Fire & Ash (7 page)

They returned to training, but Benny was clearly angry. Nix could understand why. Joe made a point of evaluating everything they’d learned from Tom, and frequently suggested some modifications. A couple of times that day Benny balked at changes in technique suggested by the ranger.

“That’s not how Tom did it.”

Joe’s reply to each comment was a shrug. “Do it whatever way will keep you alive.”

But Joe’s advice had pushed too many of Benny’s buttons.
“Hey, man, stop acting like you know more than Tom.”

Joe smiled. It was a tolerant smile, but his patience clearly didn’t go too many layers deep. “Listen to me, kid. I’m offering you the chance to learn some extra skills and about the nature of warfare. You want to learn this stuff, fine. You don’t want to learn it, also fine. But understand two things about Tom. First, he was a very, very talented amateur, but he was an amateur. He was one day out of the police academy when First Night happened. He’d never served in the military. Most of what he learned about combat he picked up during the fourteen years he worked as a bounty hunter and closure specialist. And he learned a lot from me. Now . . . from what I saw when he ran with my pack, and from what I’ve heard since, Tom became seriously good. Good enough to spank Charlie Pink-eye and his crew, and tough enough so that Preacher Jack had to shoot him in the back rather than risk fighting him one-on-one. That says a lot. Tom was the kind of guy I’d want at my back in any situation. But here’s the flip side of that. Before First Night—for a lot of years before First Night—I was the top shooter in a group that hired only top shooters. I was fighting monsters, bad guys, and terrorists before Tom was even born. Grasp that for a minute, kid. I’m not saying this to brag. This is a perspective check. I’ve been fighting this war in one way or another for more than forty years. Even before First Night I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe. Stuff that would have you screaming into your pillow every night. I led combat teams into firefights on every continent, and I’ve killed more people than you ever met. With hands, guns, knives, and once with a paperback book. You think I’m trying to bust on your brother by correcting
the way you swing a sword? Kid, if I wanted to humiliate him or you, I’d take that sword away from you and break it over my knee. But as it turns out, I happen to respect what you and Nix can do, and I respect what Tom taught you, and I respect Tom as a fallen brother-in-arms. I respect all of that so much that I want to make sure it doesn’t go to waste just because you have too much pride and ego to take some constructive criticism. So if you want to stop arguing with everything I say, then I’ll teach you every dirty trick I can so you stay alive.”

Benny glared up at him for a very long time. Finally, when his voice was under control, he said, “That’s one thing. You said there were two. What’s the other? Was there something else you wanted to say about my brother?”

Joe gave Benny the coldest smile Nix had ever seen on a human face.

“Yes,” said Joe. “Tom’s dead. I’m alive. After all these years, I’m still alive. That makes a statement. Learn from the survivors or go the hell home.”

That had been the end of the discussion. Benny had stormed off and spent the rest of the afternoon stewing about it.

The next day he was back, with his sword, his gear bag, and his apologetic pride.

Joe never said a word about the argument, never acknowledged it. They picked up where they’d left off, and Joe drilled them mercilessly. And well.

Both of them had improved quite a lot. They were faster, trickier, stronger, and far more devious.

Now, though . . .

Nix felt clumsy and stupid. Lilah got through her guard again and again and again.

“I—I’m sorry . . . ,” said Nix in a tiny voice.

“Sorry?” Lilah withdrew her spear, raised it over her head, and with a savage grunt drove it down. The blade bit inches deep into the sand right beside Nix’s face, chopping off several strands of curly red hair. “
Sorry?
Are you training for combat or practicing for your own death, you silly town girl?”

Nix covered her face with her hands and shook her head.

“I’m sorry,” was all she could say.

Lilah straightened and stood over Nix for a while. Then she threw her spear down in disgust and sank onto the ground beside the weeping girl.

“What is it?” Her voice was always a ghostly whisper.

Nix rolled toward her and wrapped her arms around Lilah, clinging to her as a child might. Clinging to her as a drowning person might.

They never heard the zoms coming until white fingers clamped like iron around their flesh.

