Fire and Ash

by Jonathan Maberry

  The reaper spat blood onto the sand. “The reapers who died at the Shrine of the Fallen were heretics and traitors to Thanatos—praise be to the darkness. They were the scum who followed Mother Rose. You have no idea what kind of army follows Saint John. Brother Peter and Sister Sun will sweep away all resistance to god’s will.”

  “Sure. Fine. Whatever. I’m sure whoever you’re quoting would be impressed. But check it out—you try and take Sanctuary again, and Captain Ledger will introduce you to Mr. Rocket-Propelled Grenade.”

  “You think that heretic can defend Sanctuary from us?” The reaper laughed.

  “Pretty much.”

  “The voice of god will echo from the mountaintops and proclaim the glory of the darkness, and clouds of blood will cover the lands. Then the quickened dead will consume those who are slow to accept the darkness.”

  “Okay, don’t take this the wrong way,” said Benny, “but you’re crazier than a bag of hamsters.”

  The knife lay ten feet from the reaper’s right foot; Benny’s sword was twelve feet to his left. They each looked at the weapons at the same time. At the sword, at the knife, then at each other. Then they lunged at the same time. The reaper was faster, taller, and stronger and he snatched up the knife, his fingers curling the deer-bone handle into perfect placement in his palm. Benny, a fraction slower and ten years younger, threw himself into a dive-roll and came up with the katana in a wide two-handed grip. He whirled and dropped into a combat crouch.

  “Don’t!” warned Benny, backing up a step. “We both know I’m going to win. Why push it? Just walk away.”

  That should have ended the fight. A knife against a sword. But the world was broken, and so was sanity.

  The reaper screamed and threw himself at Benny.

  “No!” screamed Benny as the moment became red madness.

  The knife tumbled once more to the sand. The reaper opened his mouth and said the same thing Benny had said.

  “No.”

  And it meant the same thing and so many different things. His knees buckled and he dropped down.

  “No,” he said again, as if repeating it could enforce some of his will upon the world.

  The world, stubborn to the last, refused to listen. The reaper toppled forward onto his face with no attempt to catch his fall. Small puffs of dust plumed up around the man. Benny stood there, his sword still raised.

  He closed his eyes.

  “No,” he said.

  FROM NIX’S JOURNAL

  When I was eleven I played with dolls.

  When I was twelve I started reading books about magic and romance.

  When I was thirteen I fell hopelessly in love.

  When I was fourteen I became a killer.

  22

  NIX STOOD UNDER A SHOWER of sun-heated water and scrubbed her skin raw. Lilah stood outside the stall, working the handle, pumping gallons of water from the big tank. The water was not pure enough to drink, but it was a million times cleaner than the bloody goo that clung to Nix’s hair and skin. At one point Nix heard a weird little whimpering sound, like a small, frightened animal might make. When she realized that she was making the sound, she stopped scrubbing, closed her eyes, and leaned her forehead against the inside of the wooden shower stall. Shudders rippled up and down her body. Lights seemed to flash behind her eyes. She spent a lot of time concentrating on her breathing. Trying to remember how to do it right. Keeping it from turning into sobs. Or screams.

  The water slowed and stopped. Nix heard a soft sound as Lilah leaned against the door from the other side.

  “Nix—?”

  “Y-yes.”

  “Are you . . . ?”

  “I’m fine. I didn’t get any in my mouth or eyes or anything.”

  “We have to tell them,” said Lilah. “Four of them . . . four fast ones. We have to tell Joe.”

  “I know.”

  Nix leaned her cheek against the grainy wooden door and listened to the sound of Lilah’s voice. It was rare to hear the Lost Girl sound so scared.

  “What does it mean?” asked Lilah in her ghostly whisper of a voice.

  “I don’t know.”

  23

  BENNY STEPPED AWAY FROM THE man he’d just killed.

  Overhead the first vultures were beginning to circle. Benny studied the dead man, wondering if he would rise from the dead—as nearly everyone did who’d died since the plague began on First Night—or if he would stay dead. Lately more and more people seemed to stay dead. No one knew why.

