I tried to ram my fear back down my throat. If I started sprinting, I’d literally run right out of my boots. Even if I managed to get away, I wouldn’t last an hour out here barefoot.

I started up again.

The sucking noise started up.

But now it was in stereo.

Dozens of feet squelching through the reeds.

When I looked over my shoulder, there was only darkness. I swung my head back toward the highway. I was almost there. I could even make out the station wagon smashed beneath the fallen tree at the base of the barricade.

Ten more steps.

The invisible army marched behind me.

Seven steps.

Terror bubbled up from my chest. I swallowed it back down.

Three.

At last I eased onto the asphalt, keeping both boots.

I whipped around.

Emerging from the darkness, a band of cannery workers, looking even more ragged than those before. Seven or eight of them. Clothes half torn off. Bushy beards sprouting from the men’s faces. The women’s fingernails snapped off and bloody.

They broke into a run, their feet kicking up sprays of mud.

I turned and sprinted for the barricade, the backpack bouncing on my shoulders. Their footfalls pounded the highway behind me, closer and closer.

I leapt onto the hood of the station wagon, landing before the dead Host driver—Nick’s father. He was still sprawled through the windshield where we’d left him, his head pulverized. I used his back as a stepping-stone to launch me onto the roof, and from there I shot up onto the beaver-dam rise of fallen tree trunks. My hands scrabbled across the wet bark.

The Hosts reached the base of the crisscrossed tree trunks and flew up at me.

They were closing too fast.

I wasn’t going to make it.

If I drew the gun, I’d never get off all the shots in time. I dipped a shoulder, let the pack slide into a trough between the logs. I swung the baling hooks up on their nylon loops and seized the handles.

I turned.

One Host bounded onto the station wagon, denting the roof. Only a few yards away. There’d be no running from them or outsmarting them.

Not this time.

Curved steel hooks protruding from either fist, I turned and leapt into the mass.

Entry 33

ENTRY 33

I landed on the roof of the station wagon, the impact sending out a kettledrum rumble, the metal cratering beneath my boots.

Hosts lunged up at me from all sides.

I didn’t think.

I just fought.

A flurry of steel and blood, the baling hooks like a part of my body. I sank a tip in one Host’s throat, ripping it out even as I pivoted to cave in another’s skull at the temple. The first three fell away, knocking down the others trying to scale the sides of the station wagon.

But I wasn’t done there.