The Walking Dead: Outside The Wire

The girl's body at the kitchen door had bought him precious seconds—nothing more. Marcus cataloged the scene with the cold efficiency that had kept him alive through two decades of black ops: multiple hostiles feeding on fresh meat, their attention focused inward, exit route temporarily clear. The tactical part of his mind noted the irony—her death had become his lifeline.

The human part tried to surface, to process the waste of it all, but Marcus buried it deep. Emotion was a luxury he couldn't afford. Not when twenty yards of open ground separated him from the Ford pickup, and not when a dozen shamblers were shambling through the yard toward him.

He moved.

The first walker—a middle-aged man in torn coveralls—reached him as Marcus cleared the back steps. No ammunition to waste. Marcus grabbed the shambler's reaching arm, used its forward momentum to spin it around, and drove his combat knife up through the base of its skull. The blade punched through brain stem with practiced precision. One down.

Two more converged from his left flank. Marcus let the first corpse drop and flowed into the attack, muscle memory taking over. He ducked under grasping hands, swept the legs of the nearest walker, and brought his boot down hard on its skull as it hit the ground. Bone cracked. The second one lunged, and Marcus caught it with an uppercut from his knife, the blade sliding through soft palate into brain matter.

Three down. Seventeen yards to the truck.

A cluster of four shamblers blocked his direct path. Marcus adjusted his route, angling toward a gap near an old oak tree. A walker in a bloodstained waitress uniform stumbled into his path. He grabbed a fistful of her hair, yanked her head back, and drove the knife home behind her ear. The blade stuck for a half-second in vertebrae, and Marcus had to wrench it free as another shambler closed in.

This one had been a kid—maybe sixteen. Part of Marcus's mind registered the torn school jacket, the remnants of innocence in features now slack with death. He hesitated for a millisecond, and nearly paid for it. The young walker's teeth snapped inches from his throat. Marcus drove an elbow into its chest, creating space, then ended it with a quick thrust to the temple.

Ten yards. His breathing remained controlled, steady. The knife felt natural in his grip—an extension of his will.

Two walkers flanked him as he reached the truck. Marcus rolled across the hood, using the vehicle as a barrier. He came up on the driver's side just as a shambler in a mechanic's jumpsuit rounded the front bumper. Marcus grabbed it by the shirt, slammed its head against the truck's door frame, then finished it with the knife.

The last walker—an elderly woman in a torn housedress—approached from behind the truck. Marcus drew his sidearm, aimed, and squeezed the trigger. The bullet took off the top of her skull. One round left in the chamber.

He spotted movement in his peripheral vision—three more shamblers emerging from behind a nearby shed. Too far to engage with the knife, too close to ignore. Marcus raised the pistol, centered the front sight on the lead walker's forehead, and fired his final round. The .45 slug punched through bone and brain, dropping the shambler instantly.

Marcus holstered the empty weapon and threw it into the truck's cab. No time to police brass or retrieve the knife from the last corpse. He vaulted into the driver's seat, turned the key, and felt the V8 engine roar to life.

The truck lurched forward, crushing two walkers under its front bumper. More shamblers emerged from the tree line, drawn by the engine noise, but Marcus was already accelerating down the gravel drive. Pine branches scraped against the passenger window as he navigated the curved driveway, and then he was on the main road, leaving the carnage behind.

The events at the house settled into the back of his mind like sediment in still water. Five dead men who'd deserved killing. A family he'd failed to save—husband, wife, daughter, all gone because he'd arrived thirty seconds too late. The girl at the kitchen door, her sacrifice meaningless except for the few moments it had bought him. Such was the arithmetic of this new world: good intentions measured against split-second timing, and both usually coming up short.

Marcus checked his watch: 8:31 AM. He reached into his pack with one hand while steering with the other, fingers finding the familiar weight of his last magazine. Fifteen rounds of .45 ACP. He slapped the mag into the pistol's grip, chambered a round, and holstered the weapon. Fifteen bullets to get him to Atlanta, or what remained of it.

The road stretched ahead, empty except for the occasional abandoned vehicle. Marcus settled into the rhythm of driving, his mind shifting to operational mode. Primary objective: reach CDC coordinates. Secondary objective: confirm Daryl Dixon's intel about Dr. Jenner's final act. Tertiary objective: survive long enough to determine next move.

An hour of Georgia backroads gave way to suburban sprawl—subdivisions with names like "Peachtree Meadows" and "Magnolia Springs" now serving as monuments to a dead civilization. House after house stood empty, windows dark, yards overgrown. Some showed signs of hasty evacuation: garage doors left open, belongings scattered across driveways. Others bore evidence of more violent departures—broken windows, dark stains on siding, doors hanging off hinges.

Thirty minutes later, the Atlanta skyline rose ahead like broken teeth against the morning sky. Operation Cobalt had done its work thoroughly. The downtown core was a graveyard of collapsed towers and fire-blackened ruins. Smoke still drifted from some of the wreckage. A year later, and the city was still dying. The CDC building would be somewhere in that maze of destruction, assuming it still existed.

