“That looks like a bite,” he said, recoiling from it, his brow knit in confusion.
Rachael snatched the cloth back and pressed it into place.
They both turned as they heard noises out in the hall.
“That was fast,” said Brett as he shot to his feet and ran to guide the EMTs.
Rachael bent over Gayla, all their personal animosity swept away by what was happening. Jealousy and even mutual dislike did not matter when things were boiled down to the level of pain and suffering, of desperation and survival. “Hold on, sweetie. It’ll be okay. They’re coming. You’re going to be fine. They’ll take good care of you.”
Gayla’s eyelids fluttered, her hands twitched and spasmed.
Brett stepped into the hallway, raising his hand to wave for the paramedics.
He froze and stared at something Rachael could not see.
“What the hell . . . ?” he murmured. Then, a heartbeat later, he repeated the same words. Shouting them this time in a voice filled with confusion and fear. “What the hell?”
And then something hit Brett like a thunderbolt. A streak of red and blue slammed into him and knocked him into the wall on the other side of the doorway.
Rachael stared, unable to fully process what had happened.
She’d only caught a glimpse.
Brett had been tackled with brutal ferocity.
By Superman.
6
Now
Doylestown
The little girl ran, and danced, and skipped, and whirled while a score of the hungry dead followed her. Rags gaped at her. At what was happening.
She was maybe ten years old.
Slender and pretty.
She was dressed in a costume. Black and sleek, with a stylized bat on the chest and a short cape that fluttered as she ran. Masses of curly red hair bobbed behind her.
Rags searched her oldest memories for the name of the character.
Batgirl.
Batgirl?
Rags felt as if the world had suddenly become insane. Or that maybe she had gone crazy. Had the years of isolation, of fear and violence, of constant danger finally pushed her over that delicate edge into genuine madness?
She could build a case for that. It made much more sense than what she was seeing.
A little girl dressed as a superhero, laughing as she led a pack of zombies down the streets of a dead town.
This was something from a fever dream. This was the sort of thing she imagined would happen every day in a mind that had become irreparably fractured. Rags had met several insane people, and it was clear from the looks in their eyes that they were seeing a different world than she was.
However, beside her, Ghoulie growled again.
He was seeing it too.
She hoped.
If he was seeing it, then it was real. As bizarre and unlikely as it was, these events were happening.
That was when Rags felt herself move.
It was nothing planned. One minute she stood gaping in shock, and the next she was in motion, leaping from the porch, racing across the intersection, hearing the clank of Ghoulie’s armor as he ran with her.
“Hey, kid!” she yelled as she ran. “Over here. Over here!”
That made the girl whip around.
And stumble.
The zombies howled as they swarmed toward her.
7
Then
New York City
Rachael Elle screamed.
She had reason to.
Out in the hallway, Brett screamed too.
Other screams tore through the air and burst in through the open door.
So many voices torn by screams.
Rachael was caught in a moment of terrible indecision. Stay with Gayla, keep the pressure on the wound.
Or try to help Brett.
Which?
Which?
The decision was stolen from her in the next moment.
Gayla shuddered once, arched her back, went intensely rigid, eyes wide and staring.
And then she flopped back onto the floor. A long, ragged, empty breath hissed from between her teeth. Her eyes looked at Rachael, and through her, and into nothing at all.
Rachael said, “Gayla . . . ?”
But even in that fleeting moment, she knew that Gayla was no longer there.
Gayla was gone.
Gone.
And Brett was screaming.
She felt herself rise, felt herself move even though her mind seemed to be anchored to the girl who lay on the floor in a pool of blood. Her friend. Even in the blinding heat of the moment, Rachael realized and understood that Gayla was really her friend. A rival, sure. Even a hated rival. But on the ground floor of all things, she was a friend.
Brett was outside in the hallway. Screaming and fighting.
He was her friend too.
He was still alive.
Rachael was not a fighter. She played one at Comic Con and Dragon Con. At science fiction conventions all over the country. In photo shoots with her friends. Even the few karate classes she’d taken were more to get the form right when she cosplayed action heroes.
She was not a fighter.
No.
Not until that moment.
As she moved from the dead girl to whatever was happening in the hall, something changed. She changed.
She was dressed like a hero.
And this moment, against all possible variations on the reality of her actual life, required a hero.
Rachael raced into the hall and saw that it was not just she who had changed. The world had changed. It had gone wrong. Somehow . . . wrong.
People were fighting everywhere. Some of them dressed in costumes. Some of them in ordinary clothes. One man was naked except for bedroom slippers. Everyone was screaming and yelling. And bleeding.
And dying.
On the floor, Brett was wrestling with Superman.
With a tall, muscular man dressed as Superman.
They were locked together. Superman was clawing at Brett, tearing at his costume, scratching his face and throat. Superman’s face was torn by horrible slashes, and part of his upper lip was gone. Just . . . gone. The injuries seemed to either be nothing to him, or the pain had driven him crazy. Either way, he kept darting his head forward, snapping at Brett with bloody teeth. Brett was on the bottom, and he had his big hands locked around the man’s throat and was using sheer force to push the attacker upward away from him. The attacker, though savage and clearly undeterred by his injuries, was clumsy and awkward.
