Fire & Ash (2 page)

So, the people in the Night Church decided that they needed to complete Thanatos’s plan by killing everyone who’s left. They trained all the people in the church to be really good fighters. They call themselves the reapers.

When that’s done, they plan to kill themselves.

Crazy, right?

According to our new friend, Riot, who is (no joke) Mother Rose’s daughter, the
reapers have killed about ten thousand people.

Ten thousand.

A lot of reapers were killed in a big battle. Joe killed them with rocket launchers and other weapons we found on a crashed plane. Joe’s a good guy, but seeing him kill all those killers . . . that was nuts. It was wrong no matter what side I look at it from.

But then . . . what choice did he have?

I wish the world still made sense.

3

M
ILES AND MILES AWAY . . .

The man named Saint John walked along a road shaded by live oaks and pines. The trees were unusually dry for this time of year, victims of a drought that was leeching away the vital juices of the world. The saint did not mind, though. It was another way that his god was making it impossible for life to continue in a world that no longer belonged to mankind. Saint John appreciated the subtlety of that, and the attention to detail.

His army stretched behind him, men and women dressed in black with white angel wings sewn onto the fronts of their shirts and red tassels tied to every joint. Each head was neatly shaved and thoroughly tattooed with flowers and vines and stinging insects and predator birds. As they marched, these reapers of the Night Church sang songs of darkness and an end to suffering. Hymns to an eternal silence where pain and indignity no longer held sway.

Saint John did not sing. He walked with his hands behind his back, head bent in thought. He still grieved for the betrayal of Sister Rose. But his spirits were buoyed by the knowledge that Sister Sun and Brother Peter—two of his
Council of Sorrows who would never betray him—were working tirelessly to serve the will of their god. They would light the fire that would burn away the infection of humanity.

While they labored back in Nevada to start that blaze, Saint John led the bulk of the reaper army through deserts and forests, across badlands and into the mountains in search of nine towns—nine strongholds of blasphemy and evil. Until yesterday he did not know the way. But they had met a traveler who was willing to share all that he knew of those towns. He was reluctant at first to share, but with some encouragement he was willing to scream everything that he knew.

The first of the towns was named Haven. As unfortunate and naive a name as Sanctuary.

The second town was a place called Mountainside. . . .

He listened to the songs of the reapers, a dirge lifted by forty thousand voices, and Saint John walked on, content.

Out in the dark, beyond the ranks of the reapers, came a second and much larger army. One that did not need to be fed, one that never tired, one that required only the call of dog whistles to drive it, and the presence of the chemical-soaked red tassels to control their appetites.

Yet, in their own way, they too sang. Not hymns, not anything with words. Theirs, lifted by tens of thousands of dead voices, was the unrelenting moan of hunger as the army of the living dead went to war under the banner of the god of death.

4

T
HE SUN WAS A SPIKY
crown of light resting on the mountaintops to the east. Benny closed his eyes and turned his face to the light, soaking in the heat. The holding area had been too cold. Benny had never dealt with air-conditioning before, and he wasn’t sure he liked it. The sunlight felt good on his face and chest and arms. By this afternoon he would be hunting for even a sliver of shade, but for now this was nice.

We’re going to save Chong,
said his inner voice.

“Yes we are,” Benny growled aloud.

A shadow crossed over his face, and he looked up to see a vulture glide through the air from the top of the six-story hospital blockhouse. It flapped its big black wings as it came to rest atop a parked jet that stood still and silent two hundred yards away.

The jet.

It had drawn Benny, Nix, Chong, and Lilah away from Mountainside. It was supposed to answer all their questions, to make sense of the world.

It sat facing the distant mountains, windows dark, door closed. But around that door were blood smears, arterial splashes and one handprint, faded now from crimson
to brown. The metal stairs sat a few yards away. There was blood on every step, and trails of it along the ground heading toward the row of massive gray hangars beyond the blockhouse.

The first time Benny had seen the blood, he’d asked his escort monk, Brother Albert, about it. “Did the zoms attack the crew?”

