“You think we have a chance?” Kylie asked me quietly.
“I don’t think there’s a point in worrying about that question.” In truth, I knew we were royally and completely screwed. Kate could bring up reinforcements, she said. I didn’t doubt it. So even if we took down the stalkers outside our wall or forced them to run away, it would just be a temporary peace before the next group came. And after that, there would be still more . . . the cult, I figured, could afford to just throw stalkers at us until we were all dead.
Our one hope was that it wouldn’t be worth the cost. That crushing Hearth would take too many of Anubis’s people and he would decide he didn’t care about us after all.
It was a slim thread to hold on to, but I would take what I could get.
“Tomorrow they’ll come at us for real,” I said. “We’ll have a better idea then how this is going to go.”
Kylie just nodded. She understood.
Nothing mattered except the next day.
CHAPTER 132
The next day was hell.
The attacks began at dawn and never let up. Red Kate never sent more than a few of her stalkers at us at a time, but they came from every side, and they knew exactly how to keep us terrified. A motorcycle would come roaring out of the trees, the driver bouncing over tree roots and dead branches, while a rider on the back would take aim at our wall with his assault rifle.
The bullets the stalkers fired moved fast enough and hit hard enough that they could tear right through the thin wooden walls of our houses. Only a tiny fraction of them actually hit anybody, but they seemed to have ammunition to spare. I ordered my people into the center of town, into the most defensible houses, but that just made the attacks more frightening, because we couldn’t see where they came from. There was no warning at all as bullets shattered windows and tore through flesh. The wounded seemed more shocked than in pain as we hurried them over to the municipal building.
We fought back. The motorcycles weren’t designed for riding through the forest—something about their tires, Kylie thought. They moved fast but not as fast as their drivers were used to. Strong said they were hard to target, but she did us proud. She caught one rider and made him drop his assault rifle, then caught the driver before he could turn around. I actually saw that one. He threw his arms up in the air and fell backward off the bike. The machine kept going, only stopping when it ran up against our wall, its front wheel bouncing and bumping against the barrier of corrugated tin.
I have no idea who got hurt more that day—us or them. I only know that the municipal building started filling up with the wounded, that you could barely walk through the shelves in the library for all the people lying in the aisles. I’ll admit I was still glad to go in there and see them, because I knew I was relatively safe behind its brick walls. It wasn’t easy, though, to convince the wounded people that everything was going to be okay, that we would make it through, somehow. I wrapped bandages around limbs shattered by wayward bullets, helped our doctors—basically, just positives trained in first aid—as they cleaned out bloody wounds. I met with Garrett, who was in charge of the hospital, and he showed me the three people who had died that day. He had them lain out on a conference table in a room at the back of the building.
I studied each of the cold faces, committing them to memory. People who had died for Hearth wouldn’t be forgotten, I promised. We would build a monument in the center of town to remember them.
When I’d finished there, I went back out among the wounded. I smiled and I grasped every hand that was held out to me and then I was out again, in the sun, listening to the constant chatter of the rifles.
At dusk, Kylie and Luke and I ate a cold meal on top of a house near the center of town. We were ready for Kate to pull the same trick as the night before, with her stalkers firing blind in the dark. We had plenty of torches ready.
But as the sun went down, the noise of the day actually receded. The gunfire stopped, and we could barely even hear any motorcycles. The quiet actually worried me, because it was new and therefore dangerous.
Then the peace was shattered as Red Kate turned her bullhorn on again, and feedback made us all wince.
“Stones,” she said. “Stones, I just got some great news. I’ve got a present for you. I think I’ll wait until tomorrow to give it to you, though. I want it to be light out so I can see the look on your face.”
I must have bristled, because Kylie reached over and touched my arm.
“Don’t let her get to you,” she said.
Well, I did my best.
CHAPTER 133
I tried to count my blessings. Red Kate didn’t seem to have any rocket launchers or explosives—nothing that could cut through our wall, the way the cult had blasted its way into Indianapolis. She didn’t have any tanks or helicopters. Clearly Anubis didn’t think we were worth the expenditure.
What she did have, though—perhaps her most fearsome weapon—was time. She could sit out there for months, if that’s what it took. Long enough for us to starve to death. We only had so much food stored inside the town. Our corral of half-domesticated pigs wasn’t going to last.
She could also just keep pouring bullets into the town, and eventually she would hit everybody. Or we would get scared enough to surrender. Obviously there was no great incentive for me to do that—I didn’t want to die by blood eagle—but in time, some of my people were going to decide that losing me might be worth it. They would turn against me and there would be nothing I could do.
It was really just a matter of time.
So in the hour before dawn, when I stood in the snipers’ nest watching the first light glimmer on the leaves of the trees, I was feeling pretty hopeless. Behind me, Strong set up for the day, checking her rifles, squinting at each bullet to make sure it wouldn’t jam in the breech. She had a lot fewer bullets left than I’d expected.
“How much longer can you keep shooting?” I asked her.
