We got a little space of time, a little breathing room. I tried to make the best possible use of it. Our best sniper was Strong—the woman who had accompanied Macky and me to the Deptford farmhouse. Macky had trained her personally, but she’d shown an aptitude for marksmanship even he couldn’t match. More than once while standing sentry duty she had seen a pig in the forest beyond the gate and pegged it from two hundred yards. Given the shoddy condition of our rifles, that was an incredible feat.
Following Macky’s advice, I asked her to train as many people as she could in how to shoot. We couldn’t afford to waste bullets that we had no way of replacing, but in the hardware store we found a couple of old BB rifles. Strong snorted and rolled her eyes when I showed her the toy rifles, but she did as I asked. Soon the peace and quiet of the town was replaced by a constant whizzing, plinking noise, and you had to be careful where you stepped so you didn’t slip on the BBs that littered the main square.
Kylie led a group whose job was to turn out as many hand weapons as possible. The town’s hardware store kept surprising me with all the treasures it contained. Kylie’s group laughed and smiled as they brought out hammers and pickaxes and pitchforks. There was even a barrel full of pruning hooks that looked like weapons straight out of a book on medieval warfare.
We had a woman named Lucy who had been a radio operator in New Hampshire before she was sent to the medical camp. I showed her the little wind-up radio Colonel Parkhurst had given me, and she said she could make it work. I asked her to try to get in touch with anyone who would listen. I doubted very much that any of the nearby walled cities would respond—why would they want to help a bunch of positives? But if there was a chance of getting help from somewhere, I needed to try.
I had other people work on our wall. We had put it together in a hurry, designed it to keep out zombies. It was still vulnerable to one stalker with a pair of bolt cutters. Looking it over, I couldn’t help but see plenty of places where someone with access to a pickup truck could have just driven right through it. I spent a lot of time imagining how I would get through if it were my job, trying to second-guess the cultists. We did what we could, reinforcing the wall with corrugated tin or just plywood, but I couldn’t help remember the gaping hole they’d blown in the wall of Indianapolis. We could never build anything so strong as that, and it had barely slowed the cult down.
There were times when I thought Macky had been right. Times when I looked at Kylie, hard at work sharpening a garden trowel on a grindstone, and wondered if I’d consigned my unborn child to a terrible death.
I tried not to let it show on my face.
There was a surprising amount of laughter in those days. People acted like they were preparing for an attack that would never come, like it was absurd that anyone would ever want to destroy sleepy little Hearth. Maybe the positives were just used to being in danger, or maybe they just didn’t want to think about what was coming. Kylie had her own idea of why everyone seemed so cheerful.
“They believe in you,” she said. We were lying in bed after a long day, and I had been stroking her belly. Now she turned to face me. “You’ve gotten them through so much already. They think you’re unbeatable.”
“Then they’re idiots,” I whispered.
She laughed and put an arm around my waist. Pulled me closer. “Finn, they’re just feeling what I felt when I first met you. They see in you what I saw then.”
“Oh? What’s that?”
“We’re brought up thinking the world is this horrible place, that everything is bad and getting worse. That just barely surviving is so much work it might not even be worth it. But you—you don’t live in this world.”
“No?” I asked, surprised. “Where do I live?”
“A better one,” she said. “It’s why we follow you. We think you’ll take us there with you. And so far—it’s working.”
We fell asleep holding each other. In the morning we got up and got back to work, and everything was normal, everything was the way it was supposed to be.
Until we heard the motorcycles buzzing in the distance.
CHAPTER 128
It was midafternoon. I had been working up in the snipers’ nests on top of the gate, rigging up pieces of sheet metal that the snipers could use as shields. I had people on top of the municipal building, watching the forest for any sign of movement, but the sound was our first sign.
I think my heart stopped a little when I heard that sound.
I turned and waved at the watchers on the roof of the municipal building. One of them nodded back, indicating they heard it, too.
Luke came out of his house, holding a triangle and a little mallet. As silly as it looked, we knew the sound the instrument made would carry all the way through town. We’d trained pretty hard for this, and recently enough that everybody remembered what they were supposed to do. Positives started streaming out of the houses and the factories, all of them carrying their weapons, moving to their assigned posts. Strong and her snipers came swarming up the ladders on either side of the gate.
“We’ve got it from here, boss,” she told me.
I nodded, but I wasn’t looking at her. I was still scanning the forest all around, looking for the stalkers.
“I hate to say this,” she told me, “but you’re just going to get in our way up here.”
“Hmm?” I turned around and looked at her. She seemed calm. Ready. Much more ready than I felt. I started to make an apology, intending to head down to ground level and leave her in peace.
But then I stopped myself. “You’ll have to work around me,” I told her. “I need to see this.”
Not that there was anything to see. The trees that surrounded Hearth, which I had once thought would protect it, now blocked my view of the road.
Maybe, I thought, we should have taken some of them down. Cleared a space around the town. It would have made life easier for the snipers, given them better fields of view.
