Fire & Ash (45 page)

The man on the right was in similar garb, except that he wore a San Diego Chargers helmet with a plastic shark glued to it. A heavy logging ax rested on one muscular shoulder.

The man on the left gave the reapers a wide, happy grin.

“Wassssabi?” said Dr. Skillz.

“Duuuuude,” said J-Dog, nodding to the leader’s quad. “Nice ride. Can I have it?”

The reapers laughed. There was the slithery sound of many knives being drawn from leather sheaths.

“No, seriously,” said Dr. Skillz. “Let him have the bike. He’s got a serious Davy Jones for some vroom-vroom.”

The leader looked blank. He leaned toward the reaper on his left. “Did any of that make sense?”

“They’re messing with you, brother. Let’s gut them and get moving.”

“Whoa, bad vibes, brah,” said J-Dog. “You need to drink a big chilltini.”

“And you need to get right with god,” said the leader. He gestured to his men. “Cut their throats and—”

The air was filled with the
clickety-click
of hammers being cocked and slides being racked. In the forest on either side of the road, figures moved. Men and women and teenagers. Hundreds upon hundreds of people; everyone in Mountainside who owned a firearm prepared to shoot. And the narrow country lane was a killing floor. The reapers knew it, and their righteous rage turned to icy sludge in their veins.

“Dudes,” said Dr. Skillz, “if you’re gonna ride the big one, you better
have
big ones.”

J-Dog nodded. “So . . . can I have the bike?”

•  •  •

Saint John tried to see what was happening, but there were simply too many people in the way. He heard the screams, though, and they were too close to be coming from the town.

He grabbed a fistful of an aide’s shirt. “Find out what’s happening.”

The saint thrust the man toward the crowd.

•  •  •

The Freedom Riders fired and fired, and the leading edge of zoms and reapers crumpled a hundred yards out. The next line fell at ninety yards. At eighty.

At least a hundred of the attackers collapsed with each
volley, but the tide was coming in like a tsunami. The mass of attackers rose up and down like sea rollers as they climbed over the dead. Fights broke out as zoms turned on the wounded and dying, their senses confused by the numbing bleach. Some of the reapers had to defend against their own undead shock troops. But even these skirmishes were carried forward like debris on the tide. There was too much forward momentum for anything to stop them.

“Fire!” screamed Sally. She had a bolt-action sniper rifle, and she killed everything she aimed at.

All along the line, fighters yelled out that they were reloading. Then slapped in new magazines or thumbed shells into their shotguns.

They fired and fired.

•  •  •

The tide was fifty yards away now, and Benny knew that nothing could stop it.

It was what he counted on.

It was what he’d planned for.

Down below, he saw Nix, Lilah, Morgie, and Riot dipping torches into buckets of pitch. All along the inside of the fence were unlit bonfires. Hundreds of them, and more of them throughout the town.

The tide was forty yards away. Almost to the first of the mounds of dirt.

How scary are you willing to be in order to take the heart out of the enemy?

“NOW!” Benny yelled.

The four of them slapped their torches against the ground, each at precise points, where slender trenches had
been dug. Each trench was a few inches deep and a handbreadth wide and lined with rags and straw that had been soaked in kerosene. All the tons of it that had been stored at the fuel company Benny and his friends had driven through. It had taken every spare second and every able-bodied man and boy to siphon it out of the tanks and transport it here. Now that kerosene was soaked into the earth, waiting for a single caress of one of the torches.

And now every one of those torches bowed to the ground to kiss the kerosene.

•  •  •

Nix touched her torch to the first of the trenches, and fire leaped up and raced away from her, under the metal rim of the fence and then flashing out along an arrow-straight line to the mound that was farthest from town. The fire reached the mound and then vanished into the mouth of a piece of metal drainpipe.

There was a moment of nothingness.

Then the thirty-pound propane tank buried inside the mound exploded. The dirt flew away from the blast, carrying with it all the broken glass, screws, nails, and other jagged debris that had been packed around it.

