Fire and Ash

by Jonathan Maberry

  Benny felt sick, but at the same time none of this truly surprised him. Tom had always warned against coincidences, and now he understood why.

  McReady said, “Look, mister, I don’t really know who you are, but I know enough about the Night Church. You think that we’re acting against your god’s will by trying to preserve life. But everything I learned as a doctor, every oath I took, was to preserve life, to hold all life as sacred. How is that a sin? How is acting according to my beliefs a sin, even if they’re different from yours?”

  “Because your oaths were made to a false god,” said Brother Peter.

  It was a pointless argument and everyone knew it. The reapers would not be swayed from their beliefs—if they could, they never would have invaded this facility. They were too deeply entrenched in their hatred of life.

  “You’re going to kill them all, aren’t you?” said McReady flatly. “The people in the infirmary . . . you’re really going to slaughter them.”

  “We are going to release them from their torment,” corrected Brother Peter.

  “No—I’ve released them. I’ve given them the cure. They’re going to get well. Most of them, anyway. They don’t have to die now. You can’t just kill a bunch of sick people while they’re tied to their beds. It’s inhuman. . . .”

  “It’s the mercy of Thanatos. . . .”

  “All praise to his darkness,” echoed the reapers.

  “But if their bonds are what’s troubling you, don’t worry,” continued Peter. “We’ll cut them loose so they can freely accept the kiss of the knives and the forgiveness of the darkness. Just as we released the thousands imprisoned on this side of the trench above us. We set all captives free.” He pointed back the way the reapers had come. “We even found a lonely wretch in a solitary cage back there and set him free—in both body and spirit.”

  “You what . . . ?” said Benny, looking past Brother Peter.

  “In a cage?” echoed Lilah, her face going pale. “Chong—?”

  “I’m afraid he was unable to tell me his name. I left one of my reapers to unlock his chains so he could go unfettered into the darkness that waits for us all.”

  The scream that filled the hallway was terrifying. It was torn from such a deep place, such a shattered and broken place, that it lacked any trace of personality or language or humanity. It did not—could not—have come from a human throat.

  And yet it did.

  Lilah shoved Nix aside and leaped at Brother Peter, driving the spear through the air toward his heart. It was such a murderous blow that it would have torn a red hole straight through his body.

  But Brother Peter was not there.

  He moved so quickly that his body seemed to melt out of the way of the spear. Instead Lilah’s spear killed the reaper behind him, punching through stomach and spine and driving the man down to the floor.

  Brother Peter lashed out with his empty hand; it caught Lilah on the side of the face and drove her to her knees. The impact was terrible, and anyone else would have collapsed there and then, but the rage in Lilah was too hot, the grief too awful. She dove at Peter’s legs, wrapping her arms around them and bowling him over. He fell, a cry of genuine surprise bursting from his mouth.

  Benny snapped out of his shock at the same moment the reapers did. Two of them darted in to help Brother Peter, but Benny’s kami katana flashed and slashed, and the hands slapped against Lilah’s back but they were no longer attached to the reaching arms. Jets of red splashed the struggling figures.

  In an instant the hallway was a circus of murder and mayhem.

  “Grimm,” croaked Joe weakly, “hit, hit, hit!”

  Reapers with axes and swords ran forward to try and kill Joe—the man they all feared—but Grimm met their charge. Benny had a split second’s view of heavy weapons chopping down and heard the heavy clang of knife edges against armor, the yelp of a dog, the scream of a man. Then he had no more time to do anything but fight.

  Benny whirled and kicked one of the screaming reapers so that he fell backward into the knot of others; and Benny lunged again, thrusting his blade in and in again, first on one side of the man and then the other. Two reapers shrieked as red mouths opened in their chests.

  Then the others surged forward, shoving the dying men at Benny, using them to block as they advanced. Suddenly Nix was there with Dojigiri, and the ancient blade cut low and high and low again, savagely slashing across knees and thighs.

