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“Where are the doctors and nurses?”
“There are no doctors on this side of the compound. The doctors and the scientists are all in a different hangar. In what they call a clean facility. Almost no one’s allowed in except for the research field teams. And a few special patients.” She paused. “The thing is . . . once a patient goes into the clean facility, they’re not allowed out again.”
“Why not?”
“Because most of them die, and the ones that don’t are being studied. They’re trying to cure the Reaper Plague . . . what we’ve always called the zombie plague. Not just that, though . . . they’re trying to cure all these diseases. They’ve even come up with some treatments, and when they do, they give them to the monks. Not everyone who comes here dies.”
“But most do?”
She nodded sadly. “By the time most people come here, they’re already so sick. All the monks can do is make them comfortable.”
“It’s—it’s—” Benny had no word bad enough to hang on it.
“They’re doing what they can.”
They walked toward the exit doors. One or two of the patients nodded to him and he nodded back, though he wasn’t sure what that silent communication signified. Maybe, We’re n
ot dead yet.
It was horrible.
“I’m remembering things in bits and pieces. I remember a big dog and some strange guy. Joe, maybe? I have this weird memory about a Zombie Card. . . . ”
“That’s him.” Nix told him about Lilah finding Joe, and about Joe being the head of a team of wilderness scouts called the rangers. “He used to be a bounty hunter up around our way, which is how he knew Tom and why he’s on a Zombie Card, but he left a long time ago and went south. Benny . . . there’s a kind of government. It’s small, but it’s there. They call it—”
“—the American Nation. We saw it on the plane.”
“It’s real,” she said. “They only have about a hundred thousand people so far, mostly in North Carolina, and they’ve been looking for more. People are trying to put it back together.”
Benny thought about his dream, about what Tom had said.
“I hope not,” he said. “They need to make something else, something new. Something better.”
Nix’s green eyes glittered as she studied him; then she nodded.
They walked on until they reached the end of the big hangar. The sadness of it all was a crushing weight on Benny. His heart hurt worse than his head, and he wanted to go back to his cot, pull the blankets over his head, and let all this go away. That was impossible, though, and he knew it.
Nix opened the door, and they stepped out into the sunlight.
Benny blinked and held a hand up to shade his eyes. As he adjusted to the glare, he saw that they stood outside the first in a row of massive hangars. Monks walked slowly in and out of the buildings. The grounds outside were planted with herbs, and there were rock gardens with benches for meditation. It looked peaceful out here, but the hangars held horrors inside.
Nix pointed at the other buildings, each of which had a large number painted above the door. “Building One is for patients they think will recover. Mostly injuries, animal bites, or people wounded by reaper attacks.”
“What about the other buildings?”
Nix pulled off her mask. “We’re not allowed to go in there. That’s where they keep the people with communicable diseases. Pneumonia, tuberculosis, cholera, bubonic plague. The monks who work in there never come outside.”
“What happens to them?”
Nix did not answer. She didn’t have to. Instead she said, “There are always new monks going in.”
“That’s horrible!”
She sniffed back tears. “But the monks keep volunteering. I spoke to one, a woman about my mom’s age. She said that it didn’t matter if she got sick. When it was her time to go into one of the other buildings, then at least in her last days, caring for people, she would know that her life mattered.”
Benny stared at her. “That’s what it’s come to? Is that all there is out here? Just this?”
“No,” she said, and he saw a steadiness in her eyes that he had not seen for a long time. More like the old Nix. More like the one he fell in love with. And yet there was sadness, too. Something deep and terrible. She took his hand and led him around the corner of the hangar.
