Flesh & Bone

41

“No!” cried Nix as she shoved past Benny and rushed forward, but he darted out a hand and caught her arm.

“Wait,” he warned in a sharp whisper.

“Let me go,” she said viciously, and tore her arm out of Benny’s grasp, giving him a wild and murderous glare. “Don’t you see what that is?”

“It’s a jet—”

“It’s the jet.” Tears broke and fell down Nix’s freckled cheeks. “Look at it. Everything’s ruined. Oh God, Benny… everything’s ruined.”

Benny pushed back a low-hanging branch and stepped out of the woods so he could see the wreckage. His heart sank in his chest, and his fingertips were ice cold from shock.

Beyond the trees was a plateau. One side dropped away into a crevasse that was choked with tall pines; the other side leveled out into a section of flat forestland. A long trench was cut into the mud of the flatland, stretching back at least half a mile, and the nose of the craft was smashed into a mound of mud. Benny had slid into enough bases in rainy baseball games to understand the physics of that. The plane had not simply crashed; instead the pilot had tried to land it, coming in low and then sliding to a long, messy stop on the forest floor.

Because these woods were part of the Mojave Desert, the soil was loose and sandy, which had probably kept the plane from disintegrating on impact. The fuselage was almost intact, though there were jagged tears all along the side they could see. Both wings had been sheared clean off. One was wrapped like wet tissue around a tall finger of rock two hundred yards down the trench. The other wing had torn off closer to where the craft stopped its fatal slide, and it had twisted into an upright position, looking like the sail of an old-time vessel. The main fuselage was almost a hundred feet long and was cracked in two places, but the plane had not torn itself to pieces. Even so, bits of debris were littered behind it, some blackened from fire, others still gleaming white where they were visible against brown sand and green pinyons and junipers. Creeper vines clung to the metal skin of the plane and to each of the fractured wings. The vines were draped like spiderwebs between the blades of the four big, silent propellers.

The glass windows at the front of the craft were smashed in, and the creepers had intruded there, too. A metal hatch stood open a few yards aft of the crumpled nose, gaping like a black mouth in the whiteness of the plane. Plastic sheeting hung in tatters from the open hatch, and there were old bones in the grass below the ragged ends of the plastic. Benny had seen pictures of inflatable escape ramps that were used for emergency landings, and the plastic looked like it might be the remnants of one.

He pointed it out to Nix as he picked up her fallen bokken. “Look at that. Somebody survived the crash.”

That thought edged down the panic in Nix’s eyes by a couple of degrees. She accepted her wooden sword, but her hands gripped the handle with such white-knuckled force that Benny thought she was going to attack the dead aircraft. She took a couple of quick steps toward the plane.

“Be careful,” he said, keeping his voice low in case there were reapers in the woods.

“I’m going to look,” she said in a voice that was less confident than she probably wanted it to sound.

Benny began to follow and then stopped. He felt a frown pull down the corners of his mouth, but he did not consciously understand why. His eyes roved over the scene again. The trench, the plane, the foliage, the broken wings, the open door. His frown deepened.

Something was wrong. Very wrong.

“Nix, wait,” he said. “Don’t.”

She paused and looked sharply at him. “Why not?”

Benny licked his lips. “I… don’t think that’s our jet.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Nix, that’s not the jet we saw.”

She looked from the plane to Benny and back again, and there was such fury in her eyes that he made sure he wasn’t in easy swinging range of her bokken. “You’re crazy,” she barked. “Of course it’s the one we saw.”

“No, it isn’t, and keep your voice down.” Benny came and stood beside her. “Look at it, Nix. This thing’s been here for at least a year. Probably more.”

“How would you know?”

Nix’s harshness was beginning to grate on him, and he snapped back.

“Open your eyes,” he said, his own tone growing sharp. He pointed to the small trees that had poked through the bottom of the trench. “Look at those saplings. Come on — they’re at least a year old. At least that, and maybe older. Some of them look two years old.”

“They’re saplings, Benny. Saplings bend. They could have bent over and sprung back up.”

“No way. They’d have been snapped off. Look, there are bigger trees that were torn right out of the ground.”

It was true; the dead trunks of a hundred small pine trees lay in the trench, their limbs snapped, roots torn out of the sandy soil. Many of them were ripped completely apart, and there were dried sticks that could easily have been saplings that were killed during the crash. Benny pulled a few up and brought them over to Nix.

“See?” he said. “These were the saplings the plane hit. Those others could never have survived this big freaking thing crashing down on them.”

“So what?” she demanded. Somehow, with her voice lowered to a whisper, she sounded even angrier and more annoyed with him. “Since when are you an expert on plant growth?”

“I’m not an expert, Nix, but I’m not stupid, either.”

Nix started to say something, then thought better of it and instead said, “It could have crashed after we saw it. That’s eight months. You don’t know how fast juniper saplings grow, Benny. These could be only eight months old.”

“Maybe,” Benny conceded, “but I doubt it.”

They moved forward together, cautiously, eyes searching the dead flying machine.

They were so riveted by the plane that they did not look into the surrounding woods and so did not see the dead zoms sprawled twenty yards down a crooked game trail; or the two bloody spots where a pair of reapers had died from Lilah’s savage attack. Their bodies were gone, and bloody footprints trailed away into the shrubs.

Nix went over and stood by the draped plastic that hung from the open door. Benny continued walking until he was at the base of the upright section of wing, then he stared down the length of the trench at the other wing. He looked at the twisted blades of the propellers. Two six-bladed props had been attached to each wing, and one had fallen off. Benny went over to it and touched the tip of one of the propeller blades.

“I’ll admit that I don’t know everything about planes,” he said, “but after we got back last year, I looked through every book we had in the library and in tons of magazines over at Chong’s. This is definitely not the one we saw. I’m absolutely sure of it.”

“Why?” she demanded, and there was mingled anger, fear, and hope in her eyes.

He was smiling as he turned.

“Nix, the thing we saw flying over the mountain was a jet… and this thing has propellers,” he said. “Jets don’t have propellers.”

Nix’s eyes flared and her mouth opened, but for the moment she was totally incapable of speech. Her eyes cut instantly from Benny’s face to the blades of the massive propeller that lay in the dirt behind him.

“And that opens up a whole new can of worms,” he added. He patted the wing lightly. “Because no matter which one of us is right about when this crashed, it definitely crashed more than a dozen years after all the lights went out.”

“God…,” breathed Nix.

“That means there were at least two planes in the air. And if there were two… how many more might be out there?”

FROM NIX’S JOURNAL

42

Saint John cleaned his knives with a piece of cloth he kept in his pocket. That cloth had cleaned those knives a hundred times.

He stepped around the red things that lay on the ground. Saint John did not disrespect them by stepping over their corpses. These heretics were in the darkness now, and their bodies were now holy relics, proof of the red doorway that opened between the world of flesh and the infinite realm of spirit.

“Thank you,” he said to them. “Thank you.”

He wept softly as he moved around the spot where the killing had been done. It was a shrine now, and anyone with eyes would be able to understand the beauty of what had happened here. That beauty coaxed tears from Saint John’s eyes; but that was not the only reason he cried.

There were jealous tears on his face, and he lowered his head in shame, unable to look at these transformed ones. His envy of their freedom was nearly unbearable. Though they had been blasphemers mere moments ago, each of them — even the least of them — was more fully and truly connected to the darkness than he was. While he was clothed in flesh, while he lingered here on earth, he was an outsider to the purity of the darkness. An enabler, yes, a conduit, even a guide, but not a part of it.

For that, he wept.

He staggered over to a patch of unmarked grass and dropped heavily to his knees. He slid his knives into their sheaths and then bowed down, placing his forehead on the ground in abject humility.

“Please,” he prayed, “let me come home. Please.”

The darkness whispered inside his brain.

Not yet, my son. There is still so much work to do.

“How much longer, Lord? I have opened so many red doors, I have cleansed more heretics than I can count. How much longer?”

Until the world is silent. There are so few left, and you must save them all. You must guide each of them to the red door.

“Mother Rose and I are always in the service of—”

You, my child, are my trusted servant. You.

Tears fell like rain from Saint John’s eyes, falling to the ground. His body shook with sobs, and he beat his fists upon the ground.

Last of all shall I bring you home, my believed son. Last and most treasured of all.

Saint John wept until his chest ached from it and his throat was raw.

Then, slowly, as if he lifted the entire world with him, he rose from the ground and climbed wearily to his feet.

He turned and looked at the crimson horrors behind him.

“Until the world is silent,” he said thickly. He sniffed back the last of his tears. “Such is the will of Thanatos — praise be to the darkness.”

Then he turned once more and followed the footprints of the two teenagers into the forest.

43

Chong was having the weirdest dream.

He felt as if he was flying.

Not happy flying, like in his dreams where he would rise up out of bed, swoop down the stairs, and zoom out into the streets of town and then soar up to dive and play with eagles and falcons. No, this was a bumpy, smelly, strangely loud kind of flying.

And it hurt.

He tried to move his hands and feet, but they seemed…

He fished for the proper way to describe it to himself.

They seemed… tied. Restrained.

Chong opened his eyes for just a moment and saw impossible things. He was moving across the ground at an incredible rate of speed. Faster than a horse could run. The ground was bumpy, and there was smoke in his nostrils.

He turned his head and saw the tanned back of a slim girl seated in front of him.

Her name was just beyond his reach.

The explanation to all this was just beyond his reach.

As he grabbed for it, the darkness came and took him again.

44

Benny and Nix stood in silence, lost for the moment in the enormity of what they now knew to be the truth.

Two planes.

Maybe more. Probably more.

Somebody was out there.

For Benny it was one of those moments in which he knew for sure that the world as he knew it had changed. No matter what he did, even if he turned around and went back to Mountainside, the world was never going to be the same again. It could not be.

We can’t un-know this, he thought.

Nix stepped back and studied the plane. So far all they had seen was one side and the tail section. They would have to climb the mountain of impacted dirt to see the front and the other side. Above them, the dark mouth of the open hatch seemed to scream an invitation.

Or a warning, thought Benny.

Nix pointed to something on the side of the plane forward of the hatch.

“What’s that?” she asked. “Is that writing?”

Benny squinted at it, mouthing the letters as he tried to read them through a patina of dried mud. “‘C-130J Super Hercules.’”

“What’s that mean?”

“I… think it’s the kind of plane this is. I half remember reading something about a plane called a C-130. I just can’t remember what I read. Something about troop transports, maybe?”

“Troop transports?” Nix’s eyes went wide. “Benny! Do you think that means there’s an army someplace?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know what it means. I can barely remember what it meant before First Night. Now… who knows?”

Nix’s eyes roved over the dead machine, then she pointed again. “Look, on the tail. More writing.”

They hurried closer to the big tail section, which also resembled a ship’s sail. It was badly smudged with soot and grime. The sun glare reflecting off the white metal was so bright that they had to cup their hands around their eyes.

“I think that’s a flag,” Benny said.

“Not the American flag,” corrected Nix. “Look, it only has a couple of stars. And there’s something written below it. I can’t make it out, though. American… something.”

It took Benny a few seconds to piece it together. “‘The… American… Nation.’”

Nix frowned. “Is that what they used to put on air force planes?”

“I’m not sure. I… don’t ever remember seeing it put that way. Besides, I was mostly looking for commercial jetliners. That’s what we saw.”

They stood there for a moment. Benny could feel indecision gnawing at him. He turned and looked back at the woods. “I haven’t heard anything for a while now.”

“No,” she agreed.

“I hope that’s good news.”

She nodded but said nothing; clearly she was more interested in the plane than in the welfare of Lilah and Chong. Benny found that profoundly disturbing.

“We need to look inside,” said Nix.

“Yeah,” Benny said, and headed to the front of the plane. The mound of dirt was so steep that he had to climb it on all fours. But as he reached the top, he saw that there was an easier path that emptied out from the woods. That wasn’t what made him freeze in place, however. “Oh my God!”

“What?” demanded Nix, who was just behind him.

“Don’t come up here,” Benny warned, but it was already too late. Nix reached the top and cried out exactly as he had.

“Who…?” she began, but shook her head and didn’t finish.

The clearing in front of the plane was not at all clear.

There were several things placed just in front of the crumpled nose of the plane. They had been out of sight behind a row of twisted trees.

The first object was a small altar made from red stones scavenged from the arid ground. The altar was covered with bundles of dead flowers and small fire-blackened incense bowls. Set atop the altar was a row of human heads.

Not skulls. Heads.

Five of them. The oldest was withered and nearly picked clean by insects; the freshest could not have been more than a day old.

Nix gagged.

But the spectacle was worse than this pagan display.

Beyond the altar, standing in the shadow of the big plane, were three posts, more like T-bars than crosses, and lashed to each one was a body.

The bodies wore the faded and wind-torn rags of military uniforms.

The three bodies were withered, but they were not lifeless.

They were zoms.

FROM NIX’S JOURNAL

45

Lilah was not afraid to die.

Death was something she knew too well, too intimately, to fear. Annie and George were on the other side of death. So was Tom.

Only Chong was here, and in her heart Lilah believed that if she died today, then Chong would not survive very long. Not even with Benny and Nix. The Ruin was too hard for them. Too dangerous. They were all town kids.

Below her the boars grunted and milled around, agitated by the nearness of living flesh.

Lilah examined the thing she held in her tanned hands. It was not as powerful as the spear she’d lost; or as quick as the gun that lay somewhere in the gloom below, but she liked the heft of it.

Using her knife, she’d cut three of the straightest branches she could reach, then shaved off the twigs and smaller branches and trimmed the branches into four-foot-long poles. Then she removed her canvas vest, stowed the last useful items in her pants pockets, and cut the vest into many long strips. Once all the cutting and trimming was done, Lilah placed the crossbar of the knife between the poles and lashed it all together with turn after turn of canvas. Lilah knew a great deal about knots and binding. She preferred soft leather — deer hide was best — but a smart warrior used the resources at hand rather than wasting time longing for what she did not have.

It was a painstaking process, but Lilah did not hurry. A mistake in preparation would guarantee failure. The result of her work was a kind of long-handled ax. The blade of the knife protruded at a right angle from the tip of the ax, and a piece of hard, knotty wood was lashed to the back end to create a club. As long as the poles and bindings held, she could chop and smash.

