Fire & Ash

by Jonathan Maberry

  If hope of a cure was gone, then what did that mean for Chong? Maybe he was dead already. Maybe all hope was dead.

  We lost our last chance to beat this thing.

  “No,” Benny said, and now that word held an entirely different meaning than it had a few minutes ago. Now it was filled with anger. With defiance, and Tom had once told him that defiance in the face of disaster was a quality of hope. “No—absolutely fricking no way.”

  The black mouth of the plane’s open hatchway yawned above him.

  Benny hooked his fingers through the rope ladder and tugged it. Sturdy and strong.

  But Joe—the towering, deadly ex-special ops shooter who now ran a team of rangers in the Ruin—had said to stay out of the plane. No excuses, no exceptions.

  “Well,” Benny said to the rope ladder, “what can he do? Send me to my room?”

  He climbed up into the plane.

  The inside was a mess. Joe had apparently trashed the place while scavenging the materials and looking for the missing D-series notes. With the captured zoms removed, and all the equipment cases and boxes of records gone, the structural damage was easier to see. The plane had broken its back on landing, and the craft’s metal skin was rippled and torn. The floor was littered with discarded junk. Papers, broken containers, and hundreds upon hundreds of shell casings from the automatic weapons Joe had fired when repelling the reaper assault. They gleamed dully in the streamers of light that stabbed down through tears in the ceiling. Paper trash was heaped against the walls or left where it had fallen. Benny sat down on an empty case that had once housed a rocket launcher and began digging into the paper.

  He had no real idea what he was looking for. It wasn’t like he expected to find a piece of paper labeled CURE.

  Even so, there was an answer here. Some kind of answer, he was sure of it.

  Hours passed as he went through every piece of paper, no matter how small.

  There was nothing of value there.

  Not a word, not a scrap.

  Benny picked up the papers he’d found and hurled them as hard as he could against the wall. Pages, whole and partial, slapped against the unyielding metal and then floated to the deck, as disorganized and useless as before.

  He climbed down to the ground, his face burning with anger and his whole body trembling with frustration.

  That was when he remembered the quads.

  The engines of both vehicles had eventually stalled out.

  “Ah . . . man . . .”

  He ran over to the machines. The reaper’s quad was still upright and was jammed at an angle against Benny’s machine, which lay on its side. Benny pushed the second quad, a Honda, back from his Yamaha. The Honda moved with a sluggish, lumpy resistance—the right front wheel was flat, the rubber exploded from the impact. Benny examined the Yamaha. The right rear wheel hung at a strange angle, and when he bent to examine it, he groaned. The axle had been snapped like a bread stick.

  Benny straightened, exhaled a long, slow breath, thought of Tom’s many lessons about maintaining calm in the middle of a crisis—and then spent the next two minutes screaming and kicking the Yamaha from every possible angle.

  Then he spent three minutes standing there, chest heaving, both feet hurting like hell, glaring at the machine.

  Finally he opened the rear compartment on the Yamaha and took out the jack and the lug wrench and took a wheel off his bike and put it onto the Honda. The wheels were the same size, and it wasn’t until Benny was finished that he grudgingly accepted that as a lucky break. Not all the quads were the same size.

  Then Benny tried to turn the Honda on. Nothing happened.

  He tried again.

  Same effect.

  It hadn’t stalled after the crash. It had run out of fuel.

  Benny snatched up a rock and came very close to slamming it down on the fuel gauge.

  Stop it! bellowed his inner voice.

  It actually stopped Benny mid-smash.

  He stared at the rock he held.

  “Oh man,” he said, and let it drop.

  Find a hose, said his smarter inner voice. Siphon gas out of the other—

  “Yeah, yeah, I know, I got it,” he growled.

  His inner voice shut up.

  Benny dug through the compartments and saddlebags of his own quad and found nothing. Then he began foraging through the Honda.

