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Alice pushed Urrea into the hands of the people huddling inside, snatched up Urrea’s fallen sword, and tried to swing it, but it was too heavy and awkward and she fell hard onto her knees. A ravager rushed at her, his face split by a hungry grin of dark triumph.
A second later a ball of fire exploded in the center of the town square. The ragged clothes and withered flesh of the shamblers ignited and they staggered in all directions, their senses immediately useless inside envelopes of flame. A second explosion set more of them alight. A third burst among the fast-infected who tried to escape.
Ford and Alice clung to each other, reeling backward from the heat, but the fire was not aimed at them. They saw a figure standing on the roof of the hospital. A small woman or teenage girl—it was hard to tell with the armor she wore—was hurling plastic water bottles with burning pieces of cloth stuck in them. No, not water, Alice realized as she caught a whiff of gasoline.
The ravagers tried to make a break for it, some cutting left and others right to escape the conflagration in the center of the square.
Karen Peak and Mr. Cuddly were there on the left with the last of their defenders. Their guns cracked and the ravagers fell.
On the right, Alice saw another teenager dressed in armor. A stranger, and he had a sword in his hands that he swung with deadly precision. Ravagers fell screaming around him.
And fighting beside him, swinging a machete, was Gutsy!
Her ugly dog was with her, lunging at ravagers and knocking them down within reach of Gutsy’s blade.
Behind Alice the children were crying, babies screamed, but Mr. Urrea cheered. Ford got to his feet and hefted his ax. Alice rose too.
The battle wasn’t over yet.
• • •
Sam Imura killed his way to where Ledger had fallen. He had no illusions about some miracle save that would allow Ledger to have survived. The world was not that kind, as had been proven too many times.
Then he heard a horrific roar and spun to see Grimm come charging past him. Half of his armor torn away, his helmet dented, blood streaked along the mastiff’s sides, but the monstrous dog kept going as if no force on earth could stop him. The fast-infected and the shamblers did not even try to run; the ravagers who tried, failed.
“Welcome to the party,” yelled a familiar voice, and Sam stared in true amazement to see Joe Ledger, as battered and bloody as his dog, standing with a sword in one hand and holding the hair of a severed head in the other. Ledger tossed the head at the closest infected. “Here, catch,” he said with a maniacal laugh, and then stabbed the infected through the eye.
Sam could not help but smile. If this was all proof that his own sanity had finally cracked all the way through, then so be it. There were worse ways to go down than in the company of an old friend.
He shifted to stand with his back to Ledger and fired, fired, fired.
The dead kept coming. Maybe not as many as before, but enough. More than enough.
Sam caught sight of something flying through the air, and for a weird moment he thought he was back on some previous battlefield and the object was a fragmentation grenade thrown by an enemy combatant.
It wasn’t. It was a bottle of gasoline with a burning rag. It struck the back of a shambler and exploded, dousing all the other dead around it in flames. Grimm began barking furiously and backing away in fear. Ledger whirled.
“What the—?”
Another firebomb splatted against the crest of the hill on which the head ravager had been standing, and burst. Two ravagers reeled back, clawing at fire on their ha
ir and skin.
Then a third ravager—who had escaped the flame and was raising a heavy maul in preparation for striking Grimm—juddered to a sudden stop, dropping the tool. An arrow stood out from his left temple, the shaft still quivering.
Sam and Ledger both looked up at the wall. At the bunch of figures who stood there. A curvy girl with a baseball bat, a skinny boy with a staff. And two figures in full SWAT armor. A short girl with a whole basket of bottles at her feet, and a slim boy who was busy fitting another arrow to the string of his compound bow.
“No,” said Ledger, his face nearly blank with shock. Then a huge grin spread from ear to ear. “Nix!” he bellowed. “Chong!”
On the wall, they jerked erect at the sound of his voice. It was immediately clear that they hadn’t known who it was they were saving. They were just people helping people in the middle of a battle. Now they both began jumping in the air, punching the night sky with their fists.
For about one whole second.
Then the dead rushed past their burning comrades and attacked. Sam began firing again. Ledger swung his sword and Grimm attacked with his spikes. More fire rained down. There were many more arrows.
The fight raged on and on and . . .
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