Tyre! (Eighteen)

Alan gave Geyi's corpse one last look, then turned and surveyed the area.

Across the lawn, trampled back and forth by panicked footsteps, he found not only buckets of blood, but also many fingers scattered everywhere.

They were the fingers of women and children, belonging to hands raised over their heads in futile self-defense.

In the flowerbed nearby lay an entire intact hand—a child's hand.

Alan recognized the mark on its ring.

He knew the child this hand belonged to, and he knew the father the child belonged to.

A cloud of blood seemed to burst inside the traitor's mind.

A ghoul wearing the same uniform as him charged at him in silent concentration.

His comrade Griffith twisted his rifle, hooked the creature toward himself, then carved a furrow across its face with his bayonet.

Only four soldiers remained from the original company.

Alan, Griffith, Lorne, and Brom.

The company commander was still nowhere to be seen. He was likely dead, lying in the mud alongside the other soldiers, or reduced to flesh in the bellies of these ravenous monsters.

The betrayal had come so suddenly and so bloodily. The Fifth Guard Division, once stationed outside the city, had abruptly turned from familiar comrades into hideous monsters.

An entire division, more than twenty thousand soldiers, had turned and pounced upon the defenseless city.

Alan's regiment had borne the first blow, but when the soldiers of the Fifth Guard Division came rushing in, they had assumed these poor bastards had been scattered by an Ork raid.

They had even opened up the fortifications themselves, hoping to gather as many of the "routed soldiers" as possible.

But a bloody feast awaited them all.

When the officers and soldiers of the Fifth Division revealed the fangs hidden beneath their closed lips, many still