78

“BENNY!” CALLED NIX SUDDENLY. SHE SPOKE IN A WHISPER, BUT IT seemed dangerously loud. “I think I found something.”

“What is it?” he said, fumbling blindly in the dark to try and cross to her side of the tunnel. Then he heard her cry out in revulsion at the same moment that he caught the smell. The stink of rotting flesh. They had worn cadaverine so long that they had become used to it, but their cadaverine was gone and this stink had not come from a bottle. “Nix … ?”

She pulled him down to where she knelt and pressed something hard and round into his hand. Benny knew at once what it was. A bone. He felt around and discovered other bones. Bones that had been completely cleaned of flesh, and some that the zoms had not finished stripping.

“God!” Benny said, and almost dropped it.

“Benny,” Nix whispered, her lips right against his ear. “It’s heavy… .”

He grunted as he got her meaning, but it still disgusted him. He felt the shape and length of the bone. A heavy thigh bone. About eighteen inches long, with bulbed heads at both ends; one end much bigger where it hinged into the hip. He weighed it in his hand.

There was an awful sound behind them. They had made too much noise. The zoms were coming.

“Hurry!” Benny said, and they clattered among the bones and found another thigh bone for him and a pair of stout shinbones for Nix. The darkness was filled with moans and the shuffle of slow feet. Time was up.

“At least we’ll go out fighting,” Benny said.

Nix jabbed him sharply with the bone. “Don’t give me a hero speech, Benny Imura. I want to get out of this.”

Even though she couldn’t see it, Benny grinned in the dark. Crazy, brave, unpredictable, wonderful Nix Riley. He loved her so much that he wanted to shout. So he did shout. He gave a huge, wild war whoop as he raised his grisly weapons and charged down the tunnel to meet the living dead. Nix gave a weird, high, ululating cry and followed him.

The arena guards bellowed in fury and raced toward Tom.

“NOW!” bellowed Tom, and gunfire erupted from four windows in the hotel, and the front rank of guards went down in a bloody tangle. Hector Mexico leaned out of a second-floor window and lobbed a pair of fragmentation grenades into the stands. The crowd started to scatter, but some were too slow. The explosions were enormous. Then there was a chorus of screams from the guards over by the tent, and immediately the screams were drowned out by the moans of the living dead as dozens of zoms swarmed over them. The crowd did not immediately understand what was happening even as the dead shambled out into the arena; then they saw the two men in carpet coats and football helmets hacking and slashing at the cloth strips that held the zoms in their chairs. The men were laughing as they worked.

Then the back doors of the hotel burst open, and Solomon Jones led the team of free and unaffiliated bounty hunters out into the fray. Magic Mike, LaDonna Willis and her twin sons, Vegas Pete, the hulking Fluffy McTeague in his pink carpet coat, Basher with his baseball bats, and all the rest.

Tom leaped from the porch and slammed into the stalled and shocked guards, his sword mirror-bright for a moment longer—and then it was laced with red.

Lilah stared in shock from the top of the left-hand bleachers.

Tom!

She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Tom Imura, against all odds, leading a charge of armed fighters against Preacher Jack and the crowds at Gameland. It was insane. It was impossible. And yet it was real.

She stared past the panicked spectators. She had all the items she had taken from the sports shed, along with a bucket of pitch and a lantern. Wasting no time, Lilah used a fishing hook on a line to snag a deflated soccer ball, dipped it in the pitch bucket, set it ablaze with the lantern, and hurled it far over the crowd. It splatted against the back of one of the guards, who was immediately wreathed in yellow and orange flames. The man’s shrieks rose into the air louder than any other sound. Immediately the row of spectators in front of Lilah spun around, their faces showing a mixture of fear, shock, and anger.

Lilah gave them a wicked smile as she pelted them with burning balls. The screams of the spectators drowned out those coming from below, and now the entire set of bleachers was in full panic. Was Chong here too? She looked around but could not see him. Lilah bared her teeth in a feral grin, lit another ball, and threw it.

Sally Two-Knives was in no condition for hand-to-hand combat, but she could pull a trigger. She stared down the barrel of an army sniper rifle, laid the crosshairs on one of the Gameland guards, squeezed the trigger, and grinned like a harpy.

