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The zom opened its mouth, not to moan with hunger but to utter an ear-splitting howl of inhuman hate.
And then it leaped like an ape onto the pile of debris and began climbing madly toward them. The girls flinched in horror and surprise. Lilah got to her feet and gripped her metal spear, while Nix backpedaled and whipped her sword free of its scabbard. The zombie climbed faster and faster, still howling—and now others joined it. They jumped onto the chunks of stone and pulled themselves up the twisted metal struts. First only a handful, but soon others came running out of the inner compound, out of what was left of the base. Ten more. A dozen. Twenty. More and more of the dead soldiers. They saw the figures on the edge of the crater, and the sight drove them to madness. They climbed over one another, kicking and snarling, howling with insane rage.
It wasn’t anything either of the girls had ever seen. It was wilder and yet somehow more dangerously focused even than the R3 zombie mutations they’d fought in Nevada the previous year. And it was stranger than the ravagers. This, they both knew, was some new mutation. Maybe it had been caused by the mix of all those chemicals and biological samples down in the base. Maybe it was something else entirely. All Nix and Lilah knew was that if those creatures got out of the pit, they were both going to die. Quickly and very badly.
This was a fight they could not win.
Lilah drove off as fast as she could. The wild zombies chased them. They were so whipped up into a frenzy that they slashed at the air with their fingernails, bit at the plume of dust behind the quad, and chased the girls for miles.
And miles.
And miles.
PART EIGHT THE ROAD TO ASHEVILLE
My first wish is to see this plague of mankind, war, banished from the earth.
—GEORGE WASHINGTON
32
MORGIE AND RIOT WERE MORE alert and nervous as they continued on their way—partly because the zebras had totally freaked them both out, and partly because everything seemed to be getting stranger. Wilder mutations in animals, insects, and plants. Strange clouds of chemicals that hung almost unmoving in the air. Rain that came in squalls and burned on their skin.
Morgie was jolted out of his troubled thoughts when he saw Riot, who was a quarter mile ahead, suddenly slow and pull over onto the shoulder of the highway. He stopped next to her. They were on the entrance to an overpass that crossed Texas 111. He turned off his engine and joined her over by the guardrail.
Below them, covering the whole of the road, was a gas station for big rigs, with huge white tank trucks and some scattered buildings. Everywhere, sprawled like broken dolls, were bodies. All around them, and splashed on every possible surface, was blood. Red and black. Human and zombie. Buzzards and crows pecked at the human corpses, and flies swarmed around the zoms. They could see small creatures—rats and lizards—scampering in and out. It was a frenzy of savage appetites.
“What happened here?” asked Morgie.
“Let’s go look,” Riot said.
Together they climbed down from the overpass toward the scene of the carnage. The birds, animals, and insects moved. The sluggish breeze toyed with torn strips of clothing. Everything else, though, was still.
Still as death, thought Morgie, appreciating the old simile for what it really meant.
They went all the way down and moved together through the mass of bodies, each of them angled to watch half the area, trusting the other to do the same.
Morgie’s sneakers crunched on shell casings, and he stooped to pick one up. Sniffed it and then handed it to Riot. She smelled it as well, and looked around with the critical eye of someone who has seen slaughter many, many times.
“How long ago?” asked Morgie. “Last night?”
“This morning,” said Riot. “Dawn or a little later. See? Some of them bigger pools of blood ain’t dried yet.”
Morgie straightened. “Seeing a lot of shell casings. Pistol, hunting rifle, and shotgun.”
Riot gave him a troubled nod. “How many living people, you reckon?”
“Has to be twenty or thirty,” Morgie said, looking around. It wasn’t always easy to tell regular corpses from those of freshly turned zoms.
“And at least three hundred zoms,” observed Riot. “I don’t see any guns.”
“Yeah,” said Morgie, frowning. “You think the people won and then grabbed all the guns before they left?”
“Maybe,” said Riot, but there was doubt in her voice.
“That soldier Benny talked to said something about the Night Army,” said Morgie. “Kind of wonder if this was them.”
Riot squatted down beside one of the dead humans. It was a woman of about thirty, with brown skin and a head cloth stained with blood. Riot gingerly lifted one of the woman’s hands, fighting the stiffness of rigor mortis. The arm only bent slightly, so she leaned close to peer at it, then indicated that Morgie should take a look. He knelt and saw a lot of dark specks against her skin.
