Fire and Ash (Benny Imura 4)

They all looked at him, momentarily shocked to silence.

“What the hell is it with everyone?” Benny continued, his volume lower but his voice still hard as fists. “If you’re mad at us for roughing up some of your soldiers, then too bad. Get over it. They could have acted like human beings instead of robots.”

“They were following my orders.”

“Then maybe you should start giving better orders,” Benny said coldly. “I mean, who do you think you are? Who do you think we are? We’re not on opposite sides in this thing. Unless I’m mistaken, it’s us against them, and the ‘them’ are the reapers and the zoms. We are supposed to be working together to save the world.”

“We are,” Reid fired back. “The American Nation is using its full resources to combat the Reaper Plague.”

Benny leaned on the edge of the table. “And me and my friends? We’re what to you? A nuisance?”

“I believe you already tried to play the card of importance due to finding the plane.”

Benny smiled. “Yeah, I thought I recognized your voice. That was you I talked to yesterday. You said that our finding the plane was only self-interest. Are you actually that dense? Are all you people that close-minded? We shared that information because that’s what people do. That’s how everyone survives. Maybe you haven’t been outside lately, colonel, but zombies ate the world. People have been scratching and clawing to survive for fifteen years. My own town is in California. Your jet passed right over us. Are you going to tell me that you didn’t see it? Are you going to tell me that you don’t know about the Nine Towns we have up in those mountains? Captain Ledger knows about them, so I’ll bet a brand-new ration dollar that you know about them.”

“We are aware of those towns,” conceded Colonel Reid. “What of it?”

“What of it?” Benny slapped the flat of his palm on the table so hard it sounded like a gunshot. Echoes banged off the hangar walls. “Why the hell didn’t you tell us? We thought we were alone all those years. We thought that the rest of the world was dead. Don’t you think it would have helped us to know that there were other people out there? That there was a new government? That scientists were working on a cure? That people were trying to put the world back together into some shape that made sense? Are you so removed from human emotions that you can’t realize how much that would have helped people? Helped us? It would have given us hope.”

Colonel Reid started to reply, but Benny wasn’t finished with her. “I read enough about the way things were before First Night to know that people were always fighting. Not just wars, but political fights, social fights, all sorts of things. I swear, sometimes reading those history books I wondered if people wanted to fight more than they wanted to survive.” He straightened and fixed her with a cold stare. “When we saw that jet, we thought that things were going to be okay. We thought that it represented a chance for a better future than the one we were handed. I can’t even put into words how sorry I am—how cheated I feel—to find out that things are just the same.”

The silence in the hangar was absolute.

Finally, Riot murmured, “The boy’s right . . . we’re up to our eyeballs in the alligator swamp and y’all won’t let us in the boat.”

Colonel Reid brushed nonexistent lint from her lapel. Nix balled her hands into little fists that she squeezed hard enough to make the knuckles creak.

In a calmer voice, Benny said, “Right now you need us.”

He produced the sheets with the coordinates.

Reid’s face went scarlet, and she wheeled on Ledger. “You said that you had the coordinates.”

“I did,” admitted Ledger. “And I gave them back to Benny. After all, he found them.”

“That’s treason. I could have you shot for this.”

Joe smiled. “You could try, Jane. But I don’t think that would work out for you as well as you’d like.” He shook his head. “Besides, those papers belong to Benny.”

“They are the property of the American Nation.”

“Excuse me,” cut in Nix, “but exactly where are the borders of the American Nation?”

“Is that a joke?” demanded Reid.

“No, it’s a straight question. We found those papers out here in the Ruin. Benny took some off a reaper and the coordinates from a walker. Are you saying that that happened inside your legal boundaries?”

“The whole continent is the American Nation.”

“From the Atlantic to the Pacific?”

“Of course.”

“So—central California is part of that, right?”

Reid snapped her mouth shut, but it was too late. Her foot was in Nix’s bear trap.

“You’re saying that our town, Mountainside, and all the other towns in the Sierra Nevadas are part of the American Nation?”