Fire & Ash (13 page)

“What’s the right way?”

Joe cocked his head and considered Benny. “I’ve got my fair share of psychological issues,” he said. “There have been times when I’ve been in situations where I should have lost. I’ve been up against better numbers, and I’ve fought tougher men. You know why I’m still sucking air and they’re worm food? Because when it comes right down to it, there’s nothing I won’t do to win. Nothing. One time when we were really up against it, a guy I worked for looked at me and said, ‘I’d burn down heaven itself to stop this thing.’ If you think that sounds grandiose, that’s ’cause you didn’t know the man. That’s what he was willing to do, and I’m a whole lot crazier than him. So . . . I guess you have to ask yourself, young samurai, how far would you be willing to go to stop Saint John if he was coming after you and yours? How scary are you willing to be in order to take the heart out of the enemy? Are you willing to be the monster in the dark? Are you willing to be the boogeyman of
their
nightmares? If you can look inside your own head and see the line that you won’t cross, the limit that’s too far, then I can guarantee you Saint John will win. No question about it.”

FROM NIX’S JOURNAL

Until we found the crashed transport plane, we didn’t know what was out there in the Ruin. We knew someone had managed to fly a jet, but that didn’t tell us much.

Now we know about the American Nation.

The old government collapsed, and even though there are rumors that the president and some members of Congress went into hiding in a bunker, no one’s ever heard from them again. Captain Joe Ledger told us that a big group of survivors managed to take over the city of Asheville in North Carolina. There are more than a hundred thousand people there, and at least another fifty thousand living in fortified towns near there. Joe and a bunch of soldiers cleared out the zoms, and they have teams working to clear out all the areas around the city. They took back an army base and an air force base, too, which is why they have so many weapons. And the jet. They also have Black Hawk and Apache attack helicopters. Most of that stuff is in North Carolina.

I asked him if there were helicopters and stuff in the hangars, but he didn’t answer.

31

B
ENNY SAID
, “I
FOUND SOMETHING
I think you need to see.”

“Is it a red powder?” Joe asked quickly.

“What? No. Why?”

Joe waved it away. “What’ve you got for me?”

Benny produced the Teambook and handed it to Joe.

The ranger stared at it for a moment, eyes bulging from his face. “Where did you find this?”

“The reaper had it in his quad. And no, I don’t know where he found it. We . . . didn’t really talk, you know.”

“This must have come from the plane, and it definitely wasn’t there when I searched it. That means it was removed before that day.”

“Is that good for us?” asked Benny. “Does it mean the D-series records are around somewhere?”

“It might.”

“Joe, what if the records aren’t around here?”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know . . . it just seems strange to me that one complete set of records is all that’s missing from the plane. So far we haven’t found that stuff, and none of the zoms was
Dr. McReady. What if she was never onboard that plane?”

“The whole point was to evacuate her, kid.”

“I know, but maybe something else happened. Would there be any kind of record of that?”

Joe grunted. “It’s possible but unlikely. Once the plane left, McReady wouldn’t have had any way of getting out of there, and my rangers have been to Hope One. She didn’t stay behind.”

“Are there other places she could have landed? Other bases like Sanctuary?”

“Not like Sanctuary, but there are a million places she could have landed. No way to know unless it was recorded, and I’ve been over every inch of that plane. . . .” His voice trailed off.

“What is it?” asked Benny.

“I might be jumping the gun here. We actually
don’t
know if the plane landed anywhere else or not. There was no flight log in the cockpit, at least none that we could find. I knew all those guys. Only Luis would know, and we never found his body.”

“Who?”

“Luis Ortega, the logistics coordinator. He would have maintained a record of everything. Luis was detail-oriented like that. You sneeze and he has a record of the time, the date, and the air-speed velocity. He never missed a trick.”

“Wait . . . I know that name.”

Benny flipped to the picture of Sergeant Luis Ortega and showed it to Joe. “Is this the guy you’re talking about?”

“That’s him. Luis was a big ol’ boy, looked like a linebacker
but he had the heart of an accountant. He was exactly the kind of miss-nothing guy you’d send when you wanted to evac a research facility. He’d bring back every last paper clip.” Joe cocked an eye at Benny. “How is it you picked up on him so fast?”

