Fire & Ash

CHAPTER 1

Benny Imura sat in the dark and spoke with monsters.

It was like that every day.

It had become the pattern of his life. Shadows and blood. And monsters.

Everywhere.

Monsters.

CHAPTER 2

The thing crouched in the darkness.

It stank of raw meat and decay. A metal collar was bolted around its neck and a steel chain lay coiled on the bottom of the cage, looking like the discarded skin of some great snake.

The thing raised its head and glared through the bars. Greasy black hair hung in filthy strings, half hiding the gray face. The skin looked diseased, dead. But the eyes…

The eyes.

They watched with a malevolent intensity that spoke of a dreadful awareness. Pale hands gripped the bars with such force that the knuckles were white with tension. The thing’s teeth were caked with pieces of meat.

Benny Imura sat crossed-legged on the floor.

Sick to his stomach.

Sick at heart.

Sick in the depths of his soul.

Benny leaned forward. His voice was thick and soft when he spoke.

“Can you hear me?”

The creature’s lips curled.

“Yes, you can hear me,” said Benny. “Good… can you understand me? Do you know who I am?”

A fat drop of bloody spit oozed from between the creature’s teeth, rolled over its bottom lip, hung for a moment, and then dropped with a faint plash to the floor.

Benny leaned closer still. “Do you recognize me?”

After a long moment, the thing in the cage leaned forward too. Its face underwent a slow process of change. Doubt flickered in its eyes; the lips relaxed over the teeth. It sniffed the air as if trying to identify Benny’s scent. The doubt in its eyes deepened. It bent closer still, and now the lips seemed like they were trying to shape a word.

Benny pushed himself even closer, trying to hear what sound that word carried.

“Huh,” murmured the creature in a rasping croak, “… huh… hun…”

“Go on,” Benny encouraged. “Go ahead. You can do it. Say something….”

The creature rested its forehead against the inside of the bars, and Benny leaned all the way forward.

“… hunh… hunh…”

“What is it?” whispered Benny. “What are you trying to say?”

The creature spoke the word. It came out as a whisper. A full word. Two syllables.

“Hungry!”

Suddenly it lunged at Benny; gray hands shot between the bars and grabbed Benny’s shirt. The creature howled with triumph.

“HUNGRY!”

Wet teeth snapped at him. It jammed its face between the bars, trying to bite him, to tear him.

To feed its hunger.

Benny screamed and flung himself backward, but the creature had him in its powerful hands. The teeth snapped. Saliva that was as cold and dirty as gutter water splashed Benny’s face.

“Hungry… hungry… hungry!” screamed the thing.

Behind Benny a voice shouted in anger. The soldier, moving too slow and too late. Something whistled through the air above Benny’s head and rang off the bars. A baton, swung by the soldier with crippling force.

The creature jerked backward from a blow that would have smashed its jaw and shattered its teeth.

“No!” bellowed Benny, still caught by the thing’s hands, but squirming, fighting it and swinging his arms up to block the soldier.

“Move, kid!” snarled the guard.

The baton hit the bars again with a deafening caroooom!

Benny bent his knees and forced his foot into the narrow gap between him and the bars, then kicked himself backward. The creature lost one handhold on his shirt, but it grabbed the bar to brace itself so it could pull even harder with the other. Benny kicked out, once, twice, again, slamming his heel into the hand holding the bar, hitting knuckles every time. The creature howled and whipped its hand back from the bars. Its screech of agony tore the air.

Benny’s mind reeled. It can still feel pain.

It was the strangest feeling for Benny. That thought, that bit of truth, was a comfort to him.

If it could still feel pain…

It was still alive.

“Out of the way, kid,” roared the soldier, raising his stick again. “I got the son of a—”

Benny kicked once more, and the whole front of his shirt tore away. He collapsed backward against the soldier, hitting his legs so hard the man fell against the concrete wall. Benny sank onto the cold floor, gasping, shuddering with terror.

Inside the cage, the creature clutched its hands to its gray flesh and let out a high, keening cry of pain and frustration.

And of hunger.

The soldier pushed himself angrily off the wall, hooked Benny under the armpit, hauled him to his feet, and flung him toward the door. “That’s it. You’re out of here. And I’m going to teach this monster some damn manners.”

“No!” shouted Benny. He slapped the soldier’s hands aside and shoved the man in the chest with both hands. The move was backed by all of Benny’s hurt and rage; the soldier flew backward, skidded on the damp concrete, and fell. The baton clattered from his hand and rolled away.

The creature in the cage howled and once more lunged through the bars, trying this time to grab the fallen soldier’s outflung arm. The guard snatched it out of the way with a cry of disgust. Spitting in fury, the soldier rolled sideways onto his knees and reached for the baton.

“You made a big damn mistake, boy. I’m going to kick your ass, and then you’re going to watch me beat some manners into—”

There was a sudden rasp of steel and something silver flashed through the air and the moment froze. The soldier was on his knees, one hand braced on the ground, the other holding the baton. His eyes bugged wide as he tried to look down at the thing that pressed into the soft flesh of his throat. The soldier could see his own reflection in the long, slender blade of Benny Imura’s katana.

“Listen to me,” said Benny, and he didn’t care that his voice was thick with emotion or that it broke with a sob. “You’re not going to do anything to me, and you’re not going to do anything to—”

“To what? It’s a monster. It’s an abomination.”

Benny pressed the tip of the sword into the man’s skin. A single tiny bead of hot blood popped onto the edge of the steel and ran along the mirror-bright surface in a crooked line.

“It’s not a monster,” said Benny. “And he has a name.”

The soldier said nothing.

Benny increased the pressure. “Say his name.”

The soldier’s face flushed red with fury.

“Say it,” snarled Benny in a voice he had never heard himself use before. Harsh, cruel, vicious. Uncompromising.

The soldier said the name.

He spat it out of his mouth like a bad taste.

“Chong.”

Benny removed the sword and the soldier started to turn, but the blade flashed through the shadows and came to rest again, with the razor-sharp edge right across the man’s throat.

“I’m going to come back tomorrow,” said Benny in that same ugly voice. “And the day after that, and the day after that. If I find even a single bruise on my friend, if you or any of your friends hurt him in any way… then you’re going to have a lot more to worry about than monsters in cages.”

The soldier glared at Benny, his intent lethal.

“You’re out of your mind, boy.”

Benny could feel his mouth twist into a smile, but from the look in the soldier’s eyes it could not have been a nice smile.

“Out of my mind? Yeah,” said Benny. “I probably am.”

Benny stepped back and lowered the sword. He turned his back on the soldier and went over to the cage. He stood well out of reach this time.

“I’m sorry, Chong,” he said.

Tears ran down Benny’s face. He looked into those dark eyes, searching for some trace of the person he’d known all his life. The quick wit, the deep intelligence, the gentle humor. If Chong was alive, then those things had to still be in there. Somewhere. Benny leaned closer still, needing to catch the slightest glimpse of his friend. He could bear this horror if there was the slightest chance that Chong was only detached from conscious control, if he was like a prisoner inside a boarded-up house. As horrible as that was, it suggested that a solution, some kind of rescue, was possible.

“C’mon, you monkey-banger,” Benny whispered. “Give me something here. You’re smarter than me… you find me. Say something. Anything…”

The thing’s gray lips curled back from wet teeth.

“… hungry…”

That was all the creature could say. Drool ran down its chin and dropped to the straw-covered floor of its cage.

“He’s not dead, you know,” Benny said to the soldier.

The soldier wiped at the trickle of blood on his throat. “He ain’t alive.”

“He’s. Not. Dead.” Benny spaced and emphasized each word.

“Yeah. Sure. Whatever you want, kid.”

Benny resheathed his sword, turned, and walked past the guard, out through the iron door, up the stone stairs, and out into the brutal heat of the Nevada morning.

CHAPTER 3

The man named Saint John walked along a road shaded by live oaks and pines. The trees were unusually dry for this time of year, victims of a drought that was leeching away the vital juices of the world. The saint did not mind, though. It was another way that his god was making it impossible for life to continue in a world that no longer belonged to mankind. Saint John appreciated the subtlety of that, and the attention to detail.

His army stretched behind him, men and women dressed in black with white angel wings sewn onto the fronts of their shirts and red tassels tied to every joint. Each head was neatly shaved and thoroughly tattooed with flowers and vines and stinging insects and predator birds. As they marched, these reapers of the Night Church sang songs of darkness and an end to suffering. Hymns to an eternal silence where pain and indignity no longer held sway.

Saint John did not sing. He walked with his hands behind his back, head bent in thought. He still grieved for the betrayal of Sister Rose. But his spirits were buoyed by the knowledge that Sister Sun and Brother Peter — two of his Council of Sorrows who would never betray him — were working tirelessly to serve the will of their god. They would light the fire that would burn away the infection of humanity.

While they labored back in Nevada to start that blaze, Saint John led the bulk of the reaper army through deserts and forests, across badlands and into the mountains in search of nine towns — nine strongholds of blasphemy and evil. Until yesterday he did not know the way. But they had met a traveler who was willing to share all that he knew of those towns. He was reluctant at first to share, but with some encouragement he was willing to scream everything that he knew.

The first of the towns was named Haven. As unfortunate and naive a name as Sanctuary.

The second town was a place called Mountainside….

He listened to the songs of the reapers, a dirge lifted by forty thousand voices, and Saint John walked on, content.

Out in the dark, beyond the ranks of the reapers, came a second and much larger army. One that did not need to be fed, one that never tired, one that required only the call of dog whistles to drive it, and the presence of the chemical-soaked red tassels to control their appetites.

Yet, in their own way, they too sang. Not hymns, not anything with words. Theirs, lifted by tens of thousands of dead voices, was the unrelenting moan of hunger as the army of the living dead went to war under the banner of the god of death.

CHAPTER 4

The sun was a spiky crown of light resting on the mountaintops to the east. Benny closed his eyes and turned his face to the light, soaking in the heat. The holding area had been too cold. Benny had never dealt with air-conditioning before, and he wasn’t sure he liked it. The sunlight felt good on his face and chest and arms. By this afternoon he would be hunting for even a sliver of shade, but for now this was nice.

We’re going to save Chong, said his inner voice.

“Yes we are,” Benny growled aloud.

A shadow crossed over his face, and he looked up to see a vulture glide through the air from the top of the six-story hospital blockhouse. It flapped its big black wings as it came to rest atop a parked jet that stood still and silent two hundred yards away.

The jet.

It had drawn Benny, Nix, Chong, and Lilah away from Mountainside. It was supposed to answer all their questions, to make sense of the world.

It sat facing the distant mountains, windows dark, door closed. But around that door were blood smears, arterial splashes and one handprint, faded now from crimson to brown. The metal stairs sat a few yards away. There was blood on every step, and trails of it along the ground heading toward the row of massive gray hangars beyond the blockhouse.

The first time Benny had seen the blood, he’d asked his escort monk, Brother Albert, about it. “Did the zoms attack the crew?”

Brother Albert flinched at the use of the word “zom,” and Benny regretted using it. The monks always called the dead the Children of Lazarus, and they believed that these “Children” were the meek whom God intended should inherit the earth. Benny was pretty sure he didn’t agree with that view, though it was a lot more palatable than the more extreme apocalyptic thinking of the Night Church.

“No,” said the monk, “the sirens called the Children away while the jet landed.”

The military people used a row of sirens on tall towers to lure the zoms away to clear the airstrip or allow access to the hangars and blockhouse. Soldiers stationed in a small stone building at the far end of the field controlled the sirens. When those sirens fell silent, the dead wandered back again, drawn by the living people on the monks’ side of the trench.

“Then what happened?”

Brother Albert shrugged. “Not really sure, brother. They were delivering supplies and equipment to a base in Fort Worth. Must have been an attack there.” He paused. “Do you know about the American Nation?”

“Sure. Captain Ledger and Riot told us some stuff. It’s in Asheville, North Carolina. Supposed to be, like, a hundred thousand people there. There’s a new government, and they’re trying to take back the country from the dead.”

“That’s what they say.”

Benny glanced at the jet. During the big fight with the reapers, it had come swooping down out of the sky like a monster bird out of ancient legend. Impossibly huge, roaring with four massive engines, it had sailed above the battle and descended toward Sanctuary.

When they’d first seen it almost a year ago, soaring high above the mountains in California, they’d thought it was a passenger liner. They now knew that it was a C-5 Galaxy military transport jet. The largest military aircraft ever built.

“What about the crew?” asked Benny. “Are they okay?”

The monk shrugged. “Don’t know. They don’t tell us anything.”

It was true. The military scientists ran a mostly underground base on one side of the trench, and the monks ran a hospital and hospice on the other. Except for interview sessions in the blockhouse, communication between the two was weirdly minimal.

Past the jet, at the far side of the airfield, was a huge crowd of zoms. They shuffled slowly toward Benny, though the closest of them was still a mile away. Every morning the sirens’ wail cleared the way for him to cross the trench, and every evening it cleared the field for Nix to come over. Each of them spent an hour being interviewed by scientists. Never in person, though. The interview booth was a cubicle built onto the corner of the blockhouse; all contact was via microphone and speakers. The novelty of this pre — First Night tech wore off almost at once, though. The scientists asked a lot of questions, but they gave almost nothing in return. No information, no answers. Allowing Benny to see Chong was a surprising act of generosity, though Benny wondered if it was just part of a scientific experiment. Probably to see how human Chong still was.

Hungry.

God.

Every evening the monk took Nix over there. Would they let her see Chong too?

They reached the entrance to the cubicle. It opened as Benny approached. Inside was a metal folding chair.

Benny glanced over his shoulder at the zombies. The ranger, Captain Ledger, had told Nix that there were only a couple hundred thousand. The monks said that there were at least half a million of them over there. They worked with the sick and dying far more closely.

“They’re waiting, brother,” murmured his escort monk, and for a moment Benny didn’t know whether Brother Albert meant the zoms or the scientists.

“Yeah,” said Benny. “I know.”

The monk pushed the door shut, and the hydraulic bolts slid back into place with a sound like steam escaping. There was only a tiny electric light that barely shoved back the shadows.

While he waited in the dark, he thought he could hear Chong’s voice.

Hungry.

CHAPTER 5

The Lost Girl was lost indeed.

Eight months ago she’d lived alone in a cave behind a waterfall high in the Sierra Nevadas. She spent her days hunting, foraging for books in deserted houses, evading zombies, and hunting the men who had murdered her family. From age twelve until just after her seventeenth birthday, Lilah spoke to no one.

The last words from her mouth before the long silence were spoken to her sister, Annie, as she knelt in the rain near the first Gameland.

Earlier that day Lilah had escaped from Gameland and then gone back for her sister. Annie was supposed to wait for her, but she didn’t. She escaped from her cell only to be hunted through the storm by the Motor City Hammer. In the windy, rainy darkness Annie tripped and fell, hitting her head on a rock. A mortal injury. The Hammer left her there like a piece of trash that wasn’t worth throwing away.

Lilah saw this from a place of concealment. She was twelve, emaciated, and weak. If she’d attacked the Hammer, he would have beaten her and dragged her back to the zombie pits. Knowing him as she did, he might have put Annie in with her. That was a guaranteed moneymaking attraction.

When the Hammer was gone, she crept onto the road to where Annie lay. She tried to breathe life back into Annie’s lungs, tried to push it into her chest the way George had taught her. She tried to will that fading spark to flare. She begged, she made promises to the heavens, offering her own life if Annie could be spared. But the slack form she held changed into something that did not want her breath or her prayers. All it wanted was her flesh.

Lilah held the struggling body tightly in her arms and buried her face in Annie’s hair. For a long, terrible moment she wondered if she should stop fighting, if she should lie back and offer her throat to Annie. If she could not protect her in life, she could at least offer her sustenance in death.

That moment was the longest of her life. The most terrible.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and reached for the rock onto which Annie had fallen. It was small, the size of an angry fist. Another half step to the right and Annie would have missed it and fallen into a puddle instead.

Lilah wanted to close her eyes so that she did not have to witness what she was about to do. But that was a coward’s choice. George had taught the girls to be strong. Always strong. And this was Annie. Her Annie. Her sister, born on First Night to a dying mother. She was the last person on earth who Lilah knew. To turn away, to close her eyes, to flinch from the responsibility of being a witness for her sister’s experience felt as cowardly and awful as what the Motor City Hammer had done.

So Lilah watched Annie’s face. She watched her own hand lift the rock.

She watched everything.

She heard herself say, “I love you.”

She heard the sound of what she was forced by fate and love to do. It was a dreadful sound. Lilah knew it would echo inside her head forever.

Lilah spent the next five years in silence.

There was conversation, but it was always in her head. With Annie, with George. Lilah rehearsed the words she wanted to say when she was strong enough to hunt down the Motor City Hammer. Now he was dead too. And George.

Annie.

Tom.

Lilah walked the trench, hour after hour, mile after mile. She was so much stronger now than she had been. She knew that if she could take this body and these skills and step back to that moment on the rainy road, it would have been the Hammer gasping out his last breaths in the darkness.

Lilah made sure that she was strong. Fast, and skillful and vicious.

Heartless.

That had been her goal. To become heartless. A machine fine-tuned for the purpose of slaughter. Not of zoms — they were incidental to her — but of the evil men in the world. Like the Hammer, like Charlie Pink-eye and Preacher Jack. Like Brother Peter and Saint John and the reapers. She willed herself to become merciless because if she accomplished that, then she would never know fear and she would never know love. Love was a pathway to cruel pain. It was the arrow that Fate always kept aimed at your back. Love would interfere; love would create a chink in her armor.

No, she would never allow herself to love.

As she walked, she thought about that. That promise was as vain and as fragile as the promise she’d given Annie to return and free her.

When Lilah rescued Benny and Nix from bounty hunters in the mountains, she had stepped across a line. When she met Tom and saw that a man could be good and decent, compassionate and strong, Lilah had felt her resolve weaken. George had been the only good man she’d ever known. A total stranger who’d been the last of a group of refugees from the zombie outbreak. He’d raised Annie and Lilah. He’d loved them like a father, fed them, cared for them, taught them. And had been murdered by the men who took the girls to Gameland.

Lilah had believed that he was the only decent man left alive, that all the others were like the Hammer.

Then Tom.

Whom she fell in love with. Who refused her love in the gentlest, kindest way.

Tom… who died.

She stopped and let her gaze drift across the trench to the blockhouse. To where Chong crouched in the darkness.

Lilah had never wanted to feel anything for Chong. He was a town boy. Weak and unskilled in any of the ways of survival. She had not wanted to like him. Falling in love with him was so obviously wrong that sometimes she laughed at herself. And when the absurdity of it struck her, she lashed out at Chong.

