Fire & Ash (8 page)

Nix took that moment to pick up two more stones as fast as she could, hurling them sidearm, hitting the thing in the shoulder and face. It staggered sideways into the rock wall, but it rebounded and came after her again. Nix scooped up a bigger stone. It was too big to throw, so she gripped it with both hands, raised it over her head, ran down the slope, and brought the stone down with all her strength.

The zom’s head exploded.

Black goo splattered her face and hair and clothes. She screamed and began hysterically slapping at the wormy muck.

Behind her the zom collapsed onto the ground with a boneless, meaty thud that was entirely disgusting to hear.

“Behind you!”

It was Lilah’s voice, hoarse and ghostly and urgent. Nix spun back as a third zom came running at her—fast, even going uphill. The zom was thirty feet away. Nix dove for her sword and came up with
Dojigiri
in her hands, and with no time left, she swung hard and wild.

The zombie’s last running steps were confused, and the headless body puddled down onto the ground, leaking pints of black, wormy blood.

18

H
IS NAME WAS
C
HONG.

He knew that much, though the name was more of a sound, something familiar to which he reacted. He did not know what the name meant. Or if it meant anything at all.

Chong squatted in the darkness, arms resting loosely on his knees, hands dangling, head lowered, looking up from under threads of filthy hair. Every once in a while his fingers twitched, a spasm very like the motion of grabbing something. Of squeezing something that would scream.

Spit glistened on his lips and ran down his chin.

He thought about the boy who had been in here earlier. There was a sound for him, too. A word sound that triggered memory. Not memories of laughing or talking or fishing or trading Zombie Cards. Those memories sometimes flashed through his brain, but they were meaningless fragments. No, what he remembered was the smell of the boy.

The smell of meat. So much of it. So close.

As he thought about that boy, he felt his lips move. He heard his throat make a sound. Listened as the sound filled the air.

“B-Benny . . .”

Hearing the name intensified his hunger.

That meat had been so close. His teeth had almost had it. His stomach ached at the thought. He crouched there in the shadows and waited for the other boy—for the meat—to come back.

19

T
HREE MONTHS AGO
 . . .

Saint John loved the screams. They sounded like prayers to him.

With each shriek of pain, each cry for mercy that would not come, he knew that the eyes and minds and souls of the heretics were opening to the truth. The old gods, the old religions, could not protect them, because they were all false. When the blades of the reapers opened the red mouths, each mouth spoke the truth. The only salvation was oblivion.

He stood in the burning street with Sister Sun. She pleased him. The woman was brilliant by any standard, and as cold as moonlight. She kept disease from sweeping through the reaper army, though the withering winds of cancer were destroying her day by day. In the last six months she’d lost forty pounds, and soon she would be a skeleton.

If she had a flaw beyond physical infirmity, it was a stubborn refusal to let go of the science of the old world. That brought her into conflict with the more hard-line reapers, but it also provided an interesting X factor that Saint John occasionally found useful. The fact that Mother Rose hated and feared Sister Sun was another useful thing. By observing that
dynamic without becoming involved in it, Saint John often learned valuable things about each of them. They were, at present, the two most powerful women in the Night Church.

Now he accompanied Sister Sun along a burning street toward the center of this doomed little town.

“What is it you wanted to show me?” he asked.

“Brother Victor was injured in the fighting,” wheezed Sister Sun. “A sucking chest wound. He was taken to a gazebo we’ve been using as a triage center for this engagement, but he bled out. The Red Brothers were going to release him outside of town so he could wander, but . . .”

She let her words trail off as they arrived at the gazebo that stood in the village square. The structure was surrounded by members of the Red Brotherhood—the combat elite of the reapers. They were each marked by a bloodred palm print tattooed on their faces. They parted to allow Saint John and Sister Sun a better view but kept everyone else away.

As Saint John approached, he saw Brother Victor on the other side of the rail. The reaper’s face was dead pale and his mouth dark with blood. He turned toward the movement of the newcomers and immediately crouched like a cat ready to spring. He bared his teeth and snarled. A black, viscous goo, thick as motor oil, dribbled over his teeth and down his chin. Small white worms writhed in the muck.

