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He fell with a look of deep and profound surprise on his face.
His lips formed a word, or tried to. Then he collapsed back onto the grass and lay still. Sombra stood over him, chest heaving, blood dripping onto the ground, eyes blazing.
* * *
Thirty feet away, Benny Imura fought the ravagers. He looked like a ghost from an old manga—bled pale and wild-eyed—but he moved like a dancer, his body blurring, his sword a whisper of mercury on the wind.
Several times ravagers tried to circle him and attack from his blind side, and each time there was a crack as a bullet from Sam Imura’s gun spoke with deadly eloquence. Together, the Imura brothers fought as if they had done this a hundred times before.
* * *
Gutsy turned and saw Ledger squaring off against the Raggedy Man.
“Oh my God,” she gasped. Homer Gibbon was indestructible. The unkillable lord of death. No matter how tough the soldier was, the Raggedy Man was worse.
* * *
Joe Ledger let Homer Gibbon swing first. He was ready for it, his weight on the balls of his feet, knees bent, hands loose and ready. The former serial killer was no fool, though. He swung a big, hard left, but it was a fake, and he immediately drove an uppercut to Ledger’s stomach that would have doubled the older man in half.
Had it landed.
Ledger clubbed it aside with a snort of annoyance and counterpunched a left-right-left to the zombie king’s face. The blows were blindingly fast but did not lack power. Ledger was a master fighter. Possibly the best combat specialist left on earth, and one of the best of all time. There was a reason he had survived this long.
The Raggedy Man fell back a step. He was not in pain, but he turned and spat a broken tooth onto the dirt.
“Oo’ho, look what we got here,” he said. “You’re a real schoolyard tough guy, ain’t you?” He began walking in a wide circle around the old soldier.
Ledger said nothing but turned with the monster.
“You the big bad boy who organized these Happy Meals and ta
ught ’em to fight?” asked Homer.
“No, they seem to be pretty good at whipping your ugly butt without me.”
Gibbon suddenly darted in and struck at Ledger’s throat with stiffened fingers. The soldier leaned back and snapped out a kick that cracked something in Homer’s knee. The king of the dead staggered. Ledger feinted right and shifted left and kicked the monster again, this time in the face. Before Homer could fall, Ledger cupped the back of his head and punched him four times in the face with crushing force, breaking bones and splitting the patchwork skin. Then he spit in Homer’s face and kicked him in the chest to send him sliding five feet down the hill.
The reapers and ravagers gasped and then surged forward, but Homer Gibbon shouted them back. Grimm stalked in a rough circle around the two combatants, his spikes gleaming, eyes blazing, daring any of them to interfere. Gutsy and Sombra edged forward, uncertain how—or even if—they should do anything.
Homer got to his feet, damaged but truly unhurt. He was no more able to feel pain than any zombie, and even if he could, all that would have done was make his desire to literally devour this man all the greater.
“I’m going to enjoy—” he began, but Ledger leaped from the hill and hit him with a devastating right cross that spun the monster around in a complete circle. Ledger squatted over Homer, picked him up, and locked one brawny arm around the creature’s throat.
“Listen to me, worm meat,” he said in a fierce whisper, “if I wanted you dead, you’d already be dead. You think just because you started this that you’re actually unkillable. Yeah, I know you’ve been blown up, cut up, and sewn back together, but that was because the people who did that wanted to study you. I heard they tried hard to kill you once they realized you could talk to the dead. Guess they didn’t try hard enough to end you. Well, I’m here to tell you that I do know how to put you down for good. Don’t believe me? Just look.”
He dragged the monster back to the top of the hill, limping as the wound in his leg—torn open now from his jump—threatened to cripple him. It did not matter to Ledger. He needed Homer to see what was happening out in the dark.
“See that?” he murmured in Homer’s ear, turning him to face the mass of his zombie army. “That’s your kingdom. That’s your Night Army. That’s your future.”
Homer Gibbon stopped struggling and stared.
Beyond the front ranks of his army there was a boiling, thrashing fury of movement. The plague of paracide infection from the wild men had spread beyond anything the Raggedy Man thought possible. Exponential. Faster than a wildfire. Not stopped—or even slowed—by the walls of flames.
Where there had been thousands of wild men, now there were hundreds of thousands. More than half of his army had become his enemies.
With a howl of rage Homer drove an elbow back into Ledger’s stomach, catching him off guard enough to break his hold. The Raggedy Man shoved the soldier back and spun, raising his arms. The reapers and ravagers and shamblers who’d been watching the fight—more than a hundred of them—moved forward.
“Then if I die, you go with me,” he growled. “Everyone. We’ll kill them all before those wild things take us. See if we don’t.”
