Five down.
Then six. And seven.
It was the eighth man who turned at the wrong time, maybe to say something, and saw a stranger with a wicked grin and a bloody knife. The man got half of a scream out. He died, but the scream was enough.
Then everyone was screaming and yelling.
And firing.
Joe Ledger was gone before the hunters began firing, and almost at once they were firing at the wrong thing, in the wrong direction. Ledger went deep into the brush, cut left and circled around before coming back at the group from the front. He spotted the tracker, who stood next to the brute with the sledgehammer. The tracker had a pistol in his hand and he was firing wide of the group, aiming at God knew what. With all the lead flying the leaves and branches were dancing and popping, making it look like the woods were filled with attackers.
Ledger sheathed his Ka-Bar and folding knife, drew his pistol, and ran at the tracker. He fired two rounds into the man’s back, then parked a single round in the side of the sledgehammer man’s neck. He kept firing, taking six more men and then he was gone again just as the hunters realized that not all of the gunfire was theirs. They turned, their yells rising to shrieks of fury and panic. And they did the one thing they probably thought was the smartest move, but it was the single stupidest thing they could do. It was a hit and run specialist’s dream reaction.
They spread out to try and find him.
They didn’t know who was out there or what he looked like. Or even how many attackers they were facing. Instead of forming a defensive group, they offered themselves up to the demon in the forest.
And Ledger began hunting them.
One after another after another.
~40~
Dez Fox and the Refugees
“Run,” screamed Dez again, shoving the women and children forward. The man who’d yelled was not yet in sight but he sounded close. A hundred yards? A little more? Too damn close in any case.
The southern girl had her shotgun back and had reloaded it. She was white-faced with the horror of the consequences of having fired that shot.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and kept saying it. Dez wanted to punch her.
“Shut up and move.”
They began walking backward, both of them pointing guns toward the darkness at the other end of the road. Nothing seemed to move down there, and there were no more shouts.
“Maybe they…,” began the girl but then there was a single sharp crack that split the air. The girl coughed once, then she abruptly sat down in the road. The shotgun clattered to the blacktop. The girl looked up at Dez and opened her mouth as if to offer another apology, but all that came out was a torrent of dark blood. The girl’s eyes rolled high and he fell backward.
Dez stared at her for a moment.
“There!” came the shout. A different male voice.
Dez whirled, saw figures emerging from the shadows alongside the road. Four men.
Six.
More.
“Christ,” cried Dez, and she fired four shots and then turned, not knowing if she hit anything. Gunfire tore the night apart and something buzzed past her ear with the angry urgency of a wasp. Dez ducked and jagged right, then ran into the woods alongside the road. She’d been shot at before, and she knew that when you know you had a near miss it’s not time to celebrate your luck—it’s a wake-up call that your store of luck is running low. She didn’t push it. Instead, she ran.
Guns pokked and banged in the night and she heard the whine of rounds and the dull crunch of bullets hitting trees or skipping along the blacktop.
How far was the farmhouse?
It had to be close. She caught up with the women and barked at them to leave the road and follow her. Together they dove into the woods, cutting at an angle to try and pick up the farm road.
Something moved in front of them and one of the women screamed in absolute terror and agony as a dark shape grabbed her. Dez struck the thing with her blackjack, crushing its forehead, but as it fell back it took a mouthful of bleeding skin. Blood pumped from a torn artery in the woman’s throat and she tried to stem the flow with palsied fingers. Dez stared at her, into her eyes.
And shot her.
The other women gasped and drew back, horrified, sickened. But then they turned and kept running. This was the world. This was how the world was. Appalled at what she had just done, Dez turned and followed.
Men shouted behind them and Dez could hear them crashing into the woods. They fired randomly but there was no way they could see to aim. It was a chase now. A race.
The woods thinned abruptly and the women and kids ran into a wooden rail, rebounded, fell down, crying out in pain. One woman reeled back clutching a broken wrist, but Dez grabbed her by the hair, forced her to bend and shoved her between the slats. The road was right there.
“Left,” she cried as she half shoved, half carried the injured woman. “Go, go!”
They hit the hard-packed dirt and ran in a pack. Dez let go of the woman with the broken arm and faded back, shoving and slapping at the others to make sure they all kept moving. Then she saw the first of the men reach the rail. In the darkness they crashed into it, too, and in the moment of stalled impact, Dez took aim and fired. Even in that darkness the men were easy targets. She didn’t need to kill, she needed to stop them. She aimed center mass and emptied an entire magazine into them. Their howls of pain and fear filled the night. Dez ran, swapping out the magazines as she went, slapping her last one into place. That gave her ten bullets. There were at least two-dozen men behind her, and maybe more. No telling how many she’d killed or wounded. The rest would be coming. A hail of bullets tried to find her in the dark.
She cut off the road and ran through the tall weeds on the verge, then dodged between a stand of maples to enter the corner of the big farm field. The house was there and she could see the shapes of darkened figures pelting through the tobacco plants toward it. The front door opened and light spilled out. The fool kid had not thought to douse her candle before opening the door. That light was a beacon, it was the brightest thing in the world right then, and it drew every single eye toward it.
