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  It all happened in an instant. Gentry whirled, Kenta let out a cry of pain, Rikichi screamed, and Dez felt a hard-boned arm cinch around his throat. Something cold was shoved against his left temple.

  “You fight,” a voice said into Dez’s ear, “and I pull the trigger.”

  Chapter Two

  Stomper

  Dez’s body had turned to stone the moment the man had seized him, but now his mind unlocked and his thoughts became a swarm of panicked rats scurrying inside a burning house.

  The ambush had been coordinated. That much was obvious, even before the one who’d fired the arrow at Kenta – the arrow now buried in the boy’s right thigh – appeared on the path.

  You’ve failed again, the cutting voice in his head declared. You weren’t alert enough, and now, because of your weakness, more will die.

  Dez could scarcely breathe, so powerfully did the forearm compress his windpipe, and what air he could draw was tinged with the sickening raw-meat odor puffing out of his captor’s mouth. Yet he could still see too well the hellish scene unspooling before him:

  The massive, heavily muscled archer striding out of the forest.

  The shorter but somehow more imposing figure who followed him, a man with militaristically short hair, a neck festooned with crudely drawn tattoos, and a garish gold chain dangling over the chest of his tight black tank top.

  Rikichi hurried toward Kenta, the boy howling with pain and grasping his leg wound, the arrow wagging like some dreadful joke as Kenta thrashed.

  “Nice one, Paul,” the man with the neck tattoos said. He had a raspy voice like a habitual smoker’s and a thick Irish accent. He moved with a fluidity that reminded Dez of an accomplished athlete, a fleet running back or a champion wrestler. “Was afraid you’d nail the kid in the guts. Unleash all those nasty fluids into his bloodstream.”

  Dez had forgotten Gentry for a moment, but when the gaunt man spoke, Dez could see the abject terror on his face. “You guys are maneaters, ain’t you?” He licked his lips. “You’re…you’re cannibals.”

  No one answered him. Even if one of the new arrivals had said anything, Dez wouldn’t have been able to hear it over the horrible caterwauling of the wounded boy. Rikichi was cradling his son and reassuring him, though his voice kept breaking.

  The sight made Dez sick. It seemed he felt that way every day now, but this…this was an especially harrowing tableau.

  Dez couldn’t help remembering his own son. God, if Dez were half the man he should be, he would have saved Will. He would still have his little boy.

  “It’s gonna be okay,” Rikichi said, his voice trembling. He slid a shaking hand over Kenta’s forehead, slicking his son’s sweaty hair back. “Just breathe for me, okay? I’ll fix it in a second.”

  Dammit, Dez thought as his eyes shifted to the massive archer and the scrappy-looking man who appeared to be the leader. Goddamn these sons of bitches to hell.

  As if sensing his thought, the one holding Dez captive pressed harder on his voicebox. Dez began to cough, his eyes watering. He lifted his hands, but the muzzle burrowed into his temple, the cozening voice laced with warning: “Hands down, friend. Unless you want a hole in your head big enough for my cock.”

  Kenta wailed.

  “Quiet your boy,” the leader of the group said, the Irish accent lending his words a singsong quality.

  Kenta didn’t hear, or was in too much pain to notice the command, but Rikichi turned, shot a fierce glance at the leader. “You ruthless bastard.”

  The leader’s mild expression didn’t slip. “Attend to the boy, Paul.”

  The archer’s eyes were riveted on Rikichi and Kenta. “Want me to finish him, Stomper?”

  Stomper nodded.

  Paul, the mountainous archer, whose bulging arms were bare despite the chill of the night, strode over to where Rikichi clutched his son. Paul tossed his bow aside, bent, and tapped Rikichi on the shoulder.

  Rikichi didn’t turn.

  “Hey,” Paul said and tapped Rikichi on the shoulder again.

  “Get away from us,” Rikichi muttered without turning.

  With almost loving care, Paul reached around to position one huge hand on the father’s throat. “Come here now,” he said, and swung Rikichi away from his son. Kenta’s head, unsupported, thumped down on the forest floor, and Kenta let out a strident wail. Rikichi’s arms were flailing about as though he were being electrocuted, but the size disparity between Rikichi and the archer made it impossible for Rikichi to connect with anything but the archer’s immense shoulders.

