Reapers screamed as they were caught between the savagery of Chong’s feral attack and the whistling blades of Dojigiri and the kami katana. The surviving reapers were fighting back to back, trying to use their blades to stop the longer steel, but now they were on the defensive.
Grimm raced along the wall toward Brother Peter, but the reaper deftly sidestepped and kicked the dog in the side. Even with the armor, the kick was powerful enough to knock the mastiff into the wall, where he lay winded and whining.
With a snarl of annoyance, Brother Peter waded into the fight, blocking Nix’s blade with one knife and slashing at her with the other. Blood erupted from amid the freckles on Nix’s cheek, the slash bisecting the scar that ran from her hairline to her jaw.
Nix cried out in pain and retreated, cutting with redoubled speed, but everywhere her sword went, Brother Peter’s knives were there to deflect it. He moved so fast that it looked like he had eight arms. Metal rang on metal as he drove Nix back.
Benny wanted to jump in to help her, but the other reapers renewed their attack, forcing him back. Other killers surrounded Chong.
Suddenly a shot rang out and one of the reapers went spinning away, blood erupting from a hole in his throat.
For an irrational moment Benny thought it was Joe Ledger, but the ranger had only managed to get to his hands and knees and was leaning against the wall, gasping like a fish on a riverbank.
The shock of the gunfire temporarily stopped the fight in the hallway. The reapers backed away from Chong, uncertain of what was happening; and Chong scuttled away from them, bleeding, glaring, and confused.
A figure raced up from behind Dr. McReady, grabbed the scientist, shoved her away from all the fighting, and fired two more shots. Reapers dodged and yelled, and one of them fell with a wound in his shoulder. The newcomer wore a military uniform that was torn and bloodstained, and she had a wild look in her eyes.
Colonel Jane Reid.
She fired another shot and a reaper clutched his chest and fell, but then the slide locked back on Colonel Reid’s pistol.
Brother Peter saw this and dodged Nix’s cuts and ran at Reid, eyes blazing.
In a freakish way Benny could understand the reaper’s rage. Colonel Reid was the commander of Sanctuary, and this whole place stood as a symbol of everything the Night Church wanted to destroy. Killing her must be to Brother Peter what killing one of the archdukes of hell would have been for a crusading knight of old.
Benny stepped into the reaper’s path, his sword raised.
“Stop!”
If Brother Peter was impressed in any way by Benny and his sword, he did not show it. He merely looked impatient. Benny shuffled backward to keep his body between the reaper and the colonel.
“No,” he said.
All the fighting in the hallway stopped. Even Chong hung back, his body hunched like an ape’s, his eyes feral and watchful, bloody teeth bared.
Brother Peter stopped.
“If it is your wish to die a hero, boy,” he said, “then I will oblige you.”
“That’s not how it’s going to be.”
“Ah,” said the reaper, “is this the point where you make a lovely speech about how we can all walk away with our lives intact? Will you offer me and mine safe passage out of here if we leave you and these other sinners alive? Is that what this is?”
“No,” said Benny. Despite the shadows the hallway seemed bright. All sounds were so clear and distinct. If his body trembled with fear, at that moment Benny couldn’t feel it.
“Or,” said Brother Peter, looking coldly amused, “are you going to play the hero and challenge me to a winner-take-all duel? Two champions fighting for our separate causes. It’s very grand, but—”
“Not really.”
The reaper’s eyes darkened. “Then what is it? Did you simply want everyone to watch your great death scene?”
Grimm, who had finally struggled to his feet, uttered a long, low growl.
“No,” Benny said again. He licked his lips. “This isn’t a grandstand play, and it’s not a scene from a storybook. This is me, Benny Imura, just a kid from a small town, telling you that I’m going to kill you. Right here, right now.”
Brother Peter shook his head. “Why is it that you people can’t understand that we crave death—all death, including our own. Why do you persist in trying to unnerve us with threats?”
