On the landing, Alex keened: hands by her head, fingers spread wide, eyes bulging, blood on her mouth from the red river leaking from her nose, as if the something that had burst from her was blowing her apart. To Tom’s left, Mellie screamed again as a girl raced up the steps to throw herself on the woman in a fast, flat dive. Crashing back against a balustrade, Mellie rebounded from the stone, rolled, and tried scuttling away. Swarming over Mellie’s back, the girl latched onto the old woman’s neck with her teeth. Howling, Mellie reared like a horse trying to throw its rider, hands wildly scrabbling for purchase.
To Tom’s right, Peter suddenly launched himself, a fury of golden hair and mad eyes, with Simon—that boy who might have been Chris in a different life—only a step behind: “Kill him kill him kill him—”
But Davey, Finn’s pet, his very special boy, was closer and already turning, lips skinning from his teeth, manic red eyes wild with rage.
“No, Davey!” Finn shrieked, one arm upraised, a hand going for his Colt as Davey uncoiled like a caged panther finally breaking from its prison. “NO NO N—”
Finn, as fast as he was, never had a chance. Davey barreled into the old man, bearing them both, thrashing, to the stone. Finn’s pistol spun away. Pistoning his legs in the frantic way of a man desperate to keep a rabid dog from ripping out of his throat, Finn hammered Davey’s chin with his right boot. A spume of blood splashed Davey’s white uniform; Davey’s eyes rolled in their sockets, and the boy began to slide. Finn wound up for another kick that never connected as Peter and Simon, still roaring, converged. Peter was screaming: “He’s mine, he’s mine!” Grabbing the old man by the throat, he hammered Finn’s head into the brownstone landing, a hard percussive blow. Blood spurted from Finn’s burst scalp, but the old man was still fighting, screeching now like his sister. Planting a boot in Peter’s chest, he pounded Peter back. Tom saw a flash of metal as Finn whipped the parang from its sheath, heard the whicker of a vicious backhanded slice that sizzled like a snake. Peter shrieked and there was a wash of bright red blood, and then Peter was clutching his middle, blundering back as the Changed boiled through the square, heading right for them, coming for Finn.
All this happened in less than ten seconds, and it finally got him moving. Five minutes, less than five minutes, got to get to a horse, get us the hell out of here! And break Alex, break her free of this! As Tom turned for her, he caught a blur from the corner of his eye. Maddened to a killing fury, Penny was spinning for her guard. Breaking from his paralysis, the guard swung his weapon, a Mossberg 500 shotgun. As that big black bore started coming around in a wide sweeping arc, Tom knew that not only would this man die trying—he would miss.
“Alex!” Pivoting, Tom lunged first one awkward step on his hurt leg, then two. Incredibly, he saw her whirl in a fan of bloodred hair. For a moment, he thought she was running for him. But she wasn’t. She charged Finn, and the change he saw in her face—that same killing fury he read in Peter and Davey and Simon and all the Changed— stilled his heart. Tom understood, at once, that if he did not break this now, before she reached Finn, she was lost and he might as well let the Mossberg’s slug find its mark. Hell, he would stand and hold her fast and make sure it killed them both.
He threw himself in a desperate dive, smashing into her a nanosecond before the shotgun boomed. The slug brrred a hot trail over his head. There was a splash of imploding glass as a window exploded somewhere beyond. He wrapped her up, getting up one arm to protect her head and neck, throwing the other around her waist. They fell in a heap. Tom tried rolling onto his back at the last second so he could take the brunt of it, but he was awkward, in pain, off-balance, and only managed half a turn. They smacked stone that was going wet and red now with all this blood from the Changed and men alike. When they hit, Alex’s shriek cut out. Tom felt his breath blast from his lungs, but he hung on and then he was hugging her close as she thrashed and kicked and snarled to get away. He felt the bite of glass and stone on his back and the wild beat of her heart against his, and he was screaming, too, screaming into her raving, bloody face: “Alex, Alex, it’s me, it’s me, it’s Tom!”
For an instant—and just an instant—that feral glint in her green eyes sharpened on him. He really did think that if she went for his throat, he would let it happen. In another five minutes and change, Alex wouldn’t be there anyway. For him, letting her go, again, was not an option. If he had to die, better this way, with and by her. But then her head rocked; he had the sense of something snapping either away or back into place, or maybe both. Her eyes, still so green and bright, firmed to a different reality. Firmed to him.
“Tom.” There was wonder there, a searching, and a whisper that he heard as a shout because he really did have her now, no-holdsbarred; this moment was the beginning of forever. “Tom?”
He ached to skim her hair from her face and drink her in. Instead, the world slammed back in with a vengeance, time restarting itself, and he became aware of shots and screams and the riot of Changed and men, of the violence seething all around.
