“I know you,” said Benny as he raised a bloody finger and touched Joe’s face. “You’re on a Zombie Card. Captain Ledger, Hero of First Night. You’re number two-eighty-four. I have two of you. I was going to trade one of you to Morgie for his Sheriff Rick card.”
Riot’s face swam into view. “What the heck are Zombie Cards?”
“Kid’s delirious.”
Chong said, “The reapers are coming. We saw them.”
“Where and how many?” demanded Joe.
“Reaper, reaper…,” Benny began, and tried to work it into a rhyme, but he couldn’t.
“There are a couple of hundred of them out on the desert, heading toward the hills,” said Riot. “But a bunch came running after us.”
“On foot or on quad?”
“Both. I lost them, but they’ll find us.”
Benny wondered what they were talking about. It began to occur to him that his head was not working properly, that his thoughts were silly. The word “delirious” triggered a response that went deeper than his understanding. A voice spoke inside his head.
But he did not understand what the voice meant.
Joe said, “Then we have to go now. Get to Sanctuary… ”
“We can’t move Benny,” insisted Nix. “His head… ”
“What’s an MRE?” Benny asked. They ignored him. He frowned, because he was sure that was important. He’d read it somewhere.
“We can’t fight off an army of reapers. Not here.”
“We can’t let ’em get to Sanctuary,” growled Riot. “They’ll slaughter the monks and refugees and all them scientists and—”
Joe looked stricken. “I know. They have a few soldiers there, but they can’t stop an army. And my rangers are scattered all over the place. We have to warn them. That means either we go without this kid, in which case the reapers’ll carve him into lunch meat; or we put him on a quad and let the ride out there do the job for them.”
In the distance they heard the faint buzz of quads. They all looked that way and then at one another.
“Oh God,” breathed Nix.
“What I wouldn’t give for a minigun or an—”
Benny asked dazedly, “What’s a LAW rickett?”
Joe froze and stared down at him.
“What did you say?”
“That’s what it said. L-A-W-R-K-T. LAW rickett. I read it. M-R-E. R-P-G and—”
Joe suddenly bent close to Benny, his face inches away.
“A LAW rocket? God almighty, kid… where did you see that?” he asked in a fierce whisper.
Benny smiled and winked. “I can’t tell you,” he said. “It’s a secret.”
And then he passed out.
90
Benny felt a lot of hands on him. He felt himself moving. When he opened his eyes, though, the movement had already stopped and he was back inside the airplane.
“Zoms!” he cried.
But no one reacted.
Nothing tried to bite him.
The sound of quads woke him up. Quads and shouts and a dog barking.
Benny still hadn’t seen any dog. He just heard one. A big one too.
“They’re coming,” said Riot. “God — Brother Alexi’s back with a slew of reapers. Gotta be fifty, sixty of them.”
“Oh God,” Nix said, “there’s too many!”
Someone laughed. Joe? Was Benny’s Zombie Card laughing? Silly.
He opened his eyes and saw Joe carrying something that looked like a big toy gun. Like one of those big plastic toys from before First Night. A Super Soaker. Mayor Kirsch bought one for his kids. Cost three hundred ration dollars. That was more than Mrs. Riley made in a whole season doing sewing.
“Nix?” he asked.
A small, warm hand took his, and Benny tried to turn toward her, but his head wouldn’t move. His whole body felt weird, like it was tied to a board. How crazy was that?
Nix leaned over, and he saw her face. She was so pretty.
“Nix, is your mom here?”
Pain flickered in her green eyes.
“Mama’s dead, Benny. You know that.”
“Oh. I thought I heard her laughing. She was baking muffins.”
Something hot and wet fell on his cheek.
A tear.
Where did that come from?
The roar of quads filled the whole cabin. Benny thought it sounded like a zillion of them. People were yelling. Roaring. Cursing, too.
“They’re coming!” shrieked Nix. “They’re climbing up!”
Joe’s voice roared: “Fire in the hole!”
There was big hissing sound, and then the whole plane shook with a gigantic rolling
The sound was too big for Benny, and he went back down in the darkness. He was sure Nix’s mom was baking muffins.
91
Nix and Chong stood at the edge of the hatch and stared down at horror.
The air was thick with smoke from the LAW rockets and rocket-propelled grenades that the ranger had fired. The air tasted of gunpowder and wrongness.
The clearing and the whole edge of the plateau was a slaughterhouse. Burned and blasted bodies lay everywhere. Even the trees at the edge of the forest had died in the barrage as the weapons of the old world wrought their carnage.
They were both crying.
“One man,” whispered Nix.
Chong nodded, unable to speak. Sick in body, sick in soul.
One man.
The ranger, Joe, had used those terrible weapons. The reapers, the chosen ones, the elite of Mother Rose’s army, had poured out of the forest, brought back by Alexi to claim the weapons hidden in the shrine. They thought themselves to be the most powerful force left on earth. They thought themselves to be unstoppable — those among them who believed in God and those who only believed in Mother Rose — they surged forward to slaughter the
