Dark of Night - Flesh and Fire

by Jonathan Maberry

  Would it matter if he did?

  The NKK had the numbers, and if they took hostages…what then?

  He broke from the forest and plunged into the tobacco field.

  The house was under siege. There seemed to be an army swarming around it. Too many to fight.

  But as Ledger closed in he realized that more than half of those men were no longer alive. Freshly killed hunters staggered through the overgrown plants and dirt, attacking anything with a pulse. There were at least a dozen fights in progress as the zombies fell upon their former friends. But that left several living hunters. Too many?

  He saw a corpse just beginning to rise and its dead hand still clutched an assault rifle. A Sig SG 550 with a bulky box magazine. Ledger had lost a lot of his faith in the kindness of whomever was on call in heaven, but right then he would have knelt and kissed the Pope’s ring. He kicked the zombie in the head, pinned it to the ground with a knee and tore the rifle from its twitching fingers. He brained it with the stock, then slapped pockets until he came up with a second magazine. As he shoved the magazine into his pocket he assessed the scene, calculating the odds and doing dangerous math in his head. His best chance of survival was to turn around and go. He had a family to find, friends to find. This wasn’t his war.

  “Fuck it,” he said, “and fuck you.”

  Ledger began running toward the house.

  ~46~

  In Hell

  Dez Fox fired at a man wearing a John Deere cap exactly like the one she’d worn when she went out drinking back home. Seeing it reminded her of too many things, so she put a bullet through it. The man fell but his finger jerked the trigger of the huge single-barrel ten-gauge shotgun he carried. The buckshot sprayed the room and two pellets caught Dez—one in the shoulder and one in the cheek. She staggered, pain exploding and blood pouring from the wounds. One of the refugee women sat down with her back to the wall, a dozen spots on her face and throat suddenly blossoming with red. Her eyes rolled up and she fell over. Two other women rushed to try and stanch the wounds, and Dez had no idea if they were already too late.

  Another man raised a Ruger Blackhawk at her, but he suddenly shrieked and twisted around as one of his dead friends on the floor bit deeply into his calf.

  There were a dozen corpses crowning the living room and a few had been dropped with head wounds. The others were writhing and moaning as new life ignited in their brains and new hungers awoke in their souls.

  The four living men who were trying to get to Dez and the refugees. The men were all armed with axes, clubs and knives and they screamed and began smashing at the newly reanimated dead. The room became a slaughterhouse. Blood shot from torn arteries; howls of rage and agony filled the air. Dez began scrabbling on the floor for fresh rounds. Finding some, not finding enough.

  “Oh…fuck me,” she breathed.

  Lindsey struggled to reload her gun, but her hands were streaked with blood and sweat and the weapon slipped from her grasp and landed on the chest of a dead man. She bent for it, but then the dead man’s eyes snapped open and his eyes clicked toward her. She saw the exact moment when they changed from the vacant eyes of the true dead to the predatory eyes of a monster.

  She tried to yank her hand free, but the creature had a solid grip and was stronger than her. It pulled her hand toward its mouth, which was working as if already chewing on her.

  “Watch!” yelled a voice and Lindsey looked up as Rachael stamped a booted foot down on the zombie’s face and then swung her sword in a glittering arc. Lindsey fell back with the dead hand still clamped around her. She yelped and swatted at it until the slack fingers fell away and it lay like some grotesque spider on the kitchen floor.

  Rachael grabbed Lindsey and hauled her unceremoniously to her feet and shoved her toward the corner by the stove. Heavy iron pots were stacked on the drain board, including a cast-iron frying pan. She hoped the kid would get the idea, but didn’t have time to watch. Men were still trying to fight their way in through the shattered door and the kitchen windows.

  So many of them.

  It confused her. They’d seen how many of their own had died in this siege and yet they kept coming. The cost was so high. Were they lost in some kind of battle madness or group hysteria? Was it a lust for revenge for their fallen friends? Or were they just insane?

