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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.
And they all died.
Every last one of them. More than half of Mother Rose’s army. Gone.
Nix and Chong had not fired a shot.
Nor had Lilah.