Stupid town boy.

“Chong,” she whispered.

What is the good of becoming strong if love bares your flesh to the teeth of misfortune? Why risk loving anyone or anything when life is so frail a thing that a strong wind can blow it out of your experience? She wanted to go back to her silence and her solitude. To find her cave and hide there among the stacks of dusty books. With the waterfall roaring, no one could hear her scream, she was sure of it.

How long would it take, how many weeks or months or years, before she could think of Chong’s name and not feel a knife in her heart?

The reapers had taken Chong from her.

Forever? Or just for now?

She didn’t know, and neither did the scientists in the blockhouse.

If it was forever, then a cold voice in Lilah’s mind told her what the future would be — an endless, relentless hunt to find and kill every reaper. In books the heroines vow to hunt an enemy to the ends of the earth. But she was already there. This was the apocalypse, and the future was awash in blood and silence.

“Chong,” she said to the desert sky, and tried to will her heart to turn to stone.

CHAPTER 6

“Good morning, Mr. Imura,” said a cold, impersonal female voice through the wall-mounted speaker. “How do you feel today?”

“Angry,” said Benny.

There was a pause. “No,” said the voice, clearly thrown off track, “how do you feel?”

“I told you.”

“You don’t understand. Are you feeling unwell? Are—”

“I understood the question.”

“Have you been experiencing any unusual symptoms?”

“Sure,” said Benny. “My head hurts.”

“When did these headaches begin?”

“ ’Bout a month ago,” said Benny. “A freako mutant zombie hit me in the head with a stick.”

“We know about that injury, Mr. Imura.”

“Then why ask?”

“We asked if you had any unusual symptoms.”

“Zombie-inflicted stick wounds to the head actually aren’t all that usual, doc. Look it up.”

The scientist sighed — the kind of short nostril sigh people do when they’re losing their patience. Benny grinned in the shadows.

The next question wiped the smile off his face. “What happened in the holding cell today?”

“He… tried to grab me.”

“Did he touch your skin with his hands?”

“No.”

“Did he bite you?”

“No.”

“Did he get any bodily fluids on you?”

“Eww. And, no.”

“Are you running a fever?”

“I don’t know, why don’t you let me in there so you can take my temperature?”

A pause. “There is a safety protocol—”

“—in place,” completed Benny. “Yeah, I know. I’ve heard that forty million times.”

“Mr. Imura, we need you to tell us if the infected—”

“His name is Lou Chong,” barked Benny. “And I wish you’d tell me what you’ve done to him.”

A longer pause this time. “Mr. Chong has been treated.”

“I know that, genius. I want to know how. I want to know what’s going on with him. When’s he going to get better?”

“We… don’t have those answers.”

Benny punched the small metal speaker mounted on the wall. “Why not?”

“Mr. Imura,” said the woman, “please, you’re being difficult.”

“I’m being difficult? We gave you all that stuff we found in that wrecked transport plane, all those medical records. Why can’t you do something for us?”

When there was no immediate answer, Benny tried to shift topics, hoping that might nudge them into an actual exchange of information.

“What about that pack of wild boars that tried to chow down on my friend Lilah? Where’d they come from? I thought that only humans could turn into zoms.”

“We are aware of a limited infection among a small percentage of the wild boar population.”

“What does that mean? What’s a ‘small percentage’? How many is that?”

“We don’t have an exact number….”

Benny sighed. They were always evasive like this.

After a moment the woman asked, “Are you experiencing any excessive sweating, Mr. Imura? Double vision? Dry mouth?”

The questions ran on and on. Benny closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. After a while the voice accepted that Benny wasn’t going to cooperate.

“Mr. Imura—?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m still here.”

“Why are you making this so difficult?”

“I keep telling you — I’m not. I’m trying to communicate with you people, but you keep stonewalling me. What’s that about? ’Cause the way I figure it, you guys owe me and my friends. If we hadn’t told Captain Ledger about the weapons on the plane, that reaper army would have come in here and killed everyone — you, all the sick people, the monks, and everyone in this stupid blockhouse.”

The plane in question was a C-130J Super Hercules, a muscular four-propeller cargo aircraft built before First Night. Benny and Nix had found it wrecked in the forest. It had been used to evacuate a scientist, Dr. Monica McReady, and her staff from Hope One, a remote research base near Tacoma, Washington. The team had been up there studying recent mutations in the zombie plague.

“Don’t confuse heroism with mutual self-interest, Mr. Imura,” said the woman scientist in an icy tone. “You told Captain Ledger about those weapons and materials because it was the only way you and your friends could survive. It was an act of desperation that, because of the nature of this current conflict, benefited parties that have a shared agenda. Anyone in your position would have done the same.”

“Really? That plane was sitting out there for a couple of years — pretty much in your freaking backyard — and you had no clue that it was there. If you spent less time with your heads up your—”

“Mr. Imura…”

He sighed. “Okay, so maybe we had our own survival in mind when we told you about it — we’re not actually stupid — but that doesn’t change the fact that we saved your butts.”

“That’s hardly an accurate assessment, Mr. Imura. Saint John and the army of the Night Church are still out there. Do you know where they are?”

Benny’s answer was grudging. “No.”

In truth, no one knew where the reapers had gone. Guards patrolling the fence had seen a few, and Joe Ledger said that he’d found signs of small parties out in the desert, but the main part of the vast reaper army was gone. Saint John himself seemed to have gone with them, but nobody knew where. At first Benny and his friends were happy about that — let them bother someone else; but on reflection, that was a selfish and mean-spirited reaction. An immature reaction. The reapers had only one mission, and that was to exterminate all life. No matter where they went, innocent people were going to die.

“So,” said the scientist, “you can’t really make the claim that you — and I quote—‘saved our butts.’ We might all be wasting our time.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” There was no answer. He kicked the wall. “Yo! What’s that supposed to mean?”

Nothing.

Then the lights came on and the door hissed open. Outside, the sirens were already blaring.

CHAPTER 7

Brother Albert escorted him across a bridge to the monks’ side of Sanctuary. On the other side, Benny spotted Lilah walking along the edge of the trench. He fell into step beside her. They walked for a while in silence. Behind them the guards used a winch to raise the bridge.

Lilah was tall, beautiful, with a bronze tan and blond hair so sun-bleached that it was as white as snow. She had wide, penetrating eyes that were sometimes hazel and sometimes honey-colored, changing quickly with her fiery moods. She carried a spear made from black pipe and a military bayonet.

Every time he saw her, Benny felt an odd twinge in his chest. It wasn’t love — he loved Nix with his whole heart, and besides, this girl was too strange, too different for him. No, it was a feeling he’d never quite been able to define, and it was as strong now as it had been the first time he’d seen her picture on a Zombie Card.

Lilah, the Lost Girl.

He finally worked up to the nerve to say, “They let me see him today.”

Lilah abruptly stopped and grabbed a fistful of his shirt. “Tell me.”

Benny gently pushed her hand away and told her everything that had happened. He left out the part about the soldier trying to hit Chong with his baton. There were already enough problems between Lilah and the soldiers. For the first few days after Chong had been admitted into the labs for treatment, Lilah stayed by his side. Twice soldiers had attempted to remove her, and twice soldiers were carried to the infirmary. Then on the eighth night, Chong appeared to succumb to the Reaper Plague. His vital signs bottomed out, and for a moment the doctors and scientists believed that he’d died. They wanted to have him quickly transported outside so he could be with the zoms when he reanimated. Lilah wouldn’t accept that Chong was dead. Either her instincts told her something the machines did not, or she went a little crazy. Benny was inclined to believe that it was a bit of both. When the orderlies moved in to take Chong away, Lilah attacked them. Benny never got all the details, but from what he could gather, four orderlies, two doctors, and five soldiers were badly hurt, and a great deal of medical equipment was damaged in what was apparently a fight of epic proportions. The soldiers came close to shooting Lilah, and if she hadn’t used one of the chief scientists as a shield — holding her knife to the fabric of his hazmat suit — they might have done it.

It was a stalemate.

And then the machines began beeping again, arguing with mechanical certainty that Chong was not dead. The scientist, fearing for his life and seeing a way out of the standoff, swore to Lilah that they would do everything they could to keep Chong alive, and to find some way of treating the disease that thrived within him. Lilah, never big on trust, was a hard sell. But in the end, Chong’s need for medical attention won out. She released the scientist. Chong was injected with something called a metabolic stabilizer — a concoction based on a formula found among Dr. McReady’s notes on the transport plane. Once Chong was stabilized, Lilah was taken — at gunpoint — outside the blockhouse and turned over to Benny, Nix, and the monks. She was forbidden to cross the trench. Four guards were posted on the monks’ side of the bridge to make sure of that.

As Benny described Chong’s condition, Lilah staggered as if she’d been punched. She leaned on her spear for support.

“He spoke, though,” said Benny hopefully. “That’s something. It’s an improvement, right? It’s a good sign and—”

Lilah shook her head and gazed across the distance toward the white blockhouse. “My town boy is lost.”

“Lilah, I—”

“Go away,” she said in a voice that was almost inhuman.

Benny shoved his hands in his pockets and trudged off to find Nix.

CHAPTER 8

Through the long eye of the telescope, the boy with the sword slung over his back and the girl with the spear looked like they were standing only a few feet away. Close enough to touch.

Close enough to kill.

“I will open red mouths in your flesh,” whispered the man with the telescope. “Praise be to the darkness.”

CHAPTER 9

Saint John stood under the leaves of a green tree while the two most powerful women in the Night Church argued with each other.

“It’s old-world heresy,” insisted Mother Rose, who was the spiritual leader of the Night Church. She was tall and lovely, graceful as the morning, as beautiful as a knife blade. “That plane and its contents represent everything the church opposes.”

“I don’t dispute that,” said the other woman, a frail Korean named Sister Sun. A year ago she had been athletic and strong, but over the last few months cancer had begun consuming her. By her own diagnosis she had less than a year to live, and she was determined to use that year helping the Night Church conquer the heretics. “My point is that we need to examine those materials to understand what’s happening with the gray people.”

“Nothing is happening with—”

“Mother, you know that’s not true. Our people have seen case after case of gray people moving in flocks. That never happened before. There are rumors of gray people who move almost as fast as the living. Even some incidents of them picking up rocks and stones as weapons.”

“So what?” countered Mother Rose in her haughty voice. “All life changes. Even un-life. It’s part of nature, isn’t it?”

“That’s just it,” insisted Sister Sun. “The Reaper Plague isn’t part of nature, as I’ve said many times.”

Saint John turned now and held up a hand. Both women fell immediately silent.

“The plague that raised the dead and destroyed the cities of sinful man was brought to earth by the divine hand of Lord Thanatos.”

“All praise to his darkness,” said the women in unison.

“Therefore it is part of the natural order of the universe.”

“Honored One,” said Sister Sun, “please listen to me. Both of you — listen. I know this plague. I studied it after the outbreak. My team was working with the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. No one alive knows this disease better than me except for Monica McReady.”

“That heretic is dead,” said Mother Rose.

“We don’t know that for sure,” said Sister Sun. “We sent five teams of reapers out to search for her, and two teams never returned.”

Mother Rose dismissed the argument with a flick of her hand.

“If McReady was tampering with the disease — if she was trying to create a cure for it, then she might have caused it to mutate,” said Sister Sun passionately. “Any possible change to the disease can have a significant impact on the predictable behavior of the gray people, and that is a danger to our church. You know it is. If you let me look at the research materials on the plane, I might be able to determine what she was doing. Maybe I can stop it, or perhaps learn enough to predict what changes are occurring so we can adapt behavioral modifications into our church doctrine. But we can’t allow random changes to manifest without a response from the church. Think of how disruptive that would be, especially to reaper groups that have a high percentage of new recruits. Doubt is our enemy.”

Mother Rose shook her head the whole time. “The plane is a shrine, and I have put my seal on it. It stays closed.”

She turned her back and walked away.

Sister Sun gripped Saint John’s sleeve. “Please, Honored One, surely you understand the danger.”

“The shrine belongs to Mother Rose,” he said.

“But—”

“It belongs to her.”

The saint gently pulled his arm away and walked off under the shadows of the trees, aware that she stood and watched him the whole time. He did not let her see the smile that he wore.

CHAPTER 10

The mess hall was in a Quonset hut set behind the dormitory hangar. Rows of long trestle tables, folding chairs, a steam table were set up for self-service. Benny picked up a tray and a plate, slopped some runny eggs and links of what he hoped was pork sausage. It might as easily have been lizard or turtle, as Benny had already found out.

There was never a lot of food. Enough, but none to spare.

The first time Benny had come here, he’d piled his tray high. No one had said anything until he sat down across from Riot, who gave him a stern glare.

“Y’all got enough food there for a pregnant sow,” she’d said to him, her voice heavy with an Appalachian accent.

“I know, right?” he said, and jammed a forkful of eggs into his mouth. “It’s not even that bad.”

Riot was thin and hard-muscled and very pretty, with a shaved head that was tattooed with roses and wild vines. She wore jeans and a leather vest buttoned up over nothing else that Benny could detect. “Maybe that zom knocked all good sense out your head, boy… but did it knock out all your manners, too? There’s four people not going to eat today because y’all took enough food for five. Look around — you think there’s anything close to abundance round these parts? Everyone here’s a few short steps away from starving and here you are, stuffing your face like it’s your birthday.”

When Benny looked around, all he saw were the bland, accepting smiles of the monks. Then he looked down at the heap of eggs, the mounds of potatoes and vegetables, and the half loaf of bread. Without another word he got up and walked back to the steam table and placed his tray in front of the first person in line. Then he left and didn’t eat anything else all day.

Now he had it down to a rhythm. A scoop of eggs, half a roast potato, a slice of bread thinly coated with butter, and a cup of well water. Always a little less than he wanted, always leaving a little extra for the next person. After the first couple of hungry days, Benny began to feel good about that. Now it was his ritual. He also spent time every day working in the bean fields and fruit groves, doing unskilled grunt labor to help. It was exhausting work, but it felt good. And there was the side benefit of approaching it as exercise to reclaim his strength and muscle tone.

He tried to get some of the monks working the fields to sing a few of the off-color work songs Morgie had learned from his dad, but that kite wouldn’t fly.

Today Riot was on the other side of the mess hall, seated next to Eve, the tiny blond-haired girl Benny had rescued after they’d both fallen into a ravine filled with zoms. Eve was laughing at something Riot said, and even from that distance Benny could hear the strange, fractured quality of that laughter. The poor kid had been through too much. Reapers had raided and burned the settlement in which she’d lived and slaughtered nearly everyone. The refugees spent several mad days running through deserts and forests, only to be hunted down and sent “into the darkness.” Eve had witnessed the terrible moment when reapers cut down her father and mother.

The monks worked with Eve every day, coaxing the little girl inch by inch out of the red shadows of her trauma, but even though there had been some progress, it was apparent that Eve might be permanently damaged. Benny was almost as worried about Riot as he was about Eve — the former reaper seemed to take it as her personal mission to “save” the girl. Benny dreaded what might happen to Riot if Eve’s fragile sanity finally collapsed.

It made Benny both sad and furious, because the reapers were so much worse than the zoms. The dead were mindless, acting according to the impulses of whatever force reanimated their bodies; the reapers knew what they were doing.

In his calmer moments, Benny tried to explore the viewpoint that the reapers actually believed that what they were doing was right, that they believed they were serving the will of their god. But he could not climb into the mind-set of a religion based on extinction. Even if the reapers believed that their god wanted everyone dead, they had no right to force that belief on everyone else. They had no right to turn the life of a child like Eve into a living horror show.

No right at all.

“Hey,” said a familiar voice behind him, and he turned, already smiling because a bad day had just gotten a whole lot better.

“Hey yourself,” he said, and leaned across the table to give Nix Riley a quick, light kiss. She was a beautiful girl with wild red hair, emerald green eyes that sparkled with intelligence, and more freckles than there were stars in the sky. A long pink scar ran from her hairline almost to her jaw, but even with that she looked young, and fresh and happy. It had been months since she looked this good. Like Eve, Nix had suffered through the absolute horror of seeing her mother murdered in front of her. Not by reapers — those killers were not yet a part of their lives — but by the brutal bounty hunters Charlie Pink-eye and the Motor City Hammer. Nix herself had been beaten and kidnapped by the pair. They were going to make her fight in the zombie pits of Gameland. Tom and Benny had rescued her, but from then on life for Nix had become a constant nightmare, running from one room in hell to another.

Nix sat down, but caught him staring at her. “What? Do I have something on my face?”

“Just this,” he said, and blew her a handful of kisses.

“You are too corny for words,” she said, but she was smiling. “You were in the blockhouse a long time today. What did they talk about?”

Nix’s smile leaked away as he told her about Chong.

“I thought Lilah said that he was alive!”

“He is alive.”

“But… he tried to bite you.”

“Okay, so he’s sick, he’s messed up — but he’s still Chong.”

“How? How is he still Chong? He’s totally infected, Benny. They’re keeping him in a cage, for God’s sake.”

Benny’s face grew instantly hot. “What are you saying? You think they should put him down like a dog?”

“Not like a dog, Benny. He’s a zom and—”

“And what? They should quiet him?”

Nix sat back and folded her arms tightly across her chest. “What do you think is going to happen, Benny? Do you think that Chong is going to suddenly snap out of it?”

“Maybe he will!” Benny yelled.

“Maybe he can’t.”

“I can’t believe you’re giving up on him, Nix. This is Chong. Chong! He’s our friend.”

“Was that really Chong down in that cage? Would Chong try to take a bite out of you?”

Benny whammed the table with his fist. “He’s not a zombie, Nix. He’s sick and he needs our help.”

“What help?” she demanded, her voice jumping a whole octave. “What can we possibly do for him?”

Benny had to fish for how to answer her. When he spoke, his voice was a hot whisper. “We need to give the scientists time to figure it out.”

“Okay. Fine. What happens in the meantime? We go visit him like he’s a zoo animal?”

“Why are you being such a bitch?”

Nix stood up so suddenly that her belt buckle caught the edge of her plate and flipped it over, flinging eggs everywhere. Surprise, embarrassment, and anger warred on her face.

“I—”

“Save it,” snapped Benny as he got up and stalked away.

He made it almost all the way to the door before Nix caught up to him. He heard her coming and quickened his stride, but she ran the last few steps, caught his sleeve, and spun him around. Before he could say anything, she stuck a finger in his face.

“You listen to me, Benjamin Imura. I love Chong every bit as much as you do. I loved Tom, too. And I loved my mother — but people die. In this world, people die. Everyone dies.”

