Flesh & Bone (40 page)

Riot’s face swam into view. “What the heck are Zombie Cards?”

“Kid’s delirious.”

Chong said, “The reapers are coming. We saw them.”

“Where and how many?” demanded Joe.

“Reaper, reaper . . . ,” Benny began, and tried to work it into a rhyme, but he couldn’t.

“There are a couple of hundred of them out on the desert, heading toward the hills,” said Riot. “But a bunch came running after us.”

“On foot or on quad?”

“Both. I lost them, but they’ll find us.”

Benny wondered what they were talking about. It began to occur to him that his head was not working properly, that his thoughts were silly. The word “delirious” triggered a response that went deeper than his understanding. A voice spoke inside his head.

Think, Benny
, it said.
You saw something
.

But he did not understand what the voice meant.

Joe said, “Then we have to go now. Get to Sanctuary . . . ”

“We can’t move Benny,” insisted Nix. “His head . . . ”

“What’s an MRE?” Benny asked. They ignored him. He frowned, because he was sure that was important. He’d read it somewhere.

“We can’t fight off an army of reapers. Not here.”

“We can’t let ’em get to Sanctuary,” growled Riot. “They’ll slaughter the monks and refugees and all them scientists and—”

Joe looked stricken. “I know. They have a few soldiers there, but they can’t stop an army. And my rangers are scattered all over the place. We have to warn them. That means either we go without this kid, in which case the reapers’ll carve him into lunch meat; or we put him on a quad and let the ride out there do the job for them.”

In the distance they heard the faint buzz of quads. They all looked that way and then at one another.

“Oh God,” breathed Nix.

Benny
, whispered Tom,
you know what you saw. Tell them. Tell them
. . . .

“What I wouldn’t give for a minigun or an—”

Benny asked dazedly, “What’s a LAW rickett?”

Joe froze and stared down at him.

“What did you say?”

“That’s what it said. L-A-W-R-K-T. LAW rickett. I read it. M-R-E. R-P-G and—”

Joe suddenly bent close to Benny, his face inches away.

“A LAW rocket? God almighty, kid . . . where did you see that?” he asked in a fierce whisper.

Benny smiled and winked. “I can’t tell you,” he said. “It’s a secret.”

And then he passed out.

90

B
ENNY FELT A LOT OF HANDS ON HIM
. H
E FELT HIMSELF MOVING
. W
HEN
he opened his eyes, though, the movement had already stopped and he was back inside the airplane.

“Zoms!” he cried.

But no one reacted.

Nothing tried to bite him.

Maybe I’m wrong about that
, he decided, and went back to sleep.

The sound of quads woke him up. Quads and shouts and a dog barking.

Benny still hadn’t seen any dog. He just heard one. A big one too.

“They’re coming,” said Riot. “God—Brother Alexi’s back with a slew of reapers. Gotta be fifty, sixty of them.”

“Oh God,” Nix said, “there’s too many!”

Someone laughed. Joe? Was Benny’s Zombie Card laughing? Silly.

He opened his eyes and saw Joe carrying something that looked like a big toy gun. Like one of those big plastic toys from before First Night. A Super Soaker. Mayor Kirsch bought
one for his kids. Cost three hundred ration dollars. That was more than Mrs. Riley made in a whole season doing sewing.

“Nix?” he asked.

A small, warm hand took his, and Benny tried to turn toward her, but his head wouldn’t move. His whole body felt weird, like it was tied to a board. How crazy was that?

Nix leaned over, and he saw her face. She was so pretty.

“Nix, is your mom here?”

Pain flickered in her green eyes.

“Mama’s dead, Benny. You know that.”

“Oh. I thought I heard her laughing. She was baking muffins.”

Something hot and wet fell on his cheek.

A tear.

Where did that come from?

The roar of quads filled the whole cabin. Benny thought it sounded like a zillion of them. People were yelling. Roaring. Cursing, too.

“They’re coming!” shrieked Nix. “They’re climbing up!”

Joe’s voice roared: “Fire in the hole!”

There was big hissing sound, and then the whole plane shook with a gigantic rolling
booooom!