Crack! The kick of the gun hurt her, but she took that pain and turned it to bitter ice inside her heart. Sally had lost her children to the zoms during First Night. It was the worst thing that had ever happened to her, and every night she dreamed about what it must have been like for April and Toby as the monsters came for them. The people here made the horrors of the zombie plague into a game. They forced children to fight for their lives. Children.

She squeezed the trigger again. Crack! There was no trace of remorse in her eyes. Not so much as a flicker. The heavy kick of the gun hurt, but she used that pain to fuel her rage. Sally found another target and fired. Crack. And another.

Benny and Nix crashed into the first of the zoms. It was too small to be Charlie Pink-eye, which meant that it didn’t have a nail vest or an armored skullcap. Benny rebounded from it and swung first one thigh bone and then the other at his own head height. There was a light crack as the first club hit something—an outstretched hand, perhaps—and then a much heavier CRACK as the second one slammed into something too solid to be a head. A shoulder? Benny raised both clubs and brought them down above the shoulder level, and there was a wet crunch. Then the zom was falling, brushing past Benny as it collapsed.

“On your left,” Nix said from that side, and he heard the whoosh and crunch of her clubs. Bone-club met lifeless skin and shattered the undead bones beneath it. Fighting wild and blind, they pushed forward, taking turns to smash one-two, one-two, breaking arms and wrists and fingers in order to reach skulls and necks. Benny’s arms ached, particularly his bruised left arm, but he kept going, kept swinging. Nix was growling like a hunting cat, grunting with each hit.

Then there was light! Not the reflected glow of the torches at the edges of the pit, but huge yellow light. A ball of fire came bounding into the tunnel. Literally a ball of fire. Benny saw that it was some old sports ball, a cricket ball or a softball, that burned with intense flames as it rolled. Benny could smell smoke and the stink of pitch.

The flames illuminated the T juncture of the tunnels, and Benny’s heart sank as he saw that there were zombies in every direction. At least twenty of them, and five rows back on his left was the towering form of Charlie Pink-eye.

A second flaming ball dropped through the ceiling twenty yards down, and it landed on the back of a zombie in a business suit. The creature caught fire almost at once.

Benny shot Nix a quick look. Was this some new twist on the game? Did Preacher Jack want to burn them or kill them with smoke if the zoms couldn’t do the trick? Or was Tom trying to help in some way they didn’t understand? Either way it didn’t matter; there was no way to fight past all the dead who clogged the tunnels.

White Bear shoved his father out of the way as Magic Mike charged at him, firing shot after shot from a nine-millimeter pistol. A round plucked at the bearskin cloak, and White Bear grabbed a mortally wounded spectator and shoved him in the direction of the shooter. Magic Mike tried to dodge, but the startled spectator slammed into him and then both went down.

White Bear leaped over the dying man and landed hard atop Magic Mike. He grabbed the bounty hunter’s hair and chin and snapped his neck with a vicious twist. He was grinning as he heard the bones break.

Chong crouched inside the hotel, safe behind the bricks of the rear entrance foyer. He wanted to see Nix, Benny, and Lilah emerge safe from the pits or wherever they were, but he had no desire at all to join this fight. He wanted to be back in Mountainside, safe in his room with his stacks of books. Or maybe fishing in the creek with Morgie.

Lilah.

You’re a town boy, she had said back on the road. You’re useless out here.

There was a flash, and Chong watched as fireballs suddenly arced over the field and dropped into the sea of battle on the field. At first he was alarmed, thinking that this was another trick of White Bear; but then he saw the figure that rose above the row of burning corpses at the top of the bleachers. A magical figure out of some ancient myth. Gorgeous, long-limbed, incredibly lovely, and totally alien.

Lilah!

There was a sudden ripple of gunfire—the harsh chatter of an automatic rifle and the single pops of handguns—and then Chong saw the Lost Girl spin away, the last flaming ball dropping from her hands as she plummeted limply away into the darkness.

Chong screamed her name. “Lilah!”

“No …,” he whispered a moment later. They had just shot her. He had just watched her die. Chong grabbed his bokken and ran screaming into the madness.

