It was hard to sleep that night. There were just too many thoughts whirling around inside my head, all of them jostling for position.

Daniel and I arrived back at the penthouse close to midnight. I headed straight for bed. Daniel said he had to go back out for a debriefing session. I didn’t care. I just wanted to sleep.

As I jumped into the enormous king-sized bed in the master bedroom, I wondered how much longer I would get to stay there in the lap of luxury. One thing was for certain, the military wanted me. I guess I was the face of the apocalypse.

I assumed they still wanted me for interviews. Especially since they were rescuing my friends. Well, one of my friends. They wanted me for the reaction and the reunion and the tears. I bet the whole thing had already been planned. They were so sure the mission would be a success.

I even overheard the PR Guy talking about how they were going to fly Maria’s parents in from France, or wherever they were, for a special exclusive interview and the emotional, tear-filled reunion. They were gearing up for a television ratings bonanza.

As always, when I tried to sleep, the flash backs started up. Bad flashbacks. They’re always so real, so life-like. When they start up it’s impossible to sleep.

Although I must admit, sometimes there are nice flash backs. Like the time Jack and Maria and I were swimming at Bondi Beach and we got caught in the middle of a jelly fish swarm. It wasn’t nice at the time obviously, but whenever I look back, I can’t help but laugh.

Jack and I came out in huge red marks where the tentacles and stingers had gotten us. Jack had been stung worse than I had. He even needed some ‘happy gas’ to ease his pain. We both had red marks on our skin for over a week. Maria on the other hand healed up real quick. A day later, she didn’t even have any red marks on her at all. She really was a tough girl. She had a jelly fish tangled up around her neck for crying out loud. But she was fine.

And in a weird way it brought us closer together as friends.

That was a nice flashback. It even brought a smile to my face. But ultimately that memory would lead into some nasty, terrifying, not so nice flashback. Like the time at the casino when Maria was bitten by one of the infected and Jack was preparing himself to take care of her, to shoot her.

Thinking about that over and over was enough to make me break out into a cold sweat and keep me up all night.

When I thought about stuff like that, my heart would start racing. I could hear the blood rushing around my body and around my head. Everything was so real, like I was experiencing it all over again, like I could actually hear the moaning, screaming howl of the infected, and the constant pop of automatic machine gun fire.

Suddenly there was a banging on my bedroom door. I sat straight up and held my breath.

It took me a second to realize that it was someone knocking on the door, a person, and not something else.

I took a few deep breaths and waited for my heart rate to slow. “Who is it?”

“Rebecca, it’s me. It’s Daniel.”

My heart rate picked back up and started beating like a drum. What was he doing knocking on my bedroom door this late at night? He knows not to come in here. Was he going to try something? Did he want to ‘talk’? I totally did not want to talk. Not now. Not in the middle of the freaking night.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“We need to talk.”

Oh God. He was going to do it. He wanted to talk about the kiss. “I don’t want to talk about that now. Can’t it wait till morning?”

“No. It can’t wait. I need to show you something.”

He didn’t wait for me to respond, or to say it was OK to come in. I could’ve been naked for all he knew. But when I saw his face in the moonlight, I knew he didn’t want to talk about that stupid little kiss. He looked different somehow. He looked more serious than I’d seen him these past couple of days. He looked stressed out. Weary.

“What do we need to talk about?” I asked. “What do you need to show me?”

He had a computer in his hand. “I need to show you this.”

“What is it?”

“It’s footage of the rescue team. The mission footage.”

“Mission footage? How the hell did you get that? Wait, I thought the mission was scheduled for tomorrow?”

“That’s what I need to talk to you about.”

He was starting to scare me.

“Rebecca, I haven’t been completely honest with you.”

“Honest? What are you talking about?”

“I don’t work for the US military.”

“Then who do you work for?” I asked as I tensed up. “And what are you doing here?”

“I’m a mercenary.”

“A what?”

“A mercenary. I’m part of a team of mercenaries. Basically, we’re private contractors. We do jobs that no one else can do. Jobs that no one else wants to do.”

“So what the hell are you doing here?” I asked. “What job is this? Are you here to kill me?”

He actually laughed at that. “No. I’m not here to kill you. I’m here for information. Knowledge. Like I said to you earlier, knowledge is power.”

“So what do you want to know? Wait, how much do you already know?”

“Only the bare minimum. Only what we need to know to do our job. Initially, we wanted to get close to you so we could learn as much as possible about what was going on in Australia. We wanted to know as much about the virus as possible. But now things have changed.”

“Changed? How?”

“The Special Forces team got the green light for the rescue mission a few hours ago.”

“What do you mean? Are you saying they’ve already rescued my friends? Oh wait, I get it now. They rescued Maria and they killed Jack and Kenji. And you’re here to break the news to me.”

“No. That’s not it.”

“No?”

“Rebecca, the military failed. The rescue mission failed.”

He sat down on the bed next to me and handed me the computer. “This is a recording of the mission footage.”

