Fire & Ash (44 page)

They passed through the gates. Benny turned to watch the guards pull it shut.

“God . . . ,” he murmured. He looked around. Mountainside looked like it always looked. And after today he knew for sure that he’d never see it again.

“Benny . . . ?”

He turned at the sound of her voice.

“You have to go, Nix,” he said. “There’s still time.”

She shook her head. “I can’t go.”

Benny felt his heart tearing in half. “Please, Nix . . . I can’t do this if you’re here. I
can’t
.”

“You have to,” she said. “We have to.”

Benny suddenly reached for her and pulled her close and clung to her. “Nix, please go,” he begged, his voice breaking
into sobs. “Please don’t make me kill you, too.”

She started crying too. He could feel the heat of her, even through their body armor, even through the fear. She was so alive, and she deserved to go on living. Someone had to.

“Nix . . .
please
 . . .”

She looked up at him with her green eyes. Her freckles were dark, the scars on her face livid.

“Benny,” she said softly, thickly, “I’m a samurai too.”

“Nix . . .”

“I won’t leave you,” she said, shaking her head stubbornly. “I won’t.”

He leaned his forehead against hers and they stood there, weeping, while all around them the town they grew up in prepared to die.

“Benny . . . Nix . . . ,” said a voice, and they turned to see Morgie there. “They’re coming.”

Benny drew a breath and stepped back from Nix. He fisted the tears from his eyes and nodded. Nix sniffed back her tears. She nodded too.

Lilah, Chong, and Riot stood a few feet away.

“This is it,” said Benny. “They let me make the big speech out there because this was my crazy plan. But I wanted to say something else to you guys. First . . . I told Nix and I’m telling you, there’s still time to leave. You can follow the goat path up the mountain. Or you can go out the north gate on the quads. There’s enough fuel to get you at least a couple of miles down—”

“Don’t,” said Chong. “You know we’re not leaving. My family got out, that’s all I care about.”

Neither of them admitted the reality of that comment.
Wagonloads of people had left. Thousands went on foot toward the next town. Only fighters were left here. If everything went wrong, then the reapers would follow the trail north and destroy that town, and the next, and the next. Distance couldn’t guarantee safety anymore. Only an end to the reapers could do it, and that would happen here or it wouldn’t happen at all.

The odds were that it wouldn’t happen, though. The odds were in favor of the Chongs, and everyone else, being hunted down by killers—alive and dead.

Benny turned to Lilah and Riot. “This isn’t even your town. . . .”

“It ain’t about the town, son,” said Riot. “Excuse me for saying it, but I don’t give a rat’s hairy bee-hind about this town or any other town. I want to see that smug bastard and all his minions burn.”

“ ‘Minions,’ ” echoed Morgie. “Nice.”

There were shouts from the wall. “They’re coming! God . . . it’s the runners! They’re coming.”

Benny said, “Look, if we do this, then we’re not going to be the same people afterward. This is the line that Captain Ledger was talking about. We’re about to become monsters.”

“No,” said Chong, “that’s a myth; it’s a lie of bad logic. People who don’t understand, who haven’t seen what we’ve seen, say that if you use violence in defense, then you’re just the same as the people who attacked you, that you’re just as bad. But it’s not true. If they hadn’t started this, we’d never have thought this up. Benny—I grew up with you, I know how that weird little mind of yours works. If Saint John and Brother Peter and Mother Rose and all those maniacs hadn’t started a
holy war, all you’d be thinking about would be Zombie Cards, fishing for trout, and what Nix looks like in tight jeans. Don’t even try to deny it.”

Despite everything, Nix blushed and Benny grinned.

“These people want to kill everything that we love.” Chong looked at Riot. “You want to talk about a line? They raided Sanctuary and slaughtered monks who never did anything but help everyone they met, and they killed sick people who couldn’t even lift a hand to defend themselves. And they murdered all those little children. Like Eve—they murdered
Eve
. There is no line, Benny. We’re not like them. If we’re risking our souls here, it’s to make sure that kind of wholesale slaughter doesn’t keep happening. I’m not saying we’re heroes . . . but we’re not like them.”

