Fire & Ash

by Jonathan Maberry

  The weeds and grasses grew tall all around the billboard, and a haphazard forest of young trees had grown up along the road. The road surface was cracked by roots and weather, but it was relatively clear of vegetation. When Saint John’s scouts saw this, they alerted him, and a platoon of the Red Brotherhood had come this way, following what was clearly a well-traveled route. Dried mud from recent rains showed the marks of horses’ hooves, wagon wheels, and booted footprints. A trade route or something else had been the guess, and now here was the proof.

  Four trade wagons made their slow way along the road. All of them had been converted from farm carts. The frames were a mix of truck chassis and wooden cart wheels, with big boxes bolted to the frame. Each box was covered in sheet metal, and the teams of horses were protected by carpet coats covered in nets made of steel washers connected by heavy-gauge wire. The horses of the men riding alongside the carts were similarly armored, and all the men and women in the party wore ankle-length carpet coats, thick leather gloves, and helmets of all kinds, including fencing masks, football helmets, old Norman steel caps looted from museums, and even a plastic fishbowl with holes cut for ventilation. There were four mounted riders and ten guards on foot. Everyone was armed, and apart from knives and swords, many of them had guns.

  It was a considerable defensive force, and old bleached bones lying along the road spoke to the effectiveness of their many preparations.

  Saint John approved of the weapons, the clever design of the carpet coats and metal armor. All of it was more than sufficient to stop an attack by the living dead.

  “Take them,” said Saint John.

  The reapers of the Red Brotherhood, who had been poised like a fist, struck.

  Arrows, carefully aimed, darkened the sky for a moment, and then bodies were falling and horses were screaming. Suddenly all those careful preparations disintegrated as predators far more dangerous than the walking dead proved what all wise killers already knew: that nothing was more dangerous than living men.

  50

  ONCE BENNY AND THE GIRLS were back at Sanctuary, they parked their quads and hurried over to the bridge.

  “We need to see Captain Ledger,” said Nix urgently.

  The guards said nothing. They didn’t even look at her.

  “Hey,” said Benny loudly, “we’re speaking to you.”

  Nothing.

  Riot pointed. “Look, y’all, the Lost Girl is breaking her fifty-foot restriction. She’s right here at the edge of the trench. I think y’all ought to report that to Captain Ledger.”

  One of the guards looked at Lilah, smiled, then shrugged. It was the most extensive response any of the bridge guards had ever given them.

  “Screw this,” muttered Benny as he tried to push past the soldiers and reach for the cotter pin that held the bridge.

  The closest soldier shoved him. Very fast and very hard.

  There was a rasp of steel and Nix’s sword, Dojigiri, flashed in the sunlight.

  A hundredth of a second later there were guns pointed at them. One each at Benny, Nix, Lilah, and Riot. M16s, fully automatic rifles.

  “I’m going to tell you this once,” said the guard who’d pushed Benny. “Walk away. Do it right now or we will fire. Don’t make the mistake of thinking this is a discussion. Walk away.”

  “We need to see Captain Ledger,” insisted Benny.

  “First bullet goes through your kneecap, boy,” said the guard. “You call it.”

  They walked away, but within ten paces Benny broke into a run.

  51

  ONE MILE AWAY . . .

  “What did they find, my sister?” asked Brother Peter. He crouched like a pale ape on an outcropping of red rock.

  The engine of Sister Sun’s quad was off, but she still sat in the saddle, resting her weight on the handlebars. She sighed and sat back, resting a hand on the satchel that lay on her thighs.

  “This,” she said.

  Brother Peter jumped down from the rock and took the satchel. He quickly and thoroughly searched the papers.

  “The coordinates?”

  “Gone,” said Sister Sun.

  They looked at each other.

  And smiled.

  It was an unlooked-for piece of luck.

  Not blind luck, though. It was, to them, proof of the power of their god.

  52

  BENNY HUNCHED OVER THE HANDLEBARS of his quad and gunned the engine.

