We saluted the general and he waved us off with a tired flick of his wrist, already halfway back to whatever old-man business generals had at eleven at night. The chubby aide who'd led me there — I still didn't know his name — herded the five of us back toward the gym like we were livestock that might wander off.
Nobody complained. We were all too busy looking at what we'd just been handed.
I turned the case over in my hands one more time before I clipped it shut. Two deagles, a ring that hummed faintly against my finger like it was breathing, a comm unit small enough to hide behind my ear. I'd used a deagle for months now. These ones felt different the second I picked them up — heavier in a way that had nothing to do with weight, like the crystal in the barrel was waiting for me to ask it for something.
"So," Alex said, sheathing his new sword with a flourish that was more show than skill, "anyone else feel like we just got recruited into a superhero team?"
"We got recruited into the army," Dustin said, not looking up from the bracelet he was turning over between two fingers. "Superhero teams don't have paperwork."
"Buzzkill." Alex grinned anyway.
Ian clapped his hands once, and the four of us — five of us, I had to keep correcting myself — turned toward him without really meaning to. It wasn't an order. He just had the kind of voice that made a room orient itself around him.
"We should figure out what we're actually called," he said. "The general's people are going to slap a designation on us whether we like it or not. Might as well beat them to it."
"Ace Squad," Ralph offered immediately, deadpan.
"No."
"Deadeyes."
"Absolutely not," Alex said. "We sound like a cover band."
I turned my new gun over in my hand, watched the light catch on the thin red seam running through the barrel. Two hours ago I'd been in a cramped elevator wondering if I'd ever see my friends again. Now I was standing in a gym with four strangers, arguing about a team name, holding a weapon that could probably punch through the wall behind us without slowing down.
"Vanguard," I said.
Everyone looked at me.
"We're the tip of the spear. That's literally what the general said — ace, high-threat response, first ones sent in. Vanguard fits."
Ian considered it for exactly two seconds before nodding. "Vanguard Squad. I like it."
"Democracy is dead," Ralph muttered, but he was smiling.
We didn't get much more time to enjoy it. The door to the gym opened again — a woman this time, older, silver threading through dark hair pulled back tight enough to look painful, three stars stitched into her collar that meant she outranked everyone I'd met since arriving.
"Vanguard," she said, like she'd been listening at the door the whole time. Maybe she had. "Fitting. I'm Colonel Reyes. I run your unit's operational side — General Cole handles the big picture, I handle whether you're alive to see it. Sit."
There wasn't anywhere to sit except the mats, so we sat on the mats. I felt faintly ridiculous, five newly minted elite operatives cross-legged on a gym floor like kindergarteners at story time.
"Your first assignment," Reyes said, not bothering with a preamble, "is a supply interception. Three days ago, a convoy running food and medical stock between two of our forward outposts got hit. Free faction, we're almost certain — they've been getting bolder the last month, and they don't usually bother with zombies when there's a human target worth more."
"How much did they take?" Ian asked.
"Enough that people are going to start dying of things that used to be treatable. That's the short version." Reyes's eyes moved down the row of us, cataloguing. "There's a second convoy scheduled to run the same corridor in four days. We believe they'll hit it again. You're going to be waiting for them."
"Bait," Dustin said.
"Bait with teeth," Reyes corrected. "You leave at 0600 in three days. Use the time between now and then to get comfortable with your gear and with each other. I don't care if you like each other. I care if you can trust each other not to get you killed."
She left as abruptly as she'd arrived. The five of us sat there a second longer in the silence she left behind.
"Well," Ralph said finally, "that got dark fast."
"It's the end of the world," Dustin said. "Everything's dark fast now."
I thought about the walkie-talkie call from months ago — the sergeant's flat voice telling me and Bruce to hold a position we shouldn't have been able to hold. I thought about Angela's face when the tier 4 grabbed her, and how fast the fear on it had turned into nothing at all.
I didn't say any of that. Instead I checked the mana capacity on my new ring — full, humming, patient — and said, "Guess we should actually learn each other's names properly, then."
Ian laughed, and something in the room loosened.
We spent the next hour doing exactly that. Ian was from a suburb outside Ottawa, had done two years of amateur boxing before the world ended, lost his older sister in the first week and didn't talk about it beyond that one sentence. Alex had been in university for theater, of all things, which explained the flourish with the sword. Ralph's family had all made it to a different base entirely; he hadn't seen them in two months and carried a photo of them folded into a plastic sleeve in his jacket. Dustin didn't share much. I decided not to push.
When I told them my power was short-range teleportation, nobody blinked. Why would they? Half the room could throw lightning or bend darkness into knives. A guy who could blink six feet to the left was almost boring by comparison.
That was the point. I'd learned that lesson at the first base and I wasn't about to unlearn it here, with four people I'd known for exactly one night, in an army that had already promoted me twice as fast as anyone else in my class. The higher you climbed, the more people were watching to see what you actually were.
Better they kept guessing.
"Three days," Ian said, stretching as he stood. "Let's not waste them."
None of us slept much that night. I spent most of mine on the floor of my new room, meditating, feeling the mana in the air drag itself toward my core the way it always did, slow and stubborn and mine.