The zom ignored the damage and lunged forward to take a bite.
Benny threw himself backward, and the zom’s shattered teeth closed around a pocket of the vest instead. Benny heard a bottle of cadaverine crunch to stinking fragments inside the pocket.
The creature did not notice or care, and Benny was positive now that the network of wires bolted to its face somehow cut off its sense of smell. Maybe the scientists had done it as part of some experiment, or maybe smell was really a zombie’s primary hunting sense. Not that it mattered right now . . . the zom could see and it could still bite.
Benny fell backward with the creature, and as he fell he brought his knee up between its legs, hitting it square on the bottom of the pelvis. The fall and the kick gave Benny the power he needed to hurl the monster completely over him. It landed with a bone-rattling thud and immediately scrambled to its feet.
Benny brought his sword around into a two-hand grip but only got as far as his knees before he realized that he was in worse trouble than he thought.
As the zom raced toward him again, it snatched up a broken branch from the ground and swung it full force at Benny’s head.
There was a moment of red-black blankness. Benny never actually felt the blow. One second it was about to hit him, and then he was falling.
Then he saw something inexplicable.
The zom was falling too.
It crashed down a yard away face-to-face with Benny. The milky eyes stared at him, but now there was nothing there. No animal rage. Nothing.
But the strangest part of all was that there seemed to be an arrow sticking out of its temple.
Then a shadow fell over him, and Benny tried to bring up his sword in a last desperate defense against some new terror. Maybe the other green-jumpsuited zom?
“Hey, monkey-banger,” said a familiar voice. “You pick the strangest times to lie down for a nap.”
Benny blinked and stared. “Chong?”
It was Chong, but as Benny struggled to get to his feet, he saw his friend’s face. And froze.
Chong’s skin was gray, and a pale film of white covered his eyes.
Chong was a zom.
87
ALEXI TURNED TO SEE TWO STRANGERS—A MAN AND A TEENAGE GIRL— climb off a quad, guns in their hands, barrels raised. He saw a monster of a dog dressed in spiked armor race past him and heard it crunch into the oncoming zoms. Bullets burned past him on either side.
He heard the teenage girl yell, “NIX!”
And he heard the voice of the red-haired girl yell, “LILAH!”
Then zoms piled onto him and he staggered backward.
Alexi roared and shook his body like an angry bear, flinging the dead off him. He swung his hammer to crush heads and chests.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the little redhead swinging her toy sword like she actually knew something. Shattering legs, crushing skulls, dodging and twisting.
She’d make a great reaper, he thought as he fought. If she lives through this, I’m going to recruit that little witch.
Zombies were falling dead around him, from those he smashed, from the wooden blade of the redhead, from the gunshots, and from the dog.
Alexi really liked the dog.
He’d never seen anything fight like that, and he wondered why it had never occurred to him to train dogs to work with the reapers. This one was a cunning fighter, clearly trained to fight the dead. It did not bite at all, but instead used its horned helmet and spiked armor to rend and smash and dismember. The dead had no chance against it. Those who tried to bite it shattered their teeth on its chain mail. It was like a pack of lions trying to tear down an armored personnel carrier.
Suddenly Alexi realized that everyone in the clearing was engaged in fighting the dead except him. The gray people who had attacked him were all dead. He glanced at the man and girl with the guns. They were totally absorbed in their own personal wars.
He hefted his hammer.
“Screw this,” he said, and ran away as fast as his long legs could carry him.
He vanished into the woods to find Mother Rose.
88
“CHONG—?” BENNY GASPED.
The dead-pale face split in a rueful grin. “What’s left of him.”
“But—but—your face. What happened?”
Chong stood bare-chested, wrapped in bandages. He held a sophisticated bow in his hands, and there was a quiver of arrows slung low across his hips. He did not meet Benny’s eyes, though; he gaped at something above them. When Benny reached up to touch his forehead, he felt swollen flesh. Blood dripped like red rain across his eyes.
The pain caught up to him then.
Immense, crashing, like a giant bell ringing an inch from his ears.
Chong said something, but the words didn’t seem to make sense.
Benny asked him to repeat it, but he heard his own words.
