The horses raced toward the gate in full panicked flight with the wagon bouncing and jouncing behind them. The three gate guards gawped in surprise and horror, and they were two seconds too late in trying to close the gates. The horses smashed into them, flinging all three men into the air like rag dolls.
Morgie threw himself to one side. He rolled, as Tom had taught him, and rose to the balls of his feet, knees bent, sword in his hands. As Tom had taught him.
The back of the wagon was splashed with blood, and the door hung open on a single twisted hinge. Shapes moved inside the wagon. As Morgie watched, they moved with dreadful slowness into the dying light. Pale white and bright red and the utter black of empty eyes. Traders, four of them. Big men who spent their lives working the Ruin to bring goods and supplies from the Rat Pack scavengers to the Nine Towns. They were covered with bites and the marks of violence.
Maybe one of them had been bitten out in the Ruin and the others had taken him into the wagon to try and treat him. Or maybe they’d all been walking beside the wagon to lighten the burden for the horses when zoms had attacked. Perhaps one had been bitten but hadn’t told his fellows because a bite was a death sentence and he wanted to keep every last bit of life he had left.
There was no way to know.
There was no time left to care.
They boiled out of the back of the wagon and threw themselves at Morgie.
PART TWO
THE STORM LANDS
A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for.
One of the infected wild boars got inside the gates today. Two of the soldiers from the bridge chased it on quads and shot it. I saw them dragging the carcass into one of the hangars on the other side of the trench.
What do they want with a dead zombie boar?
I asked a couple of the monks, but they always say the same thing: “We do not speak of that, sister.”
CHAPTER 33
Sister Sun followed the Red Brother out of the hot Nevada sun and into the cloying darkness of an old convenience store. The wire racks had long since been picked clean, and the floor was littered with animal droppings, bones, and trash. There were splashes of blood on the floor and walls, and Sister Sun imagined she could almost hear the screams of heretics who had been brought in here to be interrogated by the saint. The desert outside was filled with blind and skinless dead who wandered without purpose.
Behind the counter, Saint John sat on a stool, carefully cleaning his many knives. His fingers were long and deft, and if she watched them too closely, Sister Sun knew she could be hypnotized by them.
The saint did not look up. “How pleasant of you to join me, my sister.”
She bowed. “Honored One.”
“Mother Rose is back, did you know?”
“Yes, Honored One.”
“I am told that she visited the Shrine of the Fallen yesterday.”
“Yes.”
He glanced up finally, and there was amusement in his eyes. An almost prankish merriment.
“I am told that she was satisfied that the seals of the Shrine were intact,” he said, “exactly as she left them.”
Sister Sun nodded.
The saint glanced past her to the killers of the Red Brotherhood who stood silent and vigilant by the door. “Leave us,” he said. “No one enters until I say otherwise.”
They nodded and, quiet as ghosts, left the store.
Saint John let silence settle over things for a moment. His clever hands worked steadily with cloth and oil and a small pick to dig out even the slightest flake of drying blood from the skinning knife he held.
“You have had one month with the materials from the heretic Dr. McReady,” he said.
“Yes, Honored One.”
“Tell me.”
Sister Sun took a breath to steady her nerves. It was not fear that made her tremble. It was a terrible excitement.
“As I have said many times, Honored One,” she began, “science is like a knife. Used by a heretic, it is a thing of great evil. Used in the cause of righteousness, it is a holy weapon of great power.”
“And do you believe that you have discovered a way to turn these evil things to holy purpose?”
“Yes,” she said. “I have.”
He set down his knife. “Explain it to me.”
She did. It did not take very long. Saint John had a first-class intellect. And it was a cold mind, capable of separating rational assessment from emotions and religious passion. Sister Sun told him what she’d discovered in those notes, and how it coincided with theories she had been working on prior to kneeling to kiss the knife and join the Night Church. She explained what she’d learned from those notes, and she outlined what she did not yet know.
“You say that the notes include a formula to cure the Reaper Plague?” asked Saint John.
“A treatment,” she corrected. “But it amounts to the same thing. McReady was poised to eradicate the plague and all the gray people. But she apparently went elsewhere to complete her research.”
“Could you create a countermeasure to this ‘treatment’?” asked the saint.
Sister Sun chewed her lip, then gave a slow shake of her head. “No. Not as such,” she said. “But I could take her research and turn it to serve us.”
“How?”
Sister Sun told him.
“What would be required for you to do this?”
She said, “I need a lab. Or at least basic equipment.”
“We’re in a desert.”
She shook her head. “There’s a biological testing facility less than two hundred miles from here. I can use that. It would have a portable generator, which could be repaired and refueled. With ten reapers as assistants, I can have the lab running inside two weeks.”
He considered this, his lips pursed.
“And if you had fifty reapers as assistants — how quickly could you get it running?”
She stared at him. At his dark and glittering eyes. At his smile.
Then she smiled too.
CHAPTER 34
Benny looked for Nix the rest of the day but didn’t find her.
While he was walking back to try the mess hall again, he caught movement out of the corner of his eye and turned to see a blue balloon floating on the hot air. It was on the far side of the trench, though, and the zoms all raised their dead eyes to stare at it. The balloon had barely any lift and bounced from one to another of the zoms, touching the tops of heads, rebounding from clumsy fingers.
It must have escaped from Eve, he thought.
Then it occurred to him — how was it able to float at all?
Benny knew about helium from Peppertoes, the clown at the harvest fair in Mountainside. He had a big tank of helium — an item that must have cost him a fair percentage of the ration dollars he was paid by the town to perform for the kids. Every year Peppertoes would give a helium-filled balloon to the kid who grew the biggest sweet pepper. Morgie’s cousin Bethy won twice.
But who around here had a tank of helium?
He watched the balloon bounce and bounce, and then he saw a zom make a successful grab at it. The blue orb vanished into the crowd of the dead, and a second later there was a loud pop!
Benny frowned at the zoms, then scanned the sky for more balloons. There were none. And when he looked over at the playground, the children were gone. Siesta time?
Benny shrugged and forgot the balloon as he resumed his search for Nix.