Fire and Ash

by Jonathan Maberry

  “I’m serious,” she said sharply.

  Benny nodded. “I know.”

  He kissed her.

  “That’s the silliest question I’ve ever been asked.”

  Her frown deepened. “It’s not silly.”

  “It is to me. Of course I still love you. I’m always going to love you,” he said.

  Nix looked at him, troubled and puzzled. “Why?”

  “What?”

  She shook her head. “Why on earth do you still love me? Why on earth do you want to?”

  “I—”

  “I’m vicious and moody and nasty, I’m cold to you too much of the time, and sometimes I bite your head off when you’re just trying to be nice. I’m a monster.”

  “Yeah, and I’m always a yummy box of chocolates. C’mon, Nix, how shallow do you think I am?”

  Before she could answer, Benny turned away and began walking along the ravine, peering down through shadows at the pale faces below. He could feel Nix’s eyes on him, and he thought he could imagine at least some of what was going on in her head. Some. However, he wondered if she was trying to guess what was going on in his head. Benny remembered something Captain Strunk of the town watch once said on a hot summer afternoon on the porch of Lafferty’s General Store. Benny, Chong, and Morgie were sitting on the porch steps, opening packs of Zombie Cards; Captain Strunk was sitting in an old kitchen chair, and a bunch of other town men were with him. Mayor Kirsch; Wriggly Sputters, the town’s mailman; big one-armed Leroy Williams; Morgie Mitchell’s dad; and four or five others. The men had been talking about relationships, before and after First Night. When one of the men had, in exasperation, pronounced that all women were crazy and that all men were crazier for falling in love with them, everyone laughed. They agreed that there was just no understanding the mysteries of love. No sir, no how. Chong, who was twelve at the time, said, “What’s not to understand? People fall in love.”

  The men goggled at him for a few moments, and Captain Strunk said, in a dry, amused voice, “Kid, if it turns out that you well and truly understand love, I will personally nominate you for King of the World, and I can guarantee that every man here will vote for you.”

  Everyone burst out laughing. Chong had turned as red as a radish.

  As he walked, Benny could almost hear the echoes of that laughter. He’d been confused by the exchange back then, but he wasn’t anymore.

  Three minutes later Lilah called, “Here!”

  They came running to where she stood on the edge of the ravine, using her spear to point down into the darkness. A zom, taller than the others, big-armed and big-chested, stood in a middle of a pack. They could see only his shoulders and head, but it was enough to recognize the pattern of the camouflage of the American Nation. And to see a strap across his chest—a strap Benny vaguely remembered was attached to a satchel. He had taken only peripheral note of it before, ascribing no more importance to it than to the man’s shoes or belt or other items. At the time his entire focus had been on fighting this man. He’d tried a big lateral sword slash of the kind he’d seen Tom use to cut through the legs of a zom. Only the angle of Benny’s cut had been bad, and the blade had stuck fast in the zom’s heavy thigh bone. The sword handle had been torn from Benny’s hands, and the blade might have been lost had Lilah not somehow managed to recover it. Until today, Benny had assumed she’d quieted the zom in order to take back the sword, but that wasn’t so. The zom looked as powerful and deadly as ever.

  Benny crouched on the lip of the ravine. “Hello, Sergeant Ortega,” he said.

  43

  “HOW DO WE GET HIM out of there?” asked Nix.

  “Good question, Red,” murmured Riot. “There’s more dead down there than wood ticks on a coon.”

  “How many do you figure?” asked Benny.

  “Rough guess,” said Riot, squinting into the gloom, “near on about—”

  “It’s 261,” said Lilah.

  “Oh, crap.” Benny sighed. “On the bright side, that’s only sixty-five each.”

  No one laughed at the joke. Not even Benny.

  Riot fingered the silver dog whistle she wore around her throat. Each of them had one. “I had a crazy idea about two of us calling the gray people from different ends of the ravine, to thin the herd, but that plain won’t work. Too darn many of ’em.”

