THE HORROR AND SADNESS OF what surrounded them was awful. On some level Benny had feared that the answer to the mystery of Sanctuary might be something like this, but he’d never allowed that thought to fully form. Now it was incontrovertible.
“Can you do anything for them?” asked Nix as she shrugged out of her pack.
“We can try,” said McReady, “but some of them . . . I think some of them have already gone too far over the line.”
However, she stood frozen, as if shocked by her own words and all that they implied.
Benny understood what she meant; he could see it. Some of the infected looked different from the majority of the poor people in the beds. The different ones had paler, grayer skin, and there was a quality missing from their eyes. All the infected had rage and hunger burning in their eyes, but for some that was all there was. Beyond those two things there was a blackness, like the empty shadows at the bottom of a ditch. Whatever indefinable quality that separated infected person from infected zom was gone, consumed by the insatiable appetites of the Reaper Plague.
For the rest, though . . .
The spark of humanity was still there. Flickering in a dark wind, but there nonetheless.
McReady still stood unmoving.
Then Lilah crossed to her in two quick strides, spun the woman, and slapped her across the face with shocking force. “Do something. Test the drug. Show me that it works before I give it to my town boy. Show me now or I’ll feed you to them.”
It was a vicious threat, and Benny had no doubts at all that Lilah meant it. Joe took a step toward the doctor, and Benny and Nix moved in the same instant and put the tips of their swords against his chest.
“Don’t,” warned Benny.
Joe gently pushed the sword blades aside. “And don’t you forget who your friends are.” To McReady he said, “Lilah gave you an order, Monica—not a request.”
McReady glared hot death at him, but then she snatched the backpack from Nix and hurried over to the bed of a woman who still had the spark of humanity.
“Help me,” said McReady, and Lilah was right there. “Hold her head steady, yes, just like that. I need her mouth open. Good . . .”
As Lilah followed the directions, McReady took two capsules from the bag and unscrewed them.
“Normally we’d let her swallow the capsules and wait for digestion and absorption through the stomach mucosa . . . but we don’t have that time. Hold her—she’ll buck. The first dose is painful. The parasites in the body will fight it.”
Lilah’s muscles bunched and flexed, and the woman’s head did not budge at all. McReady poured the powder into the gaping mouth.
“Water,” she called, and Nix was there with a canteen. She dribbled some of the water into the woman’s mouth and then directed Lilah to force the jaws shut.
Immediately the woman began thrashing ten times more frantically than before. Her muscles went rigid as iron, and her body arched and bucked with such force that Lilah had to lie across her to keep her from breaking her own bones. The screams were terrible, the worst Benny had ever heard. High, plaintive, piercing.
“It’s not working,” said Nix. “God, it’s not . . .”
Suddenly the woman went limp.
It was as quick as a heartbeat. Her body flopped back against the bed and she lay there, staring blindly at the ceiling, her chest rising and falling with alarming rapidity as air puffed in and out between gritted teeth.
They gathered around her bed, fists balled in tension, held breath burning in their chests.
“Come on,” McReady muttered. “Come on . . . come on . . .”
Then someone said, “God . . .”
They all stared.
The voice spoke again.
“God . . . help me . . .”
It was the woman.
Wasted, drenched with sweat, covered with her own filth, ragged, and worn to a skeletal thinness.