Fire & Ash

by Jonathan Maberry

  They drove in a ghastly silence, each of them in a different kind of pain.

  Except for Lilah. She rode beside Chong, and most of the times Benny looked back at them, she was smiling.

  Strange girl, he thought, and he wondered if this meant that she would regain all the developmental ground she’d lost since Chong got sick. Would the joy of having her “town boy” be enough to carry her through the coming years of dealing with the limitations of his illness and the risk of contagion?

  For now, though, she was happy. It was the only bright spot in their day.

  Riot? She was gone. She rode the bike with competence, and during rest times she did her share of the chores without protest or comment. But she was gone. Benny reckoned that most of her was still inside a stone bunker with a small figure who lay on a makeshift bed. Maybe part of her would always remain in that dreadful place.

  The day burned down. They lost time going offroad to avoid clogged highways, washed-out bridges, roving packs of zoms, and collapsed buildings. Each lost minute hurt Benny; each wasted hour was like a knife in his heart. They pushed on until Benny’s fuel indicator was nearly buried near the outskirts of Benton, California. According to the map they had to cut through the town, and they didn’t want to do that at night. Not as tired as they were. So they took shelter in a house trailer that had been part of a construction site before First Night.

  While Lilah changed the dressing on Benny’s back, Nix filled Riot and Chong in on the flight to find McReady and the battle under Sanctuary. Benny began cringing when Nix got to the part about Archangel, but Riot said nothing.

  Chong said, “Guys, we’re busting our butts to get home to warn everyone, but let’s face it, this is really bad.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that all day,” said Benny.

  “Me too,” said Nix, and even Lilah nodded.

  “Well, call me crazy,” said Chong, “but don’t you think we should be talking about this out loud? I mean . . . let’s come up with an actual plan.”

  They took turns outlining the problem as they each viewed it and then throwing out ideas about how the towns could respond. After a while it became clear that Nix had the best suggestions for tactics of warfare—traps, ruses, physical defenses, weapons. But Benny surprised them all with his grasp of strategic thinking. He saw things from a distance. After Nix—and to a great degree, Lilah—presented a long and gruesome list of battle tactics that could be implemented very quickly, Benny told them how he thought they could win the actual war.

  Chong, the logician of the group, played devil’s advocate to poke holes in each suggestion. But for once he was unable to tear apart Benny’s plan.

  “Wow,” said Chong when they were done, “I’m very nearly impressed with you.”

  “Bite me,” said Benny.

  “Which reminds me,” said Chong. “Time for my pills.”

  Benny went outside to take first watch, and Nix stayed up with him for a bit. They sat close, but they didn’t touch.

  After a while she said, “Do you hate me now?”

  He took his time and thought about what to say before he opened his mouth. “What I am is hurt and angry. Not angry at you, but angry at us. We held hands, closed our eyes, and stepped off a cliff.” When she didn’t reply, he added, “I can’t be angry with you for telling the truth.”

  Nix got up and shivered in the chill of the desert night.

  “I’ll tell you one thing, though,” said Benny, looking up at her.

  “What?”

  “I do love you. I have for a long time, and I think I always will. When this is over—if we’re both still alive and if the world hasn’t burned down—I’m going to come looking for you. If the situation and the moment are right, I’m going to ask you out on a date.”

  “A date?”

  “We never had one. We went from being friends to being a couple. The closest thing we had to a first date was getting chased by Charlie Pink-eye, and I’m pretty sure that doesn’t count.”

  He saw her smile etched in starlight.

  “So . . . I’ll ask and we’ll see what happens.”

  Nix turned and went into the trailer.

  Benny sat on a rock and watched the stars wheel in their slow, endless dance above the battered little blue world.

  93

  THEY WERE REFUELED AND ON the road before first light.

