the old gnarly ones wouldn’t break them. The main no-no revolved around killing. Reavers were only allowed to eliminate people who’d been Marked for murder. In other words, me. Everybody else had to survive. So while the reavers had to take me out, they only wanted to take everybody else down.
What they didn’t count on was the supreme skill and professionalism of their foes. Though they outnumbered us at least three to one at the start of the attack, within sixty seconds we’d whittled their numbers to fifteen.
Our guys had taken a couple more hits. One second Otto had been crouched near to me, a half grin on his face, saying, “If I had a wheelbarrow full of dynamite I’d blow these fuckers to Mars.” The next second he lay writhing on the ground, trying not to scream, his hip shattered. As I stood over him, nailing reavers when I had a clear shot, pulling up when I realized I’d just aimed at one of my own, I saw Ricardo drop beneath a mass of monsters. Grace had made little progress toward the truck, and was bleeding heavily from a facial wound. Still, I thought we had them.
Then two more groups appeared, coming from both our flanks. These didn’t have firearms, but we already knew the power of their claws, and several swung swords. Terrence and Ashley fired into them, but they didn’t have the right angle to get more than one or two head shots per burst.
“Form on me!” yelled David.
Our guys from the farmhouse joined us and we tried to keep moving, but they swarmed us. Terrence went down under a reaver’s claws. Vayl, seeing him fall, took the reaver’s eye with his sword and pulled the wounded man to his feet. I holstered Grief and grabbed his machine gun. Switching it to three-round burst mode, I fired into the crowd of reavers coming at me, their tongues lolling in anticipation of tasting my soul.
“Jasmine!” called Vayl. “Do not stop!”
Easier said than done. I inched forward, almost tripped over a body, ducked quickly to avoid a neck-ripping swipe, and nearly screamed as the corpse between my legs lurched to its feet. I managed to mute the scream into a squawk as I jumped back, banging into Cole in my rush to avoid the rising reaver.
“Son of a bitch!” he cried. “I missed!”
“Watch out! Watch out!” I yelled. “The dead are rising!”
All around us the reavers we’d defeated the first time around had rediscovered vertical. Multiple thoughts streaked through my mind simultaneously. Not all of them made sense, but a skilled translator might put them in the following light:
Oh Jesus! Oh crap! Zombies! The Wizard’s a necromancer. He could be around here somewhere, pulling their strings. So should I just run off into the night like some rabid raccoon and hope I luck into him? How stupid is that? Plus, it’s not him. It’s probably an apprentice. You know that. It may even be the mole. Is anybody murmuring a spell? How the hell can I tell? We are so outnumbered! Did Ashley just go down? My God, I think the semi is farther away than ever. Is that possible? Oh Jesus, was that Terrence’s leg? Don’t turn your head. I said don’t — never mind. Holy shit, that’s the barrel of a Colt .45 aimed right at my face!
The reaver, a live one, grinned wide enough to show the gap between his front teeth as his finger squeezed the trigger.
“Vayl,” I whispered, my eyes somehow tracking straight to his in my final moment.
“Jasmine!” He lunged toward me, too late. The gun boomed and I went down almost at the same time. Except the horrifying pain I expected never split into my brain. A zombie had tackled me, its puppetlike efforts to take off my head such a welcome relief to point-blank murder I actually giggled. I know. Inappropriate. That’s pretty much how it happens with me.
The zombie’s weight left me as Vayl picked it up and threw it at least twenty feet. I took the hand Vayl offered and remembered to grab the SAW as he jerked me upright. Ahead of us Cole lifted Terrence onto his shoulder. Two reavers came at him, one living, one dead. Somehow the zombie missed our guys and clawed the living reaver instead, taking out most of his face. When he turned toward us I took out his legs with my machine gun.
“What is it with these zombies?” I asked Vayl. “Not that I’m complaining. But you’d think they’d come from two-thousand-year-old corpses the way they’re behaving.”
“Maybe their master is new to the art.”
“Huh.”
“Aaaah!” I spun at the sound. The zombie behind me clutched at the gaping hole in his chest. A living reaver had circled back to the farmhouse door. Had taken a bead on me. Somehow the zombie had gotten between us.
I took aim at the zombie. Hesitated. Moved my sites to the reaver. It yelled at the zombie. Gestured for it to clear the line of fire. Instead the zombie shambled straight toward the living reaver.
What the hell?
I glanced over my shoulder, hoping for some confirmation from Vayl that he’d witnessed this bizarre event as well. He was with Otto, lifting him off the ground. Grace and Ashley were already limping away ahead of them.
I looked back. The zombie had reached the living reaver. Grabbed the gun. Moved clear. I took the shot. The reaver fell dead. I waited for the zombie to make its next move. It hesitated. Appeared to study the gun as if it wasn’t sure what to do with it and, in the process, managed to blow its own head off.
“Jasmine!”
“Coming!”
I ran to join Vayl and Otto, guarding them the rest of the way to the truck. I had to take out three more zombies. More a matter of immobilizing them with leg shots than actually destroying them, since you can only turn them off by distracting or killing the necromancer whose spirit moved them in the first place.
Multiple hands reached out and helped us into the back of the semi.
“Jet,” Dave said, “you ride with Mehdi for now.”
With a sharp nod, Jet jumped out. “Everybody set?” he asked grimly.
“Yeah, close the doors,” Dave told him.
