Fire & Ash (16 page)

“No.”

“You ever fight anyone before?”

Morgie shrugged. “Nothing serious.”

In his mind, though, he remembered his last act of violence. No one had been physically hurt, but it had been a terrible moment. Shoving Benny and knocking him down, right there in Morgie’s yard. The day Benny left town. The day Morgie had killed his friendship with Benny. And Nix. Chong, too. The day he lost all his friends.

Nothing serious. Except that it ended everything.

Strunk said, “The tower guard tells me you kept your head when those zoms came rushing out of that wagon.”

Morgie shrugged.

“He says that after you took down the zoms from the wagon, you went out to help Tully and Hooper.”

“I wasn’t fast enough. By the time I got out there they were already dead.”

“ ‘Wasn’t fast enough,’ ” echoed Gorman. “Jeez.”

“The tower guard says that you quieted Tully and got Hooper inside the gate while he was still alive.”

“I didn’t quiet him, though,” said Morgie. “The other guards—”

“I know,” interrupted Strunk. “I’m not criticizing you. Just laying out the facts.”

Morgie said nothing.

“Your supervisor tells me that you only took the fence
job because you were too young for the town watch.”

“Yes, sir.”

“How young?”

“I’ll be sixteen in eight months.”

Strunk glanced at Gorman, who smiled faintly and shook his head.

A shadow fell across Morgie, and he turned to see someone standing just behind him, a person he had only ever seen on the painted fronts of Zombie Cards. The man wasn’t tall, but he was powerfully built, with a shaved head and a gray goatee. He had dark-brown skin and he wore a red Freedom Riders sash across his chest. He wore a pair of matched machetes in low-slung scabbards that hung from crossed leather belts.

Morgie’s mouth went absolutely dry.

The man nodded to Strunk. “This is the boy, Cap?”

“This is him. Morgan Mitchell.”

The newcomer studied Morgie. “You trained with Tom.”

“Yes, sir,” Morgie said.

“You friends with Tom’s brother? You one of Benny’s friends?”

The question was worse than a knife in Morgie’s guts. It took him a long time before he trusted his voice enough to answer the man.

“Benny was my best friend.” His voice almost—
almost
—broke. “I wish I’d gone with him and Tom.”

The man nodded. “From what I heard just now, Morgie, Tom would be proud of you. Benny, too.”

Morgie turned away to hide his eyes.

The man put his hand on Morgie’s shoulder. “I don’t think you have a future in the town watch.”

Morgie snapped his head around and stared in hurt and horror at the man. But he was smiling. So were Strunk and Gorman.

“I think you need to come and train with me,” said the man.

“W-what . . . ?”

“Do you know who I am?”

“Yes, sir. You’re Solomon Jones.”

“I’m building something important. Something Tom would approve of,” said Solomon. “And I’m looking for some real warriors.”

Morgie stared at him.

Solomon held out a muscular hand.

“Want to join me?”

39

T
HERE WAS ONE THING THEY
had to do first, and it was Nix who said it. They stood in the shade behind the mess hall.

“We have to tell Lilah,” Nix said, and Benny winced.

“Good luck with that,” murmured Riot.

Any conversation with Lilah was difficult. The Lost Girl had spent many years living alone and wild in the Ruin, killing zoms and preying on the bounty hunters working for Charlie Pink-eye and the Motor City Hammer. During those long years she had had no personal contact at all. No conversations, no interactions. Not even a hug, a handshake, or a kind word; and in that social vacuum she’d grown strange. Even now, after months of living with the Chong family in Mountainside, training with Tom, and traveling with Nix, Benny, and Chong on their search for the jet, Lilah was still strange. It was impossible to predict exactly how she would react to anything, though any bet laid a little heavier on the possibility of a violent reaction had a better chance of a return. For a while she’d started coming out of her shell when, against all logic and probability, she and Chong had fallen in love—but with Chong’s injury and infection, Lilah had gotten stranger still. She rarely spoke, and when she did, it was brief
and terse. Benny doubted that he’d exchanged as many as two hundred words with Lilah in the last three weeks.

“She won’t want to leave here,” said Nix. “I think she believes that the only reason they haven’t quieted Chong is because they’re afraid of how she’ll react.”