“Well, thank you, Lady Einstein. Here I was thinking that everyone lived forever and every day was apple pie and puppies.” He glared at her. “I know people die. I’m not stupid, and I’m not kidding myself about how much trouble Chong’s in. Maybe he can’t come back, maybe he’s already too sick… but I heard him speak today, and even though it was only one word, it proves that some part of him is still there. He’s not gone yet, and I won’t give up on him. Not until there’s no hope and no chance at all.”

“Benny, I—” she began, but he shook his head and turned away.

He pushed past some monks who were on their way into the mess hall. Behind him he heard Nix call his name, but she did not follow him outside.

CHAPTER 11

His name was Morgan Mitchell, but everyone called him Morgie.

Morgie was big for his age, looking more like eighteen than fifteen. Beefy shoulders, arms heavy with muscle, and a dusting of beard smudging cheeks and chin.

His clothes were soaked with sweat, and his eyes were filled with shadows.

An old truck tire hung by a rope from a limb of the big oak tree. The weathered rubber was scarred by thousands of impacts from the bokken — the wooden sword Morgie held in his hands. Each blow made the tire dance and swing, and Morgie shifted this way and that to chase it, to continue hammering it, to smash at it over and over again. The force of each blow threw echoes against the rear of the house that stood vacant and silent at the other end of the yard. The bokken was hand-carved from a piece of hickory. It was his sixth sword. The first five had cracked and broken in this yard, defeated not by the tire but by the force of the hands that swung the wood, and by the muscle in arms and shoulders and back.

And by pain.

Each blow hurt. It wasn’t the shock that vibrated back from the point of impact and shivered through Morgie’s muscles and bones. It wasn’t that at all. The pain was in his heart. And he hammered at it every day. Several times a day. The training leaned him, burning away childhood fat, revealing muscles forged in a furnace of grief and regret.

Morgie knew he was being watched, but he didn’t care. It was like that all the time, almost every day. Randy Kirsch, mayor of Mountainside and former neighbor of the Imuras, sat on his porch. Two men sat with him, each of them drinking coffee from ceramic mugs.

“Two ration dollars says he breaks another sword today,” said Keith Strunk, captain of the town watch.

“Sucker’s bet,” said Leroy Williams, a big black man sitting to his left. He was a corn farmer who’d lost his right arm in a car crash after bringing a group of people through a horde of zoms after First Night. “Kid’s working on some real fury down there. He’ll break that sword or knock the tire out of the damn tree.”

The mayor glanced at his watch. “He’s been at it for two hours now.”

“Makes me sweat just watching him,” said Strunk.

They all nodded and sipped their coffee.

The thump, thump, thump of the sword was constant.

“You ever find out what happened between him and Benny?” asked Strunk. “Heard they had some kind of fight right before Tom took those kids out of town.”

The mayor shook his head.

“I heard it was over the girl,” said Leroy. “Little Phoenix. Remember, Morgie went courtin’ at the Riley place that night Jessie was killed. Morgie got his head near stove in by Marion Hammer. And then seven months later Nix goes off with Benny.”

“Ah,” said Strunk. “A girl. That’ll do it.”

They all sighed and nodded.

“I don’t think it’s just the girl,” said Mayor Kirsch. “I think it was that fight. I heard Morgie knocked Benny down.”

“If they were fighting,” said Leroy, “then they were fighting over the Riley girl.”

They all nodded again.

Captain Strunk said, “Morgie asked me the other day if I’d let him join the town watch. When I told him he was too young, he got a job as an apprentice fence guard.”

“Ugly work for a boy,” said the mayor. “And he asked me for an application to the Freedom Riders. He wants to roll out with Solomon Jones and that crew.”

“Thought you had to be eighteen for that,” said Leroy.

“You do. But he’s trying to get a special dispensation because he trained with Tom Imura.”

“Ah,” said Strunk.

Leroy grunted. “Maybe they should let him in. Tom trained those kids good… and besides, look at him. Kid’s bigger and tougher than any eighteen-year-old I know.”

“Tom did a good job,” said Strunk as they watched Morgie hammer away at the tire. “Bet Tom would be proud of him.”

The wooden sword whipped and flashed and pounded, again and again and again.

CHAPTER 12

Benny walked along the trench — well away from Lilah — until the weight of the sun’s heat slowed him to a less furious pace. Finally, drenched in sweat and feeling about as low as he could feel, he stopped, shoved his hands into his pockets, and stood there, staring across the trench at the dead. A few of them moved restlessly, but the rest stood as still as if they were the tombstones of their own graves.

Movement caught his eye, and Benny turned to see Riot as she walked Eve to the playground and handed her over to the head nun, Sister Hannahlily. Then Riot spotted him and came his way.

“Hey,” she said quietly.

“Hey,” said Benny.

“I saw that fuss in the dining room. You fighting with Red?”

Benny shrugged.

“This about Chong?”

“Yeah,” said Benny. “I suppose.”

“He’s pretty messed up, huh?”

“He’s sick… and if you want to lecture me, too, about—”

“Whoa — slow your roll, boy,” she said. “Just asked a question.”

“Yes,” Benny said slowly. “He’s in bad shape.”

“Red wants to put him down, is that the size of it?”

“Yes.”

“She know that Lilah’d skin her quick as look at her, right?”

“She knows.”

“So, where’s that leave everyone?”

Benny sighed. “In trouble.”

“Life don’t never get easy, does it? It just keeps getting harder in stranger ways.”

They watched Lilah, who had stopped pacing and now stood as silent as the dead, staring across the trench toward the blockhouse.

“That Lilah’s a puzzle,” said Riot quietly. “I must’a tried fifty times to talk to her. Not deep conversation, just jawing about the time of day. All she did was tell me to go away. That’s it, two words. Go away.”

“Lilah’s had a really hard life,” said Benny.

Riot’s face took on a mocking cast. “Did she now? Well, she sure don’t hold the deed on grief and loss, son. We all been mussed and mauled by bad times. But that girl’s done gone and shut down. I met gray people with more personality.” She tapped her temple with a finger. “I’m beginning to suspect there ain’t nobody home.”

“She’ll snap out of it once they do something for Chong.”

Riot cocked her head to one side. “Y’all really think so?”

“Yes,” said Benny with far more certainty than he felt. In truth he was frightened for Lilah. Any gains she had made since he and Nix had found her — wild and almost unable to communicate with people — seemed to have crumbled away. And secretly, he agreed with Riot’s assessment that Lilah’s personality seemed to be… well, gone. She would participate in combat training, but otherwise there was nothing.

His inner voice asked, How deep inside your own heartbreak do you have to fall before there’s no outward sign of life?

It was a sad question, and that made him wonder what Nix would have been like if she’d dealt with her mother’s murder without friendship and support.

Or what he would be like after Tom’s death if it hadn’t been for Nix, Lilah, and Chong.

He ached to do something. If this was an enemy he could fight, he’d have his sword in his hands, but the truth was that there were some enemies you could not defeat.

Benny nodded toward the blockhouse. “You were in there, right? A few years ago? In the lab area. What was it like?”

“Those boys didn’t let me see much. They stuck me in a little room with a cot, a commode, and nothing else. Not even a good book to read. All I got to do was stare at the walls all day, every day, and that ain’t even as entertaining as it sounds.” She thought about it, then chuckled. “I was right happy when I heard that Lilah done busted up the place. They’re good people over there, but they sure ain’t nice.”

Benny grunted and changed the subject. “Have you seen Joe today? I want to ask him about Chong.”

She shook her head. “No. He was out at the wreck until late last night. Not sure when he got back. Saw that big ol’ dog of his this morning — one of the monks was walking him.”

Benny said, “What do you think of him?”

“Joe? You should ask Red,” said Riot. “She thinks the sun rises and sets around that feller. Better watch out, boy — I think she’s sweet on him.”

“It’s not like that. Nix has been pumping him for information.”

“Information for what? For that silly diary of hers?”

“It’s not silly and it’s not exactly a diary,” said Benny. “She’s been collecting information on zoms.”

“Like what?”

“All sorts of stuff — traps, barriers, and like that. How to fight them. She’s been working out how we — people, I mean — can take back the world. It’s smart, too. Joe gave her pages and pages of notes. She’s been asking him how to fight the reapers, too. Like, if we settle in a town or maybe start a settlement somewhere, Nix wants to be ready to defend it against anyone, living or dead.”

Riot nodded approval. “If that happens, let’s put her in charge of the defenses.”

He nodded.

Riot smiled. “Wow. And all this time I thought she was writing love poetry or stories about princesses and unicorns.”

“You really don’t know Nix, do you?”

“Apparently not. She’s a…”

Riot’s voice trailed off, and she stared openmouthed at something across the trench. When Benny followed the line of her gaze, he saw a figure that made him feel sick and sad.

It was a zombie. A woman. In life she had been beautiful, with masses of wavy black hair and a face as coldly regal as any of history’s great queens. Now her flesh was gray and wrinkled, the moisture leeched away by the heat, and her hair hung in matted strings.

Mother Rose.

Once the spiritual leader of the Night Church. Once consort to Saint John.

Once Riot’s mother.

Now… what was she?

Mother Rose stood at the edge of the trench, and in some weird and inexplicable way she must have recognized Riot. The two of them, mother and daughter, stared at each other. Benny tried to calculate all the things that separated them. Beliefs, remorse, life itself, so many things, all of them greater than actual measurable yards, feet, and inches.

Two small tears broke and fell down Riot’s cheeks. “Oh God.”

“Riot, don’t look,” sad Benny quickly. “Go back to the hangars, don’t let—”

“Go away,” said Riot.

“Hey, no, I just meant—”

“Just go.”

Riot crossed her legs and lowered herself slowly to the ground. She sat there, staring across the trench at the thing that had been her mother.

Benny turned and slowly walked away.

CHAPTER 13

Benny went back to the mess hall to find Nix. He didn’t want to be mad at her. Maybe if they talked it out she’d understand the thing with Chong.

But she wasn’t there.

The breakfast crowd was mostly gone, but Benny saw the ranger, Joe, come in. The big man wore camouflaged pants, a sweat-stained gray T-shirt, and handmade sandals. His blue eyes were hidden behind dark glasses. His skin was burned to a red-gold except for white lines from scars old and new. There were a lot of scars. Although he had to be in his late fifties or even early sixties, Joe was very fit, with ropy muscles that flexed under his tough hide as he walked. Ordinarily Joe was vibrant with good humor and rapid-fire snarky comments, but today he shambled to the steam table, and it looked like he needed to use serious concentration to spoon eggs onto his plate. Joe’s dog, a monster of a mastiff named Grimm, trailed along behind him. Joe thumped down into a chair at a table by the far wall; Grimm collapsed on the floor next to him. Everyone at the adjoining table got up and moved.

Benny drifted over.

Grimm lifted his head and studied Benny the way Morgie Mitchell used to study a grilled flank steak. Joe was hunched over his food, shoveling eggs into his mouth. He didn’t look up to see who was approaching.

“Buzz off.”

Benny stopped. “What?”

Joe raised his head only enough to glare at Benny over the top of the sunglasses, which had slid halfway down his nose. His eyes were bloodshot and bleary. “Oh, it’s you.”

“Mind if I sit down?”

“Yes.”

“What is it about today? Is it Tell Benny Imura to Go Away Day?”

“Sounds good to me. And in the spirit of that… go away.”

“No, I don’t think I will.” He took another step closer. Grimm gave a warning growl so deep and low that it seemed to vibrate up through the floor. “Is he going to bite me?”

“Pretty good chance of it,” admitted Joe.

“I’ll risk it.”

Joe leaned his forearms wearily on the table. “What’s your deal, kid? Does ‘buzz off’ have a different meaning with your generation?”

“No. I get it. You want me to leave. It’s just that I’m not going to.”

Benny lowered himself onto a chair. The ranger watched him with a kind of bleak fascination.

“You’re a weird kid,” said Joe. “Most people go on the assumption that Grimm would gladly have them for lunch. You don’t seem to think so. I’m not sure if you’re a good judge of character or a total moron.”

“Jury’s out on that at the moment,” said Benny.

“Okay… what’s on your mind?” Joe sighed. “And keep your voice down. My head hurts.”

Benny peered at him. “Are you drunk?”

“No, I’m hungover. There’s a distinct difference. One is fun; the other is a whole lot less fun. Right now I am not having any fun, and you’re not helping.”

“Here’s a thought — why not not get drunk?”

Benny was not a fan of drunks. Alcoholism and heavy drinking had been serious problems in all the Nine Towns ever since First Night. There were a lot of excuses, of course. Every adult had lost someone during those dreadful days. The apparent apocalypse had burned the faith out of a lot of people — faith in their religions, their ideologies, their expectations, their government, and their own dreams. The persistence of the zombie plague created tremendous paranoia. The world seemed to be ending, so why bother? Why not get drunk? Why not blur all the sharp edges? It saddened Benny as much as it disgusted him, because it was an acceptance of defeat. There was no fight left in it. There was no attempt to get back up and shake a fist at the universe and try again. One of Tom’s favorite martial arts sayings was: “Fall down seven times, get up eight.” Yet it seemed that some people just kept wanting to fall back down.

Joe sipped his coffee. “Exactly when did it become your business what I do?”

“You’re a soldier, right? A ranger? Aren’t you supposed to be a role model?”

“Wow, you’re an obnoxious SOB today. You have a double helping of cranky flakes for breakfast?”

“No. I spent the morning down in the dungeon under the blockhouse looking at my best friend, who seems to be turning into a zombie.”

“Ah,” said Joe. “Yeah, that’ll do it. I saw him yesterday. Shame.”

“It’s a ‘shame’? That’s the best you got? A shame? I thought those scientists were supposed to cure him.”

“First,” said Joe, pointing at Benny with his coffee cup, “stop shouting. You’re hurting my head. Second, what do you think they are over there? Wizards? You think they can wave a magic wand and make everything all better?”

“Yes. After we found those records on the wrecked plane, you were all excited. You said that we saved the world.”

Joe rubbed his eyes. “Yeah, well…”

“Well… what? We gave them Dr. McReady’s research notes, so why can’t they help Chong?”

“It’s complicated. They’re running into some speed bumps with those notes.”

“Like what?”

“Look, kid… you know that Doc McReady was ready to crack this thing, right? Her lab up at Hope One was where the real cutting-edge research was being done. Out there in the field. Out where the Reaper Plague was mutating. She was sending reports back here to Sanctuary, so they were following her lead, but they were a couple of steps back. It’s not like the old days when data could be shared via the Internet. When Hope One was evacuated, the transport plane was supposed to bring back everything McReady had. All of it, right up to the minute so the bigger lab at Sanctuary could finish her research and actually beat this thing.” He paused and shook his head. “Think about that, Ben. We were that close. We were ready to beat the plague that destroyed the whole world.”

“So… okay, it’s a shame that Dr. McReady died when the plane crashed — or maybe the reapers got her, whatever — my point is that if her research was on the plane, then how come the scientists in the blockhouse can’t just, I don’t know, finish it?”

“Because,” Joe said quietly, “not all the research was on the plane.”

If Joe had reached across the table and punched him in the face, Benny could not have been more stunned.

“I went over the cargo manifests,” continued the ranger, “and there’s a reference to the D series of boxes. We found series A through C. Nothing marked with a D. And based on the time Hope One was evacuated, there was nothing dated later than a month before she left.”

“Did they somehow leave the stuff up at Hope One?”

“No way. The manifest says that it was packed. It should have been on that plane.”

“Then where is it?”

“Well, gee, kid, if I knew that, I wouldn’t have gotten paralytic drunk last night, now would I?”

Benny felt his face grow hot. “You’re telling me there’s no clue at all?”

Joe sighed. “I don’t know. There was a single reference to Umatilla, but no notations. Nothing to say that they stopped there.”

“What’s Umatilla?”

“The Umatilla Chemical Depot is an army base in Oregon. They stored chemical weapons there. Stuff like GB and VX nerve agents. Bad stuff that was scheduled for destruction. The base was closed in 2015. Not sure what happened to it after that, but there’d be no reason for the transport plane to stop there, and certainly no reason to offload the D-series notes there. Whole area was overrun during First Night. I only mention it because it’s the one thing in the records we can’t account for.”

“Are you going there?”

“Me? No. I sent word to a couple of my rangers to head up that way. It’s a long shot and probably not worth the effort.”

“Look,” Benny said angrily, “even if you don’t have that last month’s worth of stuff, what we found had to put you pretty far ahead. That should be worth something.”

“It is,” Joe conceded tiredly. “Some of the clinical data in those boxes is responsible for your friend Chong still sucking air. The metabolic stabilizer and a few other treatments. That’s what’s keeping him on the happy side of being dead.”

“Chong spoke to me today.”

Joe cocked an eyebrow. “What did he say?”

Benny told him.

“Ouch,” said Joe. “Look, this thing’s gone off the rails. I was out there all day yesterday, but I couldn’t find the missing notes. I got to tell you, Benny, this isn’t the ending for all this I’d been writing in my head. For the last couple of years that plane’s been the Holy Grail for us. It was our silver bullet. We find it and find Doc McReady’s notes and bam, the mad scientists in the blockhouse cook up a cure and we all tell our grandkids how we saved the world. But… the doctors over there can’t seem to figure out where Doc McReady was going with her research during those last weeks before Hope One was shut down. There were samples of a mutagen, but there was also a reference to a workable treatment code-named Archangel. But the name’s all we have. There’s not one scrap of data on what Archangel is or does. Those boxes are the key, and they’re missing. We lost our last chance to beat this thing.”

“Don’t say that! There has to be something else we can do. There has to be a way to find that stuff.”

Joe simply sipped his coffee.

“Joe, are you going to sit there and tell me that you just give up? You? You’re Captain Ledger, for God’s sake. You’re a hero of First Night.”

“Sure, kid, it says so on a Zombie Card. It must be true.”

“My friend is dying,” growled Benny. “We can’t give up.”

“You think you’re the only person who can feel pain?” asked Joe, his eyes old and bleak. “Before this thing started, I had a wife and a six-month-old kid. I was overseas on a mission when the Reaper Plague got loose. I called my wife, told her to get the hell out, to go to my uncle’s farm near Robinwood, Maryland. It took me a week to get a flight back to the States. By the time I got to San Diego, the whole country was going nuts. No more commercial flights. The military bases were trashed too. When the people started panicking, everybody flocked to the closest base, but because so many of the refugees were already bitten and infected, those bases turned into killing fields. I stole a helicopter from a National Guard base that had become an all-you-can-eat buffet and made it halfway across the country before the army started dropping nukes on the zoms. The EMPs killed the engine, killed my cell phone and our satellite phone. Helicopter died, and we went down hard. There were ten of us on the bird. Four of us survived the landing. We split up and each tried to find our way home. It took me three weeks to make it all the way to my uncle Jack’s place. But… there was no one there. The place had burned to the ground, so there was no way for me to tell if my wife and kid ever made it there.”

