Fire & Ash

by Jonathan Maberry

  Saint John walked to within a thousand yards of the fence. Well within rifle range, but no gun fired. He stopped and pointed his knife at the town.

  Behind the gates, the men and women in red sashes suddenly turned and bolted, running in disordered panic from the fence line.

  The reapers goggled for a moment, and then laughter rippled through their ranks. It swelled and swelled until they were all laughing hysterically. It was the sight of the defenders fleeing after all their tactics had failed, and it was the release of fear and tension from each of the reapers.

  “They flee!” cried Saint John. “They flee!”

  The laughter was like thunder.

  Saint John bellowed out two words that floated above the laughter.

  “Take them!”

  The reapers began marching forward. First in orderly ranks, then faster and faster until they broke into a flat-out run. They hit the fence line, and the sheer weight of their surge tore the fence apart and ripped the poles from the ground—even at the cost of many in the front ranks being crushed at the moment of impact. The reapers flooded into the town, crossing the red zone that separated the fence line from the first rows of shops and homes, smashing through doorways of every building and house they reached. It was like a tidal surge bursting over a levee. The mass of the surge hit the town hard enough to knock walls down and uproot small trees. The thunder of all those feet shattered windows and knocked the frames of doorways out of true. The reaper army flooded into the town, knives ready, spears ready, bloodlust ready.

  And they found . . . nothing.

  The front ranks split apart to follow smaller streets. Knots of reapers burst through doors and ran down the halls of the school and the town hall and the hospital. Every closet door was yanked open, every cellar and attic was invaded.

  But there was no one in the town.

  As the last of the reapers ran across the fallen fence, the interior mass of them slowed near the center of town. They looked around, confused, frightened by the strangeness. There had been an army here minutes ago. Two or three hundred people in red sashes had fired volley after volley at them.

  Where were they? The back of the town was a steep mountain wall. If any of the defenders had climbed the winding goat paths, they’d be as visible as black bugs. There was a massive reservoir near the end of town, but no one was hiding in the silent pump house.

  Runners came to report this to Saint John as he walked without haste toward the shattered gates. He frowned at the news.

  “There’s no one there, Honored One.”

  “Then they’re hiding. Find them.”

  Saint John stopped at the entrance of town and looked around. The guard towers appeared empty too. Except for . . .

  “There,” he said, and his aides looked up at the closest tower. A single figure stood by the rail.

  The boy with the Japanese eyes.

  “Bring him to me,” said the saint. “Alive and able to scream. I will tear the answers from him.”

  Four of the Red Brothers hurried toward the tower, but before they could reach it, the figure far above raised the bullhorn and spoke. His eyes streamed and burned from all the chemicals in the air. The bleach burned his throat and made breathing difficult. But Benny’s rage shaved all thoughts of pain and discomfort away.

  “Listen to me,” he roared. “This is Benjamin Imura, samurai of the Nine Towns.”

  The reapers laughed and jeered. Some threw rocks at the tower, though no one could reach the observation deck.

  “Listen to me,” bellowed Benny. “While you still can.”

  That chilled some of the laughter, though a few rocks still banged off the structure.

  “I made you an offer before,” said Benny. “It still stands. Lay down your weapons. Do it right now. Lay down your weapons and tear those stupid angel wings off your shirts. The Night Church is a lie, and most of you probably know it.”

  The rest of the laughter died away.

  “Look at what happened already. More than half of you are dead. Whose fault is that? Saint John forced you to fight us. He forced you to die for him. I’m giving you a chance to live. To have lives again.”

  One of the Red Brothers stepped away from the rest of the army and pointed at Benny.

  “I think you’re about played out, son,” he said. He had a leather-throated voice that carried his words to everyone. “Right now you’re all alone up there. Your friends at least had the smarts to run off . . . though we’ll catch ’em. But you, sonny boy, you’re just a little kid playing in a tree house.”

