Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse: Family

By Shawn Chesser

SURVIVING THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE: FAMILY

“A gut-wrenching, hard hitting series that will leave you breathless.” John O’Brien - Best-selling author of the New World series

“Shawn Chesser is a master of the zombie genre.” Mark Tufo - Best-selling author of the Zombie Fallout series

“Through a combination of tight, well-structured plots and fully realized characters, Chesser has emerged as one of the top indie writers in the business.” Joe McKinney – Two-time Bram Stoker Award winner and best-selling author of the Dead World series

SURVIVING THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE: FAMILY
Edited by Monique Happy Editorial Services
106,000 words

Outbreak - Week 1

Presidents, premieres, prime ministers, entire governments disappeared instantly, like a fragile house of cards in a hurricane. Some hid deep underground or holed up in fortified strongholds, but most were swallowed up by the dead, never to be heard from again.

Created in a biosafety level 4 lab in Wuhan, China, a bioweapon meant to sicken and quickly kill an enemy population—leaving intact infrastructure, resources, and vast swaths of fertile farmland—instead causes the infected to die and return as mindless, flesh-eating zombies.

When the bioweapon escapes the BSL-4 lab and all efforts to contain its rapid spread within Hubei province fail, the Chinese Communist Party leadership dispatch agents to the United States with one mission: to level the playing field by seeding an unsuspecting American population with what will eventually be known worldwide as the Omega virus.

As the zombie scourge spreads like wildfire, the People’s Liberation Army takes advantage, landing sizeable ground forces on America’s shores.

Now, nearly four years later, having lost many loved ones and brothers in arms to Omega, Captain Cade Grayson—father, Patriot, Delta Force commander—has one goal in life: to arm his soon be seventeen-year-old daughter, Raven, with all the knowledge and skills necessary to survive their rapidly changing world and live up to the Bird of the Apocalypse nickname bestowed upon her by her Godfather Duncan Winters.

While on a foraging mission Raven presses her father to finally make good on a promise made to her in the early days of the zombie apocalypse.

Taking advantage of a mandatory stand down from commanding his Pale Riders team, Cade leads a solemn father daughter mission that will take them through hundreds of miles of western New America — a yet to be conquered frontier teeming with zombie hordes, roving bands of opportunist breathers, and the scattered remnants of a mostly defeated invading army.

To make an already daunting mission even more dangerous, the Graysons have reason to believe they are being stalked by an unknown entity, their motives unclear.

Will Raven gain the skills necessary to help her finally begin to emerge from under her father’s shadow?

In the end, will a promise fulfilled heal old wounds and further strengthen familial bonds?

Or will the infamous Mr. Murphy once again throw a monkey wrench into the operation and further delay much needed closure?

Come along and find out who has what it takes to Survive the Zombie Apocalypse.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shawn Chesser
• Release date: Aug 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9798988624103

Shawn Chesser

Shawn Chesser, a practicing father, has been a zombie fanatic for decades. He likes his creatures shambling, trudging and moaning. As for fast, agile, screaming specimens... not so much. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, two kids and three fish.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Elbert, Colorado

Raven Grayson sat high in the passenger seat of her father’s Ford F-650, the pickup’s airhorn blaring away, Steiner binoculars pressed to her face. Hoping to see some kind of movement, she panned the binos slowly, left to right, across the distant tree line. If what amounted to a high decibel dinner bell to the dead didn’t flush them out into the open, the possibility of a meal of fresh meat driving them to seek out the source, nothing would.

Locking her gaze on the copse of mature oaks and pines her father had pointed to prior to him pulling the massive 4x4 (nicknamed Black Beauty by Raven long ago) to the side of the straight stretch of dirt feeder road, she took one hand off the Steiners and, working by feel, clicked out of her seatbelt.

