The big female suddenly launched herself forward, tearing across the flat ground toward them.
“Nix!” yelled Benny. He let go of the pistol, brought his sword up, and jumped into the path of the charging animal. On either side the smaller lions roared and charged.
I’m going to die.
But then there was a huge crack! and Benny felt something burn past his cheek.
The charging lion shrieked and skidded to a stop, shocked by the sound. Benny couldn’t tell if she had actually been hit by Nix’s bullet. The other lions froze, looking from the prey to the lioness and back again.
Nix shouldered Benny out of the way as she pointed the smoking pistol at the leader of this pack of killers.
The big female roared in fury.
The smaller lions roared.
Even the male bellowed out a roar of bloodlust and anger.
Only Eve’s supersonic shrieks were louder.
The lions began moving forward again, but this time they crept along, angry but wary. Every muscle in their bodies was etched with tension.
In a moment of crystal clarity, Benny realized that even though they might smell like zoms, what they were doing was not zombie behavior. Skilled predators would know this. Would it deter the lions, or would it hasten their own deaths?
Nix wasn’t waiting to find out. She fired again, and this time the lioness jerked suddenly to the left, her hunting cry punched into a different shape—high and plaintive. And angry.
Very, very angry.
Once again the lions froze in place.
The two smaller cats were only twenty feet away. A few more leaps and they would have been among Benny and his friends with claws and fangs. However, their attack had been stalled by the sharp noises and the suddenness of their leader’s hesitation. They turned to look at her. Benny could see blood on the big cat’s shoulder, but if the animal was seriously injured, it didn’t show. Still, she did not immediately renew her attack; instead she began pacing in front of them. Her tail whipped back and forth in irritation, and with each turn she bared her fangs at them.
Nix trembled with mingled fear and effort as she tracked the lion with the gun.
“Benny . . . ,” she breathed.
Eve kept screaming.
“Hush!” barked Nix, and her tone was so commanding that it even silenced the watching lions for a moment; and the big female paused for half a heartbeat in her pacing. Eve lapsed into a sniffling, watching, quivering silence, her fists knotted in Chong’s shirt.
Nix’s lips barely moved as she asked, “What do I do now?”
“Shoot it!” urged Chong.
“I can’t. I only have three bullets left. The rest are in my backpack.”
Benny swallowed. The pistol was a six-shot revolver, but Tom had taught them to keep only five rounds in the cylinder, with the hammer resting on an empty chamber in case of unexpected jolts. The backpack was hanging on the tree.
“Did you hit it both times?” Benny demanded, squinting to study the animal’s fur.
The lion kept pacing, assessing them, eyes narrowed, teeth bared, tail switching with fury.
“No. I missed the first time because someone almost got in the way of my shot.”
“Oh,” said Benny.
“I got her the second time,” continued Nix, “but she doesn’t look hurt.”
“She’s bleeding,” Benny said hopefully.
The lion continued to pace.
“She’s not even limping. Can’t stop four lions with three bullets.”
The smaller ones continued to crouch and glare; and the big male was now on his feet. He might not have been part of the hunt, but he looked more than ready to use his mass and muscle to protect his mate.
“Nix,” said Chong as he shifted to put his body between Eve and the cats, “try and kill the big one. Use a couple of shots.”
“Why?” Benny and Nix both asked.
“It might scare the others off.”
Benny thought about the funeral for Morgie’s dad. Even though they had just buried a person, everyone hung around the Mitchell house for hours to eat and drink. He had an image of the other lions doing the same right now, and he did not particularly want to be grief snacks for hunting cats that shouldn’t even be on this continent in the first place.
“No,” he said. “Don’t.” He didn’t explain his reasoning.
“I have to do something,” said Nix, and now the tremble he had felt in her body was evident in her voice.
The hunting cat stopped pacing and stood directly in front of Nix. Amber eyes burned into Nix’s green ones. There was awful promise in those eyes. Revenge for pain, death to feed her family, satisfaction for frustration.
