Half a minute later another reaper appeared. He stepped out of a pocket of dense shadows where no one had apparently noticed him. He was a tough, unsmiling young man with intense dark eyes. He walked to the spot where Mother Rose and Brother Alexi had stood. Even from all the way up in the plane, Benny could see the muscles bunch at the corners of his jaw and the rigid lines of muscle definition that stood out on his arms as he clenched his fists. Benny wasn’t sure if he had ever seen anyone that totally and utterly furious.
The man spat on the ground where Mother Rose had stood, then turned and melted like the specter of murder into the forest.
Benny and Nix stared for a long time at the empty clearing.
“What the hell was that all about?” breathed Nix.
Benny shook his head. “I don’t have the slightest idea.”
58
BEFORE THEY SET OUT TO FIND THE OTHERS, JOE WENT OVER THE FUNCTIONS of the quad with Lilah. She didn’t ask why. It was practical information shared from one fighter to another. It was what Tom would have done.
“This thing will go all day long without much fuel,” he explained. “Runs on ethanol, and the reapers had a tanker of the stuff.”
“Had?”
“I, um, borrowed it from them,” he explained. “Got it hid in an arroyo a few miles from here. When we find your friends, we’ll see about borrowing a few more quads. Beats the heck out of walking everywhere.”
“How come these machines work? I thought the EMPs . . . ?”
“They blew out a lot of stuff, but not everything. I’ve been to places where people have cars—well, had cars. Gasoline wasn’t made to last more than a year or two, and by now it’s all bad. Only things still running are vehicles that used to run on ethanol. There are plenty of cornfields left. Saw a couple of junkers powered by hand-crank generators, solar panels, and even a few with little mini wind turbines. They only get up to about ten miles an hour, but that still beats walking.”
Lilah drove the machine around the big boulders a few times while Joe watched, nodding his approval. Grimm gave a single deep bark to show that he, too, was impressed.
Joe waved her to a stop and switched off the machine. “Okay, you’re good to go, and your bandages aren’t leaking, so that’s good too. I won’t ask if you feel fit enough to pull a trigger. Already know that answer.”
She nodded. “I don’t want to have to fight these people,” she said. “I want to find my friends and continue on our way.”
“Yeah, about that,” Joe said. “You never really told me why four teenagers are way the heck out in the Ruin. It’s not the place for a class trip.”
Lilah considered whether to tell him. She couldn’t see how the information could be used to hurt her or the others. So she told Joe about the jet. And about the plane she’d seen on the plateau.
“Hold on, hold on,” said Joe, suddenly excited. “You saw the transport?”
“What?”
“Big C-130J Super Hercules. Prop job, not a jet. You saw that plane somewhere out here?”
“I saw the jet and—”
Joe cut her off and explained the difference between a jumbo jet and a propeller-driven military transport plane. When he described the latter, she began nodding.
“Yes, that is what I found. It was on the plateau right by the cliff I fell off of. Where we fought the pigs.”
“Did you see any people? Pilots, crew? They’d be in uniforms. . . . ”
“There were three zoms there, hung up on posts.” She described the uniforms.
“Flight crew. Damn it. I knew those guys.” Joe made a pained face. “We’ve been looking for that plane for over a year. Nobody thought it was this close, though. With all the reapers around here, it’s probably been stripped clean. And that’s a real shame. Dr. Monica McReady was aboard that plane. Losing her was a damn hard setback.”
“Setback for whom?”
Joe said, “The human race. She was one of the best epidemiologists we had. One of only a handful who made it through First Night and the plague years. She was worth more than you and me and any five thousand people you can name, and that’s no joke.” He paused. “I guess we were all hoping she was alive somewhere. We kept expecting her to come banging on the door one of these days. I’ve got rangers out everywhere looking for her. The work she was doing . . . I can’t begin to tell you how important it is.”
“Try,” she said frankly.
Joe laughed. “Doc McReady set up the first lab during the outbreak and later moved it to North Carolina, which is where people are trying to build a new America. Lots of people there now, and they even have the lights back on. Later, after we got some reports of possible mutations to the plague in Oregon, Washington, and southern Canada, McReady took a field team up to Joint Base Lewis-McChord, which is a few miles southwest of Tacoma. They had to clean up the base first, since everyone was zommed out. McReady established a research camp up there that she called Hope One. Sixty people—scientists, support staff, and a small platoon to guard them. And it was up there that McReady figured out what caused the plague.”
“People think it was radiation from a—”
“Oh, please. No one really believes that.”
“A virus, then?”
“Yes . . . and no. McReady discovered that it’s actually a combination of several diseases and a few nasty little parasites, all of them working together like a microscopic terrorist cabal. Most people call it the Gray Plague, but the official designation is Reaper, and, yes, that’s where the reapers got their name. Bunch of freaks. Anyway, the Reaper Plague is genuine mad science, and everyone’s pretty sure that Mother Nature did not snort this out because she was feeling cranky.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that someone made this thing,” said Joe, “and somehow it got out of the lab. Or maybe it was deliberately released. No one knows that part, and we probably never will. Whoever launched it is probably dead or shuffling around as a walker. Doesn’t matter. What matters is that McReady’s last report indicated that she was on the verge of some major breakthrough. The problem is that we don’t know what that breakthrough was or even could be, because no one down here has a clue. The only hint we have is a cryptic reference in her last report of the plan to field-test a counter-plague.”
“A counter-plague . . . ? You mean a disease that would stop the Reaper Plague?”
