Damage & Decay

Chapter 35

Part Three: Lost Girls

"Man can live about forty days without food, about three days without water, about eight minutes without air, but only one second without hope."

----

The horse responded to the kick and to the control that powered that kick. Within three galloping steps his flight straightened from a wobbling panic to a determined attack. Eren screamed as Apache's broad chest slammed into the front rank of the zombies. Eren's right arm rose and fell, rose and fell, slamming the brutal edge of the hardwood sword down onto faces and hands and necks and shoulders. The dead reached for him, but he kicked with both feet, and struck and struck and struck. Apache, covered in his carpet coat, felt only the muffled pain of bites that could not tear through the carpet and did no harm. Instead it drove him into a towering fury. He reared up and lashed out with steel-shod hooves. Jaws shattered, skulls cracked, and then they were through the front rank and racing toward the line of stalled cars. The zoms turned and followed, and those in front of them shambled toward the horse.

Eren wheeled Apache around and tugged back on the reins to encourage him to rear up again and again. The hooves were backed with all the power and terror in the half-ton animal, and withered bodies crumpled before him. Eren's carpet chaps protected his legs, but he wasn't wearing his carpet coat. If he fell, or if the creatures grabbed a wrist, then only the last bits of the cadaverine would protect him. At the speed with which things were happening, they did not seem to have the time to react to the presence of the noxious chemical, and if any of them were repelled by it, Eren could not tell.

"Go! Go!" Eren yelled, and Apache surged forward toward another line of the dead. Beyond that was open ground. The sword rose and fell, and Eren felt the shock tremble up his arm, but he used the pain to fuel his rage. He drew his hunting knife with his left hand and used it to stab and slash as the hands tried to drag him down, screaming inarticulate bellows that filled the air. But the blade hit bone, and the impact wrenched it from his hand, and he lost the knife.

They slammed through the second line, and one hand snagged in his pants cuff nearly tore him from the saddle. Eren slewed halfway around and slashed backward at the clutching hand, feeling the forearm bones break as he struck down.

Where the hell is Armin?  When the walls had exploded, Eren had lost all sight 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 a moment in his chest, threatening to dampen the fires of his anger, but as the white hands reached for him again, his fury swelled, and he raised the sword and brought it down, again and again.

Something flashed blue and bright. 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. Eren 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 animal leaped forward, smashing aside more of the dead. Eren flattened himself against Apache's neck, and together they raced across the field toward the water. There were dips and small valleys hidden by the tall grass, and Eren realized that it was a longer, harder run than he thought, and there were at least fifty zoms between him and the safety of the fast blue water.

He caught movement to one side and saw a man--a man, not a zombie--entering 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 Eren. And on Armin.