I can’t really remember what happened next. I couldn’t really see. My vision had been reduced to a small, little circle. My hearing was gone. I was coughing uncontrollably. I coughed so hard, my stomach muscles all cramped up at the same time. I probably would’ve thrown up if there was anything in my stomach. Mentally, I couldn’t think straight. It was like I was concussed or something.

I could see shapes moving, running towards me. It was the guys. Daniel. Kenji. And Jack.

All of a sudden, sound returned to the world.

“You’re one brave little lady.” It was Ben.

He must’ve been standing right next to me. I couldn’t see him though. My vision was a blur.

He started patting me down. At first I thought he was patting me on the back, trying to get me to stop coughing. But then I realized he was brushing the black dust off me. The remnants of the nano-swarm.

The rest of it was spread over the road and the sidewalk. At that moment it looked like harmless black dust. Like someone had emptied a massive, industrial sized vacuum cleaner in the middle of the road.

“Wait,” I coughed. “You said this was only a temporary solution.”

“That’s right,” Ben answered.

“So there’s a chance the nano-bots could come back online or whatever and reform.”

“Yeah.”

“How long do we have?”

“I’m not sure. But I don’t want to hang around to find out.”

“Yeah, me neither.”

“We need to go now.”

I tried to stand but I couldn’t. Every single muscled ached like I’d been beaten with a baseball bat.

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Ben picked me up and carried me.

We found a car at the rear of the church. It was an old station wagon. It looked like it hadn’t been used in a while. It was covered in red dust.

Daniel popped the hood and immediately began hot wiring the car. But he couldn’t get it going.

Ben sat me down in the back seat and then pushed Daniel out of the way. “Here, let me try. Hot-wired a million of these bad boys. Worth a fortune in chopped up parts.”

“Should we try and raid the supermarket warehouse they mentioned?” Kenji asked. “I think that’s where they were getting their food and water from.”

“Yeah, that’s probably a good idea,” Daniel said.

“No,” Ben answered. “We need to go now.”

The engine finally ticked over, roaring to life.

“I agree,” Maria said as she jumped in the car next to me. “I don’t want to spend any more time here.”

“We can’t just drive off into the desert,” Kenji said.

Ben sat in the front seat. “I’ll drive. I know the roads.”

“But where the hell are we going?”

“We’re going to the Fortress.”

Jack and Kenji jumped in the back as well. Daniel was up front.

“What about guns?” Jack asked. “I don’t like the idea of being unarmed.”

Ben held up a hand gun and a shotgun. “This is it. The priest’s men, the one’s that got away, they took the rest of them.”

“I think we should go and look for them,” Jack said.

Ben shook his head. “We can’t stay here. It’s not safe. But don’t worry. Once we get to the Fortress, we won’t need guns.”

And that was the end of the discussion. The guys were satisfied with Ben’s answer. The Fortress was the best place to go.

It was a safe haven. A refuge.

Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe Ben wasn’t the right guy to trust. Sure he had saved my life, but I had the sneaking suspicion that he wasn’t stable. To make matters worse, he was beast of a man. At least seven foot tall. He had arms like tree trunks for crying out loud. He had a body that was carved out of stone and a face only a mother could love. A mother who was partially blind. And after I had witnessed his strength first hand, when he took down those mutated monsters, I knew that if he wanted to, if he decided that he’d had enough of us, he could kill us all. Snap us in half like we were twigs.

Daniel wouldn’t be able to stop him. Not even Kenji with all his martial arts training.

The messed up thing was, we needed him.

We needed to get to the Fortress. We needed to rest up. Drink. Eat.

At that point I was just glad to be sitting down in the back of a car. I was glad to be chauffeured around the desert, instead of running for my life. Every single muscle in my body ached. My skin felt itchy. It hurt to breathe.

Maria put her arm around me. I think she said thanks, but I couldn’t be sure. At that point I had begun to pass out. My last thought was that I had cheated death again. And that death probably wouldn’t keep letting that happen. Sooner or later, he would come for us, swinging his scythe. Sooner or later, he would collect us all in one foul swoop.