When I looked over my shoulder, there was only darkness. I swung my head back toward the highway. I was almost there. I could even make out the station wagon smashed beneath the fallen tree at the base of the barricade.
Ten more steps.
The invisible army marched behind me.
Seven steps.
Terror bubbled up from my chest. I swallowed it back down.
Three.
At last I eased onto the asphalt, keeping both boots.
I whipped around.
Emerging from the darkness, a band of cannery workers, looking even more ragged than those before. Seven or eight of them. Clothes half torn off. Bushy beards sprouting from the men’s faces. The women’s fingernails snapped off and bloody.
They broke into a run, their feet kicking up sprays of mud.
I turned and sprinted for the barricade, the backpack bouncing on my shoulders. Their footfalls pounded the highway behind me, closer and closer.
I leapt onto the hood of the station wagon, landing before the dead Host driver—Nick’s father. He was still sprawled through the windshield where we’d left him, his head pulverized. I used his back as a stepping-stone to launch me onto the roof, and from there I shot up onto the beaver-dam rise of fallen tree trunks. My hands scrabbled across the wet bark.
The Hosts reached the base of the crisscrossed tree trunks and flew up at me.
They were closing too fast.
I wasn’t going to make it.
If I drew the gun, I’d never get off all the shots in time. I dipped a shoulder, let the pack slide into a trough between the logs. I swung the baling hooks up on their nylon loops and seized the handles.
I turned.
One Host bounded onto the station wagon, denting the roof. Only a few yards away. There’d be no running from them or outsmarting them.
Not this time.
Curved steel hooks protruding from either fist, I turned and leapt into the mass.
ENTRY 33
I landed on the roof of the station wagon, the impact sending out a kettledrum rumble, the metal cratering beneath my boots.
Hosts lunged up at me from all sides.
I didn’t think.
I just fought.
A flurry of steel and blood, the baling hooks like a part of my body. I sank a tip in one Host’s throat, ripping it out even as I pivoted to cave in another’s skull at the temple. The first three fell away, knocking down the others trying to scale the sides of the station wagon.
But I wasn’t done there.
Rather than let the others come after me, I jumped down into their midst and waded in, both arms swinging. Blood spatter arced overhead. I was screaming not in fear but in rage. A battle cry.
I hurled a hook up through the soft flesh beneath a Chaser’s chin, the tip curving through her skull and shoving through her eyehole, popping the front membrane.
—red windshield glass skittering across the floor—
I wrenched the hook free, and she toppled, shuddering.
—Uncle Jim’s eyeless face—
Another Host grabbed me from behind, but I spun, raking both hooks, embedding the points in the sides of his head.
—Zeus licking my face, a puppy curled in my arms—
He dropped back stiffly, his body like a plank, his weight yanking his head free of the steel points.
—my brother hooked to tubes—jigsaw pendant in the grass—Cassius whimpering—Chet’s face transforming behind the chain-link—Bob Bitley staggering toward me—Patrick’s black cowboy hat lowering onto my head—my shadow looming large on the gym doors—
I tumbled out of the storm of memories, coming back to myself, breathing hard. My arms ached at my sides. The Hosts lay sprawled around, twitching and gone. My face and shirt felt sticky with their blood, and my hooks were stained oil-black.
For a moment the silence bathed me.
Eight Hosts, dead at my hand.
With each breath I seemed to inflate, my spine straightening one vertebra at a time, pulling me upright inch by inch.
A familiar sound called my attention to the side of the highway. A few more Hosts trudged toward the barricade, their legs mired up to the ankles in the marshy reeds.
I drew the revolver, waited until they reached the edge of the asphalt about ten yards away. Then I shot them through their foreheads, one after another.
I thumbed the release and let the wheel click open, the hot brass falling away, bouncing at my feet. I climbed up the station wagon again and found my backpack where I’d dumped it on the fallen trees.
After reloading the revolver, I was on my way.
Though there was no sign of Hosts beyond the barricade, I cut off the main road and traveled through the terrain alongside it as we had before. Scaling the slope was treacherous, as was making headway through the underbrush. The heavy backpack tugged at my shoulders, and the hockey stick tangled in branches. My thighs and calves burned. But at a certain point, I fell into a rhythm.
Everything hurt just as much, but I no longer cared. I was separate from the pain and exhaustion, just like the Hosts, observing it as if from some other place. Every time I got hit by thoughts of what might be waiting for me in Lawrenceville, I pushed them aside.