Benny straightened, exhaled a long, slow breath, thought of Tom’s many lessons about maintaining calm in the middle of a crisis — and then spent the next two minutes screaming and kicking the Yamaha from every possible angle.
Then he spent three minutes standing there, chest heaving, both feet hurting like hell, glaring at the machine.
Finally he opened the rear compartment on the Yamaha and took out the jack and the lug wrench and took a wheel off his bike and put it onto the Honda. The wheels were the same size, and it wasn’t until Benny was finished that he grudgingly accepted that as a lucky break. Not all the quads were the same size.
Then Benny tried to turn the Honda on. Nothing happened.
He tried again.
Same effect.
It hadn’t stalled after the crash. It had run out of fuel.
Benny snatched up a rock and came very close to slamming it down on the fuel gauge.
Stop it! bellowed his inner voice.
It actually stopped Benny mid-smash.
He stared at the rock he held.
“Oh man,” he said, and let it drop.
Find a hose, said his smarter inner voice. Siphon gas out of the other—
“Yeah, yeah, I know, I got it,” he growled.
His inner voice shut up.
Benny dug through the compartments and saddlebags of his own quad and found nothing. Then he began foraging through the Honda.
He found a siphon hose right away. However, what he found next made him forget completely about the hose, the fuel, the quad, the residual pain in his groin, and virtually everything else.
Tucked into the back compartment of the Honda was a loose-leaf binder with the word TEAMBOOK printed on the spine and a flag embossed on the front. The flag was not the Stars and Stripes of the old United States of America. No, this was the symbol of the newer, post — First Night American Nation. It was the same symbol that was painted on the tail fin of the plane and on patches worn by dead members of the crew.
Benny flipped the Teambook open and saw that there was a double-sided page devoted to each member of Dr. McReady’s team from Hope One. Each page included a color photograph of a person in either the brown-and-green uniform of the new American Nation or in the white lab coat of McReady’s science team. Below each photo was basic data: name, rank, serial number, gender, blood type, height, weight, eye color, hair color, and an abbreviated service record. A lot of it meant nothing to Benny, especially in sections where there was an overabundance of military abbreviations and acronyms. Hope One had been staffed by Dr. McReady, six other scientists, ten lab technicians, eighteen soldiers, and five general staff. Forty people. The C-130 had eight additional soldiers and a flight crew of four. Fifty-two people in all.
He studied the photo of Dr. Monica McReady. She was a black woman with short hair, and a pair of reading glasses hung around her neck. According to her data, she was fifty-six years old.
“Where are you?” he asked her. “Where’s your cure? I have a friend who needs you. His name is Chong and he’s…”
Hungry.
“… he doesn’t deserve this. Where are you?”
The picture told him nothing. The book as a whole, however, did. There was blood on every single photograph in the book. Old, dried blood. Weeks old, at least, and in some cases the gore was so old that it was caked and powdery. These were not random splashes but deliberate markings. About half the photos had been crossed out with a dripped red X. Eleven others were marked with a bloody thumbprint in the upper right corner. When he compared the prints, Benny saw that they were each different, no two alike. The remaining photos were also marked by a thumbprint, but in each of these cases the thumbprint was placed over the heart of the person. The same thumbprint was used for all these.
So what did it mean?
Benny chewed on it.
The Xs seemed obvious. Those were members of the crew who had been killed, or who’d died during the crash. Two of the pictures marked that way showed men dressed as pilots, and Benny had seen those men before. On the day they’d found this plane, there had been two zoms tied to crossbars erected on the ground in front of the cockpit.
The second set, the ones with unique thumbprints, took him longer to figure out, but as he went through each picture again he spotted a face that he recognized. The face was the same, but in the photo the man had black hair.
Benny had looked into that same face minutes ago. He had looked into those eyes while the man in the photo was alive, and he’d looked into the same eyes once all traces of human life had fled.
The reaper.
According to the Teambook his name was Marcus Flood, age twenty-six, born in Kansas City. A lance corporal in the army of the American Nation.
The man he’d just killed had been a member of Dr. McReady’s crew. One of the soldiers assigned to help evacuate Hope One.
But he’d become a reaper.
How?
Why?
Riot and Joe both said that the reaper army had been built mostly from people who had been given a choice: die with everyone else in your town, or join. It was a conqueror’s strategy that had worked for everyone from Alexander the Great to the Nazis, so apparently it still worked. Even so… Benny could not climb inside the head of someone who would willingly become part of a group whose ultimate goal was to end all human life. Sure, it meant living a little longer, but the end was still going to be the same. Death.
What made someone make that choice? Did they think that somehow they’d slip through the cracks and not be sent into the darkness when Saint John thought it was time? Or did they really buy into the reaper beliefs?
The man in that photo seemed to.
There was another photo in the batch that caught Benny’s attention. Another soldier. A big man, tough-looking but also strangely familiar. The sheet said that his name was Luis Ortega, and his designation was team logistics coordinator.
Whatever that meant.
Benny touched the picture.
“Where do I know you from?” he wondered aloud. Was this man another of the reapers, like Marcus Flood? If so, was he now wandering around on the airfield? Had he been one of the reapers with Mother Rose, one of those gathered a few yards from here? Benny and Nix had secretly watched that gathering. Had he died with Mother Rose or vanished with Saint John and the main body of the reaper army? Was he one of the thousands of sick people being tended by the way-station monks? Or one of the refugees Riot was guiding to Sanctuary?
The half-remembered encounter had to be recent, though, because it throbbed insistently in Benny’s mind.
Because of the severity of the head wound he’d received, the monks told him there was a strong chance that he might have some amnesia. Not total, not even a lot, but some blank spots. This was one of those spots, he was sure of that. He could almost—almost—see the memory of this man, almost catch it. A big man in a military uniform like this. Benny had seen hundreds of other military clothes, from zoms killed during the battles after First Night. Some of the men in town had camouflage jackets from the old world. The uniforms of the new American Nation were different. The camouflage was a different pattern, with bits of dusty red mixed in with the black, tan, brown, and gray.
Then… something, some fragment of a memory went skittering across the back of Benny’s brain, triggered by Sergeant Ortega’s face and uniform. He went still, hoping to catch a glimpse of it, to discover what it wanted to tell him.
But that fast it was there and gone, hiding in the shadows under a rock in his damaged memory.
Benny flipped back through the book, this time looking at the small pieces of paper clipped to some of the pages. One note was written in round cursive by a decidedly feminine hand.