  “What are you doing?” yelled Nix over the roar.

  “Remember in the Scouts Mr. Feeney said that survival requires a proactive attitude?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “I’m being proactive.”

  Any comment Nix might have made was lost beneath the roar as he shot past her, engine bellowing, wheels kicking sand behind him. He thought he heard her screaming his name, but he didn’t look back.

  Benny shot past the playground and the orchard. The monks and the children all stared at him, but no one said anything. Or maybe he heard one of the older monks yelling even louder than Nix had. Something about slowing down, probably. Benny chose not to hear that admonition. This wasn’t a convenient time for obeying rules.

  This was a time for taking action.

  The trench was forty yards ahead. Once he cleared the last of the orchards, he angled left, heading toward the point where the steel bridge was lowered twice a day. There was a yard-long lip of metal that stuck out over the drop, and it was wider than the bridge. Good enough on either side for the wheel width of the quad.

  Benny hoped.

  On the other side of the trench there was only a metal plate. No bridge or other obstructions.

  He had never done this before, of course. Not even in his head.

  It was all a matter of speed and angle.

  And luck.

  “Come on, Tom,” he growled as he gave the quad more gas. “Little help from beyond would be cool.”

  He gave the engine all the gas it would take, and the motor roared like a living thing. Feral and alive and powerful.

  “Come on . . . come on!” Benny yelled.

  The raised bridge was there, right there, the four soldiers flanking it. They gaped at him as if he was absolutely out of his mind. Benny could see their point.

  Two of them brought up their rifles, and Benny flattened out over the steering column, making himself the smallest possible target.

  Of course, if a bullet did hit him, it would nail him on the top of the head. That gave him a moment’s pause. The quad, undeterred by thoughts of mortality, kept racing onward.

  “HALT!” roared the guards.

  There was the hollow krak-krak-krak of gunfire.

  Benny braced against the impact.

  Felt nothing.

  Kept going.

  Benny hurtled toward the bridge, gathering every ounce of speed, and then at the last possible second he turned the wheels and the quad shot past the guards and past the upraised steel and flew out over empty space.

  There was a single bump as one rear wheel brushed the edge of the gate. Just that one tap; Benny had done it right.

  He screamed—loud and raw and free—as the sense of speed seemed to vanish and the quad hung in the air, untethered by gravity, a beautiful soaring thing. Below him the twenty-foot span of the trench seemed to move with a strange slowness, as if time itself had wound down. He looked down and saw, with a flash of panic, that the front wheels were already starting to dip toward the bottom of the trench, and the far side looked a million miles away. Benny pulled on the handlebars as if he could lift the whole machine through sheer force of muscle and will.

  Then the lip of the trench was there, and the soft tires chunked down onto the ground inches past it. There was a second thump as the rear wheels hit, and the jolt rattled Benny’s bones and snapped his teeth shut. His hands were still rolled forward, still feeding gas to the engine, so there was a moment when inertia and impact and gravity collided into a grinding nothing as wheels turned and great plumes of tan sand
kicked up behind him and the quad shivered like it was coming apart. Then the tire treads bit deep and the thrust of the engine overcame the downward pull of gravity, and Benny’s quad shot forward like a bullet from a gun.

  Benny let rip a yell of rough joy and sheer excitement.

  Krak! Krak!

  He could hear the shots, but nothing hit him. Or he prayed not. There was no pain, no heavy thud of impact, no burn of ruined nerves and tissues.

  He cut a quick look over his shoulder and saw that two of the soldiers were sprawled on the ground. Benny slewed to a sideways stop that built a wall of dust between him and the zoms. The dust seemed to freeze there—a brown stain painted on the moment. A third soldier—the one who had refused to pass along the message to Captain Ledger—leaned against the bridge, clutching what looked like a badly broken nose. The fourth was standing, unarmed, with his hands raised.