Marcus navigated around abandoned cars and military checkpoints, following memory and dead street signs toward the city center. The silence was absolute except for his engine—no birds, no insects, nothing alive in this concrete necropolis. Just the occasional glimpse of movement in shadows that might have been walkers or might have been wind stirring debris.

Atlanta had become a tomb, and Marcus was driving into its heart.

xxx

The Ford's engine began to miss around entrance sign to Atlanta. A subtle hitch in the rhythm that Marcus's trained ear caught immediately. He'd pushed the truck hard getting out of the suburbs, weaving between abandoned vehicles and debris fields without mercy for the transmission. Now the machine was telling him what every operator learned eventually: all equipment failed, usually at the worst possible moment.

Marcus downshifted, coaxing another few blocks from the dying engine. The temperature gauge had climbed into the red zone twenty minutes ago. Steam leaked from under the hood in thin wisps that would soon become a geyser. He scanned the street ahead, looking for a suitable position to abandon the vehicle. In hostile territory, you never left yourself without multiple exit routes.

The truck shuddered to a halt three blocks from where the map claimed the CDC should be. Marcus turned the key and got nothing but clicking from the starter. Dead as the city around him.

He sat for a moment in the sudden silence, hands resting on the steering wheel, eyes moving across the urban wasteland beyond the windshield. Downtown Atlanta stretched before him like the set of a disaster movie—if disaster movies had budgets for complete societal collapse. Buildings leaned against each other at impossible angles, their facades sheared away to reveal empty concrete honeycombs. Street lamps bent like broken fingers. Traffic lights hung dark and twisted from their cables, some dangling so low they nearly touched the asphalt.

Operation Cobalt had been thorough. Too thorough.

Marcus retrieved his pack from the passenger seat, checked his sidearm, and stepped out into the dead city. The air carried scents he'd encountered in war zones: concrete dust, rust, the sweet-sick smell of decomposition that never fully faded. But underneath it all was something else—an absence. Atlanta had become a sensory void.

He started walking.

The silence was profound in a way that urban environments weren't designed for. Marcus's footsteps echoed off empty buildings, the sound seeming to travel for blocks before dying against walls of debris. His tactical awareness remained sharp—corners cleared, sight lines monitored, potential cover identified—but there was nothing to see. No movement except paper scraps stirring in the breeze. No signs of life, human or otherwise.

This wasn't like Fallujah or Kandahar, where every doorway might hide an enemy but the streets still pulsed with human energy. This was extinction made manifest. A city-sized grave marker.

Marcus had operated in ghost towns before—places where ethnic cleansing or warfare had driven out entire populations. But those places retained echoes of their former lives: abandoned meals on tables, children's toys in yards, photographs still hanging on walls. Atlanta felt different. Sterilized. As if humanity had been surgically removed rather than simply killed.

He turned onto what had been Marietta Street, following the map coordinates burned into his memory. The CDC complex should be another half-mile northeast, assuming Daryl's intelligence was accurate. Assuming the building still existed. Assuming any of this made sense in a world where the fundamental rules had changed overnight.

A city bus lay on its side across the intersection, its windows blown out and frame scorched black. Marcus climbed over it, noting the bullet holes stitched across its length. Military caliber, probably from the evacuation period when everything went to hell and the soldiers started shooting anything that moved. Standard operating procedure when containment failed: scorched earth, acceptable losses, plausible deniability.

He'd seen it before in foreign theaters where the mission went sideways. The difference was that this time, there was nowhere to extract to.

Marcus paused at the intersection, checking his six out of habit. Still nothing. The city was so thoroughly dead that even the dead seemed to have moved on to easier hunting grounds. Or maybe the bombing had taken care of them too. Hard to shamble when you're buried under ten tons of concrete.

The thought should have been comforting. Instead, it felt ominous. In his experience, empty spaces didn't stay empty long. Something always moved in to fill the vacuum.

He continued northeast, navigating around crater-sized potholes and debris fields. The destruction showed clear patterns—shaped charges on load-bearing structures, thermite burns on steel girders, precision demolition disguised as carpet bombing. Cobalt hadn't been about stopping the outbreak. It had been about erasing the evidence.

Marcus knew something about evidence disposal. In his line of work, you learned to recognize the difference between collateral damage and intentional obliteration. This was the latter. Someone had decided Atlanta was too compromised to save, so they'd made sure nothing survived to tell the story.

A bank building caught his attention—or rather, what remained of one. The structure had been sheared in half by what looked like a controlled demolition, its upper floors pancaked down onto the lower ones. But the vault area was still intact, its steel reinforcement too tough even for military-grade explosives. Marcus could see papers scattered around the entrance, probably currency and documents blown clear during the collapse.

Money. In the old world, people had killed for it, died for it, built empires and destroyed nations pursuing it. Now it was just colorful paper blowing in the wind of a dead city. The irony wasn't lost on him. He'd spent his career protecting American interests—which usually meant protecting American money—and now both were equally worthless.

Marcus stepped over a pile of hundred-dollar bills without breaking stride. Adaptation was survival. The operators who thrived were the ones who could shift paradigms when the mission parameters changed. The ones who couldn't adapt became casualties.