  He found a siphon hose right away. However, what he found next made him forget completely about the hose, the fuel, the quad, the residual pain in his groin, and virtually everything else.

  Tucked into the back compartment of the Honda was a loose-leaf binder with the word TEAMBOOK printed on the spine and a flag embossed on the front. The flag was not the Stars and Stripes of the old United States of America. No, this was the symbol of the newer, post–First Night American Nation. It was the same symbol that was painted on the tail fin of the plane and on patches worn by dead members of the crew.

  Benny flipped the Teambook open and saw that there was a double-sided page devoted to each member of Dr. McReady’s team from Hope One. Each page included a color photograph of a person in either the brown-and-green uniform of the new American Nation or in the white lab coat of McReady’s science team. Below each photo was basic data: name, rank, serial number, gender, blood type, height, weight, eye color, hair color, and an abbreviated service record. A lot of it meant nothing to Benny, especially in sections where there was an overabundance of military abbreviations and acronyms. Hope One had been staffed by Dr. McReady, six other scientists, ten lab technicians, eighteen soldiers, and five general staff. Forty people. The C-130 had eight additional soldiers and a flight crew of four. Fifty-two people in all.

  He studied the photo of Dr. Monica McReady. She was a black woman with short hair, and a pair of reading glasses hung around her neck. According to her data, she was fifty-six years old.

  “Where are you?” he asked her. “Where’s your cure? I have a friend who needs you. His name is Chong and he’s . . .”

  Hungry.

  “. . . he doesn’t deserve this. Where are you?”

  The picture told him nothing. The book as a whole, however, did. There was blood on every single photograph in the book. Old, dried blood. Weeks old, at least, and in some cases the gore was so old that it was caked and powdery. These were not random splashes but deliberate markings. About half the photos had been crossed out with a dripped red X. Eleven others were marked with a bloody thumbprint in the upper right corner. When he compared the prints, Benny saw that they were each different, no two alike. The remaining photos were also marked by a thumbprint, but in each of these cases the thumbprint was placed over the heart of the person. The same thumbprint was used for all these.

  So what did it mean?

  Benny chewed on it.

  The Xs seemed obvious. Those were members of the crew who had been killed, or who’d died during the crash. Two of the pictures marked that way showed men dressed as pilots, and Benny had seen those men before. On the day they’d found this plane, there had been two zoms tied to crossbars erected on the ground in front of the cockpit.

  The second set, the ones with unique thumbprints, took him longer to figure out, but as he went through each picture again he spotted a face that he recognized. The face was the same, but in the photo the man had black hair.

  Benny had looked into that same face minutes ago. He had looked into those eyes while the man in the photo was alive, and he’d looked into the same eyes once all traces of human life had fled.

  The reaper.

  According to the Teambook his name was Marcus Flood, age twenty-six, born in Kansas City. A lance corporal in the army of the American Nation.

  The man he’d just killed had been a member of Dr. McReady’s crew. One of the soldiers assigned to help evacuate Hope One.

  But he’d become a reaper.

  How?

  Why?

  Riot and Joe both said that the reaper army had been built mostly from peopl
e who had been given a choice: die with everyone else in your town, or join. It was a conqueror’s strategy that had worked for everyone from Alexander the Great to the Nazis, so apparently it still worked. Even so . . . Benny could not climb inside the head of someone who would willingly become part of a group whose ultimate goal was to end all human life. Sure, it meant living a little longer, but the end was still going to be the same. Death.

  What made someone make that choice? Did they think that somehow they’d slip through the cracks and not be sent into the darkness when Saint John thought it was time? Or did they really buy into the reaper beliefs?

  The man in that photo seemed to.

  There was another photo in the batch that caught Benny’s attention. Another soldier. A big man, tough-looking but also strangely familiar. The sheet said that his name was Luis Ortega, and his designation was team logistics coordinator.

  Whatever that meant.

  Benny touched the picture.

