Dark of Night - Flesh and Fire (2 page)

She’d lived this long because she was too mad at God to lay down and die. And because there was hope. Thin and threadbare, but there.

Now this.

This…

Dez knew where those soldiers had come from; knew it as surely as if they had spoken to her with their dead voices. The Appomattox River rescue station was twenty miles up this road. Dez didn’t want to look at the skeletons of the four horses and six cows they’d used to pull the bus all these months. The animals had made it to within an easy day’s walk of the rescue station and then a swarm of the dead had come out of the woods. Dez and Biel had fought them, but only for a while. They’d killed thirty-six of the dead, but as that day wore on more than two hundred zombies were drawn to the sound of gunfire.

They didn’t have enough bullets to win that kind of fight. The horses and cows all died.

So, during a lull, Dez and Biel dragged the corpses of the ones she’d killed over to the bus and did her best to stack them around the vehicle. Then they wrapped rags around their own mouths, used bunches of weeds as paintbrushes, and painted the sides of the bus in the black worm-infested blood of the zombies. They were careful not to get any on their skin. It was horrible work and then only abandoned it after a fresh wave of the dead came staggering out of the woods.

The presence of the rotting corpses and the stink from the tainted blood kept the fresh waves of dead away from the bus. Those creatures were not attracted to putrescence. They only hungered for warm, living flesh.

Dez kept her kids safe in the bus and the nights and days passed in silent horror. They lived in that bus—stretching out their food, trying to ignore the stink of all those kids using buckets for toilets. Enduring. Weeping silently. Screaming into bunched-up jackets so as not to draw down death.

In the darkest parts of the night, as wave after wave of zombies passed by, Dez wondered—as she always did—about the other busses. Had any survived? If so, how many?

Had Billy survived?

Her on-again-off-again boyfriend, Billy Trout, had been in one of the other busses during the storm. She hadn’t seen him in more than five months. Three times wandering refugees had told her about seeing groups of children walking with adults along the road. Or about busses blackened by fire or splattered with blood. She had no idea if the refugees were mad or accurate, or if these were even the children from Stebbins. Everyone who was alive was fleeing, and a lot of people were headed to Asheville.

If the safe zone there was even real.

If any of it was real.

The Appomattox River rescue station was supposed to be real, though. Too many people swore to it. There were signs, freshly painted, all along this road.

But now this.

The National Guard station had been their only beacon of hope. It was supposed to be maintained by a strong unit of soldiers who had food, shelter and medical care, and all of it under the protection of tanks and heavy weapons. A fortress that not even the dead could overwhelm.

It was up this road.

It was in the direction where this pack of zombies had come from.

Dez saw the hope in all of those young eyes.

She wanted so badly to scream.

Rachael Elle

It was quiet.

If there was one thing that Rachael had to identify as the part about the end of the world that she didn’t expect, it was the silence. In video games and horror movies there was always music to announce something bad was going to happen. Bad guys had theme songs, and ambient music to build anxiety to big climaxes. She didn’t realize how much background noise existed in real life until it was all gone.

She didn’t realize how alone she was.

Now she eagerly waited for the scarce sounds of birds and other animals, anything to keep her company as she walked silently down the freeway. Anything to fill the silence.

Anything but the moans of the dead.

Those were the sounds she heard in her nightmares. Those were the sounds she heard while she was awake.

Nervously checking her weapons again, she scanned around. The road she was walking down was empty on her side for a while, with abandoned cars stacked up bumper to bumper across the median. Wrecked cars, smashed and burned out in some cases, littered the edges of the road. The wind whistled through the metal, rattling car doors left ajar and fluttering scraps of paper and plastic like leaves.

And bodies.

There were more bodies than she could bear to count. She avoided getting to close to any of the clusters of cars, the piles of dead. She didn’t want to deal with something grabbing her when she wasn’t expecting it. It was harder traveling in this world without someone having her back.

Rachael wished she’d asked someone to come with her, but she couldn’t risk any of them on this trip. They were safe in the hospital. It was probably only going to be a temporary shelter for her group, but it would do. For now, at least. They had the supplies they needed, people around, a defense system. Plus, when she came back she needed a definitive place to meet them. A rally point. If they were wandering, she’d never find them again.

Brett wasn’t happy she was leaving. In the two months it took them to get to out of New York and make their careful way south they’d taken on being co-leaders for the group. They weren’t voted in or anything as formal as that; it was just something that had happened naturally. They’d been friends for so long, they were in sync. Even when fighting they had each other’s backs.

But she couldn’t ask him to leave the group. The group needed him to be there. He was big and powerful, he
looked
like a hero, and that calmed everyone else. It made them feel safe. Without Brett, Rachael knew, there would be panic and chaos. He would keep the group safe; he would keep them all together.

However Rachael knew that Brett was as terrified as everyone else, but she also knew that he was trying to act brave for her. She also knew that acting brave was sometimes enough. Fake it ‘til you make it. She hoped that by leaving him in charge he would man up, get more confident,
become
tougher. Like her and some of the others, Brett still wore the hero costume he’d made for Comic Con. Thor, prince of Asgard. All leather and lightweight chainmail. Rachael wore her warrior woman costume, also made of leather reinforced with metal. At first they kept their costumes because it was nearly impossible to bite through those materials, but now they made a statement. To the others in their party and to each of them.

“Stay alive.”

That’s what Brett had said to her before she left, hugging her tightly as if he’d never see her again. She promised him she’d come back alive and in one piece.

Nice promise, easily said.