When the horn finally fell silent, at the end of ten long seconds that had seemed like an eternity to Raven, she looked to her father and resumed their ongoing conversation. You’ve been promising me the trip to Eden for years now, Dad. I’m sixteen going on seventeen. And I do think I’ve exhibited great patience in this matter. Plus, your ‘we can’t afford to waste the fuel’ excuse doesn’t hunt anymore. The refineries are upping their output. The guy at the depot said they’ll soon be receiving new shipments of gas and diesel every other week. She paused, clucking her tongue as something in the distance usurped her train of thought. It was a clutch of shamblers cutting across a distant clearing. There were seven or eight of them, maybe more if there were littles in the mix. It was the kid zombies that always seemed to be lurking on the periphery. Scientists at New District had long theorized that, even after first death, their propensity to be curious and their desire to explore their surroundings had somehow lived on in their underdeveloped brains. Not only were littles relentless in their pursuit of their prey, but they were also much faster than adult zombies. Her father’s old mentor, Delta Force commander Mike Desantos, had found out the hard way. It had happened during the first days of the zombie apocalypse, and he had left behind his wife and two young girls.

Raven’s father, Cade Grayson, still wouldn’t go into detail about what had transpired between the fatal bite that would ultimately kill Mike and the successful detonation of the low-yield nuclear warheads the men had placed on an overpass forty miles north of Colorado Springs. Cade would, however, tell anyone who asked that it was Mike’s ultimate sacrifice that had saved Colorado Springs and the surrounding military bases from being overrun by the half a million zombies streaming south from Denver.

As her father noted a detail on the parcel of land circled on the map that still lay open on her lap, the zombies slipped from view, disappearing in ones and twos into a dense picket of pines backstopping an Airstream trailer, its dull aluminum skin streaked vertically with thin fingers of moss. Camouflage netting strung from a pair of pines flanking the trailer was stretched over the rounded roof. The netting was held in place with long metal posts driven into the soil a dozen feet in front of the trailer. Leaves and pine needles had collected atop the netting, causing it to sag in the middle. If a person wasn’t focusing on that area of the distant tree line the trailer would easily go unnoticed.

Raven used the time the zombies were out of sight behind the trailer to press check her Glock 19. Seeing the reassuring brassy glint of the chambered round, the gold standard in the apocalypse, she returned the semiauto pistol to the drop-leg holster on her right thigh, then went back to glassing the trailer, clearing, and the forest beyond.

How did this place go unnoticed for so long? she asked.

It’s way off the beaten path. Close to forty miles from what used to be Colorado Springs, he explained. Plus, with the nature of the place, one would think the people who lived here were pretty secretive and kept to themselves.

They didn’t do anything to try to conceal the gate by the paved road.

Every farm and ranch out this way have the same type of gate to keep people from accessing their land, he responded. They all probably purchased them from the same supply outfit. Then there’s the long grass. It does a pretty good job of concealing the road displayed on the map.

Didn’t Daymon say this place was a nudist colony? She shot him a quizzical look. "And how did he know about it? He isn’t one of them … is he?"

Cade chuckled. That he did. And, no, Daymon isn’t a nudist. He removed his worn Trail Blazers ball cap and ran a hand through his short hair. Still cut high and tight, like it had been most of his adult life, the only change it had undergone since the zombie apocalypse had popped off that last Saturday in July of 2011 was it going from deep brown to being mostly silver. In fact, whereas Cade’s close friend Duncan Winters was sixty-two and a couple of inches taller, at first glance people sometimes confused the two. Not just nudists, he went on, shaking his head. Rumor is they were also hardcore preppers. Who would have thought those two mindsets could be compatible?

What did they do in the winter? Raven asked. This isn’t Florida.

They wore clothes, he said matter-of-factly. I think being a nudist means that you’re comfortable with your own body. That you don't care who sees you naked. Something about being closer to nature when in your birthday suit. He paused, thinking. They’re also a bit counterculture in their thinking. Wearing clothes to them is a social construct. Shedding the clothes is like telling the man he is no longer in charge … I think.