Benny explained about how he’d thought he recognized the man but couldn’t remember from where. “Is he here?” he asked. “I mean, is he maybe one of the zoms over on the airfield?”

Joe thought about it. “No, I don’t think so. Last time I saw him was when they were loading the plane to fly up to Hope One. But . . . let me know if you remember where you saw him. If those D-series records weren’t onboard, or if Doc McReady planned any other stops, maybe to drop some of her research and cargo anywhere, then Ortega would definitely be the one to know all the details. That’s his job.” Joe grunted again.

“What?”

“I kind of wish he
was
over at the airfield. Being the logistics guy, he’d have a notebook with every detail of every movement of every person, every box, every piece of pocket lint. Ortega was totally anal-retentive. He was always making notes about stuff and shoving them into his shirt. Added them to his duty log at the end of the day.”

“I also found one little notebook, but I don’t think it’s a duty log.” Benny handed it over.

Joe leafed through it and gave a dismissive grunt. “Reaper prayer book. Might be useful as toilet paper, that’s about it.”

“No,” said Benny, “look at the last page.”

Joe flipped it over and scanned the list, and his face made an ugly shape. “Oh . . . crap.”

“What’s it mean?”

Joe held out the book and pointed to the first lines.

CA/R 1: 4,522

Quad: 66

CA/R 2: 19,200

Quad: 452

“R stands for reaper. CA is California.”

“How do you know that?” asked Benny.

“Because there are abbreviations for Nevada and Wyoming, too. NV and WY.” Joe sighed. “These are head counts of reaper armies. Looks like there are two in California, one of 4,522 and a much bigger one of 19,200. Then you have 14,795 in Nevada, 2,375 in Utah, and 8,371 in Wyoming. You were asking about how many reapers there are. This is your answer.”

Benny did the math in his head. “That’s 49,263. Oh my
God
.”

“Yeah, well, we already knew we were in big trouble.”

“What are the rest of those numbers? The quads . . . those are how many bikes they have?”

“Yup, and the good news is that they don’t have a lot of them. Sixty-six for one group and only 452 for the big army.”

“That’s good news?”

Joe sighed. “Actually, come to think of it, it’s not. Saint John is probably using quads to pull equipment and food wagons, but push comes to shove, he’ll detach those and use the quads like light cavalry.”

Benny had hoped this stuff might help Joe find the D-series notes, but instead it was quickly crushing Benny’s own optimism. He almost didn’t give the ranger the last piece.

“I also found this,” he said reluctantly. “It’s a handwritten note, and I think it’s from Dr. McReady.”

Joe read the note.

Mutations reported in California.

This needs to be checked out.

Field Team Five?

“What’s it mean?” asked Benny.

The ranger gave him a brief, bleak stare. “It means that we have more questions than answers.” Joe clicked his tongue for Grimm, who lumbered to his feet. “Listen, kid, I want to go show this to Colonel Reid. Maybe she can make something out of it.”

“Who?”

“The base commander. She’s my boss.”

“How come I never met her? You never told me anything about—”

“There’s a lot you don’t know, kid, and there’s a lot I’m not authorized to tell you. Now’s not the time to play catch-up. Go find your girlfriend and Lilah. Let them tell you
their
story.”

“Why? What happened? Is Nix okay?”

“She’s not hurt,” said Joe evasively. “Talk to her, talk to Lilah, and then maybe we’ll all have a conversation later. I’m going over to the blockhouse. You have to promise me—swear to me—that you won’t leave Sanctuary again. Not unless I’m with you.”

“Sure,” said Benny, though he was pretty sure he was lying to the man.

32

M
ILES AND MILES AWAY
 . . .

“Heads up and eyes forward,” called the guard in the tower. “Trade wagon’s coming in.”

The three fence guards glanced up at him and then followed the direction of his outthrust arm.

“Trade wagon?” wondered Tully, the oldest of the guards. “This time of day?”

