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Tammy-Ducks had loved the training provided by Old Man Church—who she privately thought was sexy as hell, despite being really, really old and really, really scary. Like the other girls on the team, Tammy-Ducks was coordinated, fast, and knew how to learn.
Now she and her teammates were in charge of keeping the rear wall safe.
However, Tammy-Ducks was pretty sure they were all going to die.
There was a sloping hill behind the wall that rose pretty sharply upward, and not a lot of open ground. Scrub pines littered the narrow gully between wall and hill, though, and obscured good lines of sight. There were people moving behind those trees, but she couldn’t tell how many. All she was sure of was that they were not dead people. They moved quickly and furtively, and every now and then she caught a quick flash of something. Possibly the reflection of sunlight off of binocular lenses. It made her deeply uneasy, because someone out there could see her more easily than she could see them.
“Yuki,” she called to one of the other girls, “get me some binoculars, okay?”
After a minute Yuki came along the narrow walkway inside the top of the wall and handed a pair to her. They were not very good glasses, but then again the distance wasn’t very long. Tammy-Ducks took them and peered through, adjusting the focus.
“You see anything?” asked Yuki, squinting from beneath a shading hand.
“Yeah, hold on . . . ”
There was definitely movement in the trees. She saw several Rovers in leather moving quickly from right to left. They ran with unusual orderliness and then she realized why. They were running in pairs, each set carrying a ladder. Big aluminum extension ladders. The Rovers followed the uneven terrain away from the rear gate, though.
“Crap,” she said.
“What?” asked Yuki.
“Wait, I see something else,” said Tammy-Ducks, draawn by another of the bright flashes. She rested her forearms on the wall to steady her sight and studied the shadows between two pines that grew very close together. Something was glinting there.
Yes. There it was. Not binoculars at all. Only a single lens of a—
She never hea
rd the shot. The sniper’s bullet punched through the right lens of her binoculars and blew out the back of her head. Tammy-Ducks fell backward off the wall without making a sound.
***
Old Man Church ran with the young residents as they went from one home to another to retrieve hidden weapons. A pair of fine Winchester rifles, four .9mm handguns with multiple magazines, and a pump shotgun with two full boxes of buckshot. He handed out the weapons to the Pack members and a few helpers who’d come with them. One of the helpers, a good-looking Jamaican-American named Zack, accepted a Glock but then fumbled with an attempt to load it. The young man named Thomas held out his hand.
“Let me,” he said. After only a moment’s pause, Zack handed him the gun. Thomas ejected the magazine, checked that it was loaded, and slapped it back in with a great show of competence. Then he reversed the weapon and offered it butt-first. “Like that.”
Zack took it and for a moment they eyed each other with some level of communication that had nothing to do with their individual ethnicity or their place in the former structure of the Happy Valley community. When Zack took the weapon, his fingers brushed Thomas’s and there was a flicker in the air between them. Thomas smiled and turned away.
“Get a room,” muttered Slow Dog, but the two men ignored him.
The group moved on.
Members of the Pack were running wildly to and fro carrying bags or laundry baskets or pushing wheelbarrows filled with bags of fertilizer, cans of hairspray, boxes of matches, bags of nails and screws to use as shrapnel, red cans of gasoline, containers of soap powder. All of the things Dahlia would need to construct fragmentation bombs and incendiary devices. Church approved and led his own team on, kicking in doors to find what they needed, taking direction from the young residents. Once everyone was armed with something—firearm, bladed farm tool, or baseball bat—Church led them to the western wall.
“Start here,” he said. “Up on the catwalks. Walk the walls in pairs. Scout the woods.”
“Shouldn’t we be back at the gate where the fight is?” asked Bree.
“No,” said Church. “We should not.”
***
Dahlia reached the rear wall in time to see Yuki pitched backward as the sharp crack of a heavy rifle bounced off the walls. Tammy-Ducks lay in a heap along with two others. Tammy-Ducks would never rise, but the other two were already beginning to twitch as the parasites in their blood reanimated them.
“I got this,” yelled Jumper and he quickly quieted each with dagger thrusts to the backs of their necks. It was horrible, and she could see how this cost the young man.
Dahlia looked up at the wall and took a breath.
“You can’t go up there,” said one of the gymnasts, who’d leapt down and was forcing words out through terrible sobs. “He’ll kill you, too.”