  In a wider hallway the reapers would have already won, but the confines of the narrow hallway made it impossible for the killers to surround them. Nix and Benny fought side by side, slashing the way a samurai does—not chopping with muscle but stroking the long length of their katanas, using the smooth draw of the edge to make the steel bite deep. Somewhere—a million miles away—Dr. McReady was screaming.

  Benny was vaguely aware of Lilah and Peter rolling over and over on the bloody ground. The reapers of the Red Brotherhood surged forward, and suddenly it seemed as if the world was full of knives. He and Nix blocked and parried and retreated, fighting with all their skill simply to stay alive. These killers had rebounded from their immediate shock, and now Benny could understand why they were the elite of the Night Church. Each one of them was a superb fighter; any one of them might be enough to beat the two teenagers with swords and end things right here and now.

  He caught a glimpse of Grimm. The dog was still on his feet, still fighting, his armor splashed with blood. Men, none of them whole, lay on the ground around him. A reaper had picked up Lilah’s spear and was trying to kill the mastiff with it. Grimm ran and jumped at him, propelling his two hundred and fifty pounds and forty pounds of spiked armor into the air. The reaper fell backward—and his body seemed to fly apart.

  McReady’s screams took a sharper, higher note as something slammed into the back of the last reaper in the hallway. Something that bore him to the ground with such ferocity that the man’s head smashed against the stone floor. Something that leaped like a mad ape at the next man in line and tore at his throat with broken fingernails and strong teeth. Something that roared and howled and growled out a single terrifying word.

  “HUNGRY!”

  The Red Brothers turned.

  Benny and Nix stared.

  Grimm barked in fear.

  The creature bared bloody teeth at them.

  Nix was the only one who could find her voice.

  “Chong!”

  84

  BROTHER PETER WAS LOCKED IN a death struggle with Lilah, but he managed to shout an order to his startled men.

  “Kill it!”

  It was the wrong thing to say.

  Yes, it snapped everyone out of their shocked tableau; but it switched the focus of the fight to the wrong place for a fraction of a second too long.

  As the reapers lunged forward to subdue the savage monster that was Chong, they momentarily forgot Benny and Nix.

  Tom Imura’s young samurai made them pay for that inattention.

  Without a word, without even a shared look of agreement, Benny and Nix attacked. Their blades whipped and slashed with all the speed they could muster, all the skill they possessed, all the rage that burned in their hearts. They did not try for killing blows. That required more time than this fragile moment of opportunity offered. Instead they cut at tendons and muscle, across the backs of knees and the backs of arms. Men and weapons crumpled. Screams filled the corridor, the echoes punching the struggling figures from every direction.

  Benny heard a meaty thud, and out of the corner of his eye he saw Lilah pitch sideways, reeling away from Brother Peter’s vicious punch. It was the second blow he’d delivered, and tough as she was, Lilah was still a teenage girl, while Brother Peter was an adult man in the full prime of his physical strength. She rolled against the wall, dazed and bleeding from nose and left ear.

  Grimm attacked the knot of reapers from the side, slamming sideways against them to use his shoulder spikes. The Red Brothers stabbed at him and broke their blades o
n his armor.

  A few yards away Brother Peter staggered to his feet. He was bloody and panting. One eye was puffed nearly shut, and there was a ragged bite mark on his cheek from when Lilah had savagely bitten him. He had a long, shallow cut across his chest that caused the whole front of his shirt to hang down, exposing muscles that were sharply defined beneath bloody skin. For all those injuries, however, the young reaper seemed unconcerned. He still held one short knife, and as he rose he drew another from a concealed pocket inside his clothes.

  Reapers screamed as they were caught between the savagery of Chong’s feral attack and the whistling blades of Dojigiri and the kami katana. The surviving reapers were fighting back to back, trying to use their blades to stop the longer steel, but now they were on the defensive.

  Grimm raced along the wall toward Brother Peter, but the reaper deftly sidestepped and kicked the dog in the side. Even with the armor, the kick was powerful enough to knock the mastiff into the wall, where he lay winded and whining.

