“That’s great, Nix,” Benny said, stroking her back.
But she shook her head and kept shaking it.
“Nix? What is it . . . what’s wrong?”
And then he understood.
Then he remembered.
The memory was a knife in his heart.
“Nix,” he whispered, and his voice broke on that single word. “Nix . . . where’s Chong?”
She clung to him. “They’re trying, Benny. They’re trying everything. But . . . he’s so sick. He’s already so . . . ”
Nix couldn’t say another word.
Benny wouldn’t have been able to hear her anyway.
They clung to each other, and together they dropped brokenly to their knees.
-3-
IT WOULD BE HELL.
Lilah knew that.
Hell was something the Lost Girl knew. She had lived it all her life.
She was a toddler on First Night, but she remembered the panic and flight. The endless screams. The blood and the dying.
She saw her pregnant mother die as Lilah’s sister, Annie, came screaming into the world. She remembered the other refugees, filled with terror and confusion, at first recoil from her mother as she came back from that place where all souls go and only the soulless return from. She remembered what they did—what they had to do. Lilah had screamed herself raw. Those screams had smashed down the doorway into hell.
She remembered Charlie Pink-eye and the Hammer brutalizing George and then laying rough hands on her and Annie. Dragging them to Gameland.
To the zombie pits.
She remembered coming back to Gameland to rescue Annie, but Annie was not there. A thing was, wearing the disguise of beautiful little Annie.
Lilah remembered what she had been forced to do.
And she remembered every moment of every day of every month of the lonely years that followed.
Hell?
Lilah knew hell.
It had nothing to teach her, no new tricks it could play on her.
She sat on the edge of Chong’s bed and watched the strange machines beep and ping. But each beep was farther apart, each ping closer to a whisper.
Lilah held Chong’s icy hand in hers. His eyes stared up at the ceiling, but they were milky, the irises transformed into a polluted mix of brown and green and black. The pupils were pinpricks, the whites veined with black lines as thin as sewing thread.
Bags of chemicals and medicines hung pendulously from the metal bed frame, dripping their mysteries into Chong’s veins. His arm was covered with the black marks from needles. So many needles.
Lilah had refused to wear a hazmat suit. The doctors had warned her that if she didn’t put one on, she could never leave this building. Even they couldn’t guarantee that she wouldn’t carry a disease out with her that would do what the Reaper Plague and all the other plagues had failed to do. Wipe everyone and everything out. The people inside the labs lived in isolation, never touching flesh to flesh, not even a handshake. They wore their hazmat suits all day until they sealed themselves into their private bedroom cells.
Lilah didn’t care about any of that.
If she got sick and died, so what?
She would not be alone in death’s kingdom. She knew that.
She listened to the beeps and willed Chong to fight.
To fight.
Fight.
“You damn well fight, you stupid town boy,” she growled.
But with every minute those beeps, those electronic signs of life, grew fainter and fainter.
Until all she could hear was a long, continuous scream from the heart monitor.
It was almost the loudest sound in the world.
Only her own, endless keening cry of grief was louder.
Hell, it seemed, had one last trick to play.
-4-
BENNY AND NIX STOOD BY THE EDGE OF THE TRENCH AS THE SUN FELL behind the world and the stars ignited overhead. The trench was twenty feet across. It might as well have been ten miles. Ten thousand miles.
They stared at the tall building with its electric lights glowing against the shadows on the walls.
Stared at one window, high and to the left.
An hour ago they had seen Lilah’s silhouette there.
There had been no sign of her since.
They didn’t even turn when Joe’s quad rumbled to a stop. They heard him switch it off, heard Grimm’s soft whuff and the crunch of Joe’s shoes on the gravel, but they never took their eyes from that lighted window.
“Listen,” said Joe softly, “I just brought back the last of the stuff from the plane. The scientists are going over it now. It was exactly what they needed. It . . . ” His voice trailed off.
“Go away,” said Benny. His voice was crushed flat and empty.