  She swung and stabbed with her sword, but with each blow her shoulder and arm muscles were screaming at her. Even hardened by six months of combat against the dead, she knew she wasn’t able to keep fighting for much longer. Her wrist throbbed from the impact shock of each blow, and the smell of blood was making her sick. Her heart was beating wildly in her chest and each exhalation felt like a blast of heated air from a furnace.

  Joe Ledger rushed the house, coming up at an angle that would let him see the front and one side. Six men were fighting a knot of zombies. Ledger hosed them with the assault rifle from fifteen feet away. The living went down and the zombies dove onto them, biting the bleeding flesh. Ledger left them to their grisly meal. Those monsters could be dealt with later and for the moment they were useful to him.

  He saw another of the dead staggering toward the slaughter, but Ledger spun him around, grabbed him by the hair and back of the belt and ran him toward a hunter who was slapping a fresh magazine into his gun on the porch steps.

  “Here,” said Ledger as he flung the zombie against the man. They went down in a wild tangle of teeth, scrabbling fingers, blood and howls.

  Ledger caught the man’s gun before it could land in the dirt. With the assault rifle in his left, he ran up onto the porch with his new pistol leading the way. The three men on the porch turned to see their comrade wrestling with a zombie and a stranger rushing at them.

  They died.

  The last of them fell backward into the living room, and Ledger stepped on his chest as he entered the house.

  He saw Dez Fox behind a dining room table and everything around her was an orgy of murder. The dead outnumbered the living and they were tearing the hunters apart. Soon there would only be zombies in here. Sixteen at least.

  Ledger paused for one moment, doing more calculations about how many rounds he had left between pistol and assault rifle. Every single shot would have to count.

  A zombie crawled toward him and tried to bit his shin. Ledger whipped his leg up and brought his heel down in a devastating axe kick. He couldn’t hear the snap of bones beneath the general din, but from the wall the monster fell Ledger was certain that he wouldn’t need to use a bullet on that one.

  He raised his gun and fired.

  Fired.

  Fired.

  Dez Fox was seldom happy to see most people. She liked kids and dogs. She liked banging men. But she wasn’t really a people person.

  That said, when Captain Joe Ledger stepped through the door, a gun in each hand, she would have married him on the spot. Or banged him. Or whatever. He was nobody’s idea of a white knight and she was ten million miles away from being a damsel in distress. She’d have cut the balls off of anyone who even suggested that. But Ledger was a fellow cop, a fellow soldier, and he was here. Not to rescue her, but to help her save her kids.

  Behind her the refugee women and girls huddled in a quavering mass, all of them pushed to the edge of total hysteria.

  As soon as he opened up on the crowd of hunters and zombies, the mass of struggling bodies seemed to turn, to focus their awareness—however fractured—on him. That gave Dez time to find the box of nine-millimeter rounds and cram some into a magazine. No time for a full count, though. She slapped it in place and began firing.

  Baskerville raised his muzzle from the dead hunter and sniffed the air. It was thick with the smells of blood, piss, gun smoke, and sweat, but there—deep inside the olio of scents—was something else. A scent he knew like none other. The scent of his pack leader.

  He threw his head back and let loose with a howl of terrible red joy.

  A man grabbed for Lindsey, missed her arm and caught the sh
oulder of her blouse. He yanked hard just as she lunged backward, and the whole front of the shirt tore away. The bra she wore beneath was soiled and spattered with blood, old and new. The man actually leered at her and started to say something. She grabbed the skillet off the stove and swung it with all of her fear, strength, anger and disgust across his face. He spun away from her, spewing teeth and dropped at once to his knees. Lindsey hit him again, this time on the back of the head. He pitched forward at once and began twitching like a trout on the floor.

  Rachael was fighting two men, both of them armed with knives. One had a big Buck hunting knife and the other had a bread knife. She had a sword and dagger.

