The pain in her side was a searing white-hot inferno, but she swallowed it, using the pain as fuel, knowing it would shotgun adrenaline into her system. It would make her faster, more aggressive, more vicious. It would keep the fear under control. And there was a lot of fear. She never pretended to be fearless, not to others and never to herself.
She did not fear her own death. Not really.
She feared not living, and to her that wasn’t the same thing.
Death ended thought, ended knowing.
Not living meant that she would never see Chong’s face again. She would never see the exasperation he tried so hard to hide whenever she did or said something that wasn’t “acceptable” to the people in town. She would never hear his soft voice as he recited poetry. Dickinson, Rossetti, Keats. She would never feel the warmth of his hand in hers. Chong’s hands were always warm, even when it was snowing outside.
She would never kiss him again.
She would never get to say the words that she ached to say.
So she said them now, just in case. Just to have them out there, to put them on the wind. To make them real.
“Chong,” she murmured quietly, “I love you.”
It was unlikely that he would ever get to hear her say those words. The thought of these monsters taking all that away from her made Lilah mad.
Very mad.
Killing mad.
With a feral snarl that would probably have scared the life out of Chong, Lilah dropped from the branch.
She fell with all the silence and speed of gravity. Her snow-white hair whipped away from her face as she plummeted.
She struck the closest boar feetfirst with a dead-weight impact that staggered the beast even though it was nearly five times her weight and mass. The heels of her shoes struck it on the right shoulder, and the impact sent shock waves through her shins and through the gash in her side. However, Lilah bent her knees as she struck, letting the big muscles of her thighs absorb the shock rather than her fragile knee joints.
The impact knocked the boar sideways into a second animal, and Lilah fell backward away from the pack. Despite the pain, she hit the ground the right way, tucked, rolled, and came up onto the balls of her feet.
All the boars squealed in a killing frenzy. Lilah wasted no time; there was none to waste. She rushed in and swung her ax in a high overhand blow that whistled through the air. The blade smashed into the first hog’s skull and punched through right into its brain. The creature cried out and then instantly collapsed, dead for gone and forever.
Lilah went with its fall, letting the creature’s own weight tear the blade free.
She’d timed it right. The first boar was down between her and the others. That bought her two seconds of time. She needed one.
Lilah whipped the ax over and around her head just as a second boar scrabbled over the dead one, and the blade struck it square in the eye socket. The steel stabbed through one eye and out the other side.
But the boar kept charging.
The puncture had missed the brain.
What had been perfect timing a moment ago was now fatal. The boar tossed its head and tore the ax handle from her hands as easily as she could have taken a toy away from little Eve. Lilah staggered back and nearly fell. Her ax went flying into the weeds on the far side of the clearing. It might as well have been on the far side of the moon for all the good it would do her now.
The boars that had fallen were back on their feet, and the whole pack charged at her.
Lilah screamed and dove away, rolling again, feeling more of her wound open up as she rose once more to her feet. She ran, and the pain chased her as surely as did the pack of boars.
The clearing was covered in short, dry grass that had withered to a lusterless brown. As Lilah ran across it, heading for the shelter of a boulder, she saw a darker brown amid the grass, and a half pace later the gleam of steel.
Her torn gun belt and the big Sig Sauer pistol were right there!