  “Where do I know you from?” he wondered aloud. Was this man another of the reapers, like Marcus Flood? If so, was he now wandering around on the airfield? Had he been one of the reapers with Mother Rose, one of those gathered a few yards from here? Benny and Nix had secretly watched that gathering. Had he died with Mother Rose or vanished with Saint John and the main body of the reaper army? Was he one of the thousands of sick people being tended by the way-station monks? Or one of the refugees Riot was guiding to Sanctuary?

  The half-remembered encounter had to be recent, though, because it throbbed insistently in Benny’s mind.

  Because of the severity of the head wound he’d received, the monks told him there was a strong chance that he might have some amnesia. Not total, not even a lot, but some blank spots. This was one of those spots, he was sure of that. He could almost—almost—see the memory of this man, almost catch it. A big man in a military uniform like this. Benny had seen hundreds of other military clothes, from zoms killed during the battles after First Night. Some of the men in town had camouflage jackets from the old world. The uniforms of the new American Nation were different. The camouflage was a different pattern, with bits of dusty red mixed in with the black, tan, brown, and gray.

  Then . . . something, some fragment of a memory went skittering across the back of Benny’s brain, triggered by Sergeant Ortega’s face and uniform. He went still, hoping to catch a glimpse of it, to discover what it wanted to tell him.

  But that fast it was there and gone, hiding in the shadows under a rock in his damaged memory.

  Benny flipped back through the book, this time looking at the small pieces of paper clipped to some of the pages. One note was written in round cursive by a decidedly feminine hand.

  Mutations reported in California.

  This needs to be checked out.

  Field Team Five?

  Mutations?

  And . . . what was Field Team Five?

  He searched the rest of the compartments and saddlebags on the quad, but there were no more notes or papers. He found some dried meat wrapped in palm leaves, but he distrusted what the reapers considered wholesome food, so he threw that away. He found an item that seemed totally out of place among the reaper’s possessions: an old, unopened package of brightly colored rubber balloons. Fifty of them. It seemed so bizarre and incongruous a thing for a killer to have. He wondered if they were used for some kind of silent signaling. Benny almost tossed them away, then decided to keep them. Eve might like them. Anything that might put another smile on the little girl’s face was worth treasuring. He stuffed the package into his vest pocket.

  The only other thing of apparent importance he found was a small spiral-bound notebook. Every page was filled with small, crabbed handwriting. Most of what was written there were prayers and rituals of the reapers. Benny debated tossing it away, but decided to keep it. If the reapers were the enemy, then some of Tom’s advice applied: Know your enemy. The more you know about them, the less easily they can surprise you. And by studying them you might identify a weakness or vulnerability.

  And there was the phrase Lilah had learned from George, the man who’d raised her: Knowledge is power.

  The other reason he decided to keep the notebook was what the reaper had written on the last page. It was a kind of code:

  CA/R 1: 4,522

  Quad: 66

  CA/R 2: 19,200

  Quad: 452

  NV/R: 14,795

  Quad: 318

  WY/R: 8,371

  Quad: 19

  UT/R: 2,375

  Every instinct, every nerve he possessed screamed at him that this was important. This, the Teambook, and the urgent note Benny suspected had been written by Dr. McReady. Important . . . but in what way?

  How?

  No way to ask the reaper now, Benny thought, and he flinched at the memory of what he had been forced to do.

  He put the notebook in his pocket and the Teambook into the Honda’s storage bin. Then he used the rubber hose to siphon ethanol from his own crippled quad into the Honda’s tank. Benny replaced the gas cap, climbed into the saddle, started the engine, and drove thoughtfully back to Sanctuary.

  FROM NIX’S JOURNAL

  The people I grew up with, the folks in Mountainside, call the start of the plague First Night. It’s kind of misleading, because it took weeks for civilization to break down.

  Riot and the people she was with call it the Fall.

  I’ve also heard people call it the End, the Gray Rapture, the Rising, Z-Day, Armageddon, the Apocalypse, the Punishment, the Retribution, Plague Day, War Day One, and other stuff.

