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“As of six thirty this morning,” he said slowly, “we have lost all communication with Asheville. The satellite phone is working fine, so it’s not that. We’ve placed calls to the other eight towns and confirmed that they’ve lost contact with Asheville too. We called the military station near New Haven and they haven’t heard anything either. I wish I could say this is only a technical problem, but we have to face facts.”
There was a collective gasp from the crowd. Benny saw Nix take Lilah’s hand and squeeze it. Both girls looked as scared as he felt. Chong looked positively stricken. Morgie stood by the window, arms folded, mouth turned down in a hard line. The girl standing beside him was wiry, tough, and pretty, with a cynical half smile on her thin lips and a tattoo of roses and barbed wire covering her scalp, except where a stiff crimson Mohawk rose in dagger-sharp spikes. Her name was Riot, and she’d been raised within Saint John’s army, but had rebelled and fallen in with Benny’s group to fight back. She and Morgie were always trying to be a couple, but they kept breaking up. At the moment they were kind of together, but the fact that they stood a few feet apart suggested they were drifting again.
Solomon held a hand up for silence as the gasps turned to chatter. He said, “We don’t know anything right now other than our belief that there was a crisis.”
“You’ve all heard about the last call,” said the mayor, “about the screams and gunfire. That’s troubling, but it’s not a good idea for us to speculate on the nature of the emergency or the extent of it. We are waiting for more information.”
“What about Captain Ledger?” asked Benny. “Is he back yet?”
Captain Joe Ledger was an old soldier who had led a special ops team before First Night—when the dead rose—and he had been instrumental in bringing the military resources of the new Ameri
can Nation to the Nine Towns. He’d also fought alongside Benny and his friends against Saint John, nearly dying in the process. Since then he and his group of rangers had begun searching for more towns. He was also overseeing the spreading of a mutagen that amped up the parasites semi-dormant in all zoms. That was risky and had to be managed carefully, because although the mutagen eventually caused tissue breakdown that destroyed the living dead, there was a brief period where it made the creatures move much faster and even restored higher brain functions to some of them. The captain was almost never in Reclamation, though; he was busy in the field, fighting a new kind of battle in this terrible war.
Benny caught Solomon and Mayor Kirsch exchanging a brief, worried look. Then Solomon cleared his throat.
The mayor said, “We . . . um . . . Captain Ledger was already on his way to Asheville.”
“Wait,” said Nix, “what does that mean?”
“It means,” said Solomon Jones, “that he’d received a distress call from the military commander in Asheville and flew out in a helicopter. He did not share the details with us. All we know is that he and four of his rangers took a Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter that was fitted out. He planned to refuel twice at small American Nation remote outposts in Laguna Pueblo, New Mexico, and Searcy, Arkansas, before flying on to Asheville.”
“And . . . ?” urged Benny.
“We were speaking with Captain Ledger on the sat phone when the line went dead. The call ended before he could tell us his location. We don’t know if he reached Asheville or not. He may only have gotten as far as New Mexico, Texas, or Oklahoma. But whatever’s happening, he may already be caught up in it. And I’m afraid there has been no further communication with him, or with anyone in North Carolina, since this morning.”
14
BENNY AND HIS FRIENDS WANDERED back to his house. They sat on the chairs, the rail, and the top steps. Benny was the only one who stood, leaning a shoulder against the post of the railing, arms folded, feeling about as empty as a Halloween pumpkin on November 1. He felt deflated, sick, and scared. The others looked at their hands, up at the trees, out at the birds pecking for insects on the lawn. Anywhere but at one another.
And yet the sky above insisted on being a bright blue, and cheerful puffy clouds sailed overhead as if the world was fine.
Except the world wasn’t fine at all.
Maybe it never had been, thought Benny. Maybe the peace and contentment they’d all felt these last months was only a dream. Or worse, a setup to make them lower their guard. That was how it felt to him. During the fight with Saint John, Benny and his friends had become tough, hardened. They had been warriors. Young as they were, they had become the new samurai Tom had wanted them to be.
Now Benny felt like he was five years old. He felt small. Weak.
And so scared.
It was Chong who finally spoke. “What do we do?”
Nix and Morgie shook their heads. No one else said anything.
“No, seriously,” said Chong, “what are we going to do about this?”
“What can we do?” asked Morgie, not looking at him. “Asheville is, like, forever away from here.”
“So?” asked Chong. “We walked all the way to Nevada. That was over a thousand miles.”
“Yeah, you guys did that,” agreed Morgie, glancing at him. “And how many times did you guys almost get killed? All kinds of weird zoms—fast ones, smarter ones, packs of them. Not to mention a mother rhino that got out of a zoo somewhere who wanted to stomp you flat, a bear that tried to eat you, and, oh yeah, zombie wild boars. That’s not even counting an army of psychopaths who wanted to wipe out all human life.”
Benny sighed but said nothing.
“We’re not dead,” said Nix.
Morgie looked at her. “Nix, you’ve got two huge scars on your face.”
“So what? They’re just scars. I didn’t die.”