The living, and the dead.
But then Dez realized, with a sick lurch of her heart, that the figure in the doorway wasn’t Lindsey. And it wasn’t someone coming out of the house. It was a man, and he was going in. Other men clustered around the place and only then could she hear the sounds of gunfire and screaming. Coming from the house.
But worst of all, threaded through those sounds were other noises.
The howl of a dog.
And the high-pitched, terrified screams of children.
~41~
Rachael Elle and Lindsey
The front door burst inward again, half torn from its hinges by a powerful kick. The chairs Rachael had used to brace it went flying, and a huge man filled the entrance. He had monstrous shoulders and wild hair and in his hands was a scythe he must have taken from the barn. To Rachael he looked like a mad killer from one of those old slasher films. The kind of relentless killer who hunted for teenagers having sweaty sex and then killed them in brutal ways.
The man spotted Lindsey, who had come running into the living room for more shells. “Bitch!” he roared and charged at her.
Maybe he didn’t see Rachael, or maybe he didn’t think she was real. A woman dressed in armor carrying a sword. Or, more likely, his mind had snapped and plunged into a place so dark that nothing mattered, not even his own safety. He raised the scythe and swung it with a feral growl. Lindsey dropped flat on the floor and the blade missed her by two inches. But then Rachael was there. She swung her sword in a smaller, tighter arc, the blade shearing through denim and filthy skin and muscle. Rachael was savvy enough not to try to cut through the leg. Bone was so much harder to cut than movies made it seem. It caught and snapped blades.
She pierced flesh and the speed of her slash left a slender red line on his trouser leg that seemed like nothing at all unti
l the man turned toward her—and then the wound parted in a red scream. Blood geysered out. Rachael dodged away, light as a dancer and swung the blade again. This time she aimed higher and this time the blade bite through bone, but it was the more slender and vulnerable bones of the big man’s wrist. The scythe flew away with one hand still clutching it. Rachael’s third cut was through the flesh of his throat.
She kicked him sideways so that he fell across the threshold as a second man leaped inside, a butcher’s cleaver in his hand.
Her blade was longer, faster and she already moving.
Behind her Lindsey finished loading the gun and ran back to the kitchen. Down the hall there was the sound of a piercing shriek buried beneath the savage growl of a brutish dog.
And outside…
The night was filled with gunfire and shouts.
~42~
The Ranger
Ledger ghosted the hunters, making them pay for their arrogance, making them afraid of the dark and of what was in it. They had been so powerful for so long, comforted by the conceit born of victories over others, now they were learning the realities of the food chain. When there was a lot of gunfire shattering the night, he contributed his own, often slipping between hunters and killing one and then yelling as if he was one of the surprised hunters. In the dark, in all that confusion, the hunters could not tell that he wasn’t one of them, and he killed them for their lack of awareness.
Then he melted into the woods when he felt his luck was running thin, but even then he growled at the two men closest to him to come on, to follow, and they followed because when panic rules the moment the startled tend to take their cues from anyone who seems to know what’s what.
He led the men twenty feet down a deer path, and then he killed them, too.
Of the thirty men who had followed this trail, half of them were dead or dying. Ledger went silent and moved away from the confusion, circling back to the path that would take him to the farm road.
Behind him the men fired, and screamed, and did not understand anything about what had happened. As Ledger faded away he heard fresh screams and knew that the confusion he’d left behind was grinding on itself. Men shooting their companions in the dark. And things that had once been part of that group of living rising as the hungry dead.
Ledger grinned as he ran.
~43~
Rachael and Lindsey
Screams filled the house. Three men lay on the floor clutching at savage wounds ripped into them by the dog that, either despite or because of his wounds, had gone into a killing frenzy. As they forced their way through windows, Baskerville grabbed them, tore at them, and left them crippled and shrieking on the floor.
Lindsey had thrown the shotgun down because the barrels were too hot to touch and now held a bolt-action hunting rifle in her hands. Firing clumsily but unable to miss because there were men at every window.
In the living room, Rachael was hacking at men who crowded each other to get inside. One man opened up with a handgun, and Rachael had to run into the dining room to survive. She grabbed the corner of the big table and with a grunt of effort turned it over, spilling weapons and boxes of shells. Gunfire hit the big oak but few of them punched through. As much as she was loathe to do it, Rachael dropped her sword and picked up a small-frame automatic, checked that it was loaded, crouched down at one corner of the table and reached around to fire blindly. She’d read about ‘target-rich environments’ in novels. That was when it was almost impossible to miss because there were so many hostiles. She fired her gun dry, hearing screams. She swapped out the magazine. She’d been to gun ranges and knew how to use a pistol, but she didn’t like them. She was a swordswoman. But this wasn’t a time for preferences. All that mattered was surviving.
She fired and fired and fired.
