Luke brought one boot down hard on the stalker’s back, then kicked his helmet a few times for good measure. “Finn,” he said.
I had to wrestle with the bloodlust singing in my head before I could acknowledge him. “What is it, Luke?” I said, and I think some rage must have remained in my voice, because he flinched backward. “Jesus. Just say it.”
“Finn . . .” He couldn’t even look at me. “Finn—Red Kate.”
I turned around, and she was standing right there. Smiling at me.
“Hi, Stones,” she said. She pulled a pistol from her belt and smacked me across the face with it, stunning me. Then she flipped it around and shot Luke right through his left eye.
CHAPTER 146
I didn’t lose consciousness. Black spots swam before my eyes, and I heard a high-pitched tone that was loud enough to deafen me. But I could still kind of see, and I wasn’t completely unable to use my muscles.
I couldn’t stop Kate, though, as she plucked the knife from my hand and shoved it into her own belt. She put the barrel of her gun under my chin and looked me right in the eye. “You figured it out, huh? That we were low on ammo.”
“Not low enough,” I said, “judging by the number of my people you got.” I glanced out over the main square, not moving my head, not giving her any reason to pull her trigger. “Though we seem to have done okay for ourselves.” There were a lot of bodies out there. Not so many people standing up—but the majority of the living looked like positives.
“Yeah, well this gun’s still pretty full. You understand?”
“Sure,” I said.
She frog-marched me to the nearest house, just a few yards away. She shoved me inside and sent me sprawling. “Stay down,” she said, “on all fours like a dog. Got it?”
I made no attempt to jump up and lunge for her. I’d seen how Luke died. The pistol was no joke.
Jesus. Luke—Luke was dead. He’d come so far with me. He’d been by my side so long. I’d depended on him—
Kate got my attention with a kick to my ribs. “Looks like you won this one,” she said, pacing back toward the house’s front windows. She gestured for me to come and take a look. That meant getting up into a sort of half crouch, but she allowed it. It wasn’t like I could do much while she kept her gun trained on me the whole time.
She wanted me to look through the window and see what was going on out there. I did take a quick look. I saw the remaining stalkers had taken up a defensive position, standing back to back in the middle of the square. They slashed and clubbed at anyone who tried to get close to them. The positives surrounding them kept moving, testing them, looking for an opening.
On the far side of the square I saw Strong, with one of her snipers leaning on her shoulder for support. They both looked pretty beat-up. Originally the plan had been for her team—which had numbered four people—to come through town hitting the stalkers from behind. Clearly they’d met more resistance than expected. But the fact that two of them made it into town meant there was no reserve force of stalkers out there.
The battle was over. We’d won.
Red Kate, however, clearly intended to live to fight another day.
Not if I can help it, I thought. Once I’d taken in the scene in the square, I glanced down at her belt. My knife, the knife I’d taken from her my first day in the wilderness, was right there. I could grab the hilt, pull it free, bury it in her heart in less than a second.
Of course, she could pull her trigger a lot faster than that.
Outside in the square someone shouted for attention. I looked back out there and saw Kylie, her huge pregnant belly preceding her. There was blood on her shirt, but it didn’t look like her own. She waved her hands in the air and called for peace. “You can live,” she said to the stalkers. “If you all surrender.”
Some of them threw down their weapons immediately. A few kept slashing and jabbing. Without their friends supporting them, though, they were vulnerable, and my positives swept in and finished things. Some of the stalkers just had their weapons knocked out of their hands. Some were butchered like pigs. I didn’t like that much, but I wasn’t in a position to make new laws about being graceful in victory.
Besides—for me, the battle wasn’t over yet.
CHAPTER 147
Hey,” Red Kate shouted, as the positives got the surviving stalkers down on the ground and started tying their hands. “Hey! Kylie!” When there was no response, Kate smashed the glass out of the window and leaned her head through. “Hey!” she called.
Kylie looked over and saw us both framed in the window. I saw fear and confusion wash across her features.
“I think we might need to make a deal,” Kate said.
Kylie came closer. I tried to warn her away with my eyes—I didn’t want Kate shooting her out of spite. But Kylie came within ten yards of us and stared in through the window. Our eyes met, and I saw she knew I was in trouble.
“You make any moves I don’t like,” Kate said, “and Stones is dead. You understand?”
Kylie nodded.
“I know the score here,” Kate told her. “I get that you can just flood this house with your little friends. Throw people at me until one of them gets me. But I figure my hostage gives me a little room for negotiation.”
Kate pushed me forward until my head was out the window, too. She stuck the barrel of the gun against the top of my head. I could feel the agitation in her, feel her heart thudding against my back.
“Are you listening to me? Do you hear me, whore?”
Kylie nodded. “Yes, I hear you. What do you want?”
“Me and my guys walk out of here, unharmed. That’s it. We just walk away.”
Kylie’s face lost all expression. I knew what that meant.
“Well, K? What’s your answer?”
“No,” Kylie said.
