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Most of the fights he’d seen over the last few weeks had been a lot different from that. Worse, in some ways.
He eased down into the black shadows beneath a twisted willow and watched with amazed eyes at what was happening.
The clearing was actually the backyard of a substantial house. There was a jungle-gym play set and an inground pool. The play set looked brand-new, like it had never been shared by laughing children. The pool, though, was a soup of polluted water, decaying leaves, and corpses.
Some of the corpses looked like they’d been floating in that muck for weeks.
Three of them, however, were horribly fresh.
There were five other corpses—two zombie and three human—sprawled on the grass. One of the humans was missing most of his head. The other two had multiple cuts to their faces, throats, and bodies. One of these was already twitching, a sure sign that he was about to reanimate.
On the grassy, overgrown back lawn, a fight was raging among six living people.
Five of the men were dressed in biker leather. They were filthy, bearded, and brutal-looking. They had a variety of weapons in their hands—pipe clubs, lengths of chain, and various deadly hunting knives.
The sixth was a big man dressed in loose black military pants, a black tank top, and combat boots. His hair was short and blond and shot through with gray. He looked to be north of forty, but he moved with the oiled grace of a much younger man. He had a short-bladed folding knife in his right hand, the blade barely three and a half inches long.
That blade, though, and the hand that held it, were covered in blood.
The man grinned as he moved, shifting constantly to keep the five men from closing around him. Tom approved. It was a solid martial arts tactic.
One of the bikers faked left and rushed right with a sweep of his chain to try to knock the knife out of the man’s hand.
It was a very fast attack.
Tom, who was fast himself, and who was a trained observer, did not see what happened. There was a blur of movement, a flash of silver, and the biker was sagging to his knees, his chain forgotten, clamping hands to his throat.
It had happened so fast.
Impossibly fast. No one could move like that.
But he was wrong.
The big man with the knife lunged at the man on the outside of the remaining four, knocked aside a gloved fist holding a butcher knife, and delivered four cuts that were too quick to follow. The biker howled in agony and fell, propelled by a palm-strike to his temple. He crashed into a third man and dragged him down.
The other bikers rushed the man, and as he danced backward, his heel skidded on a patch of blood-soaked grass. He fell, and they piled on him.
Tom found himself moving. It wasn’t a planned thing, because he really didn’t know who the good guy was in this fight. It could as easily have been two groups of cannibal scavengers as a bunch of survivors trying to punish someone who’d stolen their supplies.
His instincts wrote a different scenario, though.
There was something about the big blond man that spoke of courage and maybe even nobility. He didn’t have the cannibal craziness in his eyes. Nor did he look underfed and desperate enough to try to rob a gang.
No. These bikers had probably targeted him.
Bad move for most of them.
Tom broke from the cover of the trees and launched himself into a jumping kick that smashed into one of the two men. He flopped over sideways and Tom landed next to him, stumbled, caught his balance, and whipped out his sword. The biker had time for one word.
“Don’t—!”
Then sword moved through the air and through flesh and the biker’s voice was still forever.
The shock of the cut trembled up Tom’s arm. The shock of having killed someone shuddered inside his chest. It was not the first time he’d had to do it, but it was not something that got easier. If anything, it was getting harder. Requiring more of him. Or perhaps cutting more of him away.
He wheeled around in time to see the big man toss the corpse of the fifth biker aside. The man’s neck was twisted in an ugly way.
The man got up with fluid grace and stared at Tom for one long second, and in that moment Tom was sure this man was taking full and accurate stock of him, his weapons, and maybe even his level of skill.
