Fire and Ash (Benny Imura 4)

“These aren’t eggs,” said Nix. “These are worms, just like in the zoms Lilah and I fought.”

“Exactly,” said Joe. “The R3’s, the fast zoms. The larvae are active in the fast zoms. In the wild boars, too. It’s part of the mutation the science team was studying.”

“Are they contagious?” asked Nix, shying back from them.

“Very,” said Joe.

“Not too bad if you get some on your skin and wipe it off fast, but if you get it in a mucous membrane . . . eyes, nose, mouth, an open wound . . .”

He didn’t need to finish.

Benny had a horrible thought. If Chong was infected, then those eggs—or larvae—were in his body too. He wanted to scream. That was why the scientist had asked him if Chong had gotten any fluids on him. He kept his thoughts to himself. It would be abominably cruel to share this with Lilah, and he hoped she wasn’t already thinking those thoughts. He even avoided looking at her, for fear she’d read his mind.

They backed well clear of the black goo and followed Joe to the air lock. It was almost exactly like the one at Sanctuary, with a small glass-fronted box set into a recess beside the door. The hand-scan device—the geometry scanner—was dark, the glass cracked and filled with sand. Joe punched two buttons and placed his hand on the glass, but nothing happened. He used the butt of his pistol to knock out the glass in order to access the wires, but after fifteen minutes of connecting one wire to another he flipped them back into the recess with a disgusted grunt. Then he pounded on the door with the side of his fist.

Nothing happened.

“I thought you said that beating on the door doesn’t do any good,” observed Benny casually. “They can’t hear it inside.”

Joe shot him a venomous look. “Ever fall off the side of a helipad into a bunch of jagged rocks?”

“Point taken,” said Benny.

“Now what?” asked Nix. “Do we go looking for a back door?”

“No,” said Joe, turning to walk back to the Black Hawk, “now we try plan B.”

Once they were all inside the bird, Joe fired up the engine and lifted the helicopter into the air. It drifted backward from the air lock, past the edge of the drop-off.

“There’s an old military saying,” mused the ranger. “If at first you don’t succeed, call in an air strike.”

“What’s that mean?” asked Benny.

“It means, ‘Fire in the hole!’?”

Joe flicked a switch on the cyclic grip and depressed a trigger. There was sound like steam escaping from a boiler, and then something shot away from under the stubby wing of the helicopter. Benny had only a hundredth of a second’s glimpse of something sleek and black, and then the entire front of the cliff seemed to bloom into a massive ball of orange fire. Chunks of stone and metal flew everywhere, but Joe was already rising into a fast climbing turn, and nothing hit the Black Hawk. The helicopter swung all the way around until it faced the cliff again. The fireball crawled up the side of the cliff, chased by smoke and hot wind. Then it thinned and fell apart into sparks. Joe angled the helicopter to use the rotor wash to whip away the smoke that clung to the helipad.

The six-ton air lock looked as if the fist of a giant had struck it. It lay on its back, driven nine feet inside the mountain. The spot where it had stood was a gaping maw almost big enough to drive a trade wagon through.

“Holy . . . ,” began Benny, but had nowhere to go with that, so he repeated it. “Holy . . .”

Lilah smiled with a lupine delight.

“What was that?” gasped Nix.

“Hellfire missile,” said Joe.

Grimm gave a deep-chested whoof as if he approved.

Benny shook his head. When Joe had used the rocket launchers to defeat Mother Rose’s reapers, Benny had been unconscious, the victim of a blow to the head. He’d never witnessed anything like this. But from the expression on Nix’s face, he could tell that this “Hellfire” missile was far more devastating than the shoulder-mounted rockets. They’d read about weapons of war in school, but Benny had never really put much thought into their true destructive power. It was deeply disturbing.

Chunks of rock littered the helipad, but there was more than enough room to land.

Joe cut the engine.

“Okay, let’s try this again.”

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