He rose, clicked his tongue for his dog, and hurried away. A few minutes later they heard the sirens as Joe prepared to cross the bridge. The last thing Nix and Lilah saw of him was the ranger vanishing into the hangar next to the blockhouse. He had the valise with him, and he was running.
CHAPTER 25
After a while Benny got to his feet.
The zom had not returned, but even so Benny removed a bottle of cadaverine from his pocket and dribbled some on his clothes. It amazed him that after all this time he could still smell the stuff, and he had to dab mint gel on his upper lip from a small pot he always carried. The mint was so strong that it completely killed his sense of smell. When your clothes smell like rotting human flesh, an overload of mint is a genuine blessing.
He had a strange thought. If he died now and reanimated, would the presence of the mint gel mean that cadaverine wouldn’t deter him? Probably. It was a creepy thought.
It was heating up to be another blistering day in a spring season that was already unusually hot. Even back home in Mountainside it had been a strange spring, with April temperatures in the eighties and almost no rain. Benny had no idea whether this was simply one of those years — there are hot ones and there are cold ones — or if it was an omen of something bad coming. His mood was tending toward the pessimistic view.
Maybe it is the end of the world, whispered his inner voice. Maybe Captain Ledger is right. Maybe there are no chances left.
“Oh, shut up,” growled Benny.
He walked over to the wrecked airplane and stood for a moment at the foot of a sturdy rope ladder Joe had rigged to the open hatch.
Benny wished he’d asked Nix to come with him. He closed his eyes for a moment and thought about how she probably looked this morning, up there in the rocks, training with focused determination with the katana Joe had given her. Benny conjured her image in his mind and suddenly she was there, as real as something he could actually touch and hold. Her wild red hair trembling in the morning breeze that swept in from the desert, her intelligent green eyes roving over the landscape as she imagined attackers closing on her, her countless freckles darkening as her pulse rose to flush her skin. And the sword. Benny was a very good swordsman, but Nix was better. She was faster, more precise, less tentative, and far more vicious. In her small hands that powerful weapon sought its true potential. The blade became a streamer of flowing mercury, the edge cleaving effortlessly through air or straw targets or living-dead necks.
So far, though, Nix had not used that blade against the living.
Not like Benny had used his kami katana. Now, and too many times before today.
She had killed, though, Benny thought. Killed with knives and guns and with her old wooden bokken. She was like him in that regard. And also like Lilah, Chong, and Riot. Killers all.
Children at war.
Children of war.
It was so unfair.
“Nix,” Benny said, just to put her name on the wind. Then he spoke her full name. “Phoenix.”
Her name, either version, even now when he was angry with her, was like a prayer to him.
The first girl he had ever loved.
The first person he had ever loved. Aside from his parents, but that had been a remembered love from a tiny child. Not like this.
He loved Nix. She was the only girl he ever expected to love.
He would kill for her.
No, corrected his inner voice, you have killed for her. And with her.
“Shut up,” Benny said again, and he turned away, as if by moving his body he could step away from that inner voice and all his melancholy thoughts.
The plane lay there. Dead. Discarded by time. And yet somehow strangely alive to him.
Waiting for him.
He found himself smiling.
Joe had expressly ordered Benny — and everyone else — to stay out of the plane. The head scientist, Dr. Monica McReady, and her entire crew had either been killed in the crash and then wandered off once they’d reanimated as zoms, or they’d been murdered by the reapers of the Night Church.
Now the most crucial part of Dr. McReady’s research was missing.
In either case, the world’s best hope for a cure was lost, maybe forever.
It was crazy, but three weeks ago Benny and Nix had not known about Dr. McReady, her team, the possibility of a cure, or the fact that anyone was still left to do the research. That had been so amazing, so life-changing.
How was he supposed to suddenly discard all that hope and simply accept that there was no future unpolluted by plague and death? He didn’t know how to fit that into his head. It didn’t seem to fit, and Benny knew full well that he didn’t want it to fit.
If hope of a cure was gone, then what did that mean for Chong? Maybe he was dead already. Maybe all hope was dead.
We lost our last chance to beat this thing.
“No,” Benny said, and now that word held an entirely different meaning than it had a few minutes ago. Now it was filled with anger. With defiance, and Tom had once told him that defiance in the face of disaster was a quality of hope. “No — absolutely fricking no way.”
The black mouth of the plane’s open hatchway yawned above him.
Benny hooked his fingers through the rope ladder and tugged it. Sturdy and strong.
But Joe — the towering, deadly ex-special ops shooter who now ran a team of rangers in the Ruin — had said to stay out of the plane. No excuses, no exceptions.
“Well,” Benny said to the rope ladder, “what can he do? Send me to my room?”
He climbed up into the plane.
The inside was a mess. Joe had apparently trashed the place while scavenging the materials and looking for the missing D-series notes. With the captured zoms removed, and all the equipment cases and boxes of records gone, the structural damage was easier to see. The plane had broken its back on landing, and the craft’s metal skin was rippled and torn. The floor was littered with discarded junk. Papers, broken containers, and hundreds upon hundreds of shell casings from the automatic weapons Joe had fired when repelling the reaper assault. They gleamed dully in the streamers of light that stabbed down through tears in the ceiling. Paper trash was heaped against the walls or left where it had fallen. Benny sat down on an empty case that had once housed a rocket launcher and began digging into the paper.
He had no real idea what he was looking for. It wasn’t like he expected to find a piece of paper labeled CURE.
Even so, there was an answer here. Some kind of answer, he was sure of it.
Hours passed as he went through every piece of paper, no matter how small.
There was nothing of value there.
Not a word, not a scrap.
Benny picked up the papers he’d found and hurled them as hard as he could against the wall. Pages, whole and partial, slapped against the unyielding metal and then floated to the deck, as disorganized and useless as before.
He climbed down to the ground, his face burning with anger and his whole body trembling with frustration.
That was when he remembered the quads.
The engines of both vehicles had eventually stalled out.
“Ah… man…”
He ran over to the machines. The reaper’s quad was still upright and was jammed at an angle against Benny’s machine, which lay on its side. Benny pushed the second quad, a Honda, back from his Yamaha. The Honda moved with a sluggish, lumpy resistance — the right front wheel was flat, the rubber exploded from the impact. Benny examined the Yamaha. The right rear wheel hung at a strange angle, and when he bent to examine it, he groaned. The axle had been snapped like a bread stick.