Despite everything, Gutsy laughed.

  It didn’t last, though. She turned and looked in the direction of the east wall. Alethea followed the line of her gaze.

  “Alice?” she asked.

  “I should check on her. Help her pack.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  They headed off to Alice’s house.

  PART EIGHTEEN THE ROAD TO ASHEVILLE

  For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast, And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill, And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!

  —LORD BYRON (GEORGE GORDON), “THE DESTRUCTION OF SENNACHERIB”

  67

  THEY REACHED THE SERPENTINE EXPANSE of Douglas Lake, still following I-40 but rarely going above twenty-five miles per hour. They made stops, though after a while they both felt hollowed out, with nothing left to give to the demands of the sickness.

  They passed through Wilton Springs, pulled off the interstate and circled around to the 440 Truck Stop, which sat at the edge of a vast, mountainous forest. The truck stop’s diner was deserted, half of it crushed nearly flat by the body of a yellow-and-black Bell Jet Ranger helicopter. The serial number—N90090—was readable, but most of the machine was either scorched black or rusted to a reddish-gray.

  Mile marker signs on the side of the road told them they were only sixty-three miles from Asheville.

  “Well,” said Riot wearily, “that’s something.”

  Morgie nodded. “I guess.”

  Riot glanced sharply at him and started to say something, but a fit of coughing stole her words. Morgie held out his canteen and she took it, still coughing.

  Sixty-three miles. A few hours, even at reduced speed. They’d be there tonight.

  To Morgie it felt as if they had been driving forever, as if the distance to where they’d left their friends was ten million miles, and the distance to home in California was incalculable. He and Riot were sick, weak, and exhausted, and so tired of riding. Every part of Morgie hurt, from the bones in his butt to the teeth in his clenched jaws. The diarrhea and vomiting were constant, and he felt like his whole body was made from wet tissue paper; anything could tear him apart.

  They parked their bikes behind a massive tractor trailer that squatted on eighteen flat tires. When the engine noise died away, the world once again became a place of eerie quiet. In the sheltered cleft of a couple of smashed semis they made a camp. Morgie fell asleep right away and dreamed that he was home. Not in the new town of Reclamation but in Mountainside, before Benny ever left. In his dream, he and Benny and Chong were sitting on the steps of Lafferty’s General Store, each of them with a small stack of unopened packs of Zombie Cards. They were tearing open the wax paper and sorting through what they had, swapping doubles, making shrewd trades.

  “Hey, look at this one,” said Chong. He held up a card for them to see, and on it was a zombie with wild hair, dead eyes, and jagged teeth biting a terrible red chunk out of Nix Riley’s throat.

  Benny laughed. “That looks like Morgie,” he said brightly.

  Chong snickered. “Morgue Mitchell,” he joked.

  “I got a good one too,” said Benny, and the card he held up actually showed Morgie. But the image was of Riot standing over him as he lay facedown in the dirt, and she was about to drive a steel sliver into the back of his neck.

  “Oh, cool,” said Chong. “I’ll trade you my extra Captain Ledger card for that.”

  “Sure,” Benny agreed. “I have doubles. Morgie’s always getting killed.”

  They both laughed at that as if it was a joke.

  The zombie Morgie on the cards—both cards—began growling so loud that the dreaming Morgie could actually hear it. It was a low, deep, steady growl. He turned away from the sound and rolled right off the counter, slammed into the cracked red vinyl seats of the row of stools, and then crashed painfully to the floor. He woke in confusion and pain.

  And froze, because waking up did not stop the growls.

  It did, however, change them. Awareness transformed the snarls from the guttural moans of the living dead to the steady, aggressive roar of engines.

  “Someone’s stealing our quads!” he yelled as he scrambled to his feet. Riot snapped awake and swung her legs over the edge. By the time her feet hit the floor, she had her slingshot out and was fishing for a ball bearing. Morgie snatched up his bokken.

  Weak and sick as they were, they ran for the door, tore it open, and rushed out, ready to fight the thieves.

