Spider was lighter and very fast, but even he moved as if his thin limbs were weighted down with blocks of stone. Alethea, though very strong, carried more weight, and she felt like her lungs were going to burst.
She used Rainbow Smite to ram the face of an infected, sending him backward off the wall, arms pinwheeling as he fell. Then another crawled over the edge near her and a shape pushed past her to smash its skull with a meat tenderizer. Alethea gaped at the blood-spattered person of Mrs. Cuddly. Her clothes were torn and her hair was wild, but there were no visible bites on her.
Mrs. Cuddly caught her eye and gave her a stern frown. “Don’t think this gets you out of kitchen duty.” Then she turned away and laid into a ravager who tried to attack Spider with a hatchet.
Alethea laughed out loud. The world was nuts, but that was fine with her.
As she turned back to the wall, she saw something below that made her stare. A big man dressed like a soldier was walking directly toward a bunch of fast-infected. He wasn’t alone, though. Stalking beside him was the biggest dog Alethea had ever seen. It was massive, nearly as big as a bull calf, and it was completely covered with armor from which spikes jutted in all directions. They were down there at the main gate, and they were attacking the dead.
The monsters howled as they rushed at him and the man reached over his broad shoulder to grasp the handle of a long, slim sword. His reach was slow, but then he whipped the blade free and stepped into the onrush. From then on the sword seemed to become invisible, just a whisper of flickering silver. The dog slammed into the dead from another angle, using its massive bulk and those spikes and blades to tear the legs from the dead. The dead swarmed toward them, and Alethea was positive she could see the man laughing as he fought.
Fifty yards away, beyond the gate and on the other side of the wall of cars, Alethea saw a figure she hadn’t noticed before climb to the top of a hill. It was a ravager, but he seemed different somehow. Bigger than the others, and there was something oddly powerful about him. He dominated the scene. She could not hear what he was saying, but it was clear he was shouting at the ravagers and to those infected who retained enough intelligence to follow orders.
It was clear that the man with the sword was fighting his way toward the tall ravager, who roared at his army to defend him. A mass of the dead that had been heading down the corridor to the attack the gate suddenly turned like a tide and washed toward the man and the dog.
95
GUTSY WANTED TO HUG ALICE. She wanted to kiss her. Both things were so wildly inappropriate in a moment like this that it made Gutsy doubt her own sanity. How could she think of romance when people were dying around her?
On the other hand, seeing Alice, and knowing that she was alive, made a lot of weariness fall away. Even in the heat of the moment, Gutsy was analytical enough to understand what she was feeling. Alice was something to fight for. She was someone to survive for. Maybe that’s what all warriors needed to come home from the battlefield. And this, after all, was a war.
Thinking that nearly stopped her again. This was war. And war was something from the past, from history books and the stories the survivors of the End told. It wasn’t really part of her experience. Like Spider and Alethea, Gutsy had grown up after the war. After what everyone assumed was the last war. Now, here it was. She was at war with the soldiers and scientists—if any survived the attack at their base. She was at war with the Raggedy Man and his army of the dead.
She was at war. She was in a war. Did that make her an actual warrior? Or a soldier? And what was the difference? All Gutsy knew for sure was that she could not be on the sidelines. She could not run and hide. She had to fight because she could fight, and because she had things—people, her home, her friends, Alice—to fight for. Gutsy almost smiled at that thought.
Then she saw two people go running across the street, heading in the direction of the town hospital. The first was Dr. Max Morton. That was normal. That made sense. But the person with him twisted the world into a grotesque shape.
Captain Bess Collins. Not dressed in her Rat Catcher clothes but in jeans and a leather jacket. She had a pistol holstered on her right hip and a familiar broad-bladed machete hanging from her left. Both of them carried big, empty canvas duffel bags and were running as fast as they could.
The words that rose to Gutsy’s mouth were not ones she ever used. They were foul, vicious, hateful. Alice stared at her in shock.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “Who is that woman?”
“She’s dead is who she is,” growled Gutsy. “Alice—get to the general store. The Chess Players will keep you safe.”
“Where are you going?”
“To catch a rat.”
The doctor and the captain pushed through the crowds of injured at the hospital, and Gutsy raced to catch up. She bullied and pushed her way through the people, trying not to do more damage to the injured, but absolutely determined to catch up with Captain Collins. People pulled back from her dog as much as from her, and Sombra played his part by showing his teeth to anyone in his way.
The hospital was packed with people, and some of them were unconscious, maybe on the edge of death. One had just reanimated, and an orderly with a hammer and spike was wrestling with him.
Gutsy hurried past in time to see Collins and Dr. Morton enter his office at the end of the hall. She ran faster but skidded to a stop when she heard them speaking in urgent voices just inside.
“—all of it, Max,” Collins was saying. “Everything. The files, the clinical trial data, the autopsy reports on the bodies we brought back.”
There was the sound of duffel bags being unzipped and file drawers being yanked open.
“We only had time for four autopsies, Bess,” said Dr. Morton.
“I don’t care. Take whatever you have. But take all of it.”
“This is insane, Bess. The town’s falling apart. These people need me.”
Gutsy heard Collins give a harsh laugh. “Since when do you care about these rats?”