  Holding Rikichi at arm’s length, Paul straddled Kenta’s midsection. Rikichi was frantic, smacking and raking at Paul’s arm. Bloody contrails bloomed on the archer’s biceps, but Paul betrayed no sign of pain, only reached toward his ankle.

  Retrieved a wicked-looking buck knife.

  Involuntarily, Dez’s hand twitched toward the Ruger.

  The muzzle dug into his temple, setting off a vicious throb. “Last warning, friend,” the voice said, the gagging stench of his breath making Dez’s eyes water.

  “Don’t—” Dez managed in a strangled voice, but Paul’s buck knife was out, and though Dez was more than a dozen paces from the ghastly drama being played out on the ground, he could see Kenta’s frightened eyes, and infinitely worse, Rikichi’s crazed expression as he fought wildly to save his son. Rikichi tore at Paul’s forearm, his shoulder. Rikichi kicked at the huge archer, but the blows deflected fruitlessly off Paul’s hip.

  “Shhhh…” Paul said, and as Rikichi looked on, the giant archer placed the buck knife against Kenta’s throat, just under the left ear. Kenta thrashed his head against the blade, but that only made the damage more acute. The blade opened a yawning slit in Kenta’s throat, a slit that bubbled and spumed as the boy thrashed berserkly against his murderer. Through it all, Rikichi’s vast, staring eyes remained fixed on his son, the sounds tumbling from Rikichi’s lips a mixture of horror and sorrow.

  Dez felt tears sting his eyes. He’d often believed himself beyond tears, but each time he was proven wrong. Before the end of the world, he’d heard the human psyche possessed a mechanism that closed the floodgates of negative emotion once a certain threshold was reached. The mechanism, he seemed to recall, was designed to prevent a mind from going insane. But if such a threshold did exist, Dez’s mind wasn’t equipped with it. God knew he’d witnessed enough atrocities to trigger that safety valve a thousand times.

  Tears streaming down his cheeks, Dez watched the giant archer complete the indelicate incision, place the buck knife on the ground beside the dying boy, and reach into Kenta’s ragged, jetting throat.

  Rikichi was still fighting madly, but when he saw the giant pull a stringy mass of pulp and cartilage from his son’s throat, he let loose with a blaring howl of heartbreak.

  Unconcerned with Rikichi’s reaction, Paul brought the handful of viscera to his open maw and began to chew. The blood, black and oily in the early dawn light, painted the archer’s chin a glistening obsidian.

  Rikichi continued to wail. Stomper appeared beside Paul, and without speaking, took hold of Rikichi’s shoulders and laid him on the ground beside the motionless Kenta. To Dez, the gesture was hideously reminiscent of a parent laying his child down in bed for the night.

  Dez had a memory of Will, of his little boy. The bedtime routines they used to share. His son’s insistence that Dez lie beside him until he fell asleep. The warm, soft feel of his son’s forehead. The sweet smell of his hair.

  Dez choked back a sob.

  “Your boy is dead,” Stomper murmured to Rikichi. “See? He’s at peace.”

  The words apparently broke through because Rikichi turned his head to look at his son, and that’s when Stomper raised a boot and stomped on the side of Rikichi’s face. One eye plopped out of the socket, the cheek and nasal cavity giving a horrid crunch as the fa
ce crumpled. Rikichi’s body jittered and spasmed, and Stomper brought his boot up, slammed it down again. This time Rikichi’s forehead folded in on itself, the sound similar to an egg dropped on a tile floor. Rikichi’s quivering face was a mask of wine-colored blood. Before Dez knew it, Stomper was on his knees beside Paul and scooping up the dangling eyeball. With a graceless tug, Stomper plucked it loose from the ocular cord and popped it into his mouth.

  “Save the other eye for me!” the man holding Dez called.

  The words jerked Dez back to his own plight, but it was the yearning, insatiable quality in his captor’s voice that galvanized him. Dez was going to die, and this man was going to dine on him as emotionlessly as the other two cannibals were dining on Rikichi and Kenta. Dez realized the man’s pelvis was jammed against him. Unbelievably, the man was erect.

