Benny nodded. “I know, Nix. I saw this coming.”
She studied his eyes, then nodded.
“So, where does that leave us?” he asked. Then he took in a breath and asked the hardest question in the world. “Do you still love me?”
Tears fell down her cheeks.
“I’ll always love you, Benny,” she said. “I just don’t know if I’m in love with you.”
She clutched his hand.
“Benny . . . please don’t hate me for telling the truth.”
Benny Imura pulled her to him, and they clung together in the heat of that awful shared awareness. “I could never hate you, Nix,” he said, his words muffled by her hair and by the pain in his heart.
She did not ask if he loved her.
Neither of them wanted to hear the answer to that question. There was no way—no matter how it was answered—that it would not cut like a sword.
89
COLONEL REID CLEARED HER THROAT, and Benny let go of Nix. She straightened and stood a few feet away.
“We need to get you on the chopper,” she said. Her eyes darted to Nix’s face, which was flushed and streaked with tears, and Benny’s, which he tried to turn away.
Nix held out her hand and helped Benny out of the chair. Dr. McReady had used a powerful local anesthetic on the knife wound, and it did, by Benny’s reckoning, nothing at all. But the pain was a marvelous distraction. It pulled his thoughts away from the even more savage wound in his heart.
They climbed onto the helicopter. Nix wanted to buckle Benny into a seat, but he shook his head, preferring to stay by the door. She reluctantly agreed and started to close the door, but Reid put her hand out to block it.
“You can still change your minds,” said the colonel. “You’re welcome to stay here. Once the American Nation realizes that our communications are down, they’ll send a team. They know we’re quarantined, but they’ll send helos to observe and report. It might only be a few days.”
“The reapers are marching on Mountainside,” said Nix. “For all we know, they could already be there. Saint John left here a month ago.”
“All the more reason to stay where it’s safe.”
Nix shook her head. “Nowhere’s safe. Not until we make it safe.”
Reid sighed and started to turn away.
“Don’t forget us,” said Nix. “Just because your people don’t see us, just because we’re inconvenient, it doesn’t mean that we don’t matter.”
Colonel Reid turned to her, and there was an indescribable look on the woman’s face. She didn’t say a word, didn’t nod or anything. Instead she slid the door shut. Benny and Nix watched through the window as the colonel and the doctor ran for the door back to the compound. It slammed shut and they were gone.
The engine fired up, and the big rotors began to turn. Joe’s voice rumbled out of the overhead speakers. “Okay, kids, here we go. If this whole thing goes into the crapper, just remember that it’s Benny’s idea.”
“Great,” yelled Benny. “Thanks.”
Joe was laughing when he cut off the mike.
A heavy buzzer sounded a warning as the big hangar doors rumbled open, rolling apart on metal tracks.
The dead were right there, right outside. Too many to count. A sea of them.
“God,” said Chong, and Benny turned to see his friend standing right next to him. Lilah, too.
“They’re coming fast,” yelled Benny.
The helicopter trembled as it lifted from the ground. Benny was doing math furiously in his head. From skids to rotor the Black Hawk was sixteen feet high. If the zoms reached up to grab, the tallest of them could reach seven and a half feet. Reid told them that the hangar door was fifty-five feet high. That should give the helicopter thirty feet of clearance. More than enough, Benny told himself. Who cared if the pilot was half-dead and more than a little crazy?
“Come on . . . come on!”
They were all saying it, willing the helicopter to rise before the tide of living dead could clear the fifty feet of open concrete.
They weren’t shambling.
They were running.
Every last one of them.
“Come on!”
It rose.
Even with the whine of the rotors, they could hear the combined voices of the zoms rise in a horrific moan of unsatisfied hunger. There was not enough living flesh in the world to assuage this army of the dead.
They heard hands thump against the skids. They heard fingernails rake along the metal. They felt the machine shudder as it fought against cold fingers that wrapped themselves around the landing assembly.
