Fire and Ash

by Jonathan Maberry

  17

  THERE WAS NO TIME TO scream.

  Four cold hands grabbed Nix from behind and tore her away from Lilah.

  The Lost Girl started to yell, but then a red-mouthed thing ran at her.

  Ran.

  It came so fast, hands reaching, lips peeling back from cracked and jagged teeth. The zom slammed into Lilah, caught her off guard, knocked her backward. They fell over and over down the slope, hung for a moment at the edge of a sheer six-foot drop into an arroyo, and then toppled out of sight.

  There was no way for Nix to tear free of the hands that grabbed her from behind. Teeth snapped inches from her neck and shoulders and ears. The angle was impossible for swordplay, so she did the only practical thing she could: She opened her hand and let Monster Cutter clatter to the ground. Then Nix threw herself backward as hard as she could, using all the power of the zombies’ pull along with the strength of her own legs. The extra momentum spoiled what little balance the awkward creatures had, and the two zombies fell hard onto the ground, with Nix’s body landing slantwise across them. With humans, a fall like that would have jolted the air from their lungs, but these were dead things. Luckily, Nix made herself exhale on impact—as both Tom and Joe had taught her. The exhale relaxed her body for the impact, but the jolt was still heavy enough to explode fireworks in her head.

  There was a strange, wet quality to the bodies she landed on. Were they recently dead? Were they still filled with blood and other bodily fluids? Her pants and the back of her shirt felt warm and damp.

  The gripping hands were still there, so Nix raised her arms straight up, hands almost touching above her, then slammed her elbows down as hard as she could. Her left elbow hit a zom in the nose and knocked its head back against the rocky ground; her right elbow struck the second zom in the ribs. In both cases, the blows jolted their bodies and gave her a split second to pull free and roll away. She scrambled to her feet and faced the dead. One of the two zoms lay still, the back of its head smashed to a pulp. The other struggled to right itself.

  “Lilah!” Nix yelled, but there was no answer. She heard scrabbling sounds from the arroyo, but it was impossible to tell if that was Lilah fighting for her life or another zom coming up the slope to join the attack.

  Nix had no weapons. She’d dropped her sword, and her gun belt was hung on a tree limb up the slope. The second zom was on its feet now, and Nix saw that it was one of the recent dead, probably another of the party of refugees Riot had been leading from the destroyed town of Treetops to Sanctuary. The zom was a Latino man, not tall, but broad-shouldered and powerful-looking. There was a faint red smudge around its mouth that wasn’t blood. It looked like powder of some kind. There was more of it sprinkled on its clothes. She wondered if it was some kind of pollen.

  The zom moved toward her, staggering on bowed legs, his gait made awkward by the absence of one shoe. As he reached out toward Nix, she saw that his palms and forearms were crisscrossed with wounds. When she realized what they were, it sickened her. Defense cuts. The kind a person gets when they’re backing helplessly away from someone trying to cut them. Had this man been unarmed against a reaper? There were similar cuts all along the insides of his arms and outer chest. Nix could imagine him backing away from a killer, arms spread in a hopeless attempt to shelter someone else. A wife, perhaps, or children. Using his own flesh as a shield, and knowing with each cut that nothing he could do, not even the sacrifice of his flesh and blood, would be enough to keep the knives of those fanatical killers from doing their horrible work.

  It made Nix want to gag. This man had suffered so much. There was a final deep gash across his throat from where the death blow had been dealt, and his clothes were stained with blood that had pumped out of him with his failing heart. That heart hung still and silent within the walls of his chest, a thing that had been both defeated and broken by evil.

  If Nix could have turned and run away, she would have. But there was only sheer rock behind her. The path to escape was behind the zom. There was no option left except to fight. To do more harm to this man.

  A black goo dribbled from the creature’s mouth, viscous and heavy, and Nix thought she could see tiny white thread-worms wriggling in the mess.