Benny stared at him.

“So why am I telling you all this?” asked Joe. “I’m telling you this because everything in our world points to my family being dead. My wife, my son, my uncle. My brother, Sean, and his family in Baltimore. I never found any of them. Not a hint, not a sign in all these years. They probably are dead. They’re probably walking around as the living dead, just like everyone else. But you know what?”

Benny said nothing. He doubted he could even speak.

Joe laid his hand on the butt of his holstered pistol. “If I believed that, if I actually got to the point where I believed that everyone I ever loved was dead, then I’d blow out all my own lights. But I don’t know that, kid. I don’t. I can’t. Not even now, not even after the setback with Doc McReady’s notes.” He sighed. “All I got left is one slim chance that the world isn’t totally broken. That’s what keeps me going, and that’s why I won’t lay down my arms.”

Finally Benny said, “Then why get drunk?”

The ranger shook his head. “Sometimes despair gets in a few good punches. Last night was a bad night. This morning sucks too. This afternoon I’ll map out a search grid, and first thing in the morning I’m going to start looking under every stone, inside every cave, and up the butt-hole of every lizard in the desert. If those records are there, I will find them.”

“What if they’re not there?” asked Benny. “What if they’re somewhere else? What if the reapers took them?”

“You ask very bad questions.” Joe sighed. “Go away.”

“I can help.”

“In ten seconds I’m going to tell Grimm to bite something valuable off of you. Ten, nine, two…”

Benny left, but he wasn’t going to waste the rest of the day. Tomorrow was too late to start looking for something that Chong needed right now.

He stole a quad, fired up the engine, and went rocketing toward the desert.

CHAPTER 14

Dr. McReady’s transport plane had crashed more than ten miles from Sanctuary. The ride to the crash site was tricky, because the soldiers once stationed at the base had used dynamite to block most of the roads, leaving only a single twisted and obscure path through the red-rock mountains. A quad could just about ease through.

Benny’s quad was an ugly little machine with four fat rubber tires and a kind of saddle for the driver. Despite the horrible sound it made, Benny found he rather liked the machine. Over rough terrain it could travel an astounding twenty-five miles per hour. On a flat road, Benny had gotten his quad to go over forty miles per hour. On foot, he could manage as much as five miles an hour if he pushed it, and more often two to three because of terrain and weather conditions.

It amazed him that he could drive all the way back to Mountainside, a trip of over 470 miles, in two days. One if he didn’t stop to eat or pee. That kind of speed seemed unreal. It had taken more than a month to walk that distance. Granted, a lot of the travel time had been spent evading zoms, hunting for food, searching out paths, and training with their swords.

As Benny left Sanctuary, he paused for a moment to look at the hand-lettered sign that was hung on the big chain-link fence.

Below that the original words, sand-blasted and pale, were still visible:

Benny took a long breath and exhaled through his nose, revved the engine of his quad, and headed out into the desert.

Those records were out there. Six boxes marked with a big letter D.

He was going to find them.

CHAPTER 15

Nix Riley could barely see the blade.

She parried more by reflex than anything, and the spear caromed off her sword with such force that shock waves rippled up her arms. The next blow was even harder, and the next. Nix stumbled back, swinging and swinging, breath coming in painful gasps. Finally one blow caught her sword just above the guard and knocked it out of her hands. It thudded to the ground. Her attacker kicked Nix’s feet out from under her, and Nix thumped down, hitting her elbows, her shoulders, and the back of her head on the hard sand. She suddenly felt the sharp tip of the spear press down between her breasts — right over her heart.

“You’re dead,” growled Lilah. They were on a rocky shelf a quarter mile behind the dormitory hangar. Sheer cliffs rose behind them, and all around were the shadowy clefts of deep arroyos. A few sparse cacti and Joshua trees littered the landscape, offering no useful shade at all.

Nix couldn’t really see the Lost Girl. The tears in her eyes smeared everything, removing all precision and meaning.

“Concentrate,” barked Lilah as they set themselves to begin another drill.

But too many things were clattering around in Nix’s mind.

She needed to apologize to Benny, but he was gone. She’d seen him drive away on a quad. She’d almost gone after him, but hadn’t. This needed fixing, but Nix didn’t know which words would form the glue of that repair.

So she’d gone looking for Captain Ledger, to see if he’d give her another combat lesson. He nearly sicced his dog on her.

The ranger was an enigma, one of the many things about this phase of her life that Nix didn’t understand. Sometimes he was so gruff and rude that she wanted to feed him to the zoms. Yet sometimes he could be extraordinarily kind and wise. Almost like Tom.

Shortly after arriving at Sanctuary, Joe gave Nix a real sword to replace the wooden sword she’d carried from Mountainside. He’d offered one to Lilah as well, but the Lost Girl preferred her spear.

The sword Joe gave Nix was one of several top-quality katanas the ranger possessed. The handle and fittings were new, but Joe said the blade was ancient. Hundreds of years old.

“Isn’t it fragile?” Nix asked, terrified that she might destroy so beautiful a relic.

But Joe laughed. “This sword was made by Hoki Yasutsuna, one of the greatest Japanese sword makers of all time. It’s a superb blade. I’d take it into any battle without hesitation. And it has a name, Dojigiri.”

“What’s it mean?”

Joe grinned. “Dojigiri means ‘Monster cutter.’ Rather appropriate, don’t you think?”

The sword did not look particularly impressive, with plain black silk bindings on the handle and a speckled cord. However, Nix accepted the sword with wide-eyed reverence.

“Dojigiri,” she repeated, holding it as if it would shatter in her hands. “Monster cutter. This is crazy. This must be worth a fortune.”

“It’s worth whatever value you place on it, Nix. No one else is looking. The whole value system is a historical footnote.”

“But… this should be in a museum.”

“Used to be,” said Joe with a smile. “It was a national treasure of Japan and happened to be part of a collection of priceless artifacts on loan to an American museum. Lately, though, the only people visiting museums are zombies and scavengers, so I liberated it along with some other goodies. Not really theft, is it? Besides… the sword was made to be used, not to gather dust. I believe Tom was training you kids to be samurai, right? So… be samurai.”

Benny drew his kami katana and showed it to Joe. “I have a good sword too.”

The ranger gave him a tolerant smile. “Not sure how to break this to you, kid, but your sword is a good-quality modern blade, and definitely reliable in a fight, but it’s not what you’d call a ‘legendary’ sword.”

Benny was affronted. “This was Tom’s sword.”

“Sure,” agreed Joe, “and he put it to good use, but the fact remains that they made about ten thousand swords just like that one. Hell, that one isn’t even Tom’s original.”

“Yes it is!” Benny insisted.

“No, it’s not. He broke his first sword a few days after First Night. He told me about it. Quite a story, too. And… I think he might have had another one after that. I was with him when he took this baby off one of the skull-riders who—”

“The who?” asked Benny and Nix together.

Joe blinked at them. “The skull-riders? The kill squad out of Reno?” He paused. “Tom never told you about that?”

“No,” said Benny and Nix at the same time.

“Didn’t he tell you about the time he and I and a guy named Solomon Jones took down a group of slavers up around Lake Tahoe? Or the time we teamed up with Hector Mexico, Johnny Apache, and the Beatbox Boys and cleared out the reavers who were raiding the trade route between the Nine Towns?”

“No,” Benny said heavily. “Are you making this stuff up? Tom never said anything about this. He was a bounty hunter, that’s all.”

“That’s all? Really?” Captain Ledger laughed. “How do you think Tom learned all his tricks? You think he got that good quieting zoms? Get your head out of your butt, kid. While everyone was building the towns and putting up that fence, your brother was riding with some hard-asses out in the Ruin.” He paused, considered, sighed. “But… I guess that’s Tom for you. He never was one to brag. Surprised you never asked the other bounty hunters about him.”

“The only bounty hunters Benny ever listened to were Charlie Pink-eye and the Motor City Hammer,” said Nix.

“Ah,” said Joe. “Those two. Tom would have done the whole world a favor by putting bullets in their brainpans back when he had the chance. Would have saved the world a lot of grief.” Joe suddenly stiffened and cut a sharp look at Nix, then winced. “Ahhh, jeez, I’m sorry. I forgot about your mom. I’m an idiot.”

Nix wanted to cry, but she kept her eyes dry. “Benny killed Charlie. I killed Marion Hammer.”

A slow smile formed on Joe’s face. “Seriously?”

“Yeah,” said Benny.

“Holy frog snot. You have got to tell me everything.”

So they told him about the murder of Nix’s mother and the horrors of that incident.

“I knew her, you know,” said Joe sadly. “Jessie was one classy lady. Gorgeous, too. You have her eyes, Nix. And her toughness. I know she’d be proud.”

Now tears rolled down Nix’s cheeks, but her voice didn’t break as they continued the story. When they got to the end, Joe clapped Benny resoundingly on the shoulder and kissed Nix on the forehead. “That’s sweet! That’s the cat’s ass. You killed Charlie with the Hammer’s own pipe, and then you killed him again in the zombie pits. Oh man, now that’s legendary.”

Nix wiped away her tears. “It didn’t feel legendary at the time. It was scary and weird.”

“Sure, but then all real adventures are scary and weird,” said Joe. “Believe me… I know.”

They returned to training, but Benny was clearly angry. Nix could understand why. Joe made a point of evaluating everything they’d learned from Tom, and frequently suggested some modifications. A couple of times that day Benny balked at changes in technique suggested by the ranger.

“That’s not how Tom did it.”

Joe’s reply to each comment was a shrug. “Do it whatever way will keep you alive.”

But Joe’s advice had pushed too many of Benny’s buttons. “Hey, man, stop acting like you know more than Tom.”

Joe smiled. It was a tolerant smile, but his patience clearly didn’t go too many layers deep. “Listen to me, kid. I’m offering you the chance to learn some extra skills and about the nature of warfare. You want to learn this stuff, fine. You don’t want to learn it, also fine. But understand two things about Tom. First, he was a very, very talented amateur, but he was an amateur. He was one day out of the police academy when First Night happened. He’d never served in the military. Most of what he learned about combat he picked up during the fourteen years he worked as a bounty hunter and closure specialist. And he learned a lot from me. Now… from what I saw when he ran with my pack, and from what I’ve heard since, Tom became seriously good. Good enough to spank Charlie Pink-eye and his crew, and tough enough so that Preacher Jack had to shoot him in the back rather than risk fighting him one-on-one. That says a lot. Tom was the kind of guy I’d want at my back in any situation. But here’s the flip side of that. Before First Night — for a lot of years before First Night — I was the top shooter in a group that hired only top shooters. I was fighting monsters, bad guys, and terrorists before Tom was even born. Grasp that for a minute, kid. I’m not saying this to brag. This is a perspective check. I’ve been fighting this war in one way or another for more than forty years. Even before First Night I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe. Stuff that would have you screaming into your pillow every night. I led combat teams into firefights on every continent, and I’ve killed more people than you ever met. With hands, guns, knives, and once with a paperback book. You think I’m trying to bust on your brother by correcting the way you swing a sword? Kid, if I wanted to humiliate him or you, I’d take that sword away from you and break it over my knee. But as it turns out, I happen to respect what you and Nix can do, and I respect what Tom taught you, and I respect Tom as a fallen brother-in-arms. I respect all of that so much that I want to make sure it doesn’t go to waste just because you have too much pride and ego to take some constructive criticism. So if you want to stop arguing with everything I say, then I’ll teach you every dirty trick I can so you stay alive.”

Benny glared up at him for a very long time. Finally, when his voice was under control, he said, “That’s one thing. You said there were two. What’s the other? Was there something else you wanted to say about my brother?”

Joe gave Benny the coldest smile Nix had ever seen on a human face.

“Yes,” said Joe. “Tom’s dead. I’m alive. After all these years, I’m still alive. That makes a statement. Learn from the survivors or go the hell home.”

That had been the end of the discussion. Benny had stormed off and spent the rest of the afternoon stewing about it.

The next day he was back, with his sword, his gear bag, and his apologetic pride.

Joe never said a word about the argument, never acknowledged it. They picked up where they’d left off, and Joe drilled them mercilessly. And well.

Both of them had improved quite a lot. They were faster, trickier, stronger, and far more devious.

Now, though…

Nix felt clumsy and stupid. Lilah got through her guard again and again and again.

“I–I’m sorry…,” said Nix in a tiny voice.

“Sorry?” Lilah withdrew her spear, raised it over her head, and with a savage grunt drove it down. The blade bit inches deep into the sand right beside Nix’s face, chopping off several strands of curly red hair. “Sorry? Are you training for combat or practicing for your own death, you silly town girl?”

Nix covered her face with her hands and shook her head.

“I’m sorry,” was all she could say.

Lilah straightened and stood over Nix for a while. Then she threw her spear down in disgust and sank onto the ground beside the weeping girl.

“What is it?” Her voice was always a ghostly whisper.

Nix rolled toward her and wrapped her arms around Lilah, clinging to her as a child might. Clinging to her as a drowning person might.

They never heard the zoms coming until white fingers clamped like iron around their flesh.

CHAPTER 16

When Riot couldn’t bear to stare at her mother any longer, she went to the playground to find Eve. They sat together on a blanket, with sewing gear scattered all around them: needles, spools of thread, balls of colored yarn, thimbles, and all sorts of fabric scraps.

As Riot watched, Eve used a pair of scissors to cut a piece of pink felt into the shape of a blouse. Almost the shape of a blouse. Currently it looked more like a blob or a three-legged pink turtle. Eve’s little pink tongue tip stuck out from the corner of her mouth as she worked.

Overhead, a pair of capuchin monkeys that had long ago escaped from a private zoo in Las Vegas capered among the leaves. The nuns had named them Charity and Forbearance. The children called the monkeys Chatty and Foobear.

“There!” said Eve proudly as she held out the finished piece.

“That looks pretty,” said Riot. The blouse still had three arms. “Is… one of those the neck hole?”

Eve considered the shirt, frowning slightly. “Oops,” she said, and trimmed one of the sleeves. “Better?”

“Way better,” agreed Riot. “That’s as pretty as a rainbow after a spring rain.”

Eve giggled.

They found some blue fabric for a skirt and little bits of brown for shoes, and Riot helped Eve glue and sew the pieces onto a burlap rag doll one of the nuns had made. As they worked, Chatty and Foobear crept down the tree and sat the edge of their blanket, watching with luminous dark eyes.

When the doll was nearly finished, Eve leaned over and began sorting through the supplies until she found a nearly empty ball of bright red yarn. She held it against the doll to examine the color, and then nodded to herself. Riot watched as Eve cut off a few small pieces and began tying them around the doll’s neck. For one horrible moment Riot was afraid that Eve was making something like the red streamers that all the reapers wore tied to various places around their bodies. The streamers were symbolic of the red mouths opened in the flesh of the “heretics” that the reapers sent on into the eternal darkness. They were also dipped in a chemical mixture concocted by Sister Sun, which emitted a strong scent that discouraged the dead from attacking.

But that was not what Eve was doing.

She strung the red yarn around the doll’s throat.

“What’s that?” Riot asked, her smile broad and forced.

“A necklace.”

“Oh… nice. What kind of necklace? Is it a ruby necklace like a princess would wear?”

Eve looked at the red loop of yarn around the burlap throat of the doll. Then she slowly turned her face to Riot. The smile was so bright and happy.

“No, silly,” she said, “it’s like the one mommy wore. Remember? Her necklace was all bright and shiny.”

“Necklace…?” Riot murmured. The heart in her chest turned instantly to ice.

Eve’s mother had indeed worn a necklace of shining red. She’d worn it the very last time Riot and Eve had seen her. It was not a necklace of rubies, of course, or even of garnets. The reaper Andrew had cut Eve’s mother down with a scythe. The blow had taken the woman across the throat, and the red that had glistened there had been her own bright blood.

Riot looked at the doll and then at Eve. The little girl smiled and smiled, bright as the summer sun, and behind those innocent blue eyes something shifted and moved.

Something very dark and very wrong.

CHAPTER 17

There was no time to scream.

Four cold hands grabbed Nix from behind and tore her away from Lilah.

The Lost Girl started to yell, but then a red-mouthed thing ran at her.

Ran.

It came so fast, hands reaching, lips peeling back from cracked and jagged teeth. The zom slammed into Lilah, caught her off guard, knocked her backward. They fell over and over down the slope, hung for a moment at the edge of a sheer six-foot drop into an arroyo, and then toppled out of sight.

There was no way for Nix to tear free of the hands that grabbed her from behind. Teeth snapped inches from her neck and shoulders and ears. The angle was impossible for swordplay, so she did the only practical thing she could: She opened her hand and let Monster Cutter clatter to the ground. Then Nix threw herself backward as hard as she could, using all the power of the zombies’ pull along with the strength of her own legs. The extra momentum spoiled what little balance the awkward creatures had, and the two zombies fell hard onto the ground, with Nix’s body landing slantwise across them. With humans, a fall like that would have jolted the air from their lungs, but these were dead things. Luckily, Nix made herself exhale on impact — as both Tom and Joe had taught her. The exhale relaxed her body for the impact, but the jolt was still heavy enough to explode fireworks in her head.

There was a strange, wet quality to the bodies she landed on. Were they recently dead? Were they still filled with blood and other bodily fluids? Her pants and the back of her shirt felt warm and damp.

The gripping hands were still there, so Nix raised her arms straight up, hands almost touching above her, then slammed her elbows down as hard as she could. Her left elbow hit a zom in the nose and knocked its head back against the rocky ground; her right elbow struck the second zom in the ribs. In both cases, the blows jolted their bodies and gave her a split second to pull free and roll away. She scrambled to her feet and faced the dead. One of the two zoms lay still, the back of its head smashed to a pulp. The other struggled to right itself.

“Lilah!” Nix yelled, but there was no answer. She heard scrabbling sounds from the arroyo, but it was impossible to tell if that was Lilah fighting for her life or another zom coming up the slope to join the attack.

Nix had no weapons. She’d dropped her sword, and her gun belt was hung on a tree limb up the slope. The second zom was on its feet now, and Nix saw that it was one of the recent dead, probably another of the party of refugees Riot had been leading from the destroyed town of Treetops to Sanctuary. The zom was a Latino man, not tall, but broad-shouldered and powerful-looking. There was a faint red smudge around its mouth that wasn’t blood. It looked like powder of some kind. There was more of it sprinkled on its clothes. She wondered if it was some kind of pollen.

