They studied each other for a long moment, each of them calculating the implications of that.
“Someday soon,” murmured the saint, “we will have a discussion with Brother Alexi.”
“Most assuredly,” agreed Brother Peter, and his eyes were hard as metal. “But . . . if Brother Alexi has fallen from grace, what does that say about Mother Rose? They are inseparable. He does not scratch an itch without her say-so.”
Saint John placed his hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “We must be vigilant, but we must not leap to judgment. The truth always finds the light, you know this?”
“Yes.”
“Then be patient. God has set many tasks before us. We have to find and end the rest of Carter’s heretics and send them into the darkness. We must find Sister Margaret and make sure that she tells only us how to find Sanctuary . . . and not her mother. This is of paramount importance.”
“Silencing her voice would be easy enough. . . .”
“Don’t underestimate her,” cautioned Saint John. “Remember how talented she was. Had she not fallen from grace, her skill could have rivaled your own.”
Brother Peter gave an elaborate shrug. “I welcome the opportunity to test that.”
“Do not give her the slightest chance. As far as the ranger, Joe . . . we need to find him before he can do more harm. Every time he kills one of ours and is not punished for it, a seed of doubt is planted in the hearts of our reapers. This man must be found.”
“Yes, Honored One.”
Saint John nodded. “There are two other tasks at hand. First, I want you to select your most trusted reapers and have them join you when you go to observe Mother Rose’s meeting at the shrine. Have some follow Her Holiness and Brother Alexi and send runners to me to report everything that is said at this meeting.”
“Of course.” Peter paused. “What is the other matter?”
Saint John looked at the line of footprints in the soft earth. He told Brother Peter about Nyx and her knight.
“Surely they are part of Carter’s party,” insisted Peter, but Saint John shook his head.
“I don’t think so. Their eyes have looked upon the darkness, I’m sure of it.” Saint John absently touched the cut on his forearm. “I will follow them and seek to discover the nature of this holy test.” He took a breath. “Go now. The god of darkness calls us to our purpose.”
“And we answer with joy,” replied Brother Peter with his flat voice and unsmiling face.
He bowed low. Saint John kissed his head and blessed him.
The young man got back on his quad, fired up the engine, and roared off into the woods.
Saint John watched him go, nodding to himself with silent approval. Brother Peter was the best of the reapers. The best by far. A genius of the blade and a killer whose every breath was dedicated to giving the gift of darkness. Saint John had no doubts that Peter would find this man—this troublesome man—and do as he had promised. He would open the doors in the man’s flesh and let the darkness in. It would be the greatest act of faith and devotion possible. Saint John almost envied him that pleasure.
He reached up and touched the silver whistle that hung around his neck. He stroked it contemplatively for a moment and then raised it to his lips. He blew into it, long and hard and with no apparent effect.
Soon, however, he heard the sound of clumsy feet crunching on dead leaves, and the swish of pine branches brushing against bodies that moved without delicacy but with the implacability of the stars themselves.
Then the saint of all the killers left on earth ran after Nix and Benny, and behind him an army of the living dead followed.
FROM NIX’S JOURNAL
Tom taught us that the samurai lived according to a code of ethics and behavior called Bushido. You’d think something that means “The Way of the Warrior” would be all about killing the enemy, but that’s not how it was. There are seven “virtues” that true warriors had to live by.
1. Justice. This is about doing the right thing or making the right decision (even if it’s the hardest choice at the time).
2. Bravery. We can’t really be fearless, but we can act brave even when we’re scared green.
3. Benevolence. Warriors should always show mercy, charity, and kindness.
4. Respect. Everyone deserves it. (I have to keep reminding myself of this one!)
5. Honesty. This includes trust and sincerity, too.
6. Loyalty. Yeah. This one’s really important if we’re going to survive out here in the Ruin.
7. Honor. Tom says this means that when you give your word, then that’s set in stone. He said, “Honor isn’t a convenience. It’s a way of life.”
34
AN ARROW THUNKED INTO THE TREE TRUNK AN INCH FROM CHONG’S FACE.
He screamed and threw himself down and away.
In the clearing, Brother Andrew shouted, “Danny! Did you get him?”
“He went right down,” cried a second voice from well behind where Chong lay. “Go get him and I’ll cover you.”
Chong had no intention of waiting while the muscle-freak with the scythe came to kill him. He sprang to his feet and bolted for the crooked line of shrubs twenty yards away. He ran bent almost in half, sword clutched in one fist. Another arrow struck a tree directly in front of him, causing him to skid to a stop and dive down behind a thick pine. A third arrow hit the pine, and when he risked a look, a fourth cleaved the air so close to his head that it tugged at his hair. It tangled in a creosote bush and fell to the ground. Chong gave it a microsecond’s glance. The arrow had an aluminum shaft, with black plastic fletching and a wicked barbed head that was smeared with some black goo. Poison? Either way, Chong did not want to touch it. He scuttled away as fast as he could.
“There he is,” called the archer, Danny, as he stepped out of the woods. “It’s just a kid with a toy sword.”
