She’d make a great reaper, he thought as he fought. If she lives through this, I’m going to recruit that little witch.
Zombies were falling dead around him, from those he smashed, from the wooden blade of the redhead, from the gunshots, and from the dog.
Alexi really liked the dog.
He’d never seen anything fight like that, and he wondered why it had never occurred to him to train dogs to work with the reapers. This one was a cunning fighter, clearly trained to fight the dead. It did not bite at all, but instead used its horned helmet and spiked armor to rend and smash and dismember. The dead had no chance against it. Those who tried to bite it shattered their teeth on its chain mail. It was like a pack of lions trying to tear down an armored personnel carrier.
Suddenly Alexi realized that everyone in the clearing was engaged in fighting the dead except him. The gray people who had attacked him were all dead. He glanced at the man and girl with the guns. They were totally absorbed in their own personal wars.
He hefted his hammer.
“Screw this,” he said, and ran away as fast as his long legs could carry him.
He vanished into the woods to find Mother Rose.
88
“CHONG—?” BENNY GASPED.
The dead-pale face split in a rueful grin. “What’s left of him.”
“But—but—your face. What happened?”
Chong stood bare-chested, wrapped in bandages. He held a sophisticated bow in his hands, and there was a quiver of arrows slung low across his hips. He did not meet Benny’s eyes, though; he gaped at something above them. When Benny reached up to touch his forehead, he felt swollen flesh. Blood dripped like red rain across his eyes.
The pain caught up to him then.
Immense, crashing, like a giant bell ringing an inch from his ears.
Chong said something, but the words didn’t seem to make sense.
Benny asked him to repeat it, but he heard his own words.
They were meaningless gibberish.
The fading sunlight flared too white and too bright, and then the hinges fell off the world and Benny was falling.
Falling.
Falling.
89
BENNY COULD NOT MOVE. HE COULD BARELY BREATHE. HIS HEAD FELT LIKE it was actually on fire.
He heard several sounds happen all at once, colliding into one another so hard and fast that it was hard to separate them out and assign meaning.
He heard a girl scream in fear. Nix?
Did she say his name? Was she the one shouting it over and over?
He heard a dog barking.
So weird. He didn’t have a dog.
He heard the moans of the living dead.
He heard gunshots.
He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them the light had changed. And now there was a ring of faces around him. Benny raised a hand and touched one of them; he traced the line of a pink scar down through a field of freckles.
“I love you,” he said.
The face, grave with concern, flushed, and that made Benny smile.
“Benny,” said Nix, “you’re hurt. You hit your head.”
“A zom hit my head,” he said. “I was hit in the head by a zom.” He thought that was funny and laughed, but laughing hurt, so he stopped.
The other faces swam in and out of focus. Lilah. Chong.
“Are you dead?” he asked Chong.
Chong tried to smile, but it didn’t suit his face. “That’s open to debate,” he said.
Nix said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Chong said something, but Benny didn’t understand it. Thinking was so hard. His head felt like it was in a hollow metal box and someone kept banging on it.
He thought he heard Nix scream. Or cry. Or maybe she was laughing.
“Are you sleeping?” asked a tiny voice, and Benny realized that his eyes had closed. He open them to see a lovely little face.
“Eve?”
“You found me in a hole in the ground,” she said. At first Benny thought it didn’t make sense, but then he realized it did.
“Yeah, just like a bunny rabbit.” He touched the tip of her nose. “You’re a little bunny.”
She giggled.
That sound seemed to screw one of the world’s hinges back into place.