Isolate an enemy and engage.
Benny cut the man across the upper shoulder, aiming to wound rather than kill. The reaper shrieked in pain and staggered back. Right into the arms of two others who’d been trying to circle him to get at Benny.
If retreat is impossible, attack without hesitation.
Benny lunged to one side, going behind the tangle of reapers, chopping and slashing at their arms and thighs. Two of the three reapers buckled, falling into the third and bearing him to the ground. Benny leaped over the closest reaper and then leaped backward as another of the killers hacked at him with a meat cleaver. As the big blade sliced downward an inch from his nose, Benny pivoted and kicked him sharply in the knee. As the man crumpled, Benny kicked him again, this time in the chest, knocking him backward against a woman reaper who had a pair of hatchets. One of the blades flew straight up into the air, and Benny struck the other with his sword, taking it and part of the woman’s hand in one slice.
Out of the corner of his eye, Benny saw the leader come charging at him with the scythe.
Benny began to smile. He was winning this.
He was going to win.
He rushed forward into the attack, bringing his sword up in a graceful, powerful sweep, his body set and balanced for the parry and the counter-cut that would destroy this reaper.
Sword met scythe blade.
Benny felt the shock of the impact shiver through his hands and vibrate along his arms. The force was ten times what he’d expected, and he found himself falling backward, the sword dropping from nerveless fingers. It clanged onto the hard ground, and Benny thumped down onto his back.
The reaper with the scythe stood over him, panting with fury.
Benny twisted and kicked out, aiming for the man’s knee with a ground-fighting kick Tom had taught him.
With a snarl of contempt the reaper moved his leg, and as Benny’s foot shot past, the man snapped out with a kick of his own. It caught Benny in the back of the calf. The man pivoted on the ball of his foot and side-kicked Benny in the chest, knocking him flat and breathless.
Benny tried to roll over to hands and knees. But couldn’t.
He tried to reach for his fallen sword. But couldn’t.
Tried to come up with one of Tom’s rules for a situation like this. For anything that would save him.
But couldn’t.
The scythe rose into the air. The other reapers—those who could still stand—clustered around to watch him die. The blade reached the apex of its lift, and golden sunlight ignited along the wickedly sharp edge.
“No!” cried Benny.
And the reaper said, “Unnh . . .”
It was a soft, surprised grunt.
The scythe trembled in the air and then fell backward as the reaper’s fingers uncurled from it. It landed hard.
The reaper’s knees began to bend. Slowly, slowly . . . until he dropped down into a kneeling position directly in front of Benny.
He said, “Unhh . . .” again.
Then the reaper fell flat on his face and did not move.
The other reapers stared in shocked horror.
Not at the fallen body. Nor at the leather-wrapped handle of the knife that stood up from between the reaper’s shoulder blades.
They stared past their leader’s corpse.
As did Benny.
A man stood there.
Tall. Grizzled. A scarred and tanned face and the coldest blue eyes Benny had ever seen. Beside the man stood a monster of a dog. Two hundred and fifty pounds of mastiff, but with armored plates all over him and a spiked helmet.
Joe Ledger said, “Sic ’em.”
Benny could swear the dog laughed as it leaped forward to attack the reapers.
And they, armed and in greater numbers, stood no chance at all.
16
South Fork Wildlife Area
Southern California
Hard miles broke slowly under their feet as they ran.
The woods all around them were filled with the dead, though, and every way they turned they encountered teams of reapers leading packs of zombies. Some packs had only a dozen of the dead, but the farther west they went, the larger the packs grew. Once they had to stop for ten minutes as a swarm of at least a thousand of the dead shambled by.
Samantha and Heather shared out the tassels among the girls, and there were enough for each of them to tie half a dozen to their clothes. For a while they worried whether that would be enough, but as the afternoon burned toward sunset, it became clear that the dead were not drawn to them. Either they could not smell living flesh through the chemical stench, or the stench deceived them into thinking the girls were other zombies.
All the time that they were running and hiding Samantha was trying to understand what she’d done back in the clearing. She could have given the reaper a chance to run, could have left her with at least a tassel. She could even have cut her throat and given her the quick death the woman apparently wanted.
Instead she’d left her to be consumed by monsters.
Please . . .
Even though the reaper’s screams had faded into nothingness hours ago, Samantha knew that they would echo inside the caverns of her soul forever.
Like all the girls, Samantha had grown up hard and along the way had been forced to spill blood many times. Human in defense, animals when hunting. Zombies constantly.
But never once had she been cruel.
Never once had she treated life without regard.
Never once had she been as much of a monster as the things that haunted and hunted her.
Until today.
Please.
With the hard miles her tears had dried, but she never ceased wanting to stop where she was and simply collapse in tears. Maybe in the path of the reapers.