  They were wrong, though.

  The quads sat in the shadow of the big truck. The roar of motors came from up the road. Not quads, either.

  A line of motorcycles was burning its way down the center of the blacktop.

  Motorcycles.

  Ten of them. And riding each were figures—male and female—dressed in soiled leather set with studs and chains. Their faces were harsh and discolored, more dead than alive.

  They were ravagers.

  Morgie and Riot flattened out on the ground and peered under the truck as the bikes thundered by. The lead biker was a brute of a man with enormous arms that were so overpacked with muscles that he looked deformed, apelike. His face was equally simian, with stiff orange hair and a filthy beard in which leaves and bugs were stuck. He had guns and knives sticking out of holsters and pockets, and a huge scythe strapped to his bike so the big curved blade arched over his head. A name was painted in silver script on the bulbous fuel tank of the Harley.

  DEATH ANGEL

  The other bikers were also fierce, but none were as massive or as unbearably terrifying as Death Angel.

  The wooden sword in Morgie’s fist felt ridiculously fragile and useless. Beside him, Riot lowered her slingshot, letting the steel ball roll out. If it came to a fight, they were never going to beat that inhuman monster or his people. Never in a million years.

  The bikes passed so close to the semi that the two teens could see the tread on their tires and the mud-caked boots on the foot pegs. Morgie and Riot clung to each other’s hands, knowing that death was one tiny moment away.

  But the bikes rolled on, leaving behind a cloud of dust that hung like a pall over the parking lot. Morgie and Riot dared not move until the sounds of the bikes dwindled and then faded. Silence blew like a winter wind beneath the big rig, chilling them and the whole day.

  Slowly, very slowly and carefully, they got to their feet, still holding hands. They stood there, weak and sick and trembling. Never before in his life, not since the world expanded for him beyond the walls of his town, had Morgie Mitchell ever felt this young. This small.

  This helpless.

  68

  DAWN WAS A PALE PROMISE on the horizon when they wheeled their quads outside and continued on their way.

  “Asheville today,” said Morgie. His voice sounded weak and fragile even to his own ears. Riot just shrugged. “Look… we’re both sick, and getting sicker. If Asheville is still there, then there will be doctors. Hospitals.”

  She nodded weakly.

  They plunged into the woods, following a road that was badly overgrown. The forest was vast and lush, and no attempt had been made to keep it from reclaiming the highway that cut through it. Only the movement of zombie swarms had trampled down the tall weeds and crushed some of the persistent shrubs that grew out of the many cracks in the asphalt. Where young trees stood, the marks of the swarm simply went around them.

  “How many do you think came through here?” asked Morgie, studying the massive swath the shamblers had cut through the overgrowth.

  Riot shook her head. “Way too many.”

  They rode on.

  Several miles in, they rode along the French Broad River, which was a brilliant blue ribbon laid haphazardly through the forest. Sunlight sparkled on the rippling water and birds bobbed near the bank, watching the quads with unreadable eyes. Morgie had an irrational desire to stop his bike, strip to the skin, and dive into the water as if it was some healing bath that could wash away the red rash and all of his other pains, inside and out. He gazed longingly at it as the miles rolled away beneath his tires.

  I should never have left home, he thought. Never.

  As if in reply, the blisters on his skin seemed to all flare at the same time. It was like being spattered with hot cooking grease, and he hissed. The pain was so sharp, so sudden, that it sent a wave of nausea through him and he had to stop, jump off the bike, and throw up.

  Riot stopped to wait. It did not take Morgie long, but he walked down to the river’s edge and plunged his face into the clear, pure water. Despite the day’s heat, the water was shockingly cold, and he kept his face under for as long as he could. Then he leaned back on his heels, sputtering and gasping as water sluiced down under his carpet coat and body armor.

  “You alive down there?” called Riot.

  Morgie grunted. “Define ‘alive’…”

  He splashed a few handfuls of water on his face and over his hair, then got up and climbed shakily back to the road.

