“That sounds like more’n a handful of ’em,” Red said grimly. “God be with you, Cassie girl.”
Cass threw one last look at them—Zihna and Red, the girls, Smoke and Ruthie—and then she ran.
She caught up with Dor and they dodged scattered and abandoned belongings. The cars had pulled bumper to bumper, making a barrier, and the drivers were out of the cars, yelling to each other.
“What now?” she demanded.
“I don’t know,” Dor shot back, frustration in his voice. “There’s no coordination, nothing—”
He stopped abruptly as they came around the side of the cars. There, lying in a thatch of kaysev, were three dead Beaters. A man stood a few paces away, holding his arm and trembling.
“He’s bit! He’s bit!” a woman was wailing.
A dozen paces away, there was a commotion surrounding more dead Beaters lying on the ground. One of the creatures remained on his feet, lurching toward a wiry man, maybe Nathan, Cass couldn’t tell. The man dodged close and jabbed and even from far away Cass could see the spray of blood from its neck. It walked, stiff-legged, in a semicircle before falling to the ground, the blood petering out while it twitched.
That was the last of them that Cass could see; all the Beaters lay dead or dying. There were shouts from the crowd, triumphant cheers. People began pouring around the cars now that it was safe.
The woman who had been wailing latched onto Dor. “He tried, he tried to kill them but that one, it bit him.”
“You’re sure?” Dor said. He seized her hand and dragged her away from the man.
“I saw, I saw it, on the arm, the arm,” the woman babbled, and Cass saw the bleeding puncture down near his wrist bone. He was still staring at his wound, at the blood dripping onto the ground, his expression a mixture of disbelief and horror.
Dor shot him.
He moved so quickly that Cass didn’t even see him reach for his gun and certainly didn’t see him aim. The man stumbled back and a hole appeared in his forehead so neat and round it looked as though it had been made by a giant paper punch. The woman’s screams turned incoherent and she pounded at Dor with her fists, but he pushed her gently away and others came forward, and led her away from the body.
“What are you armed with?” Dor demanded.
“My blade,” Cass said. “And I have a spare. There are guns on the trailer, Red didn’t think—”
“Red is not in charge,” Dor said angrily. “You got that, Cass? You don’t follow Red.”
“I don’t follow anyone,” Cass snapped, staring into Dor’s flashing ebony eyes. But it wasn’t exactly what she meant to say—she’d followed Dor into the canoe, hadn’t she, with barely a thought; they found their rhythm immediately, the canoe rock-steady as he rowed and she fired, and again at the bridge.
“You’ll follow me now,” Dor growled. He put a hand behind her neck and pulled her closer, making her falter so she had to grab his arm for balance. “This isn’t about you and me right now. We can sort that out later. This is about there being too damn few people who know what they’re doing and too many sitting ducks who are going to die if we don’t do this right. Now, I’ve got Nathan and Steve and Brandt covering the other end. You and I will take this end. We’ll get Glynnis out in the front and everyone else will drop back. You got that?”
Cass nodded. It made sense, better than anything she could come up with, at least while his hand was heavy on her neck, his face inches away, his eyes reflecting the battleground behind her.
“Now take these,” he demanded, releasing her only after he put a gun and extra rounds in her hands.
Up ahead the others were silhouetted against the rising sun, leading the Edenites across the field.
But then she looked again. It was wrong, all wrong. They were coming closer, not moving away. Their gait was ragged, jerking.
At least two dozen of the beasts, and behind them Cass could see more, stumbling toward them in groups that split and re-formed as they heaved against each other and thrashed their arms and howled.
Gasps quickly turned to screams as the rest of the crowd saw them too. Dor stepped out in front, and fired into the sky.
“Everyone! Listen to me. If you are armed and you know how to use your weapon, come to the front. Keep the children, the old folks, to the back. Stay put. No one goes back to the island. It’s not safe there anymore.”
