They found Chong on the floor, half in and half out of the open classroom doorway. He lay still and silent in a pool of blood.
Lilah flung her spear down with a harsh metallic clang as she dropped to her knees beside Chong. Her hands were everywhere, checking for the wound that killed the boy she loved.
“You’re not allowed,” she said in a weirdly high-pitched voice of panic. “You’re not allowed.”
Her face was livid with stress and her eyes bright with tears. Lilah’s hands were everywhere at once. Spider and Alethea knelt by her.
Ledger moved past them, pointing his gun down the hall. There had been a terrible fight. Broken weapons, smashed glass, and plaster from damaged walls littered the floor. Several of Chong’s arrows were buried deep in door frames or lying on the ground, the barbs coated with dark and polluted blood.
“Sam,” he said, “on me.”
The sniper fell in to Ledger’s rear left corner, and the two of them moved along the hall with quick, quiet steps, shifting their weapons toward open doors, covering each other as they took turns entering and clearing the classrooms.
Gutsy, Benny, and Nix crept behind the two soldiers. Ledger sent Grimm ahead and Sombra immediately followed, but even the dogs moved cautiously. The hall had an ugly vibe to it, as if it were a battery that could store anger, pain, and violence. Gutsy felt that whatever happened here was over, but her nerves did not accept that assessment.
When they rounded the corner at the end of the hall, they found the second guard. The man stood over a pair of dead ravagers, but he swayed as if half asleep, his eyes looking nowhere. His body was streaked with red, but the blood around the bites on his face and throat was already turning black. Gutsy could see the tiny, threadlike worms wriggling in it.
“Oh, no…,” she said. It was Abdul, a leather worker from town who worked three nights a week for Karen Peak. At least, that’s who and what he had been. Now he was a shell, a vehicle for hunger and pain. Abdul raised his hands toward them and opened his mouth in a moan of bottomless need.
“I’m sorry, brother,” said Ledger, lowering his pistol and drawing a heavy knife. The blade rose and fell, and Abdul collapsed into the only kind of peaceful sleep afforded to anyone in this broken world.
Gutsy turned away, heartsick. Abdul was one of the nicest people she knew. Kind and funny. And now gone, with all of his laughter and talent and life stolen from him. Not by Ledger but by Collins and all the scientists like her who’d done this to the world. Gutsy wanted to cry. She wanted to take her crowbar and smash Collins to pieces.
They moved on, finding more bodies of the ravagers, each with a head wound. Gutsy frowned; there was something odd about them. Some still had weapons clutched in their cold hands, and others had weapons near them, but they didn’t actually look like ravagers. Two of them were dressed in regular pants and shirts. No chains or any of that.
“Los muertos,” murmured Gutsy. “But… how’d they get in here?”
No one answered.
They reached the classroom, and Ledger waved the teens back as he and Sam went in fast. There were no shots, no yells. Nix and Gutsy exchanged a look and then entered the room. It was a complete shambles. Chairs were overturned, a desk had been flipped over and used as a barricade. The ropes used to bind Captain Collins lay cut and discarded.
And there were seven bodies on the floor. Sombra sniffed one and recoiled from the slack flesh, snarling and scared. The hair stood up all along his spine. Six of the dead had arrows stuck in eye sockets, foreheads, or temples. Chong, with his steel-tipped arrows, had fought like a demon.
The other ravager had been killed more crudely, clearly beaten with a folding chair.
“She’s gone,” snarled Benny, and kicked a metal trash can halfway across the room.
“Come on,” growled Ledger, and they went back to where Lilah and the others were clustered around Chong. Gutsy had been afraid of what they’d find there, but Chong’s eyes were open. They’d propped him against a wall, and he looked around with the glazed eyes of someone who’d just come out of a deep, deep sleep.
Benny rushed to his friend’s side, but Lilah shoved him back. “He doesn’t need you pawing at him,” she barked.
Ledger tempted fate by kneeling to examine Chong, ignoring lethal stares from Lilah. Then he sat back on his heels.
“The kid okay?” asked Sam.
“The kid,” said Chong in a weak voice, “is decidedly not okay.”
“Looks like a concussion and a pretty nasty laceration,” said Ledger. “Can’t tell if your skull’s fractured, though, so you’re going to have to take it real easy for a while.”
“Oh, bummer,” said Chong. “I was planning on doing jumping jacks and standing on my head.”
“Don’t do that,” began Lilah, then colored as she realized he was joking.
Chong just gave her a wan smile. Then he looked around. “What happened? I… can’t remember much.”
They told him about the attack in town. Chong looked horrified and saddened by the carnage.
“What happened here?” asked Ledger.
Chong’s face clouded as he picked through tangled memories. “I heard a sound. A crash, like a broken window. Abdul went to look, and then suddenly there were a bunch of zoms running down the hall.”
“Running?” echoed Nix. “Fast ones? Like R3’s?”
“I… guess,” said Chong, frowning. “It’s a little blurry.”
R3 zombies were one of several recent mutations the kids from California had fought. The R3’s had been exposed to experimental compounds that were intended to accelerate the life cycle of the parasites and essentially burn the infection out. The problem was that before that happened, those zoms became faster and, in many cases, smarter. Gutsy wondered if this was similar to what Collins and Morton had used on the soldiers who’d become ravagers.
“Weird thing is,” said Chong, “there seemed to be two different kinds of zoms, and I don’t think they liked each other all that much.”
“What do you mean?” asked Benny.
“Well… there were the ravagers like the ones we fought at the wall, all leather and chains. But there were some in regular clothes. Just people, you know? Except they were totally out of their minds. Actually raving and yelling.”
“Yelling what?” asked Gutsy.
“Just yelling. Not any actual words, just howls. Like people who are so angry they can’t even form words. These… yelling ones… they attacked two of the ravagers, but the ravagers put them down. It’s nuts, I know, but the ravagers seemed to be scared of them.”
“You must have seen it wrong,” said Alethea. “Ravagers aren’t afraid of anything.”
Chong shrugged. “Maybe. I did get hit pretty hard, so honestly I don’t know what’s real or not.”
“And maybe you saw what you thought you saw,” said Sam. “There are bodies back there dressed in street clothes. I didn’t see any obvious bites on them, now that I think about it.”
“Yeah,” agreed Ledger, looking uneasy. “And their skin color was close to normal.”
“Wait,” said Spider. “Do regular people turn into ravagers, though? I thought those guys were all soldiers who’d been experimented on.”