Even when we realized it was probably the end of us.
Even when we saw what the fire had done to the wall.
Whole sections of it were just . . . gone. Either it collapsed when the fire burned out the wooden supports, or the corrugated tin just melted from the intense heat. Where the wall still stood it sagged on broken timbers or leaned at crazy angles.
The only thing stopping Red Kate’s stalkers from flooding into the town was the fire itself, and that wasn’t going to last. As out of control as it was, there was only so much fuel for it to consume. The section of houses where it had begun was nothing now but a colossal pile of ash and burnt timbers. It wasn’t even smoking anymore.
I brought Strong and her snipers down from the gate and had them set up on top of houses in the part of town that hadn’t caught fire yet. I gave them all the guns and ammunition we had. Maybe, I thought—maybe we had a chance. We had piles of sheet metal and corrugated tin from all the sheds and workshops we’d torn down, all the buildings we’d dismantled trying to slow the fire down. If I could get my people to run over to the wall, through the ashes, if they could get there in time to put up new wall sections—they didn’t have to be particularly strong or well fastened, they just had to look like one continuous wall, if—if Kate didn’t burn down the rest of the town—if my people could stand up under the strain—if—if—if—
All my hypotheticals disappeared at once, when I heard the motorcycle engines biting and snapping at the smoky air.
Kate had seen that the wall was down.
The stalkers were coming.
CHAPTER 142
The first bike came right through the flames, roaring through a great plume of black soot and white ash. It hit a collapsed timber like a ramp and the bike jumped into the air, flying over a pile of burning rubble. Flames licked along the sides of the machine, but the stalker jumped clear before the motorcycle caught fire. It went skidding across scorched pavement, blue flames shrouding its gas tank. The stalker rolled up to his feet and ran right at a positive holding a blanket. She lifted it up as if it were a shield, but the stalker just slashed at her with a long knife, carving deep into her arm.
I started hobbling over to help, but another motorcycle was already buzzing toward me, and another over to my left. They burst out of the smoke faster than I could keep track, some of the stalkers jumping off their bikes as soon as they were inside the wall, others roaring great circles around us like they were herding pigs.
One came at me with an assault rifle in his hands, and I lifted my shotgun and fired right into his dark face shield. It turned white as it shattered and then blood poured out around the man’s neck as he lifted his hands toward his face.
I kicked him over and pointed my shotgun at the next stalker I saw. He had a metal pole in his hands that he swung around so fast it knocked the shotgun right out of my hands. He came at me, the pole blurring in the air as it spun, and I knew if it touched my face or my chest it would hit fast enough and hard enough to break bones. But even as he brought his pole up for the fatal swing, a positive in a flower-print dress stabbed him in the kidney with a carving knife.
He fell down in a heap. My savior helped me up, dragging me to my feet with both her hands. She couldn’t be more than five feet tall. It took me a while to see past all the soot on her face and realize it was Lucy, the radio operator. “Thanks,” I said. “Grab that assault rifle.” I pointed at the one that had belonged to the stalker I killed. Then I bent to pick up my shotgun.
All around us positives were drawing weapons, getting ready for the next attack. There was no doubt in our minds that more stalkers were on the way—we could hear motorcycles buzzing just beyond the cloud of smoke that wreathed the southern part of town.
I saw four stalkers down on the ground, all of them dead. Two positives were down as well, but one was just wounded, blood washing the ash off his hands and arms. I shouted for somebody to help him get to the hospital.
Lucy turned the assault rifle over in her hands. “I can’t get this to work,” she said.
I traded her, my shotgun for the assault rifle. Ike had carried a rifle when we left the medical camp, and he’d shown me how it worked. This one had skulls painted on the stock but otherwise looked the same. It felt strange, though, a little light. I checked the sights, then ejected the clip to check for jams.
There was only one bullet in the clip. I was certain the stalker hadn’t fired his weapon, that I’d killed him before he could shoot.
I looked around and saw that of the other three stalkers we’d killed, not a single one of them was carrying a firearm. They’d brought hand weapons—knives and the metal staff.
Sometimes an idea just comes to you, a thought, a conclusion. Sometimes it’s like the thing was just waiting for you to notice it, all the pieces in place, ready for you to come and see the bigger picture.
I shouted for Luke. He wasn’t far away. Two more stalkers had come through at a different part of the fallen wall, he told me. They were both dead. One of them had been carrying an assault rifle. I checked its clip and found two bullets inside. Just two.
“Come on,” I told Luke. “Get all your teams together.”
“But the fire’s still burning—”
I shook my head. “I know how Kate thinks. This wasn’t the last of it—there’ll be more of them coming through any second. Let’s go get ready for them.”
CHAPTER 143
Red Kate liked to pretend she was a wild animal, a thing of chaos. But she waited a good hour before she made her next attack, which gave us all the time we needed.
She came into town through a gap in the wall big enough she could have driven tanks through it. Most of her stalkers came on motorcycles, but she came on foot. She inspected a piece of corrugated tin that used to be part of the wall. She tore it down and tossed it aside, nearly hitting one of her stalkers.