Tom began cutting his way through the crowd toward White Bear. He wanted that man. And his psychotic father. Tom wanted to destroy the Matthias plague for good. His sword was like a living thing in his hand, moving without conscious thought. A man rushed at him with an ax, and suddenly the man was falling, his face gone. Another man raised a pistol, but hand and pistol suddenly flew away amid a piercing shriek. Three zoms came at him—two shambling slowly and one moving with unnatural speed. Then they were gone, falling in pieces. The sword sculpted a crooked path through the melee and nothing, alive or dead, could stand before him.

Four guards rushed up to shield Preacher Jack with their own bodies, and in a tight knot they ran from the center of the arena to the protection of a far corner. There was a crack, and one of the guards fell, half his face shot away. “Go … GO!” growled Preacher Jack, and the others did not hesitate or falter. They ran. Crack and another went down, his thigh pumping blood. Then they were in a cleft formed by the edge of the bleachers and a wagon. There was no angle for gunfire from the hotel.

Preacher Jack breathed in and out through his nose like a furious dragon. He was seeing everything he and his sons had built being torn down—again. By Tom Imura—again!

He wanted Tom dead so badly it was like acid in his throat. Preacher Jack grabbed the shoulder of his closest guard and spun him toward the aluminum siding that covered the wagon.

“Tear this off,” he ordered. The guards set to work to open a doorway out of the kill zone.

It was madness. Zombies staggered out from the circus tent. They had no mind, no loyalties, no ability to discern Preacher Jack’s enemies from his allies. They attacked everyone. J-Dog and Dr. Skillz, both of them drenched in the last of their personal stock of cadaverine, cut the dead free—all of them, Preacher Jack’s entire congregation.

As the zoms shambled out into the arena, J-Dog wiped sweat out of his eyes. “Dude, that old preacher’s gonna be piiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiissed.”

“Totally, brah,” agreed Dr. Skillz. He bent and picked up two objects Tom had given him. A pair of bokkens. “Let’s boogie!”

They ran toward the pits.

As he ran, Chong smashed and struck and bashed and broke, and even big guards fell to his assault. Before that moment, before Lilah fell, Chong had never hurt another person or raised his hand in anger to anyone but a zom. Now he saw faces break as he swung his sword; he felt arms shatter.

He knew that they would kill him. There was no way out of this except through death’s doorway, but he didn’t care. He was already bitten. But he had seen Lilah die … he had nothing left to lose. So Chong ran forward into his last moment, accepting death because it had already accepted him, wanting to follow Lilah down into the darkness so that she would never again be lost and alone.

On the other side of the hotel, Carrie Singleton and Foxhound Jeffries, respectively the youngest and the oldest of the bounty hunters who had come with Sally and Solomon, led a string of children into the woods at a fast run. Carrie had a crossbow and picked out a path that made maximum use of the trees and hedges to hide their escape. Foxhound had cross-belts of throwing knives. Once upon a time he had been a circus performer, a knife thrower who could put a blade through a playing card tossed into the air. Twice guards tried to stop them; each time they learned the error of that choice.

“What’s going on up there?” Benny demanded. Everything above them was a single wave of confused noise: shrieks and gunfire and the clash of steel on steel. “How could Tom be doing all this?”

Before Nix could say anything there was a different cry—a weird whoop of what sounded like pure joy—and then a figure dropped down through the pit opening. Tall, thin, wearing a football helmet and a carpet coat covered in pieces of license plates. He landed feetfirst on the shoulders of a zom, and the impact snapped the creature almost in two. He clutched three items in his hands: a spear that was almost identical to Lilah’s, and two curved wooden swords. The man pivoted and grinned at Benny.

“Hey! Little samurai dudes!” shouted Dr. Skillz.

“How … ?” demanded Nix.

“Where …,” began Benny.

Dr. Skillz tossed one of the swords to him. He dropped the thighbone and caught it. Nix dropped her shinbone and caught the other.

“Surf’s up!” yelled the bounty hunter as he swung his broad-bladed spear over their heads. He spun in place like a dancer, and suddenly two zoms were falling sideways while their heads fell in the opposite direction.

A thousand questions burned on Benny’s tongue, but more zoms closed in and there was no time to do anything but fight.

Two of Solomon’s friends, Vegas Pete and Little Bigg, trade guards from Haven, saw Preacher Jack and his men go running for cover behind the corner of the bleachers.

“Let’s get that son of a hound,” grumbled Bigg.

