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machete on my hip, opposite the side arm on my right hand side.
    “There were nearly three thousand men and women at the airfield, nearly a third of whom were refugees. Our plane got off half fueled, which is better than most. Several of the smaller planes have been redirected, and several more had to find alternative landing arrangements. They came at the airstrip from the only side that was not heavily fortified. Based on initial estimates, there were more than fifty thousand of them. They came out of nowhere. The reports stopped only ten minutes after the initial contact. It was a massacre.” His voice was still cold and detached.
    This man had never been outside. I knew this. You couldn’t talk about the destruction and carnage these godless bastards left behind without emotion.
    “Why wasn’t the last side fortified? Where did they attack from?” Kate asked as she shrugged her pack into place.
    His voice remained even, but as we followed him out the door, he said almost too softly to pick up in the clatter of the hallway, “The lake. They came out of the damn lake.”
    My head shot around at Kate and our eyes met. This was new.
    “Captain, how…” But he interrupted.
    “The general will brief you quickly on this, and on several other complications. Suffice to say we were not totally prepared for these circumstances and we are adjusting as best we can. Please, walk quickly.”
    We covered the distance to the general’s office as quickly as we could, dodging carts of ammunition and food, and scurrying service members. He was quick to greet us as we came in, and got to business immediately.
    “Here’s the situation. The plane is inbound, ETA is an hour twenty. That leaves you ten minutes before you take off. Our sniper team just took off, and is getting into position now, so you will have that cover if the weather allows. The drones are inbound, but they might not have time to do as thorough a job as we had hoped. We have boosted their payload somewhat to make them more attractive, but the biggest complications are that we have lost the cover of darkness, and that we have a massive problem with weather. And there ain’t jack shit I can do about either problem.”
    “What’s the weather problem?” I was disturbed about operating in the daylight. The effects of the vaccine unnerved me, and it was outright painful to be in full sunlight.
    “Fog,” he replied simply.
    “Thick, unrelenting and soupy fog. It’s not a problem for the plane. They can land on instruments. But you folks are going to be totally on visual and unless it breaks, your sniper cover is going to be for shit. Worse, we can’t tell if the drones are having any effect. We are flying blind, if you’ll forgive the pun.”
    “But if we can’t see them, they can’t see us either, right?”
    He nodded once, but stared at us both.
    “That’s true. But there are only four of you. There’s damn near a million of them. Only one of them has to get lucky.”
    “General, I feel pretty good about guaranteeing that we will do our best to keep that from happening. I don’t intend to end up in the rotten belly of a corpse today. You can bank on it.”
    “Good then. You’re ready to go.”
    We moved quickly to the roof, where the door opened into a blindingly sunny day—a day that for anyone other than us might have been gloomy and gray. A thick soup of fog lay on the city, and the slowly turning rotor blades of the Blackhawk helicopter were barely visible to us as we approached from only fifty feet away.
    The river, the city, and the skyline were all shrouded in mist. Below, through my thick sunglasses pulled over the top of my balaclava, I watched the creatures stir and mill about. I shivered involuntarily.
    The only thing that made those things creepier was a nice thick layer of fog that lent them all that ‘fresh out of a nightmare’ special effect. It was never more apparent to me that earth was just a waiting room for them before the