She ran her fingers through the bullets in the ammo box, jingling them together, maybe counting them. “A couple of days, if we stay picky about our targets. If they mount a big assault, come at us all at once, this’ll last maybe an hour.”
I nodded, then turned to look at her directly. Strong looked tired but resolute.
“Tell me something,” I asked her. “When you had a chance to leave with Macky, you stuck around, even though you knew you might be killed. Why?”
She took a deep breath before she answered. “I thought about it. I considered going back to the medical camp.” She shrugged. “Food’s better here.”
I started to speak, to ask her for the real reason, but just then we heard motorcycles moving out in the woods. Both of us ducked and got under the metal shields. Strong reached for her rifle.
“They’re coming closer,” she whispered, and I nodded. It was still dark out in the woods; no light at all was touching the forest floor. Strong got her rifle ready, but she didn’t even bother bringing the scope to her eye, not when it was so unlikely that she would get a good shot.
The noise of the motorcycle got louder still—and then it was all around me, and the bike zoomed into view, just a few dozen yards away on the road. There was just one stalker on it, dressed in leather and with the face shield of his helmet down. He was holding something but it wasn’t a gun. It was about the size of a bowling ball and my first thought was it must be a bomb.
He threw it at the gate. Strong brought her rifle down, but she didn’t fire—the rider was already gone. I stared at her, wondering if we were both about to die in a fiery explosion.
But we didn’t. The thing the rider had thrown just lay there. Sitting in the road just outside the gate.
Eventually I worked up the courage to climb down the ladder and take a look. By then the sky over the woods was a deep pink color. The sun was coming up.
I
leaned up against the gate and peered through the chicken wire. I could just about make out the features of the object. Then all at once I knew exactly what I was looking at.
It was Macky’s severed head.
CHAPTER 134
I couldn’t stop staring at the head. I called for some people to come help me open the gate, just for a second, so we could retrieve it. Then I held the head in my hands and just wondered how it had happened, how it was possible.
Kate was kind enough to fill me in.
“We found them on the road, about fifty miles from here,” she said through her bullhorn. “On foot, like fucking idiots. They tried to run. Can you believe it? They tried to outrun us. We didn’t even bother with a decimation—we just cut them all down where we found them.”
Kylie came and took the head away from me. “We’ll give it a proper burial,” she said. I didn’t respond. I wanted to hear more from Kate. I wanted her to give me a good reason to run out and kill her with my own two hands, then and there.
“Don’t know if they would have begged for their lives,” Kate said, “though that would have been amusing. Did you send them to get help from the army? They didn’t get very far.”
I started moving back toward the gate. I had my knife at my hip. I wrapped my fingers around the grip. I shouted for them to open the gate for me. In my head, all I had to do was walk out there and challenge Kate to a knife fight. I would kill her, and then all her stalkers would be so impressed they would just leave us alone.
Obviously I wasn’t thinking very clearly. Obviously they would have just gunned me down as soon as they saw my face. Fortunately for me, Luke was at the gate, and he told everyone to ignore my orders, to keep the gate closed.
I fell down on my knees in front of the gate. Suddenly all the strength, all the rage went out of me. Suddenly I couldn’t even stand up.
Out in the woods, Kate had one more thing to say.
“If you make us come in there,” Kate said, “we’ll do the same to all of you. Every last one. If you open the gate now, well, it’ll still be pretty ugly. But ninety percent of you will get to live. Ninety percent! That sounds like really good odds to me.”
I looked up at my people. There were maybe ten of them gathered around the gate, all of them staring at me. After a while I told them to get back to the safety of the houses at the center of town. Some of them took their time about it, but they all went. Luke and Kylie helped me over to the municipal building.
“You need to sleep,” Luke told me. “And maybe you should eat something. You don’t look very good.”
“I’m fine,” I said.
Kylie tried to rub my shoulders. I shrugged away from her.
“I’m fine,” I said again.
I went inside, into the little morgue we’d set up. The smell in the room was unbelievable—we had no way to refrigerate the bodies. I saw the ones who’d died of gunshot wounds. I saw Macky’s head sitting on a table, covered with a cloth.
I sat there with the dead and wondered if I was making a terrible mistake. If I’d been wrong all along.
I never doubted myself more than at that moment.
CHAPTER 135
Kate gave us an hour to think things over, before she started in with the flying raids again. The stalkers would come zooming out of the woods and fire off a burst from their assault rifles, then run away before we could react, just like before. Like they could keep it up forever.
At least we got better at keeping our heads down. That day nobody came into the municipal building to join the wounded. Though one young woman did get grazed by a bullet, the wound wasn’t bad enough for her to leave her post.
Unfortunately, the raids weren’t Kate’s only strategy. She had plenty of tricks to play on us. For instance, she tried to burn us to death.
She didn’t have any high explosives with her, but she had extra fuel for her motorcycles. She armed one of her stalkers with Molotov cocktails, then sent him at us just before dusk. Strong managed to shoot him dead but not before he threw a bottle of flaming gasoline at our wall.
