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Joe Ledger backed away a few steps, waving Gutsy back too. Benny and Sam broke off their battles and ran to join them, chased by killers both living and undead. The dogs retreated, and they stood in a tight knot as the mob closed in. Gutsy looked up at Ledger to see how a hero prepared himself to die.
Ledger’s face was tight with pain, but there was no defeat in his eyes.
Then there was a strange sound. A squawk of static, like the sound the satellite phone had made when Nix was testing it. Ledger raised his hand and touched something Gutsy hadn’t seen before—a small black device fitted into his ear. He pressed it.
“Well, it’s about darn time, Top,” said Ledger. “Been trying to keep these freaks entertained until you got here. Go weapons hot. It’s a target-rich environment. Let’s rock and roll.”
“What’s happening?” demanded the Raggedy Man. “Who are you talking to?”
Ledger looked at Homer Gibbon. “You have your army, sport. Turns out it just so happens I have one of my own.”
Suddenly there was a sound like a thousand cats screeching all at once, and Gutsy looked up in wonder to see that the stars were obliterated by dozens of lines of mingled fire and gray smoke. Not dozens—hundreds. They scratched like matches and arced down into the fields where the wild men and the living dead struggled for dominance. They struck, and the world was transformed from moonlit night into sun-bright day. The combined detonation of five hundred Hellfire missiles was the loudest sound Gutsy had ever heard.
She screamed and clapped her hands to her ears.
Then she whirled to see a flight of nightmare locusts rise up from over the horizon. She knew the word but had only ever seen broken husks of these things.
Helicopters.
From one side of her sightline to the other, the sky was filled with them.
Wave after wave of them. Firing missiles as they blew the dreams of the Raggedy Man into burning ruin.
Some, faster than others, flew over the field and opened up with machine guns, chasing down the ravagers and reapers. Others skirted the edges and dropped cannisters that exploded into massive clouds of flame.
Gutsy looked at Ledger and Sam and Benny. They were all grinning. She understood. Nix and Lilah had gotten through to someone. Maybe Benny’s other friends, Morgie and Riot, had reached Asheville after all. And maybe Ledger and Sam had made a call for help from Site B.
Or perhaps all of that happened. Maybe, just once, the stars aligned in the direction of hope instead of extinction.
Homer Gibbon screamed in rage and horror as his dreams burned. There was a ravager near him, and he tore the creature’s rifle from its hands and swung it toward the small group of humans on the hill.
With a movement too fast to follow, Joe Ledger drew his pistol and shot the Raggedy Man in the head. Six fast shots that blew all of the dark dreams from the mind of the king of the dead. The body of Homer Gibbon stood for one moment longer and then crumpled.
“You stole the world from us,” said Ledger quietly, “and we’re officially taking it back.”
The reapers stared at the beloved of Lord Thanatos, and the sight of him dead broke them. They scattered like leaves, and the fiery wind chased them. They tried to outrun the helicopters, but they could not. Ledger yelled to them to stop, pleading with them to throw down their weapons, to give up. To live.
Some did. A little more than half. The choppers did not fire on those who’d given up. But so many of the reapers were too far gone along the path to the shadows to which they prayed. Even as they ran, they shook their weapons in defiance to the machines that represented the hated world from before their god raised the dead. Gutsy watched in horror and wondered if such a death somehow filled those defiant reapers with joy even as the bullets found them. In a strange way, she hoped that it did.
A pair of Black Hawk helicopters dropped down low and hovered a dozen yards above the hill, doors open, machine gun barrels pointing down at the ravagers and shamblers circling the four humans and two dogs. The guns roared.
105
THE NIGHT WAS DARK AND filled with fire and blood.
But even the darkest night is burned away by the light of a new day. The sun, half blinded by smoke, peered in horror over the horizon. In its glow, Gutsy and Benny held on to each other, leaning like a pair of old people, as they made their way along the road to where the refugees from New Alamo waited. Toward Site B.
There was a mass of people in the weed-choked parking lot of a small industrial complex. The door to the main building was open, and the two horses Sam and Ledger had ridden out on were tethered there, munching grass as if there had not been a war raging a few miles away.
Chong and Spider ran to meet Benny and Gutsy. They hugged and wept, and everyone spoke at once. Trying to make sense of it.
Then Alethea was there, pushing everyone aside and wrapping her arms around Gutsy in a bear hug so fierce it nearly broke bones. Then Alethea pushed Gutsy back, alarmed by the bloody bandage wrapped around her torso.
She straightened her tiara and gave Gutsy a frank up-and-down appraisal. “Well,” she said, “you look like crap.”
Gutsy laughed, but then she glanced around. She saw Sarah Peak clinging to Mr. Howard.
“Where’s Karen?” asked Gutsy. “Did she make it out?”