The hogs crashed into the tree again.

Lilah climbed carefully down, limb by limb, until she stood on a stout branch seven feet above the circle of dead boars. They stopped ramming the tree and glared up at her, and Lilah’s smile flickered. There was intelligence in those eyes. Not human intelligence, but the cold and calculating intelligence of a predator. Animal cunning. Animal hate.

Why? And… how? The zombie plague, whatever it was, erased all intelligence when it reanimated the dead body. Right?

It was a problem she would have to think about later. Now she needed her entire mind to be focused on what would happen in the next few seconds.

Lilah tested the bindings, looking for loose knots and weak points. There were none.

A vagary of wind brought sounds to her, and she lifted her head to listen. Were there voices? Yells? She listened and listened, but all she really heard was the white noise of the endlessly moving trees and the chatter of birds and monkeys.

“Warrior smart,” she told herself.

And then she took her ax in both hands and jumped.

46

“Are you dead?”

Chong heard the voice coming from somewhere beyond the darkness in which he floated. A girl’s voice.

Nix? No, it was a harder voice.

Lilah? Definitely not. Lilah’s voice was always a smoky whisper.

“Yo!” said the voice. “You in there, boy?” This time the voice was accompanied by a sharp poke in his shoulder.

He said, “Ow.”

“Okay, then y’all’s not dead.”

She had a thick accent and pronounced it dayud.

Chong licked his lips. “Delighted to hear it,” he said. There was a cool cloth across his eyes, and he had no desire to remove it. If he did, then he would have to face the reality of where he was, and he was not quite ready for that. He felt absolutely terrible. Weakness was the worst part, and it seemed to go all the way down to his bones. He wanted to sleep. Not here; at home. The best thing in the world would be to be curled up in his bed on the second floor of his family’s A-frame house. Maybe Mom would come and tuck the blankets in around him and kiss him on the head in that way she always did, even when he was too big to be tucked in. Moms are moms, they did that sort of thing. It would be nice, too. Being tucked in by his mom would chase all the monsters away. A little kiss to make the pain go away too; to help him drift off to sleep.

That would be real nice.

But that was a different world. Mom probably thought that he was dead by now. Her skinny, bookish son lost out in the Rot and Ruin. Would she be sitting on the edge of his empty bed right now, crying, her heart broken? Would she be praying that her son wasn’t a zom shambling forever through the decaying wasteland?

“Hey,” said the girl, poking him a second time.

“Please stop doing that.”

The cloth was whipped away, and Chong reluctantly opened his eyes.

Riot sat beside him. She had cleaned the blood from her face.

“You asked if I was dead,” he said. His voice was thick. “Should I be dead? Am I dying?”

“Well,” said the girl, “you got shot, boy, so put that in the pot and see if it’s soup.”

“Ah,” he said, bracing himself for the return of his memories. Brother Andrew, the archer. Carter and Sarah.

The black-tipped arrow.

“Riot…?” he said slowly. “That’s your name, isn’t it?”

“Well,” she said, “look at you being sharp as a new blade of grass.”

She studied him with eyes that were older than the face in which they were set. There was wisdom there, and a cunning that looked every bit as sharp as Lilah’s, but there was something else, something that Chong always saw in Lilah’s eyes. Sadness. Not new grief, but an older sadness that ran so deep it was as much a part of this girl as her skin. A sadness that was aware of itself and knew that it had nowhere to go.

They were inside what looked to be an old shack. Bare walls, a wood beam ceiling draped with spiderwebs.

“What else do y’all remember?” asked Riot.

“All of it, I suppose.” Then he gasped. “Eve! What happened to her? Please, tell me that they—”

“She’s here,” said Riot quietly. “Keep your voice down. She’s sleeping.”

Chong turned his head and saw a tiny figure curled up under a thin blanket in the far corner. He made as if to sit up in order to see her better, but a meteor of pain slammed into him. He started to scream, but Riot instantly clapped a hand over his mouth, stifling the sound before it could escape. She bent close and whispered in his ear.

“If y’all wake that little girl yonder, I’ll give you something to scream about, boy. We clear on that?”

Chong took in a ragged breath through his nose. Even that was an effort. He felt thin, hollow, like he was more ghost than person. He stared into her eyes and saw that there was more fear than threat there.

He nodded.

Riot studied him for a moment, returned his nod, and slowly removed her hand. She sat back on her heels.

Chong very carefully gasped in a lungful of air. The pain subsided slowly.

“Poor kid saw her mommy and daddy cut down in front of her,” murmured Riot. “Hasn’t said a word since. Not a peep. She ain’t ever gonna be right after something like that, but at least we can let her sleep some. It’ll be a mite easier trying to grapple hold of things when she’s not dead-dog tired.”

Chong nodded. “She’s still young… maybe she won’t remember all of it.”

Riot gave him a strange, sad look. “Nobody’s that young.”

“You see something like that too?”

She shrugged. “I’ve seen some things.”

He waited, but she didn’t elaborate. He looked around. “Where are we?”

“Old ranger station, I think. Brought you here on a quad I filched from one of the reapers who clear don’t need it no more.”

He cleared his throat. He was bare-chested, and he glanced down at the feathered end of the arrow that stood up straight from his flesh. It was low, just inside the hip bone. He touched the feathers ever so lightly. “What do we do about… um… this?”

“Unless you like the look of it, we’s going to have to git ’er out. Your shirt was all bloody so I cut it off ya.”

“Ah.”

“Wound’s a funny color and it smells, which bothers me ’cause that’s too fast for ordinary infection. So I packed some stuff around the entry and exit holes — spiderwebs and moss and suchlike. Keeps it from going septic.”

Chong nodded; he knew something about natural medicines. These days everyone did, and he’d read several survival manuals during the Warrior Smart training. Sphagnum moss had acidic and antibacterial properties; spiderwebs, apart from also being antibacterial, were rich in vitamin K and helped blood to clot. Chong found it comforting that this girl knew her natural medicines. Out in the Ruin, infection was every bit as dangerous as zoms and wild animals.

Over in one corner was a small fire, and some herbs were steeping in a shallow pan of water. The bow and quiver of arrows that had once belonged to Brother Danny lay on the floor. Souvenirs of an encounter Chong would rather have forgotten.

“How… how bad is it?” he asked cautiously. “How bad am I hurt?”

“You ain’t dead, so that’s something. Arrow missed most of the good stuff, and you ain’t spittin’ blood or nuthin’.”

“Hooray?” he muttered weakly, making it almost a question.

“On the downside, you lost about a bucket of blood, boy, and you didn’t do yourself any favors when you grappled hold of Andrew back there. I wouldn’ta bet a dead possum on you making it this long, you being such a skinny boy an’ all. But there’s some pepper in your grits.”

“Thanks. I think.” He closed his eyes for a second as a wave of nausea swept through him. His skin felt greasy and clammy. “Can you just pull it out?”

Riot snorted and bent down to pick up Brother Danny’s quiver of arrows. She fished one of the arrows out and held up the point. “That arrow’s got the same barbed point as this. Big bear tip. I’d tear a flank steak offa you if I tried to pull it out. That what you want, boy?”

“No. And will you please stop calling me ‘boy’?”

“What do you want me to call you?” she asked, her eyes filled with challenge and amusement.

“My name is Louis Chong. Most people just call me Chong.”

“Chong, huh. That Korean?”

“Chinese.”

“Okay. Well, t’other thing is that I don’t know what this black stuff is that’s smeared all over the tip. Smells like death, and that’s generally not good news.”

“Poison?”

“Or something,” she said. “Either way, we have to be smart about how we take it out and what we do about infection.”

He cocked his head at her and licked his lips. “Why are you helping me? Back there at the field, you and your friends seemed pretty determined to… you know.”

“Yeah, I do know, and we’d have done it too.”

“I believe you. So… why the change of heart? Not that I’m looking to make you question your decisions.”

Riot glanced at Eve for a moment. “Evie told me that you and your friends — the cute boy with the sword and that red-headed witch — saved her from the gray people. That earned you some real points.”

“It didn’t look that way back on the field. I remember you trying to take our weapons and supplies.”

Riot shrugged. “Times is tough, ain’t you heard? Apocalypse an’ all.” She rubbed her face. “You also tried to save Sarah and Eve from Brother Andrew. Almost died doing it. Cartin’ you here and plucking out an arrow seems the least I can do.”

“Brother Andrew,” Chong repeated with a confused shake of the head. “Who the heck are these reapers and why are they doing all this?” he asked. “I mean, I heard Andrew and Carter talking, so I think I understand some of it. Is it some kind of cult thing? Some religious cult?”

Riot considered the questions. “It’s religious,” she admitted. “Don’t know much about ‘cults.’ But this is something real, and it’s big.”

She explained about Saint John and his belief that the Gray Plague had been a kind of “rapture,” and that anyone left behind was a sinner. Saint John formed the reapers to usher those left behind into the darkness.

“Darkness? What’s that? Heaven?”

“Don’t rightly know. Saint John says that it’s the place where pain and sufferin’ don’t exist no more. He never said anything about pearly gates or none of that stuff.”

“And people join him?”

A strange light kindled in her eyes. “Oh, yes they do. By the hundreds and by the thousands.”

Chong thought about it. “Brother Andrew said a lot of things about how hard it is to survive out here. All the disease and hunger, not to mention the zoms.”

“Zoms? Oh, you mean the zees. Nobody much calls ’em zoms, ’cept the odd trader or ranger. Mostly it’s ‘gray people,’ ‘gray wanderers.’ All the same.”

“So… let me see if I understand this,” said Chong. “People are eager to join the reapers and embrace the ‘darkness’ because this world is too hard to live in? Is that about it?”

She nodded. “It ain’t as simple as that, but you got the bones of it. If all you know is suffering and fear, and next year looks to be just as bad, and the year after that and the year after that… who wouldn’t take a hard look at an offer of no pain, no suffering?”

Chong sighed. “I’d say it was the craziest thing I ever heard of, but it’s actually not. Those who want to go see God can do it right now, and those who want to find some kind of redemption — or maybe some kind of important purpose — can join the reapers and do God’s work before they head off to join their loved ones.”

Riot gave him a long, appraising look. “Ain’t stupid, are ya?”

“I try not to be.”

He suddenly swayed as another wave of nausea churned through him. He fought to control the urge to vomit.

“You okay?”

“I’ve felt better. Little woozy. Sick to my stomach.”

Riot placed her palm on his forehead. “You’re sweatin’ up a storm, but I don’t feel no fever. You’re sick as a dog.”

“Arrows in my body tend to do that to me,” Chong said.

“Ah,” she said. “So I heard.”

Riot bent close and studied the arrowhead. “That is a beaut.”

“Swell.” Chong could actually feel his body turn cold. “Since we can’t, um, yank it out… what are our options?”

“It’s an aluminum arrow,” she said, nodding toward the shaft. “So I’ll try and unscrew the head, and then we can pull it out backwards-like. Might jostle a bit, which is why I wanted you awake ’fore I try. Can’t have you waking up screaming.”

“No, we can’t have that.”

She nodded at his bare shoulder. “What’s that?”

Chong did not need to look to see what she meant. There was a fresh scar from where a zombie had tried to take a bite out of him in one of the fighting pits at Gameland. He explained that to Riot.

“You was a pit fighter?’

“Not by choice.”

“And you got bit and healed?” She looked dubious.

“The zom’s teeth just pinched, and I pulled away at the same time. I lost some skin, but I didn’t get infected.”

“You got the luck. Bit by a gray wanderer and lived to brag on it, and now shot by a reaper and you’ll have that scar to use to charm the ladies. Is… there a lady, by the way? Maybe that little redhead with the freckles?”

“That’s Nix, and she’s with Benny.”

“And you all alone?” she asked, a smile touching the corners of her mouth.

“I… I’m kind of seeing someone.”

“Oh?” she asked casually as she knelt over the small fire and placed the tip of a knife in the flames. Chong did not ask her why. He already had a bad idea about what that burning metal would be used for.

“Tell me about her.”

Chong told Riot an abbreviated version of Lilah’s story.

Riot turned and stared at him. “The Lost Girl? You’re joshing me.”

“No… why? Don’t tell me you’ve heard of her?”

“Oh, dang, son, I heard ten different versions of that tall tale.” She laughed and shook her head. “Boys are funny. They’ll make up any dang story just to impress a gal.”

“You think I’m making this up?”

“Oh, no. Not at all. But when we’re done here I’ll introduce you to my uncle, Daniel Boone. He keeps a chupacabra for a pet and has a fresh-raised gray man as his personal butler.”

Chong tried to argue, to explain that Lilah was real and that he knew her, but Riot kept laughing and shaking her head. Finally he gave it up.

Riot gave him a wicked little grin and ticked her chin toward the arrow. “So, unless you got more tall tales to tell… let’s give ’er a go, shall we?”

47

Benny and Nix stared at the zombies on the T-bars. the creatures twisted and reached for them, their moans softer than the desert breeze. Red streamers were tied around their ankles.

Around the neck of each was hung a small plank of whitewashed wood. The message on each was the same.

“What’s it supposed to mean?” asked Nix in a hushed and frightened voice.

“I don’t know and I don’t want to know.”

Nix nervously touched one of the streamers tied to the nearest zom’s ankle. “That looks like what Saint John was wearing.”

“Yeah. Let me rephrase what I said. I really do not freaking want to know what this means. Actually, this whole thing is really scaring the crap out of me. We need to find Lilah and—”

“We need to look inside that plane.”

He smiled at her. “You’re actually nuts, aren’t you? The desert sun’s baked your brains and—”

Nix just looked at him. Benny felt suddenly detached from the moment. Here was Nix, the girl he loved, the girl he’d risked his life for, the girl he’d left his home for. Nix, with her wild red hair and explosions of freckles and brilliant green eyes. Nix, who had a scar on her face that Benny actually thought looked sexy. Nix, who was everything to him. But she was also the Nix he did not know. The girl he’d come to know less and less ever since they’d seen that jet.

This Nix laughed less often. This Nix was less kind, less…

Soft?

