“Lock and load, little darlin’,” bellowed Joe as he gunned the engine.
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The first reaper fell with a red poppy blossoming in the center of his chest. That stalled the others for a short second, and Nix stole her chance. She whirled and ran for the mound of dirt near the front of the wrecked plane. She knew from her training that if she could gain the high ground, she might have a slim chance.
It was bravado, she knew. A delusion, because there was nowhere to go once she made the high ground. The reapers could catch her.
Or she could lead them away from the plane and give Benny a chance.
If only Benny would do the smart thing and take it. If only he would stop thinking that he had to be Tom now that Tom was dead.
She ran.
Months of hard training in Tom’s Warrior Smart program had made Nix lean, toned her muscles, made her cat quick. She outpaced the reapers and was halfway up the slope before they were organized. Then the whole mass of them was racing along the length of the plane in murderous pursuit.
Nix climbed and climbed.
One of the reapers, faster than the others, came flying up the slope after her and dove to grab her ankles. Nix fell hard, but as she landed she twisted around and fired.
The reaper pitched backward down the slope and crashed into two others.
Nix scrambled on all fours to the top of the slope and flopped over the rim of hard-packed dirt. She rolled to her knees and clawed her bokken from its sling. She rose, turning to meet the charge.
She froze and stared.
In absolute horror.
The reapers gaped in horror too.
They screamed.
They tried to run.
But it was already too late.
From the open hatch of the airplane came a horde of zombies. Dozens of them in colored jumpsuits, boiling out of the broken plane like cockroaches, leaping down onto the reapers, heedless of whatever bones they broke in the fall. The reapers tried to turn, tried to flee, but they were in one another’s way. The zoms dove at them.
Most of them were lumbering monsters.
But not all.
Some were fast.
Some were very fast.
Brother Alexi roared in annoyance. “They can’t hurt you, you silly buggers. You’re all wearing the tassels. Get a damn grip.”
He strode toward the reapers, who were wrestling on the ground with the living dead. His look of annoyance lasted three steps. Then he saw blood geyser up.
The screams stopped him in his tracks.
The high-pitched, awful screams.
Nix saw the way doubt carved itself onto the giant’s face, and then those lines instantly eroded into outright fear.
These dead were not stopped by the chemical on the red streamers. They did not react to it at all.
Alexi snatched up the silver dog whistle he wore around his neck and blew fiercely. The dead — a few of them — looked up briefly. Then they returned to the meat that was fresh and close at hand.
The slaughter was appalling.
Nix, alone at the top of the slope, realized with sudden clarity what had happened. She whispered a single, shocked word. “Benny.”
And as if by magic, she heard him call her name.
“NIX!”
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Benny leaned out through the broken windows of the cockpit.
“Nix!” he yelled.
Twenty feet away Nix Riley whirled and stared in all the wrong places first. Then she spotted Benny, and the smile that bloomed on her face was the brightest and most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
“Come on!” he cried.
She ran along the top of the mound toward him, cutting through the shadows cast by the three dead pilots writhing on their T-bars.
“Try to climb up,” he said.
Nix turned to watch the carnage at the bottom of the slope. She winced and turned away in disgust.
“No… we’ll be trapped in there. See if you can climb down here.”
Benny climbed onto the control panel, kicked out the last jagged shards of the shattered windows, and wriggled out into the fresh air. He slid awkwardly down the crumpled nose and dropped nine feet to the top of the slope, landing with a grunt. Nix caught him, but they lost their balance and fell backward. Benny caught something out of the corner of his eye, and before he could twist out of the way, he struck his head on one of the T-bars. The zoms moaned down at him, and snakes of fire writhed through the air all around him.
“Benny! Are you all right?” asked Nix.
He cursed and groaned as Nix pulled him to his feet.
“You’re bleeding,” she said.
Benny dragged his forearm across his face, and it came away with a bright red smear.
“Swell.”
They looked down the slope at the mayhem. There was so much blood and movement that it was almost impossible to tell the living dead from the dying. They backed away and peered out from behind the nose of the plane.
“Did you let the zoms out?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said.
“How?”
Benny said nothing. He closed his eyes and was back in that darkened cabin, a new makeshift torch in one hand, his quieting knife in the other. The idea had been insane then, and it felt much crazier now.
He had to free the zom farthest from the door first, and for a terrible moment he had crouched there, staring into those dead eyes, trapped between the need to help Nix and his own horror. The zom’s eyes were milky, and even though Benny knew that there was no mind behind them — no personality, no humanity left — he felt like he was committing some awful sin.
“Nix,” he whispered as he slipped the point of the knife into the silver wire that held the zom’s mouth shut. The wire was thin and the blade was strong. The wire parted easily. All Benny had to do was cut a couple of loops, and the zom did the rest as it fought to open its mouth. And bite.
He debated pulling out the network of wires that covered its head, but decided not to. He had no idea what its purpose was, and this didn’t seem like the time to find out.