She had a big nasty smile on her face. She knew she’d won. Hearth was hers and there was no way we could keep her out, no way we could stop her from despoiling the town. From obliterating the population.
I wonder if she believed, even a little. If she thought she was doing the cult’s work, that she would be giving strength to Anubis when he needed it the most, in his war against the Washington government.
I doubt it. I think she just liked the fact she had a job where she got to burn down people’s homes. Loot their belongings. She was a maggot on the corpse of the world—she’d told me as much.
For a little while, at Hearth, I think I had started to show that the world wasn’t quite dead. That maybe we could bring it back to life.
She was here to prove me wrong.
The stalkers spread out through the streets of the town, their assault rifles up and ready. Most of them had left their bikes behind in the ashes. A few raced here and there, scouting ahead.
Some of them carried knives or staves or even clubs that looked like machine parts, like components removed from motorcycle engines. Some carried heavy metal chains. They were ready for whatever kind of fight we wanted to give them. It was impossible to see how they felt about this, with the face shields of their helmets down. Were they excited, salivating for the kill? Were they feeling devout? Were they scared? Did they just want to get this over with?
Maybe they were confused, as they moved farther and farther into Hearth and nobody ran out to gave them battle. Maybe they started to relax a little, to think that we’d all died in the fire or something.
I could see Kate’s face. I saw how she looked when she got to the main square and hadn’t found anybody. I saw her when she got to the gate at the north end of town, the gate that led to the road and the highway beyond. It was standing wide open, swinging a little in the wind from the still-roaring fire.
The sniper nests on top of the gate were empty. No sharpshooters waited on the rooftops, loo
king to line up a good shot.
Kate saw that the town was open, defenseless, and she screamed in thwarted rage.
“No, you didn’t, Stones,” she shouted. “No way. No way you just walked away. You don’t get to do that! Not again!” She drew her knife, the one with the skulls on the hilt. The cult’s knife. She pointed it at the empty gate. “I will hunt you down,” she vowed. “I will find you. And I will cut your fucking eyes out.”
Makes sense, right?
I mean, Kylie had even suggested it to me. That we pick up and go east, find a safer place to start over. I’d realized something when the fire tore through half of the town. Hearth wasn’t the houses or the land or even the name. It was the people. The positives. We were Hearth.
If we had to run, we could run. We could go somewhere else, start a new life. The dream didn’t have to die.
At least . . .
At least that was what I wanted Kate to think. I knew it would make sense to her.
She couldn’t understand what this town meant to me. That I would never leave it.
I had sent Strong and her snipers—with the last of our ammunition—around the edge of the camp, skirting the wall on the outside. So they could come up behind Kate and her stalkers once they were all inside the town.
The rest of us were inside the buildings on the main square. Keeping our heads down, waiting for the signal to attack.
“We stayed, when we could have run,” I whispered to the terrified people crouching all around me on the second floor of the municipal building. “We stayed knowing we would have to fight. This is the time. We’re going to fight because we are Hearth.”
Any second now, the signal would come, any second—and then we would fall on them with all the fury and rage of a people besieged, and we would end this for once and for all.
Except of course it didn’t work out that way.
CHAPTER 144
The signal was supposed to be two gunshots in quick succession—I’d told Strong to put them right in Kate’s heart, if she could. I waited and waited for the sound of the shots, but they never came.
Instead, one of the stalkers tripped on a piece of debris outside of a burned-out house. He dropped to all fours, then, as he stood up, he started shouting.
One of my positives, a boy maybe thirteen years old, came running out of the house. The stalker must have seen him. The boy cut the stalker’s leg with a sharpened adze, but the stalker just smacked the kid backward into the street. He drew a club from his belt and stepped into the shadows after the boy. I couldn’t see what happened next, for which I was thankful.
I had no time to think about it. I could see Red Kate running across the main square, shouting orders at her stalkers, and I knew she was on to us. “Spread out! Find them! Don’t let yourselves get boxed in!”
My turn. “Go,” I shouted, running down the stairs, slapping people on the back as I passed them. “Go—let’s go!”
Positives poured out of the municipal building, jumping out of every window. Right in front of me I saw a woman land on top of a stalker and smash in his helmet with a rock until he stopped moving. I pushed my way out of the front door as positives rushed past me, armed with knives and tools and whatever they could carry.
It wasn’t how I wanted it to go down. It was a mistake, though one I’d been forced to make. I don’t know how it could have gone differently, but I had hoped—I had gambled—that Strong and her marksmen would engage the stalkers before we had to.
I’d figured out one secret Red Kate really didn’t want me to know. She was almost out of bullets.
It was pretty obvious when I thought about it. She’d talked about reinforcements, but they never came. She had no heavy weapons. I figured that Anubis couldn’t spare any more materiel to use on us, just like the army wouldn’t.
She only had what she could carry when she came to Hearth, and that couldn’t last forever. She had stopped raiding Hearth with assault rifles and turned to firebombs instead. When her people did get inside the wall for the first time, they’d come at us with hand weapons or with assault rifles that carried only one or two bullets each. She must have burned through her ammunition even faster than we did.
