Fire & Ash (25 page)

There are such moments in a life. Solitary seconds on which the reality of what life means pivots and turns from a dead end toward a road of untrodden grass that stretches on
forever. It was a moment in which the words he said aloud and the whispers of his inner voice spoke in perfect harmony. And Benny knew thereafter that he would never hear that inner voice as a thing separate from himself. It was as if he had caught up to the idealized version of himself that had always walked a pace or two ahead.

I promise,
was what he said.

I
will, was what he meant.

59

T
HEY ENTERED THE HANGAR, WHICH
was vast but mostly empty. Two big, black helicopters squatted on the concrete pad. Unlike the ones in the first hangar, these hadn’t been stripped of parts. They looked fierce and sinister and ready to growl their way into the air. Benny had read about helicopters and thought they might be Black Hawks, though this one had stubby wings as well as rotors, and he was pretty sure that some of the stuff mounted on those wings were chain guns and missiles. Part of him thought that they were pretty cool; but the other aspect of him—the facet of his personality that had just shifted into the forefront of his mind—viewed them merely as a tool. Potentially useful, but in no way designed for anything but destruction. Even if that destruction was necessary.

He thought about the phrase “necessary evil” and believed he understood it better at that moment than ever before. It was like the sword he carried. And that sparked a memory of something Tom once told him, an old samurai maxim that describes the apparent contradiction of those who prepare for war but do not crave it.

“We train ten thousand hours to prepare for a single moment we pray never happens.”

Benny nodded to himself.

Most of the hangar was in shadows. One corner was well lit, though, and it was occupied by a big metal folding table. A woman in a military uniform sat at the table, and she rose as Joe led them over.

“Kids, meet Colonel Reid,” said Joe. “She’s the base commander here at Sanctuary.”

Colonel Reid was a stern, unattractive woman roughly the size and density of a packing crate. She had iron-gray hair cut short, a lipless slash of a mouth that was compressed into a line of stern disapproval, and eyes that had all the warmth of frozen blueberries.

Despite his immediate reaction to her, Benny wanted to get this started on the right foot. He smiled and extended his hand.

“Pleased to meet you, ma’am. My name’s—”

“I know who you are, Mr. Imura,” she said, cutting him off sharply. She eyed the four of them with the disapproval of a disgruntled diner looking at side dishes she hadn’t ordered. “I know who all of you are.”

Joe sighed.

Benny’s hand hung for a moment in the air.

“Okay, taking it back,” he said, lowering his arm.

Reid eyed Joe. “What’s your new mission status? Child-care professional?”

Joe sliced off a wafer of a smile. “They earned their spot.”

Reid shook her head. “It’s on you, then. I don’t have troops to waste minding them.”

“We didn’t ask to be minded,” said Benny.

“Right,” said Nix, “I heard that four of your guys were in the infirmary.”

Reid’s icy expression dropped to absolute zero. “You have a smart mouth, girl.”

“And you have a—”

“Okay,
enough!
” roared Benny. “Everyone cut the crap.”

They all looked at him, momentarily shocked to silence.

“What the hell is it with everyone?” Benny continued, his volume lower but his voice still hard as fists. “If you’re mad at us for roughing up some of your soldiers, then too bad. Get over it. They could have acted like human beings instead of robots.”

“They were following my orders.”

“Then maybe you should start giving better orders,” Benny said coldly. “I mean, who do you think you are? Who do you think we are? We’re not on opposite sides in this thing. Unless I’m mistaken, it’s us against them, and the ‘them’ are the reapers and the zoms.
We
are supposed to be working together to save the world.”

“
We
are,” Reid fired back. “The American Nation is using its full resources to combat the Reaper Plague.”

Benny leaned on the edge of the table. “And me and my friends? We’re what to you? A nuisance?”

“I believe you already tried to play the card of importance due to finding the plane.”

