Grimm leapt into the gap between them, spikes and blades bristling from head and shoulders and flanks. As the dead flung themselves forward, the monstrous mastiff cut them to pieces. Not with teeth, but with all that razor-sharp metal.
While all this happened, Benny felt another change occurring deep within him. His mind felt like it was detaching from the moment and from the normal flow of time. It drifted back to watch from a distance that offered a different perspective, more of a spherical view of the situation. One that allowed him to see his position, that position’s relevance to where Nix fought, the distance to where Joe knelt in front of the locked door, the opening of the chute, the numbers of the dead, the presence of the living reapers among the crowd. The big ranger worked feverishly to pick the lock.
All this was delicately separated from any emotional involvement, as if a surgeon’s deft cut with a scalpel had removed it so that it would not be impeded or influenced by any normal human involvement. It was how Benny imagined great chess players viewed a game. Clearly and from a distance.
He saw his own body, its posture, the spacing of his hands on the handle, the angle of his cuts. He saw small imperfections in the movements, and as he observed them his body made the corrections that increased the speed and efficiency of each cut.
The dead began to pile up in front of him, his enemies becoming his bulwark against the main body of the horde. Benny knew, with perfect clarity, that had he been in a fight with so many of the fast zoms even a month ago — even a week ago — he would have already died. Even a week ago. The change he’d felt earlier tonight had somehow snapped together all the disparate parts of him. All the aspects of himself that had been growing like weeds — fast, but wild and in different directions — suddenly came together within his soul. They were all there inside him. His experiences in the Ruin. The lessons from Tom and the lessons learned from both victories and defeats. The love he felt for Nix — and his new understanding of the forces at work in this red-haired warrior girl that he loved. The fierce anger at the injustices committed by the Night Church in the name of religion. The determination to have a future despite all the adult voices that kept crying out that there was no future to have. The faith in himself — in this person he had become. All of that coalesced inside a quiet space in Benny Imura’s mind.
There were sharp cracks as Lilah, standing guard over Dr. McReady, fired carefully aimed shots through the open gap between Nix and Benny. Every shot hit a target, but not every bullet struck the head. Unlimited and perfect head shots every time were an impossibility with a handgun, and Benny understood that now. It was a logical thing, and therefore it was open to his new perception.
This is how a samurai thinks, he mused. This is what it was like for Tom when he was in a battle. That’s why he always looked calm.
Even that thought was cataloged without emotional involvement. It was a truth, and it became part of his experience.
“Let’s go!”
The shout drew him back to his body, and Benny turned to see Lilah and Dr. McReady vanish through the opened door. Joe brought his rifle up as he stepped into the space between Benny and Nix.
“Grimm! Back!”
The dog spun around, retreated, and raced to Joe’s side, leaving the gap unguarded.
“I got this,” Joe yelled. “Get inside.”
Benny and Nix wasted no time. They spun too, and ran for the door as Joe hosed the opening of the chute with automatic gunfire. Then he jacked a round into the grenade launcher mounted below the rifle barrel and fired. Jacked and fired, jacked and fired. He angled the blasts toward the wall, well away from the Black Hawk, but the blast radius destroyed anything that stepped into the chute.
Then Joe spun and dashed for the door.
As he leaped through, Nix slammed it shut and Benny shot the bolt on the inside. Grimm howled in rage and triumph, and the echoes banged off the walls.
Outside, dead hands began pounding on the door.
CHAPTER 77
“Will the door hold?” asked Nix, her face flushed with fear and excitement.
“It’ll stop the dead,” said Joe, “but those reapers will figure a way in. No time to waste.”
They were in a stone hallway that led to a flight of stairs that plunged down into shadows. Joe tried the light switch and a few lights flickered on, but most of the bulbs had been smashed. Shell casings littered the floor, and the walls were smeared with blood along with some of the black mucus.
“Don’t get any of it on you,” warned McReady.
“Wasn’t planning to,” said Benny.
From below, they could hear a confusion of sounds. Gunfire, moans, shouts, and screams.
Lilah dropped the empty magazine from her pistol and slapped in a new one. “Chong’s down there.”
Joe touched her arm. “Listen to me, Chong is in the basement below the blockhouse. That’s three hundred yards from here, and there are a lot of doors between here and there. There’s also ten ways to get to those cells, or at least to the central corridor that leads down to the cells. We have to get down these steps and find the maintenance access door. We can use that and maybe slip past the zoms, maybe get ahead of them. You understand?”
She nodded.
Joe touched her cheek. “We’ll get to him.”
But there was a deadness in Lilah’s eyes, and Benny feared that the Lost Girl was already losing hope.
Nix said, “Wait, what about the soldiers? Where are they? Why aren’t they fighting back? All I saw were the guards who usually take care of the bridge… where are the rest of them? Where are the soldiers we just saw run in here?”
“That’s right,” said McReady. “There are two hundred men here….”
“There are forty-eight soldiers here,” Joe said. “And thirteen members of the medical staff.”
“Did the others ship out?”
Joe’s eyes were bleak. “I wish.”
Distant gunfire and screams seemed to answer for him. He put his rifle stock to his shoulder and went quickly and quietly down the stairs. Benny looked at the others, saw the varying expressions in their eyes. Joe’s last two words had punched everyone in the gut.
One by one they followed him down the bloodstained stairs. They found two dead soldiers who were just starting to reanimate. Joe put them down with precise single shots to their heads.
Benny went last, and as he ghosted along behind the others, he thought about all the bad things Joe’s words could mean. And he wondered if, in all this madness, they would ever find Riot and Eve. Were they alive? Were they dead? Had the wild former reaper somehow managed to battle her way through the sea of killers to defend the little girl she treasured?
If anyone could, Benny knew that she would.
The steps went down, turned a corner, went down again, and then ended in a round chamber from which four corridors spiked off in different directions. Joe paused and they all stopped to listen. The most intense sounds of battle came from the left-hand corridor. There were indistinct sounds from the middle two, and only silence from the one on the right. But the lights were out in that tunnel, and the edge of the wall leading into it was smeared with black goo.