Lieutenant Rhine hated Syracuse. He hated everything about it; from the arrogant people he was sent here to protect to the winter cold that made bones ache down to the marrow. In hind sight he knew that he should never have agreed to lead this operation, but the deal they had offered was too good to be passed up.  He thought back to how this all started and how he came to be standing on this rooftop in the Eastern United States. Actually what a stupid thought that was, this wasn’t part of the United States anymore.  Zack owned this turf now.

Rhine remembered the frantic rush to get back to the states. Back then, his main concern had been how many Taliban or Al Qaeda fighters he could send to  meet Allah or driving down some crappy Afghan road, praying the Cougar MRAP or M-ATV vehicles he was riding in didn’t hit an IED and blow him all over that particular stretch of road. Feeling that he had more him in them what his Sergeant First Class rank allowed him, he had applied to and been accepted to Officer Candidate School and was supposed to head out as soon as our tour in Afghanistan was finished.  Next thing he knew, he and the other members of the 2^nd battalion, 75^th Ranger Regiment were packing and loading their gear on to waiting C-5 Galaxy transports to be moved back stateside. His long awaited and prayed for transfer to OCS was put on indefinite hold. The Department of Defense was in full panic mode and trying to rapidly get as many men and as much material back home from overseas bases and areas of operation.  Huge convoys moved men and material by air and sea in a race against time. Things were falling apart back home and the DOD knew they would need every soldier, sailor, airman, and Marine to handle the coming crisis. Rhine had been in contact via email with his girlfriend at the home they shared in the East Bay Area in California. Sightings of the infected had been steadily growing and the police were losing the ability to keep up with the threat. Stateside active, reserve, and National Guard military units had been deployed but it just wasn’t enough. There was just too much area to cover and the units were spread too thin. All across the globe nations who had military forces abroad were recalling them and abandoning their foreign military commitments. The U.S. had held out from doing so for as long as it could, but America now needed her defenders home . He wasn’t too worried about his girlfriend; she could handle herself just fine. Their house was very safe security wise and he had built up a collection of handguns, hunting and civilian legal assault rifles, ammo, gear, and non-perishable food and water. He and his girlfriend knew that if things ever got bad one day, they would only be able to depend on themselves.  A lot of people had thought they were slightly paranoid and that all of it was a waste of money. It was starting to look like those people were eating their words now.

The 2^nd/75^th had landed at their home base of Fort Lewis in Washington State and was getting ready to be deployed when Yonkers went down. What a crap show that had been Rhine had thought. Whoever had planned that operation should have been taken out back and shot. All those men and all that equipment led to slaughter; it was disgusting. Needless to say, watching the massacre at Yonkers did nothing for his battalion’s moral. They began to feel a little better after attending their first mission briefing. Whoever had been the planner for this coming mission must have gone to an entirely different school of thought then the idiot who had planned the “Battle of Yonkers”, or as Rhine and his fellow Rangers had begun to call it “The Garbage Dump Debacle”. This was in reference to how so many brave men had been thrown away like trash because of the stupidity of their leaders. If the Battle of Yonkers had been an example of military tactics at their worst, this new mission was definitely going to be an example of it at its finest.

The government had sealed off the city of Dallas, Texas, massed a large amount of forces around its perimeter, smashed the infestation inside their quarantine zone, and were using the city as a mass evacuation hub out of the Southern United States. On all TV and radio stations, the emergency broadcast system was telling people “if you can get to Dallas, we can protect you”.  This was all well before the South African plan had been put into effect so no “blue zones” had been established and the defensive line at the Rockies wasn’t even a thought. As civilians passed though the defensive line surrounding Dallas, they were quickly screened, recorded, and put on a convoy of airliners to take them to areas they were relatively safe. The Rangers were not told the system in place for dealing with infected civilians who attempted to enter the quarantine zone. They would only be informed of this news right before they launched the mission. Had they known what would be required of them, the unit’s moral might not have been so lofty. The problem that was developing though was that following this mass movement of refugees to Dallas was an endless horde of infected that numbered in the millions. The defensive line was already starting to show signs of faltering and there was absolutely no way it would be able to hold once the main horde showed up. The decision was made by someone who pulled a big government paycheck that the Dallas Evacuation Zone was no longer tenable and would have to be shut down. The TV and radio broadcast were halted and the defensive line slowly began to collapse inward and tighten up. This is where the Rangers would come and it was a mission that was perfectly suited to their skill sets. Rhine and the rest of his battalion grabbed their gear and headed out to the flight line full of waiting helicopters. The tiny make shift base had been erected in a secured field in a state park about an hour north of Dallas. As they walked out, their platoon leader Lt. Ricks pulled Rhine and his buddy, Specialist Enrique Moreno aside.

