She lowered the glasses. “You think they have ladders hidden under the grass?”

“I’d actually be kind of disappointed if they didn’t. All things considered it’s a pretty snazzy plan. Good chance it’s going to work, too.”

“Can we do anything? I mean . . . there’s a lot of them, right? What can we possibly do now?”

I grinned and pulled the hood over my face. “Not sure about you, kiddo, but I intend to misbehave.”

“‘Aim to misbehave,’” she said.

“What?”

“It’s a quote from Serenity,” she said. “The old movie. The spinoff of Firefly . . . ?”

I patted her shoulder. “You may very well be the toughest absolute nerd girl left on Earth.”

“Thanks,” she said. And meant it.

We got up and, yes, we misbehaved.

***

Dahlia found Church and told him what she thought.

“Go back to the main gate,” he said. “It may be a dodge, and I rather think it is, but it’s still a major threat. We need to change the dynamic there. Your original plan is still a good one, but the mission has changed. Adapt to that. We need to shift the swarm. Do you understand?”

“Got it,” she said.

“I’ll leave Jumper and some people here and take the rest to the east wall.”

“What about the sniper out back?”

“Let him stay in place for now,” said Church. “We can deal with him later. We have a war to fight.”

***

Dahlia returned to the front wall and when she climbed up again she looked out on a scene from hell itself. There were no longer hundreds of the living dead out there.

Now there were thousands of them. Seething masses of the dead, boiling out of the woods like cockroaches from a collapsing building. The Rovers in their white garments beat and shoved them into the corridor of flame that led to the front gate. The archers were nearly out of arrows and some had taken to simply throwing river stones at the zombies. The mountain of corpses was now higher than the broken wall and Dahlia saw it tremble as more of the dead slammed against it from behind or writhed, still in their parody of life, within it. It was going to fall soon. There was no doubt of that. Once it did, there would be a highway of rotting bodies high enough to allow the living dead to enter Happy Valley.

If they got into the town, then it would be carnage. Maybe—just maybe—the Pack and the helpers and the few allied residents could fight the zombies. But not the dead and the Rovers. Happy Valley was too spread out inside and too poorly prepared for attack outside.