Benny smiled. “Yeah, I thought I recognized your voice. That was you I talked to yesterday. You said that our finding the plane was only self-interest. Are you actually that dense? Are all you people that close-minded? We shared that information because that’s what people do. That’s how everyone survives. Maybe you haven’t been outside lately, colonel, but zombies ate the world. People have been scratching and clawing to
survive for fifteen years. My own town is in California. Your jet passed right over us. Are you going to tell me that you didn’t see it? Are you going to tell me that you don’t know about the Nine Towns we have up in those mountains? Captain Ledger knows about them, so I’ll bet a brand-new ration dollar that
you
know about them.”

“We are aware of those towns,” conceded Colonel Reid. “What of it?”

“What of it?” Benny slapped the flat of his palm on the table so hard it sounded like a gunshot. Echoes banged off the hangar walls. “Why the hell didn’t you
tell
us? We thought we were alone all those years. We thought that the rest of the world was dead. Don’t you think it would have helped us to know that there were other people out there? That there was a new government? That scientists were working on a cure? That people were trying to put the world back together into some shape that made sense? Are you so removed from human emotions that you can’t realize how much that would have helped people? Helped
us
? It would have given us
hope
.”

Colonel Reid started to reply, but Benny wasn’t finished with her. “I read enough about the way things were before First Night to know that people were always fighting. Not just wars, but political fights, social fights, all sorts of things. I swear, sometimes reading those history books I wondered if people wanted to fight more than they wanted to survive.” He straightened and fixed her with a cold stare. “When we saw that jet, we thought that things were going to be okay. We thought that it represented a chance for a better future than the one we were handed. I can’t even put into words how
sorry I am—how cheated I feel—to find out that things are just the same.”

The silence in the hangar was absolute.

Finally, Riot murmured, “The boy’s right . . . we’re up to our eyeballs in the alligator swamp and y’all won’t let us in the boat.”

Colonel Reid brushed nonexistent lint from her lapel. Nix balled her hands into little fists that she squeezed hard enough to make the knuckles creak.

In a calmer voice, Benny said, “Right now you
need
us.”

He produced the sheets with the coordinates.

Reid’s face went scarlet, and she wheeled on Ledger. “You said that you had the coordinates.”

“I did,” admitted Ledger. “And I gave them back to Benny. After all, he found them.”

“That’s treason. I could have you shot for this.”

Joe smiled. “You could try, Jane. But I don’t think that would work out for you as well as you’d like.” He shook his head. “Besides, those papers belong to Benny.”

“They are the property of the American Nation.”

“Excuse me,” cut in Nix, “but exactly where are the borders of the American Nation?”

“Is that a joke?” demanded Reid.

“No, it’s a straight question. We found those papers out here in the Ruin. Benny took some off a reaper and the coordinates from a walker. Are you saying that that happened inside your legal boundaries?”

“The whole continent is the American Nation.”

“From the Atlantic to the Pacific?”

“Of course.”

“So—central California is part of that, right?”

Reid snapped her mouth shut, but it was too late. Her foot was in Nix’s bear trap.

“You’re saying that our town, Mountainside, and all the other towns in the Sierra Nevadas are part of the American Nation?”

Reid kept her mouth clamped shut, but her face darkened by at least two shades. Benny wanted to laugh, but he kept his own mouth shut.

“You admit that our towns are part of your new nation, and yet never once did you send anyone to us. What were we? Inconvenient? Too much trouble? Did you just write us off?”

When Reid didn’t answer, Lilah gave a derisive snort. So far it was her only contribution to the conversation, but it was eloquent.

Finally Reid couldn’t hold it back anymore. “You arrogant little snots. Who the hell do you think you’re talking to? I’ve dedicated my entire life to protecting this country.”

“Really?” asked Benny. “How much of that time was spent protecting the
people
?”

Reid shook her head. “You’re not capable of understanding what it takes to protect a nation.”

“I am,” said Joe quietly. “And the kid asks a good question. My rangers put together maps of all the populated settlements. I was in Asheville three times over the last two years to request permission to establish connections and resources to provide technology recovery services, medicines, and communication equipment. People like you argued against it every time. It wasn’t the best use of resources. The distances were too great. The indigenous populations of those settlements did not
include a high enough percentage of scientists and researchers. Lots of excuses, none of them worth a drop of moose spit.”

“It’s not in your pay grade to question policy, Captain.”

