Read Benny Imura 03.5: Tooth & Nail for Free Online Page B

and its wavering shadow. The zombies turned and lumbered that way.
    The path was now wide open, but Samantha knew it wouldn’t be for long. The people in black and red had spotted the smoke and the arrow-struck dead. They began moving toward those points, weapons glinting in the sunlight.
    Samantha rose up out of the grass and gave a third birdcall. The wild, mournful call of a marsh bird.
    Tiffany jerked erect, looked the wrong way first, and then swung around toward the cottonwood. When she saw Samantha, she didn’t waste a single moment gaping or waving. Instead she broke into a run again, pouring on the speed, racing with all her heart and fear and muscle toward the blue ribbon of water.
    Samantha ran to meet her and as Tiffany splashed down into the deepest part, Samantha was there to catch her under the armpit and haul her to safety on the opposite bank.
    “Who are those people?” demanded Samantha.
    Tiffany was too breathless to say much, but she gasped out a single word.
    “Reapers.”
    There was no time to learn more. The dead had heard the splashing and saw the movement of the two girls in the water. So had the people in black and red.
    The reapers.
    Holding on to Tiffany, lending strength to her exhausted friend, Samantha ran toward the high ground and the tall grass. The forest reached out with shadows and green arms to enfold them.
    However, behind them they heard the moans of the dead, the splash of feet in the water, and the yells—the very human yells—of the reapers as they ran in pursuit of their prey.

8
    South Fork Wildlife Area
    Southern California
    Saint John of the Knife stood in the shadows of a live oak and waited for the slaughter to begin. He stood on a grassy knoll, looking down on a country lane that wandered lazily through the countryside. Birds sang in all the trees, and the air was alive with the buzz of honeybees and bluebottle flies. Sunlight slanted through the boughs, dappling the road in yellow and purple.
    The wagon clattered along the road, wheels crunching against the edges of ruts worn into the cracked blacktop. Four heavy-boned horses pulled the wagon, their bodies wrapped in carpet coats and draped with metal mesh. Two men sat on the wooden bench seat, one with the reins in his hands, the other with a shotgun across his knees. The wagon was an old-fashioned chuck wagon that had probably been looted from a cowboy museum. The sides had been reinforced with metal sheeting, and the words gunderson trade goods had been painted in bright colors. Two men walked beside the wagon, one on each side, leading their horses. Fifty yards behind the wagon, another man rode slowly on a slate-gray Percheron that stood nineteen hands high and wore a helmet covered in spikes.
    The man who sat astride the Percheron had flaming red hair gathered back into a ponytail, dusty jeans, cowboy boots, a Western shirt with flowers and hummingbirds stitched across the chest, and crisscrossed army gun belts around his lean hips, from which holstered Glocks hung. A widemouthed sheath, from which one half of a compound bow protruded, was slung from the saddle horn. It was a metal-and-fiberglass hunting bow fitted with cables and pulleys. A quiver heavy with arrows was slung across his back.
    The man was big—tall, broad-shouldered, and muscular. His chest and arms were almost freakishly huge, nearly simian, but for all his mass there was something about him. A lurking potential to use that power with deadly speed. Saint John could see that right away; he was an excellent judge of combat potential.
    This was the man they were looking for, he decided. He fit the description given by the Night Church’s newest reaper, Brother Tony. This was the man who knew where Mountainside and the other eight towns could be found.
    The trade wagon and its guards were walking through country that was virtually empty of the gray people, and it showed in the slack disinterest of each of those men. Only the big man seemed to be