He considered that word and its implications.

Soft could mean weak, or it could mean gentle, open, receptive. The Nix he’d known all his life was soft, but was she ever weak? No, absolutely not. Not before and not after the jet. Okay, then what about the other meaning of soft? Was this new Nix gentle?

Mostly no. Life had been so hard on her that she had become hardened.

Was she open?

Again, mostly no. Where once they could spend hours discussing or even debating points as trivial and varied as the species of a butterfly or the politics of the Nine Towns, this new Nix seldom let him inside her thoughts.

Was this Nix receptive?

That was the hardest call. She seemed open to new experiences, and would readily listen to advice or information about the best ways to do things, the best routes, safety in the Ruin, all sorts of things. But that was only receptivity along the lines of a file cabinet — information was stored, but Benny had no idea of how it was being processed.

Was this the Nix he’d fallen in love with?

No. That Nix was gone. If not forever, then at least for now. There was hardly any trace of her left.

That left a final and dreadful question. One that he had been debating for a couple of weeks now.

Was he in love with this Nix?

Benny searched and searched inside his head and heart, and he just simply did not know. The only consolation was that he didn’t understand this Nix. Maybe when he did, things would get better.

He knew that Nix had always wanted to leave Mountainside. He and Chong both considered her a visionary; she had big, but practical, dreams about going beyond the fence line to make a new home out here in the Ruin. But that was before her mother was murdered and Nix was abducted. It was before Nix had been forced to fight in the zombie pits at Gameland, where she’d encountered the reanimated zombie of Charlie Pink-eye. It was before Tom died.

After all those things, Nix had changed.

Now, standing in front of the crashed plane, with proof of ugliness and madness out here in the Ruin, Benny looked into those emerald eyes and did not see anyone he recognized.

All this, all these jumbled thoughts, crashed through his mind in the space of a second or two. Most of the thoughts were rehashes of issues that had been hanging unresolved on the walls of his brain.

Benny turned away from her stare, unable to look into her eyes any longer. The Nix he knew was not there, and he didn’t want this new Nix to see the agony that must be in his own eyes.

He walked to the base of the T-bars and looked up at the zoms.

He cleared his throat. “I think they were the pilots,” he said.

“Why?”

“The uniforms. There were pictures in some of the books.”

“Should we… quiet them?”

Benny looked up at the dead, who looked down at him with empty eyes and hungry mouths. Their hands pawed at the air, gray hands opening and closing on nothing.

“No,” he said. “They’re not hurting anyone.”

Benny felt her come to stand beside him.

“I’m going to climb up into the plane,” she said.

Benny cleared his throat. “It’s not safe.”

“Safe?” Nix echoed faintly. “When are we ever going to be safe?”

“I—”

“I’m serious, Benny. Unless we find where this plane came from, all we’re ever going to do is keep running for our lives. Is that what you want? Is that why you came out here?”

He looked up at the cloudless blue sky and did not look at her. “Nix, you know exactly why I came out here.”

“Look, Benny…,” she said in the softest voice he’d heard her use in weeks. “I know things have been bad.”

He dared not turn. This was hardly the first time she’d tuned into what he was thinking, or perhaps what he was feeling. Nix was always empathic. Benny said nothing.

“Give me time,” she said.

She did not wait for him to answer. She turned away and walked down the slope to the piece of plastic sheeting that hung from the open hatch. Benny turned his head ever so slightly and watched as she began to climb.

48

Lilah did not scream a war cry as she jumped down to face the boars. She did not need to hype herself up for the fight; every nerve in her body was already blazing with the anticipation of battle and pain.

The pain in her side was a searing white-hot inferno, but she swallowed it, using the pain as fuel, knowing it would shotgun adrenaline into her system. It would make her faster, more aggressive, more vicious. It would keep the fear under control. And there was a lot of fear. She never pretended to be fearless, not to others and never to herself.

She did not fear her own death. Not really.

She feared not living, and to her that wasn’t the same thing.

Death ended thought, ended knowing.

Not living meant that she would never see Chong’s face again. She would never see the exasperation he tried so hard to hide whenever she did or said something that wasn’t “acceptable” to the people in town. She would never hear his soft voice as he recited poetry. Dickinson, Rossetti, Keats. She would never feel the warmth of his hand in hers. Chong’s hands were always warm, even when it was snowing outside.

She would never kiss him again.

She would never get to say the words that she ached to say.

So she said them now, just in case. Just to have them out there, to put them on the wind. To make them real.

“Chong,” she murmured quietly, “I love you.”

It was unlikely that he would ever get to hear her say those words. The thought of these monsters taking all that away from her made Lilah mad.

Very mad.

Killing mad.

With a feral snarl that would probably have scared the life out of Chong, Lilah dropped from the branch.

She fell with all the silence and speed of gravity. Her snow-white hair whipped away from her face as she plummeted.

She struck the closest boar feetfirst with a dead-weight impact that staggered the beast even though it was nearly five times her weight and mass. The heels of her shoes struck it on the right shoulder, and the impact sent shock waves through her shins and through the gash in her side. However, Lilah bent her knees as she struck, letting the big muscles of her thighs absorb the shock rather than her fragile knee joints.

The impact knocked the boar sideways into a second animal, and Lilah fell backward away from the pack. Despite the pain, she hit the ground the right way, tucked, rolled, and came up onto the balls of her feet.

All the boars squealed in a killing frenzy. Lilah wasted no time; there was none to waste. She rushed in and swung her ax in a high overhand blow that whistled through the air. The blade smashed into the first hog’s skull and punched through right into its brain. The creature cried out and then instantly collapsed, dead for gone and forever.

Lilah went with its fall, letting the creature’s own weight tear the blade free.

She’d timed it right. The first boar was down between her and the others. That bought her two seconds of time. She needed one.

Lilah whipped the ax over and around her head just as a second boar scrabbled over the dead one, and the blade struck it square in the eye socket. The steel stabbed through one eye and out the other side.

But the boar kept charging.

The puncture had missed the brain.

What had been perfect timing a moment ago was now fatal. The boar tossed its head and tore the ax handle from her hands as easily as she could have taken a toy away from little Eve. Lilah staggered back and nearly fell. Her ax went flying into the weeds on the far side of the clearing. It might as well have been on the far side of the moon for all the good it would do her now.

The boars that had fallen were back on their feet, and the whole pack charged at her.

Lilah screamed and dove away, rolling again, feeling more of her wound open up as she rose once more to her feet. She ran, and the pain chased her as surely as did the pack of boars.

The clearing was covered in short, dry grass that had withered to a lusterless brown. As Lilah ran across it, heading for the shelter of a boulder, she saw a darker brown amid the grass, and a half pace later the gleam of steel.

Her torn gun belt and the big Sig Sauer pistol were right there!

But the boars were too close.

Lilah ran past her gun and reached the boulder a split second before the pigs caught up. She slapped the curve of the rock and launched her body onto it and then over it. The boars slammed into the stone, one after another, their dead brains too damaged to correct the angle of their charge. They rebounded from the impact, and as Lilah ran around the far side of the rock, she saw that one of them had shattered its big front tusks. Far from reducing it as a threat, the damage resulted in dagger-sharp jagged stumps.

She piled on the speed, bent almost double even though her whole left side burned with fresh blood, then scooped up the holster, grabbed the butt of the pistol, racked the slide, skidded to a stop, whirled, and brought the gun up as the boars barreled straight toward her.

And then everything went a little crazy.

As she pulled the trigger there were two blasts.

Not one.

The lead boar pitched down and tumbled over and over, its head blown to fragments. The boars behind it squealed and stumbled, colliding with their fellows, crashing into and over one another in a massive pile. Only one boar remained on its feet, and it drove straight at Lilah.

Then something huge and gray came flying out of the woods and struck the third boar like a missile, knocking it sideways and down. The new creature rattled with the sound of metal, and Lilah had a surreal glimpse of spiked steel bands, chain mail, and a great horned helmet. It was a dog, but it was like nothing Lilah had ever seen. A monstrous mastiff, armored like a tank. It dragged down the much heavier boar and began systematically slashing the undead creature to pieces. It did not bite at all but instead smashed and tore with the blades welded to its armor.

The last three boars rose from where they had fallen over the one Lilah had shot. One took a single lurching step toward her, paused for a moment, and then fell over dead.

As it landed, Lilah saw the black dime-size bullet hole in its temple.

The two others glared at her. They grunted with awful hunger and charged.

Lilah brought her gun up, but a voice yelled, “No!”

And a second figure came rushing from the woods. Not a dog this time, but a man.

He leaped over the dead hogs and landed right in the path of the charging boars. The pale sunlight that slanted down through the trees glittered on the edge of a long sword the man raised above his head.

Not just any kind of sword.

A katana.

The man stepped into the charge of the hogs and slashed low, left and right, and suddenly the animals were falling forward, one leg on each sheared clean away. The man spun and slashed, the blade moving with incredible speed and precision so that it appeared as if the boars merely disintegrated. Then he pivoted and made two massive downward stabs, ramming the point of his sword through the weakest parts of the creatures’ skulls and destroying the spark of unnatural life that burned in their zombie brains.

Behind him, the dog rose from the destroyed hulk of the other boar.

Lilah froze, her pistol clamped in hands that now trembled. The pain in her side was screaming through her nerve endings, and shadows were piling up inside her mind.

But for all that, she could not help staring at the man who stood ten feet away, his face and body hidden by deep shadows, the katana held in his powerful hands.

She stared in uncomprehending shock.

The last thing she said before blood loss and damage dragged her down into the darkness was, “Tom…?”

49

“Y’all ready?” asked Riot. She was crouched behind Chong, her fingers lightly touching the barbed head of the arrow.

“No,” he said through clenched teeth. Then a moment later he croaked, “Go ahead.”

“Take hold of that other end, and don’t you let it turn. Otherwise we’ll be doing nothing but reaming the hole.”

“Well,” he said as conversationally as he could, “we wouldn’t want that now, would we?”

“Here,” she said, handing him a thick piece of leather strapping she’d cut from her belt, “take this. Put it between your teeth.”

“I don’t need that.”

“Yeah,” she said, “you do.”

Chong took it with great trepidation and placed it between his strong white teeth. Then he reached down and wrapped his fingers around the shaft just below the dark feathers. “O-okay.”

Riot took a deep breath; so did Chong.

“Here goes.”

She gripped the end that protruded from his back, closing her left fist around it; then pinched the flat of the barb between thumb and fingers and… turned.

The whole arrow turned. Blood suddenly welled from both sides of the wound, darkening the strips of Chong’s shirt that Riot had used to pack the wound.

The pain was… exquisite. It was pain on a level Chong had never imagined before, and in the last month he had been beaten, kicked, stomped, and punched by full-grown bounty hunters. Memories of that other pain lined the shelves in his mind. This pain was on a much higher shelf. It was worse than when he’d gotten shot by the arrow in the first place. When the arrow hit him, the shock of it blunted his nerve endings and slammed his mind and body into a weird kind of traumatic numbness.

That was then, this was now.

He could feel every single nerve ending as the arrow turned despite their grips.

As it turned out, he did indeed need that leather strap. Instead of throwing his mouth wide to scream, he bit down on the pain, and the scream echoed around within his body. He could feel his scream burning through him.

Riot straightened and craned her neck to see how he was holding the arrow.

“Dang it, son, don’t grab the shaft, grab the feathers. You need friction to hold it steady. Hold it tight.” She chuckled and added, “Pretend you’re holding the Lost Girl’s hand.”

Several biting remarks occurred to Chong, but he did not have the breath to speak them. Instead he shifted his hand position, clamped down harder on the leather strap, and waited for her to try again.

She gritted her teeth and channeled her strength into her fingers.

The arrowhead did not turn. The whole shaft shifted inside the tunnel of flesh. The pain was every bit as bad. Chong screamed a muffled scream of torment, sucking in the sound, feeling tears and sweat burst from him. Feeling the heat of fresh blood on his stomach and back.

“It’s stuck like a boot in mud,” growled Riot needlessly. She tried again. And again.

Chong could feel nausea washing around in his stomach, but he did not dare give in to it. If he started vomiting now, it would make everything worse.

“Y’all want me to stop?” asked Riot.

Chong did. He really did. He wanted to tell her that. Maybe beg for her to stop. Stopping was the only sane choice.

“N-no…,” he wheezed, forcing the word past the leather strap.

Riot leaned over and looked at him for a moment, studying his eyes. There was a strange expression on her face that Chong could not interpret. She gave him the smallest of smiles and a tiny nod, then bent back to her work.

Riot tried again. And again. Over and over, and each time it was worse than the time before. Chong wept unashamedly.

Then…

“It’s turning!”

Suddenly the pain and the awkward, terrible shifting of the arrow in his body changed. The arrow became almost still except for a faint tremor as the arrowhead turned and turned on its threads.

“Got ’er done!” cried Riot.

Chong closed his eyes and collapsed back, soaked with sweat and exhausted. The arrowhead was one step.

It was the easy step.

There were two more.

Riot got up and ran to the fire. She wrapped a piece of cloth around the knife and removed it from the fire. Three inches of the blade glowed yellow-white. She hurried back to Chong and knelt in front of him.

“Okay,” she said, and Chong could see that she, too, was sweating heavily, “here’s the fun part. I got to pull this puppy out and then cauterize the wounds. Both sides. You’re bleeding, so we got to do it right quick. You ready?”

“Stop asking me that,” he mumbled around the leather strap. “Just do it!”

Riot did something else first.

She quickly bent forward and kissed Chong on the tip of his nose.

“For luck,” she said.

Then she took the arrow in her left hand, took a breath, and pulled.

It came out with a dreadful sucking sound that Chong knew he would never forget. Blood welled hot and red from the wound.

“Bite down,” she ordered, and then she moved in with the white-hot blade.

The pain went off the scale, but still Chong held on. He screamed into the strap and bit the leather so hard he tasted blood in his mouth, but he held on.

And then he caught the smell of his own burning flesh.

That was when he passed out.

50

Benny came down the hill and watched Nix climb. Then, with a sigh and a certain knowledge that this was a bad idea, he took hold of one of the rents in the plastic and began climbing too.