His shift partner, Hooper, lifted the binoculars that hung around his neck on a leather strap and stared through the fence. The sun was almost down, and the slanting rays painted the big field and the distant tree line in shades of bloodred, vermilion, and Halloween orange.

“Trade wagon, all right,” he said. “Half a day late and . . . wait . . . I think something’s wrong.”

The youngest of the three, a fence guard trainee, raised his own binoculars. They were an old but expensive pair that had once belonged to his father. His dad was dead, though, killed in a construction accident while helping to build a corn silo. He adjusted the focus.

“The driver’s hurt,” he said.

“How can you tell?” asked Hooper.

“He’s bleeding,” said the young man.

The older men stared and then grunted. “You got good eyes, Morgie,” said Tully.

Morgie Mitchell did not acknowledge the compliment. His eyesight had qualified him as a tower guard, but he wanted to work down here on the ground. In another year they’d let him join the town watch as a cadet. And after that . . . well, when Morgie looked into the future, he saw himself sitting on a tall horse, a shotgun across his lap and a real steel
katana
slung over his shoulder in the rear fast-draw style Tom always used. That future Morgie wore a Freedom Riders sash and worked the roads from New Eden to Haven and every town in between.

For now he was only an apprentice fence guard. A job of no distinction and long hours.

Morgie was fine with that.

Now was now, and the future was something he’d get to.

The longer the shift, the less time he would have to be alone. And he didn’t believe that he deserved any distinction of any kind. Not yet. He didn’t want the borrowed celebrity that came from having studied with Tom Imura. That was Tom’s fame.

And Tom was dead. Buried out in the Ruin near the charred bones of the evil place Tom had destroyed. Gameland.

Morgie wished he’d been there. He should have been there.

Even if it meant that he would have died there. Even an unmarked grave on that field would mean something.

Tom had changed the world that day. Everyone knew it.

Until Morgie had the age, the strength, the power to change even a splinter of the world, he’d work the jobs he could get.

He continued to study the scene that was unfolding beyond the fence.

The field between Mountainside and the forest was more than half a mile wide. It was thick with weeds except for a few select paths that laborers dressed in heavy carpet coats and football helmets kept clear. The trade roads had to be in good order or the flow of supplies into town would dry up.

The field, however, was not empty. There were zoms. There were always zoms. Sometimes only a few dozen scattered along this part of the fence, sometimes as many as two hundred. Some of them had been there since the town was created. Those were the ones whose relatives lived behind the fence; relatives who could not bring themselves to authorize a bounty hunter to quiet their beloved dead. The others were wandering zoms who had come this way following prey. Often they came in a slow, ragged line behind a trade wagon or a bounty hunter returning from the great Rot and Ruin.

Today was one of the in-between days. Morgie counted about seventy zoms out there.

The road from the forest to the gate was straight as an arrow, but the wagon wandered on and off it. At least a dozen zoms followed, and more were staggering toward the wagon, arms outstretched. It kept ahead of them only because a zombie could not lead its target or plan a path of interception. The zom always went directly for where something was at the moment, adjusting only as it moved away.

“What’s that driver doing?” breathed Hooper as the wagon rolled out of the well-worn ruts and into the thick weeds.

They all stared at the wagon as it came closer. The horses were heavily protected with light carpet coats covered by a net of steel washers linked with metal wire. Their legs were wrapped in padded canvas, and their tails were bobbed. Unless the horse stopped and stood in place, a zom would never manage a bite. They kept moving forward, trail wise enough to know the route home and frightened enough of the dead to keep moving despite the erratic control from the driver.

Tully cupped his hands around his mouth. “At the gate!” he bellowed, and the team there turned toward him. “Wagon’s coming in. Driver’s hurt. Get the quarantine pen ready and call the field medics. C’mon, hop to it!”

The gate crew fetched their rifles, and a half-dozen apprentices snatched metal pots and spoons from where they hung on the fence. They ran fifty yards up the fence line and began banging and clanging. Most of the zoms turned toward this new and louder sound.

“Let’s go bring him in,” said Tully.

Hooper dropped his binoculars to let them hang and unslung the pump shotgun he carried. He jacked a round into the breach.