They walked cautiously down and saw that they were truly dead. Neither was a reaper. They were ordinary-looking folk, and savage blows to their heads and necks had probably killed them and prevented them from rising. An unintended mercy buried within a heinous crime.
A few yards away they found a third body, and they squatted down to examine it. It was a middle-aged woman, and it was clear that she had been stabbed in the chest. Nix tilted her head to one side and grunted.
“She wasn’t quieted,” she said. “No head wound, no incision at the brain stem.”
Benny double-checked and then nodded. “It’s happening here, too. Not all of the dead are reanimating.”
“I wish I knew if that was a good thing,” said Nix.
“It was for Tom.”
She looked at the ground for a few seconds, then nodded. “I’m sorry.”
He shook his head. In silence they rose and moved along the stream. They found other bodies. Many others.
This had been the scene of a terrible slaughter. Here and there they found dead reapers, too, and each of these had been quieted by knives to the base of their skulls. But most of the dead were not reapers. Benny stopped counting when the toll reached fifty. Men, women, and children.
No one had been spared.
No one.
Nix’s lips curled back from her teeth in a feral grin. “Who are these freaks?”
Benny sat down on a rock and looked at his shoes. Then an idea struck him. “I think this is some kind of death cult,” he said.
She turned sharply. “What?”
“Think about it,” he said. “What else could it be? You said Thanatos was the Greek god of death, and Saint Jerk-o kept talking about the ‘gift of darkness.’ Seems kind of obvious.”
Nix snorted. “I said Thanatos was one of the Greek gods of death. The nice one, the one that takes away suffering. These reapers don’t seem like they’re trying to alleviate suffering. Besides — I can’t think of anything stupider than a death cult after an apocalypse.”
“Maybe,” Benny said dubiously.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Benny looked at her, surprised. “Really? You’re telling me that you can’t see their point?”
“Their point?”
“Shh, keep your voice down.”
Nix stepped closer. “Benny, what are you saying? That you agree with—?”
“What?” He almost laughed. “Agree? Are you nuts? I never said I agreed with anything. All I asked was whether you could understand their point.”
“What possible point could there be to a death cult?”
Benny stared at her. “You’re serious?”
She punched him on the arm. Hard. “Of course I’m serious.”
“First… ow. Second, I thought you were the one who was always all torn up about people back home being so depressed and fatalistic. You were always going on about how people have just given up. That’s why we’re out here, isn’t it? Trying to find some survivors who still believe that there is a future.”
“That’s my point,” she snapped. “We need to focus on being alive.”
“We do, sure, but that’s you and me and Chong and Lilah. Maybe a few others. Everyone else is still acting like they’re at a funeral for the human race.”
“That’s grief and depression,” said Nix, “not a freaking death cult.”
“Maybe those things aren’t all that far apart. C’mon, you’ve heard all those stories about how many people committed suicide after First Night. Mayor Kirsch said that almost half the people who settled Mountainside killed themselves within eighteen months.”
“It wasn’t nearly that many,” Nix said defensively, but it was a weak parry.
“Yes, it was. I heard Captain Strunk talking to Tom about it. Pastor Kellogg did a sermon about it.”
Nix holstered her pistol. “I must have missed church that day.”
“Okay, then what about the way-station monks? Some of them let themselves get bitten because they think it’s what God wants. They think the zoms are the meek that are supposed to inherit the—”
“I know,” she said bitterly.
Benny paused, studying her face. “Are you really going to sit there and tell me that you never thought about it?”
Nix’s head whipped around so fast that her flying hair brushed across Benny’s face. “I would never kill myself.”
“Whoa! Whoa, now. Who said anything about—?”
“You did. You asked me if I thought about killing myself.”
“No, I didn’t,” he insisted. “I asked if you ever thought about people in town killing themselves.”
“That’s not what you said.”
“It’s what I meant, and you know it.”
Nix narrowed her eyes at him in an expression that was half a glare and half an inspection of his eyes.
“Whatever,” she said, and turned away again. She drew her bokken, then stood there, pretending to study the landscape.
Benny stared at the back of her head and did not dare say anything else. Nix had been absolutely correct. He had asked her if she ever thought about killing herself.
The thing was… he did not know why he asked that.
He wondered if beating his head against the tree trunk would help the moment any. It seemed like the most reasonable option.
Nix abruptly walked into the woods, heading to an upslope that led away from this scene of carnage. “Let’s go,” she called over her shoulder.
“Where?”
She pointed toward a line of white rocks beyond the trees. “Up there. We can climb those rocks and see if we can spot Lilah and Chong.”
She moved off, not looking back to see if he followed.
After several heavy seconds of indecision, Benny rose and ran after her.
They moved carefully through the brush, and the closer they got to the line of bright white rocks, the less certain Benny became that they were rocks at all.
Maybe it was a building, he thought. There had to be a ranger station or something out here.
Nix reached the edge of the woods first and suddenly stopped dead in her tracks.
“No…,” she said softly.
Her bokken dropped from her hand and clattered on the rocky ground. Benny hurried to catch up, and as he did Nix screamed out a single word.
“NO!”
She yelled it so loudly that birds erupted from the trees. The echo bounced off the surrounding rocks. It was loud enough to be heard a mile away.
Loud enough for everyone to hear them.
Chong. Lilah.
Riot.
The reapers.
The dead themselves.
Louder still than her scream was the thunder of Benny’s heart as he saw what had torn that shout of denial out of her.
There was no ring of white rocks. There was no ranger station or a forgotten farmhouse.
It was a huge machine that had been smashed against the unforgiving landscape.
And it was heartbreakingly familiar.
It was an airplane.