“Go for it,” agreed Pete, and they ran a zigzag across the field, smashing zoms out of the way and shoving panicked spectators into the open pits. Pete fired a Winchester rifle from the hip, and Little swung an old-fashioned cavalry saber he’d long ago scavenged from a museum. Guards and spectators fell before them. Preacher Jack’s two remaining guards rushed them. Vegas Pete missed with his last shot and broke the rifle over one guard’s head. The second guard snatched up a pitchfork and ran at Little Bigg, but Little parried the thrust and ran the man through.

That left Preacher Jack stuck in the corner with the two trade guards grinning at him.

“Now ain’t this a pickle?” asked Preacher Jack mildly. He should have been cowering. He should have been looking desperately for a way out. He was fifteen years older than these men, and where they were packed with muscle, he was a stick figure.

“Call off your goons, old man,” said Vegas Pete, “and you might walk out of this with a whole skin.”

“Well,” said Little Bigg as he pulled his saber free, “I wouldn’t say a whole skin.”

Preacher Jack’s lips twitched and writhed.

“Glad you think this is funny,” said Pete, “’cause we’re gonna—”

Preacher Jack kicked Pete under the kneecap and simultaneously chopped him across the throat with the stiffened edge of his hand. There was a sound like an eggshell cracking and Pete was backpedaling, fingers clawing at his throat as he tried to drag in air. His face turned red and then purple and he fell.

Little Bigg wasted no time gaping. He slashed a killing blow at Preacher Jack, but the old man leaped forward inside the swing. He head-butted Little, punched him in the chest and bicep, and snatched the saber out of his hand. There was a flash of silver and then Little Bigg was falling, his eyes wide with total incomprehension. It was all over in three seconds.

“Amateurs,” sneered Preacher Jack. He laid the saber within easy reach on the bleachers and set to work pulling at the aluminum siding.

Chong reached the bleachers where he had seen Lilah fall. He swore to himself that he would defend her body until this was over, and then—Oh God, he thought, then what?

He would have to quiet her. But … could he do it? The thought of it made him crazier still. He slashed at the legs of a man who stood on the bleachers trying to reload a pistol. The man fell, and Chong thrust the blunt point of the sword into a guard’s groin. The guard screamed and doubled over, and Chong knocked him flying into a line of five zoms. The creatures were already covered with blood, and two of them had been spectators themselves less than three minutes ago.

Chong kept swinging and swinging. At one point he found himself fighting almost side by side with Solomon Jones. The bounty hunter had a machete in each hand, and they whirled like windmill blades. Zoms and humans fell around him like harvested wheat.

“Get to cover, kid!” yelled Solomon, but Chong ignored him, and then a surge of battle swept him and Solomon apart.

“Lilah,” Chong said, mouthing her name like a battle chant. “Lilah!”

Benny and Nix fought back-to-back, swinging their swords at legs and necks and heads. Dr. Skillz worked the other tunnel, and despite the young bounty hunter’s laid-back persona, he fought with the speed and precision of an experienced killer. He shattered bone with the reinforced butt of the spear and cut off hands and heads with the blade.

The burning zombie had crumpled to the ground, but not before two others bumped into it and caught fire. Heat and smoke were becoming a real problem.

“We have to get out of here!” Benny yelled, then broke into a fit of coughing.

“Waiting for a ride,” Dr. Skillz shouted back.

“What?”

As if in answer, a length of knotted rope flopped over the edge of the pit, and J-Dog poked his head in. “Um … dudes? Stop screwing around. It’s getting gnarly out here.” Then he was gone; a second later someone screamed, and one of White Bear’s guards dropped bonelessly into the pit.

“You climb,” Dr. Skillz yelled. “I’ll hold ’em off!”

Benny backed away from the press of zoms. There were four of them between him and Charlie. “Nix, c’mon!”

She half turned to look at the rope, but then she shook her head. With renewed fury she wheeled back and kept hammering at the zoms.

“What are you doing?” Benny demanded, but then he understood. He had been defending himself against the zoms, but Nix had been attacking them, chopping at them to fight her way toward Charlie. “God! Nix—don’t!”

Nix rammed a zom in the throat and knocked it down with a foot-sweep.

“Hey! Kids!” growled Dr. Skillz. “The rope … not a freakin’ request here!”

