Jonathan Maberry - Tooth & Nail

Out of the corner of his eye, Benny saw the leader come charging at him with the scythe.

Benny began to smile. He was winning this.

He was going to win.

He rushed forward into the attack, bringing his sword up in a graceful, powerful sweep, his body set and balanced for the parry and the counter-cut that would destroy this reaper.

Sword met scythe blade.

Benny felt the shock of the impact shiver through his hands and vibrate along his arms. The force was ten times what he’d expected, and he found himself falling backward, the sword dropping from nerveless fingers. It clanged onto the hard ground, and Benny thumped down onto his back.

The reaper with the scythe stood over him, panting with fury.

Benny twisted and kicked out, aiming for the man’s knee with a ground-fighting kick Tom had taught him.

With a snarl of contempt the reaper moved his leg, and as Benny’s foot shot past, the man snapped out with a kick of his own. It caught Benny in the back of the calf. The man pivoted on the ball of his foot and side-kicked Benny in the chest, knocking him flat and breathless.

Benny tried to roll over to hands and knees. But couldn’t.

He tried to reach for his fallen sword. But couldn’t.

Tried to come up with one of Tom’s rules for a situation like this. For anything that would save him.

But couldn’t.

The scythe rose into the air. The other reapers — those who could still stand — clustered around to watch him die. The blade reached the apex of its lift, and golden sunlight ignited along the wickedly sharp edge.

“No!” cried Benny.

And the reaper said, “Unnh…”

It was a soft, surprised grunt.

The scythe trembled in the air and then fell backward as the reaper’s fingers uncurled from it. It landed hard.

The reaper’s knees began to bend. Slowly, slowly… until he dropped down into a kneeling position directly in front of Benny.

He said, “Unhh…” again.

Then the reaper fell flat on his face and did not move.

The other reapers stared in shocked horror.

Not at the fallen body. Nor at the leather-wrapped handle of the knife that stood up from between the reaper’s shoulder blades.

They stared past their leader’s corpse.

As did Benny.

A man stood there.

Tall. Grizzled. A scarred and tanned face and the coldest blue eyes Benny had ever seen. Beside the man stood a monster of a dog. Two hundred and fifty pounds of mastiff, but with armored plates all over him and a spiked helmet.

Joe Ledger said, “Sic ’em.”

Benny could swear the dog laughed as it leaped forward to attack the reapers.

And they, armed and in greater numbers, stood no chance at all.

Hard miles broke slowly under their feet as they ran.

The woods all around them were filled with the dead, though, and every way they turned they encountered teams of reapers leading packs of zombies. Some packs had only a dozen of the dead, but the farther west they went, the larger the packs grew. Once they had to stop for ten minutes as a swarm of at least a thousand of the dead shambled by.

Samantha and Heather shared out the tassels among the girls, and there were enough for each of them to tie half a dozen to their clothes. For a while they worried whether that would be enough, but as the afternoon burned toward sunset, it became clear that the dead were not drawn to them. Either they could not smell living flesh through the chemical stench, or the stench deceived them into thinking the girls were other zombies.

All the time that they were running and hiding Samantha was trying to understand what she’d done back in the clearing. She could have given the reaper a chance to run, could have left her with at least a tassel. She could even have cut her throat and given her the quick death the woman apparently wanted.

Instead she’d left her to be consumed by monsters.

Please…

Even though the reaper’s screams had faded into nothingness hours ago, Samantha knew that they would echo inside the caverns of her soul forever.

Like all the girls, Samantha had grown up hard and along the way had been forced to spill blood many times. Human in defense, animals when hunting. Zombies constantly.

But never once had she been cruel.

Never once had she treated life without regard.

Never once had she been as much of a monster as the things that haunted and hunted her.

Until today.

Please.

With the hard miles her tears had dried, but she never ceased wanting to stop where she was and simply collapse in tears. Maybe in the path of the reapers.

As they ran, she occasionally caught quick looks from the other girls. Each of them assessing her, judging her, measuring themselves and their own potential for darkness against what she’d done. None of them met her eye. Maybe it was contempt, pity, or perhaps to prevent Samantha from seeing a familiar darkness in the eyes of a friend.

The sun seemed to expand into a supernova as it fell down behind the western haze.

The six of them moved downland through rougher country than the reapers chose to use, cutting into ravines and through dense brush. It was slow, but it gave them safety, and the terrain would slow down any attackers, human or otherwise. The dying sun spilled its paint box across the sky, splashing the sky with gaudy shades of blood and fire.

Michelle ran point and she suddenly stopped, her fist raised in the way Dolan had taught them. They all saw the closed fist and froze, hands on weapons, eyes and ears alert.

Michelle waved them on and they clustered around her, looking where she pointed. “There’s something down there.”

A hundred feet downslope was a road, and through the leaves they could see the humped back of an old-fashioned wagon like the ones in storybooks of the Old West.

“Something’s dead down there,” said Laura.

They all nodded. Although the tassels blocked their sense of smell, they could hear the drone of blowflies. Samantha looked up to see that the sky was filled with crows and vultures turning in slow circles.

“Really dead,” she said. The others nodded at that, too. In the perversion of death that was the zombie plague, carrion birds did not feed on the living dead. Only corpses whose life force had been totally extinguished by injury to the brain or brain stem rotted in a way that attracted scavengers.

Samantha took point now and led them down through the brush. The closer they got to the road, the more the trees and shrubs thinned out and the more a horror was revealed.

The wagon was an old-fashioned chuck wagon that had probably been looted from a cowboy museum. The sides had been reinforced with metal sheeting, and on the sides the words gunderson trade goods had been painted in bright colors. There were bodies everywhere. Humans and horses. They had been killed in ugly ways, and they’d been left to rot. The ground was splashed with blood and littered with shell casings from pistols and shotguns.

Nothing moved except the flies.

If any of the victims of this massacre had reanimated, their living corpses had wandered off.

The girls fanned out across the road, looking at the dead, checking the wagon, scanning the surrounding woods.

“Reapers?” asked Laura.

Tiffany nodded. “Has to be. Who else would do something like this?”

“Why’d they kill the horses?” asked Heather. Ida had found an old wild horse years ago, and they’d had it for seven years before it died. Heather was destroyed when the horse was found dead in its stall. She stood looking down at the body of a massive Percheron. “Why would anyone kill a horse?”