Raven shook her head. While I don’t know about all that, I do remember the first time you and Mom took me to Sauvie Island. You had all the float toys trapped in your arms and Mom was loaded down with the shovels and sandcastle molds—

And we walked straight onto the clothing-optional section of the beach. He looked her square in the face. She was a spitting image of his late wife, Brooklyn. The dark hair, brown eyes, aquiline nose, and gymnast’s physique. She even adopted the same hard set to her jaw when deep in thought or when under duress. Pushing the mental image of his wife into the backseat of his mind, he went on, saying, Neither of us knew that was even a thing at Sauvie Island. Had we known, we would have never exposed you to it.

She laughed. Mom’s face was beet red. You started to stammer something. You both couldn’t lighten your loads fast enough to get to covering my eyes.

You didn’t see much, he said. "I, on the other hand, saw waaaay too much."

Raven enjoyed these rare trips down memory lane. At least the ones that didn’t include the gnashing of teeth on flesh or one of the many hair-raising near-death experiences she and her little band of survivors had endured the last three and a half years. Wiping a stray tear, one born out of loss more so than the humorous memory, she said, "I saw enough to know that some people need to keep their clothes on."

Agreed, Cade said as he reached across the cab to thumb away a fresh tear. I miss your mom, too. He swallowed hard, fighting off tears of his own. She went way too soon. And, once again, I was away when I should have been there with her. With you …

Raven said nothing.

Pounding a palm lightly on the steering wheel, he said, We’ll get her. Bring her back and give her a proper burial. I’ll have the brothers who made Memorial Plaza carve a headstone for her.

That would be nice, Raven said, her eyes now red and glistening thanks to a new wave of unchecked emotion. We could have them etch her favorite saying on it.

What’s the most important thing? he began.

Family, she finished, drying her eyes on her sleeve.

Almost a minute had gone by when the bell cow zombie, a road-worn specimen that had suffered its first death months ago, reemerged from the woods behind the Airstream. It was draped in a mishmash of winter clothing: a green parka missing one sleeve, turtleneck sweater crusted with dried blood, and bib-style ski pants, the attached suspenders dragging the ground. With each step bony alabaster knees made an appearance through gaping holes in the gray fabric. On its feet were leather hiking boots, both heels worn flat.

Behind the lead zombie was a trio of adult Zs, two undead teenagers that may have been maternal twins in life, and, lastly, their heads bobbing in unison with the others, two littles Raven had missed when the zombies had passed through the small clearing. The trailing zombies wore the same type of clothing as the one in the lead. Which suggested the entire group had suffered first death in fall or winter. Where the tragedy had occurred would forever remain a mystery. They may have perished back East and made their way here, trudging along the nation’s clogged highways and byways all spring and summer, the constant hunger known only to the undead spurring them on.

None of it mattered, thought Cade. He was troubled because what they were seeing so far contradicted the intel provided to Daymon by his best forager, Jon Wayne Nguyen. The twentysomething Asian American was a hardy survivor who preferred a singular existence outside the walls ringing New District, a city of close to thirty thousand that had become New America’s seat of government. Known as Colorado Springs prior to Z-Day, the burgeoning city was the largest of two dozen strongholds of humanity that had sprung up across the country over the three and a half years since Omega wrapped the world in its deadly embrace.

Raven relayed to her father what she was seeing, then lowered the binoculars, placing them on the dash along with the map.

Doesn’t hunt. Cade hung his head and chuckled. That’s a Duncanism, am I right?

Raven grinned. The grin was followed by a subtle nod. She wasn’t ashamed that she was known to parrot sayings thrown about daily by the grizzled Vietnam veteran she’d come to call Uncle, or Godfather, or just Old Man … whichever moniker suited the occasion. All the time spent with him was having a big impact on who she was becoming as a young woman. It was as if, at times, she was possessed by the spirit of an old curmudgeon. On the flip side of that was warrior Raven, or, as she was known to Duncan and those close to her: Bird of the Apocalypse.

