Ray couldn't move, he stood still for a brief moment.The chopper swept past overhead, close enough that the wind of its rotors flattened the grass around him.Still his eyes stayed locked on the open door, on the woman standing in it like she'd never once been afraid of anything."Ray!" Jane's voice cut through, sharp and urgent. "Ray, get down!"He barely heard the warning until she physically hauled him sideways.The two of them dropped behind cover as gunfire raked across the ground where he had been standing a half-second earlier."That's my mother," Ray screamed with hollow voice in disbelief. "Jane, that's actually her." He added."I saw her too" Jane admitted keeping low, weapon still trained on the sky. "Ray, I need you here, right now. Whatever that is, we can't afford you frozen in the middle of it."Ray forced his focus back to the fight, but something in his chest had cracked open wide and refused to close again.******The battle unfolded fast and brutal, five choppers

"The Rogues are the last real obstacle," Jane announced, laying it out plainly at the war table. "Kansas is ours except for their territory and a handful of weak stragglers and once we finish this, we finish it properly.""No," Ferris said with alarm in her voice.The word landed flat and immediate, cutting through the room's momentum entirely."No," Jane echoed slowly after her with disbelief coloring her voice. "Ferris, we've been building toward this for weeks.""We're not attacking the Rogues," Ferris repeated, steadily despite the room's rising tension. "Not now and not without understanding something you don't currently understand.""Then explain it," Ray said.Ferris was quiet a moment, weighing something clearly heavier than the room realized."The Rogues aren't working for Wolfe," she said finally. "Not really. They're mine. Spies, embedded since before any of you arrived at my camp.”“Every deal I made with them, every crate of supplies, it wasn't buying safety from traff

They reached the farmland by midmorning, smoke rising thin over a cluster of old grain silos converted into something that looked, from a distance, disturbingly organized."Cut the engines here," Ray said, and the small team — himself, Jane, Saul, and two of Mattias's fighters — approached the rest of the way on foot, weapons ready but lowered.The sound reached them before the sight did. Gunfire, sporadic, and beneath it something else, low and pained, a sound Ray had learned to recognize with a sick lurch in his stomach."That's not infected snarling," Saul said quietly, head tilted. "That's something in pain. Held pain. Contained."They found the source at the edge of the compound, a fenced enclosure built into the side of one of the silos, and what Ray saw through the gaps in the metal stopped him cold.Infected, restrained in makeshift harnesses, wired to equipment that looked cobbled together from salvaged hospital gear and farm machinery both.Several people in rough protective

Los Angeles looked almost unreal after everything they'd survived.Streets full of ordinary traffic. Storefronts open, lit, untouched by the horror that had swallowed half a country already. People walked past each other without flinching at every sudden noise, carrying groceries, laughing over coffee, entirely unaware of what marched steadily toward them from the east."It's like stepping into a memory," Zoe said quietly, watching it all pass by the car window."Enjoy it while it lasts," Jane addressed with sarcasm. "We're here to make sure it stays this way."They found a quiet motel on the edge of the city to serve as a base, and for the first night in longer than Ray could remember, nobody slept with a weapon within arm's reach.******They approached the military's regional headquarters the next morning through official channels, exactly as planned.Ray led with the same careful, rehearsed account Jane had drilled into all of them.They would serve as firsthand witnesses from t

They gave the team a few hours to recover before the next round, and Ray spent every minute of it listening.The guards here talked more than they should have.It was the careless kind of talk that came from men who never expected their prisoners to leave alive to repeat it. Ray heard fragments through the cell walls .He heard numbers, shipments, contracts and slowly, piece by piece, a picture started forming that turned his stomach worse than the jawbreaker treatment had."They're generating power down here," Nichole said quietly, catching the same fragments Ray had. "Listen to the hum in the walls, that's not a standard generator. That's biological.""Biological how?" Zoe asked."The infected," Nichole said. "Something about their altered cellular structure produces energy under the right conditions. Wolfe's not just conquering territory.”“He's turned this whole facility into a power source, using the very thing he created to run the machine that studies more of it."*******Sa