The sound was too big for Benny, and he went back down in the darkness. He was sure Nix’s mom was baking muffins.

91

N
IX AND
C
HONG STOOD AT THE EDGE OF THE HATCH AND STARED DOWN
at horror.

The air was thick with smoke from the LAW rockets and rocket-propelled grenades that the ranger had fired. The air tasted of gunpowder and wrongness.

The clearing and the whole edge of the plateau was a slaughterhouse. Burned and blasted bodies lay everywhere. Even the trees at the edge of the forest had died in the barrage as the weapons of the old world wrought their carnage.

They were both crying.

“One man,” whispered Nix.

Chong nodded, unable to speak. Sick in body, sick in soul.

One man.

The ranger, Joe, had used those terrible weapons. The reapers, the chosen ones, the elite of Mother Rose’s army, had poured out of the forest, brought back by Alexi to claim the weapons hidden in the shrine. They thought themselves to be the most powerful force left on earth. They thought themselves to be unstoppable—those among them who believed in God and those who only believed in Mother Rose—they surged forward to slaughter the pitiful handful of people who stood against them.

And they all died.

Every last one of them. More than half of Mother Rose’s army. Gone.

Nix and Chong had not fired a shot.

Nor had Lilah.

Or Riot.

Even Grimm had only watched.

One man.

Now Joe walked among the bodies, looking for signs of reanimation. Every now and then a hollow crack broke the silence. As he reloaded, he looked around, and his eyes met those of Chong and Nix. The ranger’s face was totally without expression as he pocketed the empty magazine and slapped a new one into place. His eyes were not bright with battle lust or dark with emotion. His eyes were . . . nothing. They were as dead in their way as the zoms. Joe stood for a moment, watching them watching him, then turned without a word and went about his grotesque but necessary work.

Chong found his voice, but it was thin and fragile. “When we fought Preacher Jack and his people at Gameland,” he began slowly, “I thought I understood what war was really like. But . . . ”

“This is war,” said Nix. “This is what it really looks like. God . . . there has to be something better than this.”

Chong nodded and turned away.

But then a new sound intruded into the moment. A motor sound, but not the sound of quads. It was bigger. Much, much bigger.

They leaned out.

The sound was massive, rolling out over the tops of the trees.

They turned and looked upward.

“Oh my God!” cried Nix.

Even Chong, despite everything, smiled.

The thing was enormous and white, with massive wings stretching on either side. It flew directly over the clearing, and its shadow caressed their faces as they watched. It flew low and descended toward the red desert mountains in a graceful line.

Down among the dead, Joe stopped and shielded his eyes as he looked up. Stained with soot and blood, he smiled.

The jet.

92

I
N THE LAST GLOW OF THE DYING SUN
, M
OTHER
R
OSE STOOD AT THE EDGE
of the forest. She watched the jet descend toward Sanctuary. Once, long ago, she had seen it flying high in the sky, and she’d thought it was a passenger liner. How foolish a thought that had been. She knew what it was now; her daughter had told her. A C-5 Galaxy. A cargo jet that brought staff and supplies to Sanctuary.

Even if Mako hadn’t revealed the location of the place, the landing jet would have been a beacon.

Not that it mattered anymore. Mother Rose had less than one hundred reapers left. A fraction of her force. All the rest . . . ?

Alexi had come running from the shrine, bloody and furious, claiming that children and a ranger were trying to take the weapons from the fallen plane. Mother Rose had sent so many of her reapers back with him. Too many.

And all of them . . . gone. Dead. Torn to rags by the weapons she had hidden and protected from Saint John and the rest of the Night Church.

Her weapons. The tools that would have made her the queen of this world.

Gone. The weapons, her reapers, her dreams . . . gone.

Only Alexi returned. Bloodier still. Defeated. A general without an army.

Her remaining reapers milled in the darkness. Not enough to take Sanctuary away from the monks and scientists who worked there.

Not enough.

“We’re done,” said Alexi.

Mother Rose almost stabbed him. Her hand was on her knife, but her heart was breaking and she simply could not do it. It was over.

“We were so close,” she said.