Brother Albert flinched at the use of the word “zom,” and Benny regretted using it. The monks always called the dead the Children of Lazarus, and they believed that these “Children” were the meek whom God intended should inherit the earth. Benny was pretty sure he didn’t agree with that view, though it was a lot more palatable than the more extreme apocalyptic thinking of the Night Church.

“No,” said the monk, “the sirens called the Children away while the jet landed.”

The military people used a row of sirens on tall towers to lure the zoms away to clear the airstrip or allow access to the hangars and blockhouse. Soldiers stationed in a small stone building at the far end of the field controlled the sirens. When those sirens fell silent, the dead wandered back again, drawn by the living people on the monks’ side of the trench.

“Then what happened?”

Brother Albert shrugged. “Not really sure, brother. They were delivering supplies and equipment to a base in Fort Worth. Must have been an attack there.” He paused. “Do you know about the American Nation?”

“Sure. Captain Ledger and Riot told us some stuff. It’s in Asheville, North Carolina. Supposed to be, like, a hundred thousand people there. There’s a new government, and
they’re trying to take back the country from the dead.”

“That’s what they say.”

Benny glanced at the jet. During the big fight with the reapers, it had come swooping down out of the sky like a monster bird out of ancient legend. Impossibly huge, roaring with four massive engines, it had sailed above the battle and descended toward Sanctuary.

When they’d first seen it almost a year ago, soaring high above the mountains in California, they’d thought it was a passenger liner. They now knew that it was a C-5 Galaxy military transport jet. The largest military aircraft ever built.

“What about the crew?” asked Benny. “Are they okay?”

The monk shrugged. “Don’t know. They don’t tell us anything.”

It was true. The military scientists ran a mostly underground base on one side of the trench, and the monks ran a hospital and hospice on the other. Except for interview sessions in the blockhouse, communication between the two was weirdly minimal.

Past the jet, at the far side of the airfield, was a huge crowd of zoms. They shuffled slowly toward Benny, though the closest of them was still a mile away. Every morning the sirens’ wail cleared the way for him to cross the trench, and every evening it cleared the field for Nix to come over. Each of them spent an hour being interviewed by scientists. Never in person, though. The interview booth was a cubicle built onto the corner of the blockhouse; all contact was via microphone and speakers. The novelty of this pre–First Night tech wore off almost at once, though. The scientists asked a lot of questions, but they gave almost nothing in return. No
information, no answers. Allowing Benny to see Chong was a surprising act of generosity, though Benny wondered if it was just part of a scientific experiment. Probably to see how human Chong still was.

Hungry.

God.

Every evening the monk took Nix over there. Would they let her see Chong too?

They reached the entrance to the cubicle. It opened as Benny approached. Inside was a metal folding chair.

Benny glanced over his shoulder at the zombies. The ranger, Captain Ledger, had told Nix that there were only a couple hundred thousand. The monks said that there were at least half a million of them over there. They worked with the sick and dying far more closely.

“They’re waiting, brother,” murmured his escort monk, and for a moment Benny didn’t know whether Brother Albert meant the zoms or the scientists.

“Yeah,” said Benny. “I know.”

The monk pushed the door shut, and the hydraulic bolts slid back into place with a sound like steam escaping. There was only a tiny electric light that barely shoved back the shadows.

While he waited in the dark, he thought he could hear Chong’s voice.

Hungry.

5

T
HE
L
OST
G
IRL WAS LOST
indeed.

Eight months ago she’d lived alone in a cave behind a waterfall high in the Sierra Nevadas. She spent her days hunting, foraging for books in deserted houses, evading zombies, and hunting the men who had murdered her family. From age twelve until just after her seventeenth birthday, Lilah spoke to no one.

The last words from her mouth before the long silence were spoken to her sister, Annie, as she knelt in the rain near the first Gameland.

Earlier that day Lilah had escaped from Gameland and then gone back for her sister. Annie was supposed to wait for her, but she didn’t. She escaped from her cell only to be hunted through the storm by the Motor City Hammer. In the windy, rainy darkness Annie tripped and fell, hitting her head on a rock. A mortal injury. The Hammer left her there like a piece of trash that wasn’t worth throwing away.

