At nearly twenty feet tall and thirty feet wide at its widest point, the great green beast was almost as much of a monster as the things in front of Ken and the other survivors.
Almost.
And, in some ways, more so.
It hove into view, managing to look both ponderous and slow and at the same time faster than Ken would have believed. Bright green, the only swatches of color the yellow John Deere symbol on sides and front and a red fire extinguisher clamped to the side of the huge cab.
John wasn’t a farmer any more than he was a hunter. But you couldn’t grow up in a place like Boise without at least knowing a few basics. So he knew that this was a combine harvester that could be used to harvest a variety of grains. He also knew that the long thing on the front that looked like a bingo cage lined with Ginsu knives was the thresher, and it epitomized “things you don’t want to walk in front of.”
The driver was barely visible through the glare that splashed sunlight across the front of the cab. Even at this distance Ken could tell he was huge, a body built like that of a pro wrestler crammed on the bench seat of the thresher. It looked likely that he had never actually gotten into the machine, but rather had been born on the seat and grown to giant manhood right there; that was the only way Ken could fathom him getting inside.
He was also dressed like The Redhead, with what looked like body armor and a gas mask swinging from his tree-trunk of a neck. His skin was black. Not the light brown of so many people that Ken and his friends referred to as “black” or even “African American” if they were still a few years behind the ever-shifting curve of PC designations, but so deep and dark it was almost the color of night.
He was smiling. It was not the carefree smile that Christopher so often wore – or had worn before he attacked his own child in this strangest of wars. No, it was the tight grin of a man about to kill. A smile that Ken had never really seen – not even on Aaron, who kept his emotions under tightest control – but which he recognized instantly. And which he feared.
The huge man was driving the thresher right at the zombies that separated him from the survivors.
The John Deere suddenly leapt forward.
The undead between Ken and the huge harvester finally seemed to take note of the new threat.
They turned to see what had crept up behind them.
They hissed that diamondback-rattler hiss.
39
The blades hit the first of the undead.
Then metal and flesh met.
Metal won.
Metal continued through to bone.
This was a tougher contest, but again metal proved victorious.
Blood flew in high arcs, a splash of red that painted the side of the green and yellow cab. Ken thought almost idly that the thing looked ready for Christmas.
The horde ahead was gone in under two seconds. Not cut down, not blown to pieces the way the RPG had done.
Just gone.
They disappeared into the whirling cyclone blades of the thresher. Some simply flung into the air as mist, others were blended to a pulp and carried along a conveyor to a cylinder that had been angled out so the paste spewed onto the street instead of into the grain bin behind the cab.
In moments all that was left of the undead was grume and a few tiny things that twitched and foamed yellow. Too small to worry about, too tiny to be threats.
The thresher pulled past the kill zone, huge tires riding over the red patch that had once been things that, in turn, had once been people.
The black man reached a massive arm over and pushed open the cab door. The door was mostly clear plastic or some kind of acrylic, and the man threw it open with such force that it warped, bouncing off the cab before he caught it again in a hand the size of a hubcap.
“What the hell are you waiting for?” he screamed. His voice was deeper than he was big, rumbling like tectonic plates about to quake. “Get IN.”
He nodded.
Ken looked over his shoulder and realized that in the sheer shock of the thresher’s appearance, he had forgotten that the undead in front weren’t the only ones.
There were still the ones behind.
The ones that hadn’t stopped chasing them.
The ones that were now only feet away.
40
The row of people slumped toward the thresher.
Ken pushed Maggie ahead. Pushed Buck. Neither resisted. They held the girls, the things that seemed to be at once the most important, fragile, and dangerous part of the group.
Hissing followed them. He wondered if this meant the undead things were changing the way the… infected ones had been doing. The thought terrified him.
If the dead could not only rise up, but learn and change and evolve, what hope for humanity?
He didn’t look back.
Sally fell suddenly behind them. The snow leopard roared, the bellow of a big cat that had marked its prey. Something hissed, then there were low sounds of struggle.