Fire & Ash

by Jonathan Maberry

  “He spoke, though,” said Benny hopefully. “That’s something. It’s an improvement, right? It’s a good sign and—”

  Lilah shook her head and gazed across the distance toward the white blockhouse. “My town boy is lost.”

  “Lilah, I—”

  “Go away,” she said in a voice that was almost inhuman.

  Benny shoved his hands in his pockets and trudged off to find Nix.

  8

  BEYOND THE FENCE . . .

  Through the long eye of the telescope, the boy with the sword slung over his back and the girl with the spear looked like they were standing only a few feet away. Close enough to touch.

  Close enough to kill.

  “I will open red mouths in your flesh,” whispered the man with the telescope. “Praise be to the darkness.”

  FROM NIX’S JOURNAL

  Zoms rely on one or more senses in order to hunt. Smell is big, we know that. They can smell healthy flesh. That’s why cadaverine works; it smells like rotting tissue.

  Sight and hearing are just as important to them.

  There has to be a strategic way to use these three senses against them. I’m going to talk to Captain Ledger about it. He seems to know more than anyone about fighting zoms.

  9

  SIX MONTHS AGO . . .

  Saint John stood under the leaves of a green tree while the two most powerful women in the Night Church argued with each other.

  “It’s old-world heresy,” insisted Mother Rose, who was the spiritual leader of the Night Church. She was tall and lovely, graceful as the morning, as beautiful as a knife blade. “That plane and its contents represent everything the church opposes.”

  “I don’t dispute that,” said the other woman, a frail Korean named Sister Sun. A year ago she had been athletic and strong, but over the last few months cancer had begun consuming her. By her own diagnosis she had less than a year to live, and she was determined to use that year helping the Night Church conquer the heretics. “My point is that we need to examine those materials to understand what’s happening with the gray people.”

  “Nothing is happening with—”

  “Mother, you know that’s not true. Our people have seen case after case of gray people moving in flocks. That never happened before. There are rumors of gray people who move almost as fast as the living. Even some incidents of them picking up rocks and stones as weapons.”

  “So what?” countered Mother Rose in her haughty voice. “All life changes. Even un-life. It’s part of nature, isn’t it?”

  “That’s just it,” insisted Sister Sun. “The Reaper Plague isn’t part of nature, as I’ve said many times.”

  Saint John turned now and held up a hand. Both women fell immediately silent.

  “The plague that raised the dead and destroyed the cities of sinful man was brought to earth by the divine hand of Lord Thanatos.”

  “All praise to his darkness,” said the women in unison.

  “Therefore it is part of the natural order of the universe.”

  “Honored One,” said Sister Sun, “please listen to me. Both of you—listen. I know this plague. I studied it after the outbreak. My team was working with the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. No one alive knows this disease better than me except for Monica McReady.”

  “That heretic is dead,” said Mother Rose.

  “We don’t know that for sure,” said Sister Sun. “We sent five teams of reapers out to search for her, and two teams never returned.”

  Mother Rose dismissed the argument with a flick of her hand.

  “If McReady was tampering with the disease—if she was trying to create a cure for it, then she might have caused it to mutate,” said Sister Sun passionately. “Any possible change to the disease can have a significant impact on the predictable behavior of the gray people, and that is a danger to our church. You know it is. If you let me look at the research materials on the plane, I might be able to determine what she was doing. Maybe I can stop it, or perhaps learn enough to predict what changes are occurring so we can adapt behavioral modifications into our church doctrine. But we can’t allow random changes to manifest without a response from the church. Think of how disruptive that would be, especially to reaper groups that have a high percentage of new recruits. Doubt is our enemy.”

  Mother Rose shook her head the whole time. “The plane is a shrine, and I have put my seal on it. It stays closed.”

  She turned her back and walked away.

  Sister Sun gripped Saint John’s sleeve. “Please, Honored One, surely you understand the danger.”

  “The shrine belongs to Mother Rose,” he said.