  They drove on, moving more slowly now since both of them were so out of it. They made frequent stops. Neither could keep down any food. Morgie felt like he was more asleep than awake. Or, maybe, more dead than alive. The drone of the motor was muffled, as if he was going away, deeper into his own dark thoughts.

  Neither of them was paying much attention, and had no warning at all when a pair of motorcycles burst from the woods to their right. Riot screamed as the lead bike slammed into her quad.

  “Riot!” screamed Morgie as the big motorcycle knocked her quad right off the road. Two wheels lifted, and the whole machine canted over and rolled down the hill. Morgie saw Riot tumbling on the slope a few feet away, having either dived or been thrown free from the quad. Even so, the force of her fall sent her bumping and churning down toward the water.

  Out of the corner of his eye Morgie saw something rushing at his face, and he threw himself sideways as the blade of a farming scythe slashed through the air where his neck had been. He fell out of the saddle, and the quad kept rolling until it smashed into a pine tree. Morgie hit hard, tried to tuck and roll, bungled it because it was all happening too fast, and instead flopped hard onto the weedy asphalt. The air left his lungs in a whoosh, but he forced himself to twist again as the wheel of Death Angel’s bike roared past, inches from his face.

  Morgie scrambled up, coughing weakly as he did so, fighting pain and nausea. The bike that hit Riot was twenty feet behind him, and Death Angel was turning his for another run. That gave Morgie only a scant few seconds. Run, help Riot, or fight. Those were his choices, and none was good. Only one made any real sense, though.

  He ran to his quad and tore the bokken from its holder, and instead of waiting for Death Angel to come at him, Morgie charged the monstrous ravager. The killer grinned as if amused by the attack and he gunned his bike with one hand while raising the scythe with the other. It was a testament to the biker’s massive strength that he could handle the cumbersome tool as if it was a small hatchet.

  “This is my meat,” he bellowed to his companion. “Get the girl. I want to hear her scream.”

  The second biker dropped the kickstand, got off, and ran down the hill.

  Morgie swung his wooden sword just as Death Angel’s bike seemed to leap forward and the wicked blade cut a glittering arc through the air. Morgie did not try to block the blade, nor did he try to smash the muscular half-zombie. Instead he put every ounce of his strength and all of his speed into a diagonal downward strike to the bike’s front wheel. The impact sent shock waves up his arm with such force that the sword’s handle shivered itself from his grip. Morgie fell sideways, but the blow had done its work. The scythe missed again, and the wheel slewed around on the trampled weeds, ruining the forward momentum of the bike. Death Angel was launched from the seat and crashed down hard on the road, sliding nearly four feet on his chest and hands. The scythe fell across Morgie’s waist.

  He grabbed it and propped it on end to help him stand. He hoped the biker was dead or crippled, but as soon as that thought formed in his head he knew that it was ridiculous. This wasn’t just a zom… it was a ravager. Half alive, half dead, all monster. Nearly unkillable. And before this one had transformed, he’d been something else: huge, with overdeveloped muscles and the look of someone who had always been a brute, a causer of pain, a taker of lives.

  Death Angel got to his feet. The impact with the road had torn his clothes and ripped flesh from his palms, chest, and right cheek. Blood that was a strange mixture of black and red—not blended at all, streamers of both colors—ran from the torn flaps of his flesh. He pointed a finger at Morgie and grinned to show lots of yellow teeth.

  “I was going to turn you, boy, but now I think I’ll bust you up and let you watch Mongo and me turn the little chickee into an all-we-can-eat buffet. How would you like that?”

  A scream rose from the bank of the river, but Morgie could not see what was happening with Riot.

  “I’m going to kill you,” promised Morgie, but even he could hear how weak his voice sounded. His body was tired from days of illness, and even if Morgie had been at his best, this man looked unbeatable. He had no illusions of this being a David-and-Goliath situation. Even so, he had to try. Morgie took a threatening step toward the big man.

