Fire & Ash (3 page)

Stupid town boy.

“Chong,” she whispered.

What is the good of becoming strong if love bares your flesh to the teeth of misfortune? Why risk loving anyone or anything when life is so frail a thing that a strong wind can blow it out of your experience? She wanted to go back to her silence and her solitude. To find her cave and hide there among the stacks of dusty books. With the waterfall roaring, no one could hear her scream, she was sure of it.

How long would it take, how many weeks or months or years, before she could think of Chong’s name and not feel a knife in her heart?

The reapers had taken Chong from her.

Forever? Or just for now?

She didn’t know, and neither did the scientists in the blockhouse.

If it was forever, then a cold voice in Lilah’s mind told her what the future would be—an endless, relentless hunt to find and kill every reaper. In books the heroines vow to hunt an enemy to the ends of the earth. But she was already there. This was the apocalypse, and the future was awash in blood and silence.

“Chong,” she said to the desert sky, and tried to will her heart to turn to stone.

6

“G
OOD MORNING
, M
R
. I
MURA,” SAID
a cold, impersonal female voice through the wall-mounted speaker. “How do you feel today?”

“Angry,” said Benny.

There was a pause. “No,” said the voice, clearly thrown off track, “how do you
feel
?”

“I told you.”

“You don’t understand. Are you feeling unwell? Are—”

“I understood the question.”

“Have you been experiencing any unusual symptoms?”

“Sure,” said Benny. “My head hurts.”

“When did these headaches begin?”

“ ’Bout a month ago,” said Benny. “A freako mutant zombie hit me in the head with a stick.”

“We know about that injury, Mr. Imura.”

“Then why ask?”

“We asked if you had any unusual symptoms.”

“Zombie-inflicted stick wounds to the head actually
aren’t
all that usual, doc. Look it up.”

The scientist sighed—the kind of short nostril sigh people do when they’re losing their patience. Benny grinned in the shadows.

The next question wiped the smile off his face. “What happened in the holding cell today?”

“He . . . tried to grab me.”

“Did he
touch
your skin with his
hands
?”

“No.”

“Did he
bite
you?”

“No.”

“Did he get any bodily fluids on you?”

“Eww. And, no.”

“Are you running a fever?”

“I don’t know, why don’t you let me in there so you can take my temperature?”

A pause. “There is a safety protocol—”

“—in place,” completed Benny. “Yeah, I know. I’ve heard that forty million times.”

“Mr. Imura, we need you to tell us if the infected—”

“His name is Lou Chong,” barked Benny. “And I wish you’d tell me what you’ve done to him.”

A longer pause this time. “Mr. Chong has been treated.”

“I know that, genius. I want to know
how
. I want to know what’s going on with him. When’s he going to get better?”

“We . . . don’t have those answers.”

Benny punched the small metal speaker mounted on the wall. “Why not?”

“Mr. Imura,” said the woman, “please, you’re being difficult.”

“
I’m
being difficult? We gave you all that stuff we found in that wrecked transport plane, all those medical records. Why can’t you do something for us?”

When there was no immediate answer, Benny tried to
shift topics, hoping that might nudge them into an actual exchange of information.

“What about that pack of wild boars that tried to chow down on my friend Lilah? Where’d they come from? I thought that only humans could turn into zoms.”

“We are aware of a limited infection among a small percentage of the wild boar population.”

“What does that mean? What’s a ‘small percentage’? How many is that?”

“We don’t have an exact number. . . .”

Benny sighed. They were always evasive like this.

After a moment the woman asked, “Are you experiencing any excessive sweating, Mr. Imura? Double vision? Dry mouth?”

The questions ran on and on. Benny closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. After a while the voice accepted that Benny wasn’t going to cooperate.

“Mr. Imura—?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m still here.”

“Why are you making this so difficult?”

“I keep telling you—I’m not. I’m trying to communicate with you people, but you keep stonewalling me. What’s that about? ’Cause the way I figure it, you guys owe me and my friends. If we hadn’t told Captain Ledger about the weapons on the plane, that reaper army would have come in here and killed everyone—you, all the sick people, the monks, and everyone in this stupid blockhouse.”

