This time Lilah held her tongue. She looked confused, unable to frame a reply.
Benny said, “Did you look for Jolt?”
“Oh yeah,” said Riot. “I looked all over this desert for him. Haven’t found so much as a footprint.”
“Well,” said Benny, “when this is over, when things settle down… maybe we can help you look.”
Riot smiled and shook her head. “Don’t you know nothing, boy? This ain’t never going to be over.”
She looked at the rope she held in her hands. Then, without another word, she finished tying the loose knot.
Below them, the big soldier stood in a throng of maybe a dozen smaller zoms: some women, a few teenagers, and two men of average height. Ortega looked to be about six-four or — five.
“They’re pretty thick down there,” said Riot. “Best place to lasso someone is around the chest, ’bout midway down the upper arm. But our boy’s reaching up. Might have to hook an arm and try to drag him out that way.”
Riot crept as close to the edge as she dared. The undercut ground creaked a little even under her negligible weight. Benny picked up the rope and stood behind her to anchor her in place.
“Do it!” he said.
Riot swung the lasso over her head a few times and then hurled it down.
She snagged three different arms, two of which belonged to other dead.
She eased the slack and tried again.
And again.
And again.
After eight tries she was cursing a blue streak and using language so intensely and descriptively foul that Benny was extremely impressed.
Finally Riot stepped back from the ravine and threw the lasso onto the grass.
“So much for your brilliant plan,” she groused. “I might as well hang myself with that damn thing.”
She started to stomp off, got about ten paces, and stopped. She turned with a quizzical look on her face. The same expression was blossoming on Lilah’s and Nix’s faces; and Benny was sure he wore an identical look.
Riot had said it.
Hang myself.
They looked at the lasso. Everyone smiled.
Ten seconds later they were kneeling together at the edge of the ravine, dangling a much smaller loop down into the shadows.
“A little to the left,” suggested Benny. “No, too much. Back… back…”
Lilah crouched next to Riot, her spear extended all the way down, using the blade to bat aside reaching hands and to tap the loop toward Ortega.
“Little more…,” breathed Benny. “Little more…”
The edge of the loop brushed against the big zom’s face. Everyone held their breath as, with infinite care, Riot eased it over the crown of the man’s head and then slowly, slowly down until it hung pendulously below his chin.
“Now!” cried Nix, and Riot jerked back on the rope. The slack loop snapped tight, constricting like a noose around Sergeant Ortega’s throat.
They had him.
Kind of.
He was still down in the pit.
They grabbed the rope and began to pull.
Benny, though slim, was the heaviest of them; but, like the girls, the hardships of warfare, frequent injuries, small meals, and stress had leaned him down.
Sergeant Ortega, before death and desiccation had wasted him, probably weighed 260 pounds. Now he was probably 220. They had a two-to-one weight advantage over him, but they were lifting from the top, with the majority of his weight below the noose, and they were trying to pull him up a twenty-foot wall. While he fought and writhed and struggled.
It went from a brilliant plan to a brutal struggle. The sun hammered down on them and sweat burst from their pores as they pulled. They set their feet into the sandy soil, using tufts of the tall grass for traction. They groaned and growled and yelled and cursed.
The sergeant was an improbably heavy weight. He felt like he weighed a thousand pounds. They moved another foot back.
And that was as far as they got.
Benny strained and strained until his blood sang in his ears and black poppies seemed to burst in his eyes.
Finally they collapsed. Their hands ached; their lungs burned with oxygen starvation. They lay sprawled where they’d fallen, except for Nix, who crawled like a battlefield victim to the edge of the ravine and peered down.
Nix, who was never one for cursing, repeated a few of the phrases Riot had used a few minutes ago.
“What?” asked Benny listlessly.
“It’s the other zoms,” she said.
Benny lifted his head. “What?”
“They grabbed at Ortega as soon as we started pulling him up. Some of them are still holding on to him.”
Benny let his head drop back with a thump. He felt Nix crawl up beside him and collapse. They lay there, defeated.
Finally, Lilah gasped out a single word. A statement and a question.
“Quad?”
Benny thought it was Riot who started laughing first. He had his eyes closed and couldn’t tell. First her, then Lilah’s creaking ghost of a laugh, then Nix. Then him. They burst out laughing as they lay on the withered brown grass.
CHAPTER 44
When they could walk, they fetched Benny’s quad, tied the end of the rope onto the back of the Honda, gunned the engine, and pulled Sergeant Ortega out of the ravine as easy as pulling a carrot out of soft soil. Four other zoms came up with him. Lilah and Riot were waiting for them, and blades flashed in the sunlight. Withered hands clutched at the big sergeant, but they were no longer attached to anything.
As Benny dragged Sergeant Ortega away from the ravine, Nix trotted beside the zom, her Monster Cutter sword raised to deliver a quieting blow.
But she didn’t have to.
The soldier lay still and silent on the grass.
Benny killed the engine and ran back to stand beside Nix. Riot and Lilah trotted up. The sergeant lay in a loose-jointed tangle of arms and legs. His face was placid in that slack rest of final death. At a glance, he looked like any other zom. Less comprehensively withered than the people who’d died on First Night, but still leathery from the Nevada sun. The only thing that was noticeably wrong with him was his neck.
It was too long.
Inches too long.
Between the pull of the quad and the drag of the other zoms clinging to him, the bones of the dead man’s neck had separated, and the spinal cord had stretched too far and snapped. Had the strain been a little heavier, or the process of pulling him up taken a few seconds longer, the envelope of skin and muscle that comprised his neck would have torn and all they would have pulled out of the ravine was a head.
They stood around him, their shadows falling over the zom like a shroud.
“I’m glad we don’t have to quiet him,” said Nix. The others, even Lilah, nodded.
Benny knelt down and lifted the satchel strap. He had to raise the total slack weight of the sergeant’s head in order to pull the satchel off. He winced but did it anyway. As soon as he had it off, Nix and Riot knelt down and began going through the sergeant’s pockets and laying the items out on a clear patch of dirt. Lilah sorted the items.
They found a rusted multipurpose tool, a Las Vegas poker chip that Ortega was probably carrying as a good-luck charm, a plastic pocket comb, a pencil with a tip that looked like it had been sharpened with a knife, and several folded pieces of paper money of a kind none of them had ever seen. Instead of a picture of a president, the central image was a star, and Benny saw a phrase in Latin: POPULUS INVICTUS.
Nix, reading over his shoulder, translated it. “A Nation Unconquerable.”
Unlike Benny, she had paid attention in language arts.
“I think that’s the motto of the American Nation,” suggested Benny.
Lilah nodded her agreement, but Riot snorted.
“What?” asked Benny, shooting her a look. “You don’t think so?”
“Close to three hundred million Americans have died, son, during the Fall and in the years after,” said Riot. “How many have to croak before y’all consider it game over?”
“All,” said Lilah.
“Absolutely,” agreed Nix. “We’re still fighting.”
“Yeah,” said Benny, nodding. “Besides, it wasn’t our generation who was defeated when the dead rose. I still believe there’s a future, and I intend to be there to see it.”
Riot considered him, and a slow smile spread over her face. “Well look at you, Captain Hero.”
“Oh, shut up,” said Benny, but he was grinning.
The last thing they found was a folded slip of paper with a series of numbers written on it: