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Benny squatted down on the edge of the trench, took a handful of hot sand, and let it pour slowly out of his fist. The wind whipped it away from him.
Some of the zoms across the trench were dressed in black clothes with red tassels tied around their wrists and ankles, with white angel wings sewn onto the front of their shirts. Their shaved heads were elaborately tattooed with images of flowers, thorny vines, insects, and writhing snakes.
Reapers of the Night Church.
Because of them, no one was safe.
They were worse than the zombies. The dead meant no harm; they were driven by some impulse of their destroyed nature.
The reapers?
They actually believed that everyone—every man, woman, and child left alive—should die. They were converts to a new religion based on an ancient Greek god of death. Thanatos. And their leader, the cold and deadly madman Saint John, had trained them to be an army of superb and relentless killers.
Saint John believed that Thanatos had sent the zombie plague to eradicate the “infection” of humanity and thereby cleanse the world. Anyone who survived the plague and struggled to stay alive was going in direct defiance of Saint John’s god. It made them heretics and blasphemers. They were like weeds in a bizarre version of the Garden of Eden, and Saint John used his reapers to mow them down.
Then, when the last of the heretics were gone, Saint John
planned to lead his own people into an orgy of mass suicide.
The insanity of it was scary enough. The fact that so many people joined the Night Church was insane. It was terrifying.
Benny and his friends had become embroiled in that unholy war.
Now they were injured, sick at heart, trapped, and dying.
And yet . . .
And yet.
Another emotion warred inside Benny’s heart and mind, fighting back the terror, shoving back the despair over all that he’d lost.
Rage.
It burned inside him with a fire that was as cold as it was intense.
The thought that someone like Saint John would want to end life after all the years of struggle, of working together to overcome hardships, of finding a way to preserve the spark of life after plague and famine tried to blow it out . . . it made Benny burn.
He thought of everyone he knew who’d died, who’d sacrificed so much so that others—many others—could live.
Mrs. Riley, dying to try to protect her daughter.
Tom. Saving so many.
Maybe Chong, saving a little girl from reapers.
So many.
Too many.
If the reapers had their way, all of these deaths would be meaningless. To Benny, that was obscene.
Benny reached over his shoulder and touched the handle of his sword. He could feel his lips curl back in a feral snarl of hate. He imagined Saint John in front of him, within reaching, within cutting distance.
“No,” Benny said.
It was all he said.
It was enough.
