Fire & Ash (34 page)

With that he stepped through the air lock, took a brief look, and immediately opened fire.

Lilah was right behind him, her pistol bucking in her hands as she fired and fired.

Benny and Nix adjusted their grips on their swords.

“C’mon, Doc,” said Benny, “we won’t let anything happen to you.”

The doctor’s eyes were skeptical. “Too late for that, kids. But . . . thanks.”

They heard two more shots, and then a sudden silence fell over the whole complex.

Joe Ledger called to them. “It’s clear,” he said, his voice rough. “It’s all over in here.”

They passed through the air lock and saw four reapers and five zoms lying in a tangle beyond where Joe stood. Gun
smoke from the ranger’s rifle hung in a blue pall around him.

Benny and Nix stepped into another scene of horror and madness.

There was a bed right inside the door. A man lay in it, his eyes wide with fury and pain, his pajamas soiled with blood and muck, his limbs thrashing as he fought to rise. Not to escape—but to attack. Ropes held him to the bed, lashing his arms and legs and torso to the metal frame. Black spit flew from the man’s screaming mouth.

Benny stared past him at the occupant of the next bed. And the next.

And all the others.

Hundreds of beds. Each one filled. Each person thrashing and moaning and biting the air. Each one trapped there by ropes.

Their uniforms hung over the backs of chairs, or were draped over the ends of the beds. The uniforms of soldiers of the American Nation. The lab coats of scientists. The special jackets of pilots.

Nix’s sword drooped in her grasp until the tip of the blade made a hollow
tink
against the concrete.

This was why there had been no real resistance to the reaper invasion.

This was why the jet sat idle on the tarmac.

This was why the soldiers and the scientists were so bitter.

“They’re all infected,” Benny murmured. “All of them . . .”

He heard a sob and turned to see Dr. McReady trembling.

“No,” she said. “No . . .”

Joe swapped out his magazines, his face wooden. “The infection started three months ago,” he said. “A few guards
on patrol by the siren towers got swarmed by a pack of R3’s. One fatality, but a couple of the others got the black blood on them. I don’t know if it got in someone’s eyes or mouth, or if it was on one of the soldiers’ hands and he touched his face. We’ll never know. But he brought the mutagen into Sanctuary with him. We sent word to the American Nation to quarantine this place. To write it off.”

He shook his head sadly.

“Sanctuary is dead.”

They all gaped at him.

Benny got up in Joe’s face. “
You
brought us here, damn it. Why bring us to a graveyard?”

Joe shook his head. “When I brought you here it was to save you from Saint John and Mother Rose. But we never let you inside. We kept you away from the plague until we could make sure you were uninfected. If it wasn’t for your friend Chong, I’d have taken you kids south to North Carolina. Now you’re inside the quarantine zone. You’re as trapped as everyone else at Sanctuary.”

79

S
IX CORRIDORS AWAY, A TEAM
of Red Brothers moved silently through the shadows, knives ready, eyes alert, killing anyone they met. Brother Peter ran with them, his face flushed with exertion, his clothes soaked with blood.

Two soldiers tried to hold a doorway, but Brother Peter ordered a pair of reapers to rush them. The men smiled at the chance to serve their brother, serve their god, and leaped like heroes into the darkness. They let out earsplitting roars as they charged straight into a hail of bullets. The rounds chopped into them, splattering the walls with blood, turning the killers into dancing puppets and finally into inhuman rag dolls.

But as they collapsed, Brother Peter, who had run up behind them at full speed, leaped over their corpses, a knife in each hand.

The soldiers did not have time to scream.

The rest of the Red Brothers swept through the doorway and into the lab complex. Gleaming machines, racks of sanitized instruments, cabinets of medicines, and banks of computers filled the room.

One scientist was there.

A woman, with gray hair tied in a bun and reading glasses that hung on a delicate chain around her neck.

She dropped to her knees as Peter and the reapers fanned out around her.

“Please,” she begged. “Don’t.”

Brother Peter knelt in front of her. “Why not, my sister? Tell me.”

