“. . . he doesn’t deserve this. Where are you?”
The picture told him nothing. The book as a whole, however, did. There was blood on every single photograph in the book. Old, dried blood. Weeks old, at least, and in some cases the gore was so old that it was caked and powdery. These were not random splashes but deliberate markings. About half the photos had been crossed out with a dripped red X. Eleven others were marked with a bloody thumbprint in the upper right corner. When he compared the prints, Benny saw that they were each different, no two alike. The remaining photos were also marked by a thumbprint, but in each of these cases the thumbprint was placed over the heart of the person. The same thumbprint was used for all these.
So what did it mean?
Benny chewed on it.
The Xs seemed obvious. Those were members of the crew who had been killed, or who’d died during the crash. Two of the pictures marked that way showed men dressed as pilots, and Benny had seen those men before. On the day they’d found this plane, there had been two zoms tied to crossbars erected on the ground in front of the cockpit.
The second set, the ones with unique thumbprints, took him longer to figure out, but as he went through each picture again he spotted a face that he recognized. The face was the same, but in the photo the man had black hair.
Benny had looked into that same face minutes ago. He had looked into those eyes while the man in the photo was alive, and he’d looked into the same eyes once all traces of human life had fled.
The reaper.
According to the Teambook his name was Marcus Flood, age twenty-six, born in Kansas City. A lance corporal in the army of the American Nation.
The man he’d just killed had been a member of Dr. McReady’s crew. One of the soldiers assigned to help evacuate Hope One.
But he’d become a reaper.
How?
Why?
Riot and Joe both said that the reaper army had been built mostly from peopl
e who had been given a choice: die with everyone else in your town, or join. It was a conqueror’s strategy that had worked for everyone from Alexander the Great to the Nazis, so apparently it still worked. Even so . . . Benny could not climb inside the head of someone who would willingly become part of a group whose ultimate goal was to end all human life. Sure, it meant living a little longer, but the end was still going to be the same. Death.
What made someone make that choice? Did they think that somehow they’d slip through the cracks and not be sent into the darkness when Saint John thought it was time? Or did they really buy into the reaper beliefs?
The man in that photo seemed to.
There was another photo in the batch that caught Benny’s attention. Another soldier. A big man, tough-looking but also strangely familiar. The sheet said that his name was Luis Ortega, and his designation was team logistics coordinator.
Whatever that meant.
Benny touched the picture.
“Where do I know you from?” he wondered aloud. Was this man another of the reapers, like Marcus Flood? If so, was he now wandering around on the airfield? Had he been one of the reapers with Mother Rose, one of those gathered a few yards from here? Benny and Nix had secretly watched that gathering. Had he died with Mother Rose or vanished with Saint John and the main body of the reaper army? Was he one of the thousands of sick people being tended by the way-station monks? Or one of the refugees Riot was guiding to Sanctuary?
The half-remembered encounter had to be recent, though, because it throbbed insistently in Benny’s mind.
Because of the severity of the head wound he’d received, the monks told him there was a strong chance that he might have some amnesia. Not total, not even a lot, but some blank spots. This was one of those spots, he was sure of that. He could almost—almost—see the memory of this man, almost catch it. A big man in a military uniform like this. Benny had seen hundreds of other military clothes, from zoms killed during the battles after First Night. Some of the men in town had camouflage jackets from the old world. The uniforms of the new American Nation were different. The camouflage was a different pattern, with bits of dusty red mixed in with the black, tan, brown, and gray.
Then . . . something, some fragment of a memory went skittering across the back of Benny’s brain, triggered by Sergeant Ortega’s face and uniform. He went still, hoping to catch a glimpse of it, to discover what it wanted to tell him.
But that fast it was there and gone, hiding in the shadows under a rock in his damaged memory.
Benny flipped back through the book, this time looking at the small pieces of paper clipped to some of the pages. One note was written in round cursive by a decidedly feminine hand.
Mutations reported in California.
This needs to be checked out.
Field Team Five?
Mutations?