As they gathered themselves to pass through the air lock, Benny bent and kissed Nix quickly on the lips.
“For luck,” he said.
“I know,” she replied, smiling. “But we won’t need it. We’re going to get Chong, find Riot and Eve, and get out of here.”
It was a strangely positive thing for her to say, but Benny saw no doubt in her eyes. She believed it.
It made him want to kiss her again.
Joe looked over his shoulder at them. “Benny — you’ve been bugging me for a month to tell you why the soldiers and scientists here haven’t done much to help you. Why they haven’t let you in here.” He looked grim. “Sometimes you have to be careful what you wish for.”
With that he stepped through the air lock, took a brief look, and immediately opened fire.
Lilah was right behind him, her pistol bucking in her hands as she fired and fired.
Benny and Nix adjusted their grips on their swords.
“C’mon, Doc,” said Benny, “we won’t let anything happen to you.”
The doctor’s eyes were skeptical. “Too late for that, kids. But… thanks.”
They heard two more shots, and then a sudden silence fell over the whole complex.
Joe Ledger called to them. “It’s clear,” he said, his voice rough. “It’s all over in here.”
They passed through the air lock and saw four reapers and five zoms lying in a tangle beyond where Joe stood. Gun smoke from the ranger’s rifle hung in a blue pall around him.
Benny and Nix stepped into another scene of horror and madness.
There was a bed right inside the door. A man lay in it, his eyes wide with fury and pain, his pajamas soiled with blood and muck, his limbs thrashing as he fought to rise. Not to escape — but to attack. Ropes held him to the bed, lashing his arms and legs and torso to the metal frame. Black spit flew from the man’s screaming mouth.
Benny stared past him at the occupant of the next bed. And the next.
And all the others.
Hundreds of beds. Each one filled. Each person thrashing and moaning and biting the air. Each one trapped there by ropes.
Their uniforms hung over the backs of chairs, or were draped over the ends of the beds. The uniforms of soldiers of the American Nation. The lab coats of scientists. The special jackets of pilots.
Nix’s sword drooped in her grasp until the tip of the blade made a hollow tink against the concrete.
This was why there had been no real resistance to the reaper invasion.
This was why the jet sat idle on the tarmac.
This was why the soldiers and the scientists were so bitter.
“They’re all infected,” Benny murmured. “All of them…”
He heard a sob and turned to see Dr. McReady trembling.
“No,” she said. “No…”
Joe swapped out his magazines, his face wooden. “The infection started three months ago,” he said. “A few guards on patrol by the siren towers got swarmed by a pack of R3’s. One fatality, but a couple of the others got the black blood on them. I don’t know if it got in someone’s eyes or mouth, or if it was on one of the soldiers’ hands and he touched his face. We’ll never know. But he brought the mutagen into Sanctuary with him. We sent word to the American Nation to quarantine this place. To write it off.”
He shook his head sadly.
“Sanctuary is dead.”
They all gaped at him.
Benny got up in Joe’s face. “You brought us here, damn it. Why bring us to a graveyard?”
Joe shook his head. “When I brought you here it was to save you from Saint John and Mother Rose. But we never let you inside. We kept you away from the plague until we could make sure you were uninfected. If it wasn’t for your friend Chong, I’d have taken you kids south to North Carolina. Now you’re inside the quarantine zone. You’re as trapped as everyone else at Sanctuary.”
CHAPTER 79
Six corridors away, a team of Red Brothers moved silently through the shadows, knives ready, eyes alert, killing anyone they met. Brother Peter ran with them, his face flushed with exertion, his clothes soaked with blood.
Two soldiers tried to hold a doorway, but Brother Peter ordered a pair of reapers to rush them. The men smiled at the chance to serve their brother, serve their god, and leaped like heroes into the darkness. They let out earsplitting roars as they charged straight into a hail of bullets. The rounds chopped into them, splattering the walls with blood, turning the killers into dancing puppets and finally into inhuman rag dolls.
But as they collapsed, Brother Peter, who had run up behind them at full speed, leaped over their corpses, a knife in each hand.
The soldiers did not have time to scream.
The rest of the Red Brothers swept through the doorway and into the lab complex. Gleaming machines, racks of sanitized instruments, cabinets of medicines, and banks of computers filled the room.
One scientist was there.
A woman, with gray hair tied in a bun and reading glasses that hung on a delicate chain around her neck.
She dropped to her knees as Peter and the reapers fanned out around her.
“Please,” she begged. “Don’t.”
Brother Peter knelt in front of her. “Why not, my sister? Tell me.”
Her eyes glittered with tears. “We’re so close,” she said. “We can cure this. We’re going to cure it. Please… just give us time. We can save everyone… please believe me.”
“Believe you?” mused the reaper. “My sister, I do believe you. I believe with all my heart that you can cure the plague that has come so close to destroying all human life.”
Her expression softened from abject horror to one of surprised hope. “Then you’ll leave us alone? You won’t hurt us? You won’t wreck everything?”
He set one of his knives down and used that hand to caress her face. It was an act of such gentleness, such tenderness, that the woman actually closed her eyes and pressed her cheek against his rough palm.
“I said that I believed you, my sister,” said Brother Peter as he leaned close and rested his cheek on the top of her head. “And may god have mercy on you for the sins you have committed here in this place of blasphemy.”
Her eyes snapped wide.
Not because of his words.
They opened with shock because of the pain. She sagged back from him and looked down at the knife that Peter had buried in her chest.
“May you find forgiveness in the formless eternity of the darkness.”
“All praise to his darkness,” said the others.
Peter looked around at the reapers and then at the machines that filled the room.
“Destroy everything,” he said.
CHAPTER 80
The horror and sadness of what surrounded them was awful. On some level Benny had feared that the answer to the mystery of Sanctuary might be something like this, but he’d never allowed that thought to fully form. Now it was incontrovertible.
“Can you do anything for them?” asked Nix as she shrugged out of her pack.
“We can try,” said McReady, “but some of them… I think some of them have already gone too far over the line.”
However, she stood frozen, as if shocked by her own words and all that they implied.
Benny understood what she meant; he could see it. Some of the infected looked different from the majority of the poor people in the beds. The different ones had paler, grayer skin, and there was a quality missing from their eyes. All the infected had rage and hunger burning in their eyes, but for some that was all there was. Beyond those two things there was a blackness, like the empty shadows at the bottom of a ditch. Whatever indefinable quality that separated infected person from infected zom was gone, consumed by the insatiable appetites of the Reaper Plague.