.

The pink Sheraton hotel towered over Highway A1A beyond the beach. Derelict cars were scattered across the road. Umbrellas and plastic chairs jutted out of the sand in every direction like unexploded missiles. A gust of wind sent trash shifting across the ground. Paradise had transformed into hell.

The beach looked like a war zone.

“Sarge,” Daniels said over the comm, “you see that?”

Garcia followed the muzzle of Daniels’s M4 to a pair of corpses stranded in the surf about one hundred feet to the right. Tendrils of ropy seaweed surrounded the bodies.

“Looks like we have casualties,” Garcia said. He mounted his NVGs and flipped them into position. The small corpses came into focus through the green hue. His calm heart sank at the realization they were children.

Garcia flashed a hand signal, and the six-man team waded through the surf. A draft of air carrying a putrid scent hit Garcia as soon as he reached the loose sand. The stench was a cross between a slaughterhouse and a backwater swamp in the steaming heat of summer. Garcia ignored it and hustled across the beach, his team spreading out in combat intervals.

He stepped over a broken bottle of Bud Light and motioned for three of his men to take up position near a concrete wall running along the entrance to the beach. Then he followed Daniels and Morgan to a tiki bar for cover.

It was quiet, but Garcia imagined the phantom sounds of what it had been like just over a month ago—the shouts of drunken vacationers, the growl of expensive cars prowling the strip. He never understood why people wanted to live in places like this. Maybe he was old fashioned, but he liked his peace and quiet. And now he had it. Only the faint whistle of the breeze and the whisper of the surf sounded in the distance.

The calm wasn’t reassuring. The longer Garcia stood there, the more he felt as if they were being watched, as if someone or something had the drop on him. He scanned the beach, the road, and the Sheraton for a third time. The slimy feeling passed, and Garcia glanced back at the corpses.

Something didn’t add up. The Variants rarely left meat behind. There wasn’t a single rotting body anywhere else on the beach, so why here? Variants typically took their prey to their lairs or tore them apart where they killed, leaving nothing but bones. These bodies, while mangled, showed no sign of the bite marks or deep lacerations Garcia was used to seeing.

He pointed at his eyes, then to Morgan and Daniels, then to the kids in the surf. Garcia swallowed as he followed the marines to the corpses. Both were boys no older than eight or nine, wearing shorts and what looked like torn-up swim shirts. Their legs were tangled in seaweed, and they lay facedown in the wet sand as the waves beat against their small bodies. He flipped up his NVGs and used the toe of his boot to push the first boy onto his side. In the glow of the moonlight, he examined the body.

“Holy shit,” Garcia whispered.

The boy wasn’t human. He was a Variant, with swollen lips and wide yellow irises where his innocent eyes should have been. Bulging blue veins crisscrossed his stomach and chest.

Discovering the corpses were monsters made Garcia feel better about what he was about to do.

He reached for his medical pack and pulled out a vial. The lab jockeys loved flesh samples. Fresh or rotten, they didn’t care. He grabbed his knife and prepared to cut a piece from the boy’s chest when he saw something that made him pause.

Leaning in, he pushed at the kid’s neck with the blade to expose what looked like gills under his left ear.

“Morgan, check this shit out,” Garcia whispered.

The marine hurried over and crouched. Garcia used his gloves to spread the pink, meaty gills apart. Water squished out of them, making an awful sound that caused his stomach to churn.

“Do we tag and bag?” Morgan asked.

“No. Can’t bring ’em with. Take pictures and a sample.” Garcia stood and handed him the vial. He jogged over to Daniels while Morgan worked. The other three marines held their position at the retaining wall three hundred feet away.

A few minutes later, Morgan returned with the sample. Garcia put it in his medical pack and motioned for the team to advance to the highway. This was exactly what they were here for, but they needed more than a sample or two to please the higher-ups. They needed further documentation of how the monsters were changing, and why.

