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“Benny!” Gutsy yelled, but then her warning turned into a cry of pain as Mercy slashed again, opening a burning line across her midriff. Only her fast reflexes kept the cut from going deep. Even so, blood welled and ran down her stomach. She wheeled and ran ten paces, then turned again, setting herself for his charge.
For a moment Brother Mercy paused, looking at Benny with unfiltered loathing, but then his eyes—and the full weight of his hatred—slammed back to Gutsy.
“Leafy,” he said again. “You stole her from me.”
Leafy?
With a jolt of insight, Gutsy realized that this was the female reaper she’d fought on the crane platform. And with the realization came a strange dual reaction. On one hand, she needed to stop this madman, even if it meant killing him. But on the other, he’d lost someone he clearly loved. It drove a splinter of genuine empathy into her heart. It made him less of a monster and more human. More like her. How would she feel if she thought Alice was dead? How would she react if she faced the person who’d killed her?
And yet… this young reaper had been working that crane. He had dropped the truck on the roof of the Chung house. If Alice was dead, then he had killed her as surely as if one of his knives cleaved her beautiful heart.
The wave of empathy Gutsy felt was there, but now a bigger, blacker wave of pure hatred rose up in her own heart. The air in front of her eyes seemed to blossom with black flowers, and she heard a terrible roar fill the air as some beast howled with a fury beyond speech, beyond control. Gutsy heard it and knew it to be her own cry, torn from the darkest place in her heart. She charged Brother Mercy, slashing with her machete in a series of strikes so fast they were blinding. They beat at the reaper’s knives and he stumbled back in surprise, her unbridled ferocity overriding even his own.
* * *
Benny heard the shriek of fury as he got to his feet and drew his sword. He knew who it was, but not really the why of it. Maybe it didn’t really matter. What did was that it put steel into Benny’s trembling legs. It made his feeble hand grip the sword handle with real strength. He yelled his own war cry, the one taught to him by his brother, Tom.
“Warrior smart!”
And he rushed to meet the ravagers.
* * *
Sam Imura burned through a full magazine and swapped it out with the smooth ease of someone who’d stood on a thousand battlefields, large and small, and fought a legion of enemies before this. Those enemies were all dead.
So, too, were these. The fact that it was an army of the dead that closed in on him seemed like some kind of ironic, cosmic joke. He felt his lips carve into a feral grin as he fired and fired and fired.
* * *
“You!” roared a bass voice, and Ledger turned fast—but not fast enough—as something smashed into him. It felt like being hit with a cannonball, and he fell backward, but tucked and rolled and came up on fingers and toes, staring at the thing that had hit him.
It was a human head.
The blank, empty eyes of a zombie stared into his own. The mouth opened and closed once and then was still forever. Ledger raised his eyes and saw who threw the grisly object.
The Raggedy Man.
Grimm rose to his feet and began to charge, but Ledger growled a word of command. The king of the dead was toxic, the source of all the plague in this broken world. This was the monster whose first bite started a chain reaction that killed nearly everything Ledger ever loved. His wife and child. Most of his friends. This man had destroyed everything that was beautiful, replacing it with pain and ugliness.
Ledger rose and stood his ground, letting the king of death come to him.
“Come on, Homer, haul your wormy butt up here,” he taunted. “Let’s dance.”
The zombies and ravagers and reapers closed in, but the Raggedy Man snarled them back. “This one is mine.”
* * *
Gutsy hammered at Brother Mercy with unrelenting force, but he blocked every strike. Then he twisted aside and kicked her in the stomach. If she hadn’t seen it coming and began to turn, it would have crippled her, but even so it exploded in red hot pain and sent her staggering backward.
She almost lost her machete again, but managed to hold on to it and even bring it up as he slashed first right and then left.
It was immediately obvious he was a much better fighter, far superior because he was trained and she was not. But he attacked as if he was aware of that—too aware. He slashed and chopped with a kind of arrogance born of a belief that he would win, that such an outcome was inevitable. He even teased her, cutting her here and there with quick, shallow cuts. Making her hurt. Making her bleed. Trying to humiliate her, to teach her a lesson before he killed her.
Gutsy wasn’t there to be schooled.
She saw movement behind him and yelled, “Now!”
And something moved with the speed of the wind. Gray and ugly, battered and covered with blood, it struck Brother Mercy’s left leg, clamping teeth around the base of his thigh. The reaper screamed and stumbled, and Gutsy Gomez taught him a lesson with the edge of her machete.