Rachael’s hands nervously traced the ridges in her sword as she cast around, walking quickly and silently. In the last months, her sword hadn’t left her side. It wasn’t the one that had been part of her costume. This one had been scavenged from the hotel room of one of the event’s vendors. He’d been a knife smith who sold everything from Klingon
bat’leth
to steel katanas to perfect replicas of the swords from each of the
Lord of the Rings
movies. The vendor hadn’t been in his room and Rachael had no idea what happened to him. When she and Brett had begun to raid the other hotel rooms for supplies and food, they’d found the cache of weapons. It had been a godsend. Truly. Rachael had collapsed on the floor, clutching an armful of sheathed swords to her chest, and wept.

Now she carried one of those swords, an exact but functional replica of the sword carried by the elf lady Arwen in
The Fellowship of the Ring
. It was a real weapon with a razor-sharp edge, and she had the matching daggers as well. She kept them oiled and honed and ready, and those weapons had saved her life too many times to count. She was not an expert fencer, but that didn’t matter. When you’re fighting Orcs you don’t need finesse and fancy footwork. Rachael favored slashing and working fast, taking them out with shots to the head as quickly as possible. Or chopping through their legs and letting the less skilled members of their team finish them with blunt force trauma to the head.

Orcs
. That’s what her group called the hungry dead. Easier to think of them as movie monsters, because the heroes could always cut their way through armies of Orcs. Heroes always won.

Right?

Yeah…maybe. But not always. They’d lost most of their friends in the first day. The rest didn’t make it out of New York. There were other cosplayers that had made it out of the Avengers Tower—the hotel where they’d barricaded themselves the first few weeks—and civilians. Lots of civilians. Besides the group of thirty-two they’d gotten out of the hotel at New York Comic Con, they’d picked up more and more survivors as they took the trek to New Jersey.

But there were more people out there. There had to be. For the few months that they had been at the hospital they’d sent out small groups, looking for survivors, trying to bring them to safety. After the fall, civilizations had scattered. Cities were dangerous, and from what they could tell any survivors had vanished into the countryside.

There were rumors that there were camps of survivors further out, that the government had safe places they’d set up that hadn’t fallen. Survivors meant more people. But no one could give her a definitive answer on where.

That’s why Rachael had left Brett, had left the group behind at the hospital. It was safe there, hopefully. There was food and power, enough beds for her people, and they’d managed to clear out all of the Orcs. It was their haven, at least for now.

And she’d send people back. With the world in chaos, there needed to be a safe place for survivors.

But she couldn’t make this trip with all of them. It would have taken them too long to try to find any survivors and get back, and she couldn’t risk their lives. They weren’t warriors, the people that they’d saved. They were scared. They would slow her down, and the more people there were, the larger the chances that they would lose some of them. Better she went out alone, find the camps, see if she could find any refugees that she could bring back to the safety of the hospital or, in turn, make sure there was a safe place that her and her group could stand a chance of starting their lives over again.

For someone who never played as a lawful good character, she really cared too much about saving people.

The sound of her boots was muffled against the pavement, and she was keeping a quick pace. Moving alone meant she could travel quickly, rest for shorter times, and hide easily, and since she’d left the hospital she’d covered a lot of ground. There were roaming hordes of Orcs on the road, though whether they were migrating somewhere together like geese or just happened to find each other when the world ended Rachael didn’t know. All Rachael knew was that she wasn’t taking on a horde alone.

So now she was traveling south as quickly as she could, on a fool’s errand. She could tell that’s what Brett had thought, though he never said it. Why should she go south, to the unknown, and leave their safe place behind? They had plenty of people here, plenty of food and supplies. How would she ever get back? Would she come back?

He didn’t say it, but she could see the pain in his eyes. They’d lost everyone else. Now he could lose her too.

The wind carried the faint sound of a groan and the smell of death, and Rachael cast around, drawing her sword from the scabbard on her belt. She squinted into the sunlight ahead, eying the hazy silhouette, the hunched shape of a broken body that limped along the cracked pavement. She only saw one, though that didn’t mean more weren’t out of sight.

One she could take. She couldn’t let these Orcs roam, hurt people, so she cleared them as she could.

Rachael walked towards the figure calmly, sword out and ready. It was a solo Orc, with tangled hair and half of her face tattered to shreds, which lunged at her the moment she got close, a bone chilling, inhuman sound escaping its throat the moments before Rachael sliced her sword through its head.

And then she was alone again in silence.

She couldn’t think of those Orcs as what they’d been before. Rachael was not a killer. Rachael was a survivor, and she was doing what she had to do, but the moment she thought of these things as human beings she knew she would hesitate. And hesitation would be her death.

They were not human. They were monsters, like a video game villain’s minions of darkness.

Except real.

That was the hardest part about all of this. After a life spent role-playing heroes and aliens, after years of live-action role-playing against Orcs, monsters, mutants and bands of killers in handmade costumes, this was real.

Real.

God.

Real.

The Ranger and the Dog

“What is it, boy?” murmured the big man.

He came to the edge of forest wall and squatted down next to where a huge dog stood. The animal was a mix of white shepherd and Irish wolfhound. One hundred and fifty pounds of muscle and fang, wrapped in strips of leather that were studded with heavy metal washers. Bite proof. The leather was oiled and worked to make it as silent as possible, and the dog—like the man—knew how to move without a sound. A helmet of thick iron-studded leather was buckled onto the dog’s head. It made the animal look like one of the fighting dogs from ancient times.

The man was tall, in his fifties but muscular, with coarse blond hair that was going gray and blue eyes surrounded by crow’s feet. He wore combat fatigue pants and a utility vest over a black t-shirt. The logo of the Army Rangers peeked above the vee of the vest.

The dog leaned slightly toward the road. His way of pointing. And the ranger narrowed his eyes to peer through the gloom of the woods and the bright sunlight of the midday road. The landscape was in a thousand shades of leaf green, bark brown, shadow gray and macadam black. But there in the middle of it was a bright yellow bus. Filthy, streaked with mud or possibly dried blood.