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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.
