Dark of Night - Flesh and Fire (6 page)

“Circle,” he called out and Baskerville cut suddenly left and really poured it on. He vanished into the corn but went wide to try and get in front of the fleeing girl. The girl was fast but the dog was faster. The ranger heard her voice rise in a sudden shriek. The girl had encountered the dog.

The ranger moved into the cornfield but he slowed his pace, then paused to call out.

“Girl,” he said, pitching his voice to be heard but keeping urgency out of it. “Hey, kid…don’t be afraid. My dog won’t hurt you and neither will I.”

There was no sound, no answer.

“Those guys back there…they can’t hurt you anymore.”

Nothing.

“I’m a soldier,” he called. “My name is Captain Joe Ledger. My dog’s name is Baskerville and he will not hurt you. We just want to help.”

There was silence in the cornfield but the ranger—Ledger—thought it was different. A
listening
stillness.

“Please,” he called. “I know you’re scared. You’re smart to be scared. I’m scared, too. But I’m a soldier and a father and I won’t let anyone hurt you.”

More silence except for the soft rustle of the corn.

Then a voice spoke. Young, trembling, frightened. Female.

“Leave me alone.”

Ledger inched forward. “I can’t, sweetheart. You’re alone out here and there are more of those NKK freaks out there. You’re safer with Baskerville and me.”

“I can take care of myself,” she said, and there was some iron mixed in with the fear.

“Not alone, kid. Heck, I don’t even travel alone and I used to be with Special Forces.” He had her exact location pegged now. Forty feet in and slightly to his right.

“Go away!” she yelled.

“Can’t do it, darlin’,” he said. “We good guys have to stick together.”

“I don’t need your help.”

“Yeah, you do. There’s some shamblers in the woods and they’re coming this way. And when the rest of the NKK nutbags see what happened to their boys they’re going to come hunting.”

“I didn’t do that.
You
did.”

He moved closer, but he lowered his voice a little to disguise the fact. “Sure, I did that. But they won’t know that. They’re going to come looking for someone to hurt.”

She sobbed. “Please…why can’t you people just leave us alone?”

Us.

Did she mean the innocent? Or women in general? Or was she with a party? Ledger guessed that it was a bit of all three.

“Look, kid, I’m coming to you. I won’t hurt you.”

“Don’t!”

“I have to, like I said. It’s not safe out here.”

“
You’re
one of them.”

He sighed. “No, I’m really not.”

Ledger moved through the corn, doing it slow and making noise. So she heard, so she knew.

“Please…,” she whimpered.

He found her in a small clearing. Baskerville sat watching her from ten feet away. The girl was a year or so older than he’d first thought. Maybe fourteen, but slim and undernourished. Her clothes were in rags and she had bruises on her face and arms. There were broken pieces of leaves and twigs in her filthy hair, and she sat huddled, shivering with exhaustion and terror. But there was fire in her eyes, though, and she clutched a sharp stone in one hand, ready to fight. Expecting to have to. Ledger knelt at the edge of the clearing.

“Listen to me,” he said quietly, “I understand that you’re terrified, and I know you don’t know me from a can of paint, but I won’t hurt you.”

“That’s what
they
said.”

“And they lied. I bet a lot of people have lied to you. Your parents probably told you there were no monsters, but there are. The boogeyman is real and sometimes he’s cold and dead and sometimes he’s alive, like those freaks back there. But I’m not one of them.”

She eyed him with enormous suspicion, the rock ready to strike.

Ledger crossed his legs and sat. He removed his knife from its sheath and tossed it lightly to land in front of her. “It’s better than a rock.”

The girl dropped the rock and snatched up the knife, raised it, held it ready to stab. Baskerville went
whuff,
but did not move.

“Where are you from, kid?” asked the ranger.

“I’m not a kid,” she snapped.

“Okay. Sorry. Where are you from,
miss
?”

She said, “Richmond.”

“Your family got out before they dropped the bombs?”

The girl said nothing, but after a moment she nodded.

“Are they still around? Your folks?”

The girl shook her head. A single bright tear fell down her dirty cheek.

