It didn't make sense that the zombie was dead.
Dead? Well, hell, Chris thought. Of course, it's dead, it was dead to begin with, but that had never slowed them up in the past.
He wanted to kick the vile thing until what was left would have to be scraped off the walls, but he didn't have time for that. He didn't have time to figure out what had killed it, either. He really didn't have time to check on Nova, but he did.
Conal looked woozy. Blood ran from a scalp wound and he had a swelling the size of an egg on the side of his head.
"Where's Adam? Conal. Can you hear me?"
"... stairs," he muttered. "Downstairs. Hurry, Chris ... zombies."
Out in the hall there was another dead-or unmoving-zombie. It had come from the direction of Cirocco's room. Chris ran down the stairs, around a corner, through the music room-and into the arms of another zombie.
This one fought him. It was not as far gone as the one in Nova's room; dead no more than a week or two, by the look of her. Chris lifted the zombie and threw it, hoping to gain some time. The only way to really deal with the things was with edged weapons. It also helped to have the steady rhythm of a lumberjack chopping wood, and the strong stomach of Conan the Barbarian. Hitting them or wrestling with them was a good way to get killed. They could soak it up almost forever, and even if you dismembered them they kept fighting. But severing enough of the deathsnakes that gave the zombies an obscene semblance of life would eventually do the trick.
They were incredibly strong. If they got in close, the deathsnakes would tear at your flesh.
As the zombie hit the wall he was already searching for an axe or a blade. There didn't seem to be anything. He picked up a chair, planning to use it to fend the zombie off while he made his way to the kitchen, when he noticed something. It wasn't getting up.
The zombie-it seemed ridiculous to use the female pronoun, though it had bloated and festering breasts-had collapsed on the floor, crushing a fine old silver trombone.
Once again Chris didn't pause to wonder or to question his luck. He had never intended to fight it; the zombie had simply been in his way. He hurried through the music room, made it to the kitchen, where he grabbed his biggest cleaver, and raced through the house in time to see Robin poised in a windowsill, her legs bent and her arms out in front of her.
He shouted at her, but she dived out.
Robin almost beat Chris to the doorway of the Copper Room-then almost got jammed with him, which would have hurt, as he had enough momentum by then to not really need a door; he could have just punched through the wall. She broke step enough to let him through, went through herself, and, running as fast as she could, gawked at the spectacle of Chris Major moving at full speed. She didn't get to watch long. He might have been flying.
Great Mother, but this was one huge tree.
It seemed to take forever, but finally she slammed in the back door and hurried through room after room, calling for Chris, Nova, Conal ... anybody. She never stopped moving. Once, out of the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of some horror shambling through an empty room, but she didn't pause. Nothing was going to stop her until she found Nova, and the source of that scream. She knew her daughter well, knew it wasn't a mouse that had made her shout like that.
But something did make her stop. She looked into a room with a lot of pillows and toys on the floor. She heard Adam crying, and saw a man-shaped creature-there was something badly wrong with it, but she couldn't see what in the brief glimpse-diving through the window with Adam in its hands.
Stopping in one-quarter gravity is something that needs practice. Robin wasn't good at it yet, and had to bang into a wall, push off with her hands, and swing around into the room with her hand on the door-jamb. She ran to the window, looked out, and saw the creature swimming away, one-armed. The other arm was holding Adam out of the water.
She kicked off her boots, stepped up into the window, and jumped.
Later, she would deny that she had forgotten she didn't know how to swim. Once before she had been dumped into water over her head. Something had happened to her, and she managed to reach the shore. She was counting on that to work again. But it didn't.
She hit with a stunning splash, and then struggled toward the light.
Her head breached the surface and she took a deep breath, then tried to swim. The harder she worked at it the worse it got. Her head kept going under and she didn't know any better than to try to keep her nose high-an ambition she kept defeating with her windmilling stroke. The current was carrying her in the same direction as her goal, but that didn't help, as the kidnapper was swimming with the current, too, and in the brief glimpses she got he was always farther away. They were swirling through swift water now, with rocks here and there, but it was always deep, always cold, and before long she knew she was going to die in this river. She was getting her head above water less often, and for shorter periods, and more often than not taking in a lot of water when she gasped for air.
Then an arm went around her neck and she was pulled up, on her back. She struggled for a moment but the arm tightened until she was nearly choking. She coughed up water, and relaxed. Chris pulled her strongly through the water toward the shore.
He got her to a rock in the middle of the stream where she could cling with her torso high and dry and not too much current tugging at her.
"Hang on!" he told her.
"Get him, Chris!" she shouted, hoarsely.
He was already away.
She pulled herself higher and looked over the top of the rock. The kidnapper was maybe a hundred feet ahead of Chris, and the gap was narrowing. But the water ahead was extremely rough.
A kind of frozen lethargy settled over her. She was exhausted, had been near death, and it was all she could do to hang onto the rock and watch events unfold before her eyes. They didn't seem to have much relation to her. She was able to wonder if the thief could make it through the rapids and keep Adam alive, but unable to connect his survival or death to herself. A scream kept bubbling up in her throat, but it didn't have anywhere to go.
She heard the Titanides crossing the bridge, making a sound like an avalanche. She turned, and saw Serpent pointing toward Chris, saw Rocky leap over the railing and float down, forelegs first, then hit with a splash that sent water fifty feet high. His head came up and he was swimming strongly as Serpent and Valiha went through the front door of Tuxedo Junction, not bothering to open it.
There were sounds of something crashing through the brush, and Robin turned in time to see Cirocco pounding along the edge of the river. She passed Robin's rock, passed Chris, reached a suitable place for take-off and leaped. Her body followed an almost flat trajectory and she was forty feet from shore before she hit the water.
And she didn't sink. She had arched her back and held her arms in a swept-back position, like a jetliner, and held her chin high as she hit, and she skipped twice, like a flat stone, then body-surfed another precious five feet before the water had her. She was thirty feet behind her objective and swimming strongly.
Robin found herself balanced on her knees, her fists tight and her teeth clenched, willing Cirocco onward. Dimly she was aware of the sounds of Valiha and Serpent diving into the water somewhere behind her, but her eyes never left the woman she would always think of as the Wizard. It looked like Cirocco would tear the bastard into tiny pieces when she got to him, and there was nothing in the world Robin wanted to see more than that.
She heard shouts behind her. A wide shadow swooped over her with breathtaking speed, then all she could see was the skimpy rear profile of an angel, twenty-foot wings at full extension, the tips skimming the water.