For a moment there was panic and then, incredibly, the crowd began to follow his orders. Cass spotted Zihna and Red on either side of the trailer, pushing it to the back, and Smoke, standing in front of the stroller, protecting Ruthie with his body. He had a gun in his hand, one of Red’s, no doubt.
“Deal with the ones who come to you,” Dor shouted to her. “Don’t worry about the rest. I’ve got it.”
Cass readied herself, crouching down, weighing the gun in her hands, getting used to the broad grip. The extra magazines, jammed under her belt, were high-capacity—at least a dozen rounds each. That gave her thirty shots, give or take, assuming she survived to reload, assuming she was steady enough. She wished she hadn’t allowed herself to become complacent with the rest of them. All those mornings when Dor went out alone on North Island, doing his target practice and running sprints, working with the set of barbells he kept under a tarp—she should have been there too. She’d heard the way people made fun of him, calling him Rambo, but they talked in whispers about her too, and it meant nothing, less than nothing.
She had allowed their judgment to matter. It was the mistake she seemed doomed to make over and over, and once she let their criticism in it became way too easy to go the rest of the distance, to become the thing they accused her of.
But it wasn’t who she really was. It wasn’t. Here on this field of death, Cass seized on the lesson she’d forgotten in the past few months: she was who she made of herself, and no other. She breathed deep and forced herself to exhale slowly, feeling the steel warm to her touch, and vowed to survive.
Dor fired and a gangly, thin Beater who’d sprinted ahead of the others suddenly jerked and staggered backward, right into the path of another, who fell sideways, screaming.
A trio of them ran straight toward her. The crowd had dropped back, scattering in confusion, and she was alone in the open field, the target of their focus and their desperation. She crouched lower, putting one knee to the ground, waiting. Fire too soon and she’d waste a valuable bullet and risk scattering them. The moment they split up they became ten times more dangerous.
She counted in her mind, mouthing the syllables silently. One one-thousand, two one-thousand, three…
Down the line shots were fired, screams and yelps erupting from the Beaters who were hit. But Cass did not dare take her eyes off her targets.
Closer, closer, and Cass could see the bare swinging breast that hung out of the open shirt one of them wore. It had no hair left on its scarred, filthy scalp. Its mouth yawed in a lipless leer and one of its eyes had been ruined, the socket red and pulped, bone protruding from the edges.
Cass shot that one first.
She hit its shoulder and cursed as it fell to the ground screaming and immediately started trying to crawl. A poor shot, nonfatal, but at least one of the others tripped over it, and Cass was able to get a clean shot at its dropping head, which opened like a rose.
The final one crowed, waving its arms wildly, and Cass waited until it was only a few yards away. She pulled the trigger and the gun jerked in her hand but did not shoot.
Oh God oh God it had misfired—who knew where Dor had found this gun, if this had been the Box it would have been cleaned and maintained but no This was New Eden land of peace and prosperity and complacency and the Beater was coming closer. Cass fired again and this time the gun responded and the bullet went a little bit wide but it took a good chunk out of the thing’s skull.
It wobbled on its feet, close enough that had it still been human Cass could have had a conversation with it. Spinning, grinning, lipless mouth opening in a
slow-mo scream; reaching for Cass as if it wanted to make a point, caress her cheek, fix a button. Cass wavered and wondered if the next second would bring its fetid teeth closing on her skin.
No no no
She’d beaten them before, somehow. She had to beat them again. Rage uncoiled inside her and she clenched her teeth and adjusted her position, distributing her weight better. She didn’t trust this gun, didn’t know how many bullets remained. And at this range she couldn’t miss again. She switched the gun to her left hand and grabbed for her blade. That, at least, was as comfortable as it had ever been; Cass kept it sharpened because she used it for all kinds of tasks in the garden. Now she held it tightly and when the Beater was only a few feet away, she dodged around it, reached out for its neck from behind, and cut straight and deep across its throat.
