Joe studied him with steely eyes. “What conditions?”
“First, you tell me what’s going on inside the lab and the hangar.”
“Believe me, kid, you don’t want to know.”
“Don’t tell me what I want to know. And don’t assume that I can’t handle it.”
“What’s the other condition?”
“You take me with you,” said Benny. “Me, Nix, Riot, and Lilah.”
Benny waited, his whole body tensing for the argument, the outrage, the refusal that he knew was coming. The ranger looked past him at the three fierce girls on the other side of the trench. Then he turned and looked at the zoms, who were less than a quarter mile away. Finally he looked down at the torn piece of paper in his hand.
“You’re doing all of this because of your friend? Because of that Chong kid?”
“I’m doing this because this is our world too. You don’t have a right to shut us out of the process of saving it.”
Joe drew in a deep breath and exhaled slowly through his nose.
“Let me tell you something, kid,” he said. “Because I liked your brother, I’m going to forget that you’re trying to extort me here.”
“Thanks, but it’s not extortion,” snapped Benny. “And even if it was, I can’t let Chong die without doing everything I can.”
Joe looked up to judge the angle of the sun. “You have one hour to pack. One change of clothes, water and food for a week, every weapon you have. You meet me at the bridge and have the rest of those coordinates.”
Benny dug a hand into his pocket and removed the other half of the paper and held it out for Joe. The ranger smiled and took it.
Benny smiled back. “Like I said—you should have more faith in people.”
54
MILES AND MILES AWAY . . .
Blowflies swarmed around Saint John as he stood with his hands clasped behind his back, eyes and mouth composed and thoughtful, his dark clothes glistening with blood. The cooks and their assistants were busy butchering the slaughtered horses. The quartermasters of the reaper army were searching through the trade goods in the four wagons for anything of value. Much of what the traders had brought with them was sinful—paperback books, holy books from a dozen false religions, jewelry, antibiotics, toys, luxuries. Things that made people want to enjoy being alive, and how grave an insult that was to Thanatos—praise to his darkness—who had decreed that human life should end, that anyone who stayed alive did so as an affront to god. Except for the reapers, and they all knew that when the great cleansing was done, they would open red mouths in one another and go into the darkness, where a vast a
nd eternal nothingness awaited them.
The saint’s orders to his reapers had been precise: Kill no one.
The flight of arrows that had stopped this convoy had been precisely aimed. To kill the horses, to wound every other guard. The effect was a predictable one. As the uninjured guards saw their fellows to the left and right of them fall, saw the arrows and the blood, heard the shrill screams of pain and fear, their hearts fled them. They threw down their weapons and begged for quarter. For mercy.
Only two guards possessed courage greater than their own sense of self-preservation. Or perhaps they believed themselves to be powerful enough to fight through this attack. One man, a Latino with a barrel chest, leaped from his dying Tennessee walking horse. He wore a necklace of wedding bands and carried a pump shotgun, which he emptied into the first wave of Red Brothers. When the gun was empty, he dropped it and drew a Glock nine-millimeter pistol and killed eight more reapers before the next wave crashed into him. The man went down hard. He killed and maimed with a knife he took away from one of the Red Brothers, and when that became lodged in the chest of a reaper, the Latino used his bare hands.
Saint John shouted to his reapers to take this man alive.
They did, but the figure they dragged before the saint had a dozen red mouths in his flesh and one foot already in the darkness. It saddened Saint John. This was the kind of fighter who, had he been encouraged to kneel and kiss the blade, would have made a superb Red Brother.
Saint John stood over him now, hands clasped, lips pursed. The other survivors were being tied up. Some were being taught the manners necessary to survive an interview with the saint. Their screams filled the air.
“What is your name, brother?”
The Latino glared up at him. “Hector Mexico,” he snarled. Then he punctuated that with a string of obscenities in English and Spanish that made the reapers around Saint John blanch.
The saint ignored the words and their suggestions of improbable physical acts.
“You are dying,” he said. “The darkness hungers for you.”
Hector Mexico spat blood onto Saint John’s shoes. “Maybe so, pendejo, but I put twenty of your boys in the dirt, so kiss my—”