Pablo crawled across the barricade on his elbows with blood wetting his mouth.

His eyes were too bright with hate for his own good, and if was expecting to survive the massacre in front of him, he needed to do better at hiding his emotions.

He got a hand around a pistol he’d saved just for a moment like this.

Elias tracked him past the blade of Lachlan’s machete and let the shot go only when Lachlan’s angle cleared.

Pablo’s head snapped to the side and he laid his cheek against the concrete as if he’d decided to rest. The blood coming out of his head spoke volumes about how peaceful his rest was.

Anselmo never stopped talking on the radio.

His voice was calm, way too calm for the situation he had found himself in. His words were short, but he managed to convey everything he needed in those few words.

It was clear that he had the kind of tone that men trusted even when the world went sideways.

He looked at Sera once across the chaos and there was something like curiosity there. It definitely wasn’t lust or fear. More like cataloging, naming something that shouldn’t have been named.

Elias filed that away, too.

"Engine four," Alexei murmured, eyes narrowed toward the trees. "Coming in fast."

Elias heard it a beat later. The higher note of a lighter body, maybe a bike, maybe a stripped jeep meant to move quick across fields.

They weren’t throwing everything at the bridge so much as trying to get eyes on what was happening to their ’cousins’.

"Rear left," Elias told Zubair. "Angle."

Zubair didn’t answer. He never needed to when his hands were already working.

Heat settled around the lead truck like a cloak. Bullets died before they could do any damage.

Glass softened and then cooled hard again when it needed to be a wall.

The chain that had snapped near the bumper glowed red where it touched his boot and then dropped to black as he took the heat away so it wasn’t too warm around Sera’s ankle.

The light vehicle burst out of brush at the south mouth and tried to jump the curb to the sidewalk run.

Alexei threw a strip of ice as thin as paper exactly where the front tire would land. Rubber met the black ice and went from grip to zero in a heartbeat.

The bike kicked out from under the rider. He did a graceless head-first fall into the railing and made a sound that wouldn’t matter in five seconds.

"And that, mates, is why wearing your helmet is always important," joked Lachlan, not even bothering to look over at the body on the ground.

"Break contact," Anselmo ordered someone on the far side.

His eyes never left Sera. Then he moved. He took one step off the shack stoop, one step into the lane, and put his hands up.

He wasn’t surrendering, he wasn’t calling for peace. It was just a command to slow everything enough to hear him.

He looked like he’d stopped traffic in cities, like traffic had listened.

"Your choice just narrowed," he called across the lane. "Turn around. Take your dead. Leave the trucks."

Zubair’s mouth went flat. Sera’s smirk sharpened.

Elias didn’t answer words with words.

He adjusted his rifle three inches and took another gun off the board. The man behind the van cutout who’d worked up the nerve to try his luck again shouldn’t have bothered. The muzzle jerked, then fell inside the skin.

A new sound reached them.

Not an engine. A horn. Long. Two blasts. Discipline signal.

Elias exchanged a quick look with Alexei that didn’t waste any words: there were more on the way.

He thumbed a fresh magazine into place, the motion smooth as breathing, and licked dry air off his teeth.

The stupid zombies on the nearest bank had given up fighting their chains.

They hunkered low against the poles, their jaws working empty at nothing. The stink of them rode the breeze and washed back over the bridge. Flies turned the river skin into a ticking sheet where bodies had collected on the banks.

Anselmo angled his shoulders like he had enough and checked his watch. "Five minutes," he announced. "Then you learn what the word ’cousins’ mean."

Elias translated for the ones who didn’t speak arrogant. "More trucks. Heavier guns. Probably flanking the downstream access road. We’ll get pinched if we sit." He glanced at Sera.

"We’re not sitting," she answered without looking over. "We’re cleaning... huge difference."

Zubair’s chuckle lived low and dangerous. Lachlan grinned wider and rolled his neck like a brawler hearing a bell. Alexei flexed his fingers, ice crawling his knuckles before he let it melt harmlessly again.

Elias checked sky and sun and the shadows off the trees. He checked his men and the woman who was the reason any of this mattered. He checked the map in his head that turned angles and distances into simple answers.

"On my mark," he told them, which didn’t mean they waited for orders. It meant they would move as one when the second bit down.

While Zubair was the unquestioned leader, each member of KAS came with their own set of skills. If a situation called for a particular talent, then it was fine for that man to take over.

When it came to Elias, his talent was figuring out every possible path forward, backward, and around, and then picking the best one for them to take.

The horn blared again.

The far tree line spat a new truck, lower and longer, with metal slats welded over the hood and a grille that had been replaced by a plow blade. Three men in the bed. One crouched with a long tube on his shoulder.

"Launcher," Elias called, and felt Zubair’s attention snap like a switch.

The man with the tube struggled with the safety cap, panicked by his own importance.

He fumbled it off, lifted, tried to shoulder against recoil he’d never met before.

Elias put a round through the tube’s rear sight. The man flinched and squeezed the trigger as a natural response.

The rocket tore out crooked, kissed the bridge’s support system two yards up, and turned half the welded scrap into shrapnel.

The boom rolled down the span and threw dust and rust and spent bullet jackets into the air. The gunner fell flat in shock. The driver slammed the brakes and almost took his own men over the cab.

"Three minutes," Anselmo called, almost laughing now. "Make good use."

Elias marked him with the small black X he reserved for men who enjoyed this the wrong way.

Sera reached down and scratched Luci between the ears. The wolf’s eyes went half-lidded with pleasure, then bright again the next breath—ready.

"On me," Elias finished, and brought the rifle back to the pintle truck as the gunner’s understudy popped up to take a turn at dying.

The river didn’t slow. Mother nature always played by her own rules.

He took the next breath calm and complete and squeezed.