But like us, she’d been smart enough to ration what she had. She’d kept a reserve—enough for each stalker to kill a couple of us.
Had Strong been able to drag her into a protracted firefight, right at the start of this battle, we could have forced Kate to use what bullets she had left. Then, and only then, were we supposed to fall on them with our improvised knives and clubs.
Now we had been forced to reveal ourselves too early. While she still had enough bullets to go around, if her people were careful with them.
Even as I ran out into the main square, my knife in my hand, I knew I was running toward a bloodbath.
CHAPTER 145
I heard the sputtering sound of the assault rifles immediately, as they chewed through their last bullets. A positive standing right next to me was cut down, a guy in a plaid shirt that turned black as his blood leaked through it. He grabbed my arm as he fell and nearly pulled me down. I shrugged him off and ran into the melee.
There were stalkers everywhere, and screaming positives, and half the town was still on fire. I ignored the bullets whizzing all around me and threw myself into the fight. I found a stalker, and I slashed and hacked at him with my knife, the knife that still had Costa’s blood ground into its blade. The knife I’d taken from Red Kate.
Another stalker came at me with a shovel. I cut low and sliced through the thick muscles of his thigh, and his screams echoed inside his black helmet. He tried to cut my foot off with his shovel, and I stabbed again, up and under the bottom rim of the helmet, aiming for his throat. I think I cut his face instead—he reached for it with both hands, seemingly not comprehending that the helmet was in the way.
A bullet scored my left shoulder and I cried out a little at the sudden pain, but it didn’t even slow me down. I turned and saw bodies lying before me, turned around again and found two stalkers trying to flank me. I lunged, and one of them jumped back, but I knew the other one would get me—he had a knife almost as fancy as the one Red Kate carried, and I expected it to drive right through my guts and out my stomach at any second. When it didn’t happen, I spared a moment and saw that he was dead, knocked down by a positive with a sledgehammer. I nodded my thanks and moved on.
I tried to focus on keeping my people alive. I wasn’t always successful.
I couldn’t get to Lucy in time. The radio operator had a ball-peen hammer in either hand, and three stalkers were trying to get close enough to take them away from her. She smacked one of them across the kneecap and he dropped; she hit another on top of his helmet and it was enough to disorient him, to make him lower his guard so she could smash in the right side of his rib cage.
The third stalker had a long chain. He whipped it around her neck and pulled, and she stumbled, falling down the steps in front of the municipal building. I could hear the pop as her neck snapped.
I squeezed my eyes shut in rage, but only for a moment. There was plenty of killing left to do.
I found a stalker carrying an assault rifle and stomped right toward him, not caring if he shot me. He pointed the weapon at me and shouted for me to get down on my knees. When I just kept coming, he actually threw the gun at me. It bounced off my chest—I didn’t even feel it. He was defenseless when I got to him, completely unarmed.
I pulled his helmet off and slashed his throat until he bled out.
I was in no mood to be merciful. These assholes had burned down half of Hearth. They’d killed my people. Even if we surrendered, they would still have killed a tenth of us—and me. They didn’t get any sympathy.
They certainly weren’t giving any.
I walked right past the corpse of our chief swine
herd, Harry. He had been a good kid, cheerful even when we were starving in the winter. The stalkers had smashed his face in until I recognized him only by the glasses twisted across what used to be his nose.
I saw them cut down Jane, who used to sing for us to keep us entertained on our long walk from the medical camp. She had a voice so sweet it was like listening to the wind sigh through the trees on a moonlit night. The stalkers broke her legs, then stabbed her four times in the back as she tried to crawl away.
And then I saw them surround Luke—my old friend from the medical camp. Chief among my advisers. Luke, who’d shown us how to keep the fire from consuming the entire town. Three stalkers came at him at once. I raced toward him, and my blood ran cold because I knew I wouldn’t make it in time, ran faster until I thought the wound in my belly would open. Ran right past a stalker who tried to knock me down with a club.
I collided with one of the stalkers who had pinned Luke down, knocked him sideways, away from my friend. Lashed out with my knife and hamstringed another of the three.
The third one had his hands wrapped around Luke’s throat. He was going to strangle Luke, but before he could I jabbed upward, and my knife sank through yielding flesh, inside his rib cage. He let go of Luke and was dead before he hit the ground.
Luke tried to say something, but I shook my head. The stalker I had knocked sideways had already recovered and was coming at me with what looked like a sickle. I slashed at him and he jumped backward.
“Finn,” Luke croaked out. “Finn—”
The sickle came around, shimmering in the air, orange with reflected fire light. I leaned back, almost falling on my ass, as its point tore through my shirt. He was fast—he recovered almost instantly and aimed another swing, this time at my legs. I stabbed downward with my knife and impaled his arm and he started screaming. I grabbed him and threw him aside, even as the other stalker, the one I’d hamstringed, started grabbing at my ankles.
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