Emmitt touched a hand to her arm, smiling softly when she looked over at him. “We don’t have to decide just yet.”
No, but Portia rather thought he already had. Emmitt was just waiting for her to catch up.
Portia pasted on a smile and headed to where Caris had taken charge. They had a lot of work to get through in only an hour before needing to turn around and drive home. One never wanted to be caught past the city walls after night had fallen.
Everyone they’d brought along with them knew their job. Work went quickly enough, with information being taken from the data-collecting device and compared to current numbers. Production of filters couldn’t begin until they figured out the adjustments.
They were all so focused on the task at hand that Portia didn’t realize the gunslinger hired for security purposes had stepped away from their group, staring out into the distance. She didn’t realize there was a problem until the man barked out a warning.
“Get back to the motor carriages!” the gunslinger yelled.
Portia squinted against the sunlight, trying to see what had put that sort of panic into the gunslinger’s voice. Then she saw them, hunched over and rotten, but moving with a quickness that meant they’d been dead for quite a while, long enough for the spores that saturated bloated flesh to gain complete control.
Long enough for that dangerous, insidious contamination to find a pathway to spread.
“Revenants!” one of the engineers screamed.
Portia’s feet remained rooted to the ground even as her head snapped around, gaze searching for her husband and daughter. Emmitt was by the folding table, snatching up what ledgers and devices he could grab, leaving everything else behind.
Caris was some distance away, hands tangled in the hard wire of the transmitter device they’d come out here to set up, the generator only half put together beside her. Beyond her, pushing themselves off the dirt where they’d been crawling for who knew how long, were more revenants.
“Portia!” Emmitt bellowed, staring at her with horror on his face.
Her feet finally moved, and she lurched around in time to see the revenantsbehindthem, running or staggering forward, putrid hands reaching outward. Somehow a horde had surrounded them, and they’d have to fight their way to the motor carriages, because there was no outrunning a horde like this.
A gun going off reminded Portia of the one she carried, and she yanked her pistol out of its holster. She couldn’t hear anything over the sound of her frantic breathing. Her hands weren’t the steadiest, but revenants never were ones to dodge when faced with taking a bullet to the chest.
She cursed the fact none of their bullets were poison-tipped, merely iron, and she knew—sheknew—what weapons they had wouldn’t be enough to keep the horde at bay. Reports had come back from travelers the past few weeks that passage had been easy, unexciting, but everyone knew Maricol was a land of poison and risk.
And they’d risked it to come out here because the press of business demanded it. No one had reported back of a village or town engulfed in a poison fog and left to the mercy of drifting spores. Some distant part of Portia’s mind whispered that a census count would show otherwise. Somewhere beyond here a town had turned into a graveyard, its inhabitants dead and risen to walk again.
She was a decent shot when it mattered, and this mattered, but she wasn’t a crack shot. Fear and adrenaline made Portia’s hands shake, pulling her aim off-center, sending her next bullet into the dirt rather than a revenant.
She could smell them now, close as they were, having been downwind and out of range most of the time as the crew worked. Portia gagged at the rancid smell that assailed her but kept shooting.
One of the engineers screamed in that high-pitched, wild animal way one did when they were dying. Portia couldn’t look, but the wet tearing sound that reached her ears and the ragged, wordless scream eventually cutting off was evidence enough of the revenants getting their hands on the living. He wasn’t the only one to die, and Portia’s ears rang with the sound of screams.
She couldn’t tell if any of the dying voices belonged to Emmitt or Caris.
Portia yelled wordlessly, stumbling back when her pistol clicked empty. Terror swept through her like a flash flood when she realized she didn’t have any extra ammunition on her. Her fingers trembled against the trigger of the pistol, but no matter how hard she pulled on it, her predicament didn’t change, because there were still two revenants left coming her way.
Bone bleached to a dirty white peeked through ragged hanging flesh. Desiccated eyes sat far back in dried-out eye sockets, muscle peeling apart between the jaws as their mouths worked, but no sound came out. The skin was stained a deep burgundy in areas—evidence of the spores that propagated in dead flesh and forced it to move.
If the revenants killed her, or if she got bitten and the wound festered—
Portia stumbled when she stepped back, heel catching on a rock. Her ankle rolled, the pain cutting up through her calf as she went down. Her teeth clacked together, and dirt puffed up around her, all the pain forgotten in the face of the dead lunging toward her.
She thought she screamed. If asked later, she would swear she had.
But whatever sound her voice made was drowned out in the roar of a conflagration that heated the air to something untenable. Brilliant starfire scorched the area around Portia, burning through the revenants with a ferocity that was too focused, too powerful, to be anything but magical.
Portia held her breath and fumbled for the gas mask hanging off her belt. She yanked it free and pulled it on over her face, sucking in air through the questionable protection the filters provided against such heated air. Her skin felt as if it would crack from the temperature, and her eyes stung.
For a long moment, all Portia could hear was the ragged sound of her own breathing. Then the starfire disappeared as if it had never been, leaving behind scorched dirt, the ashy outlines of bodies, and brittle pieces of bones—all that remained of the revenant horde that had attacked them.
Portia’s eyes watered as she tried to take in her surroundings. The motor carriages had survived the fire, and that was the only blessing to be found amidst the remnants of torn apart people.
“Caris!” Portia gasped out through numb lips. “Emmitt!”