The plane in question was a C-130J Super Hercules, a muscular four-propeller cargo aircraft built before First Night. Benny and Nix had found it wrecked in the forest. It had been
used to evacuate a scientist, Dr. Monica McReady, and her staff from Hope One, a remote research base near Tacoma, Washington. The team had been up there studying recent mutations in the zombie plague.

“Don’t confuse heroism with mutual self-interest, Mr. Imura,” said the woman scientist in an icy tone. “You told Captain Ledger about those weapons and materials because it was the only way you and your friends could survive. It was an act of desperation that, because of the nature of this current conflict, benefited parties that have a shared agenda. Anyone in your position would have done the same.”

“Really? That plane was sitting out there for a couple of years—pretty much in your freaking backyard—and you had no clue that it was there. If you spent less time with your heads up your—”

“Mr. Imura . . .”

He sighed. “Okay, so maybe we had our own survival in mind when we told you about it—we’re not actually stupid—but that doesn’t change the fact that we saved your butts.”

“That’s hardly an accurate assessment, Mr. Imura. Saint John and the army of the Night Church are still out there. Do you know where they are?”

Benny’s answer was grudging. “No.”

In truth, no one knew where the reapers had gone. Guards patrolling the fence had seen a few, and Joe Ledger said that he’d found signs of small parties out in the desert, but the main part of the vast reaper army was gone. Saint John himself seemed to have gone with them, but nobody knew where. At first Benny and his friends were happy about that—let them bother someone else; but on reflection, that was a selfish and
mean-spirited reaction. An immature reaction. The reapers had only one mission, and that was to exterminate all life. No matter where they went, innocent people were going to die.

“So,” said the scientist, “you can’t really make the claim that you—and I quote—‘saved our butts.’ We might all be wasting our time.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” There was no answer. He kicked the wall. “Yo! What’s that supposed to mean?”

Nothing.

Then the lights came on and the door hissed open. Outside, the sirens were already blaring.

7

B
ROTHER
A
LBERT ESCORTED HIM ACROSS
a bridge to the monks’ side of Sanctuary. On the other side, Benny spotted Lilah walking along the edge of the trench. He fell into step beside her. They walked for a while in silence. Behind them the guards used a winch to raise the bridge.

Lilah was tall, beautiful, with a bronze tan and blond hair so sun-bleached that it was as white as snow. She had wide, penetrating eyes that were sometimes hazel and sometimes honey-colored, changing quickly with her fiery moods. She carried a spear made from black pipe and a military bayonet.

Every time he saw her, Benny felt an odd twinge in his chest. It wasn’t love—he loved Nix with his whole heart, and besides, this girl was too strange, too different for him. No, it was a feeling he’d never quite been able to define, and it was as strong now as it had been the first time he’d seen her picture on a Zombie Card.

Lilah, the Lost Girl.

He finally worked up to the nerve to say, “They let me see him today.”

Lilah abruptly stopped and grabbed a fistful of his shirt.
“Tell me.”

Benny gently pushed her hand away and told her everything that had happened. He left out the part about the soldier trying to hit Chong with his baton. There were already enough problems between Lilah and the soldiers. For the first few days after Chong had been admitted into the labs for treatment, Lilah stayed by his side. Twice soldiers had attempted to remove her, and twice soldiers were carried to the infirmary. Then on the eighth night, Chong appeared to succumb to the Reaper Plague. His vital signs bottomed out, and for a moment the doctors and scientists believed that he’d died. They wanted to have him quickly transported outside so he could be with the zoms when he reanimated. Lilah wouldn’t accept that Chong was dead. Either her instincts told her something the machines did not, or she went a little crazy. Benny was inclined to believe that it was a bit of both. When the orderlies moved in to take Chong away, Lilah attacked them. Benny never got all the details, but from what he could gather, four orderlies, two doctors, and five soldiers were badly hurt, and a great deal of medical equipment was damaged in what was apparently a fight of epic proportions. The soldiers came close to shooting Lilah, and if she hadn’t used one of the chief scientists as a shield—holding her knife to the fabric of his hazmat suit—they might have done it.