“It’s not in anyone’s pay grade to devalue tens of thousands of human lives because protecting them is inconvenient. I can’t begin to tell you how deeply ashamed I am for not taking matters into my own hands. I should have told this boy’s brother about the American Nation. I should have told everyone. I should never have followed orders about leaving it to my superiors. Never. They deserve to know.”

“They would have been contacted at the appropriate time. There’s a timetable for this.”

“Contacted when?” asked Nix. “After we were all dead? After the reapers or the zoms slaughtered us? When exactly would the ‘appropriate’ time be?”

“This conversation is ridiculous,” Reid said with a dismissive shake of her head. “You’ll hand over those coordinates so I can assign a team to—”

“No,” said Benny.

“Don’t test me, boy.”

“The answer’s no. You don’t get them.”

Reid laid her hand on the pistol holstered at her hip. “You want to play games, boy? Do you want me to
take
them from you?”

Nix and Lilah drew their pistols as fast as lightning. Riot, however, very casually took her slingshot from her belt and socketed a ball bearing into the pouch. Joe Ledger folded his arms and leaned a hip against the table.

Benny did nothing except give Reid a small, cold smile. “Like Captain Ledger said—you can try.”

But Reid was not easily flustered. “Captain Ledger, I order you to—”

“Colonel Reid, I hereby resign my commission in the army of the American Nation, yielding all rank, pay, benefits, and privileges effective as of right now.”

“You can’t do that.”

“Just did. In fact, a long time ago Tom Imura offered to let me sleep on his couch and help set me up as a bounty hunter in Mountainside. So I’m retroactively taking his offer, which means that I am declaring myself a citizen of Mountainside, one of the Nine Towns of the Sierra Nevadas. You can’t tell by hearing it, but I’m capitalizing Nine Towns. If no one else has declared them a sovereign nation, then I am.”

“You—”

“Unless,” Joe said, “you would like to formally accept those towns into the American Nation, extending to the citizens the full support and resources of the American Nation.”

Before Reid could answer, Joe stepped forward. His smile was strange, Benny thought. Feral, like a wolf’s. It was almost as if a different person—more savage and more intense—glowered out through his blue eyes.

“Listen to me, Jane, and you’ll do yourself a lot of good by keeping your ears open and your mouth shut,” he said, his voice as soft as a whisper. “I’ve fought for my country and I’ve fought for my world. You sat behind a desk. You haven’t logged an hour of field time in thirty years. You don’t understand what it was that built this country in the first place. You take a lot of pride in being an officer in the ‘American’ Nation. So do I, but that rank and uniform comes with a price—no, an obligation—to protect the people as well as
the real estate. Some of our colleagues didn’t always grasp that before the Fall. Some did, a lot didn’t. Those were the boneheads who thought it was a smart idea to nuke the cities rather than try to protect the survivors and retake the land. Those were the ones who used ‘assets’ and ‘collateral damage’ to describe people and loss of life. Well, guess what . . . that ends right here and right now. America was born in the fires of a revolution, with people who wanted to push back against oppression. It was made tougher in the furnace of a civil war to make everyone free. In every single decade there were people who stood up and spoke out, people who made a stand. I look at you and what you represent, and I look at these four kids here and all their integrity and potential, and sister, you don’t measure up too well.”

“You’re a hypocrite,” said Reid.

“I know it. But that was five minutes ago. Miracle of miracles, I have officially come to my senses. Now how about that? And from now on I’ll do whatever I can, whatever I need to do, to atone for being a pigheaded jackass and a company man for way too long.” He took a small step closer. “Oh yeah, and theft. I’m going to steal one of those helicopters so I can try and find Dr. McReady.”

Benny nodded to Nix and the others, and they lowered their weapons.

“You don’t want to do this, Captain,” said Reid.

He stepped back and shrugged. “I’m not a captain anymore.”

Joe walked over to the helicopter, entered it, and did something that caused the big motor to whine to life. Then he climbed out, crossed to the wall near the door they’d entered, and pressed a big red button. Immediately the massive hangar
doors began rolling sideways, letting the hot afternoon air spill in, bringing with it the stink of zombie flesh.