Dark of Night - Flesh and Fire (15 page)

“Get in,” she said, “but don’t do anything stupid.”

“Thanks,” Rachael told her and began gently but quickly pushing the kids up the stairs. When they were all inside, she paused and glanced back over the field, over the shadowed mounds of bodies in the moonlight.

We made it
, she thought.
We’ll be safe here.

Then she spotted a figure standing at the edge of the field, almost lost in the shadows of the forest. The girl with the shotgun followed her gaze.

“It’s one of the zombies,” said the girl.

The figure walked a few paces forward and moonlight bathed his face. Rachael saw dark eyes and a wide, white smile. Hair stood up all along Baskerville’s spine and once more he uttered a low, deadly growl, however this time it was directed to the shadowy figure. Then the man turned and, without haste, walked into the utter blackness under the trees.

Rachael watched him go. Then she turned to the girl to tell her that it wasn’t an Orc out there, but it wasn’t necessary. The girl looked like someone had punched her in the gut. No, worse.

“It’s
them
,” whispered the girl in a voice that was full of sickness.

“We need to talk,” said Rachael.

The girl nodded and her face was a ghastly white. “Not out here.”

She went in and the big dog followed. Rachael lingered a moment longer, looking at the featureless blackness of the trees.

Okay,
she thought,
this is really, really bad.

The Ranger and the Cop

Ledger drew his gun and moved down the hill.

The camp Dez had built around the bus was ruined. There was blood everywhere—splashed on the side of the bus, spattered inside, and streaked along the ground. Bodies lay in ungainly sprawls, but Ledger could not find bullet wounds or shell casings. The wounds he did find confused him. They weren’t the normal stab or slash wounds, nor were they the deep clefts left by an axe-blade. No, these were very long wounds, the kind a sword might make. From the angle, depth and length of the cuts, ledger guessed the weapon hadn’t been a Japanese katana, which left injuries more like scalpels. A cavalry sword? Or something stolen from a museum, perhaps. That wasn’t out of the question. He’d been planning on looting a museum for older and sturdier weapons and maybe some real armor.

Whoever had used the sword was a little sloppy but had some moves. He saw boot marks from small feet. A teenage boy with a narrow foot or a woman. That didn’t square with Dez’s intel. The adult she’d left in charge, Mr. Biel, would have been too big and—according to Dez—not much of a fighter. And none of the kids were supposed to be old enough to do this kind of damage.

So, who was the swordsman. Correction, he thought, swords
woman.

“
Curiouser and couriouser,” he murmured. The corpses had head wounds, but there were smears to suggest that at least one of the dead had reanimated and walked off. There were no small bodies, and he thanked God for that. If God was up there and listening.

As best he could by the pale moonlight he tried to read the scene and it soon became clear that there were several overlapping stories here. Based on the orientation of footprints—particularly of which sets were more recent and overlapped others—the truth began to emerge. The teenager or woman—and he was moderately sure now that it was a woman—had led the kids away from the bus after the fight. However there was a second group of prints that seemed to almost obliterate the marks of the swordswoman’s group. All of these footprints were male. It was a large party of men, and they’d come to the bus, poked around for a while, and then left. However they went in exactly the same direction as the woman and the kids. Following them.

Or hunting them.

More of the NKK? The sinking feeling in Ledger’s gut told him that his guess was right. If there had been better light he might have been able to tell how much time had passed between when the woman took the kids and when the men began to follow. Best case scenario was half a day. Men could move faster through the woods than a bunch of kids, even if they had to follow the trail at night.

Ledger heard a sound and paused to listen. It was the rude laughter of the men leading their captives along the road. Ledger was already tired of them, of their existence. And although he’d just met Dez Fox and had never met any of the kids, they belonged to the Stebbins County refugees. He’d liked Billy Trout and liked the things the man had said about Dez. She was a little harder to like in person, but he reckoned that he wasn’t seeing her under the most convivial circumstances. Fair enough.