  “But—”

  “It belongs to her.”

  The saint gently pulled his arm away and walked off under the shadows of the trees, aware that she stood and watched him the whole time. He did not let her see the smile that he wore.

  10

  THE MESS HALL WAS IN a Quonset hut set behind the dormitory hangar. Rows of long trestle tables, folding chairs, a steam table were set up for self-service. Benny picked up a tray and a plate, slopped some runny eggs and links of what he hoped was pork sausage. It might as easily have been lizard or turtle, as Benny had already found out.

  There was never a lot of food. Enough, but none to spare.

  The first time Benny had come here, he’d piled his tray high. No one had said anything until he sat down across from Riot, who gave him a stern glare.

  “Y’all got enough food there for a pregnant sow,” she’d said to him, her voice heavy with an Appalachian accent.

  “I know, right?” he said, and jammed a forkful of eggs into his mouth. “It’s not even that bad.”

  Riot was thin and hard-muscled and very pretty, with a shaved head that was tattooed with roses and wild vines. She wore jeans and a leather vest buttoned up over nothing else that Benny could detect. “Maybe that zom knocked all good sense out your head, boy . . . but did it knock out all your manners, too? There’s four people not going to eat today because y’all took enough food for five. Look around—you think there’s anything close to abundance round these parts? Everyone here’s a few short steps away from starving and here you are, stuffing your face like it’s your birthday.”

  When Benny looked around, all he saw were the bland, accepting smiles of the monks. Then he looked down at the heap of eggs, the mounds of potatoes and vegetables, and the half loaf of bread. Without another word he got up and walked back to the steam table and placed his tray in front of the first person in line. Then he left and didn’t eat anything else all day.

  Now he had it down to a rhythm. A scoop of eggs, half a roast potato, a slice of bread thinly coated with butter, and a cup of well water. Always a little less than he wanted, always leaving a little extra for the next person. After the first couple of hungry days, Benny began to feel good about that. Now it was his ritual. He also spent time every day working in the bean fields and fruit groves, doing unskilled grunt labor to help. It was exhausting work, but it felt good. And there was the side benefit of approaching it as exercise to reclaim his strength and muscle tone.

  He tried to get some of the monks working the fields to sing a few of the off-color work songs Morgie had learned from his dad, but that kite wouldn’t fly.

  Today Riot was on the other side of the mess hall, seated next to Eve, the tiny blond-haired girl Benny had rescued after they’d both fallen into a ravine filled with zoms. Eve was laughing at something Riot said, and even from that distance Benny could hear the strange, fractured quality of that laughter. The poor kid had been through too much. Reapers had raided and burned the settlement in which she’d lived and slaughtered nearly everyone. The refugees spent several mad days running through deserts and forests, only to be hunted down and sent “into the darkness.” Eve had witnessed the terrible moment when reapers cut down her father and mother.

  The monks worked with Eve every day, coaxing the little girl inch by inc
h out of the red shadows of her trauma, but even though there had been some progress, it was apparent that Eve might be permanently damaged. Benny was almost as worried about Riot as he was about Eve—the former reaper seemed to take it as her personal mission to “save” the girl. Benny dreaded what might happen to Riot if Eve’s fragile sanity finally collapsed.

  It made Benny both sad and furious, because the reapers were so much worse than the zoms. The dead were mindless, acting according to the impulses of whatever force reanimated their bodies; the reapers knew what they were doing.

  In his calmer moments, Benny tried to explore the viewpoint that the reapers actually believed that what they were doing was right, that they believed they were serving the will of their god. But he could not climb into the mind-set of a religion based on extinction. Even if the reapers believed that their god wanted everyone dead, they had no right to force that belief on everyone else. They had no right to turn the life of a child like Eve into a living horror show.

  No right at all.

  “Hey,” said a familiar voice behind him, and he turned, already smiling because a bad day had just gotten a whole lot better.

