Extinction Edge

-Prologue-

The sharp popping of distant gunfire startled Meg Pratt awake. She jolted upright, wondering at first if she was still dreaming.

The stillness of the night squeezed her like a vise as she emerged from a deep sleep. Reality slowly set in as she remembered, bringing with it a wave of despair and anxiety that worked its way from her gut to her pounding heart. Several fuzzy minutes passed before she came to her senses.

She had awoken from one nightmare only to enter another. Over two weeks had passed since the Hemorrhage Virus swept across the nation. Honking horns, blaring sirens, and shouts from noisy neighbors were absent now. New York City was a dead zone. No more neon lights, no more blinking advertisements.

The old world was gone, and no one could bring it back.

After rubbing her eyes, she scanned the room. Jed and Rex slept in the adjacent beds, their silhouettes frozen in the rays of moonlight seeping through the gaps in the boarded-up windows.

Meg examined the two-by-fours she and the other firefighters had hastily nailed across the windows. So much had happened in that short time. And as her gaze fell upon the empty beds neatly lined up throughout the rest of the room, her mind and heart ached.

The agony was brief, ripped away by more gunshots. She held a breath in her chest, listening, trying to pinpoint a location, but once again the noise slipped away. It was the first sign of a military presence since the jets had swooped in twelve hours ago.

The next round of gunfire came a moment later. The cracks were from fully automatic weapons. The noise reverberated through the derelict city streets, making it impossible to pinpoint. It had to be military. There had only been a few civilians who could get their hands on that type of firepower, and they were all dead.

“You hear that?” came a voice a few feet away. It was Jed, the quiet Marine with a Southern accent. Meg’s crew had taken him in days earlier when his platoon had been wiped out ten blocks away.

Jed swung his feet over the side of his bed and crossed the room on his toes. The creaking of floorboards woke up Rex. His 300-pound frame shot up. “What’s going on? Did they find us?” He ran a hand through his thick red hair.

“Shhh,” Meg said, holding a finger to her mouth. She’d always found Rex to be a bit paranoid for a man of his size. But she couldn’t fault him for that now. Especially after the unthinkable things they’d seen. The three of them were all that was left now. Their families and friends were dead. Everyone they ever knew was gone.

Meg closed her eyes at the thought of her husband, infected and crazed. She’d watched him kill a neighbor before a soldier gunned him down. No matter how many times she told herself it wasn’t her husband that died that day, she still couldn’t bring herself to believe it. Some small part of him had remained when the bullets tore through his body. She had seen it in his dying eyes.

Grabbing her axe, Meg joined Jed at the window.

“See anything?” she asked.

“Not yet.”

Pressing her right eye against a crack in the boards, Meg scanned the rooftops for motion. She flinched when the gunshots came again. They were getting closer.

Meg continued to probe the darkness, her gaze stopping on the gargoyles that protruded off the stone ledges two buildings down. There was something else, too, something moving in the shadows.

“You see that?” Meg asked.

Jed craned his neck and squinted. “I can’t really see anything.”

Another round of automatic gunfire broke out. Muzzle flashes flickered on the rooftop, illuminating the silhouettes of soldiers. They fired as they ran. And although Meg couldn’t see the ravenous creatures chasing them, she knew they were out there.

“Soldiers,” Jed whispered. “And…”

Meg pressed her eye closer, scratching her forehead on the coarse wood. Moonlight spilled from the clouds and lit up the rooftops with a dim curtain of white.

A chill spiked through Meg’s body when she saw the dozens of infected chasing the soldiers across the rooftops. The pack skittered across the rooftop and along the exterior walls of the building like man-sized insects.

The gunfire couldn’t mask the noises the creatures made. The scratching, the clicking joints, and their primal screams. These no longer seemed like men and women; they were the predators of the new world. Humans transformed into monsters from the Hemorrhage Virus. People like her best friend Eric, a man she’d known her entire life. Turning her axe on him had been the hardest thing Meg had ever done. She could still hear the crunch of bone and the scream of agony.

Meg brushed a lock of brown hair from her face and pressed her eye closer to the crack in the wood, following the soldiers as they jumped from ledge to ledge. They were fast, but the creatures were faster.

Flexing her muscular legs, she remembered her narrow escape from a pack of the monsters when they’d rescued Jed. She could outrun almost every firefighter she had worked with. She was a three-time Ironman triathlete. But it wasn’t the endurance or speed she’d gained from swimming, biking and running over a hundred and forty miles in a day that secured her escape. It was the adrenaline that only pure fear could produce.

She imagined the soldiers were experiencing the same adrenaline. They eased to a stop on the next rooftop; a thirty-foot-tall billboard loomed over their silhouettes.

“They’re out of room,” Meg whispered. She strained to see the creatures trailing the team. Shadowy shapes dashed across the buildings. Apparitions in the night.

