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The second biker dropped the kickstand, got off, and ran down the hill.
Morgie swung his wooden sword just as Death Angel’s bike seemed to leap forward and the wicked blade cut a glittering arc through the air. Morgie did not try to block the blade, nor did he try to smash the muscular half-zombie. Instead he put every ounce of his strength and all of his speed into a diagonal downward strike to the bike’s front wheel. The impact sent shock waves up his arm with such force that the sword’s handle shivered itself from his grip. Morgie fell sideways, but the blow had done its work. The scythe missed again, and the wheel slewed around on the trampled weeds, ruining the forward momentum of the bike. Death Angel was launched from the seat and crashed down hard on the road, sliding nearly four feet on his chest and hands. The scythe fell across Morgie’s waist.
He grabbed it and propped it on end to help him stand. He hoped the biker was dead or crippled, but as soon as that thought formed in his head he knew that it was ridiculous. This wasn’t just a zom… it was a ravager. Half alive, half dead, all monster. Nearly unkillable. And before this one had transformed, he’d been something else: huge, with overdeveloped muscles and the look of someone who had always been a brute, a causer of pain, a taker of lives.
Death Angel got to his feet. The impact with the road had torn his clothes and ripped flesh from his palms, chest, and right cheek. Blood that was a strange mixture of black and red—not blended at all, streamers of both colors—ran from the torn flaps of his flesh. He pointed a finger at Morgie and grinned to show lots of yellow teeth.
“I was going to turn you, boy, but now I think I’ll bust you up and let you watch Mongo and me turn the little chickee into an all-we-can-eat buffet. How would you like that?”
A scream rose from the bank of the river, but Morgie could not see what was happening with Riot.
“I’m going to kill you,” promised Morgie, but even he could hear how weak his voice sounded. His body was tired from days of illness, and even if Morgie had been at his best, this man looked unbeatable. He had no illusions of this being a David-and-Goliath situation. Even so, he had to try. Morgie took a threatening step toward the big man.
Death Angel did not flinch or show the slightest concern that he was unarmed while Morgie had the scythe. Instead, his ugly grin widened to a jack-o’-lantern leer. Behind him and all around the scene of the confrontation, the woods seemed to break apart as more ravagers stepped out of the shadows with weapons in their hands, and behind them, shambling with relentless hunger, were the living dead.
There were so many of them. Too many. One quad was wrecked, the other damaged. Riot was screaming, and Morgie knew that this place, this moment, was the end of all the things he’d done, and all the dreams he ever had.
He raised the scythe anyway.
69
MORGIE CHARGED THE RAVAGERS AND the zombies. He swung the scythe as if it could somehow sweep away all of the dozens of creatures who had come from this trap to kill and devour him. Death Angel laughed and ducked backward, and the force of Morgie’s swing whipped the blade across the necks of two zombies, instantly decapitating them. It was a cut so powerful and so effective that it shocked him.
Then the tip of the blade buried itself into the chest of a ravager and stuck there. The killer cried out, more in outrage than pain, grabbed the handle near the blade, and tore the scythe from Morgie’s grasp. The ravager staggered back, completely run through, tugging at the steel and cursing.
Two of the shamblers lunged at Morgie and tripped over the front wheel of the fallen Harley. They collapsed in a heap and four others fell over them, piling up a mound of thrashing dead inches from where Morgie stood. In another place—maybe at the harvest festival at home, with actors dressed as zoms—this would have been laugh-out-loud comedy. Here it was merely unreal, as if pernicious monsters were playing a game to mock his inevitable and horrible death. Morgie had always feared the living dead, but until that moment he’d never actually hated them. Now he did.
He hated every single one of the rotting, lumbering, insatiably hungry creatures. He wanted to chop them up and burn the pieces.
Morgie whirled instead and ran to find his bokken. In stories, heroes made a glorious last stand, killing so many of their enemies that grand tales would be told about it for generations to come. But these enemies would not tell any tales, no matter how many he killed. He could fill the underworld with their corpses, and the story of it would still die right there on a lost road in an empty corner of the Rot and Ruin.
He snatched up the weapon, turned, and swung as one of the ravagers came at him with a pickaxe in his dirty fists. Morgie ducked low as he swung, evading the attack while smashing the sword into the killer’s knee. The leg buckled and Morgie darted sideways, not needing to do more to a crippled opponent when there were so man
y others.
Riot screamed again, but this time it sounded more like rage than pain. Morgie wanted to look, to see if somehow she was managing to fight, maybe to escape, but another zom came at him and he swept its reaching arms to one side and kicked it hard in the hip, driving it backward against Death Angel. The big biker bashed the thing away and drew a pistol from his belt.
“I’m gonna make this—”
And that was all the monster said. If there was more, the words were lost beneath the huge and ugly roar of a heavy caliber machine gun.
But that was impossible, Morgie thought. He turned, the world swaying sickeningly around him, as soldiers—soldiers—came running out of the forest. He slipped on blood and fell, hitting his head against a tree. The world spun sickeningly around him and everything seemed to be painted in all the wrong colors. Gunfire orange. Blood that was red and black. The green of the immense forest. And the mingled green and gray and brown of uniforms. Then it all went very, very black.
PART NINETEEN THE FALL OF NEW ALAMO
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
—WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, “THE SECOND COMING”
70
ALICE WOKE IN THE TUB, shivering. The water was ice-cold now, and her skin was pruned. She got out, dried off, and hurried into underwear, pajamas, and a thick robe. The house was still but not quiet. She put her ear to her mom’s bedroom door and heard the rustle of sheets.
Alice went to the kitchen, put the kettle on, took an orange from the basket on the table, sliced it, and arranged the pieces on a plate. There were a few ibuprofen tablets left, and she put the bottle in her robe pocket and went down the hall with the plate and a teacup. She tapped lightly on Mom’s door and turned the knob.
“Mom?” Alice whispered as she came quietly in. “How are you feeling? How are your hand and the cuts?”
Her mother was in bed, the covers pulled high, only a small lantern lit on the dresser, the flame turned low.
