There was nothing of value there.
Not a word, not a scrap.
Benny picked up the papers he’d found and hurled them as hard as he could against the wall. Pages, whole and partial, slapped against the unyielding metal and then floated to the deck, as disorganized and useless as before.
He climbed down to the ground, his face burning with anger and his whole body trembling with frustration.
That was when he remembered the quads.
The engines of both vehicles had eventually stalled out.
“Ah . . . man . . .”
He ran over to the machines. The reaper’s quad was still upright and was jammed at an angle against Benny’s machine, which lay on its side. Benny pushed the second quad, a Honda, back from his Yamaha. The Honda moved with a sluggish, lumpy resistance—the right front wheel was flat, the rubber exploded from the impact. Benny examined the Yamaha. The right rear wheel hung at a strange angle, and when he bent to examine it, he groaned. The axle had been snapped like a bread stick.
Benny straightened, exhaled a long, slow breath, thought of Tom’s many lessons about maintaining calm in the middle of a crisis—and then spent the next two minutes screaming and kicking the Yamaha from every possible angle.
Then he spent three minutes standing there, chest heaving, both feet hurting like hell, glaring at the machine.
Finally he opened the rear compartment on the Yamaha and took out the jack and the lug wrench and took a wheel off his bike and put it onto the Honda. The wheels were the same size, and it wasn’t until Benny was finished that he grudgingly accepted that as a lucky break. Not all the quads were the same size.
Then Benny tried to turn the Honda on. Nothing happened.
He tried again.
Same effect.
It hadn’t stalled after the crash. It had run out of fuel.
Benny snatched up a rock and came very close to slamming it down on the fuel gauge.
Stop it! bellowed his inner voice.
It actually stopped Benny mid-smash.
He stared at the rock he held.
“Oh man,” he said, and let it drop.
Find a hose, said his smarter inner voice. Siphon gas out of the other—
“Yeah, yeah, I know, I got it,” he growled.
His inner voice shut up.
Benny dug through the compartments and saddlebags of his own quad and found nothing. Then he began foraging through the Honda.
He found a siphon hose right away. However, what he found next made him forget completely about the hose, the fuel, the quad, the residual pain in his groin, and virtually everything else.
Tucked into the back compartment of the Honda was a loose-leaf binder with the word TEAMBOOK printed on the spine and a flag embossed on the front. The flag was not the Stars and Stripes of the old United States of America. No, this was the symbol of the newer, post–First Night American Nation. It was the same symbol that was painted on the tail fin of the plane and on patches worn by dead members of the crew.
Benny flipped the Teambook open and saw that there was a double-sided page devoted to each member of Dr. McReady’s team from Hope One. Each page included a color photograph of a person in either the brown-and-green uniform of the new American Nation or in the white lab coat of McReady’s science team. Below each photo was basic data: name, rank, serial number, gender, blood type, height, weight, eye color, hair color, and an abbreviated service record. A lot of it meant nothing to Benny, especially in sections where there was an overabundance of military abbreviations and acronyms. Hope One had been staffed by Dr. McReady, six other scientists, ten lab technicians, eighteen soldiers, and five general staff. Forty people. The C-130 had eight additional soldiers and a flight crew of four. Fifty-two people in all.
He studied the photo of Dr. Monica McReady. She was a black woman with short hair, and a pair of reading glasses hung around her neck. According to her data, she was fifty-six years old.
“Where are you?” he asked her. “Where’s your cure? I have a friend who needs you. His name is Chong and he’s . . .”
Hungry.