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The images were grainy as hell.

    A small group of soldiers, maybe five or six were sitting in the back of a helicopter. I recognized one of them as being the leader who promised the world the mission would be a success.

    The soldiers looked nervous. Scared and unsure of themselves.

    The doors of the helicopter’s cabin were wide open. Outside, I couldn’t see anything except for swirling red dust.

    A shadow moved across the screen. All of the soldiers, and I mean all of them swore.

    Someone screamed.

    There was an explosion.

    The helicopter began to spiral out of control.

    The footage flicked off and then back on.

    The next image was from a camera that was lying on the ground on its side. I turned my head so I could see properly. The helicopter had crashed into the road. It’d been reduced to a twisted, smoking wreck. The rotor blades had been bent and smashed at all different angles.

    The soldiers, what's left of them, were crouched next to the wreckage. I could only count four of them. No pilot. No co-pilot. No team leader.

    They were talking in hushed, frantic whispers.

    "What the hell was that, man?" one of the soldiers asked.

    "I don't know. But we gotta call this in right away. We need a goddamn extraction. Being on the streets was not part of the deal!"

    You could hear it in their voices, and the see it in their eyes. They did not want to be on the streets. They wanted to be in the sky, in the helicopter. They wanted to stick to the rooftops. The high ground.

    One of the soldiers was Australian. You could tell by his accent.

    "Jesus Christ," he said. "Pitt Street is a bloody mess."

    I couldn’t tell if he was just using the word bloody as a swear word or if it was actually bloody. The image was too grainy. The red dust was too thick.

    Someone said, "Radio's busted. We gotta walk out."

    "No way, man. No way are we walking anywhere in this. You saw the surveillance images; this place is crawling with infected!"

    And as soon as they said it out loud you could hear the howling scream somewhere off in the distance.

    The footage flicked off and then back on.

    Now the soldiers were running.

    They were running at full sprint.

    They were running for their lives.

    I could only count three soldiers. Including the camera man.

    The infected were howling. Louder and closer.

    The camera man tripped over and skidded along the road.

    The two soldiers in front of him stopped. One of them took cover behind a motor bike and started unleashing with his rifle. Full automatic. The flash from the gun’s barrel lit up the screen.

    The other soldier came back for the cameraman, picked him up, got him to his feet.

    They stopped and took cover behind a car. The camera man was reloading his rifle. I guess he must've already fired off a full clip.

    He was trying to reload but his hands were shaking so bad, he was struggling, he was taking forever.

    He finally loaded a magazine.

    He turned around, took aim.

    And what I saw was just too damn messed up. A shiver ran down my spine. I started shaking as if I was cold, as if I was suffering from hypothermia. My teeth started chattering.

    The soldiers were firing at will. They were shooting at a wall of infected. A sea of infected. They were so close. It was an overwhelming number, a countless number of walking corpses.

    They couldn't be any more than ten meters away.

    One of the soldiers yelled, "Reloading!"

    The infected were now five meters away.

    The guy next to the cameraman yelled, "I'm out!"

    He dropped his rifle and took out a pump action shotgun and started blazing away.

    The infected were three meters away.

    "We gotta go! Come on!"

    The cameraman was still firing. Someone, I think it was the Australian guy, grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him along. The cameraman turned around again. But then they all froze.

    They were trapped. The road was blocked at both ends by an insurmountable number of infected.

    The Australian guy swore again. The