Benny Imura 03.5: Tooth & Nail (4 page)

8

South Fork Wildlife Area

Southern California

Saint John of the Knife stood in the shadows of a live oak and waited for the slaughter to begin. He stood on a grassy knoll, looking down on a country lane that wandered lazily through the countryside. Birds sang in all the trees, and the air was alive with the buzz of honeybees and bluebottle flies. Sunlight slanted through the boughs, dappling the road in yellow and purple.

The wagon clattered along the road, wheels crunching against the edges of ruts worn into the cracked blacktop. Four heavy-boned horses pulled the wagon, their bodies wrapped in carpet coats and draped with metal mesh. Two men sat on the wooden bench seat, one with the reins in his hands, the other with a shotgun across his knees. The wagon was an old-fashioned chuck wagon that had probably been looted from a cowboy museum. The sides had been reinforced with metal sheeting, and the words
gunderson trade goods
had been painted in bright colors. Two men walked beside the wagon, one on each side, leading their horses. Fifty yards behind the wagon, another man rode slowly on a slate-gray Percheron that stood nineteen hands high and wore a helmet covered in spikes.

The man who sat astride the Percheron had flaming red hair gathered back into a ponytail, dusty jeans, cowboy boots, a Western shirt with flowers and hummingbirds stitched across the chest, and crisscrossed army gun belts around his lean hips, from which holstered Glocks hung. A widemouthed sheath, from which one half of a compound bow protruded, was slung from the saddle horn. It was a metal-and-fiberglass hunting bow fitted with cables and pulleys. A quiver heavy with arrows was slung across his back.

The man was big—tall, broad-shouldered, and muscular. His chest and arms were almost freakishly huge, nearly simian, but for all his mass there was something about him. A lurking potential to use that power with deadly speed. Saint John could see that right away; he was an excellent judge of combat potential.

This was the man they were looking for, he decided. He fit the description given by the Night Church’s newest reaper, Brother Tony. This was the man who knew where Mountainside and the other eight towns could be found.

The trade wagon and its guards were walking through country that was virtually empty of the gray people, and it showed in the slack disinterest of each of those men. Only the big man seemed to be alert. In fact, Saint John saw the precise moment when the red-haired giant realized that the woods were not as empty as they appeared. His horse passed through a patch of shadow thrown across the road by a crooked willow. As the rider passed out of the shadow and into the sunlight, his head jerked up and he looked around. First to the right-hand side of the road, then to the left. His body language changed as he shifted forward in the saddle.

He raised his head, and Saint John had the strange impression that the redhead was sniffing the air the way an animal would. Could he somehow smell the chemicals on the tassels of the hidden reapers? With all the wildflowers that bloomed on either side of the road, it seemed unlikely, improbable. It was why Saint John had chosen this particular spot for the ambush.

“Bobby, Harv,” called the big man. “Hold up.”

The two men leading their horses turned to look back at him. “What’s up, Mike?”

Iron Mike Sweeney used his thighs to guide his horse forward as he continued to look around.

“I don’t know . . . something’s . . .”

He let his voice trail off. And then it seemed to Saint John that the big man’s whole body appeared to blur. His hands were empty and then they were not. He’d snatched up his bow so fast that the eye could not follow it. An arrow seemed to appear on the string as if by magic, there was a vibrating twang, and then a wet scream tore the air. A reaper staggered from between two thick bushes with that same arrow buried to the fletching in his chest. He took two wandering steps and then toppled forward onto his face with no attempt at all to catch his fall.

“Trap!” yelled Iron Mike.

Before Harv and Bobby could even react, Mike had begun filling the air with arrows. One after the other, so fast that Saint John felt an electric thrill race through him. It was like nothing he’d ever seen. Screams filled the air as each arrow plunged into dense shadows to find a chest or throat or eye socket. Reapers fell, writhing in agony or still in death.