  26

  RIOT WAS DOZING IN A straw basket-chair when one of the nuns came to find her. She opened her eyes to see the tight, unsmiling face of Sister Hannahlily, the head nun who oversaw the children during their afternoon nap.

  “You have to come at once,” said the nun.

  “What’s wrong?” Riot demanded. “Is something wrong with Eve?”

  The nun seemed to be caught in a moment of terrible indecision, as if uncertain how to answer so simple a question.

  “You need to come,” she said. “Right now.”

  Riot got to her feet and followed the nun. Sister Hannahlily did not exactly run to the tent used for the children’s nap time, but she walked very fast, her body erect with tension, arms pumping.

  “Oh God,” breathed Riot to herself, “don’t let that little girl be hurt. Don’t let her be hurt. . . .”

  They reached the tent, where Brother Michael, a monk who helped with psychological counseling, was waiting for them. Before First Night he’d been a radio call-in host.

  “What in tarnation is going on?” asked Riot.

  Sister Hannahlily looked frightened, and Riot couldn’t imagine why. There was a faint sound coming from inside the tent, a soft thudding sound that Riot could not make sense of, like someone fluffing a pillow.

  “We moved the other children out of the tent,” said Sister Hannahlily. “We thought it best.”

  “Moved them out? Why? Where’s Eve?”

  “Inside,” said the monk.

  Riot reached for the tent flap.

  Eve was the only person in the tent. Riot could tell almost at once that the little girl was asleep, though she was standing and moving. Sleepwalking, in a way. In a horrible way.

  The girl had gathered all the rag dolls the children had made during arts and crafts. They lay side by side on one of the cots. Eve held a pair of the pinking shears used to cut the fancy, frilly trim for the dollies’ dresses. She held the shears in both hands and with slow, determined, deliberate swings of her entire body, she stabbed the dolls over and over and over again.

  And she smiled as she did it.

  Riot gasped, and Eve paused for a moment, turning her face toward the open tent flap. The little girl’s mouth smiled, but there was no humor in her eyes. There was nothing in her eyes. No emotion, no recognition, no anger.

  There was absolutely nothing.

  It was as if thos
e blue eyes looked in on a house that was empty of all light and life, a place where only dark and awful shadows moved.

  Then Eve turned back to the dolls.

  The shears rose and fell, rose and fell.

  27

  THREE MONTHS AGO . . .

  Saint John came out of a long private meditation when he heard a quiet footfall nearby. “Good afternoon, Sister Sun,” he said quietly, eyes still closed.

  “Honored One,” she said.

  Saint John opened his eyes and touched her head, murmuring a small blessing. She straightened up and sat where he indicated. Sister Sun had once been a lovely woman, and she still had deeply intelligent eyes and a face that reminded him of paintings he’d seen of Ma Gu, the ancient Korean goddess of longevity. It was a bitter irony, of course, since she had so little time left in front of her. Months, not years. He never commented on the resemblance, of course, because he felt it might offend her in a spiritual sense to be reminded of a goddess from one of mankind’s many false religions.

  Instead he said, “You look troubled, sister.”

  “I am. There have been more reports about mutations. More of the gray people who can move faster than should be possible.”

  “How many cases?”

  “Seven, which brings the total number of reliable reports to twenty-two.”

  “And this continues to disturb you?”

  “Yes, Honored One. We will be moving the reapers back into Nevada soon, and I asked Mother Rose if it wasn’t time for us to consider opening the shrine.”

  “What would you have us do, sister?” asked Saint John. “Use the weapons of the heretics?”

  Sister Sun took a moment on that. “Honored One . . . I love my fellow reapers, but I’m not fool enough to think that all of them are with us out of an undying love of Thanatos—all praise his darkness. Some of them—maybe a lot of them—are opportunists who chose to kiss the knife rather than feel its caress on their flesh.”