The hoofbeats changed.
What had been a steady rhythm turned urgent. Sharp crack-crack-crack sounds echoed off glass and steel. In the dead silence of Atlanta's empty streets, they might as well have been ringing a dinner bell.
And the city answered.
On both sides of the street, walkers that had been shambling aimlessly suddenly stopped. Their heads swiveled in unison, dozens of eyes fixing on the source of the noise. Then they started moving, converging from alleys and doorways and from behind abandoned cars.
But Rick didn't notice. Or didn't care.
His entire focus was locked on the sky, searching desperately for another glimpse of that helicopter. His body leaned forward in the saddle, urging the horse faster, and Lucien could feel the tension radiating off him like heat.
The man wanted to be seen. He probably would've fired his gun in the air if he'd thought it would help.
Lucien opened his mouth to say something, but the words died in his throat as they rounded the next corner.
The horse screamed.
Lucien felt himself sliding backward, his grip on the saddle slipping, and then Rick's arm locked around his chest.
"I've got you!"
The horse came down, all four hooves hitting asphalt. It danced sideways, tossing its head.
Lucien stared at the scene before them, and despite knowing it was coming, his mind still struggled to process the sheer scale of it.
The six-lane highway was gone. It had been replaced by a sea of the dead that stretched as far as he could see.
There were hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. They were packed so tightly together that they could barely move. The smell hit a moment later. The stench made his stomach heave.
Then the horse screamed again.
The nearest walkers turned as one. Their heads swiveled, eyes locking onto the horse. For a heartbeat, nothing moved.
Then the roar started.
At first, the sound was not loud. It started as a low moan from the nearest walkers and spread through the horde. Each walker took up the sound until it grew into a wave that seemed to shake the air. The dead surged forward, the ones in front driven by the pressure of bodies behind them, until the entire mass was in motion.
Rick hauled on the reins, spinning the horse around. "Go, go, GO!"
The horse didn't need encouragement. It bolted back the way they'd come.
Lucien twisted in the saddle, looking back. The horde was following, spilling out into the street.
"The street ahead..."
"I see it!"
But seeing it didn't change anything.
The route they'd taken into the city was blocked now. Walkers poured out from between buildings, emerging from stores and offices and parking garages, drawn by the commotion. They filled the street ahead, cutting off any escape.
The horse saw them and tried to stop. Rick pulled on the reins, looking wildly around for another route, but there was nothing. Every side street was clogged with abandoned cars or more walkers or both.
They were boxed in, trapped between two converging masses of the dead with nowhere to run.
The horse reared again, and this time Rick couldn't hold on.
Lucien felt the deputy's grip loosen as he tumbled backward, hitting the ground. The gun bag strapped to the saddle tore free and went with him, landing several feet away.
"Rick!"
Lucien clung to the reins as the horse came back down, fighting to keep his seat. His legs weren't long enough to properly grip the animal's sides, and only his death-grip on the leather straps kept him from following Rick to the pavement.
Rick rolled to his feet, one hand pressed to his ribs where he had landed. His eyes found Lucien before flicking to the walkers closing in around them. The massive horde from the highway pressed in from behind, while a smaller but no less deadly group blocked their path forward.
Maybe sixty seconds before they were surrounded, less, probably.
"Lucien Listen to me! I'm gonna draw them off, you get to that tank!" He pointed at the M1 Abrams sitting abandoned in the middle of the intersection. "Lock yourself inside and—"
"No."
"What?"
"I'll draw them off!" Lucien's heart was trying to pound its way out of his chest, and his hands were shaking on the reins, but his mind was clear.
Rick stared at him like he'd lost his mind. "Are you insane? You can't—"
"I'm on a horse!" Lucien shot back. "I'm faster! And you're the one who knows how to use that tank if walkers get in!" It was a lie, the tank was out of fuel and ammunition, but Rick didn't know that. "Think about your family! Think about Carl!"
He saw Rick's face go pale as the deputy realized he was right, that a kid on a panicked horse had a better chance of escaping than a man on foot, and that sacrificing himself wouldn't save anyone.
The walkers were thirty feet away now. Close enough that Lucien could see the details he wished he couldn't: the hanging jaw of one, the exposed ribs of another, the way their fingers reached and grasped at nothing.
Rick's gaze shifted from the tank to Lucien, then back to the advancing horde.
"You stay alive, you hear me? Whatever it takes, you stay alive!"
Lucien didn't answer. He was already moving, hauling on the reins to turn the terrified horse toward the cross street that looked least populated. The animal fought him for a second, then seemed to understand that standing still meant death.
So it ran.
He leaned low over its neck, feeling the powerful muscles bunch and release beneath him as the horse accelerated. Behind him, he heard Rick shouting something and then the sound was lost in the roar of the walkers.
The horde noticed the movement. Of course they did. A running horse was impossible to miss. He charged toward the smaller group blocking the side street.
