Down at the fence, Sally Two-Knives raised her hand. The line of Freedom Riders held fast, guns ready. They stared in horror at the tide of death that was washing toward them. None of them believed that they’d live through the day. Over the last three days, each in their own way, they’d made peace with their world, their religions, or in the absence of any faith, with themselves. Just knowing that the main population of the town might be safe, and knowing that a cure for the plague existed, put iron in their backs and kept their hearts beating. Some of them wept in fear, but they blinked away tears and took aim.
Sally turned to Captain Strunk, who stood next to her. “Glad I never got to see what I’d look like as an old lady. There’s something about an octogenarian with biker tats and a Mohawk that just doesn’t work.”
“You look beautiful to me,” said Strunk. He sighted along the barrel.
Sally slashed down with her hand. “FIRE!”
Far out in the Ruin, many miles to the north, a line of quads raced along the highway. They rode four abreast, and the line of quads stretched back half a mile.
All along the road they saw signs of the passage of people fleeing in a hurry. Dropped dolls, lost shoes, articles of clothing that must have fallen from carts, muddy wagon tracks. It was four days’ walk to the next town. The quads would catch up with the heretics in less than an hour.
Up ahead two figures stood in the middle of the road.
The leader of the mobile infantry raised a clenched fist in the universal symbol to stop. The quads slowed and stopped a dozen feet from the two men.
The man on the left grinned at the reapers through the grille of a New Orleans Saints football helmet. He was thin and wiry, with a carpet coat armored with metal squares cut from license plates. He leaned on a spear that had a bayonet blade and a heavy metal ball on the bottom. Under his helmet he wore a pair of cheap black sunglasses.
The man on the right was in similar garb, except that he wore a San Diego Chargers helmet with a plastic shark glued to it. A heavy logging ax rested on one muscular shoulder.
The man on the left gave the reapers a wide, happy grin.
“Wassssabi?” said Dr. Skillz.
“Duuuuude,” said J-Dog, nodding to the leader’s quad. “Nice ride. Can I have it?”
The reapers laughed. There was the slithery sound of many knives being drawn from leather sheaths.
“No, seriously,” said Dr. Skillz. “Let him have the bike. He’s got a serious Davy Jones for some vroom-vroom.”
The leader looked blank. He leaned toward the reaper on his left. “Did any of that make sense?”
“They’re messing with you, brother. Let’s gut them and get moving.”
“Whoa, bad vibes, brah,” said J-Dog. “You need to drink a big chilltini.”
“And you need to get right with god,” said the leader. He gestured to his men. “Cut their throats and—”
The air was filled with the clickety-click of hammers being cocked and slides being racked. In the forest on either side of the road, figures moved. Men and women and teenagers. Hundreds upon hundreds of people; everyone in Mountainside who owned a firearm prepared to shoot. And the narrow country lane was a killing floor. The reapers knew it, and their righteous rage turned to icy sludge in their veins.
“Dudes,” said Dr. Skillz, “if you’re gonna ride the big one, you better have big ones.”
J-Dog nodded. “So… can I have the bike?”
Saint John tried to see what was happening, but there were simply too many people in the way. He heard the screams, though, and they were too close to be coming from the town.
He grabbed a fistful of an aide’s shirt. “Find out what’s happening.”
The saint thrust the man toward the crowd.
The Freedom Riders fired and fired, and the leading edge of zoms and reapers crumpled a hundred yards out. The next line fell at ninety yards. At eighty.
At least a hundred of the attackers collapsed with each volley, but the tide was coming in like a tsunami. The mass of attackers rose up and down like sea rollers as they climbed over the dead. Fights broke out as zoms turned on the wounded and dying, their senses confused by the numbing bleach. Some of the reapers had to defend against their own undead shock troops. But even these skirmishes were carried forward like debris on the tide. There was too much forward momentum for anything to stop them.
“Fire!” screamed Sally. She had a bolt-action sniper rifle, and she killed everything she aimed at.
All along the line, fighters yelled out that they were reloading. Then slapped in new magazines or thumbed shells into their shotguns.
They fired and fired.
The tide was fifty yards away now, and Benny knew that nothing could stop it.
It was what he counted on.
It was what he’d planned for.
Down below, he saw Nix, Lilah, Morgie, and Riot dipping torches into buckets of pitch. All along the inside of the fence were unlit bonfires. Hundreds of them, and more of them throughout the town.
The tide was forty yards away. Almost to the first of the mounds of dirt.
How scary are you willing to be in order to take the heart out of the enemy?
“NOW!” Benny yelled.
The four of them slapped their torches against the ground, each at precise points, where slender trenches had been dug. Each trench was a few inches deep and a handbreadth wide and lined with rags and straw that had been soaked in kerosene. All the tons of it that had been stored at the fuel company Benny and his friends had driven through. It had taken every spare second and every able-bodied man and boy to siphon it out of the tanks and transport it here. Now that kerosene was soaked into the earth, waiting for a single caress of one of the torches.
And now every one of those torches bowed to the ground to kiss the kerosene.
Nix touched her torch to the first of the trenches, and fire leaped up and raced away from her, under the metal rim of the fence and then flashing out along an arrow-straight line to the mound that was farthest from town. The fire reached the mound and then vanished into the mouth of a piece of metal drainpipe.
There was a moment of nothingness.
Then the thirty-pound propane tank buried inside the mound exploded. The dirt flew away from the blast, carrying with it all the broken glass, screws, nails, and other jagged debris that had been packed around it.
The incoming tide turned red.
Saint John heard the first of the explosions.
Then the next, and the next. He saw the fireballs rising above the field and heard the screams of his attacking army turn to screams of pain.
And he heard the moans of the countless dead turn to growls of red delight as they began to feed.
The tower shook with every blast, and Benny had to cling to the ladder to keep from being hurled off by the shock waves. He watched as the explosions opened empty spaces in the storm of attackers, like the eyes of hurricanes, but the storms swept around them.
There was more fighting on the field, though. The zombies were in open revolt now. There was too much blood, too much torn meat, and that sent them into a killing frenzy. The screams and gunfire and explosions washed away any effect of the dog whistles. Now the dead did what they had done for fifteen years. They attacked anything that moved with implacable ferocity and bottomless hunger.
The reapers forgot about the town and turned their weapons on the dead.
Saint John’s aides brought up a supply cart, and he climbed onto it to get a better view. The sight nearly took the heart from him. The field in front of the town was a madhouse of battle. Reapers fighting the gray people. Forty thousand of the living against eighty thousand of the dead.