The plastic was strong, and though it swayed with their weight, the climb was easy, and there were enough holes to provide easy purchase for hands and feet. Nix scrambled up ahead of him, nimble as a monkey.

“Slow down,” Benny warned.

“Catch up,” she fired back, and gave him a second’s worth of a smile.

Almost like the old Nix.

Benny scrambled up after her, and they reached the open hatch shoulder-to-shoulder. Very carefully, as if they were peering in through the window of an old abandoned house from which ghosts might peer back, they raised their heads above the deck and looked inside.

There was a lot of debris. Broken fittings and equipment from the plane that must have torn loose during the crash, pieces of shattered pine branches, and last fall’s dried leaves. And bones. Lots of bones. Leg and arm bones, the slender curves of ribs, and part of a skull.

Benny heard Nix’s sharp intake of breath.

“No,” he said in a hushed voice, “I think it’s a monkey.”

“Are you sure?”

Benny climbed the rest of the way up and crouched inside the hatch. He lifted the skull fragment and examined it. “Monkey,” he said with relief, as much to himself as to her.

“Any, um, people bones?”

“No.”

But as Nix climbed in she froze. Benny followed the line of her gaze and saw that there were more bundles of dried flowers and incense bowls. And another sign, the writing small and feminine, painted in red on white wood.

They were both quiet for a moment.

Finally Benny said, “Well, that’s comforting.”

Nix said nothing.

They looked around. The hatch opened into a narrow compartment that seemed to divide the airplane into two parts: the cockpit to their left and a huge cargo bay to their right.

Both doors were closed, and there were painted warnings on each, and white wax had been poured over the door handles. Red ribbon had been pressed into the wax.

Nix used her palm to wipe away a film of grime that obscured the message on the cockpit door. It was a single word:

“That’s interesting,” she said. “Let’s see what’s on the other door.”

She crossed to the cargo bay door and tore away some creeper vines. Again the message was a single word.

“Charming,” observed Benny. “Take your pick.”

Nix crossed back to the cockpit door. “This one first.”

“Sure.” Benny bent and examined the seal and found it untouched. “Looks like nobody has been here. Open these doors and that wax will crack right off.”

Nix touched the door to the cockpit. “Open it.”

“You sure this is such a smart idea?”

She made a disgusted sound. “Don’t be such a girl.”

Benny bit back four or five vile and wildly inappropriate comments and reached for the door. The wax seal was thick, and he had to use both hands to turn the metal handle; then with a crack the wax broke apart and the lock clicked open.

Nix, for all her bravado, pushed Benny’s shoulder. “You first.”

51

Saint John came slowly out of the forest and stood at the edge of the plateau. The crashed steel angel lay where it had died two years ago. The gray wanderers who had been the crew of the plane still hung from their posts.

Everything was as it should be.

He bent and studied the ground, but there was no easy story to read. The top shelf of the plateau was mostly flat rock, baked hard by the sun and unable to take a footprint. The tracks of the two teenagers had petered out a quarter mile back, and now Saint John was unsure if he had come the right way.

He looked up at the open hatch. Had they gone up into the thing?

He smiled and shook his head, dismissing that level of heresy in children so young. They would not remember airplanes anyway — they’d grown up in a world without such machines. Or… mostly without them.

He walked to the base of the plastic sheeting and gave it an experimental tug.

It was solid enough, and he debated climbing up, but he dismissed the idea. There was nowhere to go in there, no reason to try. If the children had been real flesh and bone, then they would surely die up there. If they were, as Saint John suspected, merely spiritual beings pretending to be human teenagers, then they would have no need to enter the shrine.

What would be the upshot if he were to go up and look for himself?

Apart from the direct insult to Mother Rose, whose shrine this was, it would surely be viewed as a lack of faith on his part.

These children had tried to tempt him into an act of transgression. A sin. He smiled.

It was a clever trap, but his faith was stronger than his curiosity. His faith was his armor and his sword.

A sound distracted him — the roar as a quad motor started — and he walked to the edge of the cliff and looked down to see which of his reapers was down there.

Saint John froze, his breath catching in his throat.

What he saw was not any of his people.

Instead he saw a big man buckling a girl — another teenager — onto the back of an idling quad. The girl was a complete stranger.

The man, however, was not.

Nor was the monstrous mastiff who stood wide-legged beside the machine, its body clad in chain mail and spikes.

Oh, he certainly knew this man.

This sinner.

This kind of heretic.

He mouthed the man’s name. “Joe.”

Saint John’s hand strayed to the handle of his favorite knife, hidden as it was beneath the folds of his shirt.

And then he understood.

The two teenagers he had followed had manifested on earth only partly to test his faith, and he had passed that test here at the Shrine of the Fallen. But they had a higher purpose, and one that was of great importance to the reapers and their cause.

Saint John now knew where Joe was.

Joe, however, did not know that Saint John of the Knife, the man he had tried to kill so many times, crouched on the edge of a cliff not a hundred feet above where he stood.

Joe knew the secrets of Sanctuary. If those secrets could be wrested from him, then they could be used to destroy Sanctuary. And oh how it needed to be destroyed. Not just for the evil that it represented, but also because of the temptation it offered to the corrupt.

Like Mother Rose.

Saint John knew full well that if his dear Mother Rose were to reach Sanctuary first — reach it and take it — then she would become a great and terrible threat. To him, to the will of God. She would become the dark queen of this world, and if Saint John could not prevent that, then God would turn his back on him and close the pathway to darkness forever.

The key to all of it was the ranger named Joe.

Joe would soon beg to reveal the secrets of Sanctuary. The sinner would tell Saint John everything and anything he wanted to know.

And Saint John would not mind at all if Joe had to scream his answers.

52

Lilah woke with a start and immediately grabbed for her gun, drew it, raised it, and pointed it, all in a fraction of a second.

“No,” said the man who sat across from her.

Beside him a monster of a dog growled a deep-chested warning.

“Who are you?”

Before the man could answer, a wave of nausea struck Lilah, and she turned away to throw up.

There was a small pit in the ground already there in case she needed to throw up. Lilah quickly bent over it. The retching and spasming hurt. A lot.

But strangely, not as much as she’d expected it to.

She clutched the pistol, still pointing it in the general direction of the stranger. When her stomach had nothing left, she sagged back and gasped.

“There’s a canteen with clean water and a cloth to wipe your face,” said the man.

She studied him warily. He was a big man, lean but muscular, with blond hair shot through with gray and a face that was cut by laugh lines and scars. Deep blue eyes and very white teeth. He wore jeans and a camouflage T-shirt. There was an automatic pistol holstered on his right hip and a sheathed katana placed within easy reach on the ground.

“You’re not Tom Imura.”

“Ah,” he said. “That’s what you meant.”

“What?”

“Before you passed out, you called me Tom.”

Lilah said nothing. Instead she appraised the dog. She had seen mastiffs before — they were popular among the bounty hunters. The dogs were fierce, powerful, and able to take down anyone — man, zom, or apparently, a full grown wild boar. This dog was one of the biggest she’d ever seen. Easily two hundred fifty pounds. Probably more. His body was wrapped in a coat of light chain mail, and long bands of segmented metal ran from shoulders to flanks. Metal spikes stood up along the bands. A horned war helmet sat unbuckled by the dog’s feet.

The dog had dark eyes that were filled with intelligence and controlled hostility.

“Who are you?” Lilah demanded again as she shifted her aim from heart to head.

“Before you pull that trigger, let me ask you something,” said the stranger casually. “Does that gun feel right to you? I mean, does it feel like it’s fully loaded? ’Cause I’m thinking it doesn’t.” He held up the slender magazine. “Bullets are kind of heavy, don’t you think?”

Lilah glared at him and then turned the pistol over. The slot at the base of the grip was empty.

“I may be getting old,” mused the man, “but I’m not senile. Not yet, at least.”

She cursed.

“Jeez, they teach you those words in school? What is the world coming to?”

He balanced the magazine atop a small rock that lay between them. Lilah knew that even without her injuries she could never get it, slap it into place, rack the slide, and fire before the man and the dog were on her.

She lowered the gun.

The man smiled and picked up a metal spoon to stir a small pot of soup that hung over a tiny fire. The soup smelled wonderful.

“Who are you?” she asked again.

“Well, I’m not Tom Imura, that’s for sure, I think we can both agree on that. Maybe you don’t know the man, but he’s Japanese and I’m a blond-haired, blue-eyed all-American boy from Baltimore.”

“When I first saw you… you were in shadows,” she said. “And you have the same sword.”

The man nodded at the sword slung on the ground. “Similar sword,” he corrected. “Tom carries a Paul Chen kami katana, or he did last time I saw him. And he slings his over his shoulder.”

Lilah said nothing.

“My name’s Joe,” he said, then jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the dog. “That’s Grimm. He’s the brains of this outfit, and he’s made it pretty clear that I exist to fetch and carry for him.”

Grimm made a wet, glopping sound with his mouth. Perhaps it was an agreement.

“We’re in a safe place,” Joe continued. “No bad guys, no walkers.”

Lilah looked around. They were in a natural shelter formed by two massive red boulders. A quad motorcycle was parked in the shade. Joe noticed her looking at it.

“Before you ask,” he said, “no — I’m not a reaper.”

“Then who are you?” she said once more. “And why did you help me back there?”

“Is that a serious question?”

“Of course.”

“Well, let’s see. Girl. Hurt girl, actually. Bunch of freaking zombie pigs that want to eat hurt girl. Hmmm, why’d I step in? Truth is, I slept badly last night, woke with a kink in my shoulder, and as everyone knows, there’s no better way to loosen up old joints than to go chop-socky on a couple of zombie pigs. Well-known fact.”

She glowered at him. “That’s a stupid answer.”

“No,” he corrected, “it’s a silly answer. The question was pretty silly too, don’t you think?” Before Lilah could organize a comeback, Joe dipped a tin cup into the steaming pot. “Have some soup.”

She tried to think of a really good reason to refuse his offer. She wanted to smash it out of his hand and use the confusion to run, but she was positive that her injuries would slow her down. The dog would catch her and tear her apart.

Joe smiled at her as if reading her thoughts.

So Lilah took the cup. While Joe watched, she sniffed it suspiciously and finally took an experimental sip. She waited to see if there was any ill effect.

“It’s chicken soup,” explained Joe. “For some reason there’s a lot of wild chickens out here. Wacky postapocalyptic landscape, right? Threw a few herbs in. Might be a little spicy.”

Joe handed her a piece of clean cloth to use as a napkin.

Lilah noticed that he made no attempt to touch her. She knew that she was more than a little naive when it came to people, but at the same time she knew a lot about men. Or rather, about some kinds of men. She and Annie had been treated roughly at Gameland. Even though none of the bounty hunters had ever sexually abused them, Lilah had heard their rough jokes, and she believed that if they had stayed at that horrible place the jokes might have changed into something far worse.

During their Warrior Smart training, Tom had been very frank with them about the realities of the world. Death was not the only harm that could come to a person out in the Ruin. Especially a girl. Tom warned about strangers. The truth was often ugly, he said, and predators preyed on the unaware and uninformed.

Even so, this man seemed different. He appeared to be considerate and was making an exaggerated show of propriety. Why? To lull her off guard, or to allay her fears?

She brooded on that as she drank the soup. It was very spicy, but it was delicious.

If this man had wanted to assault her, he could have done it while she was unconscious. If he had, then dog or no, she would have found a way to make him pay. But she knew her own body. The only pain was from her wounds. She could feel the familiar tightness of stitches along her hip and thigh, but she still wore her clothes. When she probed the area, she saw that he’d cut slits in the side of her pants in order to dress the wounds. He had not removed her pants.

She eyed him over the rim of the cup.

Joe was a strange man; and once again Lilah had the sense that she was looking at Tom, even though this man was bigger, older, and of an entirely different ethnicity. There was a sameness, a kinship between him and Tom that she could not yet identify. She had seen similar qualities in Sally Two-Knives, Solomon Jones, and a few of the other bounty hunters who had fought alongside Tom at Gameland. She wasn’t sure if it was a sign of moral goodness or merely a lack of obvious corruption. It was too soon to tell.

Joe watched her as she studied him, and he allowed it. He even gave what appeared to be an encouraging nod. Strange, strange man.

The dog, Grimm, suddenly got up and walked over to sniff her. Before he actually did so, he cut a look at Joe. The man gave a small gesture with one finger. A signal of some kind. The dog whuffed and bent close to sniff Lilah.

“Is he safe?” she asked.

“Safe as I want him to be,” said Joe. “Pet him if you want.”

As he said that, Joe made a small clicking sound with his tongue. Another signal.

Lilah tentatively reached out and touched the dog’s head. His fur was dark and coarse, but very soft. She ran her fingers along the top of his head, tracing the skull, and then gently rubbed one of his ears between thumb and forefinger.

Grimm turned his head and licked her fingers.

“You made a friend,” said Joe. “Grimm’s not easy to charm.”

“He’s a war dog,” she said, intending that to explain why the dog would understand her. Joe nodded and sipped his soup. Grimm flopped down next to Lilah, and she continued to stroke his head. The dog’s eyes rolled up as if he was in heaven.

“Who are you?” Lilah asked again. “I mean… what are you?”

“I’m a ranger,” he said after a short pause. “It’s a group of scouts. Most of us are former soldiers or SpecOps and—”

“SpecOps?”

“Special Operators,” he explained. “Soldiers who did special missions.”

“Oh,” she said, “like Delta Force and the SEALs. I read about them in books. Novels, mostly.”

“Like that. Our outfit’s been around for a few years now, working the southern states mostly, but a couple of us started going north and west to see how things had fallen out. I even spent a little time up your way.”

“My way? How do you know—?”

“You mentioned Tom Imura.”

“You knew him?”

There was the slightest pause before the man said, “Once upon a time.”

They sipped their soup and studied each other.

“Why are you here?” she said, indicating the forest.

He shrugged. “I poke my nose in here and there. Guess you could call me a professional troublemaker.”

As Lilah set her cup down, the injury throbbed and she hissed between clenched teeth. “How badly am I hurt?”