“I need to talk to you two. Listen, in Afghanistan you two guys were rock solid. You did some tough things over there, things that a lot of people don’t have the stomach for. I’m sorry but I need that from you again.” Ricks said to them.

Rhine looked down at the desert tan backpack Ricks was carrying and mentally groaned to himself. He was already decked out in his ACU digital camouflage fatigues, full body armor, Kevlar helmet, assault pack with important gear and supplies in addition to his new FN SCAR MK16 assault rifle and as much ammo as he could carry. The last thing he needed  or wanted was an extra bag to carry and weigh him down further. As Ricks continued to speak and handed them the bag, they felt their stomachs drop. A little additional weight was the very least of their worries.

They swept into Dallas like a plague of locusts; the sky filled with helicopters of every shape and size. Army UH-60 Blackhawks and CH-47 Chinooks, Air Force HH-60 Pave Hawks and CV-22 Ospreys, Marine Corp MV-22 Ospreys and UH-1Y Venom transports, as well as any other type of helicopter the military could get its hands on. Rhine stared out the open side door of his Blackhawk at an Air force Para-rescueman sitting in a HH-60 Pave Hawk to their right. The man’s legs dangling out of the open side door, obviously unafraid of any sort of heights. Rhine gave him a wave and he threw up a two finger acknowledgment as his Pave Hawk banked away toward its target. It meant a lot that those Para-rescue guys were going in on this operation. After all this whole plan had been their idea to begin with. Rhine felt the Blackhawk descend and one of the door gunners informed his team that they were coming up on their target building, a large two story bank. The Blackhawk flared to a stop and came to a hover just above the bank’s rooftop. Rhine and his team hopped out and began a process that was being repeated all over the city. All around them, helicopters were dropping  infantry squads, small teams of combat engineers, and crates of ammunition and supplies on to each rooftop. As the four man engineer team began unpacking their equipment, Rhine began issuing orders to his squad as they began the task of securing the building. They reached the door which served to gain access to the building from the roof and collectively took a deep breath. Rhine nodded to Moreno as one of our men used a pump action shotgun to blow the lock off the door and yanked it open as Moreno swung his M-4 assault rifle into the doorway. The interior was pitch dark and the team switched on the Surefire tactical lights attached to their rifles. The high intensity beams pierced the darkness, stabbing though the black interior like blades. The men carefully moved from room to room, clearing each thoroughly as their hearts pounded in their chests. It would be a waste of time to go through all this work just to have a zombie that they had missed in the sweep take down the whole building. They cleared both floors and as soon as they reached the front door, Rhine radioed up to the engineering team who quickly arrived with bags of gear. The two combat engineers prepped the front doors to be welded shut in a hurry and then proceeded to prep the stairway door leading up to the second floor for similar fortification. Once this was finished all but two of the Rangers all made their way up to the rooftop. Rhine looked out and saw other teams on far off rooftops performing identical tasks. By this time, the other two engineers had finished setting up the key to the whole operation. A pulley system with basket that braced against the roof’s wall had been set up against the side of the building. This was the ingenious device that the Air Force pararescue boys had developed, modeled off the ones they used in their Pave Hawks to airlift casualties. As the defensive collapsed in on itself, it was inevitable that eventually the airport would have to be abandoned before being overrun by the oncoming horde. The remaining civilians or military personal who could not evacuate via the airport would be able to reach these fortified buildings that had established across the city and find shelter. The team would bring in as many as they could through the front doors as possible, but when the horde arrived they would weld the front doors and stairway door shut, seal off the first floor, and bring up any survivors who could make it to them with the basket. Men set about getting the ammo and gear ready for when the fight arrived at their doorstep. Right as they were finishing this, the radio seemed to explode from a steady stream of reports, panicked voices that oozed fear through the speaker. The horde had arrived in mass and the airport was being overrun. The forces of the defensive line attempted to squeeze as many refugees as possible into and on top of their vehicles and then moved as one massive convoy out of the city. Even still there were countless people still left in the city and they had been told to move as fast as possible to our scattered outposts. Rhine looked down the street to where Lt. Ricks had established his outpost on top of a fast food restaurant. Ricks must have sensed him watching because he turned around, looked at Rhine, and gave thumbs up. Rhine was about to return the gesture when he began receiving reports from his men position at the front door of people running down the street.

