The company then turns and runs toward the rear company positions. Behind, Jennings hears the chunk of the heavy machine guns as the Humvees try to buy some time. He races through the line, his eyes certainly showing the same exhausted yet determined look he saw in those before him.

Taking up position to the rear, Jennings’s perspective has been narrowed down to scant yards on the fields of Missouri. Where he was thinking about the operation in terms of weeks, now he counts down the minutes until the next engagement. He knows that this is being repeated along other highways, but his reality is only the wet, muddy fields immediately surrounding him. Replenishing his ammo, he sets up near a fence just outside of another demolished farmhouse. Breathing heavily, he’s not sure how many more runs like that he has in him.

The process becomes an earnest rinse-and-repeat action. The gunships providing covering fire are replaced as they run out of ammunition. Jennings thinks that it’s too bad they don’t have B-52 formations delivering strikes.

This would be cleaned out in a hurry.

Of course, he knows that there’s no way any of them this close to the lines would survive should the tons of bombs begin hammering into the horde. There’s a reason why the minimum safe distance is one thousand yards.

Jennings zooms in on the action to the front, waiting for their next turn. With his eye to the scope, the spatter of a rain drop on his arm surprises him. It takes a couple more before he realizes exactly what it is. Looking back over his shoulder, he sees the gray wall of a rain shower bearing down on the company.

The ground splashes with large raindrops, a few at first either sent as a warning or as a test. They hit the pavement, the force breaking the single drops into a dozen smaller ones, spraying outward. Jennings hears the patter on his gear, then the deluge hits all at once. The gray curtain closes around the company, the view of the world narrowing to just a few yards. The drumming of thousands of drops hitting the ground drowns out the firefight up the road. The shower passes, leaving behind wet Marines, soggy fields, and glistening roads.

Jennings settles behind his scope, turning on the thermal setting. He opted for that scope in consideration of the smoke obscuration the last time. In the rain shower slowly moving down the road, he picks out the heat images of figures moving through it.

“Hold your fire. Marines coming through,” the radio calls.

The thermal shapes materialize into soldiers, wet from the rain, streaming back from their firefight, running to continue the leap frog maneuvers. The company passes through, leaving only wet fields stretching to the sides and the pavement vanishing into the gray wall ahead.

The order comes down to reorient positions thirty yards to the rear. That won’t greatly increase the distance when the infected come pouring out from within the void of the rain wall.

“We have to hold this line,” the company commander dictates.

“Why don’t we pull back farther?” the platoon commander asks Jennings. “This doesn’t give us much room.”

“We have to buy the company to the rear time to resupply,” Jennings replies.

“I hope they do that quickly.”

“You and me both, sir.”

With his eye again to the scope, Jennings observes a solid line of heat signatures. The gunships hovering on the fringes of the company begin firing into the rain, the red tracers fading and then vanishing as if devoured by the squall. Rockets leave the pods, trailing lines of smoke as they streak into the gray and vanish before small flares of flame show for split seconds. Placing a heat signature in his sight, Jennings adds his fire as well.

All along the line, without specific targets in view, the company and Humvees start blindly firing in an attempt to slow the advancing horde. The fields fill with tracers that disappear into the void, the Marines hoping that their rounds find marks. Dim figures appear just within the squall—darker, shadowy shapes wavering on the fringes.