The shotgun man on the wagon stood up and swung his barrel around, firing blindly into the trees. Then he shrieked and pitched backward, a hatchet chunked deep into his lower back.

There was a thunderous cry, and the reapers rose up from behind bushes and rocks. A wave of them crested the top of the grassy knoll and washed down toward the road.

Harv and Bobby drew their guns and fired.

And fired and fired.

The reapers were so closely packed that every bullet hit a target.

The guns clicked empty and the guards tried to reload.

Tried.

The reaper wave slammed into them, and they went down in a froth of red as silver knives ended them. Other reapers dragged the driver down and cut him into red inhumanity.

The arrows of the big trade guard never paused. He killed seven reapers, ten, fourteen. Twenty.

They surged toward him, and he hooked the string of the bow over his saddle horn and drew his Glocks. The reapers, the killers who served Saint John’s god, ran into the storm of bullets. They screamed the name of Thanatos. They screamed the name of Saint John.

They screamed the names of their mothers as the bullets tore them down.

Iron Mike filled the road with the dead.

His mighty Percheron, twenty-six hundred pounds of warhorse, reared up and lashed out with steel-shod hooves. The elite killers of the Night Church were flung into the air with shattered skulls and arms and chests.

And then a blade whistled through the air, turning end over end, and its point bit deep into the Percheron’s throat. The horse screamed and twisted sideways and fell.

Iron Mike leaped from the saddle and landed hard, tucking and rolling, coming up onto the balls of his feet, dropping empty magazines, swapping them out, turning, firing, killing. He dropped those magazines and slapped in his last two.

The reapers formed a wide circle around him, the diameter thirty feet across, the ranks of killers thirty deep. Hundreds of knives and swords and scythes glittered in the sunlight. The red-haired giant held the pistols out as he turned in a slow circle.

Everyone knew how this was going to end. He had fifteen rounds in each gun. He had no more magazines.

There were a thousand reapers around him.

Saint John walked slowly down from the top of the knoll. He paused to retrieve his knife from the horse’s throat; then he gave an order and the reapers parted to create a corridor. The saint wiped his blade clean on his thigh and slid the throwing knife into its sheath as he strolled toward the last trade guard. He stopped ten feet away.

The big man said nothing, but he lowered his pistols.

“I am Saint John of the Knife,” said the saint. “You understand that if I wanted you dead, you would be dead.”

The big man shrugged. “Everybody dies.”

His eyes were strange. The irises were red except for a rim of gold. Saint John had never seen eyes like that except in church paintings of vampires and demons.

“The question is, my friend,” said Saint John, “do you want to live?”

9

Sanctuary

Area 51

It took twenty-five grueling, exhausting, sweaty minutes to climb all the way up to the goat path. For most of that time the goat stood there, quietly chewing on a tough piece of vegetable root, watching him with placid curiosity. Each time Benny slipped, he could swear there was a look of pitying amusement on the goat’s face.

Only when Benny climbed onto a flat shelf near the goat did the animal move away. Even then it was at so leisurely a pace that it was as if the goat was daring Benny to give chase. The path it took was less than a hand’s-width wide. Giving chase was very low on Benny’s list of things to do in this lifetime.

Following, however, was another thing. He didn’t want to catch the goat, but he definitely wanted to know how it had gotten into Sanctuary. On his climb he’d figured out what was bothering him.

If a goat could climb over the mountains and reach Sanctuary, so could a person.

Or a lot of people.

The dead would never be able to manage it, of course. They were too clumsy and mindless, and climbing required strength, coordination, observation, sharp wits, and good judgment.

The reapers had all those things.

Benny smiled grimly. If he was able to prove that Sanctuary was unsafe, that it was vulnerable to a sneak attack because of goat trails like this, then he would be able to throw that right in Captain Ledger’s face.

This was being warrior smart.

