Children of war.
It was so unfair.
“Nix,” Benny said, just to put her name on the wind. Then he spoke her full name. “Phoenix.”
Her name, either version, even now when he was angry with her, was like a prayer to him.
The first girl he had ever loved.
The first person he had ever loved. Aside from his parents, but that had been a remembered love from a tiny child. Not like this.
He loved Nix. She was the only girl he ever expected to love.
He would kill for her.
No, corrected his inner voice, you have killed for her. And with her.
“Shut up,” Benny said again, and he turned away, as if by moving his body he could step away from that inner voice and all his melancholy thoughts.
The plane lay there. Dead. Discarded by time. And yet somehow strangely alive to him.
Waiting for him.
He found himself smiling.
Joe had expressly ordered Benny—and everyone else—to stay out of the plane. The head scientist, Dr. Monica McReady, and her entire crew had either been killed in the crash and then wandered off once they’d reanimated as zoms, or they’d been murdered by the reapers of the Night Church.
Now the most crucial part of Dr. McReady’s research was missing.
In either case, the world’s best hope for a cure was lost, maybe forever.
It was crazy, but three weeks ago Benny and Nix had not known about Dr. McReady, her team, the possibility of a cure, or the fact that anyone was still left to do the research. That had been so amazing, so life-changing.
How was he supposed to suddenly discard all that hope and simply accept that there was no future unpolluted by plague and death? He didn’t know how to fit that into his head. It didn’t seem to fit, and Benny knew full well that he didn’t want it to fit.
If hope of a cure was gone, then what did that mean for Chong? Maybe he was dead already. Maybe all hope was dead.
We lost our last chance to beat this thing.
“No,” Benny said, and now that word held an entirely different meaning than it had a few minutes ago. Now it was filled with anger. With defiance, and Tom had once told him that defiance in the face of disaster was a quality of hope. “No—absolutely fricking no way.”
The black mouth of the plane’s open hatchway yawned above him.
Benny hooked his fingers through the rope ladder and tugged it. Sturdy and strong.
But Joe—the towering, deadly ex-special ops shooter who now ran a team of rangers in the Ruin—had said to stay out of the plane. No excuses, no exceptions.
“Well,” Benny said to the rope ladder, “what can he do? Send me to my room?”
He climbed up into the plane.
The inside was a mess. Joe had apparently trashed the place while scavenging the materials and looking for the missing D-series notes. With the captured zoms removed, and all the equipment cases and boxes of records gone, the structural damage was easier to see. The plane had broken its back on landing, and the craft’s metal skin was rippled and torn. The floor was littered with discarded junk. Papers, broken containers, and hundreds upon hundreds of shell casings from the automatic weapons Joe had fired when repelling the reaper assault. They gleamed dully in the streamers of light that stabbed down through tears in the ceiling. Paper trash was heaped against the walls or left where it had fallen. Benny sat down on an empty case that had once housed a rocket launcher and began digging into the paper.
He had no real idea what he was looking for. It wasn’t like he expected to find a piece of paper labeled CURE.
Even so, there was an answer here. Some kind of answer, he was sure of it.
Hours passed as he went through every piece of paper, no matter how small.