Outside the cinder-block wall, filling the desert and stretching off into the shimmering horizon, were zoms. Thousands upon thousands of them. There were more lining the edge of the trench, and when Benny looked toward the back of the building, he saw many more.
Nix said, “Joe says that there are probably two or three hundred thousand of them now. When people die, they are taken across the trench and allowed to roam free. The monks pray for them several times a day.”
“But the jet? The lab?”
Nix reached into the V of her blouse and pulled out a silver whistle on a chain. “Recognize this? It’s a reaper’s dog whistle. It’s ultrasonic. The zoms follow it every time.” She pointed. “See those towers? When the jet is ready to take off or land, they blast an ultrasonic call through those. The zoms follow the call to the towers, and it clears the runway. I’ve seen it work twice now. It’s amazing.”
“Dog whistles,” said Benny. “It’s warrior smart. Tom would approve.”
Nix nodded.
“What goes on over there?” asked Benny, pointing to the concrete buildings.
Nix started to answer, but the brave front she had been putting up collapsed, and she crumpled into grief. She put her face in her hands, and her body shook with sobs.
“Hey . . . hey . . . Nix—what’s wrong?”
Nix turned and wrapped her arms around him, sobbing as hard now as she had back on the crashed plane. But through her sobs she forced herself to speak.
“They’re working on the cure over there, Benny. They really are. With the stuff we found, the stuff on the plane, they think that maybe they really will cure it. They think that they’ll be able to stop the plague . . . to stop the infection . . . ”
“That’s great, Nix,” Benny said, stroking her back.
But she shook her head and kept shaking it.
“Nix? What is it . . . what’s wrong?”
And then he understood.
Then he remembered.
The memory was a knife in his heart.
“Nix,” he whispered, and his voice broke on that single word. “Nix . . . where’s Chong?”
She clung to him. “They’re trying, Benny. They’re trying everything. But . . . he’s so sick. He’s already so . . . ”
Nix couldn’t say another word.
Benny wouldn’t have been able to hear her anyway.
They clung to each other, and together they dropped brokenly to their knees.
-3-
IT WOULD BE HELL.
Lilah knew that.
Hell was something the Lost Girl knew. She had lived it all her life.
She was a toddler on First Night, but she remembered the panic and flight. The endless screams. The blood and the dying.
She saw her pregnant mother die as Lilah’s sister, Annie, came screaming into the world. She remembered the other refugees, filled with terror and confusion, at first recoil from her
mother as she came back from that place where all souls go and only the soulless return from. She remembered what they did—what they had to do. Lilah had screamed herself raw. Those screams had smashed down the doorway into hell.
She remembered Charlie Pink-eye and the Hammer brutalizing George and then laying rough hands on her and Annie. Dragging them to Gameland.