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When she was done kissing him, and while he caught his breath, Nix and Chong told Benny everything, starting with when they’d stopped on the road all the way up to them breaking the locks on the gate and using the quads to bring Benny inside.
“Lilah and the others had to quiet a few more zoms so we could get the fence closed and secured,” explained Nix.
“Is everyone else okay?”
Chong nodded and half smiled. “Lilah lost her shirt and Nix yelled at her for not wearing a carpet coat. She told Lilah that you getting hurt was her fault. Lilah was pissed because you helped her instead of helping me, and said that that’s why you got your head bashed in. They had a real doozy of a fight.”
“Cut it out,” muttered Nix.
“People accuse us of using foul language,” continued Chong, “but I was taking notes during that exchange, I can tell you. Nix has a real mouth on her. I’m seriously impressed. Wow. She called Lilah a—”
“Cut it out,” warned Nix again, and this time there was serious menace in her tone.
Chong pretended to zip his mouth shut, but then leaned close and said to Benny, “I’ll tell you later.”
They bumped fists. Nix glared at them so hard it made her freckles glow.
Benny looked around. “So . . . what’s this? The warden’s office?”
“Yes,” said Nix. “We couldn’t get into the infirmary. It’s locked, and they have steel doors with wire mesh over the windows. We came in here thinking there might be some keys, but there weren’t.”
“Riot’s looking for them,” said Chong.
“What about the quads?”
“All good,” said Chong. “We have five inside the fence and the sixth—yours—is still out there, but we figure the zoms aren’t going to ride off with it. Not even the fast ones.”
“Yeah, speaking of which,” said Benny, “were there really fast ones out there?”
“Four of them,” said Nix, shivering at the memory. “And two that were smarter than the others. R2’s and R3’s.”
Benny’s blood went cold.
“Oh my God,” he breathed.
36
R2’S SCARED BENNY. R3’S ABSOLUTELY terrified him. And for good reason.
When the American Nation was getting itself together, one of their most important projects involved researching reports of mutated zoms. For Benny and the other people from the Nine Towns, there was only ever one kind of living dead—the slow shufflers. They had been designated as R1’s by the American Nation scientists. Reaper One was the official label, because they were the result of the dispersal of a mutagenic biological weapon called Reaper, which the scientists hoped would combat the older bioweapon, codenamed Lucifer 113, which had been accidentally released in Pennsylvania and spread by storm winds and the movement of populations around the world.
Lucifer 113 had originally been created during something called the “Cold War”—when the old United States and Russia, then called the Soviet Union, teetered on the brink of nuclear war. Bioweapons research had been done, against all international laws, on both sides. The Soviet scientists had developed Lucifer 113 as a weapon to be dropped into enemy territory. It had a 100 percent infection rate and an equally high mortality rate. You got it, you died. The kicker was that the dead reanimated as aggressive hosts for a cluster of genetically engineered parasites. The plan was for the infected to continue attacking everyone around them until all of the enemy were infected. Then the parasites were supposed to die off, leaving all physical assets—property, missile bases, computers—undamaged. It was intended to be a weapon more effective than nuclear bombs but without the radiation and devastation.
That was bad enough.
Then fifteen years ago a former Soviet scientist who had defected to the United States and been given a job as a prison doctor after the Cold War ended decided to play God with the bioweapon. He tweaked it so that the parasites did not die off and would actually keep the dead host in a state of living death for decades by reducing all unnecessary body functions. The host occasionally had to eat living tissue to get the protein to sustain itself.
The doctor’s intention had been to use the disease to punish serial killers so that after their executions they would reanimate in their coffins and be trapped but alive, so their suffering would go on and on. It was a sick, twisted, and cruel plan, and like most bad ideas, it failed in a spectacular way. Homer Gibbon, the first death-row inmate infected with Lucifer 113, was not buried fast enough. His body was claimed by a relative and reanimated in a county funeral home. He woke up very confused, very frightened, very angry, and very hungry.
The plague, having mutated once more after passing through Homer Gibbon’s bloodstream, was now communicable by bite, or by exposure of infected blood to mucous membranes or open wounds on the victim. It had become a serum transfer disease, spread through saliva or blood.
That was where the zombie plague started. In a small county called Stebbins in western Pennsylvania. That was where Sam Imura, Tom’s older brother, had gone with his team of special ops soldiers known by the nickname the Boy Scouts. It was where Sam vanished as the plague spread uncontrollably.
Years after the end of nearly everything, the last living scientists began looking for a way back from the edge of human extinction. When reports of mutated zoms began coming in, they sent teams to capture and study them, and discovered that Lucifer 113, long believed to be an absolutely stable engineered disease, was changing. Apart from the slow and predictable R1’s, there were the quicker and more coordinated R2’s, and the far deadlier R3’s, who were capable of problem solving, coordinated action, and even using simple tools.
Surviving scientists from the American Nation later learned that the mutation was not Mother Nature’s long-hoped-for response to the plague, but was yet another bioweapon, this one created by Dr. Monica McReady and her team, hidden away in a secured facility at Zabriskie Point in Death Valley, California. They had infected some hogs with the plague and then exposed them to an experimental compound that hyperaccelerated the life cycles of the parasites. This made the infected zoms faster for a short period of time but then burned them out, killing the parasites before they could mature and reproduce. The zoms would then begin to decompose and fall apart.
“How many more zoms are out there?” asked Benny.
