Flesh-&-Bone(123)

Joe looked stricken. “I know. They have a few soldiers there, but they can’t stop an army. And my rangers are scattered all over the place. We have to warn them. That means either we go without this kid, in which case the reapers’ll carve him into lunch meat; or we put him on a quad and let the ride out there do the job for them.”

In the distance they heard the faint buzz of quads. They all looked that way and then at one another.

“Oh God,” breathed Nix.

Benny, whispered Tom, you know what you saw. Tell them. Tell them. . . .

“What I wouldn’t give for a minigun or an—”

Benny asked dazedly, “What’s a LAW rickett?”

Joe froze and stared down at him.

“What did you say?”

“That’s what it said. L-A-W-R-K-T. LAW rickett. I read it. M-R-E. R-P-G and—”

Joe suddenly bent close to Benny, his face inches away.

“A LAW rocket? God almighty, kid . . . where did you see that?” he asked in a fierce whisper.

Benny smiled and winked. “I can’t tell you,” he said. “It’s a secret.”

And then he passed out.





90

BENNY FELT A LOT OF HANDS ON HIM. HE FELT HIMSELF MOVING. WHEN he opened his eyes, though, the movement had already stopped and he was back inside the airplane.

“Zoms!” he cried.

But no one reacted.

Nothing tried to bite him.

Maybe I’m wrong about that, he decided, and went back to sleep.

The sound of quads woke him up. Quads and shouts and a dog barking.

Benny still hadn’t seen any dog. He just heard one. A big one too.

“They’re coming,” said Riot. “God—Brother Alexi’s back with a slew of reapers. Gotta be fifty, sixty of them.”

“Oh God,” Nix said, “there’s too many!”

Someone laughed. Joe? Was Benny’s Zombie Card laughing? Silly.

He opened his eyes and saw Joe carrying something that looked like a big toy gun. Like one of those big plastic toys from before First Night. A Super Soaker. Mayor Kirsch bought one for his kids. Cost three hundred ration dollars. That was more than Mrs. Riley made in a whole season doing sewing.

“Nix?” he asked.

A small, warm hand took his, and Benny tried to turn toward her, but his head wouldn’t move. His whole body felt weird, like it was tied to a board. How crazy was that?

Nix leaned over, and he saw her face. She was so pretty.

“Nix, is your mom here?”

Pain flickered in her green eyes.

“Mama’s dead, Benny. You know that.”

“Oh. I thought I heard her laughing. She was baking muffins.”

Something hot and wet fell on his cheek.

A tear.

Where did that come from?

The roar of quads filled the whole cabin. Benny thought it sounded like a zillion of them. People were yelling. Roaring. Cursing, too.

“They’re coming!” shrieked Nix. “They’re climbing up!”

Joe’s voice roared: “Fire in the hole!”

There was big hissing sound, and then the whole plane shook with a gigantic rolling booooom!

The sound was too big for Benny, and he went back down in the darkness. He was sure Nix’s mom was baking muffins.





91

NIX AND CHONG STOOD AT THE EDGE OF THE HATCH AND STARED DOWN at horror.

The air was thick with smoke from the LAW rockets and rocket-propelled grenades that the ranger had fired. The air tasted of gunpowder and wrongness.

The clearing and the whole edge of the plateau was a slaughterhouse. Burned and blasted bodies lay everywhere. Even the trees at the edge of the forest had died in the barrage as the weapons of the old world wrought their carnage.

They were both crying.

“One man,” whispered Nix.

Chong nodded, unable to speak. Sick in body, sick in soul.

One man.

The ranger, Joe, had used those terrible weapons. The reapers, the chosen ones, the elite of Mother Rose’s army, had poured out of the forest, brought back by Alexi to claim the weapons hidden in the shrine. They thought themselves to be the most powerful force left on earth. They thought themselves to be unstoppable—those among them who believed in God and those who only believed in Mother Rose—they surged forward to slaughter the pitiful handful of people who stood against them.