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It was Nix who answered; she’d fought her way to the open doors of the stable and had a good angle to see inside as she jettisoned her empty magazine and slapped in a new one. “Look!” she cried. “They’re coming up out of the ground!”
It was true. Inside the barn there were at least a dozen ravagers, and more were climbing out of a ragged hole in the dirt. Horses in their stalls screamed and kicked, and halfway down the line Gutsy’s own horse, Gordo, was rearing and slamming his massive hooves against the bolted door.
Gutsy turned to look across the street, where more of the ravagers were in a fierce battle with people outside the hospital. Could all those killers have come from this one tunnel? It chilled her to think the whole town might be riddled with hidden entrances.
The ravagers in the stable saw the cluster of teenagers and grinned like ravenous wolves. One of them bared yellow teeth that had been filed to wicked points. “Fresh meat!”
It jolted her to hear one of them speak. Had they always been able to do that? The thought made them somehow more terrifying. More like evil people than victims of a disease.
“Pair up—watch each other’s backs,” Benny yelled as he waded in, his sword moving too fast to follow. Nix moved with him, her small freckled hands rock-steady on the handle of her pistol.
Gutsy estimated that at least thirty ravagers were in the streets among the crumpled and bloody bodies of the men and women who’d first been attacked. Mr. Cantu, one of New Alamo’s tomato farmers, lay staring at the sky with sightless eyes. Sofia Vargas was slumped against a wall with most of her throat gone. Others, too—some so badly mangled that they couldn’t be easily identified. As she watched, Mr. Cantu suddenly twitched, his slack hands spasming into fists and then opening wide. He sat up, eyes still staring and totally blank, but his mouth snapping at the air as if trying to bite the smell of blood.
Movement out of the corner of her eye made Gutsy whirl around as a ravager rushed at her with a big farming sickle in each dirty hand. But Alethea moved to meet the attack, bashing one sickle away with such a powerful blow that it shattered the ravager’s arm. Then she hit the killer with three very fast blows to the face and head. He fell at her feet. Alethea’s tiara was slightly crooked in the nest of her hair, but she raised Rainbow Smite and gave a wicked grin.
4
THE FIGHT WAS DREADFUL.
In one of those odd moments where things seemed to swirl around them as if they were the calm eye of a storm, Gutsy and Alethea locked eyes. No matter what else happened now or in whatever lives they would have, both knew that they’d crossed into a bigger version of the world. Or maybe it was in that moment the two fifteen-year-olds realized with bittersweet clarity that they weren’t the little girls they’d once been. They weren’t grown women, either, but they were closer than ever to the people they would become.
They fought and fought…
And then there were no more ravagers inside the stable—only broken bodies lying in rag-doll heaps. Dead for real now. Dead forever.
Gasping, her heart aching in her chest, Gutsy staggered to the stable door and looked outside.
Captain Ledger and Sam were finishing off the last of the ravagers. Dr. Morton was overseeing the triage of the wounded, tailed by an armed guard. Morton was as much a monster as Collins, but he was the only doctor left alive in New Alamo, and they needed his medical knowledge and his understanding of the zombie plague. The guard was there to keep him from running, but also keep him alive. A lot of people in town would love to kill the man for his crimes, but they, too, needed him. When this was all over, Gutsy wondered how long the doctor would last. She certainly had no sympathy. Not a trace of it.
The doctor met Gutsy’s gaze for a moment. She saw fear there, and some anger. And a mix of other emotions she couldn’t easily define. But he turned away and busied himself with work.
Spider spat on the ground as he passed him. Alethea did too. Gutsy did not, but in her thoughts she was doing awful things to the man. Truly awful things.
Closer to the hospital entrance, the Chess Players were silencing both injured ravagers and reanimated citizens. It was brutal, soul-crushing work. A single ravager was still on his feet, but he was running away. Sam Imura raised his rifle and, with an almost casual nonchalance, put a bullet in the back of the killer’s head.
And then it was over.
The fighting, at least. Not the pain, the loss. The horror.
Everything became unnaturally quiet. Gutsy wasn’t even sure she was breathing. It was like a painting of carnage in a book; everything seemed flat and two-dimensional. There was death everywhere. Gutsy later learned that some of the killers were not ravagers but what Benny called R3’s. Fast living dead. There were none of the slow shamblers around. They hadn’t been part of this attack.
More than two dozen citizens of New Alamo lay dead or so badly wounded that they would die soon. There were nearly twenty others with lesser injuries, but of those, five had bites, which meant that within a day or two they would die too.
All around the square people were weeping, children screaming. Adults screamed too, as they came out of hiding to discover the fate of their loved ones.
Gutsy heard someone gag and turned to see Alethea bend over and vomit into the street. Gutsy, not knowing what else she could do, pulled the sweaty strands of Alethea’s hair out of the way. Then she patted her friend’s back and handed her a crumpled handkerchief. Alethea dabbed at her mouth, nodding thanks. She was pale and haggard, and her eyes were jumpy.
“Hey…,” soothed Gutsy. “Hey, now. You okay?”
Alethea pasted on a totally false smile that faltered and fell away. “I… I don’t know how much more of this I can take, Guts,” she said.
“I know,” Gutsy agreed.
She and all her friends seemed to teeter on the edge of a black and bottomless pit filled with terrors. A hole where there was no light or hope. No trust, either. That had been smashed to splinters by the betrayal of Dr. Morton and the evil of Captain Collins.
She bent and kissed Alethea’s cheek. “It’ll be okay,” she said.
Her friend shook her head. “Don’t lie to me.”