Her eyes glittered with tears. “We’re so close,” she said. “We can
cure
this. We’re
going
to cure it. Please . . . just give us time. We can save everyone . . . please believe me.”

“Believe you?” mused the reaper. “My sister, I
do
believe you. I believe with all my heart that you can cure the plague that has come so close to destroying all human life.”

Her expression softened from abject horror to one of surprised hope. “Then you’ll leave us alone? You won’t hurt us? You won’t wreck everything?”

He set one of his knives down and used that hand to caress her face. It was an act of such gentleness, such tenderness, that the woman actually closed her eyes and pressed her cheek against his rough palm.

“I said that I believed you, my sister,” said Brother Peter as he leaned close and rested his cheek on the top of her head. “And may god have mercy on you for the sins you have committed here in this place of blasphemy.”

Her eyes snapped wide.

Not because of his words.

They opened with shock because of the pain. She sagged back from him and looked down at the knife that Peter had buried in her chest.

“May you find forgiveness in the formless eternity of the darkness.”

“All praise to his darkness,” said the others.

Peter looked around at the reapers and then at the machines that filled the room.

“Destroy everything,” he said.

80

T
HE HORROR AND SADNESS OF
what surrounded them was awful. On some level Benny had feared that the answer to the mystery of Sanctuary might be something like this, but he’d never allowed that thought to fully form. Now it was incontrovertible.

“Can you do anything for them?” asked Nix as she shrugged out of her pack.

“We can try,” said McReady, “but some of them . . . I think some of them have already gone too far over the line.”

However, she stood frozen, as if shocked by her own words and all that they implied.

Benny understood what she meant; he could see it. Some of the infected looked different from the majority of the poor people in the beds. The different ones had paler, grayer skin, and there was a quality missing from their eyes. All the infected had rage and hunger burning in their eyes, but for some that was all there was. Beyond those two things there was a blackness, like the empty shadows at the bottom of a ditch. Whatever indefinable quality that separated infected person from infected zom was gone, consumed by the insatiable appetites of the Reaper Plague.

For the rest, though . . .

The spark of humanity was still there. Flickering in a dark wind, but there nonetheless.

McReady still stood unmoving.

Then Lilah crossed to her in two quick strides, spun the woman, and slapped her across the face with shocking force. “
Do something.
Test the drug. Show me that it works before I give it to my town boy. Show me now or I’ll
feed
you to them.”

It was a vicious threat, and Benny had no doubts at all that Lilah meant it. Joe took a step toward the doctor, and Benny and Nix moved in the same instant and put the tips of their swords against his chest.

“Don’t,” warned Benny.

Joe gently pushed the sword blades aside. “And don’t you forget who your friends are.” To McReady he said, “Lilah gave you an order, Monica—not a request.”

McReady glared hot death at him, but then she snatched the backpack from Nix and hurried over to the bed of a woman who still had the spark of humanity.

“Help me,” said McReady, and Lilah was right there. “Hold her head steady, yes, just like that. I need her mouth open. Good . . .”

As Lilah followed the directions, McReady took two capsules from the bag and unscrewed them.

“Normally we’d let her swallow the capsules and wait for digestion and absorption through the stomach mucosa . . . but we don’t have that time. Hold her—she’ll buck. The first dose is painful. The parasites in the body will fight it.”

Lilah’s muscles bunched and flexed, and the woman’s head did not budge at all. McReady poured the powder into the gaping mouth.

“Water,” she called, and Nix was there with a canteen. She dribbled some of the water into the woman’s mouth and then directed Lilah to force the jaws shut.

Immediately the woman began thrashing ten times more frantically than before. Her muscles went rigid as iron, and her body arched and bucked with such force that Lilah had to lie across her to keep her from breaking her own bones. The screams were terrible, the worst Benny had ever heard. High, plaintive, piercing.

“It’s not working,” said Nix. “God, it’s not . . .”

Suddenly the woman went limp.

It was as quick as a heartbeat. Her body flopped back against the bed and she lay there, staring blindly at the ceiling, her chest rising and falling with alarming rapidity as air puffed in and out between gritted teeth.