Danny was a thin black man, dressed identically to Brother Andrew, shaved head and all. He had a leather quiver of arrows slung over his back, the fletched ends ready above his shoulder so all he had to do was reach up and slide an arrow out and down into his bow. Chong had seen plenty of hunters coming back from the Ruin with quivers identical to that. What struck him, though, was the bow this man carried. It was not one of the old-fashioned red-elm recurve bows made by the Gibson brothers in Haven; nor was it one of the sixty-two-inch plain longbows Chong and all his friends used in gym class. No, this was something from before First Night: a metal-and-fiberglass compound bow fitted with cables and pulleys to bend the limb, allowing the archer superior accuracy, velocity, and distance. Chong had seen only one like it before. A moody, scar-faced trade guard named Big Mike Sweeney gave a demonstration with one at the New Year Festival two years ago. He’d outshot every archer in the Nine Towns, and each of his arrows sank twice as deep as even the longbow arrows used by Cleveland Dave Wilcox. The Motor City Hammer had offered Big Mike a thousand ration dollars for the bow, but the scar-faced man had laughed and walked away.
Chong recognized and feared that weapon. His stomach clenched into a tiny knot of ice.
He ducked so low that he was almost on all fours and wormed his way into the densest tangle of brush he could find. He heard another arrow strike a tree, but the archer was aiming in the wrong direction. Chong felt a splinter of relief. If he could stay out of sight for another couple of minutes, then he could circle behind Danny and lose himself in the forest. He risked one peek and saw that the archer was now between him and Andrew. Chong smiled grimly and kept moving.
“Hey! Where’d he go?” growled Brother Andrew. “Watch out, Danny, I can’t see him—”
“Carter!” A woman’s voice suddenly cried out in total horror, and everyone—Andrew, the archer, and Chong—turned to see a woman with an ax standing wide-eyed with shock at the edge of the clearing. Sarah. Eve clung to her mother’s leg, face blank with incomprehension.
The archer smiled and drew another black-tipped arrow.
“Sarah,” said
Brother Andrew, and he actually looked relieved. “Looks like we’ll get the whole family, praise be to the darkness. Carter won’t have to go into the darkness alone.”
The compassion in his voice chilled Chong. It was so weirdly inappropriate, and yet it seemed genuine.
“Carter!” Sarah’s eyes blazed with madness, and she kept screaming her husband’s name as if somehow the depth of her need could call him back from the dark place to which his soul had fled. Her body trembled as she fought between the desire to run to her husband and the need to protect her daughter.
“Sarah,” said Andrew, “Carter is in the arms of Thanatos now—all praise his darkness.”
“N-no . . .”
“He’s waiting for you, sweetheart. He wants you and Evie to join him.”
Tears streamed down Sarah’s face. Eve began whimpering.
“I want my daddy,” she wailed.
Brother Andrew smiled at the little girl. “You see? She wants to be with him. The darkness offers peace and an end to suffering for all of you.”
“You bastards killed my husband,” growled Sarah, her voice made rough by the jagged pieces of her breaking heart. “And now you want to kill my baby?”
“We want to save Eve and all the other children,” insisted Andrew. “Please, Sarah . . . don’t fight this. Embrace it.”
Chong knew that it was all hopeless. Sarah was on the edge of panic, and she could never defeat both reapers. She should never have come into the clearing, but Chong understood that she could not have done anything else. It was a terrible script written by an evil hand, and she and her daughter were going to become victims of their own drama.
The archer strung his arrow, the barbed head gleaming with black goo; Andrew hefted the scythe with its wicked three-foot-long curving blade.
Time seemed to have slowed for Chong, but this moment was stretched so taut that it was going to snap. He knew he could flee this encounter and head into the woods. Physically he could do that; but that was not possible on any other level. He also knew that he was no one’s idea of a hero. Benny was, although his friend would laugh at the suggestion; and both Nix and Lilah were heroes. Chong was a self-admitted sidekick. No one should ever depend on him for anything heroic. He didn’t have the mentality or the musculature for it. His bokken was clutched in his fists, and his teeth were clenched.
The reapers were distracted—Chong could simply run away.
“Move it, town boy,” he snarled at himself; and then he was up and running.
Toward the tableau that was suddenly coming unstuck from time. Sarah screamed and rushed at Andrew; the reaper raised his scythe. The archer shifted his stance to take aim at Eve, who stood alone and confused in the dirt.
This is insane, Chong told himself. I can’t do this.
“Danny!” yelled Brother Andrew. “Behind you!”
Chong was still too far away when the archer turned and fired.
35
A VOICE WHISPERED IN LILAH’S EAR.
Or perhaps in her mind.
If you don’t stop the bleeding, you’re going to die.
“I know that,” she said irritably, and it was only when she heard the sound of her own voice that she realized the other voice had not spoken aloud.
Her eyes snapped open, and with a start she realized that she was awake. She remembered falling asleep, or at least she remembered the darkness folding around her. She liked the darkness; it was soft and gentle and sweet.
Waking was none of those things.
Pain seemed to be part of everything. Even opening her eyes hurt. The sun was directly overhead, and she squinted up through a gap in the trees.
You have to stop the bleeding.
