“There, she’s down by that tall rock,” said Lilah. “See her?”
“That girl’s a reaper,” began Nix, but Benny cut her off.
“No . . . look at her.”
They did, their eyes flicking back and forth between the reaper who stood at the edge of the pack and the face of the staff sergeant in the Teambook. The thick black hair was gone, but the woman had a very distinct Native American face. She looked a lot like Deputy Gorman from the town watch, who was full-blooded Navajo.
“That’s her,” Lilah said with certainty.
“Damn,” breathed Joe. “Louisa Crisp was the squad leader for Field Team Five. It was her job to protect the science team.”
Nix shook her head. “But she became a reaper. Why?”
Joe didn’t answer that. His fi
nger rested lightly on a plastic trigger mounted on the control joystick. “Listen to me,” he said. “We have to set down and try to get through that air lock. That’s going to take time, and it’s going to leave us exposed. We have two choices. We trust to cadaverine and hope that it works on them. Smells don’t travel as well in air this dry.”
“Or . . . ?” asked Benny with a sinking heart. He knew where this was going.
“Or we eliminate the threat here and now.”
“God,” breathed Nix. “We can’t just kill them. They’re victims. . . .”
“We all know what they are, Nix,” said Lilah. “But I don’t see any real choice.”
But something else was bothering Benny, something beyond the ethical dilemma. “Wait a sec,” he said. “Joe, can this thing get closer to the ground? I mean, can you like . . . skim just above the ground from one side of the clearing to the other? Maybe get almost to the ground near them and then sort of—I don’t know what to call it—drift away from them. Not up, but across the ground. Can you do that?”
The ranger started to ask why, then smiled and nodded, getting Benny’s meaning. “Let’s give that a try.”
Joe lowered the helicopter so that the wheels bumped against the rocky ground ten yards from the cluster of zoms. The zoms instantly broke into a flat-out run, screaming like demons, hands tearing the air as they swarmed forward. Joe didn’t bother to drift backward and instead rose to fifty feet and hovered.
The truth was obvious.
They were all R3’s. Every last one.
Joe slowly turned the Black Hawk to face the zoms, who had now stopped below the machine. Some of them tried jumping up to catch the helicopter, even though it was too far above them. The ranger curled his finger around the trigger.
“You kids go back,” he suggested. “You don’t want to see this.”
“No,” said Benny, “we don’t.”
“Who would?” asked Lilah.
Nix spoke some words very softly. It was a prayer they’d heard twice the day before they’d left town. First in one cemetery as the Houser family was buried, then in another cemetery as Zak Matthias, Charlie Pink-eye’s nephew, was put into the cold ground.
A prayer for the dead.
In the cabin behind them, Grimm tilted his big head and bayed like a hound from some old-time horror novel.
As Joe opened fire with the thirty-millimeter chain guns, Benny thought he heard the big ranger murmur a single word.
“Amen.”
62
THE BIG BLACK HAWK HOVERED above the scene of carnage. Where a minute ago there had been a cluster of R3 zoms, the fastest and most dangerous kind, now there was torn meat and broken bones. The chain guns had literally torn the dead apart.
“God almighty,” breathed Nix.