She had killed them this way before, not often. A human throat was surprisingly tough to cut through, cartilage and muscle and arteries knotted densely. And a Beater had been human once. It might chew its skin off, it might lose digits and eyes and chunks of flesh but underneath its gory exterior it was still wrought of the same innards, and she threw herself into the motion and did not hold back, and the Beater’s last cry was severed along with its windpipe as it landed face-first on the ground.
The first one that had fallen was crawling toward her, its useless arm bleeding from the shoulder wound. It was making gasping, panting sounds and these, too, ended abruptly when Cass stepped on its shoulders and repeated the swipe of the blade, this time leaving the side of its neck half-severed. It gurgled and jerked as it died and Cass left it and went looking for Dor.
He’d left his own trail of dead behind him, two of them mounded together as though they were embracing, others splayed awkwardly alone. He was standing in the brilliant glow of the rising sun, arms loose at his side, and for a moment Cass thought he was praying—but when he lifted his gun and jammed a fresh magazine onto it, she knew she was mistaken.
There must be more.
She covered her eyes with her hand and squinted. Something sprinted into view, and Dor took a shot but missed, and the thing ran between them. It was heading into the crowd, yammering as it ran, hands flapping.
Why hadn’t it attacked them? Beaters always went for the closest prey. It was gospel that the people in front were most likely to die, so raiding parties always put their weakest members in the back. But this Beater had ignored them to go after the others. Had it figured out that Cass and Dor were its greatest threat? That the weakest, most vulnerable targets were the people in the midst of the crowd?
Where Ruthie was, where Smoke was
“Up ahead! Cass! There’s more ahead!”
But Cass plunged through the crowd after the rogue Beater instead. She could not let it reach Ruthie, could not take that risk. People screamed and knocked each other over trying to get out of the way, but by the time she caught up with it, it had seized the pink sleeve of a puffy coat, wasn’t that Mrs. Prince—there was her dull gray hair that she’d valiantly tried to pin-curl for so long until she finally gave up one day and had Tildy cut it all off in a pixie that suited her surprisingly well, but the Beater knocked her over as easily as if she’d been a bowling pin and fell upon her and when Cass grabbed its hair, because it still had a greasy topknot of the stuff, studded with chaff and greasy in her hand, she saw that its mouth was sodden with Mrs. Prince’s blood and the poor woman was gasping through a hole torn from her throat.
Cass stabbed at the Beater with her blade, slicing through the soft skin under its jaw, bringing her arm down again and again until its head nearly came away in her hand, and only then did she finally stagger away from the scene of carnage.
The Edenites continued to retreat in every direction—the worst thing they could do, inciting the Beaters to ever-greater excitement. She didn’t see Red or Zihna, Smoke, any of them, and she couldn’t waste time searching. She ran back toward the abandoned cars, the Beaters streaming past the paltry barrier they made. There were so many. Where had they all come from, where had they been hiding? A couple dozen more at least, and more dead on the ground. To the right, she saw Brandt being set on by a clot of the things, saw the gun fall from his hand as they slammed his body to the earth in their favorite technique and then each seizing a limb, an arm or a leg, and then dragging him away, back the way they’d come. Ordinarily they went back to their nests, but there were no buildings here, only open fields dotted with shrubs and clumps of trees. There was a leaning ranch house far in the distance to the east, but the Beaters did not head that way. Maybe they meant only to get their prey out of sight, to hide in the tall grass to feast. No matter what, Brandt was lost, his screams fading as they dragged him away.
Others approached. Too many. It was impossible.
Cass tried to choose among her targets, a pair that were making an end run around the panel van, bypassing her to get at those behind her, and a knot of four or five that jostled each other as they ran.
She could not stop them all. She would die here. Cass wondered if she could shoot herself at the last minute, if she could be disciplined enough to kill as many as she could and save that last bullet for herself. Rage surged through her but rage would not be enough, it could not make her faster or more accurate.
But she had to try. She focused on a squat, limping one, steadied herself, and was about to fire when it suddenly jerked and fell. And then the one next to it spun, its head burst in a cloud of blood.
