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Or, rather, he had been until this morning. They had no idea what had happened to his six-months-pregnant wife.

And now, Carlos had to shoot him in the head.

“Definitely the worst vacation of my life,” Carlos muttered. It was such a nice cabin, too….

He caught up to the rest of the team just as Carter leaned in and bit O’Neill on the neck.

Any other day, Carlos would have reprimanded the two of them for public displays of affection.

Today, it just meant that one of them was dead, and the other would be soon.

Before Carlos could do anything, O’Neill grabbed her lover’s head and snapped his neck.

“Fuck,” she said, putting her hand to her neck, then looking at the blood pooled on it.

Without hesitating, she pulled out her Beretta and shoved the barrel in her mouth.

“No!” Carlos screamed, but it was too late. Sam O’Neill’s blood and brains splattered in a wide pattern across the wall behind her and her body fell to the pavement next to Jack Carter’s.

Carlos looked around to see no zombies left, but only Nicholai still standing.

“Where’s Halprin?”

Nicholai pointed at the ground, where Halprin lay with her head at an impossible angle.

“Jack went after the medic first. She pushed him off, fell, and broke her neck.”

Loginov, a devout Catholic—which was why he’d left the Soviet Union twenty years ago—made the sign of the cross. “At—at least she won’t come back—as one of those—those things.”

“That’s not a helluva lot of consolation.” Carlos looked down the street. More zombies were massing and heading their way. “Let’s move.”

Maneuvering amid the abandoned and burning cars and the cracked pavement, Carlos led the two Russians to a back alley where a streetcar had gone off the rails and crashed into a wall.

When they got inside, making sure that no zombies were hiding out, Carlos took a look at Loginov’s wound, pulling a field bandage out of one of the pouches on his uniform.

Within a few minutes, he’d tied it off. “I’ve stopped the bleeding.”

He looked up to see that Loginov was losing consciousness.

“Hey. Hey! Stay awake. You have to stay conscious, understand?”

“Yeah.” But Loginov was still drifting off.

Carlos snapped. “Pay attention, soldier!”

Now Loginov’s eyes snapped into focus. “I get it. I’m okay—I’m okay.”

He didn’t sound okay. He sounded like he was about to keel over and die, which fit because he looked like he was going to keel over and die.

But at least he was awake.

“Good.”

“Thank you—for coming back.”

“You’d do the same for me.” Carlos almost added that he had to save somebody today, but didn’t. That way lay madness. “Now, stay focused, you got it?”

Loginov managed a ragged smile. “Yes, sir.”

Nicholai, meanwhile, was trying to raise someone—anyone—on the radio.

“Alpha team to base, this is alpha team to base. Come in, base. Come in, base. Dammit!” He looked over at Carlos. “Why don’t they reply? They can’t just leave us in here. Why don’t they evac us?”

Carlos had always been honest with his people, and he saw no reason to stop now. So rather than give some kind of crap answer that would sound unconvincingly reassuring, he simply said, “I don’t know.”

“Why did they even send us in here?”

Nicholai started pacing the streetcar, more agitated than Carlos had ever seen him—indeed, more agitated than Carlos had thought him capable of being.

“We never stood a chance. We weren’t trained for this—nobody’s been trained for this! We never—”

“Wait.” Carlos interrupted Nicholai’s rant at a familiar sound.

He stood up.

“What?” Nicholai asked.

“Listen.”

It was a helicopter.

Lipinski had been instructed to return to base after dropping them off, so they were stuck without evac in this mess. Maybe now, though, they’d be picked up.

“Thank God!” Nicholai moved faster than Carlos had ever seen the big man move, and ran out into the street. “They’ve come for us. Thank God!”

Carlos followed at a more leisurely pace, as did Loginov, to find the big man waving his arms at a C89 overhead. The helicopter and several others