There had to be forty of them, packed tight between the buildings.
There was no way through on the ground.
His hand dropped to his belt, fingers brushing the spike there. He could feel his magic thrumming under his skin. He'd practiced this.
Time to find out if practice translated to reality.
Twenty feet from the horde, he whispered the incantation.
"Leviosa equus." Levitate horse. Not proper Latin, probably, but intent mattered more than grammar in magic.
The spell hit the horse like an invisible hand cupping it from below. He felt the animal's weight shift as it grew lighter. It was not weightless, only manageable, like switching from Earth's gravity to the Moon's.
"Up!"
He gave the command, channeling his will through the word, and the horse leaped.
It was not a normal jump, and there was nothing remotely natural about it. The animal launched itself forward and upward, its front legs tucking in as its hind legs drove it skyward. Physics and reality bent around them as magic and momentum combined.
They went up.
And up.
And up.
Wind roared in his ears. The walkers below reached upward with grasping hands. For one impossible moment, they hung suspended above the horde.
Then Lucien released the spell.
Gravity reasserted itself all at once. The horse's trajectory curved downward, still carrying forward momentum but falling now, and he had maybe two seconds before they'd crash into the pavement on the other side of the walkers.
His left hand grabbed the saddle horn. His right went to his belt, closing around the first spike.
The Levitation Charm was already at work.
The spike flew from his hand as if shot from a crossbow. It spun once in midair, the cord trailing behind it, and slammed point-first into the back of a walker's skull. The creature dropped instantly.
Second spike. Same motion, the same push of magic guiding it. And another walker down.
Third spike. This one required a different angle. The throw was awkward from horseback, but the magic compensated. The spike tore through rotted bone and stuck fast.
The horse's hooves hit pavement just as he yanked on the cords.
The spikes tore free from dead flesh and flew back to his hand. They slapped into his palm one-two-three.
Then the horse was running again, charging down the now-clear street, and he was holding on with both hands because his legs were shaking too badly to grip properly.
---
Glenn had seen some shit since the world ended.
He'd watched his neighbors turn into monsters. The military had executed civilians in the streets. He'd hidden in a dumpster for eight hours while walkers fed on someone ten feet away, listening to every wet crunch and tear.
But this?
He'd been watching from the department store window when the cop and the kid rode into view. He saw them heading toward certain death and was already trying to figure out if there was anything he could do to help. His hand was reaching for the walkie-talkie to warn them when the horse reared and the cop went down.
Then the kid made his move.
He watched as the blond boy turned the horse and charged directly at a wall of walkers that should have been impossible to break through. His first thought was that the kid had panicked and was fleeing blindly, unaware of where he was headed.
Then the horse jumped.
"What the..."
It wasn't possible. Horses couldn't jump that high. He had been to the Kentucky Derby once with his dad and had seen champion thoroughbreds clear obstacles with trained riders. None of that compared to this.
This was a horse achieving escape velocity.
The animal went up, sailing over the packed horde in an arc that looked like something from a cartoon. For a second, he thought he was hallucinating. Stress-induced psychosis, maybe, or bad mushrooms from that last scavenging run.
Then, mid-jump, the kid moved.
His hand flashed to his belt and came back with something that glinted in the light. Three quick throws, so fast they blurred together, and three walkers dropped dead.
The horse landed and kept running. The thrown objects, spikes or knives or something, flew back into the kid's hand as if they were on strings. He squinted. There were cords, but they didn't explain what he was seeing. Three pieces of metal cut through the air, moving with a precision that ignored everything he knew about physics and momentum.
"Holy shit," he whispered. "Holy shit."
The kid and horse disappeared around a corner, leaving him staring at the empty street. His brain tried to process what he'd seen.
"What was that?"
He stood there for another few seconds, before remembering that there was still a cop trapped in that tank who definitely needed help and wouldn't believe a word of what he had just witnessed.
He grabbed his walkie-talkie.
"Uh, hey. Guy in the tank. You copy?"
The response was immediate. "Who is this?"
"Name's Glenn. I'm in the building across from you." He paused, looking at the spot where the kid had vanished. "And you're not gonna believe what I just saw."
---
Lucien was still running.
The horse did not slow. Adrenaline drove it forward in a reckless gallop, devouring the empty street. Buildings blurred past, and abandoned cars became dangers to dodge instead of barriers to go around.
Behind them, he could hear the walkers. Not close, not yet, but following. His hands were cramping from gripping the reins. His thighs ached from clutching the horse's sides.
He risked a glance back.
The street behind them was full of walkers. Not the massive highway horde, thank God, but still too many. They poured around corners and emerged from buildings, drawn by the sound of hoofbeats.
"Bloody hell," Lucien muttered. "There are hundreds of them."
Thousands, maybe. He couldn't tell anymore. The numbers blurred together as the entire city seemed to wake, every walker within earshot drawn toward him