“That ain’t altogether a stupid fear,” said Riot. “When grown men with guns are afraid of a girl with a spear, then there’s something to take a close look at.”

Benny nodded, though he had a separate concern about Lilah. He was afraid of what she would do to herself if Chong died. Lilah was emotionally damaged and was caught in a prolonged anger phase of the grief process. Her little sister had been killed, her guardian had been murdered, Tom had been murdered, and now Chong lingered in a twilight between life and death. Benny didn’t know how much more life could push Lilah before she snapped. He’d said as much to Nix, and when he glanced at her, he could see it in her eyes. Neither of them said it aloud—Riot was a friend, but she wasn’t yet part of their family.

“I’ll tell her,” said Nix.

Benny shook his head. “If she gets even a whiff of—”

“Of what? Of me saying that Chong should be quieted? That was before, Benny. I said that before I went down and looked at him.”

“I’m just saying . . .”

“I got your back, Red,” said Riot. “Question is . . . where is she? She’s usually walking the trench line, but I don’t—”

There was a soft sound above them, and they suddenly turned and looked up to see Lilah perched like a hunting hawk on the raised corrugated metal shutter over the mess
hall window. She peered down at them from between her bent knees, and only the tip of her spear rose above the shadows into the sunlight. Lilah’s eyes looked as black and bottomless as those of a skull.

“Lilah . . . ,” gasped Nix.

Benny instinctively shifted to stand between Nix and Lilah.

“Listen, Lilah, I can explain.”

The Lost Girl hopped forward and straightened her lithe body as she dropped to the ground. It was a ten-foot drop, but she landed easily, though there was a twitch of a grimace on her tight mouth—the only concession to the wound she’d suffered less than a month ago. She’d badly gashed her cheek and jaw while escaping from a white rhinoceros and a field of crippled zoms. Injury or not, the expression in her eyes was fierce. Deadly.

“God,” breathed Nix. Riot pulled her slingshot. Benny’s hand darted toward the handle of his sword.

Lilah walked forward a few paces, ignoring Riot. She got to within inches of Benny.

“Move,” she said.

“Lilah,” Benny said, holding his ground, “you don’t understand—”

But it was Nix who moved. She stepped out from behind Benny, pushing him gently out of the way. She was much shorter than Lilah and more than a year younger. Her weapons were holstered and sheathed, and her hands were empty.

“What did you hear?” she asked.

“Everything.” Without the shadows to mask her face, Lilah’s eyes were the color of molten honey. Hot, but without any trace of sweetness. “You wanted to quiet Chong.”

Nix took a breath. Benny could see that her hands were shaking.

“Yes,” she said.

“Is that why you went to see him?”

“No.”

“Then why?”

“Because he’s my friend. Because I love him. Because I wanted to see for myself.”

Lilah drew a slender knife from a thigh sheath. “This is Chong’s knife.”

“I know.”

“They won’t let me see him,” said Lilah.

“I know.”

“I
can
see him. I can get in there. You know that?”

“Yes.”

Benny and Riot nodded too. None of them doubted that Lilah could find a way into that building. People might die in the process, but she could get in.

“No one quiets Chong but me.” Lilah’s voice was a deadly whisper. “You understand?”

“Yes,” said Nix, her voice small.

Lilah looked at the others. “You all understand? No one but me?”

Benny nodded. So did Riot.

Lilah raised the knife so that sunlight glanced from it and painted Nix’s face in bright light.

“You tell me,” said Lilah, “do I need to use this today? Is Chong lost? Is he gone?”

Nix slowly shook her head.

“Say it,” growled Lilah. “Do I need to kill my town boy?”

“No,” said Nix. “God . . . no.”

Lilah’s eyes roved over her face for a long time. Then she slipped the knife back into its leather sheath. Then she nodded. A single nod, small and curt.

“If he has to die . . . you tell me.”

Nix was unable to speak, so she gave her own single nod.

Lilah looked at Benny. “You too. Tell me if I have to go in there.”

“I will,” said Benny. “But . . . maybe we don’t have to.”

And he told her about his plan.

She was in too.

40

T
WO MILES AWAY
 . . .

Once upon a time the woman had been a scientist, part of the Relativistic Astrophysics Group at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California. Now she spent day after day blowing up balloons.