“Nothing that won’t heal if you take care of yourself,” he said. “You have a world-class collection of bruises and scrapes, and your left knee is puffy, so we might be looking at a sprain. You got thirty stitches down your side. Looks like you got clipped by the boar’s tusk. Wound’s clean, though, no sign of infection.”

Lilah chewed on a word for a few moments before she said it. “Thanks.”

“My pleasure. And I saw the way you handled yourself out there. You are one tough kid.”

“I’m not a kid,” she said.

“Fair enough. No offense meant.”

She let it go and changed subjects. “That boar was a zom.”

“Yup,” agreed Joe.

“How?”

“Darned if I know,” he admitted. “Only seen a few of those critters around these last few months, and I don’t mind saying that it scares the bejesus out of me.”

“You’ve seen this before?”

“Yup. First one I saw was around Jericho Junction over in Utah. Then last week I saw a small pack of them chasing a bunch of other hogs. There’s been a population explosion of wild boars down south, all uninfected, at least as far as I know; but these were definitely walkers. Haven’t had a really good night’s sleep since. The thought that this plague has crossed the species barrier is… ” He shook his head, unable or unwilling to quantify the potential danger.

Lilah nodded. “It doesn’t make sense. Zoms are zoms. They’re people. The plague was never in the animals.”

“It is now.” He rubbed his eyes. “The plague’s been changing. Diseases do that. They’ve always done that. Before First Night there were new viruses every year, some of which were new strains of diseases we thought we’d beaten. It was simply good luck that most of the diseases of animals didn’t jump to humans, and that most human diseases didn’t jump to animals. That’s all past tense, though. The zombie plague, whatever it was, wiped out humanity, and now it’s moving into animals.”

“Other animals?”

He shrugged. “Let’s hope not. So far it’s only a small percentage of the boar population, and pig biology is pretty close to humans. That might account for it. If it gets into flies or insects, or birds, then we’re really screwed. We can’t build a fence to keep them out. Even so, those pigs… man, they give me the creeps.”

Lilah could tell that he was trying to keep his tone light, but the horror was in his eyes. “That’s not the only thing that’s changed,” she said. “Some of the zoms are faster.”

“Yeah, that’s old news. I’ve seen some real Olympic sprinters in the last year. Mostly in the Pacific Northwest. Not so much here, though.”

“We saw some today.”

He narrowed his blue eyes. “You’re sure?”

“I killed two of them today. One of them picked up a stick and tried to hit me with it.”

That news seemed to jolt Joe, and he stared at her for a moment. Several times his mouth began to form questions, but he left them unsaid. They ate their soup in silence, each of them contemplating the implications of faster and perhaps smarter zoms.

Lilah held out her cup for more soup. “You haven’t asked me my name.”

“Don’t need to,” he said as he ladled more into her cup. He was smiling, but the smile held secrets. “You’re the Lost Girl, aren’t you?”

53

The cockpit was a small compartment with two big chairs facing the smashed-out front windows and one chair set to one side, facing a wall of controls the like of which they had only ever seen in books. Computers and scanners. Things that belonged to a world that might as well have been ancient Rome or the Dark Ages for all that these devices related to Benny and Nix’s experience.

Light streamed in through the gaping windows.

There were three chairs, all empty, which reinforced Benny’s guess that the zoms outside had once been the crew.

“What do you think happened?” asked Nix. “Why’d it crash?”

“I have no idea,” he said. They spoke in hushed voices even though they were alone. The altar outside and the painted warning inside made them both feel like something was about to jump out at them.

There was a discarded jacket on the floor, and Benny picked it up. A small version of the same flag that was on the plane’s tail had been sewn onto one pocket, and below that was embroidered THE AMERICAN NATION.

“I don’t get it,” said Nix. “Shouldn’t it read ‘United States of America’?”

Benny thought about it. “Maybe not. This plane is definitely something from after First Night. Built before, maybe, but flown out here long afterward.”

“So?”

“There is no United States of America anymore. Not like it used to be.” He folded the jacket over the back of the pilot’s chair. “You know, I read in one book that the president and Congress were supposed to have a bunker or some kind of underground place they could go to during a national disaster or war. Maybe that’s what happened. Maybe some part of the government survived and, I don’t know, kind of rebuilt things after First Night. Not the same kind of country, of course, but some kind of country.”

“The American Nation,” she said, nodding. “Maybe.”

54

Lilah tensed.

Joe’s comment still hung in the air.

You’re the Lost Girl.

“How do you…?” Her words trailed off, and she looked wildly around, then bared her teeth. Her fingers tensed around the cup of soup as she prepared to hurl it in his face. “This is all about collecting a bounty, isn’t it? Try it and I’ll paint these rocks with your blood—”

Grimm suddenly sat up and in the process transformed from a friendly dog being petted to the war hound that he truly was.

“Whoa,” said Joe, “slow down.”

Lilah growled low in her throat. So did Grimm.

But Joe chuckled and shook his head. “I’m a lot of things, kid, but I’m not a bounty hunter. Never felt the calling. That’s more Tom Imura’s gig than mine.”

He clicked his tongue. “Grimm, down and easy.”

The dog’s attitude instantly changed, this time reverting back to lazy dog. He sat and pretended to look as innocent as a puppy.

“I guessed who you are because I’ve lived out in the Ruin since everything went to hell, kid, and I spent a fair amount of time in central California. Everyone round those parts knows the story of the Lost Girl. Tom Imura spent some time looking for you. Guess he found you.”

“How did you know Tom?” Lilah asked suspiciously.

“We’ve known each other off and on for eight, ten years. We had some friends in common, once upon a time. And back before First Night I even knew his uncle, Sam. We worked together for a bit. Tom takes after him. Same kind of cool smarts, same kind of integrity. After the zoms rose, I was back and forth between the Nine Towns for a while. This was early on, when they were just getting settled, but I got bored and moved on. Haven’t been back there in years now.”

“Was Tom a friend of yours?”

Then Joe narrowed his eyes. “You keep putting Tom in the past tense. Why? Has something happened to him?”

Lilah said nothing, but she could feel her eyes filling with tears.

“What happened to Tom?” asked Joe. Then understanding and pain flickered in his eyes. “Ah… jeez. How’d it happen? Walkers finally get him?”

“No,” she said. “He was murdered.”

Lilah told him about Tom’s fight with the Matthias clan. About the destruction of Gameland, and about the murder of Tom Imura by the madman Preacher Jack. When she was done, Joe got up and walked over to a small table and leaned on it, his shoulders slumping. Grimm caught the sudden shift in mood and whined a little.

“You know,” said Joe thickly, “after all the death I’ve seen — before and after First Night — after all the times I’ve pulled a trigger, after all the comrades I’ve buried, and all the people I’ve seen go down in blood and pain, you’d think that another death wouldn’t mean a thing to me. You’d think that I’d have too many calluses.” He shook his head. “But… Tom Imura. Damn.”

When he turned back to her, Joe looked ten years older. His face was drawn, his eyes dark with loss.

“Long time ago,” he said, “Tom talked about uniting the Nine Towns. He wanted to create a group like my rangers. He wanted to bring in some people he trusted, people who didn’t run with Charlie’s bunch. Guys like Solomon Jones, Hector Mexico, and Sally Two-Knives. That ever happen?”

“No,” said Lilah. “Those people were there at Gameland, they helped Tom, but the people in the towns never wanted an army like that. It made Tom angry, because it left the Nine Towns so vulnerable.”

“Tom had the right idea. He usually did. People should have listened to him.”

“There are a lot of stupid people,” said Lilah harshly.

Joe snapped his fingers. “Hey — Tom had a little brother. Benny. What happened to him?”

Lilah told him the rest of the story. When she got to the part about the ravine and the rescue of the little girl, Joe stiffened.

“Wait! You mean that Tom’s kid brother is out there right now? In these woods?”

“Yes,” she said. “Benny, Nix, Chong… but they’re safe. We have a camp near—”

“Well, isn’t that just swell?” growled Joe. “Why didn’t you tell me that before?”

She looked at him. “Why would you think I’d trust you so fast?”

“Because I saved your life and sewed up your wounds?”

Lilah gave him a stony look. “You could have been pretending to help me for some reasons of your own. If you know who I am, and if you knew Tom, then you probably know that people have taken advantage of me before. Why should I trust you or anyone?”

Joe nodded. “Good point.”

He looked over his shoulder, as if he could see the whole forest. Then he doused the fire with the remains of his soup and stood up. Grimm instantly got to his feet as well.

“Listen to me,” he said. “You have a choice — you can stay here or come with me, but I’ve got to go find Tom’s kid brother and your other friends, and I mean right now.”

“Why?”

Joe pointed with his empty soup cup. “Out there? Did you happen to see a bunch of Froot Loops running around? Bald heads, tattoos, angel wings on their chests?”

“The reapers. But who are—?”

“They are the bad guys, sweetie. They call themselves a religious movement, but that’s crap. They don’t want to save anyone. They want to kill everyone. The Night Church, the Church of Thanatos, is run by a total wack job called Saint John and a conniving, malicious witch named Mother Rose. They came out of nowhere about ten years ago, and since then they’ve converted thousands of people to their cause.”

“What cause?”

Joe handed Lilah the magazine to her pistol, then knelt to buckle the horned helmet onto Grimm’s massive head.

“They have a pretty simple agenda,” he said. “The total extinction of the human race.”

55

Her name was Sister Amy. Fifteen years ago, before the gray plague, she had been a bodyguard in the entertainment industry. Before that she had been a soldier. During the plague Amy had lost everyone she loved. Two sisters, a brother, parents, and grandparents. Friends. Everyone who made her life worth living. The gray plague had taken everything from her except her awareness of her own loss, her own pain.

For years afterward she was a ghost. She drifted from town to town, looking for something to believe in, looking for proof that the whole world wasn’t going to die. She found famine and disease. She found whole settlements that had starved to death, and settlements that had survived for years before finally falling to the gray wanderers.

She found nothing to believe in. Nothing she could save, and to someone like her, protecting and saving people was all that mattered. But she hadn’t been able to save her family, and in the wastelands of what had once been America she found nothing else worth saving. Nothing that would last if saved.

And then she met Saint John, and all that changed.

Now she was one of the most trusted reapers of the Night Church. A true believer who worshipped Saint John as much as she worshipped Thanatos and the darkness. The saint had promised her — actually sworn to her — that when her time came, he would take his own sacred knives and open a red mouth in her flesh. With his own sanctified hands he would guide her into the darkness.

That was something she could believe in. A guaranteed end to pain, and a pathway to the sea of darkness in which the spirits of her family swam.

It was beautiful.

She would do anything for Saint John.

Sister Amy lay on the ground, her body totally hidden by a thick line of shrubs, her scent masked by the chemicals into which her red ribbons had been dipped. Those chemicals fooled more than the gray people. Even dogs avoided the smell. It did not trigger their aggression. It just made her scent… uninteresting, and that was the genius of it.

She lay in the hot darkness, her body utterly still, her breathing controlled, her mind quiet and receptive.

Listening.

To the ranger and the Lost Girl.

To strange tales of how, in the terrible days after First Night, the lost and lonely survivors found one another and built fences against the dead. How they built nine towns in central California. And how, behind the fences, they survived.

Nine towns, filled with heretics whose every heartbeat was an affront to God.

Nine towns that did not even know that the army of the Night Church existed.

Yet.

56

“The American Nation,” Nix said again. “I hope it’s real. I hope it’s not just a bunch of little towns like ours.”

“It has to be more than that,” said Benny. “They have planes. This one and the jet. Maybe more. They even made a flag. It sounds… I don’t know… big. Bigger than anything we’ve ever seen.”

Nix turned away from him and stared out through the broken windows into the hot desert outside. Her back was as stiff as a board, and she gripped the back of the pilot’s chair so ferociously that her fingers dug into the cracked leather.

“Hey,” said Benny, “what’s wrong? We did it, we found proof that there’s something out there. I know things are crazy right at the moment, with those freaks out there and all, but I thought you’d be—”

She cut a sharp look at him. “Be what? Be happy? Is that what you want, Benny? For me to be happy? God, you really don’t know who I am, do you? You have no idea why I want to find that jet, or why finding all this is so… so… ” She gave the pilot’s chair a vicious kick and didn’t finish her sentence. Instead she glared out the window, muttering “God” under her breath.

“Maybe I do understand,” Benny said, and as he said it he was aware that he was stepping way out on a limb. But he was tired of being careful all the time.

Nix didn’t look at him. “What do you understand?”

“You even said it once,” Benny said. “You said that Mountainside wasn’t your home anymore. With your mom gone, and now Tom… you don’t feel like you belong there anymore.”

She still didn’t look at him.

Benny said, “Hey, I know that you think I’m just some dumb boy who doesn’t get you. Chong thinks I’m halfway to being a moron, and Lilah… well, I doubt Lilah thinks about me at all. But I’m not stupid and I’m not blind. Since Tom died I’ve had a lot of time to think things over. I’ve seen you drift away more and more ever since we left and—”

“This isn’t about us, Benny.”

“I’m not talking about us. I’m not talking about our relationship falling apart. When I say that I see you drifting away, I mean from everything. You don’t try to relate to anyone. Well… I guess Eve was the only one, and that was only for a few minutes. You’ve gone inside your own head, Nix, and I’m pretty sure you don’t like what’s in there.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she snapped.

“Yeah, I do. Just like I know that every time I want to talk about something, you snap at me. It’s a defense mechanism. You keep me and everyone else at arm’s length that way. And that way no one can get in.” He took a step toward her. “You really think I don’t understand? You lost your whole family when your mom died. You and I started when you were emotionally screwed up, I know that. I know that Tom and your mom were in love. They were probably going to get married, but that was taken away from you too. You think you’re all alone, so you need — really need — to find another place. A place that isn’t Mountainside and isn’t the Rot and Ruin. I get that, I really do. That’s why you’ve been so obsessed about the jet. It’s like a… like a lifeline, I guess.”

“It’s not that simple,” she said bitterly.

“I know that, too,” Benny said.

Nix turned away again and continued to stare out at the desert forest.

Benny summoned all the courage he could find. He braced himself to say what he knew he had to say next.

“Nix,” he began softly, “it’s okay if you don’t love me anymore. It’s okay if you don’t want to be my girlfriend anymore. It’s okay if you just want to be you.”

