"Fuckers!" He bellowed hoarsely, wriggling between the swarming dead. He felt fingernails clawing through his damp hair and scratching down the back of his neck, yanking the many collars of his clothing taught against his throat. And then he was abruptly free of the mob— if “free” was the right word for it.
The woods outside the cabin had come to boisterous life, shadowy movements bustling between the tree trunks everywhere he tried to look. He was sprinting through a swarm of oversized locusts; so many voices of so many variations and volumes were blending until he couldn't even distinguish their words at all. It was a maddening, ear-splitting buzz that never ceased. Looking at the infestation felt like looking at a bad car accident while you were stuck in traffic on a busy highway. He knew it was not something he wanted to see, and yet he was fighting the urge to stop escaping and just watch, observe their incremental but steady domination.
There is an entire fucking army out here.
The spear-torch was flickering, losing life fast. He saw no bright lights anywhere except for the one he had created. Where was there to run? What was there to do? He couldn't kill them all, but any one or two of them could kill him.
It scared the Christ out of me, and I do not scare easily.
Roy's gruff voice came to him from nowhere, as if his spirit were out there somewhere among the dead things. Emmit felt a dagger of disappointment slam home in his chest; disappointment that he wouldn't be able to bring justice to Roy like he had to Poke. Roy would survive; he had made it astronomically more difficult for him, but Roy would live to move on and establish his new camp, hang new signs to lure in other lost souls caught in the web of the time warp, and ultimately murder them for their meat. But then the gears of his mind began to turn, well-oiled now, faster and faster until they spun like saw blades.
He wanted to move the camp because he was afraid of being overrun. I remember that.
A Link was closing the gap between them, and Emmit put on a fresh burst of speed even as he was plotting. There was a surge of excitement through the masses, spreading out and away from him like ripples in a shallow pond. His rapid movements and glowing torch were making him popular.
Roy said that if a pack of Links this size hit the camp, it would flatten it like a bulldozer.
Emmit mentally kicked himself for not thinking of it sooner. If he was going to die, he was taking Roy with him. And he now had an army who would follow him without question or backtalk.
His sense of self-preservation was kicking and screaming, accelerating his pulse to the point that he thought he might croak of a heart attack before he could even get his revenge. Emmit ignored it, willing his lungs and vocal cords to work together.
"Hey assholes!" He bellowed, cupping his empty hand around his mouth. The words didn't echo as much as he had expected them to. There were too many dense bodies around that absorbed the sound, really driving home just how crowded the surrounding area was. There was another surge of excitement through the masses, their voices rising together with a murmur that sounded like sheets of incoming rain. Through the dense fog of his vision, he could see more obscure figures sluggishly turning to move in his direction. He was like a magnet, drawing metal shavings toward him in an ever-shrinking circle.
Emmit lowered the flickering spear toward the ground, looking for the path he and the Rev had made. The snow was trampled and littered with scraps of clothing and drops of dark fluid he didn't care to identify, but the trench they had left was still easy to spot if he truly concentrated. He began running along it at a blistering pace, adrenaline numbing all his aches and pains and his stifling clothing protecting him from most of the biting cold.
"God damn right I'm a bank robber!" He continued, bouncing from trees and low-hanging branches like a pinball and clumsily righting himself again. "I'm John fucking Dillinger! I needed money so I took it! Now come and get me you ugly bastards!"
He ran until his breaths were wheezing in and out of him, narrowly dodging most of the thick tree trunks but plowing into several with his arm curled in front of him like a bumper. His elbow was growing sore, the thin flesh irritated and raw. He pictured them behind him, flowing through the woods like a river of rotten meat, forming a giant V as they all congregated on his tail. It was suicide; he knew it was. But suicide was starting to feel like the only escape from the horror.
Once he was able to smell the smoke from Roy's cabin, he was brutally reminded that his mental image of the monsters on his tail, only on his tail, was dead wrong. Links weren't just lumbering along behind him; he had to dodge them as well, holding the spear horizontally and using it to bat them out of the way with fleshy thuds. The flaming tip had gone out, but Emmit hadn't had time to notice until he swung the spear into the hairless cranium of a corpse in a police uniform. The brittle, ashy wood wrapped around the thing’s knobby skull, halving the length of his only defense. The cop had been chuckling wetly as Emmit pelted past it, knocked down to one grubby knee and oozing dark ichor from the fresh gash in its head.
The trees were thinning out ahead of him, and although he had strayed