  “Not exactly,” said Benny. “What I am is a kid playing with matches.”

  He pointed with the bullhorn, and everyone turned to see figures emerging from the ground as if by magic. They rose up from camouflaged spider holes outside the fence that had been hidden by plywood trapdoors covered with mud. A massive and improbable figure in a bright pink carpet coat rose up just outside the fallen gates. He held a smoking torch in his big fist. Fifty yards away another figure—a dark-haired young man with a pair of baseball bats slung over his shoulder—stood up. He, too, held a torch. All around the outside of the town, just beyond the fence line, figures rose up, each of them holding torches.

  The man in the pink carpet coat smiled a charming smile. He had thick eyeliner and dangling diamond earrings. He blew a kiss to Saint John, pulled a thick cloth over his face, and tossed the torch over his shoulder. Everyone else flung their torches too.

  Not toward the reapers.

  But backward into the field.

  There was a gassy sound that rose from a hiss to a roar, and the world suddenly caught fire.

  104

  THE FIRE ROARED ACROSS THE ground with incredible speed. A speed possible only if the ground itself was . . .

  Suddenly Saint John understood. He now realized that the bleach served a double purpose. Not only had it destroyed the gray people’s sense of smell, but it hid other smells. Kerosene or gasoline or whatever flammable liquids these insane people had used to saturate the mud.

  The reapers recoiled from the flames, even though the walls of fire were well beyond the town’s destroyed fence line. The heat, however, was tremendous. It buffeted them back, smashing them with superheated chlorine. The gas clouds of superheated chlorine bleach rolled against the reapers, making them cough and gag, driving many of them to their knees. Men and women reeled and vomited. The reapers began to scatter, to run into houses, where they grabbed curtains and towels to cover their faces.

  But immediately they screamed and dropped the cloths. There was something on them. Some chemical they couldn’t smell with their bleach-burned noses.

  They staggered back to the streets. Hundreds of them jumped into the reservoir to escape the fumes.

  “Here!” cried one of the Red Brothers as he kicked aside one of the small bonfires to reveal a trapdoor. He whipped it up and saw a crudely dug tunnel. Smoke curled upward from the tunnel, and Saint John suddenly understood how the defenders had escaped. They’d gone through the tunnels to the spider holes outside, taking their torches with them.

  The Red Brother standing over the trapdoor gagged and staggered backward, blood spraying from a slashed throat. A figure rose up out of the hole, carrying a long spear whose bayonet tip was painted red. She had a wet towel around her nose and mouth, but her white hair danced in the hot wind. She carried a torch in her left hand, and she bent and drove the end into the ground close to where she stood.

  Another man screamed a few yards away, and Saint John turned to see the heretic Sister Margaret crawl into the light, a knife in one hand and a torch in the other.

  The reapers faded back, clustering into a tight crowd as the bonfires tipped over and defenders emerged. One bonfire spilled right behind Saint John, causing him to dance out of the way, and the false Nyx with the red hair rose up.

  The tableau held. Sixteen thousand reapers clustered together in one mass. Three hundred defenders with torches standing in the gap betwe
en them and the raging inferno. And the boy on the tower looking down at them.

  “Kill them,” snarled Saint John. “They are nothing.”

  The reapers, led by some of the Red Brothers, inched forward.

  • • •

  “Stop!” shouted Benny, his voice amplified by the bullhorn so that it rose even above the roar of the fire.

  Everyone froze. Even Saint John and his reapers.

  “You can’t get out of here without burning,” said Benny. He coughed, then pressed a wet rag to his nose and mouth for a moment. When he trusted his voice, he said, “I’m giving you one last chance. Put down your weapons and remove those angel wings.”

  “Or what?” demanded Saint John from below. “You’re running out of tricks, boy. My reapers will tear you down from that tower.”

  “No, they won’t,” said Benny.

  “My reapers would die to serve our god.”