He'd learned that lesson the hard way in Kandahar, when—

Marcus cut the thought short. The past was intelligence to be analyzed, not emotion to be processed. What mattered was the present tactical situation: solo operator, moving through hostile urban terrain, limited ammunition, undefined objective.

Everything else was just noise.

A helicopter sat crumpled against the side of a office building about two blocks ahead, its rotor blades twisted into modern art sculptures. Military designation, probably National Guard based on the markings he could make out. The crew compartment was empty, no bodies visible. Either they'd been evacuated or they'd walked away. In this world, both options led to the same question: where were they now?

Marcus altered his route to give the crash site a wide berth. Crashed aircraft attracted scavengers—human and otherwise. Even in a dead city, burnt aviation fuel could draw unwanted attention.

Remembering the coordinates in his head put the CDC about six blocks away now. Close enough to smell the finish line, if finish lines had scents in urban graveyards. Marcus had learned not to trust proximity to objectives. The last hundred meters were usually where everything went wrong.

He passed what had been a hospital—Grady Memorial, according to the partially intact sign out front. The building showed extensive damage but was still mostly standing, its emergency room entrance surprisingly intact. Ambulances sat abandoned in the circular drive, their doors hanging open like mechanical mouths frozen mid-scream. One still had its lights flashing, a weak pulse of red and blue against the gray morning.

Something about the scene felt wrong. Fresh wrong, not apocalypse wrong.

Marcus stopped, his instincts pinging like radar. The hospital's generators had been off for over a year, but that ambulance was running on battery power. Batteries didn't last that long without maintenance. Someone had been here recently. Someone with technical knowledge.

He studied the building's facade, looking for signs of habitation. Most of the windows were dark, but the third floor showed what might have been movement behind glass. Could have been curtains stirring in the breeze. Could have been something else.

Marcus weighed his options. Investigate and risk contact with unknown survivors, or bypass and maintain operational security. In the old world, the choice would have been clear—avoid civilian contact unless mission-critical. But the old world was dead, and the new one operated by different rules. Intelligence gathering was always valuable, even when you weren't sure what intelligence you needed.

He was still deciding when the decision was made for him.

The white hospital van came around the corner at forty miles per hour, its engine roaring in the silence like a chainsaw in a library. Marcus caught a glimpse of two figures in the cab. They saw him the same instant he saw them, and for a moment that stretched like taffy, they stared at each other through windshield and empty air.

Then physics took over.

Marcus dove left, toward what looked like cover behind an overturned police cruiser. The van's driver yanked the wheel right, probably trying to avoid him. Or maybe trying to hit him. Hard to tell the difference when you were about to become roadkill.

The timing was all wrong. Marcus's left boot caught on a chunk of concrete, sending him stumbling instead of diving. The van's front bumper caught him at waist level, spinning him like a rag doll. He hit the asphalt hard, rolled twice, and came to a stop against the base of a street light.

Pain exploded through his left side—ribs, definitely cracked, possibly worse. His vision went white, then black, then settled into a nauseating gray that meant concussion. Marcus tried to push himself upright and got about halfway before his body decided that was ambitious enough for now.

The van had stopped fifty yards down the street. Through his fractured vision, Marcus could see two figures getting out. They moved with purpose, not panic. Medical training, probably. They'd assess his condition before deciding whether he was worth saving or worth leaving.

Marcus reached for his sidearm and found empty holster. The pistol had skittered across the asphalt during his impromptu flight, coming to rest about ten feet away. Might as well have been ten miles. His left arm wasn't responding to commands, and his right leg felt like it belonged to someone else.

The two figures approached cautiously. In this world, helping strangers was usually a mistake that didn't get repeated.

Marcus tried to focus on their faces but kept seeing double. Medical scrub, and a police uniform. One male, one female. Both carrying what looked like medical bags. The woman was saying something, but the words sounded like they were coming through water.

"—conscious? Can you hear me?"

Marcus managed a nod, though it made his skull feel like it was splitting. The woman knelt beside him, professional in her movements. Checking his pulse, looking at his pupils, running experienced hands over his ribs.

"Couple of cracked ribs, possible concussion," she said to her companion. "Nothing life-threatening if we can get him back to the hospital."

The man remained standing, scanning the street for threats. Good tactical awareness. Marcus approved, even through the haze of pain and disorientation.

"We can't just leave him here," the woman continued. "He's the first survivor we've seen in weeks."

"Dawn's not going to like this," the man replied.

Dawn. A name. Intelligence to file away for later analysis, assuming Marcus lived long enough for later to matter.

The woman ignored her companion's concerns. "Help me get him to the van. We'll deal with Dawn when we get back."

Marcus tried to speak, to tell them he could walk, that he didn't need help, that bringing him anywhere was a mistake they'd regret. But his voice came out as a croak, and his body felt like it was held together with wishful thinking and muscle memory.

The last thing he saw before consciousness slipped away was the Grady Memorial Hospital sign, its letters swimming in his vision like fish in murky water.

Then darkness claimed him, and Marcus dropped into the tactical nightmare every operator feared: waking up in enemy hands, weaponless, injured, and completely at their mercy but they will eventually learn who he is, and what he's capable of.