The zom moved toward her, staggering on bowed legs, his gait made awkward by the absence of one shoe. As he reached out toward Nix, she saw that his palms and forearms were crisscrossed with wounds. When she realized what they were, it sickened her. Defense cuts. The kind a person gets when they’re backing helplessly away from someone trying to cut them. Had this man been unarmed against a reaper? There were similar cuts all along the insides of his arms and outer chest. Nix could imagine him backing away from a killer, arms spread in a hopeless attempt to shelter someone else. A wife, perhaps, or children. Using his own flesh as a shield, and knowing with each cut that nothing he could do, not even the sacrifice of his flesh and blood, would be enough to keep the knives of those fanatical killers from doing their horrible work.

It made Nix want to gag. This man had suffered so much. There was a final deep gash across his throat from where the death blow had been dealt, and his clothes were stained with blood that had pumped out of him with his failing heart. That heart hung still and silent within the walls of his chest, a thing that had been both defeated and broken by evil.

If Nix could have turned and run away, she would have. But there was only sheer rock behind her. The path to escape was behind the zom. There was no option left except to fight. To do more harm to this man.

A black goo dribbled from the creature’s mouth, viscous and heavy, and Nix thought she could see tiny white thread-worms wriggling in the mess.

She swiftly knelt to snatch up a fist-sized rock, and as she did so Nix saw one more thing that made no sense. The one shoeless foot was swollen and discolored, a sign of advanced decomposition. There was similar discoloration on the man’s arms and chest, and some on his face. Discolored veins were visible through his skin, and some of his fingernails had even fallen off. The tissues were becoming swollen as the process of decay released gasses from the disintegrating tissues.

But… that was impossible.

One of the enduring mysteries of the post — First Night world was that zoms decayed to a certain point, and then the process stopped. No one knew why. The living dead did not corrupt to the point where their flesh actually fell apart. But this man looked ready to burst apart; his soft tissue was beginning to liquefy. And that did not happen. Not to any zombie. Only after a zom had been quieted did the normal process of decomposition run its full course. This was something she had never heard of. Not even in Dr. McReady’s reports. Was this a new form of mutation? If so… what did it mean? What could it mean?

The zom kept moving toward her. He did not run, but it was more than a shuffling walk. Even with the advanced decomposition, he moved with more speed than a regular zom, and even more coordination.

Nix hurled the rock as hard as she could. It struck the monster in the chest with a sound like a bursting watermelon. Fetid black blood erupted from the wound. The smell was so intense that Nix staggered backward. The only thing that pungent she’d ever smelled was pure cadaverine, but that was weird, because a body only produced cadaverine when it was going through advanced decomposition. Her science class had toured the cadaverine plant in town, and they’d seen how the technicians harvested it from rotting animal flesh.

Nix took that moment to pick up two more stones as fast as she could, hurling them sidearm, hitting the thing in the shoulder and face. It staggered sideways into the rock wall, but it rebounded and came after her again. Nix scooped up a bigger stone. It was too big to throw, so she gripped it with both hands, raised it over her head, ran down the slope, and brought the stone down with all her strength.

The zom’s head exploded.

Black goo splattered her face and hair and clothes. She screamed and began hysterically slapping at the wormy muck.

Behind her the zom collapsed onto the ground with a boneless, meaty thud that was entirely disgusting to hear.

“Behind you!”

It was Lilah’s voice, hoarse and ghostly and urgent. Nix spun back as a third zom came running at her — fast, even going uphill. The zom was thirty feet away. Nix dove for her sword and came up with Dojigiri in her hands, and with no time left, she swung hard and wild.

The zombie’s last running steps were confused, and the headless body puddled down onto the ground, leaking pints of black, wormy blood.

CHAPTER 18

His name was Chong.

He knew that much, though the name was more of a sound, something familiar to which he reacted. He did not know what the name meant. Or if it meant anything at all.

Chong squatted in the darkness, arms resting loosely on his knees, hands dangling, head lowered, looking up from under threads of filthy hair. Every once in a while his fingers twitched, a spasm very like the motion of grabbing something. Of squeezing something that would scream.

Spit glistened on his lips and ran down his chin.

He thought about the boy who had been in here earlier. There was a sound for him, too. A word sound that triggered memory. Not memories of laughing or talking or fishing or trading Zombie Cards. Those memories sometimes flashed through his brain, but they were meaningless fragments. No, what he remembered was the smell of the boy.

The smell of meat. So much of it. So close.

As he thought about that boy, he felt his lips move. He heard his throat make a sound. Listened as the sound filled the air.

“B-Benny…”

Hearing the name intensified his hunger.

That meat had been so close. His teeth had almost had it. His stomach ached at the thought. He crouched there in the shadows and waited for the other boy — for the meat — to come back.

CHAPTER 19

Saint John loved the screams. They sounded like prayers to him.

With each shriek of pain, each cry for mercy that would not come, he knew that the eyes and minds and souls of the heretics were opening to the truth. The old gods, the old religions, could not protect them, because they were all false. When the blades of the reapers opened the red mouths, each mouth spoke the truth. The only salvation was oblivion.

He stood in the burning street with Sister Sun. She pleased him. The woman was brilliant by any standard, and as cold as moonlight. She kept disease from sweeping through the reaper army, though the withering winds of cancer were destroying her day by day. In the last six months she’d lost forty pounds, and soon she would be a skeleton.

If she had a flaw beyond physical infirmity, it was a stubborn refusal to let go of the science of the old world. That brought her into conflict with the more hard-line reapers, but it also provided an interesting X factor that Saint John occasionally found useful. The fact that Mother Rose hated and feared Sister Sun was another useful thing. By observing that dynamic without becoming involved in it, Saint John often learned valuable things about each of them. They were, at present, the two most powerful women in the Night Church.

Now he accompanied Sister Sun along a burning street toward the center of this doomed little town.

“What is it you wanted to show me?” he asked.

“Brother Victor was injured in the fighting,” wheezed Sister Sun. “A sucking chest wound. He was taken to a gazebo we’ve been using as a triage center for this engagement, but he bled out. The Red Brothers were going to release him outside of town so he could wander, but…”

She let her words trail off as they arrived at the gazebo that stood in the village square. The structure was surrounded by members of the Red Brotherhood — the combat elite of the reapers. They were each marked by a bloodred palm print tattooed on their faces. They parted to allow Saint John and Sister Sun a better view but kept everyone else away.

As Saint John approached, he saw Brother Victor on the other side of the rail. The reaper’s face was dead pale and his mouth dark with blood. He turned toward the movement of the newcomers and immediately crouched like a cat ready to spring. He bared his teeth and snarled. A black, viscous goo, thick as motor oil, dribbled over his teeth and down his chin. Small white worms writhed in the muck.

It was clear that Brother Victor had become one of the gray people.

The dead thing suddenly hurled himself at Saint John.

Four muscular Red Brothers leaped to intercept the rush, and they forced Victor back with wooden poles. The reaper retreated, but he began pacing back and forth, occasionally lunging at the rail with cat quickness.

Saint John frowned. “I don’t understand this. Is he dead?”

“He is,” said Sister Sun.

“But he’s so fast.”

“Yes. Fast and smart. Look.”

The dead reaper attacked the rail over and over again, hitting different points, trying to squeeze between the guards, snarling all the while. He was so fast that once he nearly got across the rail before the men with the poles battered him back.

“He keeps trying the rail at different points,” observed Sister Sun. “He’s trying to find a weakness.”

“You examined him? He has no pulse, no—”

“He’s dead,” said Sister Sun. She leaned close. “This is the mutation we’ve been hearing about. Now it’s happened to one of our own. Honored One… if this spreads…”

Saint John said nothing. He could almost taste the fear in Sister Sun’s voice, and he could see it in the eyes of the Red Brothers.

However, in his own heart, deep down in that velvety darkness, he felt quite a different emotion. And it made him smile.

CHAPTER 20

Up ahead Benny saw a hazy stretch of green floating inside a mirage.

The forest.

The very fact of the forest out here in the dry vastness of Nevada was bizarre. Before First Night, some real estate developers had come out into the hottest part of the desert and decided that this would be a wonderful place to put a golf course. They built row after row of tall wind turbines to generate electricity and pump water to irrigate the landscape, and planted trees, grass, and decorative shrubs in what was otherwise an inhospitable environment. In doing so they created the illusion of a lush forest cut with wide green lawns. The wind turbines hadn’t been knocked out by First Night; however, heat and blowing sand had stilled most of them. Only a few still channeled sluggish water into the soil. Most of the exotic foliage was now dead, coarse weeds and bare dirt having replaced most of the lush grass. Lovely shrubs had been replaced by uglier, hardier foliage. When the last of the turbines quit working, the desert would kill the remaining imported trees and reclaim the land. Benny figured that within ten years there would be no trace of the golf course, no evidence that man had ever tried to impose his whims and his will on the fierce Mojave.

The four fat tires rumbled effortlessly over the rocky ground. Ahead he could see flashes of white through the green. The plane. As he drove toward it, Benny’s mind churned on so many different things that he never heard the second quad come tearing toward him from behind a stand of trees. His only warning was when the other quad’s engine roared to full throttle as the driver slammed into Benny’s machine.

Suddenly Benny was flying into the air, arms pinwheeling, legs kicking. He landed with a thud that jolted every muscle and bone in his body. His katana went slithering out of its scabbard onto sandy ground. But Tom had taught him to react rather than allow himself to gape in surprise. He scrambled around, got to his feet, and came up into a crouch, confused, scared, and angry. His quad lay on its side near the transport plane, its wheels still turning, a second machine jammed hard against it, blue ethanol fumes chugging from both tailpipes.

He heard a crunch of a footfall, turned fast, and saw a glittering knife slash through the air toward his throat.

CHAPTER 21

Benny screamed and flung himself backward and felt wind whip past his Adam’s apple as the blade missed him by a hairbreadth. His heels hit a gnarled twist of an exposed tree root, and Benny went down on his butt with a thump that snapped his teeth together with a loud clack!

The reaper grinned in obvious anticipation of an easy kill. “I bring the gift of darkness to you, my brother.”

“Bite me,” gasped Benny, and snatched up a handful of pebbles, hurling them at the killer. The reaper twisted away and took the stones on shoulders and hip instead of full in the face.

Benny’s sword was ten feet away, the steel blade gleaming with deadly potential. The killer stood between Benny and the katana, so it might as well have been on the far side of the moon. The big plane lay a few yards behind Benny’s back.

The reaper crouched, knife in hand, muscles bunching as he prepared to pounce. He was a tall man in his early twenties, all wiry muscle and sinew, dressed in black jeans and a muscle shirt with angel’s wings hand-stitched across the chest. The man’s head was shaved bald and comprehensively tattooed in a pattern of creeper vines and locusts. Strips of red cloth were tied to his ankles and wrists and looped around his belt. The cloth smelled like rotting meat — evidence that it had recently been dipped in chemicals that were used to prevent the living dead from attacking. Benny smelled every bit as bad from the cadaverine he’d sprinkled on his clothes.

Benny scooted backward on the ground, putting as much distance as he could between him and the reaper. The killer faked a lunge and then kicked sand in Benny’s face; but Benny was already in motion, already scooping a handful of sand to throw at the reaper. Both masses of sand hissed through each other and struck their targets. Benny whipped his arm up to save his eyes, but he got a choking mouthful. The reaper tried to turn away and partially succeeded, so that the sand pelted his cheek and ear.

With a growl that was equal parts anger and fear, Benny drove his shoulder into the reaper’s gut, exploding the air from the killer with an oooof. Benny’s rush drove them both into the curved metal side of the gigantic transport plane. The impact tore a cry from the reaper, and he dropped his knife. Benny head-butted him, smashing the man’s nose. The reaper screeched again, but a split second later he jerked his knee upward as hard as he could into Benny’s crotch.

Benny staggered back, hands cupped around his groin.

The reaper moaned and sagged to his knees, blood pouring down his face from his shattered nose. “I will… open… red mouths… in your…”

“Yeah, yeah,” wheezed Benny in a tiny voice as he fought against pain and nausea, “… open red mouths in my flesh… send me into the darkness… got it… owwwww!”

Gagging and coughing, the reaper reached for the knife.

Benny kicked it away.

They got slowly and painfully to their feet. The reaper’s nose was a purple bulb; his mouth and teeth glistened with red. Benny was sure that his testicles were somewhere up in his chest cavity.

The reaper sneered at Benny. “Are you really so stupid that you think you have a chance?”

“Yes,” said Benny defiantly, then he frowned. “Wait, no, I mean I’m not stupid, but yes, I have a chance against you.”

“I’m not talking about this fight, brother.”

“Don’t call me brother, you enormous freak,” muttered Benny.

“The army of the Night Church will sweep away all defiance to god’s will.”

“Yeah, I know, you’re invincible. Oh, wait, didn’t you idiots get your butts handed to you by one guy with a rocket launcher? How’s that ‘sweeping away all defiance’ thing working out for you?”

The reaper spat blood onto the sand. “The reapers who died at the Shrine of the Fallen were heretics and traitors to Thanatos — praise be to the darkness. They were the scum who followed Mother Rose. You have no idea what kind of army follows Saint John. Brother Peter and Sister Sun will sweep away all resistance to god’s will.”

“Sure. Fine. Whatever. I’m sure whoever you’re quoting would be impressed. But check it out — you try and take Sanctuary again, and Captain Ledger will introduce you to Mr. Rocket-Propelled Grenade.”

“You think that heretic can defend Sanctuary from us?” The reaper laughed.

“Pretty much.”

“The voice of god will echo from the mountaintops and proclaim the glory of the darkness, and clouds of blood will cover the lands. Then the quickened dead will consume those who are slow to accept the darkness.”

“Okay, don’t take this the wrong way,” said Benny, “but you’re crazier than a bag of hamsters.”

The knife lay ten feet from the reaper’s right foot; Benny’s sword was twelve feet to his left. They each looked at the weapons at the same time. At the sword, at the knife, then at each other. Then they lunged at the same time. The reaper was faster, taller, and stronger and he snatched up the knife, his fingers curling the deer-bone handle into perfect placement in his palm. Benny, a fraction slower and ten years younger, threw himself into a dive-roll and came up with the katana in a wide two-handed grip. He whirled and dropped into a combat crouch.

“Don’t!” warned Benny, backing up a step. “We both know I’m going to win. Why push it? Just walk away.”

That should have ended the fight. A knife against a sword. But the world was broken, and so was sanity.

The reaper screamed and threw himself at Benny.

“No!” screamed Benny as the moment became red madness.

The knife tumbled once more to the sand. The reaper opened his mouth and said the same thing Benny had said.

“No.”

And it meant the same thing and so many different things. His knees buckled and he dropped down.

“No,” he said again, as if repeating it could enforce some of his will upon the world.

The world, stubborn to the last, refused to listen. The reaper toppled forward onto his face with no attempt to catch his fall. Small puffs of dust plumed up around the man. Benny stood there, his sword still raised.

He closed his eyes.

“No,” he said.

CHAPTER 22

Nix stood under a shower of sun-heated water and scrubbed her skin raw. Lilah stood outside the stall, working the handle, pumping gallons of water from the big tank. The water was not pure enough to drink, but it was a million times cleaner than the bloody goo that clung to Nix’s hair and skin. At one point Nix heard a weird little whimpering sound, like a small, frightened animal might make. When she realized that she was making the sound, she stopped scrubbing, closed her eyes, and leaned her forehead against the inside of the wooden shower stall. Shudders rippled up and down her body. Lights seemed to flash behind her eyes. She spent a lot of time concentrating on her breathing. Trying to remember how to do it right. Keeping it from turning into sobs. Or screams.

The water slowed and stopped. Nix heard a soft sound as Lilah leaned against the door from the other side.

“Nix—?”

“Y-yes.”

“Are you…?”

“I’m fine. I didn’t get any in my mouth or eyes or anything.”

“We have to tell them,” said Lilah. “Four of them… four fast ones. We have to tell Joe.”

“I know.”

Nix leaned her cheek against the grainy wooden door and listened to the sound of Lilah’s voice. It was rare to hear the Lost Girl sound so scared.

“What does it mean?” asked Lilah in her ghostly whisper of a voice.

“I don’t know.”

CHAPTER 23

Benny stepped away from the man he’d just killed.

Overhead the first vultures were beginning to circle. Benny studied the dead man, wondering if he would rise from the dead — as nearly everyone did who’d died since the plague began on First Night — or if he would stay dead. Lately more and more people seemed to stay dead. No one knew why.

Stay dead, Benny silently told him.

Seconds blew past him like bits of debris on a hot wind. The reaper’s fingers twitched. Then his foot. Suddenly his eyes snapped open, his lips parted, and he uttered that long, low, terrible moan of hunger that marked him as one of the living dead. It was an eternal hunger, a hunger that made no sense. The dead did not need to feed, they required no nourishment.

So why were they so hungry? Why did they kill and devour human flesh?

Why?

“Why?” demanded Benny.

The sound of his voice made the zom turn his head. The thing sat up slowly, empty eyes turning toward the sound, nose sniffing the air. Benny’s cadaverine would keep him safe. He could let this one go.

The monks back at Sanctuary did not permit any of the zoms there to be killed.

This, however, was not Sanctuary. This was the Rot and Ruin.

Benny brought his sword up into a high guard, backing away slowly as the zom got clumsily to his feet. It stood for a moment, swaying as if taking a second to get used to what it was and how it felt about this new type of existence. That was wrong, though, and Benny knew it. The dead did not think, did not feel.

They simply were.

The creature moaned again. Benny listened to it, searching inside the sound for some trace, however small, of meaning, of humanity. Of anything.

All he heard was hunger. Vast, hollow, eternal.

The zombie looked at Benny and shuffled uncertainly toward him.

“Don’t,” said Benny, and the single word caused the zombie’s head to jerk up. The glazed eyes shifted up to look directly at him. It took another step.

Benny retreated a pace, and the zom took two more steps. It was close now; one more step and it would be close enough to make a grab. Its hands rose and reached for Benny.

“Don’t.”

Benny slowly, numbly reached over his shoulder and slid the katana into its scabbard. Then his hands flopped down at his sides, hanging slack and purposeless. The zombie took another step, and now it pawed at Benny with clumsy fingers that twitched and jerked as if trying to remember their lost dexterity. Benny batted the hands aside.

The zom reached again.