“That’s not what I’m trying to do,” said Benny. “I don’t really care if you want to die or not. I don’t care if killing you is like giving you a puppy on your birthday. I don’t really care about anything, you big freak. I’m just telling you that I’m going to kill you.”
Brother Peter raised his arms out to his sides, as Saint John so often did in the moment before he taught another blasphemer the error of his presumptions. “Then go ahead, little sinner. If you think you can kill me . . . then kill me.”
Benny Imura looked into the dead eyes of this master killer.
“Sure,” he said.
And he attacked.
85
TOM ONCE TOLD BENNY THIS about fighting: “Pit two amateurs against each other and the fight will go on all day. They’ll break a lot of furniture and they’ll bloody each other up a bit, but at the end of it, no one’s likely to get badly hurt. However, in a fight between two experts—two people with some skill and a real determination to kill each other—then it’s all over in a second or two. Sportsmen duel, killers kill.”
It was all over in two fractured halves of one second.
In the first half of that second . . .
Brother Peter parried Benny’s sword with one knife, spun off the point of impact, and drove the other knife into Benny’s back. The blade tore through the tough body armor and skittered along the back of his rib cage, exploding a fireball of alien heat in Benny’s body.
But Benny was not shocked by the pain. Or the damage.
He was not surprised by being stabbed.
He expected it.
He’d planned for it.
Brother Peter was too good to be defeated in such a duel. Maybe Tom, at the top of his game, might have done it. Maybe a younger and faster Joe Ledger might have. But no one in that hallway—not Nix or Lilah, not Grimm, not Chong, or Colonel Reid even if she had more bullets—none of them could ever beat Brother Peter.
Benny knew that Brother Peter would parry his attack because Peter was expecting the attack. Benny knew the reaper would stab him, because Peter was too good not to. So Benny attacked and was parried, and he was stabbed. And he was ready for all that. His first move was a big, fast kirioroshi, a downward cut. His raised arms gave Brother Peter something to block but also kept the killer’s knives away from his own throat.
In the last half of that one second . . .
As the blade chunked into his back, Benny pivoted in place. A sloppy move filled with agony, but perfect in its selection. It used the force of the stabbing knife to power the turn as Benny swung his sword between himself and Brother Peter. A yoko-giri, a tight lateral cut that cleaved the air between them.
Except that there was not enough distance for the sword to pass unhindered.
Brother Peter was too close.
Too close to avoid that blade.
Too close to escape the moment and all its red truths.
The sword drew a line through both of the reaper’s biceps, and through the flat plates of the man’s pectoral muscles, and grated along the bones in his chest, grooving the sternum so deeply that it collapsed inward. Brother Peter coughed as those jagged bones did awful work inside his body.
The kami katana flew from Benny’s hands as he staggered past the point of impact. He managed a single reflexive step before the pain drove him down to his knees. He fell against Colonel Reid, who—like everyone else—stared in abject horror at what had just happened.
The second came and went, and in its wake there was wreckage that would last forever.
Brother Peter stood for a moment longer. The stern, unlined face of the man who had never smiled now wore its first smile. A bemused smile, as he looked down at his chest and saw the red mouth that stretched all the way across his body. He dropped to his knees with such force that the sound of bone on concrete was like gunshots.
Benny turned and looked at him. They were only three feet apart, both of them on their knees.
“You—you haven’t won,” said Brother Peter in a voice that was wet and trembling.
There was a sound—the sharp, harsh, metallic sound of someone working the bolt of a machine gun—and Benny saw Joe Ledger, still bleeding, his face gray with pain, leaning against the far wall. His weapon was in his hands, barrel pointed at the remaining reapers.
“Yes, we have,” said Benny, and his voice was firmer than he thought it would be. He expected to speak in a dying whisper, but the lights in his head were not going out. Not yet. “We have a cure now. We win.”
The reaper sneered at him, blood dribbling from between his lips. “Take your . . . cure . . . see if it will save . . . anyone . . .”
