A few monks knelt in the dirt, hands clasped in prayer, heads bowed while they allowed the dead to take them.
“Do something!” screeched Nix.
Joe flew low and opened up with the chain guns. Heavy bullets tore into the zoms, ripping arms and heads off. A few monks shook fists at them and tried to wave the helicopter off.
“What are they doing?” demanded McReady.
“Trying to protect the Children of Lazarus,” Joe said dully.
Even as the monks waved and shouted at the Black Hawk, the creatures they tried to protect overwhelmed them and tore them apart. It was sickening.
It was beyond horrible.
“Someone released the mutagen,” said McReady. “It has to be deliberate, but who would—?”
“Reapers,” said Benny. It was more than an answer; he pointed down into the melee to where reapers on quads chased a group of nuns, herding them into the arms of the dead.
McReady grabbed Joe’s arm. “Joe—”
“On it,” he said and he turned the guns on them. The quads exploded one after the other. However, the zoms swept past the burning quads and crashed like a wave onto the nuns. Joe kept firing, but there was no real point. There were tens of thousands of fast zoms swarming into the hangars, and hundreds of reapers ferreting out the monks and nuns. And it was clear this battle had been going on for too long already. Many of the zoms down there were the reanimated dead who had risen from their own murders.
Dr. McReady punched the dashboard. “No! This isn’t how it’s supposed to be. The mutagen was intended for careful release after human populations were evacuated from an area. It’s only viable until after the host dies off. In a week even any residual powder exposed to the air will be inert. Damn it, this isn’t how it’s supposed to be.” She caved forward and put her face into her hands.
“Brother Peter said they wouldn’t attack until tomorrow,” said Benny.
Lilah grabbed his shirt. “And you believed him?”
But Nix shoved her back. “Stop it. We all believed him. This isn’t helping and this won’t get us to Chong.”
Joe steered the Black Hawk away from the hangars. Benny saw tears cutting jagged tracks down his grizzled face.
“Can you see Riot?” begged Nix. “I can’t see her anywhere.”
No one answered.
One figure staggered past the row of swings, but when Joe shone a spotlight on it, the face that looked up at them was not Riot’s or Eve’s. It was Sister Hannahlily. Her mouth was smeared with red, and she held a human arm in her hands. She hissed at the helicopter.
Sickened, Joe swung the light away.
They hovered for a moment over the bridge. There were now more of the dead on the monks’ side of the trench than on the other. Many more. A group of twenty reapers manned the bridge, herding the zoms over.
“Screw you,” growled Joe as he armed a Hellfire missile. “Go to hell.”
The missile blasted away from under the Black Hawk’s stubby wing and struck the rocky ground near the bridge. The blast was immense, and when the rotor wash blew the smoke away, there was a crater in the trench wall. The bridge was still there, but all around it were charred ashes that were unrecognizable as ever having been human.
Then they saw a ripple of flashes by one of the hangars. At first Benny thought it was a string of firecrackers set off by the flames.
“Those are guns,” yelled Nix. “The soldiers are fighting back.”
Joe swung the Black Hawk toward the gunfire. Zoms chased the machine, and reapers on quads and on foot raced across the tarmac in the same direction. He fired one more missile at a crowd of mixed zoms and reapers and then flew straight through the fire and smoke.
The gunfire was coming from inside the hangar where they’d met Colonel Reid. There were bodies on the ground surrounded by the hunched figures of zoms who feasted on their victims. Benny could not tell if any of those bodies belonged to Riot or Eve. The dead poured into the hangar, and there were living reapers among them, shoving the zoms forward, herding them, driving them from kill to kill.
Joe dropped almost to the ground and flew the helicopter slowly and carefully in through the open hangar doors. The gunfire was concentrated in one corner, and Benny could see a knot of soldiers moving in a tight cluster, toward a door set in the back wall. Some of them fired at the advancing horde of zoms; others fired toward the door to clear it. But there was no doubt that some zoms and reapers had already passed through that doorway.
“They’re inside the complex,” said Joe. “That door leads to a tunnel that connects all of these buildings.”
McReady looked up, her face going paler still. “The equipment… the lab.”
“Chong!” cried Lilah.
The look on Joe’s face was as feral and cruel as any monster as he opened up with the chain guns. He turned the helicopter in a slow circle and maintained continuous fire, creating a kind of hell Benny had never seen before. One man and one machine turned the entire hangar into a slaughterhouse. Reapers and zombies flew apart. Others were punched backward into each other or against walls. Shell casings fell like rain. But then the guns clicked on empty, the rounds exhausted.
Joe landed the Black Hawk in a swirl of blood-tinged smoke.
The group of soldiers were at the door now. They gunned down the last of the reapers in their way and vanished inside the entrance to the tunnel.
And they slammed the door shut behind them.
CHAPTER 76
“Everybody out,” bellowed Joe as he erupted from the pilot’s seat. “Now—now!”
They grabbed their weapons, but Lilah also scooped up two bags of the capsules. Benny saw this and grabbed a couple as well, shoving them into his backpack.
“You never know,” he said.
Joe snatched a machine gun from a rack and began stuffing extra magazines into his pockets. “Lilah, you’re with McReady. If you want your boyfriend back, kill anyone who even looks at her.”
Lilah bared her teeth.
“Nix, Benny, you two hold the line and watch my back. I have to get through that door, and it’s going to take a minute. If I don’t and things get weird, go back into the chopper and close the door. There are enough guns and ammo in there to stop an army.”
Then Joe clicked his tongue for Grimm, and as soon as the dog turned its massive armored head toward him, Joe quickly reached out and touched Nix on the shoulder.
“Family,” said Joe, and Grimm barked once in acknowledgment.
Joe touched Benny. “Family,” he said again.
Another bark.
“Protect,” said the ranger, and the dog gave a third deep-chested bark.
Joe rolled back the door of the Black Hawk and was firing before he even jumped out. That corner of the hangar was littered with the dead, but more were pouring into the hangar through the massive open doorway. There was a narrow slot, almost a cattle chute, formed by the wall and the helicopter, and this allowed only a couple of the dead to rush forward at a time.
Nix gave Benny a single brave smile. “Warrior smart,” she said.
“Warrior smart.”
And for no reason at all other than that the world was insane, they laughed.
The dead rushed forward, and Benny and Nix — last of the samurai — went to meet them.
Benny edged forward and left and his kami katana felt alive in his hands, like it wanted this, craved it. Or maybe it was that now that Benny’s own spirit had come fully alive in him, the part of his spirit that resided in the steel of the sword had come alive too. In either case, as the first zombies rushed at him, Benny met the attack with cut after cut after cut. Dead limbs flew, zoms that were suddenly legless crashed down in front of the creatures behind them. The dead collided and fell over one another, and Benny was there, holding his ground, the blade flashing and flashing. Nix positioned herself ten feet away and swung Dojigiri with equal ferocity.