Chapter 59

Chapter Fifty-Nine

The woods were a nightmarish landscape of gray and black, broken by jerking flashlight beams and the occasional switch to ultraviolet and infrared. When Connor did that, everything became green or a palette of deep blues.

The rotting smell was even more thick with sulfur now, dense as the suffocating air. It was in Connor’s sweat, on his tongue, in his clothes and armor.

Blood. That stench came from the bugs’ blood.

It wasn’t just bug blood, though. Martienne was a dead weight on his shoulders, compressing his spine with each long stride.

At least the itching from the pollen or spores or whatever had stopped.

He twisted his head around to be sure the crack and scrape behind him was the others crashing through the woods. Rudy wasn’t there anymore to kick stragglers in the butt, to keep them all together.

Connor had a hard time making sense of that: Rudy wasn’t there.

The sergeant was too tough, too shaped by the horrors of war to die.