Benny took and grabbed the dangling rope, but Nix was still cutting her way toward Charlie. Four zoms stood in her way now, and Charlie was clawing at them to get to her.

“I’m going to regret this,” muttered Benny, and he flung the rope toward Dr. Skillz.

“What the hell?” the bounty hunter demanded, but then two zoms rushed him and he had no time for anything except fighting.

Benny jumped over a fallen zom to where Nix fought. As she cut down another zombie, one of them lunged for her blind side. Benny swung his bokken like a baseball bat inches above Nix’s head and hit the zom across the face. The blow snapped its head back, and the creature fell against Charlie with such force that its head and back struck the vest of nails and drove Charlie back a full step.

Nix finished another zom with the same ruthless precision. Her face was flushed with exertion and panic and rage, and her freckles stood out like a brown constellation on her skin. Charlie lumbered forward, his white hands barely two yards from Nix.

The remaining zom was nearly as tall as Charlie but only half as wide. He had a face like a quiet schoolteacher, but when he snarled, his jagged yellow teeth said all that needed to be said about the dreadful gulf between what he had been in life and what he had become in death.

Benny mouthed the word “Sorry” as he swung his sword. The blade hit the man on the crown of the head, and the zom instantly collapsed to its knees. Benny raised his arms to swing again, but the zom fell limply against him, and they both toppled back.

In the few seconds before Benny could crawl out from beneath the corpse, he witnessed something that was as awe-inspiring and magnificent as it was heartbreaking and terrifying. Nix Riley stood in front of Charlie Pink-eye. He was six and a half feet tall; she was barely five feet. He weighed three hundred pounds; she was less than a third of that. He was covered in spikes and armor, and he wore an invulnerability to pain that was a dark gift of the zombie plague; Nix wore a vest and shirt and jeans and did not even have a carpet coat to protect her.

Benny struggled against the zom’s limp body, but his own leg was folded under him, and there were bodies heaped everywhere. “NIX!” he screamed.

Nix Riley looked at him for a brief second. The crazy look burned in her eyes and a weird, terrible smile played on her lips. Then she turned back just as Charlie reached for her.

It was all over so fast… .

Her bokken snapped out and slammed Charlie’s hands aside. Finger bones cracked and twisted out of joint. Without pausing, Nix shifted and swung the sword around and down and cracked it across Charlie’s left knee, and the impact knocked sweat from her face and arms. Plaster powder erupted from her pockets and filled the corridor with a pall like a graveyard mist. Charlie charged toward her, but his knee buckled and his leg crumpled sideways and crashed down onto the shattered knee. Nix’s sword swept through the cloud of powder, a ghostly image that was strangely beautiful. The tapered hardwood blade caught Charlie across the side of the mouth so hard that broken fragments of teeth struck the wall and stuck there, buried to half their length. Nix reversed her angle and struck the other side of Charlie’s mouth, destroying his jaw and shattering the last of his razor-toothed grin.

Still the zombie reached for her. Crippled and with shattered bones, it could still drag her down and kill her.

Nix stepped backward with the delicate grace of a dancer so that Charlie’s reaching hand lunged too far and the monster fell forward onto its face. Nix kicked at the steel helmet, once, twice, and then it went skittering off into the dark.

“This is for my mother, you son of a bitch!” she whispered, and she brought the bokken up and down with every ounce of strength and hatred and love that she owned. The blade struck the base of Charlie’s skull—and both blade and bone shattered. The big man, the monster of all their nightmares, collapsed down and lay utterly still.

Benny finally tore his leg from under the corpse. He struggled to his feet, then paused, staring at the damage. Staring at Nix.

She looked down at what she had done, and at what it meant … then suddenly her face screwed up and she began to cry. Benny rushed to her, grabbed her, and held her, and she clung to him. Her tears were like boiling water on the side of Benny’s neck. The fires of madness that had burned in her eyes for so long … flickered once more and went out, and her face wrinkled into a mask of bottomless pain and release.

“I k-ki-killed him!” she wailed.

“Yes, you did,” he murmured into the foamy red tangles of her hair. “You killed the monster.”

Benny looked over to see what was happening with Dr. Skillz, but just as he looked up he saw J-Dog leaning into the pit again. “Dudes? If you’re done goofing off down there, we could use a little help up here.”