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“It’s gone.”
“I can see that it’s gone, genius. I’m asking you to tell me what you’re suggesting?”
“I’m not suggesting anything, brother,” said Zeke. He paused, and in a more confidential tone said, “Look, Marty, all kidding aside here, you know me. I can track pretty much anything. My dad and granddad took me hunting soon as I could walk. They taught me how to track like a pro. I can read signs. I can do that like you read a book. But I got to tell you, man, I don’t want no part of this. No sir. Tell on me to the Honored One if you got to, but I’ve said all I’m going to say.” He got to his feet and pointed into the woods. “And I will not go looking for whatever made those tracks. Not for anything.”
Brother Marty glared at him, but Zeke shook his head. He dropped the pieces of chewed rope and backed away from the paw prints. Then he turned and stalked back to his quad, muttering, “This is too weird for me, man. This is way too weird for me.”
Then he stopped and came back to Marty. “I’m just a grunt, brother,” he said quietly, “and you’re on the Council of Sorrows, so my opinion doesn’t mean either jack or squat. But we’ve been friends ever since we got scooped up by the Night Church. I thought we could, you know, talk to each other.”
“Say what you want to say, Zeke,” said Marty irritably.
Zeke pointed to the place of execution. “I think we should bug the heck out of here and not tell anyone about this. Not Saint John, not the Council . . . not anyone.”
“Why?”
“Because this spooks me, man.” The big reaper actually shivered. “Whatever this is . . . it’s wrong. Wrong in ways I can’t put into words. It’s creeping me out. I say we bug out and write this off.”
Marty studied him. Before he knelt to kiss the knife, Brother Zeke had been an enforcer for a group of road pirates working the Dakota badlands. Before that he’d run with a biker gang. He was not an imaginative or fanciful person. He was also not stupid. If he was scared—and that was evident from the man’s tight face, nervous glances, and twitchy eyes—then Marty did not want to stick around to try to prove that this was all nonsense.
Not for one second longer.
“Okay. We’re out of here right now,” Marty told the reaper. They exchanged a look that was equal parts understanding and agreement and moved quickly down the slope to their quads.
They fired up the quads and roared away at full speed.
It was a very large, very strange world, and not all of that strangeness belonged to the plague. Marty wondered if they had just cruised the edge of something older and less defined even than the dead rising to eat the living.
They never once looked back.
Marty was afraid that something would be watching them go.
15
Sanctuary
Area 51
Tom Imura had taught Benny and his friends to be warrior smart.
It was all about a way of thinking. A way of acting and reacting to the world. A way of working with the world in the way that it actually was rather than in the way one assumed it was.
Tom was a practical man. That he had died was no fault of his own.
Benny was seldom practical, but he was working it. Flexing that muscle. If he lived long enough, he figured he’d get there.
The current odds on that, however, were pretty crappy.
He dodged under the whooshing swing of the wicked scythe and tried to cut the leader of the reapers down, but he missed. The force of his swing sent him sprawling on his face, and for a moment all the reapers had a perfect chance to slaughter him.
If any one or two of them had tried, Benny would have died right there.
As it was, all
of them attacked at once, each of them so eager and desperate to make the kill that they gave absolutely no thought to themselves or one another.
They crowded in, and stabbing knives met reaper flesh, shoulders collided with shoulders, heads cracked together. Like a clown act from a May Day festival, the reapers reeled back from one another. Not one blade had touched him.
With a whimper of mingled joy and shame, he quickly rolled sideways and scrambled to his feet. His mind burned with the thought that the only reason he was still alive was because he’d been so incredibly clumsy that he’d somehow infected the reapers with stupidity.
