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Karen turned back to the fight on the wall. More than half the defenders had answered the cry to head to the rally point. They were holding it against the climbers, but there were still so many monsters out there.
“What should we do?” asked the runner.
But Karen did not have a quick answer. If they deserted the wall, then the dead would swarm over before the town could be evacuated. If they stayed to fight, they w
ould all die defending their home. She looked around as if for answers, but every door seemed to be nailed shut.
* * *
Alethea dropped the last of the shamblers with a mighty overhand swing that left a corpse with almost no head. Then she pushed the kids into a bunch and began herding them toward the hospital. It was the safest building because there were guards, more rooms to hide in, and—as a fallback—it had the escape tunnel.
“To the rally point!”
So many people were yelling it that even some of the kids took up the chant without knowing what it meant.
She was already exhausted. Huge blows with the bat were easy at first, but with every swing, Rainbow Smite seemed to gain another ten pounds. Pain lanced through her sides, and breathing felt like inhaling fire. Stopping for a rest, though, was impossible.
She ran, and the children ran with her.
* * *
The Chess Players made their way up to the wall, puffing and sweating. They each had long poles and stood shivering in the chilly wind. They were terrified, and each was acutely aware of the years, the arthritis, and the weakness that was the dreadful gift of old age.
“Funny,” said Ford, in a way that meant it wasn’t going to be funny at all, “but after all this talk of wild men, I kind of figured it would be them.”
“Yeah,” Urrea agreed.
“Not that I want a horde of wild men.”
“No. Of course not.”
They watched the army of the dead move forward with a hideous slowness. They both knew it was because the shamblers did not move fast, but it had a strange mockery to it, as if the dead had all the time in the world to consume this town.
Which, of course, they did.
79
GUTSY FEINTED RIGHT AND DODGED left, ducked, and chopped down on the foot of the closest ravager. The blade cut through shoe, skin, and bones, and the strange red-black ravager blood welled out. The ravager bellowed, and in an insight of crisis, Gutsy realized that they actually could feel pain. All of los muertos actually felt pain, because that was how the parasite worked; that was Volker’s sick design. The dead could see, hear, feel, smell, and touch, but could not do anything about it. At least, the shamblers could not. The ravagers not only felt pain, they could scream in pain. But, being zombies, pain did not stop them, though damage did slow them. This one tried to rush her, but his maimed foot gave out and he fell.
Gutsy rose fast and drove her shoulder into the killer’s side, knocking him toward a second ravager. She stepped on the back of the one she’d injured and swung at the third ravager, who was taken completely by surprise.
Her blade missed his head and instead clanged off the chain he carried as a weapon. Gutsy’s momentum sent her crashing into the monster, knocking him backward with such force that he had to take a step to catch his balance—except that he was at the edge of the platform, and there was nowhere to step. His arms windmilled for a frantic second, and several nails welded to the links of the whirling chain caught Gutsy’s vest. As the ravager fell, the chain jerked her toward the edge. She screamed, dropped her machete, and grabbed one of the steel cables with both hands. She swung out over the edge with the full weight of the ravager pulling at her. Her vest tore open, spilling the many useful things she carried for all eventualities. All, but not this one.
“Spider!” she wailed as her hands began to slip, but her friend was still nowhere to be seen.
When hands suddenly caught her and pulled her back, they were not the brown hands of her best friend. These hands were pale and diseased, and they grabbed her leg to pull her toward a mouth full of snapping teeth. It was the ravager who’d been knocked down by the injured one. He clung to her legs, his weight pulling her down while at the same time he tried to climb high enough to take a bite.
Gutsy hung between two deaths—the unforgiving ground if she fell, and the monster’s teeth below.
* * *
Benny thought he had an easy fight—a long sword against knives—but the teenager he fought was fast as a scorpion. The young man danced away from the katana time and again, parrying thrusts and cuts with his knives as if they were the superior weapons and not the ancient blade of the samurai.
Benny and the reaper dueled there on the platform, steel ringing on steel, both of them moving with quick, small steps, darting and lunging.
The reaper reminded Benny of someone else he fought last year. A young reaper not much older than this one, but who had a harsh, unsmiling face. Brother Peter, the right hand of Saint John. They’d fought a duel while both reapers and Benny’s friends watched; at the time it seemed a foregone conclusion to everyone that Brother Peter would win. He was the more skilled fighter, the protégé of Saint John. Benny was barely an apprentice to a deceased master, his brother.
What Benny learned that day was the skills Tom taught him ran deep, but the second layer of training he had gotten from Captain Ledger ran deeper still. Not the elegance of combat or the nobility of the samurai but something else Benny had gotten from Tom. An animal cunning. During that fight Benny had actually allowed Brother Peter to cut him, gambling that the cut he allowed would be damaging but not fatal. He used the moment of that cut—the certainty that Brother Peter would take the obvious opening—to deliver a killing blow.