  Benton was a terrible place. At the intersection where they turned from Route 6 to California State Route 120, they saw the rusted remains of a major crash involving two school buses and several cars. There were zoms everywhere, and it was likely they had been standing there for fifteen years until they heard the sound of the quads. The whole mass of them—adults and children—began shuffling toward the machines. Benny veered off the main street and cut behind houses and through yards to avoid the zoms. It cost time and fuel, but they managed to escape without a fight.

  Benny realized that the one main flaw in his plan was the noise the quads made. Zoms would hear them miles away and be drawn to the sound, so they’d be in the path of the five machines.

  But what choice did Benny and his friends have? California was far more densely populated than Nevada, and the deeper they went into greener areas, the more likely there would be zoms. Even so, the whole landscape seemed more brown than green. It had been an early and unusually hot spring, and it was clear that there hadn’t been much rainfall. Everything looked brittle and dry. There was none of the lushness of spring, and that depressed Benny. It made him wonder if the whole world was getting ready to die. Or to burn. The fires of hatred ignited by the reapers seemed inescapable.

  Then they saw the first billboard advertising Yosemite National Park.

  They pulled to a stop in front of it. The faded picture showed a verdant forest and tall, snowcapped mountains. After the starkness of the desert, it looked like it belonged on a different planet, but even then the park in the picture looked withered.

  “Mountainside is on the other side of the park,” Benny said to Riot as they poured the last of their fuel into the tanks. “If we follow the map, we’ll pass Haven first, and then we can cut north to our town.”

  Riot nodded but said nothing. She replaced the cap, and got back onto the saddle.

  Seconds later they were far down the road.

  They drove on.

  Eighty-four miles later they paused at another billboard.

  WAWONA HOTEL

  Benny looked at his friends. Lilah, Nix, and Chong all nodded, knowing without being asked what he wanted to do. Benny turned and drove up a side road until he came to the ruins of the hotel. It was nothing but a field of charred debris. The only structure that still stood was a small utility building. Benny turned off his engine and sat looking at it. The others pulled up beside him and killed their engines too.

  On the outside of the building, on the wall facing the road, were words Benny had painted a million years ago.

  GAMELAND IS CLOSED.

  THIS IS THE LAW.

  —T. IMURA

  Benny got off his quad and walked over to the building, his mouth open with wonder. When he’d painted those words after Tom’s death, he’d added his own name, as had Nix, Lilah, Chong, and all the surviving bounty hunters. Solomon Jones, Sally Two-Knives, Fluffy McTeague, J-Dog, and Dr. Skillz. Two dozen names in all.

  But now there were other names.

  Hundreds of them.

  Not copied names, but actual signatures. Each was unique.

  Names of people he didn’t know. Names of people he did. People who Benny would never have believed would ever step outside the fence line. Captain Strunk. Mayor Kirsch. Leroy Williams. Many others.

  And one name, written small, down in a corner, struck Benny over the heart.

  MORGAN MITCHELL

  Nix saw the name too, and the sound she made was half laugh and half sob.

  “Morgie,” said Chong. “Damn.”

  All around the building there were bunches of flowers, han
dmade corn dolls of a black-haired man with a toy sword, notes pinned to the ground by sharp sticks. A post had been hammered into the ground, and it had a portrait of Tom fixed to it. Benny did not know the artist, but the likeness was excellent. Tom, a faint smile on his face, a look of distant sadness in his eyes. A red sash was draped over the post. Benny raised the cloth to read what was stitched on it: FREEDOM RIDERS.

  He had no idea what that was.

  Benny felt tears in his eyes, but he was smiling.

  He pressed his palm flat against the wall for a full minute. The others did too. Even Riot.

  Then they got back on their quads.

  They did not stop again until they reached the hill that looked down on Haven, the southernmost of the Nine Towns. They killed their engines, dismounted, and stood there, hidden by the trees.

  Below them was a sea of movement and color.

  Thousands upon thousands of reapers and R3 zoms flooded through the streets of Haven, while all around them the town of Haven burned.