Kate couldn’t believe it. She flinched against my back, her whole body convulsing at the idea that Kylie might defy her. “No? What do you mean, no? I’ve got your guy right here. Your fucking babydaddy! Don’t you care if he lives or dies?”
“Of course I do,” Kylie said.
“Then—”
“But I also know,” Kylie went on, “that if anyone is willing to die for Hearth, it’s Finn. So the answer is no. Kill him or don’t—you aren’t leaving here alive.”
CHAPTER 148
Kate went rigid with fear. The gun in her hand moved, just a little, so that the barrel wasn’t pointing at my head. Then she lifted it and pointed it at Kylie instead.
“No,” I shouted. “No!” I reared upward, definitely reopening my wound, but I didn’t care. I had to get in the way of the shot.
Kate fired her pistol. The blast deafened me, and I could feel the bullet digging through my flesh, down the side of my neck and across my shoulder. It didn’t hurt at all, not at first. I shoved into her with my shoulder, and the gun flew out of her hand. In the same moment I grabbed my knife out of her belt.
I brought the knife up, and I could distinctly see the eagle engraved on the blade, flashing in firelight.
Kate wasted no time. She drew her own, longer knife, the cult’s knife.
I don’t know what Kylie saw outside. I don’t know if she ordered our people to attack, or if she told them to stand back and let me finish this personally. Either way, the effect would be the same. It would take a couple of seconds for even the closest positives to get inside the house to help me. I was on my own until then—and in that time, this would all be over.
Kate brought her blade high as if she would stab me in the face or the throat. I went low, aiming at her legs. Maybe I intended to take her alive—I have no idea. I wasn’t thinking in words or even fully formed thoughts.
I saw Kate’s blade come down toward me, and I twisted out of the way. She danced back to avoid my stri
ke. Suddenly there was space between us, room to maneuver. She started to sidestep, but I cut her off with a feint.
Ike had trained me how to fight with the knife. He’d shown me what they taught him in basic training. There were two kinds of knife fights, he’d explained. You could dance around each other, slashing each other until one of you bled out.
Or you could go for a single attack, right for the kill.
With all the strength I had left in me, all the rage, all the adrenaline, I lunged forward and stabbed right for her heart.
She was fast, much faster than me, and she brought her arm down to block my attack. Her blade cut through all the flesh of my wrist and knocked my blade down, below the level of her heart.
But I had enough momentum going that my lunge couldn’t be stopped. My knife sank deep into her abdomen, just below her sternum. I could feel its top edge rasp against bone.
I had to let go—one of the muscles in my arm was completely severed, and I couldn’t control some of my fingers anymore. I took a step back and watched as she dropped her own knife.
She stared down at herself for a second as if she couldn’t believe what had happened. Then she grabbed my knife and pulled it out of her body.
Blood spouted from the wound, jetting across the floor and splashing on my shirt. It gushed out with the rhythm of her pulse. She gulped noisily and then coughed and red bubbles flicked her lips.
“Got my lung,” she wheezed. “Jesus. All I wanted, St . . .” The word turned into a gasping cough that spilled blood all down her chin. “All I wanted . . .”
I never got to find out what she wanted.
She was dead before the door slammed open, dead before positives started running in from the back of the house.
I could hardly believe it. After so long—Red Kate was dead.
I felt exactly the same way as I had when I saw Adare die. Like at any second she was going to stand back up and terrorize us some more. She was, like Adare, a fixture of the wilderness, of the world after the crisis. She was supposed to live forever.
Except the world was changing. And she wasn’t going to be part of what was yet to come. The world hadn’t ended, it wasn’t dead—there was no room for maggots like her anymore.
Kylie put a tourniquet on my sliced-up arm, kept me from bleeding out. Others carried me to the hospital in the municipal building. Somebody fetched the pain pills. So much motion, so much activity all around me. I didn’t care, didn’t pay much attention.
Hearth was safe.
CHAPTER 149
Of course, it might all have been temporary. All I’d fought and bled to achieve, all the positives who’d died defending Hearth—all of it might have meant nothing. I’d killed Costa and twenty stalkers. So they sent Kate and a hundred. Next time maybe they would send Michigan Mike or Anubis himself—legendary figures I could barely imagine—with an army of thousands.
Maybe.
We were pretty scared, I’ll admit, when the helicopters came. It happened three weeks later and the whole time we’d been waiting, hoping.
The aircraft landed on the open ground out near the highway, five of them setting down like giant birds coming to roost. It was already dusk by then so we couldn’t see the paint on their fuselages. Couldn’t tell if it was army green or a pattern of skulls.
So we were ready. We were armed for whoever came, even though we knew we would never survive another battle like the one we’d fought against Red Kate.
It was dark beneath the trees. As the first emissary of this new force arrived, I could see him only in silhouette as he approached. I tried to calm myself as he came closer. Then he walked up to our front gate and gave me a big smile and said, “Finn—it’s me, buddy! Finn, let me inside!”
It was Ike.