The hardened persona was a direct result of her spending nearly every second with her father when he wasn’t downrange with his Pale Riders team. If the former Delta Force commander-cum-leader of a combined special operations team that served at the pleasure of President Valerie Clay wasn’t being helicoptered into zombie-choked territory for one reason or another, he and his Pale Riders were actively hunting the remnants of the People’s Liberation Army’s occupying force. Dispatched from mainland China aboard a fleet of naval warships just weeks after their altered Omega virus had laid waste to most of the world’s population, the pockets of well-trained and armed soldiers loyal solely to the Chinese Communist Party were still conducting hit-and-run operations against the many settlements and remote outposts scattered about New America.

I count eight rotters, noted Raven. She had shrugged off the seatbelt and was hauling her short-barreled rifle off the floorboard. Once belonging to her late mother, the Colt AR-15—fitted with an 8 barrel, suppressor, and EOTech holographic sight paired with a 3x magnifier—was her weapon of choice. With the buttstock collapsed to her liking, the twenty-five-inch six-pound SBR (Short-Barreled Rifle) was well-balanced and perfect for clearing rooms. Buttstock fully extended, she could shoulder the compact rifle and easily acquire targets out to four hundred yards. I’ll go out ahead and take care of them, she went on. Less than ten. No problemo."

There’s bound to be more in the clearing, Cade insisted, leaning hard on the pickup’s horn for the second time in as many minutes. If the map’s correct, it’s circular. The road to the compound enters the forest at the far end. Let’s give it a minute. See what comes out of the woodwork.

If it’s less than twenty, she said, giving her weapon a quick once-over, I want to cull them. I can always use more practice dinging moving targets.

Keeping watch for new movement in the tree line, Cade shook his head. Negative, Ghost Rider.

Raven shot him a steely look. Why not? she grumbled.

Because, as you’ve already pointed out, fuel is easier to come by than ammunition. Best to conserve the five-five-six for any breathers we may encounter.

Back to scanning the tree line through the Steiners, she said, Copy that. Then what’s the play? You want to go the Pied Piper route back to the main road and then play a quick game of bowling for rotters?

Nodding an affirmative, he pointed across the dash. Movement, your one o’clock. Even sans binoculars, it was easy to pick out the new arrivals, which were an assortment of clothed and naked walking corpses, the pasty white skin of the latter making it seem as if ghosts, not zombies, were flitting through the forest.

I see them, she said and started a count in her head. Arriving at thirty, she lowered the binoculars and fixed her father with a look that could only be construed as You were right.

The previous blast of the F-650’s horn had started the first group of zombies veering left. As Cade fired the engine, he hit the horn again, letting it sound for three long seconds. That had the effect he was looking for: gaining the undivided attention of close to forty Zs in varying stages of decomposition. Already the littles, the number of them surging from two to ten, were ahead of the pack, trudging along the feeder road, heads bobbing and arms swaying, their dead-eye stares locked onto the source of the sound they all knew had everything to do with fresh meat.

Cade waited until the littles were ten feet from the pickup, its steel bumper nearly level with their lolling heads, to put the transmission into Reverse. When the pack of undead kids was out of sight, eclipsed by the pickup’s front end, he took his foot off the brake pedal and let the idling engine propel the rig, in reverse, along the packed dirt track.

With the proverbial fish on the hook, Cade continued reversing, always keeping just enough distance between the bumper and pack of littles so that they could see him and Raven through the windshield. While he drove, she stuck her arm out the window and waggled her fingers. Meals on wheels, she hectored the dead. Come and get us.

A quarter of a mile north by west of the camouflaged Airstream, where the second of two gates crossed the feeder road, Cade parked the F-650.

Raven knew the drill. Without saying a word, she exited the cab, hurried to the gate, and snipped the lone zip tie she had put there to secure it behind them on the way in. Pocketing the multitool and snipped tie, she ran the gate open. Stepping to the side of the grass-choked feeder road, she stayed put as her father slow-rolled the pickup through an opening meant for a normal-sized car or truck, not a commercial vehicle that had been lifted several inches, was up-armored with Kevlar panels and ballistic glass, and that rolled on monstrous run flat off-road tires.

