United States of Z - Book 1: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller by Olin Lester

Author:Olin Lester [Lester, Olin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Pelican Publishing
Published: 2025-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

A New Friend

Mark Moon

Naval Medical Center San Diego

Infectious Disease Lab

The door opened to a violent gaggle of men and women tossing and turning across blood-slicked floors as a white smoke filtered through the air like a macabre night club of death. The smell would have been caustic and rancid aged meat, but the men of Team 3 wore breathers and couldn’t smell a three-day-old dead man rotting in the sun from four feet away.

Mark Moon ran point, leading his men into the nightmarish scene, his M4 up and ready as he nearly missed the first man but stepped to his left and contact shot him in the forehead. His head instantly canoed before his body smacked the floor like a wet towel.

Overhead, the echoes of men shrieking a guttural howl bounced off the ceiling and glass walls. Each scream landed differently in the men’s ears as they entered the room full of Carriers.

That was when Moon saw her for the first time.

In that split second before the firing began, his eyes locked with hers, and he knew she was their main target, so much so that his lips instinctively mouthed her name under his breath: “Ava.”

As each man spread left and right, they began firing. The animalistic screams were replaced with sounds of lead bullets rifling down ten- and twelve-inch M4 barrels sailing through the air and beginning to tear meat and bone from their intended and unintended targets.

Moon’s M4 swung wide as he fired, striking a female in the chest, yet the rounds didn’t much faze her. So he readjusted and put two rounds in her left eye. A quick double tap and she fell, dead on the spot. That was when he also realized there was something off about her eyes and their level of their aggression—they not only seemed dead, but sadistic, and that wasn’t a harsh enough word for what he was searching for.

Tallant had been the first man moving left in the room, where he engaged two men wearing court attire—double tapping their heads being the only thing that put them down and kept them down.

His attention focused on the dead men to the detriment of himself, allowing another infected man to stumble out from behind a set of uncleared cabinets he had passed up while fixated on the Carriers he had just shot. Methodically, the man slid a knife under his armor and between his ribs, popping his left lung and only stopping after the edge of the knife had pierced his heart.

The twenty-year army veteran had made a fatal mistake by not clearing the corner. It was a mistake almost unheard of, but in the face of encountering a Carrier for the first time, mistakes happened, but this one was costly. The best thing to ever come out of North Georgia fell dead to the ground, gasping his last breaths as his heart bled out into the void his collapsed lung had created.

Protocol Team 3 had just suffered their first casualty of what would come to be known as the Ares Plague or, by others, the Ares War.

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