“Uh-oh,” murmured Nix, and she nervously adjusted her grip on the gun. Sweat ran along her arms.
The lioness lowered herself into a crouch, her muscles springing into sharp definition as she prepared for a charge that a popgun was not going to stop.
Benny suddenly stepped forward, putting himself between her and the lioness. “Listen to me,” he said between gritted teeth. “I’m going to charge them. Maybe I can get one or two of them. As soon as I go, you run. Go into the ravine if you have to. Zoms are easier than—”
“No!” snapped Nix. “Damn it, Benny, you’re not Tom and you can’t do this.”
“I didn’t say I was Tom,” he barked.
The lions growled.
Chong said, “Will you two shut up?”
The big cat screeched her hunting cry and attacked. Her massive body became a tan blur and ran directly at Chong and Eve.
“No!” Benny and Nix both screamed. Nix shoved Benny out of the way and snapped off a wild shot.
Then something whipped between Benny and Nix and flew across the clearing toward the lioness. Benny had a splintered second’s glimpse of it. A cylinder of bright red paper that trailed a plume of thin gray smoke. It struck the ground between him and the lioness, bounced once . . .
. . . and exploded.
BANG!
The flash was as bright as the sun and as loud as a gunshot. But it was a . . .
Benny’s stunned mind scrambled for the word.
. . . a firecracker?
The lion hissed in fear and confusion, looking wildly around to find this new attacker.
Then a second firecracker dropped out of nowhere and exploded before it even hit the ground. The bang tore a howl of anger and fear from the smaller cats, and they scrambled backward, falling, snarling, twisting away.
A third firecracker snapped through the air and burst inches from the lioness’s face.
Her shriek was earsplitting.
Another and another detonated in the air around the lioness.
She tore deep gouges in the ground as she spun around and ran flat out for the tall grass. Despite her wounded shoulder, she passed the smaller cats like they were standing still, and even the powerful male ran in the dust kicked up by her passage.
In seconds the four lions had dwindled to specks in the distance and then were gone, totally out of sight.
Benny stood with his sword forgotten in his hand, mouth open. Nix and Chong were as still as statues. Benny heard a soft footfall to his right, and he turned to see a figure stand up out of the tall grass a dozen feet behind where one of the lions had crouched. A stranger whose presence had not been noticed by anyone, human or feline, who had moved with all the silent stealth of Tom or Lilah.
It was a girl. A teenager. Beautiful, tall, and wild.
But it was not Lilah.
This girl was maybe seventeen, with large brown eyes, a small mouth, and a scalp that had been completely shaved to reveal a complex series of tattoos. Wild roses and thorny vines. She had multiple silver rings pierced through the upper parts of both ears, and a silver necklace from which hung an old-fashioned skeleton key. She wore tattered camouflage shorts, sneakers that were worn to threads, and a vest that was buttoned up over, apparently, nothing else. A Marine Corps belt was s
trapped around her hips, and it supported a leather-handled hunting knife, a whistle, and a lumpy pouch of what Benny guessed were stones. Crisscrossed over her torso were bandoliers—not of bullets, but of firecrackers.
The girl held a slingshot in her hands, and there was a sharp-edged rock seated in its leather pouch.
The rock was aimed at Nix’s throat.
“I think y’all better lower that gun,” said the stranger. “Right now.”
“Well,” said Chong with a disgusted sigh, “I guess it’s fair to say that this day can’t get any worse.”
The girl smiled a wicked smile and pulled the bands back so hard that they creaked with tension. “Yes, it surely can.”
22
LILAH RAN ALONG EVE’S BACK-TRAIL AS FAST AS SHE COULD.
With every step, though, she felt her heart slip another notch and sink lower in her chest. The sky above her was filled with vultures.
Where were Eve’s parents?