His words were torn apart by a fit of coughing that sent him crashing to the stones. He fell over and stared at Benny with glazing eyes, but his lips still moved. Despite the agony in his own body, Benny crawled to him and bent to listen.
“Your sins . . . are already . . . paid for . . . ,” wheezed Brother Peter. “Even now . . . Saint John and our . . . army . . . are closing in on your . . . home.”
“Home? What are you talking about?”
Brother Peter was fading quickly, the lights burning out in his eyes. “Mountainside will burn.”
With that smile still on his lips, the reaper sagged back and seemed to settle against the cold stone. Benny wanted to grab him, to shake life back into him, to force him to live another moment longer so he could make sense of what he’d just said.
Mountainside will burn.
It was insane, impossible. How could the reapers know about Mountainside? Then he thought of the slip of paper he’d found that showed how many reapers were already in California. Two armies . . . one of forty-five hundred and another with over nineteen thousand of the killers. Already in California.
And they knew the name of Benny’s hometown.
They knew about Mountainside.
God . . .
How could his town defend itself? And with what? A tiny town watch and some fence guards? A frail chain-link fence?
Against an army of twenty-four thousand killers?
Suddenly Benny felt himself falling over.
He felt hands catching him. Women hovered over him.
Dr. McReady.
Colonel Reid.
They were both speaking at once, shouting, calling his name, yelling at each other.
Then the sound of gunfire drowned it all out.
Benny saw reapers trying to fight their way to Brother Peter; saw them suddenly jerk to a stop and dance like marionettes on the strings of a madman, their twitches and jumps purposeless. As they fell, their bodies riddled with bullet holes, Benny saw Lilah and Chong facing each other, both of them crouching like animals.
He bared his teeth at her.
She bared hers at him.
Chong attacked, pouncing like a panther; but the Lost Girl moved into the attack, slapping his head to one side, wrapping a muscular brown arm around his throat, bearing him to the ground, wrestling him, pinning him, screaming and screaming a single word that Benny fought to understand.
“Pills! PILLS!”
Nix stood there, torn between rushing to her and rushing to Benny.
Benny managed to raise one arm and made a pushing gesture toward Lilah.
She needs you, he wanted to say. Chong needs you. Help them.
Grimm stood by Joe Ledger, who had collapsed into a limp sprawl.
Benny tried to say something that would make sense of this moment.
He needed to tell Joe and Nix and Lilah about what Brother Peter had whispered to him.
Mountainside will burn.
But when he opened his mouth, all he could do was scream.
Then a hand of darkness wrapped its cold fingers around him and closed them into a fist.
PART FOUR
INVICTUS
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
—WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY, “INVICTUS”
86
A VOICE SAID, “YO, MONKEY-BANGER . . . you going to sleep forever?”
Benny’s first reaction was surprise. In his dreams he was dead, killed by Brother Peter or eaten by zoms. Or gored by a white rhino. Or shot by Preacher Jack.
But dead in any case.
His second reaction was confusion. Not at being alive, but at who was talking to him.
That wasn’t the right voice. It wasn’t Joe, and it wasn’t any of the girls. It wasn’t even Brother Albert.
Whose voice was that? It sounded like . . .
He carefully, tentatively opened one eye.
He was in a hospital bed. Metal tubing for the frame, stiff white sheets, the pervasive smell of antiseptic with other, nastier smells buried beneath it. Electric lights in the ceiling.
There was a chair beside his bed and a figure sitting in it. Thin, angular, and impossible.
“Ch-Chong?” stammered Benny.
“What’s left of him,” said his friend. Louis Chong looked like a stick-figure version of himself. He was wrapped in a blanket, cradling a cup of steaming tea between his palms. His skin was a dreadful shade of gray-green. His hair was freshly washed and combed back from his face. “Welcome back from the land of the dead.”
“How?” pleaded Benny. “How are you—I mean—”
“You guys saved me,” said Chong.