“How the hell did you get this?”

“It’s our job to be able to get this kind of stuff. We weren’t able to get all of it unfortunately.”

“So like, a camera crew went in with them?”

“No. The mission footage is recorded via cameras built into the soldier’s helmets.”

Daniel pressed play. The video started. The images were grainy as hell.

A small group of soldiers, maybe five or six, were sitting in the back of a helicopter. I recognized one of them as being the leader who promised the world the mission would be a success.

The soldiers looked nervous. Scared and unsure of themselves.

The doors of the helicopter’s cabin were wide open. Outside, I couldn’t see anything except for swirling red dust.

A shadow moved across the screen. All of the soldiers, and I mean all of them, swore.

Someone screamed.

There was an explosion.

The helicopter began to spiral out of control.

The footage flicked off and then back on.

The next image was from a camera that was lying on the ground on its side. I turned my head so I could see properly. The helicopter had crashed into the road. It’d been reduced to a twisted, smoking wreck. The rotor blades had been bent and smashed at all different angles.

The soldiers, what was left of them, were crouched next to the wreckage. I could only count four of them. No pilot. No co-pilot. No team leader.

They were talking in hushed, frantic whispers.

“What the hell was that, man?” one of the soldiers asked.

“I don’t know. But we gotta call this in right away. We need a goddamn extraction. Being on the streets was not part of the deal!”

You could hear it in their voices, and see it in their eyes. They did not want to be on the streets. They wanted to be in the sky, in the helicopter. They wanted to stick to the rooftops. The high ground.

One of the soldiers was Australian. You could tell by his accent.

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “Pitt Street is a bloody mess.”

I couldn’t tell if he was just using the word bloody as a swear word, or if it was actually bloody. The image was too grainy. The red dust was too thick.

Someone said, “Radio’s busted. We gotta walk out.”

“No way, man. No way are we walking anywhere in this. You saw the surveillance images; this place is crawling with infected!”

And as soon as they said it out loud, you could hear the howling scream somewhere off in the distance.

The footage flicked off and then back on.

Now the soldiers were running.

They were running at full sprint.

They were running for their lives.

I could only count three soldiers. Including the camera man.

The infected were howling. Louder and closer.

The camera man tripped over and skidded along the road.

The two soldiers in front of him stopped. One of them took cover behind a motor bike and started unleashing with his rifle. Full automatic. The flash from the gun’s barrel lit up the screen.

The other soldier came back for the cameraman, picked him up, got him to his feet.

They stopped and took cover behind a car. The camera man was reloading his rifle. I guess he must’ve already fired off a full clip.

He was trying to reload but his hands were shaking so bad, he was struggling, he was taking forever.

He finally loaded a magazine.

He turned around, took aim.

And what I saw was just too damn messed up. A shiver ran down my spine. I started shaking as if I was cold, as if I was suffering from hypothermia. My teeth started chattering.

The soldiers were firing at will. They were shooting at a wall of infected. A sea of infected. They were so close. It was an overwhelming number, a countless number of walking corpses.

They couldn’t be any more than ten meters away.

One of the soldiers yelled, “Reloading!”

The infected were now five meters away.

The guy next to the cameraman yelled, “I’m out!”

He dropped his rifle and took out a pump action shotgun and started blazing away.

The infected moved closer. Three meters.

“We gotta go! Come on!”

The cameraman was still firing. Someone, I think it was the Australian guy, grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him along. The cameraman turned around. But then they all froze.

They were trapped. The road was blocked at both ends by an insurmountable number of infected.

The Australian guy swore again. The two soldiers on camera physically slumped.

One of them took out their sidearm. Put it to his head. The cameraman tried to stop him but it was too late.

The red dust and the wind seemed to intensify at that point. As did the screaming howl of the infected.

The cameraman started praying. “As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” And as he said the word ‘shadow’, an actual shadow, one like before in the helicopter, seemed to cover them. It turned the screen a darker color.

“I will fear no evil. I will fear no evil. I will fear no evil.”

And then something roared. Something big.

The roar was louder than the screaming howl of the infected. So loud, the cameraman ducked, and the last remaining soldier on screen put his hands up to cover his ears.

Then the footage ended.

My teeth were still chattering. I was silent, holding my breath without even realizing. “What the hell happened? What was that?”

“We don’t know.”

“Does anyone know about this?”

“No. This is top secret. If anyone knew we had this, we’d be killed on the spot and buried out in the desert.”

“What are they going to do now?”

“From what we can gather, they’ve put a second rescue mission on hold. The situation has changed and they need to figure out what’s going on. They’re playing the waiting game basically.”

I couldn’t blame them. Not after seeing that.

“So what happened?” I asked. “What happened to their helicopter?”

“Looks like they came under fire. There’s also a chance the chopper suffered an engine failure as a result of the dust storm. But we’re not sure.”

“Under fire? From who?”

“Worst case scenario; terrorist splinter cells have gotten through the blockade.”

“Terrorists? What would they want?”

