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Part of him wanted to jump down from the flatbed and wade into the sea of wild men, to prove to himself and to everyone that he was invulnerable. He was the king of the dead. He could no longer be killed. Not by anything.
Another part of him wanted to flee. Let Wodewose take the million he had here. What was that to him? He had seven billion more dead he could call. Everyone who had died since the plague began, every man, woman, and child on the face of the earth who’d fallen to the Reaper Plague, belonged to him. He would find some way to make them better fighters. See if he could wake up enough of their minds to let them handle guns. Or…
“Reapers!” he bellowed, and when some of the children of Thanatos ran to him, Homer Gibbon pointed to the wild men. “Burn them. Burn them all. Set fire to the gray people and shove them into those maniacs. Set fire to the grass. Burn every one of them.”
The reapers ran to obey, and within moments fires began igniting all along the lines of battle. The wild men, driven by a madness more powerful than any fear of harm or death, ran at the reapers and the burning zombies, and they, too, burned.
Then the Raggedy Man turned back to the small knot of survivors by the billboard. He watched a squad of reapers zoom toward them on quads.
And then he saw the burst of flame from another hill, and the streak of gray, and the massive explosion that picked up the quads and hurled them in all directions, most of them with reapers still gripping the handlebars with burning hands.
There was a second explosion, and Homer stood at the edge of the flatbed and stared through the night. Two teenagers at the foot of the billboard, and two older men with RPGs. They looked like soldiers, and their hands moved with practiced ease as they fitted new rockets into their weapons.
“Kill them!” roared the king of the dead. “Tear them apart and bring me their hearts!” The mass of zombies and ravagers surged forward, some of them stumbling, others beginning to run because he willed it. Focused now, because he drove them. The greatest assault force in the history of Planet Earth, toward the figures on the hill. Let them fire their little RPGs. Go ahead. There weren’t enough bullets or bombs in the world to stop the Night Army.
“Kill them all,” he whispered. “Leave nothing. No trace they ever lived. Do it!”
103
THE MEN WERE BLOODY, SOILED, wearing tattered clothes.
“Joe…,” breathed Gutsy, totally stunned.
“Sam!” yelled Benny. Grimm howled in delight and ran like a puppy toward his master. Sombra ran, too, sniffing and prancing and barking. Gutsy and Benny followed, hugging the big men, staring at them in frank amazement.
“How? I mean… how?” demanded Benny, unable to frame a better question.
“We found Site B,” Sam said simply.
“But… but… what about Captain Collins?” asked Gutsy. “Wasn’t she there?”
“Sure,” said Ledger, “she was there.”
Gutsy looked from him to Sam and back again. “Didn’t she try to stop you?”
Ledger touched a bloody bandage wrapped around his chest. “She tried,” he said in the coldest voice Gutsy had ever heard.
And that’s all he said. It was enough.
Gutsy and Benny exchanged a look.
“Jeez,” Benny said.
“We’ve got bigger fish to fry,” said Sam. “The dead are coming.”
They looked down the hill. The first waves the Raggedy Man sent had been destroyed, but there were still countless more behind.
“What the heck are you two numbskulls doing here?” asked Ledger. “I saw Chong and Spider and the eggheads hotfooting it down the road with a laundry cart. Why are you two not with them?”
Gutsy explained her plan very quickly. Sam looked doubtful, but Ledger began smiling.
“Jeez, guys,” he said, “you two don’t lack ambition.”
“But we won’t have time,” said Benny.
Despite the heavy wind, they could hear a voice, and when they looked in that direction, they could see the Raggedy Man himself striding toward them, not a hundred yards distant. Reapers and ravagers flanked him, and hell followed him.
“How many of those rockets do you have left?” asked Benny.
