The odds were that it wouldn’t happen, though. The odds were in favor of the Chongs, and everyone else, being hunted down by killers — alive and dead.
Benny turned to Lilah and Riot. “This isn’t even your town….”
“It ain’t about the town, son,” said Riot. “Excuse me for saying it, but I don’t give a rat’s hairy bee-hind about this town or any other town. I want to see that smug bastard and all his minions burn.”
“ ‘Minions,’ ” echoed Morgie. “Nice.”
There were shouts from the wall. “They’re coming! God… it’s the runners! They’re coming.”
Benny said, “Look, if we do this, then we’re not going to be the same people afterward. This is the line that Captain Ledger was talking about. We’re about to become monsters.”
“No,” said Chong, “that’s a myth; it’s a lie of bad logic. People who don’t understand, who haven’t seen what we’ve seen, say that if you use violence in defense, then you’re just the same as the people who attacked you, that you’re just as bad. But it’s not true. If they hadn’t started this, we’d never have thought this up. Benny — I grew up with you, I know how that weird little mind of yours works. If Saint John and Brother Peter and Mother Rose and all those maniacs hadn’t started a holy war, all you’d be thinking about would be Zombie Cards, fishing for trout, and what Nix looks like in tight jeans. Don’t even try to deny it.”
Despite everything, Nix blushed and Benny grinned.
“These people want to kill everything that we love.” Chong looked at Riot. “You want to talk about a line? They raided Sanctuary and slaughtered monks who never did anything but help everyone they met, and they killed sick people who couldn’t even lift a hand to defend themselves. And they murdered all those little children. Like Eve — they murdered Eve. There is no line, Benny. We’re not like them. If we’re risking our souls here, it’s to make sure that kind of wholesale slaughter doesn’t keep happening. I’m not saying we’re heroes… but we’re not like them.”
Morgie clapped him on the back and then held out his hand, palm down in the center of their circle. “Maybe I haven’t been with you guys through all that, but I’ve got your back right here, right now. Tom taught us to be samurai. He taught us to fight… so let’s fight. Warrior smart.”
Chong laid his hand atop Morgie’s. “Warrior smart.”
Lilah was next, placing her brown hand over Chong’s. “Warrior smart.”
“I ain’t a samurai,” said Riot, “but I’ve got my own dog in this fight. And I guess this was my war before it was yours. So, yeah… warrior smart.” She placed her hand over Lilah’s.
Tears still streamed down Nix’s face. “All that time I was writing down how to survive and how to fight in my journal, I thought it was to build and protect something. I didn’t think it was to destroy… but I guess we don’t always get to choose our wars. I love you all. Warrior smart.”
Benny was the last to reach out, and he placed his palm over Nix’s. Her fingers were icy from terror.
“I know Tom would think we’re all crazy,” he said. “But when he taught us to be warrior smart, this is what he meant.”
They held their hands there for a long moment, and then without another word they turned and headed off to take up their posts.
CHAPTER 101
Saint John could not put down the knife. His fist felt welded shut around the handle.
“Honored One,” said one of his aides. “Our scouts picked up the trail of a large group of refugees heading north. Thousands of them. The scouts guess they have a two-day lead.”
“Send the quads after them.”
“How many, Honored One?”
“All of them, and a reserve of five thousand on foot. Hunt them down and send them all into the darkness.” He touched the aide’s sleeve. “We are no longer recruiting. Everyone goes into the darkness.”
The aide bowed and left, and a few moments later the saint heard the sound of hundreds of quad engines roaring to life.
“You cannot escape the will of god,” he said to the morning air.
Another aide appeared at his side. He wore a silver dog whistle around his neck. “We’ve called up the flocks.”
“How many answered the call?”
“Eighty thousand of them. At least a third are runners. However, we’ve already almost used up Sister Sun’s red powder.”
Over the last few days, several quads had caught up with Saint John’s army, each one laden with plastic trash bags of powder. The last gift of Sister Sun, sent with the fastest quads by Brother Peter.
“Save it for later. We have enough runners for this nonsense.”
The aide pointed. “I sent two small flocks ahead to test the defenses.”
Saint John watched the dead run in a ragged line toward the fence.
“Send the rest.”
“And the reapers, Honored One?”
“Send them all in. I want that town erased from the earth. Tear it down, paint it in blood, and grind it into the mud.”
The aide smiled, nodded, and went off to relay the orders. Sending the gray people in along with the reapers was the kind of shock and awe the Red Brothers loved. It made for a quick fight, but a memorable one. He began shouting orders.
Saint John glanced at the reapers behind him. Many of them were ordinary foot soldiers, some of them quite new to the faith. As he looked at them, quite a few dropped their eyes or looked away. They all wept, and he wondered how many of those tears were from the chlorine stench or from their own terror.
Cowards, he thought. Timid in faith and in heart.
“Listen to me,” he bellowed. “The false one has tried to trick you with lies and promises. He has tried to test your faith and make you question your commitment to god. I say to you now, our god is an unforgiving god. If any man or woman strays from his duty or withholds his blade from the cause of righteousness, then that sinner will be stripped of flesh and left to the gray people. To defy me is to defy god. All hail to Lord Thanatos!”