More flashes lit up the scene. The three soldiers stood close together, firing at the horde of infected racing toward them. The deformed creatures twitched and jerked, dropping one by one as bullets riddled their bodies. It was over in a few seconds.

The moon vanished, the sky swallowing the light like a brooding storm.

Meg pulled her eye away from the boards at the sound of heavy footsteps. Rex had finally decided to get out of bed. The man took several hesitant steps toward the window.

“I think we should try to get to that rooftop,” Jed whispered.

“Are you insane?” Rex said. “We won’t make it for more than two minutes outside.”

The distant thump of a helicopter pulled Meg back to the window. Her eyes roved across the skyline, searching for the aircraft.

“Hear that? That’s our ticket out of this hellhole.” Meg gripped her axe tighter. “I’m with Jed. We need to get to that rooftop.”

“We don’t have much time; we need to move,” Jed added.

In the corner of her eye, Meg saw Rex shaking his head. “But… no… we—”

“What’s that?” Meg narrowed her focus on the billboard. She swallowed hard when she saw infected climbing the back of the sign. There were a half dozen of them, maybe more.

“Shit,” Meg said. She scanned the roof for the soldiers. There, on the east and south ledge. For a moment they looked like the gargoyles, frozen as they waited for extraction, oblivious to the approaching threat.

“Those things are going to sneak up on them!” Jed said in a voice shy of a shout. “We have to warn them.”

Rex grabbed the Marine by his arm. “Keep it down. Are you crazy? They’ll hear you.”

Meg watched with gritted teeth. “There isn’t anything we can do. Not from here.”

Rex was right. He was a paranoid son of a bitch, but he was right. The infected were drawn to noises—and the scent of flesh. From the safety of their boarded-up room, she’d seen the creatures sniffing the air, hunting other survivors.

And here she was again, helplessly watching the three unsuspecting soldiers as the monsters advanced. There was no running from them. No escape. Hiding was the only option.

Blinking red lights on the skyline pulled her gaze away from the roof. The sleek outline of a Black Hawk descended over the building. There was no way Meg and the others would make it to the rooftop, even if they tried. They were stranded.

Jed pulled out of Rex’s grip and moved back to the two-by-fours. “Oh my God,” he whispered.

The creatures spilled over the top of the billboard. They slid down the side, and then Meg lost sight of them. Gunfire lit up the south ledge as the soldiers opened fire.

Adrenaline flooded Meg’s system with each shot. She was used to running into fires. It was almost worse being on the opposite side of the fence. She had joined the New York City Fire Department to help people, not watch them die.

The chopper hovered low and tracer rounds streaked through the night, each one impacting on its target as the soldiers fought back the infected swarm. Meg strained to see, but the gunfire ceased almost as fast as it started. The chopper pulled to the right and then traversed the skyline. Just like that it was gone, the red light blinking one last time before there was only darkness.

Meg cursed their luck. They hadn’t seen a chopper in days, let alone one so close.

“Great,” Jed said. “That’s fucking great.” He scratched his closely trimmed crew cut and then slammed his hand into the boards.

Meg glared at the Marine. “Keep it down.”

Jed shrugged and muttered an apology. He turned away and started walking back to his bunk when the sound of shattering glass came from below.

The three of them froze.

A guttural screech ripped through the building. Pounding followed. The walls shook from the impact. It sounded like a wild animal was loose on the first floor.

Rex grabbed Meg’s arm as she stepped away from the window.

“Don’t go down there,” he said.

Meg shook free and exchanged nods with Jed. Together, they crossed the room cautiously. She eyed the empty M16 on Jed’s bunk. Without a gun, Meg felt naked. Her axe slowed the creatures down, but bullets were much more effective.

A second scream echoed through the fire station, the sound lingering in the sultry night. Meg gritted her teeth and stopped. The axe slipped in her grip, sweat bleeding off her palm.

“Guys,” Rex said. “Guys, come back.”

Meg held up a hand to silence him. Then she heard the clicking. It was the sound of snapping joints, and it wasn’t coming from inside the building. It was coming from the streets, like they were surrounded by hundreds of oversized crickets. Rex stood with his eye pressed against one of the gaps.

“Oh no,” he said.

Meg scanned the bookshelves and boxes in front of the door. If the monsters found them, the barricade wouldn’t hold for long. She took in a breath and then moved back to the windows, the floor creaking with every step.

“Let me see,” Meg said. She tapped Rex on the shoulder. The man’s thick arms were trembling.

As her eyes adjusted to the dark beyond the dusty glass, her heart skipped a beat. She’d never seen so many infected in one spot. The entire street and even the walls of the buildings had come alive with the blur of white flesh.

“Holy shit,” Meg gasped.

“They must have been drawn to the gunfire,” Jed said.

“What do we do?” Rex asked, his words a panicked slur.

Meg shook her head. “We pray.”