  “So what’s plan B?” asked Nix. “Do we go down at one end and try some kind of systematic quieting thing? I mean, the ravine’s narrow enough that only three or four of them could come at us at a time.”

  “Stupid,” said Lilah dismissively.

  Nix colored. “I know, I was thinking out loud.”

  Lilah eyed her. “Don’t. Unless you have a smart plan.”

  “Thank you, queen of tact,” said Benny under his breath.

  They began hashing out an idea that involved using the quads to pull big branches, small fallen trees, and other bulky debris, then pushing that stuff down on either side of Sergeant Ortega. Push enough stuff down and they could create temporary walls that would lock in Ortega—and probably a few other zoms standing close to him. The end result would be a much smaller number of zoms they’d have to deal with in order to gain access to Sergeant Ortega’s pockets and that satchel.

  Then they began picking holes in the plan.

  “The more we use the quads, the more chance other zoms will hear us,” said Nix.

  “Reapers, too,” added Riot. “It ain’t all that far from where Benny got jumped yesterday.”

  “Besides,” said Benny, pointing down into the ravine, “if we block off the tunnel, that’ll still leave Ortega and a bunch of zoms in a tight little space. If one person went down, the zoms would have a feast. If all four of us went down, we’d be so crowded we’d get in each other’s way. And we can’t shoot the zoms because of the noise.”

  “We can come back tomorrow with Chong’s bow and arrows,” suggested Nix.

  “No,” said Lilah. “Too much time. I can lean down with my spear, try and stab them in the head . . .”

  “And probably fall in,” said Riot. “Ground’s too iffy, and you wouldn’t have squat for leverage.”

  They stood there and stared.

  Benny sucked thoughtfully at the inside of his cheek. An idea occurred to him, and he looked at the coil of rope looped slantways across Lilah’s body. “Huh,” he grunted softly.

  “What?” asked Nix.

  “Riot—you said something a couple of minutes ago,” he said slowly. “About herding the zoms?”

  “Sure, but the whistles won’t do the trick,” she said.

  “No, but I read enough Western novels to know a little bit about how cowboys herded strays.” He removed the coil of rope. “Anyone here know how to throw a lasso?”

  As it turned out, they all did.

  Nix knew a little bit about it from the Scouts back in Mountainside. Lilah had handled rope while struggling to survive—lassoing trees to climb and roping wounded animals she was hunting. But Riot was the real expert.

  “After I skedaddled from the Night Church,” she said as she began fashioning a lariat, “I fell in with a group of scavengers. Called themselves the Rat Pack. They were a crazy bunch of kids who raided towns and tagged buildings that had good supplies. The kids were all into extreme sports—or I guess what had been extreme sports before the Fall. Skateboarders, BMX bikers, in-line skaters, and free runners.”

  “What’s that?” asked Nix.

  “It’s a kind of sport where you do all sorts of acrobatics over obstacles and up walls and suchlike. Looks like a bunch of crazy monkeys, but it’s amazing. Fun, too.”

  “You did that?”

  She shrugged. “I learned me a few tricks. There was a boy named Jolt who taught me a lot of things.”

  A dreamy and distant look floated through Riot’s eyes, and Benny glanced at Nix, who clearly saw it too.

  “Was Jolt your boyfriend?” Nix asked carefully.

  “We had a little thing going,” Riot
said coyly, but didn’t elaborate.

  “What happened to him?” asked Benny, though he was afraid of what the answer would be.

  “I don’t rightly know. ’Bout a year ago, while I was running some people out to Sanctuary, the Rat Pack’s camp was overrun by reapers. I got there maybe two days after it happened and found half the people I knew slaughtered and the rest gone. They lit out in every possible direction, and from the tracks it looked like there were reapers in hot pursuit of every single person.” She sighed heavily. “I quieted the dead. Near on twenty of them. Some little ones, too. Only a few reapers, though. The scavengers ain’t much into killing, even in self-defense.”

  “Stupid,” said Lilah, and Riot shot her a hard look.

  “You’re welcome to keep your opinions to your damn self, missy,” snapped Riot, throwing down the rope and getting nose to nose with Lilah. “That Rat Pack was the closest thing I had to a real family, and I won’t hear a word against them.”