  94

  CHONG EXHALED A LONG, TIRED breath of defeat and sat down on the bare ground.

  “I can’t deal with this,” he said. “That’s what they’re going to do to Mountainside. That’s what they’re going to do to my family.”

  He put his face in his hands. Lilah squatted down beside him and laid her cheek on his head. It was clear she had no idea what to say, and the frustration of that was evident in every taut line of her body.

  Riot closed her eyes and did not move. Orange shadows flickered across her face.

  Only Benny and Nix stood watching the massacre.

  “Maybe if we’d gotten here sooner,” said Nix softly. She tugged her journal from her pack. “I have so much information in here. There are things we could have done.”

  “Against forty thousand reapers?” asked Riot without opening her eyes.

  “No army is invincible,” said Nix. Then she thought about it and phrased it differently. “Any army can be defeated.”

  Benny nodded. “Absolutely.”

  “How?” asked Chong. “The reapers have too many people. They can call as many fast zoms as they want.”

  “C’mon, man,” said Benny, “we had a high-tech army, navy, marine corps, air force, National Guard, and police, and we still lost to the zombies.”

  “That’s because they didn’t understand what they were fighting until it was too late.”

  “Kind of my point,” said Benny. “If we could be defeated, then so can they.”

  Chong just shook his head.

  “Maybe we could do a raid,” said Nix. “With all those zoms there, they have to keep putting on the chemical—the stuff that’s like our cadaverine. If we—I don’t know, sabotage it. They couldn’t make more of it way out here, could they?”

  “Spilling won’t do no good,” said Riot. “They’d roll around on the ground and get it all over ’em. You’d have to burn it.”

  “Will it burn?” asked Benny.

  “Sure. Burns like all get-out. Saint John lost a mess of reapers that way. Some of ’em get too cocky with torches. Maybe they think fire only burns the heretics.” She shook her head. “I saw some of ’em burn last night. You can’t tell a reaper’s scream from a heretic’s, not when they’re burning.”

  “Look, Riot,” began Benny, “if we’d known what was going to happen, we’d never have left to—”

  Riot shook her head. “Don’t,” she said, and left it there.

  Then she winced as a scream echoed up from the burning town.

  “I’d love to see them all burn,” she said viciously. “If I thought it would stop them, I’d set myself on fire and go running into their camp. Oh yeah . . . I’d sacrifice myself for that. . . .”

  “Don’t even think about it,” snapped Nix.

  Benny walked to the edge of the hill. With the quads running at top speed, they could be in Mountainside in three or four hours. He did some crude math in his head and figured that it was a three- or four-day march for the reaper army. That was no time at all. Even with Nix’s book filled with diagrams of earthworks and trenches, even if everyone in town worked together to reinforce the walls, three or four days wasn’t enough. The realities of this math conjured images of the reapers invading the town, setting fire to Lafferty’s General Store and the school and the town hall. If he closed his eyes, he knew he’d see images of R3’s chasing the children from the Sunday school, and climbing in through every door and window of Chong’s house. He had witnessed so much carnage since leaving town that it was far too easy to imagine more.

  He thought about Morgie Mitchell standing on his front porch, maybe holding the bokken he’d used during those long afternoons with Tom. Morgie, fighting to protect his mother and sisters. Morgie being pulled down and torn to pieces.

  There were a few scattered gunshots beyond the veil of smoke. Someone was still alive, still fighting back.

  However, Benny’s mind was churning on the word Riot had just used.

  Sacrifice.

  Is that what it would come to? Is that what it would take to stop this?

  The gunshots were fewer and farther between. The whole world seemed to be on fire.

  Lilah spoke in the silence. “The trees are burning.”

  It was true. The drought and the heat from the reapers’ fires had leeched the last of the moisture from the trees, and the intense heat caused them to burst into flame all around the town. Flaming figures ran among the trees. Zoms, Benny thought, set ablaze but unable to yield to pain until the fires melted their muscles and tendons.

