His finger twitched near the trigger guard, prepared to move soon if so much as a shadow shifted. But the only movement between those vehicles with their busted glass and wide-open doors was fireteam Alpha.
Soon as Alpha settled into place, O’Neil led Bravo forward at a hunch, their boots rolling smoothly across the lawn, then the asphalt. He had to watch his step, careful not to tread over the broken bones scattered in the street or the torn suitcases, their contents spilled across the road.
He prowled toward their next destination—a medium tactical vehicle parked in the middle of a clearing between the campus buildings. That truck had been one of the army vehicles sent to evacuate students, staff, and faculty from the university. Judging by the picked-over skeletons scattered around it and the glimmer of spent bullet casings, they had been wholly unsuccessful.
O’Neil was determined that he and his people didn’t share the same fate.
When he reached the truck, he took stock of his surroundings again, pressing his rifle tight to his shoulder, searching up and down the overgrown lawn for movement.
The lawn stretched north and south.
North led to the quad neighboring the medical campus and hospital.
Hospitals were absolute slaughter-zones filled with hostile contacts. As the bioweapon spread, people had been corralled into every available patient bed in clinics, emergency rooms, and medical institutions across the country. And then as those people had gone mad, their mind wrecked by the Oni Agent, their bodies slowly transformed by it. They helped spread that agent by attacking medical personnel and volunteers trying to help them. Those medical institutions were at the epicenter of the disaster.
So O’Neil hated hospitals. Hated that their mission even dragged them close to one.
Toward the west and east, buildings with stone facades and parapets made him feel like he’d wandered into the middle of a medieval battlefield surrounded by castles. While the trees lining the streets and sidewalks down this long strip of grass blocked his view into most of the buildings, he could use his rifle’s optics to see through a couple of the broken windows of the West Campus Union. He recognized the structure from his briefing.
Through one of the Union’s windows, he caught a dark silhouette moving in a pane of bleeding moonlight. He could just make out the strange growths spiking from the monster’s shoulders before the creature disappeared deeper into the building.
He moved his aim away from the window, back toward the shoulder-high brick wall surrounding the buildings. Banners peeled away from the wall, flapping noisily in the wind. A few advertised the upcoming football season that was as dead as the skeletons scattered around them.
Alpha made it to the center of the lawn, taking the north side of the abandoned military truck. O’Neil was getting ready to move when the voice of the drone pilot sounded over his earpiece.
“Alpha, Bravo, Eagle Eyes One. Four movers headed your direction, coming from the west.”
O’Neil caught Reynolds’s gaze. Couldn’t exactly see his expression with the four-tube NVGs blocking his eyes, but he gestured to Reynolds to see if they should engage.
Reynolds shook his head, then signaled to the truck.
O’Neil passed that onto his team.
He understood the decision. No need to engage yet. Not if they didn’t have to. Because if they fired a shot now, it wouldn’t just be four movers sprinting toward them. Soon enough it would be eight, then sixteen, and then God only knew how many would worm their way out of the campus buildings in search of prey.
“Alpha, Bravo, Charlie Actual here,” another voice called. “We have overwatch.”
“Copy, Charlie Actual,” Reynolds called back, his voice coming in at a whisper over the comms. “Hold fire for now.”
O’Neil belly-crawled underneath the truck. He pushed aside half a ribcage and a broken long bone to situate himself behind the driver’s side front wheel. Tate squeezed in beside him, with Van and Loeb to the rear of the truck. Stuart, Henderson, and McLean all lay flat in their bellies at Reynolds’s direction.
“Movers ten yards from your position,” the drone pilot called.
O’Neil lifted his rifle slowly as possible, ready to fire should one of the beasts drop down to investigate under the vehicle.
Then he heard the click of the beasts’ talons on the street. Heard their raspy breathing.
He had seen enough of the beasts to have a guess at what these ones would look like. From the sound of bone clattering against bone, these ones were probably in the advanced stages of the Oni Agent infection. Their bones would have become overgrown, bursting out of their rotten flesh, jutting in fins and bulbous growths.
He tried not to let his imagination run too wild as the beasts approached, their feet smashing through the mud and grass, kicking up the gnawed bones around the truck. Between the blades of grass, he could just see their shins and the bones that had once been inside their toes now pushing out like talons, peeled-back flesh puckering around the bones.
Two of the beasts rushed past the truck like they had spotted a hapless animal bounding through the grass. But the other two paused near the vehicle.
Scientists said these creatures’ senses weren’t much different than a healthy human. Perhaps worse. Though they were easy to excite, they responded mostly to sight and sound.
Of course, those scientists usually made those assumptions from behind the fortified walls with the rest of the rear echelon pogues who didn’t venture out into the shit like this.
O’Neil held his breath, frozen. One of the beasts remained standing, pawing at the side of the truck, its claws scraping against the metal like it was trying to climb into the passenger’s seat.
The other scooped up one of the bones near the truck’s hood. O’Neil heard a loud crunch, then a sickening slurp. Soon as the bone cracked, the other beast ran toward the one feeding. They growled at each other. Then it sounded like they were shoving and clawing at each other as best as O’Neil could tell from their shuffling feet and the clashing thud and scratch of bone against bone.
One of the monsters suddenly pushed the other to the ground.
O’Neil’s heart began hammering, thudding against his ribcage, threatening to tear out and sprint across the lawn. His lungs screamed at him for oxygen, but he dared not take a breath. Couldn’t risk attracting the attention of the fallen Skull.
Maybe it was his imagination, but he thought he felt Tate tense beside him.
The Skull had fallen on its back into the grass and bones. Most of its body was concealed from O’Neil by the long strands of grass and the bones and fragments of decaying clothing waving in the wind around them. But if the Skull looked to its left, turned its head just a bit, it would see O’Neil’s NVGs pointed straight at it.
Slowly, he moved his finger to the trigger.
One shot right to the creature’s face would end its life. Another well-placed shot would take out the second creature when it naturally dove to investigate the ringing gunshot that would come from beneath the truck.
With those two shots, the howls of neighboring Skulls would erupt from within the dormitories and student union and everywhere else the beasts were hiding. That commotion would no doubt attract the hundreds, if not thousands, wandering the corridors of the hospitals and clinics, too.
This was the shot he would take if he had to. But soon as he did, he had to be ready to fight not just one or two of these beasts, but a whole army.
He stared down his sights, praying for the Skull to look the other way.
Hoping that it would simply ignore the SEALs and be on its way.
But then the Skull turned its head.
-3-
O’Neil went absolutely still.