“That’s exactly what I mean. Problem is, McReady sent a distress call from Hope One, saying that the walker activity was spiking. They sent the C-130 up to evac her, the staff, and all the research notes. When the plane never showed, I sent a team of my rangers up. They found Hope One deserted. No staff, no research, so we know that the transport plane at least accomplished the evacuation, but no one ever saw that plane. There were a couple of places where the C-130 could have made an emergency landing, so the decision was made to send a heavy transport to do flyovers of the route. We hoped they’d find the plane down on some airfield and McReady’s people waiting for a new ride. The bird they sent to look was a mother of a C-5 Galaxy, and my guess is that’s the jet your friends saw. The timing would be about right. It did a zigzag search, looking for any sign of McReady’s plane, but they never found it. And it turns out the darn thing is right here! Made it almost all the way home. Holy crap.”
Lilah stared at him. “You know about the jet? You know what it is? Where it is?”
“Sure. Been on it half a dozen times.”
Lilah felt suddenly strange, as if she had stepped out of the real world and into a dream. When she’d seen the crashed plane, she thought that the whole purpose of their journey into the Ruin had come to a dead end. She was sure that the knowledge of its destruction would devastate Nix and Benny. Chong, she knew, didn’t really care one way or the other; he was along because he was in love with her.
Now . . . Nix would be so happy.
Joe interrupted her thoughts. “You said that the flight crew was zommed out and hung on posts? Anything else around them? Incense bowls, bunches of flowers, anything like that?”
“Yes. And signs around their necks saying that they were sinners.”
“Reapers,” growled Joe. Grimm must have recognized the word, because he gave his own low growl, full of menace and promise.
“These reapers . . . will you please tell me who they are?”
“We don’t have time to go into the whole history of the reapers,” said Joe. “The short version is this. Prior to First Night, Saint John was what the police used to call a serial killer. He was a psychopathic mass murderer, and one of almost legendary status. There were books and movies made about him. No real surprise that he survived the Reaper Plague. About ten years ago, Saint John showed up at a settlement north of Topeka. Set himself up as a kind of preacher, talking about how man did not need to suffer, how there was an end to pain, yada, yada. Long story short, at first his message got no traction because people were still busy surviving the end of everything. They were in full-blown survival mode, and nobody wanted to hear about just giving up and giving in.” He removed the magazine from his gun, checked that it was fully loaded, and slapped it back into place. “But as time went on, things got worse out there.”
He told her about the rampant diseases that swept through a lot of the communities, and the resulting death toll.
“Plus there was radiation in spots from reactor meltdowns, and more radiation from the cities they nuked on First Night. Cancer rates are probably up a thousand percent. For a lot of people in a lot of places it pretty much looked like suffering was all there was and all there was ever going to be.”
“And that’s when they started listening to Saint John?”
“Yup. By then he’d managed to recruit a hundred or so followers. His reapers. They’d go into a town, and at first there were a lot of discussions and sermons about embracing the nonphysical and letting go of the struggle to hold on to a dying world. Crap like that. Saint John presided over mass suicides in one town after another.”
“That’s stupid.”
“It’s people,” said Joe as he began filling the gas tank from a red plastic bottle.
“But . . . how can the reapers convince people to commit suicide when—?”
“When they’re still sucking air? Yeah, well, this whole enchilada gets crazier and crazier. When they’ve wiped out all the heretics and blasphemers, they intend to kill each other, and the last man standing will hang himself. Delightful, huh?”
“Really stupid,” Lilah insisted.
“Not everyone is suited for survival, especially the way people were in the early twenty-first century. People had gotten really soft, really addicted to machines, electronics, and specialists who would come in and do everything from fixing the plumbing to pulling a tooth. Nobody knew how to do things for themselves. It was kind of pathetic.”
“You sound like you agree with Saint John.”
He set down the plastic container and replaced the quad’s gas cap. “No freaking way, darlin’. Just because there are a lot of sheep doesn’t mean everyone’s a sheep. There are a lot—a whole lot—of cases where people really rose to the challenge. They learned what they didn’t know, they built shelters, they rediscovered hunting and farming, they reclaimed those qualities that put man at the top of the food chain in the first place. And they became the leaders who gathered everyone else around them. Your own town, and the other eight there in central California, are examples of that. People pitching in together to make a better life for everyone.”
“How many towns did Saint John attack?”
“Too many,” said Joe bitterly. “Way too many.”
“Is there anyone left?”
He nodded. “Sure. Saint John never made it to North Carolina, and that’s where the real heartbeat of this country is. It’s the new capital. Granted, it’s a small start compared to what we lost, but it is a start. And there are a lot of scattered towns and settlements. It’s a big country, and Saint John hasn’t had time to kill everyone.” He paused. “If his army keeps growing at the rate it’s been going . . . then nowhere’s going to be safe.”
“You make him sound as dangerous as the plague.”
Joe nodded again. “Yeah . . . I guess he is. He uses Mother Rose to recruit people into the reapers so he has a big enough force to destroy any town that won’t simply roll over for him. It’s a useful model for conquest. Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great did the same thing, though their motives were different.”
“I don’t understand it, though,” said Lilah. “Why do so many people join him?”
Joe helped her onto the back of the quad. “Too many people have simply lost hope. As long as the Gray Plague is still happening and the zoms are still out there, it’s going to be hard for most people not to think Saint John has the only answer worth hearing.”
“But you said that Dr. McReady and the others were working on a cure. . . . ”
“They are, sure.” Joe sighed. “But most people don’t know that. McReady’s breakthrough, whatever it is, is new science. We don’t even know what it is yet, or whether it’ll really change things. And without McReady’s research, we’re still stuck on the same sinking ship.”
Lilah said, “Have you given up hope too?”
Joe adjusted the seat belts carefully around Lilah’s wound. “Not a chance.”
“You’re going to fight back?”