  Nix, Lilah, and Riot had apparently come up on the soldiers’ blind side while they were shooting at Benny.

  Well, thought Benny, I guess it sucks to be them.

  Even so, he hoped the girls hadn’t injured anyone too badly. It was just too bad the guards lacked the sense, permission, or manners to pass along a simple message.

  Benny saw Nix turn to him and shake her head in exasperation. He knew that had she been aware of his plan, Nix would have done anything she could to stop him. And yet . . . a big, bright smile blossomed on her face.

  Lilah glanced at Benny and gave him a brief nod.

  Benny was sure he’d get an earful about his rashness, but for the moment some other guys were taking the brunt of the collective female outrage. He was very cool with that.

  Movement made him turn, and he saw that the dead, all four hundred thousand of them, were facing him. And shuffling his way. Here and there Benny could see zoms dressed in black clothes adorned with red cloth streamers tied to wrists and ankles. These were reapers who had died in the big fight three weeks ago. Benny recognized a few of their faces. The reapers looked like ordinary people—well, zommed-out versions of ordinary people—but they had been so vicious in life, so determined to end all life. That concept was more alien to Benny than the fact that these people were now undying corpses.

  Life is truly weird, he thought. And it’s not getting any less weird the farther I get from home.

  Then, with a collective moan of boundless hunger that shook the world, and the tramp of eight hundred thousand withered feet, they surged toward him. When he’d first met Joe Ledger, the ranger had estimated two hundred thousand zoms. The monks counted twice that many.

  And he laughed.

  “Bite me!” he yelled at the top of his voice.

  He fed fuel into the quad and kicked it forward, first racing toward the advancing wall of death, and then at the last second cutting to the left, zooming away from the hangar and the concrete blockhouse, past the silent blood-splashed jet, shooting down the line of reaching hands, driving at full speed toward the far end of the runway.

  The zombies all turned to follow.

  He soon outpaced them. The farther Benny went, the fewer the zoms. Soon he was in open country, where only a solitary zombie wandered in a slow and pointless circle, its sad pattern created by a missing foot. Benny cut right, heading toward the squat building at the foot of the row of siren towers.

  He cast a quick look over his shoulder and saw that he was at least half a mile ahead of the leading edge of the zombie wave.

  Perfect.

  He drove over to the small building. A soldier stepped out, rifle in hand.

  “Stop right there,” he commanded. “Who are you and what are you doing over here? This is a restricted area.”

  “No kidding,” said Benny. “I need you to turn the sirens on.”

  The soldier began raising the rifle.

  Benny immediately spun the quad to kick up a thick cloud of choking dust. Then he shot south along the line of siren towers. He cursed aloud, repeating every foul phrase he’d learned from Riot. That girl had a truly poisonous mouth, and Benny felt a little embarrassed grumbling those descriptions, even though no one could hear him.

  The zoms kept coming, drawn as much by the dust plume as by the roar of the quad. The dust plume was hundreds of feet high now, and the breeze, though slight, was steady—it continued to push the plume, reshaping it, shoving it away toward the mountains. The dead followed as if mesmerized.

  Once Benny was sure he was well beyond the range of any rifle shot, he roared up and down at the base of the mountains, luring the zoms.

  “Come on,” Benny said through gritted teeth. “Come on . . .”

  It took the zoms nearly twenty minutes to reach him.

  When the closest zoms were fifteen feet away, Benny fed gas to the quad and shot away, running even farther to the south. They turned like an inhuman tidal surge, but he was moving too far and too fast. Then Benny cut right and right again to head north, but he angled away from where the mass of zoms were, keeping the engine speed low so that it purred rather than growled. The zoms would eventually hear him, but not right away.

  By the time he got back to the blockhouse, Nix and the others had finished tying the soldiers up. Lilah stood over them, her Sig Sauer pistol held loosely at her side. Riot and Nix were trying to figure out how the locking assembly on the bridge worked. Dozens of monks had come out of the other buildings on that side of the trench. Some harangued the girls for their violence, but most watched in a kind of mute fascination.

