Sarah, the Army’s heavy weapons specialist, pushed her way to the front.
She was a massive woman, nearly as tall as Adrian, carrying a massive rotary cannon like it was a purse. Her eyes narrowed into dangerous slits as she glared at Marcus.
"Elias is right," Sarah growled. "Something stinks, Marcus. And it ain’t just the onion juice on your collar."
Marcus flinched.
How the hell did she smell the onion juice?
He scrambled backward off the table, standing up and drawing his sidearm, pointing it at the floor but making his intent clear.
"This is mutiny!" Marcus shouted, his voice finally losing its fake grief, replaced by a shrill panic. "I am the acting Commander of the Vanguard! I order you to stand down! We must secure the perimeter and hold a memorial for Adrian!"
The other officers in the tent, especially the mid-level commanders who were more interested in politics than loyalty, shifted uncomfortably. The military chain of command was absolute.
Marcus was technically the second-in-command. If Adrian was dead, Marcus was the boss.
Defying him was treason.
Elias and Sarah exchanged a dark, heavy look. They knew the rules. If they drew their weapons on Marcus now, the entire base would tear itself apart in a civil war, and the Vanguard would fall to the zombies before nightfall.
They needed proof.
"Fine, Acting Commander," Elias spat the title out like it was a mouthful of acid. He removed his hand from his knife, stepping back and saluting with mocking slowness. "We will honor the chain of command."
Marcus let out a subtle breath of relief, puffing out his chest.
Fools. But it’s good that they’re slowly falling in line. The Vanguard is as good as mine now.
"However," Elias continued, his eyes locking onto Marcus with the intensity of a predator, "Vanguard protocol dictates that a Commander’s body must be recovered for proper honors. Or, at the very least, his dog tags."
Marcus’s face paled.
He hadn’t taken the dog tags.
He had been too busy kicking Adrian down a ventilation shaft and running away.
"The area is completely overrun!" Marcus stammered, his fake tears entirely forgotten. "It’s a suicide mission! I forbid it!"
"You can forbid a full deployment," Sarah interrupted, stepping up beside Elias, cracking her massive knuckles. "But Vanguard bylaws allow for a voluntary two-man recon squad to confirm the status of an MIA asset. You can’t stop us from volunteering, Marcus. Not unless you want to explain to the whole base why you don’t want us finding Adrian’s body."
Marcus was trapped.
If he denied the recon mission, his guilt would be obvious to everyone in the tent. He forced a grim, pained expression back onto his face.
"Very well," Marcus choked out, holstering his gun. "If you wish to throw your lives away in Sector 4, I will not stop you. But you leave immediately. And you do not take any heavy transport."
’They’ll be ripped apart,’ Marcus thought gleefully. ’Sector 4 is swarming. The neurotoxin will have turned Adrian into a puddle of goo by now anyway. Might as well let them go die and keep that bastard company in death.’
Elias didn’t say another word.
He turned on his heel and strode out of the command tent, with Sarah following right behind him.
Once outside, the heavy canvas flap closing behind them, Sarah turned to Elias, her hand gripped tightly on her cannon.
"He’s lying through his teeth," Sarah whispered, her voice trembling with suppressed rage. "If Marcus put a knife in Adrian’s back, I am going to feed him to the Rot-Hounds."
"I know," Elias said coldly, checking the magazine of his sniper rifle. "But we need proof. We need to go to that garage in Sector 4. We need to find the Commander. If he’s dead, we bring him home. If he’s alive..."
Elias looked out toward the horizon, where the black smoke of Sector 4 stained the sky.
"If he’s alive, Marcus is a dead man walking."
"How fast can we get there?" Sarah asked, jogging toward the motor pool.
"On a pair of dirt bikes? Forty-five minutes. Let’s move."
As the two loyalists kicked their dirt bikes to life and sped out of the base gates, defying the apocalypse to find their leader, they had absolutely no idea that their terrifying, unstoppable Commander was currently cruising down the highway toward them.
And they certainly had no idea that Adrian Pendleton, the Thunder God, was currently engaged in a high-stakes, life-or-death negotiation over the auxiliary radio controls.
"Kiddo, I’m just saying, heavy metal is better for vehicular combat," Adrian argued loudly over the roar of the engine, steering the SUV with one hand while swatting a zombie torso off the hood with the windshield wipers.
Dia sat rigidly in her booster seat, her tiny finger pressed firmly on the radio dial, currently locked onto a static-filled frequency playing a pre-apocalypse recording of a children’s choir singing about numbers.
"Negative," Dia stated in her deadpan little voice. "Heavy metal rhythms disrupt my digestive enzymes. The ’Counting Songs for Toddlers Volume 3’ is mathematically soothing. It helps with the strawberry milk!"
Adrian looked at the little girl.
He remembered the pink dinosaur band-aid still stuck to his forehead.
Then he looked at the road ahead, where a horde of zombies was currently being violently atomized by his front bumper to the cheerful tune of ’One, Two, Buckle My Shoe.’
The warlord sighed, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.
"You know what, Dia? You’re the boss. ’Counting Songs for Toddlers’ it is. Let’s go introduce Marcus to the new management."
.
.
.
On the other hand,
The motor pool smelled of diesel, stale sweat, and impending treason.
Sarah kicked the starter of her heavily modified scrambler motorcycle, the engine roaring to life with a deafening, throaty growl. Beside her, Elias secured a bandolier of sniper rounds across his chest, his face a mask of cold, uncompromising fury.
They were leaving the barracks.