Benny quickly slashed the bindings on hands and feet, but even in his panic he was no fool. His training was right there, burning like a beacon as he worked. He cut the ropes almost all the way through, leaving only threads.
He did this over and over again, working with a pace that crossed the line into frenzy. Terror was the whip that drove him. His knife slashed and cut, and sometimes it gouged chunks of dry flesh from the zoms.
As he went along row after row, the cabin filled with the dry rustle of zoms fighting to break the last threads.
The first ones tore free before Benny was done. They began shuffling toward him.
Benny bit back a scream and slashed at the nylon straps holding a stack of metal cases in place, and suddenly hundreds of pounds of dead weight crashed down on the zoms. One of them collapsed with a broken neck, but for the others the cases were nothing more than an obstacle to climb over to get to their meal.
In the flickering torchlight, Benny saw that there was a second row of cases behind the stack he’d toppled. They were made of heavy-duty blue plastic and marked with a design that everyone who had survived First Night knew all too well: a biohazard symbol. The cases were stenciled in white letters:
REAPER PLAGUE
MUTATION SAMPLES
HANDLE WITH EXTREME CAUTION
The zoms kept coming, and Benny heard himself whimpering, making small cries and yelps, as he cut the last zoms free.
He scuttled backward, knocking over more crates.
The big stack of metal boxes fell next. A zom closed in on Benny, and he shoved one labeled LAW RKTS in its face. The zom flew backward into others. The container case slid off the stack and crashed down on its corner. The impact popped the hinges so the case flopped open. Benny glanced at it and saw something that vaguely resembled a gun, but it wasn’t anything he understood how to use. He ignored it and kept scramb
ling backward.
That was when Benny almost died.
He heard a sudden growl. Not a moan — a growl — and he looked up to see a zom climbing over the other zoms. Climbing fast. It was one of two zoms dressed in green jumpsuits — and Benny remembered too late the notations he and Nix had read on the clipboard, about the zoms in green.
This is an entirely new classification… able to negotiate obstacles… avoid many of the objects thrown at it… use simple tools. This reanimate appeared to be able to grasp certain concepts, particularly stealth and subterfuge.
The zom snarled at him. Its eyes were not dead eyes. They were more like those of the lions who had surrounded the camp. There was intelligence in them. If not human, then some new order of primitive intelligence.
A hateful intelligence.
The zom came clawing and scrambling its way over the others, howling out its hunger, racing straight at Benny.
Behind it, the second green-jumpsuited zom tore free of its bindings and hissed like a snake.
Benny backed away, his torch falling from his hand.
He spun and ran as fast as he could.
The zoms crawled over the others, dropped onto the metal deck, and ran after him.
Benny dove through the cargo bay hatch, across the narrow corridor, slammed into the cockpit door, jerked the handle hard, shoved his weight against it, jumped inside, slammed the door shut, and shot the handle back into place.
Then Tom spoke in his head for the first time in hours.
Some zoms can turn door handles.
Benny thought it was a slice of memory served up in a moment of need, but it still sounded like Tom was right there behind him.
He looked down at the handle.
It began to turn.
With a cry, Benny grabbed it and shoved it to the locked position. There was a shallow well around the handle so the whole door was flush.
The handle jerked and rattled with incredible force. This was not the fumbling of a zom, not according to everything Benny had seen. This was coordinated. This was powerful.
Benny thought he had already reached the limit of how high his terror could soar.
He was wrong.
He held on with one hand while he desperately scrabbled in his pockets for something he could use to wedge the handle in place. The only thing he had that was strong enough was his quieting knife.
Outside he heard the first screams as the freed zoms attacked the reapers.
With no choice left to him, Benny jammed the knife into the narrow slot between the handle and the steel door. He jammed it in hard until there was no give at all.
Instantly the zom gave up on the handle and began pounding on the door with insane fury.
Then nothing.
These memories replayed in Benny’s head in a second, and he heard the echo of Nix’s question.
“How?”
How had he let them out?
“Don’t ask,” he said, drawing his sword. “Come on… we have to get out of here and get these papers to Sanctuary.”
Together they edged away from the fight. They turned to make a dash for the safety of the woods.
Safety, however, was not theirs to have.
There was a zombie in the way.
He wore a bloody and torn green jumpsuit.
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Riot drove the quad like she had a death wish.
The machine bounced and jounced and bucked as she pushed it to the limits of speed and maneuverability. Even belted in, Chong and Eve had to hold on for dear life.
Chong kept praying that they would pass through some kind of veil and cross from a day that could only be part of some mad nightmare and into yesterday, when the worst problem was knowing which berries wouldn’t give him diarrhea.
Then he heard the strangest sound.
A small burble of happy laughter.
He looked down at the child who clung to him. Her face was alight with sheer joy as the quad banged over fallen branches and leaped channels cut by rainwater.