“All praise to his darkness,” thundered the closest reapers, and that cry spread so that soon forty thousand voices shouted it.
Saint John was satisfied. His words might not have removed doubt, but they would make even the doubters crave to dip their knives in the blood of the heretics.
The Red Brothers acted as sergeants and yelled orders.
Saint John pointed with Brother Peter’s knife.
“Now,” he commanded.
And the army of the reapers surged forth.
They started out walking onto the field, many of them coughing and gagging from the chemical vapors. But soon they were running, shouting, crying out the name of their god. Screaming for blood.
CHAPTER 102
Benny Imura climbed to the observation platform of the east tower. The field was vanishing, to be replaced by a carpet of bodies. Leading the charge were two packs of R3’s. Even from this distance they looked terrifying. They were fresh corpses too, probably victims of the raid on Haven.
Somehow that made it worse. It made it more of a sinful act on Saint John’s part. It was a level of disrespect for the dead that offended Benny in ways he couldn’t express.
It fed his rage.
He held a pair of binoculars and watched as the zoms ran across the bleach-soaked ground. Reapers with dog whistles ran with them.
No one inside the gate moved. Not a muscle, not a finger. The entire town was absolutely still. Chong stood by the tower rail, an arrow fitted in place, the string pulled back.
Benny said, “Now.”
Chong loosed the arrow. The powerful compound bow sent it whipping through the air, fast and silent and true. The arrow struck the stomach of one of the reapers running with the zombie flock. He screamed and pitched backward.
The zoms turned at the scream and the movement and at the spurt of fresh blood. Through the binoculars Benny saw the confusion on the faces of the zoms. He saw how the moment of distraction cha
nged their focus. They had come running out onto the field, driven by whistles, herded forward over the mud. They were not pulled by any smell of meat from behind the chain-link fence. Now that they were on the field, they couldn’t smell the human flesh at all. Bleach kills all sense of smell. The reapers, protected by their chemically treated tassels, herded them with sound alone.
But now the moment froze. The reapers still had their whistles, but the zoms’ sense of smell was gone.
The chemical protection of the tassels was gone.
The reapers stared into the eyes of the R3 zoms.
The zoms stared back at them.
The reaper with the arrow lay thrashing on the ground. Not dead. Benny did not want the man silent and still. He wanted screams. He wanted movement.
One of the zombies bared its teeth.
Then all of them did.
The reapers tried to blow their whistles.
But that was the wrong thing. They should have tried to run.
With shrieks like a pack of wildcats, the zoms leaped onto the reapers and bore them to the ground and tore them to pieces. All around them the reapers faltered and stared. Then the second flock of zoms, drawn by the screams, came running. They attacked anything that was close. Without a sense of smell to differentiate whole flesh from rotting meat, some of them threw themselves at other zoms.
Benny closed his eyes for a moment, not sure whether to be grateful or beg for forgiveness.
He opened his eyes again to see the forest walls vomit forth a horde of zombies. So many thousands of them that there was no need to count. They swarmed across the field. Some broke away from a straight charge to join the bloody melee. Most of them, though, kept running, drawn by the dog whistles, moving too fast for the effect of the bleach to overcome the call of the dog whistles.
* * *
Down at the fence, Sally Two-Knives raised her hand. The line of Freedom Riders held fast, guns ready. They stared in horror at the tide of death that was washing toward them. None of them believed that they’d live through the day. Over the last three days, each in their own way, they’d made peace with their world, their religions, or in the absence of any faith, with themselves. Just knowing that the main population of the town might be safe, and knowing that a cure for the plague existed, put iron in their backs and kept their hearts beating. Some of them wept in fear, but they blinked away tears and took aim.
Sally turned to Captain Strunk, who stood next to her. “Glad I never got to see what I’d look like as an old lady. There’s something about an octogenarian with biker tats and a Mohawk that just doesn’t work.”
“You look beautiful to me,” said Strunk. He sighted along the barrel.
Sally slashed down with her hand. “FIRE!”
* * *
Far out in the Ruin, many miles to the north, a line of quads raced along the highway. They rode four abreast, and the line of quads stretched back half a mile.
All along the road they saw signs of the passage of people fleeing in a hurry. Dropped dolls, lost shoes, articles of clothing that must have fallen from carts, muddy wagon tracks. It was four days’ walk to the next town. The quads would catch up with the heretics in less than an hour.
Up ahead two figures stood in the middle of the road.
The leader of the mobile infantry raised a clenched fist in the universal symbol to stop. The quads slowed and stopped a dozen feet from the two men.
The man on the left grinned at the reapers through the grille of a New Orleans Saints football helmet. He was thin and wiry, with a carpet coat armored with metal squares cut from license plates. He leaned on a spear that had a bayonet blade and a heavy metal ball on the bottom. Under his helmet he wore a pair of cheap black sunglasses.
The man on the right was in similar garb, except that he wore a San Diego Chargers helmet with a plastic shark glued to it. A heavy logging ax rested on one muscular shoulder.