Morgie clapped him on the back and then held out his hand, palm down in the center of their circle. “Maybe I haven’t been with you guys through all that, but I’ve got your back right here, right now. Tom taught us to be samurai. He taught us to fight . . . so let’s fight. Warrior smart.”

Chong laid his hand atop Morgie’s. “Warrior smart.”

Lilah was next, placing her brown hand over Chong’s. “Warrior smart.”

“I ain’t a samurai,” said Riot, “but I’ve got my own dog in this fight. And I guess this was my war before it was yours. So, yeah . . . warrior smart.” She placed her hand over Lilah’s.

Tears still streamed down Nix’s face. “All that time I was writing down how to survive and how to fight in my journal, I thought it was to build and protect something. I didn’t think it was to destroy . . . but I guess we don’t always get to choose our wars. I love you all. Warrior smart.”

Benny was the last to reach out, and he placed his palm over Nix’s. Her fingers were icy from terror.

“I know Tom would think we’re all crazy,” he said. “But when he taught us to be warrior smart, this is what he meant.”

They held their hands there for a long moment, and then without another word they turned and headed off to take up their posts.

101

S
AINT
J
OHN COULD NOT PUT
down the knife. His fist felt welded shut around the handle.

“Honored One,” said one of his aides. “Our scouts picked up the trail of a large group of refugees heading north. Thousands of them. The scouts guess they have a two-day lead.”

“Send the quads after them.”

“How many, Honored One?”

“All of them, and a reserve of five thousand on foot. Hunt them down and send them all into the darkness.” He touched the aide’s sleeve. “We are no longer recruiting. Everyone goes into the darkness.”

The aide bowed and left, and a few moments later the saint heard the sound of hundreds of quad engines roaring to life.

“You cannot escape the will of god,” he said to the morning air.

Another aide appeared at his side. He wore a silver dog whistle around his neck. “We’ve called up the flocks.”

“How many answered the call?”

“Eighty thousand of them. At least a third are runners.
However, we’ve already almost used up Sister Sun’s red powder.”

Over the last few days, several quads had caught up with Saint John’s army, each one laden with plastic trash bags of powder. The last gift of Sister Sun, sent with the fastest quads by Brother Peter.

“Save it for later. We have enough runners for this nonsense.”

The aide pointed. “I sent two small flocks ahead to test the defenses.”

Saint John watched the dead run in a ragged line toward the fence.

“Send the rest.”

“And the reapers, Honored One?”

“Send them all in. I want that town erased from the earth. Tear it down, paint it in blood, and grind it into the mud.”

The aide smiled, nodded, and went off to relay the orders. Sending the gray people in along with the reapers was the kind of shock and awe the Red Brothers loved. It made for a quick fight, but a memorable one. He began shouting orders.

Saint John glanced at the reapers behind him. Many of them were ordinary foot soldiers, some of them quite new to the faith. As he looked at them, quite a few dropped their eyes or looked away. They all wept, and he wondered how many of those tears were from the chlorine stench or from their own terror.

Cowards,
he thought.
Timid in faith and in heart.

“Listen to me,” he bellowed. “The false one has tried to trick you with lies and promises. He has tried to test your faith and make you question your commitment to god. I say to you
now, our god is an unforgiving god. If any man or woman strays from his duty or withholds his blade from the cause of righteousness, then that sinner will be stripped of flesh and left to the gray people. To defy me is to defy god. All hail to Lord Thanatos!”

“All praise to his darkness,” thundered the closest reapers, and that cry spread so that soon forty thousand voices shouted it.

Saint John was satisfied. His words might not have removed doubt, but they would make even the doubters crave to dip their knives in the blood of the heretics.

The Red Brothers acted as sergeants and yelled orders.

Saint John pointed with Brother Peter’s knife.

“Now,” he commanded.

And the army of the reapers surged forth.

They started out walking onto the field, many of them coughing and gagging from the chemical vapors. But soon they were running, shouting, crying out the name of their god. Screaming for blood.

102

B
ENNY
I
MURA CLIMBED TO THE
observation platform of the east tower. The field was vanishing, to be replaced by a carpet of bodies. Leading the charge were two packs of R3’s. Even from this distance they looked terrifying. They were fresh corpses too, probably victims of the raid on Haven.