It’s amazing how effective you can be at planning when it’s already too late.
The noise of the motorcycles kept getting louder and louder. I caught a glimmer out in the woods, just a flash—maybe a reflection off a headlight or a piece of chrome. I heard something creak and looked down and saw I was holding on to the wooden railing, so tight I was about to snap it. I forced myself to let go.
“Over there,” Strong said, and pointed deep into the woods. I could make out a dark shape. “You want me to kill that motherfucker?”
“Hold on,” I said. I knew the cultists weren’t stupid. If they’d sent another stalker group, another twenty people, then their leader would see soon enough how outnumbered he was. Maybe he would know better than to attack, and we could avoid killing anybody today.
One of the other snipers stood up and pointed into the trees, at a spot nearer the main road. “There!”
I couldn’t see what he’d pointed out, though I strained my eyes trying to.
Over on top of the municipal building someone shouted “Boss!” and I turned to look. The watcher there was pointing south, at the far side of town. Then he turned and pointed east as well.
They were coming at us from every side. There was only one road leading into Hearth. They must have worked their way through the forest to take up positions on the other sides. Surrounding us.
“Tell me when to start shooting,” Strong said.
I nodded. I had a sudden feeling this wasn’t just one stalker group. That there were a lot more than twenty people out in the woods. So far they hadn’t moved to attack us. Maybe we could get a jump on them by shooting first, maybe—
Then a horrible electronic squawk rolled across the town, a noise I hadn’t heard since the loudspeakers at the medical camp called my name. The wail of feedback. I clamped my hands over my ears so I wouldn’t be deafened. I was a little heartened to see Strong do the same thing.
The feedback died out and then a voice echoed up out of the forest.
“Stones? You in there? You want to talk about this before it gets nasty?”
I knew that voice, but I couldn’t believe it—I’d never thought I would hear it again.
I looked down into the main square of town. Kylie stared up at me, looking as mystified and frightened as I felt. She knew that voice, too. I hadn’t just imagined it.
I looked out over the forest, but I still couldn’t see anything. “Come to the gate. Alone. And we’ll talk,” I shouted.
Red Kate chuckled. “Sure, Stones. Whatever you want.”
CHAPTER 129
She’d changed her look.
Her hair was cut very short. Her face was dirty with road dust, except for a clean patch around her eyes where she’d worn goggles. She’d traded in her furs for a leather jacket with white bones painted on the sleeves and back.
But when she smiled at me, when she gave me the wicked grin I remembered from the very first time I’d met her, I could see she hadn’t changed a bit.
“It really is you!” she said, and she held out her arms as if she would hug me through the gate. “When Costa’s guy limped back to camp and told us what happened, I begged and begged for this detail, just in case he had it right. And look! It’s really you!”
“Hello, Kate,” I said.
“It’s good to see you,” she said. I must have sneered in disgust because she said, “No, really. I miss the old days sometimes.”
“You joined the skeleton cult?” I asked.
She rolled her eyes. “Apparently,” she said, and then she snorted with laughter. “I told you, last time I saw you. I knew being a road pirate was just going to end with me dead on the side of some dusty blacktop. I came west thinking what I needed was organization. People to watch my back.”
“And now you’re leading a stalker group.”
“A little more than that, Stones. I’ve got a hundred guys out here. I can get reinforcements if I need them.”
A hundred. Just like Macky had said they would send. I tried not to gulp in fear. We outnumbered them, but they would have a lot more firepower to work with. “They trust you with that kind of command?”
She leaned close, into the gate, her fingers weaving through the chicken wire. “I showed what they called leadership potential. You know what that means, when the cult says it?”
“I don’t think I want to, but—”
“You saw me last where, Pennsylvania? You saw the crew I had back then. Lot of hard road from there to Denver, where I hooked up with Anubis and his people. By the time I got there, everybody was dead except me and Andy Waters. You remember Andy.”
“I do,” I said, picturing the road pirate dressed in tan leathers.
“Good guy. Stuck with me through thick and thin. Think he might have been in love with me, or something. Anyway, I was talking about Denver. I showed up there and they saw this,” she told me. She touched the hilt of her knife, the one with the skulls around the grip. “Turns out it belonged to one of their badass people, what they call an evangelist. They told me that anybody who touches an evangelist is marked for death.”
“Yet somehow you’re still here,” I pointed out.
“I could see the score. This is the cult that thinks Death is willing to make deals, right? One life for another.”
“You didn’t—”
“Cut Andy’s throat on the spot, yeah. Then I held him while he bled out. I think he understood and forgave me. If not, well. Fuck him. He’s dead.”
“Jesus, Kate . . .”
She shrugged dramatically, making the arm bones painted on her shoulders lift and fall back. It looked like a gesture she might have practiced in a mirror. “You feeling me, Stones? You get the point? Andy was a guy I liked. You, you’re some punk I owe a beating. Now, how’s it going down? Are we going to have to kill you all?”