Somewhere overhead, he heard the chop chop of a drone. The reassuring sound of American military muscle reminded him there was a team monitoring them, watching his men advance. Help was only minutes away if they needed it.

Of course, out here minutes could separate life and death.

Garcia shouldered his M4 and worked his way across the beach. The other marines fanned out, keeping their heads low. There wasn’t much cover, and Garcia wanted to get out of the open as quickly as possible. He followed Morgan onto the highway, toward an F-150 on a lift. Daniels took up position behind an abandoned cargo van with Steve-o and Thomas. Tank crouched behind a Mini Cooper, but the car was hardly big enough to hide him. His helmet crested the top like a turret. They all paused to listen and scan for hostiles.

Morgan glanced back at Garcia for orders, but Garcia held steady for a few extra seconds. His gut still told him something was off, even if his eyes and ears showed nothing out of the ordinary. There was no sign of the Variants.

Garcia finally nodded at Morgan and shot an advance signal. The team pushed forward at a slow jog, hunched and close to the vehicles for cover. Sweat dripped down Garcia’s brow, but he didn’t bother wiping it away. He swept his M4 over the terrain.

Midstride, Garcia caught a whiff of sour, rotting fruit. A sudden wave of anxiety rose in his stomach. He froze, then took a knee. The other men followed suit.

Something was watching them. He felt it.

His instincts had saved the lives of his men before, and he wasn’t going to ignore them. They were compromised. He couldn’t see the Variants, but they were watching. Additional intel wasn’t worth the lives of his men.

Garcia flashed a retreat signal. Morgan narrowed his eyes as if he was going to protest. The moment of hesitation passed, and he was moving a second later. The team had made it only a few feet when a frantic female voice pierced the quiet night.

“Help!”

Morgan’s hand went up into a fist before Garcia had a chance to search the streets. The entire six-man team crouched and took cover behind the nearest vehicle. Garcia looked over the hood of a blue BMW before moving to the driver’s-side door of a minivan for a better look.

“Somebody … please …” The woman’s voice was hoarse and crackly, as if she had chain-smoked her entire life.

Garcia cringed at her pleas for help. If they weren’t compromised before, they sure as hell were now. He flipped his mini-mic to his lips and broke radio discipline. Stealth didn’t matter now. The woman had blown their cover. Every Variant in Key West would have heard her. They had two options: help the woman and retreat to the Zodiac—or retreat without her.

Cursing to himself, Garcia ordered his team into action. “Daniels, grab her. Morgan, Steve-o, you’re with Daniels. Tank, Thomas, you hold security, then we fall back.”

The three marines fell into a crouched trot and vanished behind a donut delivery truck. Garcia moved to the front of the minivan and saw her. The woman dragged her body across the pavement, blood streaking behind her mangled feet.

“Help me …”

Morgan approached the woman and squatted by her side, his weapon still angled into the darkness. He put a finger to his lips with his other hand while Steve-o slung his SAW over his back and crouched on her other side. Daniels reached down to grab her with his left arm, but the woman swatted at him, groaning and screeching in a voice so loud it made Garcia wince again.

Shit. Shit. Shit.

“Let’s move,” Garcia said. He didn’t like this one damn bit. How in the hell had this woman survived out here in enemy territory? Especially with feet that looked like hamburger meat?

The sensation of being watched hit him again. He could almost feel eyes burning through his back. The acid in his stomach churned. He twisted away from the road, raised his rifle, and arced the muzzle across the white balconies on the ocean side of the Sheraton. There, standing in the doorway of a unit on the third floor, was a lean figure draped in shadow. It slipped back inside the open door a second later.

“Move your asses!” Garcia shouted. “It’s a fucking trap!” The words sounded strange, and he almost couldn’t believe them. Variants didn’t set traps.

