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“I got this,” said Nix, raising her bokken.
“No!” warned Benny as he moved away from it, using his body to push Nix back. “It’s one of those smart fast ones from that scientist’s report.”
The zombie began stalking them, and immediately Nix and Benny knew they were in dangerously unknown territory. This wasn’t the slow, relentless shuffle of the zoms they knew. The creature in the green jumpsuit seemed to be assessing them as it stalked slowly forward. Its milky eyes flicked from Nix’s bokken to Benny’s
The creature — and Benny could no longer think of this thing as a zombie — bent forward and bared its teeth, its face wrinkling with feral animal hate.
“Oh God,” whispered Nix.
The creature snarled in pure fury and rushed at them.
Benny was caught in a dreadful moment of indecision.
Run or fight?
He could feel Nix’s whole body trembling beside him.
The fight and the slope were behind them.
The choice was made for him, because the creature raced at them far too fast for any chance of escape.
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Brother Alexi swung his hammer and the heavy weapon, powered by the giant’s massive muscles and all his mounting terror, slammed into the first zombie to reach him.
The zom’s head exploded, and the lifeless body flopped to the ground.
Alexi used the force of the blow to turn his body in a pirouette, and as the hammer came around again he smashed it into the second zom. The blow caught the dead thing on the shoulder, but the force shattered its spine.
Alexi checked the swing and brought the hammer over and down onto a third zombie, and a fourth.
He laughed out loud, and his fear melted away to become diluted in battle joy.
“Come on, you rotting buggers!” he bellowed.
The zoms rose from the twitching bodies of the chosen ones, their empty eyes seeking out the author of that challenge, their mouths dripping red.
“Come on!”
They came.
Eighteen of them came.
His laughter died in his chest.
Some of them were in jumpsuits, some were in bloodstained black — with angel wings on their chests.
Something small and round sailed past Alexi’s face, and he flinched reflexively away from it. It looked like a metal baseball, and it hit the ground in front of the leading wave of zoms, bounced once, and exploded.
The blast was huge.
Pieces of zoms were flung in every direction. Blood splashed against the white plane.
Alexi spun around, shielding his eyes.
Then the air was fractured by gunfire and the combat howl of a huge dog.
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Benny had no choice.
He and Nix were too close to each other to swing their swords — they were breaking one of Tom’s cardinal rules about battlefield combat.
But she seemed frozen in place.
“I’m sorry!” Benny said, and shoved her backward as he jumped forward to meet the creature.
He heard Nix’s scream as she hit the edge of the slope — and fell.
Benny had no time to process that.
The creature was on him, and Benny lunged in low and to the left, swinging the sword in as powerful a lateral cut as he could manage. The shock of impact jolted him, but the
The creature fell past him and Benny turned, controlling the erratic postimpact swing of his blade. As he pivoted, he saw the zom scramble to a stop at the top of the slope and wheel around. The sword had cut completely through the right side of its chest, from front to back. Muscle and bone were destroyed, and the monster’s right arm sagged down. It did not even pause. There was no reaction to damage; there was no pain.
It growled and came charging again, and Benny tried the same trick, aiming lower this time, trying to catch the leg.
The creature dodged out of the way.
Dodged.
It…
Benny’s brain almost froze. Even with the warning on Dr. McReady’s document, it was — it seemed — impossible.
The zom grabbed Benny’s vest with its good left hand and jerked him forward, toward its mouth full of rotting gray teeth.
Benny had no angle for a cut, so he punched the zom across the mouth with the hand that held the sword. The blow was awkward but powerful, and teeth flew from the open mouth.
The zom ignored the damage and lunged forward to take a bite.
Benny threw himself backward, and the zom’s shattered teeth closed around a pocket of the vest instead. Benny heard a bottle of cadaverine crunch to stinking fragments inside the pocket.
The creature did not notice or care, and Benny was positive now that the network of wires bolted to its face somehow cut off its sense of smell. Maybe the scientists had done it as part of some experiment, or maybe smell was really a zombie’s primary hunting sense. Not that it mattered right now… the zom could see and it could still bite.
Benny fell backward with the creature, and as he fell he brought his knee up between its legs, hitting it square on the bottom of the pelvis. The fall and the kick gave Benny the power he needed to hurl the monster completely over him. It landed with a bone-rattling thud and immediately scrambled to its feet.
Benny brought his sword around into a two-hand grip but only got as far as his knees before he realized that he was in worse trouble than he thought.
As the zom raced toward him again, it snatched up a broken branch from the ground and swung it full force at Benny’s head.
There was a moment of red-black blankness. Benny never actually felt the blow. One second it was about to hit him, and then he was falling.
Then he saw something inexplicable.
The zom was falling too.
It crashed down a yard away face-to-face with Benny. The milky eyes stared at him, but now there was nothing there. No animal rage. Nothing.
But the strangest part of all was that there seemed to be an arrow sticking out of its temple.
Then a shadow fell over him, and Benny tried to bring up his sword in a last desperate defense against some
