“The boars got them?”
“The boars got what was left of them. Reapers laid an ambush. We didn’t even know they were in the area. They trapped our team outside, forced them to give them the access codes to enter this complex. They killed a lot of our people and even let some of the boars loose in here. We had to fight them using brooms and folding chairs and whatever we could grab. The soldiers were all outside being slaughtered. Price’s science team panicked and overreacted. They used grenades and makeshift explosives to fight back, and one of the blasts did something to the air lock so we couldn’t get out. The reapers trashed our communications center. We cut them down, but it was too late. They also pushed our helicopter over the edge of the cliff. That was about a month after we got here. We killed the last of the reapers and slaughtered the pigs they let loose, but so what? We were stuck in here with no communication and no way out of this facility until you blew the door in. Between those who died in the ambush and the rest who killed themselves here, I’ve seen forty-one people die since coming here.”
72
BENNY UNDERSTOOD THE DESPAIR NOW.
The suicides and hopelessness.
McReady and her people had been trapped in this locked tomb of concrete and steel for almost a year and a half—a place that was so secret even Joe Ledger and his rangers didn’t know about it. The scientists and staff must have thought that they were doomed to die in here, forgotten by a dying world. Until McReady and then the reapers showed up.
Benny said, “Not everyone from the transport plane died in the crash. A few survived, and they joined the Night Church. I . . . um . . . killed one of them.” He cleared his throat. “One of them must have had a copy of the coordinates and gave them up when he joined the reapers. That’s probably how they found this place.”
McReady considered, sighed, and nodded. “That might also explain what happened to the missing notes and the samples of mutagen and Archangel I sent to Sanctuary.”
“We recovered some stuff,” said Joe. “Enough for Reid to make some weak versions of the mutagen, but she couldn’t work out how to process the mutagen into the cure. Without your notes Reid said that all they’ll ever hit are dead ends.”
“Damn.” McReady rubbed her eyes. They were paler in color than Benny had expected, less of the intense dark brown of the face in the Teambook photo and more of a dusty burned-gold hue. “The one upside to working in total isolation is that it focuses your concentration.” She nodded at the stacks of containers and heaps of bags. “See those boxes? Eleven tons of a powdered version of the mutagen, boxed to make it easier to transport and store. But you do not want to get any of it in a mucous membrane. Any moisture will activate the bacteria, and that starts the worms hatching.” She laughed. “Those worms are something else. Industrious and clever little buggers. Once they become active in a walker, all the walker’s tissues become softer, more pliant. This is why the R3’s are able to move so much more quickly.”
“What’s in the bags?” asked Nix. “Is that the cure? Is that Archangel?”
“Yes. We have 968,000 capsules as of yesterday’s count. They have enough supplies back at Sanctuary to make a million doses a month.”
“We can save the world,” whispered Nix.
McReady rubbed her eyes. “Yes,” she said hoarsely. “Yes, we can.”
They stared at the bags. Benny felt like the floor was tilting under him.
Lilah cut into the silence. “The mutagen doesn’t just make the zoms faster. They got smarter, too.”
Benny nodded. “One of them picked up a stick and hit me with it.”
“Mm,” McReady said diffidently. “The appearance of increased intelligence is nothing magical. From the initial infection, the parasites feed tiny amounts of oxygen to the brain as well as other key proteins and chemicals to the nervous system. That means the brains never die a complete death as they do in ordinary mortality. The parasites have to preserve some of the cranial nerves in order for the host body to walk, grab, eat, chew.”
“But they don’t need to eat,” said Benny. “Everyone knows that.”
“Sure they do. When they don’t or can’t, they go into a deeper stasis. They stop moving, stop expending energy. It’s like a super-amplified version of the hibernation state, similar to that of a ground squirrel. The squirrel’s metabolic rate drops to one percent, but with the walkers it’s down to one thousandth of one percent. They are dead by any standard clinical model, but not in point of fact. The parasites can’t let the host body completely decay, otherwise it’s of no value as a vector for spreading the disease. So the process of necrosis is slowed to an almost negligible level. However, when they do eat, the food they consume is broken down by enzymes at an incredibly slow rate. It might take them months or even years to fully digest whatever protein they’ve consumed. All the while the parasites are being fed.”
“Why don’t people know this?” asked Nix.
“People do,” said McReady. “Everyone in the American Nation knows this. It’s taught in school. I’m surprised you don’t know it.”
“That’s not the kind of thing they teach us at home,” said Nix.
“Pity,” sniffed McReady. “Knowledge is power. Lack of knowledge is suicide.”
Benny did not reply to that. He asked, “I’m confused about a few things. Like, why did that man, Mr. Price, write what he wrote?”
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“Price spent his life designing bioweapons. Airborne Ebola and a form of tuberculosis used for assassinations, that sort of stuff. He was Dr. Death for thirty years before the Fall. I guess he thought he had a lot to answer for. He probably did have a lot to answer for. Maybe not Reaper, but enough other monsters.”
“Why did you think Joe was here to kill you?”
She almost smiled. “When I saw Joe, I thought that Jane Reid or one of her masters figured I’d gone off the reservation, maybe gone crazy and joined the reapers. Whatever. Generally, if you see Joe Ledger show up pointing a gun at you, I guess you start reexamining your conscience.”
“I’m not an assassin,” said Joe mildly.