  Lilah looked genuinely surprised by Riot’s reaction.

  “But they let themselves die,” insisted Lilah.

  “So do the way-station monks,” interjected Nix. “Not everyone believes in killing.”

  Lilah pushed Riot back, but not with anger. Just to create distance. “You were with them? A scavenger?”

  “Yes,” said Riot.

  “And you kill.”

  Riot looked down at the ground. After a moment, she sighed and picked up the rope.

  “Jolt and the others? They were better than me. All they wanted to do was find food and supplies, and have some fun while the rest of the clock ticked down.” She glanced again at Lilah. “You want to tell me that’s wrong?”

  This time Lilah held her tongue. She looked confused, unable to frame a reply.

  Benny said, “Did you look for Jolt?”

  “Oh yeah,” said Riot. “I looked all over this desert for him. Haven’t found so much as a footprint.”

  “Well,” said Benny, “when this is over, when things settle down . . . maybe we can help you look.”

  Riot smiled and shook her head. “Don’t you know nothing, boy? This ain’t never going to be over.”

  She looked at the rope she held in her hands. Then, without another word, she finished tying the loose knot.

  Below them, the big soldier stood in a throng of maybe a dozen smaller zoms: some women, a few teenagers, and two men of average height. Ortega looked to be about six-four or -five.

  “They’re pretty thick down there,” said Riot. “Best place to lasso someone is around the chest, ’bout midway down the upper arm. But our boy’s reaching up. Might have to hook an arm and try to drag him out that way.”

  Riot crept as close to the edge as she dared. The undercut ground creaked a little even under her negligible weight. Benny picked up the rope and stood behind her to anchor her in place.

  “Do it!” he said.

  Riot swung the lasso over her head a few times and then hurled it down.

  She snagged three different arms, two of which belonged to other dead.

  She eased the slack and tried again.

  And again.

  And again.

  After eight tries she was cursing a blue streak and using language so intensely and descriptively foul that Benny was extremely impressed.

  Finally Riot stepped back from the ravine and threw the lasso onto the grass.

  “So much for your brilliant plan,” she groused. “I might as well hang myself with that damn thing.”

  She started to stomp off, got about ten paces, and stopped. She turned with a quizzical look on her face. The same expression was blossoming on Lilah’s and Nix’s faces; and Benny was sure he wore an identical look.

  Riot had said it.

  Hang myself.

  They looked at the lasso. Everyone smiled.

  Ten seconds later they were kneeling together at the edge of the ravine, dangling a much smaller loop down into the shadows.

  “A little to the left,” suggested Benny. “No, too much. Back . . . back . . .”

  Lilah crouched next to Riot, her spear extended all the way down, using the blade to bat aside reaching hands and to tap the loop toward Ortega.

  “Little more . . . ,” breathed Benny. “Little more . . .”

  The edge of the loop brushed against the big zom’s face. Everyone held their breath as, with infinite care, Riot eased it over the crown of the man’s head and then slowly, slowly down until it hung pendulously below his chin.

  “Now!” cried Nix, and Riot jerked back on the rope. The slack loop snapped tight, constricting like a noose around Sergeant Ortega’s throat.

  They had him.

  Kind of.

  He was still down in the pit.

  They grabbed the rope and began to pull.

  Benny, though slim, was the heaviest of them; but, like the girls, the hardships of warfare, frequent injuries, small meals, and stress had leaned him down.

  Sergeant Ortega, before death and desiccation had wasted him, probably weighed 260 pounds. Now he was probably 220. They had a two-to-one weight advantage over him, but they were lifting from the top, with the majority of his weight below the noose, and they were trying to pull him up a twenty-foot wall. While he fought and writhed and struggled.

  It went from a brilliant plan to a brutal struggle. The sun hammered down on them and sweat burst from their pores as they pulled. They set their feet into the sandy soil, using tufts of the tall grass for traction. They groaned and growled and yelled and cursed.