Joe tilted the Black Hawk forward, cruising inches above the fingers of the dead, dragging three clutching zoms with it. The external drag tilted the helicopter for a moment, and the tip of the rotor struck the field of reaching arms for a split second. Long enough, though, to tear a dozen hands from withered forearms.
Then one of the dangling zoms fell away.
And another.
Then the last one tumbled back down on the seething mass of the dead. The helicopter reached the open doorway.
“You’re too high,” cried Benny. “Too high!”
But the whirling blades cut only air. The massive doorway passed directly overhead, and suddenly they were out in the golden sunlight of the Mojave Desert.
Benny coughed out the breath he was holding as the chopper rose into the light. Then he heard a soft gagging sound. Nix, Lilah, and Chong were all there with him, staring out of the window at what lay below.
Seen from the air, with the sunshine highlighting every splash of red, every charred body, every gray face, the sight below threatened to take the heart out of Benny.
Nix made a sick sound deep in her chest. “Look . . . look for Riot. She could be anywhere.”
“Down there?” said Chong hollowly. “How could—”
He didn’t finish, and Benny knew that his friend had tried to cut off his own words a few seconds too late.
“She has to be down there,” said Nix urgently. “She’d have found a place for her and Eve to hide.”
But Joe turned the helicopter away, pointing its blunt nose toward the row of siren towers. They were silent now. That part of the airfield was also relatively clear. Except for a few of the old slow, shuffling R1 zoms, the rest of the dead were massed around the hangars on both sides of the trench.
“What do we do if the reapers trashed the sirens, too?” asked Chong.
“That’s plan B,” said Benny.
“What’s plan B?”“We feed you to the zoms, and while they’re eating you—and getting sick to their stomachs—we run away.”
Lilah laid her hand on her knife. “No, you won’t.”
“Lilah,” said Chong, “he’s joking.”
She eyed Benny icily. “It’s not a funny joke.”
“Apparently not,” said Benny.
“Whoa, whoa, guys,” said Chong, pointing past him. “Look.”
Down below, the siren house was snugged up against the red rock wall of the mountains. The crushed gravel turnaround in front of the bunker was littered with bodies—a few zoms but three times as many reapers—and there was a clear trail of corpses that led in a crooked line back to the burning hangars. A quad sat a few feet from the bunker door, and a knot of eight zoms clustered in front of the door, relentlessly pounding on the metal.
“Someone’s in there,” said Nix.
“I hope they know how to work the sirens,” said Chong.
“Who do you think it is?” asked Lilah.
“I don’t know, but those zoms are trying real hard to get in,” said Benny. “Joe?”
“Yeah,” came the reply. “Got it.”
A moment later the chain guns opened up. Lines of impact points ran along the turnaround, kicking up pieces of gravel, until they caught up with the figures at the door. The rounds punched into the dead and flung them in all directions. When they were all down, Joe landed. Lilah had the sliding door open before the wheels were settled.
She and Nix jumped to the ground. Lilah had her spear and Nix drew Dojigiri.
“Stay here,” ordered Nix. “We got this.”
Benny glanced at Chong. “They got it,” he said.
“Uh-huh.”
Chong helped Benny out of the helicopter, then reached in and removed the bow and arrows. Together they limped painfully after the girls. When Lilah realized they were following, she turned and gave Chong a look that would have peeled paint off of steel plate.
They approached the tangle of dead zoms. Two were still twitching, and Lilah quieted them with quick thrusts.
“Hello!” called Nix. “Is there anyone inside?”
Benny looked down at some of the reapers who lay dead. Not the ones Joe had just killed, but victims of whoever was in the siren house. There were no knife or bullet wounds. Most of them had crushed skulls—or rather skulls that had been dented by precise impacts from small round balls.
He bent very carefully, hissing at the pain, and picked one up. A steel ball bearing.
“Nix,” he called, and then held up the ball bearing for her to see. “Riot. Oh my God . . . Riot!”
Nix shouted the name.
Then they were all shouting her name.
