Orion silently slotted the magazine into his chest rig and glanced up at Lin Feng, who was talking to Glenn and the others. The corner of his mouth twitched.

One minute he'd extracted the enemy camp's location. The next he was already organizing a strike team.

Hard to say whether Lin Feng was vindictive or just hyper-alert, but on the execution front? Completely airtight.

"Remember: if anything goes wrong, don't start shooting wild and don't go running off on your own. Follow orders. Stay calm to stay alive, and stay alive to put out damage." Lin Feng patted Glenn on the chest and said it low and flat.

Glenn nodded. Fear, nerves, and a sharp edge of excitement had knotted together into one tangled mess, but Glenn's fingers found the ceramic plate inside the vest and stayed there a moment. That helped, a little.

Lin Feng looked over at Daryl and Orion. "You two are on scout for this run. Any sentries, you take them out quietly."

The two exchanged a glance and nodded without a word.

Lin Feng was genuinely curious. One was a top-tier hunter, the other an active-duty recon soldier. On a reconnaissance job, who would come out ahead?

"All right — no other assignments. Just one thing: stay safe."

Merle, Marcus, Shane, and Maggie nodded, gathered their weapons, and headed for the pickup.

Lin Feng turned to Rick. "Camp's yours until we're back."

Rick looked like there was something to say. In the end, there wasn't. "Okay. Come back soon."

"We will. If nothing goes sideways, we might even make it back in time for a late-night snack." Lin Feng grinned, jogged a few steps, and swung up onto the pickup bed.

Merle turned the engine over and carried them all out into the setting sun.

Half an hour later, working off the confessions extracted earlier, Merle found the other farm.

The group parked well out of sight, then crept up the hillside flanking the property and went still behind the brush and trees.

Lin Feng raised his binoculars and studied the layout below. It was set up roughly like Hershel's Farm, but with nothing added in the way of defenses. More of a temporary camp than an actual base.

"No wonder we never had any trouble while we were building up our fortifications. These bastards must have drifted over recently."

He panned the binoculars. Inside the wire-mesh perimeter, alongside a scatter of private cars and pickups, sat three large trucks.

At the center of the camp, several oil drums had wood burning in them, throwing out light like makeshift torches, with zero apparent concern that the brightness might pull walkers in.

It was probably around dinnertime, because the people down there were running something like a party. In just the short stretch Lin Feng had been watching, he'd already picked out several figures who were drunk off their feet.

The drunks weren't even the worst of it. Several people had clearly gone somewhere far beyond drunk, high out of their minds, and were already tangled together in pale, writhing heaps on the ground.

Lin Feng's face went flat. He lowered the binoculars. He was done looking. Keep going and he'd end up with styes.

Maggie noticed he was finished and reached over to take the binoculars for a look. Lin Feng sidestepped it neatly.

"Don't. Bad for your health, mental and physical both."

Maggie:?

Maggie looked over at the others who'd been watching through their own binoculars. Every face was dark enough to curdle milk.

Disgusting.

Lin Feng was just about to say something when his peripheral vision snagged on a shadow, there and gone.

He locked onto it immediately. On the hillside in the distance, shapes were moving. Moving fast. And there were a lot of them.

He brought the binoculars up for a closer look.

His eyes went wide. He bit down hard.

"WHAT THE — WHAT THE — WHAT THE HELL?! How are those things back again?!"

Merle and Marcus snapped their own binoculars up and tracked Lin Feng's line of sight. Both went quiet.

"Fuck! Where did these damn things crawl out from?! Have the walkers actually started mutating?!"

Cold sweat crept up Merle's back without asking permission. Merle hadn't forgotten the last time, coming that close to not walking away.

"What are those? Some new kind of walker? I've never seen anything like that."

Lin Feng lowered his binoculars and looked up. The sun was already more than halfway below the horizon. His voice came out flat and hard.

"You'll find out shortly. Walkers?" He let it sit for a beat. "These things wouldn't even qualify to lace a walker's boots."

Down below, completely oblivious to what was coming, the thugs were still celebrating. Shouting things that made no sense to anyone sober, bottles raised high like they'd won something.

A few had already made it past celebration and were lying on the ground with strange little smiles on their faces.

One man stood out from the rest, thickset, middle-aged, wearing a punk jacket, both arms bare and covered in ink, a fat cigar clamped between his teeth. He stood there taking in his domain with the kind of satisfaction that comes from believing you've made it.

From nothing to running a fifty-man crew. One month. That's all it had taken.

And the cost? A little product and a few women. Simple math.

Once Dinir finished smashing that small camp to the north, the food situation would ease up considerably. Maybe Dinir would even bring back a few women in the bargain.

Hopefully they'd hold up longer this time. As for things going wrong, how could they? Some old man with a handful of farmhands and two daughters. Against more than twenty of his people. Not a chance.

"Boss, charcoal steak. Want to try some?" A scrawny figure approached, plate extended, wearing a smile that was trying too hard.

The big man glanced at it. Looked decent enough. He reached out without warmth, took the plate, and set it on the oil drum beside him that was standing in for a table.

He pulled the cigar from his mouth with his right hand and looked the skinny figure up and down, mouth already curling with something sarcastic, and then he noticed the figure's eyes.

They had gone wide with pure, absolute terror. Staring at something directly behind him.

What?

He turned.

Across the ground in the distance, a mass of creatures with purple-black skin came crawling, fast, impossibly fast, and they were heading straight for the camp.

He stood there for two full seconds, frozen. Then his eyes blew open and he roared.

"FUCK! WE'RE UNDER ATTACK?!"

The cigar hit the dirt. He ran for the trucks.

