They got to their feet and continued moving toward the creek. Neither spoke for a long time. Then they found the stream and followed the muddy banks to a small clearing, and there they found the blood-spattered remains of several tents. They stood side by side at the edge of the creek, neither of them willing to take another step up the bank.

“God . . . ,” whispered Nix in a voice that was filled with horror.

Benny spotted something and made himself climb the slope to the camp. He bent and picked up a stuffed rabbit. It was smeared with blood. He held it out to Nix, but she just shook her head.

“There must have been an attack,” he said. “That’s why Eve ran. In the confusion she must have gotten separated from her family. From all this gear, it looks like there were a lot of people here. We only saw her parents and that girl, Riot.”

“Benny, look,” Nix said, pointing to the stream bed. Two bodies lay half-submerged right at the next bend. They walked cautiously down and saw that they were truly dead. Neither was a reaper. They were ordinary-looking folk, and savage blows to their heads and necks had probably killed them and prevented them from rising. An unintended mercy buried within a heinous crime.

A few yards away they found a third body, and they squatted down to examine it. It was a middle-aged woman, and it was clear that she had been stabbed in the chest. Nix tilted her head to one side and grunted.

“She wasn’t quieted,” she said. “No head wound, no incision at the brain stem.”

Benny double-checked and then nodded. “It’s happening here, too. Not all of the dead are reanimating.”

“I wish I knew if that was a good thing,” said Nix.

“It was for Tom.”

She looked at the ground for a few seconds, then nodded. “I’m sorry.”

He shook his head. In silence they rose and moved along the stream. They found other bodies. Many others.

This had been the scene of a terrible slaughter. Here and there they found dead reapers, too, and each of these had been quieted by knives to the base of their skulls. But most of the dead were not reapers. Benny stopped counting when the toll reached fifty. Men, women, and children.

No one had been spared.

No one.

Nix’s lips curled back from her teeth in a feral grin. “Who are these freaks?”

Benny sat down on a rock and looked at his shoes. Then an idea struck him. “I think this is some kind of death cult,” he said.

She turned sharply. “What?”

“Think about it,” he said. “What else could it be? You said Thanatos was the Greek god of death, and Saint Jerk-o kept talking about the ‘gift of darkness.’ Seems kind of obvious.”

Nix snorted. “I said Thanatos was one of the Greek gods of death. The nice one, the one that takes away suffering. These reapers don’t seem like they’re trying to alleviate suffering. Besides—I can’t think of anything stupider than a death cult after an apocalypse.”

“Maybe,” Benny said dubiously.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Benny looked at her, surprised. “Really? You’re telling me that you can’t see their point?”

“Their point?”

“Shh, keep your voice down.”

Nix stepped closer. “Benny, what are you saying? That you agree with—?”

“What?” He almost laughed. “Agree? Are you nuts? I never said I agreed with anything. All I asked was whether you could understand their point.”

“What possible point could there be to a death cult?”

Benny stared at her. “You’re serious?”

She punched him on the arm. Hard. “Of course I’m serious.”

“First . . . ow. Second, I thought you were the one who was always all torn up about people back home being so depressed and fatalistic. You were always going on about how people have just given up. That’s why we’re out here, isn’t it? Trying to find some survivors who still believe that there is a future.”

“That’s my point,” she snapped. “We need to focus on being alive.”

“We do, sure, but that’s you and me and Chong and Lilah. Maybe a few others. Everyone else is still acting like they’re at a funeral for the human race.”

“That’s grief and depression,” said Nix, “not a freaking death cult.”

“Maybe those things aren’t all that far apart. C’mon, you’ve heard all those stories about how many people committed suicide after First Night. Mayor Kirsch said that almost half the people who settled Mountainside killed themselves within eighteen months.”

“It wasn’t nearly that many,” Nix said defensively, but it was a weak parry.

“Yes, it was. I heard Captain Strunk talking to Tom about it. Pastor Kellogg did a sermon about it.”

Nix holstered her pistol. “I must have missed church that day.”

“Okay, then what about the way-station monks? Some of them let themselves get bitten because they think it’s what God wants. They think the zoms are the meek that are supposed to inherit the—”

“I know,” she said bitterly.

Benny paused, studying her face. “Are you really going to sit there and tell me that you never thought about it?”

Nix’s head whipped around so fast that her flying hair brushed across Benny’s face. “I would never kill myself.”

“Whoa! Whoa, now. Who said anything about—?”

“You did. You asked me if I thought about killing myself.”

“No, I didn’t,” he insisted. “I asked if you ever thought about people in town killing themselves.”

“That’s not what you said.”

“It’s what I meant, and you know it.”

Nix narrowed her eyes at him in an expression that was half a glare and half an inspection of his eyes.

“Whatever,” she said, and turned away again. She drew her bokken, then stood there, pretending to study the landscape.

Benny stared at the back of her head and did not dare say anything else. Nix had been absolutely correct. He had asked her if she ever thought about killing herself.

The thing was . . . he did not know why he asked that.

He wondered if beating his head against the tree trunk would help the moment any. It seemed like the most reasonable option.

Nix abruptly walked into the woods, heading to an upslope that led away from this scene of carnage. “Let’s go,” she called over her shoulder.

“Where?”

She pointed toward a line of white rocks beyond the trees. “Up there. We can climb those rocks and see if we can spot Lilah and Chong.”

She moved off, not looking back to see if he followed.

After several heavy seconds of indecision, Benny rose and ran after her.

They moved carefully through the brush, and the closer they got to the line of bright white rocks, the less certain Benny became that they were rocks at all.

Maybe it was a building, he thought. There had to be a ranger station or something out here.

