“I’m pretty sorry I had to go through it too,” he said.
“You sure you’re not hurt?” asked Joe.
Benny shrugged. “Some bruises. A bad case of the shakes . . . and I guess a sick feeling in my stomach.”
“Yeah. That pretty much comes with the job.”
“Job? What job? I’m not a soldier.”
“Maybe not, but let’s face it, kid, we are at war. Saint John has launched a genocidal holy war, and the very fact that we’re alive makes us enemy combatants in his book.”
“I don’t want to fight Saint John.”
“Hey, I don’t either.”
“Besides, the reaper army vanished. You drove them off with the rocket launchers and all that.”
Joe shook his head. “Be nice if that was true, kid, but the reapers I fought were Mother Rose’s splinter group. The main force of the reaper army is somewhere else. Hopefully they’re far, far from here, but the plain fact is they’re out there somewhere.”
“?‘Main force’? How many reapers are there?”
“Conservative guess, including the group with Saint John and a half-dozen smaller groups he could gather together if he needs . . . call it thirty-five, forty thousand.”
Benny nearly fell down. “What?”
“Could be more.”
“But . . . that’s more than all the people in Mountainside and the other eight towns put together!”
“I know. It’s also why Saint John keeps winning. He has too big an army to lose any fight. Even if the defenders are well armed, Saint John can keep throwing bodies at them until they run out of bullets. He’s not a tactical genius, you know, he’s simply willing to do whatever it takes to win.”
“And people are willing to die for him . . . that’s so . . .”
“You’re looking at it the wrong way,” said Joe. “They’re not dying for Saint John, they’re dying for what he’s selling. He has them convinced that death is the antidote to pain and suffering, and it’s a hard argument to beat. Most religions talk about an afterlife or a paradise, right? Well, this world has been pretty much a crap sandwich for fifteen years, and it wasn’t always so friggin’ wonderful before that. Life is hard, people suffer, people get sick, they lose those they love. If you really believed that once you pass into the darkness, as Saint John calls it, there is no more pain, no more suffering, just bliss—if you believed that, you’d do anything to get there. Even walk into a fusillade of bullets. Especially if you believed that by dying for the cause you’re ensuring the salvation and bliss of everyone else. It’s a win-win situation. Saint John may actually believe this crap too, and probably does. In strategic terms, though, he’s adopted an ‘anything goes’ approach to winning.”
“Jeez . . .”
“The reason no one’s beat him yet,” said Joe, “is that people these days are afraid. They’re fighting like whipped dogs. There’s no genuine aggression left in them. They fight defensively, and that’s why they’re going to lose every battle.”
“I thought the saying was that the best offense is a strong defense.”
“You have it the wrong way around. The best defense is a strong offense. There’s an adage from the Wing Chun style of kung fu that goes ‘The hand which blocks also strikes.’ You understand what that means?”
Benny nodded.
“It’s academic, though . . . there’s no one west of the Rockies with either the technical oomph or the monkey-bat crazy nerve to fight him the right way.”
“What’s the right way?”
Joe cocked his head and considered Benny. “I’ve got my fair share of psychological issues,” he said. “There have been times when I’ve been in situations where I should have lost. I’ve been up against better numbers, and I’ve fought tougher men. You know why I’m still sucking air and they’re worm food? Because when it comes right down to it, there’s nothing I won’t do to win. Nothing. One time when we were really up against it, a guy I worked for looked at me and said, ‘I’d burn down heaven itself to stop this thing.’ If you think that sounds grandiose, that’s ’cause you didn’t know the man. That’s what he was willing to do, and I’m a whole lot crazier than him. So . . . I guess you have to ask yourself, young samurai, how far would you be willing to go to stop Saint John if he was coming after you and yours? How scary are you willing to be in order to take the heart out of the enemy? Are you willing to be the monster in the dark? Are you willing to be the boogeyman of their nightmares? If you can look inside your own head and see the line that you won’t cross, the limit that’s too far, then I can guarantee you Saint John will win. No question about it.”
FROM NIX’S JOURNAL
Until we found the crashed transport plane, we didn’t know what was out there in the Ruin. We knew someone had managed to fly a jet, but that didn’t tell us much.
Now we know about the American Nation.
The old government collapsed, and even though there are rumors that the president and some members of Congress went into hiding in a bunker, no one’s ever heard from them again. Captain Joe Ledger told us that a big group of survivors managed to take over the city of Asheville in North Carolina. There are more than a hundred thousand people there, and at least another fifty thousand living in fortified towns near there. Joe and a bunch of soldiers cleared out the zoms, and they have teams working to clear out all the areas around the city. They took back an army base and an air force base, too, which is why they have so many weapons. And the jet. They also have Black Hawk and Apache attack helicopters. Most of that stuff is in North Carolina.