  “I want the boy’s tongue too,” his captor called. “Don’t get it dirty before—”

  Dez swung his head back as hard as he could and felt the man’s nose implode. The forearm slipped away from his throat, and Dez sucked in his first unobstructed breath since the nightmare had begun. Peripherally, he saw his captor stumble, the man’s hands slapped over his spewing nose. Dez bolted toward the southern edge of the clearing, where Gentry stood watching him with an amazed look. Dez spotted movement from his left and discovered Paul the Cannibal Archer already nocking an arrow into his bow.

  “Down,” Dez shouted at Gentry, and in one motion draped an arm around Gentry’s shoulders and dove forward. They skidded on the dirt as an arrow whistled over their heads.

  “Up,” Dez commanded, hauling Gentry to his feet and breaking toward the treeline.

  “Don’t have a chance,” Gentry moaned.

  “Move,” Dez answered.

  As they punctured the vale of forest, Dez heard a snatch of shouted conversation:

  “Get them!” Stomper commanded.

  “…my nose….”

  “Fuck your nose. It’s your own goddamned fault!”

  Dez was dragging Gentry as they raced past elms and aspens, thorn bushes and pines.

  “No way we’ll escape,” Gentry groaned. “They’ll eat us too.”

  Dez gritted his teeth. “If they only send one, we’ve got a chance.”

  They veered around a broad oak tree, found what might have been a disused trail. Gentry was moving on his own now, but his gait was a staggering, inefficient one. If Dez set off by himself, his chances would improve considerably.

  Sure, his conscience spoke up. Abandon this man the way you did Kenta and Rikichi.

  Dez said, “I didn’t abandon them, dammit. I had a gun to my head.”

  From the corner of his eye he sensed Gentry’s wondering stare. “Who you talking to?”

  “Nobody,” Dez snarled. “Get your ass moving.”

  Chapter Three

  Whiplash

  It didn’t take long for the cannibal with the broken nose to find them. What amazed Dez was the rapidity with which the injured cannibal tore through the forest. It shouldn’t have surprised him, not after all he’d seen. But it did. It was as though the last vestiges of the old world refused to relinquish their hold on him, and as a result, his reason still recoiled when confronted with another testimonial to this new, nightmarish existence.

  He knew Gentry’s strength would give out before long. And he could hear the cannibal stealing through the forest behind them. Before, the son of a bitch had moved with the stealth of a timberwolf. And while the cannibal still ran with a surprising lack of noise, the rage and the broken nose were making him careless.

  Dez slowed to a trot, fingered the handle of the Ruger. He didn’t want to use it, but he would if he had to. The noise would give away their whereabouts, and he doubted the other two cannibals would allow the murder of one of their own to pass unavenged.

  Even worse, they’d be newly fed.

  Newly empowered.

  Dez wouldn’t have believed it had he not once witnessed it. For a time he’d been a member of a struggling colony based in a network of caves along the Tippecanoe River. He’d been asleep – fitfully, as always – when a barrage of screams had assaulted him and the others slumbering in a moist tunnel just uphill of the water. By the time Dez had disengaged himself from the woman he’d slept with that evening and who’d insisted on slinging an arm over him as though to moor him to the slimy rock floor, the slaughter was already in full bloom. He’d stumbled out of the cave to find a middle-aged woman with curly brown hair – one of the leaders of the colony – spread-eagle on the ground with a cannibal’s face buried in her split stomach. Three other colonists were similarly laid out, each with cannibals grafted to them like skulking hyenas. Dez and another man had drawn their guns to blast away at the killers, but before they could fire, the cannibals had darted away into the night or, in one case, leapt up to grasp an oak bough that hung fifteen feet off the ground. The cannibal, surcharged by the flesh he’d just devoured, swung from the bough, landed nimbly on the grassy riverbank, and bounded into the forest with the agility of a jungle cat.

  The sound of Gentry stumbling brought Dez back to the present. Dez threw a look over his shoulder. Had the cannibal pursuing them eaten from Kenta or Rikichi before setting off after Dez? It was a vital question.

  One he had no time to ponder.

  “Can’t run anymore,” Gentry panted. “Can’t—”

  “You have a weapon?” Dez demanded. His lungs were burning, but that was more from fear than fatigue. The only favors this ghastly lifestyle had done for him were hardening his muscles and expanding his endurance.