  With a snarl of annoyance, Brother Peter waded into the fight, blocking Nix’s blade with one knife and slashing at her with the other. Blood erupted from amid the freckles on Nix’s cheek, the slash bisecting the scar that ran from her hairline to her jaw.

  Nix cried out in pain and retreated, cutting with redoubled speed, but everywhere her sword went, Brother Peter’s knives were there to deflect it. He moved so fast that it looked like he had eight arms. Metal rang on metal as he drove Nix back.

  Benny wanted to jump in to help her, but the other reapers renewed their attack, forcing him back. Other killers surrounded Chong.

  Suddenly a shot rang out and one of the reapers went spinning away, blood erupting from a hole in his throat.

  For an irrational moment Benny thought it was Joe Ledger, but the ranger had only managed to get to his hands and knees and was leaning against the wall, gasping like a fish on a riverbank.

  The shock of the gunfire temporarily stopped the fight in the hallway. The reapers backed away from Chong, uncertain of what was happening; and Chong scuttled away from them, bleeding, glaring, and confused.

  A figure raced up from behind Dr. McReady, grabbed the scientist, shoved her away from all the fighting, and fired two more shots. Reapers dodged and yelled, and one of them fell with a wound in his shoulder. The newcomer wore a military uniform that was torn and bloodstained, and she had a wild look in her eyes.

  Colonel Jane Reid.

  She fired another shot and a reaper clutched his chest and fell, but then the slide locked back on Colonel Reid’s pistol.

  Brother Peter saw this and dodged Nix’s cuts and ran at Reid, eyes blazing.

  In a freakish way Benny could understand the reaper’s rage. Colonel Reid was the commander of Sanctuary, and this whole place stood as a symbol of everything the Night Church wanted to destroy. Killing her must be to Brother Peter what killing one of the archdukes of hell would have been for a crusading knight of old.

  Benny stepped into the reaper’s path, his sword raised.

  “Stop!”

  If Brother Peter was impressed in any way by Benny and his sword, he did not show it. He merely looked impatient. Benny shuffled backward to keep his body between the reaper and the colonel.

  “No,” he said.

  All the fighting in the hallway stopped. Even Chong hung back, his body hunched like an ape’s, his eyes feral and watchful, bloody teeth bared.

  Brother Peter stopped.

  “If it is your wish to die a hero, boy,” he said, “then I will oblige you.”

  “That’s not how it’s going to be.”

  “Ah,” said the reaper, “is this the point where you make a lovely speech about how we can all walk away with our lives intact? Will you offer me and mine safe passage out of here if we leave you and these other sinners alive? Is that what this is?”

  “No,” said Benny. Despite the shadows the hallway seemed bright. All sounds were so clear and distinct. If his body trembled with fear, at that moment Benny couldn’t feel it.

  “Or,” said Brother Peter, looking coldly amused, “are you going to play the hero and challenge me to a winner-take-all duel? Two champions fighting for our separate causes. It’s very grand, but—”

  “Not really.”

  The reaper’s eyes darkened. “Then what is it? Did you simply want everyone to watch your great death scene?”

  Grimm, who had finally struggled to his feet, uttered a long, low growl.

  “No,” Benny said again. He licked his lips. “This isn’t a grandstand play, and it’s not a scene from a storybook. This is me, Benny Imura, just a kid from a small town, telling you that I’m going to kill you. Right here, right now.”

  Brother Peter shook his head. “Why is it that you people can’t understand that we crave death—all death, including our own. Why do you persist in trying to unnerve us with threats?”

  “That’s not what I’m trying to do,” said Benny. “I don’t really care if you want to die or not. I don’t care if killing you is like giving you a puppy on your birthday. I don’t really care about anything, you big freak. I’m just telling you that I’m going to kill you.”

  Brother Peter raised his arms out to his sides, as Saint John so often did in the moment before he taught another blasphemer the error of his presumptions. “Then go ahead, little sinner. If you think you can kill me . . . then kill me.”

  Benny Imura looked into the dead eyes of this master killer.

  “Sure,” he said.

  And he attacked.