It was a stalemate.

And then the machines began beeping again, arguing with mechanical certainty that Chong was
not
dead. The scientist, fearing for his life and seeing a way out of the standoff, swore to Lilah that they would do everything they could to keep Chong alive, and to find some way of treating the disease that thrived within him. Lilah, never big on trust, was a
hard sell. But in the end, Chong’s need for medical attention won out. She released the scientist. Chong was injected with something called a metabolic stabilizer—a concoction based on a formula found among Dr. McReady’s notes on the transport plane. Once Chong was stabilized, Lilah was taken—at gunpoint—outside the blockhouse and turned over to Benny, Nix, and the monks. She was forbidden to cross the trench. Four guards were posted on the monks’ side of the bridge to make sure of that.

As Benny described Chong’s condition, Lilah staggered as if she’d been punched. She leaned on her spear for support.

“He spoke, though,” said Benny hopefully. “That’s something. It’s an improvement, right? It’s a good sign and—”

Lilah shook her head and gazed across the distance toward the white blockhouse. “My town boy is lost.”

“Lilah, I—”

“Go away,” she said in a voice that was almost inhuman.

Benny shoved his hands in his pockets and trudged off to find Nix.

8

B
EYOND THE FENCE
 . . .

Through the long eye of the telescope, the boy with the sword slung over his back and the girl with the spear looked like they were standing only a few feet away. Close enough to touch.

Close enough to kill.

“I will open red mouths in your flesh,” whispered the man with the telescope. “Praise be to the darkness.”

FROM NIX’S JOURNAL

Zoms rely on one or more senses in order to hunt. Smell is big, we know that. They can smell healthy flesh. That’s why cadaverine works; it smells like rotting tissue.

Sight and hearing are just as important to them.

There has to be a strategic way to use these three senses against them. I’m going to talk to Captain Ledger about it. He seems to know more than anyone about fighting zoms.

9

S
IX MONTHS AGO
 . . .

Saint John stood under the leaves of a green tree while the two most powerful women in the Night Church argued with each other.

“It’s
old-world
heresy,” insisted Mother Rose, who was the spiritual leader of the Night Church. She was tall and lovely, graceful as the morning, as beautiful as a knife blade. “That plane and its contents represent everything the church opposes.”

“I don’t dispute that,” said the other woman, a frail Korean named Sister Sun. A year ago she had been athletic and strong, but over the last few months cancer had begun consuming her. By her own diagnosis she had less than a year to live, and she was determined to use that year helping the Night Church conquer the heretics. “My point is that we need to examine those materials to understand what’s happening with the gray people.”

“Nothing is happening with—”

“Mother, you
know
that’s not true. Our people have seen case after case of gray people moving in flocks. That never happened before. There are rumors of gray people who move
almost as fast as the living. Even some incidents of them picking up rocks and stones as weapons.”

“So what?” countered Mother Rose in her haughty voice. “All life changes. Even un-life. It’s part of nature, isn’t it?”

“That’s just it,” insisted Sister Sun. “The Reaper Plague isn’t part of nature, as I’ve said many times.”

Saint John turned now and held up a hand. Both women fell immediately silent.

“The plague that raised the dead and destroyed the cities of sinful man was brought to earth by the divine hand of Lord Thanatos.”

“All praise to his darkness,” said the women in unison.

“Therefore it is part of the natural order of the universe.”

“Honored One,” said Sister Sun, “please listen to me. Both of you—listen. I know this plague. I studied it after the outbreak. My team was working with the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. No one alive knows this disease better than me except for Monica McReady.”

“That heretic is dead,” said Mother Rose.

“We don’t know that for sure,” said Sister Sun. “We sent five teams of reapers out to search for her, and two teams never returned.”

Mother Rose dismissed the argument with a flick of her hand.