Chapter1

In the early hours of the morning, the sky over Santa Monica turned into a burning curtain.

I stood on the edge of the dock, watching the meteor streak towards the heart of the city. The wind from the western sea rushed into my collar, carrying sulfur, rust, and the sweet stench of rotting flesh. This smell didn't belong to any war—I'd served twelve years in the Marines, smelled the charred flesh of white phosphorus bombs in Iraq, and the ripped intestines of IEDs in Afghanistan. But I'd never smelled anything like it. The sweet stench of living, rotting flesh.

A meteor struck the city center. The world fell silent for a moment.

Then came the red light. The light spread outward from the point of impact, like a closing net, dyeing the horizon a hellish red. Not the orange-red of flames, but the red that flows in one's veins.

Seconds later, the shockwave hit me. I was thrown through the air, my back slamming into the concrete breakwater. A dull pain exploded in my back—the bones weren't broken, but I'd have a huge bruise tomorrow. I landed on the beach, my mouth full of sand and the metallic taste of blood.

In the distance, hundreds, even thousands, of people screamed simultaneously. Car sirens blared, glass shattered, buildings collapsed. Beneath all this, there was another sound: a low, wet, satisfied grunt, like the slurping of a pig eating.

I rolled over and peeked out from behind the wreckage of the lifeguard lookout tower.

The Santa Monica skyline vanished. The skyscrapers I saw every morning on my commute were now just burning skeletons. Black smoke rose from at least dozens of fires, swirling, twisting, and merging into a massive black dome against the crimson sky. And the sky itself—the sky I'd lived in for fifteen years and watched countless sunsets over—was covered by a thin, living membrane. It pulsed slowly, like some enormous creature breathing.

I closed my eyes, then opened them again. The scene remained the same.

I pushed myself up, my knees digging into my chest. A sharp pain in my back reminded me I was still alive. Six hours ago, I was handling a domestic violence case; the drunkard had smashed his wife's head with a beer bottle, and blood splattered on me. Six hours ago, I was complaining to my colleagues about how bad the police station coffee was. Now that city is gone.

I walked along the beach towards the parking lot. My boots sank into the sand, making a soft, scraping sound. Each step made the bruises on my back throb, but I couldn't stop. Stopping meant waiting to die.

A police car was parked crookedly next to my Ford Explorer, the door wide open, blood on the driver's seat, but no one was there. The trunk was open, its contents ransacked. I pulled out a spare bulletproof vest with "WILLIAMS" written on it—my colleague Mike, who had transferred from patrol to SWAT three months ago and still owed me twenty dollars—but I put it on anyway. In the apocalypse, a bulletproof vest doesn't care about ownership.

I also found a portable medkit and three stun grenades. The medkit was fastened to my belt, and the stun grenades were tucked into the buckles of my bulletproof vest. Then I opened my car door. The M4 was still in the back seat, along with two ammunition boxes: one box of 300 rifle rounds and one box of 200 pistol rounds. There was also a case of water, a week's worth of military rations, and a bag of beef jerky.

I pulled the bolt to confirm that a bullet was chambered. This was the only thing I believed in in this world.

I pulled out my phone. The signal was only for emergency calls. I tuned to a military radio frequency and managed to pick up a few fragmented words through the static.

"...Unidentified organism...aggressive behavior changes within 45 seconds to 2 minutes after bite...repeat, avoid any form of contact with bodily fluids...if bitten, please..."

The signal was lost. Forty-five seconds to two minutes. This is the window of opportunity given by the military or the CDC. Once bitten, you have less than two minutes to be yourself. Then you become those things.

I have thirty-two rifle bullets and forty-six pistol bullets. If every shot hits the head, I can eliminate seventy-eight infected. The Santa Monica metropolitan area has eighteen million people. That number made me laugh, a laugh devoid of any sense of humor.

I slung the rifle over my shoulder and walked into the city.

The streets are dead.

I turned off the beach onto Ocean Drive and headed north. The sun hadn't risen yet, but the red glow in the sky illuminated everything, bathing the world in an unreal, blood-soaked light. Car wrecks lay scattered across the road, along with suitcases, handbags, and strollers.

A Louis Vuitton handbag sits next to a plastic urinal. A man in a suit slumps in the driver's seat of a BMW X5, a fist-sized hole in the back of his head. The front window of a convenience store is smashed, and two schoolboys lie sprawled at the entrance, their hands still reaching for a case of beer. These things—everything people tried to take—are now scattered across the asphalt, like toys shaken off by a giant.

I walk through these images, letting them enter through my eyes and exit through the back of my head. I can't stop looking, I can't think about them. Once I start thinking, I'll just lie on the ground waiting to die.

I crouched down behind the overturned food cart and heard a sound coming from ahead.

Three creatures dressed in hospital gowns. They surrounded a man who was still moving—one of his legs had been bitten off below the knee, but he was still trying to crawl away, using his elbows to prop himself up. One was burying its face in the stump of the limb, chewing, making that chilling, wet sound. The second was crouching beside the victim's head, its mouth opening and closing, but not biting down—it was staring at the man, watching him before he died. The third stood two steps away, its head twitching erratically, like a radar searching for a signal.

I pointed my gun at the one that was standing there.

The thing's skin was a dull, bluish-gray, with dark veins bulging like tree roots. Its eyes were completely white, with only a tiny red dot deep in the pupils. Then it turned its head and "looked" in my direction. It couldn't see me. Its eyeballs were completely cloudy, its vision nonexistent. But it knew I was there. It smelled me, or perhaps heard my heartbeat.