  “Maybe,” said Benny. “But would they burn for it?”

  The reapers milled, confused by this. The fires in the field were still burning, but they weren’t getting any closer. They could all see that.

  Saint John shook his head and waved an arm toward the tower. “Hollow words from a blasphemous fool. My brothers . . . tear that tower down.”

  Before they could take five steps, Benny said, “You all know the ranger, Captain Ledger?”

  The name sent a buzz of fearful conversation through the crowd; some even looked around to see if the man was somehow here.

  “We were talking about this fight. About what might happen if I had to try and stop your whole army. He asked me if I was willing to become a monster in order to stop you. He said that if I could look inside my own head and see a line that I won’t cross, then you’d win. Saint John would win. We all know how far he’d go to have his way. You’re proof of that. Is there anyone down there who hasn’t seen friends or family die because of Saint John? Well . . . today I took that look inside and, no, there isn’t a line I won’t cross. I’ll do anything—any horrible, insane thing—to stop him from killing the whole world. I’ll even kill myself, the girl I love, my best friends, and my town.”

  Benny bent and picked up a torch and held it out over the edge of the tower.

  “Everything in this town has been soaked with oil, with kerosene, with cooking oils, with lighter fluid. We used every drop of everything flammable we could find and all that we could transport here. It’s in the dirt, it’s in every house, it’s on the plants and shrubs. If I drop this torch, you’ll all burn. We’ll all burn. Every single one of us.” Benny felt his mouth curl into an ugly smile of raw hate.

  “You wouldn’t dare,” said Saint John, but for a man of great faith there was a terrible doubt in his voice.

  Benny looked down at him, and his hate gave way to a strange kind of pity.

  “What choice do I have?” he asked. “You forced me into this. What else can I do?”

  The moment held and held as the world around the town burned. All of Mountainside could have been an island in hell.

  There was a sound behind the saint.

  A dull thud.

  He turned and saw a sword lying on the ground.

  It lay at the feet of one of the Red Brothers. The man said, “I’m sorry.” Then he hooked his fingers into the collar of his shirt and tore away the front, ripping through the embroidered angel wings. “I don’t want to burn.”

  Another weapon fell. An ax.

  A woman looked down at the bloody knife clutched in her hand. “Oh God,” she said, and as the sob broke in her chest, she let the blade tumble to the dirt.

  The sound of weapons falling was drowned out by the rending of cloths. And then the sound of brokenhearted tears.

  It went on and on until only Saint John stood alone, Brother Peter’s knife clutched in his fist. He, too, wept—but his tears were from grief for all the children of his faith who had now lost the grace of god.

  Benny doused his torch in a bucket and climbed down from the tower. The others—Nix, Lilah, Chong, Morgie, Riot, Solomon, and everyone else, held their ground, their torches burning. But they stood well back from the dampened mud that marked where the flammable liquids had been poured. It was a narrow safe zone, well within easy toss of a torch.

  Benny walked over to where Saint John stood. The saint looked at the knife in his hand and then at the boy who had crushed his world. The boy who had killed Brother Peter and now killed his dream of serving god.

  “Let it go,” said Benny. “Drop the knife. Let it all go.”

  Saint John shook his head. “You don’t know what you’re asking.”

  “Yeah,” said Benny. “I know exactly what I’m asking for. I’m asking for an end to hatred. I’m asking for an end to war. In the whole history of mankind, we’ve never had the chance before to really end all that.”

  “But . . . that’s what I wanted too,” said Saint John. Tears carved lines through the soot on his face. “An end to all suffering and misery. It’s what god wants. It’s all I’ve ever wanted . . . for the pain to end.”

  Benny sighed. “I know.”

  Saint John sank slowly to his knees. But as he did so he looked up at Benny, and for just a moment there was a smile on his face. In that instant something passed between them. Benny felt it, though he could never really define it. It was some message, some shared awareness. And as that message was shared, Benny felt the great boiling hatred in his chest burn down to a cinder and then wink out. And he realized that he no longer even hated this man. All there was left inside him was pity.