As they ran, she occasionally caught quick looks from the other girls. Each of them assessing her, judging her, measuring themselves and their own potential for darkness against what she’d done. None of them met her eye. Maybe it was contempt, pity, or perhaps to prevent Samantha from seeing a familiar darkness in the eyes of a friend.
The sun seemed to expand into a supernova as it fell down behind the western haze.
The six of them moved downland through rougher country than the reapers chose to use, cutting into ravines and through dense brush. It was slow, but it gave them safety, and the terrain would slow down any attackers, human or otherwise. The dying sun spilled its paint box across the sky, splashing the sky with gaudy shades of blood and fire.
Michelle ran point and she suddenly stopped, her fist raised in the way Dolan had taught them. They all saw the closed fist and froze, hands on weapons, eyes and ears alert.
Michelle waved them on and they clustered around her, looking where she pointed. “There’s something down there.”
A hundred feet downslope was a road, and through the leaves they could see the humped back of an old-fashioned wagon like the ones in storybooks of the Old West.
“Something’s dead down there,” said Laura.
They all nodded. Although the tassels blocked their sense of smell, they could hear the drone of blowflies. Samantha looked up to see that the sky was filled with crows and vultures turning in slow circles.
“Really dead,” she said. The others nodded at that, too. In the perversion of death that was the zombie plague, carrion birds did not feed on the living dead. Only corpses whose life force had been totally extinguished by injury to the brain or brain stem rotted in a way that attracted scavengers.
Samantha took point now and led them down through the brush. The closer they got to the road, the more the trees and shrubs thinned out and the more a horror was revealed.
The wagon was an old-fashioned chuck wagon that had probably been looted from a cowboy museum. The sides had been reinforced with
metal sheeting, and on the sides the words gunderson trade goods had been painted in bright colors. There were bodies everywhere. Humans and horses. They had been killed in ugly ways, and they’d been left to rot. The ground was splashed with blood and littered with shell casings from pistols and shotguns.
Nothing moved except the flies.
If any of the victims of this massacre had reanimated, their living corpses had wandered off.
The girls fanned out across the road, looking at the dead, checking the wagon, scanning the surrounding woods.
“Reapers?” asked Laura.
Tiffany nodded. “Has to be. Who else would do something like this?”
“Why’d they kill the horses?” asked Heather. Ida had found an old wild horse years ago, and they’d had it for seven years before it died. Heather was destroyed when the horse was found dead in its stall. She stood looking down at the body of a massive Percheron. “Why would anyone kill a horse?”
Samantha shook her head but didn’t say anything about the slaughter. She knelt for a moment and looked at tracks that were cut into the bloody soil.
“What’s that?” asked Laura.
“I don’t know.”
“A wolf?” asked Michelle.
“Too big.”
“A dog?” suggested Amanda. “Like a mastiff?”
Years ago, when the adults were still alive, a traveler had come through the area. A big man accompanied by a monstrous American mastiff. He’d stopped only for a cup of coffee before moving on, and afterward Samantha and the girls had looked at the prints left behind in the road. They were similar to these.
“It’s not a mastiff,” Samantha decided. “These are too big.”
They looked around at the darkening woods. There were so many strange animals out there. Wild creatures that had escaped from zoos or came in packs from other countries like Mexico and farther south. There was no way to identify these prints now, and no time to waste in trying.
Samantha said, “It’s getting dark. We need to find a place for tonight.”
One by one the girls turned away, sickened and saddened by the senseless death. Samantha watched them head up the road, moving off the road and preparing to cut across country. There were plenty of empty houses and old buildings everywhere, and they hadn’t seen a reaper now for almost two hours.
Samantha lingered for a moment longer, thinking about the killings. She wanted to find some justification for what she’d done. These dead bodies were proof that the reapers were evil.
Right? she asked herself. What I did to that woman wasn’t wrong. It was justice. Right?
The questions echoed inside her head like thunder.
She wiped at her eyes, turned away, and hurried after the others.
But then she jerked to a halt as she saw something in the thickening gloom. It was a figure sitting slumped over against a tree. Big, bulky, bleeding.
It was in near-total darkness, except for one slack, outstretched arm that was covered with blood.
The blood looked fresh.
Had it moved? Did the fingers of that slack arm twitch?
Was it a victim of the attack reanimating as a zom?
That fit the circumstances but not the timing. This massacre was hours old, maybe as much as half a day. Any dead would have risen.
Unless . . .
There were two real possibilities. A person who’d been injured and had recently passed, and was now reanimating. Or a person who was injured and perhaps dying. Alive, but badly wounded.
Samantha wanted to turn and run. This wasn’t her matter; it had nothing to with her. If it was a zombie, then dispatching it was a dangerous waste of time. If it was a wounded person, then it would be a drag on resources and a burden when efficient flight might be the only thing that would help Samantha and her little tribe survive.
She started to turn. She actually took three small steps away from the slumped fingers, but then she stopped again.
The hand twitched again.