  It was horrible.

  So horrible.

  And yet . . .

  It ignited a dreadful idea in Benny’s brain.

  95

  THEY GOT BACK ON THEIR quads and drove away.

  Twice they had to veer off the roads to avoid running into zoms. They passed through a few small ghost towns that had been cleared of zoms. They rode beside rusted steel tracks on which sat a cargo train that had to be more than a mile long. All the coal hoppers had long since been picked clean by teams of scavengers, as had some of the big chemical tankers. As they passed, Benny saw that each had been marked to indicate content and remaining quantities. There were nine bleach tankers, each one holding thirty thousand gallons. Farther along the road they passed a propane and kerosene company. Benny knew that much of the cooking oil and fuel used in town was brought in from somewhere close. This must be it. There were rows of massive tanks—rusted but still intact. He reckoned there was enough here to supply the eight thousand residents of Mountainside for the next fifty years.

  They drove on.

  But within a thousand yards Benny slowed, looked over his shoulder, and cut around in a looping U-turn. He saw everyone’s puzzled faces as he headed back to the fuel company yard.

  The gate was closed but not locked. There was nothing here to attract zoms and more than enough fuel for any of the traders to come and take some. The cost wasn’t in finding it but getting it safely back to town. The others pulled up beside him.

  Chong looked at the DANGER: FLAMMABLE sign. “While I admire your thinking, dude, I don’t think we’re going to able to talk the reapers into gathering here for a big psycho-killer cookout.”

  “Not exactly what I had in mind,” said Benny. He told them the idea that had begun forming on the hill above Haven and was taking shape minute by minute.

  They stared at him with a mixture of expressions.

  “You’re freaking nuts,” said Chong, appalled.

  “It’ll never work,” insisted Lilah.

  “In your dreams,” said Riot.

  Only Nix remained silent, her eyes narrow and cunning.

  “The other day,” said Benny, “when I was talking to Joe Ledger, he asked me how far I’d be willing to go to stop Saint John if he was coming after me and mine. He said that if I could look inside my own head and see the line that I won’t cross or a limit that’s too far, then Saint John will win.”

&
nbsp; He turned to them.

  “So, I guess I’m asking you guys the same thing. How far are we willing to go to stop Saint John?”

  Nix pulled her journal from her pack and held it out to Benny. “As far as it takes,” she said.

  96

  THEY WERE FIVE MILES FROM Mountainside when they saw two men on horses standing in the middle of the road. Benny slowed his quad and stopped twenty feet from them. Both men wore jeans and carpet coats, and both had red sashes across their chests. The man on the left was the smaller of the two. He had dark skin and a shaved head and machetes slung from each hip. The man on the right was thick in the chest and shoulders, and the handle of a wooden bokken rose above his left shoulder, held in place by a cloth sling. The horses shied at the sound of the engine, so Benny cut the motor off. So did the others.

  Everyone—the two men and the five of them—dismounted, and for a few fractured moments they stood in the road and stared at one another.

  “Oh my God,” Benny heard Nix say.

  He walked forward until he stood a foot away from the taller of the two. Close enough to shake hands. Close enough to punch.

  He said, “Morgie.”

  Morgie Mitchell looked at Benny, at the quads, at Chong and Lilah. At Riot.

  At Nix.

  Benny tensed against what was coming. Rage. Hard words. Fists.

  Then Morgie suddenly gave a huge whoop of pure, unfiltered delight and swept Benny off the ground in a fierce bear hug.

  “You ugly monkey-banger!” he bellowed. He swung Benny around in a circle, scaring the horses. Nix and Chong came running over. They wrapped their arms around Morgie. Nix kissed him. They spun in a crazy circle, ignoring all the stares and gasps and words.

  Morgie tugged his arms free and then rewrapped everyone and pulled them close.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, tears running down his cheeks. “Benny . . . Nix . . . I’m so sorry. I’m a stupid ape and you have every right to kick my ass.”