That’s what Benny’s brother Tom called it. Warrior smart. Using training and good judgment, courage and determination to confront an obstacle and overcome it. The same rules of common sense and education applied. Faced with anything from finding food in the wasteland, avoiding the zoms, preparing a battle plan, to escaping a trap, or defeating an enemy.

Warrior smart was a better way of thinking than the gung-ho stuff Ledger wanted to teach.

Grinning, he began moving slowly and carefully along the goat path.

His courage and confidence stayed with him for almost three hundred yards, but after the first time the walkway cracked beneath his shoes, he began to doubt the wisdom of this plan.

Half an hour later he was only a third of the way to the crest of this broken hill, but the ground looked like it was a thousand miles down. Hot sweat ran down his face, but cold sweat tickled in lines beneath his clothes. His breath came in ragged gasps, and he tried to drill his fingers into the rock wall.

Once, when he closed his eyes, he thought he heard his brother Tom speaking to him.

Yo! Boy genius,
said Tom.
Exactly what do you think you’re doing?

“Shut up,” breathed Benny. “I’m trying not to die here.”

How hard are you trying?

“Bite me.”

Not even if I was alive.

They both laughed, but the laughs were ghostly and unreal. What Benny really wanted to do was sob. The ache he felt for his lost brother was almost unbearable at times. He kept seeing a hole in the world in the shape of Tom Imura, and he couldn’t imagine anything filling it.

However, he believed that he was supposed to fill it. He was supposed to become the next Tom Imura.

Him.

Not some old guy who used to be a soldier back when something like that mattered. Before the dead rose and humanity fell. Now—and especially to Benny—meeting an actual soldier was like being handed proof that the old system was never good enough, that it wasn’t strong enough. That it wasn’t warrior smart enough. The world still ended.

Hot wind whistled past Benny, flapping the cuffs of his jeans and stinging his face.

“Tom . . . ?” murmured Benny.

Yeah, kiddo?

“I . . . I don’t know if I can do it.”

Tom laughed. A gentle laugh.
It’s easy. Put one foot in front of the other and try not to fall.

“That’s not what I meant.”

For a moment Benny could really see Tom, standing there in the shade under the big oak that anchored one corner of their gated yard back home. Tom standing with a cup of iced tea. The smell of hot apple pie wafting out through the kitchen window. Really good pie too. With walnuts and raisins, the way Tom made it. Sour apples so it wasn’t too sweet.

“That’s not what I meant,” Benny said again.

I know what you meant,
answered Tom.

“Tom, I—”

But Tom was gone.

The wind howled as it tore through the crags of the red rock wall.

Benny took as deep a breath as he could and sighed it out. Took another. And another. And then he continued climbing.

It took almost forty minutes to reach the top of the crest. By the time he did, his body was trembling with fatigue and jumpy from the residue of adrenaline in his blood. He staggered away from the edge onto a flat section that was covered with withered grass and strewn with huge boulders left over from the last glacier. Benny took two wobble-kneed steps and then sank down onto his knees.

His exhaustion was the only thing that kept him alive as something whipped over his head.

Benny flung himself sideways, thinking that it was the goat lashing out with hooves to defend its territory.

It wasn’t a goat.

It wasn’t an animal.

The thing that had nearly cut his head off was a broad-bladed field scythe.

And it was held in the fists of a reaper.

All around him, others reapers were emerging from hiding places among the glacial boulders.

10

Rattlesnake Valley

Southern California

Samantha and Tiffany plunged into the woods, and a veil of cool shadows dropped behind them. They ran hard and fast along a deer path for fifty yards and then cut sharply left toward a small stream that fed the larger creek. They stepped into the ankle-deep water and kept going, moving slower now, making sure they didn’t splash water onto the dry mud along the banks or dampen any of the low-hanging leaves. There was no way to know if their pursuers understood anything about tracking, but the girls were long practiced at stealth and concealment.

Samantha bent close to Tiffany. “Who were those people? Who or what are reapers?”

