All he heard was hunger. Vast, hollow, eternal.
The zombie looked at Benny and shuffled uncertainly toward him.
“Don’t,” said Benny, and the single word caused the zombie’s head to jerk up. The glazed eyes shifted up to look directly at him. It took another step.
Benny retreated a pace, and the zom took two more steps. It was close now; one more step and it would be close enough to make a grab. Its hands rose and reached for Benny.
“Don’t.”
Benny slowly, numbly reached over his shoulder and slid the katana into its scabbard. Then his hands flopped down at his sides, hanging slack and purposeless. The zombie took another step, and now it pawed at Benny with clumsy fingers that twitched and jerked as if trying to remember their lost dexterity. Benny batted the hands aside.
The zom reached again.
Benny knew that he should end this. Here and now, quick and clean. It would be easy. After everything he’d been through, a single zombie no longer frightened him. He was sure he could break its neck with his bare hands, or easily cripple it with a kick to the knee.
He could. He probably should. As long as the plane was here, a wandering zom was a potential threat. Even to someone like Joe.
But Benny didn’t attack. He backed away again, unwilling to inflict harm on this thing, even though a few moments ago it was a killer who wanted to murder him. That was different, and he knew it was different. Now everything about this creature, this thing… this former person, was different. Benny felt his heart hammering in his chest, and he wanted to do something. Scream, or throw up, or cry. Or run away.
Or die.
The zom reached again and again, and each time Benny slapped its fumbling hands away.
“C’mon, man,” pleaded Benny, “don’t.”
It kept coming. A step, a reach. Benny slapped the cooling hands away. The thing recovered its balance, brought its hands back, stepped, reached. The whole encounter was becoming a sick and sad ballet, a dance for two of the strangest kind. The moment had lost its veneer of horror for Benny and had become something else, something indefinable and surreal. It was terrifying in a nonphysical way. He felt that he teetered on the edge of some action that would damage his own soul far more than this monster could harm his body. His racing mind sought to understand it, but the truth, the insight, eluded him every bit as diligently as he eluded the zombie.
The zombie suddenly stopped, and its eyes flicked toward the forest. It took one lumbering step that way, then another, and another, heading away from Benny, heading toward the woods, following… who knew what. A sound, a smell?
Benny watched the zom until it vanished into the shadows under the trees. Then he bent and picked up his katana, cleaned the blood from the blade, and resheathed it.
The actions were performed almost without thought. His thoughts were elsewhere. They tumbled through a red awareness of what he had just done.
He’d killed a man.
A person.
A small, strange part of his mind wanted to gloat — the attacker had been older, stronger, faster, and probably more experienced, a reaper of the Night Church. In a one-on-one duel, Benny should have lost, even with the better weapon. But that part of his mind was only a fragment, and Benny prayed that it never grew to become something bigger. That part of his mind was okay with killing. It wanted to kill. It liked the excitement of battle, the promise of bloodshed, the rush of adrenaline.
Benny feared that part of himself. He tried to believe that it didn’t belong to him at all.
Lies like that never work on your own mind, though.
The rest of him was appalled by what he had just done. Benny had killed people before — at Charlie Pink-eye’s camp in the mountains of central California, at Gameland in Yosemite, and here in the Mojave Desert when the reapers tried to send Benny and all his friends into the vast, eternal darkness.
There were birds singing in the trees, and the air buzzed with insects. A small tan snake whipsawed through the brush, and off in the distance a pair of monkeys chattered as they chased each other through the boughs of a piñon tree. The desert was calm and beautiful. It was peaceful.
Benny Imura sat down with his back against a rock, set his sword aside, bent, and buried his face in his palms.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. Though whether his apology was to the day, to the man he’d been forced to kill, to the monster that man had become, to the forest, or to the distorted image of himself that capered like a bent reflection in a funhouse mirror, Benny could not say.
CHAPTER 24
Captain Ledger squatted down beside the zom Lilah had killed. He no longer looked hungover. He merely looked old and tired. And deeply disturbed.
Grimm stood nearby, looking up and down the slope at the bodies. Big and fierce as he was, the mastiff occasionally uttered a fearful whine.
“You’re certain that all of them were fast?”
“Three for sure,” said Nix. “The one whose head I cracked… I don’t know about that one.”
“Still,” said Joe, “three out of four.”
He pivoted on the balls of his feet to study the landscape. “This slope leads down to a T-road,” he mused aloud. “Go right to the hangars… go left and it becomes a deer path that goes nowhere but up into the mountains.”
“I found the tracks,” Lilah told him. She nodded to the mountains. “They came from there.”
“Does that make any sense?” asked Nix. “Why would zoms climb all the way over a mountain? I thought they didn’t go uphill unless they were following prey. That’s what Tom told us.”
“Tom was right,” agreed Joe.
“Could the sirens have called them here?” asked Lilah.
“I don’t think so. Sanctuary sits in a kind of bowl of flatland surrounded by mountains. Once that wail hits those mountains it bounces all over the place, and it’s impossible to pinpoint the source unless you’re down here on the flatland. I don’t think we can sell that as the reason.” He paused, thinking, then said, “No,” again, very softly.
When they’d told Joe about the attack, he’d fetched a small leather valise, which now stood open beside him. He spent several careful minutes collecting samples from the zoms. Tissue and fluids. Then he took a large magnifying glass and peered through it as he bent over the head and shoulders of one of the corpses. He grunted.
“What is it?” asked Lilah.
Joe used a small brush to sweep something off the zom’s blouse into a vial. When he held it up to examine it in the sun’s glow, Nix saw that it was the red powder she’d noticed on the Latino man.
“Do you know what it is?” asked Nix. “Is it important?”
“I hope to God it isn’t,” he said, but he did not elaborate. Instead he got up and examined the other bodies, focusing now almost exclusively on collecting samples of the red powder. He stopped by one corpse, glanced at it, and then looked at Nix.
“Is this the one you said might not have been fast?”
“Yes,” she said. “I landed on it and hit it in the face with an elbow and—”
Joe appeared to stop listening. He stood up, and his eyes roved over the scene.
“How the hell did this get here?” he murmured. Then Nix thought he mouthed a word: “Archangel.”
Then Joe suddenly began packing his samples into the case.
“What is it?” asked Nix. “What’s wrong?”
“Wrong?” Joe gave her a smile that might have been an attempt to reassure her. But it was ghastly. False and fragile. “It’s nothing. You girls go back to the mess hall and get some lunch. Everything’s fine.”