As she waited for the pickup to stop rolling, she repeated her previous meals on wheels quip at the littles pouring through the open gate. With her ride finally coming broadside to her, and the keening of the littles’ nails scraping the pickup’s right front fender standing the hair on her neck to attention, she hauled open her door and scrambled aboard. It was close, but not danger close. None of the littles got a hand on her as she drew her legs into the cab. She was just getting her door slammed shut and hollering Go, go, go! when the distinct noise of a dozen tiny hands drumming the sheet metal by her right knee looped her father in on just how close she had cut it.

Angry at herself for underestimating the speed and tenacity of the littles, Raven sat back and took a few deep breaths, willing her racing pulse to slow.

That was close, he said, gaze locked on Green Parka, who was still ahead of the larger group and just passing through the gate.

Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, she pointed out. Your saying, not mine.

Cade said nothing. She was right. However, there was a razor-thin line between life and death outside the wire. Most don’t survive a battlefield amputation. Nobody survives falling to a swarm of biters.

By the time Cade had gotten them rolling again, the remainder of the herd was flowing around the pickup’s front end and the banging on Raven’s door had intensified. Peering over his shoulder, he steered one-handed, luring the undead procession toward the barbed wire fence paralleling a long, straight north/south stretch of Dietler Road.

Arriving at the next gate and enjoying twice the buffer between the lead zombies and the idling F-650, roughly seventy-five yards of overgrown pasture, Raven hopped out and quickly went through the same routine as she had at the previous gate. After snipping the zip ties that she had put in place of the rusty padlock she had cut off on their way in, she returned to her seat in the pickup, closed her door, and then lifted her gaze to the advancing herd, still about thirty yards distant. The littles were barely visible, just the top of their heads sharking through the field. They didn’t seem to be having a problem navigating the tall grass. The adult zombies, on the other hand, were struggling to keep up, the grass snagging boots and bare feet alike.

Much better than the last dismount, Cade acknowledged. You know what you did differently?

She shook her head. Nope. But I’m sure you’re going to spell it out for me.

You didn’t look over your shoulder every two seconds. You put trust in yourself.

I took the tall grass into consideration, she said. Figured I had more time to work.

You read it right, he said. It’s when you’re cutting it close that you can’t afford to shift your focus from the task at hand to something you have no control over. If your pursuers are shooting at you, he added, that’s a different story. If you don’t have someone pulling rear guard, it’s on you to momentarily shelve what you’re doing and work to eliminate the threat.

What do you suggest I do next time I find myself in a similar position?

Trust your other senses. Once again, driving one-handed, he reversed the pickup onto Dietler Road. Stopping at the end of a looping J-turn, the pickup straddling the dashed centerline, its grille facing north, he watched the fully coalesced herd part the grass and surge through the open gate.

Making a face, she asked, Do you think the zip ties will hold back the survivors once we’re back inside?

Doubling them up should do the trick, he said as he watched the lead zombies make the paved two-lane and execute an abrupt left-hand turn. Once the entire herd had transitioned from the field to the open road, the pack of littles again surging into the lead, he started the pickup rolling backward. After drawing the herd another hundred yards or so away from the gate, he braked hard, selected Drive, then matted the pedal. The six-hundred horsepower V10 howled underneath the hood. For a five-ton vehicle loaded down with gear and holding more than a hundred gallons of gas in her twin tanks, the transition from standing still to the speedometer needle edging close to the posted limit was damn impressive. When the Whipple supercharger kicked in, adding a substantial horsepower boost, its distinctive whine could be heard inside the cab and Raven and Cade were pressed back into their seats.

There was no reaction from the zombies. The dead sea didn’t begin to part. No looks of surprise fell upon a single face. Eyes remaining fixed on the noisy mass of steel and glass barreling down on them, they just kept plodding ahead, totally oblivious to what was about to befall them.

Cade held the wheel steady and dropped his gaze to the speedometer. Seeing the needle close to brushing the forty-miles-per-hour hash, he warned Raven to brace. No need, she had already planted her splayed left hand on the pickup’s sloping dash.

