“Yes. Fast and smart. Look.”
The dead reaper attacked the rail over and over again, hitting different points, trying to squeeze between the guards, snarling all the while. He was so fast that once he nearly got across the rail before the men with the poles battered him back.
“He keeps trying the rail at different points,” observed Sister Sun. “He’s trying to find a weakness.”
“You examined him? He has no pulse, no—”
“He’s dead,” said Sister Sun. She leaned close. “This is the mutation we’ve been hearing about. Now it’s happened to one of our own. Honored One . . . if this spreads . . .”
Saint John said nothing. He could almost taste the fear in Sister Sun’s voice, and he could see it in the eyes of the Red Brothers.
However, in his own heart, deep down in that velvety darkness, he felt quite a different emotion. And it made him smile.
20
UP AHEAD BENNY SAW A hazy stretch of green floating inside a mirage.
The forest.
The very fact of the forest out here in the dry vastness of Nevada was bizarre. Before First Night, some real estate developers had come out into the hottest part of the desert and decided that this would be a wonderful place to put a golf course. They built row after row of tall wind turbines to generate electricity and pump water to irrigate the landscape, and planted trees, grass, and decorative shrubs in what was otherwise an inhospitable environment. In doing so they created the illusion of a lush forest cut with wide green lawns. The wind turbines hadn’t been knocked out by First Night; however, heat and blowing sand had stilled most of them. Only a few still channeled sluggish water into the soil. Most of the exotic foliage was now dead, coarse weeds and bare dirt having replaced most of the lush grass. Lovely shrubs had been replaced by uglier, hardier foliage. When the last of the turbines quit working, the desert would kill the remaining imported trees and reclaim the land. Benny figured that within ten years there would be no trace of the golf course, no evidence that man had ever tried to impose his whims and his will on the fierce Mojave.
The four fat tires rumbled effortlessly over the rocky ground. Ahead he could see flashes of white through the green. The plane. As he drove toward it, Benny’s mind churned on so many different things that he never heard the second quad come tearing toward him from behind a stand of trees. His only warning was when the other quad’s engine roared to full throttle as the driver slammed into Benny’s machine.
Suddenly Benny was flying into the air, arms pinwheeling, legs kicking. He landed with a thud that jolted every muscle and bone in his body. His katana went slithering out of its scabbard onto sandy ground. But Tom had taught him to react rather than allow himself to gape in surprise. He scrambled around, got to his feet, and came up into a crouch, confused, scared, and angry. His quad lay on its side near the transport plane, its wheels still turning, a second machine jammed hard against it, blue ethanol fumes chugging from both tailpipes.
He heard a crunch of a footfall, turned fast, and saw a glittering knife slash through the air toward his throat.
21
BENNY SCREAMED AND FLUNG HIMSELF backward and felt wind whip past his Adam’s apple as the blade missed him by a hairbreadth. His heels hit a gnarled twist of an exposed tree root, and Benny went down on his butt with a thump that snapped his teeth together with a loud clack!
The reaper grinned in obvious anticipation of an easy kill. “I bring the gift of darkness to you, my brother.”
“Bite me,” gasped Benny, and snatched up a handful of pebbles, hurling them at the killer. The reaper twisted away and took the stones on shoulders and hip instead of full in the face.
Benny’s sword was ten feet away, the steel blade gleaming with deadly potential. The killer stood between Benny and the katana, so it might as well have been on the far side of the moon. The big plane lay a few yards behind Benny’s back.
The reaper crouched, knife in hand, muscles bunching as he prepared to pounce. He was a tall man in his early twenties, all wiry muscle and sinew, dressed in black jeans and a muscle shirt with angel’s wings hand-stitched across the chest. The man’s head was shaved bald and comprehensively tattooed in a pattern of creeper vines and locusts. Strips of red cloth were tied to his ankles and wrists and looped around his belt. The cloth smelled like rotting meat—evidence that it had recently been dipped in chemicals that were used to prevent the living dead from attacking. Benny smelled every bit as bad from the cadaverine he’d sprinkled on his clothes.
Benny scooted backward on the ground, putting as much distance as he could between him and the reaper. The killer faked a lunge and then kicked sand in Benny’s face; but Benny was alrea
dy in motion, already scooping a handful of sand to throw at the reaper. Both masses of sand hissed through each other and struck their targets. Benny whipped his arm up to save his eyes, but he got a choking mouthful. The reaper tried to turn away and partially succeeded, so that the sand pelted his cheek and ear.
With a growl that was equal parts anger and fear, Benny drove his shoulder into the reaper’s gut, exploding the air from the killer with an oooof. Benny’s rush drove them both into the curved metal side of the gigantic transport plane. The impact tore a cry from the reaper, and he dropped his knife. Benny head-butted him, smashing the man’s nose. The reaper screeched again, but a split second later he jerked his knee upward as hard as he could into Benny’s crotch.
Benny staggered back, hands cupped around his groin.
The reaper moaned and sagged to his knees, blood pouring down his face from his shattered nose. “I will . . . open . . . red mouths . . . in your . . .”
“Yeah, yeah,” wheezed Benny in a tiny voice as he fought against pain and nausea, “. . . open red mouths in my flesh . . . send me into the darkness . . . got it . . . owwwww!”
Gagging and coughing, the reaper reached for the knife.
Benny kicked it away.
They got slowly and painfully to their feet. The reaper’s nose was a purple bulb; his mouth and teeth glistened with red. Benny was sure that his testicles were somewhere up in his chest cavity.
The reaper sneered at Benny. “Are you really so stupid that you think you have a chance?”