Flames jumped up around the panels of corrugated tin there, quickly spreading to the wooden buttresses on the inside of the wall. I sent everybody I could muster with buckets of water and blankets to try to put the fire out before it could spread. I got up on a nearby roof to direct their efforts—if they missed even an ember or a smoldering bit of cloth, the fire could start up again at any moment. Up there I was exposed to gunfire, but I didn’t care. I stood up there for most of an hour coughing on the smoke and baking in the heat, pointing and shouting.
And it was all just a diversion. Kate must have known that it had been a wet summer, that the fire wouldn’t spread too far. Otherwise she might have just sent more firebombs our way. No, she had something completely different planned to keep us on our toes.
While we desperately fought the fire that was consuming one section of our wall, she sent in a bunch of stalkers to dismantle another section. They must have been studying the wall the whole time because they knew exactly where to hit it. One area had just a thin piece of sheet metal mounted on a couple flimsy strands of barbed wire. It was more than enough to keep out a zombie or two, but stalkers with tools cut through it like it was a lace curtain.
They bent up a section of the sheet metal to make a gap, then wriggled through like snakes, one after another. Who knows how many of them could have got inside the wall if Garrett hadn’t spotted them? He’d come outside to take a break from his duties in the hospital and saw a flash of black leather and started screaming for all he was worth.
I told Luke to take over for me, then climbed down from the roof and ran as fast as I could for the municipal building. I saw others running alongside me, but I didn’t even stop to check who they were. By the time I reached the central square, six stalkers were already gathered there, standing in a loose formation, ready for us.
Garrett was dead on the municipal building steps, his throat cut open.
I came racing at the stalkers. I had a shotgun and I brought it up and fired, one barrel then the other, not even thinking about the fact they had assault rifles. My shotgun blasts cut one of them in half, but the others were already opening fire.
It didn’t go well, for either side.
Just to my left, a young woman caught a bullet in her cheek. She turned and brought a hand up to the wound, and the next round caught her in the wrist. A third bullet hit something vital in her abdomen, because she was dead before she stumbled and hit the ground. I watched it all as if it were happening somewhere else, far away. On my right somebody else was also dying, but I didn’t even see it until afterward. The guy had been one of our best pig hunters. He’d been vital in keeping us alive on our journey to Hearth.
I dropped the shotgun—no time to reload—and whipped my knife out of its scabbard. Roaring like a lion I slashed through a leather jacket. The stalker tried to jump back so I lunged into him, stabbing him again and again. Around me others were fighting with kitchen knives and sledgehammers, crushing bones, carving into flesh. Blood slicked the ground all around us.
Another stalker tried to crawl in through the gap in the wall, and we butchered him right on the spot, lying on his belly in the dirt. Without even pausing for breath I shouted for people to bring wood and corrugated tin and barbed wire to repair the fence, to stop any more of them getting in.
Somebody must have told me I was wounded, that I was hit, but I kept shouting orders, because I knew that the second I looked down I was going to lose all my energy, all the momentum. Eventually, though, I did have to look down. Then I dropped to sit in the mud and the blood and finger the hole in my shirt.
Eventually Kylie came for me and took me to our little hospital.
CHAPTER 136
I just don’t know. Garrett was the best at first aid and he’s . . . he’s in the morgue now,” Luke s
aid, staring at my wound. “I don’t think you’re going to die?” He made it sound like a question.
The wound had stopped bleeding, at least. The bullet had torn open my stomach, just below my belly button. It looked bad, like raw meat, but we both knew the real problem. There was no corresponding hole in my back. The bullet was still in there.
We had no idea how to remove it or even if we should. So Luke had sewn me up with a piece of fishing line that he’d soaked in rubbing alcohol. It hurt like hell—almost more than getting shot. But it didn’t take very long.
Afterward I tried to stand up again. I could still feel my feet, which I took as a good sign. But the second I put weight on my legs, my whole body just cramped up with agony. It was unbearable. Luke helped me lie back down, and for a long time I could do nothing but stare at the ceiling as my pulse pounded in my ears.
This was going to be a problem.
I could bark orders at people just fine while sitting down. But if I couldn’t be up, moving around town, checking on things—those orders wouldn’t mean much. “I have to be able to walk,” I said.
“We have some stuff for the pain,” Luke told me. “Pills. They’re twenty years old so they might not work anymore. They might even be poisonous.”
“Fine,” I said, as if he’d said they might make me drowsy.
“Plus, the one thing I do know for sure about first aid is that the more you move around, the more likely you are to reopen your wound, or the bullet in your gut could move and tear something that will kill you on the spot. It’s not safe, Finn.”
“Where are the pills?” I asked. Nobody in Hearth was safe just then. Any of us could be killed by a random bullet at any time.
He went and got them for me, though he shook his head in disbelief. When he came back, I took the bottle and looked inside and saw thirty or so old, crumbly white pills that smelled like pig urine. I put one in my mouth and swallowed it on the spot. While I waited for it to take effect, I said, “Luke, why do you always question my decisions? You always have, ever since we met back in the medical camp.”
Positive: A Novel Page 42