I forced myself to stand up a little straighter. “No,” I said. “You can retreat right now and we won’t chase after you.”
She laughed. “Good old Stones. Okay, here’s the deal we’re offering. Basically the same that Costa was sent to make. We dump all our positives here, then we leave you in peace, blah blah blah.”
“But I have to kill ten of my people,” I said.
“What? Oh, no, no, Stones—no no no. No. That was what we offered the first time. Then you went and killed an entire stalker crew.” She clucked her tongue at me. “Not nice. Shows that you’re not willing to go along to get along, huh?”
I refused to react.
“This time, we need a real decimation. Ten percent of everybody in your little town gets sacrificed. And you, too. You get to be executed publicly in Denver. I think they’re talking about doing a blood eagle. You know what that is, a blood eagle?”
“No,” I said.
“It’s how the Vikings used to execute people. They make a long cut down either side of your spine. Then they pull your lungs out and drape them across your back. Supposedly while you gasp your last breaths the lungs flutter and it looks like the wings of an eagle.”
“That’s what you’re offering,” I said. “You know my answer.”
“I hope I do. I really, really hope you’re going to say no.”
“No,” I told her.
She almost squealed in glee.
CHAPTER 130
I should have had her shot before she could go back to her people. Regardless of the strategic value of taking her out, it would have given me a lot of satisfaction. But I’d invited her to come talk, and it wouldn’t have been right, shooting her in the back.
If I ever wanted to live in this better world Kylie had spoken of, I needed to act like I was already there.
So I watched her disappear, back into the woods. And then I turned around and started giving orders. Not that I needed to. Everybody knew their roles—we’d practiced enough that they got in place smoothly. I looked around at their faces and saw determination. I saw courage. I saw people willing to fight for Hearth.
And then . . . nothing happened.
Oh, we heard a lot of motorcycles roaring around in the trees. We saw glimpses of people moving around outside of town on foot, though never for long enough that we could get a bead on them.
But they didn’t attack. For hours, they completely failed to engage us at all.
Every minute my people crouched in readiness, every hour they spent waiting for the battle to begin, they got more tired and confused and complacent. I wanted to tell them to stand down, to rest, but I knew that the second I did, Kate would attack. So all I could do was move from place to place, telling people not to lose focus, not to worry, that it would come soon.
I’d never thought of Kate as a tactician. I’d thought her style was more aggressive and less coordinated. But maybe I should have known better. She was a great manipulator. She understood human psychology very well.
So she waited to attack until darkness fell.
After so many hours, even I jumped when I heard rifle shots. Long, sustained bursts of automatic rifle fire coming at us out of the last purple dusk of the evening. I don’t think anyone was hit in that first salvo.
But the next one cut holes through a house on the edge of town. And the third attack wounded a positive down by the southern end of Hearth, a young woman who was armed with nothing but a ball-peen hammer. We all heard her scream.
There was chaos in town, as people ran this way and that, as the muzzle flashes of the assault rifles sent long daggers of light dancing between the houses. I heard people shouting for help, bellowing in pain.
But my people weren’t running in panic. They knew exactly what to do. We’d known the cult might attack by night. That we needed to be able to fight in the dark.
We’d made hundreds of torches�
��just pieces of cloth wrapped around an old chair leg or even a stick. We set them ablaze and tossed them over our wall, lighting up the ground just outside of town.
The stalkers hadn’t been expecting that. Thinking they were protected by the darkness, they hadn’t bothered to seek cover out in the trees. When the light of the torches found them, they were just standing there, rifles in hand, clearly in view of our snipers.
Strong and her team made every shot count. They took down at least four of the stalkers before the others figured out what was going on and ran for the safety of the trees.
The torches didn’t burn for long. As they started to gutter out, the stalkers began creeping forward again. But Strong had good eyes, even at night, and she picked off a fifth stalker who thought he was being clever. And then we just lit more torches—we had plenty of them, a lot more torches than bullets—and tossed them over the wall.
After that, Red Kate pulled her people back out of sniper range. Which meant well past the point where her assault rifles could harm us. They fired off a few bursts every ten minutes or so, just to keep us awake, but nobody else was hurt that night.
CHAPTER 131
We had a hospital set up inside the municipal building—its thick stone walls would protect the wounded. I made a point of sitting up with those who had been hurt, holding their hands, telling them it was going to be okay. None of the injuries looked like they would be fatal, if we could keep the wounds clean of infection.
Kylie came and took me away from there, about an hour before dawn.
“Five down,” I told her. “Ninety-five to go.”
“Ninety-six. Don’t forget Red Kate,” she said.
“Oh, I’m saving her for last,” I said. I kissed her and we started walking, just ambling through the town. As if nobody was trying to kill us, as if it was perfectly safe. I figured that might help steady some frayed nerves, if people saw us like that. Despite the hour, I knew plenty of people were still awake.
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