I slowly backed away from the food cart, landing on my toes first with each step. I kept my heart rate below sixty-five—when your heart beats slow enough, your scent fades. It's a technique I learned a long time ago at Quanti Science.

I retreated about fifty meters and turned into a narrow alley. The alley was almost completely dark. My pupils dilated in a few seconds, and I could make out a brick wall on my right, a row of trash cans on my left, and a bend about thirty meters ahead.

Just as I was about to turn, I heard the first gunshot.

Bolt-action rifle. Crisp, clean. Then a second, a third, followed by a burst of automatic fire. I quickened my pace, peeking out from the side at the end of the alley.

A modified Ford F-350 pickup truck was parked across the alleyway. Three men and a woman were firing at the infected horde across the street. The leader was a man wearing a cowboy hat, holding a Remington 700 rifle, each shot hitting the head squarely, his rhythm as steady as a metronome.

I saw more infected people coming from the street corner, at least three times the number that had already appeared.

"Hey!" I poked half my body out of the alley, pointing in the direction I came from. "Six o'clock, fifty meters, underground parking entrance! Follow me!"

The man in the cowboy hat glanced at me. His gaze lingered on me for a second—the police bulletproof vest, the way he held the M4—and he nodded.

"Let's confirm one thing first." He didn't lower the gun. "Are you a human or a thing?"

I pointed to my own eyes, then pointed the gun at the white eyes of the infected people in the distance. "Look closely, I still have irises."

The man in the cowboy hat grinned. "Let's go!"

I pulled the charging handle and took my position at the alley entrance, the first firing post. Three explosions rang out, and three infected fell to the ground. The man in the cowboy hat and his team ran past me. I waited for the woman to run past me—she had a deep, self-inflicted, fresh wound on her face—then turned and followed, firing two more shots as I ran.

We ran to the end of the alley, turned left, and found the entrance to the underground parking lot. The iron gate was half open, and I was the first to squeeze in. The big guy used an iron pipe to hold the gate shut.

The parking lot was dark. On the third basement level, next to an abandoned van, five people squeezed in and closed the door. The van was filled with the smells of engine oil, musty old leather, and the heavy sweat of the five men after strenuous exercise.

"Jack Harris. Santa Monica Police Department, SWAT."

“Jack Morrison.” The man in the cowboy hat shook my hand. “From Texas. He ran a gun repair shop in Santa Monica before the apocalypse. This is Elena, my partner. A field medic, she spent two years in Ukraine. This is Marcus, my neighbor, a retired Navy officer. And this one—this is Dylan.”

I looked at the young man in the corner. He was not yet twenty, huddled at the back of the carriage, his arms wrapped around his knees. His right wrist was wrapped in bandages, blood soaking through the gauze, revealing an unnatural gray-black ring around the edge of the bandage. His pupils were constricted to pinpoints, and his whole body was trembling.

"What's wrong with him?"

“His roommate mutated. He got scratched by one of its fingernails as he ran.” Morrison’s voice was low. “Twenty minutes ago.”

The air inside the carriage seemed to freeze for a moment.

I pressed the safety switch with my thumb. "The military radio said that aggressive behavior changes within 45 seconds to two minutes after a bite. If scratches could also transmit the virus, he would have changed long ago."

Dylan jerked his head up. His face was as white as paper, his lips trembled, but his eyes were clear. There was no white cast, no red pupils. Those young eyes held too many things that had happened too quickly.

"I don't have a fever. I don't have convulsions. I'm still myself."

“That’s the problem.” Elena stared at the grayish-black edge of the bandage on Dylan’s wrist. “You might not be infected. Or you might just be getting slower.”

I stared at Dylan. "Unwrap the bandages."

Dylan didn't move. "No."

The next second, a muffled thud came from the roof of the car. It wasn't rain, it wasn't wind. It was footsteps. Too heavy, too weighty—not the weight of a person. A second sound. From the front of the car. A third sound. From the rear of the car. More than one.

The sound of fingernails scraping against metal dragged from the front to the back of the car, sharp enough to make your teeth ache. Those things were moving on the roof. They knew there was something inside. They weren't in a hurry to get in; they were waiting.

Dylan began to tremble, his teeth chattering. "I didn't do anything... how did they know we were here?"

I didn't answer. I could already smell that cloying, rotten stench, seeping in bit by bit through the crack in the door.

Elena moved. Without a word, she stepped in front of Dylan, grabbed his right wrist, and ripped open the blood-soaked gauze. The ghastly green light of the emergency lamp shone on the wound.

Three dark finger marks were deeply embedded in the flesh, with no blood at the edges. The skin around the wounds wasn't red or swollen; it was gray—the color of death. From the edges of the wounds, spiderweb-like black lines were slowly creeping upwards along the veins. They had already passed the wrist and were spreading towards the forearm. Visible to the naked eye.

“It’s already past the wrist joint.” Elena’s voice was devoid of emotion. “If it hadn’t reached the shoulder yet, theoretically it could be amputated.”

Dylan froze, as if frozen in place. "What did you say?"

Elena pulled a tourniquet and a bone saw from her medical kit. "You have one more chance."

The truck's rear door suddenly bulged inward. Once. Twice. A grayish-white finger squeezed through the crack, its bony nails frantically scratching at the lock.

Morrison leveled his gun. This time, no one pressed the barrel. His gun wasn't pointed at the car door, but at Dylan. "What if amputation doesn't work?"

I positioned the M4 against the back door, using the butt to brace it against the door panel. My left shoulder was against the door, and my right hand pointed the muzzle of the gun at the door crack. The metal door panel vibrated violently behind me, the latches snapping off one by one. I turned around.

"Choose." I looked at Dylan. "Now. Chop off my hand, or should I shoot?"