  She wanted to say something, to drop one of those cool lines that heroes in movies always managed to come up with in the heat of the moment.

  This wasn’t a movie. This was her life, so she saved her breath for fighting.

  The slide locked back on Ledger pistol and so he jammed the empty gun into the throat of a hunter, crushing the windpipe and hyoid bone. The man clawed at his throat as if he could somehow force it to breathe, but that option was no longer his and he fell with a look of profound defeat on his face.

  Ledger took the SG 550 in both hands, set the selector switch to single shot, put the stock to his shoulder, braced his feet and began firing. One head shot after another.

  Bang.

  Bang

  Bang.

  Each shot was a crack of thunder in the room. Anyone who tried to charge him, living or dead, died. Either from one of his heavy 5.56×45mm NATO rounds or the bullets Dez Fox fired. Caught between two superb killers with automatic weapons the hunters and the zombies all fell.

  Down.

  Down.

  Down.

  The last man tried to make a break for it, running over the bodies of his friends toward the smashed in window. Ledger stepped into his path and slammed him across the face with the stock of the assault rifle. The man went staggering back, spun, looking for another way out. He saw Dez point a gun at him. The man tried to speak, but his jaw was broken and only blood and a mewling mumble of words came from his mouth. He raised his hands in a pleading gesture. Begging for mercy where none existed.

  Dez Fox shot him in the face.

  Lindsey swung the skillet at the hands reaching in through the window, breaking bones. There were no howls of pain though…only moans of unassuageable hunger.

  She kept smashing though, the skillet heavy in her bloody hands. It was the only weapon she had left.

  One of the two attackers was down, but the other was giving Rachael a real right. He was quick and although she had the longer reach with her sword, he moved like a cat, parrying, evading, dancing out of the way. As they fought he kept up a patter of ugly words, using them with as much skill as the knife he carried.

  “You’re pretty good with that thing,” he said, laughing, “but that won’t matter none. And you’re just making it worse for yourself, darlin’. Ol’ Teddy’s going to teach you some manners, yes ma’am. I’m going to enjoy teaching you the facts of life. Oh hell yes. And you look like you’d enjoy it, too. You got a rack on you and I—.”

  And Baskerville slammed into him from the side.

  Rachael stood there, her arms sagging to her sides, her weapons feeling like hundred pound weights, chest heaving and sweat pouring down her face and throat. She watched the dog and the man. The dog and what it did to the man. The dog and what quickly stopped being a man. It was a dreadful way to die, but her heart was a stone.

  She looked around the kitchen.

  Lindsey was hammering at dead hands with a skillet. Baskerville was tearing at something that no longer even screamed. Everything and everyone else was dead.

  Dead.

  She stood in a lake of blood.

  This is the world, she thought. Just this.

  Death and pain, the rapacious malevolence of the living, the ending hunger of the dead. This is what the world has become. This and nothing more.

  “God…,” she murmured. She did not even feel the tears that ran like molten silver down her cheeks.

  Then she looked down at the floor and saw that some of the old floorboards were warped from age. Blood seeped down between them and fresh horror rose in her mind as she imagined the slow rainfall of red droplets falling into the basement.

  It was only then that she could hear the muffled screams. Not of pain, but of horror. The children.

  Good god, the children.

  She took a deep breath and raised her sword and dagger, and staggered with leaden feet over to the window to help Lindsey. To fight. To end this.

  But as she reached Lindsey to push her out of the way, a voice rang out behind her.

  “Move!”

  Rachael and Lindsey both turned to see Dez Fox come striding into the kitchen. A small group of women and children—all strangers to Rachael—crowded behind her. Dez pushed between Rachael and Lindsey, raised her pistol at the dead…and fired. There were other shots—the heavier bark of an assault rifle—from outside and more of the dead fell away. The guns roared and roared. And then stopped.

  Everything seemed to stop.