  “Hey yourself,” he said, and leaned across the table to give Nix Riley a quick, light kiss. She was a beautiful girl with wild red hair, emerald green eyes that sparkled with intelligence, and more freckles than there were stars in the sky. A long pink scar ran from her hairline almost to her jaw, but even with that she looked young, and fresh and happy. It had been months since she looked this good. Like Eve, Nix had suffered through the absolute horror of seeing her mother murdered in front of her. Not by reapers—those killers were not yet a part of their lives—but by the brutal bounty hunters Charlie Pink-eye and the Motor City Hammer. Nix herself had been beaten and kidnapped by the pair. They were going to make her fight in the zombie pits of Gameland. Tom and Benny had rescued her, but from then on life for Nix had become a constant nightmare, running from one room in hell to another.

  Nix sat down, but caught him staring at her. “What? Do I have something on my face?”

  “Just this,” he said, and blew her a handful of kisses.

  “You are too corny for words,” she said, but she was smiling. “You were in the blockhouse a long time today. What did they talk about?”

  Nix’s smile leaked away as he told her about Chong.

  “I thought Lilah said that he was alive!”

  “He is alive.”

  “But . . . he tried to bite you.”

  “Okay, so he’s sick, he’s messed up—but he’s still Chong.”

  “How? How is he still Chong? He’s totally infected, Benny. They’re keeping him in a cage, for God’s sake.”

  Benny’s face grew instantly hot. “What are you saying? You think they should put him down like a dog?”

  “Not like a dog, Benny. He’s a zom and—”

  “And what? They should quiet him?”

  Nix sat back and folded her arms tightly across her chest. “What do you think is going to happen, Benny? Do you think that Chong is going to suddenly snap out of it?”

  “Maybe he will!” Benny yelled.

  “Maybe he can’t.”

  “I can’t believe you’re giving up on him, Nix. This is Chong. Chong! He’s our friend.”

  “Was that really Chong down in that cage? Would Chong try to take a bite out of you?”

  Benny whammed the table with his fist. “He’s not a zombie, Nix. He’s sick and he needs our help.”

  “What help?” she demanded, her voice jumping a whole octave. “What can we possibly do for him?”

  Benny had to fish for how to answer her. When he spoke, his voice was a hot whisper. “We need to give the scientists time to figure it out.”

  “Okay. Fine. What happens in the meantime? We go visit him like he’s a zoo animal?”

  “Why are you being such a bitch?”

  Nix stood up so suddenly that her belt buckle caught the edge of her plate and flipped it over, flinging eggs everywhere. Surprise, embarrassment, and anger warred on her face.

  “I—”

  “Save it,” snapped Benny as he got up and stalked away.

  He made it almost all the way to the door before Nix caught up to him. He heard her coming and quickened his stride, but she ran the last few steps, caught his sleeve, and spun him around. Before he could say anything, she stuck a finger in his face.

  “You listen to me, Benjamin Imura. I love Chong every bit as much as you do. I loved Tom, too. And I loved my mother—but people die. In this world, people die. Everyone dies.”

  “Well, thank you, Lady Einstein. Here I was thinking that everyone lived forever and every day was apple pie and puppies.” He glared at her. “I know people die. I’m not stupid, and I’m not kidding myself about how much trouble Chong’s in. Maybe he can’t come back, maybe he’s already too sick . . . but I heard him speak today, and even though it was only one word, it proves that some part of him is still there. He’s not gone yet, and I won’t give up on him. Not until there’s no hope and no chance at all.”

  “Benny, I—” she began, but he shook his head and turned away.

  He pushed past some monks who were on their way into the mess hall. Behind him he heard Nix call his name, but she did not follow him outside.

  11

  MILES AND MILES AWAY . . .

  His name was Morgan Mitchell, but everyone called him Morgie.

  Morgie was big for his age, looking more like eighteen than fifteen. Beefy shoulders, arms heavy with muscle, and a dusting of beard smudging cheeks and chin.