“Get off me!” screamed Brett. Blood ran from a dozen ragged cuts on his face. “Get off me.”
Rachael front-kicked Superman.
Very, very hard.
She launched the kick while running, throwing herself into the air, snapping out with the heel of her boot, catching the attacker on the side of the face. Everything she had, everything she was, went into the force of that savage kick.
Superman’s head snapped sideways and his body followed, his hands flailing but not trying to break his fall. He landed hard in the cleft between floor and wall, his head tilted over onto his shoulder, eyes bugging, mouth still trying to bite even though he was now more than four feet from Brett. Superman’s legs thrashed and his heels hammered the floor as if in the grip of a wild seizure.
“Brett—are you okay?” Rachael yelled, but didn’t even pause to listen. Superman was scrambling around to try to get up, and she kicked him again. This time it was with the flat of her foot, right in the face. The man pitched backward, hitting the wall again. His nose burst and his lip split, but instead of red the blood was dark and strange. Almost black.
Like Gayla’s.
It terrified Rachael.
Superman rebounded from the wall and hissed at her, the pain and injury seeming to be of no consequence. He flung himself forward, grabbing at her leg.
Rachael kicked at him. Kicking the hands, the fingers, the arms.
Brett lay on the floor,
too stunned to move, his mouth and eyes wide.
“Help me!” roared Rachael.
He didn’t move.
Superman caught Rachael’s ankle and jerked her foot toward his mouth, toward those bloody teeth. The sudden pull brought Rachael down hard and she landed on her side, facing the attacker. For one second they lay there and stared at each other. Her eyes met his, and she looked for some understanding.
There was nothing there.
Nothing.
No emotion, no expression, no connection.
It was like looking through an open window into the empty rooms of an abandoned house.
The mouth and the eyes seemed to belong to different faces. The madman’s lips peeled back in an expression of avaricious hate, but there was no corresponding malevolence in those eyes. There was absolutely nothing there.
The creature—for in that moment Rachael’s mind separated this thing from any connection to real humanity—darted forward and bit her. Its teeth sank into the soft leather of her boot, pinching her heel. The pain was massive. Huge.
Rachael screamed as she pulled back her other foot and lashed out, striking it in the face, the shoulders, the throat, the chest.
Over and over and over again while all around her the day was filled with blood and screams.
8
Now
Doylestown
Ghoulie raced ahead of Rags and slammed into the oncoming wall of zombies. The dog’s two hundred pounds of lean muscle coupled with its spiked armor was like an artillery shell. Dried flesh and bits of bone exploded upward as bodies collapsed back. Ghoulie wheeled and rammed his shoulder into the next wave, ripping through withered tendons with the blades welded to his harness.
The little girl cowered back, her joy and laughter gone as her game had been transformed into a life-and-death struggle.
Then Rags was there.
She jumped over the girl, swinging her matched pipes in lethal arcs that smashed down through bone and brains. Two zombies fell back from her, and she pivoted to kick another in the knee so that it collapsed in front of the rest; then Rags turned again, using her hips to generate power for a series of brutal chopping hits. She crushed skulls and shattered jaws and reduced reaching arms to crooked uselessness. Ghoulie howled like some monstrous ghost dog and kept smashing into the legs of the dead, toppling them toward the whirling pipes.
The little girl stumbled backward. “They told me to get a few . . . but . . . but . . .”
Rags had no time for that conversation. More of the dead were coming; she could see their awkward shapes in the thickening gloom.
A burly zombie dressed in the ancient remnants of a firefighter’s running gear closed in on Rags’s left side while two middle-aged women with broken and jagged teeth came at her from the right. Rags front-kicked the fireman, driving him back, but as she swung around to deal with the women, something whipped through the air and the heads of both women simply leaped up. The headless corpses instantly collapsed.
Rags stared in shock.
As the bodies fell, she saw a bizarre sight.
A woman stood beyond the crumpling bodies. She was a few years older than Rags, with a pretty face and masses of dark, wavy hair that fell loose around her shoulders. She wore a short, red, tight-fitting dress that had a fur hem and a wide brown leather waistband, with brown leather pants under the dress and leather bite-proof bands around her forearms and thigh-high boots. She wore a molded leather breastplate and matching shoulder pads. A white leather belt slanted down to her left hip with an empty scabbard clipped to it. In her gloved hands she held a long, wickedly sharp Viking sword.
The woman smiled at her and said something that made no sense at all. “Welcome to Asgard.”
Rags said, “What?”
“Nothing,” said the woman. “Oh, crap—behind you.”
Rags turned to see the fireman closing in on her. She moved into his attack, using one club to beat down his reaching hands and the other to crack his skull. It took five blows to drop him and shut down whatever strange force drove the zombie.
