Nix, Lilah, and Riot had apparently come up on the soldiers’ blind side while they were shooting at Benny.
Well, thought Benny, I guess it sucks to be them.
Even so, he hoped the girls hadn’t injured anyone too badly. It was just too bad the guards lacked the sense, permission, or manners to pass along a simple message.
Benny saw Nix turn to him and shake her head in exasperation. He knew that had she been aware of his plan, Nix would have done anything she could to stop him. And yet… a big, bright smile blossomed on her face.
Lilah glanced at Benny and gave him a brief nod.
Benny was sure he’d get an earful about his rashness, but for the moment some other guys were taking the brunt of the collective female outrage. He was very cool with that.
Movement made him turn, and he saw that the dead, all four hundred thousand of them, were facing him. And shuffling his way. Here and there Benny could see zoms dressed in black clothes adorned with red cloth streamers tied to wrists and ankles. These were reapers who had died in the big fight three weeks ago. Benny recognized a few of their faces. The reapers looked like ordinary people — well, zommed-out versions of ordinary people — but they had been so vicious in life, so determined to end all life. That concept was more alien to Benny than the fact that these people were now undying corpses.
Life is truly weird, he thought. And it’s not getting any less weird the farther I get from home.
Then, with a collective moan of boundless hunger that shook the world, and the tramp of eight hundred thousand withered feet, they surged toward him. When he’d first met Joe Ledger, the ranger had estimated two hundred thousand zoms. The monks counted twice that many.
And he laughed.
“Bite me!” he yelled at the top of his voice.
He fed fuel into the quad and kicked it forward, first racing toward the advancing wall of death, and then at the last second cutting to the left, zooming away from the hangar and the concrete blockhouse, past the silent blood-splashed jet, shooting down the line of reaching hands, driving at full speed toward the far end of the runway.
The zombies all turned to follow.
He soon outpaced them. The farther Benny went, the fewer the zoms. Soon he was in open country, where only a solitary zombie wandered in a slow and pointless circle, its sad pattern created by a missing foot. Benny cut right, heading toward the squat building at the foot of the row of siren towers.
He cast a quick look over his shoulder and saw that he was at least half a mile ahead of the leading edge of the zombie wave.
Perfect.
He drove over to the small building. A soldier stepped out, rifle in hand.
“Stop right there,” he commanded. “Who are you and what are you doing over here? This is a restricted area.”
“No kidding,” said Benny. “I need you to turn the sirens on.”
The soldier began raising the rifle.
Benny immediately spun the quad to kick up a thick cloud of choking dust. Then he shot south along the line of siren towers. He cursed aloud, repeating every foul phrase he’d learned from Riot. That girl had a truly poisonous mouth, and Benny felt a little embarrassed grumbling those descriptions, even though no one could hear him.
The zoms kept coming, drawn as much by the dust plume as by the roar of the quad. The dust plume was hundreds of feet high now, and the breeze, though slight, was steady — it continued to push the plume, reshaping it, shoving it away toward the mountains. The dead followed as if mesmerized.
Once Benny was sure he was well beyond the range of any rifle shot, he roared up and down at the base of the mountains, luring the zoms.
“Come on,” Benny said through gritted teeth. “Come on…”
It took the zoms nearly twenty minutes to reach him.
When the closest zoms were fifteen feet away, Benny fed gas to the quad and shot away, running even farther to the south. They turned like an inhuman tidal surge, but he was moving too far and too fast. Then Benny cut right and right again to head north, but he angled away from where the mass of zoms were, keeping the engine speed low so that it purred rather than growled. The zoms would eventually hear him, but not right away.
By the time he got back to the blockhouse, Nix and the others had finished tying the soldiers up. Lilah stood over them, her Sig Sauer pistol held loosely at her side. Riot and Nix were trying to figure out how the locking assembly on the bridge worked. Dozens of monks had come out of the other buildings on that side of the trench. Some harangued the girls for their violence, but most watched in a kind of mute fascination.
Benny pulled to a stop by the blockhouse air lock. He killed the engine, dismounted, and did a very quick, very quiet circuit of the entire building to make sure that he hadn’t missed any zoms.
There wasn’t a single dead person around.
Benny grinned.
He ran to the edge of the trench and called Nix’s name.
The first thing she said was, “You’re an idiot.”
“Yeah, not a news flash.”
“But I love you.”
He nodded past her to the soldiers. “They okay?”
She gave a single, cold, dismissive shrug.
What amazed Benny was the difference between his lingering male-centric perception of girls as weaker, shy, and incapable of violence or cruelty and the way they actually were. And it wasn’t like he had seen any proof to the contrary. Lilah was a walking statement about girl power. So was Riot. And Nix, who was every bit as good with a sword as Benny was. Even with all that, the splinter of gender prejudice still festered in his mind. He wondered if he would ever stop being surprised when his preconceptions were trounced by the truth.
Riot sauntered to the edge. “Y’all got an actual plan, boy, or are you hoping for divine intervention?”
“Little of both,” Benny admitted.
“Do we get to know the plan?”
“It’s simple,” he said. “I’m going to knock on the door until they let me in.”
The girls gave him long, flat stares.
“Hey,” Benny said, “I’m open to better suggestions.”
Lilah, who had been listening, called, “Knock loud.”
He knocked loud.
Every time I think about Mountainside and the other towns, I worry. Risking everything on a chain-link fence is just dumb. Even that psycho Preacher Jack was smarter about things. At Gameland they had all sorts of defenses. Smart stuff. They had a heavy chain-link fence too, but it was only the outer barrier. And it was hidden between two rows of thick evergreen hedge that acted as screens. Zoms couldn’t see through the hedge and had fewer things to visually attract them.
After the fence, the road led through this complicated network of trenches. There were rows of trip wires, and deadfall pits covered by camouflage screens. Directions for how to make it through the defenses safely were written on large wooden signs. That’s smart because humans can read but zoms can’t.
The Gameland defenses weren’t based on the way people used to protect towns and forts against attacks; these were specifically designed against an enemy that couldn’t think but also would not stop.
The trench at Sanctuary is smart too.
Tom said that to stay safe you have to understand the nature of the threat, not react to your assumption of it. I didn’t understand that at first.
I do now.
CHAPTER 53
“Open the damn door!” Benny yelled, and he yelled it so loudly that echoes banged off the distant red rock mountain and ricocheted back to him over the heads of the hundreds of zombies who now shambled slowly back toward him. His fist ached and his throat was getting raw, but he stood there and kept at it. Hammering, yelling.