  Stay dead, Benny silently told him.

  Seconds blew past him like bits of debris on a hot wind. The reaper’s fingers twitched. Then his foot. Suddenly his eyes snapped open, his lips parted, and he uttered that long, low, terrible moan of hunger that marked him as one of the living dead. It was an eternal hunger, a hunger that made no sense. The dead did not need to feed, they required no nourishment.

  So why were they so hungry? Why did they kill and devour human flesh?

  Why?

  “Why?” demanded Benny.

  The sound of his voice made the zom turn his head. The thing sat up slowly, empty eyes turning toward the sound, nose sniffing the air. Benny’s cadaverine would keep him safe. He could let this one go.

  The monks back at Sanctuary did not permit any of the zoms there to be killed.

  This, however, was not Sanctuary. This was the Rot and Ruin.

  Benny brought his sword up into a high guard, backing away slowly as the zom got clumsily to his feet. It stood for a moment, swaying as if taking a second to get used to what it was and how it felt about this new type of existence. That was wrong, though, and Benny knew it. The dead did not think, did not feel.

  They simply were.

  The creature moaned again. Benny listened to it, searching inside the sound for some trace, however small, of meaning, of humanity. Of anything.

  All he heard was hunger. Vast, hollow, eternal.

  The zombie looked at Benny and shuffled uncertainly toward him.

  “Don’t,” said Benny, and the single word caused the zombie’s head to jerk up. The glazed eyes shifted up to look directly at him. It took another step.

  Benny retreated a pace, and the zom took two more steps. It was close now; one more step and it would be close enough to make a grab. Its hands rose and reached for Benny.

  “Don’t.”

  Benny slowly, numbly reached over his shoulder and slid the katana into its scabbard. Then his hands flopped down at his sides, hanging slack and purposeless. The zombie took another step, and now it pawed at Benny with clumsy fingers that twitched and jerked as if trying to remember their lost dexterity. Benny batted the hands aside.

  The zom reached again.

  Benny knew that he should end this. Here and now, quick and clean. It would be easy. After everything he’d been through, a single zombie no longer frightened him. He was sure he could break its neck with his bare hands, or easily cripple it with a kick to the knee.

  He could. He probably should. As long as the plane was here, a wandering zom was a potential threat. Even to someone like Joe.

  But Benny didn’t attack. He backed away again, unwilling to inflict harm on this thing, even though a few moments ago it was a killer who wanted to murder him. That was different, and he knew it was different. Now everything about this creature, this thing . . . this former person, was different. Benny felt his heart hammering in his chest, and he wanted to do something. Scream, or throw up, or cry. Or run away.

  Or die.

  The zom reached again and again, and each time Benny slapped its fumbling hands away.

  “C’mon, man,” pleaded Benny, “don’t.”

  It kept coming. A step, a reach. Benny slapped the cooling hands away. The thing recovered its balance, brought its hands back, stepped, reached. The whole encounter was becoming a sick and sad ballet, a dance for two of the strangest kind. The moment had lost its veneer of horror for Benny and had become something else, something indefinable and
surreal. It was terrifying in a nonphysical way. He felt that he teetered on the edge of some action that would damage his own soul far more than this monster could harm his body. His racing mind sought to understand it, but the truth, the insight, eluded him every bit as diligently as he eluded the zombie.

  The zombie suddenly stopped, and its eyes flicked toward the forest. It took one lumbering step that way, then another, and another, heading away from Benny, heading toward the woods, following . . . who knew what. A sound, a smell?

  Benny watched the zom until it vanished into the shadows under the trees. Then he bent and picked up his katana, cleaned the blood from the blade, and resheathed it.

  The actions were performed almost without thought. His thoughts were elsewhere. They tumbled through a red awareness of what he had just done.

  He’d killed a man.

  A person.