The man on the left gave the reapers a wide, happy grin.
“Wassssabi?” said Dr. Skillz.
“Duuuuude,” said J-Dog, nodding to the leader’s quad. “Nice ride. Can I have it?”
The reapers laughed. There was the slithery sound of many knives being drawn from leather sheaths.
“No, seriously,” said Dr. Skillz. “Let him have the bike. He’s got a serious Davy Jones for some vroom-vroom.”
The leader looked blank. He leaned toward the reaper on his left. “Did any of that make sense?”
“They’re messing with you, brother. Let’s gut them and get moving.”
“Whoa, bad vibes, brah,” said J-Dog. “You need to drink a big chilltini.”
“And you need to get right with god,” said the leader. He gestured to his men. “Cut their throats and—”
The air was filled with the clickety-click of hammers being cocked and slides being racked. In the forest on either side of the road, figures moved. Men and women and teenagers. Hundreds upon hundreds of people; everyone in Mountainside who owned a firearm prepared to shoot. And the narrow country lane was a killing floor. The reapers knew it, and their righteous rage turned to icy sludge in their veins.
“Dudes,” said Dr. Skillz, “if you’re gonna ride the big one, you better have big ones.”
J-Dog nodded. “So… can I have the bike?”
* * *
Saint John tried to see what was happening, but there were simply too many people in the way. He heard the screams, though, and they were too close to be coming from the town.
He grabbed a fistful of an aide’s shirt. “Find out what’s happening.”
The saint thrust the man toward the crowd.
* * *
The Freedom Riders fired and fired, and the leading edge of zoms and reapers crumpled a hundred yards out. The next line fell at ninety yards. At eighty.
At least a hundred of the attackers collapsed with each volley, but the tide was coming in like a tsunami. The mass of attackers rose up and down like sea rollers as they climbed over the dead. Fights broke out as zoms turned on the wounded and dying, their senses confused by the numbing bleach. Some of the reapers had to defend against their own undead shock troops. But even these skirmishes were carried forward like debris on the tide. There was too much forward momentum for anything to stop them.
“Fire!” screamed Sally. She had a bolt-action sniper rifle, and she killed everything she aimed at.
All along the line, fighters yelled out that they were reloading. Then slapped in new magazines or thumbed shells into their shotguns.
They fired and fired.
* * *
The tide was fifty yards away now, and Benny knew that nothing could stop it.
It was what he counted on.
It was what he’d planned for.
Down below, he saw Nix, Lilah, Morgie, and Riot dipping torches into buckets of pitch. All along the inside of the fence were unlit bonfires. Hundreds of them, and more of them throughout the town.
The tide was forty yards away. Almost to the first of the mounds of dirt.
How scary are you willing to be in order to take the heart out of the enemy?
“NOW!” Benny yelled.
The four of them slapped their torches against the ground, each at precise points, where slender trenches had been dug. Each trench was a few inches deep and a handbreadth wide and lined with rags and straw that had been soaked in kerosene. All the tons of it that had been stored at the fuel company Benny and his friends had driven through. It had taken every spare second and every able-bodied man and boy to siphon it out of the tanks and transport it here. Now that kerosene was soaked into the earth, waiting for a single caress of one of the torches.
And now every one of those torches bowed to the ground to kiss the kerosene.
* * *
Nix touched her torch to the first of the trenches, and fire leaped up and raced away from her, under the metal rim of the fence and then flashing out along an arrow-straight line to the mound that was farthest from town. The fire rea
ched the mound and then vanished into the mouth of a piece of metal drainpipe.
There was a moment of nothingness.
Then the thirty-pound propane tank buried inside the mound exploded. The dirt flew away from the blast, carrying with it all the broken glass, screws, nails, and other jagged debris that had been packed around it.
The incoming tide turned red.
* * *
Saint John heard the first of the explosions.
Then the next, and the next. He saw the fireballs rising above the field and heard the screams of his attacking army turn to screams of pain.
And he heard the moans of the countless dead turn to growls of red delight as they began to feed.
* * *
The tower shook with every blast, and Benny had to cling to the ladder to keep from being hurled off by the shock waves. He watched as the explosions opened empty spaces in the storm of attackers, like the eyes of hurricanes, but the storms swept around them.
There was more fighting on the field, though. The zombies were in open revolt now. There was too much blood, too much torn meat, and that sent them into a killing frenzy. The screams and gunfire and explosions washed away any effect of the dog whistles. Now the dead did what they had done for fifteen years. They attacked anything that moved with implacable ferocity and bottomless hunger.
The reapers forgot about the town and turned their weapons on the dead.
* * *
Saint John’s aides brought up a supply cart, and he climbed onto it to get a better view. The sight nearly took the heart from him. The field in front of the town was a madhouse of battle. Reapers fighting the gray people. Forty thousand of the living against eighty thousand of the dead.
And the town…
The town still stood.
He turned to his aides, teeth bared, his face an inhuman mask of fury. “Slaughter the gray people. Pass the word. Do that first, do it now. And then we will pull down that fence and show those heretics the true meaning of holy wrath.”
Fire & Ash bi-4 Page 35