Ike, my partner from my subway fishing days. Ike, who’d gotten me out of the medical camp. Ike, who’d walked away when I needed him the most, in that bad first winter.
I let him in. I let him and all his fellow soldiers in, and they were amazed to see all the gravestones in the main square, but they were also amazed to see we were still alive.
For my part, I was startled to see that Ike had a scar all the way down his side from his armpit to his rib cage. A souvenir from the battle he’d fought in New Mexico. He pulled up his shirt to show it to me. “A stalker put about six bullets in me,” he said. “I lost my spleen and my gallbladder, but as long as I don’t eat spicy food, they say I can have a pretty normal life.”
I did a quick calculation in my head. He was fifteen years old.
I showed him my own scars. The one on my stomach was almost healed, though we never did get the bullet out. The damage to my hand was a lot worse, and I didn’t think I’d be using it anymore. But I had a spare one.
“Wow,” Ike said as we toured the half of town that had been destroyed in the fire. We’d had time to rebuild our wall but nothing more, not yet. “I kind of wish I’d been here to see the fighting.”
I turned to stare at him. “You could have been,” I said. I forced myself not to say that he had abandoned us when things got tough.
He looked so stricken anyway, so embarrassed that he’d left us when we could have really used his help, that I relented and pulled him into a hug.
His unit had brought some medical supplies with them—just what they normally carried, first aid kits, really. We desperately needed everything they could spare. So many injured still, so many in makeshift bandages, arms in slings, so many fighting off infections that might have killed them. There was stuff in those medical kits we didn’t even know what to do with. The soldiers didn’t want to touch us, of course. We were still positives. But they showed us how to clean out gunshot wounds and how to fight off sepsis and how to administer a course of antibiotics.
If that was all they came to do, to help us heal, I would have been grateful. But they had a different mission.
Part of it was taking our prisoners away. The stalkers who had surrendered in the main square—twenty-seven in total—had been languishing in the municipal building’s library, locked in with our books. We had fed them and given them water. We’d tried to tend to their injuries, but they were too terrified we would infect them. Three of them had died even before the army showed up. I didn’t cry about it.
There was no big ceremony. The stalkers were herded into one of the helicopters, and it flew away. I knew I would never see them again.
The commanding officer of the soldiers, a Texan named Lieutenant Groves, explained why they’d brought so many helicopters and troops. “We weren’t sure who we would find here,” he said. “Not to put too fine a point on it—we expected y’all’d be dead, and that lot’d be in charge.” He laughed. “Colonel Parkhurst hoped we’d find you still here, but we doubted it. A hundred stalkers ain’t small potatoes. I can see why he respects you so much, taking ’em all down with what you got here.”
“Give the colonel my thanks, please,” I said.
“I think we can do better than that.”
CHAPTER 150
I’d never flown in a helicopter before. I have to say it wasn’t the best experience of my life. I was sick most of the time, I couldn’t hear a word over the noise of the rotor, and every time we changed course I thought we were going to fly into a mountain.
When we slowed down over Denver and then hovered over a place called Cheesman Park, I wasn’t fit to talk to anybody. Especially after I looked out over the skyline of the city and saw grinning skulls painted on every skyscraper. At least the ones that weren’t collapsed in piles of rubble. The army had just finished taking Denver back from the cult, and from what I saw, only part of the city had survived.
The helicopter settled down to the ground and they let me lie in the grass until I felt like I wasn’t going to vomit. The soldiers laughed at me but I didn’t care.
When I felt
better, they took me into a stone pavilion that was covered over by camouflage netting. Inside I saw a table with a big map on it, and a soldier who was busy drawing little red crosses on the towns and mountains it showed. It made me think of Adare’s marked-up atlas, which had helped us so much in New Jersey.
There was nobody else in the pavilion. I figured we were waiting for somebody else to show up.
Maybe to pass the time, the soldier straightened up and looked at me for a second, then pointed at the bandages wrapped around my forearm. “That looks like quite the wound,” he said.
“This?” I asked. I shrugged. “Worth it.”
I looked at him for the first time and saw how old he was. Not just worn down by time and circumstance, but chronologically old. His skin hung in wrinkles from his face, and he was so thin he looked like somebody had hung an army uniform on a broomstick.
I didn’t know enough about the army to understand their insignia. He had four stars on his shoulders and a bunch of medals on his chest, so I guessed he was kind of important. He had a nametag on his uniform that said CLARK.
“We heard about the battle you fought. Ours was a little bigger,” he said, making a sweeping gesture to indicate the city around us. “But maybe they weren’t that dissimilar. This is my hometown, you see. It’s a place I love. A place I’ve fought for many times—first the zombies, now the cult. Just like you fought for your Hearth.”
“I’m from New York, originally,” I told him.
He nodded. “I actually knew that already, Finnegan. I know a fair bit about you. I checked your records. Saw your birth date. Somebody helped me do the math.” He pointed at my left hand. “That tattoo’s out of date, you know.”
“What?” I was just beginning to suspect that we weren’t waiting for someone else. That this was the man they’d brought me so far to meet.
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