It was clear that Brother Victor had become one of the gray people.

The dead thing suddenly hurled himself at Saint John.

Four muscular Red Brothers leaped to intercept the rush, and they forced Victor back with wooden poles. The reaper
retreated, but he began pacing back and forth, occasionally lunging at the rail with cat quickness.

Saint John frowned. “I don’t understand this. Is he dead?”

“He is,” said Sister Sun.

“But he’s so fast.”

“Yes. Fast and smart. Look.”

The dead reaper attacked the rail over and over again, hitting different points, trying to squeeze between the guards, snarling all the while. He was so fast that once he nearly got across the rail before the men with the poles battered him back.

“He keeps trying the rail at different points,” observed Sister Sun. “He’s trying to find a weakness.”

“You examined him? He has no pulse, no—”

“He’s dead,” said Sister Sun. She leaned close. “This is the mutation we’ve been hearing about. Now it’s happened to one of our own. Honored One . . . if this spreads . . .”

Saint John said nothing. He could almost taste the fear in Sister Sun’s voice, and he could see it in the eyes of the Red Brothers.

However, in his own heart, deep down in that velvety darkness, he felt quite a different emotion. And it made him smile.

20

U
P AHEAD
B
ENNY SAW A
hazy stretch of green floating inside a mirage.

The forest.

The very fact of the forest out here in the dry vastness of Nevada was bizarre. Before First Night, some real estate developers had come out into the hottest part of the desert and decided that this would be a wonderful place to put a golf course. They built row after row of tall wind turbines to generate electricity and pump water to irrigate the landscape, and planted trees, grass, and decorative shrubs in what was otherwise an inhospitable environment. In doing so they created the illusion of a lush forest cut with wide green lawns. The wind turbines hadn’t been knocked out by First Night; however, heat and blowing sand had stilled most of them. Only a few still channeled sluggish water into the soil. Most of the exotic foliage was now dead, coarse weeds and bare dirt having replaced most of the lush grass. Lovely shrubs had been replaced by uglier, hardier foliage. When the last of the turbines quit working, the desert would kill the remaining imported trees and reclaim the land. Benny figured that within ten years there would be no trace of the golf course, no
evidence that man had ever tried to impose his whims and his will on the fierce Mojave.

The four fat tires rumbled effortlessly over the rocky ground. Ahead he could see flashes of white through the green. The plane. As he drove toward it, Benny’s mind churned on so many different things that he never heard the second quad come tearing toward him from behind a stand of trees. His only warning was when the other quad’s engine roared to full throttle as the driver slammed into Benny’s machine.

Suddenly Benny was flying into the air, arms pinwheeling, legs kicking. He landed with a thud that jolted every muscle and bone in his body. His
katana
went slithering out of its scabbard onto sandy ground. But Tom had taught him to react rather than allow himself to gape in surprise. He scrambled around, got to his feet, and came up into a crouch, confused, scared, and angry. His quad lay on its side near the transport plane, its wheels still turning, a second machine jammed hard against it, blue ethanol fumes chugging from both tailpipes.

He heard a crunch of a footfall, turned fast, and saw a glittering knife slash through the air toward his throat.

21

B
ENNY SCREAMED AND FLUNG HIMSELF
backward and felt wind whip past his Adam’s apple as the blade missed him by a hairbreadth. His heels hit a gnarled twist of an exposed tree root, and Benny went down on his butt with a thump that snapped his teeth together with a loud
clack!

The reaper grinned in obvious anticipation of an easy kill. “I bring the gift of darkness to you, my brother.”

“Bite me,” gasped Benny, and snatched up a handful of pebbles, hurling them at the killer. The reaper twisted away and took the stones on shoulders and hip instead of full in the face.

Benny’s sword was ten feet away, the steel blade gleaming with deadly potential. The killer stood between Benny and the
katana
, so it might as well have been on the far side of the moon. The big plane lay a few yards behind Benny’s back.

