Joe swapped out his magazines, his face wooden. “The infection started three months ago,” he said. “A few guards on patrol by the siren towers got swarmed by a pack of R3’s. One fatality, but a couple of the others got the black blood on them. I don’t know if it got in someone’s eyes or mouth, or if it was on one of the soldiers’ hands and he touched his face. We’ll never know. But he brought the mutagen into Sanctuary with him. We sent word to the American Nation to quarantine this place. To write it off.”
He shook his head sadly.
“Sanctuary is dead.”
They all gaped at him.
Benny got up in Joe’s face. “You brought us here, damn it. Why bring us to a graveyard?”
Joe shook his head. “When I brought you here it was to save you from Saint John and Mother Rose. But we never let you inside. We kept you away from the plague until we could make sure you were uninfected. If it wasn’t for your friend Chong, I’d have taken you kids south to North Carolina. Now you’re inside the quarantine zone. You’re as trapped as everyone else at Sanctuary.”
79
SIX CORRIDORS AWAY, A TEAM of Red Brothers moved silently through the shadows, knives ready, eyes alert, killing anyone they met. Brother Peter ran with them, his face flushed with exertion, his clothes soaked with blood.
Two soldiers tried to hold a doorway, but Brother Peter ordered a pair of reapers to rush them. The men smiled at the chance to serve their brother, serve their god, and leaped like heroes into the darkness. They let out earsplitting roars as they charged straight into a hail of bullets. The rounds chopped into them, splattering the walls with blood, turning the killers into dancing puppets and finally into inhuman rag dolls.
But as they collapsed, Brother Peter, who had run up behind them at full speed, leaped over their corpses, a knife in each hand.
The soldiers did not have time to scream.
The rest of the Red Brothers swept through the doorway and into the lab complex. Gleaming machines, racks of sanitized instruments, cabinets of medicines, and banks of computers filled the room.
One scientist was there.
A woman, with gray hair tied in a bun and reading glasses that hung on a delicate chain around her neck.
She dropped to her knees as Peter and the reapers fanned out around her.
“Please,” she begged. “Don’t.”
Brother Peter knelt in front of her. “Why not, my sister? Tell me.”
Her eyes glittered with tears. “We’re so close,” she said. “We can cure this. We’re going to cure it. Please . . . just give us time. We can save everyone . . . please believe me.”
“Believe you?” mused the reaper. “My sister, I do believe you. I believe with all my heart that you can cure the plague that has come so close to destroying all human life.”
Her expression softened from abject horror to one of surprised hope. “Then you’ll leave us alone? You won’t hurt us? You won’t wreck everything?”
He set one of his knives down and used that hand to caress her face. It was an act of such gentleness, such tenderness, that the woman actually closed her eyes and pressed her cheek against his rough palm.
“I said that I believed you, my sister,” said Brother Peter as he leaned close and rested his cheek on the top of her head. “And may god have mercy on you for the sins you have committed here in this place of blasphemy.”
Her eyes snapped wide.
Not because of his words.
They opened with shock because of the pain. She sagged back from him and looked down at the knife that Peter had buried in her chest.
“May you find forgiveness in the formless eternity of the darkness.”
“All praise to his darkness,” said the others.
Peter looked around at the reapers and then at the machines that filled the room.
“Destroy everything,” he said.
80