19

“Go! Go … GO!” BELLOWED TOM AS HE GRABBED NIX AND BENNY and Chong and shoved them toward the forest wall. “Into the trees!”

“I’m sorry!” yelled Chong.

“Shut up and run!”

The ground shook as seven thousand pounds of furious muscle rumbled toward them. Despite its size, the animal was incredibly fast. Lilah flung her spear at it, but the blade merely slashed a red groove along its armored shoulder. It did nothing except make the rhino madder.

“Oh,” she said softly, and then she was running too.

Tom lingered a split second longer, sighting along the barrel of his gun at the rhino’s black eye. Then he whipped the gun away, shoved it into its holster, and ran as fast as his legs could carry him. He caught up with the others and yelled at them to cut left so that they were running almost parallel to the road.

The rhino tried to turn sharply to intercept, but the angle was too sharp. Its huge feet skidded on the dried mud of the road. Then, with a roar, it headed straight into the forest. The rhino’s shoulders slammed into a pair of slender pines, snapping them at the base.

“Use the trees,” yelled Tom. “Circle around the big ones.”

Nix was in the lead, and she shifted her angle to head toward a gnarled old sycamore. She dodged behind it, then spun and pulled Benny and Chong in behind her.

The rhino spotted them and charged. It veered at the last second, so instead of hitting the tree full on, its horns slashed a deep gouge in the wood and shook the old sycamore from roots to leaves. The rhino whirled and rammed the tree again, and Benny threw his arm up to shield his eyes from the spray of splinters the impact blew out of the gouge. The animal tried to chase them around the tree, but they were more agile. It snorted and trotted away, then cut left and rammed again, and this time there was a crack! and the sycamore canted sideways and crashed down on the grass with a huge leafy whumpf!

“Now what do we do?” whispered Chong in a strangled voice. Benny shot a look at him and saw that his friend’s eyes were wide and jumpy with fear that was very quickly going to overwhelm him.

The beast galloped forty feet away and then cut right into a tight circle. This time it didn’t attack the tree but instead began angling to come around the trunk and go straight for Chong. The rhino came at them like a thunderbolt.

“HEY!” Nix yelled as she stood up and waved her arms over her head. Instantly the rhino changed the angle of its charge and came straight for her. “Come on!” she cried to Benny, and then she was racing away from the fallen tree.

“What are you doing?” Benny yelled in panic, but as soon as he said it he understood. Nix tore across ten yards of open field toward a line of massive oaks. The rhino could never hope to knock one of them over.

Benny turned to pull Chong over the trunk so they could follow, but Chong was gone. Benny caught a glimpse of him running away from the oaks, heading toward a cluster of pines.

“Chong, no! Not that way!”

The rhino slowed to a trot and looked from Benny to Nix and then at Chong. Nix was vanishing behind the trunk of a monstrous oak. Benny was still partly covered by the huge bulk of dark roots from the overturned sycamore. Chong had a longer run ahead of him, and the only protection he had was a line of pines. Their bushy branches would hide him, but the soft pines offered no protection at all.

The rhino charged after Chong.

Benny broke from the side of the sycamore and began shouting as Nix had. “Hey! Big and ugly! Over here!”

But if the rhino heard him, it didn’t care. Chasing Chong was a straight run and an easy kill. It thundered after Chong, crushing huckleberry bushes and saplings under its ponderous bulk.

Benny made it to Nix’s oak and kept running. She was right with him, and they sprinted down the corridor of old oaks, heading for a gap that looked like it might have been either a country lane or a firebreak. Benny pointed as he ran, and Nix nodded. There was a chance they could turn left at the last oak, dash across the break, and enter the grove of pines. Benny figured they could come up behind Chong, pause long enough to beat some sense into him, then grab him and race back to the oaks.

At the break they paused for a moment, looking around for Tom and Lilah. Benny spotted them, but they were on the other side of the rhino. Lilah was climbing into a cottonwood tree. Tom was circling to try and cut the animal’s line of approach to the wall of pines.

“Hey!” Tom yelled. “Here!” He jumped up and down, waving his arms. When he got no reaction, he fired a shot into the air. That did it. The rhino skidded to a stop and turned its vicious eye on this new target. Benny was hoping that the animal would be getting tired by now, chasing one thing and then another. No such luck.

“It looks really, really mad,” said Nix.

The rhinoceros snorted a challenge, pawed the ground like a bull, tensed, and then launched itself straight for Tom.

“Oh, crap,” said Benny, but he wasn’t talking about the danger Tom was in. Tom apparently had a plan. Tom always had a plan. No, he caught movement from the pines and saw Chong break cover to watch what Tom and the rhino were doing. The rhino twitched its head as it noticed Chong.

“Oh for the love of—,” Benny began, then saved his breath for running.

Chong was smarter than Benny, but in his panic he wasn’t using that brain. Rhinos were not like people, cats, dogs, and hunting birds. They weren’t predators. Despite the creature’s formidable strength and size, it was built for protection. Predators have eyes that look forward. Prey animals have eyes on the sides of their head. Usually that was to allow them to see threats creeping up from all sides. In this case …

Once more the rhino wheeled and circled back toward Chong, who screeched, wheeled, and ran back toward the screen of pines.

“Why does it keep going after Chong?” asked Nix as they ran.

“’Cause he keeps heading for those pines,” grunted Benny.

“Yeah, but why?”

Tom fired another shot. The rhino ignored him this time and kept charging toward Chong. Tom yelled louder and jumped up and down, but the rhino had its eyes fixed on Chong. “Not that way!”

Chong either couldn’t hear or was too scared to pay attention.

Benny and Nix headed into the overgrown firebreak, crashing through the chest-high weeds, heading at a sharp angle to cut into the pines behind Chong so they could lead him out. The edge of the pine screen was fifty yards away. Benny saw that the shrubs and plants around here were already flattened down by the rhino’s massive feet, as if it had passed that way a hundred times.

Benny was only a half step behind Nix. Then she screamed and suddenly pitched forward into the grass five feet in front of him. Benny had no way of stopping himself in time, and his foot caught on something and he was falling too. He landed on her legs, the impact punching a yelp of pain out of her.

“Oooof! Sorry!” he said as he rolled quickly to his left.

And looked right into the eyes of a zom.