Gong-like sounds rang out and Cade winced as the littles met the plate metal bumper head-on and at full speed. Some were sent airborne, stick-thin arms and legs askew, no kind of grace to their aerial acrobatics. The rest were swallowed up, their little forms disappearing underneath the speeding vehicle.

As the pickup shimmied and shook, the sharp cracks of bone and skull losing out to off-road tires, Raven trapped her SBR between her knees and took ahold of the grab bar near her head. While mowing down the littles was almost always a nonevent, she knew, from experience, that parting the main herd was going to be a very violent affair.

Following the initial impacts, the F-650 slowed a bit and slewed to the right. As a result, Raven felt her body being tugged away from the window. Then, with fifty feet separating the main herd from the F-650, she felt it rear up and surge forward.

Arms sweeping up, Green Parka was first to meet the F-650’s armored grille. And he met it square on. It looked to Raven as if the zombie was soliciting a hug from the pickup. Instead of a warm embrace, the Z received the mother of all hockey checks from the multi-ton rig. She witnessed the zombie fly up and away, like undead Superman sans the colorful cape and tights. Dropping her gaze to the next in line, a female zombie naked from the waist up, she saw its reaching arms accordion toward its torso, phalanges, metacarpal, ulna, radius, and humerus instantly turned to pulp. In nearly the same moment the bland look of want on the thing’s face morphed into one of surprise. Only the transformation wasn’t borne from emotion or affected by a realization of what was happening to it. It was just Raven’s mind filling in the blanks as the extreme force of the sudden impact expelled both jaundiced eyes from the undead woman’s imploding skull. In the next instant, the zombies that had been trudging the road behind the unfortunate creature were either joining it underneath Black Beauty, or they were becoming prime examples of Newton’s Third Law of Motion, some blown out of their shoes and sent overtop the speeding vehicle, others simply being repulsed, their broken bodies going full rag doll and cartwheeling away, head over heels, only to be arrested viciously by the barbed wire fence lining both sides of Dietler Road.

The completely naked zombies in the crowd, arms and legs flailing boneless, were but white blurs as they were sent flying away from Black Beauty. The shamblers at the rear of the herd, most of them spread out along the road, were mostly spared a second death.

It was all over in a couple of seconds. However, the memory of the cacophony of flesh and bone being altered would stick with Raven for days. It always did, coming to her in the form of vivid nightmares that went on much longer than any one of them had in real life.

Chapter 2

In the F-650, a beat after Cade had warned Raven to brace, he swung his gaze forward and went quiet. Demanding his undivided attention were two things: taking as many of the zombies as possible out of the fight and keeping Black Beauty on the road. During the brief thunder run through the herd, even if he had had anything important to say, an observation on how the dead reacted, or perhaps a driving tip for Raven to file for future use, his words would have been drowned out by the morbid din created by speeding metal and bodies in motion coming together violently.

Now, as he slowed the pickup and steered toward the opening in the fence line, he dug some zip ties from the center console and passed them to Raven. Use two or three of these on each gate, he directed, eyes darting from fender to fender and then back to the narrow opening he was driving the pickup through. We have plenty. Use as many as you can fit through the padlock hole.

Copy that, she said, unable to tear her gaze from the carnage strewn along a couple of hundred feet of blacktop. Most of the littles were down for the count. About the same number of adult Zs, ten or so, had gone down after being struck and were still not moving. Of the rest—she estimated there were twenty or so—half were down but not out. Some of the zombies-turned-crawlers due to a severed spinal cord, or the loss of one or both legs, had already managed to roll onto their stomachs and were getting themselves turned toward the retreating pickup. A few crawlers were on the move, dragging themselves slowly down the road, leaving in their wake shiny red trails of blood comingled with other bodily fluids. Of the remaining zombies, half were in the process of rising off the road. The rest, the ones that had somehow been missed by the pickup and had stayed upright, were negotiating a stretch of the road littered with severed limbs, unidentifiable chunks of flesh, and shredded articles of clothing. Amazingly, Green Parka had survived the collision and was back on his feet. The meeting with the grille had left his head wildly misshapen and one arm with an obvious compound fracture. The other arm looked to be dislocated at the shoulder and swayed, pendulum-like, as the lucky ghoul craned toward the retreating vehicle. Now gone was the left sleeve of the dirty green coat. The left pant leg was also shorn off at the knee. And, in keeping with the theme, only the left one remained of the pair of road-worn boots it had been wearing before impact.