The younger girl was gasping for breath after her exertions, but she managed to get out what she’d learned. “I . . . was hunting in the eastern woods . . . and I heard a scream. I went running, thinking the dead were attacking someone, but it wasn’t that at all. Three men in black were chasing an old couple—they had to be seventy or eighty. The old lady saw me and begged for help.” She looked at Samantha for approval. “What else could I do?”

“No, Tiff, you did the right thing, I’m sure,” Samantha assured her. “Then what happened?”

Tiffany quickly told the tale. The old couple were the last of a small group of survivors who had been living in an old shopping mall. They barely had enough to eat, but they were safe from the dead. Then the people in black and red—the reapers—broke into the mall and just started killing everyone.

“Why?” asked Samantha sharply.

“That’s just it . . . they didn’t give any explanation. They kept yelling things about someone named Thanatos and about sending everyone into the darkness. Crazy stuff like that. The old couple and a few others escaped, but they were chased. They’d survived on the road, constantly heading west toward the mountains and forestlands, but the reapers picked them off one by one. Or they sent packs of the dead after them.”

“How?”

“The old man said that the reapers made up some kind of chemical stuff that keeps the dead from attacking them. They dip pieces of cloth into it and tie the cloth around their ankles and like that.”

Samantha nodded. “The red tassels,” she said. “But how do they make the zombies do what they want?”

“The old man thinks they use dog whistles.”

“But how does—?”

“The dead can hear it. Certain calls make the dead come to them, other calls make them go away. So, I guess they use the whistles to, I don’t know, steer them? Crazy, isn’t it?”

“It’s smart,” said Samantha. “Really smart.”

There was a sound in the woods and they both stiffened, ready to run or fight, but it was only a couple of zebras. More zoo escapees. The striped animals turned to where the girls hid, sniffed the air, and then whinnied in irritation and trotted away.

“Why were these reapers chasing you?”

Tiffany flushed. “Well, what I left out was how I had the chance to talk to the two old folks.”

“Tell me.”

It was a simple thing to say, but Samantha knew that there was a lot behind it. There’s always more to something than what it seems.

What Tiffany said was plain and honest and brutal. “They were trying to kill those two old people, so I killed them.”

Samantha studied Tiffany’s eyes. There were ghosts there, moving from one room of her mind to another. The reapers might have deserved the fate they got, but Tiffany would still carry the memory of what she’d done—what she’d been forced to do—for the rest of her life. Samantha saw similar ghosts when she looked in the mirror.

It made her wonder if the reapers were similarly haunted by the terrible things they were doing. Why, in fact, were they raiding camps and killing innocent folks? In a world where there was almost no one left, it was bad enough killing in defense of the innocent or oneself; but to kill for the joy of it, or for some other equally crazy reason, was a sin.

“What happened to the old people?” asked Samantha tentatively, afraid of the answer.

“I . . . was bringing them home. I thought we could help them. . . .”

“But . . . ?”

“But the reapers caught us. So many of them. They attacked us, and before I knew it the old couple was down. It was awful, Sam. What they did to those people was bad.”

Tiffany’s voice was fragile with pain and anger. And with shock, and Samantha knew how dangerous that was.

“I took another of them down, but there were too many, and I ran. You know the rest.”

“Reapers,” echoed Samantha. “If they’re coming this way, we may have to leave the motor court. We can’t defend that place against an army, and if they can control the dead, then that’s what they have.”

Leaving the motor court would be a sad thing. They’d spent most of their lives there. Their friends were buried there. And there were too many supplies to carry if they had to simply pack and run. And they had no idea what was west of where they lived. Some travelers told rumors of a bunch of small towns somewhere in the mountains, but if they’d given any specific details, that knowledge had died with Dolan and Ida.

There were birds in all the trees, but suddenly there was a single sharp owl cry. Samantha and Tiffany stopped whispering and listened. Heard it again. Samantha responded with the sound a baby owl would use to call its mother. Immediately two figures stepped from the shadows beneath an old weeping willow, both of them with arrows nocked to the strings of yew-wood bows.

