“You can’t just leave,” Jackson begins behind me. “We have to— Jane?”
I freeze. My penny has gone ice-cold.
“What is it?” Jackson says.
“Trouble.”
An unmistakable groan-growl echoes through the trees.
“Is that . . . ?” Katherine starts, her voice trailing off.
I turn around, searching for the sound. Jackson clears his throat. “On your left,” he says, voice low.
I turn, and sure enough there stands a shambler, lips pulled back in a hungry snarl. It looks like the little white girl I saw along the side of the road a few days back. Guess the patrols didn’t take care of her after all. This close it’s easier to see details, like the ragged red ribbons at the ends of her braids and her sickly yellow eyes. She’s no more than nine or ten years old. I don’t recognize her, and that’s a mercy. It’s hard having to kill the dead you once knew.
I take out my sickles, ready to end her, when Katherine makes a choked sound. “Bide your time,” she says, one of the tenets of defense we’ve learned at Miss Preston’s. I’m ready to snap out something rude when I notice the movement in the trees. Behind the little girl is a whole pack of shamblers, their clothing in tatters, their gray skin hanging loose. There are a few colored folks mixed in with the group, but they mostly look white, scarily nondescript and similar in that way shamblers get when they’ve been not-dead for a while. From their clothing they’re originals, people that got turned during the first dark days back during the war, before the armies realized that they had a bigger threat to fight than each other.
I don’t even stop to wonder at a pack this large roaming the woods so close to Baltimore. I just spin my sickles in my hand, relishing their comfortable weight. On my right, Katherine has my spare set of sickles out, and on my left, Red Jack has pulled out a long knife from God knows where.
Around my neck, the penny is now cool against my skin, no longer icy. The small shift lets me know that my time ain’t up, at least not today.
We take a step forward, and the shamblers attack. They’re slow and ungainly, tripping over their own feet, tangling in the dense underbrush, dragging themselves along the ground when they can’t find their footing. Old shamblers are the best. They’ve lost enough of their humanity that they’re dog-dumb, attacking without any sort of organization. Newer shamblers are as fast as regular people, but the long dead are like grandmas, shuffling along. Their danger comes from the large packs they travel in. Killing ten people at once may not be difficult for three people trained in combat, but it’s hard for a lone person green as the grass.
I cut down the little girl first. The sickle whistles as it slices through the air, singing in the moments before it separates her head from her body. The gore that gushes out ain’t blood but a thick black ooze. The smell, of dead and decaying things, is the worst. But this ain’t my first waltz, and I keep moving through the pack, letting my blades do the work.
My sickles ain’t like regular blades that you’d use in the field. Instead of a crescent moon curve they’re a half-moon, the blades weighted and sharpened on both sides to easily cut in either direction. They’re designed to separate a head from a body, since that’s the quickest way to put a shambler down. I like to call this harvesting, because you can’t really kill the dead, can you? Plus, it soothes my soul to think I’m doing some good when I end a shambler, sending them on to their well-deserved immortal rest.
I cut through a woman in an old-fashioned dress, noticing her long bedraggled hair more than her features. When her body falls to the ground I turn to harvest a large man crawling toward me, his mouth opening and closing without making a sound, his clothing that of a field worker. His dark head separates easily from his body. I spin and let my blades cut through the neck of an old white woman lunging for my throat, her stringy gray hair hanging loose. Her slate strands pick up leaves and twigs as her head rolls away from me across the forest floor. It’s such an odd detail to notice in the heat of the fight, but that’s just how it is sometimes.
And then, there is no more movement.
I breathe heavily, my sickles and hands covered in the inky mess that is a shambler’s blood. Katherine removes the head of a bearded man, shoulders heaving as she searches for any more dead. Jack is bending down and wiping his long knife off on a younger woman’s dress. Everyone seems fine.
“No bites?” I ask between heavy breaths as I wipe my hands off on my trouser legs. Both Katherine and Jack shake their heads. “All right.” I glance at the sky and the increasingly pink horizon. The world had already gone to shades of gray as dawn approached, but now colors are starting to bloom. It didn’t take us long to take down the pack, but it was time we didn’t have. “Me and Kate are going to have to run back to make it before classes start. We need to meet up again to figure out how we’re going to deal with this.”
“What’s there to figure out? The Spencers are out there somewhere, and my sister is with them.” Red Jack’s jaw is set, and there’s a ruthless glint to his eyes that makes me think he’s got murder on the mind.
“That’s great and all, but did you hear one clue in that conversation that could tell us for certain that they’re still alive, and if so, where
