He cut a quick look over his shoulder and saw that two of the soldiers were sprawled on the ground. Benny slewed to a sideways stop that built a wall of dust between him and the zoms. The dust seemed to freeze there—a brown stain painted on the moment. A third soldier—the one who had refused to pass along the message to Captain Ledger—leaned against the bridge, clutching what looked like a badly broken nose. The fourth was standing, unarmed, with his hands raised.
Nix, Lilah, and Riot had apparently come up on the soldiers’ blind side while they were shooting at Benny.
Well, thought Benny, I guess it sucks to be them.
Even so, he hoped the girls hadn’t injured anyone too badly. It was just too bad the guards lacked the sense, permission, or manners to pass along a simple message.
Benny saw Nix turn to him and shake her head in exasperation. He knew that had she been aware of his plan, Nix would have done anything she could to stop him. And yet . . . a big, bright smile blossomed on her face.
Lilah glanced at Benny and gave him a brief nod.
Benny was sure he’d get an earful about his rashness, but for the moment some other guys were taking the brunt of the collective female outrage. He was very cool with that.
Movement made him turn, and he saw that the dead, all four hundred thousand of them, were facing him. And shuffling his way. Here and there Benny could see zoms dressed in black clothes adorned with red cloth streamers tied to wrists and ankles. These were reapers who had died in the big fight three weeks ago. Benny recognized a few of their faces. The reapers looked like ordinary people—well, zommed-out versions of ordinary people—but they had been so vicious in life, so determined to end all life. That concept was more alien to Benny than the fact that these people were now undying corpses.
Life is truly weird, he thought. And it’s not getting any less weird the farther I get from home.
Then, with a collective moan of boundless hunger that shook the world, and the tramp of eight hundred thousand withered feet, they surged toward him. When he’d first met Joe Ledger, the ranger had estimated two hundred thousand zoms. The monks counted twice that many.
And he laughed.
“Bite me!” he yelled at the top of his voice.
He fed fuel into the quad and kicked it forward, first racing toward the advancing wall of death, and then at the last second cutting to the left, zooming away from the hangar and the concrete blockhouse, past the silent blood-splashed jet, shooting down the line of reaching hands, driving at full speed toward the far end of the runway.
The zombies all turned to follow.
He soon outpaced them. The farther Benny went, the fewer the zoms. Soon he was in open country, where only a solitary zombie wandered in a slow and pointless circle, its sad pattern created by a missing foot. Benny cut right, heading toward the squat building at the foot of the row of siren towers.
He cast a quick look over his shoulder and saw that he was at least half a mile ahead of the leading edge of the zombie wave.
Perfect.
He drove over to the small building. A soldier stepped out, rifle in hand.
“Stop right there,” he commanded. “Who are you and what are you doing over here? This is a restricted area.”
“No kidding,” said Benny. “I need you to turn the sirens on.”
The soldier began raising the rifle.
Benny immediately spun the quad to kick up a thick cloud of choking dust. Then he shot south along the line of siren towers. He cursed aloud, repeating every foul phrase he’d learned from Riot. That girl had a truly poisonous mouth, and Benny felt a little embarrassed grumbling those descriptions, even though no one could hear him.
The zoms kept coming, drawn as much by the dust plume as by the roar of the quad. The dust plume was hundreds of feet high now, and the breeze, though slight, was steady—it continued to push the plume, reshaping it, shoving it away toward the mountains. The dead followed as if mesmerized.
Once Benny was sure he was well beyond the range of any rifle shot, he roared up and down at the base of the mountains, luring the zoms.
“Come on,” Benny said through gritted teeth. “Come on . . .”
It took the zoms nearly twenty minutes to reach him.
When the closest zoms were fifteen feet away, Benny fed gas to the quad and shot away, running even farther to the south. They turned like an inhuman tidal surge, but he was moving too far and too fast. Then Benny cut right and right again to head north, but he angled away from where the mass of zoms were, keeping the engine speed low so that it purred rather than growled. The zoms would eventually hear him, but not right away.
By the time he got back to the blockhouse, Nix and the others had finished tying the soldiers up. Lilah stood over them, her Sig Sauer pistol held loosely at her side. Riot and Nix were trying to figure out how the locking assembly on the bridge worked. Dozens of monks had come out of the other buildings on that side of the trench. Some harangued the girls for their violence, but most watched in a kind of mute fascination.
Benny pulled to a stop by the blockhouse air lock. He killed the engine, dismounted, and did a very quick, very quiet circuit of the entire building to make sure that he hadn’t missed any zoms.
There wasn’t a single dead person around.