Benny swallowed a lump the size of a fist. “And… Lilah?”
“She knows. We have to be really, really careful. We can touch and all, and we can kiss. But for anything else… Jeez, Benny, this is crazy. I love her, man,” said Chong, wiping at his eyes. “I love her more than anything, but I don’t want to make her sick.”
“I know…”
“No,” said Chong, “you don’t. I told her that she should stay away from me. She shouldn’t ever touch me; she shouldn’t ever get close to me. Dr. McReady told her the same thing….”
“What did Lilah say?”
Chong gave a short, rueful laugh. “She threatened to punch Dr. McReady’s teeth down her throat and told me to stop being a stupid town boy. She said that if I ever tried to go away from her again, she’d break my legs. She’s very romantic, that girl. Sweet as a kitten… if a kitten was a Siberian tiger with mood issues.”
Benny grinned. “Yeah, but for some inexplicable reason she loves you.”
“That only proves how crazy she is.”
Benny looked around. “Hey — where’s Nix?”
“Nix was here until like a minute before you woke up. I think she went to the bathroom. They have actual bathrooms here. No squatting behind bushes and wiping your butt with poison ivy.”
“That’s not exactly what we did.”
“Felt like it.”
“And where’s Lilah?”
“Ah,” he said, his smile fading. “The doctors wanted to give her something called an MRI. No idea what that is, but they said that she might have a skull fracture.” He shook his head. “I can’t have anything happen to her, Benny. Nothing.”
Benny reached out to try and give him a reassuring pat on the arm, but then winced as pain shot through his back.
“Owwww! What the hell?”
Chong nodded. “Yeah, they said the painkillers would be wearing off pretty soon.”
“Painkillers…? For what?”
“Aww, it’s so cute that you thought of me first before remembering that you had a big ol’ sword fight with a psycho killer. That little twinge you’re feeling is a knife wound, genius. They said that the anesthetic might make you a little slow. Not that this is a new mental state for you.”
“Bite me,” said Benny through gritted teeth.
“No thanks,” said Chong. “From now on I’m going to explore that whole vegan thing.”
“This… hurts. How bad is it? What happened?”
“Basically you got stabbed in the wrong place,” Chong said, and he told Benny enough so that the door of memories opened up. The fight with Brother Peter replayed in Benny’s mind with painful clarity.
“How am I not dead?”
“Because fortune favors the stupid,” said Chong. “The knife hit your ribs at the wrong angle. Didn’t puncture anything important enough to kill you. More like a scratch.”
“Could have freaking fooled me. If I’m only scratched, why did I pass out?”
“Because you’re a girlie-man?”
“Really, seriously, bite me.”
“They said it was blood loss, shock, and something about nerve compression. They put in a crapload of stitches. They said that you’ll be able to get out of bed today, though only for a couple of minutes at a time. The armor you were wearing kept the knife from going in too deep. And they examined Brother Peter’s knife. There was no infectious matter on it. Not like on the arrow I got shot with.”
“That’s something.”
“I can’t believe you agreed to a duel with a guy who makes Charlie Pink-eye look like a punk.”
“It wasn’t a duel. I had a plan.”
“A plan to get stabbed?”
“Yes,” Benny said, and he explained what he’d done. “It was like sacrificing a queen to get a checkmate.”
Chong stared at him. “That hovers somewhere between the bravest thing I ever heard of and the stupidest. It’s probably both.”
“Probably,” agreed Benny.
Chong shook his head. “As for the rest, I got bits and pieces of everything else. That guy Joe is here somewhere too. Is he the same Joe Ledger from the Zombie Cards?”
“Yes. Is he all right?”
“He caught a break too. They operated on him and were able to save his life. Lots of damage, though. Dr. McReady said it’ll be months before he can fight again.”
“Oh, man…”
“Point is, Benny, we’re both alive, and so are Nix and Lilah.” Chong paused. “After what happened, after things started to go bad in the forest out there… I thought this was it, you know? I thought we were all dead. It seemed like the logical end to all of this. I mean, who were we? Four kids who had no business leaving home. Okay, so maybe Lilah’s different, but after Tom died, we should have gone back to Mountainside.”
And that fast the cobwebs in Benny’s head blew away.
“Mountainside!” he cried. “Oh my God!”
CHAPTER 87
They formed a circle around Joe Ledger’s bed. Benny in a wheel-chair, Chong and Lilah holding hands, Nix standing next to Benny. Dr. McReady and Colonel Reid were there too.
The ranger was awake and in great pain. His color was bad, and sweat beaded his forehead. Dr. McReady was angry with him because he refused to take any pain meds.
“I need to think,” he growled, “and I can’t do that pumped full of morphine.”
“Pain increases stress and—”
“Oh, stick a sock in it, Monica,” he fired back. “I’ve had a lot worse than—”
“I know, I know, Joe, I’ve heard all the stories. You’ve been shot, stabbed, run over, and mauled by wild animals. I’m very impressed with your level of testosterone, but the simple fact remains that those injuries happened to a much younger man and—”
“Like I said, stick a sock in it.”
Grimm — no longer wearing his armor — lay beside the bed and gave a hearty whuff.
Joe turned his red-rimmed, bleary eyes to Benny. “Go on, kid… what did you want to tell us?”
Benny repeated what Brother Peter had said with his dying breath.
Mountainside will burn.
“We have to get home,” finished Benny.
“We can’t,” said Colonel Reid. “We’ve secured this facility, but topside it’s still a war zone. All my soldiers are either dead or in the infirmary, and there are half a million infected out there. More, now that they’ve probably killed all the people in the hangars. God knows how many reapers.”
“And all the monks,” said Nix. She wore a fresh bandage over the cut from Brother Peter.
Chong said, “What about Riot and that little girl, Eve?”
No one wanted to meet his eyes.
“They were up there,” said Benny. “We… didn’t see them when we landed.”
The implications of that hung in the air.
“You’re saying they’re dead?” asked Chong.
“There are places to hide,” said Joe weakly. “And Riot knows every one of them.”
“Maybe,” said Reid, “but that doesn’t change anything. We don’t have the manpower to take the compound back from the dead, and we can’t call for help. The reapers trashed the communications center. And we’re running on the backup generator because they destroyed the main power plant.”
“We can’t be stuck down here,” said Benny, banging his fist on the metal tubing of Joe’s bed. “Our town—”
“Your town might as well be on the far side of the moon,” said Colonel Reid. “Those balloons were filled with the mutagen. It’s a red powder, sticks to everything. Until the mutagen weakens the infected through decomposition, we’re trapped. I just hope the generator lasts long enough for that to happen.”