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Nix pointed to a spot beyond the herb garden. There was a small playground with a swing set, some monkey bars, a slide, and a big sandbox. A dozen children laughed and played and ran, their faces as bright as the sun, their laughter cleaner than anything in the world.
A little blond girl was with them, playing a game of tag in and around the legs of the monkey bars as three female monks watched with patient smiles. She wore a white tunic, and there were flowers in her hair.
“Eve,” said Benny.
He made to call out to her, but Nix shook her head. “Not yet. This is only the second day that she’s been playing.”
“She looks happy,” he said.
“More each day.”
Benny nodded. Even though he knew that there would be a long uphill road for Eve, seeing her smile put a smile on his lips. He saw another figure sitting cross-legged on the ground in the shade of a palm tree that overhung the playground.
“Is that Riot?” he asked.
“Yes. She won’t let Eve out of her sight.”
“You still think she’s a freak?”
Nix shook her head. “She’s been through a lot.” She told Benny about Riot’s past, about her being a reaper and about how she’d rebelled against that lifestyle and spent the years since helping people.
“Her mom is Mother Rose?” gasped Benny.
“Was,” corrected Nix. “Mother Rose died that day we found the wrecked plane. Riot’s been dealing with that, and I think it hit her harder than she expected.”
“How could it not?” asked Benny. “She was still her mother.”
Nix nodded. “I guess . . . she’s one of us. And she did everything she could to help Eve’s family. She knows now that we were only trying to help Eve too.”
“Well,” Benny said, “Eve’s still here. We accomplished something. We saved a kid. That’s got to count for something, even in this world.”
Shadows moved in Nix’s eyes. Not the dangerous ones that had been there so often since her mother was killed; but shadows nonetheless. Was it because their trip had failed so badly in almost every way, or because this harsh world out here in no way matched Nix’s expectations? Benny was afraid to ask for fear of breaking what resolve she had managed to put in place.
Nix sniffed back some more tears and said, “Listen, Benny, there are some things I have to tell you. Good and bad things, okay?”
“I don’t know how much more I want to hear,” he said, pitching it as a joke and watching it fall flat.
Nix said, “Do you remember seeing the jet?”
Benny brightened. “I—think so. Was it real?”
“It’s real, and it’s here. It’s in one of the hangars on the other side of the compound. But before I show you, I have to warn you about something. I need you to understand how this place works.”
“You’re scaring me here, Nix.”
“I don’t mean to.” She took a ragged breath. “Benny, people have been coming here for years. A lot of them. Long before the American Nation set up the lab. Before they had any kind of treatments for anything. People came here to die in peace, Benny. They came here because this place is run by way-station monks. Do you understand what that means?”
“Yes,” Benny said, though his voice was a hoarse croak. “Way-station monks think the zoms are the meek who are supposed to inherit the earth.”
“Have inherited the earth, Benny. Have.”
He studied her, but her eyes were hard. She seemed to be waiting for him to ask, so he asked. A terrible thought crept into his mind.
“Nix,” he asked, “what happened to all those people?”
Nix nodded and took him gently by the hand and guided him around the corner of the hangar.
Benny stopped dead in his tracks. Just beyond the hangar was a trench that was twenty feet wide and twenty feet deep. Beyond that was a set of runways for a military airport. Benny had seen pictures of places like this. The flat ground stretched all the way to the range of red rocks in one direction and into a heat haze on the far horizon. A second set of hangars—four in all—stood a thousand yards beyond the trench, and in front of those was a six-story concrete building. Surrounding these buildings was a ten-foot-high cinder-block wall. On the far side of the landing field, well beyond the runways, there was a line of slender towers, like lampposts but with bell-shaped devices mounted atop each one.
