"Now," Zubair agreed.

He took them off the river and toward a wide field that had been wheat or rye once.

The stubble lay low and mean. No rocks. No fence posts inside the first hundred yards.

He lined the nose up with the long axis and let the wind push him a fraction so he could use it in the last seconds.

"Skids," Alexei warned, hands on the door frame.

"I see them," Zubair said.

The engine coughed again. Held. Then coughed harder. The tone sagged two notes and refused to climb back.

"Hold him," Sera told Luci. The wolf pressed himself lower between her knees and rumbled once, a sound that was more about courage than fear.

Lachlan laughed. He couldn’t help it. He braced his boots and grabbed the strap over his head like he dared the headliner to tear.

Elias set his palms flat on his thighs and made himself soft in the shoulders. Hard shoulders break. Soft ones ride the drop.

Dust rose in the field as the rotor wash hit it. Stubble flattened in rippling rings. The helicopter slid lower, steady, nose a hair high, skids squared to the world.

A piece of old irrigation pipe lay hidden in the weeds at the edge of the field.

Zubair saw it on the last breath.

He lifted the nose a fraction more and drifted left to miss it.

The tail cleared it by a hand’s width. The left skid caught a rut the river had left the last time it flooded. The world tilted ten degrees and then twenty.

"Brace for impact," Elias announced, his voice coming loud over the beating rotor of the helicopter.

Zubair did not answer. He flew the tilt, left pedal down, cyclic forward, trying to buy another second, then another.

The engine note died a little.

The ground came up a lot.

The rotors beat dust into a solid wall, brown and close and blinding. The field vanished. The world became sound and shake.

Sera closed her hand tighter in Luci’s fur.

Zubair held the machine level with will where fuel couldn’t.

The first skid kissed dirt.

The second skid grabbed.

The helicopter bucked like a live thing and tried to lie down on its side.

Zubair drove his heel into the pedal and shoved the stick to hold the roll.

The cabin screamed metal on dirt.

The windshield filled with earth and sky at the same time.

They were not flying anymore.

------

The helicopter died hard.

Metal screamed as the last of the fuel choked out of the engine.

The transport hit dirt, skidded fifty yards across the dead field, rolled once on the right skid, and slammed upright again so hard the bulkhead cracked.

Dust swallowed the world before anyone inside could see if they were dead or not.

Zubair kicked his door open first. The hinges spat grit.

He checked Sera before he checked himself. It was one quick look, letting out a breath he didn’t know he was holding when he saw her sitting steady with Luci crouched low between her knees, then the rest of the men.

Everyone breathing.

Outside, the wind caught the dust and shoved it sideways across the wreck.

Shapes moved inside it.

At first, they looked like men.

Then the first one limped into the open and the head turned too far, the arms hung too low, the eyes didn’t blink. Skin gray, torn, dragging itself toward the wreck like gravity owed it dinner.

"Stupid zombies," Elias muttered, racking the rifle as he stepped out behind Zubair.

"Finally! Zombies like the movies promised," Lachlan grinned, swinging his machete off his shoulder. "Slow. Dumb. And hungry."

Alexei scanned the dust wall where more of them came—dozens, staggering out of the haze where the roads had been, where the crash noise had gone first.

He didn’t like the way some obviously stayed behind, letting the stupid ones make their move first.

"Mutated," he announced flatly, pointing to the sea of blue and purple bodies.

Zubair shoved the pilot door the rest of the way open. The metal rang like a bell.

He stepped onto the field, his boots sinking into the churned dirt, and the air around him heated in a way the wind didn’t touch.

"Company," Elias warned, sight already on the runner.

It hit the ground twenty yards out when the first shot cracked.

More shapes came out of the dust.

Some dragging.

Some sprinting on limbs too long, too sharp, too fast to be human.

Sera’s horde moved without speaking, forming the ring they always did.

Lachlan left, Elias right, Alexei behind, Zubair forward, Sera in the center with Luci leaning against her thigh, fur up, eyes black, body tight as the things closed in.

And then the guns started.

The only problem was that it wasn’t theirs.

From the south fence line where the dust thinned just long enough to show three trucks crawling forward, rifles across their hoods, engines coughing smoke, men bristling in leather and scrap metal.

"Scavengers," Elias clipped.

"Opportunists," Alexei added flatly.

Lachlan grinned wide enough to show teeth. "Idiots."

The first bullet slapped dirt five feet from Zubair’s boots.

The second blew a hole through a stupid zombie’s skull—the thing crumpled mid-step, brainless before it hit the ground.

The third ripped half the chest off a mutated one—and it didn’t even slow down.

The trucks gunned closer, tires ripping ruts through the dead field. Shouting over the engines, over the gunfire, over the alarms the scavengers thought they controlled.

Nobody cared who they hit first.

Zubair lifted one hand.

Fire crawled the dry grass like it had been waiting there the whole time.

A wall of heat tore itself across the field—between the trucks and the wreck, between the stupid zombies staggering forward and the men with rifles, between the mutated ones and Sera standing in the center like she had roots in the dirt.

Smoke rolled with the wind, shoving it back toward the scavengers.

The first truck hit the wall of fire, swerved hard enough to roll into the ditch.

Men spilled out the side—one still firing blind as he hit dirt, another screaming as he tried to beat out the flames crawling up his own arms.

Elias dropped two more before they reached the line.

Lachlan waded into the first stupid zombie close enough to smell wrong, machete cracking through its neck so the head rolled one way and the rest folded the other.

Alexei froze the ground under the second truck. Tires locked into ice, chassis twisting, the whole thing skidding sideways into the fence until metal screamed and stopped moving.

The mutated ones didn’t care about fire or ice or fences.

They ran on long, snapping limbs, eyes too pale, too small, jaws opening wrong with too many teeth in too many rows.

Sera moved then.

One grabbed for her shoulder.

She caught its wrist, bent it backward until bone tore free, and shoved the splintered edge through its own throat.

It dropped at her feet without air left to scream.

Zubair stepped in front of the third truck before it cleared the smoke.

Both hands lifted this time. The grass lit under it in a sheet. The fuel tank went with it.

The blast threw heat across the field hard enough to shove the last of the scavengers back before they even reached the fire line.

The men with guns ran.

The mutated ones didn’t.

The stupid zombies didn’t even notice.

The horde cut through all of it.

Lachlan’s blade took heads off anything slow and rotting.

Elias shot down anything too fast, too many teeth, too much speed to ignore.

Alexei froze the last truck into the dirt so Zubair could turn its cab into a furnace.

Sera ripped apart anything close enough to touch her, eyes black, Luci hitting the ones behind so nothing ever reached her twice.

The field turned into smoke and fire and screaming metal.

One last mutated thing made it through the line.

Zubair met it barehanded. Heat climbed its spine before it cleared ten yards. It hit the dirt as nothing but black bone and ash.

The rest broke.

The scavengers left what was left of their trucks and ran south.

The stupid zombies dragged themselves the wrong way and forgot why halfway there.

The mutated ones stopped moving only when there was nothing left to kill.

Smoke rolled across the wreck until the helicopter disappeared behind it.

No one spoke.

The horde stood in the center of the field, dirt and blood and pieces of things cooling around them, weapons down but not away, eyes on the fence line where the next wave should have come and didn’t.

Sera ran one hand down Luci’s fur, slow, steady.

Zubair looked south where the trucks had vanished and knew they’d be back with more.

Alexei leaned against the wreck, watching smoke bleed across the sky.

Lachlan grinned with blood on his boots. "Welcome to Country M."

No one laughed.

The wind carried new engines out of the distance.

Closer.

Not nearly afraid enough.