She stiffened.

“I love you,” he said. “I really do, and I guess what I’m trying to say is that whatever you need to do to figure out who you are and what you want… I’ve got your back, but I’ll never get in your way.”

His mouth hurt to say those words, and inside his chest it felt as if a huge, icy fist was squeezing his heart into pulp. But Benny stood his ground and forced his eyes to stay dry. Tears now would be of no help to anyone.

Nix did not turn, she did not say a word. She stared out at the day, and Benny watched her and tried to remember how to breathe.

Then Nix gasped and said, “Oh my God!” She stumbled backward in horror, pointing out into the desert.

“What—?” asked Benny.

But as he rushed to her side, he saw what it was. Outside, near where the three zombies hung on their T-bars, were three people. Reapers.

Two men and a tall woman with masses of dark brown hair.

“Nix!” cried Benny in a strangled whisper, “that’s her. That’s the woman I saw today in the field right before the zoms chased me.”

57

“You’re sure?” asked Nix. “She’s the one from the field?”

“Positive.”

They studied her. She was tall and beautiful, and she stood with a grace that spoke of great confidence. Benny recalled the word he had thought of when he first saw her: regal. Queenly. But queen of what?

There were other reapers around her. Men and women, all of them dressed in black with angel wings and red tassels. They all carried weapons. Swords, axes, knives.

“I don’t see any guns,” whispered Benny.

“Not much of a comfort,” replied Nix sourly.

Then they gaped at a man who came out of the woods to take up a very protective post just behind the queenly woman. He was a giant, and he carried a massive long-handled sledgehammer.

“What is he?” asked Nix. “A troll?”

“Close enough.”

The air was split by the roar of quads as more reapers appeared from the forest until there were at least two dozen of them gathered around the woman. Except for her, all of them had shaved and tattooed heads like Saint John. And Riot, thought Benny.

None of them stood very close to her, though every eye was fixed on her. None of them paid much attention to the plane, and it was clear that they had all seen it before, or did not care about it. The woman ignored it completely.

She beckoned over a grim-faced young man, and for several moments they stood apart, their heads bowed together in an intense discussion while the giant guarded them.

“I can’t hear anything,” complained Benny. “Can you?”

Nix’s face was screwed up with concentration. “No.”

That changed a moment later. The young man bowed deeply to the woman, turned, and melted into the forest. The woman stepped onto a small, flat rock, and the other reapers clustered around her. She raised her arms out to the sides and stood for a moment in silence, the wind making the red streamers snap and pop.

Then, in a loud, clear voice she addressed the reapers. “You are the blessed of Thanatos!”

“All praise to the darkness,” they cried.

“In you he is well pleased. As I am pleased.”

“All praise to Mother Rose!”

Nix turned to Benny and mouthed the name. “Mother Rose.”

It was the name Saint John had mentioned.

“My children,” said Mother Rose, “you have all done exceedingly well. Your faith and devotion lifts my heart.”

They smiled, and a few even dabbed at wet eyes.

“Look at where we stand, my beloved ones.” She gestured to the plane, and for a moment Benny’s heart froze, thinking that she was pointing at them. But he and Nix were in shadows, invisible from outside. Even so his heart hammered. “The Shrine of the Fallen. A symbol of the corrupt world that was lies here, broken and empty. This once-mighty war machine and every heretic aboard have been given the gift of darkness. All the war machines of the old, corrupt world are silenced now. The world itself is falling silent. A silence decreed by our god. A silence that is proof of the eternal darkness that waits for us all.”

“Praise be to the darkness!”

“Saint John and his prophet, Brother Peter, have told you many times that we are coming to the end of our long road, that the darkness is a heartbeat away for us all.”

The crowd grew silent, attentive.

“But I tell you that there is much still to do.”

Even in the plane Benny could hear the crowd sigh. It was a sad sound. But Mother Rose held up a hand.

“Do not be afraid, my children. Our god has not abandoned you, and he has not foresworn his holy promise to lift you up and grant you peace. No, I say now, in your hearing, that Lord Thanatos will deliver one hundredfold on his promises. You will have peace and so much more.”

She waited as the crowd milled, the reapers murmuring to one another in confusion, but now Benny could hear a note of hope in their sounds.

“Where once the family of the reapers was weak, now we are strong,” said Mother Rose. “Where once we were scattered like sheep, now we are part of a great family. A community of saints for whom the heavens themselves are ours to sow.”

There were definite frowns on many of the faces, but Mother Rose’s beatific smile never wavered.

“What’s she doing?” asked Nix.

Benny shook his head.

“You all know that the last of Carter’s heretics are in these woods,” said Mother Rose. “What most of you do not know is that she who was my daughter intends to lead them to Sanctuary.”

The collected reapers gasped in horror.

“Saint John and Brother Peter are hunting them now,” continued Mother Rose. “It is their desire that every one of the heretics be sent into the darkness.”

A few of the reapers gave rousing shouts of approval, but Mother Rose looked at them with unblinking eyes until they fell silent. The reapers shuffled like naughty schoolboys.

“Saint John, beloved of Thanatos—”

“Praise be to his darkness.”

“—wants to find and destroy Sanctuary. He wants to open red mouths in the flesh of everyone there. He wants to end the heartbeat of all heresy.”

No one cheered, though it seemed clear to Benny that many of them agreed with what Saint John wanted to do. Confusion and doubt was written on every face except that of Mother Rose and the giant with the hammer.

“But,” said Mother Rose, her voice becoming quieter, almost a whisper, “this is not what our god wants.”

No one even blinked. They stared, stock-still.

“I have had a vision, my beloved children. In a sacred trance, Lord Thanatos himself spoke to me.”

“Oh brother,” growled Nix. “Do you believe this crap?”

“They seem to,” said Benny.

It was true; many of the reapers touched their hands to the angel designs on their chests.

“The lord of the darkness has tested us so many times and in so many ways. Those of you who have been with the Night Church since Wichita remember how many tests have been put before us.”

Several heads nodded.

“There have been failures and setbacks and defeats… and yet each time, no matter how devastating each new calamity appeared, we found the holy path through the fire and the smoke. We passed each test, no matter how difficult. We did this. Each of us, serving the will of our god even when God has made the path uncertain and the way forward choked with thorns and fog.”

More heads nodded now.

“And what has this done? All along the way we have seen many of our fellows fall, and while their spirits have gone on into the darkness we have stayed behind, weeping and tearing at our garments, crying out, Why? Why them and not us? Why has the lord of the night punished us so many times when others whose will and whose faith were not as strong as ours were allowed to go into the sacred darkness?”

“Tell us why, Mother!” cried out one of the reapers. It was a thin man with a beaky nose. He fell to his knees and clapped his hands together. “Tell us, please!”

Another reaper dropped to her knees. “What sins have we committed that bar our way to paradise?”

Nix and Benny looked at each other.

“Is it me, or did that look planned?” asked Nix.

“Yeah,” agreed Benny, “I think she seeded the crowd like Mr. Hopewell does when he’s running the Sunday auction.”

Mother Rose stepped forward and touched the bowed head of the kneeling woman.

“Sins, my daughter?” she said. “Did I say that you have sinned?”

She paused a beat and looked at the others.

“Did I say that any of you have sinned?” She drew the kneeling woman to her feet and kissed her on both cheeks. “No, my beloved, we have all passed through that fire together, and in its heat we have been purified.”

The last word hung in the air like the clear note of a church bell. Even Benny felt a chill.

“Each of us here in this sacred place has passed through the fire many times. Each of us has stayed true even when we thought that our god had withdrawn his grace from us. Each of us has proven our faith beyond all doubt. And thus, the lord of the darkness has revealed to me that this — all of this, our struggles, our doubts, our pain, our longing, our faith — has made us the chosen of Thanatos.”

There was another beat.

“Henceforth we will rise to be worthy of that choice. We will sing out in joy for the glory of God’s grace. We will no longer fear life and flee like sheep into the darkness of the grave.” Mother Rose raised her arms in triumph. “We have been reapers at work in the fields of the Lord. This task we have done well and faithfully. The fields are clear of vermin and pests. They are clean, and they welcome us to put down our tools of reaping and set about our new work.”

The woman who had been kissed cried out, “What is our purpose, Mother Rose, beloved of Thanatos?”

Mother Rose turned so that her upraised hands indicated everything. Not just this field, Benny knew… but everything.

“The chosen will go out into the world and reclaim it.”

Although Benny didn’t really understand the nature of this church, he thought he had the gist of it. It felt like a weird slant on something Charlie Pink-eye used to say: Kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out.

Except that now this woman seemed to be changing the rules.

“Is she talking about double-crossing Saint John?” asked Nix, once more proving that she was reading his thoughts.

“I think so.”

“Better her than me,” said Nix. “That guy freaked me out.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not having fuzzy puppy love about Mother Nut Job down there.”

“How many sides are there in this fight? I thought it was Eve’s family against these reapers.”

Benny nodded. “Sorry to make a bad joke, but from what we just heard, I think there’s trouble in paradise.”

“Ugh.” Nix looked around the cockpit. “Whose side do you think they were on?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea. The good guys’ side, I hope.”

“Okay, but who are the good guys? Eve’s dad tried to shoot us.”

“Wait, something’s happening,” Benny said.

Down in the clearing, the reapers were arguing among themselves. However, one by one they broke from the group and knelt before Mother Rose.

“Praise be to the mother of us all,” yelled one man. “Praise be to the mother of the chosen!”

Suddenly they were all kneeling and crying out, repeating those words like a chant as Mother Rose stood above them, arms up and out, drinking in their cries. The reapers crawled forward to kiss the bloodred streamers tied to Mother Rose’s clothes. Benny saw, however, that one of the reapers hesitated longer than the others before joining the group. He was a barrel-chested Latino with twin knives thrust through his belt. And Benny saw Mother Rose flick a covert glance to the giant and then to that reaper.

“He’s a dead man,” said Nix before Benny could say it. “He’s not buying any of this, and he’s freaking dead.”

“Sucks to be him,” agreed Benny.

As they watched, the gathering broke up. Mother Rose said a few words to each of them, mostly telling them to spread the word to the other reapers. At no point did she tell them to keep Saint John out of the loop, but it was the impression Benny got.

The man who had been the first to drop to his knees lingered for a moment, as did a few others, and Benny noted that these reapers were the ones who had first “seen the light.” It confirmed his suspicions that they were plants in the gathering, just like the friends of Mr. Hopewell who yelled out the first bids and kept driving up the sale price. These people clustered around Mother Rose and received additional instructions that Benny and Nix could not hear. When Mother Rose nodded in the direction the Latino man had taken, one of the reapers smiled, nodded, and hurried silently into the woods to follow.

Afterward, Mother Rose and the giant stood in silence until the sounds of the quads and the shouts of the “chosen” faded into silence.

The big man shook his head and laughed with a rumble from deep in his chest.

“Well, Rosie,” he said, “you really did it now. There’s no coming back from this.”

“I don’t intend to come back, Alexi,” she said with cold amusement. “It’s all about moving forward. Besides, if we waited any longer, Saint John might actually destroy Sanctuary. And we can’t have that, can we?”

“No, ma’am. But… Saint John’s going to be pissed. He has his heart set on seeing that place burn.”

“He can take it up with God. It’s his own fault. He made me the head of this crazy church. Besides,” she said with a smile, “I had a holy vision.”

They laughed and began to walk away.

Then the woman did something that absolutely mystified Nix and Benny while at the same time freezing the blood in their veins. Mother Rose turned, raised her fingers to her lips, and blew a kiss into the air.

Directly toward the plane.

Then she and the giant smiled at each other. They turned away and walked without haste into the forest.

Half a minute later another reaper appeared. He stepped out of a pocket of dense shadows where no one had apparently noticed him. He was a tough, unsmiling young man with intense dark eyes. He walked to the spot where Mother Rose and Brother Alexi had stood. Even from all the way up in the plane, Benny could see the muscles bunch at the corners of his jaw and the rigid lines of muscle definition that stood out on his arms as he clenched his fists. Benny wasn’t sure if he had ever seen anyone that totally and utterly furious.

The man spat on the ground where Mother Rose had stood, then turned and melted like the specter of murder into the forest.

Benny and Nix stared for a long time at the empty clearing.

“What the hell was that all about?” breathed Nix.

Benny shook his head. “I don’t have the slightest idea.”

58

Before they set out to find the others, Joe went over the functions of the quad with Lilah. She didn’t ask why. It was practical information shared from one fighter to another. It was what Tom would have done.

“This thing will go all day long without much fuel,” he explained. “Runs on ethanol, and the reapers had a tanker of the stuff.”

“Had?”

“I, um, borrowed it from them,” he explained. “Got it hid in an arroyo a few miles from here. When we find your friends, we’ll see about borrowing a few more quads. Beats the heck out of walking everywhere.”

“How come these machines work? I thought the EMPs…?”

“They blew out a lot of stuff, but not everything. I’ve been to places where people have cars — well, had cars. Gasoline wasn’t made to last more than a year or two, and by now it’s all bad. Only things still running are vehicles that used to run on ethanol. There are plenty of cornfields left. Saw a couple of junkers powered by hand-crank generators, solar panels, and even a few with little mini wind turbines. They only get up to about ten miles an hour, but that still beats walking.”

Lilah drove the machine around the big boulders a few times while Joe watched, nodding his approval. Grimm gave a single deep bark to show that he, too, was impressed.

Joe waved her to a stop and switched off the machine. “Okay, you’re good to go, and your bandages aren’t leaking, so that’s good too. I won’t ask if you feel fit enough to pull a trigger. Already know that answer.”

She nodded. “I don’t want to have to fight these people,” she said. “I want to find my friends and continue on our way.”

“Yeah, about that,” Joe said. “You never really told me why four teenagers are way the heck out in the Ruin. It’s not the place for a class trip.”

Lilah considered whether to tell him. She couldn’t see how the information could be used to hurt her or the others. So she told Joe about the jet. And about the plane she’d seen on the plateau.

“Hold on, hold on,” said Joe, suddenly excited. “You saw the transport?”

“What?”