  The sergeant was an improbably heavy weight. He felt like he weighed a thousand pounds. They moved another foot back.

  And that was as far as they got.

  Benny strained and strained until his blood sang in his ears and black poppies seemed to burst in his eyes.

  Finally they collapsed. Their hands ached; their lungs burned with oxygen starvation. They lay sprawled where they’d fallen, except for Nix, who crawled like a battlefield victim to the edge of the ravine and peered down.

  Nix, who was never one for cursing, repeated a few of the phrases Riot had used a few minutes ago.

  “What?” asked Benny listlessly.

  “It’s the other zoms,” she said.

  Benny lifted his head. “What?”

  “They grabbed at Ortega as soon as we started pulling him up. Some of them are still holding on to him.”

  Benny let his head drop back with a thump. He felt Nix crawl up beside him and collapse. They lay there, defeated.

  Finally, Lilah gasped out a single word. A statement and a question.

  “Quad?”

  Benny thought it was Riot who started laughing first. He had his eyes closed and couldn’t tell. First her, then Lilah’s creaking ghost of a laugh, then Nix. Then him. They burst out laughing as they lay on the withered brown grass.

  44

  WHEN THEY COULD WALK, THEY fetched Benny’s quad, tied the end of the rope onto the back of the Honda, gunned the engine, and pulled Sergeant Ortega out of the ravine as easy as pulling a carrot out of soft soil. Four other zoms came up with him. Lilah and Riot were waiting for them, and blades flashed in the sunlight. Withered hands clutched at the big sergeant, but they were no longer attached to anything.

  As Benny dragged Sergeant Ortega away from the ravine, Nix trotted beside the zom, her Monster Cutter sword raised to deliver a quieting blow.

  But she didn’t have to.

  The soldier lay still and silent on the grass.

  Benny killed the engine and ran back to stand beside Nix. Riot and Lilah trotted up. The sergeant lay in a loose-jointed tangle of arms and legs. His face was placid in that slack rest of final death. At a glance, he looked like any other zom. Less comprehensively withered than the people who’d died on First Night, but still leathery from the Nevada sun. The only thing that was noticeably wrong with him was his neck.

  It was too long.

  Inches too long.

  Between the pull of the quad and th
e drag of the other zoms clinging to him, the bones of the dead man’s neck had separated, and the spinal cord had stretched too far and snapped. Had the strain been a little heavier, or the process of pulling him up taken a few seconds longer, the envelope of skin and muscle that comprised his neck would have torn and all they would have pulled out of the ravine was a head.

  They stood around him, their shadows falling over the zom like a shroud.

  “I’m glad we don’t have to quiet him,” said Nix. The others, even Lilah, nodded.

  Benny knelt down and lifted the satchel strap. He had to raise the total slack weight of the sergeant’s head in order to pull the satchel off. He winced but did it anyway. As soon as he had it off, Nix and Riot knelt down and began going through the sergeant’s pockets and laying the items out on a clear patch of dirt. Lilah sorted the items.

  They found a rusted multipurpose tool, a Las Vegas poker chip that Ortega was probably carrying as a good-luck charm, a plastic pocket comb, a pencil with a tip that looked like it had been sharpened with a knife, and several folded pieces of paper money of a kind none of them had ever seen. Instead of a picture of a president, the central image was a star, and Benny saw a phrase in Latin: POPULUS INVICTUS.

  Nix, reading over his shoulder, translated it. “A Nation Unconquerable.”

  Unlike Benny, she had paid attention in language arts.

  “I think that’s the motto of the American Nation,” suggested Benny.

  Lilah nodded her agreement, but Riot snorted.

  “What?” asked Benny, shooting her a look. “You don’t think so?”

  “Close to three hundred million Americans have died, son, during the Fall and in the years after,” said Riot. “How many have to croak before y’all consider it game over?”

  “All,” said Lilah.

  “Absolutely,” agreed Nix. “We’re still fighting.”

  “Yeah,” said Benny, nodding. “Besides, it wasn’t our generation who was defeated when the dead rose. I still believe there’s a future, and I intend to be there to see it.”