“Tom was right,” agreed Joe.
“Could the sirens have called them here?” asked Lilah.
“I don’t think so. Sanctuary sits in a kind of bowl of flatland surrounded by mountains. Once that wail hits those mountains it bounces all over the place, and it’s impossible to pinpoint the source unless you’re down here on the flatland. I don’t think we can sell that as the reason.” He paused, thinking, then said, “No,” again, very softly.
When they’d told Joe about the attack, he’d fetched a small leather valise, which now stood open beside him. He spent several careful minutes collecting samples from the zoms. Tissue and fluids. Then he took a large magnifying glass and peered through it as he bent over the head and shoulders of one of the corpses. He grunted.
“What is it?” asked Lilah.
Joe used a small brush to sweep something off the zom’s blouse into a vial. When he held it up to examine it in the sun’s glow, Nix saw that it was the red powder she’d noticed on the Latino man.
“Do you know what it is?” asked Nix. “Is it important?”
“I hope to God it isn’t,” he said, but he did not elaborate. Instead he got up and examined the other bodies, focusing now almost exclusively on collecting samples of the red powder. He stopped by one corpse, glanced at it, and then looked at Nix.
“Is this the one you said might not have been fast?”
“Yes,” she said. “I landed on it and hit it in the face with an elbow and—”
Joe appeared to stop listening. He stood up, and his eyes roved over the scene.
“How the hell did this get here?” he murmured. Then Nix thought he mouthed a word: “Archangel.”
Then Joe suddenly began packing his samples into the case.
“What is it?” asked Nix. “What’s wrong?”
“Wrong?” Joe gave her a smile that might have been an attempt to reassure her. But it was ghastly. False and fragile. “It’s nothing. You girls go back to the mess hall and get some lunch. Everything’s fine.”
He rose, clicked his tongue for his dog, and hurried away. A few minutes later they heard the sirens as Joe prepared to cross the bridge. The last thing Nix and Lilah saw of him was the ranger vanishing into the hangar next to the blockhouse. He had the valise with him, and he was running.
25
AFTER A WHILE BENNY GOT to his feet.
The zom had not returned, but even so Benny removed a bottle of cadaverine from his pocket and dribbled some on his clothes. It amazed him that after all this time he could still smell the stuff, and he had to dab mint gel on his upper lip from a small pot he always carried. The mint was so strong that it completely killed his sense of smell. When your clothes smell like rotting human flesh, an overload of mint is a genuine blessing.
He had a strange thought. If he died now and reanimated, would the presence of the mint gel mean that cadaverine wouldn’t deter him? Probably. It was a creepy thought.
It was heating up to be another blistering day in a spring season that was already unusually hot. Even back home in Mountainside it had been a strange spring, with April temperatures in the eighties and almost no rain. Benny had no idea whether this was simply one of those years—there are hot ones and there are cold ones—or if it was an omen of something bad coming. His mood was tending toward the pessimistic view.
Maybe it is the end of the world, whispered his inner voice. Maybe Captain Ledger is right. Maybe there are no chances left.
“Oh, shut up,” growled Benny.
He walked over to the wrecked airplane and stood for a moment at the foot of a sturdy rope ladder Joe had rigged to the open hatch.
Benny wished he’d asked Nix to come with him. He closed his eyes for a moment and thought about how she probably looked this morning, up there in the rocks, training with focused determination with the katana Joe had given her. Benny conjured her image in his mind and suddenly she was there, as real as something he could actually touch and hold. Her wild red hair trembling in the morning breeze that swept in from the desert, her intelligent green eyes roving over the landscape as she imagined attackers closing on her, her countless freckles darkening as her pulse rose to flush her skin. And the sword. Benny was a very good swordsman, but Nix was better. She was faster, more precise, less tentative, and far more vicious. In her small hands that powerful weapon sought its true potential. The blade became a streamer of flowing mercury, the edge cleaving effortlessly through air or straw targets or living-dead necks.
So far, th
ough, Nix had not used that blade against the living.
Not like Benny had used his kami katana. Now, and too many times before today.
She had killed, though, Benny thought. Killed with knives and guns and with her old wooden bokken. She was like him in that regard. And also like Lilah, Chong, and Riot. Killers all.
Children at war.