Rising to his feet, Garcia watched anxiously as Morgan and Steve-o hoisted the woman up and helped Daniels sling her over his back. Tank and Thomas were already running toward the beach. Garcia checked the Sheraton one last time before he turned to run.

The high-pitched roar of a single Variant rose over the screams of the desperate woman and Daniels’s futile attempts to calm her. The shriek ebbed and flowed into a whine that made Garcia’s heart kick. He bolted through the maze of cars, flinging glances over his shoulder every few steps. A flash of motion from the parking lot of the Sheraton stopped him midstride. The clatter of clicking joints confirmed the screeching monster wasn’t alone.

The distorted shadows of long limbs and withered bodies shifted across the concrete. Three Variants galloped into the green-hued darkness a beat later. The monsters used their back legs to spring forward like rabbits.

There was no way the Variant Hunters could outrun them. Garcia switched the selector on his M4 to single shot, aimed, and opened fire as the creatures dashed onto the highway. He clipped one in the shoulder and another in the leg before they darted behind a vehicle. Pivoting to the right, he fired a short burst that punched through metal and shattered glass, killing the injured Variant as it leaped onto the hood.

Daniels lumbered away from the beasts as Morgan and Steve-o stopped to provide covering fire. The crack of Steve-o’s SAW broke out, and 5.56-millimeter rounds cut through the two beasts. Even with the AAC silencer, the gunfire was loud, but their dying shrieks were louder. He cut the creatures down in seconds. Scarlet blossomed across the street as the bodies crashed to the pavement.

The dying beasts were just the advance guard. The main horde swarmed from the open windows of the Sheraton like an army of enraged ants spilling from an anthill. They leaped off balconies and skittered down the sides of the hotel. Others squeezed from sewer openings and poured into the street faster than Garcia could flip magazines.

“Run!” he shouted. “Fall the fuck back! Tank, radio Command!” Garcia rushed toward the entrance to Smathers Beach, his lungs burning for air.

“Command, Victor Hotel Actual. We have a survivor and are being pursued by Variants. Need extraction, ASAP!” Tank said over the comm.

Garcia’s earpiece crackled, and a voice hissed into his ear. “Roger, Victor Hotel Actual, eye in the sky has confirmed your location. Delta Four, Five, and Six are en route to your insertion point.”

“Copy that,” Garcia replied. He halted in the sand and waved frantically at his men. Tank and Thomas joined him near the tiki bar, but Daniels, Morgan, and Steve-o were still running down the highway. Three dozen Variants darted after them, leaping on top of cars, sprinting down the sidewalk, and emerging from the fronts of surf shops.

They were everywhere, and Garcia watched the hungry maws chomping behind swollen sucker mouths in a state of horror. He was used to seeing Variants with long, muscular limbs, but now their stalklike arms seemed withered, almost frail, and their horned nails were even longer. They charged, scrambling over vehicles and darting on all fours across the street, claws scratching over metal and concrete.

“Covering fire!” Garcia yelled. He switched the selector on his M4 to automatic, shouldered the rifle, squared his boots the best he could in the loose sand, and sent a burst of fire at the onrushing horde. Rounds lanced across the beach at the tidal wave of pallid, veiny flesh. His foot slid in the sand as he fired, bullets ripping through car doors and breaking windows before he found a target. One of the rounds took off the top of a female Variant’s skull. It skidded across the road, brain matter spilling onto the asphalt. He dropped four more of the creatures before his magazine went dry. The monsters continued to bleed onto the street, relentless and undeterred. By the time Daniels reached the entrance to the beach, there were hundreds of Variants pursing the team.

“Changing!” Tank shouted.

“Fire in the hole!” Thomas shouted back. He lobbed an M67 grenade across the beach. It landed in the street and rolled under the F-150 on a lift. Two agonizing beats later, a mushroom of fire blasted into the air, sending shrapnel whizzing into the heart of the monstrous horde. The explosion gave Daniels, Steve-o, and Morgan a chance to escape to the sand.