  A small, strange part of his mind wanted to gloat—the attacker had been older, stronger, faster, and probably more experienced, a reaper of the Night Church. In a one-on-one duel, Benny should have lost, even with the better weapon. But that part of his mind was only a fragment, and Benny prayed that it never grew to become something bigger. That part of his mind was okay with killing. It wanted to kill. It liked the excitement of battle, the promise of bloodshed, the rush of adrenaline.

  Benny feared that part of himself. He tried to believe that it didn’t belong to him at all.

  Lies like that never work on your own mind, though.

  The rest of him was appalled by what he had just done. Benny had killed people before—at Charlie Pink-eye’s camp in the mountains of central California, at Gameland in Yosemite, and here in the Mojave Desert when the reapers tried to send Benny and all his friends into the vast, eternal darkness.

  There were birds singing in the trees, and the air buzzed with insects. A small tan snake whipsawed through the brush, and off in the distance a pair of monkeys chattered as they chased each other through the boughs of a piñon tree. The desert was calm and beautiful. It was peaceful.

  Benny Imura sat down with his back against a rock, set his sword aside, bent, and buried his face in his palms.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said. Though whether his apology was to the day, to the man he’d been forced to kill, to the monster that man had become, to the forest, or to the distorted image of himself that capered like a bent reflection in a funhouse mirror, Benny could not say.

  24

  CAPTAIN LEDGER SQUATTED DOWN BESIDE the zom Lilah had killed. He no longer looked hungover. He merely looked old and tired. And deeply disturbed.

  Grimm stood nearby, looking up and down the slope at the bodies. Big and fierce as he was, the mastiff occasionally uttered a fearful whine.

  “You’re certain that all of them were fast?”

  “Three for sure,” said Nix. “The one whose head I cracked . . . I don’t know about that one.”

  “Still,” said Joe, “three out of four.”

  He pivoted on the balls of his feet to study the landscape. “This slope leads down to a T-road,” he mused aloud. “Go right to the hangars . . . go left and it becomes a deer path that goes nowhere but up into the mountains.”

  “I found the tracks,” Lilah told him. She nodded to the mountains. “They came from there.”

  “Does that make any sense?” asked Nix. “Why would zoms climb all the way over a mountain? I thought they didn’t go uphill unless they were following prey. That’s what Tom told us.”

  “Tom was right,” agreed Joe.

  “Could the sirens have called them here?” asked Lilah.

  “I don’t think so. Sanctuary sits in a kind of bowl of flatland surrounded by mountains. Once that wail hits those mountains it bounces all over the place, and it’s impossible to pinpoint the source unless you’re down here on the flatland. I don’t think we can sell that as the reason.” He paused, thinking, then said, “No,” again, very softly.

  When they’d told Joe about the attack, he’d fetched a small leather valise, which now stood open beside him. He spent several careful minutes collecting samples from the zoms. Tissue and fluids. Then he took a large magnifying glass and peered through it as he bent over the head and shoulders of one of the corpses. He grunted.

  “What is it?” asked Lilah.

  Joe used a small brush to sweep something off the zom’s blouse into a vial. When he held it up to examine it in the sun’s glow, Nix saw that it was the red powder she’d noticed on the Latino man.

  “Do you know what it is?” asked Nix. “Is it important?”

  “I hope to God it isn’t,” he said, but he did not elaborate. Instead he got up and examined the other bodies, focusing now almost exclusively on collecting samples of the red powder. He stopped by one corpse, glanced at it, and then looked at Nix.

  “Is this the one you said might not have been fast?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I landed on it and hit it in the face with an elbow and—”

  Joe appeared to stop listening. He stood up, and his eyes roved over the scene.

  “How the hell did this get here?” he murmured. Then Nix thought he mouthed a word: “Archangel.”

  Then Joe suddenly began packing his samples into the case.

  “What is it?” asked Nix. “What’s wrong?”

  “Wrong?” Joe gave her a smile that might have been an attempt to reassure her. But it was ghastly. False and fragile. “It’s nothing. You girls go back to the mess hall and get some lunch. Everything’s fine.”