“I’ve got fifty plus civilians running down the stead headed out way, ETA about one minute Sgt!” the Corporal at the door said into his microphone.

“Copy that, stand by to begin processing, use force if you have to but maintain control of that door at all costs Corporal” Rhine responded as he moved to snatched up his SCAR and made his way downstairs.

The scattered outposts began to pop green smoke grenades to mark their positions to survivors and they soon had refugees lining up at the door. They were allowed in one at a time and quickly searched for any wounds or signs of infection. The team marked each refugee on the back of the hand with a colored marker; blue for ok, green for wounds or possible infection, and red for obvious bite marks or signs of infection.  The majority were marked black, a few given green, but Rhine’s adrenaline went through the roof as he watched one of his men look him in the eye, then pull a red marker from his vest and put an “X” on the hand of a woman with two small children. The refugees were moved up to the second floor and he told Moreno to watch the woman with the red mark on her hand. Suddenly screams erupted from those still standing in line outside as the rooftop spotters began reporting large groups of Zombie “contacts” moving down the street.

“Contact, Jesus gotta be 1,000 plus Z’s moving down the street, more and more coming, they are headed right for us Sergeant! Request permission to engage!”

“Fire at will, maintain fire discipline, single shots, do no not engage with the 240” Rhine said immediately, referring to the M-240 machine gun they had brought with them. He didn’t want to waste ammunition; the M-240 was only to be used as a last resort.

The refugees pleaded and begged to be let in and one of the Rangers guarding the front door had to put his M-4 carbine in their faces before they realized that if they didn’t calm down, they would never make it inside. Rhine could hear his men on the rooftops as well as those of nearby outposts begin engaging Zack with precise single shots. Zack was less than a hundred yards away when the last refugee was screened and allowed inside. Rhine ordered the front and stairway doors welded shut and the first floor sealed off. Zack was coming and he was headed straight for them. The nervous young sergeant saw some of the horde peel off and begin assaulting Lt. Ricks sealed front doors as more came pouring down the street toward him. He began reminding his men to calm down, take their time, and only use single shots to keep the horde from putting too much stress on the welded meal bank doorframes. Just then, Moreno came up beside him.

“That lady is for sure infected Sergeant, I have been watching to the color drain from her skin and she is starting to lose motor functions bit by bit. I have Private Jonas watching her, but we have to do this and we have to do it now.”

Rhine nodded and felt that uneasy feeling in his stomach again.

“Separate her from the group but wait for me, I’ll handle it” Rhine told him.

Moreno went down to the second floor and asked the woman to follow him because he needed her help with something. Rhine handed off rooftop command to one of his men as a refugee was being hoisted up in the basket on the back side of the building, and followed Moreno downstairs.

Rhine approached a woman who was sitting with her family and asked to speak to her in private, out of earshot of the other refugees. “I don’t have time to argue with you, I need you to so something and keep it quiet.”

“I don’t understand but I’ll do whatever you need” the woman replied.

“That woman who just left the room is infected and any minute she is going to turn, this will put all of us in incredible danger, do you understand what I am saying?”

The woman nodded and took a deep breath, semi aware of what he was going to ask her next.

Rhine looked her dead in the eye and said “I need you to take care of those children, they are about to go through something horrible and I need you to step up to the plate, can you do this?”

She nodded and he told her to go take the two children over to where her husband and child were sitting by the wall. He watched as the kids began playing with the woman’s own children and she whispered in her husband’s ear. He shot Rhine a look that started with pure anger but gradually turned to understanding.

“To hell with him” Rhine thought, he was the one who would have to answer for this one day, if not to a board of inquiry then to St. Peter at the gates.

He turned and walked into the room that Moreno and the woman had entered and shut the door behind me. The woman was sitting on the floor against the wall while Moreno stood against the other, his M-4 not pointing at her, but ready in an instant.

“What are you going to do to me? I’m not sick; my arm was cut on broken glass. Please, I have children and I don’t want to die! This isn’t right! This isn’t fair!” she pleaded, tears streaming down her face.