“There’s more of them!” yelled a voice. A man’s voice, and Rags turned to see a big blond man dressed as the superhero Thor. He had an eye patch, though, which did not look like it was part of a costume, because there was a ragged scar above and below the patch. He’d been badly hurt, but it was an old scar. Behind him were five other people in costumes. She recognized three of them, digging the names out of old memories from before the end of the world and from comics she’d read on lonely nights.
One of them wore a heavy leather jacket with yellow trim; his hair was in a weirdly pointed style with long sideburns. He wore metal braces around his forearms, from which sprouted three long sickle blades on each arm.
She mouthed the name. Wolverine.
He waded into the crowd of zoms, slashing at legs and throats. He grinned as if this was all big fun.
Next to him was a man wearing a costume that looked like it was made from layer upon layer of hockey pads that had been stitched together and spray-painted green. He was a brute of a man, easily six-foot-six and broad shouldered, and he swung a piece of pipe that had to weigh at least thirty pounds. His name was in her memories too.
The Incredible Hulk.
The last of the ones she recognized was easier to identify. Dark blue shorts speckled with white stars, a bloodred corset, stylized gold wings across the chest along with a gold belt, armbands, and a heavy lasso painted gold. She carried a Greek short sword. Lots of wild black hair.
Wonder Woman.
The other two were characters she did not know. A very muscular man in green spandex with a stylized dragon tattooed on his chest and yellow sashes tied around waist and head. He carried no weapon but used dynamic kicks and hand strikes to cripple the zoms so that his companion, a muscular black man with a steel headband, yellow shirt, blue pants, and a heavy length of steel-welded chain for a belt, could finish them using what looked like spiked gold-plated brass knuckles. The black man punched the heads of every fallen zombie, and the spikes dug deep, doing terrible damage.
The woman in red waved her sword. “Wolverine, Wonder Woman, take the left flank. Hulk, Iron Fist, Luke Cage, go right. Pincer formation. Go!”
The heroes split and ran to form lines in the path of the oncoming zombies.
Ghoulie ran back to stand by Rags, and the two of them watched in mingled shock and admiration as a group of people dressed as superheroes attacked the zombies with real zeal and a fair amount of style.
Except for the martial-arts guy in green—the hero the woman called Iron Fist—the others relied on speed and a few simple moves to do their grisly work. Rags could appreciate that. With zombies you did not have to know much about fighting—the dead never studied their enemies, never learned from the deaths of their companions, never adapted, never defended.
Even so, it was difficult work, and even the most seasoned of fighters soon became exhausted, especially when using great force over and over again.
Rags judged the fight with the eyes of experience and all the knowledge she had learned from Captain Ledger, who was the most dangerous man she had ever met. She saw some degree of care, some talent. And the woman in red kept yelling orders, reminding them to watch each other’s backs, to hold their line, to fight rather than flail.
It was pretty good.
But Rags could tell it was not going to be enough.
Things started to fall apart—a little at first, and then faster, that way things will when a system breaks down. Some of the zombies in the crowd were also dressed in costumes. The tatters of costumes. She saw Batman and the Joker. Cyclops. A couple of others that she almost recognized but couldn’t name.
None of those zombies looked to have died longer ago than a year. Most more recently.
The little girl began screaming, and Rags saw that more and more of the dead were circling the center of the fight, ignoring the combatants to pursue an easier target. They closed in, dr
awn by the shrill screams of the child.
“No,” murmured Rags. Ghoulie gave a sharp warning bark. This whole fight was about to collapse into a feeding frenzy if it kept going like this.
Rags broke into a run and closed on where the girl cowered. In the heat of the battle, the heroes had lost track of her. Or they thought their two lines formed enough protection. The woman in red turned to look, but her eyes went wide as she realized too late that the mindless dead had outflanked her.
“Charlotte!” screamed the woman, but two zombies closed on her and blocked her way.
Rags skidded to a stop beside the girl, spun, and crouched with her back to the child, arms out, fighting sticks ready. Ghoulie took position on the other side, forming two sides of a box. Rags hoped it would be enough.
There were so many of the dead. The girl—Charlotte—started to bolt, to run toward the woman in red, but Rags growled at her.
“No! Stay behind me.”
Charlotte dodged backward from the grasping hands of a man in a long black cape, like something a magician might have worn. Rags ended him with a one-two blow to the head.
As he fell, though, another staggered forward. And another.
Rags clanged her pipes together to give Ghoulie a combat command. This was what Ledger had taught her, and Rags had revised and developed the rhythm. First with Bones, and then with Ghoulie. Countless hours of training and practice, of refining their battle skills to suit her body type and his. To suit her fighting style and his. Now that shock and surprise were gone, they settled into the work that they had done in a hundred towns during their long journey.
Ghoulie bounded forward and smashed into the side of the pack of zombies. His sheer bulk knocked them back and down and sideways. As Ghoulie disrupted and destabilized them, Rags used her pipes to smash and destroy.
“Come on,” she called, both to the dog and to Charlotte, as she began moving away from the center of the street. Ghoulie backed up, forcing the girl to scuttle along behind Rags. All the time, though, the dead lunged in and were met by spiked armor and flailing metal rods. They fell.
And fell.
But still they came.