They pounded on the door, laughing and cheering that Riot had—against all logic and odds—managed to escape to this tiny stronghold.
There was a sound from inside. The scrape of a chair being moved, then the metallic click of a lock. Then the door opened slowly, and Riot was there.
Her clothes were torn. She had gashes on her face, her scalp, and across her stomach. Her arms were bloody to the elbow. Tear tracks were cut through the soot and grime on her pretty face. She held a pistol in one hand and a blade in the other.
“Oh my God,” said Nix as she rushed forward to hug Riot. “We were so worried! But I knew you were okay. You and Eve. Where is Eve? We can get you out and . . .”
Her words rambled on and on, filled with joy and relief. Chong grinned and touched Riot’s shoulder. Lilah nodded, smiling.
Riot stood there and endured the embrace. She did not return it. Or react to it.
Her eyes looked past Nix’s red hair and out into the desert.
“Nix . . . ,” said Benny quietly. He touched her shoulder and pulled her gently back.
“Benny, what are you—?”
Nix saw the look on his face. Her smile flickered. She looked at Riot, perhaps finally realizing that the girl had not reacted or responded in any way.
“Riot?”
Riot’s eyes shifted slowly toward her. The smiles faded slowly from Chong and Lilah’s faces, too.
“Riot . . . ?” asked Nix, uncertainty shading her voice. “Are you okay?”
The former reaper said nothing.
“Riot,” said Benny gently. “Where’s Eve?”
Riot slowly raised her left hand so they could see what she held. It was a small push-dagger. Like a sliver. The kind of thing that was only ever used for one thing. For one terrible purpose.
The blade was painted with red.
She opened her hand and let the blade fall. It struck the ground at her feet and lay there. The cold and silent steel screamed unspeakable things at them.
Or was it Riot screaming? Benny wondered.
Or Nix?
Or all of them?
90
BENNY WENT INSIDE.
He found the body. Riot had washed the little girl’s face and smoothed out her clothes as best she could. Eve lay on a cot, wrists and ankles tied. There was a bite mark on her arm. It was small, and Benny wondered if it had been another child who’d bitten her.
Riot had gotten her away from the slaughter. At what point had she become aware that Eve was already lost? Before the mad drive out here on a quad? After the door was barred? During the long hours of the night? Had it been quick, or had fate been crueler still and made Riot wait, hour after hour, as the disease consumed the child?
And, oh God, he thought, how can we ever tell her that the cure for the bite was inside the blockhouse all the time? Two pills—or maybe one for a little girl—and the night would not have ended with the worst nightmare any of them could imagine.
How could they ever tell Riot that?
How close to the edge did the former reaper already stand? Was she looking into the abyss, or was the abyss already in possession of her mind? Did her soul float in that vast darkness?
Rage trembled inside Benny’s body. He could feel the exact moment when it ignited, and as he stood there over Eve’s body, that rage spread all through him. His hands curled into fists that were clenched so hard his knuckles hurt. His jaws ground together to hold back—what? A scream? A roar? Whatever it was, if he let it out it would tear his throat raw and bloody. Black poppies seemed to bloom and burst apart in front of his eyes.
It was as if this small death was all the proof of evil that anyone would ever need. Proof that the “holy” mission of Saint John was corrupt to its core—even if that madman believed he had heard the voice of god. No god could ever want this. No god would encourage the kind of harm that had been visited upon this child. The destruction of her town. The slaughter of her parents before her eyes. The disintegration of her sanity. And now the defilement through disease of her body and the ultimate theft of her life. A theft that robbed her of more than the moment, but stole every hour and day and week and year of a life that should have been lived long and to its fullest.
This was the actual cost of war, right here, written with perfect clarity in the blood of the innocent.
He heard a sound in the doorway, and Joe was there. Sweating, worn thin by pain, somehow on his own feet. The ranger shambled over to stand beside Benny. They stood there for a long time looking down at the body, perhaps thinking the same thoughts.