Benny knew that he should end this. Here and now, quick and clean. It would be easy. After everything he’d been through, a single zombie no longer frightened him. He was sure he could break its neck with his bare hands, or easily cripple it with a kick to the knee.

He could. He probably should. As long as the plane was here, a wandering zom was a potential threat. Even to someone like Joe.

But Benny didn’t attack. He backed away again, unwilling to inflict harm on this thing, even though a few moments ago it was a killer who wanted to murder him. That was different, and he knew it was different. Now everything about this creature, this thing… this former person, was different. Benny felt his heart hammering in his chest, and he wanted to do something. Scream, or throw up, or cry. Or run away.

Or die.

The zom reached again and again, and each time Benny slapped its fumbling hands away.

“C’mon, man,” pleaded Benny, “don’t.”

It kept coming. A step, a reach. Benny slapped the cooling hands away. The thing recovered its balance, brought its hands back, stepped, reached. The whole encounter was becoming a sick and sad ballet, a dance for two of the strangest kind. The moment had lost its veneer of horror for Benny and had become something else, something indefinable and surreal. It was terrifying in a nonphysical way. He felt that he teetered on the edge of some action that would damage his own soul far more than this monster could harm his body. His racing mind sought to understand it, but the truth, the insight, eluded him every bit as diligently as he eluded the zombie.

The zombie suddenly stopped, and its eyes flicked toward the forest. It took one lumbering step that way, then another, and another, heading away from Benny, heading toward the woods, following… who knew what. A sound, a smell?

Benny watched the zom until it vanished into the shadows under the trees. Then he bent and picked up his katana, cleaned the blood from the blade, and resheathed it.

The actions were performed almost without thought. His thoughts were elsewhere. They tumbled through a red awareness of what he had just done.

He’d killed a man.

A person.

A small, strange part of his mind wanted to gloat — the attacker had been older, stronger, faster, and probably more experienced, a reaper of the Night Church. In a one-on-one duel, Benny should have lost, even with the better weapon. But that part of his mind was only a fragment, and Benny prayed that it never grew to become something bigger. That part of his mind was okay with killing. It wanted to kill. It liked the excitement of battle, the promise of bloodshed, the rush of adrenaline.

Benny feared that part of himself. He tried to believe that it didn’t belong to him at all.

Lies like that never work on your own mind, though.

The rest of him was appalled by what he had just done. Benny had killed people before — at Charlie Pink-eye’s camp in the mountains of central California, at Gameland in Yosemite, and here in the Mojave Desert when the reapers tried to send Benny and all his friends into the vast, eternal darkness.

There were birds singing in the trees, and the air buzzed with insects. A small tan snake whipsawed through the brush, and off in the distance a pair of monkeys chattered as they chased each other through the boughs of a piñon tree. The desert was calm and beautiful. It was peaceful.

Benny Imura sat down with his back against a rock, set his sword aside, bent, and buried his face in his palms.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. Though whether his apology was to the day, to the man he’d been forced to kill, to the monster that man had become, to the forest, or to the distorted image of himself that capered like a bent reflection in a funhouse mirror, Benny could not say.

CHAPTER 24

Captain Ledger squatted down beside the zom Lilah had killed. He no longer looked hungover. He merely looked old and tired. And deeply disturbed.

Grimm stood nearby, looking up and down the slope at the bodies. Big and fierce as he was, the mastiff occasionally uttered a fearful whine.

“You’re certain that all of them were fast?”

“Three for sure,” said Nix. “The one whose head I cracked… I don’t know about that one.”

“Still,” said Joe, “three out of four.”

He pivoted on the balls of his feet to study the landscape. “This slope leads down to a T-road,” he mused aloud. “Go right to the hangars… go left and it becomes a deer path that goes nowhere but up into the mountains.”

“I found the tracks,” Lilah told him. She nodded to the mountains. “They came from there.”

“Does that make any sense?” asked Nix. “Why would zoms climb all the way over a mountain? I thought they didn’t go uphill unless they were following prey. That’s what Tom told us.”

“Tom was right,” agreed Joe.

“Could the sirens have called them here?” asked Lilah.

“I don’t think so. Sanctuary sits in a kind of bowl of flatland surrounded by mountains. Once that wail hits those mountains it bounces all over the place, and it’s impossible to pinpoint the source unless you’re down here on the flatland. I don’t think we can sell that as the reason.” He paused, thinking, then said, “No,” again, very softly.

When they’d told Joe about the attack, he’d fetched a small leather valise, which now stood open beside him. He spent several careful minutes collecting samples from the zoms. Tissue and fluids. Then he took a large magnifying glass and peered through it as he bent over the head and shoulders of one of the corpses. He grunted.

“What is it?” asked Lilah.

Joe used a small brush to sweep something off the zom’s blouse into a vial. When he held it up to examine it in the sun’s glow, Nix saw that it was the red powder she’d noticed on the Latino man.

“Do you know what it is?” asked Nix. “Is it important?”

“I hope to God it isn’t,” he said, but he did not elaborate. Instead he got up and examined the other bodies, focusing now almost exclusively on collecting samples of the red powder. He stopped by one corpse, glanced at it, and then looked at Nix.

“Is this the one you said might not have been fast?”

“Yes,” she said. “I landed on it and hit it in the face with an elbow and—”

Joe appeared to stop listening. He stood up, and his eyes roved over the scene.

“How the hell did this get here?” he murmured. Then Nix thought he mouthed a word: “Archangel.”

Then Joe suddenly began packing his samples into the case.

“What is it?” asked Nix. “What’s wrong?”

“Wrong?” Joe gave her a smile that might have been an attempt to reassure her. But it was ghastly. False and fragile. “It’s nothing. You girls go back to the mess hall and get some lunch. Everything’s fine.”

He rose, clicked his tongue for his dog, and hurried away. A few minutes later they heard the sirens as Joe prepared to cross the bridge. The last thing Nix and Lilah saw of him was the ranger vanishing into the hangar next to the blockhouse. He had the valise with him, and he was running.

CHAPTER 25

After a while Benny got to his feet.

The zom had not returned, but even so Benny removed a bottle of cadaverine from his pocket and dribbled some on his clothes. It amazed him that after all this time he could still smell the stuff, and he had to dab mint gel on his upper lip from a small pot he always carried. The mint was so strong that it completely killed his sense of smell. When your clothes smell like rotting human flesh, an overload of mint is a genuine blessing.

He had a strange thought. If he died now and reanimated, would the presence of the mint gel mean that cadaverine wouldn’t deter him? Probably. It was a creepy thought.

It was heating up to be another blistering day in a spring season that was already unusually hot. Even back home in Mountainside it had been a strange spring, with April temperatures in the eighties and almost no rain. Benny had no idea whether this was simply one of those years — there are hot ones and there are cold ones — or if it was an omen of something bad coming. His mood was tending toward the pessimistic view.

Maybe it is the end of the world, whispered his inner voice. Maybe Captain Ledger is right. Maybe there are no chances left.

“Oh, shut up,” growled Benny.

He walked over to the wrecked airplane and stood for a moment at the foot of a sturdy rope ladder Joe had rigged to the open hatch.

Benny wished he’d asked Nix to come with him. He closed his eyes for a moment and thought about how she probably looked this morning, up there in the rocks, training with focused determination with the katana Joe had given her. Benny conjured her image in his mind and suddenly she was there, as real as something he could actually touch and hold. Her wild red hair trembling in the morning breeze that swept in from the desert, her intelligent green eyes roving over the landscape as she imagined attackers closing on her, her countless freckles darkening as her pulse rose to flush her skin. And the sword. Benny was a very good swordsman, but Nix was better. She was faster, more precise, less tentative, and far more vicious. In her small hands that powerful weapon sought its true potential. The blade became a streamer of flowing mercury, the edge cleaving effortlessly through air or straw targets or living-dead necks.

So far, though, Nix had not used that blade against the living.

Not like Benny had used his kami katana. Now, and too many times before today.

She had killed, though, Benny thought. Killed with knives and guns and with her old wooden bokken. She was like him in that regard. And also like Lilah, Chong, and Riot. Killers all.

Children at war.

Children of war.

It was so unfair.

“Nix,” Benny said, just to put her name on the wind. Then he spoke her full name. “Phoenix.”

Her name, either version, even now when he was angry with her, was like a prayer to him.

The first girl he had ever loved.

The first person he had ever loved. Aside from his parents, but that had been a remembered love from a tiny child. Not like this.

He loved Nix. She was the only girl he ever expected to love.

He would kill for her.

No, corrected his inner voice, you have killed for her. And with her.

“Shut up,” Benny said again, and he turned away, as if by moving his body he could step away from that inner voice and all his melancholy thoughts.

The plane lay there. Dead. Discarded by time. And yet somehow strangely alive to him.

Waiting for him.

He found himself smiling.

Joe had expressly ordered Benny — and everyone else — to stay out of the plane. The head scientist, Dr. Monica McReady, and her entire crew had either been killed in the crash and then wandered off once they’d reanimated as zoms, or they’d been murdered by the reapers of the Night Church.

Now the most crucial part of Dr. McReady’s research was missing.

In either case, the world’s best hope for a cure was lost, maybe forever.

It was crazy, but three weeks ago Benny and Nix had not known about Dr. McReady, her team, the possibility of a cure, or the fact that anyone was still left to do the research. That had been so amazing, so life-changing.

How was he supposed to suddenly discard all that hope and simply accept that there was no future unpolluted by plague and death? He didn’t know how to fit that into his head. It didn’t seem to fit, and Benny knew full well that he didn’t want it to fit.

If hope of a cure was gone, then what did that mean for Chong? Maybe he was dead already. Maybe all hope was dead.

We lost our last chance to beat this thing.

“No,” Benny said, and now that word held an entirely different meaning than it had a few minutes ago. Now it was filled with anger. With defiance, and Tom had once told him that defiance in the face of disaster was a quality of hope. “No — absolutely fricking no way.”

The black mouth of the plane’s open hatchway yawned above him.

Benny hooked his fingers through the rope ladder and tugged it. Sturdy and strong.

But Joe — the towering, deadly ex-special ops shooter who now ran a team of rangers in the Ruin — had said to stay out of the plane. No excuses, no exceptions.

“Well,” Benny said to the rope ladder, “what can he do? Send me to my room?”

He climbed up into the plane.

The inside was a mess. Joe had apparently trashed the place while scavenging the materials and looking for the missing D-series notes. With the captured zoms removed, and all the equipment cases and boxes of records gone, the structural damage was easier to see. The plane had broken its back on landing, and the craft’s metal skin was rippled and torn. The floor was littered with discarded junk. Papers, broken containers, and hundreds upon hundreds of shell casings from the automatic weapons Joe had fired when repelling the reaper assault. They gleamed dully in the streamers of light that stabbed down through tears in the ceiling. Paper trash was heaped against the walls or left where it had fallen. Benny sat down on an empty case that had once housed a rocket launcher and began digging into the paper.

He had no real idea what he was looking for. It wasn’t like he expected to find a piece of paper labeled CURE.

Even so, there was an answer here. Some kind of answer, he was sure of it.

Hours passed as he went through every piece of paper, no matter how small.

There was nothing of value there.

Not a word, not a scrap.

Benny picked up the papers he’d found and hurled them as hard as he could against the wall. Pages, whole and partial, slapped against the unyielding metal and then floated to the deck, as disorganized and useless as before.

He climbed down to the ground, his face burning with anger and his whole body trembling with frustration.

That was when he remembered the quads.

The engines of both vehicles had eventually stalled out.

“Ah… man…”

He ran over to the machines. The reaper’s quad was still upright and was jammed at an angle against Benny’s machine, which lay on its side. Benny pushed the second quad, a Honda, back from his Yamaha. The Honda moved with a sluggish, lumpy resistance — the right front wheel was flat, the rubber exploded from the impact. Benny examined the Yamaha. The right rear wheel hung at a strange angle, and when he bent to examine it, he groaned. The axle had been snapped like a bread stick.

Benny straightened, exhaled a long, slow breath, thought of Tom’s many lessons about maintaining calm in the middle of a crisis — and then spent the next two minutes screaming and kicking the Yamaha from every possible angle.

Then he spent three minutes standing there, chest heaving, both feet hurting like hell, glaring at the machine.

Finally he opened the rear compartment on the Yamaha and took out the jack and the lug wrench and took a wheel off his bike and put it onto the Honda. The wheels were the same size, and it wasn’t until Benny was finished that he grudgingly accepted that as a lucky break. Not all the quads were the same size.

Then Benny tried to turn the Honda on. Nothing happened.

He tried again.

Same effect.

It hadn’t stalled after the crash. It had run out of fuel.

Benny snatched up a rock and came very close to slamming it down on the fuel gauge.

Stop it! bellowed his inner voice.

It actually stopped Benny mid-smash.

He stared at the rock he held.

“Oh man,” he said, and let it drop.

Find a hose, said his smarter inner voice. Siphon gas out of the other—

“Yeah, yeah, I know, I got it,” he growled.

His inner voice shut up.

Benny dug through the compartments and saddlebags of his own quad and found nothing. Then he began foraging through the Honda.

He found a siphon hose right away. However, what he found next made him forget completely about the hose, the fuel, the quad, the residual pain in his groin, and virtually everything else.

Tucked into the back compartment of the Honda was a loose-leaf binder with the word TEAMBOOK printed on the spine and a flag embossed on the front. The flag was not the Stars and Stripes of the old United States of America. No, this was the symbol of the newer, post — First Night American Nation. It was the same symbol that was painted on the tail fin of the plane and on patches worn by dead members of the crew.

Benny flipped the Teambook open and saw that there was a double-sided page devoted to each member of Dr. McReady’s team from Hope One. Each page included a color photograph of a person in either the brown-and-green uniform of the new American Nation or in the white lab coat of McReady’s science team. Below each photo was basic data: name, rank, serial number, gender, blood type, height, weight, eye color, hair color, and an abbreviated service record. A lot of it meant nothing to Benny, especially in sections where there was an overabundance of military abbreviations and acronyms. Hope One had been staffed by Dr. McReady, six other scientists, ten lab technicians, eighteen soldiers, and five general staff. Forty people. The C-130 had eight additional soldiers and a flight crew of four. Fifty-two people in all.

He studied the photo of Dr. Monica McReady. She was a black woman with short hair, and a pair of reading glasses hung around her neck. According to her data, she was fifty-six years old.

“Where are you?” he asked her. “Where’s your cure? I have a friend who needs you. His name is Chong and he’s…”

Hungry.

“… he doesn’t deserve this. Where are you?”

The picture told him nothing. The book as a whole, however, did. There was blood on every single photograph in the book. Old, dried blood. Weeks old, at least, and in some cases the gore was so old that it was caked and powdery. These were not random splashes but deliberate markings. About half the photos had been crossed out with a dripped red X. Eleven others were marked with a bloody thumbprint in the upper right corner. When he compared the prints, Benny saw that they were each different, no two alike. The remaining photos were also marked by a thumbprint, but in each of these cases the thumbprint was placed over the heart of the person. The same thumbprint was used for all these.

So what did it mean?

Benny chewed on it.

The Xs seemed obvious. Those were members of the crew who had been killed, or who’d died during the crash. Two of the pictures marked that way showed men dressed as pilots, and Benny had seen those men before. On the day they’d found this plane, there had been two zoms tied to crossbars erected on the ground in front of the cockpit.

The second set, the ones with unique thumbprints, took him longer to figure out, but as he went through each picture again he spotted a face that he recognized. The face was the same, but in the photo the man had black hair.

Benny had looked into that same face minutes ago. He had looked into those eyes while the man in the photo was alive, and he’d looked into the same eyes once all traces of human life had fled.

The reaper.

According to the Teambook his name was Marcus Flood, age twenty-six, born in Kansas City. A lance corporal in the army of the American Nation.

The man he’d just killed had been a member of Dr. McReady’s crew. One of the soldiers assigned to help evacuate Hope One.

But he’d become a reaper.

How?

Why?

Riot and Joe both said that the reaper army had been built mostly from people who had been given a choice: die with everyone else in your town, or join. It was a conqueror’s strategy that had worked for everyone from Alexander the Great to the Nazis, so apparently it still worked. Even so… Benny could not climb inside the head of someone who would willingly become part of a group whose ultimate goal was to end all human life. Sure, it meant living a little longer, but the end was still going to be the same. Death.

What made someone make that choice? Did they think that somehow they’d slip through the cracks and not be sent into the darkness when Saint John thought it was time? Or did they really buy into the reaper beliefs?

The man in that photo seemed to.

There was another photo in the batch that caught Benny’s attention. Another soldier. A big man, tough-looking but also strangely familiar. The sheet said that his name was Luis Ortega, and his designation was team logistics coordinator.

Whatever that meant.

Benny touched the picture.

“Where do I know you from?” he wondered aloud. Was this man another of the reapers, like Marcus Flood? If so, was he now wandering around on the airfield? Had he been one of the reapers with Mother Rose, one of those gathered a few yards from here? Benny and Nix had secretly watched that gathering. Had he died with Mother Rose or vanished with Saint John and the main body of the reaper army? Was he one of the thousands of sick people being tended by the way-station monks? Or one of the refugees Riot was guiding to Sanctuary?

The half-remembered encounter had to be recent, though, because it throbbed insistently in Benny’s mind.

Because of the severity of the head wound he’d received, the monks told him there was a strong chance that he might have some amnesia. Not total, not even a lot, but some blank spots. This was one of those spots, he was sure of that. He could almost—almost—see the memory of this man, almost catch it. A big man in a military uniform like this. Benny had seen hundreds of other military clothes, from zoms killed during the battles after First Night. Some of the men in town had camouflage jackets from the old world. The uniforms of the new American Nation were different. The camouflage was a different pattern, with bits of dusty red mixed in with the black, tan, brown, and gray.

Then… something, some fragment of a memory went skittering across the back of Benny’s brain, triggered by Sergeant Ortega’s face and uniform. He went still, hoping to catch a glimpse of it, to discover what it wanted to tell him.

But that fast it was there and gone, hiding in the shadows under a rock in his damaged memory.

Benny flipped back through the book, this time looking at the small pieces of paper clipped to some of the pages. One note was written in round cursive by a decidedly feminine hand.

Mutations?

And… what was Field Team Five?

He searched the rest of the compartments and saddlebags on the quad, but there were no more notes or papers. He found some dried meat wrapped in palm leaves, but he distrusted what the reapers considered wholesome food, so he threw that away. He found an item that seemed totally out of place among the reaper’s possessions: an old, unopened package of brightly colored rubber balloons. Fifty of them. It seemed so bizarre and incongruous a thing for a killer to have. He wondered if they were used for some kind of silent signaling. Benny almost tossed them away, then decided to keep them. Eve might like them. Anything that might put another smile on the little girl’s face was worth treasuring. He stuffed the package into his vest pocket.