Ledger checked his weapon, looked around for the best vantage point, and then stepped into shadows. He had no doubt at all that Dez would be following the men, or that she would be ready. His concern was that she would not freak out when it was clear the bus was empty. Nothing to do about that now but try to ride the wave once it started and hope for the best.

He waited through five endless minutes, and then he heard a male voice ring out in sudden surprise. “Hey! Look at that shit!”

The man with the flashlight and his partner with the M-16 came running up the road. Ledger heard the rifleman yell, “Jose, Nucks, stay back, keep an eye on those bitches. Barney, Turk, get your asses up here.”

Ledger waited until the four guards—the two from the front and the two working the rear of the sad caravan began stalking forward, all of them with guns, all of them alert to danger.

And all of them looking the wrong way.

Ledger hoped Dez Fox was ready, because he damn well was. He stepped out of the shadows, closing in at an oblique angle, behind the range of the rearmost man’s peripheral vision. He moved without a sound and made it all the way to the closest of the four. The man, a bruiser with huge hands clamped on a double barrel twelve gauge, never saw Ledger coming. One minute he was working his way forward with his friends and then he was dead.

Ledger shot him in the back of the head from three feet away, then turned to fire two rounds at the other man in the back, and then four rounds at the first two.

Pop-pop.

Pop-pop.

Pop-pop.

Pop-pop.

Eight shots. Eight muzzle flashes brighter than the moonlight. Four men falling.

It hadn’t been a fight. Ledger hadn’t wanted a fight. Not a fair one. Never a fair one with men like these.

He spun in time to see more muzzle flashes in the darkness. There were screams, high and shrill and filled with terror as the women saw the fire from the guns, heard the shots, but did not yet understand. All they could know is that death and horror had once more reached out to them. Helpless, bound, humiliated and afraid, all that was left for them to do was scream.

And so they screamed.

Suddenly a voice rose, louder than the thunder of the guns. A woman. Dez.

“Shut. The. Fuck. Up!”

She bellowed it with all of the leather-throated volume of a drill instructor. The sound of her voice, and the power promised by it, smashed through the screams with more shocking force than a slap to each screaming mouth. The women flinched back, stunned to silence, all turning to stare at the woman who had appeared out of the night as if conjured by dark magic.

Dez lowered her smoking gun. The two men who had been guarding the prisoners were down, their heads pulped by hollow-point rounds.

“Officer Fox,” said Ledger, being formal in order to make a statement. To suggest that some kind of old-world order still existed. “All the hostiles are down.”

Dez glanced at him, then nodded. “Secure the perimeter. I’ll release the prisoners.”

He was pleased that Dez had understood and was quick enough to roll with the drama. He had put her in charge of the moment, and she took that role and ran with it. A woman in charge, a man taking her order. It was a useful fiction in the moment, and he could see the panic ebb ever so slightly among the prisoners.

Ledger faded back and gave Dez a moment to cut the first woman free, then watched with approval as she handed her knife to the woman. It gave the freed prisoner a task and it gave her power.
She
would free her fellow prisoners, and it set a precedent that as each one was freed she turned to help with the person in captivity next to her. Dez was doing it exactly right. This wasn’t stuff they taught in the military or in the police. It was the kind of thing learned through experience and compassion out here in the storm lands. It was a kind of benign manipulation that turned a helpless prisoner into a member of a winning team.

“Ledger,” called Dez, “report.”

He trotted over. The women shied back from him, and pulled the children close. Assuming a role of strength and protection even in their fear.

In quick words but a deferential tone, Ledger told her that the bus was empty, there were no indications that any of the kids had been hurt, and that they had been led away by an armed woman. He paused and told her than a party of men had come along sometime later and appeared to be following. This dragged some sick cries from the women, but Dez kept her cool.

She looked around for the oldest and calmest-looking of the women. “What’s your name?”

“Shannon Byrd,” said the woman.

“Okay, Shannon, here’s the deal. Captain Ledger and I are going to find my kids. We’re going to leave right now. You and the others can take the guns from the dog meat over there on the road and stay here until we come back…or you can all come with us. You get to make the call, Shannon. This isn’t a democracy.”

