Free The Fall (Book 3): War of the Living by Joshua Guess Page B

they had rung the largest dinner bell imaginable.
    They filtered into the woods in ones and twos at first, cut down by watchful sentries or clumping into larger swarms when missed. They appeared in larger numbers as the night wore on. The number was impossible to gauge. There could have been a hundred or a thousand, it didn't matter. The only number Kell cared about—other than the unknown assigned to the dead inside the compound—was how many he had to face at once.
    He fought. He moved as he had never moved before. It wasn't anger which drove him, or hate, or even a need to escape a mournful sense of finality. It was purely a need to move, to fight something that deserved it.
    His collarbone burned, punctuated by brutal knives every time he moved quickly or met resistance. As he was fighting with his spear, those razor-edged pains were nearly constant.
    He didn't care.
    Everyone else worked in groups. Here, four men and two women used homemade shields to fend off zombies while two members of their group stabbed over them from the safety of the shield wall. There, a dozen people whip-thin and hard as old leather, all swinging machetes with the careful control of jungle guides.
    Kell worked alone. Unlike the rest, he didn't stay in one place. He darted from group to group, stopping only long enough to drive the point of his spear into the temple or eye of a zombie, to kick the legs out from under them, to put an armored fist across their face.
    The familiar boiling anger inside him was nowhere to be found. There was no fear, no shock, no trigger to yank the chains off his self-control. He fought with an even, cold efficiency.
    As he loped along the vague circle surrounding the bonfire atop the hill, he came across a young man who also fought alone. There were bodies all around, all zombies. Three undead remained, but the man was in trouble; his weapon, which appeared to be a simple metal bar, had snapped. Kell carefully avoided low-hanging branches as he rushed in.
    The man drove the foot of steel in his hand into the face of the nearest zombie, but the price of getting so close was falling into the thing's grip. The blow wasn’t enough to kill it completely, and the pair went to the ground.
    Kell thrust his spear toward the closest of the two zombies still standing, but his aim was thrown off by a slick spot on the forest floor. Just a few inches, but it was enough to send the point of his weapon down a foot and a half as he tried to correct.
    The spear burst through the chest of the zombie and stuck there. Kell pulled, but he knew the split-second it stopped the thing was hopelessly seized, caught between bones.
    “Shit,” he breathed, pushing on the spear instead. This did nothing to hurt his enemy, but the advantage of six feet of aluminum being firmly stuck was the leverage it gave him. His push turned into a swing as the zombie began to tilt dangerously, then graduated into a hard shove. The tottering dead thing tripped and fell into the other zombie still on its feet, taking both of them down.
    He glanced around for another weapon. He hadn't brought his knives or ice-axes, none of the arsenal he usually carried around. There hadn't been any reason to think he would fight hand to hand. Stupid. Reckless.
    He saw a straight dark shape amid the dead leaves, dark against the night around him. Kell dove for it, snatching it from the ground.
    As he came up, the zombie not doing its best impression of a kebab rushed him. The gray skin, the smooth motion—it was New Breed, and he hadn't noticed. The damn thing had recovered from its fall fast enough to nearly catch him off guard.
    He swung the metal bar with his right arm, his collarbone screaming as the heavy rod cut the air. A horrible wet crack filled the night as it connected with the zombie's neck, an almost surprised expression on its ghoulish face as vertebrae shattered and the force of the impact reduced its spinal cord and the Chimera entwined within to so much