The incoming tide turned red.

•  •  •

Saint John heard the first of the explosions.

Then the next, and the next. He saw the fireballs rising above the field and heard the screams of his attacking army turn to screams of pain.

And he heard the moans of the countless dead turn to growls of red delight as they began to feed.

•  •  •

The tower shook with every blast, and Benny had to cling to the ladder to keep from being hurled off by the shock waves. He watched as the explosions opened empty spaces in the storm of attackers, like the eyes of hurricanes, but the storms swept around them.

There was more fighting on the field, though. The zombies were in open revolt now. There was too much blood, too much torn meat, and that sent them into a killing frenzy. The screams and gunfire and explosions washed away any effect of the dog whistles. Now the dead did what they had done for fifteen years. They attacked anything that moved with implacable ferocity and bottomless hunger.

The reapers forgot about the town and turned their weapons on the dead.

•  •  •

Saint John’s aides brought up a supply cart, and he climbed onto it to get a better view. The sight nearly took the heart from him. The field in front of the town was a madhouse of battle. Reapers fighting the gray people. Forty thousand of the living against eighty thousand of the dead.

And the town . . .

The town still stood.

He turned to his aides, teeth bared, his face an inhuman mask of fury. “Slaughter the gray people. Pass the word. Do that first, do it now. And then we will pull down that fence and show those heretics the true meaning of holy wrath.”

•  •  •

The Red Brothers raced out into the crowds, shouting orders, using curses and kicks and fists to force the reapers
into some semblance of order. To get them to fight back. Some of the reapers threw down their weapons and tried to flee, but after the Red Brothers butchered them, the others fell into line, and with the elite warriors leading them, they counterattacked.

The dead, even the running dead, were frightening and incredibly dangerous.

But they were brainless monsters. They had no tactics, no strategy, no skill at arms. The reapers knew how to fight them. Of course they did. Killing was their pathway to paradise, even the killing of the dead.

The Red Brotherhood waded into the fight, swinging two-hand swords and fire axes and farming scythes. They cut swathes through the dead, slaughtering and dismembering with machinelike precision.

Saint John watched this and slowly, slowly, his smile returned.

Any single reaper should be able to defend himself against two or three of the dead. Reapers working together, fighting in military wedges led by the fiercest of their own kind—they were a force like nothing else on earth.

•  •  •

Benny Imura saw the precise moment when this part of his plan failed. The reapers had turned on the monsters that had turned on them. Thousands of blades flashed in the sunlight, and the massive army of the Night Church crushed the legions of the dead.

He leaned his head against the ladder and sighed.

The last of the propane tanks had blown up. The Freedom
Riders at the fence line were still firing, but there were only so many bullets.

Benny knew this would happen.

He had
planned
for this failure.

But he dreaded the next stages, knowing that with each step he was venturing into darker and darker territory. Even in the slim chance that he lived through this . . . could he ever find his way out of the abyss?

He doubted it. Joe’s advice about becoming the monster they were afraid of did not come with a suggestion for how to reclaim his humanity.

He already felt lost.

103

B
ENNY CLIMBED DOWN FROM THE
tower. The pain in his back was like a constant scream, but he didn’t care. Everything was screaming. The very air seemed to cry out in pain.

Nix and the others ran to meet him. They still held their torches. Chong climbed down and joined them, picking up a torch from the bonfire.

They stood for one moment in a circle.

“Go,” said Benny, and everyone turned to run.

All except Nix.

“Benny . . . ,” she began, but he gave a fierce shake of his head.

“Not now,” he begged.

“I have to tell you in case—”

“No! Don’t, for God’s sake,” he said. “If you say it, I think it’ll kill me.”

Nix saw something in his eyes, and she took a step backward. Then with a flash of wild red hair, she turned and ran.

Benny hurried over to Solomon.

“They’re killing all the zoms,” said Benny.

The bounty hunter laughed. “Yeah, shows you what a little cooperation can accomplish.”

