‎ James McAllister surveyed his family the same way he’d once surveyed a bombed-out intersection in Fallujah: as assets, liabilities, and vulnerable perimeters. Old habits, etched into bone. ‎His wife, Lola, had shared his bed for eighteen years. A marriage sealed on a forty-eight-hour leave just before his second tour. She was born and bred in a rural logging country with a hard, logical mind that served as the perfect counterweight to his analytical paranoia. She wasn’t squeamish. She could field-strip a Glock in under a minute, though she hated what the proficiency implied about the man she loved. ‎Then came the variables. The teenagers. ‎17 year old Isaac was a broad-shouldered, sullen carbon copy of his father, minus the discipline. He burned to prove he was a man, a dangerous hunger in a crisis. And Rose, two years younger, moved through the house like a ghost with perfect hearing. She could pick out the rattle of a loose fan belt or the click of a distant latch long befor

The twelve-gauge blast ripped through the quiet backyard like thunder. It caught the pointman at forty yards, a burst of heavy buckshot tearing through cotton and flesh, turning him on his spine as he collapsed into the dust. The others didn’t hesitate as they trampled over the falling corpse in a flailing, high-speed mêlée. They spread no wider than a human width of bodies, fanning out toward the family in a flowing liquid wedge driven by pure kinetic momentum to bite, and to kill.“Run! To the canal!” Mac bellowed as he rammed another shell into the chamber with an audible clack-clack.A second blast tore open the throat of a degenerating teenager in a high school track uniform. The body hit the grass. Mac remained in a crouched firing position providing cover while Lola grabbed Rose by the arm and sprinted toward the chain-link perimeter fence that bounded the property with the city's concrete drainage channels.“Isaac! Move your ass!” Lola screamed over her shoulder, his pisto

The sound of a hundred pairs of feet on asphalt at top speed keep sounding like a rapidly approaching thunderstorm."Behind the semi! Go, go, go!" Mac bellowed above the shriek and din of honking, trapped cars.He grabbed Isaac's shoulder, roughly shoved him into the gap between the jackknifed rig and the disabled sedan. Lola followed suit, hauling the hysterical Rose forward by the wrist through the tangle of cold, dead steel. The oily, shattering-glass covered asphalt was still streaked with the blood-red horrors of the initial discharge.Behind them, a screaming wall of the Infected closed with impossible speed. The creatures bounded, climbed over and hurled themselves through the gridlocked vehicles as they gained ground, a simian, rabid wave climbing atop the rooftops and smashing through the shattered windows of overturned buses. The State Trooper runner was the lead dog at their heels, his jaw unhinged and a shriek ripping from his throat.Mac skidded to a halt at the rear

The noise from the mouth of the tunnel consumed their cries.As Mac and Lola shoved them down the sloping concrete incline toward the sound of the roaring tunnel mouth Isaac and Rose screamed out. Mac let his shotgun drop. He grabbed the chain-link fence post on top with his left hand and flung himself down. The ball sockets on his arm joints cried out at the strain as he snatched upIsaac’s hoodie just in time.Lola’s survival instinct kicked into overdrive thanks to her primal terror, and she leaped out flat onto the sloped concrete, her boot wedged in a crack while her fingers wrapped around Rosie’s wrist."Pull!" Mac shouted. His neck muscles bulged as if they would burst through his skin.With a shared, agonizing heave, they managed to wrench the two teenagers back up the forty-five-degree incline just as the first of the sprinty hoard poured out of the tunnel. They did not bother climbing the walls, the forward motion was too strong. The crowd surged ahead and smashed against

The concrete floor squeaked and popped under their boots as the control tower listing was now in inches of agonized movement. The support pillars were shrieking and tearing under the dead-weight momentum of the swarming infected. A digital death warrant still hummed over their radios from the armored vehicle on the outer perimeter: "Incendiary containment commencing in T-minus four minutes.""The stairs are pancakeing!" shouted Mac, gripping a bolted-down routing desk for support as his feet slid on the sloped floor."The window!" shouted Isaac in terror, lunging toward the fractured glass that looked out onto the eastern rail line. "We can jump to the roof of that box car!""It's twenty-five feet down, Isaac! You'll crack your pelvis!"Mac intercepted his son's path, grabbing his arm. "Look at the suspension under that car; it's a bad landing. If you break your leg I have to carry you, and then everyone dies.""Stop calling us everyone!" Isaac yelled, ripping his arm from Mac's gr