Chapter 1

I coughed heavily as I stepped into a cramped, stuffy room filled with smoke and ash. It was not a good move. I really should have stayed outside.

Except that the world I had grown up seeing had suddenly taken a massive upheaval.

My parents had died on me years before then and my uncle who raised me was an army veteran who fought in the Vietnam war. And as things had gone, my uncle was my pillar of strength and he taught me things that schools could never have done. I was raised to live by a code of honour, justice and loyalty, having discipline in every aspect of my life. And it was no surprise to anyone that I enlisted one day into the armed forces as well. Three years I spent in the 101st Airborne Division, hoping I could fulfill my uncle's wish of seeing me don the Green Beret, becoming the pride of the country. Well, that day never came.

Instead I had undergone the harsh training and mental conditioning of an Airborne Ranger. My old uncle would have been proud anyway on the day that I completed the Ranger course and graduated the top of my cohort, putting to shame several Lieutenants and even a Captain from other divisions. My team-mates in the course called me "the Bull", citing a ferocious determination and a relentless will to take on any challenges however difficult as reasons for that nickname. I was taken to the 75th Ranger Regiment and became part of the special force.

But when I had thought being a ranger was difficult, my superior recommended that I joined the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment- Delta. Me, being "the Bull", jumped at the prospect of becoming part of the legendary Delta Force. A stupid move made by a really stupid guy who just wanted to make his old uncle proud of him. I had rarely cried in my entire life, but it was in the Delta Operator course that I wept uncontrollably. Challenges that seemed so insurmountable came from every corner, stacked on top of the brutal physical training and psychological assaults. People always say that those from the Special Forces are superhuman. They are only half-right. Outwardly we portray ourselves as fearless, invincible soldiers. But inside, we are just the same. We still have feelings, fears and emotions. But how can we display any signs of weakness at all?

Before we became operators, we had already been trained to kill. Being Delta operators turned us into trained killers.

And that was why the existence of an enemy that could not be permanently eliminated overwhelmed me at first. They were all around us, pale savage zombie-like creatures. God knows what they were, but they definitely made my hair stand. They were not difficult to kill but the problem was that their numbers never seem to dwindle. They just kept coming and coming.

"Wha'cha thinkin' about, kid?" a low, rough voice echoed in the small room. I looked at the source of the voice; a dark-haired rugged man with high cheekbones and spots of grime on his face.

Ignoring the man, I kicked aside an empty can of baked beans and leaned against a wall at the far corner of the room. Gazing out through a window coated with years of dust, I could make out several of those zombie creatures staggering across a street not more than two hundred metres away.

"I'm talkin' to you, corporal." The voice came again, this time with more far more aggression than before.

My eyes swerved to the man who was sitting on an upturned wooden crate, smoking what was left of a cigarette. He met my eyes with a steely glare which would have made most adult males shrink back in trepidation. But I was not your average adult male. I stared back at his cold, onyx eyes with equal intensity.

"Now no need for all this animosity, soldiers. We're all in this shit hole together and we gonna have to work together if we wanna make it out alive."

I breathed out heavily and turned my gaze to the third man, easing the tension that was quickly building up. He was a massive guy, standing at six feet three, with a shaven head and a brown goatee. The man nodded appreciatively at me and with two fingers, removed the lit cigarette from his lips. Breathing out one last puff of smoke, the bald man tossed the cigarette onto the concrete floor and crushed it under his black army combat boots.

"Whatever you say, Staff," the dark-haired man said nonchalantly, turning his eyes back to a tattered poster of an old 1960s film about cowboys and the wild west.