“How?” he asked. “The walkers or…?”

She sniffed back her tears. “Them. The dead ones.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“Another family took me in. We were together until…until…”

She stopped and Ledger didn’t ask for details. They’d both heard enough horror stories. Retelling them only did harm.

“I was overseas when it started,” he said. “On a job. I’m with—
was
with—the military, like I said. Things all went crazy while we were half a world away. By the time we got back everything was falling apart. I…I tried to get home, you know? My wife and our kid had gone to my uncle’s place in Maryland. Nice big farm, lots of land, away from the cities.” He shook his head.

After a long minute the girl asked, “What happened?”

He sighed again. “It took me too long to get home. You know how it is. The roads, the crowds, the walkers, the nukes. By the time I made it to my uncle’s place there was nothing but burned fields and ashes where his house was.”

“Your…your family…? Were they in the…you know?”

Ledger shook his head. “No. There were no bones. I looked. God help me I really looked. And the thing is, I don’t even know if my wife made it to my uncle’s place or not. Communication was lousy even in the first few days. I know she was
going
there, but that’s all I know.”

“What did you do?” The girl still held the knife, but no longer raised to strike. Instead she clutched it to her chest. Baskerville laid down and placed his big head on his front paws.

“I think I went a little crazy,” said Ledger. “I looked everywhere I could, went to every refugee camp and rescue station. Spent months doing that. And then there was a while where I think I was out of my head.”

Baskerville whined softly as if he understood.

“He helped me get through it all,” said Ledger. “Big goof of a dog gave me a reason to keep moving, keep fighting, keep going.”

The girl looked at the dog for a moment. If Ledger had wanted to he could have reached over and plucked the knife out of her hand, but he did not.

“His name’s Baskerville? Like in the book?”

“Yup.”

The girl nodded, and they sat for a moment. A breeze stirred the corn and starlings flew overhead.

“Lindsey,” she said.

“What?” asked Ledger.

“My name’s Lindsey. Lindsey Brewer-Munoz.”

Ledger smiled. “Good to know you, Lindsey Brewer-Munoz.”

“You’re…Mr. Ledger?”

“Captain Joseph Edwin Ledger,” he said. “My friends call me Joe.”

She nodded but did not repeat his name.

“How long have you been alone?” he asked.

Her answer was a stubborn shake of the head. It wasn’t information she wanted to share. Not yet. He accepted that, letting her set the rules.

“When did you meet those NKK lamebrains?”

Lindsey looked away and down. “This morning. Only a couple hours ago. I ran away and…” She shook her head again.

“They didn’t mess with you?” he asked.

“No. They were…they were…”

She didn’t finish the sentence and he didn’t need to know what threats or promises the dead men had made.

“They’re gone,” he said.

Lindsey turned slowly and stared at him. She had very green eyes. “You killed all of them? All four?”

“We did,” corrected Joe, nodding to Baskerville. “And I’m sorry if you saw any of it.”

“Good,” she said, and her pretty young face instantly became a mask of such utter hatred that Ledger almost recoiled. It saddened him, hurt him deeply to see so much contempt on a young woman’s face. On any human face. It hurt worse to know that this girl would live with the knowledge of what almost happened to her, and have to bear the fear of the very real possibility of it happening in the future. Her innocence, or a chunk of it, had already been stolen from her. She would never again be able to believe that the world was not, at least in part, a truly vile place. And Ledger wanted very badly to put that genie back in the bottle, to seal it up, to make it not so, but the world was the world. Wishing for a better one wasn’t going to change what had already happened.

He said, “I’m sorry.”

The girl held onto the knife and the moment, ugly and raw, stretched and stretched.

Suddenly Baskerville leapt to his feet.

At the same moment Ledger heard the sounds coming from off to their left. The swish of cornstalks.

And the moans.

He shot to his feet, too. “Stay close,” he ordered. There were more moans now. From their right. And more in front of them.

The dead were coming from all sides.

“Oh god,” cried Lindsey and, still clutching the knife, she broke and ran into the cornfield, vanishing from sight.