  85

  TOM ONCE TOLD BENNY THIS about fighting: “Pit two amateurs against each other and the fight will go on all day. They’ll break a lot of furniture and they’ll bloody each other up a bit, but at the end of it, no one’s likely to get badly hurt. However, in a fight between two experts—two people with some skill and a real determination to kill each other—then it’s all over in a second or two. Sportsmen duel, killers kill.”

  It was all over in two fractured halves of one second.

  In the first half of that second . . .

  Brother Peter parried Benny’s sword with one knife, spun off the point of impact, and drove the other knife into Benny’s back. The blade tore through the tough body armor and skittered along the back of his rib cage, exploding a fireball of alien heat in Benny’s body.

  But Benny was not shocked by the pain. Or the damage.

  He was not surprised by being stabbed.

  He expected it.

  He’d planned for it.

  Brother Peter was too good to be defeated in such a duel. Maybe Tom, at the top of his game, might have done it. Maybe a younger and faster Joe Ledger might have. But no one in that hallway—not Nix or Lilah, not Grimm, not Chong, or Colonel Reid even if she had more bullets—none of them could ever beat Brother Peter.

  Benny knew that Brother Peter would parry his attack because Peter was expecting the attack. Benny knew the reaper would stab him, because Peter was too good not to. So Benny attacked and was parried, and he was stabbed. And he was ready for all that. His first move was a big, fast kirioroshi, a downward cut. His raised arms gave Brother Peter something to block but also kept the killer’s knives away from his own throat.

  In the last half of that one second . . .

  As the blade chunked into his back, Benny pivoted in place. A sloppy move filled with agony, but perfect in its selection. It used the force of the stabbing knife to power the turn as Benny swung his sword between himself and Brother Peter. A yoko-giri, a tight lateral cut that cleaved the air between them.

  Except that there was not enough distance for the sword to pass unhindered.

  Brother Peter was too close.

  Too close to avoid that blade.

  Too close to escape the moment and all its red truths.

  The sword drew a line through both of the reaper’s biceps, and through the flat plates of the man’s pectoral muscles, and grated along the bones in his chest, grooving the sternum so dee
ply that it collapsed inward. Brother Peter coughed as those jagged bones did awful work inside his body.

  The kami katana flew from Benny’s hands as he staggered past the point of impact. He managed a single reflexive step before the pain drove him down to his knees. He fell against Colonel Reid, who—like everyone else—stared in abject horror at what had just happened.

  The second came and went, and in its wake there was wreckage that would last forever.

  Brother Peter stood for a moment longer. The stern, unlined face of the man who had never smiled now wore its first smile. A bemused smile, as he looked down at his chest and saw the red mouth that stretched all the way across his body. He dropped to his knees with such force that the sound of bone on concrete was like gunshots.

  Benny turned and looked at him. They were only three feet apart, both of them on their knees.

  “You—you haven’t won,” said Brother Peter in a voice that was wet and trembling.

  There was a sound—the sharp, harsh, metallic sound of someone working the bolt of a machine gun—and Benny saw Joe Ledger, still bleeding, his face gray with pain, leaning against the far wall. His weapon was in his hands, barrel pointed at the remaining reapers.

  “Yes, we have,” said Benny, and his voice was firmer than he thought it would be. He expected to speak in a dying whisper, but the lights in his head were not going out. Not yet. “We have a cure now. We win.”

  The reaper sneered at him, blood dribbling from between his lips. “Take your . . . cure . . . see if it will save . . . anyone . . .”

  His words were torn apart by a fit of coughing that sent him crashing to the stones. He fell over and stared at Benny with glazing eyes, but his lips still moved. Despite the agony in his own body, Benny crawled to him and bent to listen.

  “Your sins . . . are already . . . paid for . . . ,” wheezed Brother Peter. “Even now . . . Saint John and our . . . army . . . are closing in on your . . . home.”

  “Home? What are you talking about?”

  Brother Peter was fading quickly, the lights burning out in his eyes. “Mountainside will burn.”