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All the boars squealed in a killing frenzy. Lilah wasted no time; there was none to waste. She rushed in and swung her ax in a high overhand blow that whistled through the air. The blade smashed into the first hog’s skull and punched through right into its brain. The creature cried out and then instantly collapsed, dead for gone and forever.
Lilah went with its fall, letting the creature’s own weight tear the blade free.
She’d timed it right. The first boar was down between her and the others. That bought her two seconds of time. She needed one.
Lilah whipped the ax over and around her head just as a second boar scrabbled over the dead one, and the blade struck it square in the eye socket. The steel stabbed through one eye and out the other side.
But the boar kept charging.
The puncture had missed the brain.
What had been perfect timing a moment ago was now fatal. The boar tossed its head and tore the ax handle from her hands as easily as she could have taken a toy away from little Eve. Lilah staggered back and nearly fell. Her ax went flying into the weeds on the far side of the clearing. It might as well have been on the far side of the moon for all the good it would do her now.
The boars that had fallen were back on their feet, and the whole pack charged at her.
Lilah screamed and dove away, rolling again, feeling more of her wound open up as she rose once more to her feet. She ran, and the pain chased her as surely as did the pack of boars.
The clearing was covered in short, dry grass that had withered to a lusterless brown. As Lilah ran across it, heading for the shelter of a boulder, she saw a darker brown amid the grass, and a half pace later the gleam of steel.
Her torn gun belt and the big Sig Sauer pistol were right there!
But the boars were too close.
Lilah ran past her gun and reached the boulder a split second before the pigs caught up. She slapped the curve of the rock and launched her body onto it and then over it. The boars slammed into the stone, one after another, their dead brains too damaged to correct the angle of their charge. They rebounded from the impact, and as Lilah ran around the far side of the rock, she saw that one of them had shattered its big front tusks. Far from reducing it as a threat, the damage resulted in dagger-sharp jagged stumps.
She piled on the speed, bent almost double even though her whole left side burned with fresh blood, then scooped up the holster, grabbed the butt of the pistol, racked the slide, skidded to a stop, whirled, and brought the gun up as the boars barreled straight toward her.
And then everything went a little crazy.
As she pulled the trigger there were two blasts.
Not one.
The lead boar pitched down and tumbled over and over, its head blown to fragments. The boars behind it squealed and stumbled, colliding with their fellows, crashing into and over one another in a massive pile. Only one boar remained on its feet, and it drove straight at Lilah.
Then something huge and gray came flying out of the woods and struck the third boar like a missile, knocking it sideways and down. The new creature rattled with the sound of metal, and Lilah had a surreal glimpse of spiked steel bands, chain mail, and a great horned helmet. It was a dog, but it was like nothing Lilah had ever seen. A monstrous mastiff, armored like a tank. It dragged down the much heavier boar and began systematically slashing the undead creature to pieces. It did not bite at all but instead smashed and tore with the blades welded to its armor.
The last three boars rose from where they had fallen over the one Lilah had shot. One took a single lurching step toward her, paused for a moment, and then fell over dead.
As it landed, Lilah saw the black dime-size bullet hole in its temple.
The two others glared at her. They grunted with awful hunger and charged.
Lilah brought her gun up, but a voice yelled, “No!”
And a second figure came rushin
g from the woods. Not a dog this time, but a man.
He leaped over the dead hogs and landed right in the path of the charging boars. The pale sunlight that slanted down through the trees glittered on the edge of a long sword the man raised above his head.
Not just any kind of sword.
A katana.
The man stepped into the charge of the hogs and slashed low, left and right, and suddenly the animals were falling forward, one leg on each sheared clean away. The man spun and slashed, the blade moving with incredible speed and precision so that it appeared as if the boars merely disintegrated. Then he pivoted and made two massive downward stabs, ramming the point of his sword through the weakest parts of the creatures’ skulls and destroying the spark of unnatural life that burned in their zombie brains.
Behind him, the dog rose from the destroyed hulk of the other boar.
