Page 25 of Redemption
“Stay in your fire teams! Rally with your units! You’ve been trained. You’ve been prepared. You are the deadliest fighting force known to mankind! Lethal dogs of war! Now’s the time to put the mustard on the hotdog, Marines! Be ready to show old Chesty what you’re made of, or be prepared to apologize to his angelic ass in the afterlife! NOW MOVE OUT!”
Holy shit…
Did he just say the virus is turning people cannibalistic?
And now... it’s fucking here.
Ready to create more.
God help us all.
Chapter Eleven
Dare
March, One year ago…
One week after the invasion
“SHHHH, SHUT THE FUCK UP,” Wiengard whisper shouts, holding his hand suspended in the air behind his back, beckoning us to… well, shut the fuck up.
It’s been a week. One single week and we’re stuck down here, hiding like a pack of rats in an underground bunker. Once we got word that the virus had made it on base, we were told to rendezvous with another group just a few miles away from our battalion’s barracks. From there, if the enemy managed to get past the initial guard, we were supposed to meet them on the road roughly fifteen to twenty miles away. That didn’t happen at all, however. The virus met us only twenty minutes later, just a few miles down the road.
It was that quick.
They might not have been fast-moving, keeping to speeds ranging from an amble to a lumbering jog, but it was five hundred or so of us versus thousands of them, and no amount of ammunition was able to take them down.
We were overrun within hours.
Prior intelligence, collectively gained over the past few weeks, suggested that the virus was primarily contracted via airborne transmission. Which was why we were instructed to make use of our military-issued gas masks. What they neglected to say was how long it took for a person to exhibit symptoms after exposure when the damn hostiles ripped them from our faces upon contact.
Apparently, fucking immediately in some cases.
In an instant, members of my battalion, as well as others, turncoated against their own fucking will. One second. One interaction. One measly breath. That’s all it took for a man to redirect his sights on his own friends and squad mates.
Even those piloting the aircraft sent in for backup weren’t able to avoid the contagion. Somehow, the virus managed to get to them as well, even in a sealed cockpit. And what was supposed to be a team of reinforcements swiftly turned into dozens of twenty-ton steel projectiles as they careened back down to Earth, cratering everything in their path.
Not everyone turned as soon as they were exposed, however. Many, seemingly immune to the contagion that ravaged the rest, managed to fight back the surge. At least, until they were inevitably overrun. Their flesh became a delicacy to the ravenous horde as it was ripped from their still screaming bodies, the sound echoing around us as more and more of our ranks met their gruesome end only to join theirs, even seven days later.
∞∞∞
One week prior...
My squad and I race around to the back of a building, using it as cover while forming a tight circle to regroup, the lot of us barely managing to escape the surging horde. Our chests heave with sawing breaths as we take a moment, every one of us overflowing with adrenaline as we look at the carnage surrounding our muddled formation.
It’s a battlefield. A sea of death. A field of carnage. The roads, formerly blacktop, are now concealed by flowing rivers of red. Thousands of bodies lie at unnatural angles, draped over everything, discarded amongst the wreckage. Some are whole, for the most part—being someone who was either trampled to death or bitten, or a hostile finally taken down—while others are simply parts of what was once a whole. Severed limbs and decapitated heads can be seen from every direction.
A terrified face looks up at me just a few feet from the soles of my shoes, its mouth open wide as if he was screaming when he met his end.
Lee...
He was one of mine. Just before the lockdown, he’d gotten news he was about to PCS to California. According to the paperwork, he was supposed to ship out this past week. He would have been on the other side of the country and far awayfrom this bullshit if it wasn’t for the mandatory shutdown and pending invasion.
But here he is...
A head... at my feet.
Laid low like the rest of them.