Who had shot? Not Dor, who was fifty feet ahead, crouched over a fallen Beater, finishing it with his blade.
The ground pounded under her feet and a blurred form approached, moving faster than any human or Beater.
A man on a horse, galloping toward them from the east.
As it grew closer Cass saw that it was a brown horse with a white diamond on its muzzle, its lips bared in furious effort as its rider dug into its flanks, urging it faster, leaning slightly out of the saddle as he fired again. And there were others—three other horsemen riding directly into the battle. The blinding rising sun had obscured their approach, but who were they? Cass had not seen a horse since early in the Siege and the bioagent that killed the cattle and made mass slaughterhouses everywhere. But these were healthy-looking specimens, large and powerful, their hooves pounding the dry, cold earth.
The Beaters seemed confused, catching the scent of the humans on the horses, torn between them and the prey on land. Cass heard the sound of an engine and saw that someone had gotten back into the pickup and was heading straight for the Beaters. The undercarriage and wheel wells were red with gore from running over corpses. It came too close to one of the horses, spooking it, and it reared up on its back legs. For a moment the rider looked as though he would be thrown from the saddle, but then the horse settled and braced stiff-limbed with its ears flattened, until the rider spurred it on again.
The horsemen circled the remaining Beaters, cutting them down efficiently. In moments there were no more of them on their feet. One of the horsemen galloped after the ones who’d dragged Brandt away, and a series of shots proved that he’d found them.
Suddenly, there was quiet on the field. The screams of an injured Beater were abruptly cut off when the pickup drove over it, and seconds later, the driver cut the engine. Dor turned to the scattered crowd.
“Everyone, stay together until we’re sure there aren’t any more,” he yelled. A few yards from Cass, Mrs. Prince lay under the Beater that had killed her, her legs sticking out awkwardly. Behind her, the crowd started to draw back together, the silence punctuated with cries and sobs.
Then a new voice rang through the air.
“People! Anyone with an injury of any sort, stand here to my right! Line up single file! Everyone else, stand with four feet between you and the next person! We will come around to check you out. Please, do not fall out of line until you are told to.”
The speaker was the rider of the brown horse, a broad man with red hair and a graying red beard. He wore sunglasse
s of the sort that were once favored by snowboarders and skiers, his expression inscrutable behind them.
“Who the hell are you?” Dor demanded.
“My name is Damon Mayhew. I’m—we’re—here to help.” He gestured at the other riders, who had spread out along the front edge of the crowd. Now Cass noticed the gear stowed on the horses’ packs, all of it dusty and hard-used. “We saw your flares. We were sheltering a few miles from here, to the northeast, along the river. Took us a little while to break camp but we came as soon as we could.”
“We’re obliged for the help,” Dor said, but there was no mistaking the suspicion in his voice. “But I’ll thank you to let us handle this.”
Mayhew spoke impatiently. “Look, we can hash this out later. Right now we’ve got a real problem and we need to deal with it now. We need to make sure no one was compromised.”
“We?” Dor demanded, his lip curled in contempt. “We? Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t you just get here a few minutes ago?”
Mayhew’s frown deepened, but otherwise he didn’t react to Dor’s challenge. Instead he pointed at the ragtag crowd. “Like I said, there’ll be time for this later. For now, you get one person infected in a group this size, think about how much damage he can do. Not even knowing it, even. What we have to do, anyone who came anywhere near those bastards, they strip and we check them out. No exceptions.”
All eyes were on Dor, who glowered at Mayhew. “None of that’s exactly groundbreaking,” he said. “We have our own procedures.”
Dana stepped forward from the crowd. Only then did Cass realize that she hadn’t seen him anywhere in the fighting, again—again he’d stayed behind in safety with the others, despite the fact that he was armed and carried a weapon with him everywhere on the island, an exception to the council’s own policies.
“I’m in charge here,” Dana said. “Why don’t you and I discuss your proposal, Mayhew. Your men can start this safety check or whatever you want to call it.”
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