The reaper crouched, knife in hand, muscles bunching as he prepared to pounce. He was a tall man in his early twenties, all wiry muscle and sinew, dressed in black jeans and a muscle shirt with angel’s wings hand-stitched across the chest. The man’s head was shaved bald and comprehensively tattooed in
a pattern of creeper vines and locusts. Strips of red cloth were tied to his ankles and wrists and looped around his belt. The cloth smelled like rotting meat—evidence that it had recently been dipped in chemicals that were used to prevent the living dead from attacking. Benny smelled every bit as bad from the cadaverine he’d sprinkled on his clothes.

Benny scooted backward on the ground, putting as much distance as he could between him and the reaper. The killer faked a lunge and then kicked sand in Benny’s face; but Benny was already in motion, already scooping a handful of sand to throw at the reaper. Both masses of sand hissed through each other and struck their targets. Benny whipped his arm up to save his eyes, but he got a choking mouthful. The reaper tried to turn away and partially succeeded, so that the sand pelted his cheek and ear.

With a growl that was equal parts anger and fear, Benny drove his shoulder into the reaper’s gut, exploding the air from the killer with an
oooof
. Benny’s rush drove them both into the curved metal side of the gigantic transport plane. The impact tore a cry from the reaper, and he dropped his knife. Benny head-butted him, smashing the man’s nose. The reaper screeched again, but a split second later he jerked his knee upward as hard as he could into Benny’s crotch.

Benny staggered back, hands cupped around his groin.

The reaper moaned and sagged to his knees, blood pouring down his face from his shattered nose. “I will . . . open . . . red mouths . . . in your . . .”

“Yeah, yeah,” wheezed Benny in a tiny voice as he fought against pain and nausea, “. . . open red mouths in my flesh . . . send me into the darkness . . . got it . . .
owwwww!
”

Gagging and coughing, the reaper reached for the knife.

Benny kicked it away.

They got slowly and painfully to their feet. The reaper’s nose was a purple bulb; his mouth and teeth glistened with red. Benny was sure that his testicles were somewhere up in his chest cavity.

The reaper sneered at Benny. “Are you really so stupid that you think you have a chance?”

“Yes,” said Benny defiantly, then he frowned. “Wait, no, I mean I’m not stupid, but yes, I have a chance against you.”

“I’m not talking about this fight, brother.”

“Don’t call me brother, you enormous freak,” muttered Benny.

“The army of the Night Church will sweep away all defiance to god’s will.”

“Yeah, I know, you’re invincible. Oh, wait, didn’t you idiots get your butts handed to you by
one
guy with a rocket launcher? How’s that ‘sweeping away all defiance’ thing working out for you?”

The reaper spat blood onto the sand. “The reapers who died at the Shrine of the Fallen were heretics and traitors to Thanatos—praise be to the darkness. They were the scum who followed Mother Rose. You have no idea what kind of army follows Saint John. Brother Peter and Sister Sun will sweep away all resistance to god’s will.”

“Sure. Fine. Whatever. I’m sure whoever you’re quoting would be impressed. But check it out—you try and take Sanctuary again, and Captain Ledger will introduce you to Mr. Rocket-Propelled Grenade.”

“You think that heretic can defend Sanctuary from us?” The reaper laughed.

“Pretty much.”

“The voice of god will echo from the mountaintops and proclaim the glory of the darkness, and clouds of blood will cover the lands. Then the quickened dead will consume those who are slow to accept the darkness.”

“Okay, don’t take this the wrong way,” said Benny, “but you’re crazier than a bag of hamsters.”

The knife lay ten feet from the reaper’s right foot; Benny’s sword was twelve feet to his left. They each looked at the weapons at the same time. At the sword, at the knife, then at each other. Then they lunged at the same time. The reaper was faster, taller, and stronger and he snatched up the knife, his fingers curling the deer-bone handle into perfect placement in his palm. Benny, a fraction slower and ten years younger, threw himself into a dive-roll and came up with the
katana
in a wide two-handed grip. He whirled and dropped into a combat crouch.

“Don’t!” warned Benny, backing up a step. “We both know I’m going to win. Why push it? Just walk away.”

That should have ended the fight. A knife against a sword. But the world was broken, and so was sanity.

The reaper screamed and threw himself at Benny.