From now until Green Parka’s eventual second death, Raven was certain he would never again be leader of the pack. How the walking corpse had gotten to its feet, especially considering the damage to its arms, was still nagging her when she felt the pickup stop moving.

You’re up, Cade said, eyes scanning the field ahead of them for stragglers.

A tiny bit nauseous from the sights, sounds, and smells she had just been subjected to, she dismounted and secured the gate behind them with a trio of zip ties.

The ride from the outer gate to the inner gate was uneventful. The entire time she was trying to push to the back of her mind the image of the littles being hoovered up by Black Beauty. One moment they were reaching for the speeding pickup, the next they were in a violent spin cycle producing the meaty thuds she had heard filtering up through the floorboards.

Giving the inner gate the same treatment as the first, she climbed back in and hit her father with a barrage of questions, asking him first if they were going to inspect the camouflaged trailer, or if they were going to bypass it altogether and get busy searching for what they had come for.

Cade nodded at the trailer. In the Teams, we assault a compound the same way we do a single structure. Say we’re taking down a terrorist cell holed up in a bunch of buildings surrounded by a single wall.

Like UBL’s compound.

Exactly, he said. We either breach the walls or rope in via helo. Once we’re in we go from door to door, clearing every room until the enemy is nullified and we’re certain we’re the only ones left standing. Consider this trailer door number one. He nosed the pickup close to the trailer, put the transmission into Park, and set the brake.

Want me to clear it? she asked.

I got this one, Cade said, elbowing open his door. It was exactly what his late mentor Mike Desantos would say. Like Mike, Cade never expected anyone to do something he wasn’t willing to do himself—especially his own flesh and blood.

As Cade’s Danner boots hit the ground, the knee-high grass flattening underneath his hundred and seventy pounds, Raven was taking up station in the pickup’s load bed, where she could cover his advance to the trailer from an elevated position. It wasn’t quite the overwatch he’d get from one of his Pale Riders teammates, but it was better than nothing. As he transited the twenty or so feet between the pickup and trailer, he saw that her head was on a swivel and she was keeping the stubby SBR trained on the forest’s edge, which was the most likely place for a threat to emerge.

Cade crept toward the trailer, attention split between the ground at his feet and the Airstream’s partially open door. He knew the trailer’s interior was a prime place for a rotter to be lurking; still, the possibility of stumbling upon a crawler in the tall grass was real.

Reaching the deployed steps, he stopped to look and listen. The midafternoon sun infiltrating the half-foot vertical seam between the door and right-side jamb illuminated a sliver of gray carpet on the floor inside as well as a tiny portion of the trailer’s back wall. Shrouded in dark shadow, the rest was a mystery.

Coming from inside the trailer was a soft rustling of fabric and what could be fingernails being dragged lightly across a hard surface.

Craning his head right, one eye finding his SBR’s holographic optic, he trained the weapon on the door and then sniffed the air. He detected only the pleasant scent of pine. Which didn’t mean a thing, because first turns, usually few and far between these days, were no longer betrayed by the sickly-sweet stench associated with active decomposition.

Knowing that Raven was watching, Cade placed a cupped hand behind his left ear, then pointed to the trailer door. I hear something inside. Next, he crabbed sideways and placed one foot on the lower stair, testing it for stability with only half of his weight. Good to go. Transferring the rest of his weight forward, weapon shouldered and aimed at the narrow gap between door and jamb, he scaled the metal stairs. Reaching