She thought about what it would do to Nix and Benny. Even to Chong.
Lilah shut her eyes for a moment and ground her teeth in helpless frustration. It was so much simpler living alone. You never had to hurt anyone you cared about, because there was no one to care about. Telling her friends about this would be exactly like stabbing them through the heart.
She lingered there, thinking it through, wrestling with it, aching with doubt.
Then a voice behind her said, “There’s one!”
Lilah instantly leaped to one side, twisting in midair to land facing the way she had come, her spear ready in her strong hands.
Thirty feet down the path she had just come stood a pair of men dressed in black with red streamers tied to their clothes.
Reapers.
Lilah gaped.
Not at the reapers, but at the figures who milled behind them.
Zoms!
There were at least a half dozen of the living dead—men, women, even a child. All newly dead, some of them glistening with blood that had not yet dried.
Lilah’s heart sank. Now she knew what had happened to the other people who had camped here. The zoms moaned in freshly awakened hunger. They staggered through the tall grass, hands reaching awkwardly toward her, completely ignoring the two reapers as they shuffled past.
“Hey, girl!” yelled one of the reapers. “Drop your spear and give yourself up to the darkness. It wants you. The darkness wants to open the red door in your flesh. Why fight it? The darkness is beautiful. The darkness is eternal. The darkness is yours if you stop fighting and allow it to enfold you.”
The words had a cadence like scripture, but they were from no holy book Lilah had ever read—and in her solitude, she had read most of them. These words were intended to coax, but instead they made the hands that held her spear tighten with anger.
“Come on, kid,” said the second reaper. “Accept the truth. The darkness wants to take you. The darkness wants to take us all. It’s the will of God.”
Lilah had never been much for profanity, but as the men continued to call for her to open herself to the darkness, she responded with a series of phrases she’d learned at Gameland. It shocked the men to silence.
The dead kept coming.
Fifteen feet away now.
Lilah debated pulling her Sig Sauer. She had no doubt that she could put all the zoms down as well as the two men with less than a full magazine.
It would be noisy, though, and Lilah liked the quiet.
Instead she gave her spear a single arrogant twirl and charged straight at the zoms.
And the dead rushed at her on stiff and clumsy legs. All but one. A tall woman whose throat had been slashed rushed ahead of the pack, arms outstretched, mouth wide, racing toward Lilah.
A fast zom.
The running zombie grabbed for her, and Lilah uttered a feral growl as she jumped left and used the short leap to channel power into a vicious cut that took the zom across the upper chest. The heavy blade sheared through one arm, part of the chest, and clean through the dead woman’s spine; and the shock of the powerful blow reverberated through Lilah’s entire body. The creature instantly dropped into a boneless heap that would never move again.
Lilah’s heart was racing as adrenaline flooded through her bloodstream.
The slower zoms had reached her now and attacked in a ragged line. Two reached her first.
Lilah spun and swept the spear low, cutting the first one’s leg off at the knee; then she continued the swing and brought the weighted opposite end around in an overhand sweep that crushed the second zombie’s skull. Before it even had a chance to fall, Lilah pivoted and used the same metal knob to end the torment of the child zom.
Three down in two seconds.
She kicked out at one zom as it tried to dive for her thigh, its teeth clacking in the air. The kick jolted it to a stop in a half crouch, and she swept the knob up under its chin so hard and fast that its head snapped back, breaking its neck.