Day three of training and Ray was already done with the basics.He walked the central clearing at dawn and watched the groups from the previous day picking up where they had stopped.Brandt ran the firearms group through positioning drills.Torres moved between the archers with quiet corrections, Gaines leading the combat group through the fall techniques Ray had taught him with the enthusiasm of someone who had discovered something useful and couldn't stop using it.They were better than yesterday.They weren't good enough yet.Ray went to find Reyes.******"I need the weapons distributed," he said. "All of them."Reyes looked up from the supply tally she had been working through. "We agreed to hold them in the……""That was before," Ray said. "Zed knows this general area. He doesn't have the exact location yet but he has enough. When his people find this camp I need everyone who can hold a weapon to already be holding one. A locked container helps nobody."Reyes put down her pen. "

Ray was unable to sleep that night.He lay in the tent allocated to him at the camp's eastern edge and stared at the canvas ceiling and thought about Harlan's right hand inside his jacket, holding something still at an angle that had nothing to do with keeping warm.He thought about the three days Harlan had spent at the camp's northern edge before Ray arrived. Three days of watching the gate, the walls, the watchtower positions. Three days of patient waiting that Ray had read as the behaviour of a cautious survivor and was now reading differently.He got up before dawn and went to find Reyes.*******She was already in the central tent with the supply tally, the same way she had been every morning Ray had been in the camp. He pulled the tent flap closed behind him and sat across from her and kept his voice low."About Harlan," he said.Reyes looked up."Last night after the meeting, he was standing at the northern wall facing the treeline” Ray said. His right hand was inside his

The second helicopter went down twenty minutes after the first.It was Ken doing.Nobody planned it and nobody told him to. He was on the eastern wall with the shotgun running low on shells when he saw the helicopter drift close enough on its sweep and he pulled the last two shells from his vest, loaded, waited for the angle, and fired both barrels at the tail rotor in one breath.The helicopter spinned.BOOOMMMM!!It came down on the northern treeline in a ball of noise and fire and the impact shook the ground hard enough that three people on the eastern wall lost their footing.Now two was down and one was left.The remaining helicopter pulled back fast, climbing higher, out of range of anything the camp had left, and without the two relay points the zombies below lost half of their direction in under a minute. The coordinated assault broke apart the way it had after Zoe took the first one down, zombies losing their shared purpose and drifting, the organised mass falling into chao

They moved out at first light.Thirty people moved in single file through the forest, without talking or making unnecessary sound. Ray was at the front with Saul one step behind him, Luiz and Diaz covering the flanks, Torres and two archers at the rear watching the back trail.Everyone was carrying something.Rifles, bows and sharp bladed tools. Body armor was on the front twelve. Bag packs with ammunition and medical supplies were distributed across the unit so that losing one person didn't mean losing all of one thing. Charlie had organized the load-out the previous night with the focus of someone who had spent his whole life thinking about inventory without knowing it would one day matter this much.Ray had pulled extra ammunition from his inventory before leaving and distributed it until everyone was carrying double what they had trained with.The forest was quiet for the first one hour.Then Saul touched Ray's arm.Ray stopped immediately.The signal went back down the line a

The decision on who was going took up to ten minutes between the group.Ray made the call the same way he made every call, based on what the mission needed rather than what people wanted, and the two things didn't always match."New York needs people who can pass as civilians," Ray said. He was standing with Reyes in the central tent, the map spread between them again, the route north marked in three stages. “They don't need fighters or a squad. They need people who can walk into an actual city and not drawing attention before we find what we're looking for."Reyes nodded. "People like who?""Me," Ray said. "Ada, Zoe, Priya, Charlie and Saul."Reyes looked at the list. "What about Ken?""Ken looks like what he is," Ray said. "A man built for combat and the same for Gaines and Brandt. New York is still running normally. People notice things in a normal city that they wouldn't notice out here." He paused. "Charlie can disappear into any crowd on the planet. Priya walks into a city a