  She swiftly knelt to snatch up a fist-sized rock, and as she did so Nix saw one more thing that made no sense. The one shoeless foot was swollen and discolored, a sign of advanced decomposition. There was similar discoloration on the man’s arms and chest, and some on his face. Discolored veins were visible through his skin, and some of his fingernails had even fallen off. The tissues were becoming swollen as the process of decay released gasses from the disintegrating tissues.

  But . . . that was impossible.

  One of the enduring mysteries of the post–First Night world was that zoms decayed to a certain point, and then the process stopped. No one knew why. The living dead did not corrupt to the point where their flesh actually fell apart. But this man looked ready to burst apart; his soft tissue was beginning to liquefy. And that did not happen. Not to any zombie. Only after a zom had been quieted did the normal process of decomposition run its full course. This was something she had never heard of. Not even in Dr. McReady’s reports. Was this a new form of mutation? If so . . . what did it mean? What could it mean?

  The zom kept moving toward her. He did not run, but it was more than a shuffling walk. Even with the advanced decomposition, he moved with more speed than a regular zom, and even more coordination.

  Nix hurled the rock as hard as she could. It struck the monster in the chest with a sound like a bursting watermelon. Fetid black blood erupted from the wound. The smell was so intense that Nix staggered backward. The only thing that pungent she’d ever smelled was pure cadaverine, but that was weird, because a body only produced cadaverine when it was going through advanced decomposition. Her science class had toured the cadaverine plant in town, and they’d seen how the technicians harvested it from rotting animal flesh.

  Nix took that moment to pick up two more stones as fast as she could, hurling them sidearm, hitting the thing in the shoulder and face. It staggered sideways into the rock wall, but it rebounded and came after her again. Nix scooped up a bigger stone. It was too big to throw, so she gripped it with both hands, raised it over her head, ran down the slope, and brought the stone down with all her strength.

  The zom’s head exploded.

  Black goo splattered her face and hair and clothes. She screamed and began hysterically slapping at the wormy muck.

  Behind her the zom collapsed onto the ground with a boneless, meaty thud that was entirely disgusting to hear.

  “Behind you!”

  It was Lilah’s voice, hoarse and ghostly and urgent. Nix spun back as a third zom came running at her—fast, even going uphill. The zom was thirty feet away. Nix dove for her sword and came up with Dojigiri in her hands, and with no time left, she swung hard and wild.

  The zombie’s last running steps were confused, and the headless body puddled down onto the ground, leaking pints of black, wormy blood.

  18

  HIS NAME WAS CHONG.

  He knew that much, though the name was more of a sound, something familiar to which he reacted. He did not know what the name meant. Or if it meant anything at all.

  Chong squatted in the darkness, arms resting loosely on his knees, hands dangling, head lowered, looking up from under threads of filthy hair. Every once in a while his fingers twitched, a spasm very like the motion of grabbing something. Of squeezing something that would scream.

  Spit glistened on his lips and ran down his chin.

  He thought about the boy who had been in here earlier. There was a sound for him, too. A word sound that triggered memory. Not memories of laughing or talking or fishing or trading Zombie Cards. Those memories sometimes flashed through his brain, but they were meaningless fragments. No, what he remembered was the smell of the boy.

  The smell of meat. So much of it. So close.

  As he thought
about that boy, he felt his lips move. He heard his throat make a sound. Listened as the sound filled the air.

  “B-Benny . . .”

  Hearing the name intensified his hunger.

  That meat had been so close. His teeth had almost had it. His stomach ached at the thought. He crouched there in the shadows and waited for the other boy—for the meat—to come back.

  19

  THREE MONTHS AGO . . .

  Saint John loved the screams. They sounded like prayers to him.

  With each shriek of pain, each cry for mercy that would not come, he knew that the eyes and minds and souls of the heretics were opening to the truth. The old gods, the old religions, could not protect them, because they were all false. When the blades of the reapers opened the red mouths, each mouth spoke the truth. The only salvation was oblivion.

  He stood in the burning street with Sister Sun. She pleased him. The woman was brilliant by any standard, and as cold as moonlight. She kept disease from sweeping through the reaper army, though the withering winds of cancer were destroying her day by day. In the last six months she’d lost forty pounds, and soon she would be a skeleton.