Rhine thought of saying something to her, something about how glass doesn’t cause bite shaped teeth marks, something to comfort her or maybe just to comfort himself. In the end he realized that any further words would do nothing but drag out this poor woman’s anguish. he reached down in to the tan pack sitting next to Moreno, pulled out the MP-5 submachine gun with it’s long black silencer, walked over to the woman and fired a 9mm round right in to her forehead. She slumped backwards and he decided that the second “insurance” shot that he had been told to use by Lt. Ricks was clearly unnecessary. Handing the MP-5 back to Moreno, he told him “lock the door on your way out and keep an eye on the rest of them. Let me know if you think any others are showing signs.”

“Are you ok Sarge?” Moreno asked, sympathy in his eyes

“Nothing about any of this is ok Enrique, its insanity, all of it” Rhine said shaking his head as he made his way to the door.

He walked out of the room and way back to the rooftop, unable to shake the feeling that he had left a piece of his soul back in that room.

Back on the rooftop, the level of fire had increased tremendously.  The rescue basket had saved the lives of ten refugees before it had been rendered useless by the fact that the bank was now surrounded on all sides by Zack. Rhine joined his men on the rooftop edge wall and brought the SCAR up to his shoulder. Using single shots he methodically burned through a 30 round magazine, the recoil absorbing into his shoulder as the heads of Z’s below exploded and their bodies collapsed. He thought exacting some revenge on Zack would have made feel better but the feeling of blackness inside of him remained. He began making the rounds to check in with each member of his team as they settled in for a long day.

It was a few hours later Lt. Rick’s voice suddenly hailed him from the radio “Reaper 6 to Reaper 2, copy?”

“Reaper 6 this is Reaper 2, send it” Rhine replied, bringing the microphone up to his mouth as he stared over the side of the building at the growing sea of ghouls.

“Reaper 2, at this point anyone from the airport is either safe with us or have joined Zack’s ranks. Even if there are survivors, there is no way they can reach us through all the Z’s down there. Start getting your team and refugees ready for extraction, the birds are going to start pulling us out.”

“Rodger that 6, trust me,  we will be ready when our taxi shows up” Rhine said, ended the conversation and feeling a little better knowing that the long day was close to coming to an end.

Then below them, though the welded door held, the shatter resistant class windows finally gave in to Zack’s relentless pounding and a flood of ghouls poured inside the first floor. Rhine’s team had planned for this and made sure that the weld on the stairway door was extra solid but just in case he had his men on the second floor begin barricading the door with furniture. Down the street, a massive Army CH-47 Chinook helicopter arrived and hovered above Lt. Rick’s single story fast food restaurant. Its twin rotors blasted air downward; knocking Z’s on the street off their feet and causing Rick’s team to take brace themselves against the rotor wash. The Chinook dropped its tail ramp down and expertly rested it on the roof so it could be boarded. It was just then that the weld holding the door to the roof of Lt. Rick’s building broke and Zack came pouring though.

“Put fire on those Z’s on the ground level NOW!” Rhine shouted to his Rangers.

He didn’t want to pour rifle fire onto the Zombies already on the roof for fear of hitting their own people, but maybe they could thin the flow coming from the 1^st floor and give Ricks a fighting chance. A few of his men began firing 40mm grenades from the launchers attached to their M-4’s and SCARS, causing Z’s to explode and send body parts and gore flying in all directions. The sharp cracks  of  the M-4’s and SCARS of Rhine squad mixed with the ripping sound of their M-240 belt fed machine gun opening fire. A steady stream of bullets, tracers, and 40mm grenades tore into the Z’s attempting to enter the first floor of Rick’s building.  The refugees scrambled to board the Chinook as Rick’s squad poured rifle fire into the approaching zombies. They were coming too fast though and Rhine watched as the Ranger furthest out was dragged down and devoured. Rick’s squad began falling backward toward the Chinook as they continued to fire on the coming zombies. Ghouls fell as their heads exploded from rifle fire but they were instantly replaced by a steady stream of reinforcements pouring through the doorway.

The last glimpse Rhine had of Lt. Ricks was of the Lieutenant pushing a struggling Ranger on board the Chinook’s tail ramp and screaming into his radio “LZ DRIVE THROUGH IS OVERUN!” as he was dragged down by Zach and the Chinook pulled away.