Bits & Pieces (Benny Imura 5)

Until today.

Please.

With the hard miles her tears had dried, but she never ceased wanting to stop where she was and simply collapse in tears. Maybe in the path of the reapers.

As they ran, she occasionally caught quick looks from the other girls. Each of them assessing her, judging her, measuring themselves and their own potential for darkness against what she’d done. None of them met her eye. Maybe it was contempt, pity, or perhaps to prevent Samantha from seeing a familiar darkness in the eyes of a friend.

The sun seemed to expand into a supernova as it fell down behind the western haze.

The six of them moved downland through rougher country than the reapers chose to use, cutting into ravines and through dense brush. It was slow, but it gave them safety, and the terrain would slow down any attackers, human or otherwise. The dying sun spilled its paint box across the sky, splashing the horizon with gaudy shades of blood and fire.

Michelle ran point and she suddenly stopped, her fist raised in the way Dolan had taught them. They all saw the closed fist and froze, hands on weapons, eyes and ears alert.

Michelle waved them on and they clustered around her, looking where she pointed. “There’s something down there.”

A hundred feet downslope was a road, and through the leaves they could see the humped back of an old-fashioned wagon like the ones in storybooks of the Old West.

“Something’s dead down there,” said Laura.

They all nodded. Although the tassels blocked their sense of smell, they could hear the drone of blowflies. Samantha looked up to see that the sky was filled with crows and vultures turning in slow circles.

“Really dead,” she said. The others nodded at that, too. In the perversion of death that was the zombie plague, carrion birds did not feed on the living dead. Only corpses whose life force had been totally extinguished by injury to the brain or brain stem rotted in a way that attracted scavengers.

Samantha took point now and led them down through the brush. The closer they got to the road, the more the trees and shrubs thinned out and the more a horror was revealed.

The wagon was an old-fashioned chuck wagon that had probably been looted from a cowboy museum. The sides had been reinforced with metal sheeting, and on the sides the words GUNDERSON TRADE GOODS had been painted in bright colors. There were bodies everywhere. Humans and horses. They had been killed in ugly ways,

and they’d been left to rot. The ground was splashed with blood and littered with shell casings from pistols and shotguns.

Nothing moved except the flies.

If any of the victims of this massacre had reanimated, their living corpses had wandered off.

The girls fanned out across the road, looking at the dead, checking the wagon, scanning the surrounding woods.

“Reapers?” asked Laura.

Tiffany nodded. “Has to be. Who else would do something like this?”

“Why’d they kill the horses?” asked Heather. Ida had found an old wild horse years ago, and they’d had it for seven years before it died. Heather was destroyed when the horse was found dead in its stall. She stood looking down at the body of a massive Percheron. “Why would anyone kill a horse?”

Samantha shook her head but didn’t say anything about the slaughter. She knelt for a moment and looked at tracks that were cut into the bloody soil.

“What’s that?” asked Laura.

“I don’t know.”

“A wolf?” asked Michelle.

“Too big.”

“A dog?” suggested Amanda. “Like a mastiff?”

Years ago, when the adults were still alive, a traveler had come through the area. A big man accompanied by a monstrous American mastiff. He’d stopped only for a cup of coffee before moving on, and afterward Samantha and the girls had looked at the prints left behind in the road. They were similar to these.

“It’s not a mastiff,” Samantha decided. “These are too big.”

They looked around at the darkening woods. There were so many strange animals out there. Wild creatures that had escaped from zoos or come in packs from other countries like Mexico and farther south. There was no way to identify these prints now, and no time to waste in trying.