“They’re here,” she said, but her eyes darted away for a moment. “We’re all here.”
“I want to see Lilah and Chong.”
Nix hesitated. “Okay,” she said eventually. “Let me get your robe and mask.”
“Mask?”
“Everyone has to wear them in the houses. It’s confusing . . . it’s easier if you see it.”
Nix helped him stand and put on a robe made of heavy wool. Then she took a blue cotton mask and tied it around his mouth and nose. She put one on too.
“Sanctuary isn’t exactly what we thought it was,” she said, and her voice sounded ready to crack.
Nix slowly pushed back the curtains, and Benny stared wide-eyed.
They were in a vast room, hundreds of feet long, with a massive arched ceiling and huge windows at either end.
“It used to be an airplane hangar,” she explained. “There are eight like this one. And more on the other side of the compound.”
Benny hardly heard her. He stared numbly at the rows of cots that stretched from one end of the hangar to the other. Every bed was filled. Some of the beds were screened off, as his had been. Most were not, and most of the figures lay as still as death. Farther down the row, separated by a line of sawhorse barricades, was a larger screened-off area. Benny heard continuous coughs coming from there. Everywhere there were soft cries, the sound of weeping, moans of pain. Way-station monks in their simple tunics moved from bed to bed, washing the patients, hand-feeding them, talking to them. A few sat reading to people who seemed to stare up at the nothingness above their beds.
“Oh my God.”
“There are a thousand people in each hangar. All the hangars are full.”
Benny was appalled. “What is this place? Nix, this isn’t right. I thought there was a lab where they were studying the plague, trying to cure it.”
“That’s the other Sanctuary,” said Nix. “The labs are on the other side of the compound. I’ll show you.”
They walked slowly between the rows. Benny’s balance was bad and his legs weak, but Nix supported him and they walked with great care. Some of the patients looked at them, their eyes glazed with pain or bleak with despair.
“Who are these people?”
“Refugees from all over. The way-station monks bring a lot of them here. Some find their own way. Riot brings some.”
“Did the reapers do all this?”
Nix shook her head. “Benny, after First Night, there were no real hospitals left. No factories to mass-produce drugs. No local doctors to prescribe them. Everything broke down. Diseases just went wild. Everything, even simple infections, went crazy. It’s like this everywhere. People are dying everywhere faster than the zoms can kill them. The monks can’t help everyone. They aren’t real doctors . . . they’re just monks. They have a few places like this.”
“Hospitals?”
She gave another sad shake of her head. They paused to look at an old man who lay curled into a fetal position, his skin mottled with dark blisters.
“It’s a hospice, Benny. This hangar is a healing place, but not the others. The monks call those transition houses. They bring people here to take care of them while they’re dying.”
“Where are the doctors and nurses?”
“There are no doctors on this side of the compound. The doctors and the scientists are all in a different hangar. In what they call a clean facility. Almost no one’s allowed in except for the research field teams. And a few special patients.” She paused. “The thing is . . . once a patient goes into the clean facility, they’re not allowed out again.”
“Why not?”
“Because most of them die, and the ones that don’t are being studied. They’re trying to cure the Reaper Plague . . . what we’ve always called the zombie plague. Not just that, though . . . they’re trying to cure all these diseases. They’ve even come up with some treatments, and when they do, they give them to the monks. Not everyone who comes here dies.”
“But most do?”
She nodded sadly. “By the time most people come here, they’re already so sick. All the monks can do is make them comfortable.”
“It’s—it’s—” Benny had no word bad enough to hang on it.
“They’re doing what they can.”
They walked toward the exit doors. One or two of the patients nodded to him and he nodded back, though he wasn’t sure what that silent communication signified. Maybe, We’re not dead yet.
It was horrible.
“I’m remembering things in bits and pieces. I remember a big dog and some strange guy. Joe, maybe? I have this weird memory about a Zombie Card. . . . ”
“That’s him.” Nix told him about Lilah finding Joe, and about Joe being the head of a team of wilderness scouts called the rangers. “He used to be a bounty hunter up around our way, which is how he knew Tom and why he’s on a Zombie Card, but he left a long time ago and went south. Benny . . . there’s a kind of government. It’s small, but it’s there. They call it—”
“—the American Nation. We saw it on the plane.”
“It’s real,” she said. “They only have about a hundred thousand people so far, mostly in North Carolina, and they’ve been looking for more. People are trying to put it back together.”
Benny thought about his dream, about what Tom had said.
“I hope not,” he said. “They need to make something else, something new. Something better.”
Nix’s green eyes glittered as she studied him; then she nodded.
They walked on until they reached the end of the big hangar. The sadness of it all was a crushing weight on Benny. His heart hurt worse than his head, and he wanted to go back to his cot, pull the blankets over his head, and let all this go away. That was impossible, though, and he knew it.
Nix opened the door, and they stepped out into the sunlight.
Benny blinked and held a hand up to shade his eyes. As he adjusted to the glare, he saw that they stood outside the first in a row of massive hangars. Monks walked slowly in and out of the buildings. The grounds outside were planted with herbs, and there were rock gardens with benches for meditation. It looked peaceful out here, but the hangars held horrors inside.
Nix pointed at the other buildings, each of which had a large number painted above the door. “Building One is for patients they think will recover. Mostly injuries, animal bites, or people wounded by reaper attacks.”
“What about the other buildings?”
Nix pulled off her mask. “We’re not allowed to go in there. That’s where they keep the people with communicable diseases. Pneumonia, tuberculosis, cholera, bubonic plague. The monks who work in there never come outside.”
“What happens to them?”
Nix did not answer. She didn’t have to. Instead she said, “There are always new monks going in.”
“That’s horrible!”