They were meaningless gibberish.
The fading sunlight flared too white and too bright, and then the hinges fell off the world and Benny was falling.
Falling.
Falling.
89
BENNY COULD NOT MOVE. HE COULD BARELY BREATHE. HIS HEAD FELT LIKE it was actually on fire.
He heard several sounds happen all at once, colliding into one another so hard and fast that it was hard to separate them out and assign meaning.
He heard a girl scream in fear. Nix?
Did she say his name? Was she the one shouting it over and over?
He heard a dog barking.
So weird. He didn’t have a dog.
He heard the moans of the living dead.
He heard gunshots.
He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them the light had changed. And now there was a ring of faces around him. Benny raised a hand and touched one of them; he traced the line of a pink scar down through a field of freckles.
“I love you,” he said.
The face, grave with concern, flushed, and that made Benny smile.
“Benny,” said Nix, “you’re hurt. You hit your head.”
“A zom hit my head,” he said. “I was hit in the head by a zom.” He thought that was funny and laughed, but laughing hurt, so he stopped.
The other faces swam in and out of focus. Lilah. Chong.
“Are you dead?” he asked Chong.
Chong tried to smile, but it didn’t suit his face. “That’s open to debate,” he said.
Nix said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Chong said something, but Benny didn’t understand it. Thinking was so hard. His head felt like it was in a hollow metal box and someone kept banging on it.
He thought he heard Nix scream. Or cry. Or maybe she was laughing.
“Are you sleeping?” asked a tiny voice, and Benny realized that his eyes had closed. He open them to see a lovely little face.
“Eve?”
“You found me in a hole in the ground,” she said. At first Benny thought it didn’t make sense, but then he realized it did.
“Yeah, just like a bunny rabbit.” He touched the tip of her nose. “You’re a little bunny.”
She giggled.
That sound seemed to screw one of the world’s hinges back into place.
A strange voice said, “Kid’s a mess. Skull fracture, concussion . . . ”
Benny looked toward the sound of the voice. A big man smiled down at him. One of those tight smiles people give when they don’t want you to know how bad things look through their eyes. It was almost a wince.“I’m Joe,” he said.
“I know you,” said Benny as he raised a bloody finger and touched Joe’s face. “You’re on a Zombie Card. Captain Ledger, Hero of First Night. You’re number two-eighty-four. I have two of you. I was going to trade one of you to Morgie for his Sheriff Rick card.”
Riot’s face swam into view. “What the heck are Zombie Cards?”
“Kid’s delirious.”
Chong said, “The reapers are coming. We saw them.”
“Where and how many?” demanded Joe.
“Reaper, reaper . . . ,” Benny began, and tried to work it into a rhyme, but he couldn’t.
“There are a couple of hundred of them out on the desert, heading toward the hills,” said Riot. “But a bunch came running after us.”
“On foot or on quad?”
“Both. I lost them, but they’ll find us.”
Benny wondered what they were talking about. It began to occur to him that his head was not working properly, that his thoughts were silly. The word “delirious” triggered a response that went deeper than his understanding. A voice spoke inside his head.
Think, Benny, it said. You saw something.
But he did not understand what the voice meant.
Joe said, “Then we have to go now. Get to Sanctuary . . . ”
“We can’t move Benny,” insisted Nix. “His head . . . ”
“What’s an MRE?” Benny asked. They ignored him. He frowned, because he was sure that was important. He’d read it somewhere.
“We can’t fight off an army of reapers. Not here.”
“We can’t let ’em get to Sanctuary,” growled Riot. “They’ll slaughter the monks and refugees and all them scientists and—”
Joe looked stricken. “I know. They have a few soldiers there, but they can’t stop an army. And my rangers are scattered all over the place. We have to warn them. That means either we go without this kid, in which case the reapers’ll carve him into lunch meat; or we put him on a quad and let the ride out there do the job for them.”
In the distance they heard the faint buzz of quads. They all looked that way and then at one another.
“Oh God,” breathed Nix.
Benny, whispered Tom, you know what you saw. Tell them. Tell them. . . .