Shannon studied her for a moment, then looked at the others. As she did so she idly touched the rope burns on her throat and fingered the edges of her torn blouse. There were bruises in the shape of a man’s grasping hand on her upper arm. She walked over to one of the dead men, bent, picked up his shotgun, hefted its weight in her hand, paused for a moment, spit on the corpse, and then walked back to Dez.

“We’re going with you.”

The other women milled around for a moment, and the kids stared in shock and uncertainty, then a teenage girl who had a split lip and a black eye went and got the other shotgun. She cracked it open, checked the rounds, knelt and picked the dead man’s pockets for extra shells, stuffed them in the pockets of her jeans, and rejoined the group.

“I used to hunt wild pig,” she said in a thick southern accent. “I’m okay to hunt some more of ‘em.”

That did it. The other women and some of the kids took guns, knives, ammunition, and water. Dez and Ledger gave them the world’s shortest course in gun safety, and then they turned toward the trail of footprints leading into the woods.

“This isn’t going to be easy,” said Dez.

“Nothing is easy anymore,” said Shannon.

“Nothin’ was ever easy,” said the southern girl.

They headed into the woods.

Hunting.

Rachael Elle and Lindsey

“We need to get the kids somewhere safe,” Rachael insisted as she followed the girl through the living room, dining room and into the kitchen. She buckled her bracer back on as she walked. The kids—heroes and little ones—had settled around the big kitchen table. Most sitting, some standing, all of them looking around at their new surroundings in silence. There was almost a sense of wonder in them, as if they’d forgotten what it was like to be anywhere but inside a bloodstained bus.

“They’re safe here,” the girl said, setting the shotgun down on the table.

“No, they’re not. Look…let’s start with who’s who, okay?” Rachael asked. “I’ll go first. I’m Rachael. I’m from Pennsylvania. I’m a long way from home, but I’m trying to find people to bring them to safety. Your name is….”

“Lindsey,” the girl finally responded.

“Okay, Lindsey. I’d say ‘nice to meet you’, but that would be kind of weird.”

“Tell me about it,” Lindsey muttered.

“There are some really bad men after us,” said Rachael, “and I think that was one of them out there, so we need to get the kids somewhere safe. Is there an attic or a basement? Somewhere they can hide?”

Lindsey nodded. “There’s a basement and the door’s really solid. Someone put a crossbar on it, you know,
after,
and they reinforced the wood with some kind of metal. Stainless steel, I think. There’s lots of stuff down there but as long as they stay quiet they’ll be able to hide.”

“Mind showing me?”

Lindsey nodded and opened a door that was built into the wall so that it looked like the front of a pantry. It was hard to tell if that was something done before the dead rose, or after. Probably after, Rachael decided. To hide it from scavengers. She wondered what happened to the clever people who did that, and who reinforced the door so heavily from the other side. After all those precautions, what had tripped them up? What was the mistake that killed them?

She wanted to ask Lindsey, but doubted the girl knew. And maybe that wasn’t the right conversation to have in front of the kids.

The basement was large and very solid, with a poured concrete floor, wooden rafters, and boxes of canned food. There was a big stack of furniture pads in one corner, more than enough for everyone to have a bed and something to cover themselves. The pads were old, covered with cobwebs and spider eggs, but who cared? Rachael tapped Supergirl on the shoulder and drew her to one side.

“Okay, I’m going to go check the rest of the house with Lindsey,” she said. “You’re in charge down here. I need you to make some smart choices. Everyone gets food and picks a spot to sleep. You and the other heroes make sure they all stay calm, understand?”

The girl nodded, eyes wide with fear but her chin was firm.
Being a hero
, thought Rachael.
Nice.

“Now,” she said, lowering her voice, “if anything happens upstairs I want you to close the door and bar it from the inside. Once you do that no one will know you’re here. But you have to be absolutely quiet. Not a sound from anyone. Promise?”