Samantha backed away. She wanted no part of this; she wasn’t sure she could be a participant to another death. She’d had her fill.
She turned her back on the figure and began to jog along the path taken by the other girls.
“Please . . .”
It was a single word, and she could have imagined it.
Perhaps it was not even a word.
She stopped and squeezed her eyes shut.
The word echoed in her head.
Please.
Up ahead the other girls were making good time, but Heather, the last in the line, glanced back.
“Come on!” called the girl.
Samantha nodded.
But not to Heather.
She abruptly turned and walked back to the slumped figure.
That one arm lay in the last of the day’s fading light. Pale skin with red hair that was coarse as wire. A thick wrist, corded muscles. Blood. Beneath the gore the arm was crisscrossed with scars, old and new. Samantha had seen every kind of injury in her young life, and she could recognize the marks of violence. Knife cuts and other trauma. Whoever this person was, he’d been hurt over and over again. Some of the scars were so faint that it was evident they were very old, perhaps wounds suffered in childhood.
The figure spoke again. Hoarse, a damaged croak of a voice.
“Please . . .”
Samantha licked her lips. “Are . . . are you one of them?”
“Please . . .”
“Are you one of them? Are you a killer?”
The shadow-shrouded body moved, and with a hiss of pain and a grunt of effort, the man leaned his head and shoulders out of the shadows. He had pale eyes that seemed to reflect the fiery light of sunset. His face was lined with pain and white with blood loss.
“I’m a killer,” he said in a voice that was filled with darkness and cold winds. A voice filled with a great and terrible sadness. “But . . . not like them.”
Samantha said nothing. Her spear felt like it weighed a million pounds.
The man spoke very softly. “I’m . . . like you.”
“Like me?”
He nodded and gave her the faintest of smiles. “Like you.”
Samantha bristled. “You don’t even know me.”
He didn’t reply to that, but instead reached out his bloody hand. “Please,” he said, “help me.”
She took a small step backward. “Why should I?”
The man didn’t answer, and his hand remained out for her to take.
“Come out where I can see you,” ordered Samantha. “If I see a gun or knife, I’ll put you down like a dog.”
The man made a sound. It could have been a laugh.
But then he moved, his bulk shifting inside the bank of shadows. He got clumsily and slowly to his knees; then, with small grunts and hisses of pain, he managed to get to his feet. He took two trembling steps forward and then stood swaying in the fiery light.
“God . . . ,” breathed Samantha.
The man was huge, with massive muscles that seemed molded onto him like lumps of clay. His clothes were torn and slashed, and there were barely enough left to cover him. The ruined shirt and trousers revealed limbs and a torso that were covered with scars and old burns and what looked like healed-over bullet wounds. Even with all the refugees and survivors of the Fall she’d seen, Samantha had never once beheld a person who had suffered a tenth as many injuries as this man.
There was a fresh wound on his chest, almost directly over his heart, but it could not have been as deep as it looked. Blood was painted across his body and down each limb.
He looked down at her with the strangest and least human eyes she had ever seen. The irises seemed to be as red as the sunset, and they were rimmed with burning gold.
“What—what—happened to you?” stammer
ed Samantha.
Those eyes were filled with sadness.
“Too much,” he said.
He carried no weapon, and despite his muscles he seemed on the verge of collapse. His face was pale, almost gray, and his lips were dry and cracked.
For reasons Samantha wasn’t able to explain, she stepped close to the man, reached out a hand, and lightly touched the edge of the wound over his heart.
“Are you going to die?” she asked.
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” he said, but if anything the sadness in his eyes intensified as he said it.
“Can you walk?”
He shook his head. “Not yet,” he said. “Not alone.”
“Are you safe?” Samantha raised her hand from his chest to his cheek. “Will you hurt me?”
“No,” he said. “I’m not safe.”
She almost pulled her hand away.
“But I won’t hurt you, Samantha.”
She stiffened. “But—but—how do you know my name?”
He did not answer the question. “My name’s Mike.”
In the gathering dusk, caught in the web of so strange an encounter, Samantha remembered two things. The first was something Ida had said to them once about twilight when all the girls were little.
“Twilight is a strange time, my girls,” Ida had said. “In daylight you can see things the way they are. At night everything’s a guess, ’cause so many things are hidden by shadows. But twilight is a little of both. It’s real and unreal. You see things, but you can’t be sure of what you see. People used to believe that twilight was when the world of what’s real and what’s unreal creaks open. If you’re not careful, you can step right through into who knows where. Or maybe something from over there can step through.”
Heather had asked, “Something from where?”
And Ida had answered, “From anywhere that isn’t here.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” declared Samantha, who, even when young, was not given to fancy.
Ida gave them all a wink and a knowing smile. “During twilight nothing has to make sense.”
Now it was twilight, and things seemed to have stopped making clear sense. It was like the sharp edges that defined the world during the day had been sanded down to a point where they were indistinct and untrustworthy.