  Death Angel did not flinch or show the slightest concern that he was unarmed while Morgie had the scythe. Instead, his ugly grin widened to a jack-o’-lantern leer. Behind him and all around the scene of the confrontation, the woods seemed to break apart as more ravagers stepped out of the shadows with weapons in their hands, and behind them, shambling with relentless hunger, were the living dead.

  There were so many of them. Too many. One quad was wrecked, the other damaged. Riot was screaming, and Morgie knew that this place, this moment, was the end of all the things he’d done, and all the dreams he ever had.

  He raised the scythe anyway.

  69

  MORGIE CHARGED THE RAVAGERS AND the zombies. He swung the scythe as if it could somehow sweep away all of the dozens of creatures who had come from this trap to kill and devour him. Death Angel laughed and ducked backward, and the force of Morgie’s swing whipped the blade across the necks of two zombies, instantly decapitating them. It was a cut so powerful and so effective that it shocked him.

  Then the tip of the blade buried itself into the chest of a ravager and stuck there. The killer cried out, more in outrage than pain, grabbed the handle near the blade, and tore the scythe from Morgie’s grasp. The ravager staggered back, completely run through, tugging at the steel and cursing.

  Two of the shamblers lunged at Morgie and tripped over the front wheel of the fallen Harley. They collapsed in a heap and four others fell over them, piling up a mound of thrashing dead inches from where Morgie stood. In another place—maybe at the harvest festival at home, with actors dressed as zoms—this would have been laugh-out-loud comedy. Here it was merely unreal, as if pernicious monsters were playing a game to mock his inevitable and horrible death. Morgie had always feared the living dead, but until that moment he’d never actually hated them. Now he did.

  He hated every single one of the rotting, lumbering, insatiably hungry creatures. He wanted to chop them up and burn the pieces.

  Morgie whirled instead and ran to find his bokken. In stories, heroes made a glorious last stand, killing so many of their enemies that grand tales would be told about it for generations to come. But these enemies would not tell any tales, no matter how many he killed. He could fill the underworld with their corpses, and the story of it would still die right there on a lost road in an empty corner of the Rot and Ruin.

  He snatched up the weapon, turned, and swung as one of the ravagers came at him with a pickaxe in his dirty fists. Morgie ducked low as he swung, evading the attack while smashing the sword into the killer’s knee. The leg buckled and Morgie darted sideways, not needing to do more to a crippled opponent when there were so many others.

  Riot screamed again, but this time it sounded more like rage than pain. Morgie wanted to look, to see if somehow she was managing to fight, maybe to escape, but another zom came at him and he swept its reaching arms to one side and kicked it hard in the hip, driving it backward against Death Angel. The big biker bashed the thing away and drew a pistol from his belt.

  “I’m gonna make this—”

  And that was all the monster said. If there was more, the words were lost beneath the huge and ugly roar of a heavy caliber machine gun.

  But that was impossible, Morgie thought. He turned, the world swaying sickeningly around him, as soldiers—soldiers—came running out of the forest. He slipped on blood and fell, hitting his head against a tree. The world spun sickeningly around him and everything seemed to be painted in all the wrong colors. Gunfire orange. Blood that was red and black. The green of the immense forest. And the mingled green and gray and brown of uniforms. Then it all went very, very black.

  PART NINETEEN THE FALL OF NEW ALAMO

  Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

  —WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, “THE SECOND COMING”

  70

  ALICE WOKE IN THE TUB, shivering. The water was ice-cold now, and her skin was pruned. She got out, dried off, and hurried into underwear, pajamas, and a thick robe. The house was still but not quiet. She put her ear to her mom’s bedroom door and heard the rustle of sheets.

  Alice went to the kitchen, put the kettle on, took an orange from the basket on the table, sliced it, and arranged the pieces on a plate. There were a few ibuprofen tablets left, and she put the bottle in her robe pocket and went down the hall with the plate and a teacup. She tapped lightly on Mom’s door and turned the knob.