Eve grinned up at him, and for the first time since he had first met her, Chong saw the uncomplicated purity of happiness. It was so odd, so totally out of keeping with everything that was happening, that even though he smiled back at her, Chong was deeply afraid for this child.
He did not for a moment believe that a kid who was borderline catatonic could simply “snap out of it.” No way. Chong kept his smile in place, but he felt that he was looking at the beautiful face of a horror deeper than his own infection.
God, don’t let her be all the way over the edge, he silently prayed. If I have any grace coming to me, then let’s agree that I don’t really need it anymore. Give it to the kid. Give Eve a chance.
Even his prayers were orderly, and Chong was good with it. He meant every word.
He closed his eyes for a moment as a fresh wave of motion-induced nausea wormed through his guts.
Lilah, he thought. Lilah...
Riot’s quad burst out of the forest and into the desert. “We’ll be in Sanctuary in less than—”
She screamed and slammed on the brakes.
Chong opened his eyes.
The desert was filled with reapers. More than a hundred of them.
One of them, a tall woman who — unlike the other reapers — had long flowing hair, drew a slender knife and pointed it at Riot.
Riot groaned and spoke a word that Chong knew would burn like acid on her tongue.
“Ma!”
She immediately spun the quad and plunged back into the forest.
Even over the roar of the engine, Chong could hear a hundred voices howl as the reapers gave chase.
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“I got this,” said Nix, raising her bokken.
“No!” warned Benny as he moved away from it, using his body to push Nix back. “It’s one of those smart fast ones from that scientist’s report.”
The zombie began stalking them, and immediately Nix and Benny knew they were in dangerously unknown territory. This wasn’t the slow, relentless shuffle of the zoms they knew. The creature in the green jumpsuit seemed to be assessing them as it stalked slowly forward. Its milky eyes flicked from Nix’s bokken to Benny’s katana.
The creature — and Benny could no longer think of this thing as a zombie — bent forward and bared its teeth, its face wrinkling with feral animal hate.
“Oh God,” whispered Nix.
The creature snarled in pure fury and rushed at them.
Benny was caught in a dreadful moment of indecision.
Run or fight?
He could feel Nix’s whole body trembling beside him.
The fight and the slope were behind them.
The choice was made for him, because the creature raced at them far too fast for any chance of escape.
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Brother Alexi swung his hammer and the heavy weapon, powered by the giant’s massive muscles and all his mounting terror, slammed into the first zombie to reach him.
The zom’s head exploded, and the lifeless body flopped to the ground.
Alexi used the force of the blow to turn his body in a pirouette, and as the hammer came around again he smashed it into the second zom. The blow caught the dead thing on the shoulder, but the force shattered its spine.
Alexi checked the swing and brought the hammer over and down onto a third zombie, and a fourth.
He laughed out loud, and his fear melted away to become diluted in battle joy.
“Come on, you rotting buggers!” he bellowed.
The zoms rose from the twitching bodies of the chosen ones, their empty eyes seeking out the author of that challenge, their mouths dripping red.
“Come on!”
They came.
Eighteen of them came.
His laughter died in his chest.
Some of them were in jumpsuits, some were in bloodstained black — with angel wings on their chests.
Something small and round sailed past Alexi’s face, and he flinched reflexivel
y away from it. It looked like a metal baseball, and it hit the ground in front of the leading wave of zoms, bounced once, and exploded.
The blast was huge.
Pieces of zoms were flung in every direction. Blood splashed against the white plane.
Alexi spun around, shielding his eyes.
Then the air was fractured by gunfire and the combat howl of a huge dog.
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Benny had no choice.
He and Nix were too close to each other to swing their swords — they were breaking one of Tom’s cardinal rules about battlefield combat.
But she seemed frozen in place.
“I’m sorry!” Benny said, and shoved her backward as he jumped forward to meet the creature.
He heard Nix’s scream as she hit the edge of the slope — and fell.
Benny had no time to process that.
The creature was on him, and Benny lunged in low and to the left, swinging the sword in as powerful a lateral cut as he could manage. The shock of impact jolted him, but the katana was sharper than a razor. It sliced through dead flesh and brittle bone.
The creature fell past him and Benny turned, controlling the erratic postimpact swing of his blade. As he pivoted, he saw the zom scramble to a stop at the top of the slope and wheel around. The sword had cut completely through the right side of its chest, from front to back. Muscle and bone were destroyed, and the monster’s right arm sagged down. It did not even pause. There was no reaction to damage; there was no pain.
It growled and came charging again, and Benny tried the same trick, aiming lower this time, trying to catch the leg.
The creature dodged out of the way.
Dodged.
It…
Benny’s brain almost froze. Even with the warning on Dr. McReady’s document, it was — it seemed — impossible.
The zom grabbed Benny’s vest with its good left hand and jerked him forward, toward its mouth full of rotting gray teeth.
Benny had no angle for a cut, so he punched the zom across the mouth with the hand that held the sword. The blow was awkward but powerful, and teeth flew from the open mouth.
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