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"Try to clie at the bottoust

"Nowe’ll be trapped in there See if you can climb down here"

Benny clied shards of the shattered s, and wriggled out into the fresh air He slid aardly down the crumpled nose and dropped nine feet to the top of the slope, landing with a grunt Nix caught hiht so out of the corner of his eye, and before he could twist out of the way, he struck his head on one of the T-bars The zoh the air all around hiroaned as Nix pulled hied his forearht red smear

"Swell"

They looked down the slope at the mayhem There was so much blood anddead fro They backed away and peered out from behind the nose of the plane

"Did you let the zoms out?" she asked

"Yeah," he said

"How?"

Benny said nothing He closed his eyes and was back in that darkened cabin, a newknife in the other The idea had been insane then, and it felt much crazier now

He had to free the zom farthest from the door first, and for a terribleinto those dead eyes, trapped between the need to help Nix and his own horror The zoh Benny knew that there was no mind behind them--no personality, no hu some awful sin

"Nix," he whispered as he slipped the point of the knife into the silver wire that held the zo The wire parted easily All Benny had to do was cut a couple of loops, and the zoht to open itsout the network of wires that covered its head, but decided not to He had no idea what its purpose was, and this didn’t seem like the tis on hands and feet, but even in his panic he was no fool His training was right there, burning like a beacon as he worked He cut the ropes al only threads

He did this over and over again, working with a pace that crossed the line into frenzy Terror was the whip that drove hied chunks of dry flesh fro row after row, the cabin filled with the dry rustle of zo to break the last threads

The first ones tore free before Benny was done They began shuffling toward him

Benny bit back a screa a stack of metal cases in place, and suddenly hundreds of pounds of dead weight crashed down on the zoms One of them collapsed with a broken neck, but for the others the cases were nothing et to their ht, Benny saw that there was a second row of cases behind the stack he’d toppled They were n that everyone who had survived First Night knew all too well: a biohazard symbol The cases were stenciled in white letters:

REAPER PLAGUE

MUTATION SAMPLES

HANDLE WITH EXTREME CAUTION

The zo small cries and yelps, as he cut the last zo overstack of metal boxes fell next A zom closed in on Benny, and he shoved one labeled LAW RKTS in its face The zom flew backward into others The container case slid off the stack and crashed down on its corner The ilanced at it and saw so he understood how to use He ignored it and kept scra backward

That hen Benny alrowl--and he looked up to see a zo fast It was one of two zoreen jumpsuits--and Benny remembered too late the notations he and Nix had read on the clipboard, about the zoreen

This is an entirely new classificationable to negotiate obstaclesavoid many of the objects thrown at ituse sirasp certain concepts, particularly stealth and subterfuge

The zom snarled at him Its eyes were not dead eyes They were more like those of the lions who had surrounded the caence in theence

A hateful intelligence

The zo out its hunger, racing straight at Benny

Behind it, the second green-jus and hissed like a snake

Benny backed away, his torch falling from his hand

He spun and ran as fast as he could

The zoms crawled over the others, dropped onto the o bay hatch, across the narrow corridor, slammed into the cockpit door, jerked the handle hard, shoved his weight against it, jumped inside, slammed the door shut, and shot the handle back into place

Then Tom spoke in his head for the first tiht it was a slice of memory served up in a ht there behind hian to turn

With a cry, Benny grabbed it and shoved it to the locked position There was a shalloell around the handle so the whole door was flush

The handle jerked and rattled with incredible force This was not the fu Benny had seen This was coordinated This was powerful

Benny thought he had already reached the li

He held on with one hand while he desperately scrabbled in his pockets for soe the handle in place The only thing he had that was strong enough was his quieting knife

Outside he heard the first screams as the freed zoms attacked the reapers

With no choice left to him, Benny jammed the knife into the narrow slot between the handle and the steel door He jaive at all

Instantly the zo on the door with insane fury

Then nothing

These memories replayed in Benny’s head in a second, and he heard the echo of Nix’s question

"How?"

How had he let the his sword "Coet these papers to Sanctuary"

Together they edged away froht They turned to make a dash for the safety of the woods

Safety, however, was not theirs to have

There was a zoreen jumpsuit

83

RIOT DROVE THE QUAD LIKE SHE HAD A DEATH WISH

The machine bounced and jounced and bucked as she pushed it to the li and Eve had to hold on for dear life

Chong kept praying that they would pass through some kind of veil and cross froht which berries wouldn’t give hiest sound

A shter