She sniffed back tears. “But the monks keep volunteering. I spoke to one, a woman about my mom’s age. She said that it didn’t matter if she got sick. When it was her time to go into one of the other buildings, then at least in her last days, caring for people, she would know that her life mattered.”
Benny stared at her. “That’s what it’s come to? Is that all there is out here? Just this?”
“No,” she said, and he saw a steadiness in her eyes that he had not seen for a long time. More like the old Nix. More like the one he fell in love with. And yet there was sadness, too. Something deep and terrible. She took his hand and led him around the corner of the hangar.
Nix pointed to a spot beyond the herb garden. There was a small playground with a swing set, some monkey bars, a slide, and a big sandbox. A dozen children laughed and played and ran, their faces as bright as the sun, their laughter cleaner than anything in the world.
A little blond girl was with them, playing a game of tag in and around the legs of the monkey bars as three female monks watched with patient smiles. She wore a white tunic, and there were flowers in her hair.
“Eve,” said Benny.
He made to call out to her, but Nix shook her head. “Not yet. This is only the second day that she’s been playing.”
“She looks happy,” he said.
“More each day.”
Benny nodded. Even though he knew that there would be a long uphill road for Eve, seeing her smile put a smile on his lips. He saw another figure sitting cross-legged on the ground in the shade of a palm tree that overhung the playground.
“Is that Riot?” he asked.
“Yes. She won’t let Eve out of her sight.”
“You still think she’s a freak?”
Nix shook her head. “She’s been through a lot.” She told Benny about Riot’s past, about her being a reaper and about how she’d rebelled against that lifestyle and spent the years since helping people.
“Her mom is Mother Rose?” gasped Benny.
“Was,” corrected Nix. “Mother Rose died that day we found the wrecked plane. Riot’s been dealing with that, and I think it hit her harder than she expected.”
“How could it not?” asked Benny. “She was still her mother.”
Nix nodded. “I guess . . . she’s one of us. And she did everything she could to help Eve’s family. She knows now that we were only trying to help Eve too.”
“Well,” Benny said, “Eve’s still here. We accomplished something. We saved a kid. That’s got to count for something, even in this world.”
Shadows moved in Nix’s eyes. Not the dangerous ones that had been there so often since her mother was killed; but shadows nonetheless. Was it because their trip had failed so badly in almost every way, or because this harsh world out here in no way matched Nix’s expectations? Benny was afraid to ask for fear of breaking what resolve she had managed to put in place.
Nix sniffed back some more tears and said, “Listen, Benny, there are some things I have to tell you. Good and bad things, okay?”
“I don’t know how much more I want to hear,” he said, pitching it as a joke and watching it fall flat.
Nix said, “Do you remember seeing the jet?”
Benny brightened. “I—think so. Was it real?”
“It’s real, and it’s here. It’s in one of the hangars on the other side of the compound. But before I show you, I have to warn you about something. I need you to understand how this place works.”
“You’re scaring me here, Nix.”
“I don’t mean to.” She took a ragged breath. “Benny, people have been coming here for years. A lot of them. Long before the American Nation set up the lab. Before they had any kind of treatments for anything. People came here to die in peace, Benny. They came here because this place is run by way-station monks. Do you understand what that means?”
“Yes,” Benny said, though his voice was a hoarse croak. “Way-station monks think the zoms are the meek who are supposed to inherit the earth.”
“Have inherited the earth, Benny. Have.”
He studied her, but her eyes were hard. She seemed to be waiting for him to ask, so he asked. A terrible thought crept into his mind.
“Nix,” he asked, “what happened to all those people?”
Nix nodded and took him gently by the hand and guided him around the corner of the hangar.
Benny stopped dead in his tracks. Just beyond the hangar was a trench that was twenty feet wide and twenty feet deep. Beyond that was a set of runways for a military airport. Benny had seen pictures of places like this. The flat ground stretched all the way to the range of red rocks in one direction and into a heat haze on the far horizon. A second set of hangars—four in all—stood a thousand yards beyond the trench, and in front of those was a six-story concrete building. Surrounding these buildings was a ten-foot-high cinder-block wall. On the far side of the landing field, well beyond the runways, there was a line of slender towers, like lampposts but with bell-shaped devices mounted atop each one.
Outside the cinder-block wall, filling the desert and stretching off into the shimmering horizon, were zoms. Thousands upon thousands of them. There were more lining the edge of the trench, and when Benny looked toward the back of the building, he saw many more.
Nix said, “Joe says that there are probably two or three hundred thousand of them now. When people die, they are taken across the trench and allowed to roam free. The monks pray for them several times a day.”
“But the jet? The lab?”
Nix reached into the V of her blouse and pulled out a silver whistle on a chain. “Recognize this? It’s a reaper’s dog whistle. It’s ultrasonic. The zoms follow it every time.” She pointed. “See those towers? When the jet is ready to take off or land, they blast an ultrasonic call through those. The zoms follow the call to the towers, and it clears the runway. I’ve seen it work twice now. It’s amazing.”
“Dog whistles,” said Benny. “It’s warrior smart. Tom would approve.”
Nix nodded.
“What goes on over there?” asked Benny, pointing to the concrete buildings.
Nix started to answer, but the brave front she had been putting up collapsed, and she crumpled into grief. She put her face in her hands, and her body shook with sobs.
“Hey . . . hey . . . Nix—what’s wrong?”
Nix turned and wrapped her arms around him, sobbing as hard now as she had back on the crashed plane. But through her sobs she forced herself to speak.
“They’re working on the cure over there, Benny. They really are. With the stuff we found, the stuff on the plane, they think that maybe they really will cure it. They think that they’ll be able to stop the plague . . . to stop the infection . . . ”