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“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 s
ent 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.”
