Once they hit the edge of the graveyard, they paused and watched for contacts as Alpha advanced. Reynolds’s fireteam filtered between the gravestones and under the trees moving as smoothly as spirits haunting the woods. They posted up at the edge of a street separating the graveyard from the university under a wall of tall, spindly trees.
Once it was their turn to move, O’Neil led his team past Alpha toward a truck that had rear-ended a minivan in the middle of that street. The windshield of the truck was nothing but glass pebbles on the cracked asphalt.
A body lay across the hood.
Or rather, what was left of the body.
Like many corpses O’Neil had seen in the field, this one was nothing but bones. Claw and teeth marks scored most of those bones. Some of the long bones had been cracked open, the marrow sucked dry.
In the back of the truck, O’Neil spotted a cooler and tent mixed in with other camping supplies. There was a shotgun in the front seat, and, to O’Neil’s horror, he noticed a second, smaller skeleton that had been dragged halfway through the passenger window. Much like the first, it had been cracked and gnawed on, only a few leathery flaps of skin and tendon left.
He tried to ignore who these people might have been before the Skulls had spread through the country. What mundane lives they might have led, shuttling between the office and fishing on the weekends. Mundane lives that O’Neil wished they had gotten to keep on living.
Maybe they used to get out to the Blue Ridge mountains a few hours away for long weekends to hike and camp. Looked like they had been desperate to embark on another camping trip—this one to escape the apocalypse—but the apocalypse had gotten to them first.
Get it together, O’Neil admonished himself.
He had to keep his mind in the game. Prevent himself from being distracted. Because he knew these would be far from the only bodies he saw tonight.
As they pushed toward the campus, buildings rising behind the trees, the fetid odor of death drifted over the teams. Smelled like a hundred corpses had been piled up and left to rot outside. That’s when he heard it. The telltale scratching and clicking. The rattle of bones against each other, an almost gentle sound, like distant wooden chimes.
The creatures responsible for that noise were anything but gentle.
Skulls.
He took in a deep breath.
Nearly gagged at the stench.
If he sat there too long, if he didn’t get moving soon as Alpha covered them, he would start to think about the hundreds of Skulls that must be lurking on the campus. Hundreds of beasts that would be more than happy to turn him and his team into their next meal.
Another howl cut through the night. That monstrous voice echoed between the trees. This time, other voices rose to meet it, shrieking in an ear-shattering clamor.
O’Neil’s blood ran cold, and a voice in the back of his mind told him to run. To get the hell out of Durham as fast as he could.
He held up his fist.
His team froze, peering through the trees, watching for contacts.
Those haunting voices alone were enough to make a man cower in fear. To whimper and cry—and O’Neil wouldn’t blame the person that did.
But that wasn’t what SEALs did.
Especially not SEAL Team 6.
There was a saying in DEVGRU.
One the brass especially liked to repeat.
‘The only easy day was yesterday.’
Problem was, yesterday was damn hard.
Really damn hard.
-2-
O’Neil couldn’t see it as they advanced, but deeper on Duke’s campus they would find the Levine Science Research Center. The building had once hosted a plethora of cutting-edge laboratories, institutions, and research.
Today, it was the last refuge for a group of seven scientists and medical professionals. That group had been working in the nearby hospitals and adjacent laboratories as the world had crumbled around them. They were desperate to find a way to reverse the biological agent that had weaponized the American population against themselves.
From the mission briefing, O’Neil knew the seven researchers had been receiving intel passed on by USAMRIID researchers up in Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland, where DEVGRU had recently been assigned. That intel had been obtained from a group of covert military contractors that called themselves the Hunters. O’Neil had been skeptical of anyone who relied on intel from a group of operatives, but their troop commander had assured him this particular contracting organization had a long history with the United States. They had spent years providing critical intelligence and executing dangerous missions to combat illegal biological and chemical weapons projects pursued by rogue states and terrorists.
O’Neil had been on his fair share of classified missions and covers ops. He guessed the bioweapon responsible for the Skulls was unlike anything the Hunters had ever encountered, even if they had faced the worst of the worst. Because the operation to stop it sure as hell was the most nightmarish scenario O’Neil had ever faced.
Most of the Skull voices silenced except for a single howl drifting over the woods. O’Neil held his fist up again, bringing Bravo to a halt. Alpha was behind them, situated in their overwatch position near a semi-truck trailer next to what used to be a dormitory.
He waited for a few seconds, his nerves sparking with electricity, listening to see if the hunting Skulls had gotten closer or if they were still prowling through the woods, calling out to each other in anticipation of finding fresh prey.
Every time the breeze shifted, the odor of rotting meat swirled around him. He had long-since learned a Skull smelled like a body left outside for a month in the hot, humid North Carolina summer.
And tonight, the air smelled like someone had committed a massacre and forgotten to bury the bodies.
Somewhere high above, a drone circled. It bathed their path in IR light to help them see with their NVGs. Problem was that their sightlines were limited by the dense trees between buildings and walkways. Even with the area bathed in IR, O’Neil couldn’t see much more than thirty to fifty feet in front of their position.
He could only guess what lay beyond visual contact based off that overwhelming scent. No matter how he wound through the trees, no matter how he tried to avoid what he guessed might be the most populated segments of the campus, he feared, sooner or later, he was going to run into the beasts.
He prayed that it would be later.
Much later.
Another thirty seconds passed without another howl.
Maybe the beasts had grown bored.
All he knew was that he didn’t want to give them another reason to start their howling again.
O’Neil led his team between the trees, each step carefully placed to avoid snapping branches until they made it to the corner of another dormitory. The building sat across from a wide lawn full of tall, swaying grass and gangly weeds. He couldn’t quite see the crisscrossing sidewalks and wide streets because of the wild plants, but knew they were there thanks to the map he’d studied.
The team posted up against the building’s stone façade, pressing themselves flat against it. Tired, haunting footsteps clacked out from the broken windows of the dormitories along with that familiar rattle and smack of bony appendages clicking together.
The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end, and he tried to slow his breathing, willing his heart to settle. Worried that even the tiniest crunch of his boots might attract the monsters lurking inside that building.
Alpha bounded past them toward the vehicles parked in the middle of the street in front of the dorms. O’Neil roved his aim over the vehicles, looking for movers. Ready to fire at the first sign of an aggressor moving in on Alpha.