Horde (Razorland #3)(71)

Spence didn’t answer, but he stepped closer. Then Zach moved in … and Danbury. Those two wouldn’t have been my first choices, but it was better for squad morale if I didn’t play favorites. The house was dark with the windows shuttered, shadows heavy as the souls of the dead. I inhaled, tasting the air; it was sick and stale, tainted with decay. Then I heard movement deeper within, and all the hair on my nape stood up.

A few seconds later, the creature that shuffled into sight, dragging a severed arm, barely registered as human. Her skin was too tight, bloated from the feast we’d interrupted. Her eyes were bright but sunken in her swollen face and so smeared with blood that they were the only bright points in a ruddy mess. She lumbered toward us, and we scattered, giving Spence a clear shot. There was no point in letting her get close enough to bite. He leveled the gun and took the safe shot right in her chest, but it wasn’t enough. Despite that wound, she kept coming.

“Again,” Thornton snapped.

Spence fired another round, nailing her right between the eyes. She dropped like a stone.

I pushed out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. “I doubt she left anyone alive, but we should make sure. Thornton, with me. The rest of you, watch the door.”

“Yes, sir.”

It was a moderate-size home. From what I could tell, it had originally been all one space, almost like a storage facility, but it had been repurposed as a house and someone had built rickety partitions. A lot about Winterville reminded me of down below. Unlike many settlements, this one looked like it didn’t belong; it was more than half made up of old salvage, used by people who didn’t fully understand what to do with it, and those foreign materials struck a strange note in the new world.

The whole house was awash in blood and feces, as if the madwoman who had broken inside had been a wild animal. She ate and excreted, and from what Thornton and I saw, that was all. In the sleeping area, I stumbled into the worst scene I’d ever encountered.

Is Appleton worse than this?

Thornton caught my shoulders as I rammed into him in an instinctive recoil. Chunks of meat and bone were everywhere, and the former residents were so chewed up that I couldn’t tell what parts belonged to which person. It was a slaughterhouse of a room, a scene that would haunt me forever. The sheds where they slaughtered the meat in Soldier’s Pond had more kindness. Then the woman, who was half devoured from the waist down, opened her eyes and whispered, “Kill me.”

“Let me,” he said.

I couldn’t have gone into that room—my feet were frozen—so he strode across the blood-smeared floor, and with a clean stroke of his hatchet, ended her misery. I moved back until I couldn’t see the massacre anymore, squeezed my eyes shut, but the images didn’t go away. Hard tremors shook through me, and I was ashamed of my weakness, until I felt Thornton’s big hand on my arm.

“Girl, I’d be worried if you could handle that. Only reason I could is because I’ve worked in the animal sheds, butchering beasts.”

I didn’t ask what mental tactic he’d employed, but I suspected he must’ve pretended she was one of those animals and he had a duty to make it quick. Thornton kept a hold of me as we stepped out and cleared the rest of the building. My heart was in my throat, fearing there would be brats, but I found none. I hurried back to the front door, and I guessed my expression gave away how bad it was because nobody asked me a single question.

“Let’s go,” I said. “We have more ground to cover before dark. I can’t speak for the rest of you, but I’m not making camp until I’m sure we’ve killed all of them.”

“You’re dead right about that,” Spence said with a hard look.

That day, I killed six more feral humans; after what I’d seen in the house, I was only just functional. My squad accounted for more, but the situation was tense. I had Danbury fretting about his bite while the rest eyed him like they wanted to cut his throat as a precaution. Finally, I called it, after we searched every structure in our part of town. It had been exhausting, and the sun was already gone, darkness driving out the streaks of vibrant color.

“This whole town is cursed,” Zach said, his skin washed red by the sunset. “There are old-world relics all over the place, no wonder they came to grief. God has forsaken them.”

“None of that crazy talk,” Spence snapped.

Before sharp words could burgeon into a full-fledged argument, I beckoned. “Let’s go find the others. I hope they didn’t run into more trouble than they could handle.”

That sparked a frank discussion of the other squads’ capabilities, which lasted until we reached Dr. Wilson’s lab building. Stalker’s crew was already waiting; they were bloody but relatively fit. Right away, Tegan went into action with her medicine bag and about half the soldiers looked like they would walk on hot coals for her. There’s just something about a girl who can heal you … or crack your head open with a staff.

As soon as he saw me, Stalker strode over to me to make his report. “We killed thirty-odd feral humans. Found some dead citizens. I’m not sure as yet how many survived the attack.”

I shrugged. “Hard to say. They’re unlikely to come out until they’re sure it’s safe.”

“True.”

When I did a head count, I belatedly realized he was down a man. “What happened?”