“No,” Cass whispered, looking frantically around the cab. No one here could help her, and she would have to leave her daughter with Smoke once again, alone, while she fought to make things right. The cries were coming from up ahead, a narrow side street made nearly impassable by the shitty cars thrown on either side. Windows were broken, shingles ripped from roofs and dead trees downed, all of it bathed in a strange soft orange glow from the fire that lit up the sky behind them. Far away behind her, she could hear the sounds of chaos, frantic yelling over a loudspeaker and the pops and crashes of secondary explosions and a building falling in on itself.
But the Beaters’ hunting cries were ten times louder.
She was close.
At the end of the block a pickup lay smashed and broken across the intersection. Someone had rammed it, over and over again-maybe the SUV that was abandoned half on the lawn of a little white ranch house. She could not drive around the wreck, and as Cass jammed the truck into Park she was already throwing open the door, because she had to go the rest of the way on foot, and fast.
A hand pressed to Ruthie’s soft cheek, a whispered promise, and a moment spent checking that the cab was as impenetrable as she could make it, the windows rolled up and the doors shut tight-and Cass ran to the back of the truck and squinted into the open doors. Dor lay on the floor, unmoving, but Cass had no time to examine him. Five girls huddled together against the far wall.
“Who has the guns?” she demanded. Three of the girls raised their hands in the darkness, not speaking.
“Can any of you shoot?”
Two hands lowered.
“I can.” It was Leslie, the girl who’d tackled the guard. The brave one.
“Then you come with me.”
But she was already jumping to the ground. “It’s the new girl, isn’t it? Roan said she escaped.”
“Yes.” Cass sucked in a breath, looking at the frightened girls who remained. “Shoot,” she urged them, a hopeless prayer. “Shoot anything that comes.”
Then she and Leslie were jogging toward the sound. A left at the corner, a flash of movement half a block ahead-then a stumbling clumped shape: Beaters. Three of them, lurching across a lawn. They halted, breathing hard.
“You killed Beaters before?” Cass asked the girl at her side, a girl who looked barely older than Sammi in the odd orange glow.
“Yes. I was in the Guard, was supposed to go to Yemen-I know what to do.” And at that Leslie broke away, running faster than Cass, whose exhaustion felt like a layer of lead slowing her down. Cass wanted to chase after her-how could the thin, almost delicate young woman take on the things by herself?
In that second, time suspended while Leslie ran, Cass remembered the other running girl, all those months before, when she had not yet returned to herself, when she was a torn and ravaged thing walking the burnt fields. That day, Sammi had sped toward her with a blade, her hair flying behind her, heartbreaking in her fearlessness. Cass could do nothing but watch, helpless, as a child was forced to play a hero’s part once again. Now it was Leslie who ran headlong and fearless into hell, and Cass could not help her, either. But she could do what she had come here to do.
“Sammi!” she yelled, praying the girl was inside the house, that she was behind stacks of furniture barricaded against a door and jamming windows shut. But even as she prayed for luck she saw a shape move on the porch of the brick house not ten yards from the Beaters-and as her feet flew faster, the last of her breath ragged in her throat, she saw the slender form of Sammi silhouetted against the brick, a wall someone had once painted a pale yellow that looked enchanted in the rosy light of the burning dawn. Sammi held something in her hands and swung it left and right-a broom, a bat, it didn’t matter, it would be nothing against three of them.
Only…it wasn’t three.
Around Cass, the vague roar that she thought had been coming from the scene of the explosion grew louder, the rumbling sound taking shape and dissolving into discrete voices. Beaters growling and braying, and from every direction-was that possible? Was it-Cass prayed-a trick of the wind, of acoustics and her own galloping fear…
Her frantic gaze caught on Leslie and Cass saw that the girl had heard it too. As she hesitated, arm upraised with her gun pointed at the sky, the first wave of them crested the street from the direction they’d arrived.