She rounded a bend in the stream and skidded to a stop, whipping the spear up into a combative grip. There, right in front of her, was a clearing in which a camp had been set up. Crude tents and a screen of cut shrubs, a cook fire in a sheltered pit. Clothes and gear.
All of it scattered and torn.
All of it bloody.
Half a dozen vultures huddled around a twisted tangle of rags that had once been a human being.
Lilah held her ground, watching before acting. To rush the scene and chase off the ugly birds would be like sending up a flag to signal her presence. Hunters and killers both watch for disturbances in nature.
She squatted down and tried to look under the carrion birds.
The body on which they were feasting was that of an old man. She could see just enough of its shape and a spill of white hair.
Too old, probably, to be Eve’s father.
The rest of the camp was empty. No other bodies. However, it was clear that there had been a fight here. There were blade marks on the surrounding trees, shrubs were trampled, and there was far too much blood to have come from one feeble old man.
Where were the others? Had they fled the fight? Or had they died and reanimated before the vultures could reduce them to scraps of flesh and bone?
No way to tell. Not without a thorough search, and Lilah did not think she had the time for that. Not with all those reapers in the woods.
Time was burning away. She would have to abandon this search and get back to her friends. If this camp belonged to Eve’s family, then it was already too late. If not . . . ?
“Chong,” she murmured. Chong was a town boy, and those reapers looked fierce. They were engaged in some kind of holy war. Lilah had no intention of getting involved in that, but at the same time, she did not have a clue as to how those reapers would react to Chong, Benny, and Nix. Would they all be left alone as outsiders?
Lilah doubted it. Her instincts were screaming at her to get back.
She backed away from the clearing and made a wide circle around the scene of carnage. As she did so, she caught sight of a ridge of white rocks just past a line of bushy pines. Lilah frowned at them. The rocks were unnaturally bright, almost like they had been painted with whitewash. Were they rocks or a structure?
She ran through the trees toward them, intending to cut past them and head west again.
However, the closer she got, the more her frown deepened, because it became quickly apparent that they were not rocks at all. Nor was it an old building.
Lilah slowed from a jog to a walk, and as she emerged from the trees she stopped stock-still. Her mouth dropped open in shock.
“No . . . ,” she whispered.
The thing lay there. Huge. Ugly. Impossible.
The thing was perched precariously on a shelf of rock that overlooked a long drop into a cleft that was thick with dark scrub pines and creeper vines. Someone had taken red paint—or perhaps blood—and written these words on the broad, white side of this impossible thing:
WOE TO THE FALLEN
Nearby, on a mound of dirt, three bodies in ragged military-style uniforms were hung on wooden posts. Zoms. They thrashed against the ropes that bound them.
Lilah turned quickly and looked back the way she’d come, staring at the woods as if she could still see Nix and the others. Indecision tore at her. Should she tell her friends about this, or steer them away from it and never say a word about it?
She thought about what it would do to Nix and Benny. Even to Chong.
Lilah shut her eyes for a moment and ground her teeth in helpless frustration. It was so much simpler living alone. You never had to hurt anyone you cared about, because there was no one to care about. Telling her friends about this would be exactly like stabbing them through the heart.
She lingered there, thinking it through, wrestling with it, aching with doubt.
Then a voice behind her said, “There’s one!”
Lilah instantly leaped to one side, twisting in midair to land facing the way she had come, her spear ready in her strong hands.
Thirty feet down the path she had just come stood a pair of men dressed in black with red streamers tied to their clothes.
Reapers.
Lilah gaped.
Not at the reapers, but at the figures who milled behind them.
Zoms!
There were at least a half dozen of the living dead—men, women, even a child. All newly dead, some of them glistening with blood that had not yet dried.
Lilah’s heart sank. Now she knew what had happened to the other people who had camped here. The zoms moaned in freshly awakened hunger. They staggered through the tall grass, hands reaching awkwardly toward her, completely ignoring the two reapers as they shuffled past.
