It rose.
Even with the whine of the rotors, they could hear the combined voices of the zoms rise in a horrific moan of unsatisfied hunger. There was not enough living flesh in the world to assuage this army of the dead.
They heard hands thump against the skids. They heard fingernails rake along the metal. They felt the machine shudder as it fought against cold fingers that wrapped themselves around the landing assembly.
Joe tilted the Black Hawk forward, cruising inches above the fingers of the dead, dragging three clutching zoms with it. The external drag tilted the helicopter for a moment, and the tip of the rotor struck the field of reaching arms for a split second. Long enough, though, to tear a dozen hands from withered forearms.
Then one of the dangling zoms fell away.
And another.
Then the last one tumbled back down on the seething mass of the dead. The helicopter reached the open doorway.
“You’re too high,” cried Benny. “Too high!”
But the whirling blades cut only air. The massive doorway passed directly overhead, and suddenly they were out in the golden sunlight of the Mojave Desert.
Benny coughed out the breath he was holding as the chopper rose into the light. Then he heard a soft gagging sound. Nix, Lilah, and Chong were all there with him, staring out of the window at what lay below.
Seen from the air, with the sunshine highlighting every splash of red, every charred body, every gray face, the sight below threatened to take the heart out of Benny.
Nix made a sick sound deep in her chest. “Look . . . look for Riot. She could be anywhere.”
“Down there?” said Chong hollowly. “How could—”
He didn’t finish, and Benny knew that his friend had tried to cut off his own words a few seconds too late.
“She has to be down there,” said Nix urgently. “She’d have found a place for her and Eve to hide.”
But Joe turned the helicopter away, pointing its blunt nose toward the row of siren towers. They were silent now. That part of the airfield was also relatively clear. Except for a few of the old slow, shuffling R1 zoms, the rest of the dead were massed around the hangars on both sides of the trench.
“What do we do if the reapers trashed the sirens, too?” asked Chong.
“That’s plan B,” said Benny.
“What’s plan B?”
“We feed you to the zoms, and while they’re eating you—and getting sick to their stomachs—we run away.”
Lilah laid her hand on her knife. “No, you won’t.”
“Lilah,” said Chong, “he’s joking.”
She eyed Benny icily. “It’s not a funny joke.”
“Apparently not,” said Benny.
“Whoa, whoa, guys,” said Chong, pointing past him. “Look.”
Down below, the siren house was snugged up against the red rock wall of the mountains. The crushed gravel turnaround in front of the bunker was littered with bodies—a few zoms but three times as many reapers—and there was a clear trail of corpses that led in a crooked line back to the burning hangars. A quad sat a few feet from the bunker door, and a knot of eight zoms clustered in front of the door, relentlessly pounding on the metal.
“Someone’s in there,” said Nix.
“I hope they know how to work the sirens,” said Chong.
“Who do you think it is?” asked Lilah.
“I don’t know, but those zoms are trying real hard to get in,” said Benny. “Joe?”