  He rose, clicked his tongue for his dog, and hurried away. A few minutes later they heard the sirens as Joe prepared to cross the bridge. The last thing Nix and Lilah saw of him was the ranger vanishing into the hangar next to the blockhouse. He had the valise with him, and he was running.

  25

  AFTER A WHILE BENNY GOT to his feet.

  The zom had not returned, but even so Benny removed a bottle of cadaverine from his pocket and dribbled some on his clothes. It amazed him that after all this time he could still smell the stuff, and he had to dab mint gel on his upper lip from a small pot he always carried. The mint was so strong that it completely killed his sense of smell. When your clothes smell like rotting human flesh, an overload of mint is a genuine blessing.

  He had a strange thought. If he died now and reanimated, would the presence of the mint gel mean that cadaverine wouldn’t deter him? Probably. It was a creepy thought.

  It was heating up to be another blistering day in a spring season that was already unusually hot. Even back home in Mountainside it had been a strange spring, with April temperatures in the eighties and almost no rain. Benny had no idea whether this was simply one of those years—there are hot ones and there are cold ones—or if it was an omen of something bad coming. His mood was tending toward the pessimistic view.

  Maybe it is the end of the world, whispered his inner voice. Maybe Captain Ledger is right. Maybe there are no chances left.

  “Oh, shut up,” growled Benny.

  He walked over to the wrecked airplane and stood for a moment at the foot of a sturdy rope ladder Joe had rigged to the open hatch.

  Benny wished he’d asked Nix to come with him. He closed his eyes for a moment and thought about how she probably looked this morning, up there in the rocks, training with focused determination with the katana Joe had given her. Benny conjured her image in his mind and suddenly she was there, as real as something he could actually touch and hold. Her wild red hair trembling in the morning breeze that swept in from the desert, her intelligent green eyes roving over the landscape as she imagined attackers closing on her, her countless freckles darkening as her pulse rose to flush her skin. And the sword. Benny was a very good swordsman, but Nix was better. She was faster, more precise, less tentative, and far more vicious. In her small hands that powerful weapon sought its true potential. The blade became a streamer of flowing mercury, the edge cleaving effortlessly through air or straw targets or living-dead necks.

  So far, th
ough, Nix had not used that blade against the living.

  Not like Benny had used his kami katana. Now, and too many times before today.

  She had killed, though, Benny thought. Killed with knives and guns and with her old wooden bokken. She was like him in that regard. And also like Lilah, Chong, and Riot. Killers all.

  Children at war.

  Children of war.

  It was so unfair.

  “Nix,” Benny said, just to put her name on the wind. Then he spoke her full name. “Phoenix.”

  Her name, either version, even now when he was angry with her, was like a prayer to him.

  The first girl he had ever loved.

  The first person he had ever loved. Aside from his parents, but that had been a remembered love from a tiny child. Not like this.

  He loved Nix. She was the only girl he ever expected to love.

  He would kill for her.

  No, corrected his inner voice, you have killed for her. And with her.

  “Shut up,” Benny said again, and he turned away, as if by moving his body he could step away from that inner voice and all his melancholy thoughts.

  The plane lay there. Dead. Discarded by time. And yet somehow strangely alive to him.

  Waiting for him.

  He found himself smiling.

  Joe had expressly ordered Benny—and everyone else—to stay out of the plane. The head scientist, Dr. Monica McReady, and her entire crew had either been killed in the crash and then wandered off once they’d reanimated as zoms, or they’d been murdered by the reapers of the Night Church.

  Now the most crucial part of Dr. McReady’s research was missing.

  In either case, the world’s best hope for a cure was lost, maybe forever.

  It was crazy, but three weeks ago Benny and Nix had not known about Dr. McReady, her team, the possibility of a cure, or the fact that anyone was still left to do the research. That had been so amazing, so life-changing.

  How was he supposed to suddenly discard all that hope and simply accept that there was no future unpolluted by plague and death? He didn’t know how to fit that into his head. It didn’t seem to fit, and Benny knew full well that he didn’t want it to fit.