Heather and Laura lowered their bows and rushed forward to help.

“I have her,” said Samantha, waving them off. “We need to get to the barn to meet the others. Buy us some time.”

Tiffany, who was puffing and gasping, croaked, “I’m all right . . . I don’t need help. . . .”

They ignored her.

However, Laura said, “I’m almost out of arrows. I’ll take Tiff and find the others.”

Samantha nodded and, despite Tiffany’s breathless protests, let Laura take up the burden of supporting the exhausted Tiffany. Then Samantha took the short spear from the leather scabbard into which she’d thrust it. The weapon had a four-foot hickory shaft and a blade scavenged from a broken sword Dolan had recovered from an empty house. A Scottish claymore. Dolan said that the sword had been on the ground next to over a dozen corpses that had once been zoms. Someone had made a heroic last stand, but now that person was probably wandering the earth as one of the living dead. That was how it was in last-stand fights. The defender ultimately runs out of ammunition, or their weapons break, or they just fatigue out against an enemy that can never get tired.

However, twelve inches of that old sword now protruded from a sturdy knot of leather at the end of the spear. The metal was heavy enough to use as a cleaver, sturdy enough to block most blades, and sharp enough to cut through leather, flesh and bone. Samantha called it her dragon’s tooth, and with it she’d defended against a great number of enemies, living and dead.

She and Heather watched the other girls move off; then they addressed the ground. When Samantha and Tiffany came out of the water, they’d left a wet trail. That had to be erased. They set to work, using dry brush to remove all footprints, then scooping handfuls of dried leaves, sticks, and stones and laying them like a haphazard carpet over any wet piece of ground. Within seconds the trail looked old and disused.

Then they erased their own footprints as they crept into tall grass. They moved in silence, knowing that they were invisible to anyone except maybe a hunting tiger or wolf. Their route cut across the path most likely taken by the people in black.

The reapers.

Then they heard sounds.

Human voices.

“—this way, I’m sure of it—”

Samantha and Heather ducked down again and watched as three figures came hurrying along the deer path. Two men and a woman. All dressed identically, and at closer range Samantha could see that the white angel wings embroidered on their shirts were highly detailed. Good needlework, done with skill and care. They moved ineptly through the forest, either because they lacked woodcraft or because they simply did not care if they made noise.

She felt Heather trembling beside her. Her eyes were glassy with fear, but that was understandable. Samantha put a hand on the younger girl’s arm and gave it a gentle squeeze. Heather flinched, but after a few moments her trembling eased a bit.

The reapers were getting closer, and the girls caught bits and pieces of their conversation.

“—be good to get some hot food once we catch up to the main army. I haven’t had a cooked meal in—”

“—Saint John will open red mouths in the flesh of every—”

“—ought to skin that girl—”

Samantha touched Heather’s bow and then pointed to the reaper out in front. He was the smaller of the two men and the one most likely to run out of bowshot faster than his companions.

Heather nodded and very quietly drew the fletched end of the arrow back to her ear.

“Now!” said Samantha in a sharp whisper, and the arrow vanished from the bow. There was a meaty
thuk
, and it appeared as if by magic between the reaper’s shoulder blades.

Samantha was in full motion before the other two reapers could react. She struck the middle reaper—the woman—in the temple with the butt-end of her spear and with a grunt and a pivot drove the blade into the chest of the third killer. He opened his mouth to scream, but he died before the sound could escape. As he collapsed, Samantha wrenched her spear free and whirled toward the fallen woman, who was bleeding and dazed. The woman had lost her ax when she fell, but she scrabbled at her belt to draw a draw a long-bladed skinning knife. Samantha kicked it out of her hand and put the edge of her spear blade under the woman’s throat.

“One word and you’re dead,” she hissed.