16

W
HEN
R
IOT COULDN
’
T BEAR TO
stare at her mother any longer, she went to the playground to find Eve. They sat together on a blanket, with sewing gear scattered all around them: needles, spools of thread, balls of colored yarn, thimbles, and all sorts of fabric scraps.

As Riot watched, Eve used a pair of scissors to cut a piece of pink felt into the shape of a blouse. Almost the shape of a blouse. Currently it looked more like a blob or a three-legged pink turtle. Eve’s little pink tongue tip stuck out from the corner of her mouth as she worked.

Overhead, a pair of capuchin monkeys that had long ago escaped from a private zoo in Las Vegas capered among the leaves. The nuns had named them Charity and Forbearance. The children called the monkeys Chatty and Foobear.

“There!” said Eve proudly as she held out the finished piece.

“That looks pretty,” said Riot. The blouse still had three arms. “Is . . . one of those the neck hole?”

Eve considered the shirt, frowning slightly. “Oops,” she said, and trimmed one of the sleeves. “Better?”

“Way better,” agreed Riot. “That’s as pretty as a rainbow after a spring rain.”

Eve giggled.

They found some blue fabric for a skirt and little bits of brown for shoes, and Riot helped Eve glue and sew the pieces onto a burlap rag doll one of the nuns had made. As they worked, Chatty and Foobear crept down the tree and sat the edge of their blanket, watching with luminous dark eyes.

When the doll was nearly finished, Eve leaned over and began sorting through the supplies until she found a nearly empty ball of bright red yarn. She held it against the doll to examine the color, and then nodded to herself. Riot watched as Eve cut off a few small pieces and began tying them around the doll’s neck. For one horrible moment Riot was afraid that Eve was making something like the red streamers that all the reapers wore tied to various places around their bodies. The streamers were symbolic of the red mouths opened in the flesh of the “heretics” that the reapers sent on into the eternal darkness. They were also dipped in a chemical mixture concocted by Sister Sun, which emitted a strong scent that discouraged the dead from attacking.

But that was not what Eve was doing.

She strung the red yarn around the doll’s throat.

“What’s that?” Riot asked, her smile broad and forced.

“A necklace.”

“Oh . . . nice. What kind of necklace? Is it a ruby necklace like a princess would wear?”

Eve looked at the red loop of yarn around the burlap throat of the doll. Then she slowly turned her face to Riot. The smile was so bright and happy.

“No, silly,” she said, “it’s like the one mommy wore. Remember? Her necklace was all bright and shiny.”

“Necklace . . . ?” Riot murmured. The heart in her chest turned instantly to ice.

Eve’s mother had indeed worn a necklace of shining red. She’d worn it the very last time Riot and Eve had seen her. It was not a necklace of rubies, of course, or even of garnets. The reaper Andrew had cut Eve’s mother down with a scythe. The blow had taken the woman across the throat, and the red that had glistened there had been her own bright blood.

Riot looked at the doll and then at Eve. The little girl smiled and smiled, bright as the summer sun, and behind those innocent blue eyes something shifted and moved.

Something very dark and very wrong.

17

T
HERE WAS NO TIME TO
scream.

Four cold hands grabbed Nix from behind and tore her away from Lilah.

The Lost Girl started to yell, but then a red-mouthed thing ran at her.

Ran.

It came so fast, hands reaching, lips peeling back from cracked and jagged teeth. The zom slammed into Lilah, caught her off guard, knocked her backward. They fell over and over down the slope, hung for a moment at the edge of a sheer six-foot drop into an arroyo, and then toppled out of sight.

There was no way for Nix to tear free of the hands that grabbed her from behind. Teeth snapped inches from her neck and shoulders and ears. The angle was impossible for swordplay, so she did the only practical thing she could: She opened her hand and let Monster Cutter clatter to the ground. Then Nix threw herself backward as hard as she could, using all the power of the zombies’ pull along with the strength of her own legs. The extra momentum spoiled what little balance the awkward creatures had, and the two zombies fell hard onto
the ground, with Nix’s body landing slantwise across them. With humans, a fall like that would have jolted the air from their lungs, but these were dead things. Luckily, Nix made herself exhale on impact—as both Tom and Joe had taught her. The exhale relaxed her body for the impact, but the jolt was still heavy enough to explode fireworks in her head.