“Alex, we have to get out of here, right now. This place is going to blow in five minutes, maybe less.” Rolling, he helped her set her feet, grabbed her arm. In the square, there were horses, and all they needed was one. “Come on, come on!”
“Wait!” Tossing a wild look around, she let out a gasping cry: “No, no, Peter, Peter!”When the screams and the guns started, it never occurred to Chris, for a second, to turn back. If anything, he urged Night on even faster. This was a collision he would not avoid, a fight from which he wouldn’t back down. If there ever was a right time to pick up the hammer, that time was now.
They were coming in fast from the northeast corner, a hundred yards from the far end of the church. He could see the chaos now, the tide of Changed sweeping over Finn’s men. Off-leash, the Changed were tearing people apart in chunks, plunging their hands into bloody craters to reel out double handfuls of guts. The square was awash in bodies and pieces of bodies and gore—and old people, still standing, as the past embraced its blighted future. He saw a woman, her gray hair a storm cloud, dart for a brute of a boy: “Lee, Lee, Lee!” Lee’s huge arms whipped the old woman—Travers, Chris thought, her name’s Travers; she likes to garden—from her feet. The boy spun his grandmother around in what might almost be joy. When Lee sunk his teeth into that woman’s throat, the look on her face was a species of an awful, final ecstasy.
“Look!” Greg was pointing toward the village hall. “On the landing!”
Chris looked—and felt his heart fail. The steps were heaving with Changed scrambling and fighting and tearing at bodies. From its bulk, one of the dead was Ernst. And his own grandfather? He didn’t see Yeager. But what he did spot on the landing, surging like some behemoth breaking the surface of the sea, was Tom.
Tom was saturated with blood, so much that he looked as if he’d plunged into a deep pool of red paint. He was staggering, too; there was a body draped over his neck and shoulders in a fireman’s carry. Tom had a pistol in his free hand, and he was banging out shots, trying to clear a path. Black shotgun in hand, Alex was by his side; Chris recognized her at once and there was . . . my God, was that a dog? Where had it come from? Huge, its white coat flecked with gore, the animal was snarling and spinning at any Changed that tried getting close. Tom’s rifle scabbard dangled from Alex’s right shoulder. Grabbing up an enormous green canvas pack, she slung it over her left shoulder and then she was shouting something to Tom, wheeling toward the Changed boy swooping in, coming for Tom’s blind spot. The shotgun bucked in her hand with an enormous boom. The Changed toppled back in a loose-limbed splay. Alex turned a brief look to her right, and Chris saw her lips move, understood what she was screaming: Come on! But he couldn’t see to whom she was speaking and, suddenly, didn’t care, because it caught up to him then that the body over Tom’s shoulders wore white going crimson. Where that fall of hair wasn’t gold, it was a deep rust-red.
Peter. “No! Alex! Tom!” Spurring Night, Chris plunged into the crowd, beating a path. He snatched the reins of a stamping, riderless roan, thinking, furiously, Get him on a horse, get Peter to Kincaid, get out get out get out! Trying to cover the distance between them was like battling a stormy sea in a rowboat with a soupspoon. The roan was shying and squealing, and he could feel Night tensing, struggling to find a safe place to set his hooves. Hands tore at his legs. The square was a sea of teeth and snarling faces. This was the nightmare of the plateau again, only this time he was trying to control two horses. Greg had pulled beside him, and Chris heard the crack of shots as they battled their way the last fifty feet.
“Chris, no! Stay on your horse!” Tom’s face was tense, pinched with pain, wet with sweat and gore. There was an enormous bloody slash across his chest, and he was breathing hard. Alex’s back was pressed to his, the Mossberg in her hands, that big dog still whirling and snapping. “Greg, help me! Chris,” he said, as Greg hurried around, “pass down the Uzi!”
“Here!” Chris stripped the weapon from his shoulders, turned it butt-first. “How bad is he, how bad?”
“Bad. Alex!” Tom shouted over his shoulder. “Take the Uzi!”
Instantly, she broke her elbows so the Mossberg aimed at the sky, and wheeled, one hand stretching for the new weapon. As soon as her fingers wrapped around the butt of the Uzi and he felt her connect, Chris let go. But she did look up. Their eyes met, and he said, “Alex . . .”
“I know, Chris. Me, too. Help Peter.” Limbering the Mossberg, she turned back to cover and buy them time.
“Chris!” Tom called. “You’ll have to hang on to him until we can get clear!”
“How much time left?” he cried, steadying Night with his knees.
“Not enough! All right, let’s go, let’s go!” Tom shifted his weight, came down on a knee, and then Peter was swooning into Greg’s arms as Tom hefted Peter’s legs.