They gathered around her bed, fists balled in tension, held breath burning in their chests.

“Come on,” McReady muttered. “Come on . . . come
on
 . . .”

Then someone said, “God . . .”

They all stared.

The voice spoke again.

“God . . . help me . . .”

It was the woman.

Wasted, drenched with sweat, covered with her own filth, ragged, and worn to a skeletal thinness.

But it was a person who spoke.

Not a monster.

Joe snapped, “Everyone—two teams.
Go.
”

It was impossible. It was a task assigned in hell. It was the
hardest thing Benny had ever done. But as Joe went through the room and quieted those whose life spark had burned out, the rest of them worked in pairs—Lilah holding patients for McReady, Benny holding for Nix.

It took forever.

Forever . . . And with every second Benny thought about Chong.

But they got two capsules into the mouths of every remaining person in the room.

Soldiers.

Scientists.

Support staff.

Flight crew.

One hundred and sixty-two people.

It took forever.

But they did it. Lilah kept saying to herself,
It works. We can save my town boy.
Over and over.

By the time they were finished, Benny could hardly stand. Nix was weeping openly. So were many of the patients.

Archangel was a miracle drug, they all knew that; but Benny had read too many science fiction novels where miraculous cures are instantaneous. He willed the infected to all suddenly snap out of it, for their eyes to clear, and for the
thing
that dwelled inside them to flee. Not all of them did. For some it was fast, for others amazingly slow. Reality is often harsher than fiction. Slower, and far less satisfying.

For most of the infected the Archangel pills triggered shrieks and convulsions, and it filled their eyes with screaming madness.

“You’re killing them!” Benny yelled.

“Shut up,” said McReady. “It’s the parasites—they are programmed to defend themselves.”

A few of the patients sagged back into panting semiconsciousness. Some turned aside and wept into their pillows, as if ashamed of the dark thoughts that had set up court in their heads. Some stared fixedly at the ceiling as if frozen in time.

Some died.

Benny began to untie one of the treated patients, but McReady stopped him, warning that a relapse, though unlikely, was possible. Observation for several hours would be needed.

They gathered around the bed of one of the worst cases. A soldier who screamed and thrashed and finally collapsed back, his eyes and mouth open, his chest suddenly silent. McReady snatched up a medical chart that hung on a hook at the end of his bed. “This soldier was bitten on patrol. Looks like he was already pretty far gone when they gave him the metabolic stabilizer.”

“Is he dead?” asked Lilah in a frightened voice.

“Yes.”

“We killed him,” breathed Nix.

McReady looked sad. “He had almost transitioned to a reanimate. All the parasitic eggs in his system must have hatched. The strain . . . it was simply too much for him, and his heart gave out.”

She examined the other fatalities.

“This one had a preexisting heart condition,” she said, reading another chart. “And this one looks like she had a stroke.”

Lilah said, “What about Chong? Will this . . . I mean will Archangel . . . ?”

The doctor shook her head. “There’s no way to tell. It’s going to be different for every infected person. There will always be a risk.”

She sighed and rubbed her tired eyes.

“I’m exhausted,” she said. “I need to sit down and—”

“No!” growled Lilah as she grabbed a bag of capsules and glared at McReady. “We have to find my town boy.
Right now.
”

81

B
ROTHER
P
ETER ENTERED A LONG
, dismal chamber lined on both sides with iron-barred cells. All the cells were empty save one. The thing in the cage glared out at him from behind strings of matted black hair. His eyes were dark and bottomless. Pale lips curled back to reveal wet teeth.

“Hello, little brother,” he said. “Why do they have you in here? What sin have you committed that they’ve locked you away like an animal?”

The thing in the cage growled. It was an animal sound with no trace of humanity. There were gnawed bones on the floor, and its metal water dish was battered and twisted.

“Looks like he’s about to cross over,” observed one of the Red Brothers. “You want to leave him or let him go?”

The creature in the cage murmured a single word. “Hungry . . .”