Somehow that made it worse. It made it more of a sinful act on Saint John’s part. It was a level of disrespect for the dead that offended Benny in ways he couldn’t express.

It fed his rage.

He held a pair of binoculars and watched as the zoms ran across the bleach-soaked ground. Reapers with dog whistles ran with them.

No one inside the gate moved. Not a muscle, not a finger. The entire town was absolutely still. Chong stood by the tower rail, an arrow fitted in place, the string pulled back.

Benny said, “Now.”

Chong loosed the arrow. The powerful compound bow sent it whipping through the air, fast and silent and true. The arrow struck the stomach of one of the reapers running with the zombie flock. He screamed and pitched backward.

The zoms turned at the scream and the movement and at the spurt of fresh blood. Through the binoculars Benny saw the confusion on the faces of the zoms. He saw how the moment of distraction changed their focus. They had come running out onto the field, driven by whistles, herded forward over the mud. They were not pulled by any smell of meat from behind the chain-link fence. Now that they were on the field, they couldn’t smell the human flesh at all. Bleach kills all sense of smell. The reapers, protected by their chemically treated tassels, herded them with sound alone.

But now the moment froze. The reapers still had their whistles, but the zoms’ sense of smell was gone.

The chemical protection of the tassels was gone.

The reapers stared into the eyes of the R3 zoms.

The zoms stared back at them.

The reaper with the arrow lay thrashing on the ground. Not dead. Benny did not want the man silent and still. He wanted screams. He wanted movement.

One of the zombies bared its teeth.

Then all of them did.

The reapers tried to blow their whistles.

But that was the wrong thing. They should have tried to run.

With shrieks like a pack of wildcats, the zoms leaped onto the reapers and bore them to the ground and tore them to pieces. All around them the reapers faltered and stared. Then the second flock of zoms, drawn by the screams, came running. They attacked anything that was close. Without
a sense of smell to differentiate whole flesh from rotting meat, some of them threw themselves at other zoms.

Benny closed his eyes for a moment, not sure whether to be grateful or beg for forgiveness.

He opened his eyes again to see the forest walls vomit forth a horde of zombies. So many thousands of them that there was no need to count. They swarmed across the field. Some broke away from a straight charge to join the bloody melee. Most of them, though, kept running, drawn by the dog whistles, moving too fast for the effect of the bleach to overcome the call of the dog whistles.

•  •  •

Down at the fence, Sally Two-Knives raised her hand. The line of Freedom Riders held fast, guns ready. They stared in horror at the tide of death that was washing toward them. None of them believed that they’d live through the day. Over the last three days, each in their own way, they’d made peace with their world, their religions, or in the absence of any faith, with themselves. Just knowing that the main population of the town might be safe, and knowing that a cure for the plague existed, put iron in their backs and kept their hearts beating. Some of them wept in fear, but they blinked away tears and took aim.

Sally turned to Captain Strunk, who stood next to her. “Glad I never got to see what I’d look like as an old lady. There’s something about an octogenarian with biker tats and a Mohawk that just doesn’t work.”

“You look beautiful to me,” said Strunk. He sighted along the barrel.

Sally slashed down with her hand. “FIRE!”

•  •  •

Far out in the Ruin, many miles to the north, a line of quads raced along the highway. They rode four abreast, and the line of quads stretched back half a mile.

All along the road they saw signs of the passage of people fleeing in a hurry. Dropped dolls, lost shoes, articles of clothing that must have fallen from carts, muddy wagon tracks. It was four days’ walk to the next town. The quads would catch up with the heretics in less than an hour.

Up ahead two figures stood in the middle of the road.

The leader of the mobile infantry raised a clenched fist in the universal symbol to stop. The quads slowed and stopped a dozen feet from the two men.

The man on the left grinned at the reapers through the grille of a New Orleans Saints football helmet. He was thin and wiry, with a carpet coat armored with metal squares cut from license plates. He leaned on a spear that had a bayonet blade and a heavy metal ball on the bottom. Under his helmet he wore a pair of cheap black sunglasses.