“On me!” Garcia shouted. He ran toward the surf, but stopped when his boots were submerged. They were out of room, and there was no way in hell they could make it back to the Zodiac. Even with their fins and their training, the Variants could swim faster.

Not to mention they had gills now.

Daniels set the woman on the sand and raised his rifle. She was mumbling between her pained moans.

“We can’t,” she hissed. “Please, we can’t.”

“We’re getting you out of here, ma’am,” Daniels said.

“No,” she groaned. “You don’t understand. They won’t let us leave. They won’t!” She collapsed to her back, her words slurring between each breath.

Garcia caught a glimpse of her in the moonlight. She was young, maybe college aged, with her blond hair in ragged braids, probably a student on vacation before the outbreak. It only took a glance to see she was in bad shape.

Both of her feet were cut to pieces, flesh hanging loosely from the bones. Her youthful blue eyes were vacant and fixated on the moon above. The marines formed a perimeter around her, guarding her life with theirs. The team hadn’t found a survivor for a week. Every remaining human soul was precious.

Injured Variants staggered onto the beach, shrapnel wounds gushing blood. They skittered across the sand and fanned out, their emaciated bodies stretching in the moonlight and yellow eyes homing in on the Variant Hunters. Garcia had to remind himself that he and his team were the predators, not the prey.

Daniels tossed a grenade and then bent over the woman to shield her body. A geyser of sand and body parts gushed into the sky, but the monsters still came, charging straight into the marines’ gunfire.

Garcia’s earpiece crackled over the noise. He only caught a piece of the transmission before the chaos drowned it out.

“Victor Hotel, watch your …”

In the distance, Garcia could make out the faint mechanical roar of choppers. The reassuring sound of salvation prompted another shot of adrenaline through his veins. He didn’t take his eyes off the horde in his cross hairs, mowing down creature after creature with short bursts. If he had turned, maybe he would have seen the Variants swimming under the waves and their pale, naked bodies leaping across the surf as they emerged from the ocean.

Maybe he could have saved Daniels and the woman before the beasts dragged them into the water.

Garcia’s heart flipped, the rush of relief transforming into the stab of fear and shock. By the time he grasped what was happening, Morgan was gone too, half of his face ripped off by a set of talons. A dozen of the creatures had flanked them from the ocean, swimming unseen beneath the waves.

He ducked down as rockets streaked overhead from an Apache helicopter. Two Black Hawks closed in, spraying sand and death into the sky from door-mounted M240s. For Morgan, Daniels, and the woman, the birds had arrived a minute too late, but for the rest of the Variant Hunters the helos were salvation.

Rounds slammed into the sand around Garcia, Tank, Steve-o, and Thomas. They huddled together to avoid the spray. Diseased limbs and chunks of gore tumbled across the beach around their phalanx.

Garcia glanced over his shoulder to watch the birds circle. Green rounds tore through the water, turning the Variants into little more than floating meat in the crimson tide.

Another salvo of rockets hissed away from the Apache toward the street. Variants galloped away in retreat, screeching and squawking.

In minutes, it was over. The bark of the guns died, replaced by the howls of dying monsters. Smathers Beach was truly a battlefield now, pockmarked with smoking craters and mangled, grotesque bodies sprawled across the sand.

Garcia took in deep breaths filled with the scent of charred flesh. Dazed, his ears ringing, he slowly stood and searched the water for his lost men and the woman they had tied to save. The Black Hawks continued to circle and fire at twitching Variants below while the Apache headed west to take care of any survivors.

As the Black Hawks finally lowered to extract Garcia and what was left of his team, all he could think about was how wrong he’d been. If he’d paid more attention to science and studied the adaptation of the creatures, his men would still be alive. The monsters had used the children in the surf and the woman on the road as bait. The deaths were on him, and he had to live with them, just like all of the others.

Fucking bait.

