Benny drew his sword but kept the blade in the shadow cast by the tree. Nix had her pistol out, the barrel pointed at the lead figure in a line of three quads that bumped and rocked along the forest path. Two men and a woman drove the machines. Reapers, without a doubt.
Benny was acutely aware that Nix had only two bullets left.
Nix thumbed the hammer back, but Benny whispered, “Don’t. Not unless they see us.”
Seconds burned away as the quads tore along the path, the roar of the motors filling the air. Then, a hundred feet shy of where Benny and Nix crouched, the line of vehicles turned and headed due east. The motor sounds diminished quickly; soon the reapers were gone, and an uneasy silence draped itself over the forest once more.
Nix blew out her cheeks and leaned her forehead on her outstretched gun arm. She uncocked the pistol. Benny bent and kissed her on the shoulder.
“They’re gone,” he said as he slid the katana back into its sheath.
Without raising her head, Nix said, “You know, Benny, there was a time—was it only a day ago?—when the sound of a motor would have been like Christmas to us. It would have proved that the world wasn’t dead, that there was something out here to find.”
?
?I know.” Benny sighed. “And I remember a time not that long ago when we were happy. When we used to laugh.”
Nix raised her head and looked at him for a long moment, her lips parted as if she was going to reply. The look in her eyes was so deeply sad that Benny had to look away to hide the tears that suddenly formed in his eyes.
They got to their feet and continued moving toward the creek. Neither spoke for a long time. Then they found the stream and followed the muddy banks to a small clearing, and there they found the blood-spattered remains of several tents. They stood side by side at the edge of the creek, neither of them willing to take another step up the bank.
“God . . . ,” whispered Nix in a voice that was filled with horror.
Benny spotted something and made himself climb the slope to the camp. He bent and picked up a stuffed rabbit. It was smeared with blood. He held it out to Nix, but she just shook her head.
“There must have been an attack,” he said. “That’s why Eve ran. In the confusion she must have gotten separated from her family. From all this gear, it looks like there were a lot of people here. We only saw her parents and that girl, Riot.”
“Benny, look,” Nix said, pointing to the stream bed. Two bodies lay half-submerged right at the next bend. They walked cautiously down and saw that they were truly dead. Neither was a reaper. They were ordinary-looking folk, and savage blows to their heads and necks had probably killed them and prevented them from rising. An unintended mercy buried within a heinous crime.
A few yards away they found a third body, and they squatted down to examine it. It was a middle-aged woman, and it was clear that she had been stabbed in the chest. Nix tilted her head to one side and grunted.
“She wasn’t quieted,” she said. “No head wound, no incision at the brain stem.”
Benny double-checked and then nodded. “It’s happening here, too. Not all of the dead are reanimating.”
“I wish I knew if that was a good thing,” said Nix.
“It was for Tom.”
She looked at the ground for a few seconds, then nodded. “I’m sorry.”
He shook his head. In silence they rose and moved along the stream. They found other bodies. Many others.
This had been the scene of a terrible slaughter. Here and there they found dead reapers, too, and each of these had been quieted by knives to the base of their skulls. But most of the dead were not reapers. Benny stopped counting when the toll reached fifty. Men, women, and children.
No one had been spared.
No one.
Nix’s lips curled back from her teeth in a feral grin. “Who are these freaks?”
Benny sat down on a rock and looked at his shoes. Then an idea struck him. “I think this is some kind of death cult,” he said.
She turned sharply. “What?”
“Think about it,” he said. “What else could it be? You said Thanatos was the Greek god of death, and Saint Jerk-o kept talking about the ‘gift of darkness.’ Seems kind of obvious.”
Nix snorted. “I said Thanatos was one of the Greek gods of death. The nice one, the one that takes away suffering. These reapers don’t seem like they’re trying to alleviate suffering. Besides—I can’t think of anything stupider than a death cult after an apocalypse.”