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Where the hell is Toht of his brother, and he risked a single backward glance and saw nothing but brown smoke that obscured the entire cliff wall

Panic flared for ato daer, but as the white hands reached for hiht it down, again and again

Soht The creek! It had wound around the far side of the cliffs and here it was, running within a hundred yards of the crowded road Benny jerked the reins to one side and kicked again, and the horse cried out in an almost human voice The muscles in its thick haunches bunched, and the ani aside ainst Apache’s neck, and together they raced across the field toward the water There were dips and srass, and Benny realized that it was a longer, harder run that he thought, and there were at least fifty zoms between hiht move the treeline on the far side of the field

The Motor City Hammer

It had to be the Hammer who’d set off the dynamite A second sooner, and the blast would have dropped half the mountain on Benny And on Tom

Tom

Benny kneas trapped on this side of the cliff wall There was no way back, and he didn’t dare race for the treeline If the Ha brothers, too, and they all had guns Nix was there, too, but she ht as well be on the far side of the ht now His--and her-- only hope lay in his survival And the only route to safety lay on the far side of Coldwater Creek Zoh fast water That’s what Tom had told him

A zom lurched into his path, and Apache had no time to swerve, so he ran the creature down Brittle bones rass

Two others, a fire only boxer shorts, closed in on hi their way Benny steered with his knees, and the horse angled just slightly to the left as Benny slashed down to the right, hitting the fire hile of pale li hills, Benny felt his blood freeze The valley beyond was shallow, no radual slope The horse could easilydead Zoms that Benny hadn’t even seen Maybe a hundred of them, and half of them were children

Children

The kids were dressed in school uniforms, and there was a s of a school bus driver He looked like a shepherd in the rotesque sheep Some of the children’s faces rinkled and blackened Had their school bus crashed and burned? Benny gagged at the thought, and again his resolve wavered Seakened his grip on the sword He knew that these creatures were dead, that they were reaniuise of the people they had once been, but To in his mind

They used to be people

How could he strike them? How could he hurt them?

Children, women, old people Lost souls

Apache pounded down the slope; the blue water beckoned

Soh the air an inch from his nose, and for a moment he had the crazy notion that it was a bee or wasp Then, alunshot echoed across the plain

And then he heard a girl scream

"BENNY!"

Benny turned toward the sound and saw a tiny figure break from the trees and run out into the field She was too far away to be sure, but Benny was sure

"Nix!" he yelled

Nix jumped over a fallen tree, stopped, snatched up a thick branch, and as one of theso hard that Benny could hear the crack all the way across the field But then three ht behind a cluster of trees A fifthat Benny that glinted with blue fire in the sunlight Without realizing that he was going to do it, Benny ducked down, and he felt the bullet sear the air just above the back of his neck The sharp bang of the shot chased the bullet through the e plucked at his pack, and he waited, listening inside his body for the pain, but there was nothing Fifty feet away a zoh its stoling back to its feet

The water was there, the crowd of dead school children spread out before him

Which would kill him, he wondered The zombies or the bullets of the bounty hunters?

"BENNY!" Nix’s voice carried as clear as a bell over the hills He turned to see her running toward hi Thirty yards noenty

He heard Nix screaest of theher up as if she were a toddler The five men immediately turned and ran back toward the trees as a wave of zo one hand i flashed past him and sla in the sunlight, and the zo apart in desiccated sections, ar that plowed through them

"Benny!" Tom bellowed "Follow me!"

It was impossible, but there he was Covered in blood and dust, his sword glittering like flowingwith insane fear as To dead and splashed into the blue water

Benny’s horse leaped over the last of the dead, his hooves caving in the head of the bus driver, and then they were in the water The cold current struck theasped as icy water bit his ribs and chest Forty or more of the zoms followed them into the water, but the powerful current plucked them up and swept them away

Benny turned and looked toward the treeline There was no sign of Nix, but for a ination or the shiht he saw another s across the field toward the treeline, heading in the same direction that the men had taken Nix She ran fast, bent low, and she carried solinted like steel Benny blinked sweat out of his eyes, and when he looked again, the sone

The treeline was an unbroken line of oaks and n of hu dead--thousands upon thousands of them--and that as as blocked and useless as the collapsed pass through the cliff Their horses claone

And they could not follow