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Benny glanced at Nix. She was smiling. She was almost sixteen and the scars on her face were only now beginning to fade from rose red to ice white against the tan of her skin. Nix caught his eye and they studied each other for a moment, sharing a conversation that didn’t need words. Her smile was so much older than she was.
“Dawn tomorrow,” said Benny. They all nodded.
And continued working.
24
THE QUADS WERE UGLY, CHUNKY little motorized machines with four fat rubber tires and a kind of saddle for the driver. On flat roads, they could tear along at forty miles an hour; and even over rough terrain, the quads could travel an astounding twenty-five miles per hour.
During the terrible weeks-long battles that, collectively, were known as First Night, the military had tried a lot of different extreme measures to stop the growing armies of the dead. When everything else failed, some maniacs had tried using nuclear weapons. That still astounded Benny, who’d learned about it in school. The nukes had destroyed some of the zoms, but they’d also killed hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of the living who were trapped inside the targeted cities. Those who didn’t die in the blasts were exposed to radiation. The cancer rate among survivors of First Night was ghastly.
What made it worse was that there were two effects that turned a war into a defeat. The people killed by the blasts, along with countless living dead, became radioactive, and that was as deadly a weapon against the living as their bites. Mr. West-Mensch, the history teacher at Reclamation High School, said that dropping the nukes insured that the dead won. Partly because of the devastation and radiation, but mostly because of the EMPs. Electromagnetic pulses were massive discharges of energy that burned out nearly all electrical equipment, from cell phones needed to call for help to the engines of emergency responder vehicles. The world went quiet all at once. Communication between people was gone. Planes fell from the skies. Even the tanks and weapons of the military ground to a halt.
“We were losing the war,” said Mr. West-Mensch, “but the shock was wearing off. If we’d used the time we had, then any groups that were temporarily protected by natural barriers, like rivers or mountains, might have survived. If not on their own, then long enough for authorities to reinforce them while mustering a counterattack. Smarter leaders would have risen inside the crisis to take charge. Had the EMPs not destroyed all cell phone, radio, and Internet communication, we would have been able to share information and strategies, offer and ask for help, make plans. Let’s face it, the zoms are simple. Within days we knew the rules of the fight. Don’t get bitten. Everyone who dies reanimates. Destroying the brain or brain stem kills them completely. They can’t think, they can’t organize or plan. They can’t adapt. We can. They can’t use weapons. We can. They don’t learn from what we do, so any good plan becomes endlessly repeatable. No . . . they didn’t win the war, we lost it.”
What really galled Benny was a belief spread among the survivors that somehow technology itself was partly to blame for the dead rising. Benny didn’t know who’d started that rumor, or why people accepted it as completely as they did, but for fifteen years no one even tried to repair the old machines. Except for a few hand-crank generators, there was no electricity at all in Mountainside.
Then Benny, Nix, Chong, Lilah, and Riot had come riding out of the Ruin on motorized vehicles. No one could say that those machines were anything but a blessing. They allowed Benny and his friends to outpace the reaper army and warn the towns. Even though the reapers had many quads, their army traveled only as fast as the soldiers on foot and the swarms of zoms they brought with them.
After that war, the Nine Towns had nearly two hundred working quads, and Solomon Jones had polled the citizens to find anyone with mechanical knowledge. A massive plan was underway to bring technology back. Technicians from the American Nation helped. There were protesters to this, of course, and even some bits of sabotage perpetrated by a radic
al few who still believed that technology would restart the war with the dead, but Benny knew that technology was coming back.
It pleased him that technology was also going to help his crew get out of town fast.
25
BENNY AND NIX MOVED THROUGH the predawn darkness like ghosts, keeping to the black shadows thrown by the double-wide trailer used as a guardhouse. They reached the foot of the tower without being seen because the guards, true to their duties, were looking out, not in. If these had been enemy sentries, Benny would have sent Lilah and Riot to take care of them. Both of them were stone killers. But the guards working the midnight-to-eight shift on the south tower were neighbors. Jenny Thomas and her uncle, Chas.
Since the reaper war, each of the Nine Towns had built much stronger defenses than the fragile chain-link fences they’d relied on before. The guard tower now looked past the fences to a field six times wider than the old one. Beyond that was the tree line of a thick forest.
They took off their shoes and began to climb, making no sound at all on the wooden rungs. Benny went first and Nix was a ghost behind him. The tower was tall, but the climb was easy, and they reached the lip of the platform in less than a minute. The door to the boxy guard station was closed, but that wasn’t a problem, because it was never locked.
There was a muffled sound of conversation from inside, and Benny pressed his ear to the door to listen. The two guards were talking about Asheville, and he could just make out the words.
Chas: “. . . leave them to their own problems. We got enough to deal with here.”
Jenny: “What about the cure?”
Chas: “Ah, the cure, the cure, that’s all I ever hear about. We only have their word that it even works.”
Jenny: “Of course it works. Look what it did for Lou Chong.”
Chas: “What did it do? He looks like one of them. Kid creeps me out.”
Jenny: “He’s a good kid, Chas.”
Chas: “Maybe he is, but if he looks at me the wrong way, I’ll put him down and won’t cry a tear about it.”
Before Benny could give Nix a signal, she stood up, opened the door, and walked in.
“Hey,” gasped Jenny, surprise making her voice jump an octave, “what are you—?”
There was a metallic sound that was absolutely distinctive. Nix had racked the slide on her Glock. Oh boy, thought Benny, and then he went in after her. Jenny and Chas were standing there, staring at the gun in Nix’s small hand, confused smiles on their faces.
“Put your hands on your heads,” said Nix in a voice that was as cold as winter ice. “If you try anything, I’ll blow your kneecaps off.”
Chas bristled and puffed out his chest as he took a threatening step forward. Benny’s sword was out of its scabbard in a tenth of a second, and the tip of it against Chas’s chest stopped him cold.