Rachael Elle

Rachael and Pablo walked beneath a canopy of green trees. The road seemed to never end, though the signs for the River station were becoming more and more frequent, and newer looking the further she traveled, which Rachael took as a sign she was moving in the right direction. But she still hadn’t seen any people, any survivors, which concerned her. It had been over a week since the last living person she’d run into, and she’d hoped the closer she got to some sort of sanctuary the more survivors she’d find.

Had the world slipped further into chaos? Was she the only one left out here, like a Twilight Zone episode gone horribly wrong?

Please let this be the right way. Please let there be people there, let this not have been completely in vain.

A sound rang out, deafening, startling Rachael in the silence.

A gunshot.

People
. Her heart began hammering and hope—that lovely, dangerous thing—flared in her chest.

There were survivors somewhere nearby
.

In trouble? Or hunting? Or…

Rachael urged Pablo forward, letting him take his lead but coaxing him into a canter and then a full gallop as she became more certain of the direction. The horse was fast and it raced along the blacktop. Rachael strained to hear above the sounds of his hooves. The wind whipped through her hair and made her cloak billow out behind her.

Another gunshot.

Closer this time. Much closer. She was almost there.

She rounded a bend in the road at full speed, and
nearly slammed right into a mass of Orcs
.

Pablo reared, hooves flailing, kicking back the arms of the dead that turned to attack them, giving Rachael a split second to pull her sword, one hand clinging tight to the pommel of the saddle. She swung the blade, slicing through an Orc and kicking it back. There were more Orcs that she could easily count, most of them attacking what seemed to be an old broken down bus, its sides caked with old blood and dirt, fingers clawing against grimy metal, trying to get whatever was inside of there.

Was there anything inside of there? She couldn’t hear any sounds, not over the sounds of the dead, but the gunshot had to come from somewhere.

Her horse bolted as an Orc attacked from their right, nearly unsaddling her as she clung tightly with her knees, keeping her grip on the sword, swinging it as best she could at the dead, but more focused on trying to stay on as clawlike hands tried to grab on to her legs or saddle.

Stay alive
. She could hear Brett’s voice in her mind, though if it was a memory or her imagination she wasn’t sure.

“I’m not dying here,” she growled to herself under her breath as Pablo turned sharply, ears flat against his head. She reined him in, trying to get him back under some semblance of control. He didn’t want to be here, and she didn’t want to either. It would be better to leave this place, leave the dead for whatever they were after.

She was turning him to go, to keep riding far away from this place, when she heard it. The terrified wail of a child.

Rachael’s heart dropped. There were kids on the bus.

Every ounce of flight reflex was gone, every ounce of self-preservation. Now she had a mission, something she needed to do, someone to save. She might not be a superhero or the heroine of a book, but she was the only hero they had right now.

“I’m sorry, Pablo.” The horse’s ears were flat on his head, eyes panicked. “I know you want to run, but we have to do this. I know we can do this.”

Most of the mass of dead was still distracted by the people inside the bus, their trapped prey, but Rachael was glad for that. A swarm of even five dead could overpower someone, and there were probably twenty or so, though it was hard to get an exact count. They were all slow, stained and tattered clothing falling off of bone and flesh. They all seemed a unified rust color as they moved, not individual people but a large mass of monsters.

This was life or death now, the big bad boss at the end of the level. She was staring it in the face, and there was no escape. She would have to fight.

“I am Arwen and Eowyn, I am Alanna and Arya.” She yelled out loud to an unresponsive mass of the dead, raising her sword above her head as if she were inspiring an army to charge into battle, “I am Sif, I am Xena.” She took a breath, trying to gather her courage. “I am Rachael, I am a warrior and I am not afraid.”

Squeezing Pablo’s sides, she urged him forward, charging down at an Orc that had turned to respond to her yelling. Her sword sang through the air, the crunch of splitting bone as the sword pierced the skull and the body collapsed. Her horse seemed to understand what she was thinking and kept to the edge, dancing out of the reach of the snapping grabbing hands that were now turning their attention to her instead of the bus.