Fire and Ash (Benny Imura 4)

“It crashed. We found it.”

It took McReady a three-count to respond to that. “W-what?”

“He’s telling the truth, Monica,” said Joe. “It crashed in the desert ten miles short of Sanctuary. Luis Ortega’s dead and so’s the flight crew. These kids found the wreckage and told me. I got your research to Sanctuary, but there was nothing on the plane to indicate where you’d gone. Then Benny and his friends found Sergeant Ortega. He was infected, but they managed to search him and

get the coordinates for this place. All that happened today, and we came out here right away.”

“The plane. . . . crashed?” McReady was clearly having a hard time processing this news. She slumped and sat down heavily on the edge of the destroyed air lock. “It never reached Sanctuary?”

“No.”

“My God . . .” McReady began absently to undo the Velcro seals of her hazmat suit. Her hands shook visibly. She pulled off the hood to reveal a face that looked considerably thinner and older than the picture Benny had seen in the Teambook. Monica McReady’s chocolate-colored skin had faded to a dusty gray. Her eyes still retained their intelligence, but there was a deep and comprehensive weariness in them, tinged by sadness as she thought about the plane. Her hair was clipped very short and it was a bad job, as if she’d done it herself.

Then she stiffened and demanded, “Did they get it all done? The mass production and distribution? Has the mutation worked its way through the population . . . ?”

Her voice trailed off. She looked from face to face, and when no one answered, McReady began to visibly shake.

“Tell me Jane Reid’s team got this out to the whole damn world!”

Joe knelt in front of McReady. “She couldn’t, Monica. Reid’s people weren’t able to pick up where you left off. They need those last notes.”

She stared blankly at him. “Which last notes?”

“The last stuff. The D-series material. Without that—”

McReady suddenly shoved Joe, knocking him right onto his butt. Grimm barked in alarm. “What are you talking about?” she screamed. “Everything was on that transport. Every scrap of research. All the field notes, our clinical studies, the mutation projections. The complete formula for Archangel. All of it.”

Benny helped Joe to his feet.

“The D-series notes weren’t there,” said Nix. “We thought you took them with you.”

“Why would I take them with me? I sent it all back to Sanctuary so Reid could start production.”

“Production of what?” asked Lilah.

McReady looked puzzled. “Of the cure. What do you think I mean?”

“Wait, wait, hold on,” said Benny. “You’re saying that you cured this thing? Is that what Archangel is?”

“Of course,” snapped McReady. “Why do you think we left Hope One?”

Lilah shook her head. “Joe told us that you wanted to evacuate because the dead were becoming too active.”

“Exactly,” said McReady flatly. “That was the whole point. We developed a metabolic stabilizer first, and then we figured out the cure. Archangel. It was radical, sure, but it worked.”

“But—but—” Lilah looked around in confusion.

“Monica . . . this isn’t making sense,” said Joe. “We’re talking in circles. We thought that Hope One was being overrun. That’s what Colonel Reid told me. The walkers were getting too frisky, and you wanted to get your team back to Sanctuary.”

Before he even finished, McReady was shaking her head. “We knew exactly how active the walkers were. We’d already rounded up the random ones to send back to Sanctuary, so Jane Reid’s team could study the range of mutations. The rest were our own test subjects. We released them into the wild near Hope One to see if they’d contaminate others with the mutagen. They did. Very, very quickly, too. Once we saw how that worked, I told Jane I wanted to bring my team back to Sanctuary to get the real ball rolling.”

“Wait,” said Benny, “you’re still not making sense. Start at the beginning.”

“Listen, Monica,” insisted Joe, “the D-series records either weren’t on the transport or someone took them off the wreck.”

“They were on the damn plane,” growled McReady.

“Then they’ve been taken. We can’t find them, and the records we could find suggest that you took them with you.”