shaved to reveal a complex series of tattoos. Wild roses and thorny vines. She had multiple silver rings pierced through the upper parts of both ears, and a silver necklace from which hung an old-fashioned skeleton key. She wore tattered camouflage shorts, sneakers that were worn to threads, and a vest that was buttoned up over, apparently, nothing else. A Marine Corps belt was strapped around her hips, and it supported a leather-handled hunting knife, a whistle, and a lumpy pouch of what Benny guessed were stones. Crisscrossed over her torso were bandoliers — not of bullets, but of firecrackers.
The girl held a slingshot in her hands, and there was a sharp-edged rock seated in its leather pouch.
The rock was aimed at Nix’s throat.
“I think y’all better lower that gun,” said the stranger. “Right now.”
“Well,” said Chong with a disgusted sigh, “I guess it’s fair to say that this day can’t get any worse.”
The girl smiled a wicked smile and pulled the bands back so hard that they creaked with tension. “Yes, it surely can.”
22
Lilah ran along Eve’s back-trail as fast as she could.
With every step, though, she felt her heart slip another notch and sink lower in her chest. The sky above her was filled with vultures.
Where were Eve’s parents?
She rounded a bend in the stream and skidded to a stop, whipping the spear up into a combative grip. There, right in front of her, was a clearing in which a camp had been set up. Crude tents and a screen of cut shrubs, a cook fire in a sheltered pit. Clothes and gear.
All of it scattered and torn.
All of it bloody.
Half a dozen vultures huddled around a twisted tangle of rags that had once been a human being.
Lilah held her ground, watching before acting. To rush the scene and chase off the ugly birds would be like sending up a flag to signal her presence. Hunters and killers both watch for disturbances in nature.
She squatted down and tried to look under the carrion birds.
The body on which they were feasting was that of an old man. She could see just enough of its shape and a spill of white hair.
Too old, probably, to be Eve’s father.
The rest of the camp was empty. No other bodies. However, it was clear that there had been a fight here. There were blade marks on the surrounding trees, shrubs were trampled, and there was far too much blood to have come from one feeble old man.
Where were the others? Had they fled the fight? Or had they died and reanimated before the vultures could reduce them to scraps of flesh and bone?
No way to tell. Not without a thorough search, and Lilah did not think she had the time for that. Not with all those reapers in the woods.
Time was burning away. She would have to abandon this search and get back to her friends. If this camp belonged to Eve’s family, then it was already too late. If not…?
“Chong,” she murmured. Chong was a town boy, and those reapers looked fierce. They were engaged in some kind of holy war. Lilah had no intention of getting involved in that, but at the same time, she did not have a clue as to how those reapers would react to Chong, Benny, and Nix. Would they all be left alone as outsiders?
Lilah doubted it. Her instincts were screaming at her to get back.
She backed away from the clearing and made a wide circle around the scene of carnage. As she did so, she caught sight of a ridge of white rocks just past a line of bushy pines. Lilah frowned at them. The rocks were unnaturally bright, almost like they had been painted with whitewash. Were they rocks or a structure?
She ran through the trees toward them, intending to cut past them and head west again.
However, the closer she got, the more her frown deepened, because it became quickly apparent that they were not rocks at all. Nor was it an old building.
Lilah slowed from a jog to a walk, and as she emerged from the trees she stopped stock-still. Her mouth dropped open in shock.
“No…,” she whispered.
The thing lay there. Huge. Ugly. Impossible.
The thing was perched precariously on a shelf of rock that overlooked a long drop into a cleft that was thick with dark scrub pines and creeper vines. Someone had taken red paint — or perhaps blood — and written these words on the broad, white side of this impossible thing:
WOE TO THE FALLEN
Nearby, on a mound of dirt, three bodies in ragged military-style uniforms were hung on wooden posts. Zoms. They thrashed against the ropes that bound them.
Lilah turned quickly and looked back the way she’d come, staring at the woods as if she could still see Nix and the others. Indecision tore at her. Should she tell her friends about this, or steer them away from it and never say a word about it?
She thought about what it would do to Nix and Benny. Even to Chong.
Lilah shut her eyes for a moment and ground her teeth in helpless frustration. It was so much simpler living alone. You never had to hurt anyone you cared about, because there was no one to care about. Telling her friends about this would be exactly like stabbing them through the heart.
She lingered there, thinking it through, wrestling with it, aching with doubt.
Then a voice behind her said, “There’s one!”
Lilah instantly leaped to one side, twisting in midair to land facing the way she had come, her spear ready in her strong hands.
Thirty feet down the path she had just come stood a pair of men dressed in black with red streamers tied to their clothes.
Reapers.
Lilah gaped.
Not at the reapers, but at the figures who milled behind them.
Zoms!
There were at least a half dozen of the living dead — men, women, even a child. All newly dead, some of them glistening with blood that had not yet dried.
Lilah’s heart sank. Now she knew what had happened to the other people who had camped here. The zoms moaned in freshly awakened hunger. They staggered through the tall grass, hands reaching awkwardly toward her, completely ignoring the two reapers as they shuffled past.
“Hey, girl!” yelled one of the reapers. “Drop your spear and give yourself up to the darkness. It wants you. The darkness wants to open the red door in your flesh. Why fight it? The darkness is beautiful. The darkness is eternal. The darkness is yours if you stop fighting and allow it to enfold you.”
The words had a cadence like scripture, but they were from no holy book Lilah had ever read — and in her solitude, she had read most of them. These words were intended to coax, but instead they made the hands that held her spear tighten with anger.
“Come on, kid,” said the second reaper. “Accept the truth. The darkness wants to take you. The darkness wants to take us all. It’s the will of God.”
Lilah had never been much for profanity, but as the men continued to call for her to open herself to the darkness, she responded with a series of phrases she’d learned at Gameland. It shocked the men to silence.
The dead kept coming.
Fifteen feet away now.
Lilah debated pulling her Sig Sauer. She had no doubt that she could put all the zoms down as well as the