Lilah saw this from a place of concealment. She was twelve, emaciated, and weak. If she’d attacked the Hammer, he would have beaten her and dragged her back to the zombie pits. Knowing him as she did, he might have put
Annie in with her. That was a guaranteed moneymaking attraction.

When the Hammer was gone, she crept onto the road to where Annie lay. She tried to breathe life back into Annie’s lungs, tried to push it into her chest the way George had taught her. She tried to will that fading spark to flare. She begged, she made promises to the heavens, offering her own life if Annie could be spared. But the slack form she held changed into something that did not want her breath or her prayers. All it wanted was her flesh.

Lilah held the struggling body tightly in her arms and buried her face in Annie’s hair. For a long, terrible moment she wondered if she should stop fighting, if she should lie back and offer her throat to Annie. If she could not protect her in life, she could at least offer her sustenance in death.

That moment was the longest of her life. The most terrible.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and reached for the rock onto which Annie had fallen. It was small, the size of an angry fist. Another half step to the right and Annie would have missed it and fallen into a puddle instead.

Lilah wanted to close her eyes so that she did not have to witness what she was about to do. But that was a coward’s choice. George had taught the girls to be strong. Always strong. And this was Annie.
Her
Annie. Her sister, born on First Night to a dying mother. She was the last person on earth who Lilah knew. To turn away, to close her eyes, to flinch from the responsibility of being a witness for her sister’s experience felt as cowardly and awful as what the Motor City Hammer had done.

So Lilah watched Annie’s face. She watched her own hand lift the rock.

She watched everything.

She heard herself say, “I love you.”

She heard the sound of what she was forced by fate and love to do. It was a dreadful sound. Lilah knew it would echo inside her head forever.

Lilah spent the next five years in silence.

There was conversation, but it was always in her head. With Annie, with George. Lilah rehearsed the words she wanted to say when she was strong enough to hunt down the Motor City Hammer. Now he was dead too. And George.

Annie.

Tom.

Lilah walked the trench, hour after hour, mile after mile. She was so much stronger now than she had been. She knew that if she could take this body and these skills and step back to that moment on the rainy road, it would have been the Hammer gasping out his last breaths in the darkness.

Lilah made sure that she was strong. Fast, and skillful and vicious.

Heartless.

That had been her goal. To become heartless. A machine fine-tuned for the purpose of slaughter. Not of zoms—they were incidental to her—but of the evil men in the world. Like the Hammer, like Charlie Pink-eye and Preacher Jack. Like Brother Peter and Saint John and the reapers. She willed herself to become merciless because if she accomplished that, then she would never know fear and she would never know love. Love was a pathway to cruel pain. It was the arrow that
Fate always kept aimed at your back. Love would interfere; love would create a chink in her armor.

No, she would never allow herself to love.

As she walked, she thought about that. That promise was as vain and as fragile as the promise she’d given Annie to return and free her.

When Lilah rescued Benny and Nix from bounty hunters in the mountains, she had stepped across a line. When she met Tom and saw that a man could be good and decent, compassionate and strong, Lilah had felt her resolve weaken. George had been the only good man she’d ever known. A total stranger who’d been the last of a group of refugees from the zombie outbreak. He’d raised Annie and Lilah. He’d loved them like a father, fed them, cared for them, taught them. And had been murdered by the men who took the girls to Gameland.

Lilah had believed that he was the only decent man left alive, that all the others were like the Hammer.

Then Tom.

Whom she fell in love with. Who refused her love in the gentlest, kindest way.

Tom . . . who died.

She stopped and let her gaze drift across the trench to the blockhouse. To where Chong crouched in the darkness.

Lilah had never wanted to feel anything for Chong. He was a town boy. Weak and unskilled in any of the ways of survival. She had not wanted to like him. Falling in love with him was so obviously wrong that sometimes she laughed at herself. And when the absurdity of it struck her, she lashed out at Chong.