“No. Only another helicopter . . .” Joe’s words trailed off. As they continued to swing around, they could see down the slope on the far side. It was a sharp drop of hundreds of feet. Halfway down, smashed in among spikes of jagged rock, was the wreckage of another helicopter. Most of the wreckage was twisted into meaningless shapes, but as if to mock them, a flat section of the hull lay on a smaller shelf in plain view. And painted on the side, faded by a year and a half of harsh sun and wind, was the flag of the American Nation.
“Oh God,” gasped Nix.
Benny said, “No one could have lived through that.”
“It’s a wreck,” said Joe, “but let’s not read too much into it yet. We don’t know if it crashed when they got here or sometime later. Those crags are inaccessible. If anyone died in that thing, their zoms would probably still be trapped there.”
Nothing moved, however.
Joe brought the helicopter back up to the level of the helipad. The rear wall of the shelf was flat, but there was a ring of cracked boulders around the shelf, some as big as two-story houses.
“What’s that?” asked Lilah, pointing to the rear corner of the shelf.
A smile appeared slowly on Joe’s face. As he drifted closer, they could all see it. The object was eight feet high and five feet wide, and though it was caked with dust and clots of dirt, it was clearly made from solid steel.
“An air lock,” breathed Benny.
“An air lock,” agreed Joe.
Nix turned a suspicious eye on him. “That’s just like the one at Sanctuary. Is there another lab hidden in there? Did you know about this?”
He shook his head. “If so, then it’s news to me.”
“More secrets?” asked Benny.
“Too many secrets,” Joe said with a slow nod. “Too damn many secrets.”
“Is Dr. McReady in there?” asked Lilah.
No one answered. The door looked like it hadn’t been opened in years.
“Well . . . on the upside,” said Benny, “at least there aren’t any zoms.”
But once again the day seemed to want to mock them. A figure stepped from the shadows of a tall, rocky cliff and glowered up at the helicopter. Another joined it. And another. They moved out of the cave mouths and crawled from under the branches of large shrubs until at least a dozen of them stood in a cluster, hands reaching upward to the noise of the rotors.
“That,” said Joe, “is not good.”
Some of the zoms were dressed in the rags of what had once been military uniforms. One wore a bloodstained lab coat. A few wore black clothes with red tassels and white wings painted on their chests. Only three of the zoms were dressed in ordinary clothes.
“This is really not good,” Joe muttered.
Nix pointed to the zom in the white lab coat. The distance was too great to see the creature’s face, but the thing was clearly a woman.
“Oh no . . . is that Dr. McReady?”
Joe worked the joystick to bring the helicopter down, which made the engine whine increase. The zoms clawed at the sky as if they could tear the machine down and crack it open to get at the sweet meat inside. The ranger leveled off and hovered, then took a pair of binoculars from a holster beside his chair and peered through them. They all watched him, seeing the muscles locked in tension beneath his clothes. After a full minute, that tension eased by a few strained degrees.
“No . . . that’s Dr. Jones. Merry, I think her name was.”
Merry, thought Benny. What a sad name for a creature that would spend eternity down there, perpetually hungry, lingering in dried flesh long past the point where life had any meaning.
Joe handed the glasses to Nix and nodded toward where the Teambook was tucked under the dashboard. At his direction she found the page for Dr. Merry Jones and confirmed the identity of the zom in the lab coat. Then she flipped through the other pages and identified three of the soldiers—Engebreth, Hollingsworth, and Carr. The others were reapers. She began to close the book when Lilah stopped her.
“Go back,” she said urgently, and as Nix fanned back through the pages, Lilah thrust a hand out and stabbed one photo with her finger. “There.”
It was the page for Sergeant Louisa Crisp.
“What about her?” asked Joe.