Ray woke up on a concrete floor with his hands zip-tied in front of him and a headache that made the rib feel like a minor complaint.They were in some kind of holding room and no windows, one door, a bare bulb overhead that buzzed instead of hummed. Zoe was against the wall to his left, awake, watching the door. Priya sat with her knees pulled up, a fresh bruise darkening along her jaw. Saul was in the corner with his head down, and Ray couldn't tell if he was praying or just listening to something none of them could hear.Nobody had told them anything. Nobody had come back since the men in unmarked gear dragged them in.Then, six hours later, the door opened, and instead of another interrogation, a single guard cut the ties on Ray's wrists and told him, without explanation, that he was being released. Just him and the rest of the team followed an hour after, one at a time, no paperwork, no charges, like the whole thing had simply been switched off from somewhere above the guard

The camp came into view a little after dawn, and for the first time in days, Ray felt something in his chest loosen just slightly at the sight of it.Smoke from the cooking fires. The fence line, patched but holding. People moving between tents with the ordinary, unremarkable purpose of a place that had learned how to keep living. Mara set the chopper down in the clearing they used as a landing zone, and before the rotors had even finished winding down, people were already running toward it.Ray climbed out first, and the welcome met him before he had taken three steps.Hands were on his shoulders. Voices were calling his name. Someone pressed a cup of water into his hands without asking if he wanted it. For a few seconds it felt like the camp didn't know yet, like this was going to be a simple homecoming, people glad to see faces they'd worried over.Then the cargo door opened fully, and the gurney came into view, and the noise died all at once.It moved through the crowd like w

For one frozen second, Ray just watched.The woman by the supply tent wasn't alone anymore. Three more had gone gray in the space it took Ray to cross the clearing.A man near the cooking fire, a teenager who had been carrying water not ten minutes ago and an older woman who dropped the basket she was holding and turned on the person beside her without a sound of warning.Then the screaming started, and Ray stopped watching and started moving.The first one reached the woman by the water station and tore into her shoulder before anyone could get close enough to stop it. Blood landed on the dirt. The sound that came out of her wasn't a scream so much as something torn loose from somewhere deeper, and Ray was already there, hauling the infected off her.He drove it back with both hands and every bit of strength his body had left after three days of bleeding his own inventory dry.It wasn't like the replicas. It wasn't like anything organized. This was raw and starving and fast in t

The fight with the zombies took almost two hours.It didn't feel like a battle so much as a long.It felt like a grinding push and clear a stretch of trees, hold it, watch three more of the infected wander in from somewhere else, clear it again. Ray lost count of how many times his arms felt too heavy to keep swinging but he swung anyway.Saul took a bite graze along his shoulder early on, deep enough to bleed but not deep enough to be the kind of bite that mattered, and he wrapped it himself without stopping, without even slowing down.Ken went down once, tackled by two of them at the same time, and it was Ranch who pulled him free, dragging him back by the collar the same way. Ray had seen soldiers do it in New York, quiet and fast and without a single wasted word.Diaz's earlier graze split open again in the fighting, and by the ninety-minute he was moving slower, favoring the arm, but he didn't stop and didn't ask to fall back.He just kept swinging with whichever hand still wor

Priya found Ray outside the cave an hour later, he was sitting alone on a flat rock near the tree, his hands were still and empty on his lap."Hey," she said, and sat down beside him without waiting for an invitation.Ray didn't answer right away."You scared everyone back there," Priya announced."I scared myself," Ray answered.Priya studied him for a moment. "I want to say something, and I need you to actually listen instead of just nodding until I stop talking."Ray managed a small, tired smile at that. "Okay.""You need to stop," Priya pushed. “It's not forever, but just enough. And you've carried this whole camp on your back since Kansas. You fed us and fought for us and buried Charlie and led a rescue the next day like your body doesn't need the same things everyone else's does. It does, Ray. It needs rest. Real rest and not four hours against a cave wall between fights.""I know," Ray looked at her."Do you?"Ray looked at his hands. "Priya, we have maybe a week of food left