This was her ninth straight day of it, and the strain of taking in huge breaths and forcing the air into the balloons was really getting to her. She was light-headed all the time now, and planets and galaxies seemed to swirl around her head.

She sat in the shadowy mouth of a cave. At least they gave her plenty of water and a stool. And runners came to her three times a day to bring food for her and the two other people working with her, a former Los Angeles Realtor and an actor who had won two Emmys for a show that was on HBO before the dead rose and ate his audience. The Realtor blew up balloons too. His face was red from effort, his eyes dark with disillusionment.

Like the woman, the other two were useless people. Neither of them could fight. They were lousy hunters. Their survival had been the result of no qualities they possessed. Each of them had been helped through the apocalypse. All
three of them were refugees. The scientist even believed—deep down in the secret place in her heart—that none of them knelt to kiss the knife because they believed in anything but a sure way to live through the moment. None of them had ever killed anyone. At least the scientist knew she had not. After testing her in combat training, the reaper-trainer had dismissed her in disgust and assigned her to the “support legion.”

That was a kind label for the growing mass of reapers who had no useful skills beyond cooking, sanitation, scavenging, and, apparently, blowing up balloons.

She finished the balloon and handed it off to the actor, who perched on a taller stool beside a rusted metal tank. He took a hose, fitted the mouth of the balloon around it, and squeezed a plastic trigger. There was a tiny burst of sound—the sharp hiss of gas under pressure—and the balloon lifted a bit. There was not enough helium in it to make it float; merely enough to let it bounce as if weightless. He tied it off, half turned on his stool, and gave the balloon a light tap, which sent it bouncing deeper into the cave where it bumped up against the thousands of others.

When the scientist reached for another balloon, her stubby fingernails scraped the bare bottom of the box that was positioned beside her.

“I’m out,” she said.

Another reaper, a child with a burn-withered leg and melted face, stood up from the shadows at the far side of the cave mouth. She pulled a black plastic trash bag with her and held it open for the scientist, who reached in and took a handful of small plastic bags. Fifty colored balloons in each
bag. The scientist and the burned girl worked together to tear open the bags and dump the contents into the box. When it was filled, the girl limped back to her spot.

The scientist took a long drink of water and squinted out at the sun-bleached landscape. Such a terrible place. From where she sat, hidden in the shadows, she could see the tall metal spires of the siren towers of Sanctuary.

She picked up another balloon, stretched it, took a deep breath, and blew her air into the bright red rubber.

41

T
HE MONK GUARDING THE QUADS
saw the four of them coming and immediately began shaking his head as he walked to meet them.

“Captain Ledger left express orders that no one is to take a quad without his permission.”

Benny glanced at Nix. “Do you see Captain Ledger anywhere?”

“No.”

“You see him, Riot?”

“I don’t see hide nor hair of that big ol’ boy anywhere.”

“Lilah?”

Her answer was a sour grunt.

“The captain was very specific about it,” insisted the monk. “He mentioned Brother Benjamin in particular. Under no circumstances were you to take a quad.”

Benny patted the monk on the arm. “I believe you’ll find that was more of a suggestion than a rule.”

The monk sputtered at them, but there was nothing he could do. Nix gave him a smile as bright as all the flowers in the world. Riot winked at him. They unslung their gear and began looking through the compartments of their quads.
They had food, carpet coats, their entire remaining supply of cadaverine, every weapon they possessed, and a first-aid kit. Benny wore his sword slung over his shoulder the same way Tom used to wear it. Nix had
Dojigiri
, the Monster Cutter—the ancient sword given her by Joe—in her belt, and Tom’s old Smith & Wesson .38 revolver snugged into a shoulder holster. Riot wore her bandoliers of firecrackers, a Raven Arms .25 automatic in a belt holster, various knives, and her favorite weapon—a sturdy pre–First Night slingshot and a full pouch of sharp stones and metal ball bearings. Lilah had weapons everywhere, including a nine-millimeter pistol. They each wore vests with many small pockets crammed with other survival gear.

The monk gave up trying to physically stand between them and the bikes and began fretting over them. He double-checked their food and water and admonished them about using violence against any of God’s creatures, living or dead.