There was a strange, wet quality to the bodies she landed on. Were they recently dead? Were they still filled with blood and other bodily fluids? Her pants and the back of her shirt felt warm and damp.

The gripping hands were still there, so Nix raised her arms straight up, hands almost touching above her, then slammed her elbows down as hard as she could. Her left elbow hit a zom in the nose and knocked its head back against the rocky ground; her right elbow struck the second zom in the ribs. In both cases, the blows jolted their bodies and gave her a split second to pull free and roll away. She scrambled to her feet and faced the dead. One of the two zoms lay still, the back of its head smashed to a pulp. The other struggled to right itself.

“Lilah!” Nix yelled, but there was no answer. She heard scrabbling sounds from the arroyo, but it was impossible to tell if that was Lilah fighting for her life or another zom coming up the slope to join the attack.

Nix had no weapons. She’d dropped her sword, and her gun belt was hung on a tree limb up the slope. The second zom was on its feet now, and Nix saw that it was one of the recent dead, probably another of the party of refugees Riot had been leading from the destroyed town of Treetops to Sanctuary. The zom was a Latino man, not tall, but broad-shouldered
and powerful-looking. There was a faint red smudge around its mouth that wasn’t blood. It looked like powder of some kind. There was more of it sprinkled on its clothes. She wondered if it was some kind of pollen.

The zom moved toward her, staggering on bowed legs, his gait made awkward by the absence of one shoe. As he reached out toward Nix, she saw that his palms and forearms were crisscrossed with wounds. When she realized what they were, it sickened her. Defense cuts. The kind a person gets when they’re backing helplessly away from someone trying to cut them. Had this man been unarmed against a reaper? There were similar cuts all along the insides of his arms and outer chest. Nix could imagine him backing away from a killer, arms spread in a hopeless attempt to shelter someone else. A wife, perhaps, or children. Using his own flesh as a shield, and knowing with each cut that nothing he could do, not even the sacrifice of his flesh and blood, would be enough to keep the knives of those fanatical killers from doing their horrible work.

It made Nix want to gag. This man had suffered so much. There was a final deep gash across his throat from where the death blow had been dealt, and his clothes were stained with blood that had pumped out of him with his failing heart. That heart hung still and silent within the walls of his chest, a thing that had been both defeated and broken by evil.

If Nix could have turned and run away, she would have. But there was only sheer rock behind her. The path to escape was behind the zom. There was no option left except to fight. To do more harm to this man.

A black goo dribbled from the creature’s mouth, viscous
and heavy, and Nix thought she could see tiny white thread-worms wriggling in the mess.

She swiftly knelt to snatch up a fist-sized rock, and as she did so Nix saw one more thing that made no sense. The one shoeless foot was swollen and discolored, a sign of advanced decomposition. There was similar discoloration on the man’s arms and chest, and some on his face. Discolored veins were visible through his skin, and some of his fingernails had even fallen off. The tissues were becoming swollen as the process of decay released gasses from the disintegrating tissues.

But . . . that was impossible.

One of the enduring mysteries of the post–First Night world was that zoms decayed to a certain point, and then the process stopped. No one knew why. The living dead did not corrupt to the point where their flesh actually fell apart. But this man looked ready to burst apart; his soft tissue was beginning to liquefy. And that did not happen. Not to any zombie. Only after a zom had been quieted did the normal process of decomposition run its full course. This was something she had never heard of. Not even in Dr. McReady’s reports. Was this a new form of mutation? If so . . . what did it mean? What
could
it mean?

The zom kept moving toward her. He did not run, but it was more than a shuffling walk. Even with the advanced decomposition, he moved with more speed than a regular zom, and even more coordination.

Nix hurled the rock as hard as she could. It struck the monster in the chest with a sound like a bursting watermelon. Fetid black blood erupted from the wound. The smell was so intense that Nix staggered backward. The only thing
that pungent she’d ever smelled was pure cadaverine, but that was weird, because a body only produced cadaverine when it was going through advanced decomposition. Her science class had toured the cadaverine plant in town, and they’d seen how the technicians harvested it from rotting animal flesh.