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deck and were overrun. There must have been sixty, maybe seventy carriers in that ship.”
        Decker went on to explain how the carriers had almost immediately brought down the boarding party. The shore guards had tried to cut the ship loose and set it adrift on the Red Sea, but the carriers were too fast. They’d run down the gangplank and spread like angry hornets through the camp, attacking the nearest living, breathing thing they set their eyes on.
        “That ship was the Charon , and opening that bulkhead let the demons loose right in the middle of us,” Decker said, eyes distant.
        The soldiers had mounted a resistance, shifting the razor-wire fencing that surrounded the base to block off access from the docks. They’d formed a firing line behind the relative safety of the wires and hammered down.
        “We killed them all. It only took us a minute or two,” Decker said, casually referring to the deaths of nearly a hundred victims of the disease. “And then we started gathering the bodies for burial.”
        Decker and his fellow soldiers had donned their MOPP gear and began neatly lining the bodies up. They slung their rifles, gritted their teeth, and took care of the dirty work. They also let their guard down.
        “Sir, you can chapter me if you want to, but I swear I’m not insane,” Decker said next.
        “Nobody is saying you’re insane. This isn’t Vietnam, and these weren’t innocent civilians,” General Sherman said.
        “You did good, sergeant,” chimed Colonel Dewen.
        “No, wait, listen,” Decker said, eyes flashing. “We killed them, but… we didn’t kill them.”
        “What?” asked Commander Barker.
        General Sherman said nothing, but knew in his heart what he was about to hear.
        “They got back up,” said Decker. “They got back up, and they slaughtered us .”
        At first it was just a couple. The soldiers had figured they had wounded-but not finished-the targets. They had put three-round bursts into the chests of the risen carriers. It didn’t even slow them down.
        “At that point, sir, order disintegrated,” Decker said.
        Some of the soldiers had lost control immediately, screaming about the impossibility of what their eyes were seeing. Others flung their rifles into the sand and had run off into the desert. A few kept their heads and had emptied entire magazines into the shambling dead, rocking the bodies with lead, but those that were knocked down crawled back to their feet and continued the slow, relentless assault. Soldiers were surrounded or trapped, then pulled down, shrieking, as grasping hands scratched at their skin and teeth clamped onto their arms.
        And all the while, more and more of the carriers were reawakening.
        “Soon the whole lot of them were back up and moving,” Decker said. “Then me and a couple others noticed that some of the infected personnel weren’t getting back up. Those had head wounds, broken necks, that sort of thing. Thought that might be important intel, sir.”
        Decker had organized a last-ditch offense near the edge of the base camp. He was certain the soldiers had been routed and the day belonged to the Morningstar strain and its victims. He armed his soldiers with the remaining ammo and told them to aim for the head.
        The soldiers turned the tide.
        It had taken nearly an hour of bloody fighting through the dusty streets of Suez to kill the remaining carriers. When the attackers were down, Decker and the other soldiers had performed a tent-by-tent, house-by-house search of the base, finding and eliminating six more carriers, each one a potential death sentence for the parts of the world that remained uninfected.
        “This time we made sure, sir,” Decker said.
        “Made sure?” Commander Barker asked.
        Decker fixed him with a gaze. “We shot the bodies in the head, sir. All of