  Benny pulled to a stop by the blockhouse air lock. He killed the engine, dismounted, and did a very quick, very quiet circuit of the entire building to make sure that he hadn’t missed any zoms.

  There wasn’t a single dead person around.

  Benny grinned.

  He ran to the edge of the trench and called Nix’s name.

  The first thing she said was, “You’re an idiot.”

  “Yeah, not a news flash.”

  “But I love you.”

  He nodded past her to the soldiers. “They okay?”

  She gave a single, cold, dismissive shrug.

  What amazed Benny was the difference between his lingering male-centric perception of girls as weaker, shy, and incapable of violence or cruelty and the way they actually were. And it wasn’t like he had seen any proof to the contrary. Lilah was a walking statement about girl power. So was Riot. And Nix, who was every bit as good with a sword as Benny was. Even with all that, the splinter of gender prejudice still festered in his mind. He wondered if he would ever stop being surprised when his preconceptions were trounced by the truth.

  Riot sauntered to the edge. “Y’all got an actual plan, boy, or are you hoping for divine intervention?”

  “Little of both,” Benny admitted.

  “Do we get to know the plan?”

  “It’s simple,” he said. “I’m going to knock on the door until they let me in.”

  The girls gave him long, flat stares.

  “Hey,” Benny said, “I’m open to better suggestions.”

  Lilah, who had been listening, called, “Knock loud.”

  He knocked loud.

  FROM NIX’S JOURNAL

  Every time I think about Mountainside and the other towns, I worry. Risking everything on a chain-link fence is just dumb. Even that psycho Preacher Jack was smarter about things. At Gameland they had all sorts of defenses. Smart stuff. They had a heavy chain-link fence too, but it was only the outer barrier. And it was hidden between two rows of thick evergreen hedge that acted as screens. Zoms couldn’t see through the hedge and had fewer things to visually attract them.

  After the fence, the road led through this complicated network of trenches. There were rows of trip wires, and deadfall pits covered by camouflage screens. Directions for how to make it through the defenses safely were written on large wooden signs. That’s smart because humans can read but zoms can’t.

  The Gameland defenses weren’t based on the way people used to protect towns and forts against attacks;
these were specifically designed against an enemy that couldn’t think but also would not stop.

  The trench at Sanctuary is smart too.

  Tom said that to stay safe you have to understand the nature of the threat, not react to your assumption of it. I didn’t understand that at first.

  I do now.

  53

  “OPEN THE DAMN DOOR!” BENNY yelled, and he yelled it so loudly that echoes banged off the distant red rock mountain and ricocheted back to him over the heads of the hundreds of zombies who now shambled slowly back toward him. His fist ached and his throat was getting raw, but he stood there and kept at it. Hammering, yelling.

  “Kid . . . yo, kid!” a voice said. “They can’t hear you.”

  Benny whirled to see the big ranger, Joe, standing behind him. He hadn’t heard him approach.

  “Where’d you come from?”

  “Originally? Baltimore. Just now—the hangar.”

  “It took you long enough.” Benny massaged his hand. “Where have you been?”

  “Busy. Want to tell me why you and your crew of girl-thugs just beat the crap out of four soldiers? And while you’re at it, how about explaining the stunt with the quad? I’ve seen stupid and I’ve seen stupid but that was—”

  “Stupid, yeah, I saw where you were going with that.”

  That put a half smile on Joe’s face. “So—what’s the deal? Is this about seeing your friend Chong? Roughing up soldiers and breaking rules isn’t going to—”

  “I’m trying to get inside,” said Benny. He gave the door another hit.

  “I figured that much, which is why I came out here. I’m trying to keep you from wasting your time.” Joe pointed at the tall steel doors set into the concrete facade of the building. “Read my lips here, kid, try to follow. They. Can’t. Hear. You.”