  The whole world juddered down to stillness.

  Rachael listened to the night. She heard nothing. No new shots, no means, no cries of anger or pain.

  Nothing.

  Baskerville suddenly went running into the dining room, through the living room and outside, yelping and barking. Not in distress.

  In joy.

  A moment later the dog came back inside and with him was a tall man with graying blond hair, a tanned face lined with age and scars, carrying an assault rifle. Captain Ledger. The one Lindsey had told him about. The man looked down around at the carnage. Then he dropped the weapon onto the chest of the man Baskerville had just killed. He smiled, a faint and sad smile that showed his age.

  “It’s over,” he said.

  And Lindsey began to cry.

  ~47~

  Dez Fox

  Dez Fox went down into the cellar and her kids swarmed around her, pulling her down the last few steps, hugging her, kissing her, clinging to her despite the blood and dirt on her clothes. She dropped to her knees and wept with them. The last of the women survivors went with her and together they shared in the thing that exists when all of the violence and bloodshed and horror has passed.

  Life.

  ~48~

  The Farmhouse

  It took days to bury all the dead.

  It was grisly work. Backbreaking and heartbreaking. The bodies of the refugee women and children who’d been killed were given markers. It was the wrong time of year for flowers, but Ledger had no doubt there would be some in the spring.

  The corpses of the NKK men were buried in a gulley and covered over with wheelbarrows filled with dirt. The only marker was when Baskerville raised a leg and pissed all over it. Dez saw that and laughed until she cried.

  While the women were burying the dead, Ledger spent most of his time in the forests. Hunting. Twice Dez went with him. They’d worked in grim silence and never once talked about the things they did out there. All that mattered was that they could tell the refugees, without lying, that none of the NKK men would be coming back. Not one. Not as living attackers or dead biters.

  It would have been nice to be able to say that all threats had been dealt with, but Ledger was tired of lies.

  The nights at the farmhouse were long. There were tears and there were stories. One of the women died two days later. She was the one who’d taken some of the buckshot in the throat. Dez made sure she wouldn’t rise again and they all stood with her when the woman was buried alongside the others. No one had a prayer to say except Rachael, who recited something in Elvish. Ledger cut a look at Dez, and she raised her eyebrows as if to say ‘it’s better than anything I have’.

  It was nearly a week before Rachael told them she had to leave. The whole group walked her out to the road and Lindsey handed her a sheet of paper with everyone’s name on
it. Rachael looked at it and then turned away to hide the tears that sprang into her eyes.

  She walked alone down the road and everyone stood and watched until she was out of sight.

  ~49~

  Rachael Elle

  Rachael couldn’t find the words in her head to express how grateful she was to see the hospital ahead as they left the woods, excited to be back with her friends, and nervous that something had happened to them, all at the same time.

  As the approached the large gate, she saw Matt, one of her Avengers Tower survivors, guarding it, broadsword in hand, and her heart soared. He called out to her in excitement, and she heard the sound of the gate being unbolted.

  She smiled at the women who traveled with her.

  “This is home. At least, for now. It’s safe here. There’s a lot of us here. We’re going to build a future.”

  She expected Matt to be the first one out to great them, but it wasn’t him that rushed out to her. Instead her eyes focused on blonde hair and red cloak, broad shoulders and big muscles, the image of a true superhero, and her heart rushed as a smile came to her face.

  Brett ran towards her, his smile matching her own, but he stopped as he approached, his eyes taking in every inch of her, as if he didn’t believe she was real. It had been nearly a month since she’d been gone, and so much had happened

  She had changed so much. She’d become nearly a different person. She had a mission now, a goal, something she needed to do. It wasn’t just about saving people and bringing them together. It was about making this world, and the hand they were dealt, worth living, for everyone.

  She could only imagine what she looked like, but she knew now what she was. She didn’t need to pretend to be a superhero, she didn’t need to play make believe.