“Big C-130J Super Hercules. Prop job, not a jet. You saw that plane somewhere out here?”

“I saw the jet and—”

Joe cut her off and explained the difference between a jumbo jet and a propeller-driven military transport plane. When he described the latter, she began nodding.

“Yes, that is what I found. It was on the plateau right by the cliff I fell off of. Where we fought the pigs.”

“Did you see any people? Pilots, crew? They’d be in uniforms…. ”

“There were three zoms there, hung up on posts.” She described the uniforms.

“Flight crew. Damn it. I knew those guys.” Joe made a pained face. “We’ve been looking for that plane for over a year. Nobody thought it was this close, though. With all the reapers around here, it’s probably been stripped clean. And that’s a real shame. Dr. Monica McReady was aboard that plane. Losing her was a damn hard setback.”

“Setback for whom?”

Joe said, “The human race. She was one of the best epidemiologists we had. One of only a handful who made it through First Night and the plague years. She was worth more than you and me and any five thousand people you can name, and that’s no joke.” He paused. “I guess we were all hoping she was alive somewhere. We kept expecting her to come banging on the door one of these days. I’ve got rangers out everywhere looking for her. The work she was doing… I can’t begin to tell you how important it is.”

“Try,” she said frankly.

Joe laughed. “Doc McReady set up the first lab during the outbreak and later moved it to North Carolina, which is where people are trying to build a new America. Lots of people there now, and they even have the lights back on. Later, after we got some reports of possible mutations to the plague in Oregon, Washington, and southern Canada, McReady took a field team up to Joint Base Lewis-McChord, which is a few miles southwest of Tacoma. They had to clean up the base first, since everyone was zommed out. McReady established a research camp up there that she called Hope One. Sixty people — scientists, support staff, and a small platoon to guard them. And it was up there that McReady figured out what caused the plague.”

“People think it was radiation from a—”

“Oh, please. No one really believes that.”

“A virus, then?”

“Yes… and no. McReady discovered that it’s actually a combination of several diseases and a few nasty little parasites, all of them working together like a microscopic terrorist cabal. Most people call it the Gray Plague, but the official designation is Reaper, and, yes, that’s where the reapers got their name. Bunch of freaks. Anyway, the Reaper Plague is genuine mad science, and everyone’s pretty sure that Mother Nature did not snort this out because she was feeling cranky.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that someone made this thing,” said Joe, “and somehow it got out of the lab. Or maybe it was deliberately released. No one knows that part, and we probably never will. Whoever launched it is probably dead or shuffling around as a walker. Doesn’t matter. What matters is that McReady’s last report indicated that she was on the verge of some major breakthrough. The problem is that we don’t know what that breakthrough was or even could be, because no one down here has a clue. The only hint we have is a cryptic reference in her last report of the plan to field-test a counter-plague.”

“A counter-plague…? You mean a disease that would stop the Reaper Plague?”

“That’s exactly what I mean. Problem is, McReady sent a distress call from Hope One, saying that the walker activity was spiking. They sent the C-130 up to evac her, the staff, and all the research notes. When the plane never showed, I sent a team of my rangers up. They found Hope One deserted. No staff, no research, so we know that the transport plane at least accomplished the evacuation, but no one ever saw that plane. There were a couple of places where the C-130 could have made an emergency landing, so the decision was made to send a heavy transport to do flyovers of the route. We hoped they’d find the plane down on some airfield and McReady’s people waiting for a new ride. The bird they sent to look was a mother of a C-5 Galaxy, and my guess is that’s the jet your friends saw. The timing would be about right. It did a zigzag search, looking for any sign of McReady’s plane, but they never found it. And it turns out the darn thing is right here! Made it almost all the way home. Holy crap.”

Lilah stared at him. “You know about the jet? You know what it is? Where it is?”

“Sure. Been on it half a dozen times.”

Lilah felt suddenly strange, as if she had stepped out of the real world and into a dream. When she’d seen the crashed plane, she thought that the whole purpose of their journey into the Ruin had come to a dead end. She was sure that the knowledge of its destruction would devastate Nix and Benny. Chong, she knew, didn’t really care one way or the other; he was along because he was in love with her.

Now… Nix would be so happy.

Joe interrupted her thoughts. “You said that the flight crew was zommed out and hung on posts? Anything else around them? Incense bowls, bunches of flowers, anything like that?”

“Yes. And signs around their necks saying that they were sinners.”

“Reapers,” growled Joe. Grimm must have recognized the word, because he gave his own low growl, full of menace and promise.

“These reapers… will you please tell me who they are?”

“We don’t have time to go into the whole history of the reapers,” said Joe. “The short version is this. Prior to First Night, Saint John was what the police used to call a serial killer. He was a psychopathic mass murderer, and one of almost legendary status. There were books and movies made about him. No real surprise that he survived the Reaper Plague. About ten years ago, Saint John showed up at a settlement north of Topeka. Set himself up as a kind of preacher, talking about how man did not need to suffer, how there was an end to pain, yada, yada. Long story short, at first his message got no traction because people were still busy surviving the end of everything. They were in full-blown survival mode, and nobody wanted to hear about just giving up and giving in.” He removed the magazine from his gun, checked that it was fully loaded, and slapped it back into place. “But as time went on, things got worse out there.”

He told her about the rampant diseases that swept through a lot of the communities, and the resulting death toll.

“Plus there was radiation in spots from reactor meltdowns, and more radiation from the cities they nuked on First Night. Cancer rates are probably up a thousand percent. For a lot of people in a lot of places it pretty much looked like suffering was all there was and all there was ever going to be.”

“And that’s when they started listening to Saint John?”

“Yup. By then he’d managed to recruit a hundred or so followers. His reapers. They’d go into a town, and at first there were a lot of discussions and sermons about embracing the nonphysical and letting go of the struggle to hold on to a dying world. Crap like that. Saint John presided over mass suicides in one town after another.”

“That’s stupid.”

“It’s people,” said Joe as he began filling the gas tank from a red plastic bottle.

“But… how can the reapers convince people to commit suicide when—?”

“When they’re still sucking air? Yeah, well, this whole enchilada gets crazier and crazier. When they’ve wiped out all the heretics and blasphemers, they intend to kill each other, and the last man standing will hang himself. Delightful, huh?”

“Really stupid,” Lilah insisted.

“Not everyone is suited for survival, especially the way people were in the early twenty-first century. People had gotten really soft, really addicted to machines, electronics, and specialists who would come in and do everything from fixing the plumbing to pulling a tooth. Nobody knew how to do things for themselves. It was kind of pathetic.”

“You sound like you agree with Saint John.”

He set down the plastic container and replaced the quad’s gas cap. “No freaking way, darlin’. Just because there are a lot of sheep doesn’t mean everyone’s a sheep. There are a lot — a whole lot — of cases where people really rose to the challenge. They learned what they didn’t know, they built shelters, they rediscovered hunting and farming, they reclaimed those qualities that put man at the top of the food chain in the first place. And they became the leaders who gathered everyone else around them. Your own town, and the other eight there in central California, are examples of that. People pitching in together to make a better life for everyone.”

“How many towns did Saint John attack?”

“Too many,” said Joe bitterly. “Way too many.”

“Is there anyone left?”

He nodded. “Sure. Saint John never made it to North Carolina, and that’s where the real heartbeat of this country is. It’s the new capital. Granted, it’s a small start compared to what we lost, but it is a start. And there are a lot of scattered towns and settlements. It’s a big country, and Saint John hasn’t had time to kill everyone.” He paused. “If his army keeps growing at the rate it’s been going… then nowhere’s going to be safe.”

“You make him sound as dangerous as the plague.”

Joe nodded again. “Yeah… I guess he is. He uses Mother Rose to recruit people into the reapers so he has a big enough force to destroy any town that won’t simply roll over for him. It’s a useful model for conquest. Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great did the same thing, though their motives were different.”

“I don’t understand it, though,” said Lilah. “Why do so many people join him?”

Joe helped her onto the back of the quad. “Too many people have simply lost hope. As long as the Gray Plague is still happening and the zoms are still out there, it’s going to be hard for most people not to think Saint John has the only answer worth hearing.”

“But you said that Dr. McReady and the others were working on a cure…. ”

“They are, sure.” Joe sighed. “But most people don’t know that. McReady’s breakthrough, whatever it is, is new science. We don’t even know what it is yet, or whether it’ll really change things. And without McReady’s research, we’re still stuck on the same sinking ship.”

Lilah said, “Have you given up hope too?”

Joe adjusted the seat belts carefully around Lilah’s wound. “Not a chance.”

“You’re going to fight back?”

“Honey, I never stopped fighting.” He slid his katana into a slot on the quad. “So here’s the plan. We’re going to find your friends, and then you kids are going to help me search every inch of that plane. If there’s any chance that even some of McReady’s research survived the crash, then I need to secure it and get it into the hands of the rest of the research team.”

“Where are they?”

“Close,” said Joe. “McReady only took a small team with her to Hope One. The rest of the science geeks are split between a new lab in North Carolina and one they set up in a military base out here. They had to reclaim the base from the zoms, but that was no problem, and it was in great shape. It was what they called a ‘hardened’ facility, meaning that the EMPs didn’t knock out the power. Once they reclaimed it, the geek squad were able to repurpose the base from military research and development to a biological research facility.”

“A laboratory?” asked Lilah. “Out here?”

“Yup,” said Joe. “Really well-hidden but closer than you’d think. McReady named it Sanctuary.”

And he told Lilah where it was.

59

As the sound of the ranger’s quad faded, Sister Amy rolled out from under the line of shrubs. Her mind burned with the things she wanted to tell Saint John. Needed to tell him.

Sanctuary.

And… nine towns.

Towns with no organized defenses.

As she ran through the woods she could not keep the smile off her face.

60

Brother Peter knelt in the dirt before Saint John. He rested his weight on his fists, his head was bowed, and he waited for the storm of the saint’s wrath to tear the world apart.

But there was silence.

After almost three excruciating minutes, Brother Peter raised his head and looked at the man who he worshipped more than the Lord Thanatos. His friend, his mentor, and in every way that mattered, his father.

Saint John stood there, hands clasped behind his back, head tilted to one side as he watched monkeys frolic in the trees. No storms of rage burned across the saint’s face. There were no tears.

There was nothing.

“Honored One?” ventured Brother Peter. “Did you hear what I—?”

Saint John spoke, his quiet voice overriding the younger man’s.

“When the world burned down,” he said, “I was alone. For many months before that, I was in a hospital, in a psychiatric ward — did you know that?” He did not wait for an answer. “They thought I was sick… mentally unstable… because I said that the god of darkness spoke to me inside my head. There are people with such sickness, you know; before the Fall and since. Some of them have joined us. Others have joined the way-station monks. After all, God speaks in so many different ways, and in the end he speaks to everyone.”

“Even heretics?”

“Even them,” agreed Saint John. “Although the heretics hear the voice of God and refuse to listen. Others — the lost ones — hear the voice and don’t, or can’t, recognize it for what it is. They are to be pitied. When we usher them into the darkness, it is always with kindness, with a gentler touch of the knife.”

The saint began walking, and Brother Peter rose and fell into step beside him.

“After the Fall, I wandered the streets of my city, watching it burn, watching the darkness grow. The Gray People never touched me. Not once.”

“A miracle, Honored One.”

“Yes. It was proof, you see. It showed others that I was indeed the first saint of this church.” They walked through the forest as casually as if the day had not been filled with screams and murder. Two scholars idly discussing a point of philosophy on a lovely afternoon. “And then I found Mother Rose. She was… merely ‘Rose’ then. A woman who had lost herself even before the world fell down around her. I rescued her from savage men, heretics who saw the coming of the darkness as an invitation to hurt and humiliate those weaker than themselves.”

“I remember,” said Brother Peter faintly.

“I know you do. And you remember the years that followed, as Rose accepted the darkness into her heart and became elevated as the mother of all.”

“Yes.” Brother Peter could not keep the bitterness out of his voice.

“Those were good days. You were so young and yet so bright. So eager to learn the ways of the blade and the purity that is the darkness. Pride is a sin, but I will accept whatever rebuke is due me for the pride I felt in you. Then and now. You have been the rock on which I built the Night Church.” They walked a few paces. “You, Peter. Not her.”

Brother Peter bowed his head in humility.

“Tell me,” said Saint John, “when you look inside your head and your heart… at those times when you are in the depths of prayer and meditation… what does paradise look like?”

“Look like?” asked Peter.

“Yes. If you were to paint a picture of what waits for us — what you want to be on the other side of the doorway, what you truly believe is beyond this world — what is that picture? Describe it to me.”

They walked for half a dozen paces before Peter said, “It is the darkness.”

“And—?”

“The darkness is all. The darkness is enough. The darkness is everything.”

Saint John nodded. “That is what I see. That is what I believe is there.”

“But I—”

“And when you think about this world — when you imagine what this planet will be when the last of the heretics is gone, and when the last of us communes with our own blades so that our darkness joins with eternity — tell me, Brother Peter, what does this world look like?”

They were at the edge of the forest now, and they looked out on the vast desert that stretched away before them and vanished into the shimmering horizon. Brother Peter nodded toward the endless sand. “That is what I see, Honored One.”

“The desert?”

“The peacefulness. Empty of human pain and misery. Empty of struggle. Restored to the perfection of nature.”

“And all that man has made and built?”

“It will turn to dust. This world will heal of the infection that is man. The world will be whole and perfect again.”

They stood there for many minutes as they each considered this.

“Do you know,” asked Saint John at length, “that I always knew this day was coming?”

Brother Peter turned and stared at him.

“Mother Rose,” said the saint. “It was inevitable that she would betray me. It was ordained that it happen. Like in the Christian story of Jesus and Judas. The betrayal was always part of the plan. Judas was a good and righteous man for most of his life, but in a moment of weakness, or perhaps pride, he stepped off the path.”

Brother Peter nodded.

“For ordinary people,” the saint continued, “such a thing can be forgiven. It can be ascribed to human weakness. As with Thomas, who doubted, and Peter, who denied. Those are momentary weaknesses, forgivable sins.”

“But not Judas?”