Three Days Later

The divine glow of a brilliant sunrise crept across Plum Island. On the walkway outside Building 5, twelve Medical Corps soldiers in black fatigues knelt with their hands tied behind their backs. Master Sergeant Reed Beckham walked the line and stopped to point the barrel of Lieutenant Colonel Ray Jensen’s Colt .45 Peacemaker at the bowed head of the closest soldier.

Beckham didn’t know the man’s name—hell, he didn’t even know his rank—but he was one of the late Colonel Wood’s henchmen. It seemed only fitting Jensen’s gun should kill them.

The soldier glanced up, his long chin wobbling. “Please. Please don’t shoot me. I was just following orders.”

Beckham resisted the urge to pistol-whip the man right then and there. If he had a bullet for every soldier who had used that line, he would have enough ammo to kill every Variant left in New York. On a deployment in Iraq, Beckham had helped disarm more than one hundred Iraqi troops during the fall of Baghdad twelve years ago. Many of those men had used that same line. It didn’t excuse them from sectarian violence or killing Kurdish women and children.

These men were soldiers, but even soldiers had a choice. The Nazis had a choice. The Taliban had a choice. Osama bin Laden’s men had a choice. When shit hit the fan, there was always a choice. Beckham had disobeyed orders in Niantic to save a stranded family, and he’d done so again when he killed Colonel Wood’s men the night before.

“I say we drop them off in New York City and let the Variants have at ’em,” Staff Sergeant Parker Horn said with a snort. “Although that would be a waste of fuel.” The Delta Force operator’s right bicep was still dripping blood, but he didn’t seem to notice the pain. His eyes blazed. Corporal Joe Fitzpatrick and Staff Sergeant Jay Chow flanked him, their rifles all aimed at the Medical Corps prisoners.

Major Sean Smith was there too, arms crossed, supervising the scene. Given the state of the world, Smith had elected to give Beckham free rein to deal with Wood’s soldiers however he saw fit. He hadn’t done so without objecting, though, and his final words on the matter rang in Beckham’s mind: It may be their funeral, but it’ll be your conscience.

On the lawn behind Beckham stood a team of Army Rangers and marines—fourteen battle-hardened men, all stationed at Plum Island since the early days of the outbreak. Staff Sergeant Alex Riley sat in his wheelchair next to Meg Pratt, the firefighter they’d rescued from New York. She was propped up on crutches. It felt good to have a small army at his back, but the longer Beckham listened to the sound of the crowd, the more he realized how fucked things really were.

“Kill them,” one of the marines barked.

“Shoot ’em!” yelled another.

Beckham was still fuming over Lieutenant Colonel Jensen’s death the night before, but this wasn’t right. His men were better than this. They weren’t executioners. Civilization was gone, but Beckham wasn’t going to let justice go with it.

“Get up,” Beckham said. He motioned with the muzzle of Jensen’s Colt .45.

The Medical Corps soldier struggled to his feet. He squinted in the morning sun, his youthful features scrunching together. He couldn’t be more than twenty years old.

“What’s your name, kid?” Beckham asked.

“Keith,” he replied, his chin still trembling. “Keith Sizemore. I’m sorry, Master Sergeant. I’m sorry about Colonel Wood. I didn’t know …”

“Shut the hell up, Sizemore,” one of the other prisoners said. Beckham strode over to the man, a sergeant named Gallagher according to his uniform. He was the highest-ranking soldier of the group.

Beckham grabbed him under the arm and jammed the revolver into the man’s back. “On your feet, Sergeant.”

“Tough guy with a gun,” Gallagher said. “Once they find out what you did to Colonel Wood, you’re all going to wish you were dead. They’re going to send an army after you fucking traitors.”

The door to Building 5 creaked open. Doctor Kate Lovato and Doctor Pat Ellis stepped out onto the landing. Kate gave Beckham a critical look and slowly shook her head. The simple act washed away whatever bloodlust was still . . .