Still of Night (Dead of Night 3)

“Can we do anything? I mean . . . there’s a lot of them, right? What can we possibly do now?”

I grinned and pulled the hood over my face. “Not sure about you, kiddo, but I intend to misbehave.”

“‘Aim to misbehave,’” she said.

“What?”

“It’s a quote from Serenity,” she said. “The old movie. The spinoff of Firefly . . . ?”

I patted her shoulder. “You may very well be the toughest absolute nerd girl left on Earth.”

“Thanks,” she said. And meant it.

We got up and, yes, we misbehaved.

***

Dahlia found Church and told him what she thought.

“Go back to the main gate,” he said. “It may be a dodge, and I rather think it is, but it’s still a major threat. We need to change the dynamic there. Your original plan is still a good one, but the mission has changed. Adapt to that. We need to shift the swarm. Do you understand?”

“Got it,” she said.

“I’ll leave Jumper and some people here and take the rest to the east wall.”

“What about the sniper out back?”

“Let him stay in place for now,” said Church. “We can deal with him later. We have a war to fight.”

***

Dahlia returned to the front wall and when she climbed up again she looked out on a scene from hell itself. There were no longer hundreds of the living dead out there.

Now there were thousands of them. Seething masses of the dead, boiling out of the woods like cockroaches from a collapsing building. The Rovers in their white garments beat and shoved them into the corridor of flame that led to the front gate. The archers were nearly out of arrows and some had taken to simply throwing river stones at the zombies. The mountain of corpses was now higher than the broken wall and Dahlia saw it tremble as more of the dead slammed against it from behind or writhed, still in their parody of life, within it. It was going to fall soon. There was no doubt of that. Once it did, there would be a highway of rotting bodies high enough to allow the living dead to enter Happy Valley.

If they got into the town, then it would be carnage. Maybe—just maybe—the Pack and the helpers and the few allied residents could fight the zombies. But not the dead and the Rovers. Happy Valley was too spread out inside and too poorly prepared for attack outside.

Dahlia wished that the plan had been to lure the Rovers in and then let them have the damn place while her Pack and the other survivors snuck out and faded into the woods. She’d even proposed that to Church early on. But now she understood why Church had turned it down. She’d seen proof of why. The Rovers were attacking on all sides. Even though the groups to the rear and west were smaller distraction forces, they were there. They were armed. They could possibly stall the Pack long enough to draw the whole Rover force in for the kill.

No. The only real way to win this was to use the town itself as a weapon.

And so she rallied her people. The supplies brought from the houses were there and she climbed down and began distributing them. There was no good plan. Only plans marginally less suicidal than others.

She recalled a snatch of conversation she’d had with Church about this as they drew near to Happy Valley.

“Some of the members of the Pack want to know why we’re bothering,” she said to him. “Those aren’t our people in there. We don’t even know how many slaves are inside the walls. Or how many Rovers are out here.”

“That is the kind of question soldiers often ask on the eve of battle,” he had answered. “In World War II, in Iraq, in other wars, soldiers were often asked to go fight and possibly die for people they didn’t know, people they would not otherwise have met. We are not a conquering army, Dahlia. We are not the ones who start a war. We don’t get to choose whether war happens. What’s left to us is to decide is whether the people caught in the path of a war deserve our commitment to try and save them. Or free them. Or even avenge them. No one fights alongside us because of coercion. You don’t.”

“No,” she’d admitted.

“No one is forced to go with us to

free the slaves in Happy Valley. Not one member of this Pack is required to do that.”

“No.”

“So, tell me,” he asked gently, “why are we going to fight this war?”