“Necklace . . . ?” Riot murmured. The heart in her chest turned instantly to ice.
Eve’s mother had indeed worn a necklace of shining red. She’d worn it the very last time Riot and Eve had seen her. It was not a necklace of rubies, of course, or even of garnets. The reaper Andrew had cut Eve’s mother down with a scythe. The blow had taken the woman across the throat, and the red that had glistened there had been her own bright blood.
Riot looked at the doll and then at Eve. The little girl smiled and smiled, bright as the summer sun, and behind those innocent blue eyes something shifted and moved.
Something very dark and very wrong.
17
THERE WAS NO TIME TO scream.
Four cold hands grabbed Nix from behind and tore her away from Lilah.
The Lost Girl started to yell, but then a red-mouthed thing ran at her.
Ran.
It came so fast, hands reaching, lips peeling back from cracked and jagged teeth. The zom slammed into Lilah, caught her off guard, knocked her backward. They fell over and over down the slope, hung for a moment at the edge of a sheer six-foot drop into an arroyo, and then toppled out of sight.
There was no way for Nix to tear free of the hands that grabbed her from behind. Teeth snapped inches from her neck and shoulders and ears. The angle was impossible for swordplay, so she did the only practical thing she could: She opened her hand and let Monster Cutter clatter to the ground. Then Nix threw herself backward as hard as she could, using all the power of the zombies’ pull along with the strength of her own legs. The extra momentum spoiled what little balance the awkward creatures had, and the two zombies fell hard onto the ground, with Nix’s body landing slantwise across them. With humans, a fall like that would have jolted the air from their lungs, but these were dead things. Luckily, Nix made herself exhale on impact—as both Tom and Joe had taught her. The exhale relaxed her body for the impact, but the jolt was still heavy enough to explode fireworks in her head.
There was a strange, wet quality to the bodies she landed on. Were they recently dead? Were they still filled with blood and other bodily fluids? Her pants and the back of her shirt felt warm and damp.
The gripping hands were still there, so Nix raised her arms straight up, hands almost touching above her, then slammed her elbows down as hard as she could. Her left elbow hit a zom in the nose and knocked its head back against the rocky ground; her right elbow struck the second zom in the ribs. In both cases, the blows jolted their bodies and gave her a split second to pull free and roll away. She scrambled to her feet and faced the dead. One of the two zoms lay still, the back of its head smashed to a pulp. The other struggled to right itself.
“Lilah!” Nix yelled, but there was no answer. She heard scrabbling sounds from the arroyo, but it was impossible to tell if that was Lilah fighting for her life or another zom coming up the slope to join the attack.
Nix had no weapons. She’d dropped her sword, and her gun belt was hung on a tree limb up the slope. The second zom was on its feet now, and Nix saw that it was one of the recent dead, probably another of the party of refugees Riot had been leading from the destroyed town of Treetops to Sanctuary. The zom was a Latino man, not tall, but broad-shouldered and powerful-looking. There was a faint red smudge around its mouth that wasn’t blood. It looked like powder of some kind. There was more of it sprinkled on its clothes. She wondered if it was some kind of pollen.
The zom moved toward her, staggering on bowed legs, his gait made awkward by the absence of one shoe. As he reached out toward Nix, she saw that his palms and forearms were crisscrossed with wounds. When she realized what they were, it sickened her. Defense cuts. The kind a person gets when they’re backing helplessly away from someone trying to cut them. Had this man been unarmed against a reaper? There were similar cuts all along the insides of his arms and outer chest. Nix could imagine him backing away from a killer, arms spread in a hopeless attempt to shelter someone else. A wife, perhaps, or children. Using his own flesh as a shield, and knowing with each cut that nothing he could do, not even the sacrifice of his flesh and blood, would be enough to keep the knives of those fanatical killers from doing their horrible work.
It made Nix want to gag. This man had suffered so much. There was a final deep gash across his throat from where the death blow had been dealt, and his clothes were stained with blood that had pumped out of him with his failing heart. That heart hung still and silent within the walls of his chest, a thing that had been both defeated and broken by evil.
If Nix could have turned and run away, she would have. But there was only sheer rock behind her. The path to escape was behind the zom. There was no option left except to fight. To do more harm to this man.
A black goo dribbled from the creature’s mouth, viscous and heavy, and Nix thought she could see tiny white thread-worms wriggling in the mess.
She swiftly knelt to snatch up a fist-sized rock, and as she did so Nix saw one more thing that made no sense. The one shoeless foot was swollen and discolored, a sign of advanced decomposition. There was similar discoloration on the man’s arms and chest, and some on his face. Discolored veins were visible through his skin, and some of his fingernails had even fallen off. The tissues were becoming swollen as the process of decay released gasses from the disintegrating tissues.
But . . . that was impossible.
One of the enduring mysteries of the post–First Night world was that zoms decayed to a certain point, and then the process stopped. No one knew why. The living dead did not corrupt to the point where their flesh actually fell apart. But this man looked ready to burst apart; his soft tissue was beginning to liquefy. And that did not happen. Not to any zombie. Only after a zom had been quieted did the normal process of decomposition run its full course. This was something she had never heard of. Not even in Dr. McReady’s reports. Was this a new form of mutation? If so . . . what did it mean? What could it mean?
The zom kept moving toward her. He did not run, but it was more than a shuffling walk. Even with the advanced decomposition, he moved with more speed than a regular zom, and even more coordination.
Nix hurled the rock as hard as she could. It struck the monster in the chest with a sound like a bursting watermelon. Fetid black blood erupted from the wound. The smell was so intense that Nix staggered backward. The only thing that pungent she’d ever smelled was pure cadaverine, but that was weird, because a body only produced cadaverine when it was going through advanced decomposition. Her science class had toured the cadaverine plant in town, and they’d seen how the technicians harvested it from rotting animal flesh.
Nix took that moment to pick up two more stones as fast as she could, hurling them sidearm, hitting the thing in the shoulder and face. It staggered sideways into the rock wall, but it rebounded and came after her again. Nix scooped up a bigger stone. It was too big to throw, so she gripped it with both hands, raised it over her head, ran down the slope, and brought the stone down with all her strength.
The zom’s head exploded.
Black goo splattered her face and hair and clothes. She screamed and began hysterically slapping at the wormy muck.
Behind her the zom collapsed onto the ground with a boneless, meaty thud that was entirely disgusting to hear.
“Behind you!”
It was Lilah’s voice, hoarse and ghostly and urgent. Nix spun back as a third zom came running at her—fast, even going uphill. The zom was thirty feet away. Nix dove for her sword and came up with Dojigiri in her hands, and with no time left, she swung hard and wild.