  “I hope you find peace in the darkness,” said Benny.

  Saint John nodded.

  He closed his eyes.

  And drove the knife to the hilt into his own heart.

  EPILOGUE

  - 1 -

  ON A LATE SUMMER AFTERNOON Benny Imura sat on the back porch of his house. He sipped from a tall glass of iced tea and set it down next to a plate on which was a half-finished slice of apple pie. Dragonflies flitted among the sunflowers, and a mockingbird stood on a branch and told lies in a dozen different voices.

  The house was on a green slope and there was a big oak tree in the yard, but the town wasn’t Mountainside.

  Mountainside was gone.

  The oil-soaked houses had been left to rot. There were some sketchy plans to destroy them with controlled burns, but that was someone else’s problem. Morgie and Chong were involved, so it would probably go wrong in one way or another.

  Benny’s new house was a gift from the Nine Towns.

  They still called themselves that. Nine Towns. Haven was being rebuilt. And Benny’s new town was just being built too. The sound of hammers and saws was constant, and there was a sense of “aliveness” to it, though Benny wasn’t sure that was a real word. He’d have to ask Chong.

  This new town had the awkward and unpopular name of Reclamation. It was the kind of name thought up by a committee, and it made the town sound like a landfill.

  New names were a big thing.

  Haven was going to be New Haven.

  And the Ruin?

  This part of it, the area that stretched from the Nine Towns to the far side of Yosemite, was going to be called Tomsland. That was a name Benny liked a lot.

  Movement across the yard nudged Benny out of his reverie, and he saw Nix Riley open the garden gate. She wore a pretty yellow dress with lots of flowers stitched onto it. She did not carry Dojigiri. She had no weapons at all with her. Benny’s sword was on the porch, laid across the arms of the rocker. He still carried it once in a while.

  When he went out into the Ruin.

  No. He had to start using its new name.

  When he went out into Tomsland.

  Nix carried a basket that she held out to him. Her red hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She never tried to hide the two scars—the long one that ran from hairline to jaw, and the smaller one that bisected it. He loved that about her.

  “What’s in the basket?”
/>
  “Muffins,” she said. “Blueberry.”

  Benny cocked an eyebrow. “Who made them?”

  “I did. First batch ever.”

  “Really?” He sniffed them. They smelled like old socks.

  “You don’t have to eat them,” she said. “They’re nasty.”

  “Then why—?”

  “They’re a peace offering.”

  He took another sniff. “You trying to start a war?”

  “No,” she said with a shy smile, “I’m trying to ask you out.”

  It took him a couple of beats to catch up to that. “You . . . wait, I’m sorry . . . what?”

  “Should I say it slower?”

  “It might help,” he admitted.

  “I would like to ask you out on a date.”

  “But . . . I thought the agreement was that when this was all over, I’d ask you out.”

  Nix folded her arms. “Um . . . it is over, and you haven’t asked me out.”

  “Yet,” he said.

  “At all,” she said.

  “I was going to get around to it.”

  “The world could end before you got around to it.”

  “Could have,” he said. “But it didn’t.”

  “No,” she agreed, smiling. “It didn’t.”

  - 2 -

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON BENNY AND his friends sat at a picnic table whose timbers were so green that pine sap stuck to their plates. It was a party—the first American Nation Day that would be celebrated by the people in the Nine Towns. Most of those citizens were still in some aspect of shock, and Benny could sympathize. The day before Saint John brought his reaper army to California, all those people thought that they were the last people left alive on earth, the last survivors. None of them knew about the American Nation, or the drive to reclaim and rebuild the world. They didn’t know that an army was out there fighting back the hordes of zoms—fighting, and winning. They didn’t know that science hadn’t died with the old world, and that a cure to the zombie plague existed.