The only other thing of apparent importance he found was a small spiral-bound notebook. Every page was filled with small, crabbed handwriting. Most of what was written there were prayers and rituals of the reapers. Benny debated tossing it away, but decided to keep it. If the reapers were the enemy, then some of Tom’s advice applied: Know your enemy. The more you know about them, the less easily they can surprise you. And by studying them you might identify a weakness or vulnerability.

And there was the phrase Lilah had learned from George, the man who’d raised her: Knowledge is power.

The other reason he decided to keep the notebook was what the reaper had written on the last page. It was a kind of code:

Every instinct, every nerve he possessed screamed at him that this was important. This, the Teambook, and the urgent note Benny suspected had been written by Dr. McReady. Important… but in what way?

How?

No way to ask the reaper now, Benny thought, and he flinched at the memory of what he had been forced to do.

He put the notebook in his pocket and the Teambook into the Honda’s storage bin. Then he used the rubber hose to siphon ethanol from his own crippled quad into the Honda’s tank. Benny replaced the gas cap, climbed into the saddle, started the engine, and drove thoughtfully back to Sanctuary.

CHAPTER 26

Riot was dozing in a straw basket-chair when one of the nuns came to find her. She opened her eyes to see the tight, unsmiling face of Sister Hannahlily, the head nun who oversaw the children during their afternoon nap.

“You have to come at once,” said the nun.

“What’s wrong?” Riot demanded. “Is something wrong with Eve?”

The nun seemed to be caught in a moment of terrible indecision, as if uncertain how to answer so simple a question.

“You need to come,” she said. “Right now.”

Riot got to her feet and followed the nun. Sister Hannahlily did not exactly run to the tent used for the children’s nap time, but she walked very fast, her body erect with tension, arms pumping.

“Oh God,” breathed Riot to herself, “don’t let that little girl be hurt. Don’t let her be hurt….”

They reached the tent, where Brother Michael, a monk who helped with psychological counseling, was waiting for them. Before First Night he’d been a radio call-in host.

“What in tarnation is going on?” asked Riot.

Sister Hannahlily looked frightened, and Riot couldn’t imagine why. There was a faint sound coming from inside the tent, a soft thudding sound that Riot could not make sense of, like someone fluffing a pillow.

“We moved the other children out of the tent,” said Sister Hannahlily. “We thought it best.”

“Moved them out? Why? Where’s Eve?”

“Inside,” said the monk.

Riot reached for the tent flap.

Eve was the only person in the tent. Riot could tell almost at once that the little girl was asleep, though she was standing and moving. Sleepwalking, in a way. In a horrible way.

The girl had gathered all the rag dolls the children had made during arts and crafts. They lay side by side on one of the cots. Eve held a pair of the pinking shears used to cut the fancy, frilly trim for the dollies’ dresses. She held the shears in both hands and with slow, determined, deliberate swings of her entire body, she stabbed the dolls over and over and over again.

And she smiled as she did it.

Riot gasped, and Eve paused for a moment, turning her face toward the open tent flap. The little girl’s mouth smiled, but there was no humor in her eyes. There was nothing in her eyes. No emotion, no recognition, no anger.

There was absolutely nothing.

It was as if those blue eyes looked in on a house that was empty of all light and life, a place where only dark and awful shadows moved.

Then Eve turned back to the dolls.

The shears rose and fell, rose and fell.

CHAPTER 27

Saint John came out of a long private meditation when he heard a quiet footfall nearby. “Good afternoon, Sister Sun,” he said quietly, eyes still closed.

“Honored One,” she said.

Saint John opened his eyes and touched her head, murmuring a small blessing. She straightened up and sat where he indicated. Sister Sun had once been a lovely woman, and she still had deeply intelligent eyes and a face that reminded him of paintings he’d seen of Ma Gu, the ancient Korean goddess of longevity. It was a bitter irony, of course, since she had so little time left in front of her. Months, not years. He never commented on the resemblance, of course, because he felt it might offend her in a spiritual sense to be reminded of a goddess from one of mankind’s many false religions.

Instead he said, “You look troubled, sister.”

“I am. There have been more reports about mutations. More of the gray people who can move faster than should be possible.”

“How many cases?”

“Seven, which brings the total number of reliable reports to twenty-two.”

“And this continues to disturb you?”

“Yes, Honored One. We will be moving the reapers back into Nevada soon, and I asked Mother Rose if it wasn’t time for us to consider opening the shrine.”

“What would you have us do, sister?” asked Saint John. “Use the weapons of the heretics?”

Sister Sun took a moment on that. “Honored One… I love my fellow reapers, but I’m not fool enough to think that all of them are with us out of an undying love of Thanatos — all praise his darkness. Some of them — maybe a lot of them — are opportunists who chose to kiss the knife rather than feel its caress on their flesh.”

Saint John did not comment on that.

“But I wasn’t making a case with Mother Rose for the weapons aboard that plane,” she said. “I only want access to Dr. McReady’s notes, samples, and clinical studies and—”

Before she could say more, her body was racked by a coughing fit that was deep and wet. It made her frail body hitch and pulse with pain, and her bird-thin bones creaked. She pressed a red kerchief to her mouth. Saint John was aware that red cloth was chosen because it more effectively hid the droplets of blood torn from her with each barking cough.

“The darkness calls out to you, my sister,” said Saint John.

When she could speak, she said, “Praise to the darkness. But please, listen to me. I’m almost out of time. Look at me, Honored One. To read and process that research takes more than a healthy mind, and when my body fails my mind will go too. The Night Church will lose a valuable opportunity to understand why this plague is changing and what those changes will mean for our mission. I don’t know how much longer I can do reliable work.”

“The plague is the plague,” he said. “It is no threat to our god’s plans.”

“I believe it has become a very real threat,” Sister Sun said. “The pathogen that started the plague was really an amalgam of several super-viruses and some genetically engineered parasites. As you know, this was not something nature — or god — created. The Reaper Plague was a weapon of war, however—”

Saint John interrupted. “No. It was the voice of god whispering in the ears of certain people. They were told to create the plague as a way of cleansing the earth of the infection of life. The Reaper Plague was the sword of god, and it is from that sword that I took the name for the servants of god whose knives open the red mouths in the last of the sinners.”

They rose and walked in silence for a while. Finally Sister Sun spoke. “Honored One, that is a theological discussion, and I defer to your holy insights. However, the matter of Dr. McReady’s research is a more… um, mundane matter. It’s science.”

“Yes, I do understand that. She wants to stop the Reaper Plague,” observed Saint John. “Dr. McReady is an enemy of god, and her works are blasphemy.”

“No doubt,” said Sister Sun quickly. “My point, Honored One, is that the pathogen may have become unstable.”

“Don’t all living things change?”

“Not this,” she insisted. “The Reaper Plague — from everything I learned about it before kneeling to kiss the knife — was designed not to mutate. This is a bioweapon, a designer plague. It was designed to remain stable so that the outcome of any implementation could be precisely predicted. That means that if the plague is mutating, it isn’t happening naturally. Someone is causing that mutation. And I think we both know who.”

They walked well beyond the perimeter of the reaper camp before Saint John spoke. “What danger do you foresee from a mutation?”

“If the gray people mutate into something that would prey on the reapers, wouldn’t that send the wrong message to our people? We tell the reapers that the gray people are like sheep and we are shepherds, but that would change. We’d become hunted. The message would get mixed, and that could hurt us. It would weaken our control. It might shake the faith of the people.”

“Or,” said Saint John, “it could test that faith.”

“Dr. McReady’s research is far too dangerous to leave unaddressed. We must act. We must find her.”

“Our best guess is that Dr. McReady is somewhere in California,” mused Saint John. “Or perhaps Oregon. If she’s still alive, then explain to me how her experiments hundreds of miles away could be causing mutations here.”

“Honored One… I think we may have caused this.”

“How so?”

“When Mother Rose found the plane, there were many things aboard. The gray people she’d captured, the medical records, biological samples, and bags of some red powder. I was never allowed to examine any of this. However, I know that one of Mother Rose’s reapers opened one of the bags of powder. Probably out of idle curiosity. He found nothing of value and dumped that bag out of the hatch. If I’m right, then it may have contained a mutagenic agent of some kind. It would explain the mutations that we’ve been seeing, because they all began after that bag was opened.”

Saint John frowned. “That’s disturbing.”

“I think McReady had compounded a mutagen and was taking it to Sanctuary for development and possible mass production.”

“Ah… Sanctuary,” murmured Saint John. “The time may come when it will be necessary to burn that pestilential place from the surface of the earth.”

“They have a whole army division there.”

“Do they?”

“It’s what our spies say.”

He gave a soft grunt.

“If I had access to McReady’s research,” continued Sister Sun, “I might be able to do something about the mutations. Possibly stop them. Or maybe devise another kind of mutation. Something that would serve the Night Church rather than pose a threat to it.”

Saint John pursed his lips but said nothing.

“Please,” begged Sister Sun softly, “let me have access to McReady’s research.”

CHAPTER 28

Nix sat on a swing, arms looped around the chains, toes dug into the sand so that the swing moved only a few inches back and forth. The adrenaline in her bloodstream had begun to wash out, and it seemed to be taking all her energy with it, leaving her exhausted and sad.

Seeing Eve did not make that sadness retreat one inch.

The little girl was dozing in Riot’s arms, but Eve’s brow was furrowed. Nix could imagine what her dreams were like.

When she closed her own eyes, Nix saw Charlie Pink-eye and the Motor City Hammer crowd her mother into a corner and begin beating her. That memory was the very last Nix had of her mother. Right after that Charlie knocked her unconscious. By the time she regained consciousness, Nix was already in the Ruin on the way to Gameland. And her mother was dead. Found too late and quieted by Tom Imura.

Would her dreams ever go away?

Nix doubted it.

She worried about it too. Grief and anger were changing her, warping her. For months she had been mean to Benny — the one person who loved her unconditionally. She felt shrewish at times, and vicious.

Only recently had that begun to change, and Nix didn’t know why.

She still had her nightmares. And in her troubled sleep she probably furrowed her brow as Eve was doing now. She knew she ground her teeth — her jaws always hurt in the morning.

How does one come back from that edge? What was that saying from Nietzsche?

Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

Nix wished she didn’t understand what that meant.

Riot caught her looking at Eve, and for a long moment the two of them stared at each other, saying so much without words. Riot slowly nodded, and Nix nodded back.

She understands too.

And Lilah.

Benny, too, now that Tom was gone.

And Chong?

He hadn’t wanted to come along on this journey. The jet didn’t matter to him. He left home for love, and in the wilderness he stumbled along all the way to the edge of the abyss.

Was Chong already lost? Was he a monster?

If you fought monsters and then became one… could you ever go back again? Or did the abyss own Chong… and Eve?

And all of them?

CHAPTER 29

Saint John leaned against a tree, peeling a fig with a small knife, enjoying the sensation of the blade sliding just beneath the skin of the fruit. He wondered, not for the first time, if fruit could feel pain. If it could scream. Even a simple fig would taste so much better if that were the case.

Six tall, stern fighters of the Red Brotherhood stood nearby. Two watching him, four watching outward. The least experienced among them had sent a hundred heretics into the darkness. Saint John loved the Red Brothers as if they were his own children, and it was their choice, not his, that they wear the tattoo of his left hand on their faces. Brother Peter was his right hand, and they — collectively — were his left.

Inside their circle, seated on a tree stump, was Sister Sun. On the ground between her and Saint John was an old blue plastic ice chest. The lid was sealed with tape. A stack of boxes stood beside the cooler. Each of the boxes was marked with a large letter D.

“My sister,” said Saint John, “do you know what this is?”

Sister Sun’s eyes were wide as she stared at the material. She nodded, almost unable to speak.

“Do you maintain that it serves the will of god to open those boxes? To read the words of the heretic McReady?”

She tried to speak, but her voice was thick. Sister Sun cleared her throat and tried again. “I do, Honored One.”

“Even though our Mother Rose believes that this is tainted?”

“Yes.”

“Even though to do so would be to break faith with Mother Rose?”

Now Sister Sun raised her eyes and looked directly at the saint. “My faith is in god,” she said. “I… I mean I love Mother Rose, but—”

“Do not apologize,” said the saint. “It’s unseemly.”

She blushed and nodded.

Saint John cut a piece of fig, put it in his mouth, chewed it thoughtfully, then nodded to the folders.

“Mother Rose will be in Utah until next month. When she returns, she will very likely inspect the seals on the Shrine of the Fallen.”

Sister Sun nodded.

“When that happens, she will find all these seals intact. Everything correct and in order.”

He did not say “or else” or make any other threat. He cut another slice of fig and offered it to Sister Sun, who reached out a trembling hand to take it. She chewed it quietly while he stood there and smiled at her.

CHAPTER 30

Benny parked the Honda in the damaged Yamaha’s slot and went looking for Captain Ledger.

As he passed the playground, though, he saw Riot and Eve sitting on a set of rusted swings. Benny drifted over that way. Riot’s face was animated as she told a funny story involving a crazy little dog name Rosie and her adventures in an abandoned toy store. Benny thought that Riot looked deeply strained despite her animation. There was an odd light in her eyes and a detectable tremolo in her voice.

Sister Hannahlily stood a dozen yards away, pretending to water flowers, but she was clearly watching Eve. Deep lines of concern were etched into her face.

Eve’s face was slack, her mouth open, her eyes dull and fixed, as if all her internal lights had been switched off. It was how she often was, drifting between moderate highs and very deep lows. Benny took the bag of balloons from his pocket, tore it open, selected a bright yellow one, and began blowing it up as he strolled over in front of the swings. Riot saw what he was doing and raised her eyebrows in surprise. Balloons were rare — like most things from the old world, they weren’t made to last, and most of them were so dried out that any attempt to blow them up was a failure. The ones in the bag were wonderfully preserved, and with each puff the balloon grew and grew.

Eve’s face remained slack, but after the fifth or sixth puff her eyes reclaimed a little bit of their focus and shifted toward him. The more the balloon expanded, the more awareness seemed to grow in the little girl’s eyes. Riot gave Benny a grateful smile that glistened with tears.

It really must be one of Eve’s bad days, Benny thought. Riot looks like she’s ready to scream.

Finally Benny stopped and tied off the balloon.

“For milady,” he said, presenting the balloon to Eve with an exaggerated flourish and bow. “I believe you ordered a big, squishy, yellow thing.”

There was a moment when Eve did nothing except look at the balloon, her mouth and body still slack. Then, like the sun peering shyly through the darkest of storm clouds, a small smile formed on her lips. She glanced at Benny and blinked several times, as if she was seeing him for the first time. Which, he thought sadly, she probably was. He kept his own smile pasted onto his face while the girl struggled out of the shadows. When her tiny hand slowly rose and reached for the balloon, she took it as lightly as someone reaching for an illusion in a dream, as if she was afraid it would suddenly vanish.

Benny straightened and took two more balloons from the pack, a blue one and a green one. He almost picked a red one, but Riot gave him a quick and desperate sharp shake of the head. He stuffed the red one quickly out of sight and handed the other balloons to Riot.

“If you fly away to the land of Oz,” said Benny, “make sure to send me a message via delivery Munchkin.”

Eve nodded seriously, as if that was a reasonable suggestion.

Benny left, and when he looked over his shoulder, Riot was teaching Eve how to blow up the green balloon. The little girl was smiling, but the whole thing hurt Benny’s heart. He was aware that the older nun, Sister Hannahlily, was watching him. He smiled and nodded to her, and she responded. A nod, no smile.

A few minutes later Benny found Joe Ledger working out in a small enclosure behind the last of the hangars on this side of the trench. Grimm, Joe’s dog, opened one baleful eye, decided Benny wasn’t a lunch being delivered, and went back to sleep. Even so, Benny stayed well away from the mastiff as he entered the enclosure.

Joe Ledger was stripped to the waist, wearing only camo pants and boots, and he shifted around on the balls of his feet as he worked a heavy bag. Joe barraged the leather with jabs, hooks, overhands, uppercuts, backhands, hammer blows, two-knuckle hits, corkscrew punches, elbows, and the occasional cutting palm. Then he shifted to kicks — snaps and roundhouse kicks, hooks and slashing knees. The bag juddered and danced as if it was being hit by continuous gunfire, and with each blow dust puffed through the canvas’s thick weave.

It bothered Benny that despite Joe being at least thirty years older than Tom, the man was at least as fast. Maybe faster. And a whole lot stronger. That was annoying. It felt wrong, somehow, as if this man’s superior skill was in some way an insult to Tom’s memory. Even so… it was mesmerizing to watch.

Eventually, though, his impatience ran faster than his fascination with the display of martial arts. Benny cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “Hey — Joe!”

Grimm gave him a single, scolding bark.

“I wasn’t talking to you,” said Benny.

Benny could almost swear that the dog cocked one eyebrow in wry amusement.

Finally Joe stepped back from the bag, chest heaving, sweat running in lines down his body and limbs. His face was flushed a deeper red than his sunburn, and his eyes were bright. He no longer looked hungover.

“Hey, kid, what’s shaking?” asked Joe as he took a canteen from where it rested atop a stack of cinder blocks, unscrewed the cap, and took a long pull. There was no alcohol stink, and Benny was pleased to see that the canteen was filled with water rather than any “hair of the dog” booze. Joe seemed to sense something of that and grinned. “Best way to clean the system out is a lot of water and the kind of workout that gets the blood pumping.”

“Or you could stay sober.”

Joe peered at Benny while he took another long pull. “You’re kind of a pain in the ass, anyone ever tell you that?”

“It’s come up in conversation.”

“No doubt. So,” said Joe as he raised the canteen for another drink, “to what do I owe the honor of your company?”

Benny said, “A reaper tried to kill me today.”

Joe spat water halfway across the enclosure. “What? Where?”

“Out at the plane.”

“At the plane?” Joe yelled. “What in the wide blue hell were you doing out there?”

“Not dying, thanks for asking,” Benny shouted back.

Joe pointed a finger at Benny. “I thought I told you kids not to go anywhere near that plane.”

“You did,” agreed Benny. “I ignored you. Mostly because I don’t remember you being the boss of me. When did that happen?”

“When you met a responsible adult,” thundered Joe.

