Alex reached up and cupped her fingers around Patrick’s, and he lifted her to her feet as though she was weightless. Her momentum carried her forward into him so that both hands pressed to his chest, and then their faces were close and she was looking at him with her lips slightly parted.
Over by the wall, Mrs. Wolfgram jerked herself to her feet, her limbs broken and angled in all the wrong directions. Patrick swung the shotgun up past Alex and said, “Cover your ears.”
Her hands rose to the sides of her head. The barrel flared. Mrs. Wolfgram smacked back against the brick wall, a chalk outline gone vertical, then slid wetly to the ground and lay still.
Alex had kept her eyes on Patrick’s the entire time. I couldn’t blame her. It was the coolest thing I’d ever seen.
The footfalls on the roofs overhead quickened. Shallow breaths reverberated down at us off the walls. We huddled a moment, our eyes flashing around, reading the shadows.
“We gotta get to the square,” Patrick said.
“But there are so many there,” Rocky said.
“At least we can see them. We’re gonna cut right through the center and head for the high school.”
“The school,” I said. “Why the—”
Dark forms flashed off the roofs, striking the ground behind us, bouncing low on their haunches, then rising.
We bolted.
Exploding out of the alley, I felt vulnerable all over again. The rising sun cast the square in an otherworldly light, everything washed in sepia tones like in an old photograph. Hosts everywhere paused from their work, then started for us.
We charted a path across the middle of the square, hurdling benches. I set JoJo down so I could use the baling hooks when I needed them. I swiped at Hosts as they neared. They were fast, pushing their muscles to their limits. Principal Delarusso pulled even with me, sprinting faster than a fifty-year-old body should allow, that string of pearls bouncing around her neck. A run in her stocking snaked up from her shin, widening as it rose, her protruding kneecap somehow obscene. She hurled herself at me, hitting me high before I could get a hook up to protect myself. The blow sent us into a rolling tumble. I glimpsed Patrick and the others ahead, their legs vanishing through the closing ranks of Hosts.
I was caught.
Delarusso flung me over, one bony knee poking me in the chest, tensed hands pinning my arms to either side. Her strength was incredible, and I had a fleeting thought of those possessed ants, their mandibles clamping with enough newfound strength to hold their entire bodies up in the air. Delarusso’s head pulled down over mine, and I found myself looking clear up through her eyes to the lightening sky above.
A streak flew overhead and wiped her from view. I rolled to my feet to see Alex finishing her follow-through, her torso twisted with the strength of her swing. She whipped the hockey stick in a full circle, staggering several Hosts back on their heels, then yelled, “Chance—c’mon!”
She cleared a route and I forged after her. We broke through the pack. Then we were dodging stragglers, knocking them over, cutting hard to fake others out. Hosts poured from the church. Most of the adults from the county had congregated there. I couldn’t even imagine what was happening inside.
Up ahead with the kids, Patrick waved at us from the Piggly Wiggly. He stood on the front mat of the supermarket’s automated doors, but they weren’t opening, not after Gene Durant cut the power. Cassius’s fur stood up, even beyond the ridge, and he was barking furiously. Patrick stepped back, lifted the shotgun, and fired at the glass doors. The big panes wobbled and scarred, but the pellets weren’t enough to break through.
I recalled Jack Kaner bragging about the new heavy-duty clear Lexan doors he’d installed after the F2 tornado ripped through last July, shattering the old ones. Bullet-resistant doors.
We ran toward Patrick as he slotted another shell into the shotgun. A few spiral-walkers kept on pacing their patterns in the big parking lot, not looking up to notice as we ran past. We reached Patrick, panting hard, and he said, “Don’t turn around.”
So of course I did.
An army of Hosts descended on us, already at the perimeter of the parking lot. More poured around either side of the building from the back, blocking off any exit path.
JoJo smashed Bunny to the hollow of her throat and squeezed her eyes shut.
Patrick said, “Get behind me.”
He stepped to the front of our little vanguard, but I’d heard the resignation in his voice. It was gonna end here like this.
As the horde closed in on us, we held our ground—because we had nothing else to do.
ENTRY 11
They flew at us, some sprinting stiffly, others bounding on all fours, blank-faced and panting. The eye sockets tunneling through their heads gave us glimpses of the waves of Hosts behind them. They would overpower us and haul us to the church and put us in cages.
And then what?
The thought of what was coming tightened the skin across the back of my neck. A flurry of images overwhelmed me, scenes from every horror movie I’d ever seen. Probes and scalpels, boiling cauldrons and bloody chains. The baling hooks swung at my sides, scraping my jeans.