Then a worse sound: wet thuds and thumps. Noises he had heard before. The sounds of unkillable things hitting the ground from heights too great for their bodies to withstand, bones and flesh shattering… and then rising up and healing.
The zombies were behind, to the sides. Falling from above.
The ones in the small horde ahead were spreading out. Thinning and widening like the lips of a mouth opening to receive strangely suicidal prey. Ken was struck again by how they moved: not a collection of individuals, not even as a coordinated group. They moved like….
He struggled to understand. To find a word.
Cells.
Each zombie was as the single structural unit of a larger creature. The individual – but not autonomous – cell of a creature so huge it could not be seen from Ken’s perspective, any more than a whale could be comprehended from the perspective of a barnacle on its fin.
The thing’s maw gaped ahead of them.
They were at its outer edges.
The things fell toward them, closing around them.
The thing was hungry.
And it must feed.
27
The Redhead screamed.
Ken heard the sound and thought it was fear. Then his perception shifted and he thought she was screaming in pain. Then he realized he was hearing neither terror nor agony.
Instead, The Readhead’s scream was one of betrayal. Rage. Unadulterated wrath.
She had a gun in her hand, a shiny black creature that seemed to hunch on her fist, waiting to sting those who offended her sense of what should be and what should not. Her gloved fist tightened and the bullets shot out, punching through the foreheads of several zombies with thunder-cracks loud enough to set Ken’s head to pounding.
The zombies – three of them – immediately went mad. Their heads exploded and became lopsided half-and crescent-moons dripping with pink and black gel. They turned on their once-fellows, on each other, on themselves.
They went from cells in a body to cancers in the organism. Killing everything without discrimination.
The Redhead shouted again. No more bullets. She threw the gun into the center mass of the zombies that hungered for them.
She was going to die or be Changed, and Ken could tell that she would do so cursing them with her last breath.
He looked at Aaron. The cowboy had an admiring light in his eye. It was different than the look he had given Dorcas: no tenderness, none of the sense that he wanted to hold and protect her. She didn’t need protecting, and would probably attack anyone who tried. So Aaron’s look was the frank admiration of one warrior appraising – and approving of – another.
One of the zombie’s grabbed The Redhead’s left hand.
She fumbled with her right for one of the machetes strapped to her back. The machete was in a scabbard, secured with a snap that she flicked open in an eyeblink. But Ken could do the calculations, could tell that she didn’t have time to clear the weapon.
She was determined to go down fighting. But she wouldn’t – couldn’t – win this fight.
She wasn’t going to make it.
28
Fshhhhhh…
… ssssss...
… WHUMP.
The sound came from behind, then beside, then before.
It was a bizarre noise, one that was utterly alien, one Ken had never heard before in person but which was nevertheless burned into his mind as a thing of fear.
No, not mere fear. It was a thing of terror, with all the heavy-laden meaning that word brought in a world after the tallest buildings had been reduced in number by two.
In the instant the sound passed he heard it in his mind, replayed in countless news reports and video games and movies. Media that only had one common thread: death. Sometimes focused, often indiscriminate, always violent.
Ken was a history teacher both by trade and inclination: a man often more comfortable in the precipitous moments of the past than the banal passages of the present. One weapon had arguably changed the face of geopolitics more than any other in the last hundred years. Not the nuke, not the submarine. Nothing so grand.
It was small, it was easily ported. It cost not millions, but mere thousands.
The rocket-propelled grenade.
The RPG had taken shepherds and nomads and turned them into warriors; had given untrained women a cheap way to kill entire squads of trained men in tanks or attack choppers. The United States – the United States that was, that had been, before the Change – had supplied RPGs to the Afghan Mujahideen guerillas in such numbers that, in trying to keep up with rising demands for heavy armored vehicles the Soviet Union had bankrupted itself into ruin and collapse. An economic end to a cold war, ushered in by what was essentially a metal tube with an explosive at one end.
RPGs had been used in Angola, in Vietnam. Russian forces in Chechnya were terrorized by men firing them from rooftops and basements. US forces had to deal with them in Iraq.
And someone had brought one to this fight.
He heard a line from an old movie, perverted by the Change: “Isn’t that just like a human: to bring an RPG to a zombie fight.”