tried so hard to hide whenever she did or said something that wasn’t “acceptable” to the people in town. She would never hear his soft voice as he recited poetry. Dickinson, Rossetti, Keats. She would never feel the warmth of his hand in hers. Chong’s hands were always warm, even when it was snowing outside.
She would never kiss him again.
She would never get to say the words that she ached to say.
So she said them now, just in case. Just to have them out there, to put them on the wind. To make them real.
“Chong,” she murmured quietly, “I love you.”
It was unlikely that he would ever get to hear her say those words. The thought of these monsters taking all that away from her made Lilah mad.
Very mad.
Killing mad.
With a feral snarl that would probably have scared the life out of Chong, Lilah dropped from the branch.
She fell with all the silence and speed of gravity. Her snow-white hair whipped away from her face as she plummeted.
She struck the closest boar feetfirst with a dead-weight impact that staggered the beast even though it was nearly five times her weight and mass. The heels of her shoes struck it on the right shoulder, and the impact sent shock waves through her shins and through the gash in her side. However, Lilah bent her knees as she struck, letting the big muscles of her thighs absorb the shock rather than her fragile knee joints.
The impact knocked the boar sideways into a second animal, and Lilah fell backward away from the pack. Despite the pain, she hit the ground the right way, tucked, rolled, and came up onto the balls of her feet.
All the boars squealed in a killing frenzy. Lilah wasted no time; there was none to waste. She rushed in and swung her ax in a high overhand blow that whistled through the air. The blade smashed into the first hog’s skull and punched through right into its brain. The creature cried out and then instantly collapsed, dead for gone and forever.
Lilah went with its fall, letting the creature’s own weight tear the blade free.
She’d timed it right. The first boar was down between her and the others. That bought her two seconds of time. She needed one.
Lilah whipped the ax over and around her head just as a second boar scrabbled over the dead one, and the blade struck it square in the eye socket. The steel stabbed through one eye and out the other side.
But the boar kept charging.
The puncture had missed the brain.
What had been perfect timing a moment ago was now fatal. The boar tossed its head and tore the ax handle from her hands as easily as she could have taken a toy away from little Eve. Lilah staggered back and nearly fell. Her ax went flying into the weeds on the far side of the clearing. It might as well have been on the far side of the moon for all the good it would do her now.
The boars that had fallen were back on their feet, and the whole pack charged at her.
Lilah screamed and dove away, rolling again, feeling more of her wound open up as she rose once more to her feet. She ran, and the pain chased her as surely as did the pack of boars.
The clearing was covered in short, dry grass that had withered to a lusterless brown. As Lilah ran across it, heading for the shelter of a boulder, she saw a darker brown amid the grass, and a half pace later the gleam of steel.
Her torn gun belt and the big Sig Sauer pistol were right there!
But the boars were too close.
Lilah ran past her gun and reached the boulder a split second before the pigs caught up. She slapped the curve of the rock and launched her body onto it and then over it. The boars slammed into the stone, one after another, their dead brains too damaged to correct the angle of their charge. They rebounded from the impact, and as Lilah ran around the far side of the rock, she saw that one of them had shattered its big front tusks. Far from reducing it as a threat, the damage resulted in dagger-sharp jagged stumps.
She piled on the speed, bent almost double even though her whole left side burned with fresh blood, then scooped up the holster, grabbed the butt of the pistol, racked the slide, skidded to a stop, whirled, and brought the gun up as the boars barreled straight toward her.
And then everything went a little crazy.
As she pulled the trigger there were two blasts.
Not one.
The lead boar pitched down and tumbled over and over, its head blown to fragments. The boars behind it squealed and stumbled, colliding with their fellows, crashing into and over one another in a massive pile. Only one boar remained on its feet, and it drove straight at Lilah.
Then something huge and gray came flying out of the woods and struck the third boar like a missile, knocking it sideways and down. The new creature rattled with the sound of metal, and Lilah had a surreal glimpse of spiked steel bands, chain mail, and a great horned helmet. It was a dog, but it was like nothing Lilah had ever seen. A monstrous mastiff, armored like a tank. It dragged down the much heavier boar and began systematically slashing the undead creature to pieces. It did not bite at all but instead smashed and tore with the blades welded to its armor.
The last three boars rose from where they had fallen over the one Lilah had shot. One took a single lurching step toward her, paused for a moment, and then fell over dead.
As it landed, Lilah saw the black dime-size bullet hole in its temple.
The two others glared at her. They grunted with awful hunger and charged.
Lilah brought her gun up, but a voice yelled, “No!”
And a second figure came rushing from the woods. Not a dog this time, but a man.
He leaped over the dead hogs and landed right in the path of the charging boars. The pale sunlight that slanted down through the trees glittered on the edge of a long sword the man raised above his head.
Not just any kind of sword.
A
The man stepped into the charge of the hogs and slashed low, left and right, and suddenly the animals were falling forward, one leg on each sheared clean away. The man spun and slashed, the blade moving with incredible speed and precision so that it appeared as if the boars merely disintegrated. Then he pivoted and made two massive downward stabs, ramming the point of his sword through the weakest parts of the creatures’ skulls and destroying the spark of unnatural life that burned in their zombie brains.
Behind him, the dog rose from the destroyed hulk of the other boar.
Lilah froze, her pistol clamped in hands that now trembled. The pain in her side was screaming through her nerve endings, and shadows were piling up inside her mind.
But for all that, she could not help staring at the man who stood ten feet away, his face and body hidden by deep shadows, the
She stared in uncomprehending shock.
The last thing she said before blood loss and damage dragged her down into the darkness was, “
49
“Y’all ready?” asked Riot. She was crouched behind Chong, her fingers lightly touching the barbed head of the arrow.
“No,” he said through clenched teeth. Then a moment later he croaked, “Go ahead.”
“Take hold of that other end, and don’t you let it turn. Otherwise we’ll be doing nothing but reaming the hole.”
“Well,” he said as conversationally as he could, “we wouldn’t want that now, would we?”
“Here,” she said, handing him a thick piece of leather strapping she’d cut from her belt, “take this. Put it