“Not him for the Christians, and not Mother Rose for us. She is not an ordinary person. Neither are you, and neither am I. Why? We have looked into our minds and have seen the true face of our god.”

“The darkness,” said Brother Peter.

“The darkness,” said Saint John. “I fear that Mother Rose has turned away from the darkness and allowed herself to become seduced by the light. By this world. Not the pure world that will come, but the corrupt and infected world that existed before the Fall. I have long suspected that she enjoyed being in the flesh. She has become seduced by its illusion of power.”

“Yes.”

“It is why she has worked so hard to recruit new reapers.”

“But we need—”

“No. We have more than we will ever need. We have reapers in the thousands, and we have the Gray People in their millions. Mother Rose has never quite grasped that. Or rather, she has purposely ignored it. She wants people to stay alive.”

“Why?” asked Brother Peter, appalled by the very thought of it.

“For the same reason she has recruited so very many reapers.”

“And… why?”

Saint John smiled. “She wants to conquer the world, my son,” he said, “and then she intends to rule it.”

Brother Peter shook his head. “But she knows the darkness. She believes—”

“Don’t you think that Judas believed in the son of his god? Don’t you think that those people who flew planes into towers or strapped on vests of explosives believed in their god? There are misguided people in all faiths, and there always have been.” Saint John sighed. “Mother Rose has been very quietly recruiting from within the reapers. Brother Alexi, Brother Simon… others. The weak ones who think they are strong, but who long to be here rather than to truly be with the darkness. She will use them as her generals. They probably believe in her with their whole hearts. Some of them are quite lost. Others… well, there has always been corruption in any organized religion. Insidious people who exploit the honest faith of the masses. Mother Rose will use all that — faith, belief, greed, whatever tools she can find — and with those she will very likely conquer every settlement, town, and city in this country. She will make a kingdom for herself here on earth.”

He pointed into the desert.

“And I suspect she wants to make Sanctuary her Camelot, the seat of her power.”

Brother Peter felt stricken. “Then… we have failed?”

The saint turned toward him, his face filled with love but also with a passionate light. “No, my son, and do not fall to doubt now. Mother Rose does not know that we know. In her pride, she opens her throat to us.”

FROM NIX’S JOURNAL

61

For a long time Chong floated in an infinite ocean of pain.

For hours, days, weeks… maybe years.

Time was meaningless.

Then he heard a voice.

“You in there, boy?”

“Don’t… call me ‘boy,’” Chong said thickly.

“I need y’all to wake up,” said Riot. “We need to have us a talk.”

Chong slowly opened his eyes. He was lying on his uninjured side and had to look over his shoulder to see Riot, who knelt behind him. She appeared to be studying the exit wound. When Chong looked down at the entry wound, all he saw was a red-black burn.

He expected it to hurt, and it did. The area around the burn was puffy and red. Chong felt hot, as if the heat of the cauterizing blade had infused his entire body. Sweat ran down his torso and pooled under him.

“I don’t feel too great,” he said.

Riot breathed in and out through her nose for a moment. “Yeah, well, that’s the thing,” she said. “We maybe got us a problem.”

“Really? A problem?” He arched an eyebrow. “Beyond arrows, burned flesh, an army of killers, and the end of the world?”

She did not smile.

“Riot—?”

Instead of answering, she picked up the arrowhead she’d unscrewed. She sniffed it, and her frown deepened. Then she picked up the quiver of arrows and studied the blackened tips of each.

“Oh, man…,” she breathed.

“What is it?” asked Chong. “What’s wrong? Is it poison?”

Riot got up and walked around so she faced him. There was a haunted look in her eyes, and her mouth was drawn and tight.

“Is it poison?” Chong repeated.

“No,” she said faintly. “No, I don’t think we’re going to catch that kind of a break.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? It doesn’t look that bad.”

“You ain’t seein’ it from t’other side. Skin around the wound looks funny. It’s turning black, and there are some crooked dark lines creeping out from it.”

“God,” said Chong, feeling panic leap up in his chest. “That’s blood poisoning! You’re telling me I have blood poisoning?”

After a long pause, Riot said, “I don’t think that’s what we got here. The lines are black, not red.”

“But—”

“You’re running a fever… but the skin back here’s cool to the touch.”

“Then we need to treat me for shock. Do you have anything we can use as a blanket or—”

“No,” she said. “Ain’t shock, neither. I think we got ourselves somethin’ else. Something we maybe can’t fix.”

“What’s that mean?”

“That black goo on the tips?” Riot held one of the arrows under his nose. “Tell me what it smells like to you.”

Chong studied her eyes for a long moment. There was a bleak, defeated look in them that made him hesitate before he took an arrow from her. Even then he didn’t immediately raise the arrow to his nose.

“You already know what it is,” he asked quietly, “don’t you?”

Riot nodded.

Chong closed his eyes for a moment. Instead of it being dark behind his eyelids, he saw twisted threads of bright red forking like lightning inside his personal darkness.

Then he opened his eyes and took a tentative sniff. He smelled what she had smelled.

“No,” he said, and his denial matched frequency with hers. This wasn’t something you just could refuse to accept.

Riot said nothing.

“Why… why would anyone do something like that?” demanded Chong.

“Why do you think?”

The answer was obvious, but it took all his courage to say it. “So… even if he just wounded someone… they’d… they’d…”

Words failed him.

Riot sighed and sat down on the floor, placing the arrows well away from Eve.

However, the smell lingered in Chong’s nose. He knew exactly what it was, and why it smelled like cadaverine.

The archer had dipped his arrows in the infected flesh of the living dead.

And now that infection was burning its way through Chong’s flesh.

62

“Honored one!” cried Sister Amy as she dashed out of the woods.

The saint and Brother Peter turned and waited for her to catch up with them. Amy was badly winded, and she dropped to her knees before them, bending to kiss the red tassels on their legs.

When she could speak without panting, Sister Amy told them about finding the ranger named Joe, and watching as he rescued a white-haired girl, tended to her wounds, and spoke with her. She told the saint everything and saved the choicest bit for last.

Saint John listened, and when she was finished, his eyes blazed with inner light.

“Nine towns,” he murmured. “In central California?”

“No militia,” mused Brother Peter. “Living up there in the mountains, they probably think they have nothing to fear except wandering gray people.”

“From what the girl said,” added Sister Amy, “they seem to believe that everything beyond their fence lines is wasteland.”

“How naive,” said Saint John. “How arrogant.”

He turned and looked toward the northwest as if he could see across all those miles.

“Nine towns,” he said softly.

63

“We better not stay here long,” said Benny. “Let’s take a quick look through this stuff, then get the heck out of here before those reapers come back. And we have to find Lilah and Chong. They don’t know about all this crazy stuff.”

Nix gave a noncommittal grunt as she set to work searching the cabinets and closets in the cockpit.

A few seconds later Nix opened one cabinet and jumped back as papers, maps, and other items came tumbling out. A mouse squeaked and dropped to the floor before scurrying into a tiny opening in the control panel. Benny squatted down and began poking through the papers. Nix picked up the maps and began unfolding them.

Benny saw a sheaf of papers on a clipboard hanging from a hook inside the cabinet. He pulled it down and began leafing through the pages in hopes of finding something that might provide answers to the mysteries that were stacking up all around them.

What he found instead dried the spit in his mouth and made his heart begin pounding like the hooves of a galloping horse.

“Nix!” he hissed. “My God… look at this.”

“What is…?” She trailed off as she began reading.

What they read changed their world.

There was more of it, but what they had just read was almost too much to grasp.

“Captain Ledger?” echoed Benny. “Hey, I know him… I mean, I have a Zombie Card with him on it.”

Nix said nothing. Her eyes were closed and she swayed for a moment, and then suddenly her knees buckled and she sagged to the floor. Benny caught her under the arm and steadied her.

“Whoa! Nix, what’s wrong?”

She shook her head. Tears rolled down her cheeks. “It’s all real,” she murmured. “The jet… other people. The world isn’t… isn’t… ”

She threw her arms around Benny’s neck, buried her face against his chest, and began to cry.

Dumbfounded and confused, Benny wrapped his arms around her as she wept.

All the time Nix kept saying, “It’s real… it’s real.”

64

Saint John and Brother Peter squatted in the dirt on either side of a burly man with a bushy brown beard and the iron-hard muscles of the steelworker he had been in his youth.

Now that man lay screaming, and with each scream he yielded up more and more of his power to the saint and the high priest of the Night Church. Red mouths had been opened by the score in his trembling flesh. Every bit of bravado and contempt and resistance had flowed out of him.

This man, Brother Eric, was one of Mother Rose’s most trusted team leaders. A deacon of great power among the reapers. Close friend to Brother Simon and Brother Alexi. A confidant of Her Holiness.

And sadly for him, he was intimately aware of what Mother Rose was planning.

Where once he had thought himself too committed to her and too powerful in himself to be forced to betray even the most casual secret, now he could not scream enough of the truth.

Saint John rose and turned away from the screaming man.

“He has told us everything of use,” he said quietly. “He has paid for his sins and now the darkness wants him. Send him on.”

Brother Peter looked down at the blade in his hand and stifled a disappointed sigh. He would never question an order from the saint, however. With a deft flick of his wrist, the screaming stopped.

“Praise be to the darkness,” he murmured as he wiped his knife clean with a handful of grass. He rose and stood with the saint. “I am sorry for your pain.”

Saint John shook his head.

“I knew about this betrayal long ago. I have already shed my tears.”

Even so, Brother Peter could see the glisten in the saint’s eyes. It filled him with a red rage that howled in his head. That anyone would bring harm to this beloved servant of their god was unbearable. There was nothing he would not do to remove that hurt from this holy man.

However, he was also filled with doubts.

“Honored One,” he began, “the infection within the Night Church runs so deep.”

“Yes. To its very heart.”

“How can it be purged?”

Saint John looked at the bloody knife in his own hand. He watched a drop of red fall and splatter on a green leaf.

“Mother Rose believes that her victory lies beyond the walls of Sanctuary.” He gestured as if shooing away a fly. “Let her have it.”

“But—”

“Let her take her ‘chosen ones,’ Peter. Let her carve the infection out of our army. Whoever is left… well, we know we can trust them.”

“We won’t help her attack Sanctuary?”

“No.”

“Honored One… we’ve spent so much time preparing for this, searching for this place. Our people fear it as a citadel of evil. We can’t just walk away.”

Saint John said, “That is exactly what we will do. We will leave this place of evil to Mother Rose.”

“But—”

The saint turned and looked toward the northwest. “I feel that we are called elsewhere, Peter. I feel that call with all my heart and soul.”

“California? Those nine towns?”

“Those nine towns.”

“May I ask why?”

“Mother Rose will attack Sanctuary. The ranger, Joe, may warn Sanctuary before she does so. We will watch what happens. If Mother Rose takes it, then we will come back and take it from her. She is not as wise a general as she believes.”

“And if Sanctuary defeats her?”

“You can learn much about an enemy when you watch him win. We will watch and learn… and plan. Either way, Sanctuary will wait for us.”

65

“So… that’s it?” asked Chong in a hollow voice. “I just die? I become a zom?”

His eyes burned with tears, but the rest of him felt cold.

Riot sat with her back to the wall. “I don’t… ” She let it trail off and merely shook her head.

“No, damn it,” protested Chong. “That’s not how this works.”

His statement made no sense, and he knew it. But what else could he say? The arrow had gone all the way through him, pushing the infected matter deep into his flesh, into his bloodstream. The sickness was already at work within him. His skin was cool and clammy to the touch and yet sweat poured down his face. In his chest, his heart was beating with all the urgent frenzy of a trapped rabbit.

He was infected.

He was dying.

He was, by any standard of life here in the Rot and Ruin, already dead.

It was too real, too big, too wrong.

“No,” Chong said again.

Riot sniffed back some tears. “I’m sorry.”

She got up and walked to the open doorway of the old shack and stood there, staring silently out at the desert, fists balled tightly at her sides.

Chong turned away and put his face in his hands. Even when the first sob broke in his chest, the arrow wounds, which should have screamed with pain, merely ached. Even his pain was dying.

Sorry.

So small a word for so enormous a thing.

Lilah.

He cried out her name in his mind, and he saw her, standing tall and beautiful, leaning on her spear, her honey-colored eyes always aware. If she saw him right here and now, would she even wait before quieting him? Would her feelings for him make her pause even for a second before she drove her spear into the back of his neck? Would she grieve afterward? Would the unsurprising death of a clumsy town boy break her heart, or merely add another layer of callus to it?

I’m so sorry, he thought. Oh, Lilah, I’m so sorry.

He squeezed his eyes shut in pain that was deeper than his physical wounds. He thought about his parents. The last time they’d seen him, he was heading out with Tom for a simple overnight camping trip in the Ruin. It had been allowed only because Tom and Lilah would both be there, and they were the most experienced zombie hunters anyone knew. And they’d allowed it because his folks knew that Chong needed to say good-bye to Benny and Nix. And Lilah.

I’m sorry, Mom. I’m sorry, Pop.

I’m sorry for everything.

Chong heard a small, soft sound and turned to see Eve in the middle of the room. She was pink-faced from sleep and jumpy-eyed from bad dreams and waking realities.

Chong sniffed and hastily wiped away his tears.

“Hello, sweetheart,” he said, and he even conjured a smile. “How are you?”

Eve came over and stood in front of him. The trauma of everything she’d experienced had regressed her. The child she had become was younger still, and Chong could see that so little of her was left — and that was hanging by a thread.

She reached out a finger and almost touched the burn on Chong’s stomach. The flesh around it was livid and veined with black lines.

“Hurt?” she asked in the tiniest of voices. Looking into her eyes was like looking into a haunted house.

“No, honey… it’s not bad,” lied Chong. “Hardly hurts at all.”

He reached out and gently stroked Eve’s tangled blond hair. She flinched at first, but he waited, showed her that his hand was empty, and tried again. This time Eve allowed it. Then she knelt down and laid her head against his chest.

“I had a bad dream,” she murmured.

That thought — that Eve believed this was a dream she would or could wake up from — came close to breaking Chong’s heart. He continued to stroke her hair while he lay there and tried not to be afraid of what he was becoming.

He hoped Lilah would never find him.