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This was not an army.
This was an ocean of the hungry dead.
She wanted to scream. She wanted to turn and run through the town, climb the rear wall and run away.
Instead she looked up and down the length of the wall. Everyone stood staring in shock. In terror. In helplessness.
Smaller groups of Rovers, similarly dressed, came out of the woods along a game trail. They were pushing big green carts on fat, low-pressure tires. Dahlia recognized the carts as the kind used at a chain of big home and garden centers. She squinted through the sun glare and tried to make out what the carts were filled with. Bottles . . . ? No, it was worse than that. Each bottle had a piece of cloth stuffed into its mouth, with the edges bouncing as the carts rolled over the uneven ground. Dahlia fished for the word for this, but John supplied it.
“Holy god,” said the man. “Molotov cocktails. They’re going to burn us out.”
The Rovers pushed the carts forward, running between masses of the dead. A few zombies took weak swipes at them, but the black gore on their clothes kept the Rovers safe from any real attack.
More and more of the dead poured out of the forest. There had to be a couple thousand of them. This was no random attack. That was obvious. The Rovers must have been planning this for a long time. Gathering supplies, working out details, and meticulously planning the siege. She could hear the people on the walls begin to buzz with nervous chatter.
“Hold fast,” she bellowed. “The dead can’t climb the walls. We got this. We . . . ”
Her words faltered as another group of Rovers walked out of the surging mass of the dead. There were five of them in protective clothes smeared with infected blood. Untouched. Unmolested by the monsters because they, too, smelled dead. They ran in a knot, outpacing the zombies and the Rovers pushing the carts as they dashed toward the walls. Two of them carried rifles, but Dahlia didn’t care about that. It was the other three that really scared her. They carried larger weapons, running with them in both hands. Like oversized rifles but with a big bulbous thing sticking out of the barrel. Dahlia knew what they were. She’d seen movies. She’d watched news footage of the wars in Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan.
She knew what a rocket propelled grenade was.
Just as she knew that the walls of Happy Valley were not built to withstand that kind of attack.
Not one chance in hell.
— 43 —
THE WARRIOR WOMAN, THE SOLDIER, AND THE DOG
I didn’t think a straight run to town was the smart move. Turns out I was right, but not for the reasons I thought.
The obvious danger was packs of Rovers. That would have been bad enough, but when there were brief pauses in the sounds of whistles we heard something else. Actually, Baskerville smelled it first and went rigid with tension. We stopped, crouching on either side of him, listening.
There it was.
The moans. It was like a wave of sound that seemed to come from everywhere. Birds fled from the trees and escaped into the western skies. A pair of deer bolted from within a nest of fallen branches and ran like mad past us. Squirrels chittered as they ran from tree to tree. Everything that lived in these woods and had enough intelligence to be frightened was fleeing. The moans, and the dark intent implied by that sound, seemed to chase them.
“God,” breathed Rachael. “Orcs.”
“A whole goddamn lot of them,” I agreed.
Suddenly the woods transformed from being a cloud of relative safety inside which we could hide and move, to a cloth of sickness into which we were sewn as fragile threads. I checked my ammunition. Two full magazines and a third with seven rounds. Rachael had a shotgun from one of the townies, but it was a single shot version and there were four rounds plus one in the breech. Not enough for a war, and too loud to risk using.
I tapped her shoulder and we moved off. Every now and then we caught glimpses of the horde—that’s the only word that really fit—and it chilled us.
“How can there be this many of them?” asked Rachael as we ran. “And why are they all heading toward the town?” Then she raised her head as a fresh burst of whistles filled the air. “Oh,” she said, then amended it. “Oh god.”
Happy Valley was in deep shit. We’d started out thinking we were going to be able to help. Now it seemed as if all we’d be able to do was maybe bury the dead.
— 44 —
HAPPY VALLEY
“Down!” screamed Dahlia as she dove for cover. John and Neeko and the others scrambled away, tripping and falling. People flung themselves from the walls, landing hard on the ground ten feet below.
There was a sharp, rising sound like steam escaping from a boiling kettle and then the whole top part of the wall seemed to lift itself from the structure of reality and fly through the air. A massive red flower of superheated gas bloomed, spreading burning petals arching into the town. Trees caught fire and people screamed as fiery debris landed on them, igniting clothes and hair.
For Dahlia the world went red and then black as she lost herself for a moment. Seconds? Longer? When she opened her eyes, she was still on the wall, but she was alone. Her ears rang with a sound like an electronic wail and her hair was burning. She panicked, swatting at it, slapping her scalp, her face.