  “Just my knife,” Gentry answered. “I use it to clean squirrels—”

  “Get it out,” Dez told him.

  A flash of movement from their right, and then pain seared through Dez’s shoulder. Somehow he was on his knees, and the cannibal was laughing, and some instinct made Dez flop down on his stomach, and it was a good thing because he heard a whistling sound, and the air he’d just vacated was rent by some fast-moving object.

  Dez pushed to his hands and knees and thought, Holy Christ. The bastard has a leather whip. And where the hell had he hidden it?

  Save Indiana Jones, Dez had never seen a whip used as a weapon, but as he scrambled to his feet now and backed away from the grinning cannibal, who was smaller than the other two but who appeared completely unhinged, Dez decided the whip was uniquely suited to this new world. Lethal enough to inflict serious damage, yet relatively silent. A man skillful enough to wield it would have better reach than a man using a knife or a machete. Sure, a bow had better range, but as Dez could attest, a lot could go wrong with a bow and arrow because you needed space to shoot.

  The whip was whistling at him again.

  Dez lunged sideways and only partially evaded the leather’s sting. Cold fire scalded his hip, but he didn’t think the denim of his jeans had been parted.

  Dez unsheathed the machete.

  The grinning cannibal had shaggy black hair and a scraggly beard smeared with what could only be human viscera. So the bastard had eaten from Rikichi or Kenta before setting off after Dez. Bad news.

  Dez didn’t comprehend the biology of it, but the experience by the river had taught him the effects of cannibalism were almost instantaneous, not unlike those old Popeye cartoons. Only instead of spinach creating bulging muscles, the ingestion of human tissue induced a maniacal power that was as extraordinary as it was revolting.

  “Come now, kitty,” the cannibal said, twirling the whip handle at his side. Dez tried not to be hypnotized by the way the long slender lash swirled and danced in the predawn air.

  “Watch him,” Gentry said.

  Dez nodded, hoping Gentry had exercised the good sense to draw his knife. Two against one, they still didn’t stand much of a chance, but if they were lucky, they might catch the cannibal off balance.

  “Tel
l you what,” the cannibal said, the whip writhing at his side like a restless serpent. “I’ll give you a head start, old man. Fifteen, twenty minutes even.” The grin broadened. “I’ll want to enjoy this meal.”

  Dez took in the man’s overwhite teeth, the too-pink gums. Tell-tale signs of cannibalism. No regular person was that healthy anymore. Only cannibals looked virile enough to star in toothpaste commercials.

  Of course, the starey, darting eyes and the expression of lunatic glee would probably disqualify this man from most ad campaigns.

  “Not goin’ anywhere,” Gentry said.

  Dez glanced at the older man and beheld a mettle that hadn’t been there before. Maybe they would live yet.

  “Fine then,” the cannibal said, nodding at Dez. “I’ll give you a chance to save your hide. You come back to the clearing and tell us where other survivors are, we’ll let you live.”

  “Maybe you should run that by Paul and Stomper,” Dez said, “since you’re obviously their little errand boy.”

  With a snarling growl, the cannibal swung the whip in a wild looping strike, and Dez dove for his knees. Dez slammed into the cannibal in a barrel roll violent enough to upend him, and before the son of a bitch could untangle his whip, Dez swung the machete and buried it two inches deep in the man’s calf muscle.

  The cannibal squealed, pawed at the blade, which Dez abandoned. Dez somersaulted forward and reached back for the crossbow. Pivoting, he drew back the bow and took aim even as the cannibal fidgeted with a revolver. Dez strode forward, leveled the crossbow at his breastbone, and knowing he’d get no better opportunity, fired.

  The bolt split the man’s sternum, the sound reminding Dez of an axe striking a cord of ironwood.

  The cannibal let out a breathless grunt and grasped the impacted bolt.

  Dez knew he couldn’t wait. Cannibals possessed uncanny recuperative powers. He reached down and snagged one of the cannibal’s scissoring feet. The cannibal didn’t seem to notice, only emitted a series of pitiful mewling sounds and fondled the fletching of the embedded bolt as though he couldn’t decide whether to risk yanking it out or not.