“We could have used a little more of that cooperation.”

Solomon drew the two machetes and gave them a quick twirl. “What’s that thing you kids keep saying?”

“Warrior smart.”

Solomon nodded. “Warrior smart.”

Benny drew his sword and began running along the fence line.

•  •  •

The Red Brothers and the army of reapers tore the gray people apart, but they took heavy losses to do it. Fewer than half of the forty thousand who had followed Saint John from the sack of Haven could still fight. However, half of those were injured. Some had bites from runners, and when their own fellow reapers saw those injuries, knives flashed and bodies fell.

Saint John allowed no infection among his people.

When the field was clear of the dead, Saint John walked out, Brother Peter’s knife still clutched in his hand. His cadre of Red Brothers fanned out behind him. The sergeants shoved and growled their men into tight divisions. Sixteen thousand of them stood in ordered lines before the gates of Mountainside. Every eye on both sides of the fence watched Saint John walk across the red-stained field. Now the stench of blood was nearly as strong as the stink of bleach.

Saint John walked to within a thousand yards of the fence. Well within rifle range, but no gun fired. He stopped and pointed his knife at the town.

Behind the gates, the men and women in red sashes suddenly turned and bolted, running in disordered panic from the fence line.

The reapers goggled for a moment, and then laughter
rippled through their ranks. It swelled and swelled until they were all laughing hysterically. It was the sight of the defenders fleeing after all their tactics had failed, and it was the release of fear and tension from each of the reapers.

“They flee!” cried Saint John. “They flee!”

The laughter was like thunder.

Saint John bellowed out two words that floated above the laughter.

“Take them!”

The reapers began marching forward. First in orderly ranks, then faster and faster until they broke into a flat-out run. They hit the fence line, and the sheer weight of their surge tore the fence apart and ripped the poles from the ground—even at the cost of many in the front ranks being crushed at the moment of impact. The reapers flooded into the town, crossing the red zone that separated the fence line from the first rows of shops and homes, smashing through doorways of every building and house they reached. It was like a tidal surge bursting over a levee. The mass of the surge hit the town hard enough to knock walls down and uproot small trees. The thunder of all those feet shattered windows and knocked the frames of doorways out of true. The reaper army flooded into the town, knives ready, spears ready, bloodlust ready.

And they found . . .
nothing
.

The front ranks split apart to follow smaller streets. Knots of reapers burst through doors and ran down the halls of the school and the town hall and the hospital. Every closet door was yanked open, every cellar and attic was invaded.

But there was no one in the town.

As the last of the reapers ran across the fallen fence, the
interior mass of them slowed near the center of town. They looked around, confused, frightened by the strangeness. There had been an army here minutes ago. Two or three hundred people in red sashes had fired volley after volley at them.

Where were they? The back of the town was a steep mountain wall. If any of the defenders had climbed the winding goat paths, they’d be as visible as black bugs. There was a massive reservoir near the end of town, but no one was hiding in the silent pump house.

Runners came to report this to Saint John as he walked without haste toward the shattered gates. He frowned at the news.

“There’s no one there, Honored One.”

“Then they’re hiding. Find them.”

Saint John stopped at the entrance of town and looked around. The guard towers appeared empty too. Except for . . .

“There,” he said, and his aides looked up at the closest tower. A single figure stood by the rail.

The boy with the Japanese eyes.

“Bring him to me,” said the saint. “Alive and able to scream. I will tear the answers from him.”

Four of the Red Brothers hurried toward the tower, but before they could reach it, the figure far above raised the bullhorn and spoke. His eyes streamed and burned from all the chemicals in the air. The bleach burned his throat and made breathing difficult. But Benny’s rage shaved all thoughts of pain and discomfort away.

“Listen to me,” he roared. “This is Benjamin Imura, samurai of the Nine Towns.”

The reapers laughed and jeered. Some threw rocks at the
tower, though no one could reach the observation deck.

“
Listen to me
,” bellowed Benny. “While you still can.”