Fight back? He hadn't entertained the thought for a single second. Those things moved on all fours as fast as a coyote at full sprint. The people under his command couldn't do anything but prey on helpless civilians, what exactly were they supposed to throw at something like that?

Their bodies? Hope the monsters choked?

There was nothing to say. Run.

Get into the cargo container, slam the doors, and the steel hull would keep those things from tearing him apart. He had food and water in there. He could ride it out for a long time.

Even if the creatures didn't leave on their own, once there was nothing left to eat out there, they'd move on. And he'd be fine.

He was still running that logic through his head when his leg buckled.

He hit the ground face-first.

He flipped over. His thigh was pumping blood in thick, rhythmic surges, and then the pain reached his brain all at once, a white-hot wave with no bottom to it.

"AAAAAAGH, "

Those things had ranged attacks?!

➤ Next: Passing the Buck

Chapter 72 - Passing the Buck

Up on the hillside, Lin Feng and the group witnessed a feast of slaughter.

Under the dim twilight, shadows swept across the ground. The lead mutated walker was enormous, and when it let out a piercing shriek, the entire pack vaulted the wire fence with animal ease and tore into the yard like wolves into a flock of sheep.

One mutated walker crawled forward at terrifying speed, locked onto a fleeing figure, then exploded off all fours and slammed the person flat to the ground. Sharp claws drove into the shoulder blades and locked there.

It thrust its head forward. Razor fangs buried into the throat. A violent jerk of the head, a chunk of flesh torn free, swallowed whole.

The screaming cut off instantly. Blood sprayed in pulses. A few seconds later, the struggling limbs went still.

Swift. Brutal. Merciless. They moved without a single wasted step, each one locked onto a separate target, their attacks barely ever overlapping.

Glenn stared for a long moment before speaking, voice low. "These things... they're an entirely different species. I mean, they don't look like walkers at all."

Orion's voice was quiet and steady. "Some degree of intelligence. Command structure. Clear division of labor. Extreme speed, capable of leaping. High individual combat effectiveness." A beat. "They're going to be hard to put down."

Lin Feng's expression was grim. "The only reason we wiped them out last time was terrain. The environment denied their speed advantage, so we could use shotguns to suppress and kill them."

"Out in the open like this, once they swarm together, they're practically invincible without wide-area firepower."

Coming out tonight, they had assumed their opponents would be human. Four suppressed M4s and two shotguns. That was what they had brought.

Against the mutated horde down there, that loadout was suicide.

Shane's scalp crawled. Glenn was right, these things and the slow-shuffling walkers were completely different creatures. The gap between them was like the gap between puppies and full-grown wolves.

Daryl stood expressionless, face perfectly calm. Though the back of Daryl's shirt had gone noticeably darker with sweat.

Lin Feng watched the mutated walkers below finish their killing, and his mind drifted back to the previous operation, they had found these creatures holed up in an attic. Corpses dug out of that burial pit had been stacked inside.

"Think these things will do what they did last time? Haul whatever they can't finish back to their nest?"

Daryl's eyes narrowed. "Not 'think' — they definitely will. They don't even turn their noses up at day-old corpses. They're not passing up fresh meat."

"Then we wait. See where they drag it."

"Fuck! Nobody mentioned the game difficulty was getting cranked up when we set out!"

Merle had already read the room. Lin Feng was looking to pick a fight with the bastards down below.

Down in the yard, the hunt complete, the leader threw its head back and let out a screech toward the sky. Like a switch had been flipped, the rest of the pack fell into their feast.

Even at this distance, Maggie and Glenn felt their skin crawl, goosebumps rising all over.

Not from fear or disgust exactly. The uncanny valley, a deep, hardwired physical revulsion that had nothing to do with conscious thought.

Time passed.

Shane spoke up. "Did everyone forget? When walkers bite someone to death, they turn..."

"Fuck!"

"Holy shit!"

"..."

Lin Feng's brain took two full seconds to catch up, and then immediately started passing the blame. Turning to Shane: "Why didn't you say something sooner?!"

Shane looked at Lin Feng with open bewilderment. "Isn't that basic?"

Glenn and the others stared at Lin Feng with the same blank look. They had assumed people killed by mutated walkers simply didn't turn, only to realize Lin Feng had just plain forgotten.

As for Merle, Daryl, and Marcus, tsk. My, the moon sure is pretty tonight. Funny how only half of it's showing, though.

Perhaps the mutated walkers sensed something. They gradually stopped feeding. After one more screech, they scrambled back up the hillside and disappeared from sight.

Then, one by one, the half-eaten bodies, the ones left untouched on the ground, they all began to stir. Slowly pulling themselves upright.

"Tsk. They headed back. What's the play?"

"What else? Go home, wash up, get some sleep. What if they double back on us? The supplies down there can wait until morning. We'll need to bring more people."

Lin Feng paused, something clicking. "Orion — how's that bomb coming along?"

"Ready to use tomorrow."

"Good. While you're at it, walk the rest of us through making Molotov cocktails. We'll put some together tomorrow. Should come in handy."

"Understood."

Back at camp, Rick came out to meet them, taking one look at all six returning intact and nodding with a small smile.

"How did it go?"

"Good news is that crew is gone. Bad news is we've run into something a lot worse."

Lin Feng laid out the situation with the mutated walkers. Rick's frown deepened with every word.

Back at the CDC, none of that doctor's research had mentioned anything about the virus mutating like this.

Natural mutation?

Hard to say. But whatever the cause, the trouble had gotten significantly worse.

Then Rick seemed to remember something.

"Oh — Lin. You remember Dale Horvath's radio?"

"What about it? New broadcast?"

Rick nodded. "There was a brief transmission on one of the channels. Sounded more like a distress call."

➤ Next: Transmigrate Properly for Me 2