  His clothes were soaked with sweat, and his eyes were filled with shadows.

  An old truck tire hung by a rope from a limb of the big oak tree. The weathered rubber was scarred by thousands of impacts from the bokken—the wooden sword Morgie held in his hands. Each blow made the tire dance and swing, and Morgie shifted this way and that to chase it, to continue hammering it, to smash at it over and over again. The force of each blow threw echoes against the rear of the house that stood vacant and silent at the other end of the yard. The bokken was hand-carved from a piece of hickory. It was his sixth sword. The first five had cracked and broken in this yard, defeated not by the tire but by the force of the hands that swung the wood, and by the muscle in arms and shoulders and back.

  And by pain.

  Each blow hurt. It wasn’t the shock that vibrated back from the point of impact and shivered through Morgie’s muscles and bones. It wasn’t that at all. The pain was in his heart. And he hammered at it every day. Several times a day. The training leaned him, burning away childhood fat, revealing muscles forged in a furnace of grief and regret.

  Morgie knew he was being watched, but he didn’t care. It was like that all the time, almost every day. Randy Kirsch, mayor of Mountainside and former neighbor of the Imuras, sat on his porch. Two men sat with him, each of them drinking coffee from ceramic mugs.

  • • •

  “Two ration dollars says he breaks another sword today,” said Keith Strunk, captain of the town watch.

  “Sucker’s bet,” said Leroy Williams, a big black man sitting to his left. He was a corn farmer who’d lost his right arm in a car crash after bringing a group of people through a horde of zoms after First Night. “Kid’s working on some real fury down there. He’ll break that sword or knock the tire out of the damn tree.”

  The mayor glanced at his watch. “He’s been at it for two hours now.”

  “Makes me sweat just watching him,” said Strunk.

  They all nodded and sipped their coffee.

  The thump, thump, thump of the sword was constant.

  “You ever find out what happened between him and Benny?” asked Strunk. “Heard they had some kind of fight right before Tom took those kids out of town.”

  The mayor shook his head.

  “I heard it was over the girl,” said Leroy. “Little Phoenix. Remember, Morgie went courtin’ at the Riley place that night Jessie was killed.
Morgie got his head near stove in by Marion Hammer. And then seven months later Nix goes off with Benny.”

  “Ah,” said Strunk. “A girl. That’ll do it.”

  They all sighed and nodded.

  “I don’t think it’s just the girl,” said Mayor Kirsch. “I think it was that fight. I heard Morgie knocked Benny down.”

  “If they were fighting,” said Leroy, “then they were fighting over the Riley girl.”

  They all nodded again.

  Captain Strunk said, “Morgie asked me the other day if I’d let him join the town watch. When I told him he was too young, he got a job as an apprentice fence guard.”

  “Ugly work for a boy,” said the mayor. “And he asked me for an application to the Freedom Riders. He wants to roll out with Solomon Jones and that crew.”

  “Thought you had to be eighteen for that,” said Leroy.

  “You do. But he’s trying to get a special dispensation because he trained with Tom Imura.”

  “Ah,” said Strunk.

  Leroy grunted. “Maybe they should let him in. Tom trained those kids good . . . and besides, look at him. Kid’s bigger and tougher than any eighteen-year-old I know.”

  “Tom did a good job,” said Strunk as they watched Morgie hammer away at the tire. “Bet Tom would be proud of him.”

  The wooden sword whipped and flashed and pounded, again and again and again.

  12

  BENNY WALKED ALONG THE TRENCH—well away from Lilah—until the weight of the sun’s heat slowed him to a less furious pace. Finally, drenched in sweat and feeling about as low as he could feel, he stopped, shoved his hands into his pockets, and stood there, staring across the trench at the dead. A few of them moved restlessly, but the rest stood as still as if they were the tombstones of their own graves.

  Movement caught his eye, and Benny turned to see Riot as she walked Eve to the playground and handed her over to the head nun, Sister Hannahlily. Then Riot spotted him and came his way.