  If she had a flaw beyond physical infirmity, it was a stubborn refusal to let go of the science of the old world. That brought her into conflict with the more hard-line reapers, but it also provided an interesting X factor that Saint John occasionally found useful. The fact that Mother Rose hated and feared Sister Sun was another useful thing. By observing that dynamic without becoming involved in it, Saint John often learned valuable things about each of them. They were, at present, the two most powerful women in the Night Church.

  Now he accompanied Sister Sun along a burning street toward the center of this doomed little town.

  “What is it you wanted to show me?” he asked.

  “Brother Victor was injured in the fighting,” wheezed Sister Sun. “A sucking chest wound. He was taken to a gazebo we’ve been using as a triage center for this engagement, but he bled out. The Red Brothers were going to release him outside of town so he could wander, but . . .”

  She let her words trail off as they arrived at the gazebo that stood in the village square. The structure was surrounded by members of the Red Brotherhood—the combat elite of the reapers. They were each marked by a bloodred palm print tattooed on their faces. They parted to allow Saint John and Sister Sun a better view but kept everyone else away.

  As Saint John approached, he saw Brother Victor on the other side of the rail. The reaper’s face was dead pale and his mouth dark with blood. He turned toward the movement of the newcomers and immediately crouched like a cat ready to spring. He bared his teeth and snarled. A black, viscous goo, thick as motor oil, dribbled over his teeth and down his chin. Small white worms writhed in the muck.

  It was clear that Brother Victor had become one of the gray people.

  The dead thing suddenly hurled himself at Saint John.

  Four muscular Red Brothers leaped to intercept the rush, and they forced Victor back with wooden poles. The reaper retreated, but he began pacing back and forth, occasionally lunging at the rail with cat quickness.

  Saint John frowned. “I don’t understand this. Is he dead?”

  “He is,” said Sister Sun.

  “But he’s so fast.”

  “Yes. Fast and smart. Look.”

  The dead reaper attacked the rail over and over again, hitting different points, trying to squeeze between the guards, snarling all the while. He was so fast that once he nearly got across the rail before the men with the poles battered him back.

  “He keeps trying the rail at different points,” observed Sister Sun. “He’s trying to find a weakness.”

  “You examined him? He has no pulse, no—”

  “He’s dead,” said Sister Sun. She leaned close. “This is the mutation we’ve been hearing about. Now it’s happened to one of our own. Honored One . . . if this spreads . . .”

  Saint John said nothing. He could almost taste the fear in Sister Sun’s voice, and he could see it in the eyes of the Red Brothers.

  However, in his own heart, deep down in that velvety darkness, he felt quite a different emotion. And it made him smile.

  20

  UP AHEAD BENNY SAW A hazy stretch of green floating inside a mirage.

  The forest.

  The very fact of the forest out here in the dry vastness of Nevada was bizarre. Before First Night, some real estate developers had come out into the hottest part of the desert and decided that this would be a wonderful place to put a golf course. They built row after row of tall wind turbines to generate electricity and pump water to irrigate the landscape, and planted trees, grass, and decorative shrubs in what was otherwise an inhospitable environment. In doing so they created the illusion of a lush forest cut with wide green lawns. The wind turbines hadn’t been knocked out by First Night; however, heat and blowing sand had stilled most of them. Only a few still channeled sluggish water into the soil. Most of the exotic foliage was now dead, coarse weeds and bare dirt having replaced most of the lush grass. Lovely shrubs had been replaced by uglier, hardier foliage. When the last of the turbines quit working, the desert would kill the remaining imported trees and reclaim the land. Benny figured that within ten years there would be no trace of the golf course, no evidence that man had ever tried to impose his whims and his will on the fierce Mojave.

  The four fat tires rumbled effortlessly over the rocky ground. Ahead he could see flashes of white through the green. The plane. As he drove toward it, Benny’s mind churned on so many different things that he never heard the second quad come tearing toward him from behind a stand of trees. His only warning was when the other quad’s engine roared to full throttle as the driver slammed into Benny’s machine.

