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“Then let’s go. No! Don’t run . . . follow me and we walk out of here.”
The reaper woman looked at them in horror.
“Wait—you can’t leave me here.”
“Why not?” asked Samantha.
“Give me my tassels back.”
“Not a chance.”
The zombies were a dozen feet away now, reaching with pale hands.
“My whistle . . .”
“No.”
“But . . . but . . .”
Samantha could feel the coldness of her own expression. “You said that the dead were here to complete your god’s will. Who am I to interfere?”
“Please!” begged the woman.
Samantha pushed Heather backward, and then the girls turned as two zombies closed in on them. Heather still had her arrow ready, and Samantha once more held her spear.
The zombies sniffed the air and their fingers grasped in their direction, but then they moved around the girls, indifferent to them, and shambled toward the woman who knelt on the ground.
“Please . . . god, please . . .”
“Don’t look,” said Samantha. “Just go and don’t look.”
Together they fled the scene, first walking, and then running, pursued only by the echo of the woman’s dreadful screams.
The last cry of “Please!” sounded like it had been torn from her throat.
Serves you right, thought Samantha coldly.
The echo of that last cry seemed to hang in the air, refusing to faded into nothingness.
Samantha tried to feel good about what she’d just done. She wanted to feel smug about how she’d spun the situation on the reaper. She tried, but by the time they reached the barn and the other girls, she was sobbing so hard she could barely run.
“I’m sorry,” she kept saying. “I’m sorry.”
Heather told the other girls what happened, and they in turn tried to tell Samantha that she had done the right thing. That it was justice. That it was okay.
But they all knew they were lying.
Please . . .
Without another word, they headed off to the Rattlesnake Valley Motor Court to pack what few things they needed. The woods were full of reapers and zombies. The day was closing like a fist around them.
14
South Fork Wildlife Area
Southern California
As the reapers marched away into the hills, Brother Marty found himself unable to stop thinking about the big man Saint John had killed. The one who must have said something that had ignited fear in the saint’s eyes—a thing Marty did not think was possible.