Alexi leaned on his hammer and hung his head. “One day,” he said. “If we’d jumped on this yesterday. One damn day.” He let the handle of his hammer fall away to thump into the sand. “Now what? How the hell do we come back from this?”

Mother Rose shook her head. “I don’t know. I . . . I’ll think of something.”

“No,” said a voice, soft as a shadow.

Mother Rose whipped her head around.

“Saint John,” she said in a whisper.

“Get back!” barked Brother Alexi, lunging for his hammer. A shadow rose up from behind a bush as the giant stretched out for his weapon, and then Alexi simply sagged forward and collapsed onto the ground. Mother Rose stared in incomprehension as the sand beneath Alexi darkened and glistened wetly. Alexi tried to speak, but there was no possibility of that. Not with what was left of his throat. He blinked once, twice, and then stared at the darkening sky.

The shadow moved into the light.

Brother Peter wore no expression at all on his face. The fading sunlight gleamed on the bloody knife in his hand.

Saint John walked slowly toward Mother Rose. He had no weapon in his hand, but she wasn’t fooled. Saint John himself was a weapon, and every fold and pocket of his clothes hid blades. He was, after all, Saint John of the Knife. How many times had she seen this man reach out in the most casual fashion, his hand seemingly empty at the beginning of a gesture and filled with steel at the end, and between start and finish the air bloomed with red. He was the greatest killer the world had ever known; she believed that with her whole heart, even if she had never believed in the saint’s God or the Night Church.

To her, it was all a scam. A means to an end.

And this was an end.

Not the one she dreamed of. Not the one she wanted.

Saint John stopped inches away. His face, though not handsome, was beautiful, the way the carved faces of saints in churches are beautiful. Cold and remote and inhuman.

Tears dropped from Mother Rose’s eyes. She knew they would do nothing to change the shape of this day. Nor would anything she could say.

If her reapers were closer, if Alexi was alive, if they had the weapons from the shrine, then she would have tried to manage this moment. To shape it, to try and work a con on the saint.

But those possibilities had set with the burning sun.

She said, “I’m sorry.”

Strangely, surprisingly, she meant it.

Saint John bent close and kissed her on the lips. Without
passion, but with love. With the kind of love only he understood.

“I know,” he said.

“Please don’t let it hurt,” she whispered.

“No,” he said.

And it did not.

Mother Rose fell into his arms, and Saint John lowered her to the ground. Then he stepped back, turned, and with Brother Peter at his side, walked away.

She lay there as the sun set. Time was dancing away from her.

There was movement somewhere to her right, and she managed to turn her head, just a little. Brother Alexi was stirring, crawling across the grass toward her.

Alive
, she thought, her heart filling with joy.
My love is alive
.

Except that he wasn’t.

The giant was as pale as the distant stars, and as he bent toward her she could see the darkness. It was in his eyes and in his open mouth.

It’s real
, she thought. Her last thought.
The darkness is real
.

93

W
HEN
B
ENNY OPENED HIS EYES ONCE MORE, THE WORLD HAD CHANGED
.

It wasn’t the inside of the plane. It was daytime.

There was a motor roar, and even though he could not turn his head, he could cut his eyes left and right. There were quads. Riot and Chong on one. Nix and Eve on another. A big dog galloping along with them.

Is that a dog barking?
wondered Benny. The dog was all in armor, and Benny thought that was cool.

He heard the motors slow.

“Sanctuary,” said a voice.

Nix?

He thought so.

“We have to hurry,” said another voice. Joe. “He’s slipping fast.”

Benny wondered if they were talking about him.

Or Chong?

The quads moved forward, and Benny looked up to see a big chain-link fence.

We’re home, he thought. We made it all the way back to Mountainside.

But there was a sign beside the gate he’d never seen on the fence back home. It read:

SANCTUARY

GIVE ME YOUR TIRED, YOUR POOR

YOUR HUDDLED MASSES YEARNING TO BREATHE FREE

But below that the original words were still visible, though sand-blasted to pale ghosts of letters by the unrelenting desert winds. As Benny passed the sign he read it:

AREA 51