The saint thrust the man toward the crowd.
• • •
The Freedom Riders fired and fired, and the leading edge of zoms and reapers crumpled a hundred yards out. The next line fell at ninety yards. At eighty.
At least a hundred of the attackers collapsed with each volley, but the tide was coming in like a tsunami. The mass of attackers rose up and down like sea rollers as they climbed over the dead. Fights broke out as zoms turned on the wounded and dying, their senses confused by the numbing bleach. Some of the reapers had to defend against their own undead shock troops. But even these skirmishes were carried forward like debris on the tide. There was too much forward momentum for anything to stop them.
“Fire!” screamed Sally. She had a bolt-action sniper rifle, and she killed everything she aimed at.
All along the line, fighters yelled out that they were reloading. Then slapped in new magazines or thumbed shells into their shotguns.
They fired and fired.
• • •
The tide was fifty yards away now, and Benny knew that nothing could stop it.
It was what he counted on.
It was what he’d planned for.
Down below, he saw Nix, Lilah, Morgie, and Riot dipping torches into buckets of pitch. All along the inside of the fence were unlit bonfires. Hundreds of them, and more of them throughout the town.
The tide was forty yards away. Almost to the first of the mounds of dirt.
How scary are you willing to be in order to take the heart out of the enemy?
“NOW!” Benny yelled.
The four of them slapped their torches against the ground, each at precise points, where slender trenches had been dug. Each trench was a few inches deep and a handbreadth wide and lined with rags and straw that had been soaked in kerosene. All the tons of it that had been stored at the fuel company Benny and his friends had driven through. It had taken every spare second and every able-bodied man and boy to siphon it out of the tanks and transport it here. Now that kerosene was soaked into the earth, waiting for a single caress of one of the torches.
And now every one of those torches bowed to the ground to kiss the kerosene.
• • •
Nix touched her torch to the first of the trenches, and fire leaped up and raced away from her, under the metal rim of the fence and then flashing out along an arrow-straight line to the mound that was farthest from town. The fire reached the mound and then vanished into the mouth of a piece of metal drainpipe.
There was a moment of nothingness.
Then the thirty-pound propane tank buried inside the mound exploded. The dirt flew away from the blast, carrying with it all the broken glass, screws, nails, and other jagged debris that had been packed around it.
The incoming tide turned red.
• • •
Saint John heard the first of the explosions.
Then the next, and the next. He saw the fireballs rising above the field and heard the screams of his attacking army turn to screams of pain.
And he heard the moans of the countless dead turn to growls of red delight as they began to feed.
• • •
The tower shook with every blast, and Benny had to cling to the ladder to keep from being hurled off by the shock waves. He watched as the explosions opened empty spaces in the storm of attackers, like the eyes of hurricanes, but the storms swept around them.
There was more fighting on the field, though. The zombies were in open revolt now. There was too much blood, too much torn meat, and that sent them into a killing frenzy. The screams and gunfire and explosions washed away any effect of the dog whistles. Now the dead did what they had done for fifteen years. They attacked anything that moved with implacable ferocity and bottomless hunger.
The reapers forgot about the town and turned their weapons on the dead.