The voice was a familiar one, but it was not one that had ever spoken to her before. Not when she was alone. Not out here in the Ruin.
George? Sure, she heard his voice all the time. Annie, too.
But not this. Not him.
“Tom—?” she asked.
The only answer was the soft rustle of the wind in the trees.
Her heart instantly began hammering as the full awareness of where she was flooded back into her mind with ugly clarity.
“Help me, Tom.”
There was a reply to that, but it wasn’t Tom’s voice. It was the hungry grunt of the monster. Somehow it had found its way down from the cliff and was below her now.
The boar.
The impossible boar.
She looked down and gasped in horror. She was suspended in the interlocking boughs of two pine trees, but she wasn’t sure how far off the ground she was. Below her was a wild boar that had somehow become infected with the zombie plague, but she did not know how to cope with it. She had no spear. That was lost, probably somewhere on the cliff or down there with the pig.
She heard a second grunt, and for a moment she strained to tell whether it was the same boar making shorter grunts or—
No, there it was again. Two grunts overlapping. Then a third. A fourth.
Then two more.
Six of them.
Somewhere below her was an entire pack of the dead boars.
She closed her eyes for a moment and listened inside her body. She could not feel any cuts, but she could feel the warmth of blood inside her clothes.
She gingerly wiggled her fingers. They worked fine. She tried her toes. Also fine. There was pain in the backs of her legs, but she was comforted by the fact that she could feel her legs. After the first boar had hit her and she landed on the rock, Lilah was sure she’d broken her back. Not so.
It was a comfort, but it was not the end of her troubles.
She lifted one leg. Only an inch, but it did move. Pain shot up the back of her thigh and into her hip joint. Had the boar torn her side open? If that was the case, then she knew that she was probably going to die.
Lilah took a breath and successfully moved hands and feet, and determined that her spine was not too badly damaged. That was something. A cut, even a bad one, was something she could deal with.
She opened her eyes and looked up at the branches above her. Several of them were cracked and broken from her fall. Directly above her was one that had snapped off, leaving a spike of wood nearly eight inches long. She reached for it, moving slowly and with great care. Her fingers wriggled for the branch, her fingertips brushing the bottom of it. Almost . . . almost.
But it was too far.
There was no way she could grab it without sitting up, and that meant that her angle to the boughs would radically change. By bending at the waist she would be placing a great deal of her upper body mass at an angle toward her middle. That V position of her body would concentrate her weight into a single point instead of spreading it out over the surface of the branches. She would slide right through and probably fall.
She looked up at the branch.
She had to make that bend, but she had to do it faster than gravity could pull her. Bend, reach, lunge, grab. Without knowing how badly she was hurt, it was a terrible risk.
The alternative was to lie there and bleed to death.
Lilah closed her eyes for a moment, conjuring the faces of the people she loved. Annie, George. Tom.
And Chong.
He was a town boy and not a good match for her in any way.
But she did love him, and she knew that Chong loved her . . . even though neither of them had ever spoken that word. Love. She smiled. Chong was probably too afraid to say it. But then again, so was she.
Afraid of all that the word meant.
As a result, they’d had so little between them. A few kisses, a few tender words. Nothing else. And if she did not move, that was all she would ever have.
That wasn’t fair. She hadn’t survived all those years in the wild only to be teased by the promise of love. In the thousands of books she’d read, love was the most important thing. It could move worlds.
Could it move her fast enough to grab that branch?
“Chong,” she said, and this time
it was his name she spoke. Not Tom’s. Chong.
She opened her eyes and glared at the branch.
Then all at once she threw her weight upward, tightened her stomach muscles, stretched with her shoulder and back, and braced for the screaming pain. The branches under her creaked and cracked as she lunged.
The pain was . . . immense.
But her hand closed on the branch.
She took everything the pain could throw at her. She bit down on it, snarled at it, opened her mouth and howled it out of her as she pulled on that branch. Broken twigs slashed at her side and legs and arms, but she took that pain too.
Pain had never owned Lilah, and it did not own her now.
Screaming with agony and rage, she whipped her other hand up, pulling now with both arms, with the muscles of her shoulders and chest and back.
Suddenly she heard a sharp crack beneath her, and the main branch on which she lay collapsed away from her, leaving her hanging. The pain, clever and deceitful as it always was, revealed that it had so much more to give.
She screamed, but she took it.
The muscles all along her tanned arms stood taut against her skin. Hot wetness ran down from her torn side, and fat drops of blood fell down into the shadows. Below her the infected hogs sent up a squeal of hellish hunger.
“Damn you,” she growled as she pulled herself up.
The whole tree swayed, tilting outward as if trying to shake her off.
Lilah pulled.
The pigs were in a frenzy, smashing themselves against the trunk.
Lilah pulled.
Pinecones rained down on her. Blood roared in her ears.
Lilah pulled.
She forced her knees up, forced her feet out to explore, forced them to find something solid.
And there it was. The stump of the branch that had just broken. Twenty inches of solid wood. Lilah stretched one foot out and shifted her weight onto it. The branch held.
With the last of her strength, she swung her body above the branch and settled her other foot on it.