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“Nova, there you are,” Lazlo said, sounding relieved.
She glanced over at me as she approached us. “Is this Harlow?”
“Yeah, yeah. Harlow, this is my friend Nova. Nova –”
“We can do proper introductions later, because we need to get out of here,” Nova said.
“I’m not leaving without Kimber,” I insisted.
Nova was standing right in front of me, but she looked past me and reached over her shoulder for the arrows in the quiver on her back. “Then you better find her right quick, because the Loths are not the worst of our troubles anymore.”
I looked over my shoulder to see three zombies running straight at us. The Loths must have unleashed their domestics to hunt us down.
Nova’s arrow took down the one in the center right away – she shot him directly through the eye, and he fell backwards on the ground. Lazlo took out another with an ax, and I drove the icepick in the eye of the third. Unfortunately, it got stuck inside the gooey brain, and I couldn’t get it back out.
“We gotta move, more are coming,” Nova said, and Lazlo grabbed me by the arm.
Half-a-dozen more zombies rounded the corner, snarling and spitting, and it was way too many to fight off, so running was the only option.
We cut through a narrow gap between the sheds and lost a few of them that way, but these ones had been trained to track and follow, so they kept on us better than the average zombie.
When we made it back out onto the open gravel path, a wolf suddenly came out of nowhere, and dove at the zombie trailing right at Nova’s heels. And then another wolf – this one larger and silvery white – tore off the leg of a zombie.
“Where are the wolves coming from?” I asked.
“Oh, those are with us,” Lazlo said, as if that was a reasonable explanation.
Since the alarms had been going, I’d been able to hear the cows mooing most incessantly, but their sounds seemed to be growing louder.
A herd of cattle suddenly started pouring out of a barn, and they were running right towards us. Behind us were snarling zombies, although the wolves had slowed them down some.
We ducked in between the closest buildings we could, and we leaned back against the wall, catching our breath as the cattle ran past and trampled the zombies.
“Will the wolfdogs be okay?” Lazlo asked.
Nova nodded once. “They know how to dodge hooves.”
“So where exactly is Kimber?” Lazlo asked, looking down at me.
“I think she let those cows out, so she’s probably close by,” I said. “She’s trying to set everything free.”
As soon as the cows made it by us, we went back out onto the gravel path and maneuvered around the half-dead zombies that the stampede had left in their wake. I headed toward the other cattle buildings. The wolves weren’t around, but Nova assured me that they would find us again.
Kimber wasn’t in the first building, or the second, but neither were any of the livestock, so that meant we were on her trail as she released all of the animals.
We raced through the second building, down the length of it and out the door, but when we did, we practically ran right into Bly and a badly injured Waylon. His clothes were covered in ash, and the fabric had been burned entirely off the left arm and leg. The exposed flesh was bloody and red and already blistered, from where the flames had been.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Waylon demanded to know, and he pointed his gun right at my head.
We were close enough, it was nearly point blank, and he would put a bullet between my eyes before Lazlo had a chance to get him with the ax or Nova could grab an arrow.
40
Harlow
“We don’t have time for this, Waylon,” I told him calmly, but I wasn’t sure if I could reason with a man who had a gun pointed to my head. “The ranch is on fire and zombies are running loose. We all need to get out of here if we want to live.”
He let out a joyless laugh and never took his eyes off me. “You think you can destroy my family, my ranch, everything that’s ever mattered to me, and then just run out of here?”