  Suddenly Benny was flying into the air, arms pinwheeling, legs kicking. He landed with a thud that jolted every muscle and bone in his body. His katana went slithering out of its scabbard onto sandy ground. But Tom had taught him to react rather than allow himself to gape in surprise. He scrambled around, got to his feet, and came up into a crouch, confused, scared, and angry. His quad lay on its side near the transport plane, its wheels still turning, a second machine jammed hard against it, blue ethanol fumes chugging from both tailpipes.

  He heard a crunch of a footfall, turned fast, and saw a glittering knife slash through the air toward his throat.

  21

  BENNY SCREAMED AND FLUNG HIMSELF backward and felt wind whip past his Adam’s apple as the blade missed him by a hairbreadth. His heels hit a gnarled twist of an exposed tree root, and Benny went down on his butt with a thump that snapped his teeth together with a loud clack!

  The reaper grinned in obvious anticipation of an easy kill. “I bring the gift of darkness to you, my brother.”

  “Bite me,” gasped Benny, and snatched up a handful of pebbles, hurling them at the killer. The reaper twisted away and took the stones on shoulders and hip instead of full in the face.

  Benny’s sword was ten feet away, the steel blade gleaming with deadly potential. The killer stood between Benny and the katana, so it might as well have been on the far side of the moon. The big plane lay a few yards behind Benny’s back.

  The reaper crouched, knife in hand, muscles bunching as he prepared to pounce. He was a tall man in his early twenties, all wiry muscle and sinew, dressed in black jeans and a muscle shirt with angel’s wings hand-stitched across the chest. The man’s head was shaved bald and comprehensively tattooed in a pattern of creeper vines and locusts. Strips of red cloth were tied to his ankles and wrists and looped around his belt. The cloth smelled like rotting meat—evidence that it had recently been dipped in chemicals that were used to prevent the living dead from attacking. Benny smelled every bit as bad from the cadaverine he’d sprinkled on his clothes.

  Benny scooted backward on the ground, putting as much distance as he could between him and the reaper. The killer faked a lunge and then kicked sand in Benny’s face; but Benny was alrea
dy in motion, already scooping a handful of sand to throw at the reaper. Both masses of sand hissed through each other and struck their targets. Benny whipped his arm up to save his eyes, but he got a choking mouthful. The reaper tried to turn away and partially succeeded, so that the sand pelted his cheek and ear.

  With a growl that was equal parts anger and fear, Benny drove his shoulder into the reaper’s gut, exploding the air from the killer with an oooof. Benny’s rush drove them both into the curved metal side of the gigantic transport plane. The impact tore a cry from the reaper, and he dropped his knife. Benny head-butted him, smashing the man’s nose. The reaper screeched again, but a split second later he jerked his knee upward as hard as he could into Benny’s crotch.

  Benny staggered back, hands cupped around his groin.

  The reaper moaned and sagged to his knees, blood pouring down his face from his shattered nose. “I will . . . open . . . red mouths . . . in your . . .”

  “Yeah, yeah,” wheezed Benny in a tiny voice as he fought against pain and nausea, “. . . open red mouths in my flesh . . . send me into the darkness . . . got it . . . owwwww!”

  Gagging and coughing, the reaper reached for the knife.

  Benny kicked it away.

  They got slowly and painfully to their feet. The reaper’s nose was a purple bulb; his mouth and teeth glistened with red. Benny was sure that his testicles were somewhere up in his chest cavity.

  The reaper sneered at Benny. “Are you really so stupid that you think you have a chance?”

  “Yes,” said Benny defiantly, then he frowned. “Wait, no, I mean I’m not stupid, but yes, I have a chance against you.”

  “I’m not talking about this fight, brother.”

  “Don’t call me brother, you enormous freak,” muttered Benny.

  “The army of the Night Church will sweep away all defiance to god’s will.”

  “Yeah, I know, you’re invincible. Oh, wait, didn’t you idiots get your butts handed to you by one guy with a rocket launcher? How’s that ‘sweeping away all defiance’ thing working out for you?”