“Nothing is happening with—”
“Mother, you know that’s not true. Our people have seen case after case of gray people moving in flocks. That never happened before. There are rumors of gray people who move almost as fast as the living. Even some incidents of them picking up rocks and stones as weapons.”
“So what?” countered Mother Rose in her haughty voice. “All life changes. Even un-life. It’s part of nature, isn’t it?”
“That’s just it,” insisted Sister Sun. “The Reaper Plague isn’t part of nature, as I’ve said many times.”
Saint John turned now and held up a hand. Both women fell immediately silent.
“The plague that raised the dead and destroyed the cities of sinful man was brought to earth by the divine hand of Lord Thanatos.”
“All praise to his darkness,” said the women in unison.
“Therefore it is part of the natural order of the universe.”
“Honored One,” said Sister Sun, “please listen to me. Both of you — listen. I know this plague. I studied it after the outbreak. My team was working with the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. No one alive knows this disease better than me except for Monica McReady.”
“That heretic is dead,” said Mother Rose.
“We don’t know that for sure,” said Sister Sun. “We sent five teams of reapers out to search for her, and two teams never returned.”
Mother Rose dismissed the argument with a flick of her hand.
“If McReady was tampering with the disease — if she was trying to create a cure for it, then she might have caused it to mutate,” said Sister Sun passionately. “Any possible change to the disease can have a significant impact on the predictable behavior of the gray people, and that is a danger to our church. You know it is. If you let me look at the research materials on the plane, I might be able to determine what she was doing. Maybe I can stop it, or perhaps learn enough to predict what changes are occurring so we can adapt behavioral modifications into our church doctrine. But we can’t allow random changes to manifest without a response from the church. Think of how disruptive that would be, especially to reaper groups that have a high percentage of new recruits. Doubt is our enemy.”
Mother Rose shook her head the whole time. “The plane is a shrine, and I have put my seal on it. It stays closed.”
She turned her back and walked away.
Sister Sun gripped Saint John’s sleeve. “Please, Honored One, surely you understand the danger.”
“The shrine belongs to Mother Rose,” he said.
“But—”
“It belongs to her.”
The saint gently pulled his arm away and walked off under the shadows of the trees, aware that she stood and watched him the whole time. He did not let her see the smile that he wore.
CHAPTER 10
The mess hall was in a Quonset hut set behind the dormitory hangar. Rows of long trestle tables, folding chairs, a steam table were set up for self-service. Benny picked up a tray and a plate, slopped some runny eggs and links of what he hoped was pork sausage. It might as easily have been lizard or turtle, as Benny had already found out.
There was never a lot of food. Enough, but none to spare.
The first time Benny had come here, he’d piled his tray high. No one had said anything until he sat down across from Riot, who gave him a stern glare.
“Y’all got enough food there for a pregnant sow,” she’d said to him, her voice heavy with an Appalachian accent.
“I know, right?” he said, and jammed a forkful of eggs into his mouth. “It’s not even that bad.”
Riot was thin and hard-muscled and very pretty, with a shaved head that was tattooed with roses and wild vines. She wore jeans and a leather vest buttoned up over nothing else that Benny could detect. “Maybe that zom knocked all good sense out your head, boy… but did it knock out all your manners, too? There’s four people not going to eat today because y’all took enough food for five. Look around — you think there’s anything close to abundance round these parts? Everyone here’s a few short steps away from starving and here you are, stuffing your face like it’s your birthday.”
When Benny looked around, all he saw were the bland, accepting smiles of the monks. Then he looked down at the heap of eggs, the mounds of potatoes and vegetables, and the half loaf of bread. Without another word he got up and walked back to the steam table and placed his tray in front of the first person in line. Then he left and didn’t eat anything else all day.
Now he had it down to a rhythm. A scoop of eggs, half a roast potato, a slice of bread thinly coated with butter, and a cup of well water. Always a little less than he wanted, always leaving a little extra for the next person. After the first couple of hungry days, Benny began to feel good about that. Now it was his ritual. He also spent time every day working in the bean fields and fruit groves, doing unskilled grunt labor to help. It was exhausting work, but it felt good. And there was the side benefit of approaching it as exercise to reclaim his strength and muscle tone.
He tried to get some of the monks working the fields to sing a few of the off-color work songs Morgie had learned from his dad, but that kite wouldn’t fly.
Today Riot was on the other side of the mess hall, seated next to Eve, the tiny blond-haired girl Benny had rescued after they’d both fallen into a ravine filled with zoms. Eve was laughing at something Riot said, and even from that distance Benny could hear the strange, fractured quality of that laughter. The poor kid had been through too much. Reapers had raided and burned the settlement in which she’d lived and slaughtered nearly everyone. The refugees spent several mad days running through deserts and forests, only to be hunted down and sent “into the darkness.” Eve had witnessed the terrible moment when reapers cut down her father and mother.
The monks worked with Eve every day, coaxing the little girl inch by inch out of the red shadows of her trauma, but even though there had been some progress, it was apparent that Eve might be permanently damaged. Benny was almost as worried about Riot as he was about Eve — the former reaper seemed to take it as her personal mission to “save” the girl. Benny dreaded what might happen to Riot if Eve’s fragile sanity finally collapsed.
It made Benny both sad and furious, because the reapers were so much worse than the zoms. The dead were mindless, acting according to the impulses of whatever force reanimated their bodies; the reapers knew what they were doing.
In his calmer moments, Benny tried to explore the viewpoint that the reapers actually believed that what they were doing was right, that they believed they were serving the will of their god. But he could not climb into the mind-set of a religion based on extinction. Even if the reapers believed that their god wanted everyone dead, they had no right to force that belief on everyone else. They had no right to turn the life of a child like Eve into a living horror show.
No right at all.
“Hey,” said a familiar voice behind him, and he turned, already smiling because a bad day had just gotten a whole lot better.
“Hey yourself,” he said, and leaned across the table to give Nix Riley a quick, light kiss. She was a beautiful girl with wild red hair, emerald green eyes that sparkled with intelligence, and more freckles than there were stars in the sky. A long pink scar ran from her hairline almost to her jaw, but even with that she looked young, and fresh and happy. It had been months since she looked this good. Like Eve, Nix had suffered through the absolute horror of seeing her mother murdered in front of her. Not by reapers — those killers were not yet a part of their lives — but by the brutal bounty hunters Charlie Pink-eye and the Motor City Hammer. Nix herself had been beaten and kidnapped by the pair. They were going to make her fight in the zombie pits of Gameland. Tom and Benny had rescued her, but from then on life for Nix had become a constant nightmare, running from one room in hell to another.