“The virus most probably. And Maria. Same thing we want, I guess.”

“Do you really think a terrorist cell could get all the way through the blockade into Sydney?”

Daniel shook his head. “It’s highly unlikely. They would need aircraft, or boats with stealth capabilities. Occam’s Razor.”

“What?”

“The most obvious reason is usually the correct one. It was probably an engine failure. That dust storm is huge. We’ve recorded wind gusts of well over two hundred miles an hour.”

“Why is it so red?” I asked.

“We’re not sure. Initially we thought it was due to nuclear fallout. But that’s not the case.”

“So what is it?”

“We don’t know. It could be a natural dust storm. They have happened from time to time. But nothing on this scale. And not for this length of time. The entire eastern seaboard has been covered in red dust for over a week now.”

“So, what now?” I repeated, desperately wanting to know that they weren’t just going to leave my friends for dead. “The military are going to try again, right?”

“We don’t know how long they’re going to wait. It could be days, it could be weeks.”

“That’s too long.”

“Yeah, I agree. Do you have any idea where your friends could be? Do you know where they would go, where they would hide if things got real bad?”

“I can’t be certain. But when we were trying to flee the city, when we were being chased by the military and the infected, our plan was to try and head west. We wanted to get out of the city, get as far away from the population centers as possible. We were going to travel west through the harbor and the river system. Our back up plan was to head further into the city. And get to another building. Get as high off the ground level as possible. Kenji told us that high ground is easier to defend.”

“I see. That’s probably why the transmission from Kenji came from the middle of the city,” Daniel said, almost as if he was thinking out loud. “Locating their exact position will be hard work. We’re not sure how long it will take.”

Or even if they’re still alive, I thought to myself.

“But we have to try,” he continued. “We have no other options.”

“Wait a minute. You’re going in there? After what you just saw?”

“Yes.”

He sounded so confident, so sure of himself. But it was different to the over-confidence of the rescue team leader. It was a deeper, quiet confidence, like he knew there was no tomorrow, like he knew that failure was not an option so he better knuckle down and get the job done.

“And,” he continued. “We need you to come with us.”

My eyeballs nearly popped out of my skull. “Excuse me? You what? You want me to come with you? You want me to go back there?”

“Yes.”

“With you and what army? Who do you even work for?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Is it a secret branch of the government? Or some multi-national pharmaceutical company?”

“Look, all I can tell you is that we need you. And we need to save Maria.”

“You don’t need me. You probably know the city better than I do.”

“But you know where they would hide. You know where they would go. You know how they think. But more importantly, when we do make contact with them, and trust me, we will find them and make contact, we need you there with us. We need you to show them they can trust us. We need you to let them know we’re the good guys.”

It was clear now. It all made sense. Daniel and his team needed me there to show my friends that they could be trusted. I was their ace in the hole. The military hadn’t even thought of using me like that.

“We’re flying into New Zealand,” he explained. “From there, we’ll fly into Australia. Once the dust storm clears we’ll be taking a chopper into Sydney. Our employer has a lot of resources. A lot of capital. If we can secure the target, if we can rescue Maria and deliver her safely, not only will we be saving the human race from extinction, but we’ll be rich. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not just doing this for the money, but I’m also not trying to hide the fact that money is a big motivator. This could set us up for life. All of us.”

I suddenly had this image of chilling out on a beach in Hawaii with my friends. It was nice.

It’s funny how only a few days ago, the only thing in the world I wanted was to get back into Sydney and be with my friends. But now, after grieving for them, after trying my hardest to move on, and seeing that god forsaken footage, I’m not entirely sure I wanted to go back.

I was too damn scared.

I made eye contact with Daniel. “How do I know I can trust you?”

“You don’t. But I’m your only ticket into Australia.”

“And you’re going in either way? With or without me?”

“Yes. But it would be a huge help if you were there. We can guarantee your safety.”

“How? How the hell are you going to keep me safe? You saw what happened to the Special Forces team.”

“We’re the best at what we do.”

“What about the infected?”

“We’ll be wearing the latest generation NBC’s.”

“NBC’s?”

“Nuclear Biological Chemical suits. You’ll be perfectly safe from infection. These suits are designed for operation in the harshest conditions. Plus, the latest models run on a type of kinetic energy power system. It increases strength tenfold. You could take on a grizzly bear in one of these bad boys if you had to. Believe me, you’ll be safe.”

“Why didn’t the rescue team have these suits?”

“Too expensive. Like I said before, our employer has a lot of capital.”

I collapsed back into bed. I wanted to hide under the covers and suffocate myself with the pillows. What good would I be in that kind of environment? Would I just get in the way? I’d be useless, wouldn’t I?

No. Maybe not. Maybe they did need me. Maybe I really was their ace in the hole. If and when they found my friends, they needed me there. They needed me so my friends wouldn’t run away.

“OK,” I whispered. “I’m in.”

“Good,” he said as he turned the computer off. “We’re leaving in one hour.”