“Hey, girl!” yelled one of the reapers. “Drop your spear and give yourself up to the darkness. It wants you. The darkness wants to open the red door in your flesh. Why fight it? The darkness is beautiful. The darkness is eternal. The darkness is yours if you stop fighting and allow it to enfold you.”
The words had a cadence like scripture, but they were from no holy book Lilah had ever read—and in her solitude, she had read most of them. These words were intended to coax, but instead they made the hands that held her spear tighten with anger.
“Come on, kid,” said the second reaper. “Accept the truth. The darkness wants to take you. The darkness wants to take us all. It’s the will of God.”
Lilah had never been much for profanity, but as the men continued to call for her to open herself to the darkness, she responded with a series of phrases she’d learned at Gameland. It shocked the men to silence.
The dead kept coming.
Fifteen feet away now.
Lilah debated pulling her Sig Sauer. She had no doubt that she could put all the zoms down as well as the two men with less than a full magazine.
It would be noisy, though, and Lilah liked the quiet.
Instead she gave her spear a single arrogant twirl and charged straight at the zoms.
And the dead rushed at her on stiff and clumsy legs. All but one. A tall woman whose throat had been slashed rushed ahead of the pack, arms outstretched, mouth wide, racing toward Lilah.
A fast zom.
The running zombie grabbed for her, and Lilah uttered a feral growl as she jumped left and used the short leap to channel power into a vicious cut that took the zom across the upper chest. The heavy blade sheared through one arm, part of the chest, and clean through the dead woman’s spine; and the shock of the powerful blow reverberated through Lilah’s entire body. The creature instantly dropped into a boneless heap that would never move again.
Lilah’s heart was racing as adrenaline flooded through her bloodstream.
The slower zoms had reached her now and attacked in a ragged line. Two reached her first.
Lilah spun and swept the spear low, cutting the first one’s leg off at the knee; then she continued the swing and brought the weighted opposite end around in an overhand sweep that crushed the second z
ombie’s skull. Before it even had a chance to fall, Lilah pivoted and used the same metal knob to end the torment of the child zom.
Three down in two seconds.
She kicked out at one zom as it tried to dive for her thigh, its teeth clacking in the air. The kick jolted it to a stop in a half crouch, and she swept the knob up under its chin so hard and fast that its head snapped back, breaking its neck.
“Hey!” yelled one of the men, but Lilah ignored him. She’d seen no firearms on them. They could wait.
A cold hand closed on her shoulder, knotting her shirt in dead fingers as it sought to pull her backward toward its bloody teeth. Lilah went with the pull, but as she did so she spun her body in a violent pirouette. The torsion bent the zom’s arm backward so fast that bones splintered and the creature lost its grip. Lilah rammed the shaft of her spear across its throat and drove it into the last of the zoms, knocking them both to the ground. She thrust the blade into the neck of one, severing the spinal cord; then tore the blade free, twirled the spear again, and brought the heavy knob down on the last zombie’s skull. There was a pulpy whack and then the trail was still.
She turned toward the two reapers, who stood where they had been, their eyes goggling, mouths hanging open in total shock.
Lilah smiled at them.
And charged.
It had taken her five seconds to destroy the six zoms.
It took two seconds to cut both reapers down.
They reeled away, each of them clutching identical red lines across their throats. They gagged. They tried to speak, perhaps to protest the impossibility of everything that had just happened; but neither of them would ever speak their confusion. They dropped to their knees. One fell forward onto his face. The other toppled backward.
In the trees above them, the monkeys screamed in panic at the smell of death and blood.
Lilah stood above the dead reapers, her chest heaving, sweat glistening on her cheeks and throat.
Her heart sank, though. Without wanting to, she had taken sides in the war between the reapers and the people they called heretics. Which meant it was her war now.
Would it get her killed?
Would it get Chong killed?
She looked down at the two men, wondering if they would reanimate. Or had the zombie plague truly changed?