Four of them. No-more. Lurching and pushing at those in front of the pack, a half a dozen, ten-and then she lost count, because others were coming across the lot on the corner, slamming through shrubs without bothering to go around, tripping and clawing and screaming. The screaming.
And there were others, from every direction. The neighborhood was lost to these things. They must have nested here because of its proximity to the Rebuilders, their quarry tantalizingly close and maddeningly unreachable, and for every citizen they managed to fell, a dozen, a hundred more Beaters arrived to join the hunt. You could hear the frustration and hunger in the chorus of their cries, and even as the full horror of the situation reached Cass, one of the three who had been stalking Sammi turned back and attacked Leslie.
And then it twisted and fell and the crack of the gunshot came a split second later and Cass realized that Leslie taken her shot from only a couple of feet away, had steeled herself not to flinch and not to run and had done everything her training told her to. The head or the neck-she must have nailed the base of the skull, the luckiest or most skillful shot. Not many people could make that shot, even that close, but Leslie fired twice more before darting backward, out of the range of the nearest beasts screaming with delight and hunger and reaching for her.
And then she stumbled. Her ankle caught on a rock, a branch, a doubt, nothing at all, and down she went, bouncing on her hip and rolling, the two Beaters crowing victoriously.
Cass burst out of her momentarily paralysis, fueled by her terror and her rage, cursing herself for hesitating. She fired and one of the creatures lurched and danced, but she’d hit the torso or the arm and it wasn’t enough, they would keep going to the girl until their dying breath. It was down, it seemed paralyzed on one side, but it was already crawling toward Leslie, and the other one was only a few feet away. Cass fired again but the clip was spent, and she cursed her aim, cursed the waste of that last bullet.
Sammi came flying down the steps of the little brick house and Cass started to scream for her to go back, run the other way, damning Leslie to a hideous death to give Sammi a chance, but the words had not left her lips when Sammi was on the closest Beater, slashing and slamming with what Cass now saw was a length of lumber, what had once been a porch rail, bent nails forming one end. She made contact with the thing’s skull and Cass imagined she felt the impact in the ground beneath her feet, who would have guessed a girl as small as Sammi could hit like that, and she was already winding up to do it again, screaming non-words as she fought, and Leslie was scrambling to her feet and then she fired one more time and the thing’s head was half gone and still it stumbled, a monster with no heart and no brain, nothing but its hunger, its desperate hunger.
Leslie grabbed Sammi and they ran, ran from the Beater that Cass had shot that was on its knees now, shuffling toward them and moaning. They caught up with Cass and all three of them turned and ran together, hands clasping and hair flying, toward the truck that sat half a block away, half a block closer to their escape from this doomed and burning place.
But their path was blocked. Three Beaters had made it to the street already-from which direction, Cass had no idea-and the swarm approaching in front of them was only half a block away now, scrambling toward the truck. The girls were in the truck, exposed, unprotected. Dor was there, unconscious on the floor, unable to help, unable to protect himself. If the Beaters reached the truck before Cass did, they would push and climb and crawl to get inside the cargo area, stepping on each other’s bodies if they had to, and once they were inside, they would not even have to drag their prey away to feast because the truck offered them exactly what they wanted: a shelter with only one way in, a dark box that would serve as their butcher’s table and which would run with the blood of the fallen.
And how long after that before they attacked the cab, with Smoke and Ruthie inside?
Leslie broke away, dodging left and sprinting straight for the three Beaters, screaming one long powerful cry of determination, and Cass was moving too, because she would not let the girl go alone. Leslie had several yards on her and she did not slow down, she slammed into the closest Beater with her full momentum, leading with her shoulder, and the thing went down with Leslie on top of it but at the last moment she rolled away, came up in a crouch and fired.
All of it so fast and breathtaking Cass wasn’t sure she even knew what had happened, and that was training like nothing she’d seen. Leslie might not have anything on Smoke or Dor, but in sheer bravery she was made fast and nimble and she was already advancing on the next Beater.
In Cass’s hand was her blade and how it got there she wasn’t exactly sure, and Sammi at her side went left so