Nix reached the edge of the woods first and suddenly stopped dead in her tracks.

“No . . . ,” she said softly.

Her bokken dropped from her hand and clattered on the rocky ground. Benny hurried to catch up, and as he did Nix screamed out a single word.

“NO!”

She yelled it so loudly that birds erupted from the trees. The echo bounced off the surrounding rocks. It was loud enough to be heard a mile away.

Loud enough for everyone to hear them.

Chong. Lilah.

Riot.

The reapers.

The dead themselves.

Louder still than her scream was the thunder of Benny’s heart as he saw what had torn that shout of denial out of her.

There was no ring of white rocks. There was no ranger station or a forgotten farmhouse.

It was a huge machine that had been smashed against the unforgiving landscape.

And it was heartbreakingly familiar.

It was an airplane.

PART TWO

BROKEN BIRDS

Shallow men believe in luck.

Strong men believe in cause and effect.

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON

41

“NO!” CRIED NIX AS SHE SHOVED PAST BENNY AND RUSHED FORWARD, but he darted out a hand and caught her arm.

“Wait,” he warned in a sharp whisper.

“Let me go,” she said viciously, and tore her arm out of Benny’s grasp, giving him a wild and murderous glare. “Don’t you see what that is?”

“It’s a jet—”

“It’s the jet.” Tears broke and fell down Nix’s freckled cheeks. “Look at it. Everything’s ruined. Oh God, Benny . . . everything’s ruined.”

Benny pushed back a low-hanging branch and stepped out of the woods so he could see the wreckage. His heart sank in his chest, and his fingertips were ice cold from shock.

Beyond the trees was a plateau. One side dropped away into a crevasse that was choked with tall pines; the other side leveled out into a section of flat forestland. A long trench was cut into the mud of the flatland, stretching back at least half a mile, and the nose of the craft was smashed into a mound of mud. Benny had slid into enough bases in rainy baseball games to understand the physics of that. The plane had not simply crashed; instead the pilot had tried to land it, coming in low and then sliding to a long, messy stop on the forest floor.

Because these woods were part of the Mojave Desert, the soil was loose and sandy, which had probably kept the plane from disintegrating on impact. The fuselage was almost intact, though there were jagged tears all along the side they could see. Both wings had been sheared clean off. One was wrapped like wet tissue around a tall finger of rock two hundred yards down the trench. The other wing had torn off closer to where the craft stopped its fatal slide, and it had twisted into an upright position, looking like the sail of an old-time vessel. The main fuselage was almost a hundred feet long and was cracked in two places, but the plane had not torn itself to pieces. Even so, bits of debris were littered behind it, some blackened from fire, others still gleaming white where they were visible against brown sand and green pinyons and junipers. Creeper vines clung to the metal skin of the plane and to each of the fractured wings. The vines were draped like spiderwebs between the blades of the four big, silent propellers.

The glass windows at the front of the craft were smashed in, and the creepers had intruded there, too. A metal hatch stood open a few yards aft of the crumpled nose, gaping like a black mouth in the whiteness of the plane. Plastic sheeting hung in tatters from the open hatch, and there were old bones in the grass below the ragged ends of the plastic. Benny had seen pictures of inflatable escape ramps that were used for emergency landings, and the plastic looked like it might be the remnants of one.

He pointed it out to Nix as he picked up her fallen bokken. “Look at that. Somebody survived the crash.”

That thought edged down the panic in Nix’s eyes by a couple of degrees. She accepted her wooden sword, but her hands gripped the handle with such white-knuckled force that Benny thought she was going to attack the dead aircraft. She took a couple of quick steps toward the plane.

“Be careful,” he said, keeping his voice low in case there were reapers in the woods.

“I’m going to look,” she said in a voice that was less confident than she probably wanted it to sound.

Benny began to follow and then stopped. He felt a frown pull down the corners of his mouth, but he did not consciously understand why. His eyes roved over the scene again. The trench, the plane, the foliage, the broken wings, the open door. His frown deepened.

Something was wrong. Very wrong.

“Nix, wait,” he said. “Don’t.”

She paused and looked sharply at him. “Why not?”

Benny licked his lips. “I . . . don’t think that’s our jet.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Nix, that’s not the jet we saw.”

She looked from the plane to Benny and back again, and there was such fury in her eyes that he made sure he wasn’t in easy swinging range of her bokken. “You’re crazy,” she barked. “Of course it’s the one we saw.”

“No, it isn’t, and keep your voice down.” Benny came and stood beside her. “Look at it, Nix. This thing’s been here for at least a year. Probably more.”

“How would you know?”

Nix’s harshness was beginning to grate on him, and he snapped back.

“Open your eyes,” he said, his own tone growing sharp. He pointed to the small trees that had poked through the bottom of the trench. “Look at those saplings. Come on—they’re at least a year old. At least that, and maybe older. Some of them look two years old.”

“They’re saplings, Benny. Saplings bend. They could have bent over and sprung back up.”

“No way. They’d have been snapped off. Look, there are bigger trees that were torn right out of the ground.”

It was true; the dead trunks of a hundred small pine trees lay in the trench, their limbs snapped, roots torn out of the sandy soil. Many of them were ripped completely apart, and there were dried sticks that could easily have been saplings that were killed during the crash. Benny pulled a few up and brought them over to Nix.

“See?” he said. “These were the saplings the plane hit. Those others could never have survived this big freaking thing crashing down on them.”

“So what?” she demanded. Somehow, with her voice lowered to a whisper, she sounded even angrier and more annoyed with him. “Since when are you an expert on plant growth?”

“I’m not an expert, Nix, but I’m not stupid, either.”