Joe walked around and stood in front of them, forcing them to see him, to react to him. He squatted down, resting his elbows on his knees. Grimm stood beside him, his eyes dark and liquid.
“I want you two to listen to me,” Joe said. “Straight talk here, okay? I know you’re hurting. I know why you left Mountainside. I understand why you’ve been searching for the jet. I know what it means to you. A better place than your little town. A chance at a real future. I get that. I’d have done the same. Tom must have thought so too, or he’d have never left and never taken you with him.”
“You don’t know anything,” said Nix.
“No? Well, I know this much,” said Joe. “You left a place that was dying on its feet. Mountainside and the rest of the Nine Towns are just going through the motions of being alive. Everybody knows that. You knew it and you got the hell out. You wanted to find a place to start something new and fresh.”
Benny glanced at him. It was almost the same thing Tom had said.
“You have,” said Joe.
“No,” said Nix.
Somewhere far away a coyote whined at the rising moon.
“You found the stuff in the jet,” said Joe. “You kids might have actually helped saved the world.”
“It’s not worth it,” Benny said. “It cost too much.”
Joe sighed and stood up. He looked up at the endless stars.
“It’s been a long night,” he said softly, “and there are still a lot of hours of darkness left. But . . . ”
He started to turn away, and Benny said, “But what?”
Joe gave him a small, sad smile. “No matter how long the night is, the sun always comes up.”
He nodded to them, clicked his tongue for Grimm, and walked slowly away. He climbed onto his quad and started the engine.
They watched him drive away.
After a while Nix turned to Benny. “Is he right?” she asked.
Benny shook his head. “I don’t know.”
He wrapped his arm around her, and they looked up at the lighted window.
The stars burned their way across the sackcloth that covered the sky.
-5-
SAINT JOHN STOOD ON A CLIFF THAT LOOKED DOWN ON A BLACK ROAD. Brother Peter stood beside him, hands clasped behind his back, head bowed in thought. It was a beautiful night, with a billion stars and a fingernail moon. Crickets chirped in the grass, and owls hunted in the air.
The saint enjoyed being out here in the wild. The desert had reclaimed much of the road over the years, but it was there, and it ran straight and true to the line of mountains that formed the border of Nevada and California.
“Nine towns,” murmured Saint John. “And a place called Mountainside.”
“Praise be to the darkness,” said Brother Peter.
Saint John raised his hand, held it high in the moonlight for a long moment, and pointed a slender finger toward the road. Toward the northwest.
The desert behind him was like a sea of roiling black. The reapers came first, flowing out of the dark, and as they reached Brother Peter they formed into orderly lines, seven across. Then they followed Brother Peter down the road. Some of them prayed, some of them sang. It took twenty minutes for all the reapers to file past where the saint stood.
Thousands upon thousands of reapers.
Those who had thought themselves lost when the world ended, who now knew that all roads led through pain and into the healing darkness. Those who had lost faith in this world of disease and death and endless struggle, who now thrived with a purpose—God’s purpose. Many of them had once fought against the reapers and then, in their defeat, beheld the truth and took up their weapons again in the service of Thanatos, all praise his darkness.
The lost who had been found.
The blind who now saw.
The last army of the world, marching to fight the last war. The only war that ever mattered. The war to save mankind from its own sinful ways.
Saint John lingered a moment after the last of them was on the road. He closed his eyes and lifted a silver dog whistle to his lips, kissed it, and then blew into it, long and hard.
Behind him a second wave—ten times larger than the mass of reapers—moved forward. If the reapers were a sea, then this was an ocean, moving in a tidal surge under the watching moon. All the crickets were shocked to silence by the moan that rose from tens of thousands of dead throats.
Saint John smiled.
Nine towns waiting.
All those godless souls waiting, aching to be shown the way.
His reapers would open red mouths in the flesh of every man, woman, and child.
And then the gray people would consume them all, flesh and bone.