“What I wouldn’t give for a minigun or an—”
Benny asked dazedly, “What’s a LAW rickett?”
Joe froze and stared down at him.
“What did you say?”
“That’s what it said. L-A-W-R-K-T. LAW rickett. I read it. M-R-E. R-P-G and—”
Joe suddenly bent close to Benny, his face inches away.
“A LAW rocket? God almighty, kid . . . where did you see that?” he asked in a fierce whisper.
Benny smiled and winked. “I can’t tell you,” he said. “It’s a secret.”
And then he passed out.
90
BENNY FELT A LOT OF HANDS ON HIM. HE FELT HIMSELF MOVING. WHEN he opened his eyes, though, the movement had already stopped and he was back inside the airplane.
“Zoms!” he cried.
But no one reacted.
Nothing tried to bite him.
Maybe I’m wrong about that, he decided, and went back to sleep.
The sound of quads woke him up. Quads and shouts and a dog barking.
Benny still hadn’t seen any dog. He just heard one. A big one too.
“They’re coming,” said Riot. “God—Brother Alexi’s back with a slew of reapers. Gotta be fifty, sixty of them.”
“Oh God,” Nix said, “there’s too many!”
Someone laughed. Joe? Was Benny’s Zombie Card laughing? Silly.
He opened his eyes and saw Joe carrying something that looked like a big toy gun. Like one of those big plastic toys from before First Night. A Super Soaker. Mayor Kirsch bought one for his kids. Cost three hundred ration dollars. That was more than Mrs. Riley made in a whole season doing sewing.
“Nix?” he asked.
A small, warm hand took his, and Benny tried to turn toward her, but his head wouldn’t move. His whole body felt weird, like it was tied to a board. How crazy was that?
Nix leaned over, and he saw her face. She was so pretty.
“Nix, is your mom here?”
Pain flickered in her green eyes.
“Mama’s dead, Benny. You know that.”
“Oh. I thought I heard her laughing. She was baking muffins.”
Something hot and wet fell on his cheek.
A tear.
Where did that come from?
The roar of quads filled the whole cabin. Benny thought it sounded like a zillion of them. People were yelling. Roaring. Cursing, too.
“They’re coming!” shrieked Nix. “They’re climbing up!”
Joe’s voice roared: “Fire in the hole!”
There was big hissing sound, and then the whole plane shook with a gigantic rolling booooom!
The sound was too big for Benny, and he went back down in the darkness. He was sure Nix’s mom was baking muffins.
91
NIX AND CHONG STOOD AT THE EDGE OF THE HATCH AND STARED DOWN at horror.
The air was thick with smoke from the LAW rockets and rocket-propelled grenades that the ranger had fired. The air tasted of gunpowder and wrongness.
The clearing and the whole edge of the plateau was a slaughterhouse. Burned and blasted bodies lay everywhere. Even the trees at the edge of the forest had died in the barrage as the weapons of the old world wrought their carnage.
They were both crying.
“One man,” whispered Nix.
Chong nodded, unable to speak. Sick in body, sick in soul.
One man.
The ranger, Joe, had used those terrible weapons. The reapers, the chosen ones, the elite of Mother Rose’s army, had poured out of the forest, brought back by Alexi to claim the weapons hidden in the shrine. They thought themselves to be the most powerful force left on earth. They thought themselves to be unstoppable—those among them who believed in God and those who only believed in Mother Rose—they surged forward to slaughter the pitiful handful of people who stood against them.
And they all died.
Every last one of them. More than half of Mother Rose’s army. Gone.
Nix and Chong had not fired a shot.
Nor had Lilah.
Or Riot.
Even Grimm had only watched.
One man.
Now Joe walked among the bodies, looking for signs of reanimation. Every now and then a hollow crack broke the silence. As he reloaded, he looked around, and his eyes met those of Chong and Nix. The ranger’s face was totally without expression as he pocketed the empty magazine and slapped a new one into place. His eyes were not bright with battle lust or dark with emotion. His eyes were . . . nothing. They were as dead in their way as the zoms. Joe stood for a moment, watching them watching him, then turned without a word and went about his grotesque but necessary work.