Chapter One

  The hunger wasn’t the worst part. Zeb had been through the whole gamut of special forces survival training. He could handle hunger, sleep dep, extreme heat or cold, pretty much anything else. That’d been true even before they’d changed him.

  Besides, he wasn’t hungry all the time, just a lot of the time. And they weren’t stingy with the frozen rations, though it wasn’t like the fresh stuff, the post-mission feasts, when he’d cram his stomach so full it would hurt. Or it would’ve hurt if he’d still felt pain.

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  The worst part was the smell, the stench like week-old roadkill. It was everywhere and got into everything--in his uniform, his bunk, the whole damn barracks.

  It still wasn’t the worst deployment ever, because it wasn’t a deployment. A deployment was when they shipped your sorry ass out somewhere, and, if you were lucky, you’d come back from that place. Zeb wasn’t going back anywhere, even if he’d remembered wherever it was he’d come from. This was a one-way ticket to hell. And hell stunk to high heaven.

  As if the smell wasn’t bad enough by itself, what added insult to injury was that it was coming from his own rotting flesh.