“Really?” returned Benny acidly. “Responsible adult? That’s a joke. Almost every adult we’ve met since we left home has been one kind of psychopath or another. Bounty hunters who tried to make us fight in the zombie pits at Gameland. Nutjob loners who like putting people’s heads on their gateposts. Way-station monks who think the zoms are the meek who are supposed to inherit the earth. Scientists who lock themselves in a blockhouse and won’t even talk to us. Reapers who are trying to kill everyone, and you — whatever you are. Joe Action Figure. Don’t lecture me on ‘responsible adults.’ Me and my friends — the kids you’re talking about — we haven’t started fights with anyone. We’re not trying to push our religious views on anybody, and we’re not trying to take what anyone else has. And just because we’re teenagers doesn’t mean that we can’t make good decisions and take care of ourselves. We’re not little kids anymore. We’ve had to grow up a lot in the last few months. A whole lot. We came out here to find proof that the people of your generation haven’t actually destroyed everything that was ever worth anything. Why? Because your story might be over, but ours isn’t. I just hope that when we become adults we’re not as vicious, violent, and destructive as most of the so-called adults we’ve met out here in the Ruin. ’Cause I’m here to tell you, Joe, we could use some better role models.”

Joe sucked his teeth. “You finished?”

“No. The reaper who attacked me was also an adult.”

Grimm gave a throaty whuff.

Joe shot the dog an evil look. “Who asked you to take sides?” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, “Okay, okay, so life’s been hard for you, kid, I get it. Later on we can sit down and cry a little. Right now, though, how about you stop making speeches and tell me what happened at the plane? Actually, no. First tell me how you got away? And where’s the reaper now?”

“He’s dead.”

“How—?”

Benny looked him straight in the eye. “I killed him.”

Joe said, “What?”

“I killed him. He came at me with a knife. I… had no choice.”

“Ah, jeez, kid.” Joe sat down heavily on the stack of cinder blocks. “Look, Ben, I’m glad you’re okay, and I’m sorry you had to go through that.”

It was not the response Benny had expected. He thought there would be more yelling, or some booyah crap about the glory of combat. Instead Joe looked genuinely sad. It confused Benny.

“I’m pretty sorry I had to go through it too,” he said.

“You sure you’re not hurt?” asked Joe.

Benny shrugged. “Some bruises. A bad case of the shakes… and I guess a sick feeling in my stomach.”

“Yeah. That pretty much comes with the job.”

“Job? What job? I’m not a soldier.”

“Maybe not, but let’s face it, kid, we are at war. Saint John has launched a genocidal holy war, and the very fact that we’re alive makes us enemy combatants in his book.”

“I don’t want to fight Saint John.”

“Hey, I don’t either.”

“Besides, the reaper army vanished. You drove them off with the rocket launchers and all that.”

Joe shook his head. “Be nice if that was true, kid, but the reapers I fought were Mother Rose’s splinter group. The main force of the reaper army is somewhere else. Hopefully they’re far, far from here, but the plain fact is they’re out there somewhere.”

“ ‘Main force’? How many reapers are there?”

“Conservative guess, including the group with Saint John and a half-dozen smaller groups he could gather together if he needs… call it thirty-five, forty thousand.”

Benny nearly fell down. “What?”

“Could be more.”

“But… that’s more than all the people in Mountainside and the other eight towns put together!”

“I know. It’s also why Saint John keeps winning. He has too big an army to lose any fight. Even if the defenders are well armed, Saint John can keep throwing bodies at them until they run out of bullets. He’s not a tactical genius, you know, he’s simply willing to do whatever it takes to win.”

“And people are willing to die for him… that’s so…”

“You’re looking at it the wrong way,” said Joe. “They’re not dying for Saint John, they’re dying for what he’s selling. He has them convinced that death is the antidote to pain and suffering, and it’s a hard argument to beat. Most religions talk about an afterlife or a paradise, right? Well, this world has been pretty much a crap sandwich for fifteen years, and it wasn’t always so friggin’ wonderful before that. Life is hard, people suffer, people get sick, they lose those they love. If you really believed that once you pass into the darkness, as Saint John calls it, there is no more pain, no more suffering, just bliss — if you believed that, you’d do anything to get there. Even walk into a fusillade of bullets. Especially if you believed that by dying for the cause you’re ensuring the salvation and bliss of everyone else. It’s a win-win situation. Saint John may actually believe this crap too, and probably does. In strategic terms, though, he’s adopted an ‘anything goes’ approach to winning.”

“Jeez…”

“The reason no one’s beat him yet,” said Joe, “is that people these days are afraid. They’re fighting like whipped dogs. There’s no genuine aggression left in them. They fight defensively, and that’s why they’re going to lose every battle.”

“I thought the saying was that the best offense is a strong defense.”

“You have it the wrong way around. The best defense is a strong offense. There’s an adage from the Wing Chun style of kung fu that goes ‘The hand which blocks also strikes.’ You understand what that means?”

Benny nodded.

“It’s academic, though… there’s no one west of the Rockies with either the technical oomph or the monkey-bat crazy nerve to fight him the right way.”

“What’s the right way?”

Joe cocked his head and considered Benny. “I’ve got my fair share of psychological issues,” he said. “There have been times when I’ve been in situations where I should have lost. I’ve been up against better numbers, and I’ve fought tougher men. You know why I’m still sucking air and they’re worm food? Because when it comes right down to it, there’s nothing I won’t do to win. Nothing. One time when we were really up against it, a guy I worked for looked at me and said, ‘I’d burn down heaven itself to stop this thing.’ If you think that sounds grandiose, that’s ’cause you didn’t know the man. That’s what he was willing to do, and I’m a whole lot crazier than him. So… I guess you have to ask yourself, young samurai, how far would you be willing to go to stop Saint John if he was coming after you and yours? How scary are you willing to be in order to take the heart out of the enemy? Are you willing to be the monster in the dark? Are you willing to be the boogeyman of their nightmares? If you can look inside your own head and see the line that you won’t cross, the limit that’s too far, then I can guarantee you Saint John will win. No question about it.”

CHAPTER 31

Benny said, “I found something I think you need to see.”

“Is it a red powder?” Joe asked quickly.

“What? No. Why?”

Joe waved it away. “What’ve you got for me?”

Benny produced the Teambook and handed it to Joe.

The ranger stared at it for a moment, eyes bulging from his face. “Where did you find this?”

“The reaper had it in his quad. And no, I don’t know where he found it. We… didn’t really talk, you know.”

“This must have come from the plane, and it definitely wasn’t there when I searched it. That means it was removed before that day.”

“Is that good for us?” asked Benny. “Does it mean the D-series records are around somewhere?”

“It might.”

“Joe, what if the records aren’t around here?”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know… it just seems strange to me that one complete set of records is all that’s missing from the plane. So far we haven’t found that stuff, and none of the zoms was Dr. McReady. What if she was never onboard that plane?”

“The whole point was to evacuate her, kid.”

“I know, but maybe something else happened. Would there be any kind of record of that?”

Joe grunted. “It’s possible but unlikely. Once the plane left, McReady wouldn’t have had any way of getting out of there, and my rangers have been to Hope One. She didn’t stay behind.”

“Are there other places she could have landed? Other bases like Sanctuary?”

“Not like Sanctuary, but there are a million places she could have landed. No way to know unless it was recorded, and I’ve been over every inch of that plane….” His voice trailed off.

“What is it?” asked Benny.

“I might be jumping the gun here. We actually don’t know if the plane landed anywhere else or not. There was no flight log in the cockpit, at least none that we could find. I knew all those guys. Only Luis would know, and we never found his body.”

“Who?”

“Luis Ortega, the logistics coordinator. He would have maintained a record of everything. Luis was detail-oriented like that. You sneeze and he has a record of the time, the date, and the air-speed velocity. He never missed a trick.”

“Wait… I know that name.”

Benny flipped to the picture of Sergeant Luis Ortega and showed it to Joe. “Is this the guy you’re talking about?”

“That’s him. Luis was a big ol’ boy, looked like a linebacker but he had the heart of an accountant. He was exactly the kind of miss-nothing guy you’d send when you wanted to evac a research facility. He’d bring back every last paper clip.” Joe cocked an eye at Benny. “How is it you picked up on him so fast?”

Benny explained about how he’d thought he recognized the man but couldn’t remember from where. “Is he here?” he asked. “I mean, is he maybe one of the zoms over on the airfield?”

Joe thought about it. “No, I don’t think so. Last time I saw him was when they were loading the plane to fly up to Hope One. But… let me know if you remember where you saw him. If those D-series records weren’t onboard, or if Doc McReady planned any other stops, maybe to drop some of her research and cargo anywhere, then Ortega would definitely be the one to know all the details. That’s his job.” Joe grunted again.

“What?”

“I kind of wish he was over at the airfield. Being the logistics guy, he’d have a notebook with every detail of every movement of every person, every box, every piece of pocket lint. Ortega was totally anal-retentive. He was always making notes about stuff and shoving them into his shirt. Added them to his duty log at the end of the day.”

“I also found one little notebook, but I don’t think it’s a duty log.” Benny handed it over.

Joe leafed through it and gave a dismissive grunt. “Reaper prayer book. Might be useful as toilet paper, that’s about it.”

“No,” said Benny, “look at the last page.”

Joe flipped it over and scanned the list, and his face made an ugly shape. “Oh… crap.”

“What’s it mean?”

Joe held out the book and pointed to the first lines.

“R stands for reaper. CA is California.”

“How do you know that?” asked Benny.

“Because there are abbreviations for Nevada and Wyoming, too. NV and WY.” Joe sighed. “These are head counts of reaper armies. Looks like there are two in California, one of 4,522 and a much bigger one of 19,200. Then you have 14,795 in Nevada, 2,375 in Utah, and 8,371 in Wyoming. You were asking about how many reapers there are. This is your answer.”

Benny did the math in his head. “That’s 49,263. Oh my God.”

“Yeah, well, we already knew we were in big trouble.”

“What are the rest of those numbers? The quads… those are how many bikes they have?”

“Yup, and the good news is that they don’t have a lot of them. Sixty-six for one group and only 452 for the big army.”

“That’s good news?”

Joe sighed. “Actually, come to think of it, it’s not. Saint John is probably using quads to pull equipment and food wagons, but push comes to shove, he’ll detach those and use the quads like light cavalry.”

Benny had hoped this stuff might help Joe find the D-series notes, but instead it was quickly crushing Benny’s own optimism. He almost didn’t give the ranger the last piece.

“I also found this,” he said reluctantly. “It’s a handwritten note, and I think it’s from Dr. McReady.”

Joe read the note.

“What’s it mean?” asked Benny.

The ranger gave him a brief, bleak stare. “It means that we have more questions than answers.” Joe clicked his tongue for Grimm, who lumbered to his feet. “Listen, kid, I want to go show this to Colonel Reid. Maybe she can make something out of it.”

“Who?”

“The base commander. She’s my boss.”

“How come I never met her? You never told me anything about—”

“There’s a lot you don’t know, kid, and there’s a lot I’m not authorized to tell you. Now’s not the time to play catch-up. Go find your girlfriend and Lilah. Let them tell you their story.”

“Why? What happened? Is Nix okay?”

“She’s not hurt,” said Joe evasively. “Talk to her, talk to Lilah, and then maybe we’ll all have a conversation later. I’m going over to the blockhouse. You have to promise me — swear to me — that you won’t leave Sanctuary again. Not unless I’m with you.”

“Sure,” said Benny, though he was pretty sure he was lying to the man.

CHAPTER 32

“Heads up and eyes forward,” called the guard in the tower. “Trade wagon’s coming in.”

The three fence guards glanced up at him and then followed the direction of his outthrust arm.

“Trade wagon?” wondered Tully, the oldest of the guards. “This time of day?”

His shift partner, Hooper, lifted the binoculars that hung around his neck on a leather strap and stared through the fence. The sun was almost down, and the slanting rays painted the big field and the distant tree line in shades of bloodred, vermilion, and Halloween orange.

“Trade wagon, all right,” he said. “Half a day late and… wait… I think something’s wrong.”

The youngest of the three, a fence guard trainee, raised his own binoculars. They were an old but expensive pair that had once belonged to his father. His dad was dead, though, killed in a construction accident while helping to build a corn silo. He adjusted the focus.

“The driver’s hurt,” he said.

“How can you tell?” asked Hooper.

“He’s bleeding,” said the young man.

The older men stared and then grunted. “You got good eyes, Morgie,” said Tully.

Morgie Mitchell did not acknowledge the compliment. His eyesight had qualified him as a tower guard, but he wanted to work down here on the ground. In another year they’d let him join the town watch as a cadet. And after that… well, when Morgie looked into the future, he saw himself sitting on a tall horse, a shotgun across his lap and a real steel katana slung over his shoulder in the rear fast-draw style Tom always used. That future Morgie wore a Freedom Riders sash and worked the roads from New Eden to Haven and every town in between.

For now he was only an apprentice fence guard. A job of no distinction and long hours.

Morgie was fine with that.

Now was now, and the future was something he’d get to.

The longer the shift, the less time he would have to be alone. And he didn’t believe that he deserved any distinction of any kind. Not yet. He didn’t want the borrowed celebrity that came from having studied with Tom Imura. That was Tom’s fame.

And Tom was dead. Buried out in the Ruin near the charred bones of the evil place Tom had destroyed. Gameland.

Morgie wished he’d been there. He should have been there.

Even if it meant that he would have died there. Even an unmarked grave on that field would mean something.

Tom had changed the world that day. Everyone knew it.

Until Morgie had the age, the strength, the power to change even a splinter of the world, he’d work the jobs he could get.

He continued to study the scene that was unfolding beyond the fence.

The field between Mountainside and the forest was more than half a mile wide. It was thick with weeds except for a few select paths that laborers dressed in heavy carpet coats and football helmets kept clear. The trade roads had to be in good order or the flow of supplies into town would dry up.

The field, however, was not empty. There were zoms. There were always zoms. Sometimes only a few dozen scattered along this part of the fence, sometimes as many as two hundred. Some of them had been there since the town was created. Those were the ones whose relatives lived behind the fence; relatives who could not bring themselves to authorize a bounty hunter to quiet their beloved dead. The others were wandering zoms who had come this way following prey. Often they came in a slow, ragged line behind a trade wagon or a bounty hunter returning from the great Rot and Ruin.

Today was one of the in-between days. Morgie counted about seventy zoms out there.

The road from the forest to the gate was straight as an arrow, but the wagon wandered on and off it. At least a dozen zoms followed, and more were staggering toward the wagon, arms outstretched. It kept ahead of them only because a zombie could not lead its target or plan a path of interception. The zom always went directly for where something was at the moment, adjusting only as it moved away.

“What’s that driver doing?” breathed Hooper as the wagon rolled out of the well-worn ruts and into the thick weeds.

They all stared at the wagon as it came closer. The horses were heavily protected with light carpet coats covered by a net of steel washers linked with metal wire. Their legs were wrapped in padded canvas, and their tails were bobbed. Unless the horse stopped and stood in place, a zom would never manage a bite. They kept moving forward, trail wise enough to know the route home and frightened enough of the dead to keep moving despite the erratic control from the driver.

Tully cupped his hands around his mouth. “At the gate!” he bellowed, and the team there turned toward him. “Wagon’s coming in. Driver’s hurt. Get the quarantine pen ready and call the field medics. C’mon, hop to it!”

The gate crew fetched their rifles, and a half-dozen apprentices snatched metal pots and spoons from where they hung on the fence. They ran fifty yards up the fence line and began banging and clanging. Most of the zoms turned toward this new and louder sound.

“Let’s go bring him in,” said Tully.

Hooper dropped his binoculars to let them hang and unslung the pump shotgun he carried. He jacked a round into the breach.

The wagon was a quarter mile out now and the horses were picking up speed, determined to get inside the safety of the fence line.

Tully tapped Hooper on the arm. “Let’s go.”

The three of them jogged over to the gate, and as soon as the crowd of zoms outside had thinned, Tully nodded for the big gates to be swung open. They started to head outside when Tully suddenly slapped a stiff forearm across Morgie’s chest.

“Whoa! Not you, son.”

“But I’m a—”

“You’re a trainee, Morgan Mitchell,” said Tully. “And all you have is a wooden sword. You stay here and let the professionals handle it.”

“But—”

“Pay attention and learn something,” said Hooper with a grin.

They headed out, first at a light trot. Then, as their path cleared, they ran at full speed toward the wagon.

Morgie adjusted the focus on his glasses. As the wagon drew closer, he could see the blood splashes on the man’s arms and chest. He could see the pale face and dark eyes. The reins were wrapped around his hands, but those hands jerked and swung with no apparent sense.

Hooper reached the wagon first. He held his shotgun in one hand and waved toward the driver, calling to him to slow down so he could climb aboard.

The driver turned to him, and the reins slipped from his hands.

Morgie watched all this through his binoculars, and he saw the expression on the driver’s face. One moment it was slack with fatigue from his serious injuries, and then as Hooper reached up toward him, the lips suddenly peeled back from bloody teeth.

“Wait!” cried Morgie. “No!”

But it was too late.

The driver flung himself from the wagon and slammed into Hooper, driving the man down to the ground in an ugly way. The impact caused Hooper to jerk the trigger, and the buckshot blasted the front of the wagon. Some of the pellets struck the flank of one of the horses. It screamed and reared and then bolted forward, spooking the other horse into instant flight. Tully tried to get out of the way, but he never had a chance as steel-shod hooves ground him into the dirt. His screams were as shrill as a heron’s until the wheels crushed him to silence.

The horses raced toward the gate in full panicked flight with the wagon bouncing and jouncing behind them. The three gate guards gawped in surprise and horror, and they were two seconds too late in trying to close the gates. The horses smashed into them, flinging all three men into the air like rag dolls.

Morgie threw himself to one side. He rolled, as Tom had taught him, and rose to the balls of his feet, knees bent, sword in his hands. As Tom had taught him.

The back of the wagon was splashed with blood, and the door hung open on a single twisted hinge. Shapes moved inside the wagon. As Morgie watched, they moved with dreadful slowness into the dying light. Pale white and bright red and the utter black of empty eyes. Traders, four of them. Big men who spent their lives working the Ruin to bring goods and supplies from the Rat Pack scavengers to the Nine Towns. They were covered with bites and the marks of violence.

Maybe one of them had been bitten out in the Ruin and the others had taken him into the wagon to try and treat him. Or maybe they’d all been walking beside the wagon to lighten the burden for the horses when zoms had attacked. Perhaps one had been bitten but hadn’t told his fellows because a bite was a death sentence and he wanted to keep every last bit of life he had left.

There was no way to know.

There was no time left to care.

They boiled out of the back of the wagon and threw themselves at Morgie.