~44~
Dez Fox
Dez raced across the farm field, not bothering to run serpentine or take cover. There were figures everywhere and everyone she saw seemed to be caught up in a frenzy of bloody violence. It was like running through hell itself.
Men dressed as hunters wrestled with pale-faced corpses dressed as soldiers or farmers. One of the refugee women had a man down and was stabbing him over and over and over while a nine year old girl tried to pull her back from whatever brink she’d climbed out onto. Zombies lay dead, and dead hunters were twitching their back to unlife. Dez fired her last bullets, killing six men. She had no idea if they were zombies or NKK hunters. They fell and her slide locked back. A zombie lunged at her and Dez’s pistol went flying. She jammed the carpet armor into its mouth, drew her blackjack and beat the thing’s head into a ruin.
Then a hand clamped on her shoulder and she was spun toward a pair of living men. Hunters who leered at her and—despite everything that was happening around them—began tearing at her clothes.
As if she was there for the taking.
As if she was helpless.
The blackjack whipped through the night, shattered finger bones, deconstructing faces, smashing into eyes, breaking, dehumanizing. Destroying. As the fell she bent and searched for weapons. Found a revolver with four rounds left. She ran toward the house and found targets for each round.
Then she brained a zombie with the butt of the gun and lost the weapon as the creature collapsed against the side of the well.
“The house!” someone yelled, and Dez saw one of the refugee women pushing children up onto the porch. But the picture was wrong. Men rushed at them, grabbing the kids, pulling them away from her. One of the men swung something at the woman and she fell with the kind of abrupt looseness that spoke of a broken neck. Dez tore across the field to the gravel turnaround in front of the house. There were three men trying to drag the kids away. She hit one from behind, crushing his skull, feeling the bones give beneath the heavy leather-wrapped lead. As the man staggered she shoved him toward another of the men, and he had not yet seen her. He turned sharply, crying out in surprise as the dead weight collapsed against him. Dez ignored him as he fell and closed on the third man—the one who had killed the refugee woman. He held a heavy length of black pipe wrapped in electricians tape. The end glistened.
Dez did not pause to challenge or threaten. She attacked, driving right at the man as he raised his pipe to strike. She went in low and fast and slapped the blackjack across his right kneecap. The degree of pain it inflicted must have felt like a gunshot and it instantly became the whole of his world. His pipe fell as he reached for his shattered kneecap with both hands.
The blackjack did terrible things to him.
Dez turned away, her face spattered with blood, snatched up the pipe and stepped over to the third man, who was still trying to climb out from under the improbably heavy slackness of his dead friend. He froze, looking up at the pipe as it whistled down at him. There was one split second of sad resignation on his face, and then he didn’t have a face.
Dez ran to the kids, who were quivering with terror. They were the three youngest from the group of refugees.
“Stay close,” she told them, and climbed the steps to the house. She needed to get to the other guns. There were too many of the hunters to fight with only a blackjack and a piece of pipe.
A voice rang out behind her. “That bitch just killed Marty.”
Dez turned to see two of the hunters rushing in, both of them armed with baseball bats. Dez turned and ran from them, her shoes slipping on the bloody porch stairs. There was a man in the doorway, but he was looking the wrong way, so Dez smashed in the back of his skull and shoulder-shoved him inside.
And damn near got shot.
As the man fell a bullet chunked into the doorframe inches from Dez’s ear. She dove sideways and as she fell saw that the living room was heaped with corpses and with badly wounded. All men. The only person on her feet was a woman who looked like she stepped out a movie about Vikings. Leather and fur and armor, but she held a gun in her hand and the barrel was tracking toward Dez’s face.
“No!” cried Dez, but
the woman swung the gun back toward the doorway and fired six shots. Dez turned to see the two men who’d chased her reeling backward.
Dez was up in a flash and ran up and over the bodies, falling, slipping, and finally crawling toward the crazy woman with the gun. She herded the refugee women and girls with her.
“Get behind the table,” she roared, and they obeyed without question, flooding around the heavy oak barricade. They could all see the Viking woman with the gun, but she was female and so were they. The attackers were all male, and that drew a deep and recognizable line in the sand for all of them.
“Dez Fox?” demanded the Viking woman as she reloaded.
“Yeah, but who the fuck are you?”
Instead of answering, the woman tossed the gun to her, bent and picked up a sword. The refugee women had their weapons, though all of their guns were empty. Even an empty gun is still a metal club, though, and they clutched these as they huddled behind the barricade. Dez joined them, liking the solidity of the oak table.
There were screams—a girl’s—from the kitchen, and the deep-chested growl of a big dog. The Viking woman flashed Dez a wicked grin and yelled, “For Asgard!”
Then she ran into the kitchen. The next screams Dez heard were all male.
Dez gaped for a moment longer. “This is fucking nuts,” she said.
And then more men came pouring into the